greatwar-1914: July 16, 1918 - Execution of the RomanovsPictured - The basement of Ipatiev house, wh
greatwar-1914: July 16, 1918 - Execution of the RomanovsPictured - The basement of Ipatiev house, where the Romanov family was shot on July 16, 1918. The high tragedy of the Romanov family and the dynasty which had ruled Russia for three hundred years came to an end on July 16, 1918. After his abdication in March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been placed in a captivity. As the revolution radicalized and then Bolshevized, their imprisonment moved further east and became gradually worse. Kerensky had put the Tsar under house arrest at his palace in Tsarskoe Selo, then moved them east to Tobolsk. Lenin moved the Tsar further east to the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg, stripped the Romanovs of their servants, forbade the Tsar from wearing officer’s shoulder-boards, and finally placed the family on soldier’s rations and under a strict military guard which delighted in tormenting the family, particularly the Tsar’s daughters. At the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg the Tsar’s family lived out the last months of their lives under this strict regime. Lenin regarded them as hostages against counter-revolution, although the Tsar hoped for asylum in Britain rather than a position with the forming White armies. Events conspired against him, however. Czech soldiers who opposed the Bolsheviks were nearing Ekaterinberg that July, and local authorities were warned to prevent a possible rescue of the Romanovs. The Ekaterinburg Soviet gathered on the night of July 16, and decided to pass a death sentence on Citizen Romanov and his family. That night a truckload of local Bolsheviks and foreign soldiers entered the house and ordered the ex-Tsar and his family to the basement. The Empress asked for chairs for her and thirteen-year-old son Alexei to sit upon. The Red commander brought in two chairs, and then informed the stunned Tsar that he had been condemned to death. “What? What?” asked the Tsar. The executioners brought out revolvers and began shooting the family. The four daughters, between twenty-two and seventeen years old, had been hiding some of their jewels in their clothes which deflected the bullets. The Bolshevik shooters stabbed them with bayonets and shot them in their heads, and stabbed to death their maid, who had shielded herself with a pillow full of jewels. What is the legacy of Nicholas the last? As a king Nicholas was an unapologetic autocrat, as a wartime leader he was disastrous. But his diaries also reveal a loving family man and devout Christian who had dreaded inheriting such a position of power, and seemed almost relieved upon abdication. Some see the death of the Romaonvs as murder, others as revolutionary justice. The Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas as a martyred saint in 2000 and built a church on the spot where Ipatiev house once stood; the Left can point out with some truth that those who agonize over the Tsar’s death seem to care little for the thousands who died under his rule. For a long time rumors claimed that Anastasia, the youngest daughter, had somehow escaped, and certainly it is the brutal slaying of the Romanov children which led many, like the Russian President Boris Yeltsin, to describe the execution as one of the “most shameful pages in Russian history.” One hundred years later the deaths of the Romanovs continue to haunt us. -- source link