The execution of the Romanov family at Yekatarinberg
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The execution of the Romanov family at Yekatarinberg Roger W. Byard 1 Accepted: 6 January 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The brutal execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and five children at Yekaterinberg in July 1918 was followed by apparently inept attempts to conceal the bodies. Despite this, the skeletons remained undiscovered until 1979. Even after anthropological and DNA analyses, the absence of two of the children in the grave raised doubts as to the identity of the remains. The discovery of the skeletal fragments of a young woman aged between 18 to 25 years and a boy aged between 10 to 14 years in a shallow grave near the primary burial site in 2007 enabled full DNA investigations of the remains to be undertaken in association with analyses of living Romanov descendants. Autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) testing revealed the sex and familial relationships within the group, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) testing of the two hypervariable regions (HVI and HVII) showed links between the Tsar and Tsarina and living maternal relatives. The same point heteroplasmy in both the Tsar and his brother, Georgii provided further supportive evidence. There appears little doubt that the skeletal remains in the two graves outside Yekaterinburg are those of Tsar Nicholas, his wife and their five children. The genetic analyses and the features of the fragmented remains are all very consistent with the tragic story of the last days of the Romanov family and with the subsequent desecration and destruction of their bodies. Keywords Tsar Nicholas II . Romanov . Yekaterinberg . Bolshevik revolution . DNA analyses . Anastasia
July 16–17 1918 in Yekaterinburg
Imposters
On the night of July 16–17 1918, Nicholas, the former “emperor and autocrat of all the Russias”, his wife Empress Alexandra and their five children (Fig. 1) were taken with their doctor and three servants into a basement room of a house in Yekaterinburg and executed by Bolshevik troops. The victims were repeatedly shot and bayoneted, with the killings allegedly taking 20 min to complete [1–4]. The exact role played by Lenin in orchestrating or ordering the deaths remains unclear as written records are lacking. Although the new government announced the death of Nicholas, it was not until 1926 that the murders of the remainder of the family were acknowledged. Stalin subsequently suppressed further discussion of the event in 1938.
This led to many years of theories as to their actual fate with one of the most bizarre involving a mentally ill Polish woman, Fraziska Schanzkowska who, living under the name of Anna Anderson proclaimed that she was in fact Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the Tsar [5]. She claimed to have survived the massacre because she had been removed from the basement in an unconscious state by one of the guards. She died in 1984 in Charlottesville, Virginia in the United States proclaiming her royal lineage to the end. Subsequent DNA testing however showed that she h
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