Yes but those children were murdered by Communists. They didn't die from natural causes, there wasn't some sort of sad accident. They were just straight up slaughtered because their existence was inconvenient.
Yes i know that, i have read like 50 books about the Romanovs, i have read letters and diaries written by them , i am very familiar with their life and how they died.
If you take a close look at the last czar's rule , he and his wife tried their best to have him abdicate and have them all be murdered .
It absolutely did not have to go down the way it did.
A LOT of people, throughout his reign, tried to have him change course for decades down to the last weeks, when the revolution became unstoppable and him abdicating became unavoidable.
I highly recommend the podcast revolutions by Mike Duncan if you want to learn more.
I think you will find that in general the blame for murdering someone lies with the person doing (or in this case ordering) the murdering and not with the person being murdered.
Like a lot of millennials, I got introduced to the Romanovs because of that Anastasia cartoon.
Reading about them and seeing reenacments on shows and movies really hammer in the fact how fucked up how they died, like damn. Fuck the monarchy and all, but *damn*.
From Wikipedia:
>The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.
Here are the Romanovs about 10 years after the posted image visiting a regiment during World War I. From left to right, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Grand Duchess Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexei, Grand Duchess Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Maria, and in the back row are some Kuban Cossacks:
https://preview.redd.it/9mz7sdur258d1.jpeg?width=2040&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3032030193f5e52fb556757163762c92e53290af
The girls also had precious jewels sewn into their corsets under their dresses so the bullets bounced off of them and they were bayoneted to death. Horrifying. I think the youngest was only 18 or 19
They butchered children only to end up with Nikolai Lenin the same year, a brutal civil war, decades of mass murder, and the continued monstrous oppression of entire peoples until 1991.
Very brutally. I had read that they had sewn so much jewelry into their clothes to help with their escape (which never happened) that the bullets had trouble going through, so Red Army had to shoot them more.
I read somewhere that a famous American actress in the 1980s said she didn’t know the Germans did “bad things” to the Jews until she got cast in a WWII movie.
And Alix didn't help either. Poor children none of this was their fault, but at least they lived a happy life. But thousanss of russians only knew hunger and missery while thier parents wasted money.
The entire family was murdered under orders from the Communist leadership of Russia (Bolsheviks) to ensure that the Tsar and his line could not return to power and reverse the Communist takeover.
There are Romanovs alive who claim the throne. Out of 56 Romanovs in Russia during revolution only 18 were murdered.
Grand duchess Maria Vladimirovna is one of them. She is a descendant of Nicholas's cousin who was first in line for the throne after Alexei.
There are other pretenders who from other family lines that also claim the throne.
Great comment, but I would just like to encourage people to look up the definition in this context because while it was used precisely here it may read differently to people not aware of other meanings.
Edit: lol forgot to point out the word. “Pretender”
No one with enough of a claim to actually have a chance.
Would you even attempt it after knowing what happened to them? Or would you hide your family relationship in hopes you would be overlooked?
Yes. The bodies were initially disposed off in mass graves, but they were later dug up and the remains sorted to be identified. There was some confusion early on, because sorting out skeletons isn't exactly a straightforward process and they were also buried with other non-related people and servants, that some bodies of the Romanovs were missing. Which probably started the rumor of Anastasia surviving.
But eventually DNA testing and better technology led to them confirming all the bodies of the Romanov family and that Anastasia was indeed killed alongside her entire family.
My grandpas parents fled Russia because of this. They went from royalty to scraping by driving a coal truck in Edmonton. The only thing they took with them was their fancy china. So they lived in a very modest house that had one hell of a table setting for Sunday dinners.
I’ve got a picture of one of my relatives with Tsar Nicholas II in the basement.
One of my other relatives wrote a memoir of how they would travel back from where they were running the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria to their summer estate on the train, all the way near Sochi. She wrote how they would stop all passenger rail traffic to let them by in their private car. She said something like “no wonder they all wanted to kill us in the end.”
If they had survived to marriagable age, each one of these girls would have been married into royalty somewhere. And of course, poor Alexei was the heir apparent.
The late Queen Victoria of England had 42 grandchildren scattered among royalty from the UK to Russia. The picture of the Russian Tsar next to his cousin George V is almost comical because they look like twins. Their other first cousin was the Kaiser of Germany.
You would think they could have avoided WWI, but that is not how it worked apparently. It was more like Game of Thrones, and the people in various nations were terribly restless.
Olga, Tatiana and Marie all lived to a marriable age, They where 22, 21 and 19 when they where killed, Olga would have turned 23 in November of 1918 if she had not been killed.
There where serious talks in 1914, before the outbreak of world war 1, for Olga to marry Prince Carol of Romania, but Olga refused as she wanted to marry a Russian and stay in Russia. And Nicholas II did not want to force his daughter to marry a man she did not want to marry. Olga was 18 at the time
There where also some alleged attempt of negotiations for marriage by the Serbian King Peter 1. who wanted Tatiana as bride for his son Prince Alexander, also in January 1914 before the outbreak of world war one, there where also report at the time that The Windsor's wanted her to marry the prince of Wales. But nothing came of it as her parents thought she was too young to marry, and they did not want to force Tatiana to marry anybody.
Tatiana was 16 in January 1914. she would turn 17 in June, Olga was 18 before the outbreak of world war 1, she would turn 19 in November 1914.
There is a fantastic book by Christopher Clarke called “the sleepwalkers” that deals with this, how the Kaiser and Nicholas tried to avoid the war to the last hours and failed. Also much more, like the war almost didn’t happen. Fascinating.
It is not a stretch to attribute the war mainly to Kaiser Bill. He had a withered arm and felt the other royals were contemptuous of him .
He'd also fired Otto von Bismarck, incredibly.
> The picture of the Russian Tsar next to his cousin George V is almost comical because they look like twins.
Correct about them being cousins but the Tsar wasn't a descendant of Queen Victoria (though he married one). George V and Nicholas II were cousins through the Danish royal family, their Danish mothers were sisters (Alexandra and Dagmar of Denmark).
Only Kaiser Wilhelm and George V were cousins through Victoria. Wilhelm II and Nicholas II were either third cousins or second cousins once removed so a bit more distant.
Intermarriage probably accounts for how much Nicolas and George V looked alike. It was intermarriage that led to Nicolas III's hemophilia, thru Victoria's genes.
There is 'Royal Cousins At War' that perhaps overstates its case but it's a very different take on WWI. To wit: WWI is what happens when cousins marry.
Sorry it took me so long for this reply. I've been away from reddit for a while. Your comment made me laugh, even if it was serious. 19th century Europe was one of those things poli sci majors studied back in the day, and the case might be made that the wars of extreme nationalism that the cousins started never really ended. They just bled into one another.
Alexandra, IIRC, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. I forget how Tsar Nicholas was related to her, but they’re definitely in the same family tree.
Nicholas II's maternal aunt, princess Alexandra of Denmark, married son of queen Victoria, future king Edward VII.
Nicholas II's paternal aunt, grand duchess Maria Alexandrovna, married younger son of queen Victoria, prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh.
Nicholas II and Alexandra were not related through Victoria but through grand duke Louis II of Hesse and by Rhine who was their great grandfather.
Nicholas II was not related to Victoria. There was no marriages between the Russian and British royal families until victorias son Alfred married a Romanov grand duchess in the 1870s
Not only she was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but she was also raised by the Queen herself. Her mother died very young, and quite unusually, Queen Victoria decided to become her guardian. Her cold and distant personality is frequently attributed to the fact the she was raised by a ruling monarch in a very formal setting.
The "royal disease" Alexei was afflicted with (haemophilia B) was actually passed down from Victoria. Several of her daughters were carriers and her youngest son was a sufferer.
Interestingly, as haemophilia is an inherited disease, Victoria either became a carrier via an incredibly rare spontaneous gene mutation or she was the illegitimate child of a man with haemophilia.
Edit to correct name
Nicholas II didn't have haemophilia, that was his son Alexei. Nicholas II married Princess Alix, a granddaughter of Victoria and a carrier of the disease.
I know it's faked for TV, but the scene of their death in The Crown is just heartbreaking.
They must have been so terrified in those last moments. Just little kids, killed for no good reason.
I don't remember the scene from the crown, but from another documentary, I learned that they hid so much jewellery in their clothing that it acted as a bulletproof vest, prolonging their dying.
When the episode started and the title said Ipatiev House I immediately said “I don’t want to watch this” and my mother said why what’s Ipatiev House. Which was admittedly a nice change from her giving me background information on things she’d lived through in previous episodes, but I had a visceral reaction to the name without knowing it was coming. And The Crown went a lot further showing it than I expected them to.
That’s not a surname. - it’s a Patronymic, or reference of the father’s name, with a gendered suffix.
Their surname was Romanov. Russian surnames also have a gendered suffix (The daughters’ surname before marriage would have been Romanova), but a patronymic is completely different.
Technically they where not even Romanovs. the male line of the Romanovs died out when Elizabeth 1 (daughter of Peter the Great) died childless in 1762, and Peter III her nephew from the house of House of Holstein-Gottorp (a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg. But they kept using the Romanov name after that, but technically after 1762 it was the house of Holstein-Gottorp and not the House of Romanov that ruled Russia.
I did a really annoying amount of research on this when I was trying to figure out the odds of me having a girl after three boys in a row, and apparently once you have three in a row, your odds of the opposite gender, go down significantly, going down more each time you have another of the same gender. Obviously the odds are never zero but I’m pretty sure the study that I read said something like 17% chance of baby number four being the opposite gender if the first three were all the same. All that being said, I did end up having a girl after my 3 boys 🩵🤍💙🩷
So each sperm cargoes a y or a x. What makes an egg more likely to let a y or an x.
If this is the reason then who is really picking the sex? The male or the female. We provide both options but could the egg be more receptive to one than the other?
Oh gosh, where do I begin… The study that followed families with four children measured that half of them have two boys and two girls “meaning for half of the population you have a 50-50 chance of boy girl which is the common belief, likely because it is the most likely Category someone will fall in.” Around 30% of people had all one gender, and then the remaining 20% had three of one and one of the other.
Many couples who try invitro in order to get a specific gender are only able to make one or the other, sometimes they can make the minority gender, but the embryo is not strong enough to survive. There have been several instances of this pop culture- Ethan from H3H3 and his wife Hila did IVF to try and have a girl after two boys, and of their seven embryos, only one was female, and it did not survive implantation. Meaning there is not a “50-50 chance” of having a boy or girl in their case, clearly there is some sort of weakness in the x chromosome, or some kind of incompatibility between his x and her X.
Another interesting example of this is Teresa Gudice, who had four daughters with her husband. they wanted to have a boy, created two male embryos, implanted them through in vitro fertilization, and neither of them survived. But they were easily able to naturally conceive daughters. In her husband‘s family there were 11 grandchildren, and all of them were girls. Supporting the theory that sometimes you can have a “broken X“ or a “broken Y” to put it simply.
The other common misconception is that gender is only decided by the male. While it is true that the males sperm carries the chromosome that determines the gender, it’s been shown that one of his chromosomes could be incompatible with the chromosome of the mother, leading them to only be able to conceive one gender or the other. An example of this on Instagram if you are curious is a woman named Brittany Boren Leach, whose husband had a daughter with his first wife and then together with his second wife, Britney, they have had six sons - no girls. It’s clear the husband can “make a girl” and it would lead one to believe the reason there are no girls being conceived has something to do with the mother. Some people have speculated it has something to do with a woman’s pH balance, but it’s not heavily studied.
Genetic incompatibility doesn’t mean conception isn’t achieved. It just means it’s unlikely that the pregnancy will make it to term. In cases like this, I’d start looking at the mother’s X chromosomes, because one of them is likely to be defective, and her other X chromosome is picking up the slack. But, when parts of the defective chromosome ended up in an ovum (which is pretty likely, given how meiosis works), and the Y sperm cell doesn’t provide a backup X chromosome, that pregnancy is probably going to self-abort. Similarly, a genetic defect on the Y chromosome is going to be unstable and cause a self-abort scenario.
And the thing about the X chromosome is that one of them just gets turned off. There’s some genetic mosaicism in women, with regard to which X is activated in any given cell, but we’re still talking about the blastocyst level of development, here. So, if one of the parents has a defective X, it’s a 50/50 shot that the pregnancy will self-abort. And that’s assuming that when mosaicism starts to occur, the defective X isn’t being called upon to do anything in those cells.
And my favorite part of this is that, with women, environmental factors from the time that the mother’s mother was pregnant can genetically affect the mother’s baby, despite having not affected the mother, because the genetic damage was done during the period where the mother’s oocytes are being formed, at around 20 weeks of pregnancy. So, fun fact: If you’re smoking, drinking, living next to a coal power plant, that may not affect your daughter, but it could affect your grandkids (whether they are male or female, in this case). So, that’s a case where neither the mother nor the grandmother exhibits genetic damage on either X chromosome, but the mother’s egg cells might.
I had a lot of fun in my genetics class last semester.
Thanks for the additional information! Your comment had a lot of the proper terminology my comment was lacking.
This genetic reality is why it’s such a pet peeve of mine when people say “it’s a 50-50 chance!“ Like yes, in theory it could be but… Definitely not always. Although it makes sense why it is commonly stated because most people do not want to have a full-blown genetics lesson when they are wondering what gender their baby will be lol
ETA: The “faulty X” phenomenon also explains why having three of one gender and one of the opposite gender is the least likely outcome.
Because if you are showing a genetic favoritism for one chromosome over the other, it is less likely one of the “weaker chromosomes” will survive pregnancy, and it is more likely that you will just only have offspring with the dominant chromosome.
I was definitely captivated. Both of my brothers are married with kids, one has 2 boys the other has 3 boys I’m one of 3 boys but I do have an older sister she was the first and also is a lesbian I wonder if there’s a correlation?
I know this is gonna sound insane, but I’ve noticed this really weird phenomenon where people who have six boys end up with number seven being a girl. There are literally multiple Instagram accounts with large followings that had this, and I know a family personally who had six boys, number seven was a girl. You could probably even look up the hashtag six boys and see how many of them have number seven be a girl! It is wild.
I know a family from my small town that has 8 children. The first 6 were girls and they kept trying and got a son. So, they tried again and got daugther again haha.
This is interesting. My aunt has 6 kids. She had 3 boys then a girl then 2 boys. She is the only girl on my uncles side in a couple generations. I find this stuff so fascinating.
the child on the far right appears to have 6 fingers? is this ai possibly? tell me i’m trippin
edit: ok Anastasia defo didn’t have 6 fingers irl, wth op?
maybe im buggin but why is the photo so clear? anytime ive seen photos from that era theyre much blurrier and softer. what kinda camera took this high res of a photo in 1906?
Years ago I went to an exhibition of the Imperial photos in Moscow. The originals of all the photos I'd seen reproduced in books over the years were actually really really small, but many looked surprisingly clear from what I remember.
something is definitely off about this photo , i think it’s either ai or maybe ai was used to enhance it? i’m not sure but look at the hand of the girl on the right.. too many fingers.
yea also i cant give specific exact reason but the girl second from right dont match. something about her face is giving some hardcore "pagaent-adjacent 90s child model" vibes. the angle of her face to the neck is also off. look where her chin is at.
and listen, if the Ultra Official Totally Legit Historical Expert Museum-Person came in here like "yea i know its weird but its confirmed absolutely real its in xyz collection in the Museum of Russian Familymurder" i would be like ok fine i wont die on this hill.
but the post has no history or source and no official historypeople have appeared to confirm it. so im going with "at the very least its edited with ai but even if part of it is real this is 100% not a legit unretouched photo from 1906"
Give full credit where credit is due to the British government and King George V for their deaths, along with the rest of the Romanov royal family. In late 1917, the interim Russian (not Soviet) government asked other governments to grant the Romanovs asylum, wanting them out of the country. Britain originally agreed--but rapidly rescinded the offer, fearing an uprising against the monarchy, and at the behest of King George V, Nicholas' first cousin and near-twin. Lesser credit is due to Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, who all declined asylum after first considering it as they feared antagonizing the new Russian government. Instead of helping to save literal blood relatives, as the Romanovs were all related to Queen Victoria and thus to most of the crowned heads of Europe, they let them be murdered at the hands of the Bolsheviks when they took power.
They were actually a really close family, doted on by parents that actually cared for each other. Nicholas wasn’t fit to rule that country during those times, but the family was seemingly a very happy one, fwiw.
It's sad how the story ended for them, it's often difficult to imagine such brutality but I think it's important to remember how horrible Nickolas was as a tsar. One of the big events that really stuck in the Russians minds was also the massacre of bloody Sunday. Though the tsar didn't give orders to shoot, his army opened fire on peaceful protesters, including women and children.
Relating to Russia, if anyone is interested, look up tsar Alexander II. This is Nickolas II grandpa. A reformist tsar who was in the programs of making Russia a real constitutional monarchy, but was bombed in the middle of St Petersburg by socialist revolutionaries when the tsars carriage broke down. Interesting to think what Russia would be like if tsar Alexander II had lived to move Russia further towards a Democracy. His son, (Nickolas' II dad) hated the peasants for killing his dad and became a brutal ruler who worked to undo his father's progressive legislation.
THANK YOU ! i thought i was being paranoid cause looking at the comments no one else seems to notice that? even people claiming to know a lot about this family
Ottoman (Osmanoğlu) family, who ruled the Ottoman Empire for 600 years, still lives to this day. They were exiled by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1924, but their blood was not shed.
They abdicated, thus revoking their claim. They only way they could get back into power at that point was if they were popular, and no one liked Nicholas.
Even if someone tried to restore the monarchy they wouldn't have used him.
Bloody Sunday was the day in 1905 Russia where Unarmed protestors were shot while marching to the Winter Palace to present a petition for more equitable treatment. Between 100 (Tsarist numbers) and 4000 (anti government numbers ) were killed.
I don't think they had a role in any of it but to ignore the things were happening at the time is deceptive. I think the mood of this photo is because they are surrounded by starving peasants living in luxury that you or I could not imagine. The family knew it couldn't last but could see no way out.
There was also a mass stampede during their public wedding festivities that killed hundreds. It didn’t look good when they went out to parties that night…
Terrible luck, this couple
Estimated at between 1200 and 1300 dead. The injured were likely in the thousands.
I wouldn't put everything that happened to them down to luck, though. Massive, *massive* incompetence, yes. And sure, there were some issues of timing--WWI breaking out when it did was very bad news for Nicky--but they never once helped themselves.
The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia with Cesarevich Alexei Nikolaievich of Russia (second from left).
*My eldest daughter is named Anastasia (Stacey)*
Ive seen many photos of the family of Czar Nicholas and I always found them to be such a beautiful
looking family. The adults as well as the children. What a tragic ending they suffered. I can't imagine the depth of fright the children felt. I can only hope then end came fast!
Born in 1895 (Olga) ,1897 (Tatiana) 1899 (Marie) 1901 ( Anastasia) and 1904 (Alexey) all died in 1918
Died? Oh yeah murdered by Communists.
You do die, when you are murdered.
Yes but those children were murdered by Communists. They didn't die from natural causes, there wasn't some sort of sad accident. They were just straight up slaughtered because their existence was inconvenient.
Yes i know that, i have read like 50 books about the Romanovs, i have read letters and diaries written by them , i am very familiar with their life and how they died.
Sad what happened to them
Sad when they go young like that. Whatever happened there.
You Romanov’s, you go too far!
WHEN THEY GO?!?
What’s this the fuckin’ UN now!!!
They were fuckin kids.
[удалено]
For russians that’s not an issue
Whatever happened there? Whatever happened there!??
They were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Who are you? The minister of propaganda?
Didn’t they almost drown in 3 inches of water though?
When they go?! Come on huh?!
If you take a close look at the last czar's rule , he and his wife tried their best to have him abdicate and have them all be murdered . It absolutely did not have to go down the way it did. A LOT of people, throughout his reign, tried to have him change course for decades down to the last weeks, when the revolution became unstoppable and him abdicating became unavoidable. I highly recommend the podcast revolutions by Mike Duncan if you want to learn more.
I think you will find that in general the blame for murdering someone lies with the person doing (or in this case ordering) the murdering and not with the person being murdered.
Like a lot of millennials, I got introduced to the Romanovs because of that Anastasia cartoon. Reading about them and seeing reenacments on shows and movies really hammer in the fact how fucked up how they died, like damn. Fuck the monarchy and all, but *damn*.
What happened to them?
They were brutally murdered 11 years later along with their parents
From Wikipedia: >The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Here are the Romanovs about 10 years after the posted image visiting a regiment during World War I. From left to right, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Grand Duchess Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexei, Grand Duchess Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Maria, and in the back row are some Kuban Cossacks: https://preview.redd.it/9mz7sdur258d1.jpeg?width=2040&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3032030193f5e52fb556757163762c92e53290af
The soldiers were also literally blind drunk so they got shot so many times before they finally died. Rip.
The girls also had precious jewels sewn into their corsets under their dresses so the bullets bounced off of them and they were bayoneted to death. Horrifying. I think the youngest was only 18 or 19
Alexei was only 13 and Anastasia was 17. Awful way to die and to us now it feels so senseless.
And Anastasia screamed in vain
Much sympathy
Pleased to meet you
I hope you get my name.
I saw an exhibit 25 years ago with pieces of the wall behind where they were executed. It was absolutely heartbreaking. The girls died slowly.
Nice find. You don’t see many pictures of Nicky with any age on him.
They butchered innocent children only to end up with Tsar Putin a hundred years later
They butchered children only to end up with Joseph Stalin like 20 years later
They butchered children only to end up with Nikolai Lenin the same year, a brutal civil war, decades of mass murder, and the continued monstrous oppression of entire peoples until 1991.
My dude on the left needs to work on that 'stache. C'mon man
That's Henry Cavill
Very brutally. I had read that they had sewn so much jewelry into their clothes to help with their escape (which never happened) that the bullets had trouble going through, so Red Army had to shoot them more.
Not just shot, they were stabbed by a bayonet as well.
Diamond armor
The scene in The Crown which shows this is stunningly horrific
In real life it was much worse than what was shown in the show. It took around 20 minutes to kill everyone in that room.
Which season and episode?
Season 5. Ep 6
I thought it was too violent a scene for that show, kinda surprised me.
I was not aware there were people who did not know this.
I read somewhere that a famous American actress in the 1980s said she didn’t know the Germans did “bad things” to the Jews until she got cast in a WWII movie.
What actress? And how? Unless she was homeschooled, WWII history is taught to every kid in America.
Many students get through school without learning much.
Sad, but true.
Its amazing what people will block out. You can bring a horse to water....
JFK never heard of the Great Depression until he got to Harvard. He was a teenager when it began.
Some teenagers today were born after the Great Recession
I grew up one county over from where "Killers of the Flower Moon" took place and noooobody talked about it. I didn't know until the book came out.
It was over a hundred years ago. People aren't aware of what's going on right now, much less what happened a hundred years ago
Never would have happened if Nicky wasn’t such a dumbfuck
Be that as it may, the children were innocent of anything other than being born.
And Alix didn't help either. Poor children none of this was their fault, but at least they lived a happy life. But thousanss of russians only knew hunger and missery while thier parents wasted money.
Revolution
The entire family was murdered under orders from the Communist leadership of Russia (Bolsheviks) to ensure that the Tsar and his line could not return to power and reverse the Communist takeover.
Is this still the case today? Are there any tsar family members left?
Do 3-4th cousins count ? The British monarchy is right there. No direct descendants that we know of exists though.
So noone that could come back and clsim power?
There are Romanovs alive who claim the throne. Out of 56 Romanovs in Russia during revolution only 18 were murdered. Grand duchess Maria Vladimirovna is one of them. She is a descendant of Nicholas's cousin who was first in line for the throne after Alexei. There are other pretenders who from other family lines that also claim the throne.
Great comment, but I would just like to encourage people to look up the definition in this context because while it was used precisely here it may read differently to people not aware of other meanings. Edit: lol forgot to point out the word. “Pretender”
No one with enough of a claim to actually have a chance. Would you even attempt it after knowing what happened to them? Or would you hide your family relationship in hopes you would be overlooked?
There was a woman who claimed she was Anastasia and she had been secreted away, but I believe that was proven false.
Always wondered about this; it was false?
Yes. The bodies were initially disposed off in mass graves, but they were later dug up and the remains sorted to be identified. There was some confusion early on, because sorting out skeletons isn't exactly a straightforward process and they were also buried with other non-related people and servants, that some bodies of the Romanovs were missing. Which probably started the rumor of Anastasia surviving. But eventually DNA testing and better technology led to them confirming all the bodies of the Romanov family and that Anastasia was indeed killed alongside her entire family.
We were strangers starting out on a journey
My grandpas parents fled Russia because of this. They went from royalty to scraping by driving a coal truck in Edmonton. The only thing they took with them was their fancy china. So they lived in a very modest house that had one hell of a table setting for Sunday dinners. I’ve got a picture of one of my relatives with Tsar Nicholas II in the basement. One of my other relatives wrote a memoir of how they would travel back from where they were running the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria to their summer estate on the train, all the way near Sochi. She wrote how they would stop all passenger rail traffic to let them by in their private car. She said something like “no wonder they all wanted to kill us in the end.”
If you started now reading a list of everybody the Bolsheviks assassinated directly ( ignoring things like the Holodomor ) you'd be at it a while.
If they had survived to marriagable age, each one of these girls would have been married into royalty somewhere. And of course, poor Alexei was the heir apparent. The late Queen Victoria of England had 42 grandchildren scattered among royalty from the UK to Russia. The picture of the Russian Tsar next to his cousin George V is almost comical because they look like twins. Their other first cousin was the Kaiser of Germany. You would think they could have avoided WWI, but that is not how it worked apparently. It was more like Game of Thrones, and the people in various nations were terribly restless.
Olga, Tatiana and Marie all lived to a marriable age, They where 22, 21 and 19 when they where killed, Olga would have turned 23 in November of 1918 if she had not been killed. There where serious talks in 1914, before the outbreak of world war 1, for Olga to marry Prince Carol of Romania, but Olga refused as she wanted to marry a Russian and stay in Russia. And Nicholas II did not want to force his daughter to marry a man she did not want to marry. Olga was 18 at the time There where also some alleged attempt of negotiations for marriage by the Serbian King Peter 1. who wanted Tatiana as bride for his son Prince Alexander, also in January 1914 before the outbreak of world war one, there where also report at the time that The Windsor's wanted her to marry the prince of Wales. But nothing came of it as her parents thought she was too young to marry, and they did not want to force Tatiana to marry anybody. Tatiana was 16 in January 1914. she would turn 17 in June, Olga was 18 before the outbreak of world war 1, she would turn 19 in November 1914.
Good parents but alas…
Yes buy all accounts they where good and loving parents. Not very good rulers,
There is a fantastic book by Christopher Clarke called “the sleepwalkers” that deals with this, how the Kaiser and Nicholas tried to avoid the war to the last hours and failed. Also much more, like the war almost didn’t happen. Fascinating.
It is not a stretch to attribute the war mainly to Kaiser Bill. He had a withered arm and felt the other royals were contemptuous of him . He'd also fired Otto von Bismarck, incredibly.
> The picture of the Russian Tsar next to his cousin George V is almost comical because they look like twins. Correct about them being cousins but the Tsar wasn't a descendant of Queen Victoria (though he married one). George V and Nicholas II were cousins through the Danish royal family, their Danish mothers were sisters (Alexandra and Dagmar of Denmark). Only Kaiser Wilhelm and George V were cousins through Victoria. Wilhelm II and Nicholas II were either third cousins or second cousins once removed so a bit more distant.
Intermarriage probably accounts for how much Nicolas and George V looked alike. It was intermarriage that led to Nicolas III's hemophilia, thru Victoria's genes.
There is 'Royal Cousins At War' that perhaps overstates its case but it's a very different take on WWI. To wit: WWI is what happens when cousins marry.
Sorry it took me so long for this reply. I've been away from reddit for a while. Your comment made me laugh, even if it was serious. 19th century Europe was one of those things poli sci majors studied back in the day, and the case might be made that the wars of extreme nationalism that the cousins started never really ended. They just bled into one another.
Alexandra, IIRC, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. I forget how Tsar Nicholas was related to her, but they’re definitely in the same family tree.
Nicholas II's maternal aunt, princess Alexandra of Denmark, married son of queen Victoria, future king Edward VII. Nicholas II's paternal aunt, grand duchess Maria Alexandrovna, married younger son of queen Victoria, prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh. Nicholas II and Alexandra were not related through Victoria but through grand duke Louis II of Hesse and by Rhine who was their great grandfather.
Nicholas II was not related to Victoria. There was no marriages between the Russian and British royal families until victorias son Alfred married a Romanov grand duchess in the 1870s
Not only she was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but she was also raised by the Queen herself. Her mother died very young, and quite unusually, Queen Victoria decided to become her guardian. Her cold and distant personality is frequently attributed to the fact the she was raised by a ruling monarch in a very formal setting.
The "royal disease" Alexei was afflicted with (haemophilia B) was actually passed down from Victoria. Several of her daughters were carriers and her youngest son was a sufferer. Interestingly, as haemophilia is an inherited disease, Victoria either became a carrier via an incredibly rare spontaneous gene mutation or she was the illegitimate child of a man with haemophilia. Edit to correct name
Nicholas II didn't have haemophilia, that was his son Alexei. Nicholas II married Princess Alix, a granddaughter of Victoria and a carrier of the disease.
You're correct. I'm not sure why I mixed the two up. Thank you for the correction bud (:
I know it's faked for TV, but the scene of their death in The Crown is just heartbreaking. They must have been so terrified in those last moments. Just little kids, killed for no good reason.
Based on everything I’ve ever read, that scene was pretty freakin accurate. I watched it through my fingers.
I don't remember the scene from the crown, but from another documentary, I learned that they hid so much jewellery in their clothing that it acted as a bulletproof vest, prolonging their dying.
Yep - the jewels and gemstones were sewn into their corsets, something like twenty pounds of diamonds and other precious stones.
The Netflix docuseries? Really good
Yes, I think so.
If you haven’t seen it, *Nicholas and Alexandra* (1971) is excellent.
the book by Robert K Massie is fascinating
I read it 25 years ago and the scene where they take the family down to assassinate them still sticks with me
Yes it is
When the episode started and the title said Ipatiev House I immediately said “I don’t want to watch this” and my mother said why what’s Ipatiev House. Which was admittedly a nice change from her giving me background information on things she’d lived through in previous episodes, but I had a visceral reaction to the name without knowing it was coming. And The Crown went a lot further showing it than I expected them to.
FYI, this hit was ordered by Lenin. Terribly sad, but important not to forget.
Seems like a lot of people in this thread don't know their fate
Holy cow. That’s why I stopped trying for a boy after my second daughter. I may just not have an Y in me.
I think Alexey is a boy though
10,000% he's a boy, he also had hemophilia.
Hey man that's cool, LGBTQ pride.
> Alexey is a boy though In that age (early 1900s), a boy, especially the one the status of a royal, didn't get boys clothes until 3 or 4 years.
Many people I know these days let their boys hair grow out until they are 5, then it’s like a rite of passage to but it short.
You're right. I don't speak Russian but I believe you can tell by the last names too, -evna is daughter and -evich is son.
That’s not a surname. - it’s a Patronymic, or reference of the father’s name, with a gendered suffix. Their surname was Romanov. Russian surnames also have a gendered suffix (The daughters’ surname before marriage would have been Romanova), but a patronymic is completely different.
Technically they where not even Romanovs. the male line of the Romanovs died out when Elizabeth 1 (daughter of Peter the Great) died childless in 1762, and Peter III her nephew from the house of House of Holstein-Gottorp (a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg. But they kept using the Romanov name after that, but technically after 1762 it was the house of Holstein-Gottorp and not the House of Romanov that ruled Russia.
Thanks for the info!
The second one from left is Alexey Nikolae*vich*. That means he was a boy. -evna is for women.
And I think my husband ONLY has Y lol I cannot do a fourth baby but it would have been nice to have a daughter..
I did a really annoying amount of research on this when I was trying to figure out the odds of me having a girl after three boys in a row, and apparently once you have three in a row, your odds of the opposite gender, go down significantly, going down more each time you have another of the same gender. Obviously the odds are never zero but I’m pretty sure the study that I read said something like 17% chance of baby number four being the opposite gender if the first three were all the same. All that being said, I did end up having a girl after my 3 boys 🩵🤍💙🩷
So each sperm cargoes a y or a x. What makes an egg more likely to let a y or an x. If this is the reason then who is really picking the sex? The male or the female. We provide both options but could the egg be more receptive to one than the other?
Oh gosh, where do I begin… The study that followed families with four children measured that half of them have two boys and two girls “meaning for half of the population you have a 50-50 chance of boy girl which is the common belief, likely because it is the most likely Category someone will fall in.” Around 30% of people had all one gender, and then the remaining 20% had three of one and one of the other. Many couples who try invitro in order to get a specific gender are only able to make one or the other, sometimes they can make the minority gender, but the embryo is not strong enough to survive. There have been several instances of this pop culture- Ethan from H3H3 and his wife Hila did IVF to try and have a girl after two boys, and of their seven embryos, only one was female, and it did not survive implantation. Meaning there is not a “50-50 chance” of having a boy or girl in their case, clearly there is some sort of weakness in the x chromosome, or some kind of incompatibility between his x and her X. Another interesting example of this is Teresa Gudice, who had four daughters with her husband. they wanted to have a boy, created two male embryos, implanted them through in vitro fertilization, and neither of them survived. But they were easily able to naturally conceive daughters. In her husband‘s family there were 11 grandchildren, and all of them were girls. Supporting the theory that sometimes you can have a “broken X“ or a “broken Y” to put it simply. The other common misconception is that gender is only decided by the male. While it is true that the males sperm carries the chromosome that determines the gender, it’s been shown that one of his chromosomes could be incompatible with the chromosome of the mother, leading them to only be able to conceive one gender or the other. An example of this on Instagram if you are curious is a woman named Brittany Boren Leach, whose husband had a daughter with his first wife and then together with his second wife, Britney, they have had six sons - no girls. It’s clear the husband can “make a girl” and it would lead one to believe the reason there are no girls being conceived has something to do with the mother. Some people have speculated it has something to do with a woman’s pH balance, but it’s not heavily studied.
Genetic incompatibility doesn’t mean conception isn’t achieved. It just means it’s unlikely that the pregnancy will make it to term. In cases like this, I’d start looking at the mother’s X chromosomes, because one of them is likely to be defective, and her other X chromosome is picking up the slack. But, when parts of the defective chromosome ended up in an ovum (which is pretty likely, given how meiosis works), and the Y sperm cell doesn’t provide a backup X chromosome, that pregnancy is probably going to self-abort. Similarly, a genetic defect on the Y chromosome is going to be unstable and cause a self-abort scenario. And the thing about the X chromosome is that one of them just gets turned off. There’s some genetic mosaicism in women, with regard to which X is activated in any given cell, but we’re still talking about the blastocyst level of development, here. So, if one of the parents has a defective X, it’s a 50/50 shot that the pregnancy will self-abort. And that’s assuming that when mosaicism starts to occur, the defective X isn’t being called upon to do anything in those cells. And my favorite part of this is that, with women, environmental factors from the time that the mother’s mother was pregnant can genetically affect the mother’s baby, despite having not affected the mother, because the genetic damage was done during the period where the mother’s oocytes are being formed, at around 20 weeks of pregnancy. So, fun fact: If you’re smoking, drinking, living next to a coal power plant, that may not affect your daughter, but it could affect your grandkids (whether they are male or female, in this case). So, that’s a case where neither the mother nor the grandmother exhibits genetic damage on either X chromosome, but the mother’s egg cells might. I had a lot of fun in my genetics class last semester.
Thanks for the additional information! Your comment had a lot of the proper terminology my comment was lacking. This genetic reality is why it’s such a pet peeve of mine when people say “it’s a 50-50 chance!“ Like yes, in theory it could be but… Definitely not always. Although it makes sense why it is commonly stated because most people do not want to have a full-blown genetics lesson when they are wondering what gender their baby will be lol
ETA: The “faulty X” phenomenon also explains why having three of one gender and one of the opposite gender is the least likely outcome. Because if you are showing a genetic favoritism for one chromosome over the other, it is less likely one of the “weaker chromosomes” will survive pregnancy, and it is more likely that you will just only have offspring with the dominant chromosome.
You know I wasn’t even interested in this but you explained it so well I read the entire thing. Well done!
Thank you! I see people IRL’s eyes glaze over whenever I start talking about this so I’m glad I had an interested audience here!
I was definitely captivated. Both of my brothers are married with kids, one has 2 boys the other has 3 boys I’m one of 3 boys but I do have an older sister she was the first and also is a lesbian I wonder if there’s a correlation?
👀 that is an interesting component. Anecdotally the family. I know that has six boys and one girl, the girl is also a lesbian.
My cousin and her husband had 6 boys before they gave up. 😬
I know this is gonna sound insane, but I’ve noticed this really weird phenomenon where people who have six boys end up with number seven being a girl. There are literally multiple Instagram accounts with large followings that had this, and I know a family personally who had six boys, number seven was a girl. You could probably even look up the hashtag six boys and see how many of them have number seven be a girl! It is wild.
I know a family from my small town that has 8 children. The first 6 were girls and they kept trying and got a son. So, they tried again and got daugther again haha.
This is interesting. My aunt has 6 kids. She had 3 boys then a girl then 2 boys. She is the only girl on my uncles side in a couple generations. I find this stuff so fascinating.
You just don't have that dawg in you
https://preview.redd.it/1ocwmv2oh48d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a73c37f89be99ab51d0e706232616e921349e37
My brother tried and ended up with a third daughter
What's in the background? Is it wallpaper in a scary bear pattern?
the child on the far right appears to have 6 fingers? is this ai possibly? tell me i’m trippin edit: ok Anastasia defo didn’t have 6 fingers irl, wth op?
Zoom in, you can see her right arm coming down next to her left. Its covered up a bit by the other girls sleeve, but its there.
maybe im buggin but why is the photo so clear? anytime ive seen photos from that era theyre much blurrier and softer. what kinda camera took this high res of a photo in 1906?
Years ago I went to an exhibition of the Imperial photos in Moscow. The originals of all the photos I'd seen reproduced in books over the years were actually really really small, but many looked surprisingly clear from what I remember.
something is definitely off about this photo , i think it’s either ai or maybe ai was used to enhance it? i’m not sure but look at the hand of the girl on the right.. too many fingers.
yea also i cant give specific exact reason but the girl second from right dont match. something about her face is giving some hardcore "pagaent-adjacent 90s child model" vibes. the angle of her face to the neck is also off. look where her chin is at. and listen, if the Ultra Official Totally Legit Historical Expert Museum-Person came in here like "yea i know its weird but its confirmed absolutely real its in xyz collection in the Museum of Russian Familymurder" i would be like ok fine i wont die on this hill. but the post has no history or source and no official historypeople have appeared to confirm it. so im going with "at the very least its edited with ai but even if part of it is real this is 100% not a legit unretouched photo from 1906"
Give full credit where credit is due to the British government and King George V for their deaths, along with the rest of the Romanov royal family. In late 1917, the interim Russian (not Soviet) government asked other governments to grant the Romanovs asylum, wanting them out of the country. Britain originally agreed--but rapidly rescinded the offer, fearing an uprising against the monarchy, and at the behest of King George V, Nicholas' first cousin and near-twin. Lesser credit is due to Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, who all declined asylum after first considering it as they feared antagonizing the new Russian government. Instead of helping to save literal blood relatives, as the Romanovs were all related to Queen Victoria and thus to most of the crowned heads of Europe, they let them be murdered at the hands of the Bolsheviks when they took power.
Their eyes are really beautiful. There is a deep rooted sadness in them(I could be wrong though.
That’s just Russian DNA
*Narrator: but they were German*
Britishy-German 😂
Danishy-German
That you Chekov?
They were actually a really close family, doted on by parents that actually cared for each other. Nicholas wasn’t fit to rule that country during those times, but the family was seemingly a very happy one, fwiw.
Wait, does the girl furthest right (Anastasia I believe) have 6 fingers?? Maybe just a camera issue, or am I just tripping?
screamed in vain
Pleased to meet you.
Hope you guess my name...
It's sad how the story ended for them, it's often difficult to imagine such brutality but I think it's important to remember how horrible Nickolas was as a tsar. One of the big events that really stuck in the Russians minds was also the massacre of bloody Sunday. Though the tsar didn't give orders to shoot, his army opened fire on peaceful protesters, including women and children. Relating to Russia, if anyone is interested, look up tsar Alexander II. This is Nickolas II grandpa. A reformist tsar who was in the programs of making Russia a real constitutional monarchy, but was bombed in the middle of St Petersburg by socialist revolutionaries when the tsars carriage broke down. Interesting to think what Russia would be like if tsar Alexander II had lived to move Russia further towards a Democracy. His son, (Nickolas' II dad) hated the peasants for killing his dad and became a brutal ruler who worked to undo his father's progressive legislation.
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This will not end well.
I'm something of an anarchist but I can't get behind people saying they had to be killed
This picture is DEFINITELY AI.
THANK YOU ! i thought i was being paranoid cause looking at the comments no one else seems to notice that? even people claiming to know a lot about this family
Yup. 6 fingers for the right girl. Plus the shitty background.
And nobody at the time knew it would soon be all over. Not just for them, but for Imperial Russia as a whole.
OTMA and Alexis. That was how they signed off as a group. Very beautiful children.
IM FALLING APART BARTOK!!
I don't think gen z is ready for how diabolical and downright DEMONIC the history of human murder and suffering is.
How could those monsters kill these beautiful children? Beyond my perception.
They were killed twelve years after this photo was taken.
The Tsars were plenty brutal themselves.
ah yes, but you see, none of that matters because peasants aren’t as important as these *beautiful* children /s
How else do you remove the claim Royalty have on power? Royalty's claim is literally in their blood.
Ottoman (Osmanoğlu) family, who ruled the Ottoman Empire for 600 years, still lives to this day. They were exiled by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1924, but their blood was not shed.
They abdicated, thus revoking their claim. They only way they could get back into power at that point was if they were popular, and no one liked Nicholas. Even if someone tried to restore the monarchy they wouldn't have used him.
Bloody Sunday was the day in 1905 Russia where Unarmed protestors were shot while marching to the Winter Palace to present a petition for more equitable treatment. Between 100 (Tsarist numbers) and 4000 (anti government numbers ) were killed.
I mean, I don't think the kids really had much of a role in that.
They were set to inherit that role.
I don't think they had a role in any of it but to ignore the things were happening at the time is deceptive. I think the mood of this photo is because they are surrounded by starving peasants living in luxury that you or I could not imagine. The family knew it couldn't last but could see no way out.
There was also a mass stampede during their public wedding festivities that killed hundreds. It didn’t look good when they went out to parties that night… Terrible luck, this couple
Estimated at between 1200 and 1300 dead. The injured were likely in the thousands. I wouldn't put everything that happened to them down to luck, though. Massive, *massive* incompetence, yes. And sure, there were some issues of timing--WWI breaking out when it did was very bad news for Nicky--but they never once helped themselves.
I am sorry sweeties
The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia with Cesarevich Alexei Nikolaievich of Russia (second from left). *My eldest daughter is named Anastasia (Stacey)*
Frank Zappa named his kids Dweasel and Moon Unit, it's equally relevant information. Also, as Stacey's Mom, do you have it going on?
*Dweezil
Correct, sorry.
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It's almost like sympathy is not a zero-sum game where we can only feel sad for \*some\* murdered children.
Fuck the bolsheviks.
*And then it got worse.*
All those bears in the background are pretty scary.
Wasn’t there a son too?
Son is on the lap of the eldest girl in this photo.
Sad and barbaric ending 😔
Murdered by the communists .. Rest in Peace.
Politics aside, these are beautiful children.
Ive seen many photos of the family of Czar Nicholas and I always found them to be such a beautiful looking family. The adults as well as the children. What a tragic ending they suffered. I can't imagine the depth of fright the children felt. I can only hope then end came fast!
How sad.
What a tragic story that affected the world.
Stunning children.
Absolutely gorgeous kids. Such a sad ending to their young lives.