It’s July 17th, 1918. We’re in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg. As one of history’s great imperial dynasties reaches its grim conclusion, the young Tsarevich Alexei sits frozen in his chair. Around him lay the bodies of his parents, Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra, freshly murdered by gunmen, their blood spilling out from beneath finely brocaded clothes.
There are other bodies, too. The bodies of his four elder sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and the bodies of the family’s few remaining servants and retainers. Some twitch and moan from sickening wounds. Others have barely a scratch, but cower where they’ve fallen, stupefied by fear and shock.
As the gun smoke and dust from the rent plaster begin to settle, the door to the room opens again; the gunmen reappear. The 13-year-old raises his head weakly. His eyes do not comprehend the horror that has just unfolded and that is still unfolding. What follows is a hail of bullets that tears into the boy’s clothing.
He slumps to the floor and yet somehow he’s still alive. Enraged by the bloody mess that all of this is turning into, one of the gunmen strides purposefully towards Alexei, his pistol raised. The man places his pistol to Alexei’s head. This time there’ll be no mistake, and the leveled barrel of the pistol is the last thing the youngster sees.
Now the assassins can get to work on finishing off the rest of the family and bringing three centuries of dynastic rule to an end. In some ways, the end of the Romanovs feels inevitable. The Tsar was an autocrat and a tyrant and he was unfeeling towards the suffering of his own people, like the Bourbon kings of France 150 years earlier.
The Romanovs lived in splendor and luxury while their people struggled and starved. And so when those people rose up, the Tsar was put to death. But let’s be totally honest here. It had always been like this. It didn’t matter whether you were living under Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible. Your life would have been wretched if you were a Russian peasant.
And you would have been a peasant. By the second half of the 19th century, 83.7% of Russians were in the peasant class, which meant basically everyone was suffering under the imperial regime. Peasants dealt with rampant disease and miserable living conditions. At the beginning of Nicholas’s reign, life expectancy at birth was under 25 for girls and under 30 for boys.
50% of Russians did not see their fifth birthday, much the same as it had been at the dawn of the dynasty in 1613. So what changed? Nicholas II was no worse than most of the other Tsars before him and probably a bit better than most. So why did this centuries-old status quo suddenly spell disaster for the Tsar and end a dynasty in the bloodiest of ways? Well, it wasn’t just Russia that was moving.
In fact, it was the world that had changed. In the modern era, lumbering antiquated systems of autocracy are no longer tolerated. For monarchs and emperors around the world, the choice was clear: Reform or die. When Nicholas’s grandfather, Alexander II, ascended to the imperial throne in 1855, he understood this. He sensed that the old ways were dragging Russia down.
By holding on to feudal serfdom and absolute power for the Tsar, Russia was falling behind. But perhaps more importantly, he sensed the very real danger of bloody revolution. In March 1856, Alexander told his nobles:
“You yourselves know that the existing order of possession of souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below.”
So in 1861, Alexander signed the Edict of Emancipation. 23 million serfs were now free. Alexander II became Alexander the Liberator. Now, we shouldn’t over-romanticize the Edict of Emancipation. While this was a milestone in Russia’s social history, it didn’t exactly lead to a “happily ever after” for Russian peasants.
The system of serfdom had certainly been exploitative and dehumanizing. Peasants worked for their lords and masters and could do nothing to escape their position in society. But these masters did have their own responsibilities towards the peasants. Masters couldn’t evict serfs from their lands without good cause. They also had to permit serfs to keep a portion of their own agricultural production for themselves.
And crucially, masters could not brutalize or murder their serfs. This was a world away from the cattle slavery taking place in America and elsewhere at the time where enslaved peoples were literally the property of their masters in every sense. So the serfs were released, but they were released into a system that was set up to see them fail.
They now had the right to buy their land from the landowner, but of course, most could not afford to do so. For household serfs, the situation was even worse. There was no land for these serfs to buy. They had their freedom, but in name only. So Russia remained a bitterly unequal society racked by poverty and squalor just as it always had been.
And in this new world with its new ideas of socialism and class consciousness, the situation was untenable. Socialist groups like the Narodnaya Volya, or The People’s Will, had been watching Alexander closely. For them, the continued suffering of the peasantry following emancipation was a complete disgrace. Something had to change.
The Tsar had to die. At 2:00 on the afternoon of March 13th, 1881, The People’s Will struck. As the Tsar traveled through St. Petersburg by carriage, a man named Rysakov stepped forward and hurled a grenade. The resulting explosion killed one Cossack and wounded several others, but the Tsar was unhurt. Had Alexander left immediately as his aides wanted, he might have survived.
But instead, he stuck around, speaking to bystanders and surveying the damage. This gave Rysakov’s accomplice his chance, and this time there’d be no mistake. The second grenade wounded 20 people and killed the assassin instantly. One witness wrote that through the snow, debris, and blood, you could see fragments of clothing, epaulettes, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.
As the dust settled, it became clear that some of those chunks of flesh belonged to the Tsar himself. Alexander was hideously wounded. His legs lay mangled in alarming directions while his face had been torn by the blast. But worse still was his chest. His abdomen was ripped wide open. Astonishingly though, he was still alive. In a whisper, he said:
“Take me to the palace. There I will die.”
And he did about 1 hour later. Retribution against The People’s Will was predictably swift and bloody. Five were hanged for their part in the assassination and their attack achieved nothing. If life had been tough for the Russian peasantry under Alexander II, it was about to get a whole lot worse under his son, Alexander III.
Alexander III was a hulking colossus of a man standing close to 2 meters tall. He was known for his strength. Some of his favorite party tricks included bending iron bars and ripping decks of playing cards in half. Immediately he set about ripping apart his father’s reforms. Literally on the day he died, the elder Alexander had set up ministerial commissions designed to offer consultation and advice to the Tsar, providing some limitation and accountability to imperial power.
The younger Alexander was not having this. This reform was the first to go. With his father’s body barely even cold in its grave, Alexander III was dismantling 25 years of social change and reinforcing his own autocracy. He launched bloody pogroms against Jews and implemented a series of sweeping counter-reforms designed to take Russia back to its conservative past.
This did not escape the attention of The People’s Will. By 1887, the group was making moves again, seeking another imperial scalp to add to their collection. But this time, the plot was foiled. On March the 1st, five conspirators were arrested in St. Petersburg. They were carrying handmade bombs stuffed with lead pellets laced with strychnine. All five were hanged.
Among them was Alexander Ulyanov. Ulyanov’s death would then radicalize his younger brother, Vladimir, pushing him into a life of revolutionary anger and fervent socialist politics. We’ll be hearing more from him later on. The Tsar, on the other hand, may have escaped his assassination attempt, but he was not long for this.
In 1888, a bizarre and scarcely believable event hastened his end. Alexander and his family were traveling through the countryside on the Imperial train when it derailed near Borki in Ukraine. The Borki rail disaster killed 21 people and should have killed the Imperial family. But Alexander had other ideas.
According to the legend, this giant of a man stood like Atlas in the ruins of the dining car, holding its collapsing roof on his shoulders, his family scurrying to safety underneath him. There is some speculation that the injuries he sustained in the crash led to the kidney failure that killed him 6 years later.
And so in 1894, Nicholas II inherited the throne from his father and inherited a powder keg of political dissent. Now, Nicholas had a choice. He could be the one to change Russia. He could be the leader who would bring an end to centuries of subjugation and mistreatment for the Russian people. Or he could be the bloodthirsty autocrat quelling dissent with violence and brutality.
In the end, Nicholas chose neither. The historical consensus on Nicholas is that he was weak-willed and ill-suited to power. In fact, he seemed to admit this himself. In Nicholas’s own words:
“What is going to happen to me and all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.”
So rather than do something tricky like make a decision or be his own man, he let his ministers choose for him. And as those ministers had been his father’s ministers too, Alexander III’s program of counter-reforms and bloody retribution continued. By 1905, the people had had enough.
And so on January the 22nd of that year, 50,000 demonstrators marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They carried a petition for Nicholas calling for reforms of labor laws. They were met by more than 10,000 soldiers of the Imperial Guard who opened fire on the crowd. The results were horrifying. Between 143 and 234 protesters were killed in the gunfire.
Up to 800 more were injured. January 22nd became known as Bloody Sunday. Nicholas was already in a bad position. His forces were losing their war against Japan in the east, exposing Russia’s weakness on the world stage. And then when his own troops began murdering Russian citizens on the streets of St. Petersburg, there seemed to be only one recourse: Revolution.
The 1905 revolution is sometimes forgotten besides the successful 1917 revolutions. But this was a real crisis for the imperial dynasty and laid bare the social issues that were rotting the empire to its core. And so across the empire, people came out in revolt and the authorities responded with trademark ruthlessness.
At Łódź, a 3,000 strong Polish workers’ militia clashed with the Russian military. At least 151 died in the streets as the rebellion was brutally put down. At Kiev, a mob of pro-monarchists and general reactionaries went on a rampage against Jews and suspected socialists. Around a hundred Ukrainian Jews were massacred.
Right across the land, peasant revolts confiscated land and burned manor houses. Many landowners were killed and many more peasants were then killed in the backlash. Now Nicholas tried to change his approach. His October Manifesto of 1905 offered some concessions such as the creation of a parliament known as the Duma. But the growing leftist movement saw through these scant reforms.
They saw the manifesto for what it was: an attempt to puncture the momentum of the demonstrators while in reality retaining the true power of the Tsar. And so the rebellion continued. General strikes brought St. Petersburg and Moscow to their knees. Workers’ councils were established in both cities. These councils were the first examples of something that would become synonymous with 20th-century Russian history: the Soviet.
In December, socialists and workers’ militias took to the streets in Moscow. One group of socialists quickly emerged as the key orchestrators and organizers of the working-class revolt. These were the Bolsheviks. They swiftly assassinated the head of the Moscow police force and issued revolutionary pamphlets to instruct the people on street-fighting techniques.
It wasn’t enough though. When Nicholas’s soldiers arrived in Moscow on December the 15th, they took just three days to crush the Soviet, killing more than 1,000 rebels in the process. On December 19th, Bolshevik commander Zinovy Litvin-Sedoy issued a stark prediction:
“Blood, violence, and death will follow in our footsteps. But it does not matter. The working class will win.”
Nicholas either never heard this prediction or simply didn’t take it seriously. The following May, the emperor opened the first Duma and then dissolved it in July when its ideas grew too radical. The second attempt at a Duma was even worse for Nicholas. Socialist candidates took 15 of the available seats.
Nicholas simply couldn’t accept this. Along with his trusted minister Stolypin, he began scheming for an excuse to dissolve the second Duma. In June 1907, Nicholas and Stolypin made their move. Stolypin read a document to the Duma alleging a socialist plot to overthrow the emperor. The plot was actually a complete fabrication, but it gave the Tsar the pretext he needed.
Hundreds of radicals and socialists were arrested and the Tsar set about reforming the Duma system. Essentially, he was going to recreate parliament in his own image, something that would serve him rather than oppose him. And so imperial power rolled on unchecked and beneath the surface all that resentment and anger just kept on simmering away.
But in contrast to the scenes of bloodshed in the streets and political maneuvering in the Duma, Nicholas was a devoted family man at home. He was known to defer to his wife Alexandra, the strong-willed princess from the German state of Hesse. And it seems he genuinely loved her. Together they had four daughters. Olga was born in 1895, followed by Tatiana in 1897 and Maria in 1899.
Then finally Anastasia in 1901. Son and heir Alexei was born in 1904 and his struggles with hemophilia would cause much stress and strain for the imperial family in the years that followed. Nicholas certainly would have considered himself a good father and a good husband. And perhaps he was right. But as a ruler, he was hopeless.
In the words of historian Richard Pipes, Russia had the worst of both worlds: a Tsar who lacked the intelligence and character to rule, yet insisted on playing the autocrat. But despite this, there was still a chance at salvation. And this chance was Pyotr Stolypin. In Stolypin, the Tsar not only had someone to buffer him from widespread unrest and dissent, but he also had a rather effective minister.
In the years following the 1907 coup, Stolypin introduced land reforms designed to improve Russian agricultural production while simultaneously improving the lives of the rural population. He did similar work in the city, too, aiming to enhance working conditions for the urban poor. Stolypin was by no means a socialist. He wasn’t on a charitable mission.
Instead, he was attempting to instill order by creating a middle class of small landowners to stabilize the current economic system. And therefore, he was a staunch supporter of imperial power. But he was also empathetic. He wasn’t interested in riding roughshod over the Russian peasantry.
He was also not a rampant anti-semite. He did try to build bridges between Russia’s gentile and Jewish populations where others, the Tsar included, had sown only division. With Stolypin on his side, Nicholas might just save himself and his much-cherished family. But on September the 14th, 1911, Stolypin was attending the opera in Kiev along with the Tsar and two of his daughters.
Shortly after the second act, a man approached Stolypin. This man was Dmitri Bogrov, a lawyer and a Jewish leftist revolutionary. Bogrov produced a gun and fired into the minister’s chest. A shocked Stolypin had just enough strength to stand, remove his gloves, and open his coat to show bystanders his blood-soaked jacket.
Making the sign of the cross, he sank to the floor. He died four days later. Nicholas had lost the only man who could save him. And there was worse to come. On August 1st, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. Before the month was out, the two empires would clash at Tannenberg in East Prussia. It was a disaster for Nicholas.
With sickening loss of life, the Russians were encircled. When General Alexander Samsonov attempted a retreat, men, horses, and material found themselves ensnared together on the swampy ground with no hope of escape. 30,000 Russian soldiers were slain. At least 92,000 were captured. The Russian Second Army was essentially destroyed.
Samsonov was despondent. “The Tsar trusted me. How can I face him after such a disaster?” And he really did mean those words. At some point in the early hours of August 30th, Samsonov left his command, walked into the nearby woods, and shot himself through the head. The Russian Empire was embroiled in the First World War and it was losing.
Russia’s catastrophe in those opening months of the war did however seem to light a fire under Nicholas and he did something pretty spectacular. He made a decision for himself. He announced that he personally would take control of the Russian armies. Unfortunately for Nicholas and for everyone else, it was the wrong decision.
His constant meddling and lack of military nous made him unpopular amongst his generals and undoubtedly cost lives and harmed the war effort. Russia did score victories in the coming years, but even these came at a dizzying cost. The Brusilov Offensive in Ukrainian Galicia in 1916 was Russia’s biggest win of the war and it came with 440,000 Russian dead and wounded.
All told, the First World War was a disaster for Russia. From the summer of 1914 to the spring of 1917, around 1.8 million soldiers died on the Eastern Front and casualties surpassed 9 million. Factoring in the millions of dead and wounded, 2 and a half% of Russia’s population became casualties of the war. This meant a massive reduction in the labor force, specifically young, fit, working-age males.
Meanwhile, refugees from Russia’s war-torn western fringes fell back into the heartlands. This coupled with the massive spending required to keep Russia in the fight left the empire bankrupt. And this was the end of the line for the Tsar. His decision to get involved in military matters meant that he would take the blame.
This disaster of a war was now his disaster. He had to go. In the spring of 1917, revolution returned to Russia and this time it was successful. Nicholas was deposed in March and was placed under house arrest by the provisional government. Understanding that the game was up, Nicholas stopped trying to cling to power.
The only possible victory now was survival. If not for himself, then at least for his family. Now, while this was all going down, hundreds of miles away in Zurich, a man was boarding a train. This train would take him on an impossible journey northwards through hostile Germany. The Germans, aware that the arrival of such a man would further weaken the Russians, allowed him to pass.
From here he traveled through Sweden into Finland and then into St. Petersburg and the newly created Petrograd Soviet. This man was, I’m sure you’ve guessed it, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, younger brother of the would-be assassin Alexander Ulyanov and better known to history as Lenin. That October, Lenin would lead Russia’s second revolution of the year.
His Bolsheviks would bring about the end of the provisional government and the Second Congress of Soviets would proclaim itself as the ruling party of Russia. Russia would fall into a civil war lasting almost 5 years, leaving millions dead. As for the imperial family, they now fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks from which they would not escape.
Nicholas and Alexandra were by now well aware that they were probably not going to get out of this. Their priority became for their four daughters and their son. The family and a handful of servants and retainers had been long evacuated from St. Petersburg. For some time they remained in the relative safety and comfort of Tobolsk in Siberia.
But by the spring of 1918 they’d been moved again. This time they were imprisoned at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg under the watchful gaze of Cheka secret policeman Yakov Yurovsky. Here they were isolated from the outside world. Many of their belongings were confiscated and they were surveilled constantly.
But with the Russian Civil War now raging across Russia, the Bolsheviks couldn’t hold the family indefinitely. They simply could not allow Nicholas and the others to fall into the hands of the Russian conservative White forces. On June 29th, 1918, the Ural Regional Soviet met with Lenin to discuss what could be done with their prisoners.
According to Central Executive Committee member Yakov Sverdlov, Lenin believed that “we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.” While this might sound ambiguous to us, the Ural Regional Soviet felt they’d received their orders loud and clear: Nicholas would have to die.
And since power passes through royals with their bloodline, his family would also have to follow him into death. At about 1:30 a.m. on July 17th, 1918, the Romanov family finally reached the end of the road. They were woken roughly and informed that they were to be moved immediately. The Whites had reached the nearby town and the Ipatiev House was no longer safe.
45 minutes later, they were led across the courtyard and down into a basement. Nicholas carried Alexei in his arms. Alexandra and the girls followed close behind along with the court physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, and several servants. Yurovsky remembered that the family were calm with no suspicions. It was almost like they really believed they were simply being moved.
The younger ones perhaps did believe this. As the prisoners settled into the basement, Alexandra was frosty and curt. She demanded that chairs be brought for them. But as the chairs were brought, the room suddenly filled with people. Yurovsky was ushering his men into the cramped basement. Some of the men appeared unsteady.
Most had been calming their nerves with vodka in preparation for the task ahead. While the family wondered what was going on, Yurovsky wasted no time. He read quickly but clearly from a piece of paper:
“In view of the fact that your relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.”
Understandably, there was a shocked response from the captives. Nicholas seemed unable to process what he heard. In a faltering voice, he said:
“I can’t understand you. Read it again, please.”
Yurovsky read it a second time, but Nicholas once again seemed not to understand. Addressing the Chekist, he could only reply:
“What? What?”
Now Yurovsky’s patience was at an end. He roared at the former Tsar. “This!” With that single word, he emptied his pistol into Nicholas’s chest. There was now an explosion of gunfire. Yurovsky’s gunmen all opened fire en masse as the Tsar’s chest erupted into a bullet-riddled mess. Dr. Botkin was hit in the chaos as were some of the servants. Tsar Nicholas lay lifeless on the ground, but none of the other members of the Imperial family had been struck.
The shooting now became chaotic. Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore describes the room as pandemonium with deafening gunfire and screaming and “smoke and dust so thick that no one could see or hear anything.” Yurovsky remembered almost being hit in the head himself while one of the assassins was struck in the hand by a bullet.
In the chaos, Alexandra began to cross herself. One of the guards, P.Z. Yermakov, seemed eager to make sure his shots actually counted. He strode towards her and with a Mauser pistol shot the former Tsarina between the eyes. As the wall was sprayed with her mother’s blood and brains, 19-year-old Maria seems to have tried to flee.
The teenager sprinted for the double doors to the adjoining room. Yermakov saw her go, turned, and fired at her with a Nagant revolver. She was hit in the thigh and sank to the ground. By now, the room was choked with plaster dust and smoke, and it was impossible for the assassins to keep on shooting without hitting each other. Yurovsky ordered the team out into the adjoining room.
Here, they coughed out plaster dust and tried to regain their composure while the survivors moaned and sobbed in the room next door. Finally, Yurovsky told his men to pull themselves together and led them back into the room. Inside was carnage. The space was spattered with gore and the floor a-washed with blood.
But surprisingly few people were actually dead. The jewels were the problem. Before leaving their quarters, the Imperial family had stuffed gemstones and jewelry into their clothes for safekeeping. As the bullets ricocheted across the room, the jewels provided the sort of armor, deflecting the shots, prolonging the horror.
Now Yurovsky and his men would finish the job. As the assassins re-entered, Dr. Botkin was attempting to get up. Yurovsky dispatched him from close range with his Mauser. Next, they turned their attention to Alexei, the young Tsarevich, who was sat where he’d been in his chair and was covered in blood, but not his own—his father’s. Yurovsky, and another guard, Grigory Nikulin, fired repeatedly at the boy, but the bullets largely bounced off the diamonds and gemstones that he’d had hidden under his shirt.
Badly wounded but still very much alive, Alexei slumped onto the floor where he groaned and coughed. At this point, Yermakov seems to have lost his mind. He leapt upon the 13-year-old Tsarevich, hacking at the boy’s chest with a bayonet, cutting him deeply, but still not killing him. Once again, those diamonds acted as a sort of armor. Yurovsky, sick of butchery, pushed his man out of the way, shot Alexei in the head, ending the torment.
Now, only the four princesses remained. Maria had been wounded, but Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were not physically harmed at all, although understandably in a very deep state of shock. It was Yurovsky and Yermakov who strode towards the Tsar’s daughters to finish them off. The sight of the two men seemed to trigger a fight-or-flight response in the girls. They scattered and crawled desperately away across the gore-soaked floor.
Tatiana was the first to go. Yurovsky shot the 21-year-old Grand Duchess in the back of the head. It covered her elder sister, Olga, “in a shower of blood and brains.” Olga did not outlive her sister for long, though. Yermakov kicked her to the floor and fired a pistol into her jaw. If Yurovsky thought that Yermakov had managed to get a hold of himself, he was wrong.
The assassin was now in the grips of a frenzy as the wounded Maria clung to a screaming Anastasia. Yermakov began hacking at them with wild, wicked swipes. Maria’s diamond-encrusted clothes seemed to have deflected some of these blows, but she was dispatched quickly with a gunshot to the head. Yermakov then began to chase Anastasia, slipping and sliding on the blood-slicked floor before he finally cornered her and began hacking her to pieces.
When his bayonet became stuck in the wall behind her, he pulled out his gun and shot her again. This didn’t seem to be enough to quench his bloodlust. With Anastasia seemingly dead, he turned once more upon the lifeless bodies of her parents. His bayonet strikes were enough to pin the body of the Tsarina Alexandra to the floorboards.
The guards could now catch their breath, their ears ringing from the gunfire and screaming. Then to everyone’s amazement, one of the servants began to awake. Anna Demidova had hidden beneath a jewel-encrusted pillow. Now she said:
“Thank God. God has saved me.”
Yermakov didn’t think much of this. He leapt upon her, stabbing her until she didn’t speak anymore. It took 20 bloody minutes to kill the Romanovs. Even after all had been pronounced dead, it was said that two of the sisters suddenly vomited and began to gurgle; they were stabbed again to make sure of the job. Of course, it was Yermakov who did the honors.
It’s not clear which of the two sisters this was. Judging by Yurovsky’s own recollections, the two survivors were probably Olga and Anastasia. Anastasia is believed to have cried out and lifted her arm, at which Yermakov grabbed a nearby bayonet and plunged it into the chest of the 17-year-old girl. When this didn’t do the job, he then predictably shot her in the head.
Yurovsky remembered that Yermakov then strode across the room, stabbing randomly at bodies with the bayonet. Out of all the killers, Yermakov seems to be the one who reveled the most in his task. Perhaps he was the most committed Bolshevik of the bunch. Or more likely, he was just a psychopath.
The family’s young bulldog, Ortino, was also bayoneted to death. It’s unknown whether or not Yermakov did this, too. When one of the guards returned to inspect the cellar, he found it, quote, “slick and slippery as a skating rink with blood, brains, and gore.”
Bodies lay in an appalling jumble, eyes staring in horror, clothing covered in blood. It seems the whole thing was too much for some of the men. Some began to vomit in disgust and fled into the night. Some looted possessions from the Imperial family before they made their getaway. Yurovsky recognized what was happening and made it clear that any looters would be shot.
The next hours were grim and exhausting. The truck transporting the bodies broke down and it took them 4 hours to get the family to the mine shaft where they would be disposed of. All were stripped of their clothes and any jewels found were handed over to the state. Around 17 pounds of gemstones were collected in total.
But when they threw the bodies down the mine shaft, they found it was too shallow. Rushing back and forwards through the night, an exhausted Yurovsky eventually used a mixture of petroleum and sulfuric acid to get rid of the bodies for good. And so a 300-year-long dynasty came to a messy, ignominious, and horrifying conclusion.
Now, the downfall of the Romanovs plays out like a gripping thriller with a climax that simply goes too far. When we hear about an empire that’s built on the blood and subjugation of its own people, we really can’t help but to eagerly await its downfall—the moment when the bad guys finally get what they deserve.
But when that downfall comes, the manner of it is so vile and distasteful that it can’t help but turn the stomach. Yes, Nicholas had the blood of millions on his hands. And yes, as historian Bernard Pares says, he had many opportunities of putting things right. He did not.
But the same cannot really be said about the imperial children. They were innocents pushed into their position by accident of birth and they were butchered for it in an episode that lasted over 20 minutes of pure barbarity in a dimly lit basement. No one could reasonably say that they deserved to die in the way that they did. But their fate was not unique.
Across the broad sweep of history, there are countless others who died similarly horrible deaths, whether at the hands of a Tsar or at the hands of someone else. The difference between those victims and the Romanovs is that history doesn’t remember their names.
