title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The guard commandant and his senior aides had complete access at any time to all rooms occupied by the family. The prisoners were required to ring a bell each time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing. Strict rationing of the water supply was enforced on the prisoners after the guards complained that it regularly ran out. Recreation was allowed only twice daily in the garden, for half an hour morning and afternoon. The prisoners were ordered not to engage in conversation with any of the guards. Rations were mostly tea and black bread for breakfast, and cutlets or soup with meat for lunch; the prisoners were informed that "they were no longer permitted to live like tsars". In mid-June, nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery also brought the family food on a daily basis, most of which the captors took when it arrived. The family was not allowed visitors or to receive and send letters. Princess Helen of Serbia visited the house in June but was refused entry at gunpoint by the guards, while Dr Vladimir Derevenko's regular visits to treat Alexei were curtailed when Yurovsky became commandant. No excursions to Divine Liturgy at the nearby church were permitted. In early June, the family no longer received their daily newspapers.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: To maintain a sense of normality, the Bolsheviks lied to the Romanovs on 13 July 1918 that two of their loyal servants, (Alexei's sailor nanny) and Ivan Dmitrievich Sednev (OTMA's footman; Leonid Sednev's uncle), "had been sent out of this government" (i.e. out of the jurisdiction of Yekaterinburg and Perm province). In fact, both men were already dead: after the Bolsheviks had removed them from the Ipatiev House in May, they had been shot by the Cheka with a group of other hostages on 6 July, in reprisal for the death of , Chairman of the Ural Regional Committee of the Bolshevik Party killed by the Whites. On 14 July, a priest and deacon conducted a liturgy for the Romanovs. The following morning, four housemaids were hired to wash the floors of the Popov House and Ipatiev House; they were the last civilians to see the family alive. On both occasions, they were under strict instructions not to engage in conversation with the family. Yurovsky always kept watch during the liturgy and while the housemaids were cleaning the bedrooms with the family.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The sixteen men of the internal guard slept in the basement, hallway, and commandant's office during shifts. The external guard, led by Pavel Medvedev, numbered 56 and took over the Popov House opposite. The guards were allowed to bring in women for sex and drinking sessions in the Popov House and basement rooms of the Ipatiev House. There were four machine gun emplacements: one in the bell tower of the Voznesensky Cathedral aimed toward the house; a second in the basement window of the Ipatiev House facing the street; a third monitoring the balcony overlooking the garden at the back of the house; and a fourth in the attic overlooking the intersection, directly above the tsar and tsarina's bedroom. Ten guard posts were located in and around the Ipatiev House, and the exterior was patrolled twice hourly day and night. In early May, the guards moved the piano from the dining room, where the prisoners could play it, to the commandant's office next to the Romanovs' bedrooms. The guards would play the piano, while singing Russian revolutionary songs and drinking and smoking. They also listened to the Romanovs' records on the confiscated phonograph. The lavatory on the landing was also used by the guards, who scribbled political slogans and crude graffiti on the walls. The number of Ipatiev House guards totaled 300 at the time the imperial family was killed.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: When Yurovsky replaced Aleksandr Avdeev on 4 July, he moved the old internal guard members to the Popov House. The senior aides were retained but were designated to guard the hallway area and no longer had access to the Romanovs' rooms; only Yurovsky's men had it. The local Cheka chose replacements from the volunteer battalions of the Verkh-Isetsk factory at Yurovsky's request. He wanted dedicated Bolsheviks who could be relied on to do whatever was asked of them. They were hired on the understanding that they would be prepared, if necessary, to kill the tsar, about which they were sworn to secrecy. Nothing at that stage was said about killing the family or servants. To prevent a repetition of the fraternization that had occurred under Avdeev, Yurovsky chose mainly foreigners. Nicholas noted in his diary on 8 July that "new Latvians are standing guard", describing them as "Letts" – a term commonly used in Russia to classify someone as of European, non-Russian origin. The leader of the new guards was Adolf Lepa, a Lithuanian.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: In mid-July 1918, forces of the Czechoslovak Legion were closing on Yekaterinburg, to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway, of which they had control. According to historian David Bullock, the Bolsheviks, falsely believing that the Czechoslovaks were on a mission to rescue the family, panicked and executed their wards. The Legions arrived less than a week later and on 25 July captured the city.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: During the imperial family's imprisonment in late June, Pyotr Voykov and Alexander Beloborodov, president of the Ural Regional Soviet, directed the smuggling of letters written in French to the Ipatiev House. These claimed to be by a monarchist officer seeking to rescue the family, but were composed at the behest of the Cheka. These fabricated letters, along with the Romanov responses to them (written on either blank spaces or the envelopes), provided the Central Executive Committee (CEC) in Moscow with further justification to 'liquidate' the imperial family. Yurovsky later observed that, by responding to the faked letters, Nicholas "had fallen into a hasty plan by us to trap him". On 13 July, across the road from the Ipatiev House, a demonstration of Red Army soldiers, Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists was staged on Voznesensky Square, demanding the dismissal of the Yekaterinburg Soviet and the transfer of control of the city to them. This rebellion was violently suppressed by a detachment of Red Guards led by Peter Ermakov, which opened fire on the protesters, all within earshot of the tsar and tsarina's bedroom window. The authorities exploited the incident as a monarchist-led rebellion that threatened the security of the captives at the Ipatiev House.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The Ural Regional Soviet agreed in a meeting on 29 June that the Romanov family should be executed. Filipp Goloshchyokin arrived in Moscow on 3 July with a message insisting on the Tsar's execution. Only seven of the 23 members of the Central Executive Committee were in attendance, three of whom were Lenin, Sverdlov and Felix Dzerzhinsky. They agreed that the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet should organize the practical details for the family's execution and decide the precise day on which it would take place when the military situation dictated it, contacting Moscow for final approval.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The killing of the Tsar's wife and children was also discussed, but it was kept a state secret to avoid any political repercussions; German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach made repeated enquiries to the Bolsheviks concerning the family's well-being. Another diplomat, British consul Thomas Preston, who lived near the Ipatiev House, was often pressured by Pierre Gilliard, Sydney Gibbes and Prince Vasily Dolgorukov to help the Romanovs; Dolgorukov smuggled notes from his prison cell before he was murdered by Grigory Nikulin, Yurovsky's assistant. Preston's requests to be granted access to the family were consistently rejected. Goloshchyokin reported back to Yekaterinburg on 12 July with a summary of his discussion about the Romanovs with Moscow, along with instructions that nothing relating to their deaths should be directly communicated to Lenin.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On 14 July, Yurovsky was finalizing the disposal site and how to destroy as much evidence as possible at the same time. He was frequently in consultation with Peter Ermakov, who was in charge of the disposal squad and claimed to know the outlying countryside. Yurovsky wanted to gather the family and servants in a small, confined space from which they could not escape. The basement room chosen for this purpose had a barred window which was nailed shut to muffle the sound of shooting and in case of any screaming. Shooting and stabbing them at night while they slept or killing them in the forest and then dumping them into the Iset pond with lumps of metal weighted to their bodies were ruled out. Yurovsky's plan was to perform an efficient execution of all 11 prisoners simultaneously, although he also took into account that he would have to prevent those involved from raping the women or searching the bodies for jewels. Having previously seized some jewelry, he suspected more was hidden in their clothes; the bodies were stripped naked in order to obtain the rest (this, along with the mutilations were aimed at preventing investigators from identifying them).


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On 16 July, Yurovsky was informed by the Ural Soviets that Red Army contingents were retreating in all directions and the executions could not be delayed any longer. A coded telegram seeking final approval was sent by Goloshchyokin and Georgy Safarov at around 6 pm to Lenin in Moscow. There is no documentary record of an answer from Moscow, although Yurovsky insisted that an order from the CEC to go ahead had been passed on to him by Goloshchyokin at around 7 pm. This claim was consistent with that of a former Kremlin guard, Aleksey Akimov, who in the late 1960s stated that Sverdlov instructed him to send a telegram confirming the CEC's approval of the 'trial' (code for execution) but required that both the written form and ticker tape be returned to him immediately after the message was sent. At 8 pm, Yurovsky sent his chauffeur to acquire a truck for transporting the bodies, along with rolls of canvas to wrap them in. The intention was to park it close to the basement entrance, with its engine running, to mask the noise of gunshots. Yurovsky and Pavel Medvedev collected 14 handguns to use that night: two Browning pistols (one M1900 and one M1906), two Colt M1911 pistols, two Mauser C96s, one Smith & Wesson, and seven Belgian-made Nagants. The Nagant operated on old black gunpowder which produced a good deal of smoke and fumes; smokeless powder was only just being phased in.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: In the commandant's office, Yurovsky assigned victims to each killer before distributing the handguns. He took a Mauser and Colt while Ermakov armed himself with three Nagants, one Mauser and a bayonet; he was the only one assigned to kill two prisoners (Alexandra and Botkin). Yurovsky instructed his men to "shoot straight at the heart to avoid an excessive quantity of blood and get it over quickly." At least two of the Letts, an Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war named Andras Verhas and Adolf Lepa, himself in charge of the Lett contingent, refused to shoot the women. Yurovsky sent them to the Popov House for failing "at that important moment in their revolutionary duty". Neither Yurovsky nor any of the killers went into the logistics of how to efficiently destroy eleven bodies. He was under pressure to ensure that no remains would later be found by monarchists who would exploit them to rally anti-communist support.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: While the Romanovs were having dinner on 16 July 1918, Yurovsky entered the sitting room and informed them that kitchen boy Leonid Sednev was leaving to meet his uncle, Ivan Sednev, who had returned to the city asking to see him; Ivan had already been shot by the Cheka. The family was very upset as Leonid was Alexei's only playmate and he was the fifth member of the imperial entourage to be taken from them, but they were assured by Yurovsky that he would be back soon. Alexandra did not trust Yurovsky, writing in her final diary entry just hours before her death, "whether it's true & we shall see the boy back again!". Leonid was kept in the Popov House that night. Yurovsky saw no reason to kill him and wanted him removed before the execution took place.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Around midnight on 17 July, Yurovsky ordered the Romanovs' physician, Eugene Botkin, to awaken the sleeping family and ask them to put on their clothes, under the pretext that the family would be moved to a safe location due to impending chaos in Yekaterinburg. The Romanovs were then ordered into a semi-basement room. Alexandra requested a chair because she was sick, and Nicholas requested a second for Alexei. Yurovsky's assistant Grigory Nikulin remarked to him that the "heir wanted to die in a chair. Very well then, let him have one." The prisoners were told to wait in the cellar room while the truck that would transport them was being brought to the House. A few minutes later, an execution squad of secret police was brought in and Yurovsky read aloud the order given to him by the Ural Executive Committee:


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Nicholas, facing his family, turned and said "What? What?" Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and the weapons were raised. The Empress and Grand Duchess Olga, according to a guard's reminiscence, had tried to bless themselves, but failed amid the shooting. Yurovsky reportedly raised his Colt gun at Nicholas's torso and fired; Nicholas fell dead, pierced with at least three bullets in his upper chest. The intoxicated Peter Ermakov, the military commissar for Verkh-Isetsk, shot and killed Alexandra with a bullet wound to the head. He then shot at Maria, who ran for the double doors, hitting her in the thigh. The remaining executioners shot chaotically and over each other's shoulders until the room was so filled with smoke and dust that no one could see anything at all in the darkness nor hear any commands amid the noise.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Alexey Kabanov, who ran onto the street to check the noise levels, heard dogs barking from the Romanovs' quarters and the sound of gunshots loud and clear despite the noise from the Fiat's engine. Kabanov then hurried downstairs and told the men to stop firing and kill the family and their dogs with their gun butts and bayonets. Within minutes, Yurovsky was forced to stop the shooting because of the caustic smoke of burned gunpowder, dust from the plaster ceiling caused by the reverberation of bullets, and the deafening gunshots. When they stopped, the doors were then opened to scatter the smoke. While waiting for the smoke to abate, the killers could hear moans and whimpers inside the room. As it cleared, it became evident that although several of the family's retainers had been killed, all of the Imperial children were alive and only Maria was injured.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The noise of the guns had been heard by households all around, awakening many people. The executioners were ordered to use their bayonets, a technique which proved ineffective and meant that the children had to be dispatched by still more gunshots, this time aimed more precisely at their heads. The Tsarevich was the first of the children to be executed. Yurovsky watched in disbelief as Nikulin spent an entire magazine from his Browning gun on Alexei, who was still seated transfixed in his chair; he also had jewels sewn into his undergarment and forage cap. Ermakov shot and stabbed him, and when that failed, Yurovsky shoved him aside and killed the boy with a gunshot to the head. The last to die were Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria, who were carrying a few pounds (over 1.3 kilograms) of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which had given them a degree of protection from the firing. However, they were speared with bayonets as well. Olga sustained a gunshot wound to the head. Maria and Anastasia were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads in terror until they were shot. Yurovsky killed Tatiana and Alexei. Tatiana died from a single shot to the back of her head. Alexei received two bullets to the head, right behind the ear. Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, survived the initial onslaught but was quickly stabbed to death against the back wall while trying to defend herself with a small pillow which she had carried that was filled with precious gems and jewels. While the bodies were being placed on stretchers, one of the girls cried out (some accounts say two or more) and covered her face with her arm. Ermakov grabbed Alexander Strekotin's rifle and bayoneted her in the chest, but when it failed to penetrate he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the head.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: While Yurovsky was checking the victims for pulses, Ermakov walked through the room, flailing the bodies with his bayonet. The execution lasted about 20 minutes, Yurovsky later admitting to Nikulin's "poor mastery of his weapon and inevitable nerves". Future investigations calculated that a possible 70 bullets were fired, roughly seven bullets per shooter, of which 57 were found in the basement and at all three subsequent gravesites. Some of Pavel Medvedev's stretcher bearers began frisking the bodies for valuables. Yurovsky saw this and demanded that they surrender any looted items or be shot. The attempted looting, coupled with Ermakov's incompetence and drunken state, convinced Yurovsky to oversee the disposal of the bodies himself. Only Alexei's spaniel, Joy, survived to be rescued by a British officer of the Allied Intervention Force, living out his final days in Windsor, Berkshire.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Alexandre Beloborodov sent a coded telegram to Lenin's secretary, Nikolai Gorbunov. It was found by White investigator Nikolai Sokolov and reads:


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Aleksandr Lisitsyn of the Cheka, an essential witness on behalf of Moscow, was designated to promptly dispatch to Sverdlov soon after the executions of Nicholas and Alexandra's politically valuable diaries and letters, which would be published in Russia as soon as possible. Beloborodov and Nikulin oversaw the ransacking of the Romanov quarters, seizing all the family's personal items, the most valuable piled up in Yurovsky's office whilst things considered inconsequential and of no value were stuffed into the stoves and burned. Everything was packed into the Romanovs' own trunks for dispatch to Moscow under escort by commissars. On 19 July, the Bolsheviks nationalized all confiscated Romanov properties, the same day Sverdlov announced the tsar's execution to the Council of People's Commissars.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The bodies of the Romanovs and their servants were loaded onto a Fiat truck equipped with a 60 hp engine, with a cargo area measuring . Heavily laden, the vehicle struggled for on boggy road to reach the Koptyaki forest. Yurovsky was furious when he discovered that the drunken Ermakov had brought only one shovel for the burial. About further on, near crossing no. 185 on the line serving the Verkh-Isetsk works, 25 men working for Ermakov were waiting with horses and light carts. These men were all intoxicated and they were outraged that the prisoners were not brought to them alive. They expected to be part of the lynch mob. Yurovsky maintained control of the situation with great difficulty, eventually getting Ermakov's men to shift some of the bodies from the truck onto the carts. A few of Ermakov's men pawed the female bodies for diamonds hidden in their undergarments, two of whom lifted up Alexandra's skirt and fingered her genitals. Yurovsky ordered them at gunpoint to back off, dismissing the two who had groped the tsarina's corpse and any others he had caught looting.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The truck was bogged down in an area of marshy ground near the Gorno-Uralsk railway line, during which all the bodies were unloaded onto carts and taken to the disposal site. The sun was up by the time the carts came within sight of the disused mine, which was a large clearing at a place called the Four Brothers (). Yurovsky's men ate hardboiled eggs supplied by the local nuns (food that was meant for the imperial family), while the remainder of Ermakov's men were ordered back to the city as Yurovsky did not trust them and was displeased with their drunkenness.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Yurovsky and five other men laid out the bodies on the grass and undressed them, the clothes piled up and burned while Yurovsky took inventory of their jewellery. Only Maria's undergarments contained no jewels, which to Yurovsky was proof that the family had ceased to trust her ever since she became too friendly with one of the guards back in May. Once the bodies were "completely naked" they were dumped into a mineshaft and doused with sulphuric acid to disfigure them beyond recognition. Only then did Yurovsky discover that the pit was less than deep and the muddy water below did not fully submerge the corpses as he had expected. He unsuccessfully tried to collapse the mine with hand grenades, after which his men covered it with loose earth and branches. Yurovsky left three men to guard the site while he returned to Yekaterinburg with a bag filled with of looted diamonds, to report back to Beloborodov and Goloshchyokin. It was decided that the pit was too shallow.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The reason for the lack of jewels in Maria's underwear was, according to Gillard and other witnesses, "not only the daughters who wore bras with jewels sewn into them, but these bras were on those daughters." They must have been, and Maria could not have such bras, as they were made in Tobolsk when she was gone, to think that these bras were worn by someone else It would be ridiculous."Yurovsky knows nothing about the lack of jewelry in her underwear, so in his 1922 memoir, ” Here the special position Maria held in the family was confirmed（she is not similar to and [also] outwardly as the first two sisters: [she is] somewhat reticent and considered like a step-daughter in the family.）” is written on it.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: During transportation to the deeper copper mines on the early morning of 19 July, the Fiat truck carrying the bodies got stuck again in mud near Porosenkov Log ("Piglet's Ravine"). With the men exhausted, most refusing to obey orders and dawn approaching, Yurovsky decided to bury them under the road where the truck had stalled (). They dug a grave that was in size and barely deep. Alexei Trupp's body was tossed in first, followed by the Tsar's and then the rest. Sulphuric acid was again used to dissolve the bodies, their faces smashed with rifle butts and covered with quicklime. Railroad ties were placed over the grave to disguise it, with the Fiat truck being driven back and forth over the ties to press them into the earth. The burial was completed at 6 am on 19 July.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Yurovsky separated the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters to be buried about away, in an attempt to confuse anyone who might discover the mass grave with only nine bodies. Since the female body was badly disfigured, Yurovsky mistook her for Anna Demidova; in his report he wrote that he had actually wanted to destroy Alexandra's corpse. Alexei and his sister were burned in a bonfire and their remaining charred bones were thoroughly smashed with spades and tossed into a smaller pit. 44 partial bone fragments from both corpses were found in August 2007.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: After Yekaterinburg fell to the anti-communist White Army on 25 July, Admiral Alexander Kolchak established the Sokolov Commission to investigate the murders at the end of that month. , a legal investigator for the Omsk Regional Court, was appointed to undertake this. He interviewed several members of the Romanov entourage in February 1919, notably Pierre Gilliard, Alexandra Tegleva and Sydney Gibbes.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Sokolov discovered a large number of the Romanovs' belongings and valuables that were overlooked by Yurovsky and his men in and around the mineshaft where the bodies were initially disposed. Among them were burned bone fragments, congealed fat, Dr Botkin's upper dentures and glasses, corset stays, insignias and belt buckles, shoes, keys, pearls and diamonds, a few spent bullets, and part of a severed female finger. The corpse of Anastasia's King Charles Spaniel, Jimmy, was also found in the pit. The pit revealed no traces of clothing, which was consistent with Yurovsky's account that all the victims' clothes were burned.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Sokolov ultimately failed to find the concealed burial site on the Koptyaki Road; he photographed the spot as evidence of where the Fiat truck had become stuck on the morning of 19 July. The impending return of Bolshevik forces in July 1919 forced him to evacuate, and he brought the box containing the relics he recovered. Sokolov accumulated eight volumes of photographic and eyewitness accounts. He died in France in 1924 of a heart attack before he could complete his investigation. The box is stored in the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Job in Uccle, Brussels.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: His preliminary report was published in a book that same year in French and then Russian. It was published in English in 1925. Until 1989, it was the only accepted historical account of the murders. He wrongly concluded that the prisoners died instantly from the shooting, with the exception of Alexei and Anastasia, who were shot and bayoneted to death, and that the bodies were destroyed in a massive bonfire. Publication and worldwide acceptance of the investigation prompted the Soviets to issue a government-approved textbook in 1926 that largely plagiarized Sokolov's work, admitting that the empress and her children had been murdered with the Tsar.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The Soviet government continued to attempt to control accounts of the murders. Sokolov's report was banned. Leonid Brezhnev's Politburo deemed the Ipatiev House lacking "sufficient historical significance" and it was demolished in September 1977 by KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, less than a year before the sixtieth anniversary of the murders. Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that "sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism". The destruction of the house did not stop pilgrims or monarchists from visiting the site.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Local amateur sleuth Alexander Avdonin and filmmaker located the shallow grave on 30–31 May 1979 after years of covert investigation and a study of the primary evidence. Three skulls were removed from the grave, but after failing to find any scientist and laboratory to help examine them, and worried about the consequences of finding the grave, Avdonin and Ryabov reburied them in the summer of 1980. The presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev brought with it the era of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (reform), which prompted Ryabov to reveal the Romanovs' gravesite to "The Moscow News" on 10 April 1989, much to Avdonin's dismay. The remains were disinterred in 1991 by Soviet officials in a hasty 'official exhumation' that wrecked the site, destroying precious evidence. Since there were no clothes on the bodies and the damage inflicted was extensive, controversy persisted as to whether the identified and interred in St. Petersburg as Anastasia's were really hers or Maria's.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On 29 July 2007, another amateur group of local enthusiasts found the small pit containing the remains of Alexei and his sister, located in two small bonfire sites not far from the main grave on the Koptyaki Road. Although criminal investigators and geneticists identified them as Alexei and one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia, they remain stored in the state archives pending a decision from the church, which demanded a more "thorough and detailed" examination.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Ivan Plotnikov, history professor at the Maksim Gorky Ural State University, has established that the executioners were Yakov Yurovsky, Grigory P. Nikulin, Mikhail A. Medvedev (Kuprin), Peter Ermakov, Stepan Vaganov, Alexey G. Kabanov (former soldier in the tsar's Life Guards and Chekist assigned to the attic machine gun), Pavel Medvedev, V. N. Netrebin, and Y. M. Tselms. Filipp Goloshchyokin, a close associate of Yakov Sverdlov, being a military commissar of the Uralispolkom in Yekaterinburg, however did not actually participate, and two or three guards refused to take part. Pyotr Voykov was given the specific task of arranging for the disposal of their remains, obtaining of gasoline and of sulphuric acid, the latter from the Yekaterinburg pharmacy. He was a witness but later claimed to have taken part in the murders, looting belongings from a dead grand duchess. After the killings, he was to declare that "The world will never know what we did with them." Voykov served as Soviet ambassador to Poland in 1924, where he was assassinated by a Russian monarchist in July 1927.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The White Army investigator Nikolai Sokolov erroneously claimed that the executions of the Imperial Family was carried out by a group of "Latvians led by a Jew". However, in light of Plotnikov's research, the group that carried out the execution consisted almost entirely of ethnic Russians (Nikulin, Medvedev (Kudrin), Ermakov, Vaganov, Kabanov, Medvedev and Netrebin) with the participation of one Jew (Yurovsky) and possibly, one Latvian (Ya.M. Tselms).


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The men who were directly complicit in the murder of the imperial family largely survived in the immediate months after the murders. Stepan Vaganov, Ermakov's close associate, was attacked and killed by peasants in late 1918 for his participation in local acts of brutal repression by the Cheka. Pavel Medvedev, head of the Ipatiev House guard and one of the key figures in the murders, was captured by the White Army in Perm in February 1919. During his interrogation he denied taking part in the murders, and died in prison of typhus. Alexandre Beloborodov and his deputy, Boris Didkovsky, were both killed in 1938 during the Great Purge. Filipp Goloshchyokin was shot in October 1941 in an NKVD prison and consigned to an unmarked grave.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Three days after the murders, Yurovsky personally reported to Lenin on the events of that night and was rewarded with an appointment to the Moscow City Cheka. He held a succession of key economic and party posts, dying in the Kremlin Hospital in 1938 aged 60. Prior to his death, he donated the guns he used in the murders to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, and left behind three valuable, though contradictory, accounts of the event.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: A British war correspondent, Francis McCullagh, who met Yurovsky in 1920 alleged that he was remorseful over his role in the execution of the Romanovs. However, in a final letter that was written to his children shortly before his death in 1938, he only reminisced about his revolutionary career and how "the storm of October" had "turned its brightest side" towards him, making him "the happiest of mortals"; there was no expression of regret or remorse over the murders. Yurovsky and his assistant, Nikulin, who died in 1964, are buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His son, Alexander Yurovsky, voluntarily handed over his father's memoirs to amateur investigators Avdonin and Ryabov in 1978.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Lenin saw the House of Romanov as "monarchist filth, a 300-year disgrace", and referred to Nicholas II in conversation and in his writings as "the most evil enemy of the Russian people, a bloody executioner, an Asiatic gendarme" and "a crowned robber." A written record outlining the chain of command and tying the ultimate responsibility for the fate of the Romanovs back to Lenin was either never made or carefully concealed. Lenin operated with extreme caution, his favored method being to issue instructions in coded telegrams, insisting that the original and even the telegraph ribbon on which it was sent be destroyed. Uncovered documents in Archive No. 2 (Lenin), Archive No. 86 (Sverdlov) as well as the archives of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee reveal that a host of party 'errand boys' were regularly designated to relay his instructions, either by confidential notes or anonymous directives made in the collective name of the Council of People's Commissars. In all such decisions Lenin regularly insisted that no written evidence be preserved. The 55 volumes of Lenin's "Collected Works" as well as the memoirs of those who directly took part in the murders were scrupulously censored, emphasizing the roles of Sverdlov and Goloshchyokin.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Lenin was, however, aware of Vasily Yakovlev's decision to take Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria further on to Omsk instead of Yekaterinburg in April 1918, having become worried about the extremely threatening behavior of the Ural Soviets in Tobolsk and along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The "Biographical Chronicle" of Lenin's political life confirms that first Lenin (between 6 and 7 pm) and then Lenin and Sverdlov together (between 9:30 and 11:50 pm) had direct telegraph contact with the Ural Soviets about Yakovlev's change of route. Despite Yakovlev's request to take the family further away to the more remote Simsky Gorny District in Ufa province (where they could hide in the mountains), warning that "the baggage" would be destroyed if given to the Ural Soviets, Lenin and Sverdlov were adamant that they be brought to Yekaterinburg. On 16 July, the editors of Danish newspaper Nationaltidende queried Lenin to "kindly wire facts" in regards to a rumor that Nicholas II "has been murdered"; he responded, "Rumor not true. Ex-tsar safe. All rumors are only lies of capitalist press." By this time, however, the coded telegram ordering the execution of Nicholas, his family and retinue had already been sent to Yekaterinburg.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Lenin also welcomed news of the death of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who was murdered in Alapayevsk along with five other Romanovs on 18 July 1918, remarking that "virtue with the crown on it is a greater enemy to the world revolution than a hundred tyrant tsars". Soviet historiography portrayed Nicholas as a weak and incompetent leader whose decisions led to military defeats and the deaths of millions of his subjects, while Lenin's reputation was protected at all costs, thus ensuring that no discredit was brought on him; responsibility for the 'liquidation' of the Romanov family was directed at the Ural Soviets and Yekaterinburg Cheka.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On the afternoon of 19 July, Filipp Goloshchyokin announced at the Opera House on Glavny Prospekt that "Nicholas the bloody" had been shot and his family taken to another place. Sverdlov granted permission for the local paper in Yekaterinburg to publish the "Execution of Nicholas, the Bloody Crowned Murderer – Shot without Bourgeois Formalities but in Accordance with our new democratic principles", along with the coda that "the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place". An official announcement appeared in the national press, two days later. It reported that the monarch had been executed on the order of Uralispolkom under pressure posed by the approach of the Czechoslovaks.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Over the course of 84 days after the Yekaterinburg murders, 27 more friends and relatives (14 Romanovs and 13 members of the imperial entourage and household) were murdered by the Bolsheviks: at Alapayevsk on 18 July, Perm on 4 September, and the Peter and Paul Fortress on 24 January 1919. Unlike the imperial family, the bodies at Alapayevsk and Perm were recovered by the White Army in October 1918 and May 1919 respectively. However, only the final resting places of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and her faithful companion Sister Varvara Yakovleva are known today, buried alongside each other in the Church of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Although official Soviet accounts place the responsibility for the decision with the Uralispolkom, an entry in Leon Trotsky's diary reportedly suggested that the order had been given by Lenin himself. Trotsky wrote:


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: However, , there has been no conclusive evidence that either Lenin or Sverdlov gave the order. V. N. Solovyov, the leader of the Investigative Committee of Russia's 1993 investigation on the shooting of the Romanov family, has concluded that there is no reliable document that indicates that either Lenin or Sverdlov were responsible. He declared:


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: In 1993, the report of Yakov Yurovsky from 1922 was published. According to the report, units of the Czechoslovak Legion were approaching Yekaterinburg. On 17 July 1918, Yakov and other Bolshevik jailers, fearing that the Legion would free Nicholas after conquering the town, murdered him and his family. The next day, Yakov departed for Moscow with a report to Sverdlov. As soon as the Czechoslovaks seized Yekaterinburg, his apartment was pillaged.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Over the years, a number of people claimed to be survivors of the ill-fated family. In May 1979, the remains of most of the family and their retainers were found by amateur enthusiasts, who kept the discovery secret until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In July 1991, the bodies of five family members (the Tsar, Tsarina, and three of their daughters) were exhumed. After forensic examination and DNA identification, the bodies were laid to rest with state honors in the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, where most other Russian monarchs since Peter the Great lie. Boris Yeltsin and his wife attended the funeral along with Romanov relations, including Prince Michael of Kent. The Holy Synod opposed the government's decision in February 1998 to bury the remains in the Peter and Paul Fortress, preferring a "symbolic" grave until their authenticity had been resolved. As a result, when they were interred in July 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as "Christian victims of the Revolution" rather than the imperial family. Patriarch Alexy II, who felt that the Church was sidelined in the investigation, refused to officiate at the burial and banned bishops from taking part in the funeral ceremony. The Russian president Boris Yeltsin described the murder of the royal family as one of the most shameful chapters in Russian history.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: The remaining two bodies of Alexei and one of his sisters, presumed to be Maria by Russian anthropologists and Anastasia by American ones, were discovered in 2007.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On 15 August 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church announced the canonization of the family for their "humbleness, patience and meekness". However, reflecting the intense debate preceding the issue, the bishops did not proclaim the Romanovs as martyrs, but passion bearers instead (see Romanov sainthood).


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: Over the years 2000 to 2003, the Church of All Saints, Yekaterinburg was built on the site of Ipatiev House.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On 1 October 2008, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled that Nicholas II and his family were victims of political repression and rehabilitated them. The rehabilitation was denounced by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, vowing the decision will "sooner or later be corrected".


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: On Thursday, 26 August 2010, a Russian court ordered prosecutors to reopen an investigation into the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, although the Bolsheviks believed to have shot them in 1918 had died long before. The Russian Prosecutor General's main investigative unit said it had formally closed a criminal investigation into the killing of Nicholas because too much time had elapsed since the crime and because those responsible had died. However, Moscow's Basmanny Court ordered the re-opening of the case, saying that a Supreme Court ruling blaming the state for the killings made the deaths of the actual gunmen irrelevant, according to a lawyer for the Tsar's relatives and local news agencies.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: In late 2015, at the insistence by the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian investigators exhumed the bodies of Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, for additional DNA testing, which confirmed that the bones were of the couple.


title: Execution of the Romanov family

text: A survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center on 11 July 2018 revealed that 57% of Russians "believe that the execution of the Royal family is a heinous unjustified crime", while 29% said "the last Russian emperor paid too high a price for his mistakes". Among those 46% aged between 18 and 24 believe that Nicholas II had to be punished for his mistakes. Only 3% of Russians "were certain that the Royal family's execution was the public's just retribution for the emperor's blunders". On the centenary of the murders, over 100,000 pilgrims took part in a procession led by Patriarch Kirill in Yekaterinburg, marching from the city center where the Romanovs were murdered to a monastery in Ganina Yama. There is a widespread legend that the remains of the Romanovs were completely destroyed at the Ganina Yama during the ritual murder and a profitable pilgrimage business developed there. Therefore, the found remains of the martyrs, as well as the place of their burial in the "Porosyonkov Log", are ignored. On the eve of the centennial, the Russian government announced that its new probe had confirmed once again that the bodies were the Romanovs’. The state also remained aloof from the celebration, as President Vladimir Putin considers Nicholas II a weak ruler.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County and Santa Clara County. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zurich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution, and, as of June 2021, has the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies. Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation. It was in Silicon Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the microcomputer, among other technologies, were developed. , the region employed about a half million information technology workers.


title: Silicon Valley

text: As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the term "Silicon Valley" came to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County and southeastern San Mateo County, and a metonymical definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire Bay Area. The term Silicon Valley is often used as a synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector. The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similarly named locations, as well as research parks and technology centers with comparable structures all around the world. Many headquarters of tech companies in Silicon Valley have become hotspots for tourism. More recently, intensifying droughts in California have further strained the Silicon Valley region’s water security.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The word "silicon" in the name originally referred to the large number of innovators and manufacturers in the region specializing in silicon-based transistors and integrated circuit chips.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The popularization of the name is credited to Don Hoefler. He first used it in the article "Silicon Valley USA", which appeared in the January 11, 1971, issue of the weekly trade newspaper "Electronic News". However, the term did not gain widespread use until the early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley was born through the intersection of several contributing factors including a skilled science research base housed in area universities, plentiful venture capital, and steady U.S. Department of Defense spending. Stanford University leadership was especially important in the valley's early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the Navy in 1912.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California, was commissioned by the United States Government for use as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to house the airship "USS Macon" in Hangar One. The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field, and between 1933 and 1947, U.S. Navy blimps were based there.


title: Silicon Valley

text: A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett Field to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its west coast operations to San Diego, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, forerunner of NASA) took over portions of Moffett Field for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms, such as Lockheed, which was Silicon Valley's largest employer from the 1950s into 1980s.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the development of this area. A very powerful sense of regional solidarity accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the 1890s, Stanford University's leaders saw its mission as service to the (American) West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient local industry. Thus regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development.


title: Silicon Valley

text: encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. In 1951 Terman spearheaded the formation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park, an area surrounding Page Mill Road, south west of El Camino Real and extending beyond Foothill Expressway to Arastradero Road), where the university leased portions of its land to high-tech firms. Terman is credited with nurturing companies like Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Lockheed Corporation, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford University campus.


title: Silicon Valley

text: After World War II, universities experienced enormous demand due to returning students. In 1951, to address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment-opportunities for graduating students, Frederick Terman proposed leasing Stanford's lands for use as an office park named the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). Leases were limited to high-technology companies. The first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military-radar components. Terman also found venture capital for civilian-technology start-ups. Hewlett-Packard became one of the major success-stories. Founded in 1939 in Packard's garage by Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park shortly after 1953. In 1954 Stanford originated the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the university on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal-computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home-printing market when it released the first thermal drop-on-demand ink-jet printer in 1984. Other early tenants included Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Lockheed.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 1956, William Shockley, the co-inventor of the first working transistor (with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain), moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California, to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to live closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto. Shockley's work served as the basis for many electronic developments for decades. Both Frederick Terman and William Shockley are often called "the father of Silicon Valley". In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the bipolar transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive management style, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor; Shockley referred to them as the "traitorous eight". Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 1957, Mohamed Atalla at Bell Labs developed the process of silicon surface passivation by thermal oxidation, which electrically stabilized silicon surfaces and reduced the concentration of electronic states at the surface. This enabled silicon to surpass the conductivity and performance of germanium, leading to silicon replacing germanium as the dominant semiconductor material, and paving the way for the mass-production of silicon semiconductor devices. This led to Atalla inventing the MOSFET (metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, with his colleague Dawon Kahng in 1959. It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses, and is credited with starting the silicon revolution.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The MOSFET was initially overlooked and ignored by Bell Labs in favour of bipolar transistors, which led to Atalla resigning from Bell Labs and joining Hewlett-Packard in 1961. However, the MOSFET generated significant interest at RCA and Fairchild Semiconductor. In late 1960, Karl Zaininger and Charles Meuller fabricated a MOSFET at RCA, and Chih-Tang Sah built an MOS-controlled tetrode at Fairchild. MOS devices were later commercialized by General Microelectronics and Fairchild in 1964. The development of MOS technology became the focus of startup companies in California, such as Fairchild and Intel, fuelling the technological and economic growth of what would later be called Silicon Valley.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Following the 1959 inventions of the monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild, and the MOSFET (MOS transistor) by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs, Atalla first proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) chip in 1960, and then the first commercial MOS IC was introduced by General Microelectronics in 1964. The development of the MOS IC led to the invention of the microprocessor, incorporating the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, designed and realized by Federico Faggin along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. In April 1974, Intel released the Intel 8080, a "computer on a chip", "the first truly usable microprocessor".


title: Silicon Valley

text: On April 23, 1963, J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at The Pentagon's ARPA issued an office memorandum addressed to Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network. It rescheduled a meeting in Palo Alto regarding his vision of a computer network, which he imagined as an electronic commons open to all, the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals. As head of IPTO from 1962 to 1964, "Licklider initiated three of the most important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking." In 1969, the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.


title: Silicon Valley

text: By the early 1970s, there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. Growth during this era was fueled by the emergence of venture capital on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980. Since the 1980s, Silicon Valley has been home to the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 1971, Don Hoefler traced the origins of Silicon Valley firms, including via investments from Fairchild's eight co-founders. The key investors in Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital were from the same group, directly leading to "Tech Crunch" 2014 estimate of 92 public firms of 130 related listed firms then worth over US$2.1 trillion with over 2,000 firms traced back to them.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically minded hobbyists who gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information pertaining to DIY construction of computing devices. It was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park. They both were interested in maintaining a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The first meeting was held as of March 1975 at French's garage in Menlo Park, San Mateo County, California; which was on occasion of the arrival of the MITS Altair microcomputer, the first unit sent to the area for review by People's Computer Company. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs credit that first meeting with inspiring them to design the original Apple I and (successor) Apple II computers. As a result, the first preview of the Apple I was given at the Homebrew Computer Club. Subsequent meetings were held at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Using money from NASA, the US Air Force, and ARPA, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s and 1970s while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), first publicly demonstrated in 1968 in what is now known as The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI was also involved in launching the ARPANET (precursor to the Internet) and starting the Network Information Center (now InterNIC). Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers beginning in the early 1970s. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers.


title: Silicon Valley

text: While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer, and Microsoft. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford University's Ethernet campus network.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Commercial use of the Internet became practical and grew slowly throughout the early 1990s. In 1995, commercial use of the Internet grew substantially and the initial wave of internet startups, Amazon.com, eBay, and the predecessor to Craigslist began operations.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble, which started in the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. After the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 "The Wall Street Journal" story found that 12 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents. Silicon Valley is also home to a significant number of "Unicorn" ventures, referring to startup companies whose valuation has exceeded $1 billion dollars.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The San Francisco Bay Area has the largest concentration of high-tech companies in the United States, at 387,000 high-tech jobs, of which Silicon Valley accounts for 225,300 high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. Silicon Valley has the highest average high-tech salary in the United States at $144,800. Largely a result of the high technology sector, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The region is the biggest high-tech manufacturing center in the United States. The unemployment rate of the region was 9.4% in January 2009 and has decreased to a record low of 2.7% as of August 2019. Silicon Valley received 41% of all U.S. venture investment in 2011, and 46% in 2012. More traditional industries also recognize the potential of high-tech development, and several car manufacturers have opened offices in Silicon Valley to capitalize on its entrepreneurial ecosystem.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Manufacture of transistors is, or was, the core industry in Silicon Valley. The production workforce was for the most part composed of Asian and Latino immigrants who were paid low wages and worked in hazardous conditions due to the chemicals used in the manufacture of integrated circuits. Technical, engineering, design, and administrative staffs were in large part well compensated.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley has a severe housing shortage, caused by the market imbalance between jobs created and housing units built: from 2010 to 2015, many more jobs have been created than housing units built. (400,000 jobs, 60,000 housing units) This shortage has driven home prices extremely high, far out of the range of production workers. As of 2016 a two-bedroom apartment rented for about $2,500 while the median home price was about $1 million. The "Financial Post" called Silicon Valley the most expensive U.S. housing region. Homelessness is a problem with housing beyond the reach of middle-income residents; there is little shelter space other than in San Jose which, as of 2015, was making an effort to develop shelters by renovating old hotels.


title: Silicon Valley

text: "The Economist" also attributes the high cost of living to the success of the industries in this region. Although, this rift between high and low salaries is driving many residents out who can no longer afford to live there. In the Bay Area, the number of residents planning to leave within the next several years has had an increase of 35% since 2016, from 34% to 46%.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley. Among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:


title: Silicon Valley

text: Additional notable companies headquartered in Silicon Valley (some of which are defunct, subsumed, or relocated) include:


title: Silicon Valley

text: Depending on what geographic regions are included in the meaning of the term, the population of Silicon Valley is between 3.5 and 4 million. A 1999 study by AnnaLee Saxenian for the Public Policy Institute of California reported that a third of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers were immigrants and that nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley's high-technology firms since 1980 were run by Chinese (17 percent) or Indian descent CEOs (7 percent). There is a stratum of well-compensated technical employees and managers, including 10s of thousands of "single-digit millionaires". This income and range of assets will support a middle-class lifestyle in Silicon Valley.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In November 2006, the University of California, Davis released a report analyzing business leadership by women within the state. The report showed that although 103 of the 400 largest public companies headquartered in California were located in Santa Clara County (the most of all counties), only 8.8% of Silicon Valley companies had women CEOs. This was the lowest percentage in the state. (San Francisco County had 19.2% and Marin County had 18.5%.)


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley tech leadership positions are occupied almost exclusively by men. This is also represented in the number of new companies founded by women as well as the number of women-lead startups that receive venture capital funding. Wadhwa said he believes that a contributing factor is a lack of parental encouragement to study science and engineering. He also cited a lack of women role models and noted that most famous tech leaders—like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg—are men.


title: Silicon Valley

text: As of October 2014, some high-profile Silicon Valley firms were working actively to prepare and recruit women. "Bloomberg" reported that Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft attended the 20th annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference to actively recruit and potentially hire female engineers and technology experts. The same month, the second annual Platform Summit was held to discuss increasing racial and gender diversity in tech. As of April 2015 experienced women were engaged in creation of venture capital firms which leveraged women's perspectives in funding of startups.


title: Silicon Valley

text: After UC Davis published its "Study of California Women Business Leaders" in November 2006, some "San Jose Mercury News" readers dismissed the possibility that sexism contributed in making Silicon Valley's leadership gender gap the highest in the state. A January 2015 issue of "Newsweek" magazine featured an article detailing reports of sexism and misogyny in Silicon Valley. The article's author, Nina Burleigh, asked, "Where were all these offended people when women like Heidi Roizen published accounts of having a venture capitalist stick her hand in his pants under a table while a deal was being discussed?"


title: Silicon Valley

text: Silicon Valley firms' board of directors are composed of 15.7% women compared with 20.9% in the S&P 100.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The 2012 lawsuit "Pao v. Kleiner Perkins" was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by executive Ellen Pao for gender discrimination against her employer, Kleiner Perkins. The case went to trial in February 2015. On March 27, 2015, the jury found in favor of Kleiner Perkins on all counts. Nevertheless, the case, which had wide press coverage, resulted in major advances in consciousness of gender discrimination on the part of venture capital and technology firms and their women employees. Two other cases have been filed against Facebook and Twitter.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 2014, tech companies Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Apple, and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic. June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, "USA Today" published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley—from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms." Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said of improving diversity in the tech industry, "This is the next step in the civil rights movement" while T. J. Rodgers has argued against Jackson's assertions.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The following Santa Clara County cities are traditionally considered to be in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):


title: Silicon Valley

text: The geographical boundaries of Silicon Valley have changed over the years. Historically, the term Silicon Valley was treated as synonymous with Santa Clara Valley, and then its meaning later evolved to refer to Santa Clara County plus adjacent regions in southern San Mateo County and southern Alameda County. However, over the years this geographical area has been expanded to include San Francisco County, Contra Costa County, and the northern parts of Alameda County and San Mateo County, this shift has occurred due to the expansion in the local economy and the development of new technologies.


title: Silicon Valley

text: The United States Department of Labor's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program defined Silicon Valley as the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 2015, MIT researchers developed a novel method for measuring which towns are home to startups with higher growth potential and this defines Silicon Valley to center on the municipalities of Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Funding for public schools in upscale Silicon Valley communities such as Woodside is often supplemented by grants from private foundations set up for that purpose and funded by local residents. Schools in less affluent areas such as East Palo Alto must depend on state funding.


title: Silicon Valley

text: In 1980, "Intelligent Machines Journal" changed its name to "InfoWorld", and, with offices in Palo Alto, began covering the emergence of the microcomputer industry in the valley.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Local and national media cover Silicon Valley and its companies. CNN, "The Wall Street Journal", and Bloomberg News operate Silicon Valley bureaus out of Palo Alto. Public broadcaster KQED (TV) and KQED-FM, as well as the Bay Area's local ABC station KGO-TV, operate bureaus in San Jose. KNTV, NBC's local Bay Area affiliate "NBC Bay Area", is located in San Jose. Produced from this location is the nationally distributed TV Show "Tech Now" as well as the CNBC Silicon Valley bureau. San Jose-based media serving Silicon Valley include the "San Jose Mercury News" daily and the "Metro Silicon Valley" weekly.


title: Silicon Valley

text: Specialty media include "El Observador" and the "San Jose / Silicon Valley Business Journal". Most of the Bay Area's other major TV stations, newspapers, and media operate in San Francisco or Oakland. Patch.com operates various web portals, providing local news, discussion and events for residents of Silicon Valley. Mountain View has a public nonprofit station, KMVT-15. KMVT-15's shows include Silicon Valley Education News (EdNews)-Edward Tico Producer.


title: Brad Pitt filmography

text: Brad Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and producer. His acting career began at age 24 in 1987 with roles in the hit Fox television series "21 Jump Street". He subsequently appeared in episodes for television shows during the late 1980s and played his first major role in the slasher film "Cutting Class" (1989). He gained recognition in "Thelma & Louise" (1991) and "A River Runs Through It" (1992). He later took on the role of vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in the horror drama "Interview with the Vampire" (1994) and for his performance in the epic drama "Legends of the Fall" (1994), he earned his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor nomination.


title: Brad Pitt filmography

text: Pitt starred in the David Fincher-directed, commercially successful thriller "Seven" (1995), in which he played a detective on the trail of a serial killer who murders people he believes are guilty of the Seven Deadly Sins. His performance as a psychotic mental patient in the science fiction film "12 Monkeys" won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. He followed it with the role of Heinrich Harrer in the biopic "Seven Years in Tibet" (1997) and as Death in "Meet Joe Black" (1998). Pitt reteamed with Fincher to star in the apocalyptic film "Fight Club" (1999) as anti-consumerist cult leader Tyler Durden, a role that required him to learn boxing, taekwondo, and grappling. A critical and commercial disappointment at the time of release, the film has since developed a cult status. Pitt portrayed Rusty Ryan in the commercially successful heist film series "Ocean's Trilogy" (2001–07). In 2002, he earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his guest appearance in the sitcom "Friends" alongside his then-wife Jennifer Aniston. Also that year, Pitt started a production company, Plan B Entertainment, whose first release was the epic war film "Troy" (2004), starring Pitt. He played an assassin opposite Angelina Jolie in the commercially successful action comedy "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005).


title: Brad Pitt filmography

text: Pitt produced the 2006 crime drama "The Departed", and starred alongside Cate Blanchett in the multi-narrative drama "Babel" (2006); the former won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pitt's portrayal of the eponymous man who ages in reverse in the drama "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. He starred in the successful war film "Inglourious Basterds" (2009), and produced the superhero film "Kick-Ass" (2010) and its sequel in 2013. In 2011, he earned critical acclaim for producing and starring in two films—the experimental drama "The Tree of Life" and the biopic sports drama "Moneyball"—both of which were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He also garnered a Best Actor nomination for the latter. His biggest commercial success came with the apocalyptic film "World War Z" (2013), which has grossed a total of $540 million worldwide. Pitt produced the period drama "12 Years a Slave" (2013), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2014, he starred in the war film "Fury" which received positive reviews from critics and proved to be successful at the box office. For playing a stunt double to Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Quentin Tarantino's film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019), he won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The first three novels are part of a trilogy following teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, and the fourth book is a prequel set 64 years before the original.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The novels in the trilogy are titled "The Hunger Games" (2008), "Catching Fire" (2009), and "Mockingjay" (2010). Each was adapted for film, establishing "The Hunger Games" film series, with the film adaptation of "Mockingjay" split into two feature-length motion pictures. The first two books in the series were both "New York Times" best sellers, and "Mockingjay" topped all US bestseller lists upon its release. By the time the film adaptation of "The Hunger Games" was released in 2012, the publisher had reported over 26 million "Hunger Games" trilogy books in print, including movie tie-in books.


title: The Hunger Games

text: "The Hunger Games" universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 13 districts in varying states of poverty. Every year, children from the first 12 districts are selected via lottery to participate in a compulsory televised battle royale death match called The Hunger Games.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The 13th district was also subjected to this, but they led a rebellion against the Capitol and brought them to surrender. Since District 13 specialized in nuclear weaponry, the Capitol quickly surrendered and agreed to a peace deal. They both agreed that the residents of District 13 would all move underground and the land above would be bombed to make it seem like the Capitol had won.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The novels were all well received. In August 2012, the series ranked second, exceeded only by the "Harry Potter" series in NPR’s poll of the top 100 teen novels, which asked voters to choose their favorite young adult books. On August 17, 2012, Amazon announced the "Hunger Games" trilogy as its top seller, surpassing the record previously held by the Harry Potter series. , the trilogy has sold more than 65 million copies in the U.S. alone (more than 28 million copies of "The Hunger Games", more than 19 million copies of "Catching Fire", and more than 18 million copies of "Mockingjay"). "The Hunger Games" trilogy has been sold in 56 territories in 51 languages to date.


title: The Hunger Games

text: A prequel novel, titled "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes", about the early days of the Hunger Games, featuring a young Coriolanus Snow as the protagonist, was released on May 19, 2020.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The Hunger Games trilogy takes place in an unspecified future time, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in North America. The country consists of a wealthy Capitol city, located in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by twelve (originally thirteen) poorer districts ruled by the Capitol. The Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, but the districts are in varying states of poverty. The trilogy's narrator and protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the poorest region of Panem, located in Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. As punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol (called the "Dark Days"), in which District 13 was destroyed, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve remaining districts, between the ages of 12 and 18, are selected by lottery to compete in an annual pageant called the Hunger Games. The Games are a televised event in which the participants, called "tributes", are forced to fight to the death in a dangerous public arena. The winning tribute and his or her home district are then rewarded with food, supplies, and riches. The purposes of the Hunger Games are to provide entertainment for the Capitol and to remind the districts of the Capitol's power and its lack of remorse or forgiveness for the failed rebellion of the current competitors' ancestors.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Each book in "The Hunger Games" trilogy has three sections of nine chapters each. Collins has said this format comes from her playwriting background, which taught her to write in a three-act structure; her previous series, "The Underland Chronicles", was written in the same way. She sees each group of nine chapters as a separate part of the story, and comments still call those divisions "act breaks".


title: The Hunger Games

text: Collins says she drew inspiration for the series from both classical and contemporary sources. Her main classical source of inspiration is the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which, as a punishment for past crimes, Minos forces Athens to sacrifice seven youths and seven maidens to the Minotaur, which kills them in a vast labyrinth. Collins says that even as a child, she was stunned by the idea since "it was just so cruel" to force Athens to sacrifice its own children.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Collins also cites as a classical inspiration the Roman gladiator games. She feels three key elements create a good game: an all powerful and ruthless government, people forced to fight to the death, and the game's role as a source of popular entertainment.


title: The Hunger Games

text: A contemporary source of inspiration was Collins' recent fascination with reality television programs. She says they are like "The Hunger Games" because the Games are not just entertainment but also a reminder to the districts of their rebellion. On a tired night, Collins says that while she was channel-surfing the television, she saw people competing for a prize and then saw footage of the Iraq War. She described how the two combined in an "unsettling way" to create her first ideas for the series.


title: The Hunger Games

text: "The Hunger Games" follows 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District 12 who volunteers for the 74th Hunger Games in place of her younger sister Primrose Everdeen. Also selected from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, who once saved Katniss from starvation when they were children. They are mentored by their district's only living victor, Haymitch Abernathy, who won 24 years earlier and has since led a solitary life of alcoholism.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Peeta confesses his longtime secret love for Katniss in a televised interview prior to the Games. This revelation stuns Katniss, who usually does not allow herself to think of romantic attraction due to her traumatic childhood and her fear of losing future children to the Hunger Games. However, she believes that Peeta is only feigning love for her as a tactic for the Games.


title: The Hunger Games

text: In the arena, Peeta saves Katniss’s life multiple times without her realizing. Katniss allies with Rue, a young tribute from District 11 who reminds Katniss of her sister. When Rue is killed, Katniss places flowers around her body as an act of defiance toward the Capitol. The remaining tributes are alerted to a rule change allowing tributes from the same district to win as a team. Katniss finds a seriously wounded Peeta, and, rather than compete alone and be unencumbered by him, she risks her life and nurses him back to health. Haymitch advises her to feign feelings for Peeta in order to gain wealthy sponsors who can provide crucial supplies to the "star-crossed lovers" during the Games. As she allows herself to get close to Peeta, she develops real feelings for him.


title: The Hunger Games

text: When all of the other tributes are dead, the rule change is abruptly revoked. With neither willing to kill the other, Katniss comes up with a solution: a double suicide by eating poisonous berries. This forces the authorities to concede that they have both won the Games, just in time to save their lives. During and after the Games, Katniss’s genuine feelings for Peeta grow, and she struggles to reconcile them with the fact that their relationship developed under duress.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Haymitch warns her that the danger is far from over. The authorities are furious at being made fools, and the only way to try to allay their anger is to continue to pretend that her actions were because of her love for Peeta and nothing else. On the journey home, Peeta is dismayed to learn of the deception.


title: The Hunger Games

text: In "Catching Fire", which begins six months after the conclusion of "The Hunger Games", Katniss learns that her defiance in the previous novel has started a chain reaction that has inspired rebellion in the districts. President Snow threatens to harm Katniss's family and friends if she does not help to defuse the unrest and marry Peeta. Meanwhile, Peeta has become aware of Katniss's disingenuous love for him, but while he feels sad, he does not pressure her in any way. He has also been informed of Snow's threats, so he promises to help keep up the act to spare the citizens of District 12. Katniss’s best friend, Gale Hawthorne, confesses his love for Katniss, which shocks and confuses her.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Katniss and Peeta tour the districts as victors and plan a public wedding. While they follow Snow's orders and keep up the ruse, Katniss and Peeta inadvertently fuel the rebellion, and the mockingjay pin she wears becomes its symbol. District by district, the citizens of Panem begin to stage uprisings against the Capitol. Snow announces a special 75th edition of the Hunger Games—known as the Quarter Quell—in which Katniss and Peeta are forced to compete with other past victors, effectively canceling the wedding.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Katniss believes that Peeta should survive these Games instead of her, and dedicates her life to saving him. Peeta, in turn, dedicates his life to saving her, and they both acknowledge the other’s opposite intentions. At Haymitch's urging, the pair teams up with several other tributes and manages to destroy the arena and escape the Games. Katniss is rescued by rebel forces from District 13, and learns that the Capitol has captured both Peeta and their District 7 ally, Johanna Mason. Katniss ultimately learns—to her surprise—that she had inadvertently been an integral part of the rebellion all along; her rescue had been jointly planned by Haymitch, Plutarch Heavensbee, and Finnick Odair, among others. At the knowledge that Peeta has been captured and will now be tortured and killed, Katniss is furious and loses the will to live.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Gale informs her that the Capitol has destroyed District 12 in retaliation. After some hesitation, Katniss joins the rebels.


title: The Hunger Games

text: "Mockingjay", the third and final book in "The Hunger Games" series, was released on August 24, 2010.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Most of the districts have rebelled against the Capitol, led by District 13 and its President Alma Coin. The Capitol lied about the district being destroyed in the Dark Days. After a standoff with the Capitol, the District 13 residents took to living underground and rebuilding their strength. The District 12 survivors find shelter with them. Katniss also learns that Peeta is alive and is being tortured and forced to speak on national television discouraging the rebellion. She agrees to become the "Mockingjay", the symbol of the rebellion. In return, she demands immunity for Peeta, Johanna Mason, Annie Cresta, and Enobaria, fellow Games victors captured by the Capitol. Katniss also demands the privilege of killing President Snow herself.


title: The Hunger Games

text: When Katniss realizes that the Capitol will keep torturing Peeta as long as she fuels the rebellion, she has a panic attack and loses the ability to function as the Mockingjay. A rescue mission is mounted that succeeds in rescuing Peeta, Johanna and Annie. However, Peeta has been brainwashed to kill Katniss, and he tries to choke her to death upon their reunion. He undergoes experimental treatment to try to cure him. Katniss does not have hope for his recovery, and decides to give her all to the rebellion and die in the process.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Throughout the novel, Katniss sees how ruthless Gale is. He does not seem to value human life as much as she does. He feels no sympathy for the enemies to the rebellion, and he feels fine with torture and murder, even of innocent civilians, to advance the rebellion. She struggles to reconcile this with the fact that she still cares for Gale. Amid her crushing loneliness and her PTSD, she kisses Gale, but he says that the kiss is not real as it is like “kissing someone who’s drunk.”


title: The Hunger Games

text: After she recovers from Peeta’s attack, Katniss and a team known as the "Star Squad", composed of Gale, Peeta, Finnick, a camera crew, and various other soldiers, are assigned to film propaganda in relatively quiet combat zones. Katniss, however, decides to go to the Capitol to kill Snow, pretending Coin gave her that mission. Peeta still struggles with his brainwashing, but he is in recovery and is still in love with Katniss. Most of the squad are killed along the way, including recently married Finnick. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, she sees a group of Capitol children surrounding it as human shields. Suddenly a hovercraft drops silver parachutes on the children, who reach for them, hoping they bear food. Some of the parachutes explode, creating carnage. The advancing rebels send in medics, including Primrose Everdeen. Then the rest of the parachutes explode, killing Primrose just as she sees her sister.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Later, Katniss, also injured, awakens from a coma to learn that the rebels have won, and Snow is awaiting execution at her hands. When she meets Snow by chance, he claims that it was Coin who secretly ordered the bombings in order to strip away the support of his remaining followers. This bomb also matches the description of the one Gale was helping to devise, and she breaks off her friendship with Gale. Coin then asks the surviving victors to vote on a final Hunger Games, involving the children of high-ranking Capitol officials (including Snow's granddaughter). In order to gain Coin’s trust, Katniss and Haymitch cast the deciding votes in favor of the scheme. However, at what is supposed to be Snow's execution, Katniss instead kills Coin with her bow. Snow laughs, then dies. Katniss attempts to commit suicide, but Peeta stops her and she is instead arrested.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Katniss is tried, but the jury believes she was mentally unfit, and she is sent home to District 12. Both Katniss's mother and Gale take jobs in other districts. Peeta regains his sanity. Katniss settles down with him, and the two “grow back together.” After many years, she finally agrees to have children. They have a girl and then a boy, who grow up in a world without the Hunger Games. To cope with her lingering PTSD, Katniss often spends time recounting every kind deed she has ever witnessed anyone do.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Set 64 years before "The Hunger Games" events, it tells the story of the 'Dark Days' which led to the failed rebellion in Panem. It follows Coriolanus Snow when he was 18 years old. Collins stated that the book would also explore the 10 years after the end of the war where the people of Panem try to get back on their feet and figure out how to go on within their new reality.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Major themes of the novels include distrust of authority (of adults and the government), class discrimination and caste, resistance, the ethics of entertainment, and most notably, the origins and effects of war. Social inequality, unaccountable governance and violence against children have also been suggested as prominent themes. "In the world of the 'Hunger Games', the Capitol lives a life of extravagant wealth and consumption. Meanwhile, out in the 'districts', millions of people work dangerous jobs with low pay. As the Capitol wallows in excess, the districts can barely afford to feed their children." Author Suzanne Collins also mentions the themes of "just war", gladiatorial combat and hunger. War as a result of climate disaster, and the power and illusions of television have also been cited as themes. Others have mentioned revolution and rebellion as themes. "Although it’s... aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of mass revolution, economic sabotage and the populist fight against oligarchy."


title: The Hunger Games

text: All three books have been favorably received. Praise has focused on the addictive quality, especially of the first book, and the action. John Green of "The New York Times" compared "The Hunger Games" with Scott Westerfeld's "The Uglies" series. "Catching Fire" was praised for improving upon the first book. "Mockingjay" was praised for its portrayal of violence, world building, and romantic intrigue.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The series received criticism regarding its reality TV "death game" theme being derivative of earlier works, particularly "Battle Royale", as well as "The Running Man", "The Long Walk", "The 10th Victim", and "". The series was also criticized for the romantic plotline: Rollie Welch of Ohio's "The Plain Dealer" criticized the characters' lack of resolute behavior, and Jennifer Reese of "Entertainment Weekly" stated that there was little distinction between Peeta and Gale and the series lacked the "erotic energy" seen in the "Twilight" series.


title: The Hunger Games

text: J.C. Maçek III of "PopMatters" stated, "While the film saga does capture the action of "The Hunger Games", the novels are most assuredly the heart of the story. They are nothing less than 'The Writer’s Cut' of the films themselves." In his review Mike Ruiz argues that "The Hunger Games" film does not have the first-person narrative that is in the original novel. As a result, Ruiz contends the novel is better than the film.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The last book, "Mockingjay", was criticized by Dan Shade of "SF Site", who felt that Katniss is a weaker character than her comrades and less resolute in her journey to the Capitol, and that with respect to her vendetta against President Snow, her actions in the finale are inconsistent with her established character.


title: The Hunger Games

text: On November 5, 2019, the "BBC News" listed "The Hunger Games" on its list of the 100 most influential novels.


title: The Hunger Games

text: Lionsgate Entertainment acquired worldwide distribution rights to a film adaptation of "The Hunger Games", produced by Nina Jacobson's Color Force production company. Collins adapted the novel for film herself, along with director Gary Ross. The cast included Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, and Liam Hemsworth as Gale. The first film began production in Spring 2011, and was released in March 2012. For "", Ross was replaced as director by Francis Lawrence; the film was released in November 2013. Lawrence then directed "Mockingjay", parts 1 and 2, released in November 2014 and November 2015.


title: The Hunger Games

text: The three-finger gesture used to express unity with the rebellion has been used in real-life protests in Thailand (2020) and Myanmar (2021).


title: Liam Neeson filmography

text: Liam Neeson is an Irish actor who rose to prominence with his acclaimed starring role in Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar winner "Schindler's List". He has since starred in a number of other successful films, including "", "Taken", "Michael Collins", "Les Misérables", "Batman Begins", "Kinsey", "Clash of the Titans", and "The Chronicles of Narnia" series.


title: Liam Neeson filmography

text: He has been nominated for a number of awards including an Academy Award for Best Actor, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and three Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. "Empire" magazine ranked Neeson among both the "100 Sexiest Stars in Film History" and "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time."


title: Celts

text: The Celts (, see pronunciation for different usages) or Celtic peoples () are a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia, identified by their use of Celtic languages and other cultural similarities. Historical Celtic groups included the Britons, Boii, Celtiberians, Gaels, Gauls, Gallaeci, Galatians, Lepontii and their offshoots. The relation between ethnicity, language and culture in the Celtic world is unclear and debated; for example over the ways in which the Iron Age people of Britain and Ireland should be called Celts. In current scholarship, 'Celt' primarily refers to 'speakers of Celtic languages' rather than to a single ethnic group.


title: Celts

text: The history of pre-Celtic Europe and Celtic origins is debated. The traditional "Celtic from the East" theory, says the Proto-Celtic language arose in the late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of central Europe, which flourished from around 1200 BC. This theory links the Celts with the Iron Age Hallstatt culture which followed it (c. 1200–500 BC), named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria, and with the following La Tène culture (c. 450 BC onward), named after the La Tène site in Switzerland. It proposes that Celtic culture spread from these areas by diffusion or migration, westward to Gaul, the British Isles and Iberia, and southward to Cisalpine Gaul. A newer theory, "Celtic from the West", suggests Proto-Celtic arose earlier, was a "lingua franca" in the Atlantic Bronze Age coastal zone, and spread eastward. Another newer theory, "Celtic from the Centre", suggests Proto-Celtic arose between these two zones, in Bronze Age Gaul, then spread in various directions. After the Celtic settlement of Southeast Europe in the 3rd century BC, Celtic culture reached as far east as central Anatolia, Turkey.


title: Celts

text: The earliest undisputed examples of Celtic language are the Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th century BC. Continental Celtic languages are attested almost exclusively through inscriptions and place-names. Insular Celtic languages are attested from the 4th century AD in Ogham inscriptions, though they were clearly being spoken much earlier. Celtic literary tradition begins with Old Irish texts around the 8th century AD. Elements of Celtic mythology are recorded in early Irish and early Welsh literature. Most written evidence of the early Celts comes from Greco-Roman writers, who often grouped the Celts as barbarian tribes. They followed an ancient Celtic religion overseen by druids.


title: Celts

text: The Celts were often in conflict with the Romans, such as in the Roman–Gallic wars, the Celtiberian Wars, the conquest of Gaul and conquest of Britain. By the 1st century AD, most Celtic territories had become part of the Roman Empire. By c. 500, due to Romanisation and the migration of Germanic tribes, Celtic culture had mostly become restricted to Ireland, western and northern Britain, and Brittany. Between the 5th and 8th centuries, the Celtic-speaking communities in these Atlantic regions emerged as a reasonably cohesive cultural entity. They had a common linguistic, religious and artistic heritage that distinguished them from surrounding cultures.


title: Celts

text: Insular Celtic culture diversified into that of the Gaels (Irish, Scots and Manx) and the Celtic Britons (Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons) of the medieval and modern periods. A modern Celtic identity was constructed as part of the Romanticist Celtic Revival in Britain, Ireland, and other European territories such as Galicia. Today, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton are still spoken in parts of their former territories, while Cornish and Manx are undergoing a revival.