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back a bottle of vodka. We drink it all, chasing it with a tube of Pringles we'd bought from a babushka on
a station platform earlier in the day.
WE disembark at Yekaterinburg, taking a break from the Trans-Siberian's interminable march, and buy a
locally published “English-language” tourist pamphlet from a vendor at the station. The pamphlet opens
with a welcome from Mayor Arkadiy Chernetsky. “Dear readers! The cities got their own biographies and
family trees like we people are,” he enthusiastically and semigrammatically begins. “Yekaterinburg takes
very special and significant place in time and space of the whole Russian State. Dear friends! Let Yekater-
inburg bring much novel and enchanted into your life!”
A city of about 1.5 million people, Yekaterinburg is infamous for being the site of the Romanov massac-
re. In 1918, at the height of the revolution, Czar Nicholas and his family were brought east by train here,
much like we've come. (Though they were in the custody of armed Bolshevik guards, and their train's ar-
rival was greeted by a bloodthirsty mob.)
After two months of imprisonment in Yekaterinburg, during which the Romanovs endured constant tor-
ment from their jailers, the royal family was herded into the basement of the house they'd been confined
in. Twelve soldiers opened fire on Nicholas; his wife, Alexandra; and their five children. After the first vol-
ley of shots, some of the children—who ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-two—remained alive. The
guards waded in to bayonet the survivors. The bodies were hauled to a forest, dismembered, burned, and
unceremoniously dumped in a mine.
The house where the Romanovs were killed was eventually turned into an “antireligion museum,” seem-
ingly in an effort to change the subject. In 1976, it was torn down. This order was given by Boris Yeltsin,
then the regional head of the Communist Party, who claimed there was an urgent need to fix the stretch of
street that ran beside it.
On our first afternoon in Yekaterinburg, we take a stroll around the grassy hill where the house once
stood. It is now the site of the evocatively named Church of the Blood, constructed in 2000 to honor the
Romanovs. That same year, the czar and his family were literally sainted—canonized as martyrs by the
resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.
As we approach the cathedral, we see a man high up in its belfry, ringing the hourly bells. He's a frenzy
of motion, all four limbs pushing and pulling different bell ropes. This guy is like the Yngwie Malmsteen
of bell ringing. He slams out a furious minor-key riff, with flurries of notes piling up on each other. I had
no idea the pealing of church bells could sound so angsty.
I'm fascinated by the Romanov murders—mostly because I have the reductionist instincts of a simpleton
when it comes to history. I find it hard to wrap my brain around the rise and fall of Russian Communism.
But I find it easy to imagine the Romanov family, ripped from their lives of opulence, huddling frightened
in a dank basement. I can also imagine the Bolsheviks convincing themselves that, in the name of crushing
monarchy once and for all, it was imperative for them to murder the innocent Romanov children. In this
one moment, you see not just the passionate certitude of the Communist revolutionaries, but also the miser-
ies that certitude would continue to inflict upon anyone who dared get in the way.
There's a tabloid dimension to the Romanovs' story, as well, with a lively cult having formed around the
memory of the czar's daughter Anastasia. Several women have claimed to be the grand duchess herself,
miraculously escaped from the Yekaterinburg slaughter. Among the more successful impersonators was a
woman named Anna Anderson, who stuck by her Anastasia story right up until her death in 1984 and man-
aged to fool all of New York society for a time in the late 1920s. (DNA research has recently confirmed the
identification of all the Romanov corpses, thus putting an end to any speculation.)
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