Murder of the Romanov family
1918 murder of Nicholas II of Russia and his family
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.
“Murder of the Romanov family” enters the record as 1918 murder of Nicholas II of Russia and his family. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Murder, Romanov and family can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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