[News]The brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his five sons: the first great crime of the "red terror"

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Web: https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-brutal-asesinato-nicolas-y-cinco-hijos-primer-gran-crimen-terror-rojo-202201071259_noticia.html

 

 

The execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his five children was as traumatic in 1918 as it remains controversial a century later. Sometimes the news about the Romanov family is the most picturesque, like the one that appeared a week ago, when it was reported that employees of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia's most important museum, had found a 118-year-old bonbon in the sleeve of one of the dresses of his sister, Grand Duchess Ksenia Aleksándrovna, one of the few who managed to escape from the escabechina.

 

As explained by the restorer Galina Fiodorova, the sweet was hidden in the sleeve and fell when the specialist proposed to check the state of the imperial garment.

 

"It was pink in color and an irregular shape," she declared. She later recounted that she was carried away by instinct and licked him, at which point she realized that he was a hottie and that he had been bitten by the Grand Duchess.

 

Other times, the news is much more important, such as the one we advanced in July 2020, when the discovery of the bodies of two of the sons of Tsar Nicholas II was confirmed. Thus ended one of the great mysteries of that murder that changed history and that neither the Russian Army nor Alfonso XIII himself could prevent. "It was a shameful crime," said Boris Yeltsin in 1998.

 

The King of Spain tried by all means to repatriate them to Madrid when he learned that the Russian royal family was in danger. He spent weeks pressuring the new Bolshevik government to let her out safely. He even wrote to King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Pope Benedict XV to help him bring them to Spain as refugees, but the new communist government had already declared Nicholas II "guilty, before the people, of innumerable bloody crimes ”and he did not succeed.

The crime

 

When the Russian Army arrived in the city of Yekaterinburg, on July 30, 1918, to try to save the Tsar and his family, held in the Ipatiev house by the Bolsheviks after the triumph of the revolution, two weeks ago they had been children. brutally executed. Since then, the world has wondered where their bodies went.

 

At dawn from July 16 to 17, 1918, Nicolás II, his wife and his children - Olga, Tatiana, María, Anastasia and Alexei - were transferred to the basement of the aforementioned house under the pretext of taking a photograph of them. . When everyone had positioned themselves, confident that it would only be a portrait, the head of the squad arrived from Moscow to act as executioner, Yakov Yurovsky, entered with a revolver and several soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets and informed them that they had been sentenced to death ... and the carnage began.

 

In the first place they were shot for several minutes together with several servants, their doctor and the dog. In view of the fact that some of them did not finish dying, they had to be finished off with the knife and with the bayonets. The revolution thus ensured the future of the regime, which would take shape shortly after in the USSR. A year later, in 1919, the royal investigator Nikolai Sokolov claimed that the murderers had "stripped the bodies and loaded them onto a truck to transport them to a salt mine. On the way, however, the vehicle broke down and the Bolsheviks decided to hastily dig a shallow ditch on the side of the road. Then, to make it difficult to recognize the bodies, they sprayed them with sulfuric acid before filling the pit. '

A century of research

 

The last episode of this mystery with more than a century of history took place in the summer of 2020, when the Russian Government announced by surprise that the human remains found in the summer of 2007 near Yekaterinburg belonged to the two sons of the last Tsar of Unidentified Russia: Princess Maria and Crown Prince Alexei, 19 and 13 at the time of their death. An identification that has been produced "through molecular genetic tests carried out on the remains of two people discovered near the place where nine other dead lie", announced the expert of the Russian Investigation Committee, Marina Molodtsova, in an interview with the newspaper "Izvestia ".

 

Molodtsova confirmed the biological relationship between Alexei and María with their parents and warned that the small number of bone fragments found suggested that one or more burial sites of other members of the Royal Family could be found near the place of the discovery. Likewise, the Investigation Committee denied, as had been defended in recent decades, that the corpses were "eliminated by applying sulfuric acid and fire," according to EP.

 

Six decades of silence have passed since Sokolov's investigation. In 1979, at last, a group of dissident investigators found the possible remains of the tsar, his wife and three of his daughters. Fearing reprisals from the USSR authorities, they kept their discovery a secret for 10 years. They made it public in 1989, during Perestroika, the thaw period that led to the dismemberment of the communist bloc two years later. In 1994, another team led by Dr. Peter Gill confirmed that the bodies had suffered violence and had gunshot and bayonet wounds, as stated in the main account. The faces had been beaten to the ground and their identification was difficult, requiring DNA analysis.

The Orthodox Church

 

All these bone fragments were also buried in the Cathedral of Saint Paul and Saint Peter in Saint Petersburg in 1998, although the Russian Orthodox Church did not recognize them for lack of evidence, they argued. In September 2015, she asked a team of Russian investigators to exhume the remains to confirm the Romanovs' ties to other relatives buried elsewhere in the country through further DNA tests. At the same time, the disputed and self-proclaimed heir to the imperial throne, Maria Vladimirovna, asked prosecutors to reopen the investigation into the murders.

 

In July 2018, the Russian Investigative Committee confirmed that the remains of the people found near Yekaterinburg belonged to the Romanov family and their entourage, and that the man investigators identified as Nicholas II was closely related to the father of the latter. emperor, Alexander III. With the discovery of 2020, Russia closed one of the most shameful pages in its history, and it did so with a procession of 10,000 people who venerate the Tsar as a saint.

 

“By the will of the revolutionary people, the bloody Tsar has happily perished in Yekaterinburg. Long live the red terror! ”, Could be read in the Russian newspaper‘ Biednata ’in 1918.