“What terrible times we live in!” Tsarina Alexandra wrote in February 1917 to her husband Nicholas II, Tsar of all Russia. These were indeed terrible times. Dissatisfied people were calling for revolt against an incompetent government and Tsar, demanding bread and peace. In Petrograd, clashes with the police were the order of the day, with protesters shooting at officers and calling on them to join them. On the morning of 27 February, Nicholas II read another telegram:
“The situation is getting worse. You need to act now, tomorrow it will be too late. The unrest started a few days ago and, unfortunately, soldiers were also involved. In Petrograd, a mob set fire to the secret police offices and did not let the fire brigade put out the fire.”
The government was no longer up to the job and disbanded. The Tsar was not in Petrograd at the time, but at his military headquarters. No one wanted to listen to his orders to put down the rebellion. He saw that the crown was lost, at least for a while, and at the urging and almost threatening of the Duma representatives, he handed over a document renouncing the throne to the Duma envoy at 3.05 p.m. on 2 March 1917, at a small station between the General Staff and the Tsar’s Messenger in the saloon car of the court train. The message he wrote on his abdication ended with the sentence.
On the twenty-second of March, Nicholas II, once Tsar of Russia, returned to Tsarskoe Selo as a prisoner of the Provisional Government. His family was already gathered there. But the presence of the former Tsar near Petrograd was not in line with the intentions of the Provisional Government. Rumours spread all the time that Nicholas. II had fled abroad, which the Bolsheviks exploited to claim that the Provisional Government was not in control of the situation. In its distress, it therefore decided that the Tsar and his family should leave the troubled capital.
The day and time of departure have long been a mystery. The decision to move “Citizen Romanov’s family” to Tobolsk beyond the Urals was announced by the President of the Provisional Government, Kerensky himself, on 13 August at around midnight. Two trains with Red Cross signs were already ready at the station. Nikolai, his family and a small entourage boarded. The two trains, with the curtains down on the windows, did not stop at the intermediate stations towards Siberia. Nikolai wrote in his diary at the time. “As we drove off, we were greeted by a beautiful sunrise. We left Tsarskoye Selo at 6.10 a.m.” His whole family stood by the windows and watched Tsarsko Selo glisten in the rising sun. Soon it disappeared over the horizon and his past disappeared with it. The break with it was violent. In one stroke, 300 years of the Romanov family history were erased.
Nikolai Romanov sighed. The days when carriages or even open sleighs would deposit couples slowly ascending the stairs in an endless queue in front of the palace staircase were not far off. The ladies were in elegant ball gowns and bare-shouldered, fur-covered dresses, their necks adorned with precious necklaces, the men strutted in black waistcoats trimmed with gold and white trousers, the officers in colourful parade uniforms with gold epaulettes. Everyone knew his place. The Grand Princes went through one entrance, the members of the court through another and the officers through a third.
The year was 1913 and the Romanovs had ruled Russia for 300 years. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the German-born Tsarina Alexandra, celebrated the jubilee with appropriate pomp, albeit without much enthusiasm. Despite having reigned for 19 years, Nicholas. II was still a timid ruler, and Alexandra, despite her pale beauty, was unhappy because Russian high society still did not accept her as its ruler. Therefore, the imperial couple spent most of their time in Tsarskoye Selo, 24 kilometres from Petrograd.
Now all that was in the past. At the beginning, there were rumours that the Tsarist family might go into exile, but these plans fell into disrepair when the Bolsheviks tried to seize power. Strategic points in Petrograd were already occupied by troops sympathetic to them, and even the garrison in the Petropavlovsk fortress came over to their side. All this was allegedly concocted by a certain Leon Trotsky. “Who is this?” wondered Nikolai. “Some upstart and a one-day fly,” his advisers reassured him.
While Nicholas wondered how all this had happened against God’s will, the train rumbled on and after three days stopped in Tyumen on 4 August. Everyone had to get off and board the river boat Russia, which slowly sailed down the Tur River and then the Tobolsk River. The Provisional Government chose Tobolsk as a refuge for the Romanovs because it was easily accessible and because there were almost no Bolshevik troops in the area.
Tobolsk was a sleepy provincial town of 20,000 inhabitants, more than 200 kilometres from the first railway line. The weather worsened during the river crossing and it started to rain, the steamer was slow and by evening the outlines of the Tobolsk kremlin could already be seen from the deck. Virtually nothing had been prepared for a proper reception of the Romanovs and their entourage. So they all had to live on the anchored ship for another week to furnish the Governor’s house properly. Ironically, the Governor’s house was now called Freedom House and stood on a street called Freedom Street.
On their arrival, everyone flocked to the shore to see the former Tsar. The Romanovs had considerably fewer companions in Tobolsk, as they could all decide for themselves when they left whether or not they still wanted to remain in the service of the former Tsar’s family. Thus, of the immediate entourage, only Nikolai’s physician Botkin, the Tsarina’s lady-in-waiting Demidova, the butler Trupp and the cook Kharitonov remained with them.
Life in Tobolsk was monotonous and without any real news about what was happening in Russia. Although the movement of the tsarist family was formally restricted, security measures were rather lax. “We are sawing and splitting firewood, and that is very nice,” Princess Olga of Tobolsk wrote to a friend. But then came November 1917, when Nicholas learned that the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia. He was devastated to hear that his wine cellars in Petrograd and Moscow had been completely looted. “How could such a thing be possible? Couldn’t Kerensky have prevented them?”
The last Orthodox New Year celebrated by the Tsarist family was at the door. The Bolshevik soviet was already at work in the city. It was so cold that people went to bed in their coats. On the eve of Orthodox Christmas, a mass was held in the local church, during which the priest wished the Tsarist family long life. At that time, church services were still allowed, although the next day an investigation had already been launched into the “provocation” in the church, and for the first time there were calls for the Romanovs to be put in prison.
In March 1918, all the church bells rang in Tobolsk and armed horsemen raced through the city streets. “The saviours have come!” the captives cheered, “to bring Nicholas II, the true and only Tsar of Russia, back to the throne.” In reality, the Red Guards had come from Omsk to consolidate Soviet power in Tobolsk.
Where to go with the Imperial Family?
In Petrograd, decisions were being taken at that very moment that had long-term consequences. In April 1917, Filip Goloschekin took over from Yakov Sverdlov, who was leaving to become Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, as leader of the Ural Bolsheviks, based in Yekaterinburg. He immediately thought that something had to be done about the former tsarist family still squatting in Tobolsk. There were unverified rumours that Nicholas had taken a priceless fortune with him to Tobolsk. From then on, the course of events can only be traced from the partially preserved accounts and notes of the people who organised and participated in the murder of the Tsarist family. Yet these events only came to our attention a few years ago and it is still not possible to piece together a mosaic that is not full of holes.
As early as November 1917, the Petrograd Revolutionary Committee had been toying with the idea that it might be able to extract some bargaining power from the Tsar’s powerful relatives in England and Germany by arresting the Tsar’s family. They even hatched a plan to transport the Tsar family to the island fortress of Kronstadt in the Baltic Sea, which was held firmly in the hands of rebellious Baltic sailors. The Soviet of People’s Commissars rejected this as an ill-timed decision, even though it had itself flirted with the idea of trying “Nicholas the Bloody” in Moscow. The prosecutor was to be Leon Davidovich Trotsky himself, and he wanted to make a world spectacle of the trial. He wanted to prove that there was no turning back for the Bolsheviks.
In January 1918, Sverdlov, now at the head of the Central Executive Committee of the Party, received a delegation of Bolsheviks charged with guarding the Tsar’s family. A month later, he was visited by Goloschekin to discuss with him the transfer of the Tsar to Yekaterinburg rather than Moscow. The frictions in the Bolshevik leadership were not yet public at that time, but some people liked to throw stones at the feet of others. This would have deprived Trotsky of the possibility of becoming too influential by organising a trial against the former Tsar.
Sverdlov was aware that he was playing with dangerous fire. Trotsky was strong, perhaps even too strong for him, and many had already experienced that opposing this man could be disastrous. Sverdlov therefore drew up three different plans to get the tsarist family out of Tobolsk. He entrusted the implementation to Vasily Yakovlev, one of the five founders of the Cheka, Lenin’s political police. But when Moscow made Yakovlev military commissar of the whole of the Urals at the beginning of 1918, the people of Yekaterinburg disagreed and appointed a man from their own ranks to the post, one Goloschekin. From that time on, the Ural Bolsheviks and Yakovlev looked at each other badly.
Yakovlev was an unusual personality. He was an adventurer and an old acquaintance of the Tsarist police. When the Bolsheviks took power, he became head of all the telephone and telegraph offices in Petrograd. Together with five other Bolsheviks, he founded the notorious Cheka political police. It was he who brought 40 wagons of grain to starving Petrograd and managed to transport 25 million gold roubles from the city to distant Ufa to prevent them falling into the hands of the interventionist white troops. He was accompanied everywhere by gunfire, blood and casualties.
But it was Yakovlev who received from Sverdlov a written mandate, signed by Lenin, which required everyone – on pain of death – to obey his orders. What his task actually was, the mandate did not say. It was given to him orally and had three versions. According to the first and official one – the other two were just versions of it – the Romanovs were to be transported to Moscow. Yakovlev proposed that this should be done without unnecessary explanation and that the Romanovs should be taken by the frozen Tobol River to Tyumen, from where the railway to Ekaterinburg ran.
As soon as we were away from Tyumen, the train would change direction and turn towards Omsk, whose rivalry with Yekaterinburg was well known. In Yekaterinburg, the idea of letting the tsarist family out of their hands was bitterly opposed. It would have been much easier to transport them from Omsk to Moscow. If something unforeseen had happened, Yakovlev would still have been able to get the exiles safely to his native Ufa, which was another plan. The third was that the Tsar and his family would, in the worst case, be transported to Yekaterinburg. Yakovlev was assigned two telegraph operators so that he could be in constant contact with Moscow.
Meanwhile, the Romanovs, who had lived relatively peacefully in Tobolsk, also fell on bad times. The shortages in Russia were such that they too had to make do with the same rations as their guards. The food was often cold, irregular, and the cold was so intense that the shotguns cracked. Then Yakovlev went to Philip Goloschekin, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, and assured him that his only aim was to bring his family to Yekaterinburg and not to Moscow.
Goloschekin was smarter than Yakovlev and knew that Yakovlev was trying to deceive him. It was also clear to him that Yakovlev could not do much without his help. He needed a strong and reliable armed escort for his fateful journey, which he did not have, and Goloshchekin promised him one. The units that had guarded Nikolai were now replaced by Red Guards. Something Yakovlev did not know, or perhaps he suspected, but he could do nothing. The Red Guards had to keep an eye on him, and if he did anything contrary to the plans of Yekaterinburg, they had orders to remove him by force.
On 25 April, Yakovlev told Nikolai the news that they were to be transferred, but did not tell him where. Nikolai was surprised and resisted the transfer because Alexei, the little haemophiliac Tsarevich, was ill from a fall down the stairs. But Yakovlev was persistent. If Nikolai resisted, he would use force. He confidentially lied to him that they would be sent into exile in Scandinavia from Moscow, where there would be no trial against him, and this at least partially reassured Nikolai.
The Tsar was now to go to Moscow alone, but the Tsarina did not want to hear about it. She decided to follow him with one of her daughters. Tatiana, as the most reliable of all Nicholas’s daughters, was to stay with Tsarevich Alexei, Olga was too weak to make the 300-kilometre journey to Tyumen in a simple open peasant carriage, and Anastasia was too small. So the Tsarina decided to take her daughter Maria with her. The separation of the family was sad. Nicholas crossed and kissed each of the remaining children on the forehead. He was accompanied by only three servants, a doctor and three members of the usual entourage. They left early one April morning.
An armed escort rode in front of and behind the carriage with the Tsar. Yakovlev rode nervously in front for a while and behind for a while. Few guards were posted on important sections. The Tsar wrote in her diary: “In the morning the ride continued. At Jevlievo, the cold water was already running over the ice. The wind whipped our cheeks. The carts were stuck in the water. I didn’t want to wade through it. They brought planks from a nearby village and made a kind of bridge. That day we arrived in Pokrovskoye, Rasputin’s home village. I stood for a long time in front of his house.”
By the next stop on 27 April, they were already in Tyumen. If anyone wanted to attack them, Tiumen would be the best place to do it. But nothing happened. Only a new reinforcement, a detachment of 250 soldiers, was waiting for them. There was also a dirty train, and they went to bed without undressing. Yakovlev was relieved and thought the danger was over, but the worst was yet to come. A detachment of Ural Bolsheviks had the task of escorting them only as far as the train, then the soldiers turned around and went back.
The train slowly pulled out and turned towards Omsk instead of Ekaterinburg. Yakovlev did not know that in the meantime Sverdlov and Goloshchekin were coordinating their plans and Goloshchekin had already made peace with the Bolshevik group from Omsk. Thus his plan to exploit the rivalry between Yekaterinburg and Omsk collapsed. Telegrams began to rain down from Yekaterinburg on Sverdlov, telling him that he was not keeping his agreement, that the Tsar’s family must come to Yekaterinburg, and that Yakovlev was a traitor who must be punished and arrested immediately.
But Yakovlev had his informers too, and when he found out about this behind-the-scenes game, he was furious and ordered the train to be stopped not far from Omsk. He disconnected the locomotive from the consist and drove it and his telegraph operator to the Omsk railway station. There, a group of people was waiting to take him to task for betraying the revolution. He was threatened with death, as he had been so many times in his life.
Nothing helped, not even the telegram he sent to Sverdlov, who turned deaf and told him only to take the Tsar to Ekaterinburg. Yakovlev suppressed his anger and got back on the train, which arrived in Yekaterinburg the next morning.
Ipati House
A few days before, Engineer Ipatiyev had been ordered by the Ural Soviets in Ekaterinburg to vacate his spacious house within 24 hours. A guard was immediately posted in front of the long, low building with thick walls and stone ornaments, surrounded by a fence, and the townspeople began to rumour that the former Russian Tsar and his entourage would be staying there. A large crowd gathered in front of Ipati’s house. Someone shouted, “Bring the Romanovs, I’ll spit in their faces!” The crowd only began to disperse when the captain of the guard ordered the soldiers to prepare their machine guns.
Meanwhile, the train has stopped at a freight station. His armed escort refused to hand him over to the leadership of the Ural Bolsheviks, and there was almost a shoot-out. Finally, the Tsarist duo and their escort were put in a car and driven to Yekaterinburg, where Yakovlev officially handed over his “consignment” to the Ural Bolsheviks. Thus, Nicholas and Yakovlev, the last official entourage of the former Russian Tsar, said goodbye.
In the following years, Yakovlev experienced almost unbelievable things. In May of that year, the Czech Legion, made up of prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had crossed over to the Russian side, stood up to the Bolsheviks along the Volga and the Urals. The Bolsheviks sent several military detachments to put down the rebellion, and one of them was led by Yakovlev. He then left the front for unknown reasons, returned to his native Ufa, publicly declared that he had “had enough of Bolshevism” and defected to the White Guard, which did not believe him and simply shot him dead in a cellar.
This was the official version of the end of his life. But the shot Yakovlev was “revived” and in 1920 was living in China under the name of Stoyanovich. In 1927 he decided to return to Russia and there, of course, fell into the hands of the organisation he himself had helped to found – the Cheka political police. He was interrogated and condemned, and only his revolutionary favours saved him from the firing squad. He was sent to the gulag on the Solovetsky Islands, where he helped build the White Sea Canal. He was released after only two years for “good behaviour”.
So in the eyes of the Bolsheviks he was not guilty of anything? In the following years, when he had no real job, he wrote to Stalin: “How is it possible that I am being punished again for the same crime? For what crime, what did he do? Was he a gambler who played a double role all his life, volunteering for the most unlikely tasks? Has he found that high ideals have been replaced by a ruthless struggle for power? His wife wrote in her memoirs that he woke up screaming at night: What have I done?
In China, as an adviser to revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, he is said to have made contact with Soviet intelligence, earning him the right to return to his homeland, but his betrayal was not forgotten. He began to write a memoir entitled The Last Journey of the Romanovs, and in it he naturally extolled his own merits. Perhaps he never wanted to take the Tsar’s family to Moscow in the first place and was playing a double role? But Trotsky was expelled from the country and his acquaintance with him was not worth mentioning, and Sverdlov is in his grave. There was no one of importance who could have helped him. All those who had worked for the revolution were facing an inevitable end. In September 1938 he was arrested and disappeared forever into the Gulag, taking his secrets with him.
The former Tsar and Tsarina and their entourage entered Ipati’s house. There were four well-equipped rooms at their disposal. Then the luggage and the entourage arrived. But Prince Dolgoruky was no longer there. It was rumoured that two rifles and a large amount of hidden money had been found in his possession in Tobolsk. Why would he have had the two rifles if he really had them? For this offence he was sentenced to death and shot by a Chekist.
At Ipati’s house, a detachment of soldiers began a thorough search of the Imperial family’s luggage. They confiscated the Tsarina’s camera as evidence of a “conspiracy” and carefully searched her medicine bag. They searched for hidden Tsarist jewels. When Nicholas spoke about the jewels in the presence of others, he always referred to them as medicines, so the investigators were convinced that they were hidden among the medicines. They found nothing, as the gems were still in Tobolsk. The daughters sewed them into corsets and wide headgear, thinking that they would soon be sent to Ekaterinburg.
This is what happened, but in a very unusual way. For Orthodox Easter, the Orthodox Bishop of Tobolsk, Hermigen, excommunicated the Bolsheviks, and they assumed that he would try to free the prisoners during a street procession. As the procession started and moved towards the building where Nicholas’s daughters and the Tsarevich were imprisoned, the Bolsheviks mingled among the people and arrested the Bishop, tied him to a piece of iron fencing and threw him into the river.
Fearing more disorder, all the captives were sent back down the river to Tjumen, where they had come from. There, a special train was waiting to take them to their father and mother. They arrived there on 21 May and the family was together again. They were never separated again. That the situation of the prisoners had changed considerably was also shown by the fact that they were now no longer allowed to be called by ‘false’ titles, such as Your Highness, but simply by their civilian names. The former Tsar thus became Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov.
Ipati’s house was heavily guarded, with an armed workers’ detachment guarding the outside, and part of the military detachment was also stationed in the house next door. Armed “Latvians”, as the Austro-Hungarian prisoners who had joined the Bolsheviks were called, roamed the house. Nikolai liked to walk in the courtyard, and to the soldiers who watched him, he seemed a very simple man, with no airs or airs of haughtiness. “He doesn’t look like a tsar at all,” they whispered to each other, smiling kindly at him.
The former empress spent her days in a four-walled house, often in a rocking chair, her head bandaged because of a constant migraine. She was rarely seen in the courtyard. She dreamt of being freed and of being able to correspond again with the rest of her family and her many relatives. But the security situation in Yekaterinburg and the wider area was constantly changing. It was not only the soldiers of the Czech Legion who were resisting the Bolsheviks, but also some of the previously loyal Cossack troops. Even in the city itself, there were occasional disturbances. The Tsar and his entourage had to be prepared to be transferred elsewhere at any time. But where? The only safe place seemed to be Moscow.
At that time, a man Nikolai called “the Black Gentleman”, Chekist Yakov Jurovsky, appeared in Yekaterinburg and in Ipati’s house. Later, when some people wanted to explain the inhuman events in the basement of Ipati’s house, they called him and his comrades murderers and sadists. Others claimed that it was the Jews’ revenge on the Orthodox Tsar for not doing anything when pogroms were being perpetrated against the Jewish population. Years later, dying in a Kremlin hospital, Jurowski himself tried to explain in his last letter why he hated religion and the Tsar:
“Our family suffered less from hunger than from my father’s religious fanaticism. We children had to pray every day and even on holidays, so it is no wonder that for the first time I actively rebelled against religious and nationalistic traditions. I began to hate God and prayer, poverty and nobility.”
Jurovski was a thin man in a black leather jacket, with a black beard and dark hair – a true “black gentleman”, responsible for preparing the end of the Romanov family. But the bloody dance started somewhere other than Ipati’s house. On the night of 13 June, three strangers turned up at a hotel in Perm and produced a written order from the local political police to take away Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Michael, and his secretary Johnson. With revolvers and bombs in their hands, they forced their way into the hotel room, shouting, “You Romanovs, we have had enough of you!” Then they cut all the telephone wires and took the Grand Duke, who resisted, saying he was ill, and his secretary into the woods. There they stopped an open carriage and ordered them both to get out. They were then shot.
The execution took place in complete confusion. Bullets were jammed in the guns of the killers and the two victims ran back and forth, bloodied. Dawn was breaking, so they just covered the bodies with branches and came back the next day, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. In the morning, the Cheka announced that no orders had been given to shoot them and that they had been kidnapped by strangers. The Perm Cheka called the incident “anarchist revenge” and distanced itself from it. It later came to light that the killers were members of the local soviet and police leadership.
A similar massacre took place a month later near the Ural town of Alapayevskaya, where the Russian Tsarina’s sister, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, and the three sons of Grand Duke Constantine were living in exile. They were put on a lorry, taken to a nearby quarry and beaten. Some were immediately shot, others were thrown alive into the mine shaft and hand bombs were thrown in. The bodies were later discovered by the rebel White Guard. In both cases, the authorities announced that the violence had been carried out by unidentified persons. It is true, however, that the central authorities in Moscow did not always have control over the provinces, and it was therefore the case that the murders were organised by the local authorities, fearing that White troops were approaching their towns.
The fatal telegram
It was at the beginning of June 1918, when, with the permission of the commandant of the guard, food for the Romanovs was brought to Ipati’s house from the nearby monastery; eggs, bacon, milk and bread. In one of the milk bottles was a letter written on thin paper. Nicholas took it in his hands and read: “We are a group of Russian officers … your friends are ready … the hour for which we have waited so long has arrived … we hope that with God’s help we will succeed without risk … we are ready to die for you.”
It was written in French and promised imminent liberation. But who wrote it? Can these promises even be believed? The Tsarina believed them, but Nicholas did not know what to say. This letter is still in the State Archives today, and there are increasing signs that it was written by the Bolsheviks, who wanted to prove that Nicholas was involved in the conspiracy. The careless Nicholas even mentioned it in the diary he was writing. It is true that rebel troops of the Czech Legion were approaching Yekaterinburg, but they were coming so slowly that it was suspicious that the rebels were not very interested in saving the tsarist family at all.
There were only 300 Red Guards in Yekaterinburg, and many of them were former Tsarist officers. One is tempted to think that the Bolshevik opponents did not intend to return Nicholas to the throne after the victory, but that their aim was a parliamentary democracy of the republican type. The tsarist family would only have stood in their way. Whoever held it would have had to grapple with the question of what and where to do with it. They were all superfluous.
The Ural Soviet was able to use the confiscated letter as evidence of a monarchist conspiracy, and Philip Goloschekin quickly travelled to Moscow, where they anxiously awaited news from Yekaterinburg. Could the city even hold out, even if only for a few days? Can the Bolsheviks still hold on to power in Russia? There were several signs that their end was near. The Germans held the Ukraine, the English and interventionist troops landed in the north, the provinces resisted. Moscow, too, was boiling. The left revolutionaries had killed the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, so the Bolsheviks imprisoned all the party leadership. The result was a real uprising and the Left Revolutionaries stormed the post office and the cheque building. The insurgents were only broken up by Latvian snipers.
Goloschekin was only interested in what to do with the imperial family. The atmosphere surrounding these discussions can be detected in Trotsky’s later memoirs: “In essence, this decision was inevitable. The execution of the Tsar and his family was necessary, but not only to frighten the enemy, to terrify him and to deprive him of all hope, but also to strengthen our ranks and to show everyone that there was no turning back. We were facing only total victory or total failure.”
These are, of course, only Trotsky’s writings. Seventy-two years later, in the State Archives, they found telegram 14228, whose receipt was confirmed by Moscow on 16 July 1918 at 9.22 p.m. From Ekaterinburg, it was first sent to Zinoviev, Lenin’s close associate, in Petrograd, who then sent it to Moscow with his explanation. It said: “To Moscow, Kremlin, Sverdlov, copy to Lenin. From Ekaterinburg we inform Moscow that the trial we have agreed on cannot be postponed, we cannot wait any longer. If you think otherwise, please inform us immediately. Goloshchekin, Safarov.” And then there is Zinoviev’s imputed instruction to Moscow: “Contact Yekaterinburg on this matter.”
A dead Tsar would make martyrs of his children and wife. Therefore, Nicholas’ death sentence sealed the fate of the whole family. But since the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia was not an entirely implausible possibility, they did not want to be associated with the bloody massacre of the Romanov dynasty. The decision for a mass slaughter had formally to come from far away, from distant Yekaterinburg. And that at a time when the city was about to fall. Unlike the bloodthirsty romantics Trotsky and Zinoviev, Lenin was a pragmatist. If Yekaterinburg was going to hold out, let everything stay as it was and the tsarist family would still serve as a good bargaining chip in the game with the great powers, especially England. That was the final agreement on that July day in 1918.
Changes were also taking place in Ipati’s house. The control of the imperial family was now taken over by Jurovsky. He immediately replaced all the house guards and began to take stock of the Tsarist family’s possessions, especially the gold. On the twelfth of July, Goloschekin returned from Moscow and immediately called a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Ural Soviet, which voted unanimously to execute the Tsarist family. It read as follows:
“Decree of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers, Peasants and Deputies of the Red Army. In view of reports that Czech gangs are threatening the Red capital of the Urals, Yekaterinburg, and aware that the crowned executioner may hide and evade the people’s court, the Executive Committee, taking into account the will of the people, has decided that the former Tsar Nicholas Romanov should be executed, since he is guilty of numerous bloody crimes.”
The execution was carried out by Yakov Jurovsky, who was responsible for protecting Nikolai. The day after this decision, Nikolai wrote his last words in his diary. “The weather is warm and pleasant. We have no news from outside.”
Jurovski has not been in the house much in the last three days. He had been walking around the neighbourhood looking for a suitable place to be executed. Descendants of those who took part in the massacre later said that he called a meeting in a city hotel and recruited volunteers for the execution. Once he had selected them, they met in a hotel room to agree on the course of the execution. It was decided that they would aim for the heart so that the victims would not suffer too much. They also decided who would shoot who. Yermakov was to shoot Nikolai, Jurovsky chose the Tsarina, Nikulin the Tsarevich and Medvedev one of the daughters. The other victims were also quickly chosen. It was decided that the execution would take place in Ipati’s house in the semi-basement. Here, the window was barred and the room was lit only by a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, but its light could not be seen from the street because of the high fence.
The aforementioned telegram No 14228, received by Moscow from Ekaterinburg and stating that the execution of the Tsarist family was imminent, was the last of a series of documents which decided their fate. This was confirmation that this was also Moscow’s wish, as Goloschekin had asked Moscow to inform him immediately if this was not the case. Goloschekin was not, of course, working on his own, and the conversations he had in Moscow about the Tsar’s fate were not sufficient reassurance. The direct order to execute him was sent by Reinhold Berzin, the commander of the Red Army, which was still holding the front in front of Ekaterinburg against the advancing soldiers of the Czech Legion. Telegram No 14228 was only a response to his order.
At the end of June, rumours spread in Moscow that Nicholas II had already been executed. A commission was immediately sent from Moscow to the Urals to find out what was true and what was false. The reply, signed by Berzin himself, was: “All rumours of Nicholas II’s execution are a provocation.” Berzin later met an unhappy end, dying in one of Stalin’s camps in 1938. Historians disagree on whether Moscow confirmed the execution. The Kremlin guard Akimov, who was also responsible for bringing important telegrams to Lenin, confirmed in his memoirs the existence of a telegram confirming the execution, but no one has yet discovered the document itself.
But Goloschekin was still not satisfied. He sent another telegram to Moscow, stating that the execution could not be postponed in view of the military situation. He ended by saying, “If you think otherwise, please inform me immediately.” But Moscow remained silent.
On 18 July Sverdlov appeared at a meeting of the Soviet of National Commissars, chaired by Lenin. He asked to speak and said that a message had come from Yekaterinburg that the former Tsar was preparing to escape, for which he had been shot and his family evacuated to safety. Those present agreed with the report and instructed him to prepare a suitable statement for the press. It was published on 19 July 1918.
Massacre in the house
In the early hours of the morning of 17 July 1918, the occupants of Pop’s house, which was opposite Ipati’s, heard muffled gunshots, many of them coming from the house next door. They looked up and immediately understood what was happening. These were dangerous times and only the cautious survived. So they didn’t run there, they just lay back and kept quiet until morning. They only mentioned the shooting when they were being interrogated by the White Guard soldiers.
In the morning, guards were posted around Ipati’s house as usual, but there were none inside. A nun from a nearby convent came with milk and eggs for the Tsar’s family. At the entrance she was brusquely refused and told not to bring any more of these things. Inside the house, Nikulin and Medvedev were sitting at the table, sorting gold and precious stones into boxes. Now now they were expecting the fall of Yekaterinburg. Jurovsky also came and started to load his things on the carriage. Among them was a box sealed with wax, which contained Nikolai’s personal archives.
Jurovský was in such a hurry that he forgot his wallet on the table. He also failed to evacuate his own mother from the city. The White Guard later interrogated her, but found no incriminating orders. Deputy Jurovsky Nikulin, disguised as a poor peasant, soon left the town. These were dangerous times for travel. Gangs cruised the roads and robbed carts and trains. Nikulin, however, was carrying a pearl, the contents of which could have cost him his life. It contained the precious stones of the Tsar’s family.
On 19 July, the execution of the former Tsar of all Russia was publicly announced. Posters about it were pasted all over the city. Two days later, the local soviet returned the keys of the house to the engineer Ipatiev and told him he could move back in.
On 25 July, the Bolsheviks surrendered the town to the Czech Legion and White Troops and fled. The officers of the White Troops immediately rushed to Ipati’s house. They entered it and found a scene of devastation. On the first floor, where the Tsar’s family lived, chairs and tables were overturned, goblets were on the floor, women’s combs, empty coat hangers and piles of rubbish were strewn all over the rooms. They found an empty Tsarina’s rocker, shoe brushes, lots of books and icons, the beds were strewn about, but no jewellery or jewels. To get into the small semi-basement room, the officers had to go down the stairs from the first floor, then out of the house, through the garden, through another door and a whole row of rooms on the ground floor. Only then did they reach the small entrance to a gloomy room measuring no more than 35 square metres. It was empty and the floor was washed.
At one end of the room was a storeroom, locked with a wooden door riddled with bullets. Traces of gunfire could also be seen on the walls. Probably the victims were running to and fro in desperation. So this is where they were shot. Traces of blood could be seen on the wooden doors, and bayonet marks on the floor, as they had used them to kill their victims. Most of the bullet marks indicated that revolvers had been used, although there were also traces of Colt and Mauser bullets. The officers began to dig up the garden and search for bodies, and also dug up the part of the town cemetery where the Cheka usually buried their victims. There was also nothing in the nearby pond. The bodies of the people who lived in Ipati’s house were not found. Thus began an official investigation into the fate of the imperial family.
On 17 July, some farmers from the village of Koptyaki, 25 kilometres from Ekaterinburg, went into the forest to cut down trees. At a place called the Four Brothers, because four trees once grew there, they were stopped by Red Army soldiers and not allowed to go further, because there were supposed to be military exercises in the forest. Indeed, when the peasants were returning home, they heard the muffled drumming of grenades. After the fall of Yekaterinburg and the Red Army’s retreat, they hurried into the forest, to where the explosions were said to have been heard. There used to be some small mines where gold was mined, but when that was gone, the mines were abandoned and some of them were flooded.
Fresh branches and charred wood floated in a flooded mine shaft, the ground around was trampled by horse hooves and carts. In the woods, they found a few trinkets, buttons and buckles, and traces of two large fires. The farmers decided to pump water out of the well, but found nothing special, except an amputated finger, part of a denture and the body of a small dog. The victims they were looking for were nowhere to be found.
A mining technician then came to the investigators and told them that he had seen Jurovsky, who was responsible for the security of the Tsar’s family, near the site a few days earlier. He asked him whether the road was passable for a heavy lorry. And indeed, on the evening of 16 July, a lorry left the garage of the local cheka and did not return until 19 July, all muddy and with bloodstains. The truck’s wheel tracks could also be seen on the path leading into the forest. In Yekaterinburg, some of the guards of Ipati’s house also fell into the hands of the Whites, who did not manage to escape.
The details of the massacre were slowly coming to light. From all these notifications, the following could be deduced. At midnight between 16 and 17 July, Jurovski woke the Romanovs and persuaded them that they had to spend that night in the cellar because of the possibility of shelling and street fighting. The Tsar and the Tsarevich in his arms, the Tsaritsa and her daughters, the court lady Demidova, the Tsar’s personal physician Botkin, the lackey Trupp and the court cook Kharitonov descended into the basement. There Jurovsky, accompanied by a small group of Latvian guards and Medvedevs, suddenly began to read to them from a paper. Then he said to Nikolai: “Your life is over.” After another confession, he said to him, ” The revolution is dying and you will die too. ”
Nicholas didn’t understand what it was all about and asked, “What?” Meanwhile, the Tsaritsa and one of the daughters crossed themselves. Jurovsky then allegedly raised his hand, cocked his revolver and said, “This is the answer to your what!”
Then others started shooting. First the Tsar and the Tsarevich fell, then the Tsaritsa, and the lady-in-waiting Demidova tried to protect herself with a small pillow, so she was bayoneted. The Tsarevich was still alive and moaning on the ground. Jurovsky came up and shot him at point-blank range. The Tsar’s daughters were all soon dead. The two youngest were leaning against the wall, screaming and covering their heads with their hands while they were still alive. They were cut down with bayonets. The room was so full of gun smoke that the guards could see almost nothing. So they fired wildly, without aiming, until they had emptied the guards.
Then someone brought some sheets, the victims were wrapped in them and loaded onto a lorry, which drove off to an unknown destination. The cleaning of the room began with sand, water and rags. Meanwhile, the truck with the bodies went on its night journey, which was not without its problems. It was muddy and the truck had to stop several times, reaching its destination only at 6am. And even here they did not find their way, searching for a mine shaft and finally discovering that no one had brought shovels and picks. A guard was posted to scare away any curious people from the nearby village. Near the shaft, they stripped the bodies and took the valuables sewn into their clothes, then burned the clothes in a fire. The bodies were then swept into the shaft and a few more bombs were dropped. The loot taken from the clothes – diamonds, pearls and precious stones – was later buried in the basement of a small building in Apalayevsk. It remained there until 1919, when it was unearthed and transferred to Moscow.
Some of the participants in the secret burial couldn’t keep their mouths shut, so the next day rumours spread even in the market. There was nothing left to do but to move the bodies of the slain to another place and bury them. They decided to burn them, but first they had to be disfigured with acid so that they would no longer be recognisable.
On the night of 18 July, several lorries brought a large quantity of kerosene and acid to the vicinity of the mine shaft. Someone climbed into the shaft and started looking for bodies in the cold water, which sometimes reached up to their chests. They were pulled to the top of the shaft with a rope, loaded onto a lorry and set off. It was a tiring journey, and they did not stop until around 5 a.m. on 19 July. The corpses were cut up with axes, placed in a shallow pit, soaked in acid, poured over with kerosene and set on fire. Planks were laid across the pit, enough soil was spread over the top, and the truck was driven over the burial site several times in an attempt to erase all traces.
Anastasia is alive?
In 1920, an unidentified woman in Berlin attempted suicide by jumping into a canal. She was rescued by passers-by and taken to hospital. She was severely depressed and hardly spoke. When she happened to see a photograph of the Russian Tsar’s family, she became very upset and rumours began to spread that the rescued girl was Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. She herself believed her own story. She spoke of the shots, the fall and that her sisters were supposed to protect her with their bodies, but then she lost her memory and did not know what happened next. She spoke of being taken away in a cart. She found herself in Romania with a soldier who rescued her, she gave birth to his child and escaped. She did not speak Russian, as they were supposed to speak to each other in foreign languages at court. Tsarina Alexandra, as a German, also spoke Russian badly.
She was quite similar to Princess Anastasia; she had remnants of her birthmark, a similar ear shape and similar handwriting. After a while, she began to have partial memories of her life at the Tsar’s court. The matter came to court, as the stranger stubbornly defended her rights, but the court rejected her. She was one of many who wanted to take the opportunity to present themselves as the successors of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. Many believed the alleged Anastasia for the rest of her life. But it turned out that she was just a Polish factory worker, Franziczka Schanzkowska. No one doubted that she was in deep shock from unknown traumatic events that led her to believe she was Anastasia. She litigated for the rest of her life, which ended in 1984 at the age of 88.
Apart from the arguments about Anastasia’s true identity, nothing new happened for a long time after that. Of course, the relatives of the Tsar and Tsarina who had managed to flee abroad continued to quarrel for many years over the remaining assets and valuables that were stashed away in various banks around the world. Jurovsky returned to Moscow and continued to work on the cheque. After the failed assassination of Lenin, he was one of the main investigators and interrogators of the assassin Fania Kaplanova, who was linked to the plot of the Party of Social Revolutionaries. After the end of the Civil War, he returned to Yekaterinburg as head of the local Cheka. After a few years, he was back in Moscow again, doing less important jobs, most recently as director of the Polytechnic Museum. He escaped Stalin’s purges, but his family did not. His daughter spent a quarter of a century in various camps.
For 70 years, official silence shrouded the tragic events of the past like a state secret. Most of the other participants in the massacre ended up in the camps of the Gulag and only a few survived. The first attempts to exhume the remains of members of the Tsarist family date back to 1979. Three geologists from Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg was then called) and a Moscow librarian found the burial site with the help of Yakov Jurovsky’s notes. The notes were not public, of course, but apparently someone was able to read them. They dug up three skulls, measured them and buried them back. One of them had a gold dental bridge and was supposed to have belonged to Nicholas. They kept quiet about their discovery for more than 10 years.
Then the grave was dug up again, amid rumours that Moscow had decided to bury the grave and transport the remains. This time they were more thorough. They dug up bones, whole skeletons, skulls, the remains of the rope used by the excavators to pull the corpse out of the mine shaft, and a few trinkets. In total, nine skeletons were found, the remains of the Tsarevich and one of his daughters were reportedly missing.
Many have questioned the identity of the remains in the tomb. But in 1993 and 1995, British and American experts independently of each other, using DNA tests, established that they also belonged to the Tsarist family. The blood analysis of Prince Philip of England, who is the grandson of the sister of the last Russian Tsarina, was identical to the DNA test of the remains of the murdered Tsarina Alexandra. The fate of the murdered Tsar Nicholas, Tsaritsa Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei, the daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and the other victims of the revolutionary madness has become known.
