History’s cold comfort
So, we can finally close the book on one very depressing bit of history:
Scientific tests have confirmed that remains found in Russia last year belong to the last tsar’s male heir and his daughter, who have been missing since the royal family was executed in 1918, officials have said.
Testing on DNA samples conducted in a US laboratory proved the remains were those of Tsar Nicholas II’s 13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, and daughter Maria, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region where the family were killed.
“We have received full confirmation that [the remains] do belong to the tsar’s children, so we have found the whole family,” he said.
That should mean that we won’t hear any more cheap Dan Brown type of stories & theories about the missing royals and their adventures after they escaped from the Communists.
Sadly enough, this latest bit of research shows that there were, as most of us already expected, no survivors. Which shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The Soviet authorities were incredibly incompetent in almost all things that had to do with normal government but they were extremely good at killing the people they wanted to be dead.
We now know that among all the millions who were killed during the Soviet era, we can now include the whole of old Russia’s royal family. One could say their role in their country’s history was such that we shouldn’t spill many tears for them - and it’s true enough that the Czars were also quite good at spilling the blood of their subjects. Still, it’s a sad little tale: the shabby murder of a whole family, children included - in the dead of night, hidden from view.
Well, hidden from view, at the time: not hidden from history itself. Dictators and mass murderers may not like this but nothing much stays ever hidden from history itself, in the long run. To the victims of history’s many foul regimes and evil madmen this may seem a very cold comfort indeed but it’s the only one remaining.
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