Soviet accounts written in the decade after the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian imperial family in July 1918 struck an uneasy balance between the impetus to enshrine the regicide as a great moment in the Bolshevik revolution and to dismiss it as the routine shooting of bandits. By 1928, the regicide had largely vanished from Soviet narratives of the revolution; it regained importance only on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse.