In the early hours, Bolshevik secret police executed former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and four attendants in a cramped basement room, acting on orders amid fears that advancing White Army forces might rescue the imperial family. The killings extinguished the three-century Romanov dynasty and became a symbol of the revolution's violent, irreversible break with Russia's past.
The Romanovs had been held under house arrest for over a year, first at Tsarskoye Selo, then in Siberian exile at Tobolsk, before being moved to a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg euphemistically renamed 'The House of Special Purpose.' As the Russian Civil War intensified and the anti-Bolshevik Czechoslovak Legion approached the city, local Bolshevik officials, with authorization from Moscow, decided the family could not be allowed to fall into White hands alive.
Just after midnight, guards woke the family and told them they were being moved for their safety, leading them into a basement room supposedly to pose for a photograph refuting rumors of their escape. Instead, a firing squad led by Yakov Yurovsky opened fire. The daughters survived the initial volley because jewels sewn into their corsets deflected bullets, forcing guards to finish the killings with bayonets, a detail that made the scene even more horrific.
The bodies were driven into the countryside, doused in acid and gasoline, and buried in a mineshaft, hidden for decades. Soviet authorities did not publicly confirm the fate of the entire family until the Gorbachev era, and remains were only conclusively identified through DNA testing in the 1990s and 2007, closing a mystery that had lingered for nearly a century.
Key people: Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, Yakov Yurovsky