You're listening to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

Listener discretion advised.

On July 16, 1918, the Imperial Russian family was woken up by guards in the middle of the night.

The guards said that enemy combatants were approaching the house where they were being kept in a

Catherineburg and they needed to go down to the cellar for their own protection.

For 16 months, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children, had been in government

custody. First, they were prisoners in their palace at Tsarko's cello outside Petrograd,

the city formerly known as the now much-too-German sounding St. Petersburg.

Next, the family was brought to Tobolsk in Siberia. Finally, in the spring of 1918,

the family came to a Catherineburg to live in a residence given the ominous name,

the House of Special Purposes. The family assumed eventually they would be brought somewhere else,

somewhere farther away, more remote, even more decrepit and depressing than the place in a

Catherineburg, with it to windows all painted white so no one could see in or out.

And so, when they were woken up in the middle of the night, nobody panicked or feared,

they took their time getting dressed, lining the secret compartments of their clothes and pillowcases

with the jewels they had managed to keep hidden in case they were leaving the House of Special

Purposes for the last time. As it turns out, they were. The cellar was small and very dark.

The youngest child, their only son, Alexi, had to be carried down the stairs by his father,

Nicholas. As they all stood in the gloom, the former Sarina, Alexandra,

asked the guards why there were no chairs. And so two were brought, one for her,

and one for the sickly, young hemophilic air. When everyone was settled, the captain of the guards

cleared his throat and read the written proclamation from the leaders of the new Russian government,

...