100 Years Ago Today

[red solo cup]

July 17, 1917

[red solo cup]

Followup article with additional pics.
https://www.historycolored.com/home/2018/7/30/tsar-nicholas-ii-the-last-emperor-of-the-russian-empire

[diaduit]

This family and Marie Antoinette always brings a lump to my throat.

RIP

[LausTibiChriste]

I'm going to Ekaterinburg soon - going to visit the church that now stands where Ipatiev House was.

[Vetus Ordo]

I'm going to Ekaterinburg soon - going to visit the church that now stands where Ipatiev House was.

If you can, take some pictures of the church and share it with us when you come back.

[diaduit]

I'm going to Ekaterinburg soon - going to visit the church that now stands where Ipatiev House was.

I would love to see pictures too.

[maryslittlegarden]

I'm going to Ekaterinburg soon - going to visit the church that now stands where Ipatiev House was.

I would love to see pictures too.

Me, three

[sedmohradsko]

A mí, cuatro.

[OCLittleFlower]

Laus -- they will tell you that the basement chapel is where the murder room was.  This is untrue.  There is a museum next door -- they will tell you it has a piece of wallpaper from the murder room (the famous piece with German writing on it).  Also a lie -- this is a reproduction.  Oh how they lied up down and sideways when I was there. (The Russian Orthodox Church museums should ALL be taken with a grain of salt.  The government is much more upfront about what is real -- go to the government museum across town, the Museum of History and Archeology of the Urals, not to be confused with another museum called the History of Ekaterinburg and go up to the VERY top floor, sorry no elevator.  There you will see everything about the excavation of the bones and the building of the Church on the Blood -- including a diagram of how the murder room is completely outside the area where the church now stands!  The people in that museum are very nice but speak no English.)

PM me if you need any info about travel, etc, including hotel recs and all that.

[Greg]

My best friend is a big shot banker there.  So if you get arrested PM me and he can pull strings

[red solo cup]

Laus -- they will tell you that the basement chapel is where the murder room was.  This is untrue.  There is a museum next door -- they will tell you it has a piece of wallpaper from the murder room (the famous piece with German writing on it).  Also a lie -- this is a reproduction.  Oh how they lied up down and sideways when I was there. (The Russian Orthodox Church museums should ALL be taken with a grain of salt.  The government is much more upfront about what is real -- go to the government museum across town, the Museum of History and Archeology of the Urals, not to be confused with another museum called the History of Ekaterinburg and go up to the VERY top floor, sorry no elevator.  There you will see everything about the excavation of the bones and the building of the Church on the Blood -- including a diagram of how the murder room is completely outside the area where the church now stands!  The people in that museum are very nice but speak no English.)

PM me if you need any info about travel, etc, including hotel recs and all that.

I don't know how much of this is true but as I understand it...the family was herded into the cellar and shot with pistols, including the dog. The family had so may jewels/diamonds sewed into the lining of their clothes that bullets kept bouncing off so they each had to be shot numerous times. One of the executioners later said that they saw sparks flying from when the bullets struck the jewels. As I recall from something I read years ago.

[OCLittleFlower]

Laus -- they will tell you that the basement chapel is where the murder room was.  This is untrue.  There is a museum next door -- they will tell you it has a piece of wallpaper from the murder room (the famous piece with German writing on it).  Also a lie -- this is a reproduction.  Oh how they lied up down and sideways when I was there. (The Russian Orthodox Church museums should ALL be taken with a grain of salt.  The government is much more upfront about what is real -- go to the government museum across town, the Museum of History and Archeology of the Urals, not to be confused with another museum called the History of Ekaterinburg and go up to the VERY top floor, sorry no elevator.  There you will see everything about the excavation of the bones and the building of the Church on the Blood -- including a diagram of how the murder room is completely outside the area where the church now stands!  The people in that museum are very nice but speak no English.)

PM me if you need any info about travel, etc, including hotel recs and all that.

I don't know how much of this is true but as I understand it...the family was herded into the cellar and shot with pistols, including the dog. The family had so may jewels/diamonds sewed into the lining of their clothes that bullets kept bouncing off so they each had to be shot numerous times. One of the executioners later said that they saw sparks flying from when the bullets struck the jewels. As I recall from something I read years ago.

Yes.

The Tsar and Empress were killed rather quickly but the rest suffered.  The girls had to be "finished off" with bayonets. One of the bayonets is in the Museum of History and Archeology.  I cried when I saw it -- wasn't expecting to round a corner and be faced with that, of all horrible things!

The jewels were in case of escape -- they hid them secretly and their diaries refer to them as "the medicines" as in "I helped Mama arrange the medicines."  If they'd gotten out, they would have had something to sell.

As for the dogs -- one was shot with the family, one was killed by the Reds a bit later, and another was found alive by the White Army and wound up at Windsor in England (that one was Alexei's Spaniel, named Joy.)

[Greg]

I found the jewels sewn into their clothes thing rather telling.  Just shows you how little they realised their situation and how money oriented they were and how unprepared for their imminent deaths. They wouldn't have needed anything to sell.  They could have lived perfectly normal middle class life just by opening buildings and writing books or giving gala luncheons for anti-communists.

Royalists all over the world would have donated, had they escaped with just the clothes on their backs.

I have been to a dozen of their palaces and country homes, and to live as they did, which was luxurious in the extreme is a sure sign that they didn't care about the welfare of the people they ruled.  They make Donald Trump look like a socialist.  Solid gold door handles, while Russians starved and died of preventable diseases?  Lack of free education?

They were asking for a revolution.  The British Royals avoided it by being far wiser and seeing the writing on the wall years before.

Life is short.  Do some good with your money.

[OCLittleFlower]

My understanding was the jewels would have acted as potential bribes to get them out in the first place.  Plenty who went through Harbin, etc, sold jewels to do it.  Even finding the right guard who could be bribed to let them out, if the opportunity were right.  Anyone less than a true Revolutionary zealot could be loosened up by a big enough diamond, after all. 

Once they escaped Russia, they would have been fine -- but in the process, it's always best to have/keep whatever resources you possibly can.  And, at one point, they only had what was hidden (plus their wedding rings and some simple gold bracelets the girls had that had been worn for years and their hands had grown too big for the bracelets to be removed).  Though even the Dowager Empress sold jewels and even Faberge eggs.  She went back to her native Denmark, but it seems that they didn't provide her with much there, so she sold much of what she had to Queen Mary. (That's how Elizabeth II wound up with two Faberge eggs, including a spectacular clock egg.)

It's also easy to confuse the places they LIVED with the places they just INHERITED.  Alexandra had rather simple taste for an Empress.  Most of her furniture was catalog stuff, like the IKEA of its time and the aristocrats hated her in part for her overly simple taste and lack of hedonism (and her distrust of them FOR their hedonism).  Their favorite place (the Farm Palace) near Peterhof is smaller than any modern American McMansion.  Heck, their daughters even shared rooms at the main residence.  And all the kids slept on folding camp beds and the girls wore hand-me-downs.  When the Reds opened up the Alexander Palace as a museum in an attempt to show the Imperial Family's "spectacular life," the effort failed miserably and the museum was closed.  Instead, people found the relatively simple furniture in the living quarters, the abundance of candid family photos, and the array of medical equipment for the ailing heir all to be humanizing.  The interiors looked middle class to upper middle class.

As far as asking for a revolution because of education, medicine, etc -- I don't view education and medicine as the responsibility of the government -- if anything, though, the growing middle class with Western and Masonic ideas is what incited this crap.  Revolutions never start at the bottom.  The trick is making people at the bottom think it's their idea.    Look at Occupy Wall Street -- funded by rich Liberals.

The average citizen in Petersburg before the war lived a better life than the average person in New York City, and Russia was expected to surpass the US in GDP by 1920.  Before wartime shortages, things weren't bad by any means, especially by the standards of the time.  And it would only get worse under Lenin, of course!

The Imperial Family were decent folks, doing a lot of good for the common people.  The Empress even worked as a surgical nurse, assisting in amputations.  Yes, carrying off limbs removed.  In a hospital they funded with their own private funds, not from the treasury.  But it's impossible to fight propaganda on the scale that occurred, especially when there is foreign meddling (like Germany sending Lenin in on the infamous sealed train).  And it's especially hard to fight that level of propaganda while fighting a literal world war.  And some of the propaganda is even believed in the West, sadly!