"There were 53 Romanovs living in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, 1917. Eighteen were slaughtered in the most heart-wrenching circumstances; 35 made their way to safety."

This year marks the centennial of the massacre of Imperial Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his family. In July 1918 their Bolshevik captors herded the doomed family into a basement in Yekaterinburg under the pretext that their photograph was to be taken.

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The Tsar and Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga (22) Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (13) fell under a hail of bullets. The family’s corpses and those of three loyal servants and family doctor were hurled down a mine and later burned.

From Kaliningrad to the Bering Straits, a distance about 5,700 miles, the Russian people this year lament their loss. Monuments and museums, art galleries, movies, television documentary and drama, church services, it is hard to forget the tragedy – except in the West.

Is lack of interest due to shame? The so-called Russian revolution was a coup similar to most Western-inspired regime changes. Jacob Schiff, (1847 – 1920), the Wall Street banker who had financed Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904 – 1905), publicly boasted of his success in bringing about the coup.

In 1911 the St. Louis Dispatch published a cartoon by Bolshevik insider Robert Minor. His published cartoon portrays Karl Marx with a book entitled Socialism under his arm, standing amid a cheering crowd on Wall Street.

Gathered around and greeting him with enthusiastic handshakes are characters identified as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, Morgan partner George W. Perkins and Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Progressive Party.

Western corporations moved in for the kill; Ford, General Electric, International Harvester, Caterpillar etc. Gulag slaves, whom Trotsky dubbed White Negroes, worked harder and cost less than those employed in Western sweatshops. Over 1,000 Gulag camps were scattered across this banksters colony.

Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Plan (1941) was inspired by the need to rescue Bolshevik Russia from the Reich. The United States and Britain had invested heavily in Stalin’s blood-soaked regime.

The fate of the Tsar and his family are fairly well known. However, few have been told what happened to others making up the then Romanov Dynasty (1613 – 1917).

The Romanov Dynasty was primarily a family made up of the best of Europe’s royal houses. The blood of the martyrs was that of England, Denmark, Greece, Germany, and Romania, Habsburg dynasty, Russia and Serbia (then a powerful state).

Queen Victoria and her family

The martyred Romanovs could lay claim to being the essence of Europe’s royal houses. Theirs was not so much a Russian as a European dynasty.

There were 53 Romanovs living in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, 1917. Eighteen were slaughtered in the most heart-wrenching circumstances; 35 made their way to safety.

Imperial Russia’s gold reserves weighed 1,311 tonnes, which is $60 billion at today’s value. This too went west and not to the workers.

MICHAEL WALSH is the author of Slaughter of a Dynasty and Trotsky’s White Negroes , available on Amazon.