Members of the Romanov family–the former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, Empress Alexandra, and their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei–were shot and stabbed to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Also killed that night were members of the imperial entourage who had accompanied them: court physician Eugene Botkin; lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova; footman Alexei Trupp; and head cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent identification, and buried.
Following the February Revolution in 1917, the Romanovs and their servants had been imprisoned in the Alexander Palace before being moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution. They were next moved to a house in Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains, before they were murdered in July 1918. The Bolsheviks initially announced only Nicholas's death. For the next eight years, the Soviet leadership maintained a systematic web of disinformation regarding his family, making claims ranging from murder by left-wing revolutionaries in September 1919, to outright denial of their deaths in April 1922.
In 1926 the Soviet regime acknowledged the killings of the entire family (following a French republishing of a 1919 investigation by a White émigré) but claimed the bodies were destroyed and that Lenin's Cabinet was not responsible. The Soviet cover-up of the murders fuelled rumors of survivors. Various Romanov impostors claimed to be members of the Romanov family, which drew media attention away from the activities of Soviet Russia.
In 1979, amateur detective Alexander Avdonin discovered the burial site. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge the existence of these remains publicly until 1989 during the Glasnost period. The identities of the remains were confirmed by forensic and DNA analysis and investigation in 1994, with the assistance of British experts. In 1998, eighty years after the killings, the remains of the Romanovs were reinterred in a state funeral in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. The funeral was not attended by key members of the Russian Orthodox Church, who disputed the authenticity of the remains. In 2007, a second, smaller grave which contained the remains of two of the Romanov children, missing from the larger grave, was discovered by amateur archaeologists; those remains were confirmed to be from Alexei and a sister—either Anastasia or Maria—by DNA analysis. In 2008, after considerable and protracted legal wrangling, the Russian prosecutor general's office rehabilitated the Romanov family as "victims of political repressions". A criminal case was opened by the Russian government in 1993, but nobody was prosecuted on the basis that the perpetrators were dead.
According to the official state version of the Soviet Union, the imperial family and retinue were killed by firing squad by order of the Ural Regional Soviet. Historians have debated whether the execution was sanctioned by Moscow leadership. Some Western historians attribute the execution order to the government in Moscow, specifically Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov, who wanted to prevent the rescue of the imperial family by the approaching Czechoslovak Legion during the Russian Civil War. This is supported by a passage in Leon Trotsky's diary. However, other historians have cited documented orders from the All-Russian Central Committee of the Soviets preferring a public trial for Nicholas II with Trotsky as chief prosecutor and his family spared.
A 2011 investigation concluded that, despite the opening of state archives in the post-Soviet years, no written document has been found which proves Lenin or Sverdlov ordered the executions. However, they endorsed the killings after they occurred.
Members of the Romanov family–the former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, Empress Alexandra, and their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei–were shot and stabbed to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Also killed that night were members of the imperial entourage who had accompanied them: court physician Eugene Botkin; lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova; footman Alexei Trupp; and head cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent identification, and buried.
Following the February Revolution in 1917, the Romanovs and their servants had been imprisoned in the Alexander Palace before being moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution. They were next moved to a house in Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains, before they were murdered in July 1918. The Bolsheviks initially announced only Nicholas's death. For the next eight years, the Soviet leadership maintained a systematic web of disinformation regarding his family, making claims ranging from murder by left-wing revolutionaries in September 1919, to outright denial of their deaths in April 1922.
In 1926 the Soviet regime acknowledged the killings of the entire family (following a French republishing of a 1919 investigation by a White émigré) but claimed the bodies were destroyed and that Lenin's Cabinet was not responsible. The Soviet cover-up of the murders fuelled rumors of survivors. Various Romanov impostors claimed to be members of the Romanov family, which drew media attention away from the activities of Soviet Russia.
In 1979, amateur detective Alexander Avdonin discovered the burial site. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge the existence of these remains publicly until 1989 during the Glasnost period. The identities of the remains were confirmed by forensic and DNA analysis and investigation in 1994, with the assistance of British experts. In 1998, eighty years after the killings, the remains of the Romanovs were reinterred in a state funeral in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. The funeral was not attended by key members of the Russian Orthodox Church, who disputed the authenticity of the remains. In 2007, a second, smaller grave which contained the remains of two of the Romanov children, missing from the larger grave, was discovered by amateur archaeologists; those remains were confirmed to be from Alexei and a sister—either Anastasia or Maria—by DNA analysis. In 2008, after considerable and protracted legal wrangling, the Russian prosecutor general's office rehabilitated the Romanov family as "victims of political repressions". A criminal case was opened by the Russian government in 1993, but nobody was prosecuted on the basis that the perpetrators were dead.
According to the official state version of the Soviet Union, the imperial family and retinue were killed by firing squad by order of the Ural Regional Soviet. Historians have debated whether the execution was sanctioned by Moscow leadership. Some Western historians attribute the execution order to the government in Moscow, specifically Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov, who wanted to prevent the rescue of the imperial family by the approaching Czechoslovak Legion during the Russian Civil War. This is supported by a passage in Leon Trotsky's diary. However, other historians have cited documented orders from the All-Russian Central Committee of the Soviets preferring a public trial for Nicholas II with Trotsky as chief prosecutor and his family spared.
A 2011 investigation concluded that, despite the opening of state archives in the post-Soviet years, no written document has been found which proves Lenin or Sverdlov ordered the executions. However, they endorsed the killings after they occurred.
Background
On March 7th while his family was in Tsarskoye Selo, Nicholas was stuck in Stavka. He kept in touch with Alexandra through several letters, in which they expressed how much they missed each other. Shortly following his abdication on March 15th, Tsar Nicholas II, addressed by the sentries as "Nicholas Romanov", was reunited with his family at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, on March 22nd. He was placed under house arrest with his family by the Provisional Government, and the family was surrounded by guards and confined to their quarters. During this time Alexandra recorded in her diary the temperatures of her children, specifically Alexei, Tatiana, and Olga who were ill.
In August 1917, after a failed attempt to send the Romanovs to the United Kingdom, where the ruling monarch, King George V, was the mutual first cousin of Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, Alexander Kerensky's provisional government evacuated the Romanovs to Tobolsk, Siberia, allegedly to protect them from the rising tide of revolution. There they lived in the former governor's mansion in considerable comfort. The justice minister in charge of handling the family's arrest, Kerensky, highlighted in his speeches how he hopes this treatment will cause Nicholas to feel ashamed of the “horrors that had been perpetuated in his name”. However the guards were cruel towards the family and often scribbled insulting graffiti on the walls and benches. After the Bolshevikscame to power in October 1917, the conditions of their imprisonment grew stricter as talk within the government of putting Nicholas on trial grew more frequent. Nicholas was forbidden to wear epaulettes, and the sentries scrawled lewd drawings on the fence to offend his daughters. On 1 March 1918, the family was placed on soldiers' rations. Their ten servants were dismissed, and they had to give up butter and coffee.
As the Bolsheviks gathered strength, the government moved Nicholas, Alexandra, and their daughter Maria to Yekaterinburg under the direction of Vasily Yakovlev in April 1918. Alexei, who had severe haemophilia, was too ill to accompany his parents and remained with his sisters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia, not leaving Tobolsk until May. The family was imprisoned with their few remaining retainers in Yekaterinburg's Ipatiev House, which was designated the House of Special Purpose (Russian: Дом Особого Назначения, romanized: Dom Osobogo Naznacheniya):
All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest attempt at counter-revolutionary action in the town will result in the summary execution of the hostages.
— Announcement in the local newspaper by Bolshevik war commissar Filipp Goloshchyokin, in overall charge of the family's incarceration in Yekaterinburg.
House of Special Purpose
The Romanovs were kept in strict isolation at the Ipatiev House. They were forbidden to speak any language other than Russian and were not permitted access to their luggage, which was stored in a warehouse in the interior courtyard. Their Brownie cameras and photographic equipment were confiscated. The servants were ordered to address the Romanovs only by their names and patronymics. The imperial family was subjected to regular searches of their belongings, confiscation of their money for "safekeeping by the Ural Regional Soviet's treasurer", and attempts to remove Alexandra's and her daughters' gold bracelets from their wrists. The house was surrounded by a 4-metre-high (13 ft) double palisade that obscured the view of the streets from the house. The initial fence enclosed the garden along Voznesensky Lane. On 5 June a second palisade was erected, higher and longer than the first, which completely enclosed the property. The second palisade was constructed after it was learned that passersby could see Nicholas's legs when he used the double swing in the garden.
The windows in all the family's rooms were sealed shut and covered with newspapers (later painted with whitewash on 15 May). Their only source of ventilation was a fortochka in the grand duchesses' bedroom, but peeking out of it was strictly forbidden; in May a sentry fired a shot at Anastasia when she looked out. After the Romanovs made repeated requests, one of the two windows in the tsar and tsarina's corner bedroom was unsealed on 23 June 1918. The guards were ordered to increase their surveillance accordingly, and the prisoners were warned not to look out of the window or attempt to signal to anyone outside, on pain of being shot. From this window, they could see only the spire of the Voznesensky Cathedral located across the road from the house. An iron grille was installed on 11 July, after Alexandra had ignored repeated warnings from the commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, not to stand too close to the open window.
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.
To maintain a sense of normality, the Bolsheviks lied to the Romanovs on 13 July 1918 that two of their loyal servants, Klimenty Nagorny (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 Ivan Malyshev, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We like this man less and less.
— Diary entry of Tsar Nicholas II, referring to the constant tightening of restrictions on his family by Yurovsky.