Romanov Re-education

The state of TIAH

July 16th, 2006

in 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries holding the Tsar's family at Yekaterinburg are told to begin the Romanov's re-education. The once-royal family is informed that they will now be peasant farmers, working the land like any other family. Tsar Nicholas refused, at first, and was beaten with horse-whips in front of the rest of the family until he acquiesced. Some of the older members of the family also needed physical encouragement to begin realizing their new lot in life, but they bore the stripes as if they were badges of honor. Nicholas was loathe to see his family toil as peasants, and convinced a guard to look the other way one day while some of his children made a break for it. Of the three that ran, only Anastasia was never recaptured. As the Tsar and his family became mere farmers and their royal past faded into history, Anastasia popped up in Paris, France, in 1931, seeking to raise funds to help free her parents and siblings from Russia and spirit them into the west. Many Russian emigres, forced out by the Communists, gave generously to this cause, and by 1932, the surviving Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas had been whipped to death by Bolsheviks in 1929 after refusing to shovel manure – were received at the home of the French President and given full diplomatic honors.

in 1947, Dr. Powell, who treated young Bessie Brazel for radiation sickness and has been talking to an old contact of his at the Roswell Air Force base, manages to convince his friend to let him into the morgue to see the two bodies that were recovered from the Brazel ranch. Although mangled and burned quite a bit, Dr. Powell is able to recognize the two bodies as human; he can even still read a partial tattoo on one of the men's arms that reads Flying High. He begins speculating to himself that this was all for a mission concerning space – but to space rather than from it. He pressures his friend at the morgue to tell him who the men are, but the mortician will not bend - “The Air Force told me to keep their names secret, and I'm gonna do that.” Dr. Powell begins making careful notes of everything that he has seen recently, and hides them at his office in case something should happen to him.

in 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr accepts an offer from a flight instructor to help navigate himself, his wife and sister-in-law from New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard. This turned out to be a wise choice, because the night's conditions overwhelmed Kennedy, and he lost sight of where he was. The more experienced instructor took control of the plane and guided them safely in to the vacation site, where they dropped off Lauren Bessette, Carolyn Kennedy's sister. The Kennedys and the instructor then proceeded on to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys were holding a wedding for the son of John's uncle Robert. This simple weekend trip had a profound effect on Kennedy; the instructor told him that at the point where he had lost sight of the horizon, it would have been very easy for him to have crashed the plane. Looking around at the wedding and seeing the absence of the groom's father, as well as his own, Kennedy resolved to make a change in the world. He became a candidate for Senator from New York, which motivated First Lady Hillary Clinton, who had been considering a run for the Senate from that state, as well, to instead move to her home town of Chicago and successfully run for the Senate in 2004. John proved to be a leader in the Senate, a reliable liberal voice who spoke out for the victims of September 11th when he opposed shifting the focus of the war on terror from finding Osama bin Laden to attacking Iraq – his moral presence is credited with the failure of the President's bid to get an authorization of force passed to allow him to attack Iraq. Although some on the right saw this as a political gamble, when American troops captured bin Laden in 2004, Kennedy was hailed alongside Bush as being right to keep America's focus where it needed to be.

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