The Romanovs — three centuries of autocracy ended in a cellar

The House of Romanov ruled Russia for just over three hundred years, from the election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917; sixteen months after that abdication, on the night of 16–17 July 1918, the last tsar, his wife, their five children and four members of their household were shot and bayoneted to death in the cellar of a requisitioned merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg. The dynasty did not so much fall as exhaust itself, and then was extinguished.

Nicholas II had inherited an autocracy that he believed it his sacred duty to preserve undiminished. He ruled an empire of roughly 170 million people across a sixth of the world’s land, and he met its mounting strains — defeat by Japan in 1904–05, the revolution of 1905, and finally the catastrophe of the First World War — with concession offered too late and withdrawn too soon. By 1917 the army was bleeding, the cities were starving, and the dynasty had isolated itself behind the peasant mystic Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the Empress Alexandra had become a public scandal.

When food riots and a soldiers’ mutiny erupted in the capital, Petrograd, in late February 1917 (Old Style), the monarchy collapsed within days. Nicholas abdicated on 15 March 1917 (New Style) for himself and, on medical advice concerning his haemophiliac son, also for the boy. His brother declined the throne. A 304-year dynasty ended without a battle for it.

What followed was captivity, and then murder. Held under the Provisional Government at Tsarskoye Selo, moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, and finally confined in the Ipatiev House in Bolshevik-held Yekaterinburg, the family was killed as anti-Bolshevik forces closed on the city. The five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the thirteen-year-old Alexei — were murdered with their parents. The killing of the children removed any line of legitimist restoration and turned a deposed family into martyrs whose remains, identity, and fate would be contested for the rest of the century.