The killing of all the IF was no accident, a quirk of convenience.
No, it was no accident.
But much remains unclear about when and how the final decision was made and what phases it passed through before taking its final comprehensive form. As you point out, the Bolsheviks killed GD Michael a month earlier. Since the IF was in their custody, what was the reason they delayed an additional month in killing them?
And if the decision had long been in place, what was the reason the Bolsheviks bothered to move the family from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg?
And if it was a foregone conclusion from the time of the Bolshevik coup that they would kill all of the Romanovs within their reach, why did six months elapse between the killing of the IF and the killing of the four grand dukes in St. Petersburg (over a year after the coup)?
If it was an early foregone conclusion that the IF would be murdered, why did the Bolsheviks let the White Army get within earshot of Ekaterinburg before executing the family?
The only way one can make sense of this timeline is to recognize that the decisions of whether to kill, why to kill, and whom to kill were made almost on the fly, as internal power ebbed and flowed within Bolsheviks ranks and as events evolved.
The very fact that the Bolsheviks waited so long to execute the IF and took the risks of relocating them from Tobolsk and even then delaying the execution until the Whites were almost upon them seems to me to suggest that there was some scenario which the Bolsheviks thought -- at least for a period of time -- might develop that would warrant the IF being kept alive.
One really has to read Orlando Figes'
A People's Tragedy to get a sense for how much brutality and murder (much of it far more gruesome than the Romanov murders -- there were cases of people being actually being flayed alive) descended on Russia after 1917, from both the White and Red sides. In fact, one of the reasons the Whites failed to maintain control of the regions they initially conquered during the civil war was their brutal tactics in dealing with the countryside.
The Romanovs -- who lost their power largely through incompetence and, in the final stages, paralysis -- were but the tiniest drops of blood in an ocean of blood unleashed during the Revolution by all sides.
To get a sense for just how bizarre it got, during the March Revolution a squadron of loyal troops made its way from the suburbs of St. Petersburg to the Winter Palace to come to the defense of Grand Duke Michael . . . and he refused them entry because their boots were dirty and they might break the china in the display cases.
I am sorry the IF was massacred. But the dynasty had become a limp, fuzzy shadow of what it had once been well before revolution engulfed Russia.
And the Romanovs had quite a track record of murdering each other to gain or hang onto power.
Remember that Peter I had good reason to fear that his half-sister Sophia might have him killed. Remember that Peter I was in turn complicit in his son's murder to preserve his legacy. Remember that both Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II were willing to murder the imprisoned Tsar Ivan VI to keep their power (and Catherine actually did it). Remember that Catherine II's husband was murdered to secure her coup (which was as much a coup against her son Paul's rights to succeed his father as it was a coup against Peter III). Remember that Tsar Paul was murdered to clear the way for his son, with his son's possible complicity.
In killing Romanovs, the Bolsheviks did no more to them than they had been doing to themselves for two centuries. To me, the true evil of Bolshevism was in destroying a fledgling chance of constitutional government and continuing the absolutist and repressive society of imperial Russia. (The censorship, the planned economy, the police state, forced labor, imperialist foreign policy -- all these things continued almost seamlessly from the autocratic era into the soviet era. Even Stalin's Terror had its antecedents in the
Oprichniki of Ivan IV and in the Black Hand of the late imperial era.)
Sorry I've veered off the topic of not taking Olga to Ekaterinburg. But this seems to be of a bit more consequence, historically speaking.