Century-Old Mystery Solved
By Dr. Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, was forced to abdicate his throne in the midst of widespread riots resulting from the country’s disastrous involvement in the World War I. The empire had not yet recovered from the humiliating defeat suffered in 1904-5 at the hands of the Japanese when it got sucked into another doomed international conflict in Europe. Widespread deprivation and poverty of the Russian peasants led to violent protests against autocratic rule, leading to the abdication.
As the reign of Romanov dynasty, spread over three centuries, drew to a close, the Czar and his family were forced out of their palace, placed under house arrest and moved to several different locations. When the Bolsheviks seized power from the provisional Government a few months later, the living conditions of the royal family got worse. Finally, they were exiled to a desolate little town in Central Russia, named Yekaterinburg, some 1,500 kilometers east of Moscow
This relatively tranquil phase of their life in incarceration was not to last long. In July 1918, the former Emperor, once one of the most powerful rulers of Europe, and his family were abruptly awakened from sleep in the middle of the night, ordered to dress and go down to the basement of the house. There, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, one of the granddaughters of Queen Victoria, their five children, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty two, along with the family doctor and three servants were shot in cold blood. It is said that the princesses had to be stabbed with bayonets to finish them off, as rifle bullets ricocheted off from gems they were wearing under their clothes.
Apparently, the order for their execution came directly from Vladimir Lenin, the new Bolshevik ruler of Russia, who was worried that their continued existence might ignite and fuel a counter revolution. The bodies of the royal family were burned, doused with acid to make their identification difficult, and the remains unceremoniously thrown in unmarked, dirt graves. The burial sites were kept a closely guarded secret until the end of the Soviet era, lest they become shrines and pilgrimage sites for the Czar loyalists.
The summary execution of Russia’s royal family offers a fascinating glimpse into the ephemeral nature of power and the unreliability of family and personal ties. At the time of the Russian revolution, the thrones of two of the most powerful European empires, Britain and Germany, were occupied by two sovereigns, George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who were closely related to Czar Nicholas II. George V, Kaiser Wilhelm and Empress Alexandra, wife of the Czar, were Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, while George V and Nicholas were cousins on their mothers’ side. The Czar was certain that he would have a home in England, the country ruled by his cousin, and in anticipation had asked, as he prepared for his abdication, that his imperial robes be packed so they would be available for use in ceremonial parades and other imperial ceremonies in England. The dream, however, never materialized.
Initially, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, made an offer of asylum to the royal family, only to withdraw it later. The war, with Britain and Germany on opposite sides, had made public opinion in England vehemently hostile to Germany and all things German. The English royal family was at the time worried about their own survival, because of their German heritage and family bonds with the Kaiser. To make matters worse, the Czar’s wife was a close relation of the German Kaiser. Also, the possibility that the Russian revolution might be exported to England, threatening the British monarchy, seemed real at the time. In an ignominious move, King George V after much cogitation wrote a letter to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, urging him to rescind the offer of asylum. His request was carried out. Subsequently, having become aware of the grave, potential threat to the life of Czar and his family, King George V attempted to launch a stealth mission by intelligence agents to rescue them, but these attempts proved too little, too late.
The Bolshevik Government did not announce the execution of the Czar for two days, but, when it did, the news sent a shock wave around the world; it was not the overthrow of the monarchy, but the cruel manner in which the royal family had been eliminated that was so distasteful. However, the autocratic monarchal system was now no longer sustainable and many European monarchies in the aftermath of the First World War were overthrown and replaced by republican forms of governments.
Uncertain about its own stability, the Bolshevik Government had kept the grave of the imperial family a secret. However, a local geologist discovered it in 1970 during the course of his research, but did not announce his finding. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the information became public and extensive excavations revealed the remains of five members of the family. The fate of the two missing members remained a mystery. It had been rumored that one of the Czar’s daughters had somehow escaped execution and was alive. The failure to find two family members strengthened these speculations. Indeed, several women came forward earlier in the twentieth century to claim that they were the Czar’s missing daughter, but their claims were ultimately debunked by the use of forensic technology.
Questions were initially raised whether the disinterred remains were those of the Czar’s family. The use of cutting-edge DNA technology unequivocally established that the remains removed from the mass grave were indeed of the royal family. Nuclear DNA testing, using sequences of repeating nucleotides (STR), performed in both the United Kingdom and Russia confirmed the gender of each skeleton and showed that they were related. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as Empress Alexandra’s only surviving grand nephew, provided blood specimens for mitochondrial DNA studies. These test revealed compelling evidence of maternal relationship between him, the empress and her daughters. Despite these definitive results, some skeptics continued to doubt the authenticity and royal origins of the remains, since two of the family members were still unaccounted for. Thus, one of the confounding mysteries of the twentieth century persisted, as did the search for the remains of the missing members of the Romanov family.
Finally, last July, a group of amateur archeologists looking for the second grave fortuitously stumbled upon the burial site of the two missing members of the Czar’s family some 70 meters from the first grave. Extensive forensic studies were performed on the bones by a team of scientists drawn from several European countries and the United States. In a scientific paper published in April of this year in PLoS ONE, they presented inconvertible evidence that the remains were those of the crown prince, Alexi, who suffered from hemophilia, and one of his sisters.
During the Soviet era, Czar Nicholas II was demonized and every attempt was made to erase memories of his reign. However, once the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, a wave of nostalgia for the Czarist era swept the country, and Nicholas was embraced by members of the Russian Orthodox faith. After much debate, the Church conferred sainthood on the family in 2000. Their remains were exhumed in 1998 and reinterred with full honor in a church in St. Petersburg, the former imperial capital of Russia. Now, since the remains of the two missing children have been found, they are expected to be buried in St. Petersburg church as well, uniting them with their parents after more than eight decades.
