There is no evidence that the family of Russia’s last tsar was murdered on Vladimir Lenin’s order, declared the country’s Investigative Committee.
“Not a single document indicates that Lenin or Kremlin officials issued an order to shoot the tsar’s family,” said senior investigator and criminologist Vladimir Solovyov. “Even if some oral instructions were given, they were not formalized, and we don’t have such documents.”
The shooting, the investigator insisted, was thus carried out solely on the decision of the Urals regional council.
“This is the work of dozens of outstanding experts,” Solovyov said. “It involved a lot of technological novelties and new identification technology.”
The announcement follows the release of a final decision in the Romanovs murder case, which has at last been closed by the Investigative Committee.
The case materials – totaling more than 800 pages – have been handed over to the Romanov family’s descendants.
“This is a truly significant event and a sign that the Russian Federation is a rule-of-law state,” said Aleksandr Zakatov, director of the Romanov family chancellery. “This is also a sign that all citizens have equal rights, regardless of historical twists.”
Russian historians, however, say that the Investigative Committee’s version is quite doubtful.
“It is highly unlikely that such a big decision could be taken by regional authorities,” professor Mikhail Davydov told RT. “This could have easily been a mere phone call. And even if it was a written document, it would most probably be destroyed. This is not the first time in the world’s history that the authorities got rid of historic archives.”
Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and children were shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918 in Ekaterinburg. Their relics were discovered in 1991 and reburied in St. Catherine’s Chapel of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral, where the other Russian emperors are buried.
In 2007, archeologists found the remains of two other people 70 kilometers south of the first burial site. Numerous tests have concluded that the relics belong to Crown Prince Alexey Romanov and his sister Maria.
Despite numerous investigations into the case, the exact circumstances of the emperor’s family death remain a mystery up to now.