A Crime Remembered

An excerpt from, “Murder of The Czar’s Family: Complete Story of Their Imprisonment and Execution at Ekaterinburg – One of the Grimmest Tragedies in the History of Royalty” Current History (1916-1940), Vol. 13, No. 2, Part I (NOVEMBER, 1920):

No grimmer or more tragic story than that told in the October issue of Current History of the manner in which the former Czar of Russia and his entire family were slaughtered in cold blood in the remote Ural town of Ekaterinburg, it would seem, could be invented by the most morbidly imaginative of romancers.The Chamber of Horrors of the Russian epileptic, Dostoievsky, has nothing to equal it. That sombre and pathological genius, Leonid Andreiev, whose short stories of Russian life even went beyond those of Dostoievsky in their obsession by the horror of Russian life and the depths of the Russian soul, would have reveled in such a theme, had he lived to read the revelations only now being made of the way in which the Czar, the Czarina, their children and their personal attendants met their death in a remote provincial town on the outskirts of Siberia.

Even in the bare outline which was given in last month’s issue of this magazine the story is as horrible as any story by Andreiev or Edgar Allan Poe. But the full story recently published in all details in The London Times masses in black shadows between the cold and naked lines, deepens, touch by touch, the impression of brooding fate, the horror of men’s souls.

Those who read this story in full, even those who were hostile to the Czar and his Government during the Romanov regime and have not yet been convinced that the ruthless executions by which the Czar’s reign was marked were permitted by the Czar through weakness of character, not through inherent cruelty, cannot but feel compassion for the innocent children who were included in the ghastly murders of the house of Ipatiev. Nor can they fail to be impressed by the unfailing courtesy, patience and humility of the Czar throughout the most cruel and degrading captivity which any deposed monarch ever had to face, by the Czarina’s love of her sick boy, by her unfailing devotion to the man to whose downfall, through her blind cult for the sinister priest Rasputin, she had herself so powerfully contributed.

On the heads of this man and woman – the last representatives of Czardom – rested the ultimate responsibility for the woes of modern Russia, for the violent end of many Russian idealists, but they went to their own deaths like the aristocrats of the French Revolution: nobles they were, and nobles they remained to the very end. The quiet courtesy of their demeanor, their unshakable dignity and fortitude of soul, contrast powerfully with the brutality, the cruelty, the unspeakable obscenity of their Bolshevist guards and executioners.