It is estimated that by 1920, of the 53 Romanovs living at the time of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917, only 35 remained alive. Those who could fled Russia by whatever means possible, on foot and by boat. About a dozen Romanovs, including Nicholas’s mother, Maria Feodorovna; his sister Xenia; and her husband, Alexandr, were evacuated from their Crimean estate by warships sent by their royal relative, George V of England. In Europe, they joined thousands of Russian émigrés driven out of their land by the Bolshevik terror. Stateless, largely destitute and shellshocked, the Romanovs had to learn to live without the country whose stewardship had been their duty for three centuries — and mourn those left behind.

That the survivors could not bury their dead made their situation harder to bear. Of all the murdered Romanovs, only one had been interred — Nicholas’s cousin Dimitry, his corpse rescued from the mass grave by his former adjutant and buried in the yard of a private house. The bodies of those executed in Alapayevsk, though retrieved by royalist forces from the mine pit, were moved farther east, hostages of the changing fortunes of the retreating Whites. Those remains ended up in the Russian cemetery in Beijing, which was demolished in 1957. A layer of asphalt now covers their graves.

The bodies of the imperial family could not be found, despite an intensive search carried out by a criminal investigator named Nikolai Sokolov during the White Army’s brief occupation of Yekaterinburg. According to one persistent rumor, never substantiated, the heads of Czar Nicholas and his empress could not be found because they had been delivered to Lenin as proof of the Romanovs’ eradication.

To her last breath, the czar’s mother waited for a letter from “her unfortunate Nicky,” refusing to believe newspaper accounts of his death. Shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1920, Sokolov, by then also an exile in Europe, tried to hand over to the Romanovs a box containing what he said was evidence he’d managed to assemble from Ganina Yama, another mine pit north of Yekaterinburg, where the bodies of the imperial family had allegedly been destroyed. The Romanovs did not accept the offer.

The lack of proof worked in the Bolsheviks’ favor. With their grip on power solidified, they were keen to distance themselves from the bloodshed on the very foundations of the state they were building. By the 1940s, books that referred to “acts of revolutionary justice” against the Romanovs were taken out of circulation. The personal account of the czar’s executioner, Yurovsky, which had until then been proudly displayed in Moscow’s Museum of the Revolution, also disappeared.