How many romanovs were killed

In case of your refusal I must take you by force or resign. In the latter case they would probably decide to send a less scrupulous sort of man to take my position. Be calm; I am responsible with my life for your security. If you do not want to go alone you could take with you the people you desire. Be ready; we are leaving to-morrow at four o'clock. No indication was vouchsafed as to the ultimate destination; but Khobylinsky was able to deduce from certain hints let fall by Jakolev as to time and distance that it was Moscow.

He communicated his belief to the royal pair. I will let them cut off my hand rather than do it. Alexandra suspected a German intrigue and, declared to Gilliard that afternoon, in a tempest of emotion: 'They will take him away, alone, in, the night.

I cannot abandon him at such a moment I know, they are preparing some ignominy They will make him sign a peace at Moscow The Germans are behind it, knowing that only a treaty signed by the Tsar has any value. My duty is never to permit that nor abandon him. But how can I leave Alexis? What would become of him without me? Tom between love of son and fear for the safety of husband,—or was it apprehension that he might again show, a weakness detrimental to the dynastic rights of Alexis?

Gilliard makes the following record But she finally found herself and became the old Alexandra Feodorovna of the Rasputin days. It was agreed that the Empress and the Grand Duchess Marie should accompany the ex-Tsar, while Alexis and the three remaining Grand Duchesses were to be entrusted to the protection of Gilliard.

They left the Tsarevitch suffering from a cruel attack of his hereditary disease and bathed in tears. But before their departure another messenger had slipped out of Tobolsk. It was a spy, of Jewish extraction, Zaslavsky by name, who, after insinuating himself into the favor of the local guards, had spread poisonous rumors as to the intentions of Jakolev and had, moreover, sent reports by wire to Sverdlov in Moscow. Now that the transfer was about to take place, he took a six hours' start and reached Ekaterinburg in time to play his part in the weaving of the complicated net of death.

The travelers began their journey on April It was a horror. No conveyances were available except the peasant tarantass, consisting of a large wicker basket resting on poles in place of springs. Passengers lie or sit on the straw-covered floor, at the mercy of every jolt. The roads were what all country roads in Russia are in early spring—quagmires of clinging mud. The horses floundered about, up to their knees in ooze and to their chests in water when crossing rivers.

Wheels were broken, horses exhausted, and passengers bruised and sore. But at last the two hundred and eighty versts to Tiumen, the nearest railroad station, were covered in safety, and an assuring message came back to Tobolsk on April 'Traveling in comfort.

How is the Boy? God be with you. But dead silence thereafter until May 7. Then a letter, from Ekaterinburg with the laconic announcement that they were well. Nothing more. Why Ekaterinburg? An agony of fear descended on the children at Tobolsk. Ekaterinburg was the headquarters of the Ural Soviets.

What and who had diverted their parents to the stronghold of the Reds? The mystery remained unsolved—as, in fact, it remains to this day—until, on May 8, the officers and men of the guard who started out with, Jakolev returned to Tobolsk and told a story which, while it does not explain, at least describes the occurrence. Once on the open road, Jakolev manifested a feverish desire to hasten forward without losing an instant.

He seemed possessed by some secret, driving fear. Despite the appalling condition of the roads, he would permit neither, halts nor relaxation of speed. En route, the cavalcade passed the house of. Rasputin in Pokrovskoie; the wife and children of the murdered staretz were standing in the doorway and made the sign of the cross over the royal couple as they swept by. Arriving at Tiumen on the evening of the twenty-seventh, Jakolev conducted his prisoners to a waiting train arid started westward toward European Russia by the line passing through Ekaterinburg.

But on approaching that city, with no intention of stopping, he learned, no one knows how, that the local authorities would not permit him to pass, but intended to arrest him. He doubled on his tracks and sped at full steam back to Tiumen and took the alternative, but longer, Cheliabinsk-Ufa route to Moscow. At the station of Koulomzino, the last stop before. Omsk, his train was again halted, this time by a massed contingent of Red Guards who declared that the Soviet of Ekaterinburg had pronounced him an outlaw for having attempted to rescue Nicholas Romanov and transport him to a foreign land.

Jakolev then uncoupled his engine and rode into Omsk, where he spoke by direct wire with someone in Moscow. He was ordered to proceed via Ekaterinburg. This he did, with train and passengers. The convoy had barely steamed into the station of that city when this amazing game of hare and hounds came to an abrupt end.

Jakolev was surrounded by Red soldiers, his guard disarmed and thrown into a cellar. Jakolev himself went to the office of the local Soviet for a conference; he soon came out, crestfallen, his authority gone. The three royal prisoners were conducted to a house that had been hurriedly requisitioned from a wealthy Siberian merchant named Ipatiev and there imprisoned. It was to be their death chamber. After a few days the soldiers imprisoned in the cellar, Jakolev's Tobolsk detachment, were released; Jakolev himself left for Mocow and from there sent a message to his private telegraph operator at Tobolsk: -.

With the exit and disappearance of the mysterious Commissar charged with his mission of 'particular importance' vanished the key of that bewildering performance. He is never to be heard from again; report had it later that he had been killed in battle, fighting on the side of the Whites. At the end of this artic1e I shall hazard a guess as to who Comrade Jakolev really was. On May 23 the Tsarevitch Alexis and his three sisters arrived at Ekaterinburg from Tobolsk; the entire family was thus reunited, never again to be separated.

But the two foreign tutors, Gilliard and Gibbs, were not permitted to continue in attendance on their pupils. They remained in Ekaterinburg, however, until the arrival of the White troops.

The imprisonment which now began was far different in character and severity from the preceding periods. Brutality replaced respect: the thirst for vengeance became increasingly apparent in the attitude of the jailers. Two hoardings of rough logs aid planks were erected around the Ipatiev house, the outer one a short distance from the first stockade, leaving a walking space between.

These barricades reached to the level of the second-story windowtops, thus completely isolating the prisoners from sight and the outside world from them. To ensure a complete screen, the windows themselves were painted. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, driven desperate by the isolation, once opened her window, and looked out.

She was driven back by a shot from a sentry, the bullet lodging in the woodwork of the window frame. The first floor was occupied by the Bolshevist guards; the royal family was quartered on the second. For the first time the prisoners were subjected to personal search. Avdeiev, the Commandant of the 'House of Special Designation,' rudely snatched a reticule from the hands of.

Nicholas protested: 'Until now I have had honest and respectful men around me. Didkovsky, one of the searchers, retorted: 'Please remember that you are under,arrest and in the hands of justice. Tchemodourov, the Tsar's faithful valet. The very walls of the Ipatiev house, particularly in the lavatory, were made to contribute something to the mental suffering of the helpless victims. The guards, under the tutelage of a certain Bielomoine, covered them with ribald verses and gross sketches caricaturing the Empress and Rasputin.

On another occasion Faya Safonov, one of the most offensive of the guards, climbed a fence to the level of the Tsarina's window and sang filthy songs at her. The girls had a swing in the garden; soldiers carved indecent words on the seat.

Under the moral torture and physical confinement—toward the end the prisoners were allowed but five minutes in the garden each day —the ex-Tsar maintained that astonishing external calm and passivity which characterized his whole life. His health did not seem to weaken, nor did his hair whiten. During the few minutes allowed for exercise in the open air, he carried the Tsarevitch in his arms, as the boy was unable to walk, and marched stolidly up and down until his precious five minutes were over.

But the Empress never left the porch; she aged visibly, her health failed, and gray hairs appeared. The first days of July brought important and ominous changes in the personnel guarding the prisoners. Avdeiev and his colleagues, Moshkin and all the peasant-soldiers who had been recruited locally from the Zlokazov and Sissert factories, were dismissed or removed to a position outside the house.

All 'key' stations were taken by 'reliable' guards, a sure indication that murder was contemplated. Three entirely new figures now glide into the picture —Jankel Mikhaiovich Jurovsky, who assumed the duties of Commandant vacated by Avdeiev, Chaia Isaacovich Golostchekin, an active and influential member of the Bolshevist Party, and Alexander Georgevich Bieloborodov, the twenty-five-year-old peasant who served as President of the Soviet of the Ural region.

Jurovsky and Golostchekin were of Jewish birth, while Bieloborodov was of purely Slavic origin. All three were leading spirits in the local organ of terrorism, the Chrezvychaika , commonly called the 'Cheka' or secret police, and had contributed their share to its final roll call of 1,, victims. All, particularly Golostchekin, were in close relation with another Jewish. It was to Sverdlov that reports would be directed from Ekaterinburg.

The new arrivals were accompanied by ten Lettish soldiers—that is, by a detachment of those hardened shock troops whose ruthless brutality won for them the reputation of being the bashi bazouks of the Russian Revolution. In the present instance certain circumstances would indicate that this group were really Magyars. In any case, the Cheka simply followed its common practice in thus removing all strictly Russian guards from immediate participation in the most comprehensive act of regicide in the history of a people whose annals reek with deeds of violence and bloodshed.

Golostchekin had been in Moscow for the two weeks preceding the night of the murder, remaining absent until the fourteenth of July. During that time he was closeted in frequent conference with Sverdlov, with whom he lodged. Bieloborodov kept him informed by wire of events at the Ipatiev house. In the meantime, Jurovsky had been seen by townsfolk on several occasions surveying the woods in the suburbs of Ekaterinburg; a week before the murder he was discovered in the same occupation near the locality which subsequent investigation determined as the spot where the funeral pyre had been erected.

On July 14, the day of Golostchekin's return from Moscow, an Orthodox priest of Ekaterinburg, Storobjev by name, was permitted. He testified later that Jurovsky had remarked On Monday, the fifteenth, four women were admitted into the death house and ordered to scrub the parquet floors.

Their testimony, taken before the Commission of Inquiry, establishes the fact that the entire imperial family was alive on that day and in good health. On the same day, two lay sisters from a local institution, Antonina Trinkina and Maria Krokhaleva, presented themselves as usual with milk for the prisoners.

Jurovsky himself received the charitable offering and informed them that on the morrow they should bring not only milk but fifty eggs, carefully packed in a basket. This the good Samaritans gladly did on the sixteenth, all unconscious of the cynical preparation Jurovsky was making to ensure a luncheon for his executioners in the woods after the deed of blood was done and the traces removed.

During the minute examination of the ground in the forest at the spot where the bodies were cremated, the indefatigable Nicholas Sokolov discovered a mass of broken eggshells.

Final preparations seem to have been completed by Tuesday, July On that day the boy Leonid Sednev, a playmate of the Tsarevitch, was removed from the house and transferred to an adjoining building. He was never seen again, except for a brief moment next day as he sat in tears at an open window.

Five motor lorries were requisitioned from the official Bolshevist garage, and the chauffeurs were instructed to have, them in readiness outside the Ipatiev house at midnight. On one of these trucks were placed two barrels of benzine and a few smaller jugs containing a supply of sulphuric acid.

The Commission of Inquiry which gathered and laboriously analyzed every scrap of evidence bearing on the gruesome happenings of those twenty-four hours was able to establish from the confiscated receipts delivered by Jurovsky for these supplies, that the barrels held more than three hundred litres of benzine and the jugs one hundred and ninety kilogrammes of the deadly acid.

These destructive precautions had been obtained on mandates signed by Voikov, who paid for his zeal with his life; he was assassinated by a Russian exile at Warsaw, in June The instruments of death were provided; the grave was ready; the executioners were resolved, and the victims were asleep in their beds.

It was Tuesday night, July 16, The knell sounded shortly after midnight, when Jurovsky knocked at the door of the ex-Emperor and bade Nicholas arise and dress.

The same summons was delivered to the Tsarina, the children, and their suite. Jurovsky explained to Nicholas that the Siberian Army, under Admiral Kolchak, and the Czechoslovak troops, those former prisoners of war who had succeeded in arming themselves and were now a serious menace to the Soviet regime in Siberia, were approaching Ekaterinburg; an engagement was imminent, and bullets would be flying in the streets.

In his solicitude for the safety of the royal family he must insist that they come below stairs, where they would be secure from accident or injury. Eventually the bodies were piled into a truck, which soon broke down. Out in the woods, where the Romanovs were stripped naked and their clothing burned, it turned out that the mineshafts that had been selected to receive the bodies were too shallow.

In a panic Yurovsky improvised a new plan, leaving the bodies and rushing into Ekaterinburg for supplies. He spent three days and three nights, sleeplessly driving back and forth to the woods, collecting sulfuric acid and gasoline to destroy the bodies, which he finally decided to bury in separate places to confuse anyone who might find them.

He was determined to obey his orders that "no one must ever know what had happened" to the Romanov family. He pummeled the bodies with rifle butts, doused them with sulfuric acid, and burned them with gasoline. Finally, he buried what was left in two graves. Yurovsky and his killers later wrote detailed, boastful, and confused accounts for the Cheka, a precursor to the KGB.

The reports were sequestered in the archives and never publicized, but during the s renewed interest in the murder site led Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB and future leader of the USSR , to recommend that the House of Special Purpose be bulldozed. Next year is the centennial of the Russian Revolution, and while the country will undoubtedly find many ways to mark the occasion, the unburied bones of its deposed ruling family present a dilemma.

For a nation that aspires to regain its former influence and historic glory, coming to terms with complicated moments in its past is of paramount importance.

But the protracted burial saga reflects issues that are universal and not easy to address. Notions of birthright, bloodlines, and family power still have the ability to fascinate and resonate globally. Even though Britain, for example, is a constitutional monarchy in which the royal family has no power whatsoever, the E!

And during the presidential election four years ago, a vocal "birther" movement tried to prove that Barack Obama did not have the right to be president of the U. In , the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, in conjunction with an investigation committee set up by Putin, ordered the retesting of all the bones.

For the latter, scientists were able to use blood caked on a tunic the tsar was wearing when he was assassinated. There were also plans to test Alexandra's DNA against samples from the preserved body of her sister Ella, who was also killed by the Bolsheviks and whose body is now displayed in a glass case in a Russian church in Jerusalem. Nicholas, Alexandra, and three daughters were returned to their tomb, but Alexei and Maria remain unburied.

A year later there have been vague reports that the tests have been completed but no new announcements about a final burial. This might seem a strange process, but it reflects the opaque way power has always worked in Russia—under tsars, Bolsheviks, and now its contemporary leaders. The church certainly has its own agenda, but it has historically been an arm of the autocracy. Most Kremlin observers agree that the final decision regarding the remains of the Romanovs will be Putin's.

Somehow he has to reconcile the Revolution, the slaughter of , and contemporary Russia. Will there be ceremonies to commemorate both? A reburial ritual with royal honors or a religious ceremony to revere saints? No one knows exactly how he will try to pull it off. Members of the Russian public, particularly those who are either ultranationalists or Orthodox believers, are fascinated by the story of the Romanovs.

And almost everybody is willing to embrace the tsars as part of Russia's magnificent past. Stalin promoted a few of them, such as Peter the Great, as rigorous reformers, but Putin's new textbooks present many as heroic leaders. So, even if there's little support for a restoration of the dynasty, there is huge enthusiasm for the restoration of the glory and prestige and power that the dynasty represented.

Putin's view of Russian history, fueled by his regular reading of historical biographies, is organized by success and achievement, not ideology. One thing is certain: Putin's view of Russian history, fueled by his regular reading of historical biographies, is organized by success and achievement, not ideology.

And, as he has told his entourage, unlike Gorbachev and the last Romanov tsar, "I'll never abdicate. I recently completed a history of the Romanov dynasty, and I am often asked if I censored anything from the gruesome and sexually explicit materials I discovered in the archives of the family's three-century rule.

The answer is yes, but only one once. As I was finishing the book, I left out the more horrid and brutal details of the family's murder in Whatever the fate of the bodies, whatever the future of Russia, however one regards the violent drama of Romanov rule, this remains the most heartbreaking and unbearable scene of them all.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian whose latest book is The Romanovs, The Scene. Type keyword s to search. Tsar Nicholas II center with his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their son Alexis being held by a Cossack during celebrations at the Kremlin to mark the Romanov family's years in power.

The burial ceremony for the remains of Tsar Nicholas ll and his family at St. Peter and Paul cathedral in St. Getty Images. The Romanovs' remains were initially moved from their unmarked graves to a room in the Bureau for Forensic Examination in Ekaterinburg. England's Prince Philip right is the great-great-grandson of Nicholas I, which means his descendants are Romanov relatives as well.

Related Story. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. July 17, The entire family of Nicholas II along with their physician and three servants were shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Siberia. All seven of the Romanov family plus Dr.

Eugene Botkin and three servants maid Anna Demidova , cook Ivan Kharitonov , and footman Alexei Trupp were escorted to a basement room. Chairs were brought in for Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexei. The family believed they were being evacuated to a new location. Eight members of the firing squad entered the basement room along with Yakov Yurovsky , the commandant of the Ipatiev House.

A few minutes later Yurkovsky informed the prisoners that they were about to be executed. Nicholas arose in shock but was quickly shot down. Chaos ensued as the executioners gunned down the family members and their servants. Alexandra and her daughters had sewn jewels into their clothing to provide money if the family was sent into exile and these jewels acted for a time as shields against the bullets.

Anna Demidova carried a pillow also sewn with jewels. Eventually, the soldiers brought out bayonets to kill the last remaining survivors. After several minutes of ricocheting bullets and stabbings, all eleven members of the party were dead.