Tsar of Russia – Nicholas II – Imperial family murder

Nicholas II (born Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov) was the last Tsar of Russia. He ruled from 1894 until he was forced to abdicate in the Russian Revolution of 1917 by the Bolsheviks. His reign was marked with antisemitic pogroms, a crushing defeat by Japan in the Russ-Japanese War, revolutions, internal unrests their bloody suppressions, undue influence by the mystic Rasputin and World War I. In April of 1918, the Tsar family and some of their entourage were moved by the Soviet authorities from Siberia to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.

On July 17, after midnight, the family was woken up and led to a basement room along with four aides. Aleksei and Alexandra were given chairs. A group of armed men entered the room, and a local commander announced that, by order of the regional soviet committee, they were all to be shot. Yakov Yurovsky, the commander, later wrote: “The others then made a few incoherent exclamations… Then the shooting started.” The tsar was killed instantly by the first bullet; Alexandra died next. The rest were shot in the following two or three minutes. Aleksei and three of his sisters were not killed instantly and “had to be shot again.” The last daughter was still not dead after the second round of bullets. “When they tried to finish off one of the girls with bayonets, the bayonet could not pierce the corset. Thanks to all this, the entire procedure took around 20 minutes.” After: Yale Alumni Magazine, Summer 2003, Vol. LXVI, Number 8.

Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the order of the leaders of the Communist Party (comrade Lenin & Co.) and of the Soviet government. Because CK feared that the Russian soldiers won’t shot on their czar, the execution squad was formed from Hungarian soldiers, and among them the future communist leader Imre Nagy.

When pieced together, a secret account left by the chief executioner Yurovsky, plus a seven-volume dossier written by a White Russian monarchist who officially investigated the execution in 1918 to 1919, paint a vivid picture of how and where the victims were buried. According to these sources, the bodies were transported by truck to a forest clearing several hundred yards from the Ekaterinburg-Perm railway line, stripped of their clothing, in at least some cases badly burned (most likely by sulfuric acid), and then unceremoniously dumped in a relatively small and shallow pit. According to Yurovksy’s account this was not the victims’ first burial site–two days after the murder, the bodies were retrieved from the mine shaft down which they were initially deposited on the day of execution and then reburied out of fear that they might be discovered by the approaching White Army.

Seventy years after the murder (in 1998) the Russian Postal Administration has commemorated the memory of the defunct tsar by a stamp with a label (shown below in the middle). The stamps show tsar’s portrait. On the label is displayed the image of the last Russian tsar, surrounded by his family.