Murder of the Romanov family

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The murder of the Romanov family took place on the same day a Danish newspaper asked Lenin whether the tsar was still alive. On the 16th of July 1918, the editors of Nationaltidende wired Moscow about a rumor that Nicholas II had been murdered. Lenin answered with three short sentences: "Rumor not true. Ex-tsar safe. All rumors are only lies of capitalist press." Within hours, in a basement room in Yekaterinburg, the family was dead. The story the world would hear afterward was already being shaped. Who really gave the order? Why did the Soviet government spend eight years denying and bending the truth? And how did the bodies, hidden with such effort, come to be found, doubted, and found again?

  53142811

• 2. House of Special Purpose

  ›

  On the 1st of March 1918, in Tobolsk, Siberia, the family was placed on soldiers' rations. Ten servants were dismissed, and butter and coffee vanished from the table. Conditions had tightened since the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. Nicholas was forbidden to wear epaulettes, and sentries scrawled lewd drawings on the fence to offend his daughters.

  In April 1918, Vasily Yakovlev moved Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughter Maria to Yekaterinburg. Alexei had severe haemophilia and was too ill to travel. He stayed behind with Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia until May. The reunited family was held in the Ipatiev House, which the authorities renamed the House of Special Purpose. A notice declared: "All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest attempt at counter-revolutionary action in the town will result in the summary execution of the hostages."

  Inside the Ipatiev House, the prisoners were forbidden to speak any language except Russian. Their luggage sat in a warehouse in the interior courtyard, and their Brownie cameras were confiscated. Servants had to address the Romanovs only by name and patronymic. Guards searched their belongings regularly, took their money "for safekeeping" by the Ural Regional Soviet's treasurer, and tried to remove the gold bracelets from the wrists of Alexandra and her daughters.

  A double palisade four metres high ringed the house. On the 5th of June a second, taller fence went up, after the guards learned that passersby could see Nicholas's legs when he used the double swing in the garden. The windows were sealed and covered with newspaper, then painted with whitewash on the 15th of May. The only ventilation was a small vent pane in the grand duchesses' bedroom, and peeking out of it was forbidden. In May a sentry fired a shot at Anastasia when she looked out.

  After repeated requests, one window in the tsar and tsarina's bedroom was unsealed on the 23rd of June 1918. It showed them only the spire of the Voznesensky Cathedral across the road. On the 11th of July an iron grille was fitted, because Alexandra had ignored repeated warnings from the commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, not to stand near the open window.

  Daily life ran on strict rules. Water was rationed, and the prisoners could walk in the garden only twice a day, for half an hour each time. Breakfast was mostly tea and black bread, and lunch was cutlets or meat soup. They were told that "they were no longer permitted to live like tsars". From mid-June, nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery brought food daily, though the captors took most of it. Princess Helen of Serbia came to the house in June and was turned away at gunpoint.

  The guards filled the house with their own noise. In early May they moved the piano into the commandant's office next to the Romanovs' bedrooms. There they sang revolutionary songs, drank, smoked, and played the family's records on the confiscated phonograph. By the night the family was killed, the guards at the house numbered 300. One of four machine gun emplacements sat in the attic, directly above the tsar and tsarina's bedroom.

  339636566

• 3. A Plan Takes Shape

  ›

  On the 29th of June 1918, the Ural Regional Soviet agreed that the entire Romanov family should be executed. Filipp Goloshchyokin carried that message to Moscow on the 3rd of July, insisting on the Tsar's death. Only seven of the 23 members of the Central Executive Committee attended, and three of them were Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov and Felix Dzerzhinsky. They agreed that the Ural Soviet's presidium, under Alexander Beloborodov and Goloshchyokin, should organize the practical details. The date would depend on the military situation, with Moscow contacted for final approval.

  The fate of the Tsar's wife and children was also discussed, but it was kept a state secret. German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach kept asking about the family's well-being. British consul Thomas Preston lived near the Ipatiev House. Pierre Gilliard, Sydney Gibbes and Prince Vasily Dolgorukov pressed him to help, yet every request for access was rejected. Goloshchyokin reported back to Yekaterinburg on the 12th of July with instructions that nothing about the deaths be communicated directly to Lenin.

  On the 4th of July, Yakov Yurovsky replaced Aleksandr Avdeev as commandant. He moved the old internal guards to the Popov House across the road. The senior aides stayed, but only watched the hallway, and only Yurovsky's men could enter the Romanovs' rooms. The local Cheka picked replacements from the volunteer battalions of the Verkh-Isetsk factory. They were hired on the understanding that they might have to kill the tsar, and they were sworn to secrecy. Nothing was said yet about the family or the servants.

  To prevent the friendliness that had grown under Avdeev, Yurovsky chose mainly foreigners. On the 8th of July, Nicholas noted in his diary that "new Latvians are standing guard". Their leader was Adolf Lepa, a Lithuanian.

  In late June, Pyotr Voykov and Beloborodov directed the smuggling of letters in French into the house. They claimed to come from a monarchist officer planning a rescue, but the Cheka had composed them. The Romanovs answered on blank spaces or envelopes, and Moscow gained further justification to "liquidate" the family. Yurovsky later observed that Nicholas "had fallen into a hasty plan by us to trap him".

  On the 13th of July, Red Army soldiers, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists gathered on Voznesensky Square and demanded the dismissal of the Yekaterinburg Soviet. Red Guards under Peter Ermakov crushed the protest with gunfire, within earshot of the tsar and tsarina's bedroom. The authorities presented it as a monarchist rebellion threatening the prisoners. That same day, the Bolsheviks told the family that Klimenty Nagorny, Alexei's sailor nanny, and the footman Ivan Sednev had been sent away. Both men were already dead. The Cheka had shot them on the 6th of July, with other hostages, in reprisal for the killing of a regional Bolshevik party chairman by the Whites.

  Meanwhile, forces of the Czechoslovak Legion were closing on Yekaterinburg to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway. Historian David Bullock argues that the Bolsheviks wrongly believed the Legion was coming to rescue the family, and panicked.

  On the 14th of July, Yurovsky worked out where the family would die and how to destroy evidence. He wanted a small, closed space with no escape. The chosen basement room had a barred window nailed shut to muffle gunfire and screams. He rejected shooting them in their beds, and rejected killing them in the forest and sinking them in the Iset pond with metal weights. His plan was to kill all 11 prisoners at once. He also had to stop his men from abusing the women or searching the bodies for jewels. He already suspected more gems were hidden in their clothes, so the bodies were to be stripped.

  On the 16th of July, the Ural Soviets told Yurovsky that Red Army units were retreating everywhere and the killings could not wait. At about 6 pm, Goloshchyokin and Georgy Safarov sent a coded telegram to Lenin seeking final approval. No record of any reply survives. Yurovsky insisted that around 7 pm Goloshchyokin passed him an order from the Central Executive Committee. A former Kremlin guard, Aleksey Akimov, said in the late 1960s that Sverdlov had him send a telegram approving the "trial", the code word for execution.

  At 8 pm Yurovsky sent his chauffeur to find a truck and rolls of canvas. The truck would idle near the basement entrance, its engine masking the shots. Yurovsky and Pavel Medvedev collected 14 handguns: two Brownings, two Colts, two Mausers, one Smith & Wesson and seven Belgian-made Nagants. The Nagants burned old black powder, which gave off heavy smoke and fumes.

  In the commandant's office, Yurovsky assigned a victim to each killer. Ermakov armed himself with three Nagants, a Mauser and a bayonet, and was given two victims, Alexandra and Botkin. Yurovsky told his men to "shoot straight at the heart to avoid an excessive quantity of blood and get it over quickly." Lepa and an Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war named Andras Verhas refused to shoot the women. Yurovsky sent both to the Popov House for failing "at that important moment in their revolutionary duty". No one had planned how to destroy eleven bodies, yet Yurovsky knew that any remains left behind could become a rallying point for monarchists.

  339642818

• 4. The Basement Room

  ›

  While the Romanovs sat at dinner on the 16th of July 1918, Yurovsky came in and said that Leonid Sednev, a chef's assistant, was leaving to meet his uncle. The uncle, Ivan Sednev, was already dead. The family was upset, because Leonid was Alexei's only playmate and the fifth member of their entourage taken away. Yurovsky promised the boy would soon return. Leonid was held at the Popov House that night, since Yurovsky saw no reason to kill him.

  Around midnight on the 17th of July, Yurovsky ordered Dr Eugene Botkin to wake the sleeping family and have them dress. The pretext was a move to a safe place because of coming chaos in Yekaterinburg. They were led into a semi-basement room. Alexandra asked for a chair because she was sick, and Nicholas asked for a second for Alexei. Grigory Nikulin remarked to Yurovsky that the "heir wanted to die in a chair. Very well then, let him have one."

  A squad of secret police entered, and Yurovsky read out the order from the Ural Executive Committee: "Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you." Nicholas, facing his family, turned and said "What? What?" Yurovsky repeated the order and the weapons rose.

  A guard later recalled that Alexandra and Olga tried to bless themselves but could not finish amid the firing. Nicholas fell dead, hit by at least three bullets in the upper chest. Ermakov, drunk, killed Alexandra with a shot to the head. He then fired at Tatiana as she ran for the double doors and wounded her in the thigh. The other killers shot wildly over one another's shoulders until smoke and dust hid everything and no one could hear a command.

  Alexey Kabanov had gone out to the street to judge how far the noise carried. He heard the dogs barking in the family's quarters, and the shots came through clearly despite the roar of the Fiat's engine. He hurried back down and told the men to stop firing and finish the family and their dogs with gun butts and bayonets. Soon Yurovsky had to halt the shooting anyway. The burned gunpowder was caustic, plaster dust was falling from the ceiling, and the noise was deafening.

  When the doors were opened to clear the smoke, the killers heard moans from inside. Several of the retainers were dead, but all the children were alive, and only Tatiana was hurt. The daughters were carrying over 1.3 kg of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which had given them a degree of protection. Bayonets proved ineffective, and the children had to be finished with more shots, this time to the head. Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, survived the first volley. She was stabbed to death while trying to shield herself with a small pillow stuffed with gems.

  As the bodies were laid on stretchers, Anastasia cried out and covered her face with her arm. Ermakov seized a rifle and tried to bayonet her. The blade failed to penetrate, so he drew his revolver and shot her in the head.

  The killing lasted about 20 minutes. Yurovsky later blamed Nikulin's "poor mastery of his weapon and inevitable nerves". Investigators later calculated that roughly 70 bullets were fired, of which 57 were recovered from the basement and three burial sites. Besides the family, the dead included the court physician Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, the footman Alexei Trupp and the head cook Ivan Kharitonov.

  Some of Pavel Medvedev's stretcher bearers began frisking the bodies for valuables. Yurovsky demanded they hand over what they had taken or be shot. Beloborodov and Nikulin then oversaw the ransacking of the Romanov quarters. The most valuable things were piled in Yurovsky's office, while items judged worthless were burned in the stoves. Everything else was packed into the Romanovs' own trunks for Moscow.

  Only one living thing in the house escaped. Alexei's spaniel, Joy, was rescued by a British officer of the Allied Intervention Force and spent his last days in Windsor, Berkshire.

  3391004688

• 5. Burying the Evidence

  ›

  The Fiat truck that carried the bodies had a 60 horsepower engine and a cargo bed of six by ten feet. Heavily loaded, it struggled nine miles along a boggy road toward the Koptyaki forest. Yurovsky was furious to find that the drunken Ermakov had brought only one shovel. Farther on, near crossing no. 185 on the line serving the Verkh-Isetsk works, 25 more of Ermakov's men waited with horses and light carts. They were intoxicated and angry that the prisoners had not been delivered alive, having expected to join a lynching. Yurovsky held them off with great difficulty.

  The truck then stuck fast in marshy ground near the Gorno-Uralsk railway line, and the bodies went onto carts. By sunrise the carts reached a disused mine in a clearing called the Four Brothers. Yurovsky's men ate hardboiled eggs supplied by local nuns, food that had been meant for the imperial family. Ermakov's remaining men were sent back to the city, because Yurovsky distrusted them.

  Yurovsky and five others laid the bodies on the grass and undressed them. The clothes were burned while Yurovsky made an inventory of the jewellery. The naked bodies were dumped into a mineshaft and doused with sulphuric acid to make them unrecognizable. Only then did he find the pit was under three metres deep. The muddy water below did not cover the corpses as he had expected. His attempt to collapse the mine with hand grenades failed, and the men covered the shaft with loose earth and branches. Yurovsky returned to Yekaterinburg with a bag holding 18 lb of looted diamonds. He and the other organizers decided the pit was too shallow.

  A local Soviet official told Yurovsky of deeper copper mines west of the city, in remote and swampy ground. Yurovsky inspected the site on the evening of the 17th of July and reported to the Cheka at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. He sent for more trucks and told Pyotr Voykov to obtain barrels of petrol, kerosene and sulphuric acid, plus plenty of dry firewood. Voykov eventually secured 570 L of gasoline and 180 kg of sulphuric acid, the latter from a Yekaterinburg pharmacy.

  At about 4 am on the 18th of July, Yurovsky and Goloshchyokin, with several Cheka agents, returned to the mineshaft. The sodden corpses were hauled out one by one on ropes tied to their limbs and laid under a tarpaulin. Yurovsky tried to dig a new grave on the spot, but the ground was too hard. He loaded a truck with blocks of concrete to weigh down bodies in the deeper mine. At 10 pm that evening he returned to the forest, and the bodies were loaded again onto the Fiat, now pulled out of the mud.

  In the early hours of the 19th of July, the truck stuck again, this time near Porosenkov Log, which means Piglet's Ravine. The men were exhausted, most refused orders, and dawn was near. Yurovsky decided to bury the bodies right there under the road. The grave measured six by eight feet and was barely 60 cm deep. Alexei Trupp's body went in first, then the Tsar's, then the rest. The men used sulphuric acid again, smashed faces with rifle butts and covered them with quicklime. Railroad ties were laid over the grave, and the Fiat was driven back and forth to press them into the earth. The burial was finished at 6 am.

  Yurovsky buried Alexei and one of his sisters about 15 m away, hoping to confuse anyone who found a grave with only nine bodies. The female body was so disfigured that he mistook it for Anna Demidova. In his own report he wrote that he had really wanted to destroy Alexandra's corpse. Alexei and his sister were burned on a bonfire, and the charred bones were smashed with spades and thrown into a smaller pit.

  Voykov would later say of the whole operation: "The world will never know what we did with them."

  339901214

• 6. Orders and Reckonings

  ›

  Years later, Leon Trotsky recalled a conversation in Moscow, after Yekaterinburg had temporarily fallen to anti-Bolshevik forces. He had asked Sverdlov in passing, "Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?" Sverdlov answered, "Finished. He has been shot." Trotsky asked about the family and was told, "The family along with him." Asked who had decided, Sverdlov said: "We decided it here. Ilyich Lenin believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances." Trotsky wrote that he understood the reasoning.

  Some Western historians use this passage to blame the Moscow leadership, specifically Lenin and Sverdlov. They argue the aim was to stop the Czechoslovak Legion from rescuing the family during the Russian Civil War. Other historians point to documented orders from the All-Russian Central Committee of the Soviets preferring a public trial of Nicholas II, with Trotsky as chief prosecutor, and the family spared. The official Soviet version placed the decision entirely with the Ural Regional Soviet.

  A 2011 investigation concluded that no written document proving an order from Lenin or Sverdlov has been found, even after the post-Soviet opening of state archives. Vladimir Solovyov, who led the Investigative Committee's 2007 inquiry, said the presumption of innocence applied. Experts such as Sergey Mironenko, director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, had searched without precedent, and he saw no reliable proof of initiative by Lenin and Sverdlov. The investigation did conclude that both men endorsed the killings after they happened.

  The gap in the paper trail fits how Lenin worked. He favored coded telegrams and insisted that the original, and even the telegraph ribbon, be destroyed. Archives No. 2 (Lenin) and No. 86 (Sverdlov) show that party "errand boys" relayed his instructions by confidential notes or anonymous directives issued in the name of the Council of People's Commissars. Lenin's 55-volume Collected Works and the memoirs of the killers were heavily censored to stress the roles of Sverdlov and Goloshchyokin.

  Other traces point toward Moscow. After the killings, Beloborodov sent a coded telegram to Lenin's secretary, Nikolai Gorbunov, which White investigator Nikolai Sokolov later found. It read: "Inform Sverdlov the whole family have shared the same fate as the head. Officially the family will die at the evacuation." Earlier, in April 1918, Yakovlev had tried to take the Romanovs onward to Omsk, and he proposed hiding them in the mountains of the Simsky Gorny District in Ufa province. He warned that "the baggage" would be destroyed if handed to the Ural Soviets. According to the Biographical Chronicle of Lenin's political life, Lenin and Sverdlov were in direct telegraph contact with the Ural Soviets about the change of route, and they insisted on Yekaterinburg.

  Lenin's views of the dynasty were not hidden. He called the House of Romanov "monarchist filth, a 300-year disgrace". He described Nicholas as "a crowned robber". When Grand Duchess Elizabeth was murdered at Alapayevsk on the 18th of July 1918, with five other Romanovs, Lenin welcomed it, remarking that "virtue with the crown on it is a greater enemy to the world revolution than a hundred tyrant tsars". Over the next 84 days, 27 more friends and relatives were killed, 14 of them Romanovs. Only the resting places of Elizabeth and her companion Sister Varvara Yakovleva are known today, in the Church of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem.

  Historian Ivan Plotnikov of the Ural State University established the identities of the executioners. They included Yurovsky, Nikulin, Ermakov, Stepan Vaganov, Alexey Kabanov, Pavel Medvedev and others. Goloshchyokin did not take part. Sokolov had wrongly claimed the killers were Latvians, but Plotnikov showed that the group was almost entirely ethnic Russians.

  Most of the killers lived through the immediate aftermath, but few died comfortably. Vaganov was killed by peasants in late 1918. Pavel Medvedev was captured by the White Army in Perm in February 1919 and died in prison of typhus. Voykov, who became Soviet ambassador to Poland, was assassinated by a Russian monarchist in July 1927. Beloborodov and his deputy Boris Didkovsky died in the Great Purge of 1938, and Goloshchyokin was shot in October 1941 in an NKVD prison.

  Yurovsky reported to Lenin three days after the murders and won a post in the Moscow City Cheka. He died in the Kremlin Hospital in 1938, aged 60, having given the guns he used to the Museum of the Revolution. A British correspondent, Francis McCullagh, claimed after meeting him in 1920 that he felt remorse. Yet in a last letter to his children, Yurovsky wrote only of his revolutionary career, and called himself "the happiest of mortals".

  282123251

• 7. Silence and Searching

  ›

  On the afternoon of the 19th of July 1918, Goloshchyokin stood in the Opera House on Glavny Prospekt and announced that "Nicholas the bloody" had been shot. He added that the family had been taken to another place. Sverdlov approved a local newspaper notice saying the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov had been sent to a safe place. The national press carried an official announcement two days later. It reported that the Ural Soviet had acted under pressure from the approaching Czechoslovaks. That same day, the Bolsheviks nationalized all confiscated Romanov property, and Sverdlov told the Council of People's Commissars about the Tsar's execution.

  The deception lasted years. Soviet leaders offered claims ranging from murder by left-wing revolutionaries in September 1919 to outright denial of the deaths in April 1922. In 1926, after a French republication of a White émigré's 1919 investigation, the regime admitted the whole family had been killed. It said the bodies were destroyed and that Lenin's Cabinet bore no blame. The cover-up fed rumors of survivors, and various impostors claimed to be Romanovs. Their publicity drew media attention away from the activities of Soviet Russia.

  The investigator who first exposed much of the truth was Nikolai Sokolov. After Yekaterinburg fell to the White Army on the 25th of July, Admiral Alexander Kolchak set up a commission, and Sokolov, a legal investigator for the Omsk Regional Court, took charge. In February 1919 he interviewed Pierre Gilliard, Alexandra Tegleva and Sydney Gibbes. Around the first mineshaft he found items Yurovsky's men had overlooked: burned bone fragments, congealed fat, Dr Botkin's upper dentures and glasses, corset stays, belt buckles, keys, pearls, diamonds, and part of a severed female finger. The body of Anastasia's King Charles Spaniel, Jimmy, lay in the pit.

  Sokolov never found the grave on the Koptyaki Road, though he photographed the spot where the Fiat had stuck. The return of Bolshevik forces in July 1919 forced him to flee, carrying the relics in a box. It is stored today in the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Job in Uccle, Brussels. He died of a heart attack in France in 1924, leaving eight volumes of photographs and witness accounts. His report appeared in French and Russian that year and in English in 1925. Until 1989 it was the only accepted account. He wrongly concluded that most victims died at once and that a massive bonfire destroyed the bodies.

  The Soviets banned his report. They also issued a government-approved textbook in 1926 that largely plagiarized his work. Leonid Brezhnev's Politburo judged the Ipatiev House to lack "sufficient historical significance", and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov had it demolished in September 1977. Boris Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that "sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism". Pilgrims and monarchists kept visiting the site anyway.

  In 1978, Yurovsky's son Alexander voluntarily gave his father's memoirs to two amateur investigators, Alexander Avdonin and the filmmaker Geli Ryabov. On the 30th and the 31st of May 1979 they located the shallow grave, after years of covert research. They removed three skulls, but found no scientist willing to help. Fearing the consequences, they reburied the skulls in the summer of 1980.

  Then came Gorbachev's glasnost. On the 10th of April 1989, Ryabov revealed the grave to The Moscow News, to Avdonin's dismay. Soviet officials opened the grave in a hasty "official exhumation" in 1991 that wrecked the site and destroyed precious evidence. With no clothes left on the bodies and heavy damage, it stayed unclear whether the skeleton buried as Anastasia was really Maria.

  191163

• 8. Reburial and Judgment

  ›

  In July 1998, exactly eighty years after the killings, the remains of the Romanovs were reburied in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Forensic and DNA work with the help of British experts had confirmed their identities in 1994. The tests used mitochondrial DNA from Prince Philip, a great-nephew of Alexandra. Five family members lay in the grave: the Tsar, the Tsarina and three of their daughters. They rested in the St. Catherine Chapel, where most Russian monarchs since Peter the Great are buried. Boris Yeltsin and his wife attended, with Romanov relatives including Prince Michael of Kent.

  The Russian Orthodox Church did not stand beside the state that day. The Holy Synod had opposed the government's decision in February 1998, preferring a symbolic grave until the remains' authenticity was settled. The priest at the service referred to them as "Christian victims of the Revolution", not as the imperial family. Patriarch Alexy II, who felt the Church had been sidelined, refused to officiate and barred bishops from taking part. Yeltsin called the murder one of the most shameful chapters in Russian history.

  On the 15th of August 2000, the Church announced the canonization of the family for their "humbleness, patience and meekness". After intense debate, the bishops named them passion bearers rather than martyrs. Between 2000 and 2003, the Church of All Saints was built where the Ipatiev House once stood.

  On the 29th of July 2007, another group of amateurs found the small pit with the remains of Alexei and a sister, near two bonfire sites close to the main grave. They recovered 44 partial bone fragments in August. Investigators and geneticists confirmed Alexei and a sister, either Maria or Anastasia. Russian anthropologists presumed Maria, while American ones presumed Anastasia. These remains stay in the state archives, pending a decision from the Church, which demanded a more "thorough and detailed" examination. In late 2015, at the Church's insistence, investigators exhumed Nicholas II and Alexandra for further DNA testing, which again confirmed the couple.

  The legal verdicts came slowly. A criminal case opened in 1993, but nobody was prosecuted, because the perpetrators were dead. On the 1st of October 2008, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled that Nicholas II and his family were victims of political repression and rehabilitated them. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation denounced the decision and vowed it would be corrected. On the 26th of August 2010, Moscow's Basmanny Court ordered prosecutors to reopen the investigation. The court reasoned that a Supreme Court ruling blaming the state made the gunmen's deaths irrelevant.

  Public opinion has settled unevenly. A survey by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center on the 11th of July 2018 found that 57% of Russians called the execution a heinous, unjustified crime. Another 29% said the last emperor paid too high a price for his mistakes. Among those aged 18 to 24, 46% believed Nicholas II had to be punished for his mistakes. Only 3% thought the killings were the public's just retribution.

  On the centenary, over 100,000 pilgrims followed Patriarch Kirill from the city center of Yekaterinburg to a monastery at Ganina Yama. A widespread legend holds that the remains were fully destroyed there, and a profitable pilgrimage business grew around it. The remains found elsewhere, and the burial place at Porosyonkov Log, are therefore overlooked. On the eve of the centennial, the Russian government announced that a new probe had again confirmed the bodies were the Romanovs'. The state stayed aloof from the commemoration, because President Vladimir Putin considers Nicholas II a weak ruler.

  151612183