What happened to Nicholas II

The killings happened in the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, a merchant’s house the Ural Soviet had requisitioned and fenced as a “house of special purpose.” After midnight the guard commander, Yakov Yurovsky, woke the household and said they were to be moved because of firing in the city. They were taken downstairs. Nicholas carried his son. A chair was brought for Alexandra, and another for the boy.

Yurovsky then read out that the Ural Soviet had sentenced them. The squad fired. The room was small, the smoke thick, and the jewels sewn into the girls’ clothes deflected bullets. Bayonets and shots to the head finished the work. Eleven people died: the former emperor, his wife, five children, and four retainers who were not Romanovs and not combatants. There was no trial in that cellar.

Yurovsky wrote a note of the operation in 1920 for the Soviet historian Pokrovsky. It is a perpetrator’s account: the decision to shoot, the weapons, the failure of the first burial plan, the acid, the second burial. Nikolai Sokolov, the investigator who followed the Whites into the house, published the physical evidence he could still recover — bullets, jewelry, a finger, burned clothing — in his émigré book. Soviet textbooks for decades admitted the tsar and hid the children.

The local authority was the Ural Regional Soviet. Its chairman was Alexander Beloborodov. The regional military commissar was Filipp Goloshchyokin. Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the house, commanded the shooting and fired the first shots. Pyotr Ermakov of the local Cheka was in the squad. A telegram from Yekaterinburg informed Moscow that the former tsar had been shot and that the family had been evacuated. The second clause was false. The children were dead in the cellar.

Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, told that body the Presidium had recognized the Ural decision as correct. The government that held the family, staffed the guard, and accepted the killing in public was the Bolshevik government. The children and the four servants were killed with Nicholas and Alexandra.

The first plan, a mine shaft at Ganina Yama, failed. The bodies were recovered, mutilated, burned in part, and doused with acid. Most were buried under a corduroy of railway ties in a pit later called Pig’s Meadow, on the Koptyaki road. Two bodies — the boy and one daughter — were burned and buried apart. Local memory and a 1979 search by Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov found the main grave. The state acknowledged it only at the end of the Soviet period. DNA work in the 1990s identified Nicholas, Alexandra, three daughters, and the retainers. The two missing children were found nearby in 2007 and identified by further genetic testing, including comparison with living relatives and with Nicholas’s brother George.

The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the family. DNA work identified the remains, including the two children found nearby in 2007. The impostors of the 1920s, including the woman known as Anna Anderson, failed the documents and later failed the DNA.