2018 will mark a hundred years since one of the most painful events of the 20th century for the Russian people, the murder, which to this day resonates with pain in the souls of people.
At 1 a.m. on July 17, 1918, the former Russian Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, their five children and four servants, including a doctor, were taken to the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, where they were held in custody, where they were brutally shot by the Bolsheviks, and subsequently burned body.
The eerie scene continues to haunt us to this day, and their remains, which have lain for most of a century in unmarked graves, the location of which was known only to the Soviet leadership, are still surrounded by an aura of mystery. In 1979, enthusiastic historians discovered the remains of some members of the royal family, and in 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, DNA analysis was used to confirm their belonging.
The remains of two more royal children - Alexei and Maria - were discovered in 2007 and subjected to a similar analysis. However, the Russian Orthodox Church has questioned the results of the DNA tests. The remains of Alexei and Maria were not buried, but transferred to a scientific institution. In 2015, they were analyzed again.
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts these events in detail in his book 'The Romanovs, 1613-1618', published this year. El Confidencial has already written about her. In Town & Country magazine, the author recalls that in the fall of last year, the official investigation into the murder of the royal family was resumed, the remains of the king and queen were exhumed. This has generated controversial statements from government and Church officials, bringing the issue back to the public eye.
According to Sebag, Nicholas was good-looking, and his apparent weakness concealed a powerful man who despised the ruling class, a fierce anti-Semite who did not doubt his sacred right to power. He and Alexandra married for love, which was then a rare occurrence. She brought paranoid thinking, mystical fanaticism (suffice it to recall Rasputin) and another danger - hemophilia, which was passed on to her son, the heir to the throne, into family life.
Wounds
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In 1998, the reburial of the remains of the Romanovs took place during an official ceremony designed to heal the wounds of Russia's past.
President Yeltsin said that political change should never again be violent. Many Orthodox Christians reiterated their opposition and took the event as an attempt by the president to impose a liberal agenda in the former USSR.
In 2000, the Orthodox Church canonized the royal family, as a result of which the relics of its members became a shrine, and according to the statements of its representatives, it was necessary to carry out their reliable identification.
When Yeltsin left his post and nominated the unknown Vladimir Putin, a KGB lieutenant colonel who considered the collapse of the USSR "the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century," the young leader began to concentrate power in his hands, erect barriers to foreign influence, help strengthen the Orthodox faith and conduct an aggressive foreign policy … It seemed - with irony Sebag ponders - he decided to continue the political line of the Romanovs.
Putin is a political realist, and he is following the path outlined by the leaders of a strong Russia: from Peter the Great to Stalin. These were outstanding personalities who faced the international threat.
Putin's position, which questioned the results of scientific research (a faint echo of the Cold War: there were many Americans among the researchers), calmed the Church and created a breeding ground for conspiracy, nationalist and anti-Semitic hypotheses about the remains of the Romanovs. One of them was that Lenin and his followers, many of whom were Jews, transported the bodies to Moscow, ordering them to be mutilated. Was it really the king and his family? Or did someone manage to escape?
During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks declared the Red Terror. They drove the family away from Moscow. It was a terrible journey by train and horse-drawn carts. Tsarevich Alexei suffered from hemophilia, and some of his sisters were sexually abused on the train. Finally, they ended up in the house where their path of life ended. It, in fact, was turned into a fortified prison and machine guns were installed around the perimeter. Whatever it was, but the royal family tried to adapt to the new conditions. The eldest daughter Olga was depressed, and those that were younger played, not really understanding what was happening. Maria had an affair with one of the guards, and then the Bolsheviks replaced all the guards, tightening the internal regulations.
When it became obvious that the White Guards were about to take Yekaterinburg, Lenin issued an unspoken decree on the execution of the entire royal family, entrusting the execution to Yakov Yurovsky. At first, it was supposed to secretly bury everyone in the nearby forests. But the murder turned out to be poorly planned and even worse executed. Each of the members of the firing squad had to kill one of the victims. But when the basement of the house was filled with smoke from the shots and the screams of people being shot, many of the Romanovs were still alive. They were wounded and cried in horror.
The fact is that diamonds were sewn into the clothes of the princesses, and the bullets bounced off them, which confused the murderers. The wounded were finished off with bayonets and shots to the head. One of the executioners later said that the floor was slippery with blood and brains.
Scars
Having completed their business, the drunken executioners robbed the corpses, loaded them onto a truck, which stalled along the way. In addition, at the last moment it became clear that all the bodies did not fit into the graves previously dug for them. The clothes were removed from the dead and burned. Then the frightened Yurovsky came up with another plan. He left the bodies in the forest and went to Yekaterinburg to get acid and gasoline. For three days and nights, he brought containers of sulfuric acid and gasoline into the forest to destroy the bodies, which he decided to bury in various places in order to confuse those who intend to find them. Nobody was supposed to know anything about what happened. They doused the bodies with acid and gasoline, burned them, and then buried them.
Sebag wonders how 2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. What will happen to the royal remains? The country does not want to lose its former glory. The past is always perceived in a positive light, but the legitimacy of autocracy continues to generate controversy. New investigations, initiated by the Russian Orthodox Church and carried out by the Investigative Committee, led to the repeated exhumation of bodies. A comparative DNA analysis was carried out with living relatives, in particular, with the British Prince Philip, one of whose grandmothers was the Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna Romanova. Thus, he is the great-great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas II.
The fact that the Church is still making decisions on such important issues has attracted attention in the rest of Europe, as well as a lack of openness and an irregular sequence of burials, exhumations, and DNA tests of certain members of the royal family. Most political observers believe that the final decision on what to do with the remains on the 100th anniversary of the revolution will be made by Putin. Will he finally be able to reconcile the image of the 1917 revolution with the barbaric massacre of 1918? Will he have to run two separate events to suit each side? Will the Romanovs be given royal honors or church honors as saints?
In Russian textbooks, many Russian tsars are still represented as heroes, fanned with glory. Gorbachev and the last Tsar Romanov abdicated, Putin said he would never do it.
The historian claims that in his book he omitted nothing from the materials he examined on the execution of the Romanov family … except for the most disgusting details of the murder. When the bodies were taken to the forest, the two princesses groaned and had to be finished off. Whatever the future of the country, Raquel Márquez