March 1, 1917 Nicholas II abdicated, first in favor of Alexei, then in favor of his brother, the Great Duke Michael, who in his turn abdicated in favor of the Provisional government. This last abdication marked the end of monarchy in Russia.

March - August 1917 The royal family under house arrest in their palace (Alexander Palace, Tsarskoye Selo).

On August 1, 1917, the imperial family and many of their friends left Petrograd for Tobolsk by train. The commander of the garrison in Tobolsk did his best to make their captivity not too difficult.

On the night of October 24-25, 1917 thousands of red guards infested Petrograd and overthrew the Provisional government. Bolshiviks came to power.

A new commissioner named Vassili Yakovlev, sent by the new Bolshevik government, arrived in Tobolsk on April 22 to remove the Romanovs from the region loyal to the royal family. Four days later, Nicholas, Aleksandra, and their daughter Maria finally left Tobolsk. Alexei was too weak to travel.

The train that was supposed to carry the Romanovs to Moscow was stopped by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg on April 30. Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Alexei, and other close friends who had been a part of the Romanovs' captivity from the beginning joined them in Yekaterinburg on May 23.

The Bolsheviks had improvised a place of detention for the Romanovs: a "house of special purpose" - the house of wealthy man Nicolay Ipatiev.

On July 17, 1918, shortly after midnight, Yakov Yurovsky, the head Bolshevik captor of the royal family awoke his prisoners and asked them to go down in the house basement to take shelter under the pretext that the white army was encircling the city and that battle was imminent. Former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Aleksandra, their four daughters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia), Tsarevich Alexei, their faithful (Doctor Botkin, lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, cook Kharitonof, and footman Trupp) quickly woke up and went downstairs. Shortly, Yurovsky brought ten men armed with rifles. Within half an hour everything was over.

Then, the bodies were loaded on a truck which left Yekaterinburg at about half past two for a former iron mine. Bolshevicks threw the bodies down into the flooded collapsed pit mine, but there was not enough water and the bodies could still be seen.

The next morning they reloaded the bodies on trucks in order to bury them in another deeper pit mine located not far from there. After some miles, the truck got stuck in the mud. As they were near a level crossing, they took here wood planks so that the truck might get over the mud and decided to bury the bodies in this place, under the road. They dug a big hole in the road, put the bodies in the hole, recovered it with wood planks, and left the place, expecting to finish the work later.

However, events did not leave them the time to end their task because some days after, on 25 July, Ykaterinburg felt to the advancing white army.