Word: czars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DEATH OF COMRADE NICHOLAS Romanov was nasty and brutish. In 1918 the last Czar of Russia was a prisoner of the Ural Regional Soviet in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg. With him were his German-born wife, the Czarina Alexandra; their four daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, and hemophiliac son, the Czarevich Alexis; the family doctor, Eugene Botkin; and three servants...
...Robert K. Massie points out in The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (Random House; 320 pages; $25), the imperial family's murder was only one horrifying moment in an unfinished saga. Shortly after officials in Moscow announced that the Czar had been shot (there was no immediate mention of his family), rumors arose that some or even all of the royals had managed to escape. In the 1920s, Europe and America were almost awash with fraudulent Romanov wannabes, several of them demanding access to a huge fortune that Nicholas had allegedly secreted abroad...
...most notorious of these claimants was "Anna Anderson" (subject of a 1956 film starring Ingrid Bergman), who persuaded a few surviving Romanovs, including the ex-Czar's first cousin Grand Duke Andrew, that she was Nicholas' youngest daughter Anastasia. A majority of the family were not convinced: their skepticism was vindicated last year when Anderson, who died in 1984, was exposed as an imposter by DNA testing...
...though some symbols of the czarist past, like the country's pre-Soviet flag, have been restored. Should the impossible happen, one plausible candidate for the throne is a retired U.S. Marine colonel named Paul R. Ilyinsky, the son of the late Grand Duke Dimitri, a cousin of the Czar's. Ilyinsky, however, prefers the job he already holds: mayor of Palm Beach, Florida...
Russia's last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family will be reburied next February in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg. The family was slain by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg in 1918, and their remains (minus those of son Alexei and daughter Anastasia) were exhumed in 1992; DNA tests later confirmed the imperial identities...