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The Romanov Family Died a Century Ago.

It’s Time to Lay the Myths About Them to Rest, Too

On Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, a large industrial city in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, a gathering of
hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world at the city’s Church on the Blood marks the 100th
anniversary of the murder of Russia’s last Imperial Family, the Romanovs.

Today most of us are aware of the tragic circumstances of this killing, the brutal and merciless way in which Nicholas
and Alexandra, and their five innocent children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey, were murdered by the
Bolsheviks. For a century the Romanov story has exercised a seductive power that has never ceased to fascinate.
Now, with 100 years passed, the centenary offers an opportunity for that fascination to be refocused on the facts of
what really happened to the last Tsar and his family.

It began with the emergence of Anna Anderson in Berlin in 1920. As the first claimant to be Anastasia, she said she
had miraculously escaped the bloodbath at the Ipatiev House. Her longstanding campaign for recognition, which
sparked a whole written and filmed mythology, was fought in the European courts for decades, ensuring that the
Romanov story regularly resurfaced in the press, though for all the wrong reasons. People became so fascinated by
a woman who was later proved conclusively to be a fraud that they lo st sight of the real Romanovs. The fondness for
conspiracy theories that this fed into and an insistence by claimants persisted (there have been several false
Anastasias as well as Alexeys in particular), even after the remains of most of the family and th eir four servants
were excavated from a shallow grave in 1991. The bodies had in fact been found in secret in 1979 but it was not until
after the fall of the Soviet Union that the political climate allowed their burial place to be revealed.

But two of the children were missing from that grave — Alexey and Maria. Although the rest of the family were given
a grand official re-interment by Russia’s then-president Boris Yeltsin, in the Peter & Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg
in 1998, the missing remains were not finally located until 2007. They were found by a combined team of local and
U.S. archaeologists only 60 meters or so from the original grave.

Extensive DNA and other scientific testing was conducted on the Romanov remains b y teams of forensic scientists in
Russia, the U.K. and the USA. But these tests and studies were complicated by the fact that in 1981, the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad had already declared the Romanovs to be Saints and ‘New Martyrs.’ The Patriarchate in
Moscow initially resisted recognition of the Romanovs as Saints, but f inally followed suit in 2000, naming them Saints
and ‘passion bearers.’ To the layman there may seem little difference in the terms, but to the Church ‘passion
bearers’ explicitly denotes those who faced their death in a ‘Christ -like’ manner of acceptance and faith.

Because the Romanovs are deemed to be Holy Martyrs, their remains are likewise holy relics; in Orthodox practice
those deemed Holy Martyrs cannot be buried in a funeral service in the same manner as we ordinary mortals. The
conventional burial of the Romanovs was thus deemed to be an apostasy, prompting the church to take a position of
‘benign non-recognition’ of the remains.

That policy has led the confusion that surrounds the Romanovs to continue far longer than necessary.

Having presented a list of its own questions about the previous DNA testing, in 2015 the Russian Orthodox Church
(ROC) insisted that the Romanov bodies be exhumed so that additional samples might be taken for further tests
to be conducted by its own, exclusively Russian scientists. Hopes were raised for an end to this ongoing
controversy, but so far no announcement of the church’s findings has been forthcoming. However, like it or not, the
FBI has come up, separately from the ROC, with its own conclusive tests, based on entirely different DNA samples
that have recently come to light.

This has been thanks to the dedicated work over many years of former U.S. Navy captain Peter Sarandinaki. As
president of the SEARCH Foundation, which oversaw the discovery of the remains of Maria and Alexey in 2007, and
which is still searching for those of Tsar Nicholas’s brother Michael, murdered near Perm in 1918, Sarandinaki was
approached with a new lead by the respected Russian art scholar and antiques expert Nicholas Nicholson. As Senior
Vice President of the Philadelphia auction house Freeman’s and himself a Fabergé expert, Nicholson had met a
private collector who owned two crucial royal objects made by the famous Russian master craftsman.

These were a Fabergé locket containing a photograph of Tsaritsa Alexandra and with a lock of her hair, and a
Fabergé photograph frame with a picture of Queen Louise of Denmark that also contained a cutting of her hair.
Louise was Nicholas II’s grandmother, another direct link to the Romanovs for any testing of mitochon drial DNA.
Captain Sarandinaki sent these samples to the FBI to see if any DNA could be extracted from the hair in these two
Fabergé pieces. It seemed a very long shot but the FBI ran DNA tests. The hair samples proved, miraculously, to be
sufficiently non-degraded to be viable, having been sealed inside the two objects for over a century.

The DNA extracted from the hair in the locket turned out to be the perfect match for the female line Mitochondrial
DNA for Tsaritsa Alexandra, and also checked correctly against the DNA on file from Prince Philip, another distant
relation who had donated samples for the first DNA tests in the 1990s. The DNA extracted from the photograph
frame material also proved to be the correct female line mitochondrial DNA for Tsar Nic holas.

In short, as confirmed by a Justice Department report released in June, all of the DNA from the two samples
perfectly matches the already long-published DNA sequence of the remains found in the Koptyaki forest. This
information has been submitted to the Patriarch, and the Commission on the Imperial Remains. Meanwhile the two
crucial Fabergé pieces and other material relating to their scientific testing can be seen at a new exhibition “Last
Days of the Last Tsar” that has just opened at the Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville in upstate New York . It is the
first major exhibition to focus specifically on the final days of the Russian Imperial Family.

The Russian people and others fascinated by this history long for an end to the doubt, to the bogus claims of
fraudsters and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Closure did not come in time for the 100th anniversary, and
the Russian Orthodox Church may choose, still, not to sanction the remains found in the Koptyaki Forest outside
Ekaterinburg as indeed being those of the Romanov family. But, with or without its official blessing the science is
now incontrovertible. The Romanovs all died at Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. May they all now rest in peace. And
may the world see an end, at last, to the fantasies of the false claimants.

The Last Night

No evidence survives to suggest the Romanovs reacted with anything but docility. Carrying the tsarevitch in his arms,
Nicholas led the family and the four servants—family doctor Eugene Botkin, maid Anna Demidova, chef Ivan Kharitonov,
and footman Alexei Trupp—down to the cellar. Gathered together in a small, bare room, they still appeared oblivious to
their fate. Chairs were fetched for Alexandra and Alexei while the others stood.

Yurovsky approached them, with the executioners behind him in the doorway, and read from a prepared statement to the
astonished prisoners: “The presidium of the Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, has decreed that the
former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty of countless bloody crimes against the people, should be shot.” When, he
finished, they began firing on the family. Accounts are conflicting, but most say that the tsar was the main target, and
that he died from several gunshots. The tsarina died from a bullet to the head.

As the room filled with gun smoke, discipline among the killers vanished. The grand duchesses seemed unharmed by
the bullets, which had ricocheted off their bodies (it was later discovered that diamond jewelry sewn into their clothing
had acted like armor during the initial assault). One of the murderers—a drunkard named Ermakov—lost all control and
began to slash at the Romanovs with a bayonet. Finally, after a horror-filled 20 minutes, the entire family and their
servants were all dead: shot, stabbed, and beaten.

The 11 bodies were hauled out of the house and loaded onto a truck. The disposal of the remains was chaotic. Scholars
believe the bodies were first dumped in a shallow mine called Ganina Yama, which the Bolsheviks tried to collapse with
grenades. The shaft stayed intact, so the bodies were hastily removed. On the way to the new burial site, the truck got
mired in mud, and two bodies—now believed to be Alexei and Maria—were removed and disposed of in the forest. The
nine other bodies were burned, doused with acid, and buried in a separate grave not too far away.

Truth Comes Out

After the Romanov family’s murder, Soviet officials were cagey when addressing the topic. Even shortly after the
Bolsheviks announced Nicholas’s death, they were claiming that Alexandra and Alexei were alive in a safe place. The
deaths would not be officially confirmed until 1926, and even then the Soviets refused to accept responsibility for the
execution.

Josef Stalin officially suppressed discussion of the family’s fate in 1938, and the Ipatiev House was demolished in 1977
as Soviets decreed it had “no historical value.” The forced silence surrounding the Romanovs’ fate may have quelled
open discussion, but it fueled unending curiosity. Royal imposters would spring up in the coming decades, most claiming
to be one of the tsar’s children. Each time a new claimant appeared, the story would be resurrected, making it
impossible for the mystery to die as the Soviets hoped it would. In 1979 a pair of amateur sleuths found the larger burial
site near Yekaterinburg, but the find was kept secret until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As a new revolution spread through Russia, scientists returned to Yekaterinburg in 1991 to reclaim history. They
exhumed the remains of nine people, who were later scientifically identified as Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana,
Anastasia, and their four servants. Finding their bones began a healing process in which both the horrors of their deaths
and their places in history could be acknowledged.

In 1998 these remains were laid to rest in St. Petersburg’s Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral, traditional burial place of the
tsars. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children as “passion-bearers.” At
Ganina Yama—the first place where Bolsheviks tried to dispose of the bodies—the Russian Orthodox Church erected a
monastery. Where the Ipatiev House once stood, the magnificent Church on the Blood was consecrated in 2003 and has
since become a pilgrimage site. In 2007 Alexei’s and Maria’s remains were found, and later identified using DNA
analysis.

It has been said that families who are closely attached may cut themselves off from the outside world. So it was with the
Romanovs. Their self-absorption made them slow to appreciate their danger, but their love strengthened each other and
made their confinement bearable. It was the greatest mercy of their last months that, right up to the terrible end, they
were, at the very least, all together.

Remains Of The Romanov Family Authenticated By DNA Tests


The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for looking into heinous
crimes, revealed that the latest round of DNA testing confirmed the authenticity of the imperial family's remains.
The tests were ordered by the Orthodox Church after disputing the results of the previous testing done in 2015 where the
clergy said they felt sidelined.

The investigations also included exhuming the remains of Nicholas's father Alexander III, who himself was assassinated in
1881. This was to confirm that both remains belonged to father and son.

Vladimir Legoida, the spokesperson for the Church, said they will consider the results of the latest tests. He also praised
the manner in which the investigation is being conducted.

Confusion From The Orthodox Church


President Boris Yeltsin ordered the bodies of Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra to be exhumed from their resting place at
the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg to undergo testing in 2015.
Tests done by international and Russian experts on the skulls of both remains confirmed the bodies were authentic.
Further testing showed DNA and blood taken from the bones of Nicholas matched DNA found on a shirt worn during an
earlier assassination attempt.

Alexandra's DNA also matched DNA extracted from descendants of Queen Victoria of England, the tsarina's
grandmother.
The Orthodox Church declared the last of the Romanovs holy martyrs, which would make their bones sacred relics.

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