In 1918, a brutal crime was committed in Yekaterinburg. The mother, father, and their children—four girls and a small boy—were cruelly murdered. They were shot at close range and finished off with bayonets. The room’s walls splashed with blood, dismembered bodies, an attempt to hide the traces of the crime…
If such a report had appeared in the press even in our modern criminal times, it would surely have made many shudder. But ninety years ago, not just a family was killed— the royal family was killed, in an attempt to put an end to the thousand-year history of Russia.
A widely known, though even today scarcely published book by N.A. Sokolov, "The Murder of the Tsar’s Family," tells how "fiery revolutionaries" walked step by step, day by day, toward this unprecedented crime. The investigator Sokolov, who worked on the case of the death of the last royal couple from the House of Romanov, meticulously and painstakingly studied the smallest details that could reveal the true sequence of events. Unfortunately, he himself died in exile under strange circumstances, and the documents he collected disappeared without a trace.
This book, which he managed to publish shortly before his death, is all that remained from the materials of the most famous and mysterious criminal case of the 20th century.