What Happened to the Romanov Family?

At 11:50 p.m. on 17 July 1918 (4 July O.S.), a squad of eight Chekists under the command of Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky raised their pistols and fired eleven bullets into the chest of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of All the Russias, in the 22-foot by 18-foot basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains. The first round killed Nicholas and the prikhod kuhmister Ivan Kharitonov. The second and third rounds, with bayonet and butt, killed the Empress Alexandra, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, the Tsarevich Alexei, the court physician Yevgeny Botkin, the lady’s maid Anna Demidova, and the footman Alexei Trupp. The firing lasted about three minutes. The 11 Romanovs and 4 retainers had been executed. The bodies were taken by lorry to the Motovilikha forest, 22 km north of the city, stripped, the jewellery and diamonds removed, and burned with sulphuric acid; the remains of two of the victims — those burned less completely — were re-buried on 19 July at a second site, the Rogozhka forest. The official announcement of the execution of Nicholas was published in the Petrograd newspapers on 19 July 1918 (Massie, The Last Days of the Romanovs, 1995; Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, 1992; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).

The execution was ordered by the Ural’skii oblastnoy sovet under the chairmanship of Pyotr Voikov, on the receipt of the telegram of 16 July 1918 from the central government in Moscow.

The captivity

The Romanovs were held in four successive places:

The Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, 9 March 1917 – 13 August 1917, under the komissar V. A. Protopopov. The Romanovy kept a kitchen staff of 14 and a prikhod kuhmister (court cook) who continued to bake the family khleb.
The Tobolsk governor’s mansion, 31 August 1917 – 30 April 1918, transferred under the gubernator K. P. Gol’she; the move was authorised by the Vremennoye pravitelstvo of Alexander Kerensky on 22 August 1917 and conducted by the Vremennoye komandovanie under Colonel Kobylinsky.
The Ipatiev House (the “House of Special Purpose”) in Yekaterinburg, 30 April 1918 – 17 July 1918, on the order of Yakov Sverdlov and the Central Executive Committee. The Yekaterinburg gubernator was Pyotr Voikov. The transfer was by the komissar of the Ural Soviet, Vasily Yakovlev, and the Romanov carriage was a 14-day train ride via Tyumen and Ekaterinburg.
The Cellar of the Ipatiev (the “Romanov cellar”), 17 July 1918, the posledniye of the dynasty.

The Yekaterinburg gubernator had been given the gubernator’s mansion as the dacha for the Romanovs; the Romanov were placed in the torgovii dom (commercial building) at 2 Voznesensky Avenue, on the Ipatiev gorodskoi kvartal, in the Oktyabrskii raion of the gorod (Massie, 1995; Pipes, 1990; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).

The advance of the Czech Legion

The Belei Korpus of the Chekhoslovatskogo (the Czechoslovak corps of 60,000 men, originally the Czech deserters of the Austrian army who had been formed in the Russian POW camps) had, by 1 July 1918, taken the Trans-Siberian line from Yekaterinburg in the east to Penza in the west. The Czechoslovak national council in France, the Narodna Rada, was at Vladivostok. The Czechoslovak korpus was not a White Russian force but it was carrying the Whites’ banners. The advance of the Belaya Czechs toward Yekaterinburg in the second week of July 1918, the approach of the Czech 1st Division to Yekaterinburg, and the threat of the Czech 2nd Division to take the city from the south, were the motiv of the execution. The Telegramma of Yakov Sverdlov, read to the Romanovy at 8:00 p.m. on 16 July 1918, was the gubernator’s authorisation of the rasstrely (shooting) (Figes, 1996; Pipes, 1990; Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 2002).

The executioners

The firing squad of 8 was composed of:

Yakov Yurovsky (commander);
Grigory Nikulin (deputy commander);
6 Latvian, Hungarian, and Russian Chekists (M. A. Medvedev, A. G. Kabanov, P. Z. Yermakov, S. P. Vaganov, V. N. Netrebin, and the komissar of the Chekist komissiya);

The trucks were driven by the Romanov okhrana of the Chekist komissiya. The Romanov’s prikhod (the body-servant Ivan Kharitonov) was a Romanov employee; the lady’s maid Anna Demidova had been in the service of the Empress since 1913 (Massie, 1995; Radzinsky, 1992).

The fate of the Grand Dukes

The Yekaterinburg execution was the Romanov end of the Romanov male line. The other Romanovs were killed in Romanovskie places of exile. Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, Nicholas’s brother, was shot in the Romanovskii forest near Perm on 13 June 1918. Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s uncle, was shot in the Petrograd Petropavlovskaya fortress on 30 January 1919. Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, the Romanov historian of Alexander I, was shot in the Petrograd Petropavlovskaya fortress on 28 January 1919. Grand Duke Dmitri Konstantinovich was shot in the Petrograd Petropavlovskaya fortress on 30 January 1919. Grand Duke George Mikhailovich was shot in the Petrograd Petropavlovskaya fortress on 30 January 1919. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich was killed in 1920 in the Romanovskii on the Black Sea. The Tsar’s cousin, the Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, was abroad — in Finland and France — and assumed the title of Emperor-in-exile. His son, Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, would carry the title until 1938. The Romanov Romanovskii Romanovsky in France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and the United States form the romanovskie vetvi of the dynasty (Massie, 1995; Pipes, 1990; Ferrand, Les Romanov, 1995).

The 1989 and 2007 identifications

The remains of 9 of the 11 victims were recovered in 1979 by the geologists Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov, and the Soviet authorities were informed in 1981. The recovery was kept secret until 1989, when the Russian Supreme Soviet published a resolution on the reburial. The Romanov DNA identification was performed in 1994 in the laboratory of Peter Gill, and the 9 bodies were re-buried in the Romanov Tikhvin Cemetery in the Petropavlovskaya fortress on 17 July 1998 (the 80th anniversary of the Romanov). The Romanov’s Tikhvin kost’) is in Romanov Cemetery, Tikhvin Cemetery, Petropavlovskaya fortress, St Petersburg. The remaining two bodies (the Romanov and the Romanov’s sister) were recovered in 2007 from the Rogozhka forest, 70 km north of the Romanov. The Romanov Tikhvin reburial was in Romanov Romanov Cemetery in Tikhvin in Romanov Romanovskii in 2008 (Massie, 1995; Figes, 1996).

The 2000 canonisation

The Romanovs were canonised as novomučeniki (new martyrs) by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981, and were added to the Russian liturgical calendar with the Sobor novomučenikov i ispovednikov Rossiiskikh. The Moscow Patriarchate canonised the family in 2000, with the title of strastoterptsy (passion-bearers), the same status as the medieval Boris and Gleb. The derzhavnaya (the “sovereign”) icon of the Mother of God, in the Kazan Cathedral of Moscow, is associated with the Romanovs (Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 1998; Figes, 1996).