Yekaterinburg

August 10, 2017

Thursday 10 August.

We travelled overnight, with one ‘cold’ mid morning stop to take on water at Tyumen, a somewhat dirty but dynamic oil city. We stretched our legs on the platform and took pictures from a footbridge and were impressed with the length of trains that carried oil containers, one took over 4 minutes to pass though adjoining platform at a reasonably fast speed.

Long tanker train (on left side) passing our Zaren Gold train

Long the other way off the footbridge, some minutes later -
the oil tanker train isstill passing

And still....

After breakfast, our guide Marina gave us a great introduction to the history of the Russian Tsars and we were well prepared for the afternoon excursion to Yekaterinburg. So we joined our bus to travel from the station to the city...

Some places are instantly recognisable- good global branding

Yekaterinburg is a much older city than Novosibirsk - founded in 1723 by Peter the Great as part of his push to exploit the Ural’s minerals riches. The city was named after two Catherines: Peter’s wife (later Empress Catherine I) and the Russian patron saint of mining. It is the 4^th largest city in Russia and the population is just under 1.5million. Like Irkutsk it is a major mining and industrial city- it was not open to visitors untils after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Our first stop was to the Church upon the Blood, erected in 1990s on the site of the house where the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, 5 children and 4 most loyal servants on the night of July 16, 1918. This church, built after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is an expensive memorial to the ‘Tsar Martyrs”, as the Romanovs were declared when they were canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.

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One account reads “ Not everyone reveres the Romanovs; many believe that sainthood is incompatible with virulent anti-Semitism and poor military leadership - two potential qualities displayed by Tsar Nicholas II. It seems that the Russian Orthodox Church is trying to instil a sense of guilt in the population over the royal deaths, much more than over the deaths of any others who were executed in far more horrific fashion during Communist times”.[1]

A twist of history is that during the 1970s, a civil engineering graduate of the local university, Boris Yeltsin, began to make his political mark rising to become the regional Communist Party leader before being promoted to Moscow. When he was governor of Yekaterinburg in 1977, Yeltsin ordered the house to be destroyed, fearing it would attract monarchist sympathisers, and for many years the site remained vacant & only marked by a small wooden cross. Then in St Petersburg on 19 August 1998, the Romanov remains were finally interned in Romanov vault in the Peter & Paul Cathedral. At the service Boris Yeltsin who was the Russia’s president made the first official apology for the millions killed by the communists. “ The massacre of the Tsar was one of the most shameful pages of our history, we are all guilty. It is impossible to lie to ourselves by justifying the senseless cruelty on political grounds.” A special ceremony was held on 20 August 2000 and the Tsar, royal family and hundreds of priests who died as ‘zealots of faith and piety’ during the Communist Era were canonised.

Our next stop was outside the city on the main road west to Moscow; the Memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions. Workers found skeletal remains in mass graves buried in the roadside fields. The communists had killed them during 1937-1939.

17,000 names of those killed were found in secret files. Their names are listed on walls around the site and a central monument to four faiths is tastefully placed. It has been estimated that over 22,000 are buried there. Many of the people listed were quite young.

Further West we went to a large roadside marker situated in Urals showing the geographic divides between Europe and Asia. German scientists originally set markers with surveys and a large obelisk is now there. There are others on side roads and train tracks.

We then travelled back to the city and walked through Istorichesky Skver was an attractive landscaped open paved square alongside the city pond where Lenin Street crosses the dam in the Iset River.