The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In the Kremlin, Lenin worried that the killing of the Romanov children might make a terrible impression internationally: the French Revolution, template for the Bolsheviks, had guillotined the king and queen, but spared the children. When Goloshchekin arrived, Sverdlov ordered the appointment of a commandant to liquidate the family if necessary. On 4 July, the Ural Party secretary reported to ‘Chairman Sverdlov for Goloshchekin’ that ‘the matter’ had been ‘organized according to the Centre’s instructions’. The Central Committee nationalized the properties of the Romanovs. It was understood that if the Romanovs should fall into enemy hands, they must be slaughtered. ‘We decided it here,’ Sverdlov later told Trotsky. ‘Ilich [Lenin] thought we could not leave them a living banner, especially in the present difficult circumstances.’ Goloshchekin’s commandant was that observer of Maria’s and Anastasia’s flirtations: Yakov Yurovsky.10

  *

  ‘I came to my duty knowing I would have to take a stand on the question of liquidating the Romanovs,’ wrote the forty-year-old Yurovsky, an ascetic Bolshevik, bearded and husky with thick jet-black hair.* He started ‘disinfecting’ the guards: a new team was put in place at the House on the specific orders of the Centre; the periphery was now guarded by a detachment of Bolshevik workers, the internal guard made up of local Chekists, a mix of Latvians, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians and Russians.

  ‘Today the commandants were changed,’ wrote Nicholas. ‘The one we presumed was a doctor, Yurovsky, appointed.’ Yurovsky was a trained medical orderly but he had come to kill them all, not cure them. Nicky hoped he would stop the petty thefts; to restore proletarian morality, the self-righteous commissar catalogued the Romanovs’ belongings. Yurovsky certainly regarded his mission with pride: ‘It was left to me the son of a worker to settle the Revolution’s score with the Imperial House for centuries of suffering.’

  The family noticed Yurovsky’s controlled hostility. Alexandra called him ‘the Ox Commandant’, while Nicky noticed the hostile Latvian guards. ‘We like this type less and less,’ he wrote. Two days later on 30 June, he added: ‘Alexei took his first bath since Tobolsk; his knee is getting better but he can’t straighten it completely yet. The weather is warm and pleasant. We have no news from the outside.’ This was his last diary entry.

  The adults sensed death was stalking them. The vanishings of Dolgoruky, Tatishchev, Nagorny were ominous. ‘My voluntary confinement here is restricted less by time than by my earthly existence,’ wrote Dr Botkin in a letter he never sent. ‘In essence I am dead but not yet buried or buried alive.’ On 10 July, Dolgoruky and Tatishchev were taken into the forest and shot by Grigory Nikulin, Yurovsky’s twenty-three-year-old deputy commandant.

  The next day, a psychopathic, long-haired Chekist, Peter Ermakov, who had once sawn off a man’s head during a bank robbery, visited the nearby Koptyaki forest and selected the disused Four Brothers iron mine in which to dispose of the bodies.

  On 12 July, in Room 3, Hotel Amerika, Goloshchekin told the Praesidium that Moscow had approved the execution – but with some reservations. Lenin still toyed with the idea of a trial yet recognized that this was now impractical. It is clear from Yurovsky’s orders, received while Goloshchekin was in Moscow, that Lenin had approved the killing of the entire family in discussions with Sverdlov in the Kremlin. The timing was left to the Urals commissars because it depended on the security of Ekaterinburg. The Romanovs could not be securely moved so if the town was about to fall, the Urals Soviet was permitted to activate the order with which Golshchekin returned to Ekaterinburg. It was agreed that the Uralites would use codenames: ‘the trial’ meant the massacre and Yurovsky’s actual operation was given the prosaic codename ‘chimney-sweep’.* Ekaterinburg was about to fall so ‘we decided the question on our own,’ recalled Voikov.

  ‘I started to make my preparations on the 15th,’ recalled Yurovsky, ‘as everything had to be done as quickly as possible. I decided to use as many men as there were people to be shot, gathering them together . . . explaining the task. It has to be said that it’s no easy matter to arrange an execution, contrary to what some people think.’ The factory battalion of Letts and Hungarians had already been chosen on the understanding that they would help kill the tsar. Now he had to decide the venue inside the House, selecting a cellar room, twenty-one feet by twenty-five, lit by a single bulb, half built into the hillside.

  The family could feel the front getting closer: ‘Constantly hear artillery passing . . . Also troops marching with music,’ observed Alexandra. Howitzers boomed. On 14 July, a local priest, Father Ivan Storozhev, was allowed to visit and celebrate mass. He noticed that the entire family – the girls dressed in black skirts and white blouses with their growing hair now down to their shoulders – fell to their knees to pray. He was moved by the spectacle of their passion: they were believers and their ardent faith had helped them survive so far. Whatever one’s view of the ex-tsar and his family, one can only admire their grace, patience, humour and dignity in the face of humiliation, stress and fear as the sky darkened and the garrotte tightened. After the mass, in a demonstration of sincere piety and immaculate manners, the girls whispered ‘thank you’.11

  *

  On 16 July, ‘a grey morning, later lovely sunshine’, Alexei had ‘a slight cold’, wrote Alexandra, but ‘all went out for half an hour.’ Then ‘Olga and I arranged our medicines’ – their codename for the jewellery, suggesting they were ready for a sudden move. ‘The Ox Commandant [Yurovsky] comes to our rooms, at last brought eggs again for Baby.’

  Afterwards Yurovsky ordered a Fiat truck from the Military Garage to transport the bodies. At 5.50 p.m. Filipp Goloshchekin telegraphed Lenin and Sverdlov in Moscow, via Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd Soviet (because telegraph communications were increasingly unreliable): ‘Let Moscow know that for military reasons the trial agreed upon with Filipp (Goloshchekin) cannot be put off; we cannot wait. If your opinions differ then immediately notify. Goloshchekin.’ ‘Trial’ was the codeword for execution; the telegram’s addressees proved that the murder had been discussed at the highest level, and its tone reveals that Moscow had given Ekaterinburg the option to make the final decision. Yurovsky recalled that a telegram from the Centre gave assent – though this has never been found. Goloshchekin and Beloborodov summoned the terrifying Ermakov and told him, ‘You’re a lucky man. You’ve been chosen to execute and bury them in such a way that no one ever finds their bodies.’

  While the Romanovs were eating supper at 8 p.m., the commandant told his senior guards: ‘Tonight, we’ll have to shoot them all.’ In his office, they amassed their arsenal of fourteen guns – six pistols and eight revolvers including two Mausers. There were eleven victims and Yurovsky summoned his murder squad but ‘at the last minute two of the Letts backed out’, refusing to kill the girls. ‘They didn’t have what it takes.’ He was left with ten, or even eight, killers – himself, his deputy Nikulin, Ermakov who arrived drunk, plus two other guards and four or five others, including one who was seventeen.* Goloshchekin joined them.

  After supper, Yurovsky left his office and sent away the kitchen boy Lenka Sednev, who was friendly with the family, claiming he had to meet his uncle. ‘Wonder whether it’s true,’ noted Alexandra, ‘and we shall see the boy back again.’ She wrote her diary before bed: ‘Bezique with N. 10.30 to bed, 15 degrees.’

  Yurovsky waited for the truck to arrive. The lights were out in the Romanov rooms. At 1.30 a.m. on 17 July the truck arrived outside. Yurovsky knocked on Dr Botkin’s door, explaining that ‘Everyone had to be woken and must dress quickly. There was trouble in the city and we have to take them to a safer place,’ but so as not ‘to cause them any unnecessary pain, they had plenty of time to get dressed’. Botkin awoke the family. The children carefully donned their heavy jewel-invested underwear.

  Hurrying back to his office, Yurovsky assigned victims to each killer, then distributed the weapons, taking a Mauser and a Colt for himself while Ermakov ‘rambling drunkenly
’ armed himself with three Nagants, a Mauser and a bayonet: he was the only one to have two assigned victims – Alexandra and Botkin. Yurovsky ordered the squad to ‘shoot straight at the heart to avoid an excessive quantity of blood and get it over quickly’.

  At about 2.15 a.m., Nicholas emerged carrying Alexei in his arms, both dressed in military uniforms with vizored caps secretly lined with jewels, followed by Alexandra and the girls, in white blouses and dark skirts, then Dr Botkin (dapper in suit and tie) and three servants. The three dogs remained upstairs. As they walked down, the family crossed themselves as they passed the stuffed bear on the landing out of respect for the dead. ‘Well, we’re going to get out of this place,’ said Nicky. Yurovsky led them out across the courtyard into the basement, past the room where the killers waited, and through the double doors into the cellar.

  ‘Why is there no chair here?’ asked Alexandra, now thin, grey, dishevelled. ‘Is it forbidden to sit down?’

  Yurovsky ordered two chairs brought in. Alexandra sat on one and Nicholas ‘gently set his son in the second in the middle of the room’, then ‘stood in front so that he shielded him’. Botkin stood behind the boy, while the steady Tatiana was directly behind her mother’s chair with Anastasia behind her. Olga and Maria leaned on the wall behind. The room, thought Yurovsky, ‘suddenly seemed very small’. Announcing he was off to fetch the truck, he left them. ‘The Romanovs were completely calm. No suspicions.’

  Outside, Ermakov told the driver to back the truck into the courtyard and gun the engines to drown out the noise of shooting. As the truck revved, Yurovsky led the executioners into the room.

  Yurovsky ordered the prisoners to stand. ‘In view of the fact that your relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia,’ he read from a scrap of paper, ‘the Praesidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.’

  ‘Lord oh my God,’ Nicholas said. ‘Oh my God, what is this?’

  ‘Oh my God! No!’ came a chorus of voices.

  ‘So we’re not going to be taken anywhere?’ asked Botkin.

  ‘I can’t understand you,’ Nicholas told Yurovsky. ‘Read it again please.’ Yurovsky read it again. ‘What? What?’ stuttered Nicholas.

  ‘This!’ Yurovsky drew his pistol and fired it directly into Nicholas’s chest. All ten of the killers aimed at the ex-tsar, firing repeatedly into his chest which exploded in blood. ‘I shot Nicholas and everyone else shot him too.’ Quivering with each shot, with vacant eyes, ‘Nicholas lurched forward and toppled to the floor.’ The barrage hit Botkin and the servants who collapsed, but scarcely anyone had fired at the rest of the victims who, frozen with terror, were just screaming. It was pandemonium. Yurovsky shouted orders, but the shooting was ‘increasingly disorderly’, the crack of gunfire so deafening, the smoke and dust so thick, that no one could see or hear anything. ‘Bullets were flying around the room.’ One of the shooters was wounded in the hand. ‘A bullet from one of the squad behind me flew past my head,’ recalled Yurovsky, while those in front were burned.

  Alexandra was crossing herself. She had always believed that she and Nicky would be, as she wrote long before, when they were newlyweds, ‘united, bound for life and when life is ended, we meet again in the other world to remain together for all eternity’. As her hand was raised, Ermakov fired his Mauser point-blank at her head which shattered in brain and blood. Maria ran for the double doors at the back so Ermakov drawing a Nagant from his belt fired at her, hitting her in the thigh, but the smoke and clouds of plaster were so dense that Yurovsky ordered a halt and opened the door to let the shooters, coughing and spluttering, rest as they listened to ‘moans, screams and low sobs’ from within. Only Nicholas and Alexandra, and two of the servants, were dead. Leading the assassins back into the room, Yurovsky found Botkin getting up and, placing his Mauser against the doctor’s head, he pulled the trigger. Spotting Alexei still frozen in his chair, white face spattered with his father’s blood, Yurovsky and his deputy Nikulin fired repeatedly into the thirteen-year-old, who fell but lay moaning on the ground until the commandant called for Ermakov, who drew his bayonet.

  As Ermakov stabbed frenziedly, blood squirting in an arc, poor Alexei was still alive, protected by his diamond-armoured shirt, until Yurovsky, drawing his Colt, shoved Ermakov out of the way and shot the boy in the head. Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia was still untouched, huddled together screaming. ‘We set about finishing them off.’ As Yurovsky and Ermakov stepped over the bodies towards them, they scrambled, crouched and covered their heads. Yurovsky shot Tatiana in the back of the head, spattering Olga in a ‘shower of blood and brains’; next the blood-drenched Ermakov kicked her down and shot her in the jaw. But Maria, wounded in the leg, and Anastasia were still alive, crying out for help. Ermakov wheeled round to stab Maria in the chest, but again ‘the bayonet wouldn’t pierce her bodice’. He shot her. Anastasia was the last of the family moving. Slashing his bayonet through the air, Ermakov cornered her but, stabbing manically against her diamond-armoured bodice, he missed and hit the wall. She was ‘screaming and fighting’ until he drew another pistol and shot her in the head. Now berserk with intoxicated bloodlust, Ermakov spun back to Nicholas and Alexandra, wildly stabbing first one then the other so hard that his bayonet cracked bones and pinned them to the floorboards. One of the servants, Anna Demidova, suddenly stirred: ‘Thank God! God has saved me!’ Ermakov stabbed her until she was silent.

  After this ten-minute frenzy, Yurovsky checked that the victims were all dead, then ‘ordered the men to start moving them’. As they piled them on to the Fiat, Ortino, Tatiana’s bulldog, rushed down the stairs, only to be bayoneted by one of the soldiers.* Yurovsky staggered into his office, lying on the sofa with a cold cloth on his head just as Voikov arrived to inspect the cellar: ‘bodies lay in an appalling jumble, eyes staring in horror, clothing covered in blood. The floor was slick and slippery as a skating rink with blood, brains and gore.’ As they carried out two of the girls, probably Maria and Anastasia, they started to splutter and cry, still alive. Ermakov, taking a bayoneted rifle, stabbed them again as some of the assassins vomited and fled; others pillaged watches, rings and Nicholas’s diamond-studded cigarette case. Yurovsky reappeared, called the killers into his office and demanded that the looters return the valuables or be shot.

  At 3 a.m., the truck swung on to the road on a halting journey to the Four Brothers mine. Out in the forest, Yurovsky encountered the drunken posse arranged by Ermakov who were pumped up to kill the family themselves. ‘What did you bring them to us dead for?’ they complained. But the Fiat broke down and as the bodies had to be transferred to carts, the men discovered the jewels: ‘diamonds could be seen. The men’s eyes visibly lit up.’ All wore amulets with tiny portraits of Rasputin. Again, Yurovsky had to draw his pistol to restore order, dismissing the extra men. It was nearly 7 a.m. The bodies were stripped naked, and the clothes were burned. Seventeen pounds of jewels were collected, to be handed over to Moscow. They threw the bodies down a mineshaft, only to discover that it was very shallow. Yurovsky started to panic. Leaving a guard and rushing back to the city, Yurovsky reported to the Praesidium at the Amerika Hotel, but admitted that he and Ermakov had failed to dispose of the bodies. Goloshchekin was furious at Ermakov’s conduct but ordered Yurovsky to find another way of destroying the bodies. He rushed back and forth twice during the night, finally deciding to burn some bodies and use acid to destroy the others so ‘no one will ever know what happened.’ He asked Voikov, commissar of supplies, to procure fifteen gallons of sulphuric acid and a lot of gasoline.

  ‘Inform Sverdlov the entire family suffered the same fate as the head,’ Beloborodov telegraphed to the Kremlin. Next day, the Central Executive Committee ‘recognizes the decision of the Ural Regional Soviet as correct’.12

  At the same session in the Amerika Hotel, the Soviet ordered the killing of the other Romanovs.*

  At eleven o’clock that evening, 17 July, at the Napolnaya School in Alapaevsk, a
posse of Chekists woke up Grand Duchess Ella and the others, telling them that the advance of White armies meant they had to be moved urgently. Ella, in her nun’s habit, her companion Sister Varvara, three of KR’s sons and Prince Vladimir Paley, son of Uncle Pitz, were tied up and blindfolded. Sergei Mikhailovich ‘was the only one to oppose us’, recalled one of the killers, Vasily Ryabov. ‘He was stronger than the rest. We had to grapple with him. He told us he wasn’t going anywhere as he knew they were all going to be killed. He barricaded himself behind a cupboard,’ until ‘finally I lost patience and shot him’ in the arm. ‘He didn’t resist further.’

  Then he joined the others as they were led out to waiting horse-drawn carts that set off for the woods. Unlike Nicky and Alix, they knew they were going to die. ‘Tell me why,’ said Sergei. ‘I’ve never been involved in politics. I loved sport, played billiards, was interested in numismatics.’

  ‘I reassured him as best I could,’ said Ryabov, but ‘I was myself very agitated by everything I’d been through that night.’

  At 1 a.m., they were made to walk towards a flooded iron mine. When Sergei again resisted, he was shot in the head. Then Ella was bludgeoned with rifle butts and thrown unconscious down the mineshaft, followed by Sister Varvara, in the hope that they would drown. But then ‘we heard the splashing of water and then the two women’s voices’, recalled Ryabov, who now began to panic, unsure what to do next. ‘Having no alternative’, they decided to ‘throw in all the men as well’, but ‘none of them drowned in the water and we were able to hear all their voices. Then I threw in a grenade. It exploded and everything was quiet.’ But then ‘we heard talking. I threw in another grenade. And what do you think? From beneath the ground we heard singing. I was seized with horror. They were singing the prayer Lord Save Your People.’ The murderers filled the shaft with wood and lit it. ‘Their hymns rose up through the thick smoke’ – until there was silence.13