1918

Murder of the Romanov family

Nicholas II, His Family, and Four Attendants Are Killed at the Ipatiev House

Eleven people were taken down to the basement — seven Romanovs and four attendants — and none of them came back up.

Woken with a lie

During the night of 16–17 July 1918, the prisoners in the Ipatiev House at Ekaterinburg were awakened on the pretext that unrest in the city required their evacuation, and were taken into a basement room.

Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei — and four attendants were killed there. The attendants were physician Eugene Botkin, cook Ivan Kharitonov, maid Anna Demidova and valet Alexei Trupp.

Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the Ipatiev House and a Cheka member, directed the killing squad.

Who gave the order is not settled

The killings implemented a resolution of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, whose leaders had concluded they could not wait for a proposed trial as anti-Bolshevik forces approached Ekaterinburg.

They reported the decision to Moscow, but the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library notes that no central leadership response to that telegram has been found in the archives, and no surviving written order from Lenin or Sverdlov authorising the killing of the whole family has been located.

On 18 July the central executive presidium approved the local decision concerning Nicholas.

Two accounts sent the same day

Later on 17 July, Ekaterinburg sent Moscow a coded telegram saying the whole family had met the same fate as Nicholas — and a public account claiming the family had been evacuated.

Nicholas's execution was officially announced in 1918; what was concealed was the murder of everyone else. The claim that the Soviet Union first acknowledged the executions in 1989 is wrong.

The 1998 burial did not include everyone either: the remains attributed to Alexei and one daughter were absent from the original grave investigation and were not interred that year.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited Date corrected

How this was checked

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1918-07-17.

What the sources leave uncertain

The killing date and victims are firmly documented. Because the operation began late on July 16 and continued after midnight, sources properly call it the night of July 16–17; the event date is normally given as July 17.
The Ural Regional Soviet's role is documented, but historians dispute whether Lenin or Sverdlov gave prior oral authorization. No direct written order from either has been found.
The surviving records do not justify the title-as-listed's unqualified claim that the Bolshevik Party as a national body ordered the entire family's execution.