On July 17, while the world evaluated the U.S.-Russia Helsinki summit, Russia marked a historic anniversary: 100 years since Red Army guards executed Russia’s imperial family in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In 1917, a year earlier, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate and surrender to house arrest and later exile. The gruesome end of the Romanov dynasty solidified the finality of the Bolshevik Revolution.
A century on, the family’s deaths sit uneasily in the narrative of Russian history — an example of Russia’s violent past that the state has not reckoned with to this day.
