[SIZE=5]Execution of the Russian Royal family in 1918[/SIZE]
[SIZE=5]A full description of the Romanov murders
[/SIZE][SIZE=2]The dreadful night of July 16, 1918, at midnight the chief executioner Yakov â??dark manâ? Yurovsky, went upstairs to awaken the family. In his pocket he had a Colt pistol with a cartridge clip containing 7 bullets, and in his coat he carried a pistol and a clip of 10 bullets. When he went and knocked on the door Dr. Bortkin, the family doctor was alert, he was already awake writing a letter which would turn up to be his last letter. Yurovsky explained his intrusion saying, â??Because of unrest in the town, it has become necessary to move the family downstairs,â? he said. â??It would be dangerous to be in the upper rooms if there was shooting in the streets.â? Botkin understood and went to awake the family and tell them to get dressed quickly. Nicholas, 50, and Alexis, 13, dressed in simple military shirts, trousers, boots, and cap. Alexandra, 46, and Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Marie, 19, and Anastasia, 17, put on simple dresses without outer wraps or ruffles. Nicholas carrying his son Alexis, Alexandra clutching a pillow, so as the other daughters, and Anastasia holding her small King Carles spaniel, Jimmy. Following them were Trupp, Nicholasâ??s valet; Demidova, the maid; and Kharitonov, the cook. From there Yurovsky led all of them downstairs, to a bare room with no furniture. Alexandra seeing the empty room asked, â??No chairs? May we not sit?â? Yurovsky, went out to get 2 chairs, while one of the soldiers whispered to one another â??The empress needs a chair...evidently she wants to die in one.â? Alexandra took one and put Alexis in the other. Then Yurovsky gave the â??death directionsâ?--â??Please, you stand here, and you here..thatâ??s it in a row!â?-- spreading them out across the back wall. He explained that he needed a photograph because people in Moscow were worried that they had escaped. When he finished aligning them, Yurovsky then called in NOT photographers, but 11 armed Bolshevik soldiers. Yurovsky stood in front of Nicholas, his right hand in his pocket and left holding a paper and reading,
"In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to......execute you."
Nicholas quickly turned looked at his family and said â??What? What?â? Yurovsky jerked out the Colt out of his pocket and fired at the Tsar. Soon the entire squad began to fire at the family, each of the soldiers had been told beforehand whom they were assigned to shoot and ordered to aim for the heart to avoid excessive quantities of blood. The empress and Olga each tried to make a sign of a cross as a prayer but they did not have time. Now Alexis and Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia remained alive. Bullets fired at the daughtersâ?? chest but they seemed to bounce off, (later Historians found out the daughters sowed jewels on their dresses to act as a shield) the executioners continued to fire, in the smoke, Marie and Anastasia pressed on the wall, while Alexis grasping for support was kicked in the head by a executioner. Then the executioners stabbed Alexis, Marie, and Anastasia. Blood was everywhere.
Sheets off the beds were collected to drag out the bodies. When they picked up Anastasiaâ??s body and put her on a sheet she cried out. She was still alive. But then she got still and they continued, till they got to a abandoned place in the dense forest called the Four Brothers. There they undressed the family and collected their items and the jewels from the duchesses to resell them in a market, as shown in the animated, movie â??Anastasiaâ?. At some point in carnage, perhaps in a attempt to make the corpses unrecognizable, the faces had been crushed by the blows from the rifle butts. While the diggers threw the bodies in the ditch, some of them, the despicable low-lives that they were, actually touched the naked bodies of the duchesses. One of them said in a interview, quote: â??I felt the empress myself and she was warmâ? another one said â??Now I can die in peace because I have squeezed the empressâ??s breastsâ?. To get rid of any evidence of carnage, bones, and a rotting corpse they chopped the bodies up into fine pieces which looked like chopped meat, ...then the bodies were destroyed with sulfuric acid and by burning on the bonfires with the aid of gasoline. The fatty matter in the corpses melted and spread over the ground where it became mixed with the earth
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