Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  As dawn broke on the 19th, the procession of carts and an almost catatonic Yurovsky, who had not slept for 70 hours, slowly made their way over the treacherous boggy ground to the Fiat truck and once more transferred the bodies into it, before heading back down the road in the direction of Ekaterinburg. Time and again the men had to stop and give the truck a shove when it encountered deep ruts in the track. Then, just before they were due to swing right on to the Moscow–Siberia Trakt, the Fiat slipped and lurched and got stuck yet again in a dip in the road, near the place known as Porosenkov Log (Pig’s Meadow) that they had passed on the way out to the forest. The additional truck carrying the men also ground to a halt in the mud not far behind.

  Yurovsky finally gave up. They had to bury them all now, quickly, right there under the road where the truck had stalled, and they had to do it before the sun came up and before any outriders of the Czechs or the Whites, who they knew were in the area, came upon them. As the men tossed the corpses from the Fiat, Yurovsky decided to separate two of the smallest (those of Alexey and Maria) from the rest and burn them about 50 feet away, in a faint attempt to confuse anyone who might later discover the mass grave with only nine in it. The men’s strength was totally spent as they grumbled and struggled to dig a grave six feet by eight in the breaking sunrise for the now bloated bodies. The grave was barely two feet deep and it filled up with peaty black water as they dug it, but finally, at seven, the Romanovs and their loyal retainers received their last ghastly funerary rites, overseen by the man who had orchestrated their deaths: thrown on top of each other, Trupp’s body first, followed by the Tsar’s, all of them tumbled into this small pit, their bodies doused in sulphuric acid, which fizzed and bubbled on flesh, their faces smashed to a bloody pulp with rifle butts to prevent them from being recognised. After this they were covered with quicklime and a shallow layer of boggy earth before the ground was trodden down over them and brushwood strewn around to disguise its newness.

  Over at the smaller grave site, the sodden corpses of Maria and Alexey hissed and smoked on their improvised funeral pyre and were only partially burned, Yurovsky unaware that it needed as long as 50 hours to burn corpses in the open air as compared with an incinerator. Those few, pitiful charred bones of Maria and Alexey that remained were pounded to fragments with spades and tossed into their own small graves, the remaining ashes kicked around by the men in all directions ‘to further blur the traces’. Finally, to disguise the location of the main grave, the men took up the pile of rotting wooden rail ties they had laid nearby on the track when the truck had stalled the day before and placed them over it. Then Lyukhanov drove the truck back and forth over the ties to make sure the earth was pressed well down and that it looked as though they had been put there long ago to reinforce the road.

  By 6 a.m. on the morning of 19 July, the long and tortuous burial of the Romanovs and their retainers was finally completed. As Yurovsky drove back to Ekaterinburg from the Koptyaki Forest he felt satisfied. He had made the best of a horribly inept and botched job. The ‘Imperial hangman’ had been consigned to oblivion and he had fulfilled his duty to the Revolution. Pavel Ermakov would later lay claim in his lurid and self-serving memoirs to a vastly aggrandised role in the killings and the disposal of the bodies, asserting unconvincingly that they had all been destroyed on a massive funeral pyre deep in the forest. After that, so he asserted, he himself had taken a shovel and with dramatic finality had ‘pitched the ashes into the air’. ‘The wind caught them like dust’, he said ‘and carried them out across the woods and fields.’

  Had this really been the final, poetic fate of the bodies of the Romanovs, Petr Voikov’s confident prophecy that ‘The world will never know what we did to them’ might well have prevailed. The Special Detachment of the Ipatiev House may have left their victims’ horribly violated bodies to rot, as highwaymen of old had been left – at a roadside without a cross or a tombstone to signify their last resting place – but 60 years later, history would finally start catching up with them. A shallow grave in Pig’s Meadow would not, in the end, be the Romanovs’ final pitiful resting place.

  Back in Ekaterinburg, news had travelled fast. That Thursday, workers at the Verkh-Isetsk factory had been talking enthusiastically about the supposed secret execution of the Romanovs. The tongues of those who had been out in the forest with Ermakov had been wagging. It didn’t take long either for rumours to filter back into the city itself. At the Opera House on Glavny Prospekt that afternoon, Goloshchekin called a meeting of Ekaterinburg’s citizens at which he proudly announced that, under orders from the Ural Regional Soviet, ‘Nicholas the bloody’ had been shot and his family taken to another place. The Bolsheviks of the Urals were to have their moment of glory. But the crowd were angry and full of disbelief; some of them wept. ‘Show us his body’, they shouted.

  On the evening of 18 July, Lenin had been in the midst of chairing a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars in the Kremlin when Sverdlov interrupted the proceedings, sat down behind him and whispered something in his ear. ‘Comrade Sverdlov asks for the floor’, Lenin told his colleagues. ‘He has an announcement.’ Sverdlov stood up and read out the communiqué sent on the afternoon of the 17th from Ekaterinburg that Nicholas had been executed. A show of hands was taken and a resolution passed approving the decisive action of the Ural Regional Soviet and instructing Sverdlov to supervise the composition of a suitable official press announcement, which appeared the following day in the Moscow edition of Izvestiya. Lenin, however, passed no comment; it was all a formality and he straight away returned to the agenda before him. Sverdlov was soon on the line back to Beloborodov in Ekaterinburg informing him of the resolution taken in Moscow and granting permission for the local paper to publish news of the Tsar’s execution with the coda that ‘the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place’, leaving the fate of the girls deliberately ambiguous.

  Back at the Ipatiev House, senior guard Anatoly Yakimov, who had witnessed the murders on the morning of the 17th reported reluctantly for duty at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of the 18th. He was very apprehensive about entering the house after the horrors of the previous night. There was such a terrible silence upstairs, the rooms scattered with torn and fragmentary reminders of a family that had now been destroyed: buckles and fasteners, charred toothbrushes, thimbles and hairpins, porcelain dominoes and gramophone needles, strewn in all directions, as well as dozens of charred images of saints and icons and a jumble of Bibles and prayer books: The Ladder of Paradise, Letters on the Christian Life, Of Patience in Suffering. Among them lay perhaps the most poignant item of all, a book with a glossy blue cover bearing the monogram ‘A’ – Alexey’s treasured copy of Method to Play the Balalaika.

  The only sign of life that morning came from the commandant’s office. Here Yakimov found Pavel Medvedev and a couple of the guards sitting, gloomy and morose, in sight of the table piled high with the Romanovs’ most treasured possessions, their valuable icons, jewellery and ornamented photograph frames, all ready to be packed up and sent to Moscow.

  Just then he heard a plaintive whimper. Outside, by the double doors leading into the Romanovs’ quarters, sat the Tsarevich’s chestnut and white King Charles spaniel, Joy, the boy’s constant companion in exile, looking expectantly up at the door, his ears pricked, patiently waiting to be let in.

  EPILOGUE

  The Scent of Lilies

  The Bolshevik commissars of Ekaterinburg could not contain their revolutionary pride for long after the murder of the Imperial Family. On 19 July the local paper announced the ‘Execution of Nicholas, the Bloody Crowned Murderer – Shot without Bourgeois Formalities but in Accordance with our new democratic principles’. Although the announcement had been intended for local consumption only, word soon spread. French diplomat Louis de Robien, with the enclave at Vologda, heard the news of the Tsar’s death on 20 July through a reliable contact in Moscow, who added that the centre was extremely an
xious that ‘it must not be known’. The diplomatic corps in Vologda went into mourning for the Tsar, in so far as they were able, as too did the local bourgeoisie, but it was September before de Robien got any of the details, from a Czech officer who had been in Ekaterinburg, and even then the story was garbled, the Tsar having been killed ‘by a certain Goloshkin [sic], a Jewish dentist . . .’ The names Beloborodov and Safarov were mentioned, but not a word of Yurovsky. The news of the initial finds by investigators out at the Four Brothers, as de Robien heard, seemed to indicate that the whole family had been murdered, but he felt that ‘a glimmer of hope remains’.

  Dutch ambassador William J. Oudendyk, who had remained in Petrograd rather than be evacuated to Vologda for his safety, had seen the official communiqué published in Izvestiya on 19 July reporting Sverdlov’s announcement of the Tsar’s execution to the Council of People’s Commissars the previous day, the same day that the Bolsheviks announced that they were nationalising all confiscated Romanov properties. Oudendyk knew the report was full of untruths, but notices were already being posted up on the walls of apartment blocks around the city confirming the news. As Oudendyk boarded a crowded tram, a newspaper boy ran past announcing the death of the Tsar, but ‘not a single passenger paid any attention’. Later, on the train out to Oranienbaum, the same unnerving silence prevailed: ‘it was evident that everyone was too much occupied with his own thoughts, and perhaps his conscience’.

  The poet Mariya Tsvetaeva recorded much the same experience. She too heard the newsboys shouting ‘Nicholas Romanov shot!’ and looked around her at the people sharing her tram: workers, members of the intelligentsia, women with children. Some of them bought the paper in silence, glanced at the news story and then turned their gaze away. But everyone was too afraid; there were spies everywhere. Under the Bolsheviks, people had learned not to express their opinions in public; it might cost them their lives. Besides, the murder of the Tsar was no different from any other murder; there was now so much arbitrary brutality on the streets of Russia. But in the churches, it was a different story. The silent faithful in their thousands had gone to weep and light candles and say prayers for the souls of their former monarch and his family.

  In America the news of the Tsar’s murder finally broke on 21 July in the New York Times and the Washington Post, with the London Times following a day later, all reports buying the Bolshevik line that the Tsaritsa and the children had been spared and ‘sent to a place of safety’. The Western response to this historic act was as subdued and lacklustre as that in Russia; the papers were preoccupied with blanket coverage of the 2nd Battle of the Marne, which had begun on the 15th. ‘Ex-Czar Killed by Order of the Ural Soviet’ jostled for space on the front page of the New York Times with a lead story informing readers: ‘Germans Pushed Back, Allies Gain Three Miles, Now Hold 20,000 Prisoners’; the long, terrible war in Europe was finally drawing to a close. Practically all of the Western papers were hampered by having no correspondents in Siberia, or Russia for that matter, at a time when news-gathering was severely hampered by the civil war, and the disruption to the telegraph lines made things even worse. The Times in its obituary of the 22nd could only find praise for the Tsar’s ‘dogged resistance’ to German oppression during the war, whilst noting that he was ‘not endowed with much originality or initiative’. The Daily Telegraph had little to add: Nicholas suffered from an ‘instability of mind and a lack of moral resolution’. The Daily Mail could do no better: Nicholas was ‘a poor little Czar’ and his life and death were ‘pitiful’. But it was the illustrated weekly the Graphic that proved the most critical; under the dismissive headline ‘The Dead Tsar’, it noted that Nicholas had suffered ‘a fate which he had often ordered for many of his subjects’ and that his conduct during the war had found him ‘completely wanting in all the qualities of statesmanship’. He had now ‘gone the way of all waxworks’, into the melting pot of history.

  *

  On Sunday 21 July, King George’s aunt Princess Helena and her family arrived for lunch with the King and Queen at Windsor, only to find themselves kept waiting for an hour and a half in an anteroom. This was most unusual; the King and Queen were usually very punctual. Finally they appeared, ashen-faced, to greet Helena with the news that the Tsar had been murdered. Queen Mary made a brief note in her diary on 24 July that ‘the news were [sic] confirmed of poor Nicky of Russia having been shot by those brutes of Bolsheviks’. It was, she said, ‘too horrible and heartless’. She commiserated that afternoon with Alexandra, the Queen Mother, and Princess Victoria – the Tsaritsa’s aunt and sister – over tea at Windsor, but in all their written and spoken reactions, such as they were, the British royals remained hidebound by a stiff upper lip that made their responses seem profoundly inarticulate and stunted.

  The murder of his cousin Nicky was a crushing blow for the King; Mrs Asquith, wife of the Foreign Secretary, recorded that George’s grief was palpable when he spoke of the vindictive and unnecessary killing of ‘the poor Czar’. It was, he said, an ‘abominable’ act, but that was about the best he could muster. His response thereafter was to retreat into silence, apart from ordering four weeks of full mourning at court and attending a low-key memorial service on 25 July at the Russian embassy chapel in Welbeck Street. Privately, he was conscience-stricken. It was ‘a foul murder’, he wrote in his diary: ‘I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men.’ For the rest of his life George reproached himself for not having saved the Imperial Family, but that didn’t stop him from making sure that his government suppressed the full grisly details of the investigation that were later forwarded to the Foreign Office from Allied HQ in Siberia. It wasn’t just a matter of sparing the sensibilities of the nation, but of salving his own deep sense of responsibility.

  As soon as the German government heard of the murder of the Tsar, Ambassador Riezler protested that the ‘whole world would sharply condemn the Bolshevik government’. The Soviets assured him that the execution had been necessary to prevent the Tsar falling into the hands of the Czechs, but as for the Tsaritsa and the girls, yes, they might be able to arrange safe conduct for them on humanitarian grounds. With the Germans now occupying vast swathes of their territory and threatening their precarious hold on power, it was essential that the Bolsheviks continue to prevaricate. The Tsaritsa had been taken to Perm, they told Riezler, but Riezler didn’t believe them. Rumours later circulated that the family had taken refuge in a monastery in Siberia. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks started suggesting various bogus trade-offs – the Romanovs in exchange for Russian POWs, or Leo Jodiches, a Polish Social Democrat leader under arrest in Berlin. But by November it was too late; the German Empire too had crumbled and the Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and go into exile. To his dying day Wilhelm denied having failed to act swiftly on behalf of his Romanov relatives, hinting at the abject failure of his cousin George: ‘the blood of the unhappy Tsar is not at my door; not on my hands’, he insisted.

  It was left to King Alfonso and King Christian of neutral Spain and Denmark to make the last diplomatic representations on behalf of the family, not knowing that they were all already dead. The Bolsheviks played cat and mouse with Alfonso, but would not co-operate even though the King also offered refuge to the Dowager Empress and the Tsar’s two sisters, Olga and Xenia, still trapped in the Crimea. Alfonso also lobbied for the release of four more Grand Dukes – Pavel, Nikolay, Georgy and Dmitry – now being held, ‘for their own safety’, according to the Bolsheviks, in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd. (On 28 January 1919 they were executed by firing squad in the fortress courtyard.) King Alfonso’s final resort was to the Vatican. In August Pope Benedict XV put in his own pleas for the Tsaritsa and her children, backed by a personal message from Queen Mary (details of whose initiative have never been fully released). But it was all to no avail; after being fed a smooth line of disinformation and deliberate lies, the Spanish and Vatican initiatives had both petered out by the end of August. It was then that the British directo
r of military intelligence in northern Russia cabled London, warning that reliable sources in Siberia now indicated that the whole family were dead; the news was officially communicated to the British War Cabinet on 1 September.

  In the days immediately after the Imperial Family’s murder, Ekaterinburg teetered on the precipice. Thomas Preston was now in considerable danger at the British consulate, with the Ural Regional Soviet becoming increasingly hostile about his perceived interference in local affairs. With the Czechs about to take the city, he had been warned that all foreigners, including himself and his family, were to be taken hostage and bartered. Receiving a tip-off that a mob was coming to get him, Preston barricaded his family into the consulate and went out to confront them. Several tins of Virginia cigarettes seemed to win them round; the crowd hadn’t seen such a thing for months. Preston handed hundreds of them out as he argued about ‘Britain, politics, the Revolution’, until he heard shouts that the Whites were in the city suburbs, after which the crowd suddenly melted away.

  Ekaterinburg finally fell to the Czechs on the night of 25/26 July after a relatively short engagement at the main Ekaterinburg railway station at the top of Voznesensky Prospekt. After a couple of days of sporadic street fighting and a second skirmish at the Mikhailovsky cemetery at the southern end of the city, the Bolsheviks finally fled. But not without having first emptied the city’s banks and treasury, taking huge amounts of looted goods with them in a vast convoy of lorries that Thomas Preston heard trundling past his consulate until late into the night.

  As the liberating Czechs and Whites paraded down the city streets to a rousing German march, they were greeted by waving flags and flowers thrown by the exultant population and the sound of church bells pealing. Preston had a front-row seat on the balcony of his consulate, from where he shouted, at the top of his voice, ‘Long Live the Constituent Assembly’ (the slogan of the Socialist Revolutionary anti-Communists). Soon afterwards, the Red Flag was hauled down and the white and green of Admiral Kolchak’s new Siberian government was flying over Ekaterinburg. The city’s liberation was, wrote Preston later, ‘like the opening of a door into the sunshine from a huge cave in which we had been kept prisoner for nearly nine months’.