Why did British King George V not save his brother and close friend Emperor Nicholas II from death?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

As you know, the imperial Romanov family was shot on the night of July 17, 1918 by the Bolsheviks. Many people ask a natural question: why did Nicholas II and his family not leave the country, because such a possibility was seriously considered by the Provisional Government? It was planned that the Romanovs would go to England, but Nicholas II's cousin George V, with whom they were very close and insanely similar, for some reason preferred to disown their relatives.

Participation in the First World War for Russia had very disastrous consequences. During the February Revolution of 1917, Nicholas II signed his abdication. In return, the Provisional Government promised him and his family unhindered travel abroad.

Later, the head of the Provisional Government AF Kerensky assured:.

Instead of Murmansk, the imperial family was sent to Tobolsk, since anarchist sentiments were growing in the capital and the Bolsheviks were eager for power. As you know, after the overthrow of the Provisional Government, the new leaders considered that the Romanovs should be physically destroyed.

Assessing the situation, historian and writer Gennady Sokolov said:.

The Romanovs had to actually go to England, because during the First World War both countries were considered allies, and members of the royal and imperial families were not strangers to each other. George V was a cousin of both Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna.

George V wrote to his cousin:.

On March 22, 1917, the British Cabinet of Ministers made a decision to "provide the Emperor and Empress with shelter in England while the war is going on." A week later, George V began to behave quite differently from what he wrote to "old Nicky." He doubted the expediency of the arrival of the Romanovs in England, and the path is dangerous …

On April 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour expressed his surprise to the king that the monarch should not back down, since the ministers had already decided to invite the Romanovs.

But George V was persistent and a couple of days later wrote to the Foreign Minister:. In the afterword, he stressed that it was not the king who invited the imperial family, but the British government.

In May 1917, the Russian Foreign Ministry received a new order from the British Ambassador, which indicated that. It also played into the hands of propaganda against Nicholas II and his wife, who, as you know, was of German origin. The closest relative left his cousin to the mercy of fate, and everyone knows the sad ending of this story.

Some historians explained this position of George V in relation to the Romanovs by the fact that he was afraid of a revolution in Great Britain, since the workers' trade unions were very sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. The disgraced imperial family could only worsen the situation. For the sake of preserving the throne, "Georgie" decided to sacrifice a cousin.

But if the surviving documents are to be believed, the king's secretary wrote to the English ambassador Berthier in Paris: "It was the firm conviction of the king who never wanted this." That is, from the very beginning, George V did not want the Romanovs to move to England. And Russia has always been considered a geopolitical rival of Great Britain.

Well, at the same time, the Bolsheviks set themselves a goal: to destroy not only Nicholas II and his wife with children, but also all relatives with this surname. V The Alapaevsk Romanovs were simply thrown into the mine and pelted with grenades.