ninme

The Times - Russian admits massacre of the Tsar and his family was a Bolshevik crime

The ruling may not change the lives of the family, but it does represent a milestone: it is the closest that any post-Soviet government has come to accepting the criminal nature of Bolshevik rule.

Westerners may see that as a truism. But present-day Russia is still in the thrall of the iconography of Lenin. His image is emblazoned on schools and underground stations; his embalmed body is still visited in Red Square, even if not by the thousands of Socialist pilgrims who turned up in the Soviet days.

If the Romanovs were innocent of any crime, and if their death was an execution ordered from above, then Lenin could in theory be an accomplice to murder. It is at the very least the beginning of a debate. And Russian school textbooks will have to go into more detail about the last day of the dynasty.

The shootings occurred on July 17, 1918, in the cellar of a merchant’s family in Yekaterinburg. The Tsar’s family was told to stand as if about to be snapped for a group photograph. Their guards then shot them, but the Tsaritsa and the girls had jewels sewn into their corsets and these appear to have deflected the bullets.

This reportedly terrified the killers, who had been brought up to believe that the royal family ruled by divine right and was therefore somehow shielded by God. The bayoneting also failed to kill all the group, so they were shot in the head at point-blank range.

I picked a good time to marry a part-Russian!

/ambitious