![]() Malofeyev, now 42, was born near Moscow to parents who lived in a special housing reservation for Soviet scientists. ![]() While Vladimir Putin’s administration has expressed admiration for the achievements of the Soviet Union, its foundation in 1917 is regarded as a tragedy, for the bloodshed and turmoil it caused. Nicholas II has been canonised by the Russian Orthodox church. In the post-Soviet period there has been renewed interest in the history of the pro-tsarist forces. Chavchavadze’s family returned to the Soviet Union in 1947 in a wave of patriotism after victory in the second world war, but his father was quickly arrested as a spy and sent to the Gulag for 25 years, while the family was exiled to Kazakhstan. Nicholas II and his family were executed in 1918 many aristocrats fought for the White armies in the Russian civil war, or fled to western Europe or further afield.ĭuring the Soviet period, discussion of the Whites was forbidden. Photograph: Shaun Walker/GuardianĪfter the February revolution – named for the month it began in Russia’s then- Juilan calendar – the country embarked on a short liberal experiment, but the provisional government was deposed by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik uprising in October of the same year. “For me it’s very important to restore the traditions that were broken off in 1917.” “The mission of our school is to ensure that our graduates will be Orthodox patriots who will carry the thousand-year traditions of Russia, not just those of the last 20 or 100 years,” said Malofeyev, from his central Moscow office, adorned with Orthodox icons and a large portrait of Tsar Alexander III, a 19th century ruler known for his conservatism. The school, he said in an interview with the Guardian, is meant to function as “an Orthodox Eton”, which will prepare the new elite for a future Russian monarchy. Malofeyev, well-connected in the Kremlin, is believed to have funded rebel forces in East Ukraine, and has set up a nationalist, Orthodox Christian television channel, Tsargrad. The school is the pet project of Konstantin Malofeyev, a mysterious Russian financier known as the “Orthodox oligarch”. The mission is to ensure that our graduates will be Orthodox patriots, carring the thousand-year traditions of Russia Konstantin Malofeyev, founder The lessons include scripture studies and Latin, and the school’s history textbooks were specially commissioned, to avoid the positive view of much of the Soviet period given by the standard Russian textbooks. A statue of Catherine the Great dominates a hallway, and the student ballroom features vast portraits of eight tsars. The Russian people strive for a monarchy the Russian soul is monarchic,” said Chavchavadze.Īt St Basil the Great school, portraits of the tsars look out at pupils from the corridors. As soon as someone is in power for a few years, they become sacred. “Look at what the Russian people did with Lenin, Stalin, Putin. As the centenary approaches of Russia’s 1917 revolution, which deposed the Romanov dynasty after centuries of rule, Chavchavadze is part of a small but influential section of Russians who are looking to the tsarist past for inspiration – and even hope to restore a monarchy one day soon.
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