Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  A mile or so further on, not far from the Gorno-Uralsk railway line, the truck ground to a halt in an area of marshy ground as it entered the dense forest; Yurovsky ordered the men to unload all the corpses into the long wet grass so that they could try and get the truck moving again, but to no avail. Lyukhanov repeatedly gunned the engine but it rapidly overheated and he was forced to go and rouse the railway guard from her booth, near Grade Crossing 184, to get some water to cool it down. She indicated a pile of old wooden railway ties lying nearby and the men hauled these over to the Fiat and placed them across the muddy road to form a bridge. Slipping and sliding in their attempts to gain purchase in the mud, the men gave the truck an almighty push and managed to get it moving again, but the pot-holed road beyond was boggy with the heavy rainstorms of summer. When Ermakov directed Lyukhanov to turn off the road along an overgrown track in the forest surrounded by tall nettles and weeds, the vehicle lurched sideways and got stuck between two trees. They would have to give up on the truck; all of the bodies would have to be unloaded on to the carts that Ermakov’s men had brought in the rear and taken on to the site by them, leaving the Fiat to be extricated later. Yurovsky placed his men on guard at the truck, under instructions to turn back any people who might pass that way, and borrowed a couple of horses from Ermakov’s detachment in order to ride on ahead with Ermakov to ascertain the exact location of the burial site. Ermakov’s brain was still addled by drink as he struggled to remember the precise location of the Four Brothers, somewhere amidst the tall forest that loomed over them on all sides in the dark. They had no luck, and another group of men rode off up the trail to try to find the mineshaft. Eventually, with all the bodies finally hauled from the truck and on to the rickety and inadequate carts, the ghoulish funeral cortege set off through the great watching forest to what everyone fervently hoped would be the Romanovs’ last resting place.

  The sun was up by the time the long line of carts came in sight of the mineshaft at Four Brothers. A group of official witnesses from the Cheka and Ural Regional Soviet, as well as an unidentified ‘man from Moscow with a black beard’, as some witnesses later testified, arrived soon after by car. But as the cortege came closer to the mine, Yurovsky now spotted another problem: a group of local peasants were out in the very meadow they were heading for, sitting by a fire, having camped out overnight to mow the hay along the Koptyaki Road. How on earth could they hide the bodies in secret now? Farce had turned to catastrophe. It was market day in Ekaterinburg and the peasants from nearby Koptyaki village would be heading into town to sell their fish, passing right by the meadow as the men laboured at their nefarious task. Yurovsky sent the peasants who had come to mow packing and they headed back to Koptyaki with a look of terror in their eyes. He did his best to cordon the area off, sending Ermakov’s riders ahead to the village to warn its inhabitants not to venture forth, under dire warnings that the Czech legions were now very close.

  With the sun coming up over the treetops and another warm July day beckoning, Yurovsky shared with his hungry men the hardboiled eggs brought the previous day by the nuns. It was all the food they were going to get that day. The men ate hastily, scattering the eggshells all around and warming themselves at the fire left by the peasants – nights in the Siberian forest are cold, even in summer. Yurovsky did not want Ermakov’s rapacious cronies from the Ekaterinburg Squadron to be part of what happened next; they’d cause too much trouble trying to lay hands on the valuables that he knew were concealed about the bodies, and he ordered them back to the city. His own men from the Ipatiev House now unloaded the bodies, and began stripping and searching them. Their clothing was piled up and burned on two huge fires which belched smoke up into the blue of the early morning sky.

  It was only now that Yurovsky finally discovered what he had long suspected. There were a great number of jewels hidden in three of the girls’ camisoles as well as disguised under cloth buttons and fastenings; even the Tsarevich wore a jewel-filled undergarment, and his forage cap had gemstones sewn into it too. (Maria interestingly did not wear one, further confirmation, so Yurovsky thought, that the family had ceased to trust her ever since she had become too friendly with one of the guards back in May.) It was an extraordinary sight that chilly morning to see diamonds – one of eight carats and worth a fortune – as well as other precious stones spilling out on to the boggy earth from the Romanovs’ torn and blood-soaked clothes. The men snatched at them with their dirty hands, pulling the clothes apart and manhandling the bodies as they ripped at them, searching frantically for anything they could find, and missing many in the process (these would be found first by curious peasants searching the site, the remainder by subsequent investigators). Much to everyone’s astonishment, the Tsaritsa’s corpse yielded up several rows of fine large pearls – her favourite jewellery – concealed inside a cloth belt around her waist, as well as a great thick spiral of gold wire wrapped tight around her upper arm. More touchingly, each of the children wore round their necks an amulet containing Rasputin’s picture and the text of a prayer he had given them. It was hard to resist the temptation to pocket a souvenir or two, but Yurovsky’s eagle eyes were on them and he took an inventory of the jewellery as the men did their work.

  The corpses, many of them with hideous, gaping head wounds and broken and dislocated limbs, were now horribly mangled and ugly, their hair matted with caked blood. It was almost impossible to associate these wretched twisted bodies with the five charming, vibrant children of the official publicity. Not even the girls were pretty any more, recalled one of the men later; ‘there was no beauty to see in the dead’. Then the moment came to lower the corpses of the Imperial Family and their servants down into the mine-working, one on top of the other. In death at last there was no precedence for the proud Tsaritsa. It was only then that Yurovsky discovered to his horror that the mine was far too shallow – only about nine feet deep – and that the pool of water at the bottom in which he expected the corpses to be submerged barely covered them. The smell of dissolving flesh was awful as they sprinkled acid over the tangle of bodies at the bottom of the shaft, after which Yurovsky threw down a couple of hand grenades in hopes this would make it collapse over the remains. But it didn’t work – the sides were too well shored up with timber – so they covered the opening with loose earth and branches from nearby trees. But fragments of the bodies would have been blown off and scattered for later investigators to find or animals of the forest to take away, thus explaining the absence of many of the smaller bones.

  It was all pointless; the suspicions of the locals had already been alerted and the site, rutted with cart tracks as it now was and trampled by men’s boots and horses’ hooves, would quickly be found. Worse, there was no contingency plan. Yurovsky knew he would have to start all over again with his ‘troublesome corpses’; he and his men would have to come back, better equipped with picks and spades and shovels and ropes, and haul the bodies back out of the mineshaft and take them somewhere else. Leaving his own men to watch uneasily over the site and keep the Verkh-Isetsk men, still eager to loot what they could, well away, Yurovsky headed back to Ekaterinburg. But his men were exhausted; most of them slept a sodden, fitful sleep in the long damp grass that day, while others ventured into the nearby village to get milk.

  That same day back at the Ipatiev House the remaining guards, under the supervision of Beloborodov and Nikulin, had busied themselves overseeing the ransacking of the Romanov quarters and collecting up all the family’s personal property – icons, diaries, letters, photographs, jewellery, clothes, shoes, fine underwear – the most valuable items being piled up on the desk in Yurovsky’s office, whilst things considered inconsequential and of no value were stuffed into the stoves and burnt. Everything was to be packed into the Romanovs’ own trunks from the outbuilding and taken off to Ekaterinburg railway station for dispatch to Moscow under escort by Bolshevik commissars; Cheka man Lisitsyn was already on his way back to Moscow with the diaries and letters. As the men went
about their work, the local nuns arrived as usual at the front gates with a quart of milk for the family. They knocked and they stood and they waited. But nobody came. They asked the guards where the commandant was. ‘Go away’, the guards said, ‘and don’t bring any more.’

  It was not long before Thomas Preston got wind of events in the Ipatiev House down the road from his consulate, though not their full and horrific details. That morning, as the men were still out in the forest burying the Romanovs, he hurried to the local telegraph office on the corner of Voznesensky and Glavny Prospekts to file ‘probably the briefest and certainly the most dramatic report of my career’ to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in England. His text read simply: ‘The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night.’ As he stood in line in the telegraph office a short, stumpy man approached him and snatched it from his hand. It was Filipp Goloshchekin, who proceeded to strike out the words of Preston’s text, rewriting on the paper in red pencil, ‘The hangman Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot today – a fate he richly deserved.’ Preston recalled that he had no alternative but to let Goloshchekin’s version go, though it is unlikely the telegraph ever reached London. It was the British secret agent Bruce Lockhart who was the first to hear the ‘official intimation’ of the Tsar’s death that evening in Moscow from a commissar at the Soviet Foreign Office, and to be, as he believed, ‘the first person to convey the news to the outside world’.

  At the Ural Regional Soviet the members of the presidium had sat down at midday to compose their first, all-important communiqué to Moscow on the successful completion of their historic task; a copy was handed to the editor of the local paper, the Uralskiy Rabochiy, for publication as soon as the centre had vetted it. At 2 p.m. a formal telegram was sent to Lenin and Sverdlov informing them that in view of the proximity of the Czechs to Ekaterinburg and their discovery of a ‘serious White Guard plot’ to abduct the Tsar and his family (they had the documents to prove it – the officer letters to which the family had responded), ‘Nicholas Romanov was shot on the night of the sixteenth of July by decree of the Presidium of the Regional Soviet’. His wife and children, it added ‘have been evacuated to a safe place’. The telegram asked the centre for approval for this statement to be issued by the URS in Ekaterinburg to the public and the press, adhering to the strict instructions given them by Moscow that there should be no mention of the fate of the family. At 9 p.m. a reassuring, unofficial communiqué followed, a short coded telegram from Beloborodov, addressed to the secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars, Nikolay Gorbunov (the Ekaterinburgers were conscious that nothing relating to the Tsar’s death should be directly communicated to Lenin): ‘Inform Sverdlov that the entire family suffered the same fate as its head.’ ‘Officially’, Ekaterinburg now assured Moscow, ‘the family will die during evacuation’ from the city, their deaths becoming a meaningless statistic as just six among many casualties of the escalating civil war. Lenin and Sverdlov’s hands were clean. The Revolution was off the hook. It was the beginning of a long and elaborate lie.

  After Yurovsky trailed back into Ekaterinburg with his sack full of the valuables – 18lb of diamonds alone – found on the bodies out at the Four Brothers, his first duty had been to report back to Beloborodov and Goloshchekin at an emergency meeting of the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet. No longer trusting to the bleary-eyed Ermakov’s inflated claims that he knew his fiefdom of the Koptyaki Forest well, Yurovsky now decided with Goloshchekin that the bodies would first be disfigured by acid and burnt as much as possible before being reburied. Chutskaev from the city soviet told Yurovsky that he had heard of some deeper copper mines about three miles further up the old Moscow–Siberia Trakt (the road along which exiles had tramped) west of the city that might prove a more suitable location for the 11 corpses. The area was remote and swampy and a grave there less likely to be discovered. No one, however, went into the logistics of how they would reduce 11 bodies to ash by fire; nor did they have the least inkling that do so was a virtual impossibility.

  It was eight in the evening of the 17th when Yurovsky, having been out on horseback to inspect the new site with a fellow Chekist, Pavlushin, who was to help him in the burning of the bodies, got back to Ekaterinburg. En route their horses had stumbled and fallen on muddy ground, and Yurovsky had injured his leg. It was an hour before he managed to haul himself back on his horse again. He reported the latest developments to the Cheka at the Amerikanskaya Hotel and then went off to order additional trucks to be sent out to Koptyaki, whilst assigning Petr Voikov to obtain barrels of petrol and kerosene, and more jars of sulphuric acid, 15 gallons in all, and plenty of dry firewood. He also requisitioned several horse-drawn carts from the local prison to be sent out, driven by Cheka men, to assist in the removal of the bodies to the new site. Then Pavlushin announced that he couldn’t come with him; he too had badly hurt his leg in the fall. Unable to get an official car to take him, Yurovsky requisitioned a horse and cart and set off back to the Four Brothers the slow way. It was now 12.30 a.m. on 18 July.

  16

  ‘The World Will Never Know What

  We Did to Them’

  THURSDAY 18 JULY 1918

  When he arrived back in the Koptyaki Forest at about four in the morning of the 18th, Yurovsky discovered that a detachment of new men had gone ahead of him to offer their revolutionary services to the task in hand. These had been sent out from the Kusvinsky works in the city by local Bolshevik commissars; Yurovsky didn’t like these men and didn’t want them muscling in on his operation. He delegated some of them to watch the road and sent others to the village to warn the locals that anyone from the surrounding area trying to get through would be shot.

  In the shadows of the still dark forest, by the light of flickering torches, 10 dishevelled men, like nineteenth-century grave robbers, had begun the laborious process of retrieving the bodies from the bottom of the flooded mine. Goloshchekin and some other Cheka men, including Isay Rodzinsky, had driven out by motor car to make sure the job was done properly this time. Vladimir Sunegin from the Kusvinsky detachment had been selected for the gruesome task of climbing down into the cold, flooded mineshaft to ferret out the bodies one by one. Groping around in the darkness in icy water up to his waist, he was encountering difficulties untangling the corpses in the dark, so he was joined by Grigory Sukhorukov. Finally they grabbed hold of a leg that turned out to be the Tsar’s, tied ropes to it and the men at the surface hauled the body out. There, lying in the wet grass in front of them, was the lifeless, naked body of the former Tsar of All the Russias. The men could not resist this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a look, and agreed that Nicholas had a very fine physique, with well-developed muscles in his arms, back and legs – and a firm backside too, so they noted.

  One by one, the remaining bodies slowly twisted and turned their way to the surface at the end of ropes, after which they were laid under a tarpaulin cover. The water in the mineshaft had washed the blood from their faces and some of them were still recognisable. They were all as pale as marble lying there in the early morning light but their bodies were now badly broken by many additional post-mortem injuries from so much manhandling, and parts of limbs were missing as a result of the grenade explosion in the mineshaft. The job of pulling them up the shaft was slow and laborious; the men were getting tired and angry and hungry and Yurovsky was already worrying whether there would be time to take the bodies on to the deeper mine. He thought of digging a burial pit then and there, but when the men tried this, the ground proved too stony. At this point a peasant – a friend of Ermakov’s – appeared on the scene. Yurovsky was sick of Ermakov and his ‘damn friends’; they had caused one problem after another. He would have to go back to Ekaterinburg yet again to confer with the Cheka at the Amerikanskaya.

  Back in the city he put in an urgent call to the military garage for a car to take him back to the forest, but it proved as unreliable as the Fiat truck and broke down on the way. Yurovsky spent an hour desperately trying
to fix it but could do nothing. Realising that it was essential that he had more back-up vehicles, he started the long walk back to Ekaterinburg at a limp, his leg possibly fractured by the fall from the horse earlier that day. Fortunately he saw two riders out in the forest and prevailed on them for the use of their horses to tow his car back to the city. Here he managed to requisition another car and a single lightweight truck, which he ordered to be loaded with equipment and food, as well as blocks of concrete with which the bodies would be weighted before being submerged in the new mineshaft they would take them to. As chance would have it, he managed in the end to lay hands on a second, heavier truck which would take a detachment of Cheka men out to the Four Brothers to help move the bodies.

  It was ten o’clock on Yurovsky’s third night without sleep when he set off yet again for the forest. Lyukhanov and the Fiat were still parked near crossing 184; the truck was now extricated from the mud, but Yurovsky did not want to risk it getting stuck again by bringing it to the mine, so he ordered the convoy of carts on which the bodies had now been piled to rendezvous back with the Fiat at the crossing.