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This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. July 1918, Yekaterinburg, Russia. It's a sweltering night, and within the claustrophobic walls of Anastasia and her sister Maria's bedroom, the heat hangs heavy in the air. Anastasia had eventually managed to get to sleep. Despite the distant pitter-patter of gunfire...
and the ever-looming presence of the guard outside her door. Whilst asleep, she could pretend these worries were far, far away. In the middle of the night, however, the sisters are awoken by a rapid knock at the door. "Fighting," the guard says. "Enemies closing in on the city. It's too dangerous, and they need to be moved. They're told to get dressed and come downstairs." The sisters do as they're told.
Anastasia helps Maria lace up her bodice, careful not to dislodge the small diamonds they've sewn into the seams. Relics from their old lives they keep hidden from the guards. They hope to use them one day if they ever escape, even if they know they can never again be the princesses of Russia.
They meet the rest of their family on the landing. Their father, Nicholas. Mother, Alexandra. Their two other sisters, Olga and Tatiana. And their sickly younger brother, Alexei. The family are led down to the basement. Once there, Anastasia hears a truck approach outside. It must be their ride away from the city. But to her shock, one of their captors stands before the family. And from a piece of paper, he reads, By order of the Yekaterinburg Executive Committee.
you are to be shot. On the 17th of July, 1918, at a house in the Soviet city of Yekaterinburg, the Romanov Imperial Royal Family of Russia were brutally executed in cold blood by the communist Bolsheviks. To this day, the deaths of the Romanov family remains one of the most controversial subjects in Russian history.
It was a murder mystery that spanned nearly a century and was the subject of countless conspiracies, including the theory that one of the daughters may have survived. For nearly a hundred years, researchers and investigators hunted for the truth,
What they discovered was one of the most chilling royal deaths of all time. The Bolsheviks were terrorists. They wanted a reign of blood, and they wanted the blood of the Romanovs. It wasn't an execution. There was no court case, nothing. It was a brutal murder.
In this episode, Russian history experts help to uncover how this gruesome event came to be, what really happened to the Romanov family, and the century of speculation that followed their disappearance. You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies.
This is the murder of the Romanovs. The last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was born in 1868 and ascended the throne in 1894. He had a loving wife, Alexandra, four daughters, and a youngest son, Alexei, who was next in line to the throne. The Romanovs were the last in the line of a family dynasty that had been on the Russian throne since 1613.
during which time the country had become one of the largest economic and military powers in the world. To introduce us to their story is Helen Rapoport, historian, author and expert on this era of Russian history. Traditionally in Russia, the Tsar and Tsaritsa had always been viewed as these semi-divine beings who were so
actually remote from the Russian population at large. They were almost viewed as these sort of benign gods. And the Tsar himself, Nicholas, had this sense of his divine right. Supplying more context is historian and author on the subject, Andrew Cook. Many peasants would see...
the Romanovs and Nicholas in particular, almost as a religious iconic figure. He was head of the Russian Orthodox Church but seen very differently by growing working classes in cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg and so forth. This was because times were changing and the Romanovs were growing increasingly out of touch.
Nicholas and Alexander were not indifferent to the people. In fact, they admired the simple Russian peasant and their devotion to God and their powerful sense of belief. But I think they were too blinkered to realize how detached, in fact, they were from the Russian people. With a primarily peasant population, Russia had yet to emerge into the modern era.
For a special insight is writer and royal historian James Sherwood. The Romanov dynasty were ruling like an 18th century monarchy and we were in a 20th century country. There was something horribly wrong there and completely out of sync. Nicholas was very much a traditionalist like his father before him. He believed in preserving the unique
despotic power of the throne. And because of that, really, he set in train his own path to his own terrible end. With life in Russia growing increasingly hard for the common people, and Nicholas being against any constitutional change, a greater divide began to grow between them and the Tsar.
Prominent royal biographer and historian Christopher Warwick helps illuminate this turbulent time in Russia's history. The turning point came in February 1905 on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
When thousands of people marched on the Winter Palace with petitions, demands for better working conditions, to alleviate poverty. The crowd, including women and children, marched on the Tsar's residence in St. Petersburg. It was intended to be a peaceful protest aimed at highlighting the poor working conditions of Russia's peasant workforce.
The authorities ordered the Cossacks into Palace Square. The Cossacks fired warning shots over the heads of the crowds and then fired into the crowds when they didn't disperse. It is estimated that over 130 people died from the shooting, but many more lost their lives in the ensuing stampede as people tried to flee from the gunshots.
Even though Nicholas was not in St. Petersburg at the time, and nor did he give the order to open fire on the crowd, the events of that Sunday gave rise to huge resentment against the Tsar. Much of the respect and much of the love for Nicholas II instantly evaporated that day. That was the first time that the Tsar was called Bloody Nicholas or the Tyrant Nicholas rather than the Demigod.
Even after it passed, Russia continued to undergo a period of severe political, social and economic hardship. But it was nothing compared to what was about to come.
By 1914, the world was seeing the onset of the Great War. Nicholas approved the mobilization of his troops, which was viewed as an act of aggression. Germany declared war on Russia. And Germany was so much better prepared, whereas Russia simply wasn't. And the losses were almost incalculable. The cost of World War I on the Russian people was catastrophic.
They had lost over three million soldiers to fighting and nearly one million civilians to disease and starvation.
Russia was on the brink of economic and military collapse. The peasants, who were bearing the brunt of the hardship, put the blame firmly on Nicholas. You saw the imperial family sleepwalking towards disaster. You saw them teetering on the precipice of the Russian Revolution, still living in such great opulence, still blind to the fact that, you know, their people were being slaughtered in droves in World War I.
And it didn't help that due to the illness of their son, Alexei, Nicholas and his family became ever more removed from the greater Russian public. They had locked themselves away effectively at their palace. From the moment Alexei was born, because of his haemophilia, they pretty much shut themselves off from the public. So they, by becoming more and more detached from their people, became even more mythical.
And in their desperation, they sought the advice of a prominent mystic whose involvement with the couple would be the final nail in the coffin for their reputation. His name was Rasputin. After easing their son's pain, he became a close friend of Nicholas, and particularly of Alexandra.
Despite many outcries regarding rumors of him being a debauched charlatan, the royal couple refused to see him as anything other than a holy man. In 1915, Rasputin influenced Alexandra into convincing Nicholas to go to the front line and lead the Russian army into battle. Nicholas was persuaded, wanting to be seen as a strong leader.
However, this decision only played into Rasputin's hands. Alexandra, in Nicholas's absence, had really become regent, if you like. That would not have been so bad had the Empress not had at her shoulder and whispering in her ear the influence of Rasputin.
And it was Alexandra constantly writing to Nicky, telling him who he should appoint, who he should dismiss. In just over one year, for example, there were five prime ministers. Rasputin was essentially puppeteering the government of Russia through Alexandra and Nicholas. If the lack of clear leadership wasn't enough to fully disillusion the Russian people against the Tsar and Tsaritsa,
The vicious rumours that then began to circulate certainly did. What made it even worse, and this was where it became incredibly dangerous and incredibly damaging for the Romanovs, who wouldn't hear a word said against Rasputin, were the rumours and the stories that Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra were lovers of.
And there were all sorts of pornographic graffiti and posters produced to that effect. What was damaging was that it wasn't just the ordinary folk that believed this. There were politicians and ambassadors who believed this too. And it was very dangerous for the Romanovs. And it all came to a head when Rasputin was murdered in December 1916 by politicians and aristocrats.
who were tired of his influence over the couple. Only a few months later, in 1917, under increasing pressure from the Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, and fueled by the mounting grievances of his people, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had no other option but to abdicate.
He had hoped in doing so, it would guarantee the safety of his family. He made the decision to abdicate while he was still at the front in command of the Russian army. He was a long way away from his family, 600 miles away, and he had to make a very difficult and dramatic decision. And one has to admire him because he felt he was doing the best thing for Russia. Nicholas II actually returned to Zazke-Selo.
to the Alexander Palace, which is where he and the family had lived since the birth of the Tsarevich. And they were immediately under house arrest, and they were no longer the Imperial family. He was Colonel Romanov, and his family were no longer the Imperial family. Nicholas and his family were put under house arrest at the Alexander Palace, partially as punishment, but mainly for their own protection.
Kerensky and the provisional government genuinely feared for his safety. -It was very difficult for the new provisional government to placate the various different groups within Russia, some of whom wanted Nicholas to be taken out effectively and tried and shot. Sooner or later, the mob
After several months of confinement in the Alexander Palace, the situation in Russia had started to grow increasingly hostile, with various different political groups vying for power, and often by violent means.
The provisional government had to decide what to do with the family, and initially, there was a glimmer of hope from an unlikely source.
-There was this initial reaction from King George that, obviously, Nicholas, so fairly closely related, you know, his mother was a sister of Nicholas's mother. But he very quickly got cold feet about the offer. It's an extremely complex situation. -And it was withdrawn because the Russian royal family were deeply unpopular. They were looked on as tyrants, and they could destabilize the political situation in Britain.
With British King George V rescinding his invitation, Kerensky had to take drastic action.
It was decided that they were to be moved further away, away from Tsarskoye Selo, and they were moved almost 2,000 miles from St. Petersburg to Siberia, to the town of Tobolsk. Tobolsk is a town in the Tyumen Oblast region of Russia and the former capital of Siberia. Kerensky had requisitioned the governor's mansion to accommodate the Tsar and his family.
Here, they were to spend the coming winter months hidden away from the dangers of the ongoing revolution. And the reason they chose Tobolsk was that it was effectively cut off for a good six months of the year by snow and ice, and the rivers were frozen, there was no railway. And at the time, it seemed a very secure place to move the family to. Clearly, this was a little bit of a comedown from living in a royal palace, but it was still a reasonably civilized...
surroundings and standard of life. Primarily for that family, as long as they were together and allowed to see the world outside and take fresh air and walk and be a family, that is what they clung to. And that really is what kept them going. But then again, the imperial family believed in fate. They were deeply religious people, so they believed that anything that happened to them was sent by God to try them. And my goodness, would that come home and haunt them.
By October, the Bolshevik party had overthrown Kerensky's government and seized control for themselves. The Bolsheviks were what became the Communist Party, you know, founded by Lenin in 1905. And they rose to power really on the fall of the Tsar, but also the ineptitude
of the provisional government. Theirs was a reign of terror, and the Bolsheviks were terrorists. They wanted a reign of blood, and they wanted the blood of the Romanovs. -The moment the Bolsheviks took over, probably all chance and all hope
of getting out began to fade very rapidly. And yet they found the good in it, they found the positives. They would have been more than grateful just to be allowed to live out their lives and just be a loving and supportive family. But everything changed. While the family were in Tobolsk, now in the capture of the Bolsheviks, fierce fighting broke out across Russia between the new Bolshevik government and the anti-communist White Army.
The pro-royalist white Russians, who wanted the Tsar reinstated, were now closing in on the house in Tobolsk. The Bolsheviks holding the Romanovs decided they had to move them somewhere even more secure, where they could keep even tighter control over them, which was the city of Yekaterinburg. They were moved to a former merchant's home called Ipatiev House in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Russian Urals.
This was to be a far cry from anything the family had ever experienced before. Known by the Bolsheviks as the "house of special purpose," it was to become the scene of one of the most horrific events in Russian history.
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Just as the family arrived, a large wooden palisade was erected all around the front of the house. People wanted to see, but because the palisade was there, they were warned off in no uncertain terms. In Nicholas's letters and diaries, he says that they're in prison circumstances. The windows were whitewashed. There were huge fences built, wooden fences around the house, so they couldn't see anything at all. All of their luxuries were taken away.
and they were now under constant guard. Only their most faithful servants were allowed to go with them, including Alexandra's maid and Alexei's physician, Dr. Botkin.
They came out to use the lavatory or the bath. There were guards standing there. They were watched and very, very closely confined. And on top of that, you know, even Siberia gets hot in the summer. It was stiflingly hot. The windows were all sealed closed. They begged and begged and begged permission for one window to be opened.
It was pretty grim. They weren't allowed the ministrations of a priest. Food was rationed. Nicholas and Alexandra both said that the regime there was hostile to them and they felt under threat. It soon became apparent to Nicholas, Alexandra and the children that any hope of salvation was rapidly fading away.
The person in charge of their imprisonment, and the man responsible for the conditions they were living under, was Yakov Yurovsky, a fully-fledged Bolshevik who was described by the local people as a dangerous man.
In the Tsar's letters, he said he was more than unnerved by Yurovsky and that he sort of had the measure of an evil, evil man. So I'm sure there was a pre-sentiment that they were not safe. They were surrounded by very hostile people. By July 1918, the Romanovs had been at a Patiev house for nearly 78 days. The confinement continued.
Fear and living conditions had taken their toll on the family. But around midnight on the 17th of July, a glimmer of hope as news arrived that they were to be moved.
The white Russians were closing in on Ekaterinburg, so salvation might have been at hand. In fact, what happened, the family had woken up about 2:00 in the morning and told that the situation was getting too dangerous in Ekaterinburg, there was too much shooting going on, and they would have to move them down in the basement, and there they would wait in the basement, and a truck would come to take them somewhere else.
It was enough to convince the family, "Okay, we're going to be moved." And they were desperate, desperate to get out of the apartheid house because it was so claustrophobic there. - So they got dressed.
and came down to the basement, quite literally lambs to the slaughter. Yurovsky was the mastermind behind the whole plan. Yurovsky chose his team from within the inner core, the hardliners who were guarding the family at the house. They weren't chosen at random, no, not at all. He knew which people were going to be involved. But Yurovsky hadn't anticipated the resistance he would meet.
Now, quite a few of the hardline Bolsheviks in that house guarding the family, they had actually got to quite like the girls and be friendly with them and think they were quite sweet and charming and enjoyed, you know, chatting to them. So when the crunch came, the sort of night before, when Uroski was sort of sitting down with them, saying, right, you kill the Tsar, you kill the Tsaritsa, you kill one of the sisters, and you kill another one, suddenly backed off, and nearly all of them said, oh, no, we're not going to shoot the girls.
We will not kill the girls. Yurovsky insisted, and the guards, fearful of retribution, complied. But this hesitancy would lead to dire consequences. When the family and their loyal servants reached the basement, they were given chairs to sit down and were still convinced of their impending freedom.
The moment only came when Yurovsky stood in front of the Tsar with a piece of paper and said, "By order of the Akachenberg Executive Committee, you are going to be shot." And Nicholas was so taken aback, he actually asked him to repeat it. -And Yurovsky read it a second time. And then, once he'd finished, he then took the Colt revolver from his pocket and shot the Tsar in the chest.
Now, instead of his henchmen doing what they were supposed to do, two or three others also fired at the Tsar. -After the-- the smoke had died down, it was evident that most of the royal family were still alive. Nicholas is dead. He's killed instantly. -Because all the assassins wanted to shoot Nicholas first,
The others started screaming and running around the room. And that's when the carnage began. And gunshot after gunshot rings through this room. I mean, countless bullets must have gone into these poor people's bodies.
and the room is now just full of smoke. There was screaming, there was blood and brains and God knows what else. The two older Grand Duchesses clung to one another. The oldest Grand Duchess, Olga, ended up being shot through the jaw. They stopped firing, the smoke clears, and they tried to see if anybody's left. One of the Grand Duchesses, she's thought to have been Anastasia, actually sat up, covering her face with her hands and screamed. Certainly Anastasia Maria
The bullets hadn't finished them off. The guards tried to finish them off with bayonets and they were even inept trying to bayonet the poor girls. It was, quite frankly, savage. I can't imagine how indescribably horrible that was, that scene, but it was no neat execution. Yurovsky ordered that the bodies of the Romanov family be taken away and
and buried in unmarked graves at his secret location. Yurovsky had arranged for a Fiat truck to come at a pointed hour and be waiting outside the Palisades, gunning its engine, ready for the bodies to be loaded and taken out to this site they had wrecked out in the Koptyaki forest. This Fiat truck trundled off, overloaded with all these bodies into the forest.
Hours and hours to get where it should in the forest because it kept sinking in the mud and getting stuck. They were to be taken nine miles into the forest to a place called the Four Brothers Mine. And they start dropping them down what they thought was a mine working to discover that it was only about
eight feet deep and very shallow and full of water. - It wasn't deep enough for the family. - And Urofsky takes one look and says, "Well, I'm sorry, chaps. We're all gonna have to come back tomorrow and take the bodies somewhere else because the monarchists and the local peasants are gonna find them in five minutes." They had to all come back the next day, drag them out of this water-filled hole, put them back in the truck,
And the plan was to take them off 10 miles north of the city to a proper mine and dump them down there. But of course, this Fiat truck
again kept getting stuck in the mud. And eventually, Yourofsky, completely exhausted, just capitulated and said, "Right, that's it. We just dump them here." There's a horrible dimension to this story which almost descends into black comedy, and that was the gross ineptitude in the planning and execution of the murders themselves. - He totally misjudged
the process by which you bury a relatively large group of individual people. He just didn't work out how physically demanding, time-consuming it would be. They were finally buried, if you like, in this pit with railway sleepers, wooden railway sleepers put over them. Two of the children were not amongst them. And as we shall see, it's that decision that will have fateful consequences in many decades to come.
The Bolsheviks admitted to killing Tsar Nicholas, but would neither confirm nor deny what had happened to his family. The exact fate of the Romanovs remained a mystery to all but those involved in the events at Apatiev House.
-The Bolsheviks admitted Nicholas had been shot. That was a fait accompli. The Tsar was dead, and the news of that got out quite quickly. -But that certainly didn't include the Grand Duchesses or Alexei, which opened the door, really, for all of the conspiracy theories that possibly one of the Grand Duchesses, either Anastasia or Maria, had survived or that the Tsarevich had survived, actually, and been spirited away.
And in 1920, a young woman, apparently suffering from amnesia, was found in the German city of Berlin. She was taken to a mental asylum where she was described by the hospital staff as German-speaking but with a Russian accent. She carried no official papers and was known only as Anna Anderson.
Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Anderson, who had previously stated that she had no memory of her former life, made the astonishing claim that she was none other than Anastasia Romanoff. Illuminating this mystery is historian Guy Walters.
She spent much of her life trying to convince the world that she really was Anastasia. And indeed, she really did look like her. Her features were very similar. And if you look at young pictures of Anastasia and pictures of a middle-aged Anna Anderson, you can see why a lot of people might be gulled into thinking they're one and the same person. All the time the bodies were missing, people could hope
because there was no tangible proof. You know, they could hope that maybe someone had survived. And the Anna Anderson claim went on for decades. She was in and out the courts, and there were rival camps of supporters and detractors, and the whole Anastasia controversy went on
and on and on and furthermore people really wanted to believe it. They really wanted to believe that this beautiful, playful, mischievous princess was still alive and well. Anderson remained adamant of her identity right up until her death in 1984 and despite the many disputes to her claim there was no one who could answer for certain whether or not she was really Anastasia.
That was until a monumental discovery was made in the Siberian Urals. In 1991, a Russian archaeologist makes, frankly, the discovery of a lifetime. After a lot of careful research, he discovers the exact spot where the Romanovs are buried. It's unearthed.
And there are all these corpses. And they match the Romanovs. You know, there's a man the right height as the Tsar. There's a woman the right age. The skeletons match. This is, you know, going to close the story. The bodies found in Yekaterinburg were forensically proven to be the Romanovs.
But there was a problem. Two of the bodies are missing. That of Anastasia and her brother Alexei. Where are they? All the time those two children's bodies were missing, people would still claim, "Ah, but there's two bodies missing. Maybe two of them got away." And as a result of this, the myth or the story or the legend that Anastasia survived continues. And it continues for a very long time. Speculation started to circulate about why Alexei and one of his sisters were not with the rest of the family.
There is a theory at the time that Anastasia may have survived the hail of gunshots.
There is even a suggestion that she may have unwittingly protected herself against the bullets. During the course of their captivity, the girls in particular had progressively sewn rubies, diamonds and emeralds into their corsets. I suppose they still clung on to the hope that they were going to get out of this situation and they wanted to get out of the situation with as much of the valuables that they had taken into captivity with them.
Many began to theorize that these jewels acted as an armor, ricocheting the bullets. Many wanted to believe that a guard had taken pity on a wounded Anastasia and helped her escape. Again, the focus was put onto the now deceased Anna Anderson. Was she really the lost Grand Duchess?
By 1994, advancements in DNA allowed the authorities to test a tissue sample that had been gathered from Anna Anderson 20 years before. So they have to find a DNA match with someone alive who's related to the Romanovs. And in fact, the investigators go to no lesser figure than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of the Queen of Britain. Prince Philip was related to the Tsaritsa Alexandra through his maternal bloodline.
Investigators were able to cross-reference his DNA with both the Romanov remains and the Anna Anderson tissue sample.
After extensive genetic testing, scientists proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanoff. The whole thing was fabricated. Whoever she was, she certainly wasn't a member of the Russian royal family. It turned out that Anna Anderson had been born in Poland in 1896 and had a long history of psychological problems before emigrating to Germany in 1920.
But while investigators were able to solve the Anna Anderson mystery, in doing so, they created another. If Anderson was not the missing princess, then where was she? The search was now on to find out once and for all what really happened to the missing Romanov children. It took over 15 years and numerous archaeological digs, but persistence finally paid off.
After excavating a site less than 70 meters from the first grave,
they made another startling find. Well, in 2007, an amateur archaeologist discovered another pit containing remains, and they were the remains of an adolescent boy, the Tsarevich Alexei, and a girl aged between, I think, 17 and 20, which would have made her either Anastasia or Maria. This proves once and for all that those two graves in the Ekaterinburg hold or held
the remains of the Romanovs. We have to confront this ridiculous myth at this point about the bullets bouncing off the girls. The bullets did not bounce off them. They weren't flak jackets. The reason it took so long to kill them all was because the murderers were so inept and there was pandemonium and screaming and running around and thick, acrid smoke. For all the conspiracies, lies and press attention that the Romanov mystery received,
it would be easy to forget that at the heart of this story was a husband, wife, and five children whose lives were cut tragically short
in what is still considered one of the darkest times in their country's history. We all color history in our own way, and despite the horrendous tragedy of the final hours of the Romanovs, there is still a certain kind of romance attached to that.
To tragedy, there is a kind of romance. And so it would have been appealing to have thought that maybe this young Grand Duchess had been spirited away into the forest. I think you'd have to be inhuman not to want to believe that at least one of the Grand Duchesses or the Tsarevich Alexei had survived that horrific massacre. The murders of the Romanov royal family were the start of a nearly century-long mystery.
It spawned hundreds of archaeological digs, countless tabloid stories, and produced numerous impostors claiming to have survived the massacre. Just how had so many people been duped into believing that anyone could possibly have made it out alive?
In a word, Yurovsky was an incompetent. He made a complete hash of the execution, he made a complete hash of the burials, and most of the controversies that exist to this very day can be traced back to the incompetency of this revolutionary. And it shows that history is always a living thing. Despite their deaths, you know, the stories of these people will always live.
And of course, with someone like Anastasia, her story was always clouded and was always muddied by so much nonsense and all these imposters. Now, with the discovery of their bodies, the true story of the Romanovs can finally be told. Tsar Nicholas II was a complex man. He and his wife Alexandra failed in many regards as leaders for their people.
But despite this, the horror of their deaths and the slaughter of their children cannot be understated. A century of conjecture has clouded the family's legacy. Now the truth has come to light, we can untangle myth from reality and reflect on the chilling demise of the last Tsars of Russia. Could Tsar Nicholas and his family have been saved by his cousin, King George V?
For a deep dive into the Romanovs' relationship to the British royal family, listen to our extra episode, Forbidden Fruit, available now on all your favorite podcast platforms. This is an audio production by Laika Shott Entertainment, presented by Bridget Lappin. Executive Producers, Danny O'Brien and Henry Scott. Story Producer, Maddy Bowers. Assistant Producer, Alice Tudor. Thank you for listening.