Of everything that was to follow, Sverdlov and Moscow had full knowledge. Avadeyev had been replaced not only because of his pilfering, but because members of the Regional Soviet and the Central Executive Committee had sensed the change in the feelings of his men for the prisoners and realized that he was losing control. On July 4, the reassuring news of his replacement was telegraphed to Sverdlov: “Anxiety unnecessary. Useless to worry…. Avadeyev replaced by Yurovsky. Inside guard changed, replaced by others.” The planning of the prisoners’ fate now moved swiftly forward.
The Ural Soviet had never been in any doubt as to what to do with Nicholas. Soon after his arrival in Ekaterinburg, the Soviet decided unanimously in favor of execution. Unwilling to take this responsibility upon themselves, they sent Goloshchekin to Moscow to learn the attitude of the central government. Goloshchekin was not a local Ekaterinburg man. Born in the Baltic provinces, he was a professional revolutionary who had escaped abroad and attached himself to Lenin. He knew Sverdlov well and while in Moscow stayed with him. Goloshchekin learned on his visit that the leaders had not yet decided what to do with the Tsar; they were still toying with Trotsky’s idea of holding a public trial at the end of July with Trotsky himself as prosecutor.
Before this could be arranged, however, there was a sudden dip in Bolshevik fortunes which, ironically, was to have a disastrous effect on the prisoners’ fate. Civil war and foreign intervention had begun to challenge Boshevism’s feeble grip on Russia. Already American marines and British soldiers had landed at Murmansk. In the Ukraine, Generals Alexeiev, Kornilov and Deniken had organized a White Volunteer Army in cooperation with the fiercely independent Don Cossacks. In Siberia, an independent Czech Legion of forty-five thousand men was advancing westward. They had taken Omsk and were moving rapidly toward Tyumen and Ekaterinburg. The Czechs were former prisoners of war taken from the Austro-Hungarian army, reorganized and equipped by Kerensky to fight on the Russian front for the freedom of their homeland. When the Bolsheviks arrived and made peace, Trotsky had agreed that the stranded Czechs be permitted to leave Russia by way of Siberia, Vladivostock and the Pacific to sail around the world to France and there resume the fight. The Czechs were already in Siberia headed eastward in a string of trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad when the German General Staff vigorously objected to their passage and demanded that the Bolsheviks block and disarm them. The Bolsheviks tried, but the Czechs fought back. Already a formidable force in that chaotic arena, the Czechs were strengthened by anti-Bolshevik Russian officers and soldiers. It was the rapidly mounting threat of this advancing army which forced the Bolsheviks to abandon their thoughts of a show trial of the former Tsar and make other plans for Nicholas and his family.
On July 12, Goloshchekin returned from Moscow and appeared before the Ural Soviet to declare that the party leaders were willing to leave the fate of the Romanovs in their hands. The commander of the Red military forces was asked how long Ekaterinburg could hold out against the Whites. He reported that the Czechs already had outflanked the city from the south, and that Ekaterinburg might fall within three days. Upon hearing this, the Ural Soviet decided to shoot the entire family as soon as possible and to destroy all evidence of the act.
Yurovsky was given this order on the 13th, and at once preparations for the massacre began. For the next three days, Yurovsky and Goloshchekin made trips into the woods around the city, looking for a place to hide the remains. Fourteen miles from Ekaterinburg, near the village of Koptyaki, they discovered a suitable site: an abandoned mine shaft close to four lonely pine trees known to the peasants as the “Four Brothers.” At the same time, Voikov, another member of the Ural Soviet, began buying drums containing 150 gallons of gasoline and 400 pounds of sulfuric acid.
The prisoners quickly sensed the change in mood. Yurovsky was not the drunken bully that Avadeyev had been. He did not rant about “Bloody Nicholas” and appeared to have no strong feelings about his captives. He was a professional; they were simply his next assignment. Two women who came to the house to scrub the floors saw Yurovsky sitting and asking the Tsarevich about his health. Earlier that same day, Yurovsky had been at the “Four Brothers” supervising preparations.
The great change in the family’s attitude these last days was noted by an Ekaterinburg priest who had been permitted once before to enter the House of Special Purpose to read the service. On his first visit, at the end of May, he noticed that although the Empress seemed tired and ill, Nicholas and his daughters were in good spirits. Alexis, although unable to walk, had been carried to the service on a cot. He seemed happy, and when Father Storozhov approached with the crucifix, the boy looked up at him with bright, merry eyes. On July 14, when the priest returned, the change was marked. The family appeared extremely anxious and depressed. When the deacon sang the prayer “At Rest with the Saints,” the family knelt and one of the girls sobbed openly. This time, when the crucifix was brought to Alexis, the priest found him pale and thin, lying in a white nightshirt with a blanket covering him up to the waist. His eyes, looking up, were still clear, but sad and distracted.
On July 16, the day of the murder, Yurovsky ordered the kitchen boy sent away from the house. At four in the afternoon, the Tsar and his four daughters went for their usual walk in the garden. At seven p.m., Yurovsky summoned all the Cheka men into his room and ordered them to collect all the revolvers from the outside guards. With twelve heavy military revolvers lying before him on the table, he said, “Tonight, we will shoot the whole family, everybody. Notify the guards outside not to be alarmed if they hear shots.”
The decision was carefully hidden from the family. That night, at 10:30, they went innocently to bed. At midnight, Yurovsky awakened them, telling them to dress quickly and come downstairs. He explained that the Czechs and the White Army were approaching Ekaterinburg and that the Regional Soviet had decided that they must be moved. Still unsuspecting, the family dressed and Nicholas and Alexis put on their military caps. Nicholas came down the stairs first, carrying Alexis. The sleepy boy had his arms tightly around his father’s neck. The others followed, with Anastasia clutching the spaniel Jimmy. On the ground floor, Yurovsky led them to a small semi-basement room, sixteen by eighteen feet, with a heavy iron grill over the window. Here, he asked them to wait until the automobiles arrived.
Nicholas asked for chairs so that his wife and son could sit while they waited. Yurovsky ordered three chairs brought and Alexandra took one. Nicholas took another, using his arm and shoulder to support Alexis, who lay back across the third chair. Behind their mother stood the four girls and Dr. Botkin, the valet Trupp, the cook Kharitonov and Demidova, the Empress’s parlormaid. Demidova carried two pillows, one of which she placed in the chair behind the Empress’s back. The other pillow she clutched tightly. Inside, sewed deep into the feathers, was a box containing a collection of the Imperial jewels.
When all were assembled, Yurovsky reentered the room, followed by his entire Cheka squad carrying revolvers. He stepped forward and declared quickly, “Your relations have tried to save you. They have failed and we must now shoot you.”
Nicholas, his arm still around Alexis, began to rise from his chair to protect his wife and son. He had just time to say “What …?” before Yurovsky pointed his revolver directly at the Tsar’s head and fired. Nicholas died instantly. At this signal, the entire squad of executioners began to shoot. Alexandra had time only to raise her hand and make the sign of the cross before she too was killed by a single bullet. Olga, Tatiana and Marie, standing behind their mother, were hit and died quickly. Botkin, Kharitonov and Trupp also fell in the hail of bullets. Demidova, the maid, survived the first volley, and rather than reload, the executioners took rifles from the next room and pursued her, stabbing with bayonets. Screaming, running back and forth along the wall like a trapped animal, she tried to fend them off with the cushion. At last she fell, pierced by bayonets more than thirty times. Jimmy the spaniel was killed when his head was crushed by a rifle butt.
/> The room, filled with the smoke and stench of gunpowder, became suddenly quiet. Blood was running in streams from the bodies on the floor. Then there was a movement and a low groan. Alexis, lying on the floor still in the arms of the Tsar, feebly moved his hand to clutch his father’s coat. Savagely, one of the executioners kicked the Tsarevich in the head with his heavy boot. Yurovsky stepped up and fired two shots into the boy’s ear. Just at that moment, Anastasia, who had only fainted, regained consciousness and screamed. With bayonets and rifle butts, the entire band turned on her. In a moment, she too lay still. It was ended.
Epilogue
The bodies were wrapped in sheets and placed in a truck outside the cellar. Before dawn, the vehicle with its sickening cargo reached the “Four Brothers” and the process of dismembering and destroying the bodies began. Each body was carefully cut into pieces with axes and saws, then placed in a bonfire kept burning fiercely with frequent soakings of gasoline. As the ax blades cut into the clothing, many of the jewels sewed inside were crushed, and the fragments spilled out into the high grass or were ground into the mud. As expected, many of the larger bones resisted fire and had to be dissolved with sulfuric acid. The process was neither easy nor quick; for three days, Yurovsky’s ghouls labored at their macabre work. Finally, the ashes and residue were thrown into the pool of water at the bottom of the mine shaft. So satisfied were the murderers that they had obliterated all traces that Voikov, the member of the Ural Soviet who purchased the gasoline and acid, proudly declared, “The world will never know what we did with them.” Later Voikov became Soviet Ambassador to Poland.
Eight days after the murder, Ekaterinburg fell to the advancing Whites, and a group of officers rushed to the Ipatiev house. In the courtyard, half famished, they found the Tsarevich’s spaniel Joy, wandering about as if in search of his master. The house itself was empty, but its appearance was sinister. The basement room had been thoroughly mopped and scrubbed, but the walls and floors bore the scratches and scars of bullets and bayonets. From the wall against which the family had been standing, large pieces of plaster had fallen away. It was obvious that some kind of massacre had taken place in the room. But it was impossible to tell how many victims there had been.
An immediate search for the family led nowhere. Not until the following January (1919) did a thorough investigation begin when Admiral Kolchak, “Supreme Ruler” of the White government in Siberia, selected Nicholas Sokolov, a trained legal investigator, to undertake the task. Sokolov, assisted by both of the Tsarevich’s tutors, Gilliard and Gibbs, located the mine and uncovered a wealth of tragic evidence. For Gilliard, especially, the work was excruciating. “But the children—the children?” he cried when Sokolov first told him of the preliminary findings. “The children have suffered the same fate as their parents,” replied Sokolov sadly. “There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind on that point.”
Before the investigation was concluded, hundreds of articles and fragments had been collected, identified and catalogued. Even the heart-broken Gilliard was convinced. Among the objects collected were these: the Tsar’s belt buckle; the Tsarevich’s belt buckle; an emerald cross given to the Empress Alexandra by the Dowager Empress Marie; a pearl earring from a pair always worn by Alexandra; the Ulm Cross, a jubilee badge adorned with sapphires and diamonds, presented by Her Majesty’s Own Uhlan Guards; and fragments of a sapphire ring which had become so tight on Nicholas’s finger that he could not take it off.
In addition, the investigators found a metal pocket case in which Nicholas always carried his wife’s portrait; three small icons worn by the Grand Duchess (on each icon, the face of the saint had been destroyed by heavy blows); the Empress’s spectacle case; six sets of women’s corsets (the Empress, her four daughters and Demidova made exactly six); fragments of the military caps worn by Nicholas and Alexis; shoe buckles belonging to the Grand Duchesses; and Dr. Botkin’s eyeglasses and false teeth.
There were also a number of charred bones, partly destroyed by acid but still bearing the mark of ax and saw; revolver bullets, many of which had been reduced by heat to molten blobs; and a severed human finger belonging to a middle-aged woman. It was slender and manicured like the Empress’s.
The investigators collected an assortment of nails, tinfoil, copper coins and a small lock which puzzled them until they were shown to Gilliard. He immediately identified them as part of the pocketful of odds and ends always carried by the Tsarevich. Finally, mangled but unburned, the little corpse of the spaniel Jimmy was found at the bottom of the pit. For some reason, the murderers had taken great care to destroy the bodies of the owners, but had ignored the still recognizable body of their pet.
Later, to confirm this evidence, the Whites added the depositions of captured members of the guard at the House of Special Purpose, who described the execution. Later still, Sokolov’s findings were fully confirmed from the Bolshevik side by P. M. Bykov, Chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet.
Within a few hours of the murder, a report was telegraphed to Moscow. On July 18, the Presidium of the Central Executive Council approved the action. That night, as the Commissar of Health was reading a draft of a new public-health law to the Council of People’s Commissars, Sverdlov came into the hall and whispered to Lenin, who interrupted the speaker.
“Comrade Sverdlov wants to make a statement,” said Lenin.
“I have to say,” declared Sverdlov, “that we have had a communication that at Ekaterinburg, by a decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot. The Presidium has resolved to approve.”
A hush fell over the room.
Then Lenin spoke up calmly: “Let us now go on to read the draft [of the health law] clause by clause.”
Although only Nicholas’s name was publicly mentioned, Lenin and Sverdlov knew that the entire family was dead. In their haste to evacuate Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks left behind the tapes of several telegrams exchanged with the Kremlin after the murder. “Tell Sverdlov,” said one, “that the whole family met the same fate as its head. Officially, the family will perish during the evacuation.” Another message asked how Moscow wished the news to be broken. Apparently the Bolshevik leaders decided that one murder was enough to announce at that time, and on July 20, the official proclamation mentioned only Nicholas. It came in the form of an announcement by the Ural Soviet with an endorsement by the Central Executive Committee:
DECISION
of the Presidium of the Divisional Council of Deputies of Workmen, Peasants, and Red Guards of the Urals:
In view of the fact that Czechoslovakian bands are threatening the Red Capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg; that the crowned executioner may escape from the tribunal of the people (a White Guard Plot to carry off the whole Imperial family has just been discovered) the Presidium of the Divisional Committee in pursuance of the will of the people, has decided that the ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty before the people of innumerable bloody crimes, shall be shot.
The decision of the Presidium of the Divisional Council was carried into execution on the Night of July 16th-17th.
Romanov’s family has been transferred from Ekaterinburg to a place of greater safety.
Moscow’s endorsement was worded:
DECISION
of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of all the Russias of July 18th:
The Central Executive Committee of the Councils of Deputies of Workmen, Peasants, Red Guards and Cossacks, in the person of their president, approve the action of the Presidium of the Council of the Urals.
The President of the Central Executive Committee
Sverdlov
A year later, unable to maintain their fiction, the Bolsheviks admitted that the entire family was dead. They still did not admit their own responsibility for the murders. Instead, they arrested and brought to trial twenty-eight people, all Social Revolutionaries, who, it was charged, had murdered the Tsar in order to discredit the Bolsheviks. Five of the defendants were executed. The hypocrisy of this second crim
e was later admitted by the Bolsheviks themselves in Bykov’s book.
The link between the party leaders in Moscow who authorized the murder and the Ural Soviet which determined the time and method of execution was later described by Trotsky. He explained that he had proposed a public trial to be broadcast by radio throughout the country, but before anything could come of it, he had to leave for the front.
“My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Ekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: ‘Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?’
“‘It’s all over,’ he answered. ‘He has been shot.’
“‘And where is the family?’
“‘And the family along with him.’
“‘All of them?’ I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
“‘All of them,’ replied Sverdlov. ‘What about it?’ He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.
“‘And who made the decision?’ I asked.
“‘We decided it here. Ilyich believed that we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.’
“I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin…. This Lenin sensed well.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 65
