00:00 The Romanov family ruled over the Russian Empire for over 300 years until Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne and his family met a grisly fate under house arrest during the Communist Revolution.

02:23 The Romanov family was denied entry into Britain, France, and Finland, and were eventually placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace before being moved to the remote Siberian town of Toboliska, where they lived well until the October Revolution brought the Communists into power and their privileges were removed.

04:29 In July 1918, the Bolshevik leadership in Yetkaterinburg decided to execute the Tsar and his family, and they were awakened in the middle of the night and taken to the basement where they were shot by a firing squad.

06:26 The Tsar and his family were brutally executed in a basement, with the children and one servant initially surviving the gunfire but ultimately being stabbed and shot, and their bodies were later disposed of in a shallow grave.

08:22 The order to execute the Romanovs is believed to have been given by Lenin, although no direct documentation has been found, and it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the truth about the murders began to emerge and the bodies were exhumed and identified.

10:33 The remains of Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and their servants were identified through DNA testing, and in 1998 they were reinterred at the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, while the bodies of the two remaining children were discovered in 2007 and positively identified in 2008, leading to a murder investigation in 2010 and additional DNA testing in 2015, and the Apativ House where the murders took place was eventually demolished and replaced with the Church on Blood.

12:41 The current head of House Romanov is Prince Carl E. Mik of Liningen, recognized by the monarchist party in Russia, while the Russian Orthodox Church recognizes another claimant, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna.