July 17 -- Feast of Tsar Nicholas II and household

In "Sympathy for the Devil," Mick Jagger channeled Lucifer, walking briskly through history to point out some of his notable achievements.  These lyrics are among the incidents noted:

I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

The Imperial Romanovs in better days

Sir Mick refers to the murder of the Romanov royal family in Ekaterinburg, Russia, on July 17, 1918.  The Bolshevik guards, fearing that loyalist soldiers would liberate the royal family, took them to the basement, shot and stabbed them. Also executed were court physician Yevgeny Botman, cook Ivan Kharitonov, maid Anna Demidovna, and valet Alexei Trupp.  Lady-in-waiting Anastasia Hendrikova and tutor Catherine Adolphovna Schneider were executed in September.  The last two had been separated from the rest of the household and held in Perm until the order came to march them into the forest and execute them.  Rather than wasting the bullets, the soldiers killed them with the butts of their rifles. 

Tsar Saint Nicholas II icon

When the song was written, the bodies of two of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra's children were unaccounted for.  Their absence fueled rumors that young Tsarevich Alexi and one of his sisters, perhaps Anastasia, survived the massacre. At least ten women claimed to be Anastasia; most famously, a German woman named Anna Anderson who filed a lawsuit to recover foreign deposits controlled by the imperial heirs.  Two women, claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria, were taken by a Russian priest to a convent in the Urals where they lived from 1919 until their deaths in 1964. 

The Church on the Blood - built on the execution site

In 1991, the grave was excavated and the bodies exhumed.  Two bodies were missing, but that was consistent with the story that two of the children's corpses had been dragged away, cremated, and buried separately.  This was to prevent any loyalist forces from using the royal relics to rally for rebellion.  The bones of the other two children -- Alexei and either Maria or Anastasia -- were discovered in 2007.  Confirmation of all the Romanovs was done by DNA testing; Anna Anderson's claim to be a Romanov was debunked posthumously using the same process.

 Church of St.Nick2 -- built on the gravesite

When the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, they were hard on the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).  They were harder on other churches, of course, since those were foreign.  But they were still hard on the Orthodox clergy, whom they saw as bloodsuckers and charlatans, peddling the opiate of the masses.  When Patriarch Sergius I of Moscow pledged the ROC's loyalty to the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA), also known as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), formed to carry the torch. 

In 1981, the ROCOR proclaimed every victim of the massacre a "new martyr."  The decision was controversial, not least because there's no real evidence that any of them died for their faith and because the Tsar and his family were not particularly attuned to the suffering of the millions of Russians living under their rule.  Nonetheless, they were heralded as saints, a decision repeated by the ROC in 2000, which proclaimed them "passion bearers."

Fun fact One: The ROCA recognized them all.  The ROC left out Alexei Trupp, a Roman Catholic, and Catherine Adolphovna Schneider, a Lutheran.  

Sir Mick in scarf with his dad and daughters

Fun Fact Two:  Catherine Adolphovna Schneider, a German who had taught Alexandra of Hesse Russian when she married Nicholas Romanov and then stayed to tutor the children, once refused to allow the four tsarevnas to perform a particular play because it had the word "stockings" in it.  


So if Mick Jagger saw the murder of the royal family as the work of the Devil, was he a closet royalist all along?  If so, then perhaps his knighthood is not as much of a sham as Keith Richards thought?