The Russian Royal Family was executed and buried in July 1918. So why does Vladimir Putin keep bringing up the bodies? July 17, 1918, in a fortified mansion in the town of Ekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains, the Romanovs—ex-tsar Nicholas II, ex-tsarina Alexandra, their five children, and their four remaining servants, including the loyal family doctor, Eugene Botkin—were awoken by their Bolshevik captors and told they must dress and gather their belongings for a swift nocturnal departure. What happened russia ruler wife—the slaughter of the family and servants—was one of the seminal events of the 20th century, a wanton massacre that shocked the world and still inspires a terrible fascination today.

A 300-year-old imperial dynasty, one marked by periods of glorious achievement as well as staggering hubris and ineptitude, was swiftly brought to an end. But while the Romanovs’ political reign was over, the story of the line’s last ruler and his family was most certainly not. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia with Tsarina Alexandra and their children Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei. For the better part of the 20th century the bodies of the victims lay in two unmarked graves, the locations of which were kept secret by Soviet leaders. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the graves were reopened and the identities of the interred confirmed by DNA testing. Most of the family was still alive, wounded, crying and terrified, their suffering made worse by the fact that they were in effect wearing bulletproof vests.

Instead, events took a strange turn. Even though both sets of remains were identified by teams of top international scientists, who compared recovered DNA to samples from living Romanov relatives, members of the Russian Orthodox Church questioned the validity of the findings. More research was needed, they claimed. Last fall the official state investigation of the tsar’s murder was reopened, and Nicholas and Alexandra were exhumed, as was Nicholas’s father, Alexander III. Who is the Real Anastasia Romanov?

Ultimately, though, his well-intentioned but weak personality—which also comprised duplicity, obstinacy, and delusion—contributed to the disasters that befell the dynasty and Russia. Kremlin to mark the Romanov family’s 300 years in power. He was handsome and blue-eyed but diminutive and hardly majestic, and his looks and immaculate manners concealed an astonishing arrogance, contempt for the educated political classes, vicious anti-Semitism, and an unshakable belief in his right to rule as a sacred autocrat. He was jealous of his ministers, and he possessed the unfortunate ability to make himself utterly distrusted by his own government. His marriage to Princess Alexandra of Hesse only exacerbated these qualities. Theirs was a love match, which was unusual for the times, but both Nicholas’s father and Alexandra’s grandmother, Queen Victoria of England, regarded her as too unstable to succeed as empress.