Dr Botkin had already been hit twice in the abdomen when a bullet aimed at his legs had shattered his kneecaps, knocking him to the ground. From here he had lifted himself up on his right elbow and tried to reach towards the Tsar in one final, protective act. Seeing Botkin was still alive as he re-entered the room, Yurovsky took aim with his Mauser and shot him in the left temple as the doctor turned his head away in terror. His wish had been fulfilled: he had, at least, been permitted to die with his Emperor.
None of the Romanov girls – those pretty girls whom none of the guards had really wanted to have to kill – had died a quick or painless death. Maria had earlier been felled by a bullet in the thigh from Ermakov as she had pounded hysterically at the locked storeroom doors, and was now lying on the floor moaning. Her three sisters had suffered terribly, filling the room with their screams as they shrieked out for their mother, Olga and Tatiana doing what came instinctively, pressing themselves into each other’s arms in the darkest corner for protection. Realising that the two older girls were still alive, Ermakov lunged at them with the eight-inch bayonet he had stuffed in his belt, stabbing at their torsos. But, drunk and uncoordinated as he was, he had trouble penetrating the girls’ chests.
It was the cool and collected Yurovsky who strode though the smoke and shot Tatiana in the back of the head as she struggled to her feet to escape his approach, the brains and blood from her shattered skull showering her hysterical sister. A wild-eyed Ermakov shot Olga through the jaw as she tried to rise to her feet too and run; in her death throes she fell across Tatiana’s body.
Anastasia meanwhile had taken refuge near the wounded Maria. Realising that the two youngest girls were still cowering alive in the corner, Ermakov again resorted to his bayonet and stabbed Maria repeatedly in the torso, but his weapon would not go through and Yurovsky had to step over and deliver the coup de grâce with a bullet to her head. Anastasia suffered horribly too: Ermakov lunged at her like a wild animal, again attempting to pierce her chest with his bayonet as he rained blows down on the helpless girl, before finally taking his gun to her head.
Yurovsky and the other killers later claimed that the bullets from the Nagants ricocheted off the layers of jewels sewn into the girls’ bodices, which appear to have acted as primitive flak jackets; the bayonet thrusts failed to penetrate them too. It is more likely, however, that the force of the bullets, fired at random, simply propelled the jewels into the girls’ torsos, causing numerous flesh wounds, or shattered the pearls, of which there were a great many, on impact.
Incredibly, Yurovsky now saw that the Tsarevich was still alive (for, as it later turned out, the boy too was wearing an undergarment sewn with jewels). He could not comprehend the sick boy’s ‘extraordinary vitality’ and watched in disbelief as a shaky Nikulin spent the entire clip of bullets from his Browning on him.
But the fatally flawed blood of the haemophiliac boy still continued to pump round his body, keeping him alive when on so many occasions in the past it had nearly killed him. Yurovsky, having fired the last bullets from his Mauser, could do no better than Nikulin. Frenzied stabs by Ermakov with his bayonet again had little success at penetrating the layer of jewels surrounding the boy’s torso. In the end Yurovsky pulled a second gun, his Colt, from his belt to give the dying boy the coup de grâce as he lay on the chair which had fallen sideways on to the floor. Alexey’s body then finally slumped and rolled silently against that of his father.
Miraculously, the maid Demidova had somehow survived till now, wounded in the thigh, having fainted while those all around her were being put to death. When the shooting died down, she came to and staggered to her feet screaming, ‘Thank God, I am saved!’
Immediately Ermakov turned on her with his bayonet as Demidova found superhuman strength in the face of imminent death. She had been frightened of what the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg might do to them all; she had said so when she left Tobolsk. And now she resisted violently, turning this way and that, fending off bayonet thrusts with her reinforced cushions – the Tsaritsa’s jewels that she had so carefully protected now protecting her – until one of the assassins pulled them from her. In desperation Demidova made a final attempt to defend herself against the bayonet, hysterically swiping at it with her bare hands until she was finished off.
Yurovsky had seen plenty of death and mutilation during his time as a medical orderly in the war. He had a stronger stomach for the grisly spectacle of the basement room than most of the men there that night, and now the medical man in him took over as he went round checking pulses to make sure the victims were all dead. Ermakov meanwhile, his drunken brain reeling from this orgy of killing, staggered and stumbled and slipped as he crossed back and forth in the room, flailing at bodies with his bayonet, wreaking his personal hatred on the bullet-ridden bodies of the Tsar and Tsaritsa and cracking their rib cages.
It had taken 20 minutes of increasingly frenzied activity to kill the Romanovs and their servants. Professional marksmen given the same task would have taken 30 seconds. What should have been a quick, clean execution had turned into a bloodbath. Prior to the execution, Yurovsky had told the members of the squad who was to kill whom and to aim straight for the heart. That way there would be less blood and they would die quicker, he told them. Ermakov would later claim that they all knew exactly what they were supposed to do ‘so there’d be no mistake’; he was the only one designated two targets: the Tsaritsa and Dr Botkin. But once Yurovsky had fired the first shot at the Tsar, the men behind him opened fire in a fusillade of noise, smoke and fumes, making it impossible to be certain who exactly shot whom; later accounts are confused and contradict each other. Once the killers broke from the co-ordinated firing plan, the ratio of wild, inaccurate firing became ever greater, with the men taking pot shots at each other’s designated target. Many of the shots fired would have missed their targets altogether or only caused flesh rather than fatal wounds; none of them were absorbed by the wooden, plaster-covered walls as Yurovsky had hoped. With their victims panicking, screaming and crawling on the floor, the uncoordinated frenzy of the killers would have escalated. It is surprisingly easy for untrained marksmen to miss a target, even at relatively close range, if one takes into account a lack of expertise, compounded by the stress of waiting and too much to drink. Yurovsky later admitted to Nikulin’s ‘poor mastery of his weapon and his inevitable nerves’. Visibility would have been a major problem too: the level of smoke from the guns had rapidly fogged out the light from the one feeble electric bulb, making the room so murky that it was almost impossible for anyone to see what they were doing except by the light of momentary firearm flashes. In addition, with eight or nine killers crowded into the doorway in three rows, one shooting over the shoulder of the other, rather than spreading out across the room, many of those firing might well have been grazed by bullets or their aim skewed by the recoil from the arm of the man in front of them. Others got singed by the residue from the guns. All of the killers, within seconds of the adrenalin kicking in, would have been overtaken by that strange phenomenon of tunnel vision, when time goes into slow motion, and would not have been able to take account of the real situation in the room as a whole and act accordingly. Their victims too would have gone into a state of trauma, seeing only the barrels of the guns in front of them, until the classic fight-or-flight response took over.
Some of the old Nagants may well have jammed and proved useless because they had been loaded with the wrong bullets and the men using them were not used to handling them, thus explaining the relatively low number of bullets found here and at all three subsequent gravesites: about 57 in all out of a possible 70 bullets – roughly seven bullets per assassin from the mainly 0.32-calibre gun clips emptied that night, as subsequent investigations calculated. It has also been suggested that when the moment came, after taking revenge on Nicholas, most of the killers lost their nerve about killing the women and fired mainly at the men or above the heads of their victims, leaving the few tough nuts – Yurovsky,
Nikulin and Ermakov – to kill the others.
Up in the Romanovs’ quarters, the two dogs left behind had instinctively sensed danger when not allowed to accompany the family downstairs and had started whimpering the moment they were taken away. Once the shooting started down in the basement they would have barked in a frenzy of fear; and the sound of it would have been heard for some distance. Alexey Kabanov, who had left his machine-gun post in the attic to come down and take part in the killings, had run out on to the street to check the noise levels. He heard the dogs barking and also the sound of gunshots loud and clear despite the noise from the Fiat’s engine; many of the neighbours later testified to hearing the shooting too. Kabanov had hurried back in and told the men to stop firing and finish their victims off with their gun butts or bayonets to reduce the noise; they should kill the dogs too.
As the smoke and fumes cleared amidst the pile of twisted bodies, the full horror of the murder scene was finally revealed. All the dead were hideously distorted, their faces contorted in their final agony and covered in blood. The bodies all had numerous bullet wounds – some of them fatal through-and-through wounds to the soft tissue, caused by the powerful, large-calibre Mausers being fired at close range – as well as bones fractured or broken by gunshots. What remained of their smoke-charred clothes was covered in blood and tissue.
Wasting no time, Yurovsky ordered any valuables from the bodies to be collected up. The assassins slipped and slithered in the glutinous, coagulating mess as they searched among the pathetically blood-soaked handbags, shoes, pillows and slippers that had fallen from their victims and now lay tumbled in disarray across the floor, and gagged at the strange and terrible smell of death that hung in the room. As they turned the bodies over, they struggled with distorted limbs to strip the jewellery from them. The Tsaritsa’s gold bracelets that she never took off and which she had refused to yield to Yurovsky on the day of his arrival were yanked from her wrists, and those from her daughters too, and handed over. As Petr Voikov, who had been a witness to the killings (but who later claimed to have taken part), turned the body of one of the Grand Duchesses over, it gave out a terrible gurgling sound and blood gushed from its mouth. It was a sight to shock the hardest of stomachs. Greed inevitably prompted some of the men to pocket the valuables they found – a cigarette case here, a gold watch there – as they dragged the bodies to the doorway. Yurovsky soon got wind of this and called all the men together and threatened to shoot them if they did not take the items upstairs and leave them on his desk. Soon it was piled with ‘diamond brooches, pearl necklaces, wedding rings, diamond pins and gold watches’.
Commandant Yurovsky, the agent of proletarian vengeance, had now fulfilled his revolutionary duty and he was exhausted. He went upstairs to lie down in his office for a while and recover. It was now down to Petr Ermakov to play his essential part in ensuring the efficient disposal of the bodies in the forest. But Ermakov had turned up late, and drunk (like the other guards having boozed away most of his pay the day before), and remained so for hours afterwards, his eyes bloodshot and his hair dishevelled. Could he remember the location of the site in the dark, and was he in any fit state to carry out his task at this late hour? No one seems to have given a thought beforehand as to how they would carry 11 badly bleeding bodies out to the waiting Fiat, or cope with the large bulky body of Dr Botkin, which slipped to the floor as they tried to raise it. Worse came as they moved one of the daughter’s bodies – probably Anastasia’s – on to the stretcher, for she suddenly shrieked and sat up, covering her face with her hands. Ermakov grabbed Strekotin’s rifle and started trying to finish her off with its bayonet, but finding it impossible to penetrate her chest pulled another pistol from his belt and shot her.
Outside, the Fiat truck waited in the courtyard created between the two palisades at the north end of the house. This meant that the bodies had to be carried the long way round, through the interconnecting basement rooms from the southern end to the courtyard exit then out to the waiting Fiat. Despite the guards’ crude attempts to wrap them up in sheets brought from the Romanovs’ rooms upstairs, the bodies left a trail of blood across the basement and into the courtyard as the men carted them out on a crude stretcher improvised from the shafts of a sledge in the yard. Here the corpses were thrown in a jumble on to the wooden slats of the Fiat which had been covered with military cloth from the storeroom. At 6 feet by 10 in size, there was not much room for 11 bodies in the back of the truck, but someone had at least thought to put a layer of sawdust there to absorb the blood.
All this time, Goloshchekin, and other official witnesses had been hovering in the background; the guards later talked of men from the ‘local soviet’ or the Cheka being in attendance, but they weren’t sure who. Beloborodov, as head of the Ural Regional Soviet, almost certainly would have been close by, either in the house or down the road at the Cheka HQ at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. But there was also one other essential witness, on behalf of the centre in Moscow: Aleksandr Lisitsyn of the Cheka, designated to ensure the prompt dispatch to Sverdlov in Moscow soon after the executions of the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s politically valuable – and damning – diaries and letters. These would be published in Russia as soon as possible. Goloshchekin, despite being the mastermind with Sverdlov of the murders, does not appear to have had the stomach to stand and watch once the shooting started, but went outside and paced back and forth along the perimeter palisade of the house to see if anybody could hear what was going on. As the bodies were brought out to the truck he stooped down to take a look at that of the Tsar. He pondered for a moment, then turned to Kudrin, who was in charge of loading the bodies, and remarked, ‘So this is the end of the Romanov dynasty, is it . . .’ No, not yet; there was still much work to do in the forest before the Tsar and his family could be finally obliterated from history. Meanwhile, the last pathetic remnant of the Imperial Family’s life at the Ipatiev House was brought out by a guard on the end of a bayonet – the corpse of the little lapdog Jimmy – and tossed on to the pile of bodies in the back. ‘Dogs die a dog’s death’, hissed Goloshchekin as he stood by watching.
Yurovsky by now, however, was deeply concerned at the uncontrolled behaviour of the patently drunk and incompetent Ermakov. Earlier, knowing Yurovsky was sick with tuberculosis, Goloshchekin had suggested he need not go out to the forest to witness the ‘burial’. But Yurovsky knew he would have to go with Ermakov and the others to make sure the job was done properly and the bodies didn’t fall into the hands of the approaching Whites. As Ermakov, Kudrin and Vaganov climbed up into the truck, Yurovsky and Goloshchekin, leaving Nikulin in charge at the Ipatiev House, got into a nearby motor car to follow on behind them; Beloborodov and Voikov may well have accompanied them too. Three more guards rode shotgun in the open back of the truck with the bodies rolling round under their feet, as the Fiat struggled off down Voznesensky Lane, skirted the Iset Pond and then turned north-west out past the racetrack on the Verkh-Isetsk Road, heading for the Koptyaki Forest. But it was now seriously overloaded by as much as half a ton; it could barely pick up any speed and it was almost daylight.
When the shooting had finally stopped, the doors into the courtyard had been opened wide to let in the air as the men of the execution squad had stumbled out choking and coughing. One by one men from the external guard on duty that night had ventured in to view the murder scene, many of them reacting with profound horror and anger, others weeping. Several of the internal guard billeted downstairs who had heard the shootings but not taken part refused to sleep in the basement that night and had gone up to Yurovsky’s room to camp out there. Even Cheka men such as these were nauseated and shocked by what had happened.
Meanwhile, Medvedev went over to the Popov House to gather a contingent of guards to clean up the floors. There was so much blood now, thick, sticky and congealing in puddles, that as the Tsarevich’s tutor Gibbes was later told, they had to ‘sweep it away with brooms’. The air was heavy too with the smell of gunpowder as they struggle
d back and forth with buckets of cold water, washing and scrubbing as best they could with sand, sawdust having been thrown down first to help absorb the puddles of blood and tissue; no doubt a few stray bullets were swept up in it as they cleared the floor. But there were blood splashes up the walls too which the men went at ineffectually with wet rags. Hardly an efficient clean-up operation and one which today would have left a cornucopia of DNA-testable clues as to who had died in that cellar, thus circumventing 80 years of speculation and baseless claims of survival.
It took two hours for the Fiat truck to crawl the excruciatingly slow nine miles out to Koptyaki. The truck’s engine was noisy and its gears crunched and ground with every change, and Yurovsky was worried that it would draw attention to itself, even at this early hour. To make matters worse, he had now discovered that the incompetent Ermakov had only brought one shovel and no picks or other tools for the burials in the forest. ‘Perhaps someone else had brought something with them’, Ermakov ventured half-heartedly. It was now clear that the greatest moment in Russian revolutionary history was on the brink of being turned into farce.
After crossing the Perm railway line the heavily laden Fiat barely managed to negotiate a steep incline before finally getting on to the Koptyaki Road. At this point the going became even slower as the truck lurched on to what was really only a narrow, muddy rutted track leading through the forest. About half a mile further on, near crossing no. 185 on the line serving the Verkh-Isetsk works, a party of men with horses and light carts stood waiting for them across the road. They were Ermakov’s outriders, 25 fellow workers and local Bolshevik thugs from the 2nd Ekaterinburg Squadron, who had turned up to be part of the burial detachment and, they hoped, of the lynch mob. They had all been drinking and had been expecting to have a bit of fun with the Romanov girls, whom they had assumed would be brought out to the forest alive. An angry scene ensued when they discovered their victims were already corpses. An exhausted Yurovsky had great difficulty maintaining control of the situation, but eventually got the men to shift some of the bodies from the truck on to the carts, one of them later claiming that he had taken the opportunity to put his hand up the Tsaritsa’s skirt and finger her genitals; now, he said, he could ‘die in peace’. With the mounted detachment following in the rear, the Fiat laboriously continued its journey.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 28