The Execution of the Romanovs

THE EXECUTION OF THE ROMANOVS is a gripping account of the fall of Russia's imperial family and the violent end of a dynasty that had ruled for more than three centuries.

In the early hours of 17 July 1918, Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children, and loyal members of their household were taken into a basement room in Ekaterinburg. Within minutes, the Romanov dynasty ended in gunfire, smoke, confusion, secrecy, and death.

But the cellar was not the beginning of the tragedy. It was the final point of a long collapse: sacred autocracy, repression, failed reform, the warning of 1905, the catastrophe of the First World War, the abdication of Nicholas II, and the rise of revolutionary power during civil war.

This book follows the road from imperial splendour to political captivity: the sacred image of the tsar, the fragility beneath the Romanov crown, Bloody Sunday, reform without trust, Russia's disastrous war, the abdication train, confinement at Tsarskoe Selo and Tobolsk, the House of Special Purpose, the Bolshevik decision to kill, the execution itself, the hidden bodies, the survival myths, forensic proof, and the Romanovs' contested memory after death.

Part of the Blood and Power Series, this book examines how revolution destroyed the living symbol of the power it replaced, and how the murder of a captive family became one of the most haunting crimes of the twentieth century.