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The Tsarina is shown here at about the time of her
marriage. She was a beautiful woman, a loving wife and a good mother,
but due to what the Russian aristocracy saw as an air of haughtiness,
and later her relationship with Rasputin, she was not popular at
court. |
In March of 1917,
Nicholas was forced to abdicate. The family was virtually imprisoned at
the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo and was later moved to Ekaterinburg
in Siberia. Early on the morning of July 16/17, 1918, the Bolshevik in
charge of their imprisonment, Yakov Yurovsky, led the family into a room
in the basement of the house. There they were shot at close range by a
dozen soldiers, then repeatedly stabbed with bayonets. The few servants who had remained
loyal to them in their captivity also perished.
The house where they
were murdered was first turned into a museum. In 1977, however, amidst fears that it was
a gathering place for Romanov loyalists as communism faltered, it was destroyed on the
orders of the local Communist Party leader -- one Boris Yeltsin.
The Tsar and his family did not rest in death any easier than they did in
life. The new government claimed no knowledge of the whereabouts of the
Empress and her children until 1926. Until the 1990s, it was believed that the bodies had been burned and
the remains dissolved in acid. In 1992, two researchers began interviewing
soldiers who had been present at the massacre and doing additional
research. They learned that the bodies had initially thrown down an abandoned mine, then moved to a grave deeper in the woods. Eventually they
found evidence of the site where the bodies were buried and the remains
were disinterred.
The process of identification was muddled by national and international
politics, by lack of funds, and by the skepticism on the part of some
Romanov descendants and the Russian Orthodox church. But most of the
remains were eventually verified, using DNA analysis, as those of the royal family. Still
missing are the remains of the Tsarevitch and one of his
sisters (scientists disagree on whether one of the female skeletons is
Marie or Anastasia).
Over the years, several people have claimed to be a survivor of the
massacre; the most famous was Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the
youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia. Anna Anderson had died by the
time the royal family remains surfaced, but after a long court battle
samples of tissue removed during routine surgery years before proved her to be an
impostor.
After their remains reposed in laboratories and political limbo for years,
The Romanovs were given a Russian Orthodox funeral and buried in the walls
of a room in the church of Sts. Peter and Paul. Patriarch Alexei of the
Russian Orthodox Church, who disputed the DNA evidence, refused to
attend. In response, Boris Yeltsin decided not to attend, although
he changed his mind the day before. The funeral was held on
July 18, 1998, 80 years to the day after their deaths.
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