The Murder of 16–17 July 1918

The sober, documented account of the killing: in the small hours of 17 July 1918, the seven members of the imperial family and their four remaining retainers were shot and bayoneted in a basement room of the Ipatiev House at Ekaterinburg, and their bodies were carried to the Koptyaki forest and disposed of over the following day and night. This file reconstructs the event from the perpetrators’ accounts (above all the Yurovsky Note) and the Sokolov investigation, notes what is firm and what is contested, and leaves the question of ultimate authorization open.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

The Eleven

Eleven people were killed. The seven members of the family were the former Emperor Nicholas (50), the former Empress Alexandra (46), the Grand Duchesses Olga (22), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), and Anastasia (17), and the Tsarevich Alexei (13). With them died four retainers who had stayed to the end: the physician Dr. Eugene Botkin, the valet Alexei Trupp, the cook Ivan Kharitonov, and the maid Anna Demidova (King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003; Rappaport, The Last Days of the Romanovs, 2008). The distinction between the family and the servants will matter for the canonizations, which treated them differently (see What the Church Canonized).

The Killing

The account that follows is drawn chiefly from the Yurovsky Note — the commandant Yakov Yurovsky’s own narrative, dictated in 1920 — checked against other participants’ testimony and the physical findings of the Sokolov inquiry (the Note and its analysis in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs, 1995; King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003).

Late on the night of 16 July / early 17 July 1918, the family was woken and told they were being moved for their safety because of the fighting near the city. They were taken down to a small semi-basement room. Alexei, unable to walk, was carried by his father; chairs were brought for the boy and the Empress. When the family and servants were assembled, Yurovsky and a squad of executioners entered, and Yurovsky read out a brief sentence to the effect that the Ural Soviet had condemned them to death. The squad then opened fire. Nicholas was killed almost at once; the killing of the others was protracted and brutal, because bullets were partly deflected by jewels the daughters had sewn into their undergarments, so that several had to be finished with bayonets and further shots (Yurovsky Note, in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, 1995; King and Wilson, 2003; Rappaport, The Last Days of the Romanovs, 2008). The eleven were dead within a period estimated at roughly twenty minutes. The event is reported here in this restrained factual form deliberately: the horror needs no rhetorical amplification, and the sources support the outline given without requiring the embellishments that later accounts sometimes add.

The Disposal of the Bodies

The disposal was improvised and botched, which is why the remains survived to be found decades later. The bodies were loaded onto a truck and taken to the Koptyaki forest north of the city, to an abandoned mine at a site called the Four Brothers (Ganina Yama), where the executioners attempted to destroy them — stripping, and throwing them down a shaft (King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003). Finding the shaft unsuitable and fearing the site was known, Yurovsky’s party returned the following night to move the bodies to a new location. The truck bogged down at a place called Porosenkov Log (“Pig’s Meadow”). There the majority of the bodies were buried in a shallow pit under railway ties, while two — the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters — were burned and buried separately a short distance away, apparently to frustrate any attempt to reckon the count of victims (Yurovsky Note, in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, 1995; King and Wilson, 2003). Sulfuric acid was poured over the remains to disfigure them. This two-grave disposal is the key to the later forensic story (see The Discovery and Identification); it also explains why the Sokolov investigation, which found the Ganina Yama site but not the Porosenkov Log graves, wrongly concluded the bodies had been totally destroyed.

Who Ordered It

[Disputed: the ultimate authorization for the murder. The killing was carried out by the Ural Regional Soviet’s men under Yurovsky, and the local authorities issued the death sentence. What remains contested is the degree of sanction from the central Bolshevik leadership in Moscow. (a) One reading, following the surviving telegraphic traffic and the roles of Yakov Sverdlov and the Ural Soviet, holds that Moscow — Sverdlov, with Lenin’s knowledge and probable approval — sanctioned or at least did not forbid the killing, the “local decision” framing being partly a later cover (Service, The Last of the Tsars, 2017; discussion in King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003). (b) A second reading emphasizes the genuine autonomy and radicalism of the Ural Soviet and the military emergency of the advancing Whites, treating the killing as substantially a local initiative that Moscow accepted after the fact. The documentary record is incomplete and was shaped by the regime’s own shifting interest in claiming or disclaiming responsibility. This collection reports the question as open and names both positions rather than asserting a single chain of command.]

What is not in serious doubt is that the killing was a political execution ordered by Bolshevik authority to prevent the family’s liberation by advancing anti-Bolshevik forces and to extinguish the dynasty as a rallying point. This political character of the death is precisely what makes the category of the family’s sanctity a genuine question: they were killed as the deposed royal family in a civil war, not, in the classical sense, for confessing Christ — the distinction that the passion-bearer glorification was designed to respect (see The Theology of the Passion-Bearer and The Arguments For and Against).

The Announcement and the Cover

The Soviet authorities announced only the execution of Nicholas, initially concealing the killing of the wife and children — a concealment that fed decades of survival rumors and impostures, most famously the Anna Anderson claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia (King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003; on the DNA resolution of the Anderson claim, see The Discovery and Identification). The next day, 18 July, the family of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna — the Empress Alexandra’s sister — and others were murdered at Alapaevsk, thrown alive into a mineshaft (see St. Elizabeth the New Martyr).

See Also

• From Tsarskoe Selo to Ekaterinburg — the captivity that leads to this room
• Sources and How We Know — the Yurovsky Note and Sokolov file weighed as sources
• The Discovery and Identification — how the two-grave disposal was undone by forensic science
• The Theology of the Passion-Bearer — why the political character of the death shapes the category of sanctity

References

• Steinberg, Mark D., and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv. The Fall of the Romanovs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. (The Yurovsky Note reproduced and analyzed.)
• King, Greg, and Penny Wilson. The Fate of the Romanovs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (The fullest source-critical reconstruction of the killing and disposal; the perpetrators’ accounts.)
• Rappaport, Helen. The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg. London: Hutchinson, 2008. (The killing in detail.)
• Service, Robert. The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution. London: Macmillan, 2017. (Assessment of the authorization question.)
• Sokolov, Nikolai A. Enquête judiciaire sur l’assassinat de la famille impériale russe. Paris: Payot, 1924. (The White investigation; the erroneous total-destruction conclusion.)