“I noted the archive reference especially for you to preclude any doubts,” he said when I had finished reading.
Nevertheless, I did check. By then I had received a letter from a reader in Sverdlovsk with excerpts from Ermakov’s memoirs, which her husband, an army political worker who had access to the secret archive, had made at one time. The excerpts coincided exactly, down to nonessential punctuation.
Yes, before me were the genuine memoirs of one of the principal actors on that monstrous night.
“The memoirs are odd, aren’t they?” my guest continued. “Nearly every detail is wrong.”
Indeed, if Yurovsky’s Note and the statements of the other witnesses coincided, Ermakov’s story differed surprisingly in many inaccurate details.
“In the first place, he combines himself with Yurovsky, ascribing to himself everything the commandant did. But if we toss out that boastful invention, then the memoirs represent a garbled compilation of well-known facts. As soon as he gets to the details the mistakes begin. The car did not arrive at ten but at midnight old style—that is, about two in the morning new style. Ermakov wasn’t the only one with a Mauser, Yurovsky had one as well; Yurovsky read the resolution, there were only two chairs, and so on. The only truthful detail, evidently, is the story about turning on the truck’s engine. As for Nicholas’s last sentence, that is evidently another invention, Ermakov himself changed that last sentence of the tsar’s many times.”
At this point I related to my strange guest Ermakov’s story told around a Pioneer campfire about the tsar’s last sentence.
“Yes, sure, ‘They know not what they do’—those are words Peter Zakharovich could scarcely have thought up, indeed. For all his wild imagination! He was after all very far removed from those kinds of words. So that it is quite likely those were Nicholas’s last words, which suddenly surfaced in Ermakov’s memory. We’ll be coming back to that ‘surfaced.’ It’s hard to believe that a man who took an active part in the execution could not remember a single truthful detail. And was only capable of garbling well-known facts. You get the feeling he simply wasn’t there, as if he were telling it from others’ words. Or as if it were all very hazy for him, surfacing in spates. No, I understand he was there but”—he chuckled—“he was drunk!”
Of course—he was drunk! Why hadn’t I realized that before! To inflame himself, to inspire revolutionary fury? Or was it nerves—that he could not stand the anticipation, the wait for an answer from Moscow and for the truck? Or, what is more likely, was he drunk simply because that was payday, and many sharpshooters in the guard (like Proskuryakov and Stolov) had gotten drunk? The blatant, wild bestiality of Ermakov, who finished off the unfortunate girls with his bayonet in the gun smoke, was a continuation of that loutish, bestial “he was drunk.”
I told my guest about one other letter.
From a letter of Mstislav K. Afanasiev in Moscow:
“In the 1920s my father worked as an inspector for the Sapozhek Fire Department in Ryazan Province. The local priest told him a few details he had heard from one of the assassins of the Romanov family. Who this dying assassin was, he did not tell my father, but the dying man’s sins were forgiven. The dying man said that the leader of the murder had suggested they rape the grand duchesses. They were all drunk, and that day they had got their wages. They did not want to kill the women, however. ‘We’re not shooting womenfolk! Just the men!’ The chief assassin himself suffered from chronic alcoholism, and he was drunk that day. They shouted at him: ‘That’s not how you make a revolution!’”
Again my guest choked with laughter: “You mean my old friend Peter Zakharovich promised the girls? No, not to the riflemen, the priest simply misunderstood—to his own dashing lads. He promised them to his Upper Isetsk companions. Naturally, the man dying in the Ryazan town of Sapozhek was not one of the regicides, he was from Ermakov’s detachment. Ermakov’s men were present at the burial of the bodies, which is why they proudly counted themselves among the assassins. I’ve come across this before. As for the idea itself: promising rape before execution—that kind of thing happened in those days. Melgunov writes about it in The Red Terror. By the way, the Whites practiced it, too—that was nothing new. As far as Ermakov being drunk, I never doubted that. That was why Yurovsky had to go along to ‘watch over’ the interment of the bodies. Otherwise the commandant would never have dared to shadow Upper Isetsk Commissar Ermakov himself. That is why Yurovsky got into the truck—to transport the bodies. Ermakov probably drunkenly insisted on helping load the bodies too—after all, this was his job. I understood as much from my conversations with Peter Zakharovich, that he even climbed up onto the truck to direct the loading. Evidently he couldn’t get down, though, so he stayed in the back with the bodies.
“So that at a crucial moment in revolutionary history Peter Zakharovich was, to be blunt, drunk. Why then, though, in fighting with him for the honor of the execution, did Yurovsky never once take advantage of that circumstance? Or even so much as hint at it? Why did he spare the political prisoner’s honor? Or did something prevent him?
“I tried to feel out Ermakov himself many times, once I had begun guessing. But I never could find out anything precisely. I’m talking about the ride.”
Again I asked what he meant. I simply could not adapt to his mode of conversation.
“For a while I tried to calculate at what point that something might have happened to them both: the road, the truck with the bodies. That was when I began to question him carefully about the ride. To the simplest questions—well, let’s say I asked him, ‘Did the sharpshooters in the truck guard ride in the truck or on horseback?’ Even that question, though, he answered differently every time: he made out as if he couldn’t remember; the madman, he’d drunk away his memory.… Yes, he did like to drink. He kept everyone at the town beer stands entertained with stories about how he had killed the tsar. But at the beer stand, drunk as a skunk, not a word about the ride. Still, since he was very drunk.… Then I began my conversation again, and he, as always, contributed his part: how he killed them all. On his way out, he suddenly asked, ‘I can see you don’t believe they were all …?’ And he chuckled. Then he added: ‘They all perished, all of them!’ and suddenly gave me a bone-chilling look, like a wild animal.
“Before he died I paid him a visit. In my day, there was a revolutionary idea in the air that a Chekist should visit a dying man instead of a priest. In the end, even atheists need to unburden their souls, and who better to tell than the institution where one was supposed to speak only the truth? So that a special corps could have been created in the Cheka of Chekist priests. They could have been called something like Truthgatherers. It was in this capacity of ‘truth-gatherer’ that I chatted with Peter Zakharovich. But again nothing! By the way, have you ever tried to reconstruct that ride and the truck’s route?”
——
I had studied that route well. Investigator Sokolov had once attempted to reconstruct it from the tracks left by the terrible truck in the rain-wet earth and from the statements of witnesses.
The route the tsarist bodies took to their first grave turned out to have been described in detail in Commandant Yurovsky’s secret note.
Finally, two amateurs from Sverdlovsk studying the history of the execution sent me a map of the truck’s route.
In the summer of 1989 I went to Sverdlovsk and traversed on foot the entire path to that first grave of the family.
And all the statements coalesced.
THE TRUCK WITH THE BODIES
The Ipatiev house gates open, and the driver Sergei Lyukhanov steers the truck out into the street. It is three in the morning. The truck sets out down Ascension Avenue, then turns down Main Street, drives past the city limits by the racetrack, and then down the road toward the village of Koptyaki.
Passing by the Upper Isetsk factory, the truck then crosses the railroad tracks to Perm and enters a dense, mixed forest that stretches all the way to Koptyaki. About 3 versts (2 miles)
to the north of the Perm railway line, the truck crosses a second set of tracks—the mine-factory line—near station number 120.
These are wild places where the only structures are railway booths. Here the road forks: the truck turns toward the railroad crossing, toward booth 184, where there is a marshy, swampy place, and about 100 meters from the booth it gets stuck in a quagmire. Lyukhanov tries to get it out, but the motor overheats. Now he needs water for the engine and planks to lay over the swampy area in order to cross the marsh. Fortunately, nearby is the railroad crossing by booth 184. Lyukhanov gets out of the truck.
At this time the noise of the truck skidding in the swamp awakens the watchwoman in booth 184. There is a knock at the door; she opens it and sees Lyukhanov and the truck’s silhouette dark in the dawning sky.
The driver says his motor has overheated and asks her for some water. The watchwoman grumbles, at which Lyukhanov lashes out: “You’re sleeping here like god almighty, while we’ve been breaking our backs all night long.”
Through the open door, the watchwoman sees Red Guards around the truck and immediately begins pumping water readily for the engine. Then the Red Guards take some planks dumped around her booth and lay them over the swampy area, and the truck drives over the planks. Passing the booth, it enters the forest and drives 3 versts along the forest road to the Four Brothers, a landmark in the desolate terrain.
At this time near Koptyaki a picket of Red Guards is standing on a knoll, turning all inhabitants back to the village. Another picket is standing not far from booth 184. They let no one onto the road. They evidently meet the truck and lead it through the Four Brothers.
Yurovsky: “Having gone about 5 versts [3.3 miles] from the Upper Isetsk factory, we ran into an entire camp of about twenty-five men, some on horseback, some in droshkies, and so on. They were the workers (members of the Executive Committee Soviet) whom Ermakov had prepared. The first thing they shouted was: ‘Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?’ They thought the Romanovs’ execution would be left to them.”
The bloodthirsty, carousing, drunken crowd has been expecting the grand duchesses Ermakov had promised them, and now they are not being allowed to participate in the good deed of finishing off the girls, the boy, and the papa tsar. So they complain: “Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?”
Yurovsky: “Meanwhile, they started transferring the bodies to the droshkies, since we had to use carts. It was very awkward. They immediately started cleaning out their pockets—I had to threaten them with a firing squad then and there.”
So here too they try to rob the corpses as they move the bodies onto the carts.
Yurovsky: “Here we discovered that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia were wearing some kind of special corset. It was decided to strip the bodies naked, not there, but at the burial site.”
Not all the bodies fit on the droshkies, however. There are not enough good carts. The carts are falling apart. That is why the truck continues on toward the mine with some of the bodies.
Yurovsky: “It turned out, though, that no one knew where the mine shaft selected for this was. It was getting light. The com[mandant] sent riders to find the place, but no one could. It became clear that nothing had been prepared at all, there weren’t any shovels, etc.”
No one knows where to take them. Suddenly they have lost their destination. True, it is very hard to believe that Ermakov’s Upper Isetsk companions have lost what only the day before they knew so well. But Yurovsky penetrates this crude cunning: they are hoping he will get tired and leave. They want to be left alone with the bodies; they are dying to get a look at the “special corsets.”
Yurovsky waits patiently. They have to find the mine. And once again the awful procession sets out.
Riding ahead is Ermakov’s loyal assistant, one of the commanders of the Ermakov boys, the Kronstadt sailor Vaganov. The entire area is utterly remote and hidden from the Koptyaki road by tall forest. Here the procession of bodies encounters some Koptyaki peasants, whom Vaganov drives back. The sun is already rising when they ride up to the first turn off the road to the nameless mine Ermakov and Yurovsky have chosen. Here the truck breaks down.
Yurovsky: “Since the vehicle got stuck between two trees, it was abandoned and the procession continued on in the droshkies, the bodies covered with a cloth. They had gone sixteen and a half versts [n miles] from Ekaterinburg and stopped one and a half versts [1 mile] from Koptyaki. This was at six or seven in the morning.”
The truck breaks down at a pit that was once used for sorting ore and that forces the road very close to some large trees; Lyukhanov miscalculates and wrecks the truck.
They are two hundred paces from the mine. While some Red Army soldiers are dragging the truck out, others begin fashioning stretchers from young pines and pieces of the tarpaulin that covers the bodies. (The White Guard inquiry discovered planed, broken off branches along the road.)
Now the bodies move toward the mine—on carts and on stretchers.
Yurovsky: “In the forest we found an abandoned prospector’s mine (once mined for gold) three and a half arshins [8 feet] deep. There was an arshin of water in the mine shaft.”
Near the mine the bodies are laid out on the clayey ground, a level area right by the mine.
Yurovsky: “The commandant ordered the bodies undressed and a fire built so that everything could be burned. Riders were posted all around in order to drive away anyone who might come by. When they began undressing one of the girls, they saw a corset torn in place by bullets—and through the opening they saw diamonds. The spectators had obviously had their hearts set on.… The com[mandant] immediately decided to dismiss the entire group, keeping only a few sentries from the guard and five from the detachment. The rest dispersed.”
Next to the mine, on the clayey, rain-drenched ground, lies the tsar’s family as well as their servants and Dr. Botkin. The sun is already up when the bodies are undressed and the corsets with the sewn-in diamonds that had saved the unlucky girls for so long are removed from the grand duchesses. And the pearl belt, which had not saved the empress.
Yurovsky: “The detachment started undressing and burning them. A. F. turned out to be wearing an entire pearl belt made from several necklaces sewn into linen. The diamonds were immediately recorded, about half a pood [18 pounds] were collected.”
The clothing is burned right there on the fire. The naked corpses lie on the naked earth by the mine. The girls’ corset laces have made running knots along their bare bodies.
Yurovsky: “Each of the girls turned out to be wearing a picture of Rasputin around her neck with the text of his prayer sewn into an amulet. The ‘holy man’ was with them even after death.”
From the report of Kolchak’s Ministry of Justice:
“November 27, 1919, from N. Mirolyubov, Procurator of the Kazan Palace of Justice, regarding December 12, 1918, Omsk:
“According to Kukhtenkov’s testimony, after his military discharge he took a position as deputy leader of a workers’ club. On July 18–19, at about four in the morning, the chairman of the Upper Isetsk Executive Committee Soviet, Sergei Malyshkin, Military Commissar Ermakov, and prominent members of the party, Bolsheviks Alexander Kostousov, Vasily Levatnykh, Nikolai Partin, and Sergei Krivtsov, arrived at the club.
“At the club the abovementioned individuals met secretly.… Krivtsov asked the questions, and Levatnykh and Partin gave the answers. Levatnykh said: ‘When we arrived they were still warm. I felt the tsaritsa myself and she was warm.… Now it was no sin to die because I had felt the tsaritsa.’ [In the document the last sentence was crossed out in ink.] Then came the questions: How were the slain dressed, and were they pretty?… About their clothing Partin said that they were in civilian dress, that various jewels had been sewn into their clothing, and that none of them were beautiful: ‘There was no beauty to see in the dead.’”
——
Finally the bodies are covered with the tarpaulin. After much discussion it is decided to burn the
clothing and throw the bodies to the bottom of the nameless mine.
Yurovsky: “Once we had gathered together everything of value into sacks, everything else we found on the bodies was burned and the bodies themselves lowered into the mine shaft. In the process some of the valuables (someone’s brooch, Botkin’s false teeth) were dropped.”
The Last Tsar Page 48