On July 17, while the world evaluated the U.S.-Russia Helsinki summit, Russia marked a historic anniversary: 100 years since Red Army guards executed Russia’s imperial family in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In 1917, a year earlier, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate and surrender to house arrest and later exile. The gruesome end of the Romanov dynasty solidified the finality of the Bolshevik Revolution.

A century on, the family’s deaths sit uneasily in the narrative of Russian history — an example of Russia’s violent past that the state has not reckoned with to this day.

The Soviet regime silenced any public reference to these murders  and ordered the Ipatiev House quietly demolished in 1977. But after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, strove to place Russia on a path to Western democracy, in part by promoting a culture of remembrance and reconciliation with Russia’s violent past.