Our Lady of Kazan, "Liberatrix and Protectress of Holy Russia" (II)

Nicholas II, Czar of all Russia, was arrested in 1918, a few days after dedicating his empire to the Virgin of Kazan, and on Trotsky's orders, executed along with his entire family. 

The Kazan icon disappeared in the horrors of the Russian Revolution. Many thought that it was destroyed in the great burning of icons and holy images during that period, but in 1965, the public learned that it was for sale at a major New York auction, without its oklad (the gold and precious stone covering of an icon) and badly damaged. The asking price of $500,000 was enormous for the time, and the Soviet government was in line to buy it, but the Russians of the diaspora bought it back and had it restored. 

Because of the prophecies pronounced there concerning Russia, it was placed in the Domus Pacis (“House of Peace”) of Fatima, Portugal, in a vaulted room inside a specially dedicated chapel. The statue was presented to Pope John Paul II during one of his visits to Fatima, but the holy pontiff asked his legate, Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, to hand it over to the Russians on August 28, 2004, the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, in a long ceremony featuring a rich Orthodox liturgy in the grandiose setting of the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral. 

On this occasion, Patriarch Alexis II thanked the Pope "wholeheartedly" for "this event, which is a joint contribution to overcoming the negative consequences of a twentieth-century history marked by unprecedented persecution against faith in Christ."

Source: AFALE Magazine, 

Issue # 293, September 2004