The Russian Imperial Family of Seven Shot and Bayoneted in the Cellar of a Yekaterinburg Merchant's House at 1:30 a.m. on 17 July 1918

Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated on 15 March 1917 after the February Revolution. The provisional government held him and his family under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo until August 1917, then transferred them east to Tobolsk in western Siberia, then in April 1918 — under the new Bolshevik government — to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg in the central Urals.

The Ipatiev House — a two-storey merchant’s house owned by a Yekaterinburg engineer named Nikolai Ipatiev, requisitioned for the purpose — became the family’s final residence on 30 April 1918. The Bolshevik authorities called it the House of Special Purpose. The family inside it numbered seven: Nicholas (50), his wife Alexandra (46), their daughters Olga (22), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), and Anastasia (17), and their haemophiliac 13-year-old son Alexei, the heir-apparent who had abdicated together with his father.

Accompanying them were four staff: the family physician Dr Yevgeny Botkin (53), the cook Ivan Kharitonov, the valet Aloysius Trupp, and the maid Anna Demidova.

Why July

By mid-July 1918 the Russian Civil War had reached a critical phase in the central Urals. The Czechoslovak Legion — a corps of approximately 40,000 Czech and Slovak prisoners-of-war originally part of the Austro-Hungarian army, captured by Russia in 1914-1916 and converted to a separate Czechoslovak nationalist combat force against the Central Powers — had mutinied against the Bolshevik government in May 1918 and was advancing eastward across Siberia to the Pacific. By mid-July their advance was approximately 50 km west of Yekaterinburg.

The Czechoslovak Legion’s likely capture of Yekaterinburg in the following week would have rescued the imperial family. The local Ural Soviet — under the direction of the Yekaterinburg Bolshevik leader Filipp Goloshchekin — telegraphed Moscow on 12 July 1918 requesting authorisation to execute the family. The response of the central Bolshevik leadership (Lenin and Sverdlov) has never been definitively recovered from archive — the contemporary telegram traffic was destroyed in the post-1991 archive reorganisations — but the conventional consensus is that Moscow either authorised the killing or declined to forbid it.

The decision was implemented locally by the new Ipatiev House commandant Yakov Yurovsky, a Yekaterinburg-born Bolshevik who had taken over from his predecessor Avdeyev on 4 July 1918.

1:30 a.m. on 17 July

The family was woken at approximately 1:00 a.m. on the night of 16-17 July 1918 and told that they were being moved to a safer location, that the Czechoslovak Legion was approaching, and that they should dress and assemble in the basement cellar of the house for transport. Nicholas carried Alexei downstairs; Alexei could not walk because of a recent haemophilia episode.

The eleven assembled in a cellar room approximately 5 by 6 metres. Two chairs were brought for Nicholas (carrying Alexei) and Alexandra. The other nine stood. Yurovsky entered the room with a written execution order and read it aloud.

The execution squad — Yurovsky and approximately six Latvian and Hungarian guards — entered behind him with revolvers and a Mauser pistol. Yurovsky shot Nicholas at first range. The other shooters opened fire across the group at the same moment.

The execution went wrong. The four Romanov daughters had sewn approximately 1.3 kg of family diamonds into their underclothes during the Tobolsk-to-Yekaterinburg transfer in April 1918 as a portable wealth reserve. The diamonds deflected the small-calibre revolver bullets. Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei were not killed by the initial volley. The execution team had to finish them with bayonets and close-range pistol shots over the subsequent ten minutes. Anastasia and Maria were reportedly still moving when the bayoneting began.

The killing was complete by approximately 1:50 a.m. The eleven bodies were carried out of the cellar, loaded into a waiting truck, and driven north through the Ural forests to a disused mine shaft known locally as the Four Brothers near the village of Koptyaki.

What Yurovsky did next

The original burial plan — to drop the bodies down the Four Brothers mine shaft and seal the shaft with grenades — failed because the shaft was shallower than expected and a portion of the bodies would have been visible. Yurovsky changed the plan overnight. The bodies were exhumed from the partial mine deposit on the evening of 17 July, transported approximately 2 km further north along the Koptyaki road, doused with sulphuric acid and gasoline, partially burned, and buried in a pit at a obscure location off the road known later as Pig’s Meadow.

Yurovsky separated two of the bodies — eventually identified as Maria and Alexei — and buried them in a smaller separate pit approximately 70 metres from the main grave to confuse any subsequent reconstruction of the burial.

The Yurovsky burial pattern remained the canonical mystery of the case for the subsequent 73 years.

1991 and 2007

The main grave at Pig’s Meadow was located in 1979 by the geologist Alexander Avdonin and the writer Geli Ryabov, working from the Yurovsky Note — a 1922 written confession by Yurovsky himself that had been preserved in the Soviet archive and disclosed to Ryabov in the 1970s. Avdonin and Ryabov had kept the discovery secret through the Soviet period for political reasons. They disclosed it after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The main grave excavation in July 1991 recovered nine bodies: Nicholas, Alexandra, three of the four daughters, Botkin, Kharitonov, Trupp, and Demidova. The 1992-1994 forensic investigation — including the mitochondrial DNA matching against Prince Philip, who was the maternal grand-nephew of the Tsarina Alexandra — confirmed the identifications. The Romanov bodies were reburied at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 17 July 1998 — the 80th anniversary of the executions — with Russian state ceremony attended by Boris Yeltsin.

The small separate pit containing Maria and Alexei was located in August 2007 by a Russian search team. The DNA analysis confirmed both identifications. They were reburied with the rest of the family.

The discovery of all eleven bodies eliminated any possibility that Anastasia had escaped — confirming that Anna Anderson, the 1922-1984 claimant, had not been Anastasia. The DNA evidence had already confirmed this in 1994 (see Anna Anderson).

The Russian Orthodox Church canonised the Romanov family as Passion Bearers on 20 August 2000. The Ipatiev House was demolished by the Sverdlovsk Communist authorities in September 1977 to prevent it becoming a monarchist pilgrimage site. The Church on the Blood — a new Russian Orthodox cathedral — was constructed on the site between 2000 and 2003 and commemorates the execution.