Mystery solved as tests prove Tsar's entire family was murdered
DNA analysis of bone shards shows no one escaped 1918 slaughter in the cellar
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
Hulton/Getty
Left to right: The Grand Duchesses Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia and Olga, and the crown prince Alexei
enlarge
In the early hours of a July day in 1918, one of history's most infamous murders was perpetrated on parents, their five children and their loyal servants in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg, central Russia.
The gunshot-and-bayonet murder of the Romanovs – the family of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia – spawned countless conspiracy theories, including the belief that at least one child had survived to escape abroad.
Since that fatal dawn, about 200 people have claimed to descend from one or other of the Romanovs who had somehow survived the slaughter in the basement of Ipatiev House. But now a scientific study based on meticulous DNA evidence has finally provided irrefutable evidence to show that all five children had indeed perished with their parents at the hands of nervous Bolsheviks of the Ural Soviet, worried about a possible rescue bid by nearby White Russian troops.
Scientists have pieced together DNA evidence from two graves near Yekaterinburg and have conclusively shown that Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, died with all five of their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and their haemophiliac son, the crown prince, Alexei. The only remaining mystery is whether the girl buried alongside Alexei in a separate grave from the rest of the family was Maria or Anastasia, says a study printed in the online journal Public Library of Science.
The story should have come to a close soon after a mass grave near Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) was revealed in 1991 by a local geologist, Alexander Avdonin, who had kept the discovery secret for more than a decade, until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Scientists, including Peter Gill from Britain's Forensic Science Service and the Russian geneticist Pavel Ivanov, managed to extract enough DNA from the bone fragments of nine skeletons to show that they included a family of two parents and three daughters.
A comparison with the DNA of living Romanov relatives, including Prince Philip, proved that the family was that of the last Tsar and Tsarina, with the four remaining skeletons belonging to the family doctor and three servants.
But the two missing children only generated further conspiracy theories, according to a report on the study written by an international team of scientists, led by Michael Coble of the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland.
"Rather than bring closure to the mystery of the fate of the Romanovs, identification of only five of the seven family members continued to fuel speculation that somehow two miraculously escaped the bullets of the executioners and made their way out of Russia," Dr Coble said.
But then, in 2007, amateur archaeologists found a second grave just 70 metres away, containing dozens of charred human bone fragments that someone had tried to cremate. "Of the 44 bone fragments and teeth present, it was possible to determine that at least two individuals were present, one female and one putative male," the report added. The mystery is solved.
DNA: The detective in the grave
The Romanov study used three different ways of analysing DNA to determine family relationships within the graves – and the relationship, if any, to living relatives of the Russian royal family. Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only down the maternal line, was used to assess the relationship of Prince Philip, who is related to the Tsarina through his mother, with bone fragments found in the grave. This helped to determine that the Tsarina and her four daughters were indeed buried in the two graves. DNA known to be inherited only from fathers by sons on the male Y chromosome was used to determine the relationship between the crown prince, Alexei, and his father, Tsar Nicholas II. And finally, DNA from the rest of the chromosomes was used to find out who was who in the mass graves – separating family members from three servants and a doctor.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
It was whole-sale carnage that, it seems to me, issued in the twentieth Century which would have even more barbarity.
The murders, as they were, are indefensible.
They were disgusting.
Anyway, given what happened to so many ordinary Russians including civilians at that time, the fate suffered by the Tsar and his family is not so unusual. Why should royalty be spared? I don't condone murder, but who unleashed all this brutality in the first place. The Romanovs had more than enough blood on their hands so the fall of their regime was poetic justice.
123 pen pen says it's wholesale carnage - er not really.
Wholesale carange was firing on unarmed workers who were trying to present a petition to the Czar (many cheering the Czar - thinking he would listen )
The Czar's troops killed 100 people and wounded 300 - the original Bloody Sunday
Where are the tears for these ordinary - innocent human beings ?
I just don't happen to condone the slaughter of the Czar's family, his children to be exact.
They weren't making policies, they didn't order programs or attacks. They were young women and the boy was a child of eight!
Whatever the Czar was, that could have been addressed--WITHOUT THE MURDER OF HIS CHILDREN.
That's my point, understand?
A child is not necessarily innocent--and studies prove that most small children are more selfish than others of advanced years for it is a me-first complex and thus they throw themselves into temper tantrums when they do not get their way (ever been to a grocery store and watched those little children beside their parents? I have even seen little children 3 and 4 years of age kick, hit, spit on, and pound their parents because of too much permissiveness). Little children think they are adults and thus Alfie Patten claims to be a father at age 12 while playing games and does not even get an allowance. But the Tsar's children did get allowances--more in a month that the average worker made in a year. That is what is wrong with this picture. The children of the Tsar were as contemptible as the Tsar.
Do you have children? I have strong doubts and as for your mental health too. For what sound ideas can a man approving of the murder of children express?
Executing a child who committed murder is not murder but execution. The boy in Arkansas who killed his father's 8-month pregnant girlfriend should be executed. The 11-year-old in Pennsylvania who killed his parent should also die. Throughout time there has been a sane and just law: "a life for a life". Only the effete and the mindless would let a murderer go free or be imprisoned--for the former allows the murderer to repeat the killings, and the latter takes from society food, medicine, and the rest of mortal comforts to sustain the person who committed murder. What have you read to justify allowing cold blooded murderers to live? There are numerous records available if you do your research that will show you that murderers who are given parole commit murder again--regardless of the age.
I thought World War I began when Germany invaded Belgium. Why would Germany invade its ally Austria?
If the nefariously odious opportunists, the Romanovs, were not so bent on war--prodded by the Tsarina's secret lover, the priest Rasputin--the Serbs may have arrested the assassin and the war blocked. But World War I was definitely initiated by the Serbs with the backing of Russia. Austria was an innocent victim of Slavic intrigue, and Germany was merely responding to the common language, cultural, and heritage bond it had with Austria--which once was a united empire.
The greatest and most blessed thing that happened to Russia was the Bolshevik Revolution and the liquidation of a useless, pathetic class of nobles that destroyed the nation, fought wars "for glory" and metals while hundreds of thousands of innocent lives of civilians were destroyed or snuffed out. The increasing arrogance and ignorance of the Russian Orthodox church today knows no bounds of idiocy and make-believe by declaring the Romanovs to be saints on its calendar, yet not a Romanov including the witless Tsarina or her son ever did one good deed in their lives nor can be found to have produced a "miracle" save in the minds of the desperate. The Russian Orthodox religion is absurd and foully based as is Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Mormonism, and all the other quaint and manmade religions of the world. But it will take a more massive revolution to rid the world of these religious parasites who deprive women of the right of choice over their own bodies, or preach against family planning as if all people were animals. The UK will suffer the most when the German pope, Benedict XVI, installs a far right radical into Westminster, and then the eating away of basic civil and human rights will begin in the once proud and free UK.
That Rabbi arthur_ide criticized Christian religions with such hateful words without being censored in this forum is business as usual. Would this forum have allowed his hate speech if he had included his own religion in this list of religious "parasites"?
Rabbi arthur_ide's defense of his Bolshevik tribesmen is understandable, since Palestinians are being treated as savagely in their own homeland every day.
Too bad America: your time has come. These Bolsheviks will soon bring their atrocities to your hometown via the police state that the Patriot Act has crammed down our throats.
Communism is being ruled by the people whom your god chose to be above all others, for your own good of course. American sheeple will get a taste of what communism truly is before long.
How long before the police bust down your door because you posted something they do not like in this forum?
The treatment of the Palestinians is unforgiveable, and the holocaust launched by the Israeli government is tantamount to the Nazi holocaust costing millions of lives of Jews, gays, White Russians, gypsies, etc. The Jews like to pretend that they were singled out for extermination which is not true.
The USA is among the most evil nations in the world with the rise of the neocons under George W. Bush and his gang of goons (from Condi Rice and Prof Yoo of UCBerkeley, to the corrupt CIA and the military on a rampage of killing, rape, and theft on the streets and torture in Abu Gharib prison in Iraq--and the Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, and Yoo argument that waterboarding is not torture--but waterboarding has a long history beginning with the Babylonians and Akkadians, refined by the Roman Catholic Inquisition and used by the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans in the 16th century. It is still used by the Israelis--and by the Iranians and other people who believe in the myth of religion and a special people.
George W Bush will, indeed, go down in history as among the worse men on this planet by allowing Tom DeLay and Dick Armey (both from Texas) to push through the Patriot Act, to create the neo-Nazi Department of Homeland Security, and to glorify a war and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (an invasion nearly identical to that of Hitler's putsche into Poland and the Sudetenland (western rgions of Czech Republic).
I have no god (none exists) so read my responses carefully. We actually agree on every point--where you came up with the idea I am a rabbi is beyond me.
By the way, what's your take on the ukrainian famine?
Why is it I bet arthur doesn't have nearly the vitriole for stalin that he does for the murders of dead kids? ("they LAUGHED, they should be shot and stabbed to death!"