Today in History—July 17: The End of House Romanov

When the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were awakened and crowded into a small cellar about midnight on this day in 1918, they probably didn’t know they were walking to their deaths.

It had been more than a year since Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate the Russian throne. His unpopular reign was marked by disastrous wars, food shortages, unemployment, uprisings, and, ultimately, revolutions—two, to be precise.

Yet even as unrest swelled, he blocked attempts at reform and stubbornly clung to power.

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The monarchy was overthrown in the February Revolution of 1917, and the tsar and his family became prisoners of the revolutionaries. Their captivity took them from western Siberia to Yekaterinburg. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in the October Revolution, and Russia plunged into civil war.

As the anti-Bolshevik forces approached Yekaterinburg in the middle of July of 1918, the Bolsheviks feared that the royal family might escape or be rescued. And so, the Bolsheviks decided that the royal family had to die.

That night, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were ushered into the cellar of the house where they were imprisoned, along with four of their loyal servants. Then came a firing squad led by Yakov Yurovsky, a secret police official. The Romanov family was fatally shot and bayoneted in a chaotic haze of smoke and dust.

Few had foreseen so swift an end to a dynasty that had ruled Russia for more than 300 years.

For decades after, the Bolsheviks’ secrecy around the massacre fueled rumors that some of the Romanovs had survived, most famously Anastasia. This possibility diminished after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the remains of the tsar, his wife, and three of their daughters were identified in 1991. When the remains of the other two children were found in 2007, one of history’s most persistent royal mysteries was laid to rest. Mostly.

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