...The year is 1918
...The place is Ekaterinburg, Russia, in the midst of the Red Urals
...It is almost midnight.
A family is awakened and ordered to get dressed. Father, mother, four daughters and a little boy; a doctor, a maid, and two other servants.
They are led through the house to the basement -- twenty-three steps down. They are lined up against the wall. They are told they will be photographed. They are told they will be safe.
A group of soldiers files in, following the bearded man in charge. The son of a locksmith, reading a telegram. Condemning them to death.
They are startled:
“What?”
“Mother!”
The soldiers throw up their guns and fire. The mother and the elder girl attempt to cross themselves. The doctor moves to shield the Empress. The Tsar hugs his little boy.
But that is all. Long minutes, dragging through the warm night. Bullets cutting the air into a million pieces, jumping on the floor. The laughter that once rippled down palace corridors is replaced by the terrible rhythm of hearts beating their last, the deafening silence of a futureless future. Blood streams against the tiles. The soldiers become sick -- they think the blood is blue.
Eleven bodies wrapped in bloody sheets are hauled out onto the back of a truck, covered by tarpaulin to hide the terrible crime. The gates open, and the truck begins its journey.
Away from city lights -- into the darkness that permits everything. Buried in a mass grave, without a priest, with the intention of never being found again. A sacrilege to three hundred years -- a murder without warning or trial.
The Romanovs -- clockwise from far left: Grand Duchess Marie, Grand Duchess Tatiana (standing), Grand Duchess Olga (standing), Grand Duchess Anastasia, Tsar and Emperor Nicholas II, Tsarina and Empress Alexandra, Cesarevich and Heir Aleksei (crouching)
On this date I find it appropriate to begin my series of articles about the Romanov family. I hope that this will offer my readers the much-needed insight into the lives of these beautiful, courageous people. We have focused too much on their deaths. But to do them justice, we must learn to see their lives behind the red veil of the Revolution which consumed them with such tragic swiftness.
We can speculate forever about whether or not any of them survived. They were killed brutally, horribly, in the darkness of the night, with the White Army that supported them about to take over the city and the Red Guard in panic. They were killed in a small cellar lighted only by a small lamp and filled soon with the smoke of burnt gunpowder. Their deaths were brutal. When their remains were found, their bones had to be glued back together even to claim that they were whole skeletons. The girls’ corsets -- two corsets, in fact, sewn together, with jewels hidden in between -- had made the bullets ricochet around the room. Bayonets had had to be used to finish off the women. And this murder had been conducted by boys barely over eighteen themselves. To them, the girls might have looked beautiful that night. Could any of them have survived? The possibility exists, as some would claim. But in my opinion they would not have wanted to survive. They had stayed in Russia to be together, and to be able to die in the country they loved. They would not have wanted to be separated. Thus let us leave their terrible secret to them, for, after nearly ninety years of controversy, I believe they would want to be left in peace.
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