The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

by Candace Fleming

  Minutes later, Yurovsky walked the priest to the front gate. Both men knew that the family had just been given their Last Rites. And Yurovsky seemed pleased. It was one more item off his to-do list.

  JULY 15

  Upstairs, the Romanovs went about their usual morning routine—prayers, breakfast, reading. They had just gathered around the dining room table to play cards when the double doors of their prison opened. There stood four women from the Union of Professional Housemaids. They had come to wash the floors. Why? Yurovsky was trying to create a sense of normality so the doomed family would not suspect their time was short.

  Smiling, happy to see faces from the outside world, the grand duchesses dropped their cards on the table. They hurried to help the women move the beds and other furniture.

  Following the group to the doorway of the bedroom, Yurovsky glared at them for several minutes. When he finally moved away, Anastasia thumbed her nose at his back. Both grand duchesses and cleaning women laughed. Then the girls got down on their hands and knees to help the women scrub. No matter, Tatiana whispered. They welcomed this brief chance for some exercise. The girls, recalled one cleaning woman, “were spirited and breathed [a] love of life.” Their hair was “tumbled and in disorder, their cheeks were rosy like apples.”

  Not so the others. The cleaning women had grown up with the idea that the tsar was a god, “a giant among men,” while the empress was a beauty with a voice “like a flute from paradise.” Instead, they found a “drab man with a large balding spot [and] legs too short for his body.” His wife looked “tired and sick … and lacking color.” And their son was “the color of wax,” his eyes “with great dark circles under them.” When the women left ninety minutes later, they took with them a new view of the imperial family. “They were not gods,” said one, “but … ordinary people like us, simple mortals.”

  JULY 16

  The day—Nicholas and Alexandra’s seventy-sixth in the House of Special Purpose—dawned gray and rainy. As usual, the family said their morning prayers before sitting down to yet another dismal breakfast of tea and black bread.

  Around the same time, Yurovsky was summoned to Bolshevik headquarters. When he returned an hour later, he pulled his assistant, Gregory Nikulin, into his office. “It’s been decided,” Yurovsky told him. “Tonight.… We have to carry out the execution tonight, execute everyone [including the servants].”

  He appeared, recalled Nikulin, “to be in a state of near-panic.” There was still much to do, and little time to do it. Picking up the telephone receiver, Yurovsky called the military garage. He needed a driver and a large truck, he told the person on the other end. Come to the house at midnight.

  Next, he ordered a handful of guards to clear all the furniture from one of the house’s cellar rooms. This, Yurovsky decided, was where the execution would take place. The small space would keep his victims confined and unable to escape, while the room’s wallpaper-covered stone walls would muffle the sounds of gunshots.

  As guards cleaned out the basement room, the Romanovs took their morning walk. The sun had come out, chasing away the rain clouds, and now Nicholas carried Alexei into the overgrown garden, while Anastasia and Marie ran ahead, the dogs chasing happily at their heels. As usual, Alexandra stayed inside. Olga kept her company. The two spent their time “arranging [their] medicines,” making sure the jewels they’d sewn into their clothing in Tobolsk remained safely hidden.

  Around one o’clock, as the family sat down to lunch, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks sent a telegram to Moscow. They had decided to let Lenin know their plans.

  Did Lenin cable back? And if so, did he finally authorize the execution? Most historians believe he did, although he never admitted it. After all, he did not want to be linked with the children’s murder. Still, as one official close to Lenin explained, “the execution of the tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify and dishearten the [White Army], but also to shake up our own ranks to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay complete victory or complete ruin.… This Lenin sensed well.”

  Midafternoon, the Romanovs headed outside for their second walk. This time, Tatiana stayed inside with Alexandra, reading Bible verses while her mother made lace. There wasn’t, reported one guard, “anything out of the ordinary with them.”

  That evening, just as the prisoners were sitting down to dinner, Yurovsky appeared. He ordered the kitchen boy, Leonid Sednev, to pack his things.

  Where was he going? Alexandra demanded to know. Was he not returning?

  Yurovsky explained that the boy’s uncle wanted to take him home. This was a lie. In truth, the commandant did not want the fourteen-year-old to be among the murder victims. Leonid was taken to a house across the street.

  Afterward, Yurovsky returned to his office. He still had one important decision to make: who would do the shooting? After some thought, he picked several (the precise number is unknown) of his most ruthless guards to join him and Nikulin on the execution squad. But when Yurovsky explained what was expected of them, at least two of the men balked. “[They] said they did not feel able to shoot at the girls and refused to do it,” Yurovsky later recalled. These men quickly joined the kitchen boy in the house across the street. They spent the rest of the night, remembered one of their comrades, “complaining about the murders.”

  Around nine o’clock, the prisoners gathered for evening prayers. Afterward, Alexei was carried to his bed in his parents’ room while the girls went to their own. Putting on their nightgowns, they slid beneath the sheets of their army cots.

  From the drawing room came the snap and shuffle of cards as their parents played one last game of cards before bed.

  In the distance, artillery echoed.

  At ten-thirty, Nicholas and Alexandra went to their own room. Sitting at her corner table, the empress took a few minutes to make one last entry in her diary, noting the temperature: “15 degrees” (58 degrees Fahrenheit). Then she switched off the light and lay down beside her husband.

  Darkness shrouded the rooms.

  The family slept.

  JULY 17

  At one thirty in the morning, Yakov Yurovsky tucked a Colt pistol into his pocket. Then he went out to the landing and knocked on the prisoners’ door.

  A sleepy Dr. Botkin answered. What was happening? he asked.

  “Everyone [must] be woken up right away,” Yurovsky told him. With the White Army’s approach, “the town [is] uneasy.” It would be dangerous for the family to remain in the upstairs rooms. What if an artillery attack was launched? For precautionary reasons, everyone was being moved to the safety of the cellar. As for their personal belongings, added the commandant, “they [should not] bring anything with them.” The guards would bring them down later.

  While Dr. Botkin went to wake the others, Yurovsky returned to his office. For the next forty minutes, he waited impatiently for the prisoners to dress. Every so often, a member of the execution squad, Peter Ermakov, crept down the hall to check on their progress. Pressing his ear to the closed double doors, he could hear the family moving and talking. But what was taking so long?

  On the other side of the door, the family prepared for what they believed would be an evacuation from the house. In their bedroom, the girls carefully slipped into their jewel-lined camisoles, making sure every tiny eye hook was securely fastened before donning their plain white blouses and black skirts. Alexei, too, put on an undershirt concealing gems, while Alexandra tied a cloth belt containing several rows of large pearls around her waist. High up on her arm, she wound a length of solid gold wire.

  At last the double doors opened, and the prisoners stepped out onto the landing. First came Nicholas wearing his usual soldier’s tunic and military cap, his still-strong arms carrying thirteen-year-old Alexei. The boy, also dressed in a soldier’s tunic, winced with every step his father took.

  Alexandra came next, walking with difficulty. Rail thin, her gray hair untidy from her being awakened at such an hour, she
leaned heavily on Olga’s arm.

  Olga, too, was “all skin and bones,” remembered one of the guards. She appeared faded and sad. But not the other girls. Following behind their mother, “they smiled naturally at us in their usual cheerful manner.”

  Rounding out the group was Alexei Trupp, the family’s footman, Ivan Kharitonov, the cook, and Anna Demidova, the parlor maid. Demidova clutched two pillows she claimed were for the empress’s back. Only the captives knew the truth—buried deep within the cushion’s feathers lay two boxes containing even more jewels.

  Yurovsky inspected the prisoners. “They still did not imagine anything of what was in store for them,” he later recalled. Added one of the guards, “None of the members of the imperial family asked … any questions.… There were no tears, no sobbing either.”

  Yurovsky, along with the other men, steered the group toward the narrow stairs leading to the ground floor. At that moment, the family’s dogs—Joy, Jemmy, and Ortipo—scampered after them. Wiggling and whining, they begged to come along.

  No dogs, Yurovsky instructed.

  But Anastasia refused to leave Jemmy behind. Although the dog had been a gift to Tatiana from a family friend, he’d become Anastasia’s constant companion during their captivity. She couldn’t abandon him now. Scooping up the little King Charles spaniel, she hugged him to her chest.

  Not wanting to create a scene and alarm the Romanovs, the commandant ignored Anastasia’s disobedience and let her take the dog. He led them down the stairs.

  At the bottom, Nicholas turned to the others. “Well, we’re going to get out of this place,” he said.

  Yurovsky pushed open the door, and the prisoners filed out into the early-morning darkness. For the first time in months, they felt the cool night breeze tickling their cheeks. Overhead, stars twinkled like a thousand watching eyes in the dark Siberian sky.

  Across the sloping courtyard at the corner of the house lay an open door, and behind it, more steps leading into a labyrinth-like cellar. Down they went, twenty-three steps—one for every year of Nicholas’s ill-fated reign. At the bottom, Yurovsky took them through a series of hallways toward a storeroom at the opposite end of the house. Opening another set of double doors, he waved them inside.

  The space—just eleven by thirteen feet—was lit by a single naked lightbulb hanging from the low ceiling. A heavy iron grille barred the room’s only window, and a piece of wood had been nailed over it from the inside. Faded wallpaper covered the walls, and the yellow painted floor was without rugs. There was no furniture.

  “What, there isn’t even a chair?” said Alexandra. “One isn’t even allowed to sit down?”

  Ignoring her haughty tone, Yurovsky turned to one of the guards. He asked for chairs to be brought down.

  Grumbling under his breath, the guard obeyed, returning minutes later with two straight-back chairs. Alexandra lowered herself onto one while Nicholas gently settled his son on the other.

  The maid, Anna Demidova, hurried over. She tucked the pillows she’d been carrying behind the empress’s bony back.

  Now Yurovsky began giving instructions. “Please, you stand here,” he said, spreading the group against the wall. “And you here … that’s it, in a row.”

  When he finished, there were two rows: Nicholas stood next to his son’s chair in the front, while Alexandra sat in her own chair on the other side of the boy. The girls—Anastasia still clutching the dog—stood behind their mother, while Dr. Botkin and the servants stood behind Alexei and the tsar.

  Yurovsky looked them over. “They [still] had no idea what was taking place,” he later recalled. Then, lying yet again, he asked the prisoners to wait there until the truck taking them to safety arrived. No one was to speak. He stepped from the room, closing the door behind him.

  From outside came the rumble of a truck—the one Yurovsky had ordered earlier—pulling into the courtyard. Did the family believe it had come to take them from the house? Disobeying the commandant’s order, Alexandra whispered something in English to her daughters.

  The cellar door reopened. There stood Yurovsky. Behind him, crowding into the room, came the others.

  Nicholas, obviously thinking this motley group was a special detachment sent to escort them to safety, took a step forward.

  And Yurovsky moved farther into the room. In his left hand, he clutched a piece of paper. He asked the prisoners to stand.

  Unable to obey, Alexei remained seated. Alexandra, “with a flash of anger in her eyes,” according to one squad member, pulled herself to her feet.

  Yurovsky began reading from the paper: “In light of the fact that your relatives in Europe [are] continuing their aggression against Soviet Russia [it] has been decreed that [you are] to be shot.”

  “Lord, oh, my God!” stammered Nicholas. He turned to his family. “Oh, my God! What is this?”

  “So we’re not going to be taken anywhere?” cried Dr. Botkin.

  “I can’t understand you,” said Nicholas. “Read it again, please.”

  Yurovsky did.

  “What?” Nicholas cried again. “What?”

  Yurovsky let go of the paper. As it fluttered to the floor, he jerked the Colt pistol from his pocket. “This!” he said. He shot the tsar.

  Nicholas crumpled to the floor just as the other men raised their guns and fired. Alexandra died as she tried to cross herself. Dr. Botkin, Trupp, and Kharitonov also died instantly.

  But the others were still alive. Incredibly, bullets aimed directly at both the girls’ and Alexei’s chests merely bounced off and “jumped about the room like hail,” remembered Yurovsky. It was the jewels sewn into camisoles and T-shirt. They had unwittingly turned the garments into bulletproof vests.

  As the men shot, Alexei—unable to get up and run—gripped his chair in terror. In the chaos, it toppled over, flinging the boy to the floor. He moaned and clutched his father’s arm. Minutes later, Yurovsky shot him in the head.

  Meanwhile, the others dropped to the floor, instinctively trying to protect themselves. Crawling through the thick cloud of gun smoke that now filled the room, they searched frantically for a way out. Only their outlines could be seen, and the men began firing randomly at anything that moved. The bullets ripped into the wallpaper, “sending dust flying in the air and bullets flying about the room,” remembered one squad member.

  Olga and Tatiana, arms around each other, huddled in a corner. Bullets soon took their lives.

  In another corner, Anastasia and Marie pressed themselves together. Both girls screamed for their mother. The murderers moved forward. They slashed at the “Little Pair” with bayonets before silencing them both with gunshots.

  Anna Demidova was the last to die.

  Then an eerie quiet settled over the room. The imperial family lay still. Calmly, Yurovsky checked for pulses. Then the men wrapped the bodies in sheets taken from the girls’ army cots, and carried them up the stairs to the waiting truck. That’s when someone found the body of Anastasia’s little dog. They tossed it into the truck, too.

  Under cover of darkness, they headed for Koptyaki Forest.

  “BUT THE CHILDREN —THE CHILDREN!”

  Eight days later, on July 25, 1918, the White Army captured Ekaterinburg, and a group of officers raced to the House of Special Purpose to free the tsar and his family. What they found was an empty house, save a few remnants that lay scattered about the prisoners’ rooms—thimbles, icons, a jewelry box covered in lilac silk, an ivory hairbrush with the initials A.F. carved on its handle. On a small side table sat a box of dominoes, along with a heavily underlined prayer book titled Patience in Suffering. Next to the fireplace sat a wheelchair.

  But it was a room in the cellar that shook the officers. Although scrubbed clean, the wooden floor still showed the nicks and gouges made by bullets and bayonets; the walls were pocked with holes; and smears of dried blood could be seen on the baseboards. It was obvious something awful had happened here.

  Three day after the murders, Bo
lshevik officials in Ekaterinburg had bluntly and publicly announced: “The … Soviet passed a resolution to execute Nicholas Romanov and carried it out on July 16.” But they did not confess to killing the rest of the family. Instead, they claimed Alexandra and the children had been “sent to a safe place.” That’s because the Bolsheviks, afraid of losing the public’s support, did not want to admit to murdering innocent children and servants. Without any bodies to contradict their lie, “the world will never know what has become of them,” remarked one official.

  In truth, it didn’t appear as if most Russians cared. They “received the news [of Nicholas’s death] with amazing indifference,” reported British journalist Bruce Lockhart. And rumors that the rest of the family had been killed didn’t elicit much emotion either. Only some former noblemen mourned. Admitted a tearful General Brusilov, he prayed each night for the “missing Romanovs.”

  Announcement made, Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg fled before the White Army could capture them. Yurovsky skipped town, too. He took with him a black leather suitcase full of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls—jewels he’d discovered hidden in both the children’s and empress’s clothing while disposing of their bodies. He also loaded up seven trunks of the family’s belongings, including Nicholas’s diaries and letters, as well as their photograph albums. Then he headed to Moscow, where, days later, he made a full report to high-ranking Bolsheviks. The rest of the Romanovs’ belongings were hastily crated by the remaining guards and sent to the capital by train just hours before Ekaterinburg fell.

  Without witnesses or evidence, White officers did not know what to believe. Desperate to learn the truth, they launched an investigation. And they put a hard-nosed detective named Nicholas Sokolov in charge. Sokolov did not doubt that an assassination had taken place in the cellar. But had everyone been killed? Or was it possible, as Bolsheviks claimed, that some members of the family had survived? The only way to know for sure was to find their bodies.