Execution of the Romanov Family (1918): The Last Tsar's Fate

The execution of the Romanov family took place in the early hours of 17 July 1918, when a Bolshevik firing squad shot the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children and four loyal servants in the basement of a merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg. The killing ended more than three centuries of Romanov rule in the most brutal way and became one of the defining events of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks hid the bodies, and the full truth emerged only decades later, through investigations and DNA testing.

Background: from tsar to prisoner

Nicholas II had ruled Russia since 1894. Military disaster in the First World War, food shortages and political crisis led to the February Revolution of 1917, and on 15 March 1917 (2 March in the old Russian calendar) Nicholas abdicated. His family was placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, near Petrograd.

The imperial couple had lost much of their prestige during the war. Empress Alexandra, born a German princess, was deeply unpopular, partly because of the influence of the mystic Grigori Rasputin, whom she believed could help her son’s haemophilia. The murder of Rasputin in December 1916 did little to restore confidence in the monarchy.

The Provisional Government considered sending the family into exile in Britain, but the offer from King George V, Nicholas’s cousin, was withdrawn amid fears of unrest. In August 1917 the government of Alexander Kerensky moved the family to Tobolsk in Siberia, partly for their own safety. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, conditions grew harsher.

In April and May 1918 the family was transferred to Yekaterinburg, a stronghold of the Bolshevik-controlled Ural Regional Soviet. Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughter Maria arrived on 30 April; the other children, including the haemophiliac heir Alexei, followed on 23 May after Alexei had recovered from an injury.

The House of Special Purpose

The family was held in the Ipatiev House, a two-storey mansion requisitioned from an engineer and renamed the “House of Special Purpose”. A high wooden fence was built around it and the windows were whitewashed. The prisoners were allowed short walks in the garden, and they passed the time with reading, card games and religious services.

The guards, mostly local workers at first, were sometimes hostile and sometimes merely curious. In June 1918 the family received letters, apparently from a monarchist officer, offering to help them escape. They were in fact written by the Bolsheviks to test whether the prisoners would try to flee, and the replies were later used to justify the killing.

On 4 July 1918 the guard was replaced. Yakov Yurovsky, a member of the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police), took command, bringing in a new squad. Meanwhile the Russian Civil War was going badly for the Bolsheviks in the region: the Czechoslovak Legion and anti-Bolshevik White forces were advancing towards Yekaterinburg.

The night of 16-17 July

Late on 16 July the Ural Soviet confirmed the decision to kill the family. Shortly after midnight the prisoners were woken and told they were to be moved because of unrest in the town. They dressed and were led down to a semi-basement room, where chairs were brought for Alexandra and Alexei.

Around 2 am Yurovsky entered with the firing squad and read out a short statement that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute them. The shooting that followed was chaotic. Jewels sewn into the daughters’ clothing deflected some bullets, and several victims were finished off with bayonets and further shots. Eleven people died:

• Nicholas II, aged 50, and Empress Alexandra, aged 46
• Grand Duchesses Olga (22), Tatiana (21), Maria (19) and Anastasia (17)
• Tsarevich Alexei (13)
• Dr Yevgeny Botkin, the family physician; Anna Demidova, the empress’s maid; Alexei Trupp, a footman; and Ivan Kharitonov, the cook

The family’s spaniel, Joy, survived and was later taken to England by a British officer.

The cover-up

The bodies were loaded on a lorry and taken to an abandoned mine shaft at Ganina Yama, about 15 kilometres from the town. Yurovsky’s team stripped them, burned the clothing and threw the bodies into the shaft. Fearing the site would be discovered, they retrieved the bodies the next night. When their lorry became stuck on a forest road at Porosenkov Log, they burned two bodies and buried the other nine in a shallow pit, pouring sulphuric acid over them.

On 18-19 July the Bolsheviks publicly announced that Nicholas had been shot, but claimed that his wife and son had been moved to a safe place. The fate of the women and children was concealed for years. Around the same time other Romanovs were killed: Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Michael near Perm in June 1918, and several relatives, including Alexandra’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, at Alapayevsk on 18 July.

White forces captured Yekaterinburg on 25 July 1918. Their investigator, Nikolai Sokolov, gathered extensive evidence and concluded that all the bodies had been destroyed at Ganina Yama, but he never found the grave.

Who gave the order?

Historians agree that the Ural Regional Soviet ordered and organised the killing and that Yurovsky led it. The role of Moscow is more debated. Leon Trotsky later wrote in his diary that Yakov Sverdlov told him the decision had been taken with Lenin in Moscow, and telegrams between Yekaterinburg and the Kremlin show that the central leadership was kept informed.

No written order signed by Lenin has been found. Some historians believe Moscow gave its approval in advance; others think the Urals leaders acted on their own initiative and that Moscow endorsed the killing afterwards. The central government’s Presidium formally approved the execution of Nicholas on 18 July. The killings were followed in the late summer and autumn of 1918 by the Red Terror, a campaign of officially sanctioned mass arrests and executions of real and suspected opponents of the regime.

Discovery and identification of the remains

In 1979 the local geologist Alexander Avdonin and the filmmaker Geli Ryabov found the grave at Porosenkov Log, but kept it secret under Soviet rule. They revealed their discovery in 1989, during glasnost, and the remains were officially exhumed in 1991. DNA testing by Russian and British scientists, including comparison with a sample from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a great-nephew of Alexandra, confirmed in 1993-94 that they were the Romanovs.

On 17 July 1998, eighty years after the killings, nine sets of remains were buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg in a ceremony attended by President Boris Yeltsin. In 2007 amateur searchers found the burned remains of two more people near the original grave; DNA tests in 2008 identified them as Alexei and one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia.

Because the Russian Orthodox Church had doubts about the earlier identification, Russian investigators reopened the criminal case in 2015. New genetic tests reported in 2018 again confirmed that the remains belonged to members of the imperial family.

The Ipatiev House itself was demolished in 1977 on Soviet orders, to stop it becoming a place of pilgrimage. The Church on the Blood, a large Orthodox cathedral, was built on the site and consecrated in 2003.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Anastasia escaped the massacre. Fact: This legend inspired impostors, books and films, most famously around Anna Anderson. DNA testing in 1994 showed that Anderson was not related to the Romanovs, and the 2007 discovery accounted for the remaining children.
• Myth: The whole family was killed instantly. Fact: Accounts by participants, including Yurovsky’s own report, describe a prolonged and disorderly shooting lasting several minutes.
• Myth: The Bolsheviks openly announced the killing of the entire family. Fact: At first they admitted only the death of Nicholas and claimed the others were alive.

Legacy

The Romanovs became symbols of very different things: to some, victims of revolutionary terror; to others, representatives of an autocracy that had brought Russia to disaster. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonised the family as martyrs in 1981, and the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow glorified them as “passion-bearers” in 2000, a category for those who met death with Christian humility.

The killings also foreshadowed the violence of the Russian Civil War and the political murders that followed. For historians, the long cover-up and its eventual unravelling are a striking example of how archives, forensic science and DNA can recover the truth about a state secret.

Timeline

• 1917, 15 March: Nicholas II abdicates after the February Revolution.
• 1917, August: The family is moved from Tsarskoye Selo to Tobolsk in Siberia.
• 1918, 30 April: Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria arrive at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.
• 1918, 23 May: The other children join their parents in Yekaterinburg.
• 1918, 4 July: Yakov Yurovsky takes command of the guard.
• 1918, 17 July, about 2 am: The family and four servants are shot in the basement.
• 1918, 25 July: White forces capture Yekaterinburg.
• 1991: The remains of nine people are exhumed at Porosenkov Log.
• 1998, 17 July: Burial in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, St Petersburg.
• 2008: DNA tests identify the remains of Alexei and one of his sisters, found in 2007.

Why it matters

The execution of the Romanovs marked the violent end of the Russian monarchy and showed how far the Bolsheviks were prepared to go to secure power. The decades-long cover-up and the eventual DNA identification turned the story into a lasting subject of history, religion and popular myth, from Soviet silence to modern Russian commemoration.