At the end of the year 1919, Yekaterinburg was again under Bolsheviks.

Ipatiev house remained for a long time unoccupied. In 1927, for the 10th anniversary of the revolution, the Ipatiev House became a museum dedicated to the revolution and the murder of Romanov family. This museum was closed in 1932. After 1945, the house was used for different purposes: archives of the local party, museum of atheism. In 1977 Moscow gave an order to destroy the Ipatiev house. On July 16, 2003 the new Cathedral on the Blood, was opened on the Ipatiev house place.

The first people who discovered the remains of the royal family were Gueli Riabov, a Moscow producer, and Alexander Avdonin, local ethnographer. They spent 3 years researching and looking for the remains. Riabov, working in a ministry, had access to national archives and was lucky to find Yakov Yurovsky's son Alexander, who gave them his father's notes, which led them eventually to the burial place.

On May 30, 1979, they removed earth and the wood pieces, and, at a depth of 0.8 m, found skeletons. Fearing they could be discovered, they decided, after taking photos of the skulls, to bury them again in the same place.

Riabov, Avdonin and their friends kept their discovery in secret for 10 years being afraid that the remains would be destroyed if revealed. They said they had waited until the political context of USSR would allow them to talk about their discovery.

In March 1991, Riabov succeeded in getting Boris Yeltsin's support and finding money to finance the exhumation. A team of archaeologists and scientists started working on the burial site on July 11, 1991 and discovered about 1000 bone fragments but only 9 skulls, whereas 11 people had been murdered.

An American forensic team led by William Maples of the University of Florida also arrived at Yekaterinburg on July 25, 1992 for investigation.

The following summer the DNA tests on the bones were conducted in collaboration with Peter Gill at the British Forensic Science Service. They performed nuclear and mitochondrial (mt) DNA tests on nine bone samples. These tests made it possible to identify the filiation between skeletons of Alexandra and the daughters. The English gathered DNA samples from living relatives of the Tsar and Tsarina including Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh. When the team compared DNA samples from the bones thought to be those of Nikolai with DNA from two living relatives, they discovered an unusual mismatch. The Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church required further evidence at this point. So investigators exhumed the body of Georgii Romanov, a younger brother of Nikolai's who had died of tuberculosis in 1899. Georgii's DNA indicated the same feature - heteroplasmy - as DNA of the last Tsar.

Russian scientists having conducted skeletons' identification concluded that Alexei's and Maria's bodies were missing.

After six years of research, including a DNA analysis done by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington and forensic work done in Russia and Britain, a Russian Government commission concluded that the skeletal remains were those of Nicholas, Alexandra, three of their five children, and four family attendants.