Victims of the Shooting of the Romanov family



Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (b. 1901)

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (b. 1899)

Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia (b. 1895)

Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia (b. 1897)

Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia (b. 1872)

Aleksei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia (b. 1904)

Nikolai II of Russia (b. 1868)

Anna Demidova (b. 1878)

Ivan Kharitonov (b. 1872)

Alexei Trupp (b. 1858)

Yevgeny Botkin (b. 1865)




The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted 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 murdered 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, buried, and mutilated with grenades to prevent identification.Following the February Revolution, the Romanov family 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 their execution in July 1918. The Bolsheviks initially announced only Nicholas's death; for the next eight years, the Soviet leadership maintained a systematic web of misinformation relating to the fate of the family, from claiming in September 1919 that they were murdered by left-wing revolutionaries, to denying outright in April 1922 that they were dead. The Soviets finally acknowledged the murders in 1926 following the publication in France of a 1919 investigation by a White émigré but said that 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 one of the children, which drew media attention away from activities of Soviet Russia.The burial site was discovered in 1979 by Alexander Avdonin, an amateur sleuth. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge the existence of these remains publicly until 1989 during the glasnost period. The identity of the remains was later confirmed by forensic and DNA analysis and investigation, with the assistance of British experts. In 1998, 80 years after the executions, the remains of the Romanov family 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 the two Romanov children missing from the larger grave, was discovered by amateur archaeologists; they were confirmed to be the remains of Alexei and a sister 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 post-Soviet 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, ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, along with members of his family and retinue, were executed by firing squad by order of the Ural Regional Soviet. Most 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 ongoing Russian Civil War. This is supported by a passage in Leon Trotsky's diary. 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 murders after they occurred. Other sources argue that Lenin and the central Soviet government had wanted to conduct a trial of the Romanovs, with Trotsky serving as prosecutor, but that the local Ural Soviet, under pressure from Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, undertook the executions on their own initiative due to the approach of the Czechoslovaks.