Romanovs Part 6: The End

PART 6/6. You guys this is it ... the end, in every sense of the word. Although not everyone believes it ... for despite the death of the Romanovs in 1918 there have always been rumours of one surviving grand duchess, which begs the question: Did one Romanov remain? If you want to watch the rest of our Romanov content you can find it here https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1rxk28oArv73AsShJ1Xvq8?si=_Ot0slGOQk-WEWnGP5VGGA&nd=1&dlsi=cff2eb270e8f44dd. Shout-out to our incredible researcher Gracie McCamish and editor Jamie Rose for pulling this together. If you're wanting more Hot History you can follow along on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/hothistoryclub/?hl=en, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@hot.history?lang=en, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://substack.com/@hothistoryclub, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@hot.history ! 'Til next week, Ainslie x Please take care while listening, should you require assistance please use the below: In Australia, support is available 24/7 by calling or texting 0477 131 114 (lifeline) or 1300 22 4636 (Beyond Blue). In the USA, support is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 (⁠⁠988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline⁠⁠) or texting HOME to 741741 for the ⁠⁠Crisis Text Line⁠⁠. In the UK, support is available 24/7 by calling NHS 111 (NHS) or ⁠⁠116 123⁠⁠ (Samaritans)

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  Hi guys, I just want to drop you a note before we get started today to say that this episode of Hot History will contain themes including suicide, death, and human remains. If you need support at any point throughout this episode, I have left some resources in the show notes below.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Hi guys, and welcome back to Hot History, your corner of the internet where we cover all the things in history that you probably should know, but don't. I'm Mainzly Harvey, your hot historian here, ready to dive back into our series on the last Tsar's Russia, guys. The Romanovs. This is part six. We are at the end. Six of six. Almost nine hours of content on the last imperial family, which means today we are going to cover the end of their lives while also looking at exactly what happened afterwards, including whether Grand Duchess Anastasia truly lived. So let's get into it today by rewinding back to May of 1918.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Now, at this point, guys, the Romanovs have been under house arrest for over a year. First at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, then to the governor's mansion in Tbilis, and by May, the whole family had been reunited and moved to what would be their final destination: Empatiap House in Yekaterinburg, aka the House of Special Purpose. Now, this was a very deliberate move by the Bolsheviks and Lenin to keep the Romanovs out of the hands of the approaching White Army, whose politics opposed their own Soviet agenda, which made the Romanovs a potential rallying point for White Army troops who could use them to re-establish the monarchy. This, for the Bolsheviks, was the worst possible scenario, so they moved the former imperial

• 2:57Speaker 02

  family to Yekaterinburg, deep in the Ural Mountains, a stronghold full of loyal Bolshevik guards, to basically keep them out of reach. Here, the Romanovs spent three months trapped with their captors under the worst conditions yet, with high walls, locked windows, and guards who, in no uncertain terms here, guys, hated them. There was zero privacy, constant checks of their persons and their rooms, and some guards were so cruel that they even began putting anti-monarchy graffiti around the house for the family to see, some of which was highly sexual. It was, at this point, a powder keg waiting to explode, as everyone within the house's

• 3:40Speaker 02

  worlds became incredibly small, including a man by the name of Yakov Yurovsky. We're gonna talk a lot about him today, guys. He is the commandant of the Romanovs' house arrest and came from a poor, working-class Jewish family in Siberia, whose religion saw him experience extensive legal discrimination and even periods of direct violence as he and his family struggled against the backdrop of Imperial Russia, living in what he called "a flooded basement for the majority of their lives." Eventually, he developed a trade, becoming a watchmaker, which, by all accounts, he excelled at, but eventually abandoned when he became involved in revolutionary politics, where he converted to Christianity and joined the medical corps, serving as a medical orderly

• 4:25Speaker 02

  during World War I, seeing some of the most gruesome wartime injuries imaginable. So this is a man who has experienced proper suffering and persecution under Nicholas's rule, and now has borne witness to his devastating decision to not only go to war in the first place, but also become military commander, all of which turned him more and more radical, eventually becoming an essential member of the Bolshevik presence in Yekaterinburg, where he was given the special commission directly from HQ itself to become the commandant of the House of Special Purpose. The thing to know about Yurovsky, okay, because he is a really fascinating figure, and like I said, so central to this story that we're about to discuss today, is that

• 5:08Speaker 02

  despite absolutely hating the Tsar and everything he stood for, he wasn't necessarily a cruel man, which is about to have a sense of irony in about 10 minutes or so, but he was never outwardly cruel, violent, or vengeful towards Nicholas, and especially not towards his children. In fact, under Yurovsky's leadership, he cracked down on guards stealing from the family and implemented a disciplinary system to stop some of the crude behaviour of his men, especially towards the young grand duchesses. However, just because he didn't express his disdain didn't mean it faded. At no point did Yurovsky feel sympathy for or really alter his view of the imperial

• 5:52Speaker 02

  family while he was in that house. For to him, Nicholas wasn't a beaten-down, kind of, you know, middle-aged father who'd lost his job, like we often view him. He was the living embodiment of autocratic rule, which had plagued the empire and him personally. And while Yurovsky's diaries, which are very detailed, guys, and still surviving, don't expressly direct feelings for the children, like either way, like he feels sorry for them or he kind of dislikes them, their last names made them a part of that same system. And for the wider party, made them part of the same threat of rising pro-monarchy sentiment, all of which points us towards the belief that Yurovsky's more conscious care of the

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Romanovs' conditions under his charge had less to do with sympathy, right, and kind of feeling sorry and making these concessions, and more to do with the thing he'd been long obsessed with his whole life: precision and order. I mean, think about it, guys. Watchmaking, medicine, administration, these are all tasks that require significant order and process, which we really see reflected in Yurovsky's hobbies of photography, too. So it's far more likely that he made these, like I said, kind of concessions and, you know, better conditions and care of the family to try and quell the powder keg of emotions

• 7:18Speaker 02

  from going off, rather than something out of sympathy. Or, more accurately, I should say, he kind of, you know, gets the house to simmer and not go off until the right time. Yeah. You see, guys, despite growing whispers of the approaching White Army, which came so close that the family could even hear the artillery fire at night, the Romanovs would never see their hopes for rescue or their plans for deportation succeed. And if I'm being really honest here, guys, I'm not sure there is a world where the entire family ever would have lived, despite, as we spoke about last week, the British escape plan, or even if Alex had left with the kids during the revolution, because I think that

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Nicholas would have always met his end. In fact, and I didn't know this until last year, guys, there was a plan in place earlier in 1918 to possibly bring Nicholas to Moscow and put him on public trial. Politically, would have made sense as a kind of way to indict an entire system and an entire old regime through this one man, which likely would have ended in his execution, similar to that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which we saw in the French Revolution. I doubt he would have had his head lobbed off, guillotine-style, but you never know. It's one thing, though, to kill a former Tsar, right? Like we said, politically as this kind of symbol of government, or old government, anyway.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  But it is another thing entirely to butcher a whole family. Genuinely, here for a minute, guys, like I have spent years researching the Romanovs and obviously, like, intensely the last few months really being in it, I don't think anyone expected what came in July of 1918 to actually happen. But by the 16th, that was the plan, for the entire Romanov family was set to die.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  But before we get into the how, the then, the what, the where, all of that, I first wanna talk to you about who decided this, right? Who goes, not only are we gonna kill the Tsar, but we are going to kill Alexandra and all five of the Imperial children? Because common sense would say Lenin is behind all of this, right? And there's a signed kind of order with his name on it saying, yep, execute them all. But that's not the case here. And if I'm being honest, again, talking about the kind of research I've done over the last few months, I was in a bit of a weird position digging into this, because there's some information that we have from one side, but destroyed information from another.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And it's all kind of like a bit unbelievable that perhaps this was kind of a spur of the moment thing. So let's unpack it and try and kind of get to the bottom, starting with the actual power structures and key decision makers who could authorize the execution of the former Imperial family. At the top, we obviously have Lenin, who was leading the Council of People's Commissars, which was basically the new Bolshevik government cabinet, which also featured Trotsky as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Stalin as the People's Commissar for National Affairs. So they're kind of the government, right? And under them sits the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which was basically the Congress headed up by Yakov Sverdlov,

• 10:42Speaker 02

  who is an important figure here because he acts as the key link between the power brokers in Moscow, who we've just spoken about, and the Ural Regional Soviet, who are in charge of the Romanovs in Akaterinburg at this point in time. And they include three key figures. Firstly, Alexander Belaborodov, who was the chairman, Philippe Goloschenik, who was the link to Sverdlov in Moscow, and then Yurovsky, who, as we said, was the commandant. Now, there are a lot of unknowns in this equation between these three parties, as I said. But what we know for certain is that by June 1918, the Russian Civil War between the Reds and the Whites was rapidly intensifying,

• 11:26Speaker 02

  with the Whites approaching Akaterinburg with kind of fervor and ferocity. Which really means that the decision with what to do with the Romanovs becomes far more urgent, right? You can't just kind of tuck them away in this backwater because there's no way that anyone can get to them and they can kind of stay hidden. So you can mull it over a bit longer and kind of, you know, maybe keep them in that house another year until you figure out what's right to do or the threat kind of goes away and you can squirrel them out somewhere. It's now pretty urgent, which historians assume is why Goloschenik travelled to Moscow in early June 1918 to meet with Sverdlov. And the reason we have to say, we assume here, guys, is because there is no written proof whatsoever of what this meeting was about,

• 12:11Speaker 02

  what kinds of actions were discussed, and most importantly, whether the contents of that discussion made their way to Lenin. Now, this may seem unimaginable, that an execution order of the former Imperial family would go ahead without Lenin's approval. But again, we have no evidence that he signed off on this or knew about it. There's no kind of transcript of a meeting or an execution order that is signed. All we do know for certain is that Goloschkin met with Sverdlov, who did have the authority to take something like the killing of the family up the chain to Lenin. Because I do think it is largely unlikely that the Ural Regional Forces in Akaterinburg

• 12:55Speaker 02

  just decided to do this alone without anyone in Moscow's approval. But it's not impossible. So do we then think Lenin was involved? Well, again, guys, zero proof, I wanna reiterate, no proof of this. But that doesn't really mean that much. Because according to the Library of Congress, there is substantial evidence from other episodes during Lenin's time and later Soviet regimes, where politically sensitive instructions were delivered verbally rather than written down to ensure no leaks and no tracing back to that person. Which, given the awful shit that they did, kind of logical, right? You're covering your own ass. So the lack of signed order

• 13:38Speaker 02

  and the kind of non-existence of a paper trail by Lenin doesn't necessarily prove that Moscow knew nothing. If anything, it can be argued that Lenin did know and did approve, opting not to record it down because he knew the decision would be criticized. Not for killing Nicholas as such, as we said, there's kind of this whole political angle in doing that, but for killing the whole family. Which I do think was the directive from the beginning. Like, I don't really see a world where they took only Nicholas outside and shot him, because even then you have Alexei as a living heir and Alexandra as his, kind of in their eyes, co-conspirator. Which then leaves four pretty orphaned former Grand Duchess's

• 14:21Speaker 02

  who can go on to become kind of, you know, martyrs for the White Army or marry foreign royals and produce more heirs to threaten the regime. So, no. I think that ultimately the lack of paper trail here suggests the total elimination of the family was always the plan at this point. The big question is, who approved it? If it's me personally answering that question, I think I find it pretty difficult to believe something as significant as the execution of the Romanovs happened without Lenin's say-so. I also have no evidence to this, so make your own conclusions, guys. But the reality is that by July 16th, 1918, the order was given. And Yurovsky and his group of guards were merely awaiting the final go-ahead.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So, what did the Imperial family do on their final days then? And did they have any idea that these passing hours would be their last? Well, retrospectively, there are certain signs this plan was in motion. But mercifully, at the time, I don't think they knew. With the days largely being the same, apart from one exception on July 14th, when the family was unexpectedly allowed an Orthodox service inside Empatiyev House, where Father Ivan Storsev carried out the prayers and readings, recalling later that the family became unusually solemn during a prayer associated with death, even kneeling in unison, which he said made a strong impression on him. Whether this detail was added after the executions,

• 15:49Speaker 02

  when the fate of the family became clear to Father Ivan, we don't know. But even if it is true, I think it's more so a sign that they really kind of recognize and understand at this point their situation is very precarious and death could happen, not that they were actually going to die, like, in the next two days. July 15th was also pretty normal, with local women coming up to clean the house, which the former Grand Duchess's took pleasure in helping with, meeting any opportunity for conversation outside of the guards and their family with open arms. Yurovsky too displayed kindness that morning, sitting beside the young Tsarevich Alexei and asking about his health. And while I wouldn't go so far as to kind of say this was sympathy as such and most likely a fact-finding mission to assess his condition,

• 16:33Speaker 02

  it does show a human side to him. But this was no obvious indication to the Romanovs of what was to come, so they carried out their day as normal. They prayed, they ate, they read, and they were in each other's company constantly, listening as night fell to the sounds of artillery fire and hoping, as we said, for rescue or escape, which they intended to be ready for at any given moment, laying their clothes out every night to be well within reach and even keeping their shoes laced to save every second they could. One of their more renowned preparations for escape or rescue was the Grand Duchess's corsets. I'm sure you guys may have heard of this. If you haven't, then like saddle up, because this is wild.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Basically, they'd taken almost constant care of their undergarments in the last 12 months, using their sewing skills and plethora of time under lock and key to sew their remaining jewels into their corsets, with one of them keeping watch at the door for guards, while the other would take thread and needle to emeralds, diamonds, gold, silver, and rubies the size of your palm, well, my palm's relatively small, but you know, big jewels, sewing them precisely between the boning of their undergarments, which they wore every single day and every single night, including that of July 16th, when the clock struck midnight and the Bolshevik's plan sprung into action. Alerted already at 6pm by Goloschkin

• 18:00Speaker 02

  that the decision was being made with Moscow at that moment, Yurovsky waited until he had the final go-ahead, making preparations to ensure if the answer was yes, that he was ready. Immediately, he arranged trucks, told his men to clean and check their weapons, and stood by the comms unit waiting for an update, which, we're not sure when this was received, but we do know from a surviving telegram that the regional Bolsheviks sent a message to Moscow at 9:22pm. And while there's no record of Moscow's reply, either like in the Bolshevik documents in Akaterinburg or in Moscow, because it's likely been destroyed on purpose, we can assume it was yes. For after this, at around midnight, Dr. Botkin, the Romanov family's physician,

• 18:45Speaker 02

  was awakened by the guards and told to rouse the family who were being moved to a safer location, with the fighting now too close for comfort. It was then, in the very early hours of July 17th, that Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei, Dr. Botkin, their maid Anna Demidova, a footman Alexey Trup, and their cook Ivan Kartanov, were urged to dress with haste and led downstairs into a small basement room. Here, they waited anxiously, believing they were finally going to be rescued. And while being, yes, I will say, slightly suspicious that they were being told to remain in a basement away from the trucks outside, their anxieties were calmed when they were told

• 19:29Speaker 02

  they were simply here for a photograph as proof of their time in the house before then to party. Not wanting to disturb the status quo, Nicholas agreed to this, assembling his staff and daughters at the back while asking for a chair to be brought in for Alexandra, who was very frail at this point, and Alexei, who still struggled to stand after his fall the prior winter. Here, the family sat, the very picture of what once was a grand imperial dynasty, now reduced to pawns and prisoners, whose humble clothes concealed the blood of the Romanov line, which at so many points seemed so sure to break with succession crisis, assassination

• 20:09Speaker 02

  and war all beating down on the heads of those who came before. None of whom would have believed that it was here, in this dirty, dusty, damp room, that their dynasty would come to an end. For in a matter of moments, Yurovsky walked through the doors, head held firm and eyes fixed straight on a piece of paper which announced that the Presidium of the Ural Soviet had sentenced the former Tsar and his family to death. Or, as one commonly quoted but not verified account says, "Nikolay Alexandrovitch, your relatives abroad wanted to save you, but they did not succeed, and so we ourselves are now forced to shoot you."

• 20:53Speaker 02

  The whole room fell silent, with Nicholas barely having time to respond reportedly saying, "What? What?" before Yurovsky fired the first fatal shot, killing the former Tsar instantly. What followed was akin in many ways to what we've described in the events of Nicholas's reign with Bloody Sunday, the Lena River Incident and the February Revolution itself, as the room erupted into chaos. There were gunshots firing every second as metal and smoke and gunpowder exploded into the room, hitting Alexandra and Alexei next, whose seated positions at the front saw them killed on impact as their bodies slumped forward.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  What came next was more difficult, as the haze decreased visibility, but one by one the Romanov staff fell victim to the gunfire, dying on the floor of that basement, serving their imperial family to the end. That left the four Grand Duchesses, whose position at the back behind their parents and the chairs had given them cover initially, but as the bullets sprayed, they eventually found their mark, lodging into the limbs of the girls, seeing blood and screams now fill the room. But death would not take them, for the jewel-encrusted corsets they'd worn and made as their great hope for life after escape had protected their organs, sending those same bullets

• 22:17Speaker 02

  that came for them ricocheting off and hitting the sister next to them. It was a bloody, brutal business, with the world's most expensive bulletproof vests keeping the girls alive, but in excruciating agony, resulting in the room falling silent for nothing but their whimpers. Initially, the guards stopped and stared in disbelief at what they'd done, until Yurovsky told them to take their bayonets and finish the job, which they did, killing the four Grand Duchesses one by one. It was bloody, it was gruesome, and it was not at all quick, with the room all but destroyed

• 22:59Speaker 02

  like shredded guys from bullet fire, leaving 11 lifeless bodies on the cold, hard basement floor, where the last of the Romanov Tsars parted from this world. Which begs the question, what now? After all, guys, you can hardly take these bodies and bury them in the traditional crypt of the imperial family in St Petersburg, so what do you do? Well, you do what anyone does after a murder: you hide the evidence.

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• 24:25Speaker 02

  So, almost as quickly as the family were executed, their bodies were taken and loaded onto a truck which set out for the Kopetiaki Forest just outside Yekaterinburg, where Yurovsky and his men had staked out a well-hidden burial ground days earlier. After all, having a public site where the remains of the Romanovs could be venerated would allow pro-monarchists to gather and use them as martyrs for their cause, which is almost as dangerous as having the Romanovs alive and breathing before them. So, their executions had to be treated as a national secret, and, most importantly, their remains needed to remain hidden at all costs. So, the initial idea was to conceal the crime by stripping the bodies of all identifying

• 25:10Speaker 02

  attributes, including jewelry, clothes and undergarments, which is where the Grand Duchess's jewel stash was found and pocketed by those present, after which the bodies were doused with sulfuric acid to prevent identification and buried in a mineshaft. However, after consideration, Yurovsky felt this wasn't effective enough, so they were then recollected and moved to a second burial site along a forest road, where nine of the bodies were placed in one grave and another two were buried further away in a second one to disguise the total number of victims and therefore limit the links between the imperial family and these bodies. So that's it, guys. The end of the Russian imperial family in smoke and blood, the great irony of which

• 25:54Speaker 02

  was this was how a lot of Nicholas's reign had been: brutal, repressive and lethal, too little, too late, which was also the case for the Romanovs here. For on July 25th, only eight days after their murder, the White Army captured the city, heading to a patio house in search of the former imperial family, where they found no Yurovsky, no guards and no Romanovs. This prompted a swift investigation led by Nikolai Sokolov, who discovered human blood in cracks between the floorboards, 16 bullet marks in the eastern wall, six bullet holes in the floor, and additional holes elsewhere consistent with bayonets.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, portions of the wall had blood smears consistent of an attempt to wash the scene, although it was rather carelessly done, suggesting Yurovsky and his fellow guards had left with haste after disposing of the bodies. Recognizing this was in fact the scene of a mass casualty, Sokolov took the investigation up a notch, questioning anyone and everyone in the surrounding areas and beyond, including former guards, servants, soldiers, washerwomen, priests and Pierre Gillyard, the children's tutor, who could help identify the possessions of the family to try and piece together what had happened in the days prior, which eventually led them to a truck that was seen travelling

• 27:17Speaker 02

  towards the Kopetiaki Forest in the early morning hours of July 17th, which nearby neighbours thought was strange, given how remote the forest was in that direction. Following this route, Sokolov and his men were delivered straight to the mineshaft the family's bodies were originally thrown down, searching it, but again, finding no bodies. They did however find jewelry fragments, pearls, diamonds, buckles, shoes, keys, bullets, burned bone and even the body of Anastasia's King Charles Spaniel Jimmy in the surrounding mine area, which suggested there was clearly a dumping of something here, but they couldn't necessarily say it was bodies. In the end, his official report concluded that the imperial family were killed and

• 28:01Speaker 02

  their bodies destroyed by all recognition through burning and acid somewhere around this site, which of course was partly right, they were dead and their remains were burned and doused with acid, but not at this site, but in fact at the second one. So what then is the public's reaction to this, right? How do they feel about their former Tsar and Tsarina and the five imperial children's murders? Well, they didn't, because they didn't actually know, guys. In fact, despite Sokolov's evidence to suggest the family had been killed, the Soviets did everything in their power to hush up the execution of the Romanov family, only announcing the day after, on July 18th, that Nicholas had been killed to prevent him from being

• 28:46Speaker 02

  rescued and the monarchy restored as he was conspiring with White Army forces. Meanwhile, the official communique on the rest of the family was that Alexandra and Alexei had been taken to a "safe place," leaving deliberate ambiguity about the Grand Duchess's, which intended to confuse both the Russian public and the wider international community, which included surviving members of the Romanov family, namely former Dowager Empress Maria Theodorovna. Such terrible heartbreaking news for her, guys, when this reaches her, and we know from her diary that she found out about her son's execution while she was in Crimea on

• 29:26Speaker 02

  July 18th, but she flat out refuses to see any validity in these claims, writing, "Lord, here my prayers, save and protect my unfortunate Nicky." She is so strong in all this and like I think largely has to kind of hold on to this hope and hold on to this attitude to just like live day to day, but she maintained the belief that her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren had survived her whole life, writing again in September 1918, saying, "I am sure they all got out of Russia." So Maria refuses, despite all of the reports and the chatter and the kind of rumours in St Petersburg, to believe her family have been killed, and even when she was picked

• 30:11Speaker 02

  up on the HMS Marlborough in 1919, she still believed they were alive. Like, it's genuinely incredible, the will she had to hold on to hope, and again, I think like it's what she had to hold on to to really stay alive, because hope was all she had, right? They were gone and she would never see them again, spending the rest of her days in her native Denmark until she drew her final breath in 1928 at aged 80.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  So there's a real ambiguity about the fate of the family in this post-war, post-revolutionary period. And when the USSR was formed in 1922, the subject of the Romanovs was hushed up altogether. It's actually hard to imagine now, given, right, how much we know about the Romanovs now, especially for me, like, having spent so much time in it. Also, because there's just no way that in kind of our age of social media and surveillance, that something like this could happen. But genuinely, no one knew what had happened to the Romanov family. Like, at all. And while rumours spread that they had all been killed after Sokolov published his findings of the investigation in Paris in 1924, after he kind

• 31:24Speaker 02

  of escaped a USSR gag order, there were other, greater rumours in circulation, that one or more of the family members had actually survived. Namely, the youngest of the Grand Duchess's, Anastasia. The bright, bubbly troublemaker of the family, Anastasia was, in many ways, the trigger for the succession of holy men and alternative spiritual methods that Nicholas and Alexandra employed to try and have their son. With her birth as the fourth daughter in a row being one of the big dominos we spoke about like two or three episodes ago. She's also significant here, and certainly there's a real symmetry to the history in this moment.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  As the first Romanov woman we spoke about in part one, to kind of launch this 300-year-old dynasty, was also called Anastasia Romanov. And here we have the final girl, or more so, woman, as she was 17 at the time, sharing that same name. She was also the favourite of her grandmothers, the loudest of anyone in the household, and really the number one fascination of the 20th century, with millions of people and millions of dollars being made of the belief that maybe, just maybe, she was still alive. So let's unpack the fact and the fiction behind the myth of the surviving Anastasia's, starting with Anna Anderson. Of all the Romanov pretenders

• 32:49Speaker 02

  in all the world who capitalised on the lack of information coming out of Russia about the family's true fate, Anna Anderson, guys, is the most famous and the most seemingly legit, okay? So who the hell is she? Well, she pops up in 1920 at the Daldorf Asylum in Berlin, after being pulled from one of the city's canals after an apparent suicide attempt, where rescuers noticed extensive and deep scarring on her limbs consistent with large knives, or, more likely, bayonets. Wounds that majority of the public were able to recognise thanks to the horrific injuries of soldiers during World War I. Initially, when she was taken to the asylum,

• 33:31Speaker 02

  she was all but mute, refusing to identify herself and clearly in the midst of PTSD. However, after extensive treatment by German psychiatrist Dr Carl Bonhoeffer, she began to talk again, befriending a fellow patient by the name of Clara Puthard, who became so convinced that this young girl, Anna Anderson, was actually Grand Duchess Tatiana, that she contacted Russian emigres in 1922, bringing former Romanov lady-in-waiting Sophie to Berlin. She met Anna, and upon leaving whispered to the doctor, "It isn't her", to which Anna replied, "I did not say I was Tatiana". After this, the story switched firmly to that of Anastasia, with Anna saying she

• 34:14Speaker 02

  suffered from partial memory loss, but recalled escaping the basement in the Katerinburg with the help of Alexander Tchaikovsky, a sympathetic soldier who took her to Romania, where they lived together and had a child before he was killed. She then said she made her way to Berlin, hoping to contact her aunt Princess Irene of Prussia, who was Alexandra's sister, but became frightened by the big city and the prospect of needing to answer so many painful questions, so she instead attempted suicide. The story was sensational, both at the time and now, guys. And as we said, with such little information out of Russia, it seemed plausible, with the scars on her body and clearly her psychological state showing she'd suffered greatly,

• 34:57Speaker 02

  that this could be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Her age also matched that of Anastasia's and her looks were pretty close to the former Grand Duchess. So naturally, word spread like wildfire, reaching former Romanov staff, including Gleb Botkin, son of the Romanov doctor, who was also killed on July 17th, Lily Den, a close friend of Empress Alexandra, former Grand Duke Andre, Nicholas II's first cousin, and Matilde Koshinka, the famous Romanov ballerina, who all believed Anderson was Anastasia. But not everyone was convinced by her claims, guys, with Pierre Gillyard, the Imperial Children's Tudor, rejecting Anna, as did former Grand Duchess Olga, Nicholas's younger sister, Princess Irene of Prussia, Alexandra's sister,

• 35:42Speaker 02

  and her brother, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hess, who not only strongly rejected Anna Anderson's claim, but personally financed an investigation to identify her, which found that she was a missing Polish factory worker by the name of Fransiska Schenkowska, and not Grand Duchess Anastasia. Despite this, though, it was hard to deny that Anna Anderson knew things that only members of the inner Romanov circle could know. However, this was largely due to her spending time with people like Gleb Botkin, who divulged secrets and tidbits she could then share, making serious claims against the remaining Romanov estate, which included a mysterious Swiss bank account full of gold, many, many years after the first rumours of her as Anastasia

• 36:26Speaker 02

  swirled. Eventually, German courts decided she had not sufficiently proven she was Grand Duchess Anastasia and dismissed her claims. But still, she persisted, finding herself caught up for decades in legal battles, which ultimately became an international sensation, inspiring books, headlines, and, of course, guys, the 1997 20th century fox hit Anastasia. But Anna Anderson wasn't the only Anastasia pretender. For around this same time, which is the 1920s, Nadeza Vasilyeva, a young woman imprisoned by Soviet authorities, insisted she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, writing letters in French and German to King George V, asking him

• 37:08Speaker 02

  to rescue his, quote, cousin. No one really believed her claim, though, as she kept abandoning the story, claiming instead to be the daughter of a merchant one day, before then going back to the Anastasia claim, to whoever guarded her based on their political sympathies. Then, there was Eugene Smith in the late 60s, who published a memoir entitled Autobiography of H.I.H. Anastasia Nikleneva of Russia, claiming she had escaped Yekaterinburg with the help of loyal guards and eventually emigrated to America. Her claim also received a significant amount of attention both in the US and abroad, as she was around the same age and physical description of the Grand Duchess, and even passed a controversial lie detector exam administered

• 37:50Speaker 02

  by a polygraph expert. But her story also fell short, because she initially said the manuscript had been written by Anastasia and trusted into her care, before later declaring that she herself was actually the author. Again, important to note, guys, in every single one of these cases, no one produced convincing documents, or evidence, or identification, which confirmed their claims. And as more rumours of lost Romanov gold and secret Swiss bank accounts swirled, as did Romanov belongings hitting the open auction for extraordinary values, the imposters also grew day by day, including Bulgaria's Eleanor Kruger, who claimed she had escaped the execution and later lived quietly in Bulgaria with another Romanov claimant named George Zuden,

• 38:35Speaker 02

  who said he was Zara Vich Alexei. So you have a bit of a fake brother, fake sister reunion here. These are just a few of the bigger claimants, but the grand total in the end was far larger, with other Anastasias and Alexais popping up in Europe, South America, and the United States as the years passed. And while some genuinely believe they were the lost Grand Duchess because of, you know, mental illness or mistaken identity, others simply sought publicity and financial gain, taking advantage of the botched reporting and hidden evidence of the Imperial family's deaths. But as the fall of the Soviet Union approached, we would soon learn the truth. Now, I was actually going to do, um, and kind of cover in a bit of a deep dive, the USSR as a

• 39:20Speaker 02

  whole, including its fall in this series, which would have been in this episode, guys. But it is simply far too fucking gargantuan to unpack as part of this. Like, it genuinely needs its own, its own kind of multi-part standalone series, which I'll definitely do for you all one day. So instead of covering it all in here, I'm just going to give you kind of a couple of minute rundown of the state of Russia, post-formation of the USSR in 1922, up until the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where our story will pick up again. So, as we said, the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was formed five years after the Russian Revolution by Lenin, who governed

• 40:00Speaker 02

  until his death in 1924, after which Joseph Stalin consolidated power and implemented enormous political repression, purges, and imprisonment. Guys, hold on to your hats at these numbers I'm about to roll out at you. When I was researching this, I was thinking, there is no fucking way this can be right. I have gone through so many academic documents and different kind of records and reporting. These numbers are bang on and it's fucking wild, okay? Because under Stalin, there were 800,000 deaths via execution for political and related state security offences, another 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in Gulag camps and colonies, another 5.7 million people

• 40:41Speaker 02

  dying across the Soviet Union, including at the time 3.5 to 4 million in Ukraine, between 1932 to 1933 alone, from famine. And then, on top of all of that, we have 20 to 27 million Soviet deaths during World War II. Uh, so bloody, guys, and brutal, and just like absolutely

• 41:13Speaker 02

  total lack of care of human life doesn't even begin to cut it here. And clearly is far more brutal by the numbers than the Tsarist regime which came before, meaning that Russia's great dream of kind of equality and shared property in a post-Tzarist world was all just-

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• 42:30Speaker 02

  ...theory. Now, as part of this repression and state sanctioned media, which was an important part of the USSR, the Romanovs are a big old no-no. But just because the Russian people aren't meant to talk about them didn't mean the interest wasn't there. After all, if you've seen the Anastasia film, or you've seen the Anastasia musical, or you've listened to the kind of music in the musical like I do every week, there are plenty of rumors in St. Petersburg at this time, especially held by one Soviet geologist by the name of Alexander Abdonin. Now, I love this diva, okay? He's an amateur historian, which we love. He's got his hot historian hat on here. We're obsessed with him.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  And he was always fascinated by the fate of the former imperial family, so much so that he decided to join forces with filmmaker Gely Rehov to conduct their own investigation into the location of the family's remains, getting their hands on a very, very useful source to do so: the diary of Yakov Yurovsky. Declassified by the Soviet archives by this point, it described everything from how the bodies had been taken to the mineshaft and were later moved, and, most importantly, guys, the approximate location of the final burial based on nearby markers. Following these directions, Abdonin and Rehov conducted a covert search

• 43:54Speaker 02

  in the region of Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1979, digging in a forest clearing near the old road known as the Field of Piggies, where they make the ultimate discovery: human bones. This was it, my divas, okay? The jackpot, the thing that they had spent years endlessly researching and looking for, within their hands right now, potentially being the proof to not only end this history mystery once and for all, but to silence all of these fake Anastasia rumors that are roaming about. But as quickly as they make this discovery, kind of, you know, have this moment of, oh my gosh, we've done it,

• 44:38Speaker 02

  they soon realize they had a problem. Again, let me remind you here, this is Soviet Russia, okay? The same Soviet Russia who would hush this all up in the first place. So it's highly unlikely that such a discovery as this was going to be, one, welcomed, and, two, treated properly. So the pair did the only thing they could. They carefully and meticulously reburied the remains for the safety of both their lives and the bodies themselves. Again, guys, these are human remains, right? They are real people, or were real people at one point in time, ensuring that in, in kind of hiding them and in kind of returning them back to their original state,

• 45:21Speaker 02

  that they would not be destroyed. And I really do commend these guys for this. Like, imagine finding something you've spent years and years researching and funding and kind of squirreling around in secret for, and you finally got it in your hands, and it can bring you fame, and it can bring you fortune, and it can bring you answers, but for the sake of that very history, you put it back, which is where it remained for almost 10 years, until the late 80s, where the USSR began to show serious signs of struggle. By this point, guys, its economy was bad. There were chronic shortages of everyday goods, and people had become increasingly frustrated

• 46:06Speaker 02

  with government corruption and censorship, which, again, was meant to be what communism actually combated against the Tsar. So when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he introduced two major reforms. One, restructuring to reform the struggling economy, and two, openness to allow greater freedom of speech and public discussion, which, just like in Nicholas's case with the Duma, eventually led to those people being openly critical of the government and demanding independence, which came, ish, in December 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, where 15 independent countries emerged,

• 46:46Speaker 02

  including Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and more. Russia, the biggest of these, became the Russian Federation, led by Boris Yeltsin. Again, long story. He's kind of one of the key political figures who undid the Soviet Union. We'll cover him on a separate time. Which had a huge impact on the Romanov story. For this new Russian government wanted to distance itself from many of the crimes committed under the Soviet regime, and began trying to piece together the end of its imperial history, which, my divas, is when Rehov comes back into the picture. He's like, yeah, it's my time, I'm coming back into the spotlight. And he basically says, look, I think I found the bodies of the former Romanovs. This led to a formal archaeological excavation,

• 47:31Speaker 02

  where, after months of work, they discovered the skeletons of nine individuals. It was a real moment of historical reconciliation and of justice for Rehov, whose regard and care for the preservation of these human remains was rewarded after these 10 long years. But as promising as those bodies were, there were two missing. For if this was the imperial family, there should be seven Romanovs and four of their aides, which totaled 11 bodies, not nine. So there's some real big questions here which require further investigation, which is why after the bodies were excavated from the grave, the bones were carefully taken to labs for testing,

• 48:15Speaker 02

  where they concluded that these were, in fact, the remains of six adults and three female children, which, again, doesn't match the Romanov numbers. So how do they get to the bottom of this all? Well, for this, investigators were able to turn to a revolutionary new tool: DNA testing. Developed back in the 50s, the field of DNA testing was a part of the mid to late 20th century technology boom, which soon became very handy in the solving of crimes. First used five years earlier, detectives were able to apply DNA testing in the murders of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth in Leicestershire, which helped exonerate the initial suspect who was actually arrested and identify the real culprit.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  It was revolutionary at the time, guys, opening the door for many cold cases to now be solved, where victims' families, who had never been given answers, could finally have some closure. However, the problem with DNA testing was it only worked if you did, in fact, have a living relative to test it against. So in the case of the bodies found in Yekaterinburg, Soviet teams would have to find the closest living match to the Romanov family to confirm if it was, in fact, them. Lucky for us, and indeed them, the Romanovs come from a long line of families across Europe, as we've covered in part one and part two of this series. So it wasn't necessarily a matter of quantity being the issue here, right? There's lots of different points and people that we can pull from.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  It was actually a matter of the best quality, which in the end was a strapping young gent in Britain called Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Yeah, that's right, guys. Where many would assume that you'd go to the British royal family or the Germans for the best sample, it was Prince Philip who had the correct strain of maternal mitochondrial DNA. So to kind of break this down, Prince Philip's mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, whose own mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse, whose own mother was Princess Alice of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, who, as we know, happened to also be the mother of former sirena Alexandra, making her Prince Philip's great-auntie,

• 50:29Speaker 02

  which mattered here because this kind of DNA testing needed to be done through the maternal line versus the paternal line. So Philip, because he's an absolute gent, rolled up his sleeves and gave the necessary DNA to the British Russian scientific team, who helped spearhead this investigation, which was compared to samples of the female skeletons, and once and for all, without shadow of a doubt, confirmed that these bodies belonged to the last imperial family of Russia. So finally, some answers, a real sigh of relief here that, yes, we finally have figured out what's happened. However, it still didn't quite solve the Anastasia mystery, though, with one Grand Duchess and Alexei's skeletons

• 51:10Speaker 02

  still missing by 1993, when the necessary tests had been done. So what happens now, guys? You know, we finally have these answers of what happened to these individuals. And like I said, a proper history mystery's been solved here. So what do you do? Do you re-bury them in Yekaterinburg, like in their original state? Do you cremate them and, you know, spread the ashes? Like, what's the process? Well, after all the relevant tests were run, the former imperial family were finally laid to rest in 1998, exactly 80 years after their murders, with full state honors in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, the traditional burial place of the Romanov Tsars. Attended by surviving members of the Romanov family

• 51:55Speaker 02

  and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who described the executions as, quote, "one of the most shameful pages in our history, it was a moment of reconciliation, in many ways, between Russia's painful imperial past and its devastating Soviet chapters, a moment in modern time where all history was on it. And while the Russian Orthodox Church declined to recognize the remains officially at that time, it was a moment of unity, but not one of completeness. For, as we said, two of the Romanovs were still unaccounted for and would be for more than 10 years, until teams of archaeologists and forensic experts, determined to finally reunite this family, turned once again to the diary of Yurovsky,

• 52:38Speaker 02

  who made note of the main grave off the forest road in detail, which prompted them to a full-scale excavation of the entire area in 2007 to look for the two missing children, who they eventually found just 70 meters away in a second, much smaller grave, which they tested once again with Philip's DNA using even more modern technology, which allowed them to identify which sister was laid to rest with Alexei. In the end, it was never Anastasia, but Maria, the second youngest Grand Duchess, silencing once and for all the rumours, the pretenders and the fantastical believers who hoped that just one of the children made it out alive.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  But it wasn't the case, for the Romanov family died side by side in that basement on July 17th, together, all at once. And now with these two final bodies, they could finally be put together and laid to rest in the Imperial Crypt. However, despite significant evidence confirming that they are the two remaining Romanovs, the Russian Orthodox Church still refuses to bury the remains of Maria and Alexei, who remain in a lab held under state custody to this day. Speaking of which, what is going on in the state at this point? Well, as we know, the USSR has fallen, creating the Russian Federation, which is when a little-known

• 54:06Speaker 02

  former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin enters the picture, becoming PM in 1999, which is wild, guys, that he's been in power for as long as I've been alive, where he has since concentrated his power, curtained political opposition, tightened control over independent media, and presided over a government widely criticised for human rights abuses, imprisoning political opponents and restricting democratic freedoms, as well as leading military interventions, including the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has been widely criticised as a violation of international law. So objectively, pretty bad guy, right? Who reflects this kind of Stalin-esque stature in a lot of what he does, which is why I

• 54:50Speaker 02

  find it so interesting, from both a political point of view and a psychological point of view, that Putin hasn't really embraced Russia's communist past, instead promoting a broader vision of Russian history that celebrates its imperial era. For it was under Putin that the Romanovs have been publicly commemorated, where churches destroyed under communism have been rebuilt, and Tsar Nicholas II and his family were made martyrs. Yeah, guys, it's pretty wild, but in 2000, shortly after Putin became president, the Russian Orthodox Church officially canonised Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their five children as, quote, "passion bearers",

• 55:32Speaker 02

  which is a little different, because it's a title given to people who face suffering and death with Christian humility and forgiveness, rather than like, straight saintly martyrs? But it's a huge recognition, and one which Putin's government strongly supported in pushing the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia's pre-Soviet history, something which the world has long been obsessed with. As Faberge exiles have soared year by year, the story of the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia was made into animated films and a Broadway musical. But why? Right? Why on earth are we so obsessed with this family that died over a hundred years ago? It's a fascinating question, guys, and one which I often end up asking myself.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  I do love to study the Romanovs, but why? What is it that whips the masses into a frenzy, that sees millions of views on social media and has become largely a multi-billion dollar enterprise in and of itself, between possessions being sold off and gains from their names and likeness? Well, I think after many, many years, certainly the last few months of really intense research into the Romanovs, I think it comes down to two things. Firstly, which is really the most obvious one, we are obsessed with the morbid, the terrible, the car crashes of history, where everything implodes around you and all that anyone can do now is watch.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  From Kedinka Field to Bloody Sunday to the World War to the execution in the basement of the House of Special Purpose, we revel in the terrible, morbid details which paint colour into the lives of these people, which is, of course, in many ways entirely fucked up, but in all ways entirely human. I think we as a species crave morbidity in many ways, as this kind of great deterrent of what not to do, right? To understand the consequences of what certain actions can be, even if we ourselves would never be 20th century autocratic Tsars, we still want to understand the consequences if we do, especially if it's very brutal.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  I also think we look around us today, especially in 2026, and see many men and many nations who act similar to that of Nicholas and his father, and those who came before him, and try our best to understand their decisions to try and recognise the signs. A noble pursuit for sure, and really the best reason to study history. Truthfully though, beyond that, I think that we're obsessed with the Romanovs, because they are from a world that feels so foreign to us, it's akin to more of a fantasy realm than historical period. Like something from Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon or Akata, where the opulence and the grandeur feels so unimaginable in comparison to what followed, which we still

• 58:25Speaker 02

  now largely fail to understand. I mean, communism, as we've already discussed, guys, is a tricky beast to wrangle, we still don't really understand it today, but a monarchy? One single family who rule and consolidate power? That is a system that has existed for as long as time, which means that it is one that is recognisable, and therefore the threat of that feels lesser. And, I mean, perhaps it is, who knows? But one thing's for certain, it is this blend of tragedy and fantasy which meet in the story of these seven family members, which have us all in such a chokehold, almost unable to conceive how a true love match between childhood sweethearts could result in such

• 59:10Speaker 02

  devastation? How this family blessed with all the jewels and gold in the world could end up dead on a cold, hard basement floor? How the birth of four healthy, beautiful girls could lead to the diagnosis of hemophilia in the only son? And how these god-fearing, self-serving, autocratic giants could be taken in by a Siberian mystic with blue eyes and pretty words? Mainly though, I think, anyway, the real dichotomy is how 300 years' worth of history can come crashing down in the blink of an eye. Although, for us, it's been many, many hours over many, many weeks now, but in the grand

• 59:52Speaker 02

  scale of time, the Romanov dynasty and its final Tsars were merely a speck of dust in the annals of history. Which brings us, guys, not only to the end of another episode of Hot History, but to the end of this series on the Romanovs. Six parts, nine hours and many, many years covered in this timeline. It has been such a huge project to work on for you guys, I could not have done it without our incredible research assistant, Gracie McCamish, big love to you, my diva, without our incredible editor, Jamie Rose, big love to you, my queen, and of course, to each

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  and every single one of you who follow along, week in, week out. I know I've said it a couple of times before, guys, but I just want to reiterate, this show is entirely self-produced, it is entirely self-funded, it is entirely self-made, we cannot do what we do if you guys don't watch and listen along. So thank you, thank you, thank you, your support means everything, because we want to keep making great hot historical content for you, week in, week out. Speaking of which, you have to come back next week, okay? Because even though we are stamping out of the world of Romanov Russia, we are going to be covering the GOAT of the literary world, okay? I have backed up with a woman who not only invented yearning and masterminded the tropes

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  we see on screen and read on page, but who has inspired my life and my consumption of media in a way that is almost akin, um, to USSR propaganda, okay? That's how embedded she is in my life. We are talking about the one, the only Jane Austen. Guys, it's gonna be epic, I cannot wait, and it may even feature a very special couple of guests who I cannot wait to chat with, I cannot default any more information, but just know, it's gonna be amazing. If you would like some more hot history before then, though, you can follow us on Instagram and Substack at Hot History Club, and on YouTube and TikTok at Hot dot history.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  As always, guys, what a pleasure it is to get down and dirty in time with you every single week, and I will speak to you all shortly. Thanks, guys, love you, bye. This episode of Hot History was recorded on Darrickland, always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

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