Outside this window stood sentries, their faces pressed against the grimy glass, able to see all that passed within, especially as the room had been lighted, for the better aim of the executioners. The testimony of these onlookers forms one of the strongest elements in the convincing depositions gathered during the inquiry.
There was, moreover, another window, opening not directly into the room, but into a lobby before it; this window commanded a view of the interior, and here too stood a sentry who witnessed the butchery. The deposition of Medvedev, one of the actual participants in the murder, later captured by the Whites; the description given to Yakimov by Klescheev and Deriabin, the sentries who gazed spellbound through these windows; and the account of Proskouriakov, the Red guard who removed the bloodstains from the floor with water, mop, and sawdust, make it possible to reconstruct the tragedy in all its hideous detail.
The midnight procession, in passing through the dim courtyard, must have seen the motor trucks silhouetted against the summer sky. In that northern latitude it is light until after 10 P. They doubtless imagined the vehicles were for their escape in case of danger, or possibly for the baggage. Not one of the victims seems to have suspected what lay beyond that open door through which light was streaming into the courtyard. Above, nothing to be seen but sharp points of light, like a myriad watching eyes in a clear blue sky; below, shadowy figures lurking at corners and along the inner stockade; no sound, except the shuffling of many feet on the dirt walk.
Jurovsky marshaled them, leading the way and beckoning toward the open door; behind followed Medvedev and the scowling Letts, eleven men, fingering their pistols as they closed in on their unsuspecting victims.
As it is the last time we shall look upon their faces before the fiery acid eats away all traces of a human countenance, let us note them carefully as they pass into the shambles Nicholas Romanov , fifty years of age, late Tsar of All the Russias, carrying in his arms.
The Tsarevitch, Alexis , a boy, of fourteen years, heir to the throne;. The Grand Duchess Olga , eldest daughter, twenty-three years of age;.
The Grand Duchess Tatiana , daughter, twenty-one years of age;. The Grand Duchess Maria , daughter, nineteen years of age;. The Grand Duchess Anastasia , youngest daughter, seventeen years of age;. Eugene Sergeievich Botkin , physician to the royal family, a stout, gray-haired man, between fifty-five and sixty years of age;.
Anna Demidova , a chambermaid, tall, thin, dark, about forty-years of age;. Ivan Haritonov , cook to the imperial family, a short man, slightly bald, with black hair and moustache, aged forty years;. Alexis Troupp , a footman, tall, thin, dark, thirty-five years of age. Once having entered, exit for them is barred by the executioners, who mass themselves before the door, awaiting the prearranged signal. Nicholas, still believing that the family is about to be conveyed to a place of safety, requests that chairs be brought for the Empress and the children.
It is done. They rest, waiting in simple expectation, hats on and clad in traveling clothes. At this point the available testimony, which covers volumes, diverges slightly, but only in unimportant chronological details.
According to some witnesses, Jurovsky, standing at the head of his file, suddenly produced a paper and read what purported to be a death warrant which authorized him to execute Nicholas the Bloody and all his family; others, not mentioning the death warrant, depose that Jurovsky suddenly addressed Nicholas thus Your relatives have sought to rescue you, but it could not be managed by them and so we ourselves are obliged to kill you.
The ex-Tsar did not seem to understand and asked: What do you mean? This is what I mean! The scene that followed must await its own proper Dante. Twelve revolvers bellowed thunder and spat tongues of fire; the hollow chamber, reverberating with the explosions, filled up with smoke and acrid fumes; not once nor twice, but again and again each Lett, frenzied with primeval blood-lust, fired, choosing his, own particular victim.
With twelve men letting loose the pent-up hatreds of three hundred years, it is not unreasonable to expect that each empties the clip of his automatic, which would make nearly a hundred shots. Medvedev, a participant, confessed that the sight, with the blended smell of blood and powder fumes, nauseated him.
The petrified onlookers at the windows were harrowed by the shrieks of women and the groans of men; Alexis, the Tsarevitch, was not killed outright, but moaned and writhed over the bodies of his dead parents.
It was Jurovsky who finally dispatched him with his revolver. Those who still breathed were bayoneted to death. The floor was chipped and torn with bayonet thrusts driven through the soft bodies. A little dog, a King Charles spaniel, pet of the Grand Duchess Anastasia and brought down by her in her arms, ran hysterically about, darting between the legs of friend and foe, barking furiously.
Floor and walls were spattered with blood and bits of clinging flesh. Twenty-three living persons had entered that narrow cellar—eleven prisoners and the twelve guards conducting them to a place of greater safety. As dawn began to streak the sky, twelve persons came out, leaving eleven corpses safely within, lying in pools of blood that spread in widening circles out into the corridor.
Such evidence must be removed; Jurovsky called for Proskouriakov to mop up the floor, scatter sawdust about, and cleanse the walls.
Sheets were then brought from upstairs; into them the bleeding bodies were rolled and then piled pell-mell into the waiting motor truck, precedence no longer observed. Twelve miles northwest of Ekaterinburg, on the shores, of Lake Isset, stands the secluded little village of Kopchiki, in the centre of a heavily wooded forest. Once the site of extensive mining operations, it was now deserted, save for the scattered peasant families, who remained unaffected by the coming and going of miners and engineers.
Off the beaten track, forgotten and insignificant, the Siberian hamlet slumbered in obscurity—until July 17, Early that morning, Anastasia Zykova, a peasant, accompanied by her son Nicholas and her daughter-in-law Maria, started before sunup for Ekaterinburg, with horse and cart, to sell their catch of fish.
They had barely passed one of the abandoned mines, the one known as Four Brothers because of the four pine trees that once stood there—when they perceived a procession of some sort approaching them. It took the form of several vehicles guarded by Red horsemen. Barely recovered from their surprise at the early morning apparition, they were further dismayed when two of the horsemen galloped swiftly forward to intercept them. The soldiers reined up before the Zykovi, ordered them curtly and with menace in their voices to turn back to their village, and, above all, not to dare to look behind.
The simple peasants obeyed, turned their horses head toward home, and retreated. But one of the women looked back, whereupon the two Red guards galloped in pursuit and with drawn revolvers accompanied the party nearly a mile, threatening them with instant death if they attempted to see what was going on behind them. In a short time the village of Kopchiki was buzzing with excitement.
But the village scouts found that sentries had been stationed in a wide circle, completely isolating the locality; frightened and wondering, they crawled back and awaited developments. Toward evening they saw in the heavens glowing reflections from a great bonfire kindled on the spot where the Bolsheviki had finally halted. The hidden rite, whatever it was, continued throughout the next day; only on Friday, July 19, were the woods deserted and silent.
Then, and only then, did a group of peasants venture to approach the scene. But on poking under the ashes with sticks they encountered a collection of burnt objects that gave rise to horrible suspicions: first, a Maltese cross set with emeralds, six corset steels from womens corsets, a miscellaneous collection of charred buttons, buckles, parts of slippers, hooks and eyes, beads, parts of womens, clothing, and a number of small, dirty pebbles which, on being cleaned and treated chemically, turned out to be pure diamonds.
Francis McCullagh, that brilliant and supremely daring journalist who visited these scenes a few weeks after the murder and interrogated the peasants and even Jurovsky himself, spent many weeks—trying weeks— with the present writer in Moscow. He recounted his findings at Ekaterinburg in considerable detail. It was the discovery of that Maltese cross that led to the ghastly truth. Such a decoration was worn only by personages high in Imperial Service. Pometkovsky, one of the searchers, who was in reality an escaped royalist officer in hiding, knew that there was but one such person in Ekaterinburg.
As other metallic and stone objects that had resisted the fire, but plainly revealed their late owners, were placed before him, he cried aloud: God Almighty! Can they have burned the whole family alive? He was right, but not entirely so; they had burned them, but not while alive. The spot for the cremation of the bodies had been chosen in advance by Jurovsky and extraordinary precautions taken to destroy the corpus delicti. Subsequent events, however, have proved that, though the bodies of the victims can never be produced as primary evidence of the crime, the boast of Voikov, The world will never know what we have done with them, has not been justified.
The elaborate technique of concealment overshot its mark and ignored a number of obvious possibilities. Jurovsky had added to his staff two new assistants whose particular function seems to have been to dismember the bodies. Arrived at the, pit, which was thirty feet deep, the regicides set to work to finish their gruesome task. The corpses were drenched with benzine, the countenances having probably first been destroyed by the sulphuric acid, and the human bonfire was then ignited.
Acid was likewise used to dissolve the larger and tougher bones which were likely to resist the flames. When fire had consumed all the flesh and reduced skulls and skeletons to ashes, the debris was swept up and cast into the yawning mouth of the iron pit. An attempt was made to rearrange the scarred face of nature by scattering the embers and foliage carelessly about, so as to simulate the appearance of an ordinary camping ground or picnic place.
But the wound was too deep; the executioners were tired and probably hurried. They sat down at last beneath the pine trees to eat their lunch, letting fall the telltale eggshells. The Commission of Inquiry found hundreds of clues and articles definitely identified as belonging to the imperial family: the six sets of corset steels, exactly the number for six women; belt buckles of both Tsar and Tsarevitch; the buckles from the womens shoes; hooks and eyes and other metallic parts of feminine wear; the broken lenses of the Empresss eyeglasses; a set of artificial teeth identified as those of Dr.
Botkin; fragments of chopped and sawed human bones; and one human finger, long, slender, well-shaped, probably cut from the Empresss hand to get at a ring. This pathetic collection of relics, the meagre remnants of a fallen dynasty, this admixture of human bones and ashes, corset steels and diamond dust, was transported in a single trunk to Harbin and from thence to, a sure place.
That is all the record shows; where or how far they wandered after crossing into Mongolia I know not. Eight days after these events, on July 25, , Ekaterinburg was evacuated by the Bolsheviki, and the combined Kolchak and Czechoslovak troops entered the city.
Five days later, on July 30, an orderly investigation, conducted in a scientific and judicial spirit, was instituted, first under the direction of Judge Nametkin, of that territorial jurisdiction, but later—and fortunately—committed to the very capable hands of Judge Nicholas Sokolov of the Omsk Tribunal. On the evacuation of the town by the Bolsheviki, someone had the presence of mind to rush to the telegraph office and secure possession of the official telegrams that passed between Moscow and the Ural capital during those eventful days; from these records, fortified by the sworn statements of the scores of witnesses and the mute testimony of the hundreds of recognizable clues that had been trampled into the clay in the forest or found at the bottom of the shaft, Sokolov was enabled to publish to an expectant world in his precious report of pages, totaling , words.
With infinite difficulty, patience, and hazard, he managed to smuggle his material out of Russia to Western Europe, where in peace and safety he edited and published his findings. His work done, he died of hardship and exhaustion. These documents, of inestimable importance for students of the Russian Revolution, are a monument to the painstaking judicial mind of their author. They set at rest, definitely, all doubt as to the fate of the Romanovs, not only with respect to the immediate family of the Tsar, but also his near relatives, the Grand Dukes and Princes who were murdered about the same time, either at Petrograd or in the environs of Perm.
Twenty-four hours after the death of Nicholas, six other Romanovs were officially murdered in that city by the Bolsheviki, their bodies thrown down the shaft of an unused mine, and hand grenades dropped down to ensure complete destruction of life. But the bodies of the Perm victims were eventually recovered and identified. The moral responsibility for the wholesale butchery of the imperial family would now seem to rest fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Soviet Government, and can no longer be charged off to an alleged uncontrollable fanaticism on the part of local Ekaterinburg authorities.
It was decided upon, approved, and arranged by Jankel Sverdlov at Moscow; Bieloborodov, Golostchekin, and Jurovsky were merely the executors—most willing executors—of a matured governmental policy. But, in the copious light shed upon events by the official telegrams confiscated at Ekaterinburg, such evasion is no longer tenable. There was but one telegram sent by the Ekaterinburg authorities on the day following the murder; it was for Moscow and signed by Bieloborodov, President of the Ural Soviet.
Written in code, the combinations of numbers defied the best cypher experts of Europe for two years. But when human ingenuity had unraveled what other human ingenuity had contrived, the cryptic groupings of numbers fell into the following indictment of Moscow as having had a clear understanding with Ekaterinburg before the murder Tell Sverdlov that the entire family has met the same fate as its head.
Officially, they will perish during the evacuation. In an earlier paragraph of this article I promised to hazard a guess as to the identity of Commissar Jakolev and the nature of his mission of particular importance. It will be only a deduced conclusion, in the realm of conjecture, quite distinct from the facts before narrated, which have been juridically established and historically authenticated.
The only persons capable of fully substantiating my thesis are dead; the remaining principal actors in that unsuccessful episode are still dumb, though, they have contributed valuable hints. It will be necessary to recall the military history of the Great War and to visualize the situation on the Western Front at that time.
Germany had suffered a fatal check by the entrance of the United States into the arena on the side of her adversaries. With fresh and seemingly unending American forces pouring into the trenches and massing before Saint-Mihiel, the German High Staff prepared for that supreme drive on Paris that caused the world to hold its breath in agonized expectation. The scales of war hung even. The disappearance of Russia from the Allied line was followed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which reduced Bolshevist Russia to the status of a sullen vassal of the Teutonic Powers.
Fully aware of the fundamentally revolutionary character of Bolshevism, with its threat to German monarchism as well as to Russian autocracy, and perfectly willing to crush this Frankenstein monster which military necessity had obliged her to introduce behind the Russian lines, Germany decided on a bold move. She would restore monarchy in Russia and place Alexis on the throne—provided the Tsar would consent to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and align Russia with the Teutonic powers!
The Tsars spontaneous and indignant reaction to Jakolevs very first proposals and his outspoken resentment against Germany support this view: I will let them cut off my hand before I do it. The coachman who drove the team to Tiumen reported that Jakolev had sought in vain to win the Tsar over to some weighty project.
Although unable to hear the exact words, the driver made out that Nicholas always refused; he did not scold the Bolsheviki, but somebody else. General Ludendorff, in his Memoirs , gives solid ground for a similar surmise. Guardedly, vaguely, as if unwilling yet to admit the full truth, he says These are significant words. If Mirbach was authorized to sound out Nicholas on this important possibility, he must get the Tsar back to Moscow, or, better still, out of Russia. Sverdlov, already under the domination of Mirbach, may have been obliged to acquiesce—or feign acquiescence—in the plan to move the Tsar.
It was noted at Tobolsk that Jakolev was not the usual type of Bolshevist Commissar; he was suave, well spoken, versed in foreign languages, showed breeding,—had clean hands and thin fingers,—in the words of Khobylinsky, and treated the former monarch with courtesy and deference. He did not omit to salute Nicholas as the Emperor entered the cart for the trip to Tiumen.
But something went wrong. Either the Tsar refused point-blank to accede to the Teutonic advances, as we may reasonably assume from his own condemnatory utterances, and was flung back into the hands of the Soviets by the infuriated Mirbach, or Mirbach himself was doublecrossed by Sverdlov, who permitted the escape as far as Omsk and then ordered the farce to be ended at Ekaterinburg.
In any case, the decision was abrupt and unexpected; no preparation had been made for the imprisonment at Ekaterinburg and Ipatievs house was requisitioned at a moments notice; no properly constituted guard was on hand, but had to be recruited from a local factory; the encircling stockade was hurriedly erected after the arrival of the prisoners. Neither Sverdlov nor Mirbach is available to affirm or deny; they were assassinated too soon.
Their stay there was bearable but depressing. Boredom turned to danger when Kerensky was overthrown by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October Lenin famously said that "revolutions are meaningless without firing squads," and he was soon considering, along with lieutenant Yakov Sverdlov, whether to place Nicholas on public trial—to be followed by his execution—or just kill the entire family.
The Bolsheviks faced a desperate civil war against the Whites, counterrevolutionary armies backed by Western powers. Lenin responded with unbridled terror. He decided to move the family from Tobolsk closer to Moscow, to which he had relocated the Russian capital. A trusted Bolshevik factotum was dispatched to bring the Romanovs westward, and in April they endured a terrifying trip by train and carriage.
The teenage Alexei suffered an attack of bleeding and had to be left behind; he came to Ekaterinburg three weeks later with three of his sisters. The girls, meanwhile, were sexually molested on the train. But eventually the family was reunited in the gloomy, walled mansion of a merchant named Ipatiev in the center of the city, whose leaders were the most fanatical of Bolsheviks.
The mansion was ominously renamed the House of Special Purpose and converted into a prison fortress with painted-over windows, fortified walls and machine gun nests. The Romanovs received limited rations and were watched by hostile young guards. Yet the family adapted. Nicholas read books aloud in the evening and tried to exercise.
The eldest daughter, Olga, became depressed, but the playful and spirited younger girls, especially the beautiful Maria and the mischievous Anastasia, began to interact with the guards. Maria began an illicit romance with one of them, and the guards discussed helping the girls escape.
When this was uncovered by Bolshevik boss Filipp Goloshchekin, the guards were changed, regulations were tightened. All of this made Lenin even more anxious. There is long-established tradition in Russia of murdered royals suddenly reappearing. By the beginning of July it was clear that Ekaterinburg was going to fall to the Whites.
Goloshchekin rushed to Moscow to get Lenin's approval, and it is certain that he got it, though Lenin was clever enough not to put the order on paper: The killing was planned under the new commandant of the House of Special Purpose, Yakov Yurovsky, who decided to recruit a squad to murder the royals all together in one session and then burn the bodies and bury them in the woods nearby. Just about every detail of the plan was ill conceived and would be grotesquely bungled in practice.
Early on that July morning, the bleary-eyed Romanovs and their loyal retainers stood in the cellar as the heavily armed murder squad filed into the room. Yurovsky suddenly read out a death sentence. Then the men used their weapons. Each was meant to fire at a different family member, but many of them secretly wished to avoid shooting the girls, so they all aimed at the loathed Nicholas and Alexandra, killing them almost instantly.
The firing was wild; the killers managed to wound one another as the room filled with swirling dust and smoke and screams. When the first volley was done, most of the family was still alive, wounded, crying and terrified, their suffering made worse by the fact that they were in effect wearing bulletproof vests. The Romanovs were famed for their collection of jewelry, and they had left Petrograd with a large cache of diamonds hidden their baggage.
During the last months they had sewn the diamonds into specially made underwear in case they needed to fund an escape. On the night of the execution the children had pulled on this secretly bejeweled underwear, which was reinforced with the hardest material in existence. Tragically, ironically, the bullets bounced off these garments. Finally the murderers waded into the gruesome scene of wounded, bleeding children one of the killers compared it to a slippery ice rink awash with blood and brains and stabbed them manically with bayonets or shot them in the head.
The mayhem lasted 20 agonizing minutes. When the bodies were being carried out, two of the girls turned out to still be alive, spluttering and coughing before being stabbed into silence. This was surely the origin of the legend that Anastasia, the youngest daughter, had survived , a story that inspired so many impostors to impersonate the murdered grand duchess.
Now that the deed was done, drunken assassins and Bolshevik thugs argued about who was to move the bodies and where. They mocked the deceased royals, pillaged their treasures, and then failed to conceal or bury them. Eventually the bodies were piled into a truck, which soon broke down. Out in the woods, where the Romanovs were stripped naked and their clothing burned, it turned out that the mineshafts that had been selected to receive the bodies were too shallow.
In a panic Yurovsky improvised a new plan, leaving the bodies and rushing into Ekaterinburg for supplies. He spent three days and three nights, sleeplessly driving back and forth to the woods, collecting sulfuric acid and gasoline to destroy the bodies, which he finally decided to bury in separate places to confuse anyone who might find them.
He was determined to obey his orders that "no one must ever know what had happened" to the Romanov family. He pummeled the bodies with rifle butts, doused them with sulfuric acid, and burned them with gasoline. Finally, he buried what was left in two graves. Yurovsky and his killers later wrote detailed, boastful, and confused accounts for the Cheka, a precursor to the KGB. The reports were sequestered in the archives and never publicized, but during the s renewed interest in the murder site led Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB and future leader of the USSR , to recommend that the House of Special Purpose be bulldozed.
Next year is the centennial of the Russian Revolution, and while the country will undoubtedly find many ways to mark the occasion, the unburied bones of its deposed ruling family present a dilemma. For a nation that aspires to regain its former influence and historic glory, coming to terms with complicated moments in its past is of paramount importance. But the protracted burial saga reflects issues that are universal and not easy to address. Notions of birthright, bloodlines, and family power still have the ability to fascinate and resonate globally.
His health became the main focus of their lives. Nearly any activity carried the risk of a knock or cut that could trigger catastrophic bouts of bleeding. Alexandra would sleep on the floor by his bedside during the weeks of recuperation.
The boy was gentle, with a mischievous streak and spoiled by his mother and sisters. It also made them vulnerable. When someone came along who could exploit that vulnerability, they fell for him completely. Grigory Rasputin, born in western Siberia, was a self-proclaimed holy man. Whether he was a huckster or believed he had supernatural powers is unclear.
The Romanovs definitely believed in him, and he wielded powerful influence over the royal family, especially Alexandra. When Rasputin first met the Romanovs in , the tsarina was desperate. The revolution had almost seen the monarchy overthrown. The birth of Alexei the previous year gave them the heir she had been hoping for, but his hemophilia was not only a personal tragedy but also a threat to the dynasty.
This situation of political crisis and maternal agony enabled Rasputin to insinuate himself into the family. Although he almost certainly was not her lover, he did have affairs with untold numbers of women at the Romanov court.
Nicholas ignored the calls to remove Rasputin from court, further angering the Russian people. Keeping his wife happy and his child happy kept Nicholas from removing the threat. See how the faith of the Russian tsars now enjoys favored status. The time was ripe for revolution. For the Bolsheviks, once they took power in November , the Romanovs simultaneously became a bargaining chip and a headache.
Russia needed to negotiate its exit from World War I while also avoiding a foreign invasion. Some wanted them sent into exile, some wanted them put on trial for their perceived crimes, and some wanted them to disappear, for good. At first the family was sent to the palace at Tsarskoye Selo. They were not treated badly, and Nicholas even seemed to thrive.
He enjoyed the outdoor, rural life and did not miss the stress of being tsar. The family retained a generous staff: 39 servants altogether. They kept many of their personal possessions, including their beloved family leather-bound photograph albums. It was still possible in these early days of their imprisonment to dream of a happy ending.
Better still, perhaps they would be allowed to retire to their estate in the Crimea, the scene of many happy summers. They did not understand that, little by little, each escape route was closing until only one was left, the worst one: the road to Yekaterinburg.
The most radicalized city in Russia, Yekaterinburg was strongly communist and fanatically anti-tsarist. The family stayed in a large building known as the Ipatiev House, after its former owner. A high wooden palisade was constructed to cut off the outside world. They had the use of a garden for exercise. The man in charge, Avdeev, was corrupt his men stole freely from the Romanovs but not cruel.
The guards were ordinary men, recruited from local factories. As time went on they became familiar and even friendly with their charges. The local Bolsheviks replaced Avdeev with Yakov Yurovsky, the man who would orchestrate their murders. He stopped the petty thieving that had gone unpunished by his predecessor, but he instituted a much harsher regime and recruited stricter, more disciplined guards.
He maintained a distant but professional relationship with Nicholas and Alexandra, even as he planned their deaths. Nicholas—getting it wrong yet again—even seemed to like him. The last civilians to see the Romanovs alive were four women who had been brought in from the town to clean the Ipatiev House. Mariya Starodumova, Evdokiya Semenova, Varvara Dryagina, and an unidentified fourth gave the family a small amount of relief from the boredom of their confinement, and one final contact with the outside world.
The testimony of these women has given the most penetrating and humane portrait of the doomed family. Forbidden to speak to the Romanovs, the cleaners nevertheless had the chance to observe them at close quarters. The grand duchesses were ordinary girls. As for poor, broken Alexei, he looked to Semenova like the epitome of delicate suffering. Like so many before her, she was particularly struck by his eyes, which were soft and callow, but which appeared to Semenova to be full of sadness.
The family, however, was delighted with the diversion. The sisters threw themselves into helping scrub the floors, taking the opportunity to speak with the cleaners in defiance of house rules.
Semenova managed to say a few kind words to Alexandra. The visit to the Ipatiev House made a deep impression on the women. The Romanovs were to be killed because they were the supreme symbols of autocracy. The irony was that, in Yekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks had turned them into the opposite of aristocrats. They were actually ordinary people like us. Simple mortals. On the night of July 16, a telegram was sent to Moscow informing Lenin of the decision to carry out the murders.
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