On a private tour of the Solzhenitsyn House in Moscow in 2018, I viewed an extraordinary exhibition detailing the lives of those who fled Russia in the wake of the 1917 Revolution and never returned. Founded by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the massive archive serves as a repository of the history of the Russian diaspora, storing the memories of the exiles—including much of the Imperial elite. Time and again, our tour guide, Vera, returned to the Romanovs. “The monarchy has always been central to the Russian identity,” she said. “It is now a collective national trauma for Russians that we killed the tsar’s family. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many now look back to the Romanovs with nostalgia and profound pain.” “There has been a reckoning,” Vera said, an attempt at collective national repentance for a century-old regicide.
The title ‘tsar’ has surfaced frequently of late. In 2016, Stephen Lee Myers published The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin; the BBC reprised the moniker in 2018 with the documentary “Putin: The New Tsar.” It has become popular to refer to Putin in such terms; Radio Free Europe called Putin “a modern-day Tsar”; several books call him an “accidental Czar”; the Telegraph and the Washington Post have both used the title. Putin has even compared himself to Peter the Great and framed his war in tsarist terms. This, too, has fuelled an already longstanding interest in the Russian empire’s last true tsar, Nicholas II, murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks in a mansion ominously called the ‘House of Special Purpose’ in the Ural Mountains on July 17, 1918.
The road to regicide was one of paralyzing crises. In 1905, Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra came under the thrall of the drunken, promiscuous ‘holy man’ Grigori Rasputin, whom the empress desperately hoped could heal their hemophiliac son Alexei. The Romanovs became isolated as scandal, the tsar’s incompetence in the face of worsening economic conditions, and public anger at the handling of World War I created a tinderbox. Nicholas fired competent officials; they were replaced by Rasputin sycophants. In 1916, a handful of desperate nobles murdered the mystic, who allegedly survived three glasses of poison and a gunshot wound to the chest before being shot in the head and dumped into the Little Nevka River.
Not even Rasputin’s assassination woke Nicholas to the mounting danger. He fired the popular commander in chief of the military and assumed supreme command himself. Riots broke out in St. Petersburg on March 8, 1917, and the government called for his abdication. Nicholas renounced the throne in favor of his brother Michael, who refused it, on March 15. The government placed him under house arrest with his family at the Alexander Palace south of St. Petersburg and attempted to exile the Romanovs to the UK. King George V, a first cousin of both Nicholas and Alexandra, was close to the tsar, with whom he shared a striking familial resemblance. After initially agreeing to offer the Romanovs asylum, the king reneged, fearing it might fuel anti-royalist sentiment in England.
It was a decision that would haunt him. After hearing of the mass execution the following year, George V mourned the “poor children” and wrote in his diary: “It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men, a thorough gentleman, loved his country and his people.”
In August 1917, the Romanovs were moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, allegedly to protect them from the revolutionaries. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October, sterner guards arrived, and the family was placed on soldiers’ rations. In April 1918, Lenin ordered the family to be moved again to Yekaterinburg. The girls were sexually molested by Bolsheviks on the train. Still, the family attempted to resurrect some normality in the heavily guarded ‘House of Special Purpose,’ a prison fortress with painted-over windows surrounded by machine gun nests. Nicholas read to his family; the girls befriended the guards, who were swapped when some indicated willingness to help them escape. As the Western-backed White Russian forces approached, the Bolsheviks decided that a rescue needed to be prevented.
In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918, the family was ordered into the cellar with four loyal retainers. Head executioner Yakov Yurovsky recalled: “I ordered them to stand along the wall. Obviously, at that moment, they did not imagine what awaited them. Alexandra Feodorovna said, ‘There are not even chairs here.’ Nicholas was carrying Alexei. He stood in the room with him in his arms.” Yurovsky abruptly read out the death sentence, and Nicholas started: “What? What?” A volley of gunfire answered, filling the room with dust and smoke. Nicholas and Alexandra were killed outright, but the children were still alive. Each guard had been assigned to shoot a family member, but most did not want to shoot the girls and had aimed instead at their parents.
The cellar became a hellish scene. The guards fired wildly, wounding even each other as awful shrieks filled the room. The children had sewn family jewels into their clothing, and the bullets ricocheted about the basement. Alexei, sitting on a chair, had an entire Browning magazine emptied into him before he was stabbed and finally shot in the head. The screaming girls were attacked with bayonets. One guard recalled that the floor was slick with blood and brains; even after twenty minutes, two of the girls were found to be alive as they were being carried out, triggering another frenzy of stabbing. This horrific detail—of the girls coughing as their killers bore them from the basement—gave rise to the legend of Anastasia Romanov’s survival and the many imposters that followed.
The deposed Tsar Nicholas II was only 50 years old; his wife Alexandra was 46. The beautiful Romanov daughters were still young women: Olga was 22, Tatiania 21, Maria 19, and Anastasia was just 17. Alexei was 13; his birthday was weeks away. Anastasia’s pet spaniel Jimmy and Tatiana’s bulldog Ortino were killed for good measure; Alexei’s spaniel, Joy, bolted at the sound of gunshots and was the sole survivor of the massacre. He was adopted by a White Russian colonel arriving with anti-Bolshevik forces shortly thereafter and is now buried in a garden near Windsor Castle—the only one to make it to England. The family had loved one another fiercely, and the confused and conflicting accounts of how they died together would become the stuff of legend and nightmare.
Their location remained a state secret for decades. The bodies were loaded onto a Fiat truck and driven into the forest, stripped naked, looted, and dumped first into a shallow mine shaft and then buried elsewhere. They were disfigured to avoid future identification, doused with sulfuric acid, and their faces smashed with rifle butts. The family remained hidden for nearly sixty years. In 1979, geologist Alexander Avdonin, who had grown up in the area and heard drunken tales of the murders from one of the assassins, and filmmaker Geli Ryabov, who had been given information by the son of another executioner, located and exhumed some remains after a years-long private investigation. Fearing the repercussions of their discovery, they reburied the skulls with icons and prayers, and the secret slept again.
In 1989, Ryabov told the press about their discovery, triggering an official government investigation in 1991. It was a botched job, with bulldozers opening up a pit that remains haphazardly collected. Remains of all but two—Alexei and Maria—were found; their identities were confirmed in 1994 by genetic analyses. On July 17, 1998, five Romanovs and their four servants were granted a state funeral at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg and interred within the crypt on the 80th anniversary of their murder. President Boris Yeltsin attended, stating: “Today is a historic day for Russia. For many years, we kept quiet about this monstrous crime, but the truth has to be spoken.” Over fifty members of the Romanov family traveled to Russia to attend, as did other European royals and dignitaries from around the world.
In 2007, an amateur historian discovered more bones near Yekaterinburg. DNA tests concluded that they belonged to the two missing children, and the Russian government announced in 2008 that the entire family had been recovered; the same year, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the murders were acts of “unfounded repression,” completing the official Romanov rehabilitation. An additional 37 forensic investigations were conducted, with scientists comparing the DNA with that of then-surviving relatives such as Prince Philip. In 2020, scientists again affirmed that the remains belonged to Alexei and Maria. Despite this evidence, the Russian Orthodox Church, which canonized the family in 2000, has refused to accept the findings due to a petty feud with the government over the handling of the first investigation. The bones of Alexei and Maria have thus not yet been laid to rest with their family and remain in the Russian state archives.
More than a century after the regicide, what is the Russian state’s relationship with the remaining Romanovs? As with most of Europe’s crownless royal houses, it is complicated. There are at least three Romanovs who claim the right to accession in the event of a restoration. In October 2021, the most prominent of them—Georgy Romanov, great-grandson of Nicholas II’s first cousin, Grand Duke Kirill—was married to Italian author Rebecca Bettarini in St. Petersburg’s first royal wedding in over a century. As Mark Galeotti noted in the Spectator, the event brought together “the scattered scions of Europe’s intermarried royal families, from Queen Sofia of Spain to Simeon II of Bulgaria,” as well as “the new Russian elite,” including Konstantin Malofeyev, owner of the TV channel Tsargrad. Catering was provided by restaurant owner and commander of the mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane mysteriously dropped from the sky in August 2023 after an anti-Putin rebellion the previous year.
But as Galeotti observed, a Romanov restoration is largely the stuff of royalist fantasy; 3% of Russians want old tsarism; less than 10% want Russia to become a monarchy, although twice that many would be willing to consider monarchy if a supportable candidate emerged. Such a candidate, incidentally, would unlikely be a Romanov, as most are now considered to be foreigners. Putin has cautiously embraced the Romanovs, even bringing the remains of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna to St. Petersburg from Denmark nearly 80 years after her death to honor her wish to be interred next to her husband and granting her a public funeral in 2006. That, too, is likely part of Putin’s longstanding quest to resurrect the Russian identity out of the ashes of the Soviet Union, which also fuels his support of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Romanovs are a useful link to Russia’s past, not contenders for influence or power.
All that is left of the 300-year-old dynasty in Russia now are restored remains. I walked through the Winter Palace and its grounds on a snowy day in February—its sheer grandeur is still breathtaking. After it was sacked during the October Revolution, it was turned into a museum. The Romanovs had rarely been in residence, but it was easy to imagine the family there, still together and still happy despite the black clouds gathering on history’s horizon. Like many hapless royals in happy marriages, Nicholas would have likely been a contented man if he had avoided the crown; perhaps a more competent tsar might have been less catastrophic. The murder of the Romanovs stays with us because they were among the first of more than sixty million victims of communist terror to follow. The murder of ‘Bloody Nicholas’ was the end of the tsars, but the beginning of a seventy-year horror show that reaped a vast and deadly harvest of Russian daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers.
We return to the Romanovs time and again, not just because we wonder who those beautiful children might have become, but because of what Russia might have been if they had lived. Some moments prove to be hinges upon which history swings, and the awful scene in the basement of the ‘House of Special Purpose’ where an era and a dynasty died was one of them, leaving us to wonder where other paths could have led. But instead, Bloody Sunday turned into a bloody century, and it is hard to imagine that a Romanov reign would have been worse than what the Bolsheviks brought: first regicide, then democide.
