was roused from their beds in the middle of the night. They were marched down to the basement of the house in which they were being held captive (having been under house arrest for the last sixteen months), lined up, and killed in this room.
A group of men shot at the family, their doctor, and the three servants who had chosen to accompany them into exile. Most of the bullets ricocheted off the bodies of the four daughter, as, unbeknownst to their captors, they had sewn some of the family's diamonds into the lining of their dresses when they had first been taken prisoner. Seeing that the bullets were failing, the men then stabbed the young women with their bayonets.
They were the Romanovs, once the Imperial family of Russia. Many had become displeased with the way the country was being run, and so Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in face of the Bolshevik uprising and the Russian Civil War. For a while the enemy forces had been content to keep the family hostage, but when the White Russian forces were gaining ground and would potentially have been able to stage a rescue attempt, the order was given to execute the family. According to Leon Trotsky, the order came from Vladimir Lenin.
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| The four grand duchesses and their dogs while in captivity |
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| Their brother the Tsarevich, one-time heir to the throne (photo taken while in captivity) |
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| The children all contracted measles while in exile, and the practice back then was to shave the head to get rid of any remaining traces of virus. Pictured here are the four girls. |
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| Relations with their guards were fairly civil in the beginning. Here, the former Tsar and one of his daughters (the two standing in the back to the right) pose with some of their gaurds. |
The bodies of the Romanovs were driven out into wilderness to be disposed of. They were tossed into an abandoned mine shaft, which turned out to be much shallower than their murderers had hoped. A few grenades were tossed into the shaft in an effort to collapse earth in around the corpses and cover them up, but that didn't work out so well either. The men covered the bodies with brush for the time being, while they returned to town and worked on coming up with a plan B.
The next day the story had already begun to make the rounds - some of them men had gone drinking and bragged about what they had done, even mentioning the area where they had ditched the bodies. So now the bodies had to be moved. They drove the corpses to another location and dug a mass grave. They smashed the faces with the butts of the rifles and doused them with sulfuric acid, hoping to render them unrecognizable should the bodies be discovered.
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| The site where the remains of the Romanovs lay buried for more than half a century, now marked and commemorated |
As it turned out, no one found the disposal site until 1979. But the men who found the remains then were too scared to tell anyone about it; it was not a time in Russian history when they would be thanked for uncovering the last imperial family. They returned all of the bones to the grave and covered them back up.
10 years later the political climate had changed enough that one of the men told the world of the discovery, and said he would point out the location of the site if the remains were given a proper Christian burial. In 1991, the official go ahead was given to open the grave.
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| Diagram of the grave that was exhumed in 1991 |
But wait a minute. What about the fourth daughter? What about the son?
Thus began the trend over the next many years of people popping up all over the place claiming to be the long lost Tsarevich or Grand Duchess. (Think the Disney movie "Anastasia.")
Russian and American scientists disagreed on exactly which girl was missing, Anastasia or Maria.
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| Only five skulls from a family of seven |
So we definitely had Empress Alexandra (whose skull had dentures made from platinum):
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| Alexandra, shown here with her beloved son Alexei |
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| A photograph of the last tsar superimposed over the skull believed to be his |
We had the oldest two daughters, Olga and Tatiana:
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| Olga on left, Tatiana on right |
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| Olga |
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| Tatiana |
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| Maria |
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| Anastasia |
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| All four grand duchesses together when they were little |
And we were definitely missing this guy:
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| Tsarevich Alexei |  |
In the meantime, scientists worked on positively identifying the remains they did have. They confirmed that two of the skeletons had been the parents of those that belonged to the three young women. They exhumed the remains of the tsar's long-dead brother to compare DNA, and confirmed a sibling relationship. One last important step was achieved with the help of Prince Philip of England (the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.)
Dude was kind enough to provide a DNA sample for study. And since pretty much all of European royalty was related to one another in some way throughout history, this helped seal the deal. (In this case, Prince Philip's grandmother was Empress Alexandra's sister.) The skeleton of the mother and the three young women were matched to Philip's DNA.
And now, just because it amuses me, I am going to further emphasize how tight the gene pool of European royalty was at the time. Check out this picture of the Tsar of Russia and the King of England.
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| Tsar Nicholas II and King George V. I'll let you guess which is which. |
Whoa, for real?
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| Yes, for real. |
The two men were first cousins. Incidentally, King George V was also the Empress Alexandra's first cousin. Of course.
For many years the recovered remains were studied in this way, by scientists from around the world.
But the mystery remained - where were Alexei and his sister? Had they somehow survived that brutal night? Had they escaped? If they were killed along with all the others, as their executioners claimed, then why were they not buried with the rest? Much was made of those questions, breeding as they do our sense of the romantic.
However, in case you didn't hear (because I sure didn't until well after the fact), in 2007 the bodies of the other two WERE discovered. They were found in a separate grave about 260 feet away from the first. It irked me that after so much speculation and sensationalism, this side of the world barely even heard about it when the mystery was finally solved. (DNA testing confirms the whole lot: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004838)
One possible explanation for the separate grave is this: when the first attempt to hide the bodies failed so miserably, the man in charge of the operation scrambled to come with another idea. He set his men to digging one huge mass grave. In the meantime, he tried to burn two of the bodies to see if that was a viable option for disposing of them all. He chose to burn the Tsarevich Alexei and Empress Alexandra. However, due to the nature of the corpses at that point, he mistook the body of one of the Grand Duchesses for the Empress.
I'm still not sure why this would lead to him burying them separately. I'm sure the world will never know exactly what happened, since people in that grisly period of Russian history were constantly changing their stories to suit. For example, multiple men from the firing squad tried to turn their guns in to museums, claiming that theirs was the one that had ended the last tsar.
In 2008 the bodies of the Romanovs were finally laid to rest with state honors in the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
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| Little Romanovs! |
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| Fifth time's the charm - finally got that boy! |
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Keep an eye out for my next blog post, which will be all about Rasputin, the mad monk.
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