NARRATOR: Shortly after
the course of Russian history was changed with one
act of brutal violence.
[gunshots]
Czar Nicholas II and the royal Romanov family
were executed on orders from the revolutionaries who had
taken control of their country.
The Romanov's rule over Russia had begun over 300 years
earlier, during Russia's Time of Troubles,
a 15-year period of dynastic confusion
and foreign invasions.
Mikhail Romanov, the 16-year-old son
of Russia's religious patriarch, was ultimately chosen
to take the throne in 1613.
From there, the Romanov line continued.
And in 1894, Nicholas II took power.
But Nicholas was not the most capable of Russia's czars,
described by contemporaries and historians
as weak, submissive, and insecure.
He only chose advisors who didn't pose
an intellectual threat, leading to questionable decisions
throughout his reign.
In 1904, Nicholas started a war with Japan
after refusing to negotiate Russia's
further expansion into Asia.
Japan decisively won the war.
The next year, workers in the capital
marched to protest unfair labor conditions.
Imperial soldiers fired on the crowds,
killing hundreds and sparking the failed
Revolution of 1905, which caused the deaths of thousands more.
Through all of this conflict, Nicholas
was still supported by the love of his life,
the Empress Alexandra.
The couple had four daughters and one son in succession--
Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei.
While loved by her husband, Alexandra
was viewed as an outsider by her own people.
She was German by birth and her first cousin
was Kaiser Wilhelm II.
And like Nicholas, Alexandra only
trusted a select few advisors-- but mainly,
the infamous mystic, Rasputin.
And by easing the chronic pain of their hemophiliac son,
Alexei, Rasputin gained a prominent place
in the Romanov's inner circle.
In September 1915, Nicholas left Russia to personally take
command of the army on the front lines of World War I,
leaving his wife to oversee the government's
day-to-day operations.
Alexandra was ill-equipped to govern a country at war,
where wages were depressed, food was unaffordable,
and industrial workers were abused to meet wartime quotas.
To make matters worse, Alexandra gave Rasputin
a formal role in government.
He was allowed to hire and fire government ministers at will,
angering the rest of Russia's nobility.
Meanwhile, on the front, Nicholas and the Russian army
suffered defeat after defeat.
By November 1916, the country had lost 1.7 million troops
to the Great War.
The Russian people had reached their breaking point.
First in December 1916, Rasputin was shot, and maybe poisoned,
and maybe drowned, by a group of disgruntled noblemen.
Then on the morning of March 8, 1917,
thousands of Russian women took to the streets of the capital
to protest the government on International Women's Day.
By midday, 100,000 women and men had joined the march.
The protests continued for days.
By Saturday, March 10, more than 250,000 protesters
forced the city to shut down.
Czar Nicholas, still commanding troops in Europe,
wired his generals to fire on the mobs.
But when given the order the next day,
Russian soldiers instead turned their guns on their officers.
By Thursday, Nicholas II had abdicated the Russian throne.
His palace was overrun by revolutionary troops,
ending 304 years of Romanov rule over Russia.
The family was initially placed under house
arrest at the Alexander palace, south of St. Petersburg.
But the new provisional government wanted the Romanovs
out of the country.
So they asked Nicholas' first cousin, King George V of Great
Britain, to take them in.
At first, the King accepted, but then changed his mind
after realizing just how unpopular
the Romanovs were with both parliament
and the British public.
In August of 1917, the Romanovs were
moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, where their situation
continued to deteriorate.
In November, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks
seized control of the government.
They had a much more hostile attitude
towards the former monarchy, expelling many of the Romanov's
servants and restricting the family
to a diet of army rations.
The next spring, the Romanovs were
moved to their final location in Yekaterinburg--
to a building called the House of Special Purpose.
On July 17, 1918, Nicholas Romanov and his family
were awoken from bed shortly after midnight.
They were told that counterrevolutionary troops
were approaching and that the family
had to move into the basement for their own safety.
The Romanovs and four loyal servants obliged.
Several were wearing clothing with precious jewels sewn
into the seams, which they had smuggled with them
throughout their captivity.
Once the family was in, the basement room was sealed,
and Yakov Yurovsky, their chief executioner,
informed them they would be executed.
Nicholas could only respond with one word--
[speaking russian]
Yurovsky and his men opened fire on the family,
killing Nicholas and Alexandra.
But some, including the children,
survived the initial attack.
The jewels lining their clothing had acted as armor.
The Bolsheviks finished them off with bayonets and gunshots
to the head.
[gunshots]
Yurovsky had the family buried in two
separate, unmarked graves off the side of a local road.
The first grave wasn't rediscovered until 1979,
the other until 2007.
The Romanov family has since been
reinterred at Peter and Paul cathedral in St. Petersburg.
In July of 2018, Yekaterinburg commemorated
the 100th anniversary of the family's execution.
More than a century after their deaths,
100,000 pilgrims attended the ceremony, still
mourning Russia's lost royalty.