Today the 17th:
1762 Empress Catherine II becomes Tsarina of Russia after the death and rumored assassination of Tsar Peter III
Execution of the Romanovs
By July 1918, Russia was engulfed in a hellish civil war which would cost millions of lives and damage a country already reeling from the devastation of World War I. Swept away in this hellfire was the old Tsarist monarchy, last headed by Nicholas II.
Nicholas had abdicated in 1917 as the Russian Revolution swept through the nation. Since then he had been a prisoner of successive governments, first the Provisional Government and then the administration run by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
The Romanovs were shipped from place to place, eventually coming to Yekaterinburg in April, in the Urals, an area known for its hard Communist sympathies. As the White Russian forces grew closer, Lenin and his associates ordered the murder of the family to prevent them falling into anti-communist hands.
On the night of 17/18 July 1918, Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and their children Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia as well as several of their staff were executed in the basement of Ipatiev House. Their bodies were removed, mutilated and burned before being buried in a forest.
The remains of the family were discovered in stages - all except Alexei and Anastasia in 1979, and the bodies of the remaining children in 2007. Before the discovery of their bodies, rumors spread that some had survived, particularly Anastasia who would posthumously become the most famous of the Tsar's children.
1918-07-17 The Romanov royal family and several of their retainers are executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
The Romanov family—Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children—were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on July 17, 1918. Ordered by Vladimir Lenin's government to prevent the royal family's rescue by advancing anti-Bolshevik forces, the killings brought an end to the 300-year Romanov dynasty.The group included the Tsar, his wife, their four daughters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia), their son (Alexei), and four loyal servants who remained with them during their imprisonment.The ExecutionOn the night of July 16–17, 1918, the family was awakened and told they were being relocated to a safer place. They were brought into a small cellar room in the Ipatiev House under the pretense of waiting for a truck. Instead, a Bolshevik firing squad led by Yakov Yurovsky entered the room and opened fire.Aftermath and DiscoveryFollowing the shootings, the Bolsheviks attempted to hide the bodies to prevent the site from becoming a rallying point or shrine for royalists. The remains were transported to a nearby forest, mutilated, doused in acid, burned, and dumped in an unmarked pit.For decades, the exact location of the graves remained a closely guarded secret of the Soviet regime. The site of the execution, the Ipatiev House, was eventually demolished in 1977 on orders of the Communist Party.Modern IdentificationAfter the fall of the Soviet Union, the primary grave site was excavated in 1991, revealing the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three of their daughters. The bodies of Alexei and Maria were missing but were eventually discovered in a separate, nearby pit in 2007. DNA testing has since confirmed the identities of all seven family members. In 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the family as passion bearers.