The Russian Revolution

17

Murder of the Imperial Family

On the night of July 16–17, 1918, at approximately 2:30 a.m. in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg, a squad of Chekists murdered, in the basement of a private home, the ex-Emperor, Nicholas II, his wife, their son and four daughters, the family physician, and three servants. This much is known with certainty. The steps that led to this tragedy, however, remain obscure, despite the immense literature, and will remain such until all the pertinent archives are thrown open to scholars.*

Two other European monarchs had lost their lives in consequence of revolutionary upheavals: Charles I in 1649 and Louis XVI in 1793. Yet, as is the case with so much that concerns the Russian Revolution, while the superficial features of events are familiar, all else is unique. Charles I was tried by a specially constituted High Court of Justice, which lodged formal charges and gave him an opportunity to defend himself. The trial was held in the open and its records were published while it was still in progress; the execution took place in public view. The same held true of Louis XVI. He was tried before the Convention, which sentenced him to death by a majority vote after a long debate, in the course of which a lawyer defended the king. The trial records, too, were published. The execution was carried out in broad daylight in the center of Paris.

Nicholas II was neither charged nor tried. The Soviet Government, which had condemned him to death, has never published the relevant documents: such facts as are known of the event are mainly the result of the efforts of one dedicated investigator. In the Russian case, the victims were not only the deposed monarch but also his wife, children, and staff. The deed, perpetrated in the dead of night, resembled more a gangster-type massacre than a formal execution.

The Bolshevik seizure of power at first brought no significant change to the ex-Tsar’s family and its retainers living in Tobolsk, where they had been exiled by Kerensky. In the winter of 1917–18, life in the Governor’s House and its annexes went on much as before. The family was allowed to take walks, to attend religious services in a nearby church, to receive newspapers and correspond with friends. In February 1918, their state subvention was cut off and their allowance reduced to 600 rubles a month, but even so they lived in reasonable comfort. The Bolsheviks, who had their hands full with more urgent matters, gave little thought to the Romanovs, all of whom had withdrawn from public affairs. They discussed what to do with the ex-Tsar as early as November 1917 but took no decision.¹

The situation began to change in March, in connection with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The treaty brought terrible odium to the Bolshevik regime. In this atmosphere attempts at restoration could not have been precluded, the more so that the Bolsheviks were aware of pro-monarchist sentiments among German generals. To avoid trouble, precautions were taken to remove the Romanovs from the scene. On March 9, Lenin signed a decree ordering into exile Grand Duke Michael, the putative heir to the Russian throne. Michael had shown no interest in politics since rejecting the crown offered him by Nicholas in March 1917. He lived quietly on his estate at Gatchina, near Petrograd, shunning politics and keeping out of the public eye.² How unconcerned he was with political events may be gathered from the fact that a few days after turning down the throne, he appeared before the astonished officials of the Petrograd Soviet with a request for permission to hunt on his estate.³ In the summer of 1917 he asked the British Ambassador for a visa to England, but was turned down with the explanation that “His Majesty’s Government do not wish members of the Imperial Family to come to England during the war.”* ⁴ At the end of 1917, Michael’s petition to Lenin for permission to change his royal name to that of his wife’s, Countess Brasova, received no response.⁵

Michael was now placed under arrest, first at Smolnyi and then at the Cheka headquarters. On March 12, following the departure of Lenin and the rest of the government for Moscow, he was sent under guard to Perm, not far from Tobolsk. Because the Bolsheviks feared that the Germans might occupy Petrograd and get hold of members of the Imperial family, they decided to remove them from this exposed area. On March 16, Uritskii, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, ordered all members of the family in Petrograd and vicinity to register.⁶ Later that month, he issued a further order that all these individuals were to be deported to the provinces of Perm, Vologda, or Viatka, at their choice. Once there, they were to report to the local soviet and receive from it residential permits.⁷ As it turned out, all the Romanovs, except those who were in prison or lived outside Bolshevik control, ended up in Perm. This region had the largest concentration of Bolshevik Party members after Petrograd and Moscow who could be relied upon to keep a sharp eye on the Imperial clan.

These were precautionary measures, for the Bolshevik leadership had not as yet decided what to do with the ex-Tsar and his relatives. In 1911 Lenin had written that “it was necessary to behead at least one hundred Romanovs.”⁸ Such mass execution, however, would be dangerous, because of the strong monarchist sentiments of the village. One possibility was to try Nicholas before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Isaac Steinberg, who as Commissar of Justice at the time was in a position to know, writes that such a trial was under consideration in February 1918 to prevent a restoration of the monarchy—tacit admission that one year after his universally welcomed abdication, the unpopular Nicholas appealed to enough Russians to worry the Bolsheviks. According to Steinberg, at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee, Spiridonova opposed a trial on the grounds that Nicholas would be lynched en route from Tobolsk. Lenin decided that it was still too early for legal proceedings against the ex-Tsar but ordered that materials for them be gathered.†

In the middle of April, the Russian press carried reports of an impending trial of “Nicholas Romanov.” This, it was said, would be the first of a series of trials of prominent figures of the old regime which Krylenko was readying as head of the Supreme Investigatory Commission. The ex-Tsar would be charged with only those “crimes” which he had committed as constitutional ruler—that is, after October 17, 1905. Among them would be the so-called coup d’état of June 3, 1907, which had violated the Fundamental Laws by arbitrarily changing the electoral law; the improper expenditure of national resources through the “reserved” part of the budget; and other abuses of authority.⁹ But on April 22 the press reported a denial by Krylenko that Nicholas would be tried. According to Krylenko, the rumors were due to a misunderstanding: the government really meant to try an agent provocateur by the name of Romanov.¹⁰

The fact that Tobolsk had no railroad saved it from being immediately caught up in the revolutionary turmoil, for at this time the “Revolution” was spread mainly by gangs of armed men traveling by train. This explains why as late as February 1918 Tobolsk had no Communist Party cell and its soviet remained under the control of SRs and Mensheviks.

Tobolsk’s isolation ended in March when the Bolsheviks of nearby Ekaterinburg and Omsk evinced an interest in its royal residents. In February, Ekaterinburg held a Congress of Soviets of the Ural Region at which it elected a five-man Presidium controlled by the Bolsheviks. Its chairman, the twenty-six-year-old Alexander Beloborodov, a locksmith or electrician by profession, had been Bolshevik deputy to the Constituent Assembly.* But the most influential member of the Presidium, by virtue of his intimate friendship with Sverdlov, was Isai Goloshchekin, the Military Commissar of the Ural Region. Born in Vitebsk in 1876 in a Jewish family, Goloshchekin had joined Lenin in 1903 and became a member of the Central Committee in 1912. Goloshchekin also served as member of the Ekaterinburg Cheka. He and Beloborodov were to play critical roles in the destiny of the Imperial family.

Our knowledge of the political situation in Ekaterinburg in the spring and summer of 1918 derives almost entirely from a single Communist source, the accounts of P. M. Bykov, which also provide the earliest Soviet version of the Ekaterinburg tragedy.† The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks were annoyed by the comforts the ex-Tsar was enjoying in Tobolsk and alarmed by the degree of freedom allowed him and his entourage. They feared that with the coming of the spring thaws the Imperial family would flee.¹¹ At the time persistent rumors circulated in the Urals that all sorts of suspicious individuals were assembling in and around Tobolsk.* Some of the Ekaterinburg Communists were extremists who hated Nicholas II—“Nicholas the Bloody”—with genuine passion because of the persecutions they had suffered at the hands of his police. But all of them were afraid of a restoration of the monarchy: not so much out of any abstract political considerations as from fear for their lives. They reasoned as did Robespierre when he pleaded in 1793 before the Convention for a sentence of death to be passed on Louis XVI: “If the king is not guilty, then those who have dethroned him are.”¹² They wished the Romanovs out of the way as quickly and expeditiously as possible: and to make certain the ex-Tsar would not get away, they wanted him under their own control, in Ekaterinburg. To this end, in March-April 1918 they contacted Sverdlov.

Omsk had similar ideas, but it lacked connections in Moscow and in the end lost out.

The Ural Regional Soviet in Ekaterinburg discussed the Imperial family as early as February 1918, at which time some deputies expressed fears that by May, when the ice melted on the rivers, the Romanovs would either escape or be abducted. In early March the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks requested from Sverdlov permission to remove the Imperial family.¹³ A similar request came from Omsk.

To leave nothing to chance, Ekaterinburg dispatched on March 16 to Tobolsk a secret mission to investigate conditions there. After the mission had returned and delivered its report, Ekaterinburg sent an armed detachment to Tobolsk to lay the groundwork for the transfer of the Romanov family. It also posted patrols along possible routes of escape. Upon reaching Tobolsk on March 28, this detachment discovered that it had been preceded by a group of armed Communists sent by Omsk for the same purpose. The Omsk group, which had arrived two days earlier, had dispersed the city Duma and evicted the SRs and Mensheviks from the local soviet. The two groups disputed who was in charge. Being the weaker, the Ekaterinburg detachment had to retreat, but it returned on April 13 with reinforcements led by the Bolshevik S. S. Zaslavskii and took charge. Zaslavskii demanded that the Imperial family be incarcerated.¹⁴ To this end, cells were readied in the local prison.¹⁵

These events disrupted the calm which the Imperial family had been enjoying until then. Alexandra noted in her diary on March 28/April 10 that she “sewed up” jewels with the help of the children.† Although no evidence has come to light that the Imperial family made plans to escape, and all alleged plots toward this end by sympathizers turned out to be empty talk, an oppressive sense that they were captives rather than exiles overcame the Imperial household. Any possibility, however remote and unreal, of escaping from the Bolsheviks now vanished.¹⁶

At the end of March, Goloshchekin left for Moscow. He reported to Sverdlov on the situation in Tobolsk, warning of the need for urgent measures to prevent the Imperial family’s escape. Approximately at the same time—the first week of April—the Presidium of the CEC in Moscow also heard a report on the situation in Tobolsk from a representative of the local guard. According to an account given to the CEC by Sverdlov on May 9, this information persuaded the government to authorize the transfer of the ex-Tsar to Ekaterinburg. This explanation, however, is a post facto attempt to justify events which unfolded contrary to the government’s intentions. For it is known that on April 1 the Presidium resolved “if possible” to bring the Romanovs to Moscow.¹⁷

On April 22, there appeared in Tobolsk Vasilii Vasilevich Iakovlev, an emissary from Moscow. Long a mysterious figure, suspected even of being an English agent, he has recently been identified as an old Bolshevik whose real name was Konstantin Miachin. Born in 1886 near Orenburg, he had joined the Social-Democratic Party in 1905 and taken part in many Bolshevik armed robberies (“expropriations”). In 1911 he emigrated under false identity (Iakovlev) and worked in Belgium as an electrician. He returned to Russia after the February Revolution. In October 1917 he served on the Military-Revolutionary Committee and was a delegate to the Second Congress of Soviets. In December 1917 he was appointed to the Collegium of the Cheka. He participated in the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly.¹⁸ In other words, he was a tried and trusted Bolshevik.

Iakovlev-Miachin was silent about the ultimate purpose of his mission, and Communist sources have been similarly reticent. But it can be established with certainty that his task was to bring Nicholas, and, if feasible, the rest of his family, to Moscow, where the ex-Tsar was to stand trial. This can be established from circumstantial evidence: common sense dictates that the government would not have sent an emissary from Moscow to Tobolsk, nearly 2,000 kilometers away, to escort the Imperial family to nearby Ekaterinburg, especially since the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks were most eager to have them in their custody. But there exists also direct evidence to this effect, supplied by N. Nemtsov, a Bolshevik commissar from Tiumen and chairman of the Perm Guberniia Central Executive Committee. Nemtsov recounts that in April he had a visit from Iakovlev, who appeared with a “Moscow detachment” of forty-two men:

[Iakovlev] presented me with a mandate for the “removal” of Nicholas Romanov from Tobolsk and his delivery to Moscow. The mandate was signed by the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ilich Lenin.*

This testimony, which somehow slipped by the exceedingly tight Soviet censorship on all information concerning the fate of the Romanovs, should put an end to speculation that Iakovlev either was under orders to bring the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg or that he was a secret White agent sent to abduct them and bring them to safety.

En route to Tobolsk, Iakovlev stopped in Ufa to meet with Goloshchekin. He showed his mandate and asked for additional men. From there he proceeded to Tobolsk, going not by the direct route through Ekaterinburg, but by a roundabout way through Cheliabinsk and Omsk.¹⁹ He did so apparently out of fear that the Ekaterinburg hotheads, eager to lay their hands on Nicholas, would abort his mission, for the success of which he had assumed personal responsibility. Indeed, while he was en route to Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg attempted to anticipate him by sending a company of soldiers to bring back the ex-Tsar “dead or alive.” Iakovlev almost caught up with this detachment, arriving in Tobolsk a couple of days later.²⁰ He had a guard of 150 cavalry, 60 of them provided by Goloshchekin. The party was armed with machine guns.

Iakovlev spent two days in Tobolsk acquainting himself with the situation. He met with the local garrison and won its favor by distributing its overdue pay. He also familiarized himself with conditions inside the Governor’s House. He learned that Alexis was severely ill. The Tsarevich, who had suffered no hemophiliac attacks since the fall of 1912, had bruised himself on April 12 and since then was confined to bed. He was in great pain, with both legs swollen and paralyzed. Iakovlev twice visited the Imperial household and convinced himself that the Tsarevich indeed was in no condition to undertake the hazardous journey to Moscow. (“Intelligent, highly nervous workman, engineer” was Alexandra’s impression of him.) April was the worst possible time for traveling in the Urals because by that time the snow had melted sufficiently to impede the movement of sleds and carts but not enough to free the rivers for navigation. On April 24, Iakovlev communicated with Moscow by wire: he was instructed to bring Nicholas alone and for the time being leave the family behind.²¹ †

Up to this time, Iakovlev had been extremely polite, almost deferential, to the Imperial family, which aroused the suspicions of the soldiers of his entourage and of the Tobolsk garrison. They thought it highly suspect that a Bolshevik would so demean himself as to shake hands with “Nicholas the Bloody.”²² After receiving fresh instructions, Iakovlev retained his good manners but turned official. On the morning of April 25, he told E. S. Kobylinskii, the commandant of the Governor’s House, that he had to remove the ex-Tsar; where to he would not say, although he apparently let it slip that the destination was Moscow. He requested an “audience,” which was set for two o’clock that afternoon. On arriving in the Governor’s House, Iakovlev was annoyed to find Nicholas in the company of Alexandra and Kobylinskii. He requested them to leave, but Alexandra made such a scene that he agreed to them staying. He told Nicholas that he had instructions from the Central Executive Committee to depart with him early the next day. His original orders had called for him to take along the entire family, but in view of Alexis’s condition, he was now instructed to bring only Nicholas. The response of the ex-Tsar to Iakovlev’s news is recorded in two versions. According to an interview which Iakovlev gave to Izvestiia the following month, Nicholas merely asked: “Where shall they take me?” Kobylinskii, however, recalls Nicholas saying: “I shan’t go anywhere,” which seems rather out of character. According to Kobylinskii, Iakovlev responded:

Please, don’t do that. I must carry out my orders. If you refuse to go, I will either have to use force or resign my mission. In that case, they may replace me with someone who will be less humane. You may rest easy. I answer with my head for your life. If you do not wish to travel alone, you may take with you whomever you wish. We depart at four tomorrow morning.²³

Iakovlev’s order threw the Imperial couple, especially Alexandra, into a state of extreme agitation. According to him, Alexandra cried out: “This is too cruel. I do not believe you will do that …!”²⁴ He would not say where he was to take Nicholas, and later, writing for a White newspaper, claimed that he did not know. This, of course, is untrue, and was probably intended to give credence to rumors, favorable to him at the time, after he had gone over to the Whites, that he really had meant to bring Nicholas into areas controlled by them.*

After Iakovlev left, Nicholas, Alexandra, and Kobylinskii discussed the situation. Nicholas agreed with Kobylinskii that he was to be brought to Moscow to sign the Brest Treaty. If so, the mission was in vain: “I will rather have my hand cut off than do this.”²⁵ That Nicholas could believe the Bolsheviks needed his signature to formalize the Brest Treaty shows how little he understood of what had happened in Russia since his abdication and how irrelevant he had become. Alexandra, who also believed that this was the purpose of Iakovlev’s mission, was far less confident of her husband’s steadfastness: she had never forgiven him for agreeing to abdicate and felt certain that had she been in Pskov on that fateful day, she would have stopped him. She suspected that unbearable pressure would be brought on Nicholas in Moscow, mainly by threats against his family, to sign the disgraceful treaty and that unless she stood by his side he would cave in. Kobylinskii overheard her saying to a close friend, Prince Ilia Tatishchev: “I fear that if he is alone he will do something stupid there.”²⁶ She was beside herself, torn between love for her sick child and what she felt to be her duty to Russia. And in the end the woman who for years had been accused of betraying her adopted country chose Russia.

The Tsarevich’s Swiss tutor, P. Gilliard, who met with her at 4 p.m., describes the scene thus:

The Czarina … confirmed that I had heard that Iakovlev has been sent from Moscow to take the Czar away and that he is to leave tonight.

“The commissar says that no harm will come to the Czar, and that if anyone wishes to accompany him, there will be no objection. I cannot let the Czar go alone. They want to separate him from the family as they did before …

“They’re going to try to force his hand by making him anxious about his family … The Czar is necessary to them; they feel that he alone represents Russia … Together we shall be in a better position to resist them, and I ought to be at his side in the time of trial … But the boy is so ill … Suppose some complication sets in … Oh, God, what ghastly torture!… For the first time in my life I don’t know what I ought to do; I’ve always felt inspired whenever I’ve had to take a decision, and now I can’t think … But God won’t allow the Czar’s departure; it can’t, it must not be. I’m sure the thaw will begin tonight …”

Tatiana Nikolaevna here intervened:

“But, Mother, if Father has to go, whatever we say, something must be decided …”

I took up the cudgels on Tatiana Nikolaevna’s behalf, remarking that Alexis Nikolaevich was better, and that we should take great care of him …

Her Majesty was obviously tortured by indecision; she paced up and down the room, and went on talking, rather to herself than to us. At last she came up to me and said:

“Yes, that will be best; I’ll go with the Czar; I shall trust Alexis to you …”

A moment later the Czar came in. The Czarina walked towards him, saying:

“It’s settled; I’ll go with you, and Marie will come too.”

The Czar replied: “Very well, if you wish it.” …

The family have spent the whole afternoon at the bedside of Alexis Nikolaevich.

This evening at half past ten we went up to take tea. The Czarina was seated on the divan with two of her daughters beside her. Their faces were swollen with crying. We all did our best to hide our grief and to maintain outward calm. We felt that for one to give way would cause all to break down. The Czar and Czarina were calm and collected. It is apparent that they are prepared for any sacrifices, even of their lives, if God in his inscrutable wisdom should require it for the country’s welfare. They have never shown greater kindness and solicitude.

This splendid serenity of theirs, this wonderful faith proved infectious.

At half past eleven the servants were assembled in the large hall. Their Majesties and Marie Nikolaevna took leave of them. The Czar embraced every man, the Czarina every woman. Almost all were in tears. Their Majesties withdrew; we all went down to my room.

At half past three the conveyances drew up in the courtyard. They were the horrible tarantass. Only one was covered. We found a little straw in the backyard and spread it on the floor of the carriages. We put a mattress in the one to be used by the Czarina.

At four o’clock we went up to see Their Majesties and found them just leaving Alexis Nikolaevich’s room. The Czar and Czarina and Marie Nikolaevna took leave of us. The Czarina and the Grand-Duchesses were in tears. The Czar seemed calm and had a word of encouragement for each of us; he embraced us. The Czarina, when saying good-bye, begged me to stay upstairs with Alexis Nikolaevich. I went to the boy’s room and found him in bed crying.

A few minutes later we heard the rumbling of wheels. The Grand-Duchesses passed their brother’s door on their way to their rooms, and I could hear them sobbing …²⁷

Iakovlev was in a desperate hurry. Any moment the thaw could set in and make the roads impassable. He also knew of lurking dangers. His orders were to safeguard the life of the ex-Tsar and deliver him safely to Moscow. But everything he had learned on his mission convinced him that the Bolsheviks of Ekaterinburg had different plans. The Bolshevik conference of the Ural Region at this very time voted in favor of a prompt execution of Nicholas to prevent his flight and a restoration of the monarchy.²⁸ Iakovlev had information that Zaslavskii, one of the Bolshevik commissars in Tobolsk, had fled to Ekaterinburg on the day of his arrival; there were rumors that he had set up an ambush at Ievlevo, where the road leading to the railroad junction of Tiumen crossed the Tobol River, with the intention of capturing and, if necessary, killing Nicholas.²⁹

The party left as scheduled, traveling in tarantassy (or, as they are known in Siberia, koshevy), long, springless carts pulled by two or three horses. They were accompanied by a bodyguard of thirty-five. In front rode two men armed with rifles, followed by a cart with two machine guns and two more riflemen. Next came the tarantass carrying Nicholas and Iakovlev, who had insisted on sitting by the ex-Tsar. Behind were two more riflemen, the tarantass with Alexandra and Maria, followed by more riflemen, machine guns, and carts. Included in the party were Dr. Evgenii Botkin, the family’s physician, Prince Alexander Dolgorukii, the Court Marshal, and three domestics. Alexandra put her favorite daughter, Tatiana, in charge of the boy and the two sisters. Iakovlev promised that as soon as the rivers became ice-free, which was expected to occur in two weeks, the children would rejoin their parents. He remained secretive about the ultimate destination: the Imperial couple knew only they were being taken to Tiumen, the nearest railroad junction, 230 kilometers away.

The road to Tiumen was in an atrocious condition, badly rutted after the winter and in parts dissolved in mud. Four hours from Tobolsk, they forded the Irtysh River, with the horses wading deep into the icy waters. Halfway, at Ievlevo, they ran into the Tobol River: here the water had flooded the ice and they crossed it walking on wooden planks. Just before Tiumen, they traversed the Tura River, partly on foot, partly by ferry. Iakovlev had organized along the way relays of horses, which reduced stops to a minimum. At one point, Dr. Botkin became ill and the party halted for two hours to allow him to recover. In the evening of the first day, after sixteen hours of travel, they arrived at Bochalino, where arrangements had been made to spend the night. Alexandra jotted down in her diary before retiring:

Marie in a tarantass. Nicholas with Commissar Yakovlev. Cold, gray and windy, crossed the Irtish after changing horses at 8, and at 12 stopped in a village and took tea with our cold provisions. Road perfectly atrocious, frozen ground, mud, snow, water up to the horses’ stomachs, fearfully shaken, pains all over. After the 4th change the poles, on which the body of the tarantass rests, slipped, and we had to climb over into another carriage-box. Changed 5 times horses … At 8 got to Yevlevo where we spent the night in house where was the village shop before. We slept 3 in one room, we on our beds, Marie on the floor on her mattress … One does not tell us where we are going from Tiumen, some imagine Moscow, the little ones are to follow us soon as river free and Baby well.³⁰

En route Iakovlev permitted Alexandra to post letters and telegrams to the children. At one of the stops a peasant approached to ask where Nicholas was being taken. When told he was going to Moscow, the peasant responded: “Glory be to the Lord … to Moscow. That means we will now have order here in Russia again.”³¹

The guards accompanying the party grew ever more suspicious of Iakovlev because of the deferential manner with which he continued to treat the ex-Tsar. They could not understand why Nicholas seemed so cheerful and began to wonder whether Iakovlev did not intend to spirit him away to eastern Siberia or even Japan. Through patrols which had been posted along the way, they communicated their misgivings to Ekaterinburg.

At 4 a.m. on April 27, after a night passed without incident—the expected ambush had not materialized—the journey resumed. At noon, the party stopped at Pokrovskoe. This village, one of thousands scattered across Siberia, had been the home of Rasputin. Alexandra noted: “stood long before our Friend’s house, saw His family and friends looking out of the window.”

According to Iakovlev, Nicholas seemed to flourish from the exercise and fresh air, while Alexandra “was silent, talked to no one, and acted proud and unapproachable,”³² but both greatly impressed him: “I was struck by the humbleness of these people,” he later told a journalist, “They never complained of anything.”³³

As far as one can determine from the confusing evidence, Iakovlev intended to get to Ekaterinburg as quickly as possible and, leaving it fast behind, proceed to Moscow. But he grew anxious about the prospects of getting his charges safely through that city. He would have been even more alarmed had he known that on April 27, while his party was on the second leg of its journey, a commissar from the Ekaterinburg Soviet appeared at the residence of the engineer Nicholas Ipatev, on the corner of Voznesenskii Prospekt and Voz-nesenskii Street, to inform him that his house was requisitioned for the needs of the Soviet and he was to vacate it within forty-eight hours.³⁴ Ekaterinburg had its own plans for the Romanovs.

Iakovlev’s party arrived at Tiumen at 9 p.m. on April 27. There it was at once surrounded by a troop of cavalrymen, who escorted it to the railroad station, where stood a locomotive and four passenger cars. Iakovlev supervised the transfer of the Imperial family, its staff, and their belongings. Then Nemtsov appeared and, as the Romanovs retired to sleep, the two commissars went to the telegraph office. Using the Hughes apparatus, Iakovlev communicated to Sverdlov his misgivings about the intentions of the local Bolsheviks and requested authorization to remove the Imperial family to a safe place in Ufa province. In the course of a five-hour conversation, Sverdlov rejected this proposal. He agreed, however, to Iakovlev’s proceeding to Moscow not directly, through Ekaterinburg, but by the same roundabout route he had taken earlier that month on his way to Tobolsk—that is, through Omsk, Cheliabinsk, and Samara. To conceal his plan, Iakovlev instructed the station master to send the train in the direction of Ekaterinburg, then, at the next station, attach a new engine, reverse directions and have it proceed at full speed through Tiumen toward Omsk.³⁵ At 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 28, the train bearing the Imperial family left for Ekaterinburg and then turned around. By way of explanation, Iakovlev told Avdeev, an associate of Zaslavskii’s, he had information that Ekaterinburg intended to blow up the train.³⁶

When he awoke in the morning, Nicholas noted with surprise that his train was traveling eastward. He wondered in his diary: “Where are they going to take us after Omsk? To Moscow or Vladivostok?”* Iakovlev would not say. Maria struck up a conversation with the guards, but even her beauty and charm failed to draw them out. Very likely they, too, were ignorant.

Ekaterinburg was advised in the early hours of the morning that the train with the Imperial family was on its way. It only learned of Iakovlev’s ruse later in the day from a telegram sent by Avdeev. The Presidium declared Iakovlev “a traitor to the Revolution” and placed him “outside the law.” Wires to this effect were dispatched in all directions.³⁷

On receipt of this information, Omsk sent a military detachment to intercept Iakovlev’s train before it reached the Kulomzino junction, where it could turn west and, bypassing Omsk, head for Cheliabinsk. When Iakovlev learned that he was accused of attempting to abduct his charges, he stopped the train at the Liubinskaia station. Leaving three passenger cars under guard, he detached the locomotive and proceeded in the fourth to Omsk, to communicate with Moscow. This happened during the night of April 28–29.

The substance of Iakovlev’s conversation with Sverdlov is known only from a most suspect secondhand account by Bykov:

[Iakovlev] called Sverdlov to the telegraph and explained the circumstances which had caused him to change the itinerary. From Moscow came the proposition [predlozhenie] that he take the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg and there turn them over to the Ural Regional Soviet.* ³⁸

This version is almost certainly false, for three reasons. For one, Iakovlev did not “change the itinerary” but proceeded exactly as Sverdlov had instructed him during their previous conversation. Second, the powerful chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Lenin’s close confidant would not “propose” to a minor functionary, but would order him. Third, if Sverdlov indeed wanted Iakovlev to turn over the Imperial family to the Ekaterinburg Soviet, there would not have occurred the next day a three-hour altercation in Ekaterinburg between Iakovlev and the local Bolshevik Party. The most plausible explanation—though it is only conjecture—is that Sverdlov told Iakovlev to avoid getting into an argument with the Ekaterinburg Soviet, which mistrusted him, and to proceed to Moscow by way of Ekaterinburg so as to put to rest suspicions that he intended to abduct the ex-Tsar.

After talking to Sverdlov, Iakovlev ordered the engineer to reverse direction. All this transpired during the night, while Nicholas and family were asleep. On awakening in the morning of April 29, Nicholas noted that the train was now traveling westward, which confirmed his earlier belief that he was being taken to Moscow. Alexandra noted in her diary, most likely from information supplied by Iakovlev: “Omsk soviet would not let us pass Omsk and feared one wished to take us to Japan.” Nicholas wrote on that day: “We are all in good spirits.” Thus, the prospect of being delivered out of the hands of their tormentors to foreigners did not please them, but it raised their spirits to be taken to Russia’s ancient capital, now the main citadel of Bolshevism.

They traveled all that day and the night that followed, with occasional stops, to cover the 850 kilometers between Omsk and Ekaterinburg. The voyage was uneventful. Iakovlev recalled that the ex-Tsarina was so painfully shy that she would wait for hours to go to the lavatory, until the car was clear of strangers, and remain there until she was sure there was no one in the corridor.³⁹

The train pulled into the main Ekaterinburg station on April 30 at 8:40 a.m. Here a large hostile crowd had gathered, apparently assembled by the local Bolsheviks to pressure Iakovlev into turning over his charges. The events of the next three hours, during which the train stood in place, its passengers forbidden to leave, are shrouded in confusion. It seems that Iakovlev refused to surrender Nicholas and Alexandra because they would not be safe in Ekaterinburg. According to Nicholas’s diary: “We waited three hours at the station. A strong conflict [literally: fermentation] occurred between the local commissars and ours. In the end, the former won out.” Nicholas, in his simplicity, believed that the argument was over which station to detrain, because shortly after noon they were shunted to a secondary, commercial depot, Ekaterinburg II. Alexandra knew better: “Yakovlev had to give us over to the Ural regional soviet,” she wrote in her diary. The dispute between Iakovlev and the local commissars was indeed over the question whether the party would proceed to Moscow. Iakovlev lost the argument, possibly after the intervention of Moscow, which did not wish to antagonize the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks and was not quite certain what to do with the Romanovs in any event. Leaving them in Ekaterinburg in safe hands, until some future trial of the ex-Tsar, may well have appeared to Lenin and Sverdlov as not a bad compromise.

Once the train pulled into Ekaterinburg II, Iakovlev turned over the prisoners to Beloborodov, obtaining from him a handwritten receipt which absolved him of further responsibility in the matter.⁴⁰ He demanded guards, presumably to protect the Imperial family from mob violence.⁴¹ Before being allowed to depart for Moscow he had to explain his actions to the Ekaterinburg Soviet, which he apparently did to its satisfaction.⁴² That he had done nothing wrong in the eyes of his superiors in Moscow is indicated by the fact that a month later he was appointed chief of staff of the Red Army forces in Samara and, subsequently, commander of the Second Red Army on the Eastern (Ural) Front.*

At 3 p.m. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Maria, accompanied by Beloborodov and Avdeev, were taken in two open cars to the center of town, followed by a truck which Alexandra described as filled with soldiers “armed to their teeth.” According to Avdeev,⁴³ Beloborodov told Nicholas that the Central Executive Committee in Moscow had ordered him and his family detained until his forthcoming trial. The cars stopped at Ipatev’s large, whitewashed house, which the owner had vacated the day before and which the Bolsheviks now called the “House of Special Designation.” The Imperial family would not leave it alive.

Nicholas Ipatev, a retired army engineer, was a well-to-do businessman. He had acquired the house only a few months earlier, and used it partly as residence, partly as business office. It was a two-story stone building, constructed in the late nineteenth century in the ornate style favored by Muscovite boyars which returned to fashion at that time, with unusual luxuries such as hot running water and electric lights. He had furnished only the upper story, which consisted of three bedrooms, dining room, salon, reception room, kitchen, bathroom, and lavatory. The lower story, a semi-basement, was empty. The building had a small garden and several attached structures, one of which was used to store the belongings of the Imperial family. While the train was shuttling between Ekaterinburg and Omsk, workers had constructed a crude palisade to conceal the house from the street and block the inmates’ view. On June 5, another, taller palisade was added.

95. Ipatev’s house—the “House of Special Designation”: The murder occurred in the basement room with the arched-frame window on the lower left.

The house was converted into a high-security prison. The palisades prevented any communication with the outside world; and as if this were not enough, on May 15 the sealed windows were covered with white paint, except for a narrow strip at the top. The prisoners were allowed to send and receive a limited amount of correspondence, mainly with the children, which had to pass through censorship by the Cheka and the soviet, but this privilege was soon withdrawn. Once in a while outsiders were allowed in—priests and charwomen—but conversation with them was forbidden. The guards too had instructions not to speak with the prisoners. For a time newspapers were delivered but that ceased on June 5. Food brought from town—at first from the canteen of the soviet, later from a nearby convent—underwent inspection by the guards. The prisoners’ isolation was complete.

The guard of seventy-five men, all Russians except for two Poles,⁴⁴ recruited from among local factory workers, was divided into internal and external detachments. They were well paid, receiving 400 rubles a month in addition to food and clothing. The smaller internal detachments lived in Ipatev’s house; the external guard was initially billeted on the lower floor but later moved into a private residence across the street. While on duty, the guards carried revolvers and grenades. Two or three of them manned posts on the upper floor, keeping the prisoners under constant surveillance. Four machine guns defended the house: on the second floor, on the terrace, on the lower floor, and in the attic. Guards were posted outside, protecting the entrances and ensuring that no unauthorized persons came near. Avdeev had overall command. He set up his office and sleeping quarters in the reception room on the upper floor.

96. Ipatev’s house surrounded by a palisade. Photograph taken in the Fall of 1918 by an American soldier.

Nicholas and Alexandra fretted about the children, but their worries came to an end in the morning of May 23 when the three girls and Alexis suddenly appeared. They had traveled by steamer on the Tobolsk River as far as Tiumen, and from there by train. The girls had concealed in their special corsets a total of 8 kilograms of precious stones. On arrival, the guards forbade servants to help them with the luggage.

The Cheka arrested four retainers: Prince Ilia Tatishchev, Nicholas’s adjutant; A. A. Volkov, the Empress’s valet; Princess Anastasia Gendrikova, her maid of honor; and Catherine Schneider, the Court Lectrice. They were taken to the local prison, to join Prince Dolgorukii, who had accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra from Tobolsk. With a solitary exception, they were all to perish. Most of the remaining members of the Imperial suite were told to leave Perm province. Alexis’s personal attendant, K. G. Nagornyi, and the valet Ivan Sednev moved into Ipatev’s residence. Dr. Vladimir Derevenko, Alexis’s physician, received permission to stay in Ekaterinburg as a private citizen. He visited the Tsarevich twice a week, always in the company of Avdeev.

The Tobolsk party had brought a great deal of luggage, which was stored in the garden shed: members of the Imperial family frequently went there to fetch things, accompanied by guards. The guards helped themselves to the contents. When Nagornyi and Sednev protested the thefts, they were arrested (May 28) and sent to prison, where four days later the Cheka killed them. These pilferings caused Nicholas and Alexandra a great deal of anxiety because the baggage included two boxes with their personal correspondence and Nicholas’s diaries.

At the end of May 1918, Ipatev’s residence housed eleven inmates. Nicholas and Alexandra occupied the corner room. Alexis at first shared the bedroom of his sisters, but on June 26, for reasons which will be spelled out, moved in with his parents. The princesses had the middle room, where they slept on folding cots. A. S. Demidova, the lady-in-waiting, was the only prisoner to have a room to herself, next to the terrace. Dr. Botkin occupied the salon. In the kitchen lived the three servants: the cook, Ivan Kharitonov, and his apprentice, a boy named Leonid Sednev (a nephew of the arrested valet), and the valet of the princesses, Aleksei Trup.

The family settled into a monotonous routine. They rose at nine o’clock, took tea at ten. Lunch was served at one, dinner between four and five, tea at seven, supper at nine. They went to sleep at eleven o’clock.⁴⁵ Except for the meals, the prisoners were confined to their rooms. Life grew so dull that Nicholas began to skip entries in his journal. Much time was spent reading aloud from the Bible and from Russian classics, sometimes by candlelight because of the frequent power failures: Nicholas had his first opportunity to read War and Peace. The family prayed a great deal. They were allowed short walks in the garden, fifteen minutes at most, but no physical exercise, which was very hard on Nicholas. In good weather, Nicholas carried his disabled son into the yard. They played bezique and Russian backgammon, called tricktrack. They were not allowed to attend church, but on Sundays and holidays a priest would hold services in an improvised chapel in the salon, under the watchful eye of the guards.

97. Alexis and Olga on board the ship Rus on their last journey from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg: May 1918.

There exist many lurid stories about the abuse of the Imperial family at the hands of the guards. It is said that the latter entered the rooms occupied by the princesses any time of day or night, helped themselves to the food which the family, at Nicholas’s insistence, shared with their servants at a common table, and even jostled the ex-Tsar. These stories, while not baseless, tend to be exaggerated: the behavior of the commandant and his guards was undoubtedly rude, but no evidence exists of actual maltreatment. Even so, the conditions which the Imperial family endured were exceedingly painful. The guards posted on the second floor amused themselves by accompanying the princesses to the lavatory, demanding to know why they were going there and standing outside until they came out.⁴⁶ It was not uncommon for obscene drawings and inscriptions to be found in the lavatory and bathroom. A proletarian lad named Faika Safonov amused friends with renditions of obscene ditties under the windows of the Imperial prisoners.

The Romanovs bore their confinement, discomforts, and indignities with remarkable serenity. Avdeev thought that Nicholas did not behave like a prisoner at all, displaying “natural gaiety.” Bykov, the Communist historian of these events, speaks with irritation of Nicholas’s “idiotic indifference to the events occurring around him.”⁴⁷ The behavior of the ex-Tsar and his family, however, was due not to indifference but to a sense of decorum and a fatalism rooted in religious faith. We shall, of course, never know what went on in the minds of the prisoners, behind the façade of Nicholas’s “natural gaiety,” Alexandra’s hauteur, and the children’s irrepressible spirits, for they confided in no one: Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s diaries for the period are logs rather than intimate journals. But an unexpected insight into their inner feelings is provided by the discovery among their belongings of a poem called “Prayer.” It was written by S. S. Bekhteev, a brother of Zinaida Tolstoy, a close friend of Alexandra’s, in October 1917 and sent to Tobolsk with a dedication to Olga and Tatiana. In the papers of the Imperial family, two copies of this poem were found, one in the hand of Alexandra, the other in that of Olga. It read:

Give patience, Lord, to us Thy children

In these dark, stormy days to bear

The persecution of our people,

The tortures falling to our share.

Give strength, Just God, to us who need it,

The persecutors to forgive,

Our heavy, painful cross to carry

And Thy great meekness to achieve.

When we are plundered and insulted,

In days of mutinous unrest,

We turn for help to Thee, Christ-Savior,

That we may stand the bitter test.

Lord of the world, God of Creation,

Give us Thy blessing through our prayer,

Give peace of heart to us, O Master,

This hour of deadly dread to bear.

And on the threshold of the grave

Breathe power divine into our clay

That we, Thy children, may find strength

In meekness for our foes to pray.⁴⁸

In the spring of 1918, when they had confined Nicholas and his family in Ekaterinburg and the rest of the Romanov clan in other towns of Perm province, the Bolsheviks were placing them in what appeared to be a safe area: far away from the German front and the White Army, in the midst of a Bolshevik stronghold. But the situation in this territory changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Czech rebellion. By the middle of June, the Czechs controlled Omsk, Cheliabinsk, and Samara. Their military operations endangered the province of Perm, located directly north of these cities, and placed the Romanovs close to a battlefront where the Bolsheviks were in retreat.

What was to be done with them? In June, Trotsky still favored a spectacular trial:

During one of my brief visits to Moscow—I believe it was a few weeks before the execution of the Romanovs—I remarked in passing to the Politburo that, considering the bad situation in the Urals, one should speed up the Tsar’s trial. I proposed an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign (peasant policy, labor, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc.). The proceedings of the trial would be broadcast nationwide by radio; in the volosti, accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily. Lenin replied to the effect that this would be very good if it were feasible. But … there might not be time enough.… No debate took place, since I did not insist on my proposal, being absorbed in different work. And in the Politburo there were only three or four of us: Lenin, myself, Sverdlov … Kamenev, as I recall, was not present. At that time Lenin was rather gloomy and had no confidence that we would succeed in building an army …⁴⁹

By June 1918 the idea of a trial had ceased to be realistic. There exists convincing evidence that shortly after the outbreak of the Czech uprising, Lenin authorized the Cheka to make preparations for the execution of all the Romanovs in Perm province, using for pretext the device of contrived “escapes.” On his instructions, the Cheka arranged for elaborate provocations in the three towns where members of the Romanov family were then either confined or living under surveillance: Perm, Ekaterinburg, and Alapaevsk. In Perm and Alapaevsk the plan succeeded; in Ekaterinburg it was abandoned.

A rehearsal for the massacre of Nicholas and his family was staged in Perm, the place of exile of Grand Duke Michael.⁵⁰ On his arrival in Perm in March, in the company of his secretary, the Englishman Nicholas Johnson, Michael was placed in jail. He was soon released, however, and allowed to take up residence, along with Johnson, a servant, and a chauffeur, in a hotel, where he lived in relative comfort and freedom. Although under Cheka surveillance, had he wished to escape he could have done so without difficulty, for he was permitted to move freely about town. But like the other Romanovs he displayed utter passivity. His wife visited him during the Easter holidays, but at his request returned to Petrograd, from where she eventually escaped and made her way to England.

On the night of June 12–13, five armed men drove up in a troika at Michael’s hotel.⁵¹ They awoke the Grand Duke and told him to dress and follow them. Michael asked for their credentials. When they could not produce any, he demanded to see the head of the local Cheka. At this point (as Michael’s valet later told a fellow prisoner before being himself executed), the visitors lost patience and threatened to resort to force. One of them whispered something in the ear of either Michael or Johnson which seems to overcome their doubts. It is almost certain that they posed as monarchists on a rescue mission. Michael dressed and, accompanied by Johnson, entered the visitors’ vehicle parked in front of the hotel.

The troika sped away in the direction of the industrial settlement of Motovilikha. Out of town, it turned into the woods and stopped. The two passengers were told to step out, and as they did so, they were cut down by bullets, probably shot in the back, as was the Cheka’s custom at the time. Their bodies were burned in a nearby smelting furnace.

Immediately after the murder, the Bolshevik authorities in Perm informed Petrograd and cities in the area that Michael had escaped and a search was underway. Simultaneously, they spread rumors that the Grand Duke had been abducted by monarchists.⁵²

The local newspaper, Permskie Izvestiia, carried the following report of the incident:

During the night of May 31 [June 12] an organized band of White Guardists with forged mandates appeared at the hotel inhabited by Michael Romanov and his secretary, Johnson, abducted them, and took them to an unknown destination. A search party sent out that night found no trace. The searches continue.⁵³

This was a tissue of lies. Michael and Johnson in fact had been abducted not by “White Guardists” but by the Cheka, headed by G. I. Miasnikov, an ex-locksmith and professional revolutionary, chairman of the Motivilikha Soviet. His four accomplices were pro-Bolshevik workers from the same town. Since the myth of a “White Guard” plot could not be sustained once the remains of Michael and Johnson had been located by the Sokolov commission the next year, the subsequent official Communist version has claimed that Miasnikov and his accomplices had acted on their own, without authorization either from Moscow or from the local soviet—a version which must strain the credulity of even the most credulous.*

On June 17, newspapers in Moscow and Petrograd carried reports of Michael’s “disappearance,”† Concurrently rumors spread that Nicholas had been killed by a Red Army soldier who had broken into Ipatev’s house.⁵⁴ These rumors could have originated spontaneously, but it is much more likely that they were intentionally floated by the Bolsheviks to test the reaction of both the Russian public and foreign governments to the killing of Nicholas, preparations for which were underway. What gives credence to this hypothesis is the extraordinary behavior of Lenin. On June 18, he gave an interview to the daily Nashe slovo in which he said that while he could confirm reports of Michael’s escape, his government was unable to determine whether the ex-Tsar was dead or alive.⁵⁵ It was most unusual for Lenin to give an interview to Nashe slovo, a liberal newspaper and as critical of the Bolshevik regime as the conditions permitted, with which the Bolsheviks normally had no dealings. Equally curious was his pleading ignorance about the fate of the ex-Tsar, since the government could readily establish the facts of the case: as late as June 22, the Press Bureau of the Sovnarkom stated that it still did not know the fate of Nicholas, although it admitted to maintaining daily communication with Ekaterinburg.⁵⁶ This behavior of the government lends strong support to the hypothesis that Moscow spread these rumors to test the public reactions to the projected murder of the ex-Tsar.^‡

Apart from aristocratic and monarchist circles, the Russian population, intelligentsia and “masses” alike, gave no indication of caring one way or another what happened to Nicholas. Nor was foreign opinion upset. A dispatch filed by the Petrograd correspondent of The Times of London on June 23 and published on July 3 carried an ominous hint:

Every time this kind of public prominence is given to the Romanoff family people think that something serious is on foot. Bolshevists are getting impatient of these frequent surprises about the deposed dynasty, and the question is again raised as to the advisability of settling the fate of the Romanoffs, so as to be done with them once for all.

“Settling the fate of the Romanovs” could, of course, only mean killing them. This rather crude feeler fell on deaf ears.

The indifference to these rumors inside Russia and abroad seems to have sealed the fate of the Imperial family.

On June 17, the family heard the welcome news that the nuns of the Novotikhvinskii Convent, whose previous requests of this nature had been rejected, would be allowed to deliver eggs, milk, and cream to them. As became subsequently known, this was done not out of concern for their well-being but as part of a Cheka plot.

On June 19 or 20, the Imperial prisoners received from the nuns a container of cream, the cork of which had concealed a piece of paper with the following message, carefully penned or more likely copied by someone with poor knowledge of French:

Les amis ne dorment plus et espèrent que l’heure si longtemps attendue est arrivée. La revolte des tschekoslovaques menace les bolcheviks de plus en plus serieusement. Samara, Tschelabinsk et toute la Sibirie orientale et occidentale est au pouvoir de gouvernement national provisoir. L’armée des amis slaves est à quatre-vingt kilometres d’Ekaterinbourg, les soldats de l’armée rouge ne resistent pas efficassement. Soyez attentifs au tout mouvement de dehors, attendez et espérez. Mais en même temps, je vous supplie, soyez prudents, parce que les bolcheviks avant d’être vaincus represent pour vous le peril réel et sérieux. Soyez prêts toutes les heures, la journée et la nuit. Faite le croquis des vos deux chambres, les places, des meubles, des lits. Ecrivez bien l’heure quand vous allez couchir vous tous. L’un de vous ne doit dormir de 2 à 3 heure toutes les nuits qui suivent. Repondez par quelques mots mais donnez, je vous en prie, tous les renseignements utiles pour vos amis de dehors. C’est au même soldat qui vous transmet cette note qu’il faut donner votre reponse par ecrit mais dites pas un seul mot.

Un qui est prêt a mourir pour vous

L’officieu [sic] de l’armée Russe.*

The response was supplied on the same sheet of crumpled notebook paper. Next to the inquiry about the hour when the family retired, is written “à 11½”; the query about “two rooms” is corrected to “three rooms.” Underneath is written in a firm, legible hand:

du coin jusqu’au balcon. 5 fenêtres donnent sur la rue, 2 sur la place. Toutes les fenêtres sont fermées, collées et peintes en blanc. Le petit est encore malade et au lit, et ne peut pas marcher du tout—chaque secousse lui cause des douleurs. Il y a une semaine, qu’a cause des anarchist[es] on pensait a nous faire partir à Moscou la nuit. Il ne faut rien risquer sans être absolument sûr du résultat. Sommes presque tout le temps sous observation attentive.*

This secret message from alleged rescuers has some puzzling features. To begin with, its language. The letter is not written in a form which a monarchist officer would adopt toward his sovereign: it is hard to conceive that he would address him as “vous” instead of “Votre Majesté.” Altogether, the vocabulary and style of this letter are so unusual that one investigator of the Ekaterinburg tragedy believed it to be an outright forgery.⁵⁷ Then there is the question of how the letter reached the prisoners. Its author refers to a soldier, presumably a guard. But Avdeev, the commandant of the Ipatev guards, writes that the secret letter was discovered in the cork of a bottle with cream brought by the nuns, and turned over to the Chekist Goloshchekin, who had it copied before delivering it to the prisoners. According to Avdeev,⁵⁸ the Cheka pursued the matter and found the author to be a Serbian officer by the name of “Magich,” whom it arrested. There was, indeed, in the area a Serbian officer and member of the Serbian military mission to Russia, Major Jarko Konstantinovich Mičič (Michich), who had aroused suspicion by requesting to see Nicholas.⁵⁹ It is also known that Mičič traveled to the Urals to locate and rescue the Serbian Princess Helen Petrovna, the wife of Grand Duke Ivan Konstantinovich, interned at Alapaevsk. But it can be established from the recollections of Micic’s traveling companion, Serge Smirnov, that the two men had arrived in Ekaterinburg only on July 4, which meant that Mičič could not have written from there on June 19–20.⁶⁰

Another possible bearer of the initial note was Alexis’s physician, Dr. Derevenko. It is known, however, from Derevenko’s deposition, given the Soviet authorities in 1931, that he was forbidden during his visits to have any communication with the prisoners.⁶¹ It can be further established from Alexandra’s diaries that he paid his last visit to Ipatev’s house on June 21, which makes it theoretically possible for him to have carried the first secret message, but even this was not likely since, confirming Derevenko, Alexandra wrote that he never appeared “without Avdeev, so impossible to say one word to him.”

It thus seems reasonable to suppose that the letter was fabricated by the Cheka and delivered to the prisoners by a guard involved in the provocation.*

According to Avdeev, Nicholas replied to the first letter two or three days after he had received it,⁶² which would date it between June 21 and 23. The response was, of course, intercepted, setting in motion the Cheka’s scheme.

On June 22, apparently in reaction to Nicholas’s response, workers inspected the windows in the Imperial couple’s bedroom. The next day, to the latter’s delight, one of the double windows was removed and a ventilation pane opened, letting fresh air into the stuffy and hot upper floor. The prisoners were forbidden to lean out: when one of the girls stuck her head out too far, a guard fired.

On June 25, a second secret message arrived; a third followed on June 26. Incontrovertible evidence that these letters reached the Imperial family comes from the diary of Nicholas, who under the date June 14 [27] incautiously wrote: “We have recently received two letters, one after the other, which advised us to be ready to be spirited away by some devoted people!”

The second letter urged the recipients not to worry: their rescue carried no risks whatsoever. It was an astonishing assurance, even if one makes allowance for the desire of the alleged conspirators to allay the fears of the captives, given that they were surrounded by dozens of armed guards. It certainly casts the deepest doubts on its authenticity. It was “absolutely necessary,” the letter went on, that one of the windows be unglued—which indeed had been arranged, two days earlier, by the obliging commandant. Alexis’s inability to walk “complicated matters,” but it was “not too great an inconvenience.”

To this letter Nicholas responded at some length on June 25. He informed the correspondents that two days earlier one of their windows had indeed been opened. It was imperative to save not only them but also Dr. Botkin and the servants: “It would be ignoble for us, even if they do not want to burden us, to leave them behind after their following us into exile voluntarily.” Nicholas then expressed concern over the fate of two boxes stored in the shed, a smaller one, labeled AF No. 9 (i.e., Alexandra Fedorovna No. 9), and a larger one, designated “No. 13 N.A.” (Nicholas Alexandrovich), which contained “old letters and diaries.”

The third letter from the stranger requested additional information. Regrettably, it might not be possible to rescue everyone, he wrote. He promised to provide a “detailed plan of operations” by June 30, and instructed the family to be on the alert for a signal (which he did not describe): as soon as they heard it, they were to barricade the door leading to the hall and descend from the open window by means of a rope which they were somehow to procure.

That night (June 26–27), in anticipation of the promised rescue attempt, Alexis was moved to his parents’ room. The family did not go to sleep. “We spent an anxious night and kept vigil, dressed,” Nicholas noted. But the signal never came. “The waiting and uncertainty were most excruciating.”

What happened to have caused the Cheka to cancel its plan cannot be determined.

On the following night, Nicholas or Alexandra overheard a conversation that made them give up the thought of escape. “We heard in the night,” Alexandra wrote on June 28, “sentry under our rooms, being told quite particularly to watch every movement at our window—they have become again most suspicious since our window is opened.” This seems to have persuaded Nicholas to communicate to his correspondent a tortured note to the effect that he was not prepared to escape although he was not averse to being abducted:

Nous ne voulons et ne pouvons pas FUIRE. Nous pouvons seulement être enlevés par force, comme c’est la force qui nous a emmenés de Tobolsk. Ainsi, ne comptez sur aucune aide active de notre part. Le commandant a beaucoup d’aides, les changent souvent et sont devenu soucieux. Ils gardent notre emprisonnement ainsi nos vies consciencensement et son bien avec nous. Nous ne voulons pas qu’ils souffrent à cause de nous, ni vous pour nous. Surtout au nom de Dieu évitez l’effusion de sang. Renseignez vous sur eux vous même. Une descente de la fenêtre sans escalier est completement impossible. Même descendu on est encore en grand danger à cause de la fenêtre ouverte de la chambre des commandants et la mitrailleuse de l’étage en bas, où l’on pénètre de la cour intérieure. [Crossed out: Renoncez donc à l’idée de nous enlever.] Si vous veillez sur nous, vous pouvez toujours venir nous sauver en cas de danger imminent et réel. Nous ignorons completement ce qui si passe a l’extérieur, ne recevant ni journaux, ni lettres. Depuis qu’on a permi d’ouvrir la fenêtre, la surveillance a augmenté et on défend même de sortir la tête, au risque de recevoir un balle dans la figure.*

At this stage the spurious rescue operation was aborted. The Imperial family received yet another, fourth and final, secret communication, which had to have been written after July 4 because it requested information about the new commandant of Ipatev’s, who replaced Avdeev on that day. It was a crude fabrication of the Cheka, which assured the Imperial family that its friends “D and T”—obviously, Dolgorukii and Tatishchev—had already been “saved,” whereas in fact both had been executed the previous month.

After these experiences, the appearance of Nicholas and the children changed: Sokolov’s witnesses told him they looked “exhausted.”⁶³

Although it has been the undeviating practice of Communist authorities then and since to lay responsibility for the decision to execute the Imperial family on the Ural Regional Soviet, this version, made up to exonerate Lenin, is certainly misleading. It can be established that the final decision to “liquidate” the Romanovs was taken personally by Lenin, most likely at the beginning of July. One could have inferred this fact much from the knowledge that no provincial soviet would have dared to act on a matter of such importance without explicit authorization from the center. Sokolov was convinced of Lenin’s responsibility in 1925, when he published the results of his investigation. But there exists incontrovertible positive evidence to this effect from no less an authority than Trotsky. In 1935, Trotsky read in an émigré newspaper an account of the death of the Imperial family. This prodded his memory and he wrote in his diary:

My next visit to Moscow took place after Ekaterinburg had already fallen [i.e., after July 25]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing, “Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?” “Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.” “And where is the family?” “The family along with him.” “All?” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise. “All,” Sverdlov replied. “Why?” He awaited my reaction. I made no reply. “And who decided the matter?” I inquired. “We decided it here. Ilich thought that we should not leave the Whites a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances …” I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.⁶⁴

Sverdlov’s offhand remark undercuts once and for all the official version that Nicholas and his family had been executed on the initiative of the Ekaterinburg authorities to prevent them from either escaping or being captured by the Czechs. The decision fell not in Ekaterinburg but in Moscow, at a time when the Bolshevik regime felt the ground giving way and feared a restoration of the monarchy—a prospect that only a year earlier would have appeared too fantastic to contemplate.*

At the end of June, Goloshchekin, the most powerful Bolshevik in the Urals and a friend of Sverdlov’s, left Ekaterinburg for Moscow. His mission, according to Bykov, was to discuss the fate of the Romanovs with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.⁶⁵ That the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks and Goloshchekin in particular wanted the Romanovs out of the way is well established: hence it can reasonably be deduced that he sought from Moscow authorization to proceed with the execution. Lenin approved this request.

The determination to execute the ex-Tsar, and possibly the rest of his immediate family, seems to have been taken in the first days of July, very likely at the meeting of the Sovnarkom in the evening of July 2. Two facts speak in favor of this hypothesis.

One of the items on the agenda of this Sovnarkom session was the nationalization of the properties of the Romanov family. A commission was appointed to draft a decree to this effect.⁶⁶ This could hardly have been considered an urgent matter in those critical days, given that all the Romanovs living under Communist rule were either in jail or in exile and their properties had long been taken over by the state or distributed to peasants. It seems likely, therefore, to have been raised in connection with the decision to execute Nicholas. A decree formally nationalizing the properties of the Romanov family was signed into law on July 13, three days before the murder, but in an unusual departure from practice not published until six days later—that is, on the day the news of the murder was made public.⁶⁷

The other fact which speaks in favor of this conjecture is that immediately afterward, on July 4, the responsibility for guarding the Imperial family was shifted from the Ekaterinburg Soviet to the Cheka. On July 4, Beloborodov wired to the Kremlin:

Moscow. Chairman Central Executive Committee Sverdlov for Goloshchekin. Syromolotov just departed to organize affairs in accord with center’s instructions fears groundless stop Avdeev replaced his assistant Koshkin [Moshkin] arrested instead Avdeev Iurovskii internal guard all changed replaced by others stop Beloborodov*

Iakov Mikhailovich Iurovskii, the head of the Ekaterinburg Cheka, was the grandson of a Jewish convict sentenced for an ordinary crime and exiled to Siberia long before the Revolution. After a sketchy education he was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Tomsk. During the 1905 Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks. Later he spent some time in Berlin, where he converted to Lutheranism. On returning to Russia, he was exiled to Ekaterinburg, where he opened a photographic studio said to have served as a secret meeting place for Bolsheviks. During the war, he underwent paramedical training. On the outbreak of the February Revolution, he deserted and returned to Ekaterinburg, where he agitated among soldiers against the war. In October 1917, the Ural Regional Soviet appointed him “Commissar of Justice,” following which he joined the Cheka. He was by all accounts a sinister person, full of resentment and frustration, a type that gravitated to the Bolsheviks in those days and provided prime recruits for the secret police. From interrogations of his wife and family, Sokolov obtained the portrait of a self-important, willful man, with a domineering, cruel disposition.⁶⁸ Alexandra took an instant dislike to him, calling him “vulgar and unpleasant.” He had several virtues which made him valuable to the Cheka: scrupulous honesty in dealing with state property, unrestrained brutality, and considerable psychological insight.

98. The murderer of Nicholas II, Iurovskii (upper right), with his family.

The first thing Iurovskii did upon taking charge of Ipatev’s house was to put a stop to the stealing: this indeed presented a danger from the point of view of security, because thieving guards could be bribed to carry messages to and from the prisoners outside Cheka channels and even help them escape. On his first day, he had the Imperial family produce all the valuables in its possession (minus those which, unknown to him, the women had sewn into their undergarments). After making an inventory, he placed the jewelry in a sealed box, which he allowed the family to keep but inspected daily. Iurovskii also put a lock on the shed where the family’s luggage was stored. Nicholas, always ready to think the best of others, believed that these measures were taken for his family’s benefit:

[Iurovskii and his assistant] explained that an unpleasant incident had occurred in our house; they mentioned the loss of our belongings.… I feel sorry for Avdeev that he is guilty of not having prevented his men from stealing out of the trunks in the shed.… Iurovskii and his assistant begin to understand what sort of people had surrounded and guarded us, stealing from us.*

Alexandra’s diary confirms that on July 4 the internal guards were replaced by a fresh crew. Nicholas thought they were Latvians, and so did the captain of the guard when interrogated by Sokolov. But at the time the term “Latvians” was applied loosely to all kinds of pro-Communist foreigners. Sokolov learned that Iurovskii spoke with five of the ten new arrivals in German.⁶⁹ There can be little doubt that they were Hungarian prisoners of war, some of them Magyars, some Magyarized Germans.† They had moved from the Cheka headquarters, housed at the American Hotel.⁷⁰

This was the execution squad. Iurovskii assigned them to the lower floor. He himself did not move into Ipatev’s house, preferring to stay with his wife, mother, and two children. Into the commandant’s room moved his assistant, Grigorii Petrovich Nikulin.

On July 7, Lenin instructed Ekaterinburg to grant the chairman of the Ural Regional Soviet, Beloborodov, direct wire access to the Kremlin. He acted in response to Beloborodov’s request of June 28 for such access “in view of the extraordinary importance of events.”⁷¹ Until July 25, when Ekaterinburg fell to the Czechs, all communications between the Kremlin and that city on military matters and the fate of the Romanovs were conducted by means of this channel, often in cipher.

Goloshchekin returned from Moscow on July 12 carrying the death warrant. On the same day, he reported to the Executive Committee of the Soviet on “the attitude of central authority toward the execution of the Romanovs.” He said that Moscow had originally intended to try the ex-Tsar, but in view of the proximity of the front, this ceased to be feasible: the Romanovs were to be executed.⁷² The Committee rubber-stamped Moscow’s decision.⁷³ Now, as afterward, Ekaterinburg assumed responsibility for the execution, pretending that it was an emergency measure to prevent the Imperial family from falling into Czech hands.^‡

The following day, July 15, Iurovskii was seen in the woods north of Ekaterinburg. He was looking for a place to dispose of the bodies.

The Imperial family suspected nothing because Iurovskii maintained a strict routine at Ipatev’s and with his solicitous manner even gained its trust. On June 25/July 8, Nicholas wrote: “Our life has not changed in any respect under Iurovskii.” Indeed, in some respects it improved, for the family now received all the provisions brought by the nuns, whereas Avdeev’s guards used to steal them. On July II, workmen installed iron railings on the single open window, but this too did not strike them as unusual: “Always fright of our climbing out no doubt or getting into contact with the sentry,” Alexandra noted. Now that the Cheka had given up its plan of a spurious escape, Iurovskii wanted to take no chances on a genuine escape. On Sunday, July 14, he permitted a priest to come and say mass. As he was leaving, the priest thought he had heard one of the princesses whisper: “Thank you.”⁷⁴ On July 15, Iurovskii, who had some medical knowledge, spent time with the bed-ridden Alexis, discussing his health. The next day he brought him some eggs. On July 16, two charwomen came to clean. They told Sokolov that the family seemed in fine spirits and that the princesses laughed as they helped them make the beds.

All this time, the Imperial family was still hoping to hear from their rescuers. The last entry in Nicholas’s diary, dated June 30/July 13, reads: “We have no news from the outside.”

Until recently, the bloody events which transpired at Ipatev’s house on the night of July 16–17 were known almost entirely from the evidence gathered by Sokolov’s commission. The Bolsheviks abandoned Ekaterinburg to the Czechs on July 25. Russians who entered the city with the Czechs rushed to Ipatev’s house: they found it empty and in disarray. On July 30 an inquiry opened to determine the fate of the Imperial family, but the investigators allowed precious months to pass without any serious effort. In January 1919, Admiral Kolchak, recently proclaimed Supreme Ruler, appointed General M. K. Diterikhs to direct the work, but Diterikhs lacked the necessary qualifications and in February was replaced by the Siberian lawyer Nicholas Sokolov. For the next two years Sokolov pursued with unflagging determination every eyewitness and every material clue. When forced to flee Russia in 1920, he carried with him the records of his investigation. These materials and the monograph he wrote on the basis of them provide the principal evidence on the Ekaterinburg tragedy.* The recent publication of the recollections of Iurovskii supplements and amplifies the depositions of P. Medvedev, the captain of the guard, and additional witnesses whom Sokolov had questioned.⁷⁵

The Imperial family spent July 16 in its customary manner. Judging by the final entry in Alexandra’s diary, made at 11 p.m. as the family retired for the night, they had no premonition that anything unusual was about to happen.

Iurovskii had been busy all that day. Having selected the place where the bodies were to be cremated and interred—an abandoned mineshaft near the village of Koptiaki—he arranged for a Fiat truck to park inside the palisade by the main entrance to Ipatev’s house. At the approach of evening, he asked Medvedev to relieve the guards of their revolvers. Medvedev collected twelve revolvers of the Nagan type, standard issue for Russian officers, each capable of firing seven bullets, and took them to the commandant’s room. At 6 p.m. Iurovskii fetched from the kitchen Leonid Sednev, the cook’s apprentice, and sent him away: he told the worried Romanovs that the boy was to meet his uncle, the valet Ivan Sednev. He was lying, because the elder Sednev had been shot by the Cheka weeks before, but even so it was his only humane act during these days, for it saved the child’s life. Around 10 p.m., he told Medvedev to inform the guards that the Romanovs would be executed that night and not to be alarmed when they heard shots. The truck, which was due at midnight, arrived one and half hours late, which delayed the execution.

Iurovskii awakened Dr. Botkin at 1:30 a.m. and asked him to arouse the others. He explained that there was unrest in the city and for their safety they were to be moved to the lower floor. This explanation must have sounded convincing, for residents of Ipatev’s house had often heard sounds of shooting from the streets: the preceding day Alexandra noted hearing during the night an artillery shot and several revolver shots.* It took the eleven prisoners half an hour to wash and dress. Around 2 a.m. they descended the stairs. Iurovskii led the way. Next came Nicholas with Alexis in his arms: both wore military shirts and caps. Then followed the Empress and her daughters, Anastasia with her pet King Charles spaniel, Jemmy, and Dr. Botkin. Demidova carried two pillows, concealed in one of which was a box with jewelry⁷⁶. Behind her came the valet, Trup, and the cook, Kharitonov. Unknown to the family, the execution squad of ten, six of them Hungarians, the rest Russians, was in an adjoining room. According to Medvedev, the family “appeared calm as if expecting no danger.”

At the bottom of the inner staircase, the procession stepped into the courtyard and turned left to descend to the lower floor. They were taken to the opposite end of the house, to a room previously occupied by the guards, five meters wide and six meters long, from which all furniture had been removed. It had one window, half-moon in shape, high on the outer wall, barred with a grille, and only one open door. There was a second door at the opposite end, leading to a storage space, but it was locked. The room was a cul-de-sac.

Alexandra wondered why there were no chairs. Iurovskii, as always obliging, ordered two chairs to be brought in, on one of which Nicholas placed his son; Alexandra took the other. The rest were told to line up. A few minutes later, Iurovskii reentered the room in the company of ten armed men. He thus describes the scene that ensued:

When the party entered, [I] told the Romanovs that in view of the fact that their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet had decided to shoot them. Nicholas turned his back to the detachment and faced his family. Then, as if collecting himself, he turned around, asking “What? What?” [I] rapidly repeated what I had said and ordered the detachment to prepare. Its members had been previously told whom to shoot and to aim directly at the heart to avoid much blood and to end more quickly. Nicholas said no more. He turned again toward his family. The others shouted some incoherent exclamations. All this lasted a few seconds. Then commenced the shooting which went on for two or three minutes. [I] killed Nicholas on the spot.⁷⁷

It is known from eyewitnesses that the Empress and one of her daughters barely had time to cross themselves: they too died instantly. There was wild shooting as the guards emptied their revolvers: according to Iurovskii, the bullets, ricocheting from the walls and floor, flew around the room like hail. The girls screamed. Struck by bullets, Alexis fell off the chair. Kharitonov “sat down and died.”

It was hard work. Iurovskii had assigned each executioner one victim and they were to aim straight at the heart. Still six of the victims—Alexis, three of the girls, Demidova, and Botkin—were alive when the salvos stopped. Alexis lay in a pool of blood, moaning: Iurovskii finished him off with two shots in the head. Demidova offered furious defense with her pillows, one of which had a metal box, but then she too went down, bayoneted to death. “When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through the corset,” Iurovskii complained. The whole “procedure,” as he calls it, took twenty minutes. Medvedev recalled the scene: “They had several gun wounds on various parts of their bodies; their faces were covered with blood, their clothes too were blood-soaked.”⁷⁸

The shots were heard on the street even though the truck engine was running to muffle them. One of the witnesses who testified for Sokolov, a resident of Popov’s house across the street, where the external guard was billeted, recalled:

I can reconstruct well the night from the 16th to the 17th in my memory because that night I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I recall that around midnight I went into the yard and approached the shed. I felt unwell and stopped. A while later I heard distant volleys. There were some fifteen of them, followed by separate shots: there were three or four of those, but they did not come from rifles. It was after 2 a.m. The shots came from Ipatev’s house; they sounded muffled as if coming from a basement. After this, I quickly returned to my room, for I was afraid that the guards of the house where the ex-Emperor was held prisoner could see me from above. When I returned, my next-door neighbor asked: “Did you hear?” I answered: “I heard shots.” “Get it?” “Yes, I get it,” I said, and we fell silent.⁷⁹

The executioners brought sheets from the upstairs rooms, and after stripping the corpses of valuables, which they pocketed, carried them, dripping with blood, on improvised stretchers across the lower floor to the truck waiting at the main gate. They spread a sheet of rough military cloth on the floor of the vehicle, piled the bodies on top of one another, and covered them with a sheet of similar cloth. Iurovskii demanded under threat of death the return of the stolen valuables: he confiscated a gold watch, a diamond cigarette case, and some other items. Then he left with the truck.

Iurovskii charged Medvedev with supervising the cleaning-up. Guards brought mops, pails of water, and sand with which to remove the bloodstains. One of them described the scene as follows:

The room was filled with something like a mist of gun-powder and smelled of gun-powder.… There were bullet holes on the walls and the floor. There were especially many bullets (not the bullets themselves but holes made by them) on one wall.… There were no bayonet marks anywhere on the walls. Where there were bullet holes on the walls and floor, around them was blood: on the walls there were splashes and stains, and on the floor, small puddles. There were also drops and pools of blood in all the other rooms which one had to cross to reach the courtyard of Ipatev’s house from the room with the bullet holes. There were similar bloodstains on the stones in the courtyard leading to the gate.⁸⁰

A guard who entered Ipatev’s house the next day found it in complete disarray: clothing, books, and ikons lay scattered pell-mell on tables and floors, after they had been ransacked for hidden money and jewelry. The atmosphere was gloomy, the guards uncommunicative. He was told that the Chekists had refused to spend the rest of the night in their quarters on the lower floor and moved upstairs. The only living reminder of the previous residents was the Tsarevich’s spaniel, Joy, who somehow had been overlooked: he stood outside the door to the princesses’ bedroom, waiting to be let in. “I well remember,” one of the guards testified, “thinking to myself: you are waiting for nothing.”

For the time being, the external guards remained at their posts, creating the impression that nothing had changed at Ipatev’s. The purpose of the deception was to stage a mock escape attempt during an “evacuation” in the course of which the Imperial family would be said to have been killed. On July 19, the most important belongings of the Tsar and Alexandra, including their private papers, were loaded on a train and taken by Goloshchekin to Moscow.⁸¹

Aware that the Russian people assigned miraculous powers to the remains of martyrs, and anxious to prevent a cult of the Romanovs, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks went to great pains to destroy all trace of their bodies. The place that Iurovskii and his associate, Ermakov, had selected for the purpose were woods near the village Kiptiaki, 15 kilometers north of Ekaterinburg, an area full of swamps, peat bogs and abandoned mineshafts.

A few miles out of town, the truck carrying the bodies ran into a party of twenty-five mounted men with carts:

They were workers (members of the soviet, its executive committee and so on) assembled by Ermakov. They shouted: “Why did you bring them dead?” They thought they were to be entrusted with the execution of the Romanovs. They started to transfer the bodies to carts.… Right away they began to clean out [the victims’] pockets. Here too I had to threaten death by shooting and to post guards. It turned out that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia wore some kind of special corsets. It was decided to strip the bodies naked—not here, though, but where they were to be buried.

It was 6–7 a.m. when the party reached an abandoned gold mine nearly three meters deep. Iurovskii ordered the corpses undressed and burned.

When they began to undress one of the girls, they saw a corset partly torn by bullets: in the gash showed diamonds. The eyes of the fellows really lit up. [I] had to dismiss the whole band.… The detachment proceeded to strip and burn the bodies. Alexandra Fedorovna turned out to wear a pearl belt made of several necklaces sewn into linen. (Each girl carried on her neck an amulet with Rasputin’s picture and the text of his prayer.) The diamonds were collected; they weighed about half a pud [8 kilograms]…. Having placed all the valuables in satchels, other items found on the bodies were burned and the corpses themselves were lowered into the mine.⁸²

What indignities were perpetrated on the bodies of the six women must be left to the reader’s imagination: suffice it to say that one of the guards who took part in this work later boasted that he could “die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s———.”⁸³

It is this place, known to local peasants as “Four Brothers” for four large pines that once had grown here from a single stem, that Sokolov excavated for several months to unearth the Romanov remains. He located much material evidence—ikons, pendants, belt buckles, spectacles, and corset fastenings—all of which were identified as belonging to members of the Imperial family. A severed finger was also found, believed to be the Empress’s, probably hacked off to remove a tight ring.* A set of false teeth was identified as belonging to Dr. Botkin. The executioners had not bothered to cremate the dog, Jemmy, whose decomposed corpse was found in the shaft. They either missed or accidentally dropped a ten-carat diamond belonging to the Empress, a present from her husband, and the ex-tsar’s Ulm Cross, both left in the grass.

The remains of the victims, however, were nowhere to be found and this led for many years to conjectures that some or even most members of the Imperial family had survived the massacre. The mystery was cleared up only with the publication of Iurovskii’s memoir, from which it transpires that the bodies were buried at Four Brothers only temporarily.

Iurovskii thought the Four Brothers’ mine too shallow to conceal the grave. He returned to town to make inquiries, from which he learned of the existence of deeper mines on the road to Moscow. He soon returned with a quantity of kerosene and sulphuric acid. In the night of July 18, having closed neighboring roads, Iurovskii’s men, helped by a detachment of the Cheka, dug up the corpses and placed them on a truck. They proceeded to the Moscow road but on the way the truck got stuck in mud. The burial took place in a shallow grave nearby. Sulphuric acid was poured on the faces and bodies of the victims and the graveside covered with earth and brushwood. The place of burial remained secret until 1989.

While the murderers were concealing traces of their crime, another act of the Romanov tragedy was played out at Alapaevsk, 140 kilometers northeast of Ekaterinburg. Here, the Bolsheviks had kept in confinement since May 1918 several members of the Imperial clan: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna (the widow of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, murdered by terrorists in 1905, and sister of the ex-Empress, now a nun), Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei (Paley), and three sons of Grand Duke Constantine—Igor, Constantine, and Ivan. Attended by aides and domestics, they lived under house arrest, in a school building outside Alapaevsk guarded by Russians and Austrians.

On June 21—the very time when the prisoners in Ipatev’s house received the first communication from their alleged rescuers—the status of the Alapaevsk detainees changed. They were now put on a strict prison regime. Except for two retainers—a secretary named F. S. Remez and a nun—their companions were removed, valuables confiscated, and freedom of movement severely restricted. This was done on orders of Beloborodov, issued from Ekaterinburg, allegedly to prevent a repetition of the “escape” of Michael from Perm the week before.

On July 17, the day the Imperial family was murdered, the Alapaevsk prisoners were told they would be moved to a safer place. That evening the authorities staged a mock attack on the school building where the Romanovs were held by an armed band disguised as “White Guardists.” The prisoners were said to have taken advantage of the ensuing melee to escape. In reality, they were taken to a place called Verkhniaia Siniachikha, marched into the woods, severely beaten, and killed.

At 3:15 a.m., July 18, the Alapaevsk Soviet wired Ekaterinburg, which had staged the whole charade, that the Romanov prisoners had fled. Later that day Beloborodov cabled to Sverdlov in Moscow and Zinoviev and Uritskii in Petrograd:

Alapaevsk Executive Committee informed attack morning 18th unknown band on building where kept onetime Grand Dukes Igor Konstantinovich Konstantin Konstantinovich Ivan Konstantinovich Sergei Mikhailovich and Poley [Paley] stop despite guard resistance princes were abducted stop victims on both sides searches underway stop.⁸⁴

Autopsies performed by the Whites revealed that all the victims, save for Grand Duke Sergei, who apparently resisted and was shot, were still alive when thrown into the mineshaft where they were found. The five victims and the nun companion of Grand Duchess Elizaveta perished from lack of air and water, possibly only days afterward. The postmortem revealed traces of earth in the mouth and stomach of Grand Duke Constantine.⁸⁵

Even if there did not exist incontrovertible evidence that the murder of the Romanovs had been ordered in Moscow, one would have strongly suspected this to have been the case from the fact that the official news of the “execution” of Nicholas was issued not in Ekaterinburg, where the decision had allegedly been made, but in the capital. Indeed, the Ural Regional Soviet was not permitted to make a public announcement of the event until five days after it had happened, by which time it had already been publicized abroad.

Although the evidence is inconclusive, it appears that Moscow ordered Ekaterinburg to withhold the announcement because of the very sensitive issue of the fate of the Empress and children.

The problem was the Germans, whom the Bolsheviks at this time went to extreme lengths to cultivate. The Kaiser was a cousin of Nicholas and a godfather of the Tsarevich. Had he been so inclined, he could have demanded that the ex-Tsar and his family be turned over to Germany as part of the Brest-Litovsk peace settlement, a demand that the Bolsheviks would have been in no position to refuse. But he did nothing. When in early March the King of Denmark asked him to intercede on their behalf, the Kaiser responded that he could not offer asylum to the Imperial family because the Russians would interpret it as an attempt at a restoration of the monarchy.⁸⁶ He also rejected the request of the Swedish King to help ease the plight of the Romanovs.⁸⁷ The most likely explanation of this behavior was provided by Bothmer, who thought it was due to fear of the German left-wing parties.*

For all its indifference to the fate of Nicholas, Berlin displayed some concern for the safety of the Tsarina, who was of German origin, her daughters, and the several other German ladies at the Russian court, among them Elizaveta Fedorovna, Alexandra’s sister, whom they referred to collectively as the “German princesses.” Mirbach raised the issue with Karakhan and Radek on May 10, and reported as follows to Berlin:

Of course, without venturing to act as an advocate for the overthrown regime, I have nevertheless expressed to the commissars the expectation that the German princesses will be treated with all possible consideration and, in particular, that there will be no small chicaneries, let alone threats to their lives. Karakhan and Radek, who represented the indisposed Chicherin, received my remarks in a very forthcoming and understanding manner.⁸⁸

On the morning of July 17, an official of the soviet in Ekaterinburg—almost certainly its chairman, Beloborodov—appears to have sent a cable to the Kremlin with a report on the events of the preceding night. The extremely detailed chronicle of Lenin’s life, which traces his public activities hour by hour, notes cryptically in an entry under that date: “Lenin receives (at 12 noon) a letter from Ekaterinburg and writes on the envelope: ‘Received. Lenin.’ ”⁸⁹ Since at this time Ekaterinburg did not communicate with the Kremlin by post but by direct wire, it can be taken for granted that the document in question was not a letter but a telegram. Second, the chronicle in question normally provides the gist of those messages to Lenin which it lists. The omission in this case suggests that it concerned the murder of the Imperial family, a subject which Communist literature invariably disassociates from Lenin. Apparently the message was not specific enough about the fate of Nicholas’s wife and children, because the Kremlin telegraphed Ekaterinburg for clarification. Later that same day Beloborodov sent to Moscow a coded message which sounds as if it were a response to a query. Sokolov found a copy of this cable at the Ekaterinburg telegraph office. He was unable to break the code. This was accomplished only two years later in Paris by a Russian cryptographer. The document settled the question of the final fate of the Imperial family:

MOSCOW Kremlin Secretary of Council of People’s Commissars Gorbunov with return verification. Inform Sverdlov whole family suffered same fate as head officially family will perish during evacuation. Beloborodov.⁹⁰

Beloborodov’s message reached Moscow that night. The following day, Sverdlov announced the news to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, carefully omitting to mention the death of Nicholas’s family. He spoke of the grave danger of the ex-Tsar falling into Czech hands and obtained from the Presidium formal approval of the actions of the Ural Regional Soviet.⁹¹ He did not bother to explain why the Imperial family had not been moved to Moscow in June or early July, when there had been ample time to do so.

Late that day, Sverdlov dropped in on a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars which was in progress in the Kremlin. An eyewitness describes the scene:

During the discussion of a project concerning public health, reported on by Comrade Semashko, Sverdlov entered and took his seat, a chair behind Ilich. Semashko finished. Sverdlov approached, bent over Ilich, and said something.

“Comrade Sverdlov asks for the floor to make an announcement.”

“I have to say,” Sverdlov began in his customary steady voice, “that we have received information that in Ekaterinburg, by decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot. Alexandra Fedorovna and her son are in reliable hands. Nicholas wanted to escape. The Czechs were drawing near. The Presidium of the Executive Committee has given its approval.”

General silence.

“We shall now proceed to read the project, article by article,” Ilich suggested.

The reading, article by article, got underway, followed by a discussion of the project on statistics.⁹²

It is difficult to know what to make of this charade, for surely the members of the Bolshevik cabinet knew the truth.* Such procedures seemed to satisfy the Bolshevik need for formal “correctness” with which to justify arbitrary actions.

Sverdlov next drafted an official statement which he gave to Izvestiia and Pravda for publication the following day, July 19. As translated by The Times of London, where it appeared on July 22, it read as follows:

At the first session of the Central Executive Committee elected by the Fifth Congress of the Councils a message was made public, received by direct wire from the Ural Regional Council, concerning the shooting of the ex-Tsar, Nicholas Romanoff.

Recently Ekaterinburg, the capital of the Red Ural, was seriously threatened by the approach of the Czecho-Slovak bands. At the same time a counterrevolutionary conspiracy was discovered, having for its object the wresting of the tyrant from the hands of the Council’s authority by armed force.

In view of this fact the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council decided to shoot the ex-Tsar, Nicholas Romanoff. This decision was carried out on July 16.

The wife and son of Romanoff have been sent to a place of security. Documents concerning the conspiracy which were discovered have been forwarded to Moscow by a special messenger.

It had been recently decided to bring the ex-Tsar before a tribunal, to be tried for his crimes against the people, and only later occurrences led to delay in adopting this course. The Presidency of the Central Executive Committee, after having discussed the circumstances which compelled the Ural Regional Council to take the decision to shoot Nicholas Romanoff, decided as follows: The Russian Central Executive Committee, in the persons of the Presidium, accept the decision of the Ural Regional Council as being regular.

The Central Executive Committee has now at its disposal extremely important material and documents concerning the Nicholas Romanoff affair: his own diaries, which he kept almost to the last days; the diaries of his wife and children; his correspondence, amongst which are letters by Gregory Rasputin to Romanoff and his family. All these materials will be examined and published in the near future.

Thus the official legend was born: that Nicholas—and he alone—was executed because he had attempted to escape and that the decision was made by the Ural Regional Soviet rather than the Bolshevik Central Committee in Moscow.

On and immediately following July 19, when Pravda and Izvestiia carried the first announcements of the alleged decisions of the Ekaterinburg Soviet—along with the decree nationalizing Romanov properties signed into law on July 13—the Ekaterinburg Soviet still maintained a stony silence.

The world press reported the story according to the official Bolshevik version. The New York Times broke the news on the front page of its Sunday edition, July 21, under the heading “Ex-Czar of Russia Killed by Order of the Ural Soviet. Nicholas Shot on July 16 When it was Feared that Czechoslovaks Might Seize Him. Wife and Heir in Security.” The accompanying obituary patronizingly described the executed monarch as “amiable but weak.” As Moscow had correctly anticipated from the indifference that had met rumors of Nicholas’s death the preceding month, the world took the execution in stride.

On the day when the Soviet press broke the news, Riezler met with Radek and Vorovskii. He perfunctorily protested the execution of Nicholas, which he said world opinion was certain to condemn, but stressed again his government’s concern for the “German princesses.” Radek must have exercised supreme self-control when he responded that if the German Government was truly concerned about the ex-Empress and her daughters, they could be allowed to leave Russia for “humanitarian considerations.”⁹³ On July 23, Riezler again raised the matter of the “German princesses” with Chicherin. Chicherin did not respond immediately, but the next day told Riezler that “as far as he knew” the Empress had been evacuated to Perm. Riezler had the impression that Chicherin was lying. By this time (July 22) Bothmer knew the “horrible details” of the Ekaterinburg events, and had no doubt that the entire family had been murdered on orders of Moscow, the Ekaterinburg Soviet having been given a free hand to determine the time and manner of the execution.⁹⁴ And yet as late as August 29, Radek proposed to the German Government to exchange Alexandra and her children for the arrested Spartacist, Leon Jogiches. Bolshevik officials repeated this offer on September 10 to the German Consul, but became evasive when pressed for details, claiming that the family of the ex-Tsar was cut off by military operations.⁹⁵

On July 20, the Ural Soviet drafted an announcement and asked Moscow for permission to publish.⁹⁶ The announcement read:

EXTRA EDITION. By Order of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies of the Urals and the Revolutionary Staff, the ex-Tsar and autocrat, Nicholas Romanov, has been shot along with his family on July 17. The bodies have been buried. Chairman of the Executive Committee, Beloborodov. Ekaterinburg, July 20, 1918, 10 a.m.*

Moscow forbade the release of this announcement because it referred to the death of Nicholas’s family. In the only known copy of this document, the words “along with his family” and “the bodies have been buried” have been crossed out by someone with an illegible signature, who scribbled: “Forbidden to publish.”

On July 20, Sverdlov wired to Ekaterinburg the text of the approved announcement which he had drafted and published in the Moscow press.⁹⁷ On July 21, Goloshchekin broke the news to the Ural Regional Soviet: A week before, apparently unknown to itself, it had decided to shoot the ex-Tsar. This decision had now been duly carried out. The population of Ekaterinburg was informed of this in broadsheets that were posted on July 22 and reproduced the following day in The Ural Worker (Rabochii Urala). This newspaper ran the story under a headline: “White Guardists attempted to abduct the ex-Tsar and his family. Their plot was discovered. The Regional Soviet of Workers and Peasants of the Urals anticipated their criminal design and executed the all-Russian murderer. This is the first warning. The enemies of the people will no more achieve a restoration of autocracy than they succeeded in laying hands on the crowned executioner.”⁹⁸

On July 22, the guards protecting Ipatev’s house were withdrawn: Iurovskii gave them 8,000 rubles to divide among themselves and informed them they would be sent to the front. That day Ipatev received a telegram from his sister-in-law: “Resident departed.”⁹⁹

Eyewitnesses agree that the population—at any rate, the inhabitants of the cities—showed no emotion when told of the ex-Tsar’s execution. Services were held in some Moscow churches in memory of the deceased, but otherwise the reaction was muted. Lockhart notes that “the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”¹⁰⁰ Bothmer had the same impression:

The population accepted the murder of the Tsar with apathetic indifference. Even decent and cool-headed circles are too accustomed to horrors, too immersed in their own worries and wants, to feel something special.¹⁰¹

Ex-Prime Minister Kokovtsov even discerned signs of positive satisfaction while riding a Petrograd streetcar on July 20:

Nowhere did I observe the slightest ray of pity or commiseration. The dispatch was read aloud, with smirks, jeers, mockeries, and with the most heartless comments.… One heard the most disgusting expressions, “It should have been done long ago” … “Eh, brother Romanov, your jig is up.”¹⁰²

The peasants kept their thoughts to themselves. But we have a glimpse of their reaction, expressed with their peculiar logic, in the thoughts which an elderly peasant confided in 1920 to an intellectual:

Now, we know for sure that the landlords’ land was given to us by Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich. For this them ministors, Kerensky and Lenin and Trotsky and the others, first sent the Tsar off to Siberia, and then they killed him, and the Tsarevich too, so that we would have no tsar and they could rule the people forever themselves. They didn’t want to give us the land, but our boys stopped them when they came to Moscow and Petrograd from the front. And now them ministors, because they had to give us the land, choke us. But they ain’t gonna strangle us. We are strong and we will hold out. And later on, us oldsters, or our sons, or our grandchildren, it don’t make no difference, we will take care of all them Bolsheviks and their ministors. Never you mind. Our time will come.¹⁰³

During the next nine years, the Soviet Government stubbornly adhered to the official lie that Alexandra Fedorovna and her children were safe: Chicherin claimed as late as 1922 that Nicholas’s daughters were in the United States.¹⁰⁴ The lie found favor with Russian monarchists who could not reconcile themselves to the thought that the entire Imperial family had been wiped out. On reaching the West, Sokolov was cold-shouldered by monarchist circles: Nicholas’s mother, Empress Dowager Marie, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the most prominent surviving Romanov, refused even to see him.¹⁰⁵ He died, ignored and impoverished, a few years later.

A Soviet participant, P. M. Bykov, in an early account of these events, published in Ekaterinburg in 1921, had told the truth about the fate of the family, but this work was promptly withdrawn from circulation.¹⁰⁶ Only in 1926, after the appearance of Sokolov’s book in Paris had made the old version untenable, was Bykov authorized to write an official Communist account of the Ekaterinburg tragedy. This book, which Moscow had translated into the principal European languages, finally admitted that Alexandra and the children had perished along with the ex-Tsar. Bykov wrote:

Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in mud, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have duly rotted.*

Iurovskii, having escaped from Ekaterinburg ahead of the Czechs, subsequently returned but later moved to Moscow, where he worked for the government. As reward for his services he was honored with an appointment to the Collegium of the Cheka: in May 1921, he was warmly received by Lenin.† The revolver with which he killed Nicholas was placed in the special depository of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. He died a natural death in August 1938 in the Kremlin hospital.¹⁰⁷ As a Chekist and “comrade-in-arms of Dzerzhinskii” he has earned himself a niche in the pantheon of minor Bolshevik heroes: he is the subject of a novel and of a biography, which depicts him as a “typical” Chekist: “closed, severe but with a soft heart.”¹⁰⁸ The other principals in the Ekaterinburg tragedy fared less well. Beloborodov at first made a rapid career, being admitted in March 1919 to membership in the Central Committee and the Orgbiuro, and eventually attaining the rank of Commissar of the Interior (1923–27). But he was undone by his friendship with Trotsky: arrested in 1936, he was shot two years later. Goloshchekin was also a victim of Stalin’s purges and perished in 1941. Both were subsequently “rehabilitated.”

Ipatev’s house served for many years as a club and a museum. But the authorities grew anxious over the number of visitors who came to Ekaterinburg (now renamed Sverdlovsk) to see the building, some of them seemingly on a religious pilgrimage. In the fall of 1977, they ordered it torn down.^‡

In view of the tens of thousands of lives which the Cheka would claim in the years that followed the Ekaterinburg tragedy, and the millions killed by its successors, the death at its hands of eleven prisoners hardly qualifies as an event of extraordinary magnitude. And yet, there is a deep symbolic meaning to the massacre of the ex-Tsar, his family, and staff. Just as liberty has its great historic days—the battles of Lexington and Concord, the storming of the Bastille—so does totalitarianism. The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.

To begin with, it was unnecessary. The Romanovs had willingly, indeed happily, withdrawn from active politics and submitted to every demand of their Bolshevik captors. True, they were not averse to being abducted and brought to freedom, but hope of escape from imprisonment, especially imprisonment imposed without charges or trial, hardly qualifies as the “criminal design” that it was designated by the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks to justify the execution. In any event, if the Bolshevik Government indeed feared their fleeing and turning into a “live banner” for the opposition, it had ample time to bring them to Moscow: Goloshchekin had no difficulty leaving Ekaterinburg by train for the capital with the Imperial family’s belongings three days later. There they would have been beyond the reach of Czechs, Whites, and other opponents of the Bolshevik regime.

If this was not done, the reason must be sought not in such spurious excuses as lack of time, the danger of flight, or of capture by the Czechs, but in the political needs of the Bolshevik Government. In July 1918 it was sinking to the nadir of its fortunes, under attack from all sides and abandoned by many of its supporters. To cement its deserting following it needed blood. This much was conceded by Trotsky when, reflecting on these events in exile, he concurred with Lenin’s decision seventeen years earlier to dispatch the wife and children of the ex-Tsar—an act for which he bore no personal responsibility and therefore had no need to justify:

The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.¹⁰⁹

On one level, Trotsky’s justification is without merit. Had the Bolsheviks indeed killed the ex-Tsar’s wife and children in order to instill terror in their enemies and loyalty in their followers, they would have proclaimed the deed loud and clear, whereas in fact they denied it then and for years to come. But Trotsky’s terrible confession is correct in a deeper moral and psychological sense. Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”

When a government arrogates to itself the power to kill people, not because of what they had done or even might do, but because their death is “needed,” we are entering an entirely new moral realm. Here lies the symbolic significance of the events that occurred in Ekaterinburg in the night of July 16–17. The massacre, by secret order of the government, of a family that for all its Imperial background was remarkably commonplace, guilty of nothing, desiring only to be allowed to live in peace, carried mankind for the first time across the threshold of deliberate genocide. The same reasoning that had led the Bolsheviks to condemn them to death would later be applied in Russia and elsewhere to millions of nameless beings who happened to stand in the way of one or another design for a new world order.

*The basic account remains that of Nicholas A. Sokolov, the chairman of a special commission appointed by Admiral Kolchak to investigate the crime: Ubiistvo tsarskoi sent’i (Paris, 1925) (available in French and German translations). Of the secondary sources, the best are by Paul Bulygin, The Murder of the Romanovs (London, 1935) and S. P. Melgunov, Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia (Paris, 1957). For the fate of the other Romanovs, the main source is Serge Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs (Paris, 1928). P. M. Bykov’s Bolshevik account in its original version: “Poslednie dni poslednego tsaria,’ in N. L. Nikolaev, ed., Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale (Ekaterinburg, 1921), 3–26, is helpful. The dossiers of Sokolov’s commission deposited at the Houghton Library of Harvard University are indispensable: a scholarly selection has been edited by Nicholas Ross, Gibel’ tsarskoi sem’i (Frankfurt, 1987).

In 1989, the Soviet press began to publish important new materials. The most valuable are the recollections of Ia. M. Iurovskii, the commandant of the murder squad, published by Edvard Radzinskii in Ogonè’k, No. 21 (1989), 4–5, 30–32. The film producer Gelii Riabov, who claims to have discovered the remains of the Imperial family, brought out in Rodina (No. 4 and No. 5, for 1989) some interesting additional information; unfortunately it is edited in a very slipshod manner.

*Michael’s friend, O. Poutianine, therefore is incorrect in claiming that Michael refused to seek asylum in England in the belief that the Russian people would do him no harm: Revue des Deux Mondes, XVIII (November 15, 1923), 297–98.

†I. Steinberg, Spiridonova, Revolutionary Terrorist (London, 1935), 195. On January 12/25, 1918, Vechernii chas carried an interview with Steinberg in which he expressed confidence that a trial would take place: “As is known, it was originally proposed that the ex-Tsar be tried by the Constituent Assembly, but it now appears that his fate will be decided by the Council of People’s Commissars.” It has been confirmed since that the Council of People’s Commissars passed on January 29, 1918, a resolution to turn Nicholas II over to a court: G. Ioffe in Sovetskaia Rossiia, No. 161/9,412 (July 12, 1987), 4.

*On him see, Granat, XLI, Pt. 1, 26–29. Anti-Semitic monarchists, determined to blame the murder of the Imperial family on Jews, have decided that Beloborodov’s real name was “Weissbart,” for which there exists no evidence whatever.

†Bykov first published under the title “Poslednie dni poslednego tsaria” in N. I. Nikolaev, ed., Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale (Ekaterinburg, 1921), 3–26; this text was reprinted in ARR, XVII (1926), 302–16. He was subsequently given access to some unpublished materials, on the basis of which he drew up the official story: Poslednie dni Romanovykh (Sverdlovsk, 1926). The latter book has been translated into English, German, and French. For all its obvious tendentiousness it has value because it makes reference to documents locked up in Communist archives. Bykov was chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet after the October coup.

*Report of the Chekist F. Drugov, who says he heard it at the time (fall 1918) from a fellow Chekist, Tarasov-Rodionov: IR, No. 10/303 (February 28, 1931), 10. Drugov’s account, however, loses some of its credibility because he reports having met and talked to Tarasov-Rodionov while traveling on a nonexistent railroad from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg.

†The diaries of the ex-Empress, written in her idiosyncratic English, have never been published in entirety. The American journalist Isaac Don Levine brought out a photographic copy and published extensive excerpts in the Chicago Daily News, June 22–26 and 28, 1920, and in Eyewitness to History (New York, 1963).

*Krasnaia niva, No. 27 (1928), 17. Avdeev in KN, No. 5 (1928), 190, confirms that Iakovlev carried a mandate from Lenin. According to I. Koganitskii (PR, No. 4, 1922, 13) Iakovlev had orders to bring Nicholas to Moscow, which suspicious local Bolsheviks authenticated by communicating with the capital.

†For purposes of security, the communications between Iakovlev and the Kremlin referred to the ex-Tsar and his family as “merchandise.” The official in Moscow told Iakovlev to “bring only the main part of the baggage”: Iakovlev in Ural, No. 7 (1988), 160.

*In October 1918, Iakovlev defected to the Whites and gave an interview to the newspaper Ural’skaia zhizn’; it is reprinted in the monarchist journal RL, No. 1 (1921), 150–53.

*Nicholas’s diaries for 1918 are in KA, No. 1/26 (1928), 110-37.

*According to a recent account by a historian with access to the archives, Iakovlev talked with Sverdlov, who then communicated with Ekaterinburg, requesting “guarantees,” presumably of the safety of the Imperial family. Ekaterinburg is said to have given these guarantees on condition that it be allowed to take charge of the prisoners: Ioffe in Sovetskaia Rossiia, No. 161/9,412 (July 12, 1987), 4.

*A. P. Nenarokov, Vostochnyi front, 1918 (Moscow, 1969), 54, 72, 101. After defecting to the Whites later that year, Iakovlev was arrested by Czech counterintelligence. He fled to China, returned to the Soviet Union, and was arrested. After spending some time in a concentration camp at the Solovetskii Monastery, he was freed, and appointed commandant of an NKVD camp. Sometime later he was rearrested and executed. I owe this information to the Soviet writer, Mr. Vladimir Kashits.

*Bykov, Poslednie dni, 121. Miasnikov later became one of the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition, for which he was expelled from the party in 1921 and arrested in 1923. In 1924 or 1925 he turned up in Paris, where he peddled a manuscript describing Michael’s murder. He is said to have published it in Moscow in 1924 (Za svobodu!, April 1925).

†E.g., NVCh, No. 91 (June 17, 1918), 1. A month later the Press Bureau of the Sovnarkom issued a communiqué that Michael had fled to Omsk and was probably in London: NV, No. 124/148 (July 23, 1918), 3.

‡P. B.[ulygin] in Segodnia (Riga), No. 174 (July 1, 1928), 2–3. Only on June 28 did the Soviet authorities confirm that Nicholas and his family were safe, having allegedly received a wire from Ekaterinburg from the commander in chief of the Northern Urals front, that he had inspected the Ipatev house on June 21 and found its residents alive: NV, No. 104/128 (June 29, 1918), 3. Cf. M. K. Diterikhs, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i i chlenov doma Romanovykh na Urale, I (Vladivostok, 1922), 46–48. The delay of one week in reporting this information is inexplicable except in the context of deliberate dissimulation.

*“The friends sleep no longer and hope that the hour so long awaited has arrived. The revolt of the Czechoslovaks menaces the Bolsheviks ever more seriously. Samara, Cheliabinsk and all of eastern and western Siberia are under the control of the national provisional government. The army of the Slavic friends is eighty kilometers from Ekaterinburg, the soldiers of the Red Army are not resisting effectively. Be attentive to all outside movement, wait and be of good hope. But at the same time, I implore you, be prudent because the Bolsheviks, prior to being defeated, represent for you a real and serious danger. Be ready at all hours, day and night. Make a sketch of your two rooms, the places, the furniture, the beds. Write clearly the hour when all of you go to bed. One of you ought not to sleep between 2 and 3 every night from now on. Answer in a few words, but give, I beg you, all the useful information for your friends outside. Give your reply to the same soldier who transmits to you this note in writing but say not one word.

One who is prepared to die for you

An officer of the Russian army.”

*“from the corner up to the balcony. 5 windows face the street, 2 the square. All the windows are closed, sealed and painted white. The little one is still sick and in bed, and cannot walk at all—every concussion causes him pain. A week ago, because of the anarchists, thought was given to having us moved to Moscow at night. One must risk nothing without being absolutely sure of the result. We are almost all the time under careful observation.”

The four letters smuggled to the Imperial family in late June and early July 1918, with their replies, were first published in Russian in the Moscow daily Vechernye Izvestiia, No. 208 (April 2, 1919), 1–2, and No. 209 (April 3, 1919), 1–2. In November 1919, the Communist historian Michael Pokrovskii provided photographic copies of the originals to Isaac Don Levine, who published them in English translation in the Chicago Daily News, December 18, 1919, and again in his autobiography, Eyewitness to History (New York, 1973), 138–41. Levine adopted the dating and sequence suggested to him by Soviet archivists, which, as can be established from internal evidence, cannot be correct. Letter #2 in his version should be Letter #3, and vice versa; Letter #4, which he dates June 26, had to have been written after July 4. Mrs. Levine kindly allowed me to make copies of her late husband’s materials, and the correspondence appears here in the original French for the first time.

*It has been recently revealed that this and the subsequent letters from alleged monarchist rescuers were drafted by one P. Voikov, a member of the Ural Ispolkom and a graduate of Geneva University, and copied by another Bolshevik with neater handwriting: E. Radzinskii in Ogonëk, No. 2 (1990), 27.

*“We do not want to and cannot FLEE. We can only be abducted by force, as it was force that carried us from Tobolsk. Thus, do not count on any active assistance from us. The commandant has many assistants, they are frequently changed and have become anxious. They attentively guard our prison as well as our lives, and are good to us. We do not want them to suffer because of us, nor you for us. Above all, for God’s sake, avoid spilling blood. Obtain information about them yourselves. It is utterly impossible to descend from the window without a ladder. Even after the descent there still exists great danger because of the open window from the room of the commandants and the machine gun on the lower floor which one enters from the inside court. [Crossed out: “Therefore give up the idea of abducting us.”] If you are watching over us, you can always come to save us in case of imminent and real danger. We are completely ignorant of what goes on outside, receiving neither newspapers nor letters. After permission has been given to open the window, the surveillance has intensified and it is prohibited even to put one’s head out of the window, at the risk of getting a bullet in the face.”

*The Ekaterinburg massacre, once the details became known from the investigations of commissions set up by Admiral Kolchak, led to a revolting outpouring of anti-Semitic literature by some Russian publicists and historians, which found repercussions in the West. Much of this literature blamed the Ekaterinburg massacre on Jews and interpreted it as part of a worldwide “Jewish conspiracy.” In the account of the Englishman Robert Wilton, a London Times correspondent, and even more in that of his Russian friend, General Diterikhs, the Judeophobia assumed pathological dimensions. Probably nothing that happened at the time contributed more to the spread of anti-Semitism and the popularization of the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So determined were these writers to blame the tragedy on Jews, they conveniently forgot that the death sentence was passed by the Russian Lenin.

*Sokolov, Ubiistvo, Photograph No. 129, between pp. 248 and 249. A. M. Moshkin, Avdeev’s assistant, was arrested on charges of stealing from the Imperial family.

*According to Alexandra’s diary, on July 6 Iurovskii returned to Nicholas a stolen watch.

†Sokolov found on a wall in Ipatev’s house an inscription in Hungarian: “Verhás András 1918 VII/15e—Örsegen” (Andras Verhas July 15, 1918—Guard). Houghton Archive, Harvard University, Sokolov File, Box 3.

‡in memoirs written in 1920 but published only in 1989, Iurovskii said that the coded order for the “extermination” (istreblenie) of the Romanovs was received on July 16 from Perm. Perm was the provincial capital used by Moscow as a communications center for the Urals region. According to him, the final execution order was signed by Goloshchekin at 6 p.m. the same day. Ogonëk, No. 21 (1989), 30.

*A carbon copy of the Sokolov Commission’s inquiry, in seven typewritten folders, is on deposit at Harvard’s Houghton Library: it originally belonged to Robert Wilton, the Russian correspondent of The Times of London who accompanied Sokolov. The fate of the manuscripts, of which there were three, is discussed by Ross in Gibel’, 13–17. There is some additional evidence on the Ekaterinburg events in Diterikhs, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i.

*Some accounts state that the Imperial family was told they would be taken to a safe place away from Ipatev’s house, but this version is contradicted by the fact that they left their rooms without any of the items they would have been likely to take with them, including an ikon from which Alexandra never separated when traveling: Diterikhs, Ubiistvo, I, 25.

*It could have been Nicholas’s, however: on July 4, Alexandra, referring to Iurovskii’s demand that they turn over to him all jewelry, noted that her husband’s engagement ring would not come off.

*K. von Bothmer, Mit Graf Mirbach in Moskau (Tübingen, 1922), 104. A German scholar, defending the behavior of his country, cites the statement of Alexandra as recorded by the Tsare-vich’s tutor, Gilliard, that she would rather “die a violent death in Russia than be saved by the Germans”: Jagow in BM, No. 5 (1935), 371. This may be true, but, of course, the German Government had no way of knowing at the time that she felt this way.

*Bruce Lockhart claims that Karakhan had told him already in the evening of July 17 that the entire Imperial family had perished: Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1935), 303–4. One wonders why it did not occur to anyone to ask in whose “hands” were Nicholas’s four daughters.

*The text of this document has become available in the West under rather suspicious circumstances. In the spring of 1956 there appeared at the editorial offices of the West German mass-circulation weekly 7 Tage an individual who identified himself as Hans Meier. He claimed to have been directly involved, as an Austrian POW, in the Ekaterinburg decision in 1918 to execute the Imperial family, and produced documents bearing on the matter which he said he had concealed for eighteen years while living in eastern Germany. His version of the events was full of fantastic details: its main purpose seems to have been to remove any doubt that Anastasia, stories of whose alleged survival began to circulate once again in the West, had perished along with the rest of the family. Meier’s documents seem partly authentic, partly fabricated: the most probable explanation is that he acted on behalf of the Soviet security police. His account is in 7 Tage, Nos. 27–35 (July 14-August 25, 1956). The above draft announcement, which appears authentic, was reproduced in 7 Tage on August 25, 1956. On Meier’s “evidence,” see P. Paganutstsi in Vremia i my, No. 92 (1986), 220–21. The author states that a German court which inspected Meier’s documents in connection with a suit brought by the so-called Anastasia declared them a forgery.

*Bykov, Poslednie dni, 126. It is said that the first admission of the death of the family was made in P. Iurenev’s “Novye materialy o rasstrele Romanovykh,” Krasnaia gazeta, December 28, 1925 (Smirnoff, Autour, 25).

†Leninskaia Gvardiia Urala (Sverdlovsk, 1967), 509–14. An English officer, interested in the fate of the Imperial family, visited him in Ekaterinburg in 1919: Francis McCullagh in Nineteenth Century and After, No. 123 (September 1920), 377–427. Iurovskii kept a journal while commandant of Ipatev’s house: it remains unpublished except for brief fragments in Riabov’s article in Rodina, No. 4 (April 1989), 90–91.

‡The Ekaterinburg tragedy had a bizarre sequel. In September 1919, the Executive Committee of the Perm Soviet tried twenty-eight persons for the murder of the late Tsar, his family, and retainers. Although none is known to have had any connection with the event, the Left SR M. Iakhontov “confessed” to having ordered and personally participated in the murder of the Imperial family. He and four other defendants were sentenced to death for the alleged crime. The background and purpose of this mock trial cannot be determined: Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (London, 1920) 102–3, citing Rossiia (Paris), No. 1, December 17, 1919, with reference to Pravda; see also New York Times, December 7, 1919, p. 20.