87 Years Ago Today...
Written on 6:02 PM by Jack B.
"Remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love..."
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna in a letter to a friend while in captivity
In a cellar in Ekaterinburg, Russia, in a building called "The House of Special Purpose" by its soviet overseers, one of the most brutal and cold-blooded mass murders in history, Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their 5 young children and three loyal servants were massacred by the Bolsheviks with a volley of gunfire. The Heir, Alexis, didn't die immediately so the sickly hemophiliac boy was finished off with several bullets point blank into his head. The daughters of the Tsar also did not die because they had loaded their corsets full of diamonds (to live off on, in case they ever escaped) and it acted as bullet-proof vests protected them. So as they crawled into a corner looking at the dead bullet-ridden bodies of their parents and their brother, the Bolsheviks finished off the girls with bayonets. Their bodies were then stripped, valuables confiscated and then the dead were placed into trucks. At first they attempted to burn the bodies but when time grew short and the bodies wouldn't burn fast enough. So they doused the bodies with acid so they could not be identified and they were buried in a quickly dug pit by the side of the road. The bones would not be discovered for over half a century and even then Alexis and one of his sisters was still missing. There had been no trial, no charges, no mercy. The Communist authorities in Moscow under Lenin announced "Nicholas the Bloody" had been killed as an enemy of the Russian people but that the Empress and her children were still alive and kept in a "safe place" This was obviously a lie, as was quickly discovered when White Russian Army troops marched into Ekaterinburg and found the evidence of the massacre even if the bodies were missing.
A couple of years later the USSR published its own version of the events of the massacre, calling it a victory of the people and of the "Revolution" and never even acknowledging that by doing so their previous claims that only Nicholas died were lies. The actual murderers themselves were treated as heroes and the House turned into a museum of the "People's Victory" over imperialism. It would be over 70 years and the fall of the Soviet Union before the bones of the Imperial Family were dug up and buried with ceremony in the traditional burial place of the Tsars, the Fortress of St.Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg. As mentioned, Alexis and one of the girls (identified as Marie but possibly not) was missing. Their remains have never been found. The President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, attended the funeral and admitted the murder of the Imperial Family was in fact a murder, not an event to be celebrated as in years past, nor an event to be covered up. This was ironic since it was Yeltsin as the local Communist boss of Ekaterinburg many years before who had the job of demolishing "the House of Special Purpose" because the Communists were afraid of it becoming a monarchist shrine. Now this same man as President did homage to the victims of this event. The Orthodox Church of Russia canonized the Imperial Family as saints in the category of "passion-bearers" - that is they had suffered with Christian forbearance and were willing to give the sacrifice of their lives for Russia, for their faith, and for the good of all men. A church in honor of the Royal Martyrs now stands on the site of that pit their bodies were flung into and buried in for all those years. Their murder was just the beginning of one of the most bloody and destructive governments and ideologies in the history of man where hundreds of millions of nameless people lost their lives just as the Romanovs did, in a 20th Century in which more human beings were killed than who had ever been killed in all of the centuries in the past combined.
So Began A Century of Blood, and For Those Under Communism, A Century of Terror
May God have mercy on their souls...and for all of ours as well.
+Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov 1868-1918
+Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova 1872-1918
+Olga Nikolaevna Romanova 1895-1918
+Tatiana Nikolaevna Romanova 1897-1918
+Maria Nikolaevna Romanova 1899-1918
+Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova 1901-1918
+Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov 1904-1918
