Soviet newspaper hails ‘execution of Nicholas, the bloody crowned murderer – shot without bourgeois formalities ...’
THE DEPOSED Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, has been murdered by his Bolshevik captors it emerged last night. It is believed that his wife and children have also been killed. Initial reports suggest the Tsar was murdered in cold blood by a firing squad wielding rifles and bayonets at Ekaterinburg, a city in western Siberia under the control of hard-line Bolsheviks, where he and his immediate family have been incarcerated for the past ten weeks.
A local newspaper announced what it called the ‘execution of Nicholas, the bloody crowned murderer — shot without bourgeois formalities but in accordance with our new democratic principles’.
This has been confirmed in a cable to the Foreign Office in London from Thomas Preston, the British consul in Ekaterinburg, and also in the Moscow edition of the Izvestia newspaper. This is the official voice of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers’ Soviets (workers’ councils), which is chaired by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
Izvestia reports that the Tsar’s family — the Tsarina, Alexandra, the 13-year- old heir to the throne, Alexei, and four daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Maria, 19, and Anastasia, 17 — are in ‘a safe place’. However, reliable sources in Ekaterinburg said last night this is a fabrication and the Bolsheviks are attempting to cover up the slaughter of women and children.
Orders approving the ‘liquidation’ of the Romanov family were sent from the Kremlin to the Urals Regional Soviet in Ekaterinburg, whose gunmen carried out the instruction. The codeword for the murder of the whole family, not just the Tsar, was ‘chimney sweep’. It was given after the Urals Soviet decided that ‘there is grave danger Citizen Romanov will fall into the hands of counter-revolutionaries’.
The family were roused from their beds in the early hours of Wednesday, July 17, and directed by their guards to the basement of the house where they were lodged.
They waited there in the semi-darkness of a single light bulb until a dozen heavily armed revolutionary guards, some of them drunk, pushed into the doorway.
Their leader, Commandant Yakov Yurovsky, read out a decree that ‘Nicholas Romanov is guilty of countless bloody crimes against the people and should be shot’. Also killed are believed to be the royal family’s personal physician, Dr Eugene Botkin, and three of their servants, a maid, a footman and a cook.
Scandal has long dogged the 350-year-old Romanov line. Queen Victoria referred to her Russian relatives in private as ‘dark and unstable with a want of principle’. But it was the present Great War with Germany and Turkey that plunged the dynasty into catastrophe when it broke out in 1914.
Humiliations outweighed victories on the battlefield and Russian casualties quickly soared towards two million out of an army of six million. The forces of the German Kaiser overran vast tracts of Russian territory and it became apparent that the nation was facing abject defeat.
At home, severe food shortages left the people starving and led to strikes and violent street demonstrations. There were widespread mutinies within both the army and navy. Popular sentiment turned against the war and demanded peace.
The Tsar — politically naive despite his 23 years as emperor and with little knowledge or understanding of how the vast majority of his subjects lived — responded with extreme force, leaving thousands of demonstrators dead and provoking further anger and opposition.
RUNNING out of support, he abdicated on March 16, 1917, to be replaced by a Provisional Government of socialists under Alexander Kerensky. When informed that his father had given up the throne, the sickly 13-year- old Tsarevich, Alexei — known in the family as ‘Sunbeam’ or ‘Baby’ — is said to have asked: ‘But if there isn’t a Tsar, who’s going to rule Russia?’ It was a good question, as the country descended into turmoil and terror, with rival political factions battling each other for supremacy.
The family, meanwhile, had retired to Tsarskoye Selo, its private estate outside Petrograd, and there Nicholas, for a while, lived the contented life of the country squire that he had always wished to be. But this peaceful interlude did not last long.
Fearing the Romanovs were at risk of being seized and lynched by Red extremists, Kerensky had them moved under guard to Tobolsk in Siberia, a five-day train ride away on the far side of the Urals.
Lodged in a roomy mansion there, they passed their time playing cards and dominoes and helping in the fields, while Nicholas kept fit by chopping wood.
There were hopes that they might be allowed quietly to go into exile. But Lenin — who in October 1917 ousted the moderate Kerensky and seized power for his Bolsheviks — had other ideas. This dangerous character is a notorious advocate of violence as an essential component of politics and has decreed that ‘a revolution without firing squads is meaningless’.
His plan was to subject ‘Citizen Romanov’ to a show trial in Moscow, with Leon Trotsky, Bolshevik minister of defence, as prosecutor, as a pretext for shooting him.
Stage- managing a trial, however, proved problematic. The Bolshevik takeover of government sparked a civil war
between the Red Army and an alliance of antiCommunist forces known as the Whites.
This intensified in March when Russia left the Great War and troops previously involved in fighting Germany on the Eastern Front returned home to join the civil war, swelling the ranks of both sides.
As a consequence, chaos now reigns, so much so that a leading U.S. newspaper correspondent, who a year ago welcomed the abdication of the Tsar as a release from ‘the dark spirits of despotism’, recently reported: ‘Russia is broken down, wretched, demoralised, starving and in desperate need of sane government.’
The ruthless Lenin, determined to keep his new Soviet Republic from being crushed, has responded to the outbreak of civil war by taking total, one-party control of the government in Moscow, outlawing his opponents and instituting a reign of terror against any opposition.
It was in this context that he and his closest henchmen decided the time had come to end the Romanov line once and for all.
At the end of April, he ordered the Tsar and his family to be moved to a sealed-off house in the middle of Ekaterinburg, provincial capital of the Urals region, under the jurisdiction of the hard-line local workers’ soviet there.
Designated ominously as ‘the House of Special Purpose’, its windows were painted over so that no one inside could see out. It was surrounded by a high wooden fence, watch-towers and machine-gun posts.
More than 50 heavily armed guards patrolled the perimeter, with another 16 inside the house keeping constant watch over their captives.
They were selected for their toughness. The British consul reported that he had never seen a more cut-throat band of brigands.
In recent days a 10,000-strong anti-Bolshevik army of Czechoslovakians allied to the Whites has neared Ekaterinburg. The Romanovs would have been able to hear artillery in the distance. Rescue may at last have been at hand.
The Bolsheviks, fearful that if he was freed the Tsar could become a unifying figure for the disparate White forces, could not take that risk.