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THEATRE: Unravelling the bloodbath of the Romanov murders
The full, horrifying final brutality of the Romanov murders will be laid bare in a special talk for the Chichester Festivities.
What really happened on that terrible night in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 will be explored by author and historian Helen Rappaport in an evening to complement Chichester Festival Theatre's production of The House of Special Purpose.
Helen's talk will be in the Old Kitchen, Bishop's Palace, on Friday, July 3 at 6pm.
The Romanov story is powerful and compelling, as Helen says. And it simply won't go away. Its fascination is enduring as the pieces finally come together. The discovery in July 2007 of the missing remains of Tsarevich Alexey and his sister Maria disproves claims about escape and survival.
As Helen says: "The major reason I wrote my book was that after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening up of the archives made available a considerable amount of eye-witness testimony, either people directly involved in the murders or second or third-hand – testimony that until then had been buried.
"It was possible to pin down a bit more. I really concentrated in my book on getting together the story in particular of the last two weeks in that house."
Part of the problem has been the contrasting post-murder responses of those involved.
"Some of the killers were quite proud of what they had done and dined out on it for a while. They donated their guns to the Museum of Soviet History. Others did not want to talk about it. Some of the men who were instructed to take part in the final killings had refused. They did not want to kill the girls. They had become fond of them and could not see any reason for killing them.
"So you have some people who were extremely reluctant and disappeared and some people who told the officially-engineered view of what happened. There is conflicting evidence.
"I spent a lot of time with the forensic ballistic evidence talking through the logistics of the murder scene and just what would happen when you had that many people crammed into a room and a lot of generally-inexperienced murderers firing in all directions.
"It should have been a clean not-quite execution, but in fact it turned into a bloodbath."
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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