page_title: Execution of the Romanov family
section_title: Executioners
hierarchical_section_title: Execution of the Romanov family / Executioners
caption_attribution_description: English: Peter Ermakov at the grave site of Nicholas II, his family and servants on Koptyaki Road.Ermakov wrote the following in the back of the photograph: "I am standing on the grave of the Tsar."
context_page_description: The Russian Imperial Romanov family were shot and bayoneted to death by Communist revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Also killed that night were retainers who had accompanied them: notably Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp and Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped and mutilated.
  In 1919 the White Army commissioned an investigation but were unable to find the unmarked gravesite. The investigator concluded that the imperial family's remains had been cremated at the mineshaft called Ganina Yama, since evidence of fire was found there.
  In 1979 and 2007, the remains of the bodies were found in two unmarked graves in a field called Porosenkov Log. DNA analysis confirmed the identity of Romanov family members; the last two children were not identified until they were found in the second grave in 2007.
  According to the official state version of the USSR, former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, along with members of his family and retinue, was executed by firing squad, by order of the Ural Regional Soviet, due to the threat of the city being occupied by Whites.
context_section_description: Ivan Plotnikov, history professor at the Maksim Gorky Ural State University, has established that the executioners were Yakov Yurovsky, Grigory P. Nikulin, Mikhail A. Medvedev (Kuprin), Peter Ermakov, Stepan Vaganov, Alexey G. Kabanov (former soldier in the tsar's Life Guards and Chekist assigned to the attic machine gun), Pavel Medvedev, V. N. Netrebin, and Y. M. Tselms. Filipp Goloshchyokin, a close associate of Yakov Sverdlov, being a military commissar of the Uralispolkom in Yekaterinburg, however did not actually participate, and two or three guards refused to take part. Pyotr Voykov was given the specific task of arranging for the disposal of their remains, obtaining 570 litres (150 gal) of gasoline and 180 kilograms (400 lbs) of sulphuric acid, the latter from the Yekaterinburg pharmacy. He was a witness but later claimed to have taken part in the murders, looting belongings from a dead grand duchess. After the killings, he was to declare that "The world will never know what we did with them." Voykov served as Soviet ambassador to Poland in 1924, where he was assassinated by a Russian monarchist in July 1927.
  The men who were directly complicit in the murder of the imperial family largely survived in the immediate months after the murders. Stepan Vaganov, Ermakov's close associate, was attacked and killed by peasants in late 1918 for his participation in local acts of brutal repression by the Cheka. Pavel Medvedev, head of the Ipatiev House guard and one of the key figures in the murders, was captured by the White Army in Perm in February 1919. During his interrogation he denied taking part in the murders, and died in prison of typhus. Alexandre Beloborodov and his deputy, Boris Didkovsky, were both killed in 1938 during the Great Purge. Filipp Goloshchyokin was shot in October 1941 in an NKVD prison and consigned to an unmarked grave.
  Three days after the murders, Yurovsky personally reported to Lenin on the events of that night and was rewarded with an appointment to the Moscow City Cheka. He held a succession of key economic and party posts, dying in the Kremlin Hospital in 1938 aged 60. Prior to his death, he donated the guns he used in the murders to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, and left behind three valuable, though contradictory, accounts of the event.
  A British officer who met Yurovsky in 1920 alleged that he was remorseful over his role in the execution of the Romanovs. However, in a final letter that was written to his children shortly before his death in 1938, he only reminisced about his revolutionary career and how "the storm of October" had "turned its brightest side" towards him, making him "the happiest of mortals"; there was no expression of regret or remorse over the murders. Yurovsky and his assistant, Nikulin, who died in 1964, are buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His son, Alexander Yurovsky, voluntarily handed over his father's memoirs to amateur investigators Avdonin and Ryabov in 1978.
  Lenin saw the House of Romanov as "monarchist filth, a 300-year disgrace", and referred to Nicholas II in conversation and in his writings as "the most evil enemy of the Russian people, a bloody executioner, an Asiatic gendarme" and "a crowned robber." A written record outlining the chain of command and tying the ultimate responsibility for the fate of the Romanovs back to Lenin was either never made or carefully concealed. Lenin operated with extreme caution, his favored method being to issue instructions in coded telegrams, insisting that the original and even the telegraph ribbon on which it was sent be destroyed. Uncovered documents in Archive No. 2 (Lenin), Archive No. 86 (Sverdlov) as well as the archives of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee reveal that a host of party 'errand boys' were regularly designated to relay his instructions, either by confidential notes or anonymous directives made in the collective name of the Council of People's Commissars. In all such decisions Lenin regularly insisted that no written evidence be preserved. The 55 
caption: Peter Ermakov survived the civil war unscathed; however, unlike the other killers, he received no awards or advancements, for which he grew bitter. For the rest of his life,[150] he fought relentlessly for primacy by inflating his role in the murders as well as the revolution.[151] Local Communist Party members annually pay tribute to his gravestone on the anniversary of the murders, though on a few occasions it was also vandalized.[152]
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