The Last Tsar's Dragons

Timelines

The killing of the mad monk, Rasputin, on December 30, 1916 is the stuff of saints’ tales or Grand Guignol plays. But for years, the details of his death were exactly as described in our story. Except for the dragons, of course. But new examination of his bones in 2016 seems to show he was more reasonably executed by a bullet to the back of the head. His death, and the death of his influence, would help precipitate the downfall of the Romanovs—the tsar’s family. Frankly, we prefer to believe the mad monk was killed by dragons.

As for the Romanovs, this is the actual timeline leading to their brutal murders.

February 1917: Russian Revolution.

After the revolution, the tsar and family are placed under house arrest.

March 15, 1917: The tsar is forced to abdicate.

August 1917: The tsar and family are taken to the Siberian town of Tobolsk.

April 1918: The Romanovs (as the tsar and family are now called) are moved to the Russian town of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, to a smaller accommodation where the windows of their rooms are painted shut and Anastasia is even shot at when trying to open a window on one stifling summer day.

July 17, 1918: At night, the Romanov family are led into a cellar and there shot, bayoneted, and battered with the barrels of guns. Death by dragons would have been swifter, cleaner, more merciful, so we gave that to them.

For eight years, the new Soviet leadership told lies about the fate of the tsar and his family, even hinting that they were alive and in exile. The Soviets only acknowledged in 1926 that the entire family had been murdered.

In 1981, Nicholas II and his entire family—wife, daughters, and son—were proclaimed passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. A passion-bearer is a saint killed not because of his faith, like a martyr, but one who dies in faith at the hand of murderers.

1989: The bodies of Nicky and his family were exhumed and re-interred in St. Petersburg, joining most of his forebears back to Peter the Great within the walls of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

2018: A hundred years after their deaths, the Romanovs were declared saints. Murdered for their faith. As The Guardian has put it: “Yurovsky, the commissar who planned and implemented the killing, was of Jewish background.” So it is possible that there was a whiff of anti-Semitism in the canonization.

Trotsky, Lenin, and Borutsch (later Pavel Axelrod) all worked on the Russian revolutionary paper, Iskra, whose motto was “From a spark a fire will flare up.” Quite a bit on the nose once dragons are involved, but there you go.

In 1903, at the historic Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, all three of the men’s philosophies diverged, and Borutsch ended up with the Mensheviks opposing Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Trotsky started with the Mensheviks but eventually switched his allegiance to the Bolsheviks. It didn’t end well for either of them.

The entire minutes from this historic meeting, which lasted for months and had to be moved from Brussels to London partway through due to police interest, can be found online at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903.

Koba graduated from robbery, kidnapping, and protection rackets to become one of the most fearsome dictators in all of history, Joseph Stalin.

There were actually two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The February Revolution overthrew the tsarist government and established a provisional government. Just eight months later, the famed October Revolution put paid to all that and established the Soviet government. We largely ignored the February Revolution for purposes of our story, because, well, it didn’t last very long and frankly, they didn’t have any dragons.

And finally, a note about those larcenous Chinese eunuchs. Jane thought that was way over the top, but Adam showed her the evidence. Yes, larcenous Chinese eunuchs burned down a building in the Forbidden City to hide the fact of their embezzlements in 1923. Well, it was the customs house, not dragon barns. But nevertheless, it stayed in. History is strange enough—even without dragons.