Details about killing
In summer of 1918, Bolshevik leaders worried that advancing White armies might rescue the Romanovs. This led to the decision that the family and their retainers should be executed. Their guards feared a mob attack at any time, and the mood among the locals grew increasingly hostile.
The Bolshevik leaders’ ultimate decision to execute the Romanovs was taken at a meeting in Moscow, and implemented by Uralists acting without reference to the Central Executive Committee.
Yakov Yurovsky, the Ural Soviet’s chief Chekist, was put in charge of carrying out the sentence. In the early hours of 17th July 1918, Yurovsky awakened the Romanov family and their four loyal retainers, and led them down to a basement room.
He announced that they were about to be executed and, when he had finished reading out the sentence, his firing squad opened fire. In the confusion, some shots missed and others were deflected by jewels sewn into the victims’ clothes. Several members of the family were still alive after the initial fusillade, so Yurovsky and members of his squad finished off the wounded using their pistols and bayonets.
The bodies were then stripped and carried away on trucks. They were buried near a kop (small wooded hill) called Ganina Yama, some 15 miles from Yekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks initially claimed that only Tsar Nicholas had been executed and that the rest of the family had been moved to a safe place.