This story is the first in a two-part series about the Romanovs. Read part 2 here.
In 1979, a geologist in Russia approached a grassy area near the Koptyaki forest. He had a permit to dig, and authorities assumed he was there for geological research. But he had a different mission: He believed the bodies of the murdered Romanov family were somewhere in that field.
More than 60 years earlier, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne while under pressure from the Red Army, an army created in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks placed the family under house arrest, and then suddenly executed them in 1918 — an event that toppled Russia's last imperial dynasty. The Tsar, Empress Alexandria, their four daughters and one son were all believed to have perished.
