“The empress sat down by the wall where the window was, closer to the rear column of the arch. Behind her stood three of her daughters. The emperor was in the middle, next to the heir, and behind him stood Dr. Botkin. The maid, a tall woman, stood by the left jamb of the storeroom door. With her stood one of the daughters. The maid had a pillow in her arms. The tsar’s daughters had brought small pillows; they put one on the seat of the heir’s chair, the other on their mother’s. Simultaneously, eleven men walked into the room: Yurovsky, his assistant, the two from the Cheka, and seven Latvians. According to Medvedev, Yurovsky told him: ‘Go out to the street and see whether anyone’s there and the shots will be heard.’
“He walked out and heard the shots. By the time he returned to the house, two or three minutes had passed. Walking into the room he saw all the members of the tsar’s family lying on the floor with numerous wounds to their bodies.
“The blood was gushing … the heir was still alive—and moaning. Yurovsky walked over to him and shot him two or three times at point blank range. The heir fell still. The scene made me want to vomit.
“… The corpses were brought out to the truck on stretchers made of a sheet stretched on shafts taken from the sleigh standing in the yard. The driver was Sergei Lyukhanov. The blood in the room and yard was washed off. By three o’clock it was all over.”
The investigator asked him about Strekotin.
“I do remember—he really was at the machine gun. The door from the room where the machine gun was into the entry was open, and so was the door from the entry into the room where the execution was carried out,” stated Medvedev.
From this the investigation concluded that Strekotin and Kleshchev really could have seen what happened—witnesses of the Apocalypse.
Medvedev denied that he himself had done any shooting, but his wife established his guilt:
“According to Pavel, all those awakened got up, washed, dressed, and were led downstairs, where they were put into a room where a paper was read to them that said: ‘The revolution is dying, and so shall you.’ After that they started firing, and they killed them, one and all. My husband fired, too.”
Proskuryakov, to whom he had also recklessly recounted how he fired at the tsar and “emptied two or three bullets into him,” also established Medvedev’s guilt. He must have told his wife as well that he had fired at the tsar. But she did not want to establish her husband’s guilt in such a heinous crime.
Actually, for her that crime was a matter of pride, of course, as it was for Pavel Medvedev. The Ipatiev house guard commander must have been a reliable man, that is, fanatical, otherwise Yurovsky and Goloshchekin would not have taken him for such a post. He was making statements about the execution because he knew that others would tell the story anyway. It made no sense to refuse to talk.
The investigation continued. It was established that two more trucks went to the Koptyaki forest on July 18, bringing three barrels, which they moved onto carts and took into the forest. One of those barrels was filled with gasoline.
The investigators learned that there had been other barrels as well. They found a note from the supply commissar, “Intellectual,” P. Voikov, in the Ekaterinburg pharmacy about supplying a large quantity of sulfuric acid.
After the witnesses’ corroborating statements, the investigation came to its conclusion: on the night of July 16–17, the tsar, his family, retainers, and servants—eleven people—were shot in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house.
Then, according to the investigation’s hypothesis, the corpses were stowed in a truck and taken to an unnamed mine near the village of Koptyaki. On July 18, a large quantity of gasoline and sulfuric acid was brought to the site. The bodies of the slain were chopped up with axes (the investigation found one of the axes), doused with gasoline and sulfuric acid, and burned in bonfires whose remnants were discovered not far from the mines.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE SLAIN
But … But Sokolov never did find the bodies of the tsar’s family. There was someone’s separated finger, someone’s false teeth … and a bonfire next to an unnamed mine that he declared to be the grave and ashes of the tsar and his family.
Yes, the statements of witnesses to the execution coincided, but….
But Sokolov was a monarchist. He brought a political obsession to his work, and that made the statements he obtained highly suspect. Both sides in the Civil War learned cruelty from each other, and the cellars of White counterintelligence rivaled those of the Cheka. The interrogations may not have been altogether idyllic. May that have been why the statements coincided? Skeptics have argued that it was a biased investigation and that the conclusion—that it is indeed possible to burn eleven bodies without a trace—was debatable. For the fact was indisputable—there were no bodies.
A year and a half after the “family was executed in the Ipatiev house” (as Sokolov asserted) or “the Romanov family disappeared from the Ipatiev house” (as his opponents formulated it), “Anastasia” would appear, a mysterious woman whose fate has continued to disturb the world for seventy years.
A brief account of the well-known story:
In Berlin an unknown young woman decided to commit suicide by jumping into a canal one night in 1920, but she was saved and placed in a clinic, depressed and almost mute. In the clinic she came across a photograph of the tsar’s family, which produced a remarkable agitation in her and from which she could not be parted. Soon a rumor arose: the miraculously saved daughter of the Russian tsar, Tatiana, was there, in a Berlin hospital.
Tatiana—that was what she called herself at first. But soon after she changed her name to Anastasia.
No, there was nothing conclusive in this fact. A powerful shock may simply have burned out her memory. She did not remember who she was. She dug deep in her memory—and found herself: she was Anastasia.
She told a fantastic story about her rescue: a shot, she fell, her sister behind her, shielding her from the bullets with her body. Then, senselessness, a gap in her memory … then stars … she was being taken away on a wagon of some kind. Then the journey to Romania with the soldier who, it turned out, had saved her. The birth of a child fathered by the soldier. Her escape. And all this in incoherent waves.
Moreover, she did not speak Russian. There could be an explanation for this: the Russian spoken during the monstrous murder, as she lay there heaped with the bodies of her family, may have created a kind of permanent taboo in her consciousness. She could not pronounce her native sounds; they brought the horror back to her consciousness. But this circumstance was very heartening to her opponents. (In our opinion, a woman who does not speak Russian and has decided to declare herself a Russian grand duchess either has to be crazy or must truly believe herself to be Anastasia.)
There was also, however, her amazing likeness to the photograph of the Russian tsar’s daughter. She even had the trace of a birthmark right where a birthmark had been removed from the young Anastasia, and the shape of her ears, and a similar handwriting. And, finally, the mysterious woman spoke freely about the details of the family’s life.
She attempted to defend her right to the name of the tsar’s daughter in court and suffered defeat.
But when the mysterious “Anastasia” died, she was buried in a crypt with her Romanov relatives the princes of Leuchtenberg.
Who was she?
To me she was a woman who for terrible reasons had suffered a shock and forgotten who she was and then spent her whole life trying to remember it. She truly believed she was the tsar’s daughter, but evidently she did not know precisely which one of the four. She declared herself to be Anastasia because, of the four sisters, she looked most like her, but to the end of her life she continued to dig painfully in her memory. So that for all her certainty, she was to some extent uncertain. That burning torment: trying to remember, going back and forth, into the monstrous past—in an attempt to meet up there, in that horror, with herself … and never to do so.
“Anastasia�
�� declared she had been “rescued after the execution.” Subsequently books would begin appearing proving that the tsar’s daughters had not been shot at all. Only the tsar and the heir had been executed, these books asserted. The retainers and the unlucky Botkin had perished to create the appearance of the entire family’s destruction. In fact, at the demand of the Germans, on the basis of secret articles of the Treaty of Brest, the daughters and the tsaritsa were taken out of Russia. True, it is hard to believe that the second most important man in the government, Trotsky, who participated in the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest and in exile asserted that the tsar’s entire family had been shot, did not know about that. (What he would have given for it not to have been so!)
That these fantastic versions popped up was inevitable. After all, in the seventy years since the execution not one voluntary statement by participants in the execution in the Ipatiev house was published. The terrible night of July 16–17, 1918, remained the object of mysterious rumors and legends.
In the 1970s, at the start of my investigations, I did not believe anyone—not Sokolov and not his opponents. I set myself one goal—to find voluntary statements of witnesses to that terrible night. I was sure that they existed in the bowels of the Soviet secret storehouses. Only they could give the answer as to what did happen in the Ipatiev house. About one such document, the legendary “Yurovsky Note,” rumors abounded.
I began questioning my former classmates at the Historical Archival Institute, who worked in various archives. Everyone I talked to had heard of it, but no one had read it.
“SUBSTANTIVE EVIDENCE: THE EXECUTION WEAPONS”
In the late 1970s, an old and once close friend called me. We had studied together at the Historical Archival Institute and now, after many years, we met, frightening each other with our changed faces. She got into my car and without saying a word placed a paper on my knees.
I began to read:
“To the Museum of the Revolution, Museum Director Comrade Mitskevich.
“Bearing in mind the upcoming tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the younger generation’s likely interest in seeing substantive evidence (the weapon that executed the former tsar Nicholas II, his family, and those retainers who remained loyal to him to the grave), I feel I must transfer to the museum for safekeeping two revolvers that have been in my possession: Colt no. 71905 with a cartridge clip and seven bullets, and Mauser no. 167177 with a wooden gunstock and a cartridge clip with ten bullets. The reasons for the two revolvers are as follows: I killed Nicholas on the spot with my Colt; the remaining bullets in the one loaded clip for the Colt, as well as the loaded Mauser, went to finish off Nicholas’s daughters, who were armored with corsets made of a solid mass of large diamonds, and the strange vitality of the heir, on which my assistant also spent an entire clip of bullets (the strange vitality of the heir must probably be put down to my assistant’s poor mastery of his weapon and his inevitable nerves, evoked by his long ordeal with the armored daughters).
“The former commandant of the special house in Ekaterinburg, where the former tsar Nicholas II and his family were held in 1918 (up until his execution in the same year on July 16), Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky, and the commandant’s assistant Grigory Petrovich Nikulin attest to the above.
“Ya. M. Yurovsky has been a member of the party since 1905, Party ticket no. 1500, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.
“G. P. Nikulin has been a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1917, no. 128185, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.”
So it did all happen!
She said, “This is a copy of a restricted document held by the Museum of the Revolution. I was told you want to find out how it happened? I’m glad I can give you the chance. But this document was copied out at my request, and I don’t want to put anyone on the spot. So you have to keep mum about it. Not that you’re very likely to be able to talk about all this any time in the next hundred years. So enjoy the abstract knowledge, that’s enough.”
“This is the Yurovsky Note?”
“What do you mean! This is just an ordinary notice Yurovsky wrote.”
(In 1989 I was finally able to look at this “ordinary notice” with my own two eyes. It was indeed written in the commandant-assassin’s characteristic hand.)
“No, no.” She chuckled. “The Yurovsky Note is something completely different. It’s a long document. By the way, in the 1920s he gave it to Pokrovsky.”
(Mikhail Pokrovsky was the director of the Communist Academy in the 1920s, the leader of Soviet historical science.)
“You saw it? It’s in the Museum of the Revolution?”
“I don’t know,” she said dryly. “I only know that the NKVD [as the Cheka’s successor was called in the 1940s] removed those revolvers of Yurovsky’s from the museum before the war, along with all his papers. There’s a record of that there. What else could they have done? After all, his daughter was arrested.”
“Yurovsky’s daughter? Arrested?”
“Her name was Rimma. She was a Komsomol [Young Communist League] leader, apparently a secretary on the Komsomol Central Committee. She spent more than a quarter of a century in the camps. Even if the Yurovsky Note were in the museum, though, you would never get your hands on it, as you must understand. Documents about the execution of the tsar’s family are especially secret.”
She went, and I was left with his notice. The first voluntary participant statement I had obtained!
So it was all true. There was an execution. And ten years later, Yurovsky was still living that execution. He was incapable of writing an “ordinary notice.” The Ipatiev house pursued him—the armored girls, the boy they finished off. If this was an “ordinary notice,” imagine his note! I realized she was right—I would get nowhere at the museum.
Yurovsky’s biography, in the style of Soviet hagiography, published in a limited edition in Sverdlovsk as I Am the Chekist, by Yakov Reznik, contains the commandant’s last will and testament, in which he again turned to his loyal “son”—his assistant in the execution, G. Nikulin. As he lay dying from an excruciatingly painful ulcer, he again evoked the specter of the terrible Ipatiev house:
“To G. P. Nikulin.
“My friend, my life is at an ebb. I must dispose of what remains. You will be given a list of the basic documents and a list of my property. The documents give to the Museum of the Revolution….
“… You have been like a son to me, and I embrace you, as my son. Yours, Yakov Yurovsky.”
So, “The documents give to the Museum of the Revolution.” The circle was closed. Realizing the futility of it all, I still made a trip to the Museum of the Revolution archives. To my question there was a clear reply: We have no Yurovsky papers! We’ve never even heard of any “note.”
So I decided to compile a list of the institutions where he had worked. I began to run down the events of his life.
After the execution and his departure for Moscow, the commandant went back to the Urals. First he was instructed to take the “gold train”—the treasures of the Ural banks—from Perm to the capital.
In the nights of August 1918, his wife, his daughter the Ekaterinburg Komsomol leader Rimma, his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander, and one more “son” who had returned with him from Moscow, Nikulin, loaded endless canvas sacks of gold, silver, and platinum onto the train. Once again Yurovsky, the commandant, was commandant of the train, and once again his assistant was Nikulin.
Upon his arrival in Moscow, Yurovsky was given familiar work—in the Cheka. After the attempt on Lenin’s life by Fanya Kaplan, Yurovsky was assigned to a group ordered to ferret out Socialist Revolutionaries suspected of ties to Kaplan. He was one of the most meticulous of the investigators. To the end, though, Kaplan declared she was acting alone. Kaplan was shot.
After the Whites surrendered, Yurovsky went back to Ekaterinburg, where he was chairman of the Social Security Department and simultaneously one of the leaders of the Cheka. He was involved with all aspects of citizens’ social s
ecurity. The Ural Worker regularly published articles under the heading “The Punishing Activity of the Provincial Cheka.”
In May 1921 he was transferred to Moscow to work in the Russian Republic’s State Depository of Valuables, where the treasures “confiscated from the enslavers” were also kept. He guarded them loyally. “A reliable Communist”—that was how Lenin referred to him in a letter to the people’s commissar of finance. At the end of his life our hero was already employed in prosaic jobs, directing the Red Warrior factory and the Polytechnic Museum.
I conscientiously inquired about his documents at every institution where the “reliable Communist” had worked. Either there was no answer or there were “no documents listed.”
THE YUROVSKY NOTE
This happened when the archives were only just starting to be declassified.
In a small room in the Central Archive of the October Revolution, I sorted through the formerly secret files of the All-Russian Executive Committee, once the highest organ of power in revolutionary Russia, headed by Sverdlov. One file immediately caught my attention: “File on the Family of Former Tsar Nicholas the Second, 1918–1919.”
1919? File on the Family? But the family had already been shot by 1919!
This meant that this file contained some document concerning the family but created in 1919—after their execution! I leafed through the file impatiently.
It began with the telegram about the former tsar removing his shoulder straps. Then came the Ural Soviet’s famous telegram to the Central Executive Committee regarding the tsar’s execution … and the documents of the “monarchist plot”—all those letters signed “Officer.”
The Last Tsar Page 44