On the evening of July 17, the bodies are exhumed, loaded onto carts, and transported towards the Moscow Highway mines.

JULY 18, 1918

The carts carrying the bodies break down on the way to the mine. Yurovsky orders a pit to be dug, but halfway through the digging, he is informed that the hole can be seen too easily from the road. Yurovsky abandons the pit and orders trucks to be requisitioned so that the group can continue to the deep mines on the Moscow Highway.

On this day, Pravda announces that the Tsar has been executed, but that the Tsarina Alexandra and his son, Alexei, have been spared and moved to a safe location. There is no mention of the Tsar’s four daughters or their household staff. The article implies that the executions were carried out on the initiative of the Ekaterinburg guards and not on orders from Moscow.

JULY 19, 1918

In the early hours, the trucks that have been requisitioned as replacements for the broken carts also break down on the rough roads.

Yurovsky orders another pit to be dug. In the meantime he burns the bodies.

The remains are thrown into the pit and acid is poured on top of them. The pit is filled in and railway sleepers-wooden beams set beneath the iron rails-are laid out over the burial site. The trucks are then wheeled back and forth over the sleepers to hide any evidence of burial.

By dawn, the work has been completed. Before departing the burial site, Yurovsky swears the participants to silence.

The bones remain hidden, in spite of an extensive search launched by the White Army when it overruns Ekaterinburg a few days later. The Whites are eventually forced out and control of Ekaterinburg returns to the Red Army.

In the months that follow, stories surface about the survival of the Tsarina and her daughters. Witnesses report seeing them on a train heading for the city of Perm. Another story involves the appearance of a young woman, one of the daughters, who is reported to have lived for a short while with a family in the woods before being handed over to the Cheka, who then killed her. A tailor named Heinrich Kleibenzetl claims to have seen the Princess Anastasia, badly wounded, being treated by his landlady in a house directly opposite the Ipatiev residence immediately after the shootings. An Austrian prisoner of war, Franz Svoboda, claims to have personally rescued Anastasia from the Ipatiev house.

1920

A woman attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. She is committed to a Dalldorf mental institution, where it is discovered that she has numerous wounds that resemble those made by bullets, and one that appears to have been made by the cruciform blade of a Russian Mosin-Nagant bayonet. The woman appears to be suffering from amnesia and is referred to by the hospital staff as Fräulein Unbekannt (“Jane Doe”).

1921

Fräulein Unbekannt confides in one of the Dalldorf nurses, Thea Malinovsky, that she is in fact the Princess Anastasia. She claims to have been rescued from execution by a Russian soldier named Alexander Tschaikovsky. Together, they fled to Bucharest, where Tschaikovsky was killed in a fight.

1922

The woman claiming to be Anastasia is released from the asylum and taken in by Baron von Kleist, who believes her story.

In the years that follow, the woman is visited by numerous friends and relatives of the Romanovs, including the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Nicholas II, and Pierre Gilliard, private tutor of the Romanov children, both of whom declare her to be a fraud. Based on a dental mold of her teeth, the dentist of the Romanov family, Dr. Kostrizky, also declares the woman’s claim to be false. Not all of those who meet the woman believe her to be lying, though. In Germany, the nephew and niece of the Romanov family physician, Dr. Botkin, vigorously support her claim amid accusations that they are simply after the missing Romanov family fortune, by today’s standards said to be worth in excess of $190 million (approximately £90 million).

The legal battle that ensues becomes the longest-running case in German history.

A private detective, Martin Knopf, claims that based on his investigation, the woman is actually a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska and that the wounds on her body came from an explosion at the munitions plant where she had been employed.

Schanzkowska’s brother, Felix, is brought in to identify the woman. He immediately declares her to be his sister but then mysteriously refuses to sign an affidavit to that effect.

1929

The woman moves to New York, where she resides temporarily with Annie Jennings, a wealthy Manhattan socialite. Shortly afterwards, following several episodes of hysteria, she is once again committed to an asylum, this time the Four Winds Sanatorium.

1932

The woman, now known as Anna Anderson, returns to Germany.

1934

Yurovsky gives a detailed account of the executions and the events leading up to them at a Communist Party conference in Ekaterinburg.

1956

Release of the film Anastasia, starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner.

1968

At the age of seventy, Anna Anderson moves back to the United States and marries John Manahan, who believes her to be the Princess Anastasia. The couple live in Virginia.

1976

The remains of the Romanovs are located exactly where Yurovsky had said they would be, but the information is kept secret and the bodies are not exhumed.

1977

Future Russian president Boris Yeltsin, then Communist Party chief in Sverdlovsk (formerly known as Ekaterinburg), orders the Ipatiev house to be destroyed, noting that it has become a pilgrimage site.

1983

Anna Anderson is once again institutionalized. Within hours of her entering the psychiatric facility, Manahan kidnaps her and the two escape through rural Virginia.

FEBRUARY 12, 1984

Anna Anderson dies of pneumonia.

1991

The skeletons of the Romanovs are exhumed. Through DNA acquired from, among others, the Duke of Edinburgh (whose grandmother was the sister of Tsarina Alexandra), the remains are positively identified as those of Nicholas II, Alexandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia, as well as the three household servants and Dr. Botkin. Two bodies, those of Maria and Alexei, are missing.

1992

DNA testing of a tissue sample from Anna Anderson confirms that she is not the Princess Anastasia. The DNA sample is found to match that of Karl Maucher, great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska.

AUGUST 27, 2007

Remains believed to be those of Maria and Alexei are located in shallow graves not far from the other burial site.

APRIL 30, 2008

The Russian government announces that DNA testing has confirmed the identities of Alexei and Maria. On the same day, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the executions, more than 30,000 Russians visit the mine where the Romanovs were buried.