Боже, Царя храни! (god save the tsar!)

Imprisonment[edit]

The Governor's Mansion in Tobolsk, where the Romanov family was held in captivity between August 1917 and April 1918

Nicholas desperately wanted to go into exile in the United Kingdom following his abdication. The British government initially offered him asylum in Britain, but this was over-ruled by King George V who, acting on the advice of his secretary Lord Stamfordham, was worried that Nicholas' presence in the UK might provoke an uprising like the previous year's Easter Rising in Ireland. The French government declined to accept the Romanovs in view of increasing unrest on the Western Front and on the home front as a result of the ongoing war with Germany.

In August 1917, the Kerensky government evacuated the Romanovs to Tobolsk in the Urals, allegedly to protect them from the rising tide of revolution. There they lived in the former Governor's Mansion in considerable comfort. In October 1917, however, the Bolsheviks seized power from Kerensky's Provisional Government; Nicholas followed the events in October with interest but not yet with alarm.

He continued to underestimate Lenin's importance. In the meantime he and his family occupied themselves with keeping warm. Conditions of imprisonment became more strict, and talk of putting Nicholas on trial grew more frequent. The Tsar was forbidden to wear epaulettes.

On 1 March 1918, the family was placed on soldier's rations, which meant parting with ten devoted servants and giving up butter and coffee as luxuries. What kept the family's spirits up was the belief that help was at hand. The Romanovs believed that various plots were underway to break them out of captivity and smuggle them to safety. But on 30 April 1918 they were transferred to their final destination: the town of Yekaterinburg, where they were imprisoned in the two-story Ipatiev House, the home of the military engineer Nikolay Nikolayevich Ipatiev, which ominously became referred to as the "house of special purpose".

Present with Nicholas, Alexandra and their children were their doctor and three of their servants, who had voluntarily chosen to remain with the family—the Tsar's personal physician Eugene Botkin, his wife's maid Anna Demidova, and the family's chef, Ivan Kharitonov, and footman, Alexei Trupp. A firing squad had been assembled and was waiting in an adjoining room, composed of seven Communist soldiers from Central Europe, and three local Bolsheviks, all under the command of Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky. The soldiers are often described as Hungarians; in his account, Yurovsky described them as "Latvians"

Nicholas was carrying his son; when the family arrived in the basement, the former empress complained that there were no chairs for them to sit on. Yurovsky ordered two chairs brought in, and when the empress and the heir were seated, the executioners filed into the room. Yurovsky announced to them that they had been condemned to death by the Ural Soviet of Workers' Deputies. A stunned Nicholas asked, "What? What?" and turned toward his family. Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and shot the former emperor outright

The executioners drew revolvers and the shooting began. Nicholas was Hitted by an Intense blur and Nicholas disappeares from the earth, FOREVER.