I have stuck closely to the known facts about the Romanovs’ stay in Ekaterinburg. Konstantin Ukraintsev, Avdeyev, and Yurovsky are all real people, but the characters of Peter Vasnetsov and Anatoly Bolotov are my inventions. The men who executed the Romanovs were recruited from the militant Verkh-Isetsk metallurgy works and the meeting I describe in the prologue of this novel did take place. My depiction of the events of July 16–17, 1918, is derived from accounts left by Yurovsky and others who were present. In the days following the mass execution, members of the public were able to wander into the Ipatiev House and help themselves to souvenirs, and the place later became an unofficial pilgrimage site. It was destroyed under Leonid Brezhnev’s premiership in 1977, just a year after my fictional Australian character Val visited it.

Two days after the execution in 1918, it was announced in Russian newspapers that Tsar Nicholas had been killed but that the rest of the family were being held in a safe location. This location was never divulged and the uncertainty led to dozens of Romanov impostors emerging over the subsequent decade, most famously Anna Tschaikovsky (later Anderson), who claimed to be Anastasia and was only proved posthumously to have been a Polish factory worker. Some Maria impostors came forward but none of the stories were credible.

A report by a White Army inspector, Nikolai Sokolov, first published in 1924, gave a strong hint as to the fate of the Romanovs. It detailed some grisly objects he had found near an abandoned mine shaft in the Ekaterinburg area, including belt buckles, shoes, dentures, and bone fragments, though he did not discover the family’s graves. Under Stalin’s authoritarian rule, speculation on the fate of the erstwhile royals was discouraged and the subject was seldom raised in the Soviet Union. During the mid-1970s, when my character Val began investigating the Romanov possessions she found in her late father’s house and safe deposit box, the fate of Russia’s royal family was still not entirely certain.

Some amateur archeologists found the main grave site in 1979, but the news was not publicly announced until 1991, after the collapse of Communism. The bodies were then exhumed and sent to labs in Russia, the UK, and the US for DNA analysis. It was discovered that the remains of Alexei and one of the younger girls—either Maria or Anastasia—were missing. Their grave was not found until 2007.

The mainstream view is that the Tsar and Tsarina, their five children, and the four retainers—Dr. Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp, and Ivan Kharitonov—were shot and bayoneted to death in the Ipatiev House during the night of July 16–17. A few historians, however, still claim that there could have been mistakes in the identification of the remains due to contamination of the bone samples, and that one or more of the Romanovs could have escaped the slaughter in Ekaterinburg.

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