The Children of Nicholas II

It had been a horrible, violent, lawless death - carried out in secret, without a trial or without justice. It was a fate that was to befall millions of ordinary Russians in the years under Communist rule - a system of government which has still, inexplicably, managed to escape the historical condemnation it so richly deserves. The Soviet Union was a depraved and genocidal regime, which even on its best days bore all the qualities of a sociopath. It was devoid of morality or respect for human life. It was infinitely worse than any regime in Russian history. And although it had technically come to power in October 1917, it was the events in Yekaterinburg on 17th July 1918 that should arguably be seen as the Soviet Union's true birth-date. Everything that defined it and everything that it was prepared to resort to was contained in how it executed the Romanovs. As Trotsky so rightly pointed out, with his chilling disinterest in human suffering - it proved that there was no going back. It defined what was to come.