This is a blog for use in both of my HIS 241 and HIS 242 Russian history survey courses at Northern Virginia Community College.

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01 May 2008

Missing Romanov Family Found

There have been a number of recent articles about the fact that recent DNA tests on some bone remains unearthed near Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains of Russia, where the Russian royal family was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 on the orders of Lenin. Anyway back to the story, the DNA tests prove that the remains are those of the tsarevich Aleksei (heir to the throne) and his sister Marie. The remains of the other members of the imperial family (tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, Anastasia, Olga and Tatiana) has all been previously located. They had been reburied in the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral (the family's imperial burial place) in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg in 2000. The identification of these last remains closes one of the last mysteries related to the Romanov family.

9 comments :

John b said...

I found it intereting that the Romanov family lawyer has been trying to get the Russian Courts to claim the executed family were victims of political repression but the courts keep refusing claiming the family were victims of premediteated murder, not a political reprise. I read somewhere else that there bodies were mutilated by the executioners and bathed in acid and thrown into a mine.

Anonymous said...

The charred bodies of the Romanoff family that were executed on July 17, 1918, were exhumed in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It took years of testing to identify the bodies before they could be laid to rest at St Peters and Paul Cathedral. Patriarch Alexiy II, head of Russia's Orthodox Church, has never fully accepted the authenticity of the identity of the remains.The two missing bodies of the children led to much speculation about possible survivors. Over the years many people have claimed to be one of the survivors. The most famous was a lady named Anna Anderson who until her death claimed to be Anastasia, even though DNA testing proved this to be untrue. The remains of the two missing children were discovered in 2007.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know why the two children were buried separately from the rest of the family?

Anonymous said...

Apparently one of the murderers, Yakov Yurovsky, said in his statement that he set aside two of the corpses to be burned and buried separately to confuse royalists who would be searching for 11 bodies. (Nicholas II, his wife, five children, doctor and three servants)

AV-AB said...

The church in questionis the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin

Anonymous said...

Here is some more information about the Church of the Annunciation. It was built by Ivan the Terrible to replace a previous church, which was damaged by fires and riots before Ivan’s coronation. The church was a private church for the Grand Dukes and Tsar’s and it was connected to the Tsar’s personal chambers. Ivan the Terrible was not allowed to attend services, because, he was married to his fourth wife and this was against the rules of Russian Orthodoxy (they only accepted three marriages). Ivan built a porch alongside the new church were he could stand and observe the services. Inside the church there are icons painted by Andrei Rublev.

Rolland La Haie said...

I believe that it was a good thing to bury the family in St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in the traditional manner that members of the royal family were buried in. It almost seems like an act of atonement, in some ways.

Anonymous said...

I always thought it interesting about the people who would apear and call themselves part of the royal family. That one time after Ivan the Terrible died and everyone kept coming back saying they were his son. It is crazy that they kept believing them and following them.

aanchonline said...

The claim that Yurovsky set aside two bodies and dumped them at a different spot to confuse the White Army seems impractical. If he indeed wanted to confuse, then he would have buried bodies in groups of 2-3 not 9 and then 2.

I guess, we may never really find out what really happened...