The abdicated Russian Imperial Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and stabbed to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918. Also killed that night were members of the imperial entourage who had accompanied them: court physician Eugene Botkin; lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova; footman Alexei Trupp; and head cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent identification, and buried.
Following the February Revolution in 1917, the Romanovs and their servants had been imprisoned in the Alexander Palace before being moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution. They were next moved to a house in Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains, before their execution in July 1918. The Bolsheviks initially announced only Nicholas's death. For the next eight years, the Soviet leadership maintained a systematic web of disinformation regarding his family, making claims ranging from murder by left-wing revolutionaries in September 1919, to outright denial of their deaths in April 1922.