People Being 'Horrified' by OTMAA's Murders?

[GDSophie]

I was watching 'The Russian Revolution' on Netflix last night and when they reached the part about the massacre Helen Rappaport said that no one expected that the children would be shot and cruelly murdered. I saw it being mentioned on here a lot but no one showed any evidence that the Russians and half of the world back in 1918 were not expecting Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei to be assassinated. I've saw newspaper clippings of when the news was released but it said nothing about anyone's reactions to the children being murdered.

Does anyone have anything-diary entries, articles, anything really-from after the world was informed of their murders that say that people were surprised and, from Helen's own words, horrified?

[TimM]

Well, the world was not informed.  Lenin and Co. didn't exactly step forward and say:  "Yeah, we killed them all."

Instead, only rumours trickled out.  That is why Anna Anderson and other fakes were able to get away with what they did for so long.  There was no direct proof that the I.F. were all dead at that point.

[Forum Admin]

Lenin and Co. all deliberately kept what happened to the IF murky and unclear. They didn't want the world to know what had happened and in fact encouraged all the claimants. While their immediate family "knew" what had happened, they had no evidence and many, like Marie Feodorovna kept hope that somebody might have survived.  There were no "official announcements" of the murders.

[GDSophie]

So how do we know that people were 'horrified' at the rumours of them being murdered when they themselves didn't know?

[Forum Admin]

Because they said so in letters.

[Forum Admin]

Marie Feodorovna wrote: "You know that my thoughts and prayers never leave you. I think of you day and night and sometimes feel so sick at heart that I believe I cannot bear it any longer. But God is merciful. He will give us strength for this terrible ordeal." Her daughter Olga Alexandrovna commented further on the matter, "Yet I am sure that deep in her heart my mother had steeled herself to accept the truth some years before her death.

[GDSophie]

I didn't mean the Romanovs themselves. I meant civilians in Russia and outside the country itself; supposedly they were also horrified that OTMAA had been murdered, even people who wanted the Tsar and his family dead in the first place.

[Lochlanach]

OTMAA were  mysterious , distant figures to most people I guess , even to Russians, especially OTMA  . The Tsars death would have been more meaningful to them.
On Rappaport : I have enjoyed her work but she is prone to romanticism and overstatement occasionally , especially on camera . There is a tendency to project our modern revulsion back to those times. After all , OTMAA are better known now, and sympathised with, more than ever before .

[AdamPR]

I'm curious if anybody knows the reaction of Woodrow Wilson? He didn't like the Russian Monarchy, but he also didn't like the Bolsheviks. Did he ever release a statement, or tell someone word of mouth what he thought?

[Sanochka]

In "Nicholas &  Alexandra," Robert Massey writes that one purported reaction among the peasants to news of the  Tsar's possible death at Yekaterinburg was, "Merciful Christ, could they have burned the whole family alive?" 

Since no formal announcement of the assassination was made, the world had only rumors to go on at first.  But even rumors of the assassination of the Tsar and his family would naturally have evoked shock, horror, and revulsion among some, and indifference among others in 1918, just as they would today.   However, the Imperial family were so removed from their subjects that little was known about them by anybody outside their immediate circle.  Given that, and the turmoil Russia and the world were embroiled in at the time, I suspect that any reaction to rumors of the assassination would have passed quickly as people's thoughts turned back to the matter of daily survival. 

[TimM]

And it was only later on that the true horror sank in.

[edubs31]

I have reproduced clippings from the New York Times from August, 1918 that devotes a large multi-page article w/family photographs to the death of the IF. I believe the front page headline read; “Apparent Death Of Tsar & His Family” or “Apparent Death of the Russian Imperial Family”, or something to that effect. I’ll have to dig it up for another look.

The generally tone of the article was one of restrained shock & outrage. Perhaps because the details were sketchy and because the Tsarist rule in Russia was viewed skeptically by many Americans (especially in New York).

[Focus0106]

I remember my British grandmother saying (before 1987) that she had been shocked by the murder of "all those Russian princesses" but I don't recall the context of the conversation or any other details. But her statement does indicate that there was some knowledge of the murders in Britain and that it was taken as fact.

[Kalafrana]

According to Princess Marie Louise, she was asked by George V some time in August 1918 to visit VMH to inform her of the murders, the newspapers having agreed to hold back the news until the following day. I imagine the major British newspapers would also have treated the matter with restrained shock.

We should bear in mind that the First World War was still raging, and the first instalment of the spanish Flu epidemic reached Britain in July 1917, so susceptibility to shock was probably more blunted than it would be now. To draw a parallel, over the last week or so, the news here has reported a succession of knife attacks on teenagers in North London. My reaction, and I suspect that of many others, is, 'Oh no, not another one,' and wondering what the causes are.

[LisaDavidson]

Both my grandmother and my mother said they thought Russians were savage people because they killed their own royal family. Grandma was born in 1906 and mom in 1936. Horrified didn't begin to describe their emotions about the children being killed.