![guillotine II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/guillotine-II.jpg)
Is July the Cruelest Month?
A macabre coincidence of date links three historic tragedies, each very different, with the 17th of July.
The best known occurred in revolutionary Russia with the brutal murder of an entire family in the presence of each other, for base political ends. This was notoriously the fate of the Russian Romanov family: Czar Nicholas II, his wife the Empress Alexandra, their four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, their little son, Alexei, and four loyal retainers Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp and Ivan Kharitanov.
The eleven were shot and bayoneted by their Bolshevik captors, allegedly with the personal approval of Lenin, at 1 am on July 17, 1918, in the basement of the fortified Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, located east of the Ural Mountains and sometimes described as Russia’s gateway to Asia. The eleven bodies were stripped, despoiled and carried away for disposal in improvised grave sites.
The Bolshevik murders were for a…
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