July 17: A Date Worth Remembering

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time. Forced from power, the once almighty leader had been removed from his palace and imprisoned in a former merchant’s home. There he and his family were stripped of many of their luxuries and subjected to insults of his captors. Revolutionaries seldom are gentle to the deposed.

On July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas Romanov, his wife, his five children, and a host of aides were herded into the basement and executed by Bolsheviks acting on orders from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Those who survived the initial hail of bullets were bayoneted. Three centuries of Romanov rule were ended once and for all.