Putting the Romanovs to rest Why the Russian Orthodox Church refuses to recognize the remains of the Tsarist Empire’s last royal family
Ten years ago, Russia’s Investigative Committee reopened the investigation into the 1918 murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family at the insistence of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Federal investigators exhumed the bodies of the Romanovs, the Russian Empire’s last ruling family, and carried out additional DNA testing to confirm the authenticity of their remains. And while the investigation concluded that they were genuine, the Orthodox Church leadership has yet to recognize the results. In an article for Meduza, historian Alexey Uvarov recounts the circumstances surrounding the Romanov family’s execution and the recovery of their remains, and explains how radical “Tsar-worshippers” have kept the authenticity dispute alive to this day.
The execution of the Romanovs
After Tsar Nicholas II was deposed in March 1917, the fate of the imperial Romanov family rested with the Provisional Government. Amid the revolutionary chaos in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and calls for the emperor’s head, the new authorities placed the family — Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, and their five children — under house arrest. They were held at a royal residence in the nearby town of Tsarskoye Selo, purportedly for their own safety.
However, the Provisional Government also feared a monarchist counterrevolution and sought to isolate the Romanovs from their supporters. A plan to send the royal family to the United Kingdom fell through. Nicholas II’s first cousin, King George V, backtracked on offering them asylum, fearing a scandal that would strengthen revolutionary sentiments domestically. The Provisional Government then moved the Romanovs further away from the capital, to the Siberian town of Tobolsk.
After the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution, the Russian Empire descended into civil war. As the White Army advanced in the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks deemed Tobolsk too dangerous and moved the royal family to the Ipatiev House, a mansion in Yekaterinburg. The Romanovs were placed under even more restrictive conditions, including tighter security, regular searches, and extremely limited communication with the outside world.
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Though the Bolsheviks initially planned to hold a public trial of Nicholas II, the war made this impractical. During the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks killed two other members of the Romanov dynasty: the tsar’s youngest brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and the tsarina’s sister, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna. With the military situation deteriorating, the Ural Regional Soviet decided that the royal family should also be executed.
On the night of July 16–17, the Romanovs and their four remaining servants were awakened under the pretext of an evacuation and taken into a basement room. The Ipatiev House’s commandant, Bolshevik revolutionary Yakov Yurovsky, then read aloud the order to execute them. The executioners immediately started shooting indiscriminately, killing Nicholas and Alexandra. They then finished off the Romanov children and the servants with gunshots and bayonets. In an attempt to cover their tracks, Yurovsky’s men smuggled the bodies to a nearby forest, where they stripped them of their jewelry and burned their clothes. They then dumped the corpses in a mineshaft and doused them with acid, later reburying the disfigured remains at a second site.
In the days that followed, Soviet officials announced that Nicholas II had been shot and that his family had been “taken to a safe place.” While the news of the tsar’s execution was seen as yet another instance of revolutionary terror during the brutal civil war, the Bolsheviks succeeded in distorting the true picture of events. Foreign newspapers and diplomats repeated Soviet claims, making it appear as though Alexandra and the Romanov children were still alive. Official reports of their deaths did not appear in the Soviet press until later that summer. Furthermore, the full details — including the fact that the entire family had been executed — only became known to the general public in the 1920s, when Russian émigrés and eyewitnesses began publishing memoirs.
After the White Army took Yekaterinburg on July 25, the new authorities decided to investigate the tragedy and established a probe into the tsar’s murder. Legal investigator Nikolai Sokolov, who was appointed to lead the commission in February 1919, managed to gather hundreds of testimonies and a wealth of material evidence (including a number of the Romanovs’ belongings, bullets, soil samples, and ashes). However, Sokolov’s team failed to locate the remains. The lead investigator concluded that the Bolsheviks had shot the entire royal family, dismembered their bodies, covered them in acid, and then burned them. Therefore, in his view, searching for their remains was pointless.
As the Bolsheviks closed in on Yekaterinburg, Sokolov fled to France, taking the case materials with him so he could continue his investigation in exile. His findings, published in a 1925 book titled The Murder of the Imperial Family, would serve as the basis for subsequent investigations. And while the discovery of the Romanovs’ remains later disproved some of Sokolov’s theories, the evidence he collected is still the most important in the murder case.
Imposters, new martyrs, and Romanov remains
After the murder of Nicholas II and his family, some 200 impostors came forward claiming to be Romanovs who had miraculously evaded execution. In most cases, they posed as one of the children. Perhaps the most famous of these impostors was Anna Anderson, who, beginning in the 1920s, claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Anderson’s claim was long supported by a segment of the Russian émigré community and was even the subject of a court case. DNA testing would later prove that she was not related to the Romanovs. Nevertheless, the myth that Anastasia had survived inspired books, documentaries, and feature films, including the 1956 historical drama Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman and the acclaimed 1997 animated musical of the same name.
Beginning in the early 1920s, the myth of the “martyred” imperial family began to take shape within the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), a de facto independent sect established by émigré bishops. By the 1930s, calls to canonize the murdered Romanovs had become increasingly frequent. However, the ROCOR’s hierarchs were in no rush to declare them saints.
Metropolitan Anthony, who led the church from 1920 to 1936, considered this step premature, mainly due to the lack of “incorrupt relics.” Many monarchist émigrés and priests did not believe that the Romanovs were dead, and continued to conduct prayers for the imperial family’s health. Moreover, the ROCOR long avoided carrying out canonizations to avoid appearing to be a separate church, cut off from believers in Bolshevik Russia.
After World War II, however, the prevailing position within the ROCOR changed. The church began collecting materials related to “new martyrs”: people who had suffered for their faith at the hands of the Soviet regime. In 1964, the church’s supreme administrative body, the Holy Synod, officially recognized the deaths of the imperial family members, and several years later, began commemorating Nicholas II as the “murdered Tsar-martyr.” The ROCOR held a funeral for the Romanovs in 1968. And although not everyone agreed with granting the late tsar the status of a new martyr, or with canonizing his wife, the roots of the Tsarebozhiye or “Tsar-as-God” movement had been planted within the Russian diaspora.
In 1981, the ROCOR’s Council of Bishops canonized Nicholas II, his family, and their servants along with a number of other new martyrs. Icons of the imperial family were painted at the church’s behest, and its hierarchs began actively calling on Soviet believers to join them in worshipping the Romanovs.
Meanwhile, in the USSR, Soviet filmmaker Gelii Ryabov and amateur historian Alexander Avdonin finally discovered the location of the imperial family’s remains.
Ryabov, who took an interest in the Romanovs’ execution while filming the popular television series Born of Revolution, met Avdonin in Sverdlovsk. A geologist by training, Avdonin had long been studying historical documents related to the events of 1918. And based on these materials — including a report by Yakov Yurovsky describing the disposal of the Romanovs’ bodies — he and Ryabov managed to locate the pit containing the remains in Porosenkov Log, a field outside of Sverdlovsk.
The pair recovered two skulls from the site, which Ryabov tried to smuggle to Moscow in the hope of having them analyzed in secret. However, this proved impossible, and they reburied the bones in 1980.
Their discovery remained a secret until 1989, when Ryabov published an article about it in the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti. In 1991, the Soviet Interior Ministry ordered an excavation of the site, which uncovered nine bodies. The authorities then launched an official investigation, which included forensic analysis and DNA testing of the remains. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, a government commission led by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov declared that the nine bodies found at the site belonged to Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, three of their daughters, and the four servants.
On July 17, 1998, the 80th anniversary of the executions, the remains were reburied at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Most of the Romanovs’ surviving descendants attended the ceremony, as did Russia’s political elite, including President Boris Yeltsin. (Decades earlier, as the Sverdlovsk region’s Communist Party leader, Yeltsin had overseen the demolition of the Romanovs’ execution site, the Ipatiev House, on secret orders from the Politburo.) However, the then-head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, did not attend the ceremony, citing the “politicization” of the investigation into the Romanovs’ deaths.
The bodies of Crown Prince Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria were not discovered until 2007, though they were located not far from the other burial site. In 2008–2009, laboratories in Russia and abroad conducted DNA analysis of the recovered bone fragments, which confirmed that the remains were indeed theirs. Additional genetic testing conducted after Russian investigators reopened the Romanov murder case in 2015 later corroborated these results.
Pandering to the ‘Tsar-worshippers’
The debate within the Russian Orthodox Church over the authenticity of the Romanovs’ remains continues to this day. Indeed, the Moscow Patriarchate has yet to formally recognize them as genuine.
The Moscow Patriarchate debated the grounds and the rite by which the imperial family should be glorified throughout the 1990s. A Synodal Commission was tasked with studying the Romanovs’ lives and final months, letters from believers, and reports of veneration and miracles. At the same time, the church leadership underscored that their goal was not to “rehabilitate the monarchy” but rather to affirm that during their imprisonment, the Romanov family embodied Christian virtues — namely, meekness, patience, and a willingness to accept death without bitterness.
In August 2000, the ROC’s Council of Bishops canonized Nicholas II and his family as passion bearers — saints who faced their deaths in a Christ-like manner (as opposed to martyrs, who are directly killed for their faith). This move brought the Moscow Patriarchate’s stance on the Romanovs closer to that of the Church Outside Russia, which had insisted on the canonization of its “new martyrs” as a condition for reunification.
Nevertheless, the Moscow Patriarchate has continued to postpone the decision on recognizing the imperial family’s remains as genuine, for fear of coming into conflict with “Tsar-worshippers” and other conservative believers, who maintain that the Bolsheviks completely destroyed the Romanovs’ bodies in 1918 and that the recovered remains are fake. Even though a church commission was involved in the 2015 investigation, the ROC has continued to insist on additional verification and the need to conduct its own investigation.
The Tsar-worshippers (or tsarebozhniki, as they are called in Russian) follow a radical doctrine that casts Nicholas II as the “Tsar redeemer” — an idea that arose in Russian émigré circles shortly after the Romanovs’ execution. Monarchist publications claimed that Nicholas II had been sacrificed due to the betrayal of the Russian people, and the ROCOR’s liturgy reinforced the idea that the imperial family had suffered “for witnessing God’s truth.”
In the decades after World War II, the ROCOR continued to preach about the murder of the tsar as a “collective sin” for which the Russian people must atone. And by the end of the 20th century, a myth had developed in émigré and conservative Orthodox circles claiming that the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917 was a “mystical crime” and that the Romanovs’ execution was a “sacred sacrifice” that was meant to lead to the “rebirth of Russia.”
The cult of Tsar-worship gradually developed around Nicholas II to the point where he was likened to Jesus Christ. Even today, its followers create special icons that do not conform to official Orthodox canons and use prayers that emphasize loyalty to the autocracy. In particularly radical circles, believers observe a strict fast on the eve of July 16–17, the anniversary of the Romanovs’ execution, in honor of “Tsarist Easter.”
The tsarebozhniki movement spread to Russia following the USSR’s collapse, after decades of developing in exile. Believers formed brotherhoods and circles, published hymns and prayers to “Tsar redeemer,” and carried out protests and “national repentance ceremonies” at the Nicholas II monument in Mytishchi, a town on the outskirts of Moscow.
At the same time, sharp criticism of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church leadership became widespread within the movement. In the early 2000s, the Tsar-worshippers opposed the introduction of personal identification numbers in Russia, viewing them as the “number of the beast” and a harbinger of the apocalypse. They also sought to establish their own “Tsarist churches” outside of the Orthodox canonical tradition. Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate condemned the idea of “Tsar-worship,” repeatedly deeming comparisons between Nicholas II and Jesus Christ theologically unacceptable and the “rite of national repentance” spiritually harmful.
In Russia today, the tsarebozhniki form a number of fragmented but fairly prominent groups and movements. In recent years, one of the most influential preachers was the former Schema-Hegumen Sergii Romanov, a dissident priest who broke with the Russian Orthodox Church over his radical views on the coronavirus pandemic. Romanov was defrocked and excommunicated in July 2020, after he seized a women’s monastery outside of Yekaterinburg. Russian security forces stormed the monastery and arrested Romanov later that December. He was later sentenced to a total of seven years in prison on multiple criminal charges, including inciting hatred.
Natalia Poklonskaya, the former Russian-appointed prosecutor of Crimea and an ex-State Duma lawmaker, is also associated with the Tsar-worshipper movement. During her political career, Poklonskaya made veneration of Nicholas II a keystone of her image and led a campaign against the 2017 film Matilda on religious grounds, claiming it insulted the memory of the “holy tsar.” However, Poklonskaya later distanced herself from the tsarebozhniki. In 2024, she fully embraced neopaganism, provoking strong backlash from the Russian Orthodox Church.
Alexey Uvarov
Abridged translation by Eilish Hart