What happened to the Romanovs?

The House of Romanov ruled Russia from 1613 until 1917, when Nicholas II abdicated the throne. But what actually happened to the royal family? Tune in as Katie and Sarah get to the bottom of the mysterious demise of the Romanovs in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we
are granting listener requests fairy Godmother style. We've had a

(00:21):
lot of requests for this particular subject, but here is
a sample email from Lauren of Somerville, South Carolina, um
who said that she had listened to our podcast on Resputin,
but I've learned of the youngest roman off daughter, Anastasia
and the mystery that surrounds her. In nineteen seventeen, when
her family was murdered by the Bolsheviks. They never found
Anastasia's body. Did she die or was she actually Anna Anderson,

(00:45):
a German woman who claimed to be Anastasia for her
whole life since the murder, So Kaddis and Josh did
a podcast on Resputin, how did respute and really die?
But Lauren's right, that doesn't solve all of the mysteries
of the Roman family. So first let's get ourselves a
cast of characters. So the family in question, the romanofs

(01:06):
ruled the Russian Empire from sixteen thirteen to nineteen seventeen.
But the guy we're talking about is Nicholas the Second,
who succeeded Alexander the Third in eighteen ninety four, and
he also married his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna that same year.
Together they have five kids, Alexey, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia,

(01:26):
who is perhaps the most famous today. Um Alexey is
the baby, and he's the only son, and he's the
heir um. But he's a hemophiliac, which is something that
he inherited from his ancestress, Queen Victoria, so he's not
the best air you could ask for, but the family
is happy with their lot. When Olga was born, the

(01:48):
Czar supposedly said, I am glad the child is a girl.
Had it been a boy, who would have belonged to
the people. Being a girl, she belongs to us, which
reminded us a lot of Anne Boleyn and Henry the Eighth.
It may be an apocryphal que to well the kind
of thing more than likely, but it's the kind of
thing it's fun to say. Definitely, they were pretty happy
family all in all, but as rulers, not so much.

(02:09):
In this book, History's Monsters by Simon sebag Montefiori. He
called them inept, cruel, rigid, and obtuse reactionaries, which you
know out Yeah, most people agree that Nicholas just wasn't
very well suited to his position. He's a timid man,
which means that he's easily manipulated and taken advantage of.

(02:31):
And Alexandra actually has a lot of power over him,
and he has favorites in court who have a lot
of power over him. So this makes people uncomfortable, and
he was really out of touch with his own people.
He believed in divine right, he had God given power,
so you know, he did what he wanted because he
had God's blessing, and he listened to who he wanted,

(02:51):
even if it wasn't maybe the best people, it wasn't
the advisors, right, So he decided that anyone who disagreed
with him wasn't an me with the capital E. And
this does not breed happiness among his subjects. Yeah, Needless
to say, Nicholas is very unpopular and his international relations
are a mess. And this all brings us to the

(03:13):
Russian Revolution of nineteen o five, which kind of gets
this story started. So in January nineteen o five, the
workers of St. Petersburg, which at the time was Petrograd,
march to the Winter Palace with demands for Nicholas. They
said that they were still loyal to the Czar, but
that they wanted to elect a legislative assembly. So even
these fairly moderate demands are not met well, and the

(03:36):
Czar's troops fire on them, kill a hundred and thirty
and it's called Bloody Sunday, and it ignites outrage in
the Russian people. By October nineteen o five, there's a
general strike. The cities are shutting down because they have
no workers and Nicholas. Okay's a legislative assembly. But don't
think the monarchy is giving up that easily. On their side,

(03:58):
they have the Black Hundreds, who are counter revolutionaries and
zarists who had access to a lot of arms. They
were made mostly of the wealthier class and some clergymen,
and they go after students and left wingers and um
have bloody programs against the Jews, and they're really not
fond of Ukrainians either. So this repressive regime is just

(04:22):
getting worse, almost But the revolutionaries are just as violent.
There's a military mutiny and several political assassinations. So you
could sum up this whole period with the phrase violent unrest,
and this continues for a long time. But with that,
we'd like to explain. I guess why the Romanovs are
so interesting. It's not because they're just part of these revolutions,

(04:46):
kind of out of touch for standing against the revolution.
It's because they're weird, really weird. They're kind of a
freaky family. Alexandra Nicholas actually had a pretty happy marriage,
but everyone else thought they were really bizarre. The Russians
hated Alexandra because of her German nous. Not only did
was she a German, she also was a haughty, cold

(05:07):
kind of person, or at least that's how the people
thought of her, and she epitomized what Russians didn't like
in about German romists, and the First World War didn't help.
She was accused of being a spy, and perhaps unsurprisingly,
because the people didn't like her, she didn't really like
them back and didn't make much of an effort. So
the fact that their only son and heir has hemophilia

(05:27):
doesn't really endear Alexandra to her people either. The Russians
want a good strapping healthy air, and she has this
invalid who she absolutely obsesses over, and she's of course
blamed for it, and Alexander, whatever you say about her,
she does kind of have a right to obsess over
this disorder. Um. It's it's very serious and at the

(05:50):
time it was incurable. It's a bleeding disorder where your
blood doesn't clot and um. Some variations can be mild,
but in the most serious cases you bleed internally and
into your joints and um it's extremely painful. So her
worries weren't unfounded. You know, this was a really serious
thing for her son, but they kept his illness as secret,

(06:12):
which probably made things seem very mysterious and very odd.
People would just to wonder what was going on and
also why this child was being coddled so much. So
they were always looking for ways to cure him. And
when medicine failed him, the mystic rest Sputant entered their lives,
who supposedly could heal a little Alexei And we won't
go into this story too much because of the other podcast,

(06:34):
but resciput And had a lot of power over the
romanofs and was a very strange and possibly evil man.
He was murdered in nineteen sixteen after several attempts to
kill him, but he wouldn't die much like a cartoon character.
He keeps having that annvil fallen okay and surviving. So,
just to add to this rather damning case against the

(06:56):
Czar and his wife, people also think Nicholas set It
was impotent, and Alexandra was a lesbian, and that she
had had sex with rescput and to get her children.
So there's just so much wrapped up around this couple,
and also that all the daughters were having sex with
Rescipued and people had no idea again what was really
going on in that palace, But as far as outward

(07:17):
appearances go, they thought something was entirely out of whack.
So again, behind all of this, the revolutions are still happening.
The Revolution of nineteen o five did not end in
nineteen o five, and neither did that unwrast players change exactly.
So then we have the Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen
and the government is very corrupt. Everyone hates the czar

(07:38):
at this point, he's blamed for all the things he
has done and the things he hasn't done. And it's
also become very clear during the war that while the
rest of Europe has been modernizing, Russia has not. That's
something we talked about a little in our Crimean War episode.
They were realizing that even then, because it's especially clear
to the army, which is falling apart during warfare. There

(08:00):
is also a food shortage, which is when the rioting started.
And in this climate, Nicholas abdicated in March. His brother
wouldn't take the throne. I wouldn't either if I had
been his brother. And the romanofs are done. They have
fallen completely out of power in the Russian Empire. So
there's a power grab that happens. And to really simplify

(08:20):
something that's quite complicated, the Bolsheviks and the left socialist
revolutionaries are the winners, and the Bolsheviks promise peace, land
and bread, which sounds like a pretty good deal. You
can understargue with that, how people would get behind that.
So back to our family. Nicholas of course abdicated after

(08:42):
the February Revolution, which was part one of the Revolution
of nineteen seventeen. So now what the families on house
arrest for five months in Alexandra Palace, But in August
nineteen seventeen they're sent to Tobolsk, Siberia, and the Bolsheviks
have a fateful decision to make at this point exile

(09:02):
the royal family or kill them. Killed the tsar and
the family is a symbol, and because symbols are so important,
you can see why this would be such a momentous decision.
If you exile the family, they can always come back,
you could have grandchildren come back, and it can go
on for for centuries. So in April nineteen eighteen, they're

(09:23):
still wavering on what to do, and they summoned Nicholas away.
Alexandra and Maria go with him to eat Katerineburg and
the yearls and the rest of the family doesn't join
until May because Alexei was too sick to go before.
And this is a big change for the royal family.
There's not a lot of food, they're dressed in rags,
they're not treated well. They're imprisoned in this house and
don't have a lot to do. They spend a lot

(09:45):
of time reading the Bible, and in July nineteen eighteen,
a man named Yakov spared Love signs off on the
killing of the Romanov family and um. At two o'clock
in the morning, a group of men come for the Romanovs,
and the family, along with a few of their servants
whould remain loyal to them and their doctor, are taken

(10:08):
into a small room and shot to death. And according
to Robert Matthew's The Romanovs, the final chapter uh those
who don't die in the first round of shots, which
the girls are then bayoneted. Alexei is shot in the ear,
Anastasia's made is bayonetted thirty times after she survives the
gunshots and tries to escape, and the families also disfigured.

(10:31):
They're hit in the face with rifle butts, and Anastasia's
dog is even killed. So just this really violent assassination
of the You have to picture this group, I think,
what twelve executioners and then this family of nine in
this teeny tiny room and all the blood. So, the bloody,
disfigured to bodies were brought to a place called the

(10:52):
Four Brothers, which was north vie Katerinburg and a place
of swamps and pete bogs and minds. And when the
bodies were stripped, the men found that the roman off
daughters had diamonds sewn into their corsets, which explained why
the bullets weren't killing them. The jewels redflicting them, something
I remember learning about when I was a kid and
just being fascinated by by this story. Always keep diamonds

(11:15):
in your clothes. They're always the original kevlar. They were
also wearing amulets with Rasputant's picture on them. Again, this
is all according to Massey's book. And the bodies were
thrown down a mine shaft with grenades thrown after them,
and by July eighteen it was announced at a meeting
where Lennon was present that Nicholas had been executed, but

(11:36):
that Alexandra and the children were safe. And this it
turns out to be alive because Lennon knew about the
executions before they happened, knew about the executions of the
whole family. Yes, this was kept up for a long
time that Lennon had no idea what was going on,
but it was all signed off on long before. So
on the twentieth the papers announced the death of Nicholas,

(11:59):
but again his family was reported to be alive. It
wasn't until much later that the world found out that
they were dead. So about a week after the executions,
the counter revolutionaries the Whites uh capture a Katerine Burke
and obviously search for the Romanovs. Can't find them, but
they do find their blood, and by January nineteen nineteen

(12:22):
a real search has been launched at four brothers by
the Whites and they find little bits of jewelry, buckles, glasses,
case of finger but no bodies. So where are they?
And around the same time or shortly thereafter, they start
to be rumors that some of the royal family has
indeed escaped. A woman named Anna Anderson claims that she

(12:46):
is Anastasia and she made it out alive, and there
are several other Anastasia impostors that pop up over the years. Yeah,
Anastasia somehow becomes the central figure of this story. But
back to our question of the bodies. Word got out
about where they'd been buried after they had been buried,
so one of the executioners went and moved them, and

(13:08):
they remained a secret for a very long time until
someone found that same man's diary much later and pieced
together where they might be. In n nine bodies were
discovered in the area they were assumed to be Nicholas, Alexandra,
three of the kids, their doctor, and three servants, which
leaves us with two kids unaccounted for, who were assumed

(13:30):
to be Alexey and Anastasia. And in it was confirmed
with DNA evidence that those were the Romanovs, and so
the Romano bones were buried in St. Petersburg, and there
was a lot of controversy about this about the burial.
The church objected to it because it didn't recognize that
these were the Romanovs remains, and their names weren't said

(13:52):
during the service, and a lot of people didn't buy
the story that these were the Romanov bones, and um
in two thousand four, another study came out in this group,
also using DNA evidence, said that there was no way
that these bodies could be the romanoff them right. They
thought the DANNA evidence had been contaminated and so you

(14:12):
couldn't say with any certainty that that's who they were.
So we have our our story debunked. Just a little
over a decade later, and in two thousand seven, two
more bodies were found and these were positively identified as
Alexei and one of the girls. The people who did
the studies said it was virtually irrefutable evidence, and all
these bodies, all these bodies, by the way, are found

(14:33):
around the Four Brothers area. As a result of these studies,
we basically have three camps. So the first one, all
the Romanofs were killed and we found all of their remains.
So the bodies the real deal and the two thousand
seven bodies the real deal. Everything is completely buttoned up.
The second camp, all the Romanoffs were killed, but we

(14:54):
need more studies to find out if what we have
is the real deal, and maybe we have some of
the real bodies and we don't have others. Yes, I'm
in the second camp for the record. And the third
camp was that some of the Romanovs escaped and went
on to live lives elsewhere. But the woman we mentioned before,
Anna Anderson, who's the most famous Anastasia Impostor, really was

(15:16):
an impostor. Mitochondrial DNA tests were done after her death
and it doesn't match at all the Romanoffs. In nineteen
seventy seven, the patty of house where the Romanovs spent
their last days was demolished with a wrecking ball, and
um Yeltsin actually did it under Brezhnev's orders, because it
was still a place of pilgrimage. It was still a

(15:37):
place where people went to, I guess celebrate the secretly manarchists.
In two thousand, the Romanovs were named Holy passion bearers
by the Russian Orthodox Church. And it's kind of like
being martyrs. But martyrs are people who die for their faith,
whereas passion bearers or people who still show great faith
in the face of death, but are sort of interesting.

(16:00):
Concluding point here, The big about faces that in two
thousand and eight, the Russian Supreme Court ruled that the
Romanovs were victims of political oppression. Um. Before that, I
think people were focusing on the murders. It's just a
random act, not a government directed act. So it was
a big step to take resibility. Fascinated exactly in a

(16:26):
distant descendant of the Romanovs. I think he was an
ancestor of Nicholas the First actually told Newsweek here's a
pretty long quote for you. There was a certain logic
to the murders. From the Bolshevik point of view. Reaction
to the revolution was still strong. They were being attacked
from all sides, so destroying the czar a symbolic figurehead
committed all those who participated in the revolution to an

(16:47):
irreversible course. It's terrible to say it, but I understand
their logic. It would have been too dangerous to leave
the czar alive. But how they did it was a
different matter. They murdered the family with the utmost barbarity,
then tried to cover up the to the family and
tried to pretend it was a local decision. It's set
the tone for future secretive state terror. And that's the

(17:07):
final word on the romanofs. But if you help some
ideas on what you think happened to them, email us
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And
if you'd like to learn more about their creepy mystic,
you should check out an article how to rescue you
can really die. But cat brings us to listener mail.
So we have another comment for you on our Satchel

(17:29):
Page episode. This is from Brian in New York and
it was left on the blogs um. He wrote after
we said that Satchell reportedly pitched at up to a
hundred and five miles per hour. You're at a hundred
and five miles per hour, the highest recorded speed in
recent history is a hundred and four point eight, and
that's in an era where pitchers take much better care

(17:51):
of their arms. And even that one is widely acknowledged
to be inflated, as it's one point eight miles prour
higher than any other recorded pitch. The highest number I
could find for page is one oh three, which is
probably at or just beyond his actual one pitch and
a lifetime top speed at which, given the circumstances under
which he was playing, is certainly so stupefying ly impressive

(18:12):
that it doesn't need embellishment. I wouldn't believe that if
someone told me caulled Bunny in through one oh five.
So we thought that was pretty funny. So thank you
for the clarification, Brian. If anyone else has anything to
say about it, feel free to email us. We're also
on Twitter if you'd like to follow us at missed
in History and again, you should check out rs Scute
and article on our homepage at www dot how stuff

(18:36):
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