Mary, the "invisible Tsarina"

On the night of February 13, 1917, a peasant woman from Botchinki (a suburb of Moscow, Russia) named Eudoxia Adrianova, heard a mysterious voice in her sleep: “There is a large black icon in Kolomenskoye (a town near Moscow). You must put the red icon there too."

Eudoxia obeyed the voice and went to Kolomenskoye to transmit this message to a priest, Father Nicolas Likhatchev. She had to make two more visits, on February 26th, and March 2nd, in order to convince the priest to take action.

Fr. Likhatchev showed Eudoxia all the icons revered in the church, but there were no red icons (the color of the bloody regime about to take over Russia), and none that looked like the one she saw in her dream. The priest continued his search and found a large icon depicting the "Queen of Heaven sitting on her throne," with a purple cloak, a scepter and a globe in her hand, and the Child Jesus on her knee. Eudoxia recognized the icon from her dream.

This icon was venerated in an itinerant procession making stops at the various monasteries and churches in Moscow. A new Akathist hymn was composed in honor of the Mother of God, and made known with the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon, patriarch of Moscow from 1917- 1925. It was also in February 1917 that the Bolshevik revolution began. Eudoxia's visit to the church took place on the same day of the Czar’s abdication, March 2nd, shortly before his arrest on March 20th.

By the priest's account, Eudoxia added that this icon was the effigy of "Mary, the invisible Tsarina." The first apparition of Fatima took place on May 13th, and it was on July 13th, according to Lucia (1967) that the three secrets prophesying the end of the persecutions in Russia were communicated. This prophecy could not have been understood then, since the Bolsheviks took power only in October of that year.

It turns out that the Kolomenskoye apparitions were a preface to the Fatima apparitions, taken seriously by Popes Pius XII and Saint John Paul II. On September 19, 1990, as the Perestroika effectively put an end to Christian persecution in Russia, the Kolomenskoye Shrine overflowed with a fervent crowd gathered under its onion shaped domes.

Adapted from Fr. René Laurentin, in Les Chrétiens détonateurs des libérations à l'Est (The Christian detonators of the Liberation in the East), Paris, O.E.I.L. 1991