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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we

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Speaker 1: are granting listener requests fairy Godmother style. We've had a

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Speaker 1: lot of requests for this particular subject, but here is

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Speaker 1: a sample email from Lauren of Somerville, South Carolina, um

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Speaker 1: who said that she had listened to our podcast on Resputin,

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Speaker 1: but I've learned of the youngest roman off daughter, Anastasia

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Speaker 1: and the mystery that surrounds her. In nineteen seventeen, when

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Speaker 1: her family was murdered by the Bolsheviks. They never found

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Speaker 1: Anastasia's body. Did she die or was she actually Anna Anderson,

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Speaker 1: a German woman who claimed to be Anastasia for her

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Speaker 1: whole life since the murder, So Kaddis and Josh did

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Speaker 1: a podcast on Resputin, how did respute and really die?

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Speaker 1: But Lauren's right, that doesn't solve all of the mysteries

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Speaker 1: of the Roman family. So first let's get ourselves a

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Speaker 1: cast of characters. So the family in question, the romanofs

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Speaker 1: ruled the Russian Empire from sixteen thirteen to nineteen seventeen.

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Speaker 1: But the guy we're talking about is Nicholas the Second,

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Speaker 1: who succeeded Alexander the Third in eighteen ninety four, and

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Speaker 1: he also married his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna that same year.

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Speaker 1: Together they have five kids, Alexey, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia,

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Speaker 1: who is perhaps the most famous today. Um Alexey is

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Speaker 1: the baby, and he's the only son, and he's the

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Speaker 1: heir um. But he's a hemophiliac, which is something that

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Speaker 1: he inherited from his ancestress, Queen Victoria, so he's not

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Speaker 1: the best air you could ask for, but the family

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Speaker 1: is happy with their lot. When Olga was born, the

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Speaker 1: Czar supposedly said, I am glad the child is a girl.

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Speaker 1: Had it been a boy, who would have belonged to

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Speaker 1: the people. Being a girl, she belongs to us, which

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Speaker 1: reminded us a lot of Anne Boleyn and Henry the Eighth.

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Speaker 1: It may be an apocryphal que to well the kind

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Speaker 1: of thing more than likely, but it's the kind of

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Speaker 1: thing it's fun to say. Definitely, they were pretty happy

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Speaker 1: family all in all, but as rulers, not so much.

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Speaker 1: In this book, History's Monsters by Simon sebag Montefiori. He

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Speaker 1: called them inept, cruel, rigid, and obtuse reactionaries, which you

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Speaker 1: know out Yeah, most people agree that Nicholas just wasn't

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Speaker 1: very well suited to his position. He's a timid man,

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Speaker 1: which means that he's easily manipulated and taken advantage of.

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Speaker 1: And Alexandra actually has a lot of power over him,

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Speaker 1: and he has favorites in court who have a lot

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Speaker 1: of power over him. So this makes people uncomfortable, and

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Speaker 1: he was really out of touch with his own people.

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Speaker 1: He believed in divine right, he had God given power,

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Speaker 1: so you know, he did what he wanted because he

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Speaker 1: had God's blessing, and he listened to who he wanted,

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Speaker 1: even if it wasn't maybe the best people, it wasn't

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Speaker 1: the advisors, right, So he decided that anyone who disagreed

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Speaker 1: with him wasn't an me with the capital E. And

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Speaker 1: this does not breed happiness among his subjects. Yeah, Needless

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Speaker 1: to say, Nicholas is very unpopular and his international relations

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Speaker 1: are a mess. And this all brings us to the

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Speaker 1: Russian Revolution of nineteen o five, which kind of gets

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Speaker 1: this story started. So in January nineteen o five, the

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Speaker 1: workers of St. Petersburg, which at the time was Petrograd,

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Speaker 1: march to the Winter Palace with demands for Nicholas. They

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Speaker 1: said that they were still loyal to the Czar, but

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Speaker 1: that they wanted to elect a legislative assembly. So even

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Speaker 1: these fairly moderate demands are not met well, and the

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Speaker 1: Czar's troops fire on them, kill a hundred and thirty

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Speaker 1: and it's called Bloody Sunday, and it ignites outrage in

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Speaker 1: the Russian people. By October nineteen o five, there's a

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Speaker 1: general strike. The cities are shutting down because they have

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Speaker 1: no workers and Nicholas. Okay's a legislative assembly. But don't

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Speaker 1: think the monarchy is giving up that easily. On their side,

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Speaker 1: they have the Black Hundreds, who are counter revolutionaries and

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Speaker 1: zarists who had access to a lot of arms. They

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Speaker 1: were made mostly of the wealthier class and some clergymen,

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Speaker 1: and they go after students and left wingers and um

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Speaker 1: have bloody programs against the Jews, and they're really not

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Speaker 1: fond of Ukrainians either. So this repressive regime is just

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Speaker 1: getting worse, almost But the revolutionaries are just as violent.

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Speaker 1: There's a military mutiny and several political assassinations. So you

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Speaker 1: could sum up this whole period with the phrase violent unrest,

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Speaker 1: and this continues for a long time. But with that,

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Speaker 1: we'd like to explain. I guess why the Romanovs are

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Speaker 1: so interesting. It's not because they're just part of these revolutions,

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Speaker 1: kind of out of touch for standing against the revolution.

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Speaker 1: It's because they're weird, really weird. They're kind of a

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Speaker 1: freaky family. Alexandra Nicholas actually had a pretty happy marriage,

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Speaker 1: but everyone else thought they were really bizarre. The Russians

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Speaker 1: hated Alexandra because of her German nous. Not only did

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Speaker 1: was she a German, she also was a haughty, cold

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Speaker 1: kind of person, or at least that's how the people

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Speaker 1: thought of her, and she epitomized what Russians didn't like

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Speaker 1: in about German romists, and the First World War didn't help.

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Speaker 1: She was accused of being a spy, and perhaps unsurprisingly,

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Speaker 1: because the people didn't like her, she didn't really like

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Speaker 1: them back and didn't make much of an effort. So

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Speaker 1: the fact that their only son and heir has hemophilia

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Speaker 1: doesn't really endear Alexandra to her people either. The Russians

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Speaker 1: want a good strapping healthy air, and she has this

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Speaker 1: invalid who she absolutely obsesses over, and she's of course

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Speaker 1: blamed for it, and Alexander, whatever you say about her,

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Speaker 1: she does kind of have a right to obsess over

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Speaker 1: this disorder. Um. It's it's very serious and at the

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Speaker 1: time it was incurable. It's a bleeding disorder where your

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Speaker 1: blood doesn't clot and um. Some variations can be mild,

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Speaker 1: but in the most serious cases you bleed internally and

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Speaker 1: into your joints and um it's extremely painful. So her

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Speaker 1: worries weren't unfounded. You know, this was a really serious

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Speaker 1: thing for her son, but they kept his illness as secret,

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Speaker 1: which probably made things seem very mysterious and very odd.

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Speaker 1: People would just to wonder what was going on and

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Speaker 1: also why this child was being coddled so much. So

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Speaker 1: they were always looking for ways to cure him. And

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Speaker 1: when medicine failed him, the mystic rest Sputant entered their lives,

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Speaker 1: who supposedly could heal a little Alexei And we won't

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Speaker 1: go into this story too much because of the other podcast,

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Speaker 1: but resciput And had a lot of power over the

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Speaker 1: romanofs and was a very strange and possibly evil man.

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Speaker 1: He was murdered in nineteen sixteen after several attempts to

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Speaker 1: kill him, but he wouldn't die much like a cartoon character.

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Speaker 1: He keeps having that annvil fallen okay and surviving. So,

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Speaker 1: just to add to this rather damning case against the

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Speaker 1: Czar and his wife, people also think Nicholas set It

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Speaker 1: was impotent, and Alexandra was a lesbian, and that she

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Speaker 1: had had sex with rescput and to get her children.

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Speaker 1: So there's just so much wrapped up around this couple,

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Speaker 1: and also that all the daughters were having sex with

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Speaker 1: Rescipued and people had no idea again what was really

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Speaker 1: going on in that palace, But as far as outward

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Speaker 1: appearances go, they thought something was entirely out of whack.

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Speaker 1: So again, behind all of this, the revolutions are still happening.

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Speaker 1: The Revolution of nineteen o five did not end in

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Speaker 1: nineteen o five, and neither did that unwrast players change exactly.

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Speaker 1: So then we have the Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen

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Speaker 1: and the government is very corrupt. Everyone hates the czar

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Speaker 1: at this point, he's blamed for all the things he

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Speaker 1: has done and the things he hasn't done. And it's

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Speaker 1: also become very clear during the war that while the

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Speaker 1: rest of Europe has been modernizing, Russia has not. That's

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Speaker 1: something we talked about a little in our Crimean War episode.

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Speaker 1: They were realizing that even then, because it's especially clear

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Speaker 1: to the army, which is falling apart during warfare. There

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Speaker 1: is also a food shortage, which is when the rioting started.

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Speaker 1: And in this climate, Nicholas abdicated in March. His brother

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Speaker 1: wouldn't take the throne. I wouldn't either if I had

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Speaker 1: been his brother. And the romanofs are done. They have

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Speaker 1: fallen completely out of power in the Russian Empire. So

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Speaker 1: there's a power grab that happens. And to really simplify

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Speaker 1: something that's quite complicated, the Bolsheviks and the left socialist

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Speaker 1: revolutionaries are the winners, and the Bolsheviks promise peace, land

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Speaker 1: and bread, which sounds like a pretty good deal. You

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Speaker 1: can understargue with that, how people would get behind that.

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Speaker 1: So back to our family. Nicholas of course abdicated after

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Speaker 1: the February Revolution, which was part one of the Revolution

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Speaker 1: of nineteen seventeen. So now what the families on house

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Speaker 1: arrest for five months in Alexandra Palace, But in August

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen they're sent to Tobolsk, Siberia, and the Bolsheviks

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Speaker 1: have a fateful decision to make at this point exile

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Speaker 1: the royal family or kill them. Killed the tsar and

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Speaker 1: the family is a symbol, and because symbols are so important,

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Speaker 1: you can see why this would be such a momentous decision.

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Speaker 1: If you exile the family, they can always come back,

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Speaker 1: you could have grandchildren come back, and it can go

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Speaker 1: on for for centuries. So in April nineteen eighteen, they're

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Speaker 1: still wavering on what to do, and they summoned Nicholas away.

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Speaker 1: Alexandra and Maria go with him to eat Katerineburg and

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Speaker 1: the yearls and the rest of the family doesn't join

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Speaker 1: until May because Alexei was too sick to go before.

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Speaker 1: And this is a big change for the royal family.

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Speaker 1: There's not a lot of food, they're dressed in rags,

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Speaker 1: they're not treated well. They're imprisoned in this house and

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Speaker 1: don't have a lot to do. They spend a lot

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Speaker 1: of time reading the Bible, and in July nineteen eighteen,

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Speaker 1: a man named Yakov spared Love signs off on the

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Speaker 1: killing of the Romanov family and um. At two o'clock

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Speaker 1: in the morning, a group of men come for the Romanovs,

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Speaker 1: and the family, along with a few of their servants

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Speaker 1: whould remain loyal to them and their doctor, are taken

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Speaker 1: into a small room and shot to death. And according

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Speaker 1: to Robert Matthew's The Romanovs, the final chapter uh those

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Speaker 1: who don't die in the first round of shots, which

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Speaker 1: the girls are then bayoneted. Alexei is shot in the ear,

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Speaker 1: Anastasia's made is bayonetted thirty times after she survives the

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Speaker 1: gunshots and tries to escape, and the families also disfigured.

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Speaker 1: They're hit in the face with rifle butts, and Anastasia's

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Speaker 1: dog is even killed. So just this really violent assassination

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Speaker 1: of the You have to picture this group, I think,

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Speaker 1: what twelve executioners and then this family of nine in

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Speaker 1: this teeny tiny room and all the blood. So, the bloody,

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Speaker 1: disfigured to bodies were brought to a place called the

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Speaker 1: Four Brothers, which was north vie Katerinburg and a place

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Speaker 1: of swamps and pete bogs and minds. And when the

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Speaker 1: bodies were stripped, the men found that the roman off

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Speaker 1: daughters had diamonds sewn into their corsets, which explained why

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Speaker 1: the bullets weren't killing them. The jewels redflicting them, something

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Speaker 1: I remember learning about when I was a kid and

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Speaker 1: just being fascinated by by this story. Always keep diamonds

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Speaker 1: in your clothes. They're always the original kevlar. They were

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Speaker 1: also wearing amulets with Rasputant's picture on them. Again, this

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Speaker 1: is all according to Massey's book. And the bodies were

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Speaker 1: thrown down a mine shaft with grenades thrown after them,

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Speaker 1: and by July eighteen it was announced at a meeting

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Speaker 1: where Lennon was present that Nicholas had been executed, but

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Speaker 1: that Alexandra and the children were safe. And this it

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Speaker 1: turns out to be alive because Lennon knew about the

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Speaker 1: executions before they happened, knew about the executions of the

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Speaker 1: whole family. Yes, this was kept up for a long

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Speaker 1: time that Lennon had no idea what was going on,

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Speaker 1: but it was all signed off on long before. So

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Speaker 1: on the twentieth the papers announced the death of Nicholas,

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Speaker 1: but again his family was reported to be alive. It

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Speaker 1: wasn't until much later that the world found out that

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Speaker 1: they were dead. So about a week after the executions,

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Speaker 1: the counter revolutionaries the Whites uh capture a Katerine Burke

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Speaker 1: and obviously search for the Romanovs. Can't find them, but

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Speaker 1: they do find their blood, and by January nineteen nineteen

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Speaker 1: a real search has been launched at four brothers by

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Speaker 1: the Whites and they find little bits of jewelry, buckles, glasses,

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Speaker 1: case of finger but no bodies. So where are they?

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Speaker 1: And around the same time or shortly thereafter, they start

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Speaker 1: to be rumors that some of the royal family has

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Speaker 1: indeed escaped. A woman named Anna Anderson claims that she

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Speaker 1: is Anastasia and she made it out alive, and there

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Speaker 1: are several other Anastasia impostors that pop up over the years. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Anastasia somehow becomes the central figure of this story. But

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Speaker 1: back to our question of the bodies. Word got out

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Speaker 1: so one of the executioners went and moved them, and

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Speaker 1: they remained a secret for a very long time until

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Speaker 1: someone found that same man's diary much later and pieced

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Speaker 1: together where they might be. In n nine bodies were

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Speaker 1: discovered in the area they were assumed to be Nicholas, Alexandra,

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Speaker 1: three of the kids, their doctor, and three servants, which

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Speaker 1: leaves us with two kids unaccounted for, who were assumed

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Speaker 1: to be Alexey and Anastasia. And in it was confirmed

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Speaker 1: with DNA evidence that those were the Romanovs, and so

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Speaker 1: the Romano bones were buried in St. Petersburg, and there

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Speaker 1: was a lot of controversy about this about the burial.

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Speaker 1: The church objected to it because it didn't recognize that

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Speaker 1: these were the Romanovs remains, and their names weren't said

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Speaker 1: during the service, and a lot of people didn't buy

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Speaker 1: the story that these were the Romanov bones, and um

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Speaker 1: in two thousand four, another study came out in this group,

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Speaker 1: also using DNA evidence, said that there was no way

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Speaker 1: that these bodies could be the romanoff them right. They

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Speaker 1: thought the DANNA evidence had been contaminated and so you

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Speaker 1: couldn't say with any certainty that that's who they were.

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Speaker 1: So we have our our story debunked. Just a little

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Speaker 1: over a decade later, and in two thousand seven, two

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Speaker 1: more bodies were found and these were positively identified as

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Speaker 1: Alexei and one of the girls. The people who did

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Speaker 1: the studies said it was virtually irrefutable evidence, and all

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Speaker 1: these bodies, all these bodies, by the way, are found

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Speaker 1: around the Four Brothers area. As a result of these studies,

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Speaker 1: we basically have three camps. So the first one, all

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Speaker 1: the Romanofs were killed and we found all of their remains.

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Speaker 1: So the bodies the real deal and the two thousand

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Speaker 1: seven bodies the real deal. Everything is completely buttoned up.

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Speaker 1: The second camp, all the Romanoffs were killed, but we

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Speaker 1: need more studies to find out if what we have

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Speaker 1: is the real deal, and maybe we have some of

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Speaker 1: the real bodies and we don't have others. Yes, I'm

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Speaker 1: in the second camp for the record. And the third

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Speaker 1: camp was that some of the Romanovs escaped and went

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Speaker 1: on to live lives elsewhere. But the woman we mentioned before,

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Speaker 1: Anna Anderson, who's the most famous Anastasia Impostor, really was

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Speaker 1: an impostor. Mitochondrial DNA tests were done after her death

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Speaker 1: and it doesn't match at all the Romanoffs. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: seventy seven, the patty of house where the Romanovs spent

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Speaker 1: their last days was demolished with a wrecking ball, and

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Speaker 1: um Yeltsin actually did it under Brezhnev's orders, because it

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Speaker 1: was still a place of pilgrimage. It was still a

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Speaker 1: place where people went to, I guess celebrate the secretly manarchists.

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Speaker 1: In two thousand, the Romanovs were named Holy passion bearers

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Speaker 1: by the Russian Orthodox Church. And it's kind of like

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Speaker 1: being martyrs. But martyrs are people who die for their faith,

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Speaker 1: whereas passion bearers or people who still show great faith

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Speaker 1: in the face of death, but are sort of interesting.

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Speaker 1: Concluding point here, The big about faces that in two

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Speaker 1: thousand and eight, the Russian Supreme Court ruled that the

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Speaker 1: Romanovs were victims of political oppression. Um. Before that, I

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Speaker 1: think people were focusing on the murders. It's just a

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Speaker 1: random act, not a government directed act. So it was

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Speaker 1: a big step to take resibility. Fascinated exactly in a

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Speaker 1: distant descendant of the Romanovs. I think he was an

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Speaker 1: ancestor of Nicholas the First actually told Newsweek here's a

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Speaker 1: pretty long quote for you. There was a certain logic

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Speaker 1: to the murders. From the Bolshevik point of view. Reaction

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Speaker 1: to the revolution was still strong. They were being attacked

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Speaker 1: from all sides, so destroying the czar a symbolic figurehead

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Speaker 1: committed all those who participated in the revolution to an

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Speaker 1: irreversible course. It's terrible to say it, but I understand

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Speaker 1: their logic. It would have been too dangerous to leave

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Speaker 1: the czar alive. But how they did it was a

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Speaker 1: different matter. They murdered the family with the utmost barbarity,

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Speaker 1: then tried to cover up the to the family and

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Speaker 1: tried to pretend it was a local decision. It's set

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Speaker 1: the tone for future secretive state terror. And that's the

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Speaker 1: final word on the romanofs. But if you help some

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Speaker 1: ideas on what you think happened to them, email us

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Speaker 1: at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And

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Speaker 1: if you'd like to learn more about their creepy mystic,

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Speaker 1: you should check out an article how to rescue you

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Speaker 1: can really die. But cat brings us to listener mail.

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Speaker 1: So we have another comment for you on our Satchel

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Speaker 1: Page episode. This is from Brian in New York and

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Speaker 1: it was left on the blogs um. He wrote after

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Speaker 1: we said that Satchell reportedly pitched at up to a

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Speaker 1: hundred and five miles per hour. You're at a hundred

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Speaker 1: and five miles per hour, the highest recorded speed in

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Speaker 1: recent history is a hundred and four point eight, and

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Speaker 1: that's in an era where pitchers take much better care

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Speaker 1: of their arms. And even that one is widely acknowledged

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Speaker 1: to be inflated, as it's one point eight miles prour

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Speaker 1: higher than any other recorded pitch. The highest number I

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Speaker 1: could find for page is one oh three, which is

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Speaker 1: probably at or just beyond his actual one pitch and

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Speaker 1: a lifetime top speed at which, given the circumstances under

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Speaker 1: which he was playing, is certainly so stupefying ly impressive

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Speaker 1: that it doesn't need embellishment. I wouldn't believe that if

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Speaker 1: someone told me caulled Bunny in through one oh five.

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Speaker 1: So we thought that was pretty funny. So thank you

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Speaker 1: for the clarification, Brian. If anyone else has anything to

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Speaker 1: say about it, feel free to email us. We're also

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Speaker 1: on Twitter if you'd like to follow us at missed

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Speaker 1: in History and again, you should check out rs Scute

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Speaker 1: and article on our homepage at www dot how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of

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Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com and

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Speaker 1: be sure to check out this stuff you Missed in

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Speaker 1: History class blog on the how stuff Works dot Com

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Speaker 1: home page,