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For seven decades, the July 1918 deaths of Czar
Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra and their four daughters
and son at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg spawned theo-
ries about the demise of the Russian royal family. The
Bolsheviks clearly killed the family as they ushered in a
communist era that had little room for nobility or dis-
sent. Yet the family’s remains were lost. The house in the
Ural Mountains became a Museum of the Revolution
and, to the annoyance of the Soviet leadership, also at-
tracted pro- Romanov worshippers, causing Soviet leader
Boris Yeltsin to order its destruction in 1977. But the de-
molition could not bury history. For just over a decade
before, Harvard University received a gift of documents
from the investigation into the deaths. Among the papers
from coroner Nikolay Sokolov’s probe was this image of
the room where the deaths took place, with the blood-
stained wallpaper ripped by bullets, the shattered wall
and the plaster-covered floor all seemingly intact from the
day of the massacre. Suddenly there was visual proof of
the regicide that marked the start of the Soviet Union.
It would be decades still before the nation owned up to
the deaths. In August 2000—nine years after the Soviet
Union fell—the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the
Romanovs, proclaiming that these victims of Bolshevism
were “passion bearers” for their “humbleness, patience
and meekness” during their imprisonment. Churches have
since been built for each of the family members, and in
2003 the gold-domed Church on Blood in Honour of All
Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land rose on the site
of Ipatiev House, a fitting worship space for the flocking
pilgrims. Five years later, the Russian Supreme Court re-
habilitated the family and ruled their execution an act of
“unfounded repression.”