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It is known from eyewitnesses that the Empress and one of her daughters barely had time to cross themselves: they too died instantly. There was wild shooting as the guards emptied their revolvers: according to Iurovskii, the bullets, ricocheting from the walls and floor, flew around the room like hail. The girls screamed. Struck by bullets, Alexis fell off the chair. Kharitonov “sat down and died.”
It was hard work. Iurovskii had assigned each executioner one victim and they were to aim straight at the heart. Still six of the victims—Alexis, three of the girls, Demidova, and Botkin—were alive when the salvos stopped. Alexis lay in a pool of blood, moaning: Iurovskii finished him off with two shots in the head. Demidova offered furious defense with her pillows, one of which had a metal box, but then she too went down, bayoneted to death. “When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through the corset,” Iurovskii complained. The whole “procedure,” as he calls it, took twenty minutes. Medvedev recalled the scene: “They had several gun wounds on various parts of their bodies; their faces were covered with blood, their clothes too were blood-soaked.”78
The shots were heard on the street even though the truck engine was running to muffle them. One of the witnesses who testified for Sokolov, a resident of Popov’s house across the street, where the external guard was billeted, recalled:
I can reconstruct well the night from the 16th to the 17th in my memory because that night I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I recall that around midnight I went into the yard and approached the shed. I felt unwell and stopped. A while later I heard distant volleys. There were some fifteen of them, followed by separate shots: there were three or four of those, but they did not come from rifles. It was after 2 a.m. The shots came from Ipatev’s house; they sounded muffled as if coming from a basement. After this, I quickly returned to my room, for I was afraid that the guards of the house where the ex-Emperor was held prisoner could see me from above. When I returned, my next-door neighbor asked: “Did you hear?” I answered: “I heard shots.” “Get it?” “Yes, I get it,” I said, and we fell silent.
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The executioners brought sheets from the upstairs rooms, and after stripping the corpses of valuables, which they pocketed, carried them, dripping with blood, on improvised stretchers across the lower floor to the truck waiting at the main gate. They spread a sheet of rough military cloth on the floor of the vehicle, piled the bodies on top of one another, and covered them with a sheet of similar cloth. Iurovskii demanded under threat of death the return of the stolen valuables: he confiscated a gold watch, a diamond cigarette case, and some other items. Then he left with the truck.
Iurovskii charged Medvedev with supervising the cleaning-up. Guards brought mops, pails of water, and sand with which to remove the bloodstains. One of them described the scene as follows:
The room was filled with something like a mist of gun-powder and smelled of gun-powder.… There were bullet holes on the walls and the floor. There were especially many bullets (not the bullets themselves but holes made by them) on one wall.… There were no bayonet marks anywhere on the walls. Where there were bullet holes on the walls and floor, around them was blood: on the walls there were splashes and stains, and on the floor, small puddles. There were also drops and pools of blood in all the other rooms which one had to cross to reach the courtyard of Ipatev’s house from the room with the bullet holes. There were similar bloodstains on the stones in the courtyard leading to the gate.
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A guard who entered Ipatev’s house the next day found it in complete disarray: clothing, books, and ikons lay scattered pell-mell on tables and floors, after they had been ransacked for hidden money and jewelry. The atmosphere was gloomy, the guards uncommunicative. He was told that the Chekists had refused to spend the rest of the night in their quarters on the lower floor and moved upstairs. The only living reminder of the previous residents was the Tsarevich’s spaniel, Joy, who somehow had been overlooked: he stood outside the door to the princesses’ bedroom, waiting to be let in. “I well remember,” one of the guards testified, “thinking to myself: you are waiting for nothing.”
For the time being, the external guards remained at their posts, creating the impression that nothing had changed at Ipatev’s. The purpose of the deception was to stage a mock escape attempt during an “evacuation” in the course of which the Imperial family would be said to have been killed. On July 19, the most important belongings of the Tsar and Alexandra, including their private papers, were loaded on a train and taken by Goloshchekin to Moscow.81
Aware that the Russian people assigned miraculous powers to the remains of martyrs, and anxious to prevent a cult of the Romanovs, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks went to great pains to destroy all trace of their bodies. The place that Iurovskii and his associate, Ermakov, had selected for the purpose were woods near the village Kiptiaki, 15 kilometers north of Ekaterinburg, an area full of swamps, peat bogs and abandoned mineshafts.
A few miles out of town, the truck carrying the bodies ran into a party of twenty-five mounted men with carts:
They were workers (members of the soviet, its executive committee and so on) assembled by Ermakov. They shouted: “Why did you bring them dead?” They thought they were to be entrusted with the execution of the Romanovs. They started to transfer the bodies to carts.… Right away they began to clean out [the victims’] pockets. Here too I had to threaten death by shooting and to post guards. It turned out that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia wore some kind of special corsets. It was decided to strip the bodies naked—not here, though, but where they were to be buried.
It was 6–7 a.m. when the party reached an abandoned gold mine nearly three meters deep. Iurovskii ordered the corpses undressed and burned.
When they began to undress one of the girls, they saw a corset partly torn by bullets: in the gash showed diamonds. The eyes of the fellows really lit up. [I] had to dismiss the whole band.… The detachment proceeded to strip and burn the bodies. Alexandra Fedorovna turned out to wear a pearl belt made of several necklaces sewn into linen. (Each girl carried on her neck an amulet with Rasputin’s picture and the text of his prayer.) The diamonds were collected; they weighed about half a pud [8 kilograms]…. Having placed all the valuables in satchels, other items found on the bodies were burned and the corpses themselves were lowered into the mine.
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What indignities were perpetrated on the bodies of the six women must be left to the reader’s imagination: suffice it to say that one of the guards who took part in this work later boasted that he could “die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s———.”83
It is this place, known to local peasants as “Four Brothers” for four large pines that once had grown here from a single stem, that Sokolov excavated for several months to unearth the Romanov remains. He located much material evidence—ikons, pendants, belt buckles, spectacles, and corset fastenings—all of which were identified as belonging to members of the Imperial family. A severed finger was also found, believed to be the Empress’s, probably hacked off to remove a tight ring.* A set of false teeth was identified as belonging to Dr. Botkin. The executioners had not bothered to cremate the dog, Jemmy, whose decomposed corpse was found in the shaft. They either missed or accidentally dropped a ten-carat diamond belonging to the Empress, a present from her husband, and the ex-tsar’s Ulm Cross, both left in the grass.
The remains of the victims, however, were nowhere to be found and this led for many years to conjectures that some or even most members of the Imperial family had survived the massacre. The mystery was cleared up only with the publication of Iurovskii’s memoir, from which it transpires that the bodies were buried at Four Brothers only temporarily.
Iurovskii thought the Four Brothers’ mine too shallow to conceal the grave. He returned to town to make inquiries, from which he learned of the existence of deeper mines on the road to Moscow. He soon returned with a quantity of kerosene and sulphuric acid. In the nig
ht of July 18, having closed neighboring roads, Iurovskii’s men, helped by a detachment of the Cheka, dug up the corpses and placed them on a truck. They proceeded to the Moscow road but on the way the truck got stuck in mud. The burial took place in a shallow grave nearby. Sulphuric acid was poured on the faces and bodies of the victims and the graveside covered with earth and brushwood. The place of burial remained secret until 1989.
While the murderers were concealing traces of their crime, another act of the Romanov tragedy was played out at Alapaevsk, 140 kilometers northeast of Ekaterinburg. Here, the Bolsheviks had kept in confinement since May 1918 several members of the Imperial clan: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna (the widow of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, murdered by terrorists in 1905, and sister of the ex-Empress, now a nun), Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei (Paley), and three sons of Grand Duke Constantine—Igor, Constantine, and Ivan. Attended by aides and domestics, they lived under house arrest, in a school building outside Alapaevsk guarded by Russians and Austrians.
On June 21—the very time when the prisoners in Ipatev’s house received the first communication from their alleged rescuers—the status of the Alapaevsk detainees changed. They were now put on a strict prison regime. Except for two retainers—a secretary named F. S. Remez and a nun—their companions were removed, valuables confiscated, and freedom of movement severely restricted. This was done on orders of Beloborodov, issued from Ekaterinburg, allegedly to prevent a repetition of the “escape” of Michael from Perm the week before.
On July 17, the day the Imperial family was murdered, the Alapaevsk prisoners were told they would be moved to a safer place. That evening the authorities staged a mock attack on the school building where the Romanovs were held by an armed band disguised as “White Guardists.” The prisoners were said to have taken advantage of the ensuing melee to escape. In reality, they were taken to a place called Verkhniaia Siniachikha, marched into the woods, severely beaten, and killed.
At 3:15 a.m., July 18, the Alapaevsk Soviet wired Ekaterinburg, which had staged the whole charade, that the Romanov prisoners had fled. Later that day Beloborodov cabled to Sverdlov in Moscow and Zinoviev and Uritskii in Petrograd:
Alapaevsk Executive Committee informed attack morning 18th unknown band on building where kept onetime Grand Dukes Igor Konstantinovich Konstantin Konstantinovich Ivan Konstantinovich Sergei Mikhailovich and Poley [Paley] stop despite guard resistance princes were abducted stop victims on both sides searches underway stop.
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Autopsies performed by the Whites revealed that all the victims, save for Grand Duke Sergei, who apparently resisted and was shot, were still alive when thrown into the mineshaft where they were found. The five victims and the nun companion of Grand Duchess Elizaveta perished from lack of air and water, possibly only days afterward. The postmortem revealed traces of earth in the mouth and stomach of Grand Duke Constantine.85
Even if there did not exist incontrovertible evidence that the murder of the Romanovs had been ordered in Moscow, one would have strongly suspected this to have been the case from the fact that the official news of the “execution” of Nicholas was issued not in Ekaterinburg, where the decision had allegedly been made, but in the capital. Indeed, the Ural Regional Soviet was not permitted to make a public announcement of the event until five days after it had happened, by which time it had already been publicized abroad.
Although the evidence is inconclusive, it appears that Moscow ordered Ekaterinburg to withhold the announcement because of the very sensitive issue of the fate of the Empress and children.
The problem was the Germans, whom the Bolsheviks at this time went to extreme lengths to cultivate. The Kaiser was a cousin of Nicholas and a godfather of the Tsarevich. Had he been so inclined, he could have demanded that the ex-Tsar and his family be turned over to Germany as part of the Brest-Litovsk peace settlement, a demand that the Bolsheviks would have been in no position to refuse. But he did nothing. When in early March the King of Denmark asked him to intercede on their behalf, the Kaiser responded that he could not offer asylum to the Imperial family because the Russians would interpret it as an attempt at a restoration of the monarchy.86 He also rejected the request of the Swedish King to help ease the plight of the Romanovs.87 The most likely explanation of this behavior was provided by Bothmer, who thought it was due to fear of the German left-wing parties.*
For all its indifference to the fate of Nicholas, Berlin displayed some concern for the safety of the Tsarina, who was of German origin, her daughters, and the several other German ladies at the Russian court, among them Elizaveta Fedorovna, Alexandra’s sister, whom they referred to collectively as the “German princesses.” Mirbach raised the issue with Karakhan and Radek on May 10, and reported as follows to Berlin:
Of course, without venturing to act as an advocate for the overthrown regime, I have nevertheless expressed to the commissars the expectation that the
German
princesses will be treated with all possible consideration and, in particular, that there will be no small chicaneries, let alone threats to their lives. Karakhan and Radek, who represented the indisposed Chicherin, received my remarks in a very forthcoming and understanding manner.
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On the morning of July 17, an official of the soviet in Ekaterinburg—almost certainly its chairman, Beloborodov—appears to have sent a cable to the Kremlin with a report on the events of the preceding night. The extremely detailed chronicle of Lenin’s life, which traces his public activities hour by hour, notes cryptically in an entry under that date: “Lenin receives (at 12 noon) a letter from Ekaterinburg and writes on the envelope: ‘Received. Lenin.’ ”89 Since at this time Ekaterinburg did not communicate with the Kremlin by post but by direct wire, it can be taken for granted that the document in question was not a letter but a telegram. Second, the chronicle in question normally provides the gist of those messages to Lenin which it lists. The omission in this case suggests that it concerned the murder of the Imperial family, a subject which Communist literature invariably disassociates from Lenin. Apparently the message was not specific enough about the fate of Nicholas’s wife and children, because the Kremlin telegraphed Ekaterinburg for clarification. Later that same day Beloborodov sent to Moscow a coded message which sounds as if it were a response to a query. Sokolov found a copy of this cable at the Ekaterinburg telegraph office. He was unable to break the code. This was accomplished only two years later in Paris by a Russian cryptographer. The document settled the question of the final fate of the Imperial family:
MOSCOW Kremlin Secretary of Council of People’s Commissars Gorbunov with return verification. Inform Sverdlov whole family suffered same fate as head officially family will perish during evacuation. Beloborodov.
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Beloborodov’s message reached Moscow that night. The following day, Sverdlov announced the news to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, carefully omitting to mention the death of Nicholas’s family. He spoke of the grave danger of the ex-Tsar falling into Czech hands and obtained from the Presidium formal approval of the actions of the Ural Regional Soviet.91 He did not bother to explain why the Imperial family had not been moved to Moscow in June or early July, when there had been ample time to do so.
Late that day, Sverdlov dropped in on a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars which was in progress in the Kremlin. An eyewitness describes the scene:
During the discussion of a project concerning public health, reported on by Comrade Semashko, Sverdlov entered and took his seat, a chair behind Ilich. Semashko finished. Sverdlov approached, bent over Ilich, and said something.
“Comrade Sverdlov asks for the floor to make an announcement.”
“I have to say,” Sverdlov began in his customary steady voice, “that we have received information that in Ekaterinburg, by decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot. Alexandra Fedorovna and her son are in reliable hands. Nichola
s wanted to escape. The Czechs were drawing near. The Presidium of the Executive Committee has given its approval.”
General silence.
“We shall now proceed to read the project, article by article,” Ilich suggested.
The reading, article by article, got underway, followed by a discussion of the project on statistics.
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It is difficult to know what to make of this charade, for surely the members of the Bolshevik cabinet knew the truth.* Such procedures seemed to satisfy the Bolshevik need for formal “correctness” with which to justify arbitrary actions.
Sverdlov next drafted an official statement which he gave to Izvestiia and Pravda for publication the following day, July 19. As translated by The Times of London, where it appeared on July 22, it read as follows:
At the first session of the Central Executive Committee elected by the Fifth Congress of the Councils a message was made public, received by direct wire from the Ural Regional Council, concerning the shooting of the ex-Tsar, Nicholas Romanoff.
Recently Ekaterinburg, the capital of the Red Ural, was seriously threatened by the approach of the Czecho-Slovak bands. At the same time a counterrevolutionary conspiracy was discovered, having for its object the wresting of the tyrant from the hands of the Council’s authority by armed force.
In view of this fact the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council decided to shoot the ex-Tsar, Nicholas Romanoff. This decision was carried out on July 16.
The wife and son of Romanoff have been sent to a place of security. Documents concerning the conspiracy which were discovered have been forwarded to Moscow by a special messenger.
The Russian Revolution Page 120