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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Romanovs’ Fate Revealed
By JONATHAN EARLE
July 10, 2012 5:57 p.m. ET
Moscow
Nicholas Romanoy, the deposed czar of Russia, and his family were awakened in the
middle of the night on July 16-17, 1918, and told to get dressed. They were being moved to
a safe location, their Bolshevik captors said, away from the White army that was closing
in on Yekaterinburg, in the southern Ural Mountains.
The soldiers shepherded the family and four servants—a cook, valet, doctor and maid—
into the basement of the house where they were being held. Nicholas carried his ailing
son, Alexei, in his arms. Once all were assembled, a death sentence was read aloud,
twice, and the eight executioners raised their guns.
Precisely what happened next took Soviet and Russian investigators nearly a century to
piece together.
Now the results of those investigations, the last of which was closed last year, are the
subject of an ambitious exhibition at the Russian State Archives in Moscow. "The Death
of ‘'sar Nicholas Il’s Family: A One-Hundred Year Investigation,” through July 29, aims
to clear away seven decades of misinformation and silence under the Soviet regime.
"The Soviet government hid all of this true story from the people for so long,” said Diana,
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a 22-year-old student, who said she was struck by the savagery of the execution, which
ended in a bayonet charge.
The truth presented here is an ugly one. "None of the Romanovs were saved on that
terrible night, and all the remains of the family and those who were with them have now
been accounted for,” said Sergei Mironenko, director of the Russian State Archives and
co-organizer of the exhibition.
There were, in other words, no romantic escapes, no jaunting through Europe, no
hidden riches—not even for Anastasia, at 17 years old the youngest duchess, whose
purported survival has inspired numerous films and theater productions.
‘The executions closed the door on the 30-year-old Romanov dynasty and
foreshadowed years of violence to come under Bolshevik rule.
But silence from the Soviet government—a single line in Pravda, "Nicholas Romanov has
been executed. His family has been evacuated to a safe location,” is all that the Soviet
government had to say on the matter until 1991—led to rumors that the family had
survived and gave rise to scores of imposters. ”Not even Nicholas’s mother and sisters
believed he was dead,” Mr. Mironenko said.
State investigators went to extraordinary lengths to determine what happened in the
basement of the Ipatiev House and how the executioners disposed of the bodies.
"DNA tests, mitochondrial DNA tests, dental exams, anthropological studies, situational
studies and trace-material studies. You name it, they did it,” Mr. Mironenko said. Many
of the results of these studies are on display, including a map of the murder scene that
shows where the participants stood, how they moved around the room, and where each
bullet fell.
The exhibition also includes rare artifacts from the first investigation, conducted in 1919
after the Whites captured Yekaterinburg, such as part of the jaw of the Romanovs’
family doctor, Yevgeny Botkin; the investigator's notebooks; and bullets found in a
shallow mineshaft where the bodies were initially dumped. "This is essentially the first
time that Russians have a chance to view these items, which recount a tragic page in
Russia’s history,” wrote Friar Vladimir von Tsurikov, dean of Holy Trinity Seminary in
Jordanville, NY., in an emailed message. The seminary contributed a copy of the 1919
report and other artifacts.
Visitors on a Friday afternoon said they were delighted to see so many original
bhipshwwra ws) com/atcles/SB 10001 42405270230395290157 75085707 17420772svn ‘The Dosthof Tar chs Family | Russan Sse Archives| Romanos Fale Reveled | By Jertn Erle - WS
documents, including Nicholas’s letter of abdication, dated March 2, 1917, and his diary
entry of that same date in which he wrote: "I'm surrounded by treachery, cowardice and
deception.”
“That the documents are original is the most important thing,” a middle-age woman,
who refused to give her name, said upon exiting the exhibition. She called the czar’s
overthrow “a tragedy” and said she hoped for a restoration of the monarchy, "Rus:
historical path.”
Although memories of the Soviet Union have grown rosier under Vladimir Putin, a
proud former KGB agent, many Russians see the Bolshevik Revolution as the start of a
70-year detour from their nation’s path to becoming a developed, Western European-
style state—’a normal country,” as they like to say. For them, the Romanovs’ death
predicts the violence and misery of the Civil War, the Stalinist era and World War II, and
provides fertile ground for counterfactual fantasies in which the monarchy or the
progressive government that overthrew it survives, No Gulags, no purges, no terrors,
maybe.
Not all Russians have accepted the results of the state’s investigations. The most
peculiar and powerful skeptic is the Russian Orthodox Church, whose influence has
grown in recent years with the strong support of Mr. Putin.
For reasons that are not widely understood, the Russian Orthodox Church does not
recognize the authenticity of the remains that have been discovered. It instead favors
the version put forth by the original investigator, Nikolai Sokolov, who in 1919 argued
that the royal family’s remains had been completely destroyed.
Their resistance drives Mr. Mironenko to despair. ”I don’t understand it. There are some
reasons here. I don’t know. I don’t understand them at all,” he says with visible agitation.
Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin said by telephone that he
couldn’t give details about the church's remaining objections to the state’s evidence,
except to say that there were still unanswered questions.
In 1998, the remains of Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and three of their daughters were
reinterred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg beside their royal ancestors.
Two years later, the royal family was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as
“passion bearers,” a classification similar to martyr. The Russian Orthodox Church
outside Russia recognizes the family as martyrs.
bhipshwwra ws) com/atcles/SB 10001 42405270230395290157 75085707 17420772svn ‘The Dosthof Tar chs Family | Russan Sse Archives| Romanos Fale Reveled | By Jertn Erle - WS
But the remains of Alexei and Maria, which were discovered in 2007, have not yet been
reinterred and are unlikely to be without the church’s support.
"No one wants to see a repetition of the original burial of the Romanovs remains, when
the Russian public witnessed a disconnect in the assessment,” Friar Vladimir wrote.
Viktor Aksyuchits, a Christian-monarchist politician who led the government
commission that identified and buried the remains discovered in 1991, says this
completely undermines the exhibition. "On the one hand, it’s a big deal that the state
archives decided to hold this exhibition. On the other hand, we're still waiting for the
government to make a decision about burying the others. The remains of Alexei and
Maria are still lying in a box somewhere in the State Archives,” he said by telephone.
The exhibition ends, rather unexpectedly, on a cheerful note: a room of family
photographs and a film reel of the family at play: Nicholas—by most accounts a loving
father and husband—and Alexandra sit across from one another in the cockpit of a boat,
staring lovingly into each other's eyes; Nicholas shoveling sand over his giggling son;
Grand Duchess Tatiana giving a cheeky wink to the camera in a portrait with her sisters
and a young mustached sailor.
It is a reminder that while they were a royal family, they were also a family.
Here, Mr. Mironenko’s feelings on the execution hint at the intended response: "How
can you feel about the murder of children?” he said. "How can you feel about this
barbaric murder of the members of the royal family? The Soviet government told us it
had to be done to protect against reactionary forces. I think it’s now obvious that that
was alie.”
Mr. Earle is a reporter for the Moscow Times.
bhipshwwra ws) com/atcles/SB 10001 42405270230395290157 75085707 17420772 assrtan016 ‘The Death of Tsar Nicholas I's Family | Rusian Sate Archives | Romanovs' Fate Revealed | By Jonathan Eacle- WS)
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