Russian history at the end of WWI and even back to Tzar Alexander’s freeing of the serfs in the 1870s was affected by extreme stratification of society along with the ineffectiveness of Tzar Nicholas II who cracked down on protestors and instigated violent pogroms against the Jews who were isolated into an area of Ukraine called The Pale. Ending WWI lead to the abdication of the Tzar and a vicious civil war between groups who were loyal to different political philosophies: Menshevik, Bolshevik and White Russian. 

The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) and all those who chose to accompany them into imprisonment—notably Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trupp and Ivan Kharitonov, according to the conclusion of the investigator Sokolov, were shot and bayoneted to death[1][2] in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.[3] According to the official state version in the USSR, former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, along with members of his family and retinue, was executed by firing squad, by order of the Ural Regional Soviet, due to the threat of the city being occupied by Whites (Czechoslovak Legion)[4][5]. By the assumption of a number of researchers, this was done according to instructions by Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov and Felix Dzerzhinsky. Their bodies were then taken to the Koptyaki forest where they were stripped and mutilated.[6][2] Initially thrown down a mineshaft called Ganina Yama, the bodies were later disposed of in two unmarked graves in a field called Porosenkov Log.[7] A White Army investigation failed to find the gravesite, concluding that the imperial family's remains had been cremated at the mine, since evidence of fire was found.[8]