by Sam Eastland
JULY 4, 1918
The local guards are dismissed after they are accused of stealing from the Romanovs. Their place is taken by Cheka officer Yurovsky and a contingent of “Latvians” who are in fact mostly Hungarians, Germans, and Austrians. From now on, the only guards allowed inside the Ipatiev house belong to the Cheka. Guards are posted all over the house, even outside the bathrooms. The Romanovs live on the second floor. They are permitted to do their own cooking, relying on a diet of army rations and donations from the nuns of the Novotikvinsky Convent in Ekaterinburg.
JULY 16, 1918
With the White Army approaching the region of Ekaterinburg, Commissar Yurovsky receives a telegram ordering that the Romanovs be put to death, rather than risk having them be rescued by the White Army. This telegram was presumably sent by Lenin, although its origin is still unclear.
Yurovsky immediately orders his guards to hand in their issue Nagant revolvers. He then loads the weapons, returns them to their owners, and notifies them that the Romanovs are to be shot that night. Two of the Latvians refuse to shoot women and children in cold blood.
Yurovsky details one guard for every member of the Romanov family and their entourage, so that each man will be responsible for a single execution. The total number of guards is eleven, which corresponds to the number of people in the Romanov family, plus the Tsarina’s lady-in-waiting, Anna Demidova; a cook named Kharitonov; their physician Dr. Botkin; and a footman named Trupp, who are also to be shot.
JULY 17, 1918
At midnight Yurovsky wakes the Romanov family and orders them to get dressed. He tells them that there is disorder in the town. Approximately one hour later, the entourage is led down to the basement, which Yurovsky has chosen as the place of execution.
When the Romanovs reach the basement, the Tsarina Alexandra requests chairs, and three are brought in. The Tsarina sits in one of them, Alexei in another, and the Tsar himself in the third.
A truck that has been ordered for the purpose of transporting the dead after the executions does not show up until almost 2 A.M. When the truck arrives, Yurovsky and the guards descend to the basement and enter the room where the Romanovs have been waiting. It is so crowded that some of the guards are forced to remain standing in the doorway. Yurovsky informs the Tsar that he is to be executed.
According to Yurovsky, the Tsar’s reply is “What?” He then turns to speak to his son, Alexei. At this moment, Yurovsky shoots him in the head.
The guards then begin firing. Although Yurovsky has planned for an orderly sequence of events, the scene rapidly deteriorates. The women are screaming. Bullets ricochet off the walls and, it appears, off the women themselves. One guard is shot in the hand.
Having failed to kill the women, the guards then try to finish them off with bayonets, but are unsuccessful. Finally, the women are each shot in the head.
The last to die is Alexei, who is still sitting in his chair. Yurovsky shoots him several times at point-blank range.
The bodies are brought up into the courtyard of the Ipatiev house, carried on improvised stretchers made from blankets laid across harness beams removed from horse carriages. The dead are loaded into a truck and covered with a blanket.
At this point Yurovsky realizes that the guards have robbed the Romanovs of the valuables they were carrying in their pockets. He orders the items returned. Under threat of execution, the guards return the objects to Yurovsky. The truck drives towards an abandoned mine which has been chosen as the burial site for the Romanovs and their entourage. Before reaching its destination, however, the truck encounters a group of about twenty-five civilians who have been detailed by another member of the Cheka as a burial crew. The civilians are angry because they were expecting to execute the Romanovs themselves. They unload the bodies from the truck and immediately begin robbing the dead. Yurovsky threatens to shoot them unless they stop.
Yurovsky then realizes that no one in the group, including himself, knows exactly where the mine shaft is located. Nor has anyone thought to provide digging equipment for the burials.
Yurovsky loads the bodies back onto the truck and searches for another burial site. By dawn he has located another abandoned mine near the village of Koptyaki, which is about three hours’ walking distance from Ekaterinburg.
The bodies of the Romanovs are unloaded once again from the truck. They are stripped and a fire is prepared for burning the clothes prior to hiding the bodies in the mine. As the bodies are being undressed, Yurovsky discovers that the Romanovs are wearing waistcoats into which hundreds of diamonds have been sewn, which explains why the bullets failed to kill the Romanov women. The valuables are hidden and later transported to Moscow. After the clothing is burned, Yurovsky orders the bodies to be thrown into the mine shaft and then attempts to collapse the mine with hand grenades. The effort is only partially successful and Yurovsky realizes that he will have to re-inter the bodies somewhere else.
After reporting to his superiors, he is advised by a member of the Ural Soviet Committee that the bodies could be hidden in one of several deep mines located near the Moscow Highway, not far from the original burial place. The mines are filled with water, so Yurovsky decides to weight the bodies with stones before throwing them in. He also conceives of a backup plan to burn the bodies, then pour sulfuric acid on them and bury the remains in a pit.
On the evening of July 17, the bodies are exhumed, loaded onto carts, and transported towards the Moscow Highway mines.
JULY 18, 1918
The carts carrying the bodies break down on the way to the mine. Yurovsky orders a pit to be dug, but halfway through the digging, he is informed that the hole can be seen too easily from the road. Yurovsky abandons the pit and orders trucks to be requisitioned so that the group can continue to the deep mines on the Moscow Highway.
On this day, Pravda announces that the Tsar has been executed, but that the Tsarina Alexandra and his son, Alexei, have been spared and moved to a safe location. There is no mention of the Tsar’s four daughters or their household staff. The article implies that the executions were carried out on the initiative of the Ekaterinburg guards and not on orders from Moscow.
JULY 19, 1918
In the early hours, the trucks that have been requisitioned as replacements for the broken carts also break down on the rough roads.
Yurovsky orders another pit to be dug. In the meantime he burns the bodies.
The remains are thrown into the pit and acid is poured on top of them. The pit is filled in and railway sleepers—wooden beams set beneath the iron rails—are laid out over the burial site. The trucks are then wheeled back and forth over the sleepers to hide any evidence of burial.
By dawn, the work has been completed. Before departing the burial site, Yurovsky swears the participants to silence.
The bones remain hidden, in spite of an extensive search launched by the White Army when it overruns Ekaterinburg a few days later. The Whites are eventually forced out and control of Ekaterinburg returns to the Red Army.
In the months that follow, stories surface about the survival of the Tsarina and her daughters. Witnesses report seeing them on a train heading for the city of Perm. Another story involves the appearance of a young woman, one of the daughters, who is reported to have lived for a short while with a family in the woods before being handed over to the Cheka, who then killed her. A tailor named Heinrich Kleibenzetl claims to have seen the Princess Anastasia, badly wounded, being treated by his landlady in a house directly opposite the Ipatiev residence immediately after the shootings. An Austrian prisoner of war, Franz Svoboda, claims to have personally rescued Anastasia from the Ipatiev house.
1920
A woman attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. She is committed to a Dalldorf mental institution, where it is discovered that she has numerous wounds that resemble those made by bullets, and one that appears to have been made by the cruciform blade of a Russian Mosin-Nagant bayonet. The woman appe
ars to be suffering from amnesia and is referred to by the hospital staff as Fräulein Unbekannt (“Jane Doe”).
1921
Fräulein Unbekannt confides in one of the Dalldorf nurses, Thea Malinovsky, that she is in fact the Princess Anastasia. She claims to have been rescued from execution by a Russian soldier named Alexander Tschaikovsky. Together, they fled to Bucharest, where Tschaikovsky was killed in a fight.
1922
The woman claiming to be Anastasia is released from the asylum and taken in by Baron von Kleist, who believes her story.
In the years that follow, the woman is visited by numerous friends and relatives of the Romanovs, including the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Nicholas II, and Pierre Gilliard, private tutor of the Romanov children, both of whom declare her to be a fraud. Based on a dental mold of her teeth, the dentist of the Romanov family, Dr. Kostrizky, also declares the woman’s claim to be false. Not all of those who meet the woman believe her to be lying, though. In Germany, the nephew and niece of the Romanov family physician, Dr. Botkin, vigorously support her claim amid accusations that they are simply after the missing Romanov family fortune, by today’s standards said to be worth in excess of $190 million (approximately £90 million).
The legal battle that ensues becomes the longest-running case in German history.
A private detective, Martin Knopf, claims that based on his investigation, the woman is actually a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska and that the wounds on her body came from an explosion at the munitions plant where she had been employed.
Schanzkowska’s brother, Felix, is brought in to identify the woman. He immediately declares her to be his sister but then mysteriously refuses to sign an affidavit to that effect.
1929
The woman moves to New York, where she resides temporarily with Annie Jennings, a wealthy Manhattan socialite. Shortly afterwards, following several episodes of hysteria, she is once again committed to an asylum, this time the Four Winds Sanatorium.
1932
The woman, now known as Anna Anderson, returns to Germany.
1934
Yurovsky gives a detailed account of the executions and the events leading up to them at a Communist Party conference in Ekaterinburg.
1956
Release of the film Anastasia, starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner.
1968
At the age of seventy, Anna Anderson moves back to the United States and marries John Manahan, who believes her to be the Princess Anastasia. The couple live in Virginia.
1976
The remains of the Romanovs are located exactly where Yurovsky had said they would be, but the information is kept secret and the bodies are not exhumed.
1977
Future Russian president Boris Yeltsin, then Communist Party chief in Sverdlovsk (formerly known as Ekaterinburg), orders the Ipatiev house to be destroyed, noting that it has become a pilgrimage site.
1983
Anna Anderson is once again institutionalized. Within hours of her entering the psychiatric facility, Manahan kidnaps her and the two escape through rural Virginia.
FEBRUARY 12, 1984
Anna Anderson dies of pneumonia.
1991
The skeletons of the Romanovs are exhumed. Through DNA acquired from, among others, the Duke of Edinburgh (whose grandmother was the sister of Tsarina Alexandra), the remains are positively identified as those of Nicholas II, Alexandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia, as well as the three household servants and Dr. Botkin. Two bodies, those of Maria and Alexei, are missing.
1992
DNA testing of a tissue sample from Anna Anderson confirms that she is not the Princess Anastasia. The DNA sample is found to match that of Karl Maucher, great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska.
AUGUST 27, 2007
Remains believed to be those of Maria and Alexei are located in shallow graves not far from the other burial site.
APRIL 30, 2008
The Russian government announces that DNA testing has confirmed the identities of Alexei and Maria. On the same day, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the executions, more than 30,000 Russians visit the mine where the Romanovs were buried.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bulygin, Paul. The Murder of the Romanovs. London: Hutchinson, 1966.
Crawford, Rosemary and Donald. Michael and Natasha. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Erickson, Carolly. Alexandra: The Last Tsarina. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
Iroshnikov, Mikhail. The Sunset of the Romanov Dynasty. Moscow: Terra, 1992.
Mossolov, Alexander. At the Court of the Last Tsar. London: Methuen, 1935.
Steinberg, Mark, and Vladimir Khrustalëv. The Fall of the Romanovs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SAM EASTLAND lives in the United States and Great Britain. He is at work on the second Pekkala novel, which Bantam will publish in 2011.
www.inspectorpekkala.com
Eye of the Red Tsar is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Sam Eastland
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber & Faber, Ltd., London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eastland, Sam.
Eye of the Red Tsar : a novel of suspense / Sam Eastland.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90766-7
1. Political prisoners—Fiction. 2. Romanov, House of—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Russia—History—20th century—Fiction. 5. Kings and rulers—Succession—Fiction. 6. Russia (Federation)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.A85E94 2010
813′.6—dc22
2009052898
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
What Really Happened to the Romanovs?
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
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