The life of the Royal Martyrs of Russia
After Nicholas abdicated in 1917 the family was placed under arrest, eventually held by the Bolsheviks in a merchant's house at Ekaterinburg. On the night of July 16 into 17, 1918, they were woken and led with several loyal servants into the cellar, told they were being moved elsewhere; there a firing squad shot and bayoneted them. Their remains were taken to a mineshaft outside the city, burned, and hidden.
Their bearing through months of captivity, marked by patience and prayer rather than defiance, drew veneration even under Soviet rule. The Russian Church Outside of Russia glorified them as martyrs in 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them in 2000 as passion bearers, a rank the Church gives those who meet a violent death not for openly confessing Christ but by imitating Him in innocent suffering, as with the earlier Russian princes Boris and Gleb. Remains recovered near Ekaterinburg and identified through forensic study as the family's were interred in the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998, a conclusion the Church continued to weigh for years afterward. The Church on the Blood now stands at Ekaterinburg on the site of their death.
