THE story of the arrest, captivity, and execution of the last Russian tsar and his family in 1917–1918 has long appealed to the public imagination in both Russia and the West. In the United States and western Europe, émigrés published dozens of accounts—invariably impassioned but varying in reliability—in the first decade after the Russian Revolution, and Western writers and historians continued to explore the story in the years following. In Russia, Soviet ideological constraints and preoccupations precluded any open discussion of the fate of the imperial family until the early days of glasnost. Then came an explosion...

WELL before the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, the democratic challenge to traditional structures of power in Russia worried Russian conservatives, among them Nicholas II. At the very beginning of his reign, Nicholas acknowledged the growth in Russian society of “senseless dreams of participation … in matters of internal administration.”¹ Inspiring these dreams were powerful and dangerous ideas about inalienable rights and the moral and political necessity of civil liberty. Since the late eighteenth century, liberal ideas of the European Enlightenment had increasingly found a place in the thinking of Russia’s educated elite, including many state officials. As the number and...

INSPIRED by divergent ideas about the meaning and purposes of the revolution, the Provisional Government and the powerful nationwide network of soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies viewed the fate of the abdicated tsar and his family differently. The liberals in the government held an embracing notion of citizenship that disregarded class and position. They were committed to promoting national unity and concord rather than conflict and hesitated to punish former enemies. Their political vocabulary was filled with references to nation, morality, law, duty, and rights. When considering the fate of the former imperial family, these liberals tended to view...

AT dawn on 1 August 1917, the former tsar and his family left their palace at Tsarskoe Selo for the last time and, under heavy guard, boarded a train to Siberia. Although Minister President Aleksandr Kerensky stated that Nicholas, his family, and those who voluntarily accompanied them were to be treated as “under arrest” (Document 59), conditions en route and in exile were no harsher than at Tsarskoe Selo. The journey to Siberia was made in comfortable sleeper cars of the International Wagon-Lits Company and with a restaurant car serving—according to the evaluation that Nicholas noted in his diary...

ACCORDING to Pave1 Matveev, a member of the guard that accompanied Nicholas on his journey from Tobolsk, when Nicholas realized that his destination was Yekaterinburg, not Moscow, he commented, “I would go anywhere at all, only not to the Urals,” where, he had heard, the “mood” was “harshly against” him.¹ The comment may be apocryphal, like so much of the testimony of witnesses that has served as evidence, but even the fact that it was reported reflects the Urals’ well-deserved reputation as a bastion of left-wing radicalism. This reputation was reconfirmed, according to other recollections, the moment of the group’s...