Books, Arts & Manners: Up from the Pit

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, by Edvard Rad-zinsky (Doubleday, 462 pp., $25)

ON JULY 16, 1918, a picked murder squad shot down in cold blood Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsaritsa, their 14-year-old son and four daughters, as well as the family doctor and three retainers faithful to the end. Eleven in all. The scene of this crime was a cellar in a house belonging to the merchant Ipa tiev in Ekaterinburg, a large town in the Urals where the imperial family had been imprisoned. The corpses were then disposed of in a nearby forest. Two seem to have been incinerated and buried in a pit, and the remainder tipped down a shallow mineshaft.

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

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The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, by Edvard Rad-zinsky (Doubleday, 462 pp., $25)

ON JULY 16, 1918, a picked murder squad shot down in cold blood Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsaritsa, their 14-year-old son and four daughters, as well as the family doctor and three retainers faithful to the end. Eleven in all. The scene of this crime was a cellar in a house belonging to the merchant Ipa tiev in Ekaterinburg, a large town in the Urals where the imperial family had been imprisoned. The corpses were then disposed of in a nearby forest. Two seem to have been incinerated and buried in a pit, and the remainder tipped down a shallow mineshaft.