‘It was a visual indictment of the nation in ignorance of its history.’ – IRINA CHMYREVA, HISTORIAN
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 theories 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 dissent.
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 attracted pro-Romanov worshippers, causing Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin to order its destruction in 1977. But the demolition 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 bloodstained 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 there gicide 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 Romanov's, 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 rehabilitated the family and ruled their execution an act of “unfounded repression.”