Catherine Schneider

Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider (baptized Henrietta Catharina Luisa Schneider, called "Trina" in the imperial family, 1856 to 1918) was a Baltic German tutor at the court of Tsar Nicholas II, reader and friend of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna. She stayed with the imperial family in exile and was killed at Perm in September 1918, during the Red Terror. She was canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), although she was Lutheran. As far as our sources show, she has not been canonized by the Moscow Patriarchate or any other canonical Orthodox Church.

Family and studies

She was born on 20 January 1856 in Saint Petersburg, into a Baltic German family, daughter of the Hof-⁠Councillor Adolf Schneider and his wife Maria Louise, born Swanberg. The English source adds that she was the niece of the former imperial physician Dr. Hirsch. She was baptized in the Evangelical Lutheran church of Saint Catherine in Saint Petersburg, with the name Henrietta Catharina Luisa. From birth she lived with her parents in an apartment on Liteiny Prospect.

She attended the Liteiny girls' gymnasium and finished in June 1875 with a good certificate "in studies and conduct". Wishing to go further, she enrolled in the Pedagogical Courses of the girls' gymnasiums of Saint Petersburg, completed in 1880, with the right to receive without examination the diploma of governess, issued by the Ministry of Public Education on 1 July 1880. From the summer of that year she gave private lessons, and from 1 January 1881 she was teacher in the home of a court councillor. In August 1881 she applied to the Nicholas Orphans' Institute in Moscow and was appointed class mistress. Here she proved a capable worker, as shown by the testimonial she received on leaving for family reasons in December 1894: she had never been punished or dismissed.

At court

In 1884 she was engaged as Russian teacher to Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, elder sister of Princess Alix of Hesse-⁠Darmstadt, before Elizabeth's marriage to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. After the engagement in 1894 of the heir, Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, to Princess Alix, Schneider was called to London to teach the bride Russian. The lessons went on for several years. In a letter of 4 February 1895 to her elder sister Victoria of Battenberg, Alexandra Feodorovna wrote that "Schneiderlein", as she called her in her absence, lived in the Winter Palace, that "the other day she turned 38 or 39", that she came every morning and they worked diligently, and that she read to her for an hour before dinner. Contemporaries noted the empress's good Russian, and Schneider became also her lifelong friend.

When the lessons were no longer needed, she received at court the post of reader to the empress (from 11 August 1904) and lived all her life in the Winter Palace, then in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. In the imperial family she was called "Trina". She was not a servant in the strict sense: with the years she became a member of the family. She never married and her life centered on the imperial family. Her apartment, of seven rooms on the second floor of the suite wing of the Alexander Palace, shows her rank. She lived beside Alexandra Feodorovna for twenty-⁠three years. The English source describes her as "infinitely sweet tempered and good hearted" and primly Victorian: once she refused to let the four grand duchesses stage a play because it contained the word "stockings".

Exile and death

After the arrest of the imperial family she went with it voluntarily into exile at Tobolsk, then Ekaterinburg, where she was arrested by the Chekists among the hostages from the family's entourage. After the murder of the Romanovs she was sent from Ekaterinburg to Perm. In the prisoners' railway car with her were, among others, Princess Elena Petrovna and Countess A. V. Hendrikova. On reaching Perm, the women were put in one cell, in the tower of the former prison castle, where especially dangerous political prisoners had earlier been held.

She was killed at Perm by Chekists, together with a group of prisoners, in the night of 3 to 4 September 1918, after the Bolsheviks had proclaimed the Red Terror, on the irrigation fields (sewage fields) at the fifth verst of the Siberian highway. The group (six women and five men) was gathered on 3 September in the prison office, with their belongings, and led out under escort, then taken through the town and along the Siberian highway. The guards courteously offered to carry their bags, probably to seize the belongings before having to share them with others. The prisoners were brought to an embankment between two fields, set with their backs to the guards and shot at point-⁠blank range or, to save cartridges, killed with blows of rifle butts to the head. The bodies were thrown into the ditches of the fields and barely covered with earth. The English source states that the elderly Schneider and the thirty-⁠one-⁠year-⁠old Hendrikova were driven to a forest outside Perm, told to march forward, and killed with a rifle butt. The inquiry under the Kolchak government, after exhuming the bodies, established that Schneider died of a shot to the heart and a heavy blow of a rifle butt to the back of the head. The two sources do not agree on the place (irrigation fields or forest) and the manner of death (shot or only the rifle butt).

The Whites recovered the bodies in May 1919. On 16 May 1919 Schneider's body was reburied by Christian rite in a communal wooden vault in the New All Saints (Yegoshikha) Orthodox Cemetery. After Bolshevik power was finally established in the region, the graves of the murdered hostages were levelled, and their place remained only approximately known.

Canonization and remembrance

In 1981 she was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) alongside other servants of the imperial family; besides the Protestant Schneider the Catholic Alois Trupp was also canonized. The service of glorification took place in the Synodal Cathedral of the Sign of the Mother of God in New York on 19 October (1 November) 1981. In 1982 ROCOR published at Montreal the "Service to the Holy Royal Martyrs", in which the two are named Ekaterina and Alexei. Archbishop Anthony (Sinkevich) of Los Angeles gave as the ground that they, "being devoted to the tsar, were baptized by their martyr's blood" and are worthy to be canonized with the family. Not all agree, since in the Orthodox Church even the funeral service is not allowed for those who were not Orthodox. The English source states only that she was canonized as a martyr by ROCOR in 1981, although she was Lutheran. Nothing in our sources shows a canonization of her by the Moscow Patriarchate.

On 16 October 2009 the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate 52 persons close to the imperial family who had been repressed, among them E. A. Schneider. In October 2012, at the initiative of parishioners from various churches of Perm and with the blessing of Metropolitan Methodius of Perm and Solikamsk, a memorial cross was set up at the burial place. In 2020 the exact place of burial, probably with the bodies of the court ladies, was found by analyzing a photograph of the 1919 burial, and forensic examination established the identity of the remains. On 29 May 2024 the Metropolis of Perm announced the consecration, planned for 9 June, of a memorial at the true burial site, the Russian Church thereby acknowledging the remains as identified.