Why the Romanov Family’s Fate Was a Secret Until the Fall of the Soviet Union

On July 17, 1998, Russia buried Tsar Nicholas II and family, 80 years after they died. An excerpt from the article:

"Remains of Romanov family members are not discovered for 61 years, but it takes until 2007 for Alexei and Maria’s bodies to be located
In the 1970s, a geologist named Alexander Avdonin, who had heard rumors about the site of the Romanovs’ grave his entire life, began asking others for information about its location. In 1979, with the help of Yurovsky’s son, he finally found the grave near the site of the mansion in Yekaterinburg, Russia where the family had been imprisoned. They began to exhume bones from the site. Fearing reprisals from the Soviet government, they reburied the bones. But in 1988, after the Soviet Union began to loosen its stance on discussing the Romanovs, Avdonin approached Gorbachev’s government and asked for an investigation.

It was finally carried out in 1991, after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The state’s investigative team found thousands of bones and other relics from the imperial family, and DNA analysis soon confirmed they were in fact the Romanovs. The remains were buried in St. Petersburg cathedral in 1998, and the buried Romanovs were declared saints in the Russian Orthodox church.

But two of the children’s remains were missing: Maria and Alexei. Rumors about their possible survival swirled until 2007, when Sergei Plotnikov, a builder who was part of a club that looked for the missing Romanovs on the weekends came across bone fragments. It was the missing children. “It was clear they didn't die peacefully,” Plotnikov told The Guardian."