Ipatiev House | in a flash
Hush little Alexei, can you feel the fireplace?
The guardsmen broke the silence: For a family photo, before you head for Yekaterinberg station tomorrow.
He strained at the faces of his daughters, his wife. In that murkiness, he saw how disturbed and weary they all really were. Shivering, swollen eyelids, frail fingers clutching the rims of thin white shawls. There was no light at the end of this stairway, and a deathly wind rose from the tunnel. As the began the descent, the little Tsarevich began to to stir in his arms — and Nicholas leaned in for a gentle kiss.
Hush little Alexei, can you feel the fireplace?
Toward midnight of July 16~17th 1918 Tsar Nicholas II and his family were hastily woke up by deputies from the Yekaterinberg Soviet. They were told to pack their necessities in trunks and carry them to the basement, where their family photo would be taken before they were removed from Ipatiev house to avoid the advancing White Armies. As everybody gathered in the small basement of the merchant mansion, Nicholas asked one of the deputies for a chair to be brought down weary wife, Alexandra requested another for the sickly Tsarevich Alexei. Both wishes was fulfilled.
Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.
What? What?
The deputies announced their orders, the firing-squad opened fire and three centuries of Romanov rule was thus forfeited in the basement of the Ipatiev House.
Revolutions are often presented as an unbalanced equation of necessary evil. In this equation, every individual becomes a constant to be added or subtracted. And I suppose the Tsar and his family were no different.
