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On the night of July 17, 1918, as the Russian Revolution reshaped an empire, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and four loyal attendants were awakened in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. They were told they were being moved because anti-Bolshevik forces were approaching. Instead, a firing squad was waiting. Within minutes, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for more than three centuries came to a violent end. The bodies were hastily transported to a forest, stripped of valuables, burned with acid, buried in secret, and deliberately concealed. The new Bolshevik government had little interest in giving the imperial family a dignified farewell. Instead, it erased them from public memory as symbols of the old order.