The concealment of the Romanov remains
The Bolsheviks killed the Tsar, his wife, their five children and four servants in a cellar in 1918, announced only the Tsar's death, and hid the bodies. The gap that left in the record was filled for eighty years by women claiming to be Anastasia.
Why this verdict
Confirmed by the executioner's own written account and by the graves it led to: the Soviet government announced only the Tsar's death, concealed the killing of the family and the location of the bodies for seventy years, and the concealment is what allowed the survival claims to run. DNA testing has since identified every member of the family.
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01The claim
Two claims sit on top of each other here, and they have opposite answers. The first: that the Soviet state concealed the murder of the entire Romanov family and the disposal of their bodies, announcing only the execution of Nicholas II. The second, which grew in the space the first created: that one or more of the children — Anastasia most often, Alexei sometimes — survived the cellar at the Ipatiev House.
02Where it came from
The family and their household were shot in the early hours of 17 July 1918 in Yekaterinburg. The announcement said Nicholas had been executed and that his wife and son had been moved to a place of safety. The bodies were driven out to the Koptyaki forest, and after a failed attempt to dispose of them down a mine shaft were buried in two places, doused in sulphuric acid.
Within three years the first claimant appeared. The most durable was Anna Anderson, pulled from a Berlin canal in 1920, who maintained until her death in 1984 that she was Anastasia, was believed by some surviving members of the Tsar's circle, and litigated the question in German courts for decades.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
The concealment is documented from the inside. Yakov Yurovsky, who commanded the execution party, wrote an account — the 'Yurovsky note' — describing the shooting, the failed mine-shaft disposal and the two burial sites. It sat in the archives. Working partly from it, the investigator Alexander Avdonin and the writer Geli Ryabov located the main grave in 1979 and kept the find secret until 1989.
The grave was exhumed in 1991 and contained nine sets of remains. DNA analysis published in 1994, using a mitochondrial reference sample from Prince Philip, a maternal-line relative of the Tsarina, identified the Tsar, the Tsarina and three daughters, along with the four servants. Two children were missing — which sustained the survival claims for another sixteen years.
In 2007 a second, smaller burial was found nearby containing the burned remains of two juveniles. Testing published in 2009, including work by Michael Coble and colleagues, identified them as Alexei and the remaining daughter. Every member of the family is accounted for.
Anna Anderson was resolved separately and definitively. Tissue preserved from a 1979 operation was tested in 1994: her mitochondrial DNA did not match the Romanov line, and did match a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who had disappeared from Berlin days before Anderson was pulled from the canal.
04What it cost
This entry is in the archive as a matched pair. The cover-up was real, was ordered by a state, and lasted seventy years. The survival story was false, and it was false for the whole of those seventy years — during which it was entirely reasonable for people to believe it, because the only party who could have refuted it was the party concealing the graves. That is the general shape of the problem the archive exists to document: official secrecy does not merely fail to prevent conspiracy theories, it manufactures the conditions in which sensible people adopt them.