The Murder of the Romanovs in Ekaterinberg, July 1918

please welcome dr. Helen Rappaport good morning it's such a wonderful experience being here with you all I can't remember when I last saw blue skies consistently day after day after day which kind of lightens the mood a little because this is a pretty sad story as you all know we've all seen these evocative images I think if anyone knows anything it's all about the Romanovs it's connected to these wonderful almost chintzy chocolate box images of this perfect beautiful family and it's these three r's as I call them Russia Romanovs revolution that have been the big inspiration in my writing life and of course if you say it in Russian our asiya alayha Lucia Romana V it's so much more romantic and evocative and then you're only needs really to look at the wonderful photographs to see that this was a family who on the outside seemed to be so perfectly happy so tranquil always kind of on holidays somewhere nice in this particular image Nicholas and Alexandra on board their private yachts the standart that they like to sail around this the Finnish archipelago on in the spring and spring and summer of of every year when it gets got too hot in the city and always we have these images of this lovely unified devoted family another picture that again expresses that sense of her father a father who actually was very hands-on with all his children who did things with his his children in a very non showy royal domestic way and his Nicholas in the snow with his son and heir that Sergeyevich Alexei and his second daughter Tatiana and again tennis they all loved playing tennis and there here they are at Livadia nicolas with his daughter eldest daughter olga on his left the one with the untidy hair is anastasia she was a bit of a wild spirit always rushing around into things demanding attention then quiet reserved tatiana next and a member of the entourage so when they had their downtime their free time as a family they really did love nothing more than just being together being private and being ordinary and here again their favorite place Livadia the Black Sea coast here again is Olga and Tatiana with a lady-in-waiting enjoying the sea now the real Russia of course that they were inhabiting by 1917-18 was not this glorious permanent holiday that they seem to be enjoying it was a country on the brink of a total breakdown of society suffering the hunger the deprivation the shortages it coming into the third year of the war in Western Europe and life with the wars outbreak had begun changing quite dramatically for the Romanov family there kind of cosy Idul of the early 1900s was pretty much over and the outbreak of war of course changed everything and the first thing that happened of course was Alexandra very conscientious very devoted mother of the nation wanted her eldest daughters to train as nurses with her and in three months they did a crush Red Cross nursing course Alexander Olga and Tatiana and became extremely devoted to nursing the wounded in their own hospitals at South Sea law on the outside there in civilian clothes anastasia on the right and maria on the left who would still too young to train as nurses and they really played their part in the war effort in a very a very devoted and loving way now there isn't time in this talk unfortunately for me to describe the circumstances that led to the revolution and the downfall of the imperial family because that would take 45 minutes on its own but I do see this damaged photograph in many ways as a kind of metaphor the damage the crumpling the torn corners a metaphor of the destruction of their world that was going to come and it came after disruption riots protests street marches in protest mania economic conditions lack of food in February 1917 but on our calendar which was 13 days ahead of the old Russian calendar I will use those dates so on the 15th of March 1917 Nicholas who was a long way away from home at the time he'd taken over command of the army at the front he felt duty-bound for the sake of Russia to to abdicate because he felt by abdicating things might settle down and they needed to keep the loyalty of the army they needed to keep Russia in the war now when Nicholas abdicated the one very clear thing all the family immediately wanted and hoped for was that they would be allowed to just retreat very quietly on without any fuss and live here at their livadia palace now if you've been to Crimea it's a beautiful limestone Palace but his palaces go pretty modest it was built in 1911 but it was absolutely their refuge they loved it more than any of their other homes and as one of the girls said in some petersburg we work but at Livadia we live and that's where they wanted to go and live quietly and on ostentation Lea unostentatiously and not be a burden to anyone every day is wonderful in Livadia sit at Yana and you can see why because they're girls like nothing better here she is with her older sister Olga sitting on the balcony having their lessons here with their Institute appears really odd who taught in French unfortunately though the government the new provisional government that took over after the Revolution would not allow them to go and live in any kind of luxury or have that kind of concession in Livadia it was a pipe dream instead the family were placed under house arrest here at the Alexander Palace in which is in South cocea law which is about nine mile 15 miles south of San Petersburg and again they were very fond of their home at South go solo and the extraordinary thing about the Romanovs throughout the last 18 months of this story is they made the best of every situation in which they found themselves and that they immediately sought things to do ways of occupying themselves because of course they're limited very much to the confines of the palace and the grounds but the girls at every opportunity all the children were being outside with their father when when the weather was still cold helping break ice in the canals doing things being active here you have Tatiana and Nastasia with her little dog Jimmy Alexei and Olga sitting outside in the sunshine and they were so delighted when spring came that they were able they were allowed to dig a vegetable garden you know join the war effort dig a vegetable garden and if you look at the right they even see him in uniform nicolas turning to camera and he was a very active man he could not bear the frustration of sitting being idle he was used to walking a lot to being very physical and active and they made the most of it and they all took such pride in growing vegetables for their garden but meanwhile behind the scenes of course the politicians were at work trying to sort out what to do with the Romanovs which was an enormous problem for everyone now again it would take me too long in this talk to explain the very complex political toing and froing that was going behind-the-scenes in fact I because of this I've now written a new book that's coming out in June precisely describing the whole failed asylum leave the failure to get the Romanovs out to safety the children had been ill with measles and was still recovering and that was one of the first reasons that prevented a very quick evacuation but of course everyone's hopes were pinned on george v king george v here he is with nicholas looking incredibly similar everyone called them the heavenly twins you'll note also at every opportunity they always had a cigarette going so the hope was king george v of Great Britain's will come galloping to their rescue because you know Alexandra the Tsar's wife was his first cousin they were they're all very closely related George the faith's mother was a Danish princess ice was Nicholas's they were all closely intertwined it was all very very interconnected in the european royal families at the time and but negotiations rapidly stalled there were lots of political problems about bringing them to britain I again I'm sorry I can't go into them here and the family was sitting waiting patiently waiting for something to happen not knowing hoping that they might be allowed out to England but really not being told anything and then a few days before the end of July they were told you're being moved and they started packing their things but they were then told pack warm clothes now they didn't need to be told their destination to know what that meant it meant one thing Siberia they were going to be sent west into the heartland a deep deep heartland of Siberia so on the night of the 13th of July they said they're sorry 13th of August the family gathered in the downstairs circular room this wonderful beautiful room at the back of the aleksandr palace waiting for the car to come for them and this would have been the last site they had as they went out through those doors into the waiting cars and were taken away and put on a train to Siberia I took that picture myself when I was at South Sea and for me it kind of sums up the leaving of the place they loved and they were put on a train here to turmoil sck in Western Siberia now at the time Tobolsk was pretty much a backwater where nothing much was happening okay there was a lot of revolutionary disturbance in this in the capital and but main it hadn't yet the revolution really was yet to creep into Siberia and everyone thought well that you locked them away there and you can forget about them nothing's going to happen they're not going to cause any problems and very quickly everyone forgot about them stuck here in Tobolsk why because it was cut off by snow and ice the rivers all froze for nearly half the year and interpose as I've said at the outset they made the best of things they were housed here at the best building that the city could come up with the governor's house attaboys and it was there that the family settled in and and made the best of their surroundings made a home for themselves but of course they didn't go there entirely alone and unsupported when they left the Alexander Palace they were allowed to take a considerable entourage of 39 people servants of various ladies-in-waiting and family retainers plus a huge train of baggage and uh you know everything went with them Alexandra packed the best silver and the dumbest napkins and you know the the nicholas ii monogrammed plates and and the other things they took with them of course which luckily have come down to us their hundreds of photograph albums and the value the letters that Nicholas and Alexandra had written to each other during the war years so interpose they settle in here and the year goes and the the city is cut off by the snow and they begin to find a modus vivendi a kind of happy life in fact Maria the third daughter said you know we'd be quite happy to stay here we we have each other what matters to them was that they were still together and that they were just going to be allowed to just live and love and you know state devout their faith and just live very modest lives and so they did right through that summer here they are they used to like to get up on the roof of the greenhouse and Sun themselves but you'll notice in this picture and the very few pictures we have after boys you don't see Aleksandra very very rarely see she was very sick she didn't like sitting out in the sunshine and more and more it's Nicholas and the children hanging on and giving each other's support and also very significantly in this picture the eldest sister oil ger those of you who heard my talk yesterday becomes very detached and melancholy and lonely and introverted and upset I think she sense that things could get worse and then of course in October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power and solely but surely the Civil War begins to spread from Petrograd from Moscow across West into Siberia and suddenly Tobolsk is no longer this safe bolt-hole this backwater and eventually the moment comes in April 1918 where the Lenin's government and the people controlling the guard at the Governor's House decide they're going to have to move the family somewhere even more secure where they could really keep very very stringent guard over them and then Nicholas heard the one thing he dreaded hearing he heard that they were going to be taken to Ekaterinburg and he actually said I would go anywhere at all but not to the Urals now Ekaterinburg was a major industrial and mining center in on the edge of the Euro mountain mountains known already by this time to be a hotbed of extremely radical militant Bolshevism very anti Soros as you would imagine that's why he dreaded being taken there because he knew everyone hated him so much the revolutionary atmosphere there was very very aggressively hostile and so they were taken to a house in Ekaterinburg if you see the tall cathedral there that's the Bosnian Ski Cathedral and a street level opposite was the house they were taken to which was this place the a party of house it had been requisitioned at very short notice from a local engineer and it was much more modest than the governor's house much more cramped and and some of the retainers were got rid of when they got to Ekaterinburg and we're not allowed to join them in the house and here you get a very very strong sense immediately the family enter that house that there is a very foreboding sense of the end game coming because they were told by the Commandant as they arrived you are now entering a prison regime you know they'd had it too easy at table was this was now going to be a prison and you can see why because by the time the Romanovs got there the apache of house had had this huge wooden palisade constructed around it to stop people in the streets who want to try and get a sight of the Tsar and his family because they used to wave at people from the windows that to boys and not long after that within a couple of weeks another second palisade was built even higher obscuring the house from the street and worse than that can you imagine for that family it's now approaching summer and Siberia in the summer can be very hot and stuffy and the windows were all sealed and painted white so suddenly they couldn't see the world outside anymore they won't allowed anymore letters anymore parcels from family and friends they weren't allowed to send any communications and now you know the world is closing in on that family in that house it was in fact very heavily guarded and and that get again as I've intimated the people guarding them now with special detachments of extremely politicized recruits from the local factories who all now thought it was an honor to guard the Romanovs and be involved in the revolutions revenge on them so at any one time there are at least fifty guards outside the Palisades between the Palisades in the garden there were machine-gun posts they were absolutely surrounded and this is one thing to bear in mind when one comes across the myths of a possible escape and rescue anyone trying to get them out of there it would have been a bloodbath it would have been impregnable or certainly impossible to get them out without a massacre happening now mum rooms inside were pretty modest but again they did the best they could to cohabit with the the few trusted servants who were with them who were fundamentally there dr. Boyd kin who was Alex's physician and their their valet troop Hari torn off the cook and the chambermaid alla demidova and those four of course died with the family and are now martyrs in the Russian Orthodox canons the rooms were modest but things closed in on them and what is very interesting during those final days and weeks at the party of house is how you get a very interesting situation coming you may have heard of the Stockholm Syndrome it's when captors and captives stuck together in very close proximity begin to develop some kind of relationship and rapport and what in fact happened was the girls who were lovely and gregarious are bored so bored can you imagine for hormonal girls a depressive menopausal mother all locked up in that house together they started talking to their guards they they made I won't say make friends but some of the guards began to sympathize they like the girls through they were sweet they were they're engaging and what happened was word got back that this was happening this fraternization was happening and the clampdown was imposed and the family were not allowed really to have much more communication with their guards because a new commandant was brought in to take control now this unsavory looking man at the top right and his equally unsavory family these are all members of his family was called Yakov NeuroSky he was a really hard line local Bolshevik a member of the Czech other secret police and he was brought in to impose a much stricter regime to stop the fraternization and also crucially to plan the endgame to plan the murder of the family because by the end of June 1918 there had been meetings back and forth going on in Moscow between two key people in the process that decided the fate of the Romanovs oh sorry I just forgot to mention that man on the left was Yucca florovsky x' deputy equally ruthless henchmen and head of the guard called Pavel Medvedev but the real plotting and planning about the end of the family and what they were going to do it and how they were going to dispose of them was orchestrated between two men in this picture now if I can just indicate the man in the in the leather with the with the leather cap on on the right this is the kind of Bolshevik poster by boy uniform was called Philippe Gullah shocking he was the region regional commissar in the euros and the man next to him the white showed very interesting figure in this too he was Yakov Smirnoff who was a local man from the Urals who was Lenin's right-hand man and throughout their story this end game it was Yakko sorry no I've got one important thing and third from the right in the back row do you recognize him Josef Stalin in the big black hat they were all in exile together in Siberia now Slav was the middleman between Gullah shocking the man in leather the local Urals man and this man of course Lenin now there's huge debate about the extent to which learning was aware of what the local Ural Uros Bolsheviks were doing and whether he gave the final order I personally have no doubt whatsoever that learning closely controlled the decision to kill the Romanovs from the distance of Moscow but in fact what happened because of the telecommunications breakdown of the Civil War because of the distance and the difficulty of telegraphing back-and-forth at these meetings in June between Lenin's at LOF and ghoulish walk in in Moscow Lenin rubber stamped his approval that when the time came that Yurovsky the Commandant felt it was necessary they were going to kill the family and that meant all of them the children as well because Lenin insisted there could be no living banner as he called it ie if the children survived and stayed in Russia or went into exile they would could be a rallying point for a counter-revolution and Lenin was not going to risk that by now of course of the civil war coming the monarchists the counter-revolution in the year in Siberia people coming in across from Vladivostok to challenge the Bolsheviks were approaching on the trans-siberian line to Ekaterinburg which is a very important Junction a very crucial strategic point on that railway line Lenin and the Central Committee in Moscow knew that the city sooner or later was going to fall so the decision was made at the end of June and transmitted to Euro ski when you know the city is going to be taken you kill the Romanovs and so it's now this ghastly process of watching and waiting to see what would happen and I can't go into the murders I described them in great detail in my book last days of the Romanovs I spoke to ballistics expert to a forensic expert who does legal leave legal advice for counselling in ballistics and murders and those sort of cases and he taught me through what happens when you try and kill 11 people in a room and it's not pretty and it's horrific in fact because the one thing I must stress to you all people still have this misconception that it was an execution that there was some kind of line them up in a robe bang bang bang you're dead it was not like that it was a brutal savage chaotic disorganized botched affair euros fees selected the guards he wanted to kill the family a few night no in fact only about a night or two before and what happened that was going to be one killer for each member of the family and suddenly three of all the men the guard said we are not going to kill those girls why should we kill them they're perfectly lovely we I don't want to do it and so what happened was the number of killers was reduced and when it came to the moment when your Oskie said shoot they all wanted to claim fame later of having shot bizarre so Niklas in fact was the lucky one he died quickly and was the first but the girls who suffered horribly and had in the end most of them to be bayonetta to death and then we come into what becomes a hideous black comedy in this story because then they have to get rid of the bodies and this man he looks very glamorous doesn't he he was a local commissar a leader of the very millicent local factory workers his name was piata yireh markov he was detailed to bring a truck and all the equipment to take the bodies out to the forest to a pre pre chosen site where they were going to dump them what happens he arrives late and drunk with one fiat truck and one shovel one shovel to bury all those bodies it talked about incompetence I mean it's so hideous ly incompetent I wouldn't say it was funny but it's it becomes so horrific now we then have this ghastly story of how the bodies were loaded on this truck with air escort Yaffe's key and the escort and taken out to the forest to a site that had been pre chosen and wreckage supposedly by euro ski where they were gonna dump the bodies they thought it was a mineshaft no it wasn't it was just a mine working so it's a fairly shallow mine working so what happens they throw the bodies in first having stripped them stripped the bodies naked found the jewels that they'd been sowing into their clothes that was their insurance policy if they ever got out dowsing them with sulfuric acid to try and disfigure them the bodies only fell a few feet down euro ski by now they're all catatonic with the exhaustion because they're up all night this is the night of the 17th July so we're gonna have to bring them all up again and go and find somewhere deeper so you get this farce where they dragged the bodies out of this hole and take them to a site on the road going through the kaki forest and and then the Fiat truck keeps getting stuck in the mud keeps breaking down you know and they're all exhausted and your ah ski finally says ok let's just dig a hole here and so what happens they dig a very pretty shallow grave not probably not even six feet but chuck the bodies in and extraordinary that it was such a crude and hasty burial and it took I can't 78 I think it was found in secret that so took six years for that site to be found now just to carry on with the rest of the story then of course the bodies disappear and there is this big gap once the Soviet era comes into being where the Romanovs you can't discuss them that there was no talk about the Romanovs no no one really knew what had happened to him that of course it's a later commemoration of the hole in the ground where they were dumped and things start worrying the Soviets because like it or not although they kind of bands religion they could not stop ordinary Russians pious Russians who had had revered the Ronis going every anniversary up to the house and people would go and cross themselves and pray in respectful mourning of the family and so on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the murders in July 1977 orders were sent down from Brezhnev then President to a certain Boris Yeltsin who was then head of the local Ekaterinburg Soviet and within two days the whole house was pulled down and then for years and years after that all there was was just a horrible muddy piece of waste ground and people kept putting across there and it would be taken down by the Soviets oh no another cross would come there and as time went on and then we have the fall of communist Russia in 91 then another cross is put up and for a while that was all there was to commemorate the family and there you see one of the Exile Grand Dukes the head of the Romanov family in exile Nikolai Romanov paying his respects then fast forward because I don't want to run out of time as you know I'm sure you're all aware there has been an enormous resurgence in the Russian Orthodox Church since the collapse of communism in fact it never ever went away just went underground and with that of course abroad the church in exile canonized the Romanovs and once the old Soviet system came crashing down as orthodoxy revived in Russia so they started building rebuilding all the churches and putting up an awful lot of new ones I mean it's astonishing how many new churches have been built in especially in the last ten years in Russia and one of the first to be built to commemorate the Romanovs was the church on the spilled blood in Ekaterinburg which was built on the site of the demolished house where they were killed and interestingly they had money from all kinds of sponsors including McDonald's to build it not sure how many million McDonald's gave them but anyway but it's a funny thing you know I went to that church on the anniversary and approaching the anniversary in 2007 and you go in and it's big and it's beautiful and there's all these gorgeous frescoes and the incense and pious people devout people weeping and praying everywhere but it's so new and it's so official and it for me I couldn't sense them at all it wasn't the Romanovs as I understood them and they're very deep faith and I walk the city and I looked for remembrance of the city as it had been when they were alive and in the end I really had to go out to the forest now out in the forest where they are of course in that the grave with some of the family had been found in the 9x cavae turd in the 1990s they've now built the monastery of the holy Tsarist passion bearers and there's one little church for each member of the family in this kind of magic circle and this extraordinary moment when you go there because it's like landing on a Disney set it's not real it's like those little chintzy churches you see in Russian folk tales and I was still searching for a sense of the family and finally I found it it was the most lovely moment for me every year on the site of that mine working where they first dumped the bodies before they moved them to the second grave they have plants at all white Arum lilies and I went on the morning of the actual anniversary of their deaths very very early because it gets so crowded and those lilies the scent was absolutely overpowering and I had this moment of Epiphany I connected with them the story the the tragedy of it and that smell will stay with me forever of those beautiful beautiful lilies of ganon uyama now the one thing that happens of course every year in Russia is there is this enormous commemoration of the murders and it happens up at the church on the blood in Ekaterinburg now every year the expand the increase in the number of pilgrims and worshipers just mushrooms it's got so big now they can't get everyone in the church they have big screens everywhere people stand outside and stand through a three-hour vigil commemorating the murders that's before they even start their long trek out to the forest to remember them and all over the city at the time of the commemoration of the murders you see posters and and their heartbreaking really that stuck up on trees and it says here put us ste Minya Moy ghusl dad forgive me my sovereign and there is a sense of anguish among particularly devout Russians obviously of grief and remorse that they collectively still bear this burden of guilt for having killed their own imperial family and particularly this agony that those beautiful children also horribly murdered so at the end of that long service outside the Cathedral everyone that's I think last year 60,000 people young old people with children in babies in push chairs and carrying them round them walk 9 miles through the night having already stood for three hours right out to the forest where the grave is where the Romanovs commemorated and that happens every single year I need to just tell you the most recent discoveries of course which is when the fact that the first grave where your skin is men dumped the bodies that night in 1918 they had a very cack-handed attempt at trying to incinerate two of the but children's bodies and they were Maria oh sorry yes Maria and Alexei and they took them aside away from the main grave tried to burn them and it didn't work because they didn't do their homework of course and they dumped their bodies separately and there has been this endless quest ever since to find the two missing children it why it's why Anna Anderson got away with it was so long because all the time people those two missing bodies had not been found because there was a dispute whether it is Maria or Anastasia who was missing people like her and many other false claimants could come along and say I'm you know Here I am I survived eventually that grave was found the obviously the family's grave had been found and commemorated it's still very simple commemoration but eventually in secret in 2007 when I was actually in Ekaterinburg doing research for my first Romanov book some exciting news came just as I was leaving I was so frustrated now on this map in the middle of that road through the centre of the forest you can see number one that's the site where your ski said okay dig a hole here and dump them but if you look at the other red square that's where they found the remains of Maria and Alexei in 2007 and luckily this time the people who found those remains were local archaeologists because we the other grave was excavated in the 90s they did it and the most unsuccessful and a lot of I think valuable evidence was probably this desert it destroyed and here you have actually the pitiful fragments and it is pitiful because all they found were about 10% of the bones of the two children because they delete ride to burn them along with at the top there that piece of ceramic a piece of the one of the jars of sulfuric acid that they poured all over the bodies it really is barely enough bones for a shoebox not over the next 18 months after this discovery there was again exhaustive DNA testing done the other remains of course had already been tested comparative samples being given by dirk van bruh and i had the great good fortune to get to know a wonderful scientist called mike Coble who was head of the Armed Forces DNA identification lab at Rockwell Mary Lyons and I correspond it closely with Mike and he filled me in on all the analysis of the remains and he assured me and I want to assure you and I just want everyone to believe it they all died we have the bodies they all died and what really nailed it it's fascinating was that in the Hermitage Museum they suddenly discovered that they had a shirt locked away in a cupboard that had been worn by Nicholas when he was on a tour of Japan in 1891 he was attacked by crazy Japanese man with a sword who slashed at his head and he'd narrowly escaped being killed the blood-stained shirt survives now what was fantastic as Mike explained to me when that blood-stained shirt was found fairly recently they could take samples of Nicholas's living DNA to compare with the dead DNA of the bones and absolutely 100% again reconfirmed that those were the bodies of him and his wife and children and there is one interesting coda to these new tests because they also checked the remains of the two children they found for the hemophilia gene and guess what anastasiya was the only one of the four girls to be a carrier I find that hugely ironic so as I said just to summarize the Romanovs been canonized by the Orthodox Church and I think the writer Edward Rudd Sinskey the Russian writer summed it up really when he said this we have two graves that symbolize the revolution the dirty hole into which the Romanovs were thrown and the mausoleum of the one who ordered this the closing of the first grave should lead to the closing of the second they're Saints now every Church in Russia has got these enormous icons they are quite beautiful some of them are garish but there are some extraordinary examples of modern iconography being done with the Romanov images this is the latest news that there are plans now to build a massive huge new cathedral on stilts in the middle of the river is yet in Ekaterinburg opposite the church on the blood and finally just in case you want to read any more the last days of the Romanovs describes those two weeks those final two weeks when your röszke was brought in to plan the murders and my new book the race to safe the Romanovs which will be out in the USA in on 26th of june is my concerted attempt to try and explain why no one could save them and how it was so much more complicated than anyone can imagine and I just want to finish by saying I hope people this year with the anniversary the hundredth anniversary in Ekaterinburg which I am going - in July I just hope we can finally put the lid on the coffin and may they rest in peace thank you

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

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Keywords: RMWF, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Dr. Helen Rappaport, Helen Rappaport, Romanovs, Czar Nicolas, Imperial Family, Romanov Family

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Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018