The following pages are sample lectures from the U3A course on Russian History:

One gives an outline of Peter the Great (1682 - 1725)

• Peter was the first modern ruler of Russia, who took his country from its backwardness into the world of modern Europe.
• Peter was prepared to be an ordinary person in his tour of Europe when he learned the skills the latter had to offer.
• Peter laid the foundations of the city which became the tsarist capital, St. Petersburg.
  
  The other tells the tragic story of the murder of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family in 1918. Yes, a brutal, cold-blooded murder, NOT an “execution” as the communists (and their many sympathisers) have always tried to represent it!
  Consider:
• Executions are carried out pursuant to legal process. There was not even a semblance of legal process! No charge; no trial; no conviction.
• Executions do not take place in basement cellars, in strict secrecy, at the dead of night, without independent witnesses, as was the case here.
• Executions do not take place with a lorry’s engine running, so as to cover the noise of the shots, as the perpetrators did.
• Executions are not covered up by furtive and obsessively secret disposal of the bodies, as Ermakov and his gang did in this procedure.

Can their deaths be construed as martyrdom, as the Russian church has always insisted? I believe so.