Haunted Cosmos - The murder of Christendom (S8, E4)

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

A violent hatred for the old way of doing things, a revolutionary spirit that would not stay quiet, unfettered wretchedness in the souls of the Soviets, and a simple political calculation- all of it coalesced into the darkness of that fateful July night in 1918 when the Romanov family was murdered. Brian’s new book, The Longhouse: How Feminism Conquered the West and Made Us Miserable, is now available for pre-order! - Thelonghousebook.comNew Haunted Cosmos shirt available for a limited time! - Get it here!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes and monthly Livestreams, by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosThis episode is sponsored by: Chronicles of the Elohim is a line of premium action figures Visit https://kaleolegends.toys and pre-order your figures todayIndigo Sundries Soap Company - Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com and use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today. https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosTalk to Josh at Volenté Creative to get help you with your branding and marketing: https://volentecreative.com/ncpMemento is helping thousands of Christian men grow in their spiritual discipline - Go to Memento70.com/haunted and get 10% off an annual membership.White Tree Solutions can help your company’s data problems. Call William at 952-209-9638 or visit WTSData.comGray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Buy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!If you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at [e-mail] Support the show

This episode is brought to you by Caleo Legends. In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we talk about one of the darkest tales in recent history. A tale that stands as a watershed moment in the history of Western civilization. A moment when Satan certainly made his full court press against Christendom. But also, because of the nature of this tale, a tale that involves violence and bloodshed, probably not suitable to be listened to by women, children, or frank, anybody. So don't listen to this episode. Nicholas Romanov was woken by his trusted physician, Dr. Botkin, who told the former Tsar that he and the family must prepare themselves to leave as

quickly as possible. That forces loyal to him were marching towards Yatterenburg, and that chaos was sure to come should they delay. Nicholas roused himself before gently waking his wife, Alexandra. She was sick with a mild fever and so resisted at first, but upon realizing the situation, gravity, she wrote a wave of adrenaline which allowed her to dress herself and assist Dr. Botkin in waking the children. The house was sparsely lit by candles. The walls danced in the flickering light in competing shadows. Within minutes, the family and some trusted servants, including Botkin, were being shuffled down hallways ever deeper into the belly of their safe house. Ural Soviet guards pushed from behind. More of them stood waiting ahead on either side of an open door.

Nicholas was the last of his family to enter, carrying his only son, the very sick Alexei. Though emptied of all furniture, the room felt cramped with the seven Romanovs and their attendants and the handful of guards inside. It was darker there than anywhere else in the home, but some precious light allowed Nicholas to study his wife's and children's faces, and he offered them words of comfort. The only exit was the door they'd enter by, and it was now blocked. The adrenaline faded for Alexandra, and she requested a chair to wait in. Nicholas requested a second one for his son. These were brought in by silent soldiers, and the mother and child sat down. Alexandra was relieved.

She sat with a huff and held her husband's hand. Alexei was evidently nervous and descended very slowly into his seat, eyeing the rabble of guards the entire time, and they in turn watched him with blank expressions. Nicholas knelt in front of the boy and told him to focus, on his father that it would all be our right soon enough. The attendant stood adjacent to the family. Everyone was ordered to wait quietly while the truck was brought around for their escape. The guards filed out, but the truck had a different purpose. Some minutes passed before the door to the room

was open again. When it was, a line of secret police stepped inside and spread themselves from wall to wall. They held their rifles at low ready and studied the prey gathered in a tight knot before them. The old Tsar was not facing them. He had not so much as glanced at the newcomers. He was still just kneeling before his son, uninterrupted, talking and whispers to him and the rest of the family. Words again of encouragement and comfort, only the tenderest words for his people.

He reminded them it wasn't the first time such a hasty move was required. He assured them it wouldn't be the last, and he swore that in the end they would be together. The Bolshevik captain Yakovievsky stepped forward. He held out a telegram, cleared his throat, and announced the decree from the Ural Soviet. Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.

Nicholas's countenance fell in a shock of abject sorrow. His eyes stared a thousand yards through the most loved of all people before he turned, exclaiming, What? What? and Yorovsky repeated the order. The executioners raised their weapons. The mother and the girls and the boy cowered and whimpered and pleaded. Some tried to cross themselves in desperate supplications to God.

Nicholas, standing between his family and their doom, watched Yorovsky raise his pistol and fire a bullet deep into his chest. He sank to the ground and his face maintained its sadness. Sadness, but not fear. He perished instantly, the first of many. Thus did Russia's captain sink with the ship. The cries of the others were swallowed in a storm of downfire. Bullets flew all around.

The Bolsheviks shot wildly over the shoulders of their comrades, rifle and then pistol and then rifle again until all of the magazines were spent. The room filled with smoke and noise and flashes of light, and the air was hardly breathable. Sarina Alexandra was shot in the head. 21-year-old Tatiana ran for the closet behind the family and was shot in the leg. She cried out in pain, now unable to move.

Another of the secret police rushed in and told the men to use buttstocks and bayonets for the rest of the job because the shots were waking the neighbors all around. And so when the tempest calmed enough for the guards to see and hear, they found that all the Romanov children were somehow still alive. The sickly young prince Alexei was still frozen with terror in his chair. A guard approached him, and the boy sprang to life. And when the wild stabbing of the bayonet and the frustrated shots of the guard didn't prevail, again, somehow, Yorovsky shoved his comrade to the side and ended Alexei with a shot to the head.

The soldiers turned on the daughters then, four sisters precious in one another's eyes. And these girls endured jagged bayonets ripping through their persons with contempt. Their reinvigorated screams echoed through the room and out of the doors of the home, until all of Russia was witness to them. Each was finished by gunshots to torso and head. The killers laid the stretchers down and started dumping the bodies onto those. Then, young Anastasia, only 17, shouted a final appeal to God. She was somehow still alive.

She was met with a rush of stabbings and one more gunshot. Finally, she died. The last of the Romanov dynasty, which had endured for over 300 years in Russia. The bodies were taken to the forest. Each Romanov was stripped along with their murdered attendants. Their clothes were searched for valuables before being burned. Then the bodies were dumped into a mine shaft. In order to disfigure the corpses beyond recognition, sulfuric acid was poured down the shaft.

But it was at this moment that Yorovsky determined their grave to be too shallow. The family was thus pulled from that grave and taken to a copper mine elsewhere in the forest, but the truck carrying them there got stuck, and couldn't continue. So, Hearovsky ordered the Romanovs to be buried beneath the road where they were stuck, with the exception of Alexei and Maria. An even shallower grave than before was dug. More acid was poured in.

Rifle butts were used to brutalize the faces, which were then coated in quicklime to accelerate decomposition. Railroad ties were placed over the grave, which the truck then drove over numerous times to flatten it out, and then Alexei's body was burned along with Maria's a short distance away for reasons unknown, their charred bones were then pulverized and thrown into a small pit after the fire had died out. How did it come to this, you might be wondering? On these pivotal days, on the road of the destiny of Russia, it is our duty to do everything we can for the good of the people, to gather our strength and to unite our ranks to achieve a quick victory. For this reason, do we, Nicholas II, see that it is best to abdicate from the throne of Russia and to surrender

the supreme power. That is, an excerpt from Sarn Nicholas II's abdication address. By March of 1917, Russia was hemorrhaging. World War I had drained her natural and human resources to the point of crisis. A number of military failures and poor displays of organization called the competency of the government and her czar into question. Nicholas was already struggling to maintain any amount of popular support. The war was draining the last credit he had with his people. As a result, worker strikes and demonstrations begging for bread and income and an end to the war started in the streets of major cities. These continued for some days. All the while, as R. Nicholas stayed closer to Russia's western border and the warfront, having assumed overall

command of military operations two years prior. His intelligence told him that these were simple protests, nothing to be greatly concerned about, and he believed that. Then March 9th came, and the strikes had not ceased. On the contrary, more people joined the masses until entire factories were forced to close, and until the state police had genuine difficulty maintaining any level of order. Two days later, the first shots were fired into the crowd,

killing civilians. This show of force, though, effective for the moment, did not last very long. Instead, driven by pity for their fellow countrymen, the rank-and-file soldiers turned on their higher officials and joined the demonstrations in an act of mutiny. Nicholas finally started to understand the situation's gravity, but he remained slow to act with decisiveness. On March 12th, vast quantities of the Petrograd military garrison abandoned their posts.

Tens of thousands of soldiers strong, and this mass of angry men formed an uprising, and the tide rose until it consumed military arsenals, prisons, train depots, government buildings. The Petrograd Soviet was established in opposition to the Tsar, and the lower rung of the state parliament, called the Duma, started administering a parallel and provisional government in opposition to the Soviets. It was, at this point, a national collapse on the brink of revolution. And at this moment, Nicholas II finally decided to return, but it was too little too late.

His generals told him that any effort to restore order by force would either be futile or too destructive to justify. And they were virtually unanimous in their counsel. he had to abdicate the throne. Only by giving up his seat of power could he have any hope of avoiding civil war and preserving the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas listened and moved to abdicate

in favor of his son, Prince Alexei, but doctors could not recommend this. If his son took the throne, it would mean separation from his family, and that was something that neither Nicholas's heart nor Alexei's body could actually endure. Thus, on March 16th, 1917,

Nicholas II, abdicated for both himself and his son, in favor of his brother, Grand Duke, Mikhail Alexandrovich. In response, Mikhail declined to assume any power until he was elected by a representative body of the people. This shocked Nicholas and was another nail in the coffin of Russia as the world knew it. Years of bitterness between citizen and ruler had finally matured. While civil order was taken up by the provisional government, the Soviet party vied for more power and would go on to continue this fight for supremacy until it won or died. But then what became of Nicholas and his family?

The immediate plan, to be executed by the provisional government, was to place the Romanovs under a soft house arrest at the royal palace in Sarskoia, while officials worked to find political asylum for them in another European country. The top choice, due to family ties, was Britain. You see, King George V was the first cousin of Nicholas. The two had historically enjoyed good relations. and affection for one another. And at first, all the parties thought it would work smoothly

and would serve to avoid further civil unrest in Russia. But after a short period of consideration, the offer of asylum from Britain was withdrawn. This occurred for a number of political reasons, some important and some foolish, but the tragedy does not distinguish. With Britain off the table and precious few other countries even willing to entertain the idea of asylum,

the provisional government continued the house arrest until a longer-term solution could be found. Thus, the family was transferred to the remote village of Tawelsk in Siberia. The civil unrest there was minimal, and given its location, an assassination attempt on the royal family was pretty unlikely. During this period, the Romanovs enjoyed a certain type of tranquility. They stayed in the former governor's mansion, which, despite not being a Petersburg palace, was still quite comfortable. They retained a number of attendants who assisted them in maintaining some semblance of normalcy for the children, things like education and family meals, for example, looked remarkably similar to former times.

Since Nicholas was no longer burdened by the crown, he was able to connect with his wife and children at a level of the war had made impossible. He cut wood with his son Alexei and he read stories to the family at breakfast time. They attended church services together. They even entertained friends on occasion. To be sure, freedoms and contact with the outside world was limited, but it was not entirely cut off, at least not yet. Then, however, the autumn of 1917 came, and with it came the true rise of the Bolsheviks. The Dumas provisional government was overthrown, the Soviets proved far less reasonable and accommodating towards the Romanov's, of course, and the family knew that they could not expect any sort of clemency. Over time,

this expectation of theirs proved correct. The guards became hostile. Time outside the mansion, for church services and recreation dwindled to zero, and the family was forbidden from attempting such things. Their food and monetary allowances were also greatly restricted. To the Bolsheviks, Nicholas and the Romanobs represented the most ornate political pillar of the past that remained to be thrown down. They also worried that the Romanovs might become heroes and rallying points for the growing bands of counter-revolutionaries

springing up across the country. And as these concerns became more pronounced and civil war seemed more likely, the fateful decision was made to move the family to the more Soviet loyalist city of Akaternberg. There, they would endure a genuinely antagonistic house arrest in a much smaller building. The family stayed hopeful, but Nicholas could read the Times. Akaterinberg was ruled by the increasingly radical Ural Soviet, which was increasingly convinced that the family should be actually. executed. In April of 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra, their daughter Maria, and certain attendants

left Tobolsk to make their home in Echranburg, while Alexei had fallen ill and couldn't travel. So he was left in Tobolsk with his other sisters and the rest of the attendants who would join his parents later. It was over a month before everyone was reunited again, and when they were, the antagonism picked up fast. The hostility of those tasked with their safekeeping was evident. The guards became the captors. It started with the name of their new quarters, a merchant's estate, the Ural Soviet started to call the House of Special Purpose. Attendants and family members alike were openly mistreated.

Nearly every creature comfort was withheld from both parents and children. Their money was openly pilfered during routine searches by their captors. A 13-foot-high palisade blocked the estate from public view. no visitors were admitted, no attendance at church services was allowed. The windows and the family bedroom was painted over and sealed shut, and the family was required to ask permission before leaving their rooms for any reason, even to use the bathroom. Alexei's doctor was not even allowed to treat the boy anymore,

and the children were also subjected to intimidation and harassment. For his part, the guards handled Alexei very rough constantly, every time he was being moved, and they spoke to him in derogatory terms, and the daughters were, of course, subjected to verbal sexual harassment, at least by multiple guards, along with crude and vulgar words and drawings painted on the walls of their bathroom. House of special purpose indeed. In less than three months after their arrival in Akatrenburg, the counter-revolutionary Czechoslovak Legion was marching toward the city along the Trans-Siberian Railway,

which they sought to control. As they marched, they constantly fought in small conflicts with the Soviets. The Ural Soviet Bolsheviks, believing the Legion's true intention to be the rescue of the royal family, hastily planned the family's execution and subsequent burial, the details of which you have already heard. And that is how things reached the point of murder. A violent hatred for the old way of doing things. A revolutionary spirit that would not stay quiet, unfettered wretchedness in the souls of the Bolsheviks. and a simple political calculation.

All of it coalesced into the darkness of that July night. But what else contributed to it all? Surely the royal family could have done something more to help themselves in their country, right? What about the strange character known as Rasputin? And what about the rumors that the Romanov murders were actually a ritual killing? A sacrifice meant to appease some false God?

These are all questions we intend to answer in this very special and haunting. episode of Haunted Cosmos, and we're glad that you're here. Kaleo Legends debut series, Chronicles of the Elohim, explores the divine beings referenced in scripture and mythology, framing their story within a biblical worldview. They're asking big questions. If the gods are real and created by the one true God, what were their roles before their rebellion? What were the consequences of that rebellion? And what part does humanity play in the divine counsel? Chronicles of the Elohim is a line of premium action figures

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Parenthoodleaders. LLC. A registered advisor with the U.S. A registered advisor with the U.S. Security Exchange. Does your outdated website give your visitors sleep paralysis? What? Is that a thing? Are you haunted by that logo your uncle's pet werewolf made? Brian, what are you talking about?

If you're ready to level up your brand and website, you need to talk to Josh. at Valenti Creative. What's up, guys? Josh, my guy! What the heck? How did you just appear? Head to valentecreative.com slash NCP to talk with Josh

about your brand and website. Oh, oh, this is an ad that we're doing right now? Wait, wait, how did he teleport into this room? Ben, I wish I could tell you, but this is an ad. You have to go to valentecreative.com slash NCP and reach out today. Do you want a six-pack? No, I don't mean abs and I don't mean beer.

Now, I'm talking about the six-pack you really want. A six-pack of masculine-smelling bars of soap from Indigo-Sundry soap company. And if you're buying masculine soap, then we all know your beard need some grooming too. And that's why they sell a beard care bundle with beard oil, balm, and mustache wax. Get the soap and the beard bundle at Indigo sundry soap.com and subscribe for 10% off your order. In 2023, Indigo Sundries became one of our sponsors. At the time, their business was little more than a side hobby generating a couple hundred a month. But because of their partnership with us and because all of you chose to support them,

they've grown enough to make it their full-time livelihood. This is what happens when Christians support Christians. Our communities are strengthened and faithful businesses thrive. So if you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at Advertising at newchristendompress.com. Welcome back to this episode of haunted cosmos. A historic moment, episode 4, of season eight because we're about to do something unprecedented and take a mid-season break and go into another round of the graveyard shift. But before we do, we wanted to visit the literal graveyard and talk about a story that I truly regret deciding to talk about because it's just

horrible. But first, I'd like to welcome really the main event, Ben Garrett. Hey, here's the deal. Yeah. What is it? Here's the thing. Really sad story. Is this going to be a place as you shouldn't go situation? No. I don't want it to be.

Really sad story. I know that I am not alone in saying that any time the topic of Russia comes up at all, one song and one song only gets stuck in my head. And it's Bonnie M.'s Rasputin. They pronounce it weird in the song. But I remember all the dance moves to the Just Dance. Dance. Have you guys seen the meme where the kid is like dancing on the DDR or whatever?

And it's like me in 2009 while my parents were like going through a horrible divorce and losing their house in the housing crisis. This was Ben Garrett. Well, there were highs to that moment. Baskin Robbins comes out with the birthday cake flavor. That was that time period. That was around that time period. And we needed it.

We needed it. What else happened? Just Dance was getting popular. DDR was still popular. And you were getting good at it. Yeah, I mean, I remember my homecoming. I remember my freshman homecoming. Yeah.

After party, me and like four of my friends went back to my friend's basement, played Just Dance. So what song is this? I was home. I was asleep by a tight 1030. Yeah, I mean, that's late. It's the one that's like, they lived a certain man in Russia long ago.

And then the ladies come in, He was big and strong, and his eyes are flaming glow. And then the guy, most people looked at him with terror and with fear. But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely. I remember all the dance moves. I want. Ra, Ra, Rasputi. At Benjamin Khan's wedding, it played.

And I went out there and almost blew my ACL. I want. Oh, I do remember that. Because I was doing the costume dance. Yeah, I remember that. I want, here's what I want. I want Evanescence or whoever is editing this video, to cut.

Ben's saying horrible, depressing things from the cold open and then him singing that. And then over the screen overlay the words, somehow this was the same episode. Terrible. Also, that was a real French nun situation

in terms of order of events. We are going to talk about good old Gregory Rasputin. And when I say good old, I mean, I... Really a bad person. So bad. Yeah.

Having said that, look, I know. All right. There's no having said that. Just can you hear me out? Yeah. Like, what do we know? How do we know what we know about him?

From like widespread reports. They say, some say that history is written by the victors. Okay. All I'm saying is maybe he was a little misunderstood. I'm actually kidding. Resputin was a bad guy. You'll hear about it short. He was a bad guy.

You know who else was a bad guy? every Bolshevik that's ever existed. Seriously, they are... Bolsheviks, communists are not people. They have... Yeah, they made themselves very subhuman. Yes. So here's what I would like to do.

Yeah. Because we went through the narrative of the killings. Mm-hmm. Really sad. There's some... Yeah, horrible. There's some tidbits that are, I think, fascinating. There's also just like the larger historical framing

that I think will let us get into the Rasputin talk. Yeah. First thing I want to say as a qualifier is the dates that we give are probably going to be different from what you see in Wikipedia because at the time, the Russians were still using the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian calendar. Classic mistake. I'm a Gregorian guy. Actually, Pope Gregory is one of my favorite historical figures. He said this many times for various reasons. He's not making it up. He stood at the cusp of antiquity and the medieval. Like, he was an interesting guy. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. So we say, people are going to look back on you similarly. He stood at the cusp of what, of modernism and AI singularity.

No, no, no, no, no, no. And when we take over the world. Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes. The ride, the new Christmas. There's going to be a future Hanna Cosmos episode talking about you. And someone's going to say he was misunderstood. It's like, so obviously, yeah, the co-host is going to say, oh, yeah, Ben Garrett, obviously a horrible guy. And then someone would be like, no, he was misunderstood.

I think he was a little misunderstood. And then everyone will laugh at him. Anyway, welcome to Hana Cosmos. My name is Ben Garrett. And this is my co-host, Brian Silvay. It's good to be here. And we're using the Gregorian calendar. We're using the Gregorian calendar.

Now, what do you know about, you obviously look a lot like Star Nicholas II? I actually get this all the time. Put it up. What do you know about Sir Nicholas II? Is he one of your favorite Russian Tsars? Is he not? Why?

Like, what's your familiarity with the story? Apart from the Disney animated movie, there was a lot, it is tough historically because you have the issue of history being written by the victors. However, a lot of the rule in Russia, I do think under the Tsars

had devolved into bureaucratic incompetency and a lot of failures of leadership. So there's like, on the one hand, Sarned Nicholas II, and legitimate critiques of the Tsars, Yeah. In terms of their governance. And then there's another issue, which is like the family itself, the children,

just a real tragedy that is painful to make eye contact with, quite frankly. Did not enjoy listening to that cold open as you made your way through it with a clean read. Because I couldn't read it. No, with a clean read. No, too. They don't know. The editing, shout out Gavin. The editing is good.

I can't see. It's true. He has a prescription. for both contacts and glasses. Where's neither? So anyway, it's self-inflicted. The read took a while. Yeah, no, no, but it was horrible.

So there are real historical critiques to be made of the Tsars, but then there's even the larger issue of monarchy versus these scientific communism, Bolshevism, Marxism, a lot of the evils of the 20th century and really like the long 20th century, some of which tails into the 19th century, and then even continues into the 21st, a lot of some of the same issues.

And on that front, unequivocally, the things that toppled monarchy and replaced them infinitely worse. Oh, yeah. Like take all of the, and people talk about like almost comic incompetency with some of the czars and the leadership there. However, what replaced it,

Bolshevism and communism, Soviet Union, absolutely horrible. We forget, we learn about, in school, you read about it. Like, I'm almost not joking when I say the Bolsheviks and the communists were not people. Like the famous story of the soldier, you know, someone asked him like, you know,

you killed a lot of people in this war. You'd be like, no, I never killed any people. I only killed communists. Yeah. But like, there's a reason that that sentiment existed. These are unspeakably evil people. They dehumanized themselves to the point of bestiality. I mean, they were like,

they were lighting people on fire. They were just in a state-sanctioned level. They executed hundreds of thousands of people, just state-sanction executions. They directly murdered millions of people. And then through the totally predictable results of their policies killed another many millions of people. It caused unspeakable suffering,

absolutely opposed Christianity, and, um, violently tortured and murdered millions and hundreds of thousands of Christians. These were just some of the worst people who have ever lived in the history of mankind, the most satanic, the most demonic. And the fact that they could bash in the faces of little children and stab and shoot them to death is just like the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. So this, there is so much some people say, why would you do this episode?

There's an incredible historic moment happening in the murders. but also it's typical. It is like a type of what happened to the West. We killed the king and regicide turned out to be deicide. They tried to kill God. And the unspeakable acts of evil they did in killing the Tsar and his family was just a little typological foretaste of what they would do to this great people, the Russians.

and there are other people groups, obviously, around the Ukrainians, Czechoslovakia, like there are many, many people groups who were horribly, horribly, genocided, murdered, relocated, plundered, tortured. So there's almost not enough, there is no malediction

in the languages of elves and ser men for what they did for the communists. We shall have peace. We shall have peace. Yes. When you hang from a gibbet for the, sport of your own crows. When you answer for the blood of the men.

May hewed hammer before the gate. Yeah, so to give you some more idea of how inhuman these people were, soon after the Bolsheviks and the Soviet regime took power, they erected a statue to Judas Ascariat. They routinely, and I mean actually systematically murdered the Orthodox priest, and the leaders of the Orthodox Church, they routinely and systematically raped and otherwise violated the monks

and the female, you know, the nuns. The nuns. Yeah, thank you for that word. The nuns. And would keep them alive so that they had to live with that. And at a time, it really was like Russia was kind of seen as this almost bastion of the Old West in a way. Not entirely. They weren't alone.

but theirs was a special autocracy where the czar held kind of the ceremonial like pontifax Maximus at least cultural title he wasn't you know sara nicholas the second was not actually the leader of the church but he was a symbol of christendom you know and European Russia and killing him was certainly a yeah like oh we're going to kill god by killing the king and we're not going to stop there. We're going to kill the whole family as well. And we're going to take all of our wrath at the old ways out on this one family. And then from there, I mean, you have, yeah, literally tens of millions dead of their own people, predominantly Christian, in the Soviet Union. Absolutely awful. Now, when you start to ask like, well, okay, so yeah, how did it get there? Like Brian said,

there's real critiques that can be made of the Tsars and they're governing. You even see, this in Dostoevsky's work and in Tolstoy's work, there's this unrest that people feel with the aristocracy and then with the autocracy of the Tsars in particular. But there's still that respect there. There's still an overwhelming sense of love there. Dostoyevsky is actually an interesting case study because he got in with a pretty bad crowd and was literally basing the firing squad. Yeah, like about to be shot. He was about to be shot for opposing the crown. What a crazy moment. And literally, the guns are raised to him and his compatriots. And an order comes in from the Tsar and says, no, you know what?

Send him to forced labor instead. He goes to forced labor. He does his military service, his required service, comes out, becomes a Russian literary hero. And actually is the personal tutor of the Tsar's children. Yeah. So anyway, Dostoevsky's a cool guy. Crazy story. But Sarned Nicholas II, he really was struggling to make.

any popularity with conservatives and with the kind of Bolshevik movement that was happening. You know, he had things like the loss of the Russo-Japanese War that happened right before World War I. And he was so confident that they were just going to dominate the Japanese. And he had bad intel, but he also didn't pay attention to what his own eyes were telling him. And then you had the 1905 situation where there was Bloody Sunday, there was a workers protest that allegedly was very peaceful, but none of the other than that, the soldiers killed like 92 of the protesters across St. Petersburg, which I think back then was still Petrograd. And then you had the revolution of 1905, which saw the institution of that

elected parliament house called the Duma. And the Duma, as you heard in the cold open, actually played an important role in transitioning between the monarchy and the Soviet regime. Because they tried to set up the provisional government that would actually maintain a monarch, but it would be an elected monarch. And they were the ones who were trying to help their Ominovs not die. They were trying to find political asylum for them. They were moving them around house arrest. But at that time, the house arrest was really not that bad. It was more so for their own safety than it was for their punishment. But then, of course, the provisional government failed, the Duma failed, and you had the Soviets take over. So it really was like a fuming time

not only in Russia but in all of Europe. And part of why the asylum failed for Britain was because, like, King George V wanted to help his cousin. He wanted the Romanobs to come and find asylum in Britain. He really wanted that. The reason that he couldn't do it was because no one else in the government would let it happen because of what it would say in, like,

basically fueling the populist uprisings that were happening there as well. It was politics. Yeah, it was politics. And so he wasn't able to help his cousin. And, you know, Finland was interested and some other. But ultimately, it was like, it was Britain or bust. And Britain couldn't do it because of stupid political reasons. And what's interesting, I found this out in my research for this show.

Do you want to know the first country to recognize the validity of the provisional government after Nicholas's abdication? Wait. First country? The first country to formally recognize. the legitimacy of the provisional government in Russia. Did you know the year? It would have been, well, he abdicated in 1917.

So it would have been in 1917. I'm guessing either America or Germany. It was America. Okay. The United States was the first one. And that is a bummer, just to be honest. I was, I thought it was America, but I was like Germany just because of like the complete opposite world.

Yeah. Like, because it be, you signal that it was going to be surprising. Yeah. No, it's... So, no, yeah, America. At the end of the day, it's important that we remember this story because it's our story.

It's the story of the West. It's one of the stories that has made the West what it is today. And it's one of the stories that if we don't properly understand the evil that it represents with communism and the Soviet kind of ideal.

And then also, the failure of nerve to own mistakes that happen. and to properly respond to incompetencies and dropped balls that led up to it, then even if we do kind of get the West back and get this Christian ideal reestablished in the West, you run the risk of just repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And giving that materialistic, that godless to the degree that it is demonic type of thought that just keeps coming back over it over and over again.

Surrounding this story, there's also a strange swirl. of esoteric religious figures, as well as conspiracy theories, and even supernatural ghost stories. Yeah. And things like that. Whenever you have such a dark, bloody, historically momentous occasion like this,

these kinds of things pop up. But I think it will be interesting to discuss some of these. I mean, there are angles of people have argued that there was a Kabbalistic Jewish element. as well, where you have in early, in Bolshevism, disproportionate participation of many Jews, prominent Jews within Bolshevism and communism and all, you know, Marxism, Leninism.

And so there's obviously highly, highly controversial. Yeah. Debate and arguments between, you know, you're exactly the camps that you would think about whether this was legitimate. I have a hair in my mouth. Well, you're saying that just as a. I'm pulling this beard hair out of my mouth. Kind of another note.

Part of why the Jewish element is legitimately important to analyze in this story is because there was a growing movement in Russia in the years before World War I of, we need to get the Jews out of Russia. There was actually like legitimate political movements that were running on platforms of we need to get them out of Russia. Now, of course, historians look back and say, oh, it's anti-Semitism. Look at how these brutes, you know. And Nicholas II found himself enmeshed in that, where he would like publicly say, like, we shouldn't go that far.

We can't go that far. But there were reports of him privately being really on board with the demonstration of the parties vying for the expulsion of the Jews. And so that can kind of help explain, like assuming it's true. that can kind of help explain why the Bolsheviks in particular really hated the Romanovs and all that they represented. There was, it wasn't just political calculation for them. There was vengeance and a desire to vindicate themselves.

And it's really no mistake. You can see it in both, and they are, they genuinely are historically enmesh, but you can see the incentive structure. Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome kind of thing for Jewish, peoples who are a stateless people, especially this time. This is pre, you know, after World War II, the Zionist dream is fulfilled,

and you get the state of Israel, the modern nation state of Israel. But for centuries and centuries before this, the Jewish people are stateless people. They establish middlemen cultures, things like that. But they are genuinely incentivized as a people. Think of them as like a political identity block even, removing the religious element for a second. We'll get there. they are incentivized to erode a strong Christian identity, self-identity of a nation,

especially to the extent that that Christian identity is enmeshed with the governance of that nation. So for the Jewish people, Russia, a very strongly Christian Russia is one of the worst case types of situations. They're going to benefit much more from a multicultural and religiously plural. or quote unquote secular type of governance and leadership. So you can see why that would be ideal. There is also a whole,

probably won't get into in this episode. E. Michael Jones writes a book on the revolutionary spirit of the Jewish peoples. And this is just, again, like I know this is really controversial guys. And a lot of this, some of you probably, you're like, dang it, I don't want to hear about the Jews. Like your hands are sweating. You're like, what are they going to say?

Jews. palms are sweaty, there's vomit on his sweater already. My knees are weak. He's nervous, but on the surface, he looks calm and ready to talk about the Jews again. No, so E. Michael Jones, he has like three-volume work. You get on the revolutionary spirit that is often present in Jewish history on down to the present day.

And it's, this is so historically obvious that even, you know, you get a guy like, what's his name? Dennis Prager, who is like a kind of a normie Republican conservative influencer type of guy. Who is himself Jewish, paraphrasing a quote, he notes just as a historical fact that if you look at every ism

like other than Nazism, every is, for obvious reasons, if you look at every ism other than Nazism, like feminism, communism, all of these isms that have propagated through the 20th century, especially.

You find disproportionately and influential in the leadership, Jews. Even the civil rights movement in the United States of America, the people writing speeches for Martin Luther King Jr. were Jewish lawyers, the people writing the legislation for the Civil Rights Act. And Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that flooded the workplace with women

and made, you know, all the race, sex, all these things have protected class for hiring, title not. Like, they were Jewish lawyers that were involved in this. You go all the way back to the French Revolution and through Marxism and Leninism and on, and then even all the way to the modern day, where now there's actually, because of Zionism,

there's a strong strain within the left, liberals, like the Democrats that are increasingly like anti-Zionist. And what's funny is it's led to many liberal Jews, and the Jewish Jews in America are very liberal people group. They will object and say, You can't kick Jews out of liberalism. We built liberalism. And they'll go through and like, and they'll say,

and they will agree with basically Dennis Prager's assessment. So I know, guys, that this is controversial, but just as a straightforward historical fact, there's a lot mixed up with the Jewish involvement in Bolshevism and communism. And so you could see why there would come up, you know, that there would develop, even if it's not true,

which historically, think it's quite tenuous. A lot of the, like, that the Romanov killing was a ritualistic, Kabbalistic ceremony. I don't think we have great evidence of that. However, you could see why that kind of story would develop. And then the other group that's very much, and they are intermeshed, but communism is not like just Jewish, and neither is Bolshevism. There's lots of people who are non-Jews who are involved in them. But communism and Marxism, Leninism, have a very strong incentive also to get rid of what? Christinctly, Christian, especially nationalist.

Christian governance mixed together, any kind of Christian self-identity, because Christianity makes universalizing claims upon a people. It gives them a totalizing identity. It tells them what right and wrong is. It tells them the purpose of the state, which is not its own basically deification, but it's subservience to God and a minister of God's justice. So you see why they also would be very much incentivized. You're not going to get scientific communism

unless you can not just subjugate, but eradicate Christian governance, especially. That's the key word. The Christian king. Is the eradication. You have to destroy it. Yeah, it can't be, the foundation can't remain. So one of the reasons to do something like this on haunted cosmos

is that if you want to talk about, there is like the demonic on the everyday or the individual level. Where you're talking about possession and we cover a lot of that stuff regularly. But when you talk about the prince of the power of the air, when you talk about not wrestling with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities in the heavenly places,

they have a geopolitical strategy. Yeah. Satan has a geopolitical strategy. And communism is one of its purest expressions ever. Now let me ask you something. I was going to say some other stuff, but I can see the comments now. We did an episode last season about the death of the old gods, you know, Christus Victor, the nation is no longer being deceived, et cetera.

I know some post-millials and we're post-millennial, which is they say now is the time. We're living in the time when Satan has been let loose. The little season. Yeah, the little season to deceive the nations once more. And actually this story and all of the consequences of the world wars and all this stuff is proof of that. And that's what they're point to. And I think, because I agree with everything you said, you're looking at the architectonics of the world being or interacting with spiritual darkness and it's having an effect on the everyday life. And you can see it in history.

But how do we reckon that with the belief if you still, if you believe this, that Satan is still bound and that the nations are not being deceived in that same. way right now. Yeah, and in the argument, the general shape of the argument, eschatologically, is that you have omelennialism and post-millennialism. And some forms of post-millennialism like overlap with on-millianism in terms of their timeline where they would see the entire period from the enthronement of Christ, the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, enthronement of Christ through his second coming as the millennium. And then some other versions of post-millennial SMC, a distinct beginning in history after that at some point to the millennium, often with Christendom or the Middle Ages or something like that. But that the relevant

passage in Revelation describes the binding of Satan, specifically with respect to his ability to deceive the nations. That's the thing that he cannot do in the same way that he was before. And then he, you know, he's cast out, he's, but then there will come a time in the future after that point, after that thousand years, well, he will be loosed and he will get essentially, gather a final rebellion and then God will just absolutely mock. Yeah. I mean, second advent. Curb stomp him.

Armageddon. He's done. And then the end comes. He's thrown into hell, the lake of fire, along with, you know, Sheel and it gets just basically total, total Christ victory, total Christian victory. Realized. Like, formally realized, eternal state. Okay.

So this theory is that most people would identify as Christendom as the thousand year period, especially historic pre-millennial or post-millennialists. Who would say, you know, basically that there was at some point of beginning and then for a thousand years, the nations had been converted and like this huge swath of the world had come to Christ and the zenith of Christian civilization. But then Satan was released again. And then you start to see things like the Enlightenment, French Revolution,

culminating in communism and all the things we've seen in the 20th century, apostasy, many falling away. World War I, World War II, Christendom killing itself. Chris and Intr, internist signed war in Christendom. And then, so this views that we're in Satan's little season. Yeah. And I think when you're reading eschatology, there's probabilities, not certainties. And so maybe.

Yeah. I think I'm not of the type where my eschatological particulars. Like I have high confidence in certain things. And then I have medium confidence, lower confidence. Yeah. I agree and believe that Satan will be loosed and that there will be a time of rebellion like that that is yet future. I believe that is yet to come. I'm not, I don't necessarily, I actually would lean towards we're not in Satan's little season and that there's much more history to unfold and that we have quite a, quite a ways to go still in history.

Partly because, you know, I'm basically the same way. I'm like, yeah, maybe. I'm not one to know. What I'm really confident on is the actual timeline of post-millennialism in its basic form, which is the gospel is successful as Christ has this thousand-year reign from the throne of heaven on the earth. And there will be a time where Satan is released. And the second advent will occur after that, not before. And then we will all be called up.

The world was remade and all this good stuff. But yeah, then when he gets to the particulars, I'm like, yeah, I am not the one to know. know and it's probably one of those things that you can only know ex post facto. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with that. And I also think it's worth noting that you look around the world today and certainly not the way that you'd want it to be, largely speaking, especially in the West. But remember that, like, man is pretty good at sitting on his own, too.

And the old gods that Christ judged, the influence that they have dies hard. And it doesn't mean that there's now like no spiritual darkness that exists in the world. It just means that Satan is not allowed to deceive the nations or not able to deceive the nations in the same way as he was. And so it's important to keep these things in mind. We're not contradicting ourselves when we allude to, you know, spiritual forces at play and how we're still wrestling against powers and principles. Because we are. That's what Paul says. And we fully, fully affirm that.

And that's not contradicting. No. You know, anything that we would say in terms of Christus Victor. And well, because Christ, what Christ is done and what God has done in Christ is he's taken away the weapons that he had. He's taken away the guilt of Pete. Like we, there is something that Satan, he's an accuser. That's formally his title. He's an accuser.

In Christ, his accusations fall flat. Because Christ has taken our reproach. He's taken our shame. He became a record of debt. With its legal demands, Colossians teaches us. And so it's removed from, from, his people. I would still see that there are many swabs of earth that have yet to be converted. It never were. So when I look at the promises that make me post-millennial, like in Psalm 22 and Psalm

17 and in Psalm 110 in the book of Isaiah. Basically Isaiah chapters 60 on. Yeah. In the parables of the kingdom, in a lot of these things, I would say there's a lot of work to be done. I don't think India has been converted. I don't think Africa. has been converted. Japan. I don't think Japan's been converted. I think there's a lot. And people can, I think it's a legitimate debate that could be had.

However, we are still in a world, the binding of Satan with respect to his ability to deceive the nations means that like after the cross, there's an explosion of nations and people's flooding into the kingdom of God with the veil being torn, the veil, the scales being removed from their eyes. They're gods being trampled down. and Christ progressively subduing the world, but it's like this. Yeah.

And there's also real consequences to apostasy and sin, and we will have nations that were converted in this timeline that then apostatize or succumb to internal slash external opposition. Even back to the Jewish thing. Why not? I forgot to finish explaining it. Like E. Michael Jones' theory or how he explains it, is that essentially the Jewish peoples,

having rejected Christ and embracing Barabbas, the zealot. Barabbas being like a revolutionary, a political revolutionary, political messianic movement, where they're like, we are going to violently overthrow Roman rule, and that is our messianic movement. And some of the disciples asked Christ, when are you going to usher in the case? This was a common expectation,

misunderstanding of the purpose of the Messiah's first coming what he was going to do and how he was going to conquer. It wasn't that he wasn't going to conquer Rome, but it was how. Yeah. Right. It was a lot more than that. It was bigger.

So they embraced Barabbas and rejected Christ. And in doing so, in rejecting their God, they became a permanently stateless, godless, and revolutionary people. So they had no place because God swiftly judged Israel in Jerusalem in 1780. under Titus and removed them from their land. Almost all of them were either enslaved or killed in that period of time. And then they're scattered. Yeah.

Right. And then they exist as this stateless people, but also because they are attempting to worship God, God, but while literally rejecting God having murdered God and never repenting for that, they are on their partial hardening. They are legitimately a particularly godless people in the sense that they had this great light of revelation. There's a reason Jesus said, woe to you, Corrason, and woe to you, Bessata. If the work's done and you have been done in Sodom, they would have repented. So your judgment will be worse.

It'll be better on the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah. The principle is that the greater light of revelation, you have increases your responsibility. And it also, when you harden your heart against it, it leads to insane, devastating downfall. you're just broken and you're crushed under the cornerstone. And so there's this, this permanent just, they can have no peace as a people because they, you have to go back to the place where you veered off the road. It was in literally crucifying the Messiah. Now the Romans, the Gentiles participated, all our sin participated in the crucifixion of Christ. But there's a particular role that his own kinsman, his brothers, according to the flesh, played in that. And so that you could,

I mean, again, like you could read E. Michael Jones. Yeah. Multi-volume work on this subject. But many do draw a through line as they come through even the history of the Jewish people's through the Christendom and through the Middle Ages and all the way through the French Revolution and then into Marxism and communism. And they say, look, still the same things going on. And so it's no surprise that you would end up with some of these theories that like, oh,

it was a Kabbalistic, which is like a mystic form of Judaism. if you don't know that. Yeah, it's like a denomination of Judaism. You can think about it that way. That's a really simplistic way to think about it. Yeah, but a mystical version of Judaism. And so there is, and all that to say, a lot of this, the people involved in this,

they weren't all religiously Jewish. That's not even the point. It's not even the point. They would identify, I am a part of the Jewish people. Yeah. So this is one of those, historical moments where like there is a lot that's under debate. But what's clear, if you zoom out and you say,

maybe you agree or disagree with a lot of what I just said, what we can all agree on and we should agree on is that despite any gas and incompetencies among the Tsars and the Russian monarchy and monarchy in general, leading to some of the unrest, what you are certainly looking at in the murder of the Tsar and more broadly, the destruction of Christendom and the dissolution of all the monarchies

and the replacement with modern versions of scientific... Naturalism, yeah, positivism. Is demonic. Yeah. Is fundamentally satanic. It's not just a, oh, it's a morally permissible alternative form of government.

It is a satanic attack upon Christ in his people. And you can see this in really like the death. of Nicholas II, his family, the fall of the Tsars in Russia, being kind of this first major world domino to fall that led to the liberal spirit that ended colonialism, that ended all of these things. I mean, like, it's no coincidence that you can draw a pretty clear line ideologically from the death of the Romanoff family to Queen Elizabeth giving the colonies back. Yeah. And was that good or bad for the colony?

It was bad. Bad. It was bad. And it's important that we see that and how this plays a role in that because it does. I mean, this was a groundbreaking thing that occurred. And it left Europe shaking. Yeah, it absolutely left Europe shaking. It was a vacuum that was filled with satanic, demonic, evil ideologies that made

universalizing and totalizing demands upon humanity. but that so they're which god is the one who's able to who's allowed to do that right and they did not do it in the name of god but in the name of their false god it's in the name of satan fundamentally even though many of them were oh we're just atheists and we're whatever yeah but atheism is demonic and satanic so you you look at this assault and it's like it couldn't be clearer what is happening on the meta level in in these things absolutely clear this is an assault on the Christian faith this is assault on Christian peoples, which is why the world, like, who are the victims of the world wars? Christians.

Yeah, Christians. Overwhelmingly Christians. Even if, even in the Nazi concentration camps, the majority of people, there are Christians. The majority of those listed in Auschwitz, it was like 55% are Christians, evangelical Christians. Various Christians. So it was Christians led to the precipice politically killing one another. It was scientific Marxism. and Leninism and scientific communism,

literally liquidating and killing millions of Christians and killing the system of Christian governance and all vestiges of the Christian faith from the Russian peoples, who are a people, and then establishing this Soviet Union of these peoples and in giving them a new God in atheism. It was an all out of salt on the Christian. West and Christendom. It was overtly satanic.

One of the, it should be no surprise in this next story that one of the figures you see that leads to the Tsar being so despised, turns out he was a heretic. Yeah, like by the way, I was obviously, I'm joking when I say Rasputin's misunderstood. I don't believe that. I think he's awful. And so what we're going to do is talk a little bit about him because he is an important player in this whole story. But I want you to notice kind of the shape of the episode. So you have all the facts in terms of what the episode's actually about immediately, the death of the Romanoff family, the things that led to it, generally speaking. And now we're going to talk about some of the more esoteric conspiratorial

theories that go into that, starting with Rasputin, going then to this idea of like potential blood libel with the Jewish Kabbalistic ritual murder. And then ending also with this almost supernatural undying element of remembrance and memorialization that has occurred around these murders. So with that, I'm going to give it over to Brian, and we are going to learn about Gregori Rasputin. Here at Haunted Cosmos, we talk about a world that isn't just stuff. But if the unseen world is real, it should change how we live in the visible one, especially as husbands and fathers. That's why we're excited to partner with Memento. Memento helps men build disciplined lives through daily devotions, structured scripture reading,

seasonal spiritual disciplines, accountability, and tools to track participation and progress, alongside a growing brotherhood of men pursuing the exact same thing. Go to Memento70.70.com slash haunted to join thousands of Christian men and get 10% off in annual membership. Are you ready to record Hauna Cosmos? Yeah, for sure. Let me just grab my Gratotelo lip balm, my Gratotel, my Wipped Bomb for smooth, moistrized skin, and also my Gratio... Why do you need all of that? Dude, I got to feel moist. I got to feel fresh for every episode. Otherwise, I'm not going to perform well. I guess it's a good thing then that gray toad tallow uses simple organic ingredients instead of synthetic fillers most skin care products use. I'm moisturized. Thinking smooth. I'm

thinking moist. I'm ready to tell some ghost stories. Visit graytoed tallow.com and use code cosmos 15 for 15% off your order so you can tell spooky stories too. Most companies have a data crisis. Not from a lack of data, but from how that data is managed. White Tree Solutions has recognized that data is often scattered across reports, systems in the minds of employees. They figured out how to turn data into functional processes by connecting the systems that run your company. They then build AI models on top of those processes to assist the people at your company. Protect what your company knows. Call William at 952-209-9638 or visit WTSData.com.

It's late January in 1869. The small family of peasants live in a rural village called Pokrovskoia in Imperial Russia. The father looks down at his son and at his wife. She squeezes his hand and asks him what the name should be. He considers it for a moment and then settles the matter. He announces to all of those witnesses that this child will be called Grigory. Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin lived out his childhood and early adulthood in Pokroskoya.

The details of his early life are virtually unknown, but it's known that he was a peasant. Thus, he most likely lived a peasant's life. Depending on who one asks, the young Rasputin was either a scoundrel or a hero in his youth. Some say that he indulged a life of drunken pilfering and blasphemy in those days. Others relate how he once saved his brother Dimitri from drowning after the lad fell into a freezing river. Rasputin dove in and dragged him to shore. tragically, however, the damage was already done and Dimitri died of pneumonia only days later. Perhaps given the variety of these polar opposite histories, one can assume the real story is a mixture of the two.

In 1886, Rasputin met a peasant girl named Praskovia while traveling to a neighboring province. The two were married shortly thereafter. They lived the same ways as their parents before them in a small wooden Isba in Pokrovskoia. Rasputin tilled the land and paid his taxes and hoped to be given a little more at each meeting of the elders. Praskovia tended to the home, helped him in the fields where she could, and took the lead in raising the children. That last duty was the cause of great heartache for both Rasputin and for his wife. Out of seven children born to them, only three survived into adulthood. The Rascovian remembered by history began to take his final form only ten years into his marriage.

For reasons that remain unclear to this day, Rasputin underwent a complete religious reform. Again, perhaps he was not utterly blasphemous before, but even by the most charitable reading, he did not take the Christian faith seriously in earlier years. That all changed, however, in the 1890s. The young husband and father started experiencing visions of heaven and the saints and the risen Christ.

He received impressions of mystic truth, urging him toward what he believed, to be the pure love of God. These revelations inspired him to embark on a pilgrimage to the monastery of St. Nicholas in 1897. He was 28 years old, married for 10 years to a wife who was with child, and was the father of an infant son. Whatever the reason, Rasputin was already confused.

He spent months at the monastery and went away greatly indebted to the monastic order there. They taught him how to read and write. In later life, he accused those same monks of being coercive and engaging in. and rank homosexual relationships with one another. Whatever the truth of his experience is there, he returned to his family, a changed man. Neighbors reported him to be disheveled in appearance and behavior. He was erratic.

He sang and prayed in a fever pitch that came off as insincere to all. He gathered about him a number of devotees who were mostly women and his familiarity with them was not befitting the times or the places they lived. rumors spread about this unofficial and heterodox cleric. People said he was leading a cult or was at least a prominent member of one, that the prayer meetings he hosted were really ritualistic orgies that included self-harm as a feature of the rights, and that the followers of Rasputin were, in truth, his harem.

The Russian Orthodox Church investigated these claims in 1908 and concluded that, though apparently heterodox in his practice of faith, no evidence supported such extreme accusations. But herein lies the mystery of Rasputin. Why did the Russian Orthodox Church officially investigate this Siberian peasant, this itinerant and self-appointed holy man who could barely read or write? What turn of events brought Rasputin to the forefront of the Russian mind in the waning days of the empire? The simple answer is twofold.

Rasputin had about him a distinct air of charisma, yes, but also the higher society of St. Petersburg had grown idle. They saw in Rasputin a curiosity, perhaps a holy fool that they could doad on and be fascinated by. But it was not only the secular elites that were drawn to him. In the early 1900s, before the scandals really began,

he made good friends with multiple bishops and archimandrities in the church. Indeed, these ecclesiastical connections are what initially took Rasputin to St. Petersburg. Once there, these connections found him introduced to the most influential errant aristocracy. These idle aristocrats mentioned before, and thus his doom began. For among the inquisitive gentry, two grand duchesses, Melitsa and Anastasia, princesses from Montenegro who married into the

Russian royalty, took special liking to the Siberian pilgrim. They, cousins-in-law to the ruling house of the Romanov's, wasted little time in introducing him to Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. Upon hearing of his wife's new acquaintance, Sarnichaelus II himself, insisted on hosting Rasputin in his own Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg. Here the timeline grows hazy. It's not known precisely when, but soon after their first meeting, Rasputin's place of influence in the royal family was sealed when he apparently eased the pain and suffering of the sickly young Prince Alexi. Being the fifth child and the only son of Sarnichaelus II meant that Alexi's life was marked by the highest expectations even before it began. But there was also the greatest of joy. He was the

apple of his father's eye and received all of the doting a child could hope for from his mother and sisters. He was the pride of Russia. And yet, the life of pressure and trial presented itself to the boy in his first moments. For upon cutting the umbilical cord, doctors and nurses watched with sorrow as the wound bled for many hours. Lexi had hemophilia. He appeared healthy and vigorous enough, which allowed the condition to be hidden from the public, but the royal family knew, in great doubt, befell them all. The baby prince, Alyosha, as they called him, was none the wiser to the anguish his life was already causing. In his youth, his hemophilia immensely lessened his quality of life. He frequently endured painful hemorrhages, fatigue, and fainting spells due to blood loss. There was little relief

to be found. Sarnicholas watched helpless as his son suffered constantly. And then the family met Grigori Rasputin. Little could they have predicted what would come of that. One crisp fall morning, Alexi fell and injured his leg while playing in a city park. The leg suffered an internal hemorrhage that refused to settle down for multiple days. The boy could not sleep as he endured unrelenting torture. The result was a dark leg swollen to almost double its size. In desperation, Alexandra asked her kinswoman, Princess Anastasia of Montenegro, to send for a sputin.

The mystic reportedly entered the room reverently, bowed to pray over the boy, and then said, for all to hear, your pain is going away. You will soon be well. You must thank God for healing you, and now go to sleep. The words were final for Rasputin,

who left immediately thereafter. Within minutes of his leaving, the swelling was rapidly decreasing, and Alexi enjoyed the first sleep he'd had in days. The next morning, his leg was normal and functional. Alexi could move more freely, and his fever was gone. The Sarina's friend, Anna Virubova, remembered the words of Rasput.

She recalled them for Alexandra and bid her keep him close for any of Alexi's future needs. The Empress agreed and so solidified one of the most infamous relationships the world of nobility and modern history has ever seen. Sarn Nicholas appointed Rasputin as the palace and the royal family's personal spiritual advisor. He was charged with keeping the icon lamps lit throughout the residence and was given increasingly free admission to the emperor, the Empress, and the Romanov children. Many rumors of particular depravity circulated in the public at this time, talk of Rasputin sexually assaulting the children and carrying out an affair with the Empress, but little evidence suggested the veracity of the claims. But we do not need rumor to learn the type of man, Rasputin became.

His own boasted reputation is enough. He started to accept bribes from supporters who desired royal favors. At times, these bribes came in the form of sexual favors from female admirers, His drunkenness, a far cry from the abstinence he committed to at his conversion, became a thing of mythic proportion. He most certainly engaged in many affairs with high-ranking aristocratic women, and when they did not satisfy him, paid for the services of St. Petersburg prostitutes without shame.

Through it all, Sarn Nicholas and the consort Alexandra maintained their loyalty to the faith healer. On the eve of Russia joining the First World War, Rasputin was enjoying a visit to his family in Poveroskoya. his wife never wavered in her faithfulness to her husband. On his way to telegram the emperor, apparently to urge him to avoid war, Rasputin was attacked in the street and stabbed by a peasant woman named Guseva. He nearly died and endured a harsh surgery in Siberia, but he ultimately pulled through. Guseva was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity for her crime.

But insane or not, her actions betrayed the rising contempt in the Russian heart for this strange and outrageous man. Rasputin was believed to be the true ruler of the motherland, a ruler hell-bent on the destruction and damnation of his people. The perceived reign of Rasputin and the resulting contempt of the people eventually came to a boil in 1916, early in the morning hours of December 30th. Two relations of Sarnikilis, a cousin named Dmitri Pavlovich, and a nephew named Felix Usopov invited Rasputin for dinner and a party at the Yusopov family's Moika Palace in St. Petersburg.

Little's known for certain of that night. It was cold. That much is true. But it was not cold enough for the Nevka River next to the palace to be frozen over, and that was meaningful to the assassins. What other details we do have are the subject of much debate to this day, as they come from Felix Usopo's personal account. He claims that Rasputin arrived at the palace soon after midnight,

whereupon he was ushered to the basement by attendance. Usopov greeted him warmly, inviting him to sit for tea and cakes, and engaged Rasputin in casual conversation. But Rasputin did not know is that his tea and his cakes were laced with cyanide poisoning. But lo and behold, the poison had no obvious effect on the mystic. Having consumed these first trifles, Rasputin asked for wine to be served. Usopov predicted this earlier and had ensured the wine was laced with poison as well. But after drinking three full glasses in quick succession, the poison still had apparently no power over him.

At 2.30 a.m., Usopov invited Rasputin to continue to the basement while he went upstairs for a moment. This was a pretext which allowed Yusopov to consult with the other chief conspirator, Dmitri Pavlovich. He took from his kinsman a revolver and returned to his guest. The mask was finally off. Usopov pointed at the crucifix hanging from the room's far wall before flatly telling Rasputin to say a final prayer. He unceremoniously shot him once in the chest. Assuming this had finally ended Resputin's life,

Usopov and Pavlovich, with some other conspirators, drove to Rasputin's apartment in Petersburg. One of their party, a man named Sukkotin, dressed in Rasputin's coat in order to trick neighbors who may happen to be watching into thinking the Holy Man had simply returned home. It was a perfect alibi. Or it would have been, for of course,

Rasputin was not yet dead. When the group returned to Moika Palace and went downstairs to dispose of the body, Rasputin jumped up. He attacked Yusufiope. with the crazed energy of a vindictive madman. Usopov hardly escaped up the stairs, but he was followed closely behind by the victim.

Rasputin chased his would-be killer into the palace courtyard. There another conspirator named Prudishkevich was waiting to deal the hopefully final blow. He fired. When the smoke cleared, the poison and lead-filled Rasputin was slumped lifeless into a snowbank. The killers wrapped his body in a length of cloth, drove it to the middle of the bridge over the Nevka River. and tipped it over the railing and into the ceaseless water. The body was discovered lodged under a chunk of ice some 200 meters down river from the bridge

on January 1st. He was buried the following day. Neither his wife nor his children nor his mistress were invited to the funeral. Only the imperial family and some intimates of the court were admitted. He rested in the yard of a small church built by Anaviriobova, the closest friend of the Sarina. But his body did not remain there long. After the murder of the Romanovs, Resputin's body was exhumed and publicly burned by soldiers of the new regime who'd been sent by Alexander Karenski.

The provisional government wanted every trace of the old world extinguished forever. And thus ended, Rasputin. Okay, very fascinating. I think everyone's fascinated by this character of Rasputin, partly because of the Disney animated movie Anastasia that presents him in this almost like comically, like gregariously demonic. like he has fire coming out of his eyes and stuff like that.

The character of Rasputin is certainly a fascinating study. Not a good guy. He was, I mean, you heard it in the scripted section. Like he was not a recognized officer of the Russian Orthodox Church. He eventually fell out of favor with all of the Russian Orthodox Christians. And one of the reasons why he is important to understand is because the Romanovs let him in, so close to the royal family. And so whether it was reality or not, eventually perception becomes its own kind of reality.

And everyone was perceiving Rasputon as being this puppet master behind the scenes that was basically using the Sardina Alexandra to manipulate Nicholas II and getting him to institute policy changes, ideological shifts, etc. That made him less and less popular. It was, again, whether it was real or not, it ended up being a, failure of leadership because a lot of people effectively thought, even the conservatives thought that Sarina was long-housing her husband. And it was because of some level of inappropriate relationship that she had with this resputin character. Who was hideously ugly by the way?

Hideously ugly. And no one knows if they actually had an affair or like no one really knows. But what we do know is that he gets in by appealing to Alexei, more or less, this sickly child. and by all accounts, whenever he's around and when he's praying for Alexei, things are getting better, and Alexei is able to function better and all this stuff, and everyone's very happy. And that gets him a foot in the door. But after he gets that foot in the door, it quickly devolves into overt degeneracy. Drunkenness, orgies, hiring prostitutes, just openly. An analog to this, it's not identical, but it's like when under the Biden years, when we knew two things,

like Biden's in decline. And they're like, no, Biden's sharp as he ever was. And he's like, I'm as someone is fly, you know, whatever that. Oh, it's focused. Oh, it's focused. How would you say your mental focus is? Oh, it's focus. One of the best internet means. Incoherent rambling of the modern day. But then you have Hunter Biden like doing cocaine and like being associated with the White House. And it's just bringing a morally degenerate person like that can just bring reproach upon a whole nation. Yeah. And in there, there was a lot of overtones of corruption with Ukraine and money and getting

on boards of oil companies and energy companies and, oh, war-torn countries that we're involved in militarily and politically. And it's like pretty soon, because there's a cloak of mystery over it, we don't know exactly what's truly happening. And the evidence what we do see is really bad, it does. develops into this just, you know, it removes credibility from the regime. Yeah, you start being an actual country and a legitimate regime and you start being a caricature. Yeah, you're like all of a sudden a tin pot dictatorship with like some.

So, Rasputin, he functioned that way. Yeah. At least in the public eye. Now, he could have just been a degenerate religious cultic weirdo that Satan used. This is actually a pretty big claim. You know, he could have just been. Satan used and like perform some false miracles to get in the door. I absolutely think that could have been the case.

Or he could have just been a charlatan, drunk weirdo who liked to have orgies. Yeah. And who happened to like hit the jackpot and find himself in with the royal family. Yeah, happy coincidence. Either way, the result is the same. The people lose yet more heart and trust in the monarchy. But how Rasputin connects to the larger conspiracies that some people have tossed around with this event is some people will say, ah, Rasputin was a Jewish agent

and he had a Jewish handler. And the Jewish handler was, I think, like a jeweler in Petersburg or Petrograd that Rasputin would report to and then he would, you know, he would receive funding. And so that's how he was able to initially get in a door with not only, by the way, the Romanovs and the elites on the political side, but also the leaders of, of the church. And he was, he was beloved when he first arrived on the scene by Orthodox, priests, monks, even the metropolitans. Very strange. It was very strange. And everyone basically looked at him as this holy idiot, you know, and I don't mean idiot in the terms of he has a mental incapability. I mean the Russian sense of idiot where it's like, you're a holy fool. You're simple,

but you're simply holy. You know, you don't concern yourself with these things. You're just this pure lover of God and of Christ and of his love for humanity. And so people are drawn to that, especially in a city like Petersburg, which contrasted with Moscow, or Moscow, was always liberal. Like Petersburg was the Paris of Russia. It was the cutting edge of new ideas and materialism and modernism and all these things. And so you had this guy come in to this place where all the elites that were, at least nominally Christian are just like, I want something new. Spiritualism is starting to make inroads. They're

just interested in new. They were idlers. And idleness is just a cardinal sin. And so they become interested in this man and he gets behind the door of the rural family. In one way or another, starts to influence them or by the appearance of influencing them, influencing all of Russia against them. And so some people have this idea of like, oh, well, he was a Jewish handler. And that's how we get into this conspiracy theory about the Kabbalistic ritual killing of the Romanovs. That was really formalized by this guy named Mikhail. Mikhail Skaryaten. Skaryaten, what a great name.

Dude, Mikhail is just overall an S-tier name. S-tier name. I had a, dude, I had a multivariable calculus professor in college named Milienko Zybchich. Are you kidding me? He was the coolest guy, dude. He was so Russian. He had a scar down his face. That's how Russian he was.

That is insane. He drank vodka in class. Could we get him? Could we get him on the show? Dude, I think so. I still have his email. What's his name? Milyenko Zijic.

It's so cool. That name goes so hard. Russians have amazing names. Russians do have amazing names. Mikhail Skaryatan, the sacrifice. Yeah. This guy Mikhail. Mikhail.

Mikhail. He wrote this book called the sacrifice where he said he was able to decipher some odd etchings on the walls of that basement room where the Romanovs were killed. Now, those etchings were really there. No one disputes that. What people dispute is what they meant.

And when they appeared, a lot of people say, like, well, we don't actually know that they appeared right after the killings or were drawn up by any of the Bolsheviks that were involved in the killings. Many of whom, by the way, were just not Jewish, not ethnic Jewish at all. We know that. Only one of the actual people doing the murder was Jewish.

I'm pretty sure that's true. Yeah. From what I understand, I could be wrong. But however you shake it, these markings, these graffiti, whatever you want to call it, was there.

And this guy, Mikhail, he said that he was able to figure out that one of the lines came from a poem, a German poem. And how does he say it in German? Bel Setsar.

Which said Belchazar was slain by his servants that same night. Okay, so that should make us think of, you know, Daniel and the king of Babel. Many, many, tecala. Yeah, thank you so much. Many, many tecola, because I always get it wrong. And then, so that was that first line. Belchazar is slain, you know, that same night.

And then there was another set of graffiti that Mikhail said he used a Jewish Kabbalistic code to decipher until it said, here, by order of the secret powers, the czar was sacrificed for the destruction of the state, let all people's be informed. From that, this conspiracy theory really takes off. He formalized it. By the way, you can't find this book anywhere for obvious reasons because it, you know, Google is like it's super anti-Semitic. It's like hundreds of dollars to, or thousands of dollars to purchase this book. But the problem with it, and this is why it is so tenuous and you really got to be careful with running on something like this is that people have tried to look through cabalistic literature to look at the pictures that do exist of these markings

on the wall and they have not been able to figure out how McHile came to this conclusion. Like verify it. Yeah. And so he basically presented something that hasn't been able to be verified or falsified. Yeah. And so just based on the evidence that you have, the hard evidence that you have, you really have to be careful with running too far with this. It's why in my whole explanation of the involvement of Jewish leadership within Bolshevism and communism and a lot of the history,

the reason I explain it that way where you, like, okay, first you have this thing that is just historical fact that you have to explain. Why Dennis Prager is right and the boasting liberals of Jewish liberals today are correct. that they were absolutely disproportionately influential in all of these isms. That is historical fact. Now, disproportional is important word there because that doesn't mean that all the Bolsheviks were Jews.

Lots of them weren't. It just means that relative to the population, you had more of them show up than you would expect. And that's how it's worked in all of the... You also have a lot of other people groups who are involved who are not Jewish. And it also doesn't mean that, let's say you were a Bolshevik and you were an ethnic Jew and you were there at the killings.

It doesn't, you can't say by force that you were explicitly performing a religious act. No. So you go back to what we know like firm foundation under our feet, what we know, which it's true. They're disproportionately involved. And then you can ask this very interesting question. Why? Why is that the case? And I think you can come to good answers. Some of them pretty certain, like rejecting Christ and worshiping a false God is a bad thing. does bad things to you. See India and Muslim countries. Okay. See African spiritualism. See Papa New Guinea. See Israel at 80-70. See, it's just bad. Bad things happen. Increased light of knowledge increases that responsibility and makes it worse. We know that biblically. Okay. And then I think E. Michael Jones' revolutionary spirit line of argumentation is persuasive. You can reject it or not,

I think have an argument one way or the other. But I think it's a good general explanation. of what you're looking at when you say over and over and over, this pattern repeats, where did it come from? And I generally think that's a pretty good explanation of what's going on. What I don't think you need, and this is where I think we're getting at, you don't necessarily need that the Tsar's murder was a Kabbalistic ritual. No. And I mean icing on the cake maybe, but it's, A, we're not sure that it was,

but B, it doesn't really change the fact that what happened when the monarchies of Christendom and them were killed. The Christian West was killed. Not only, yeah, exactly. Not only does it not change what happened. Yeah. It also doesn't change what it overall means. Yeah.

Reading the situation doesn't require us to go down and say, there was tassels and, you know, decapitations and blood libel going on. Maybe, maybe not, but you actually don't even need that to read the situation. And if you, and if you think, if you really think about it, though, if you think you need that,

here's the thing. You're actually like a glutton for the worst that it could possibly be and all of the the worst things that a person could do. And I actually don't think that that's just healthy for the human soul to be hungry for like, it has to be worse though. It has to be overtly demonic. It has to be overtly satanic. It can't just be everything we've already said, which is still satanic by the way. It's just we're not saying that you can confidently and with certainty say and it would and they were consciously satanic as they did it. They were doing it to honor Satan explicitly. Because there's only two teams.

Right. There's Satan's team and then there's the Lord Jesus Christ's team. And communism isn't on Christ's team. It's Satan's team. Don't do it. Objectively. And guess what else is on Satan's team? Judaism.

True. Guess what else is on Satan's team? Islam. Guess what else? Zoroastrianism. The Hindu. The Spice Girls. Dude.

Like, it's a long list. People act like it's really complicated, but it's really not. There is Satan's team and God's team. And literally like, but what happens is that as soon as you start saying, like applying an equal weight and measure and saying, yeah, like Judaism, I'm super satanic, real bad. People are like, ah. Yeah, people freak out. And I'm like, yeah, but I say so is Islam. Yeah.

And communism and all the non-Jewish stuff. going on too. So a lot of it is like we generally here at Honest Cosmos and elsewhere like the Ogden folks, we want to tell the truth about what happened. Yeah. And then also recognize that there's things we don't know. Maybe, maybe this happened, maybe not. It's kind of weak evidence in terms of certain elements and some of the conspiratorial stuff. Yeah. But what we do know is both important and obvious. And still remains true regardless of whether or not this, there's any water to this. Yeah. whether it's a little bit true or not true at all.

And so we bring it up because, frankly, I would be remiss to do an episode on the Romanov killing without bringing this idea up because it's a major conspiratorial threat in the whole narrative arc. But you do, like, you actually can't just be careless with what you believe about things.

You can't. You actually don't want to slander someone, even when they're awful. What they did is bad enough on its own. And you can ask the question, And you can do the, and you can have an opinion that differs for mine. That's totally cool. But what you can't do is make claims of certainty on things that you can't be certain about.

Like that's just a dangerous thing to do. This quote, though, the Kabbalistic code, like hereby order of the secret powers, the Tsar was sacrificed for the destruction of the state, let all people's be informed. It's true. Yeah, I mean, that is what happened. Typologically and symbolically and in many ways historically and politically, that is what happened. And part of, and I think this is why Mikhail, Mikhail, Mikhail got the notoriety that he did, is because whether or not he made up that

quote or whether he actually figured something out, that no one else, like, it doesn't, it doesn't change the fact that what that says is what happened. Yeah. And it led to ruin for Europe and Christendom. So all that to say, what we just said. But I think now we can lead into a close. And we can see... I think we can say for certain, first of all,

that we haven't been banned from any platform for this episode. I know, I know. I think we know that for sure. No one should listen to this. It's all satire. 100%. But I think that we are now ready to go into the hot clothes. Yeah, I think we are better. Where we see that despite it being quite a long time

since this has occurred, this is still a very powerful and enduring story for our day. Yeah. And we just want to give one more piece of evidence to show that that is actually true. In another conspiracy. That's true, actually. And a whole another conspiracy we didn't even talk about.

But it is pretty much like defunct. Are the Romanov's truly dead? In 1920, a Jane Doe threw herself from a bridge in Berlin. Her impact with the water in the canal was hard, but not hard enough to end her life. The woman was taken to a mental asylum in a northern district of the city. She was without papers, without any documentation. at all, in fact, and refused to disclose her identity to the officers and caretakers. In fact, it was as if she didn't even know who she was.

She spoke little, but when she did, it was German. It was a form of German, though, that sounded a little bit Russian to some of her listeners. Her intake examination revealed multiple scars of unknown origin on her body and head, and having no name and giving no name, she was just called Frailine Unbeckant, Miss Unknown. Two years after her admission, another patient named Clara came forward professing her belief that Miss Unknown was none other than the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, Grand Duchess Tatiana. But of course, the Romanov's had been dead for four years by then. Well, that's not entirely true. Of course, they were dead, but Europe only learned about Nicholas's death, and that was within days of the murder.

You see, Europe learned about Nicholas's death within days of his murder, but, But misinformation and outright lies meant that the general public did not know about the rest of the family's death until as late as 1924. So though the claim sounds outlandish to us now, it was anything but back then. But back to the story. Clara, this other patient, convinced some Russian immigrate nobles, including a relative of Leo Tolstoy, actually, to come and see the mysterious woman for themselves. After a brief meeting, the Russians left convinced that she was not Tatiana. but in response, Miss Unknown quipped, I did not say I was Tatiana.

Little came of things, or at least history remembers precious little about exactly how the story progressed from there, but somehow, by May of 1922, that same Miss Unknown had convinced that same group of Russian nobles that actually she was a Grand Duchess, just not Tatiana.

She was Anastasia, Tatiana's younger sister. It was odd. Perhaps that's why it took as long as it did to become a mainstream story. She hid behind a veil of trauma and amnesia, but said essentially that she had survived the cellar massacre somehow, was rescued by a guard who took pity on her and helped her escape, and then traveled west before eventually ending up in Berlin. When asked why she had been found trying to jump off a bridge,

she referred the questioners back to that trauma and amnesia. Now, the likeness between this woman and Anastasia was certainly remarkable. Their ages, or approximate ages, appeared to line up. What's more, the woman did sound Russian. She couldn't speak Russian, but remember, trauma and amnesia, that convenient crutch that she always leaned on. She went on to convince the son of the family physician who had died with the family. His name was Gleb Bakken, the son of Eugene Bakken,

who woke up Sir Nicholas II the night he was murdered. Now, he had not been as close to the family as his father, but he was certainly familiar with them, and his approval of this potential enableness. Anastasia convinced many members of the public that it really was her. Those close to the family, however, couldn't be convinced. Notably, Anastasia's former tutor, along with Nicholas II's own sister. They both rejected her story out of hand and found in the woman nothing to sway them otherwise.

The crazy thing is that this ruse went on for more than 50 years. Vast numbers of people thought that she was actually Anastasia, now wrongly kept from the noble renuncias. and honor that she was due. The civil courts in Germany even got involved. And those courts eventually determined that she had not proven she was Anastasia, but they offered nothing in the way of who she actually was, and so were very unhelpful. Eventually, investigators determined that the woman was probably Francisco Shankowski,

a Polish worker who had been injured in a wartime explosion and suffered from multiple psychological disorders. But the woman denied it. And since no forensic testing could be done, it was her word against theirs. Now, to be sure, not everyone believed her, probably not even most people believed her, but some did. Gleb-Botkin did, for example, and he still did until his death. And then when the woman died in 1984 and was cremated, not a few believed that the princess, Anastasia, had only just finally passed away. It wasn't until the 1990s that DNA testing

removed all doubt. Despite her having been cremated upon her death, a tissue sample from Miss Unknown had been saved by a hospital in Germany during an operation earlier in her life. It wasn't a match to those tested at the burial site. Further, it proved she actually had been that Polish worker named Francisco that the police posited decades prior. Then in 2007, researchers in Russia finally found the second burial site, the one that contained the pulverized bones of Alexei and one of his sisters, and it all came together to confirm that no, Miss Unknown had not been Anastasia. And I bring this up not only because it's a fascinating wrinkle and the enduring story of the Romanov murders, but also because it illustrates that enduring power so effectively.

For decades after, and still today as evidenced by this episode, people have found something profound and architectonic in the fall of the Romanovs. The house in which the family was executed, Apatiev House, or again the House of Special Purpose, was demolished in 1977. Today, a church stands there. It's called the Church on the Blood, bidding name. Before the demolition of Apatyev House,

it was, of course, the final residence of the Romanov family. Its basement room remained filthy and ruined for quite a long time after the murders. Very few ventured in. only those most spiteful toward or most admiring of the family. Some investigators gathered evidence from the crime scene when anti-Bulshevik forces briefly took Yatterinburg. But after that, once Yatterinburg was back under Soviet control, it became a government office building.

Then it went through a life cycle of housing various museums, the Museum of Revolution, an anti-religious museum, an archive, and collections of other things at different times. Sometime after World War II, when communism finally showed signs of weakness and Christianity and Russia started to reawaken, the house became a pilgrimage site for those wishing to remember the past, so wantonly thrown away by wicked men. The dying Soviets couldn't stand for this. So in desperation, a communist party chief named Boris Yelton carried out its demolition. But in the years bookending, the murders and the demolition, something is said to have happened

that no one can explain. Investigators, government clerks, and museum attendees claimed to have seen fresh blood on the floor and walls of that basement room, as if the horrible crime had only just occurred. Splatter on the plaster and wallpaper, handprints, both small and large, crawling and streaked across the floor, and thick drops remaining just where they had been,

despite the room having been cleaned and renovated, multiple times. And then the church on the blood was erected. So perhaps it's the scale of that time in history in general. Perhaps it's the image of Bolshevism's darkness shrouding the power of Christendom, which diminished to nothing in the world wars. Perhaps it's the pure and inescapable tragedy of it all. The children, why did the children have to die? Whatever the reason, the story endures, and it will continue to endure. Better yet, it ought to endure. Let us all rue the day in the West

that we forget about the Romanovs. Still your soul, Bigfoot skin walkers off from my control. Want more Honod Cosmos? Head over to the Honod Cosmos Patreon page. Over there, you get the pride and joy of supporting two very handsome men, Brian and myself.

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