On the night of
July 17, 1918, Bolshevik authorities acting on Yakov Sverdlov's orders in
Moscow and led locally by Filip Goloschekin and Yakov Yurovsky, shot Nicholas
II, his immediate family, and four servants in the Ipatiev House's cellar.
The family was
roused from sleep around 2:00 a.m. and told that they were being moved to a
newer, safer location. They dressed quickly but informally. They were then led
from the house where they had been staying and taken across a courtyard and
down some stairs, then through a number of corridors and small dark rooms, few
of which were lit. They reached a room at the end of one particular corridor
that had a single electric light burning dimly. They asked for and were brought
two chairs for the youngest children to sit on. The family members were then
left alone for several minutes. Suddenly, a group of armed men led by Yurovsky
entered the room. Yurovsky read an announcement from the local Duma explaining
that they must all be killed immediately. Nicholas was utterly perplexed, and
asked Yurovsky, "What? What?" Yurovsky eventually responded by
saying, "This!" and shot Nicholas in the chest. Thus commenced the
the messy, botched affair.[11]
At first, all of
the gunmen, who loathed the Tsar immensely, shot at Nicholas, who immediately
fell dead from multiple bullet wounds. Then the dark room filled with toxic
smoke and dust from the spray of bullets, and the gunmen shot blindly, often
hitting the ceiling and walls, creating yet more dust. Alexandra was soon shot
in the head by Ermakov, and killed, and some of the gunmen themselves became
injured. It wasn't until after the room had been cleared of smoke that the
shooters re-entered to find the entire remaining Imperial family still alive
and uninjured. Some of these were now quickly shot in the head, but several of
the others, including the young and frail Tsarevich, would not die either from
multiple close-range bullet woulds or bayonet stabs. Finally, each was shot in
the head. Even so, two of the girls were still alive 10 minutes later, and had
to be bludgeoned with the butt of a rifle to finally be killed. Later it was
discovered that the bullets and bayonet stabs had been partially blocked by
diamonds that had been sewn into the children's clothing. The bodies of the
Romanovs were then hidden and moved several times before being interred in an
unmarked pit where they remained until the summer of 1979 when amateur
enthusiasts disinterred and re-buried some of them, and then decided to conceal
the find until the fall of communism. In 1991 the grave site was excavated and the
bodies were given a state funeral under the nascent democracy of post-Soviet
Russia, and several years later DNA and other forensic evidence was used by
Russian and international scientists to make genuine identifications.
The Ipatiev House
has the same name as the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, where Mikhail Romanov
had been offered the Russian Crown in 1613. The large memorial church "on
the blood" has been built on the spot where the Ipatiev House once stood.
Nicholas II and
his family were proclaimed passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church in
2000. In orthodoxy, a passion-bearer is a saint who was not killed because of
his faith, like a martyr; but who died in faith at the hand of murderers.
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