Yekaterinburg
In the early morning of July 17, 1918, a massacre was being carried out in the Ibatev Palace in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
At least 11 people were rushed to the basement by the secret police who guarded them and carried out mass executions using machine guns.
Their bodies were destroyed by being poured with sulfuric acid and gasoline, and the remains of the bones were buried in an abandoned cave in the Yekaterinburg area.
The executors were the family of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of the Russian Empire, and their servants and doctors.
Nicholas II was executed at the age of 50, along with Nicholas II's 46-year-old empress Alexandra, and their four daughters and a son, Namely Olga, 23, Tatyana, 21, Maria, 19, Anastasia, 17, and Alexei, 14, the last Crown Prince.
The last Tsar's family consisted of seven
Nicholas II was born on 18 May 1868 in the village of Tsar (the summer residence of the Tsar) near St. Petersburg to the son of Tsar Alexander III and to the son of Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Dagmar's siblings include Queen Alexandra of England, King Frederick VIII of Denmark and King George I of Greece.
On October 20, 1894, Alexander III died and was succeeded by Nicholas II at the age of 26. The Empress was Alexandra, Lord alex of the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Rhine, and the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.
Nicholas II and empress
Nicholas II was weak and indecisive, but Empress Alexandra's stubbornness and willfulness played a pivotal role in Nicholas II's initiatives to some extent.
At the beginning of Nicholas II's succession, the tsarist system had begun to falter, and the empress strongly protected her husband's position as tsar, actively supporting the use of dictatorship to consolidate his power. As a result, the emperor also believed that the monarch had absolute power and opposed any form of democratic reform. Every time Nicholas II wrote to the Empress, the final payment was "your weak husband".
Nicholas II and Alexandra were free lovers, and the two met at a noble wedding, exchanged feelings, and began secret dating, when Nikolai was 16 years old and Alexandra was 12 years old. In a series of diaries by Nicholas II, Alexandra became his dream lover. After marriage, he was a good husband and almost obedient to the queen, calling her "someone I absolutely trust.".
Nicholas II
After marriage, the couple gave birth to 4 daughters in a row, and finally gave birth to a son named Alexei. However, as the sole heir to the throne, this son unfortunately has a "royal disease", that is, hemophilia inherited from Queen Victoria. This was considered an incurable disease at the time.
Alexandra first sought Russian doctors and hospitals to treat Alexei, but their treatment failed, and Alexandra, frustrated, turned her hopes to religious and mystical powers. In this way, the mysterious "monk" Rasputin from Siberia broke into the political vision of the Russian Empire.
At Rasputin's suggestion, Alexei gradually recovered. Alexandra became increasingly dependent on Rasputin, and this dependence increased Rasputin's political power, which in turn seriously affected the fate of the empire.
Russian folklore has spread all kinds of stories of Rasputin and the empress stealing love, which should have a certain degree of credibility. Because Rasputin was deified at that time, the aristocratic women of Tsarist Russia believed that their union with Rasputin would be protected and blessed by some mysterious force, so they rushed to approach Rasputin.
Rasputin is said to have had superb hypnotic eyes that slept with all the aristocratic maidens in Russia, and if he had sex with a virgin, Rasputin would collect a single strand of her hair, and in 1977 when the Leningrad municipal government demolished the house where he lived, he found boxes of hair in the garden.
Empress Alexandra trusted Rasputin almost unconditionally, and Nicholas II trusted the Empress almost unconditionally, and Rasputin was named the "Tsarist Lamplight Officer", who could freely enter and leave the inner palace, which in turn affected Nicholas II's decision-making on the inside and outside world.
Rasputin
In this life, Nicholas II was full of ambitions, trying to revive the empire and restore the prestige of the Tsar with foreign wars.
In 1904, in order to realize his political ambitions to capture Manchuria, Nicholas II sent troops to northeast China, triggering the Russo-Japanese War. However, Russia suffered a crushing defeat in the war, the Pacific Fleet was completely destroyed, and eventually the Russian Revolution of 1905 was detonated.
But Nicholas II remained content and continued to prepare for a larger military adventure.
In 1914, Russia entered World War I. Nicholas II attempted to seize the Black Sea Strait, Constantinople and Turkish Armenia from the Ottoman Empire and Galicia from austria-Hungary.
In 1915, Nicholas II dismissed his uncle Grand Duke Nikolai Yevich and personally served as supreme commander-in-chief of the Russian army, a decision that propelled Russia into the quagmire of war.
What makes people speechless is that on the battlefield of World War I, whether it is the combat policy or military mobilization, Rasputin almost always intervened. Because the Tsar must first consult "our friend" Rasputin whenever he encounters a difficult problem, even whether and when the front line will attack depends on Rasputin's prophecy.
Under rasputin's confusion and false predictions, Nicholas II went on a campaign and continued to lead Russia to disaster, and Russia's internal affairs were also stirred up by Rasputin. In just two years from 1914 to 1916, there were four presidents of the Council of Ministers of State of Russia, six Ministers of the Interior, four Ministers of The Army, 3 Ministers for Foreign Affairs and 4 Ministers of Justice.
Map of the situation in World War I
The war on the front line was increasingly unfavorable to Russia, and bad news came one after another, and immediately after the blockade of the Turkish Strait, there was a serious economic crisis and food shortages in Tsarist Russia. The people's discontent is intensifying.
The Emperor's relatives successively issued warnings to the Tsar. The three grand dukes asked Nicholas II to be wary of the Empress and to establish a responsible body. Nikolai said, "I trust my wife infinitely, and I trust only my wife."
On December 30, 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by a conspiracy to kill Prince Yusupov, Grand Duke Dimitri, Mp. Pulisicvić, and others.
On February 27, 1917, the armed uprising in St. Petersburg was victorious. The February Revolution broke out, and the Tsar lost the support of the military, bureaucrats and capitalists. On 2 March, Nicholas II, who had reigned for 23 years, was forced to abdicate.
Forcing the Tsar to make the decision to abdicate was his commander on the Northern Front, General Ruzsky. Nicholas II asked the other two generals present for their views on the matter, and both supported Luzsky. After a few minutes of silence, Nicholas II said helplessly, "Well, I abdicate." ”
Nicholas II did not pass the throne to his sick son, but decided to pass the throne to his younger brother Duke Mikhail. Mikhail, fearing that he would not be able to clean up the mess, refused to succeed to the throne. Thus, the Romanov dynasty, which lasted for 304 years, came to an end with 20 tsars.
Nicholas II abdicated
After his abdication, Nicholas II said: "I want to be an ordinary subject and live by my son's side." ”
But the harsh reality didn't give him that chance.
Since the leadership of the February Revolution was mostly former tsarist vassals, they were quite good to the Tsar's family.
From 9 March to 14 August 1917, Nicholas II and his family were placed under house arrest at Alexander's Palace in the Tsar's village.
At first, the Provisional Government had prepared to send them to England to defect to the Tsar's cousin, King George V, but George V refused the request, fearing that this move would trigger a political crisis or even revolution in Britain out of self-interest.
Later, in St. Petersburg, the revolutionary activity was in full swing, and in order to avoid the emperor's family being affected by the revolution, the provisional government moved the emperor's family to the Siberian city of Tobolsk.
On November 7, 1917, the October Revolution broke out and the Provisional Government was overthrown, and the Bolsheviks who were in charge of the government took the Tsar's family back from Siberia and transferred them to Yekaterinburg, where they were imprisoned in the apartment of the merchant Ipatiev.
In the early hours of July 17, 1918, yurovsky, the head of the dispatch team, entered the room and ordered the Tsar's family to stand in concentration and read out the execution sentence. Immediately, the machine gun began to strafe for several minutes until there was no living mouth.
Five children of Nicholas II
According to the notes of the firing officer, after the mass execution, the Tsar's family was stripped of their clothes and burned in a concentrated manner. The body was initially dumped into an abandoned mine pit north of Yekaterinburg, but was soon recovered. The bodies of Crown Prince Alexei and the fourth princess Anastasia were poured with sulfuric acid, but this method was slower, so the remaining bodies were burned with oil, and the remains were dismembered and buried under a section of railway sleepers.
On July 17, 1998, Yeltsin, then President of Russia, signed an order to solemnly bury the remains of nicholas ii in Peter and Paul Cathedral.
In 2000, Alexandra, along with Nikolai, their children, and several other members of the royal family who were killed during the Russian Revolution, was canonized as a martyr by the Russian Orthodox Church.
In 2008, Russia's Supreme Court "rehabilitated" the last Tsarist family, calling the brutal destruction of Tsar Nicholas II and his family a victim of the political repression campaign at the time.
The Nicholas II family