The general public usually employs it as a synonym for the U.S.S.R. (q.v.), but this is incorrect: the Soviet Constitution places, at least in law, the Russian element—which, with its numerical and political predominance, had claimed for itself a privileged position in the tsarist state—on an equal footing with all the other ethnic elements that converge in the new federal structure. The R.S.F.S.R. (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic), which constitutes the most prominent unit in every respect within this structure, is sometimes also referred to by the name of R., in contrast to the other 15 units, but this too is unofficial and improper usage (the R.S.F.S.R. includes, in Asia, many territories that cannot reasonably be called Russian), just as it is improper to equate R. with the whole of those administrative units that have the greater part of their territory to the west of the traditional boundary between Asia and Europe (not least because those units themselves take no account of such a boundary).
The same city of R. besides its Gothic cathedral, destroyed during the last war but now restored, has a magnificent monastic church in Romanesque style from the 12th century.
MARTYRS OF R. - A group of secular clergy and religious massacred there by Calvinists in 1572.
During the fierce revolt of the Netherlands, the Calvinist troops of William the Silent, having seized the city of R. by a coup de main on 24 July 1572, fell upon the local clergy, putting to death in the midst of terror and slaughter the priests Erasmus of Utrecht, Vincent of Herch, Matthias of Cologne, John of Liège, William Wellen, John Leevis, the deacons Henry Wellen, John Gresserich, and the lay brothers of the Carthusian order Stephen Albert Winsemius and John Sittard.
The question of Orange’s connivance in the massacre remains unresolved; he however did not intervene to save the victims, nor did he take measures against the assassins.