The Minority Report

Always first with breaking news…from 1918…I found this first person account of the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family fascinating. I’m sure you knew already but I didn’t know that there were accounts floating around of the actual event.

the Tsar and his family were initially kept as prisoners near St. Petersburg and then transported beyond the Ural Mountains finally ending up in the town of Ekaterinburg in the Spring of 1918. The seven members of the royal family and their small retinue were confined to the house of a successful local merchant, N. N. Ipatiev, which had been commandeered by the Bolshevik’s for this purpose. The Execution of Tsar Nicholas II, 1918

Here is a small portion of the first person account by Pavel Medvedev, member of the guards:

Yurovsky said to me, ‘We must shoot them all tonight; so notify the guards not to be alarmed if they hear shots.’ I understood, therefore, that Yurovsky had it in his mind to shoot the whole of the Tsar’s family, as well as the doctor and the servants who lived with them, but I did not ask him where or by whom the decision had been made…At about ten o’clock in the evening in accordance with Yurovsky’s order I informed the guards not to be alarmed if they should hear firing. The Execution of Tsar Nicholas II, 1918

I’ve always been fascinated by the Princess Anastasia and whether she escaped the execution or not. It’s been recently proved conclusively that she didn’t escape but died with her brother and burned near Ekaterinburg.

Persistent rumors of her possible escape circulated since her death, fueled by the fact that the location of her burial was unknown during the decades of Communist rule. The mass grave near Ekaterinburg which held the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three daughters was only revealed in 1991, but the bodies of Alexei Nikolaevich and one of his sisters — either Anastasia or her elder sister Maria — were not discovered there.

Her possible survival has been entirely disproven. In January 2008, Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 were most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008 that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters.Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So the whole point of this posting that Greg Laden posted this in his blog today about a new paper coming out about the identification of the two Romanov children using DNA analysis.

Now, we have a paper coming out at this very moment in PLoS ONE: Mystery Solved: The Identification of the Two Missing Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis.

Initially, it was not clear from the report what the connection might be between the reports last year and the current paper. So I contacted the authors and found out that there is a connection, though it seems a bit complicated. The present paper includes members of a large international team that has worked on the forensics in this complicated case, and this paper is the “first full detailed, forensic accounting of the the Romanov family remains.” And it is quite a nice piece of work. Greg Laden’s Blog : The Identification of the Two “Missing” Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis