This is Eli Lake and you're listening to the re-education.

The topic of today's show is the Russian soul and what it means for the war in Ukraine.

My guest is Fred Kagan, who is the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.

Earlier this month, the 104th anniversary of the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia.

On July 18, 1918, it was a grisly affair. The year before, Tsar Nicholas abdicated his throne during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917,

and he and his family were taken to a palace outside of Moscow.

By then, Russia was in the throes of a civil war,

pitted the red communist army against the white czarist army.

And as the white army approached the castle, where the czar and his family were held hostage,

the Bolsheviks met privately and sentenced the former czar and his entire family to death.

Only the Romanovs didn't know it.

When the local authorities escorted the family and a few of their loyal servants to a cellar room in the castle, they were told they were posing for a photograph. They were not photographed.

Instead, a group of 12 or 13 eager Bolshevik volunteers, heavily armed with pistols, rifles,

and bayonets, some of them drunk, some of them psychotic, entered the

cellar. An apperat read the sentence, and the Bolsheviks opened fire. There was a catch.

The youngest Romanov daughters had sown the family's diamonds into their clothes, creating

a kind of bulletproof vest, pointing the historian Simon Seabontofiore.

So the initial round of fire only wounded their limbs, but they did not die.

And eventually, they had to be stabbed after watching their family murdered in this awful,

gruesome cellar that turned into an

obitur. Here's Montefuri describing the gruesome aftermath.

After about half an hour, 20 minutes of this absolute mayhem, during which, by the way,

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