Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 53 minutes ago
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, was the absolute ruler of the Russian Empire. Following the Russians military disasters of the Russo-Japanese War and the Great War, and in the face of imminent revolution, Tsar Nicholas abdicated, ending the Romanov Dynasty that had lasted over three centuries.
As Russia, and then the Soviet Union, plunged into civil war, the ruling Bolsheviks came to view him and his immediate royal family as a rallying point for counter-revolutionaries, and thus a threat to their power. On the night of 17 July 1918, the Bolsheviks set out to eliminate the threat he and his family posed for good. It would not be for another 70 years until the Soviet Union finally revealed the full fate of the Tsar's family.
A few notes:
1) This programme was made in 1992. The 1922 report of Yakov Yurovsky (the lead executioner) detailing his account of the execution and disposal of the Tsar and his family would be published in 1993. The bodies of Alexei and one of his sisters (Maria or Anastasia) would not be found until 2007, thus conclusively proving that all of the Tsar's immediate family died on that July night in 1918.
2) The documentary appears to have confused Konstantin Pobedonostsev with Dmitriy Sipyagin. Pobedonostsev was the Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, effectively the Imperial Russian government's non-clerical head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He had served under Tsars Alexander II and III, and he died of natural causes in 1907. Sipyagin was the Minister of the Interior from 1899 to 1902, when he was assassinated, and was replaced by Vyacheslav von Plehve. Both Pobedonostsev and Sipyagin were staunch autocrats.
This is the full length version of the episode. Previous uploads are TV recordings that have about 3 minutes of footage cut, including a section providing some background about the state of Russian society at the turn of the 20th century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, was the absolute ruler of the Russian Empire. Following the Russians military disasters of the Russo-Japanese War and the Great War, and in the face of imminent revolution, Tsar Nicholas abdicated, ending the Romanov Dynasty that had lasted over three centuries.
As Russia, and then the Soviet Union, plunged into civil war, the ruling Bolsheviks came to view him and his immediate royal family as a rallying point for counter-revolutionaries, and thus a threat to their power. On the night of 17 July 1918, the Bolsheviks set out to eliminate the threat he and his family posed for good. It would not be for another 70 years until the Soviet Union finally revealed the full fate of the Tsar's family.
A few notes:
1) This programme was made in 1992. The 1922 report of Yakov Yurovsky (the lead executioner) detailing his account of the execution and disposal of the Tsar and his family would be published in 1993. The bodies of Alexei and one of his sisters (Maria or Anastasia) would not be found until 2007, thus conclusively proving that all of the Tsar's immediate family died on that July night in 1918.
2) The documentary appears to have confused Konstantin Pobedonostsev with Dmitriy Sipyagin. Pobedonostsev was the Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, effectively the Imperial Russian government's non-clerical head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He had served under Tsars Alexander II and III, and he died of natural causes in 1907. Sipyagin was the Minister of the Interior from 1899 to 1902, when he was assassinated, and was replaced by Vyacheslav von Plehve. Both Pobedonostsev and Sipyagin were staunch autocrats.
This is the full length version of the episode. Previous uploads are TV recordings that have about 3 minutes of footage cut, including a section providing some background about the state of Russian society at the turn of the 20th century.
