Source: Another City
July 15, 2018
July 17, 2018, marks the centennial of the killing of the Russian royal family.
On that date a hundred years ago, the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife the tsarina Alexandra, their five children and four retainers, were ushered into a basement in the city of Yekaterinburg in the early hours of the morning, for an execution that would mark a turning point in history.
The family, by all accounts pious and loving and known for personal works of charity, had suffered months of humiliation at the hands of communists who had taken over the Russian government in the wake of the tsar’s forced abdication in March 2017. Walls of their prison house, which they would have passed on the way to the room of their execution, were bedecked with obscenities, and guards had enjoyed drunken sex antics in the basement where they were killed. On that night, trucks outside ran their engines to muffle the sound of gunshots.
It took 20 minutes for the inept, alcohol-impaired shooters to kill them as the room filled with smoke from the guns and cries of pain. The two youngest girls and the tsarevich survived the fusillade only to be brutally bayoneted, while their maid, not initially hit, vainly tried to fight back.
When the children’s English tutor Charles Sydney Gibbes, who later became an Orthodox priest taking the name Nicholas after the czar, arrived soon after with the White Army forces, he was told that the blood had to be swept away with brooms.
...Read the rest at Another City.
