King George V has long stood accused of withdrawing an offer of asylum to Tsar Nicholas II, and abandoning him to his dreadful fate 100 years ago. It’s an alluring theory, but does it stand up to scrutiny? Could the British really have saved the Romanovs?
On the night of 16–17 July 1918, in the bare and dingy basement of a house in Ekaterinburg in the foothills of the Urals, the Bolsheviks brutally murdered the seven members of Russia’s last imperial family.
This ignominious end to the Romanovs, a dynasty that had ruled Russia for more than 300 years, was far from being a neat and expeditious execution. There was no trial, no due process of law, no chance of appeal, nor any mercy shown to the five innocent children of Russia’s former tsar and tsaritsa, Nicholas and Alexandra. Olga , Tatiana , Maria , Anastasia and Alexey were all brutally slaughtered with their parents in an act of revolutionary vengeance that is still chilling today.
Too often, people have stuck to the kneejerk response that it was all George V’s fault. After all, it’s widely believed that the British king offered his relatives asylum in Britain before pulling the plug on the offer. Even now people question: “Why did George V betray his Romanov cousins?”