Black and white photograph of Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky.

Yakov Yurovsky

(1872 - 1938)

Yakov Yurovsky was the chief executioner of the Russian Imperial family. Following the riots in Petrograd in March 1917, Nikolai II’s abdication, and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Romanovs were taken in April 1918 to the Ural Mountains and guarded by Bolsheviks. It is believed that Yurovsky, a Bolshevik officer who had joined the party in 1905, had received an order for the Romanovs’ execution from Vladimir Lenin. He died in 1938. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the former tsar and his family in 2000, placing them at the lowest rank of sainthood, “passion bearers.”

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