Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.BOOKS: IN SEARCH OF THE ROMANOVS
THE DEATH OF COMRADE NICHOLAS Romanov was nasty and brutish. In 1918 the last Czar of Russia was a prisoner of the Ural Regional Soviet in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg. With him were his German-born wife, the Czarina Alexandra; their four daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, and hemophiliac son, the Czarevich Alexis; the family doctor, Eugene Botkin; and three servants.
On the evening of July 17 a member of the Soviet's executive committee, Yakov Yurovsky, ordered the prisoners to dress. They were herded into a barren, unfurnished room with a single grilled window. Because "your relatives...
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