But had they made the right decision about how to kill them all? The simple fact was that Yurovsky, despite being utterly ruthless about fulfilling his task, had no idea how best to kill 11 people, nor had he come to grips with the logistics of disposing efficiently with that many bodies. Executing the Tsar was one thing, but to kill the whole family and their servants and manage, as instructed, to keep quiet about the fact was quite another. And then there was the added pressure of ensuring that no remains would later be found by monarchists who would exploit the ignorance of the devout among the peasantry by using them as a ‘sacred miraculous relic’ to rally anti-Bolshevik support.
The preferred killing method of the Cheka was to take victims out into the forest and shoot them in the back of the head; Petr Voikov suggested that they do this in the forest beyond the Verkh-Isetsk plant and then weight the bodies with lumps of metal and drop them in Iset Pond. This method might work for single victims at a time, but trying to perform an efficient execution of 11 terrified people and then, as Yurovsky was forced to take into account, prevent those involved from raping the girls or searching the bodies for jewels, might provoke mayhem. Besides, there was always the chance of local peasants stumbling on the scene – even out at that remote spot. No, the execution had to be in situ, in the house. Yurovsky’s associates had suggested killing the family at night in their sleep – either by shooting or stabbing them. Someone even suggested putting them together in one room and throwing hand grenades in on them. But that could prove noisy and messy, and they might easily lose control of the situation. The only viable way was to get the family into a closely confined space from which they could not escape and where the noise levels from guns could be minimised. The basement rooms of the Ipatiev House were the only option. These were currently in use by the internal guards, and whichever room was selected would have to be cleared of its furniture. Yurovsky settled on one of the two rooms located furthest into the hillside into which the house had been built. It was presently occupied by the Ipatiev House machine-gun squad, led by Mikhail Kabanov, who were moved along with their beds into another room.
With the city being evacuated from the main rail station only half a mile away at the top of Voznesensky Prospekt, there was a lot of traffic passing back and forth in front of the house. The liquidation would have to be carried out late, after the traffic had died down. The hillside room would muffle the noise despite having a large arched window, which was barred and faced on to Voznesensky Lane; the double palisade would absorb some noise too. Out on the street the window and its light would not be visible. The room chosen was 25 by 21 feet, with a vaulted ceiling, large enough for 11 prisoners, Yurovsky thought; its stone walls were covered in plaster, with striped wallpaper on top of that, and should be a good buffer for any stray bullets. As too would be the wooden skirting boards. The plain wooden floor would be easy to wash clean after the event. One set of double doors opened into the room; the men would take aim at their victims from the doorway; another set of doors at the room’s opposite end led into a storeroom beyond stacked full of excess furniture, but was firmly locked. In another nearby room a guard was always on duty at a Colt machine gun. There was no way out but straight into the line of fire.
At around 11.30, as Yurovsky and Nikulin finalised the plans for their hoped-for efficient ‘liquidation’ and the destruction of the bodies afterwards by acid and fire in the clearing chosen for that purpose, the Romanov family had their morning walk. Remaining inside with her mother, Olga helped ‘arrange our medicines’ – the Romanovs’ code for sewing their jewels into their clothing, perhaps an indication that with the unsettled situation in Ekaterinburg the family anticipated being moved again soon and wanted to be sure the jewellery they had not given up to Yurovsky’s inspection – the far more valuable strings of pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires and other precious gems – should remain well hidden.
While the Romanovs were sitting down to lunch at one that afternoon, over at the Kremlin in Moscow Lenin, just back from Kuntsevo, was handed a telegram from the Danish newspaper the National Tidende. It was asking for his comments on the latest rumours circulating abroad that the Tsar was dead; was there any truth in the story? Lenin drafted a reply denying the rumours; it was all, he asserted, ‘a lie of the capitalist press’ – a typical piece of Bolshevik disinformation that would be issued by Moscow over the coming weeks and months. In the event the telegram was not sent – a connection through to Copenhagen could not be made – but the evidence remains in the Russian archives.
In the afternoon Tatiana stayed indoors and read from the prophets Amos and Obadiah as Alexandra sat making lace. At around 3 p.m., the Tsar, Olga, Anastasia, Maria and Alexey went outside into the scrubby little Ipatiev House garden for what was to be the last time. One of the guards, Mikhail Letemin, saw them coming back from their walk at around four. He did not notice ‘anything out of the ordinary with them’, so he later recalled. As the family re-entered the house Yurovsky and Beloborodov were once again leaving it by car. A local villager saw the car out in the Koptyaki Forest at about five that afternoon. He and other peasants from the Verkhistskavo Mill had been out scything hay along the Koptyaki Road in the late summer sunshine. There were other men with Yurovsky but the man did not know who and he couldn’t recall any other details, for the men in the car ordered the villagers away from the area. Another local boy encountered one of the Ipatiev House internal guard in the forest that afternoon, a man called Vaganov as he later identified him, (this was the sailor Stepan Vaganov, a sidekick of Petr Ermakov and commander of the machine-gunners of the internal guard). The boy was also ordered to turn back and go home. Yes, there were men out in the forest, he later recalled, and several cars – as many as 10 of them. He had in fact been witness to a final on-site review by the bigwigs of the Ural Regional Soviet and the Ekaterinburg Cheka in preparation for the liquidation to come.
Back at the Ipatiev House two of the external guards, Filipp Proskuryakov and Igor Stolov, who like the others had received their pay the day before, turned up for their evening shift at five, having spent the afternoon drinking at the house of a local policeman. Seeing that they were both roaring drunk and unfit for duty, commander of the guard Medvedev manhandled them into the bath house of the Popov House across the street and locked them in to sober up.
On returning to Ekaterinburg from their inspection in the forest, the Central Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet held one final, heated meeting at the Amerikanskaya Hotel, at which Yurovsky argued again, as he had earlier in the day to Goloshchekin, that he saw no reason to kill the kitchen boy Sednev, whom he wanted to send away from the house before the execution took place. During the meeting a report from the Front was discussed; the prognosis was gloomy, said Goloshchekin: hastily assembled Red Army detachments could not contend with the better-equipped Czechs and were retreating in all directions. Ekaterinburg would fall within the next three days. A ‘painful silence’ followed, after which it was agreed that the executions could not be put off any longer. Moscow should be contacted for the final go-ahead. A coded telegram was therefore sent by Goloshchekin and Safarov at around six that evening, addressed to Lenin in Moscow. All was ready; they were now awaiting the final signal that operation trubochist could go ahead.
But the lines were down and they could not get a direct connection. There was nothing for it but to send the telegram on the direct line to Petrograd instead – addressed to Grigory Zinoviev, head of the city soviet based at the Smolny Institute, and ask him to forward it on to Sverdlov with a copy to Lenin: ‘Let Moscow know that for military reasons the trial agreed upon with Filipp [Goloshchekin] cannot be put off; we cannot wait’, the telegraph read, the word ‘trial’ being code for the already agreed execution. ‘If your opinion differs then immediately notify. Goloshchekin, Safarov.’ Zinoviev duly forwarded the telegraph to Moscow, noting that he had done so at 5.50 p.m. Petrograd time (it was now 6.20 in Moscow and 7.50 in Ekaterinburg). The cable was not however re
ceived in Moscow until 9.22 that evening, the lines being yet again disrupted. A reply would have taken at least a couple of hours to get through to Ekaterinburg, but there is no documentary record of an answer from Moscow arriving in the city, although Yurovsky later insisted that an order from the CEC in Moscow to go ahead had been passed on to him by Goloshchekin at around seven that evening when he arrived at the Ipatiev House. What Yurovsky must in fact have been referring to was the previously drafted decree for the execution which Goloshchekin had brought back with him from Moscow, ready to pass on at the appropriate moment and to which he had now added the date and his signature.
In the late 1960s a former member of the Kremlin guard, Aleksey Akimov, claimed that Sverdlov personally instructed him to take a telegram to the telegraph office confirming the CEC’s approval of the executions but with strict instructions that both the form on which it was written and the telegraph tape should be brought back by him immediately it had been sent. Because of the breakdown in the telegraph lines, it would have had to be sent via Petrograd outbound and then via Perm on the return route. At Perm, Goloshchekin already had his own men in control; all it would have needed was for them to transmit the final word from Moscow to Ekaterinburg either on the phone or via a telephonogram with the coded response, which might well have been very short, if not simply the code word trubochist itself.
Whether a telegram from Lenin in Moscow did actually get through and was later destroyed, the fact was that the Ekaterinburgers had already, at the beginning of July, been given the leader’s agreement in principle to the execution; this latest message to the centre had been a final, perhaps nervous move to inform Lenin that they judged the time right to go ahead and wished for his final sanction. What they were about to do, Yurovsky later asserted, was, after all, to resolve a question ‘of great political importance’ and he was anxious that they do so ‘skilfully’. The question remains, however: did the Ekaterinburgers have approval to kill all the family? The evidence is equivocal and one can only go by the political logic that drove Lenin and Sverdlov, the men at the centre. One might also ask whether the Ekaterinburgers, now extremely anxious to carry out the liquidation, deliberately sent their final telegram asking for approval too late that day, in the knowledge that it would not get to Moscow in time for the executions to be stopped. If the direct lines were down, the telegram would have had to go the route: Ekaterinburg–Petrograd–Moscow and then back Moscow–Perm–Ekaterinburg, and there was a two-hour time difference between the two cities. Either way, Moscow would not complain – for it was about to be saved from direct association with a highly damning political act.
At 6.10, the meeting at the Amerikanskaya broke up and Yurovsky returned to the Ipatiev House. All seemed as normal until, while the Romanovs were having dinner, something unexpected and greatly disconcerting for them happened. Yurovsky came into the sitting room to inform them that the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev should get his things together – he was leaving the house to go and see his Uncle Ivan, who had returned to the city asking to see him (Ivan was of course dead, murdered by the Bolsheviks). The family were very upset – Leonid was the fifth member of their entourage to be taken away, and none of the others had yet been returned to them. Dr Botkin as the family’s spokesman went to Yurovsky’s office, followed by Tatiana, who was greatly distressed, asking where Leonid had been sent, why and for how long – Alexey was already missing him terribly; it would make things so much harder for him without his company. They were assured by Yurovsky that he would be back soon. The family seemed to accept this, albeit reluctantly, so the guards later claimed, but Alexandra did not trust Yurovsky. In her diary entry that night she wondered ‘whether its [sic] true & we shall see the boy back again!’ Leonid Sednev had in fact been taken across the road to the Popov House, where he was kept that night, in earshot of what took place.
It was now 8 p.m. and the curfew was sounding over Ekaterinburg, a city now officially under a state of siege. British assistant consul Arthur Thomas, on his way back to the consulate on foot past the Ipatiev House, had been stopped by a very nervous sentry who had ordered him to the other side of the street and fired at him when he didn’t move quickly enough. No one was being allowed to walk past the house; later both Thomas and Consul Preston noticed that machine guns had been placed in position on Voznesensky Square across the road from the house as well as on the roof. Local inhabitants stayed indoors, sensing something ominous was afoot. Inside the house Yurovsky was finalising arrangements for the executions. All now depended on the truck; earlier that afternoon he had ordered his chauffeur Lyukhanov– a man who had got his plum job at the House of Special Purpose thanks to his brother-in-law Aleksandr Avdeev’s influence – to put in an order with the Ekaterinburg Military Garage for a truck to take the bodies away, bringing with it rolls of canvas to wrap them in. The intention was to have it parked as close to the basement entrance as possible, within the double palisade, with its engine running to mask the noise of gunshots. If the engine backfired then so much the better. As the regular change of guard came at 10 p.m. and new men arrived, the Romanovs sat upstairs reading and playing cards. Nicholas and Alexandra were enjoying a final game of bezique as the men who were to be their executioners gathered in the basement rooms downstairs.
Earlier that evening, between seven and eight, when Medvedev had just come on duty, Yurovsky had ordered him to collect all the handguns from the exterior guards. ‘We must shoot them all tonight’, so Yurovsky told him. The guns issued to the guards were old tsarist Nagants, standard issue in the Imperial Army since 1895. But they were unlikely to all have been needed for the execution. As Cheka men, the new internal guards who had been brought in especially for the job would have had their own Nagants. Yurovsky, however, was taking no chances: best to have as many weapons as possible in case any of them jammed. In the end, some of the killers had two guns; a few others were handed round to the witnesses from the Central Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet, Goloshchekin and possibly Beloborodov and Safarov – just in case of trouble. Another reason for the confiscation may be that Yurovsky was so anxious about the operation that he feared some of the men of the external guard – men who had once worked inside the house and had got to know the family well, and whose reliability he had already openly doubted in a meeting at the Amerikanskaya – might prove to have last-minute sympathies for the family and try to intercede. He wasn’t taking any chances and told Medvedev that although the external guards should be forewarned about the shootings, which would come after midnight, they shouldn’t be told until the latest possible moment.
There was no question of using rifles for the execution – these would have made far too much noise and would have been impossible to conceal from the family in the moments before their deaths. The selection of 14 guns Yurovsky and Medvedev now chose from their entire arsenal to use that night was comprised of two Browning pistols, two American Colts and two 7.65 Mausers. The Mausers, carried by Yurovsky (who also had a Colt) and Ermakov, were relatively new models, released in 1914 and by far the most powerful of all the guns, their clips holding 10 bullets each, as opposed to the seven of the others. The remaining weapons were revolvers: one Smith & Wesson, and seven Nagants. The Belgian-made Nagants operated on the old powder system, the less acrid, smokeless nitro-powder only now being phased in for these weapons. The old black gunpowder would produce a good deal of smoke and fumes. But Yurovsky still had to decide the all-important question: who was going to kill whom. He wanted to have one killer per victim – in a moment of false humanity, the killers would later claim that they had wanted the deaths to be simultaneous so that no member of the family or their servants should see the others die. Yurovsky had originally designated 11 men to take part: himself, his assistant Nikulin, Ermakov Mikhail Kudrin, Pavel Medvedev and six others drawn from the new Cheka guards collectively labelled as ‘Letts’. These latter men remain shadowy figures, their identities the subject of much discussion and controversy, among
both the men who took part themselves that night and historians ever since. One thing at least is known: at this late hour Yurovsky faced a problem. At least two of the ‘Letts’ – a Hungarian POW named Andras Verhas, and Adolf Lepa, himself in charge of the Lett contingent – had had cold feet. They would not shoot the girls, they said. Yurovsky sent them over to the Popov House; he could not risk men in the execution squad failing ‘at that important moment in their revolutionary duty’. The execution squad was now down to probably eight or nine men.
Down in the summer gardens by Iset Pond at the bottom of Voznesensky Lane the performance of Autumn Violins had finished and the streets were quiet when, after ten, the family, Dr Botkin and the servants gathered together for their usual family prayers and then retired to bed. It was a mild summer’s night and the sun was only just going down. It was still warm outside – 15 degrees, so Alexandra noted punctiliously. It was the final page of her diary.
In the sitting room, Dr Botkin did not immediately go to bed; he sat down to try to finish his letter to Sasha. In the distance from time to time came the sound of artillery fire on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Czechs were now tantalisingly near, only 20 miles away on the line south to Chelyabinsk. All was quiet on the first floor of the Ipatiev House as the lights went out in the family’s rooms. But in the commandant’s office next door Yurovsky was in a state of escalating panic as the lights continued to blaze, men came and went and the telephone rang. Petr Ermakov, who the previous day had taken several cans of petrol out to the site in the forest as well as two buckets of sulphuric acid and a truckload of firewood, and who seemed at the time to have matters in hand, had still not turned up. Two of this evening’s guard had reported for duty drunk and were out of action; two of his execution squad had bottled out, and he still hadn’t given proper thought as to how the bodies would be carried out of the house and disposed on the lorry, which had been ordered to arrive at midnight.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 26