#i love my post soviet gay patriarchs

[liefallow]

[csykora]

Yeah, so, that’s been going on.

I am going to try to summarize what’s been up with Pasha. Thanks to @immoveableobject, the Moscow Times, and the Independent. This is going to be Drunk History in the sense that you should have a stiff drink or another coffee before reading. There’s…context.

After Nikolai II abdicated as emperor in 1917, the Romanov family were sent to live under summer-cabin-arrest in Tobolsk, in Tyumen region (western Siberia). Nikolai spent the summer reading books and chopping firewood to take his mind off things, which he wrote was his favorite activity.

Disagreements between Omsk (the capital of Tyumen) and an acquisitive Yekaterinburg (in the Ural region which neighbors Tyumen to the west), led Moscow to order they move the Romanovs back west. The guards transporting them contacted Moscow to say they had to take a route that passed closer to Omsk, which made Yekaterinburg think Omsk was going to keep them, so they called Moscow too and insisted the convoy stop in Yekaterinburg instead, where the Romanovs were stored in a local merchant’s house.

At that unrelated but unfortunate point, the Czechoslovak Legion came into it. This wasn’t a unit named for the country, which didn’t even exist yet: it consisted of ethnic Czechs and Slovaks who had been volunteered to fight with the Russian army back in 1914. Leaders in the Czech and Slovak homelands of the Austro-Hungarian empire thought this would improve their name recognition in the international community, and build credit toward their own independence after the war. Czech history is actually just dramatic irony.

They were highly effective against the Germans, and then sent east. By 1918 the Czechoslovaks were stationed all along the railroad into Siberia. They were not jazzed about the Bolsheviks. They turned around toward Yekaterinburg to express this.

The guards in Yekaterinburg, who thought the Czechs were coming to take the Romanovs, took them down into the cellar and executed them.

Time passed and so did the Soviet Union. The site of the executions became a church. That church has a shrine in the cellar. It’s not the same cellar, but an exact replica; the church was shifted a bit for a better foundation, so the actual site is now an outside wall. It’s called The Temple on the Blood, although, again, it isn’t on it. 

In 1981 the Romanovs were named martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church that isn’t outside Russia recognized them as passion-bearers. A passion-bearer is believed to have ‘faced their death in a Christ-like manner.’ A martyr is believed to have died defending their faith in Christ. So all martyrs are passion-bearers, but not all passion-bearers are martyrs.

The entire story is going to be like this.

Sometime around 1980, a different man who wasn’t named Nikolai Romanov originally but is now killed someone. He was, of course, a cop. He was sent to a prison camp in Tyumen region for thirteen years. When he was released, he says he walked the length of the Romanov’s last journey to Yekaterinburg.

At some point along the way he changed his legal name from whatever it used to be, became a priest, and took the religious name Father Sergei. 

He found a decrepit old monastery and rebuilt it, becoming the confessor for the nuns that live there. He found the pit outside the city where the Romanovs’ bodies were dissolved in acid, called Ganina Yama, and built a complex around Tsar Nikolai’s final resting place.

Except, again, he didn’t. The bones that had been found in Ganina Yama in 1919 weren’t even human. The Yekaterinburg guards didn’t manage to destroy the Romanovs’ bodies (they apparently didn’t bring enough acid with them, because this was all a fuck up), so they buried them in the forest a few kilometers away. The actual burial place was found in 1978 (with the last two children found a little ways away in 2007), and the Romanovs were finally given a funeral in St. Petersburg in 1998. The Orthodox Church did not attend, and still maintains this did not happen and the Romanovs are nowhere but Ganina Yama.

His new next door neighbor told the Independent she was doing the dishes one evening and looked out to see a bunch of strange nuns performing exorcisms.

 “They circled around the house; devil this, devil that. And then they put a cross outside our toilet.”

The monastery continued on, annoying their neighbors and growing steadily weirder, for years. Nikolai went from passion-bearer to martyr to a direct analogue of Christ, dying for Russia’s sins. Everything superficially connected to him became, at least to some Russians, holy. The monastery and pilgrimage site became one of the most popular in Russia. Father Sergei came to international attention for:

1. his writing desk, which is a coffin

2. getting big mad about the 2017 film Matilda, which is about young Nikolai fucking ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya, which he very much did do. 

Politician Natalia Pokolnskaya, who attends Father Sergei’s services, had the film pulled and audited for its “anti-Russian” Tsar-sex scenes. Another follower of Father Sergei drove his car into a movie theater and then tried to set it (the car, although also the theater I guess) on fire with a Molotov cocktail after attending services at the Temple on the Blood. Another made his own film in response to the film, saying, 

“Imagine someone makes a film showing your mother as a prostitute and your father as a German gay porn actor. Go inside the church, look at the lord tsar’s blue eyes and you will see how moral he is.”

Everyone forgets the longer verses of John Lennon’s Imagine.

At some point in the mid 2000s, hockey player Pavel Datsyuk started going to Father Sergei as his confessor. He very much did do that, and stuck by him through the movie thing. When he won gold at the World Championships he gave the medal to the monastery, saying, “we won it together.”

This summer he told Championat, “Father Sergei has been my spiritual father for more than 10 years. [He] has a burning, loving heart, he sees me through and through." Maybe not a great choice of adjective, given the arson.  

Then coronavirus. 

This spring, Patriach Kirill of Moscow issued a decree to suspend church services. As in most things, though, the rest of Russia runs on the words, “Moscow is far away.” Whether or not the Patriarch has power to tell churches outside Moscow to do anything without a full Synod is its own debate: it doesn’t matter, because they didn’t listen.

Russian Orthodox churches held Pasha like usual, and a lot of people got sick, with at least one bishop dying and the virus spreading dangerously in monasteries. Patriarch Kirill repeated himself, threatening that any priest who conducts services with members of his congregation present may be penalized by an ecclesiastical court.

Father Sergei thinks coronavirus tests are an excuse for Putin to inject people with tracking devices, so back in June—you remember June, right?—he and a bunch of armed Cossacks holed up in the monastery, saying, “I’m not going anywhere... they’ll have to chase me out with police and the National Guard.”

Remember he is writing that statement on his coffin.

The ostensible head of the monastery, Mother Superior Varvara, did not appreciate Cossack boots on her carpets, and quit “to avoid unnecessary infighting, to which Father Sergei is prone, and give him a chance to come to his senses.”

Patriach Kirill and the ecclesiastical courts booted him from the church, although not the monastery, which he is very much still inside.

At that point we got reports that Pavel was holed up in the monastery with him to avoid coronavirus testing. There was a brief flurry on certain (old) parts of hockey twitter that Pasha was off his rocker.

His agent, Dan Milstein, responded by posting a video on twitter, accompanied by the comment, “Pavel Datsyuk’s morning workout and family breakfast at the cottage. Have a good summer everyone!”

It’s short, showing, for some reason, a man from behind against a generic wall. We don’t need to get into whether or not it is Pavel, and if so where and when. I’d hope no one but a hockey player hikes his socks up like that. But whatever Pavel’s role in creating it, in context there’s something unsettling about the choice of subject: like Nikolai Romanov, he’s chopping firewood.

[damnhitsuzen]

I just can’t hold it, I have to show you people this. This is quite fresh Ukrainian singer, Chrystyna Soloviy. And her perfect, scary and serious as heart attack music video. First things first - everything is so beautiful! Colours, shapes, light. Just look *__* Now about serious stuff. If anyone’s interested, I can translate the lyrics. Long thing short - girls sings about her love and how dependant she feels because of it. She feels like a captive, like a bird that can’t fly. The video makes thing more clear: she is existing in the life of her beloved like a background, furniture. Her presence and efforts are unnoticed, he is simply using everything she has as if it’s given. Unfortunately, it is a very common situation here. Here comes my rant about sexism in Ukraine.

In Ukraine and as in other post-soviet countries sexism rooted so deep in the routine, only few open minds actually understand that. Pre-soviet Ukrainian culture was very patriarchal and soviet communism had as much real gender equality as Trump has. Women were not only supposed to work equally to men (yet underpaid), but also be everything for family. Give birth and raise children, obey husband, do almost all the housework (or all of it) and still be beautiful and lovely and craving for a “strong man’s shoulder”. It’s still like that. The majority of women I know would condemn the girl who is not willing to follow this image and lifestyle. Stockholm syndrome is strong here. See how doll-like beautiful she seems and how plain and grey his looks are? He’s your ordinary guy next door. There’s a horrible saying in Russian speaking countries: man must be just a little more handsome than a monkey. Beautiful is gay, gay is shameful. If you dare to spend more that 60 seconds to make yourself presentable - well, you know where it goes. And that’s how is born a stereotype about gorgeous Slavic girls and ugly men. Grumpy face, military/prison haircut. It was very popular till late 00s, I fucking hate it. It was supposed to look aggressive, like you’re straight out of prison, it was age of glorifying the most awful aspects of human society. Aggressively masculine, criminal, prison culture, where crime was cool. It ended with a good-for-nothing (fuck, not even a proper dictator), ex-convict (street gangs, robbery and rape) president. Hell with him, may it be in Rostov or wherever. It’s supposed to be a new country now. But now there is a new wave of some false traditional shit in parliament and government, which I guess, is the reaction to Russia’s more aggressive one. Both countries discussed new laws concerning family abuse almost simultaneously. Ours was actually pretty decent, until some crazy conservative assholes dropped terms “gender” and “sexuality” from it. What a fucking dicks, said I and some progressive people. And then Russia brought its new law that actually decriminalises family abuse. Well, if it's just once. Once doesn’t count, everybody knows that. I’m so grateful now we already had a new law by now. It’s not good, but it’s a start. I mean, we actually bring up gender and sexuality in discussion. Because the only place in Ukrainian laws where the word “sexuality” exists is the law against discrimination at the workplace. Well, we can’t discriminate queer people at work at least. That’s a start. Very, very low one, unfortunately. Everything here is at very, very low start. I would really like to hear the starting whistle in my lifetime. Now, knowing the discourse, rewatch the video.