The Bolsheviks executed a sick 13 year old so the Whites had no living Romanov banner left.
After holding Nicholas, Alexandra and the 5 children in the Ipatiev House since spring, Yurovsky’s squad marched them into the basement on the night of July 16, 1918 and opened fire.
Jewels sewn into the daughters’ clothes deflected the bullets, so the guards finished Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia with bayonets.
Moscow announced only the Tsar’s death and claimed the family was safe. Trotsky later wrote that Sverdlov told him Lenin wanted no live banner left for the Whites to rally around.
The bodies were burned, doused in acid and thrown down a mine shaft at Ganina Yama before being reburied. Most were found in 1991, Alexei and Maria only in 2007.
The Church on the Blood now stands where the house was, and the family are Orthodox saints.
After holding Nicholas, Alexandra and the 5 children in the Ipatiev House since spring, Yurovsky’s squad marched them into the basement on the night of July 16, 1918 and opened fire.
Jewels sewn into the daughters’ clothes deflected the bullets, so the guards finished Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia with bayonets.
Moscow announced only the Tsar’s death and claimed the family was safe. Trotsky later wrote that Sverdlov told him Lenin wanted no live banner left for the Whites to rally around.
The bodies were burned, doused in acid and thrown down a mine shaft at Ganina Yama before being reburied. Most were found in 1991, Alexei and Maria only in 2007.
The Church on the Blood now stands where the house was, and the family are Orthodox saints.
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According to Lenin, the famine killing millions was the perfect moment to execute clergy by the thousands.
When the Bolsheviks took power, they nationalized every church and banned religious teaching after 9 centuries as Russia’s state religion.
In 1922, he ordered mass executions while troops fired on believers resisting confiscations in Shuya, and an estimated 8,000 priests were killed that year alone. Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated them, got arrested, and signed a loyalty pledge to avoid the same fate before dying in 1925.
After the monasteries turned into camps, fewer than 500 of 54,000 churches stayed open by 1939. For Lenin any loyalty outside the state, whether property, courts, or the Church, counted as a threat that had to be destroyed.View quoted post on X
