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It is a bye-week for the regular podcast, but this is a bonus from the newsletter On This Day in Women’s History. If you sign up for it on Patreon or on Substack, every Monday you will get a small story about what historical women did on that day. If today were Monday, it might say something like this:
In the evening of July 16, 1918, the Romanov family went to bed as usual in Ipatiev House, where they were being held under house arrest. But they were awoken in the middle of the night, ostensibly so they could be moved to a safer location. The former Tsar Nikolai and the former Tsarina Alexandra went downstairs to the cellar with their four daughters and one son: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. They would never come up again.
The Romanovs did not know the day or hour of their deaths, but their murder was not unexpected.
The Romanov royal house had been in peril for years. Every monarchy is in trouble when it didn’t have an heir apparent: Alexandra and Nikolai had four girls before they produced a son. And when they did, little Alexei was proved to have hemophilia. It was more than possible that he would not live to inherit. That would make things unstable even if other circumstances were good. And other circumstances were decidedly not good.
The once mighty country of Russia had been brought low by a series of events: Changes in world politics had left many Russians fully aware that other countries were not led by divinely appointed autocratic rulers. Nikolai and Alexandra seemed unwilling to gracefully cede rights and powers as the British monarchs had done. Instead, they had a series of public relations disasters, even though several of them were not their fault. Changes in the world economy had left Russia technologically backwards and many of its people very poor. Then World War I slaughtered Russians in the millions.
In 1917, Nikolai was forced to abdicate, and the Russian revolutionaries had to decide what to do with a former Tsar and his family. They were held under house arrest and moved several times. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks had no interest in paying the household expenses of a former tsar. Nor were they interested in allowing said tsar to live outside the country where he might rally support.
Ironically, the people most interested in orchestrating a prison break were the Germans. Russia had more or less stopped fighting in World War I by now, but Germany had not. They wanted to call the shots in Russia. They thought a restored tsar would be grateful to them, and a lot easier to manage than this Bolshevik rabble. Empress Alexandra was appalled by this idea. “After what they have done,” she wrote, “I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans.”
On that point alone, Alexandra and the Bolsheviks were in total agreement. Hence the decision to make sure the royal family could not be rescued.
Sometime after midnight, in the early morning of July 17th, the family waited in the cellar, but the people who came to greet them were armed guards who began shooting. They didn’t all die immediately, so the guards moved on to bayonets. The bodies were thrown into a well but later recovered and treated with gasoline and acid so they would be more difficult to identify. Then they were buried in the forest in two different sites.
For many years, it was rumored that Anastasia had somehow survived. Unfortunately, the rumors turned out not to be true. When DNA testing became possible, the remains were confirmed. Anastasia died with the rest of her family in 1918.
If you would like to hear more about Queen Alexandra and the Romanov family, I have a full episode on her.
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