Murder of the Romanov family

Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children, and four retainers were shot and bayoneted in the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg. The killers were local Bolsheviks under Yakov Yurovsky. Moscow’s political ownership runs through the Ural Soviet and Yakov Sverdlov, who informed the central government. Historians treat Lenin’s approval as real. A cinematic “signed death warrant for the children” is not how the paperwork looks, and forging one does the victims no honor.

The Whites’ investigator Nikolai Sokolov documented the crime in exile. Soviet histories for decades admitted only the tsar’s execution. The children’s remains were located in the late 1970s and acknowledged in the 1990s. It was a political murder of noncombatants, including a boy and four girls, in the first year of the regime.