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Murder of members of the Imperial House of Romanov near Alapaevsk
The day after the execution of the royal family in Yekaterinburg, on the night of July 18, 1918, local representatives of the Soviet government carried out an extrajudicial massacre at the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine near Alapaevsk (now the Sverdlovsk region). The victims were eight members of the Romanov imperial family and their associates.
Due to the offensive of the German army on the Eastern Front during the First World War and the difficult internal political situation in Russia in the spring of 1918, the Bolshevik leaders decided to relocate the arrested members of the Romanov family to the Urals. On March 9, Nicholas II's younger brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich was exiled from Petrograd to Perm.
On March 26, princes Sergei Mikhailovich, Ivan, Konstantin, and Igor Konstantinovich, and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley were also exiled from Petrograd. They were later transferred to Yekaterinburg from Vyatka in May 1918.
Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, the elder sister of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, was also transported from Moscow to Perm and then Yekaterinburg at the end of May. The transfer of the entire royal family from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg was completed by the end of the month.
On May 18, 1918, the Ural Regional Council decided to transfer the Grand Dukes and Princess Elizabeth Feodorovna to Alapaevsk. They were placed in a local school on the outskirts of the city, under the supervision of the Alapaevsky Workers' and Peasants' Deputies Council and the Extraordinary Investigative Commission. The initial, mild detention conditions were replaced by strict ones on June 21. Prisoners were stripped of their personal belongings and prohibited from leaving the school grounds, due to the alleged escape of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich from arrest in Perm on the night of June 12-13. In fact, Mikhail and his secretary N. N. Johnson were kidnapped and killed by Perm Chekists and police. Their remains have never been found. In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Mikhail as a martyr outside Russia.
The day after the execution of the royal family in Yekaterinburg, on the night of July 18, 1918, the Alapaev exiles were taken out of the city under the pretense of being transferred to a safer location. They were stunned by blows to the head with the axe butt, and Sergei Mikhailovich, who resisted, was shot. The bodies were dumped into the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine, which had been filled with grenades and logs, and covered with earth.
After Alapaevsk was occupied by white Siberian troops in September 1918, the bodies were discovered. Some of the victims died instantly, and others died from starvation and injuries. Among those who died were the Grand Duchess, Grand Dukes Fyodor and Sergey, the manager of Grand Duke Sergey's affairs, and Varvara, the nun of Marfo-Mariinsky Monastery and cellmate of Elizaveta Feodorovna.
On July 18, 1918, the Ural Regional Council, according to a report from the Alapaevsky Executive Committee, sent a telegram to Moscow stating that on the morning of July 18, a group of "unknown armed men" had attacked the school where the prisoners were being held and kidnapped them.
However, the "Transcript of Memoirs of the Party Asset of the Alapaevsky District, 1917-1918", dated January 6, 1933, contains the memoirs of E. L. Seredkin, Chairman of the Upper-Sinyachikha Council of the Alapaevsky District, and N. P. Gavyrin, Chairman of the Extraordinary Investigation Commission in Alapaevsk, stating that the kidnapping had been staged after the killing of the prisoners.
The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized all those who died in Alapaevsk (except for F. S. Remesa) as martyrs. However, the Russian Orthodox Church only canonized the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and the nun Barbara, whose remains are in Jerusalem, as holy martyrs. The remains of the other victims were transported to China in 1920 and are now believed to be lost.
The execution of the royal family and the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich as well as the massacre of those arrested near Alapaevsk, were not the only instances of the Soviet government's use of violence against members of the Romanov imperial house. At the end of January 1919, four grandsons of Emperor Nicholas I - Grand Dukes Pavel Alexandrovich, Dmitry Konstantinovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich, and Georgy Mikhailovich - were shot in the Peter and Paul Fortress as hostages by the Cheka in response to the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany.
In 1981, all four were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, except for Nikolai Mikhailovich. The exact location of their graves remains unknown. In 2004, a memorial plaque honoring the deceased grand dukes was erected in the Grand Ducal Tomb within the Peter and Paul Fortress.
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Based on the materials:
The execution of the Royal family // 1918: [digital collection]
Individual and Mass Terror during the Civil War // 1918: [digital collection]