Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (36 page)

As the smoke and fumes cleared amidst the pile of twisted bodies, the full horror of the murder scene was finally revealed. All the dead were hideously distorted, their faces contorted in their final agony and covered in blood. The bodies all had numerous bullet wounds – some of them fatal through-and-through wounds to the soft tissue, caused by the powerful, large-calibre Mausers being fired at close range – as well as bones fractured or broken by gunshots. What remained of their smoke-charred clothes was covered in blood and tissue.

Wasting no time, Yurovsky ordered any valuables from the bodies to be collected up. The assassins slipped and slithered in the glutinous, coagulating mess as they searched among the pathetically blood-soaked handbags, shoes, pillows and slippers that had fallen from their victims and now lay tumbled in disarray across the floor, and gagged at the strange and terrible smell of death that hung in the room. As they turned the bodies over, they struggled with distorted limbs to strip the jewellery from them. The Tsaritsa’s gold bracelets that she never took off and
which she had refused to yield to Yurovsky on the day of his arrival were yanked from her wrists, and those from her daughters too, and handed over. As Petr Voikov, who had been a witness to the killings (but who later claimed to have taken part), turned the body of one of the Grand Duchesses over, it gave out a terrible gurgling sound and blood gushed from its mouth. It was a sight to shock the hardest of stomachs. Greed inevitably prompted some of the men to pocket the valuables they found – a cigarette case here, a gold watch there – as they dragged the bodies to the doorway. Yurovsky soon got wind of this and called all the men together and threatened to shoot them if they did not take the items upstairs and leave them on his desk. Soon it was piled with ‘diamond brooches, pearl necklaces, wedding rings, diamond pins and gold watches’.

Commandant Yurovsky, the agent of proletarian vengeance, had now fulfilled his revolutionary duty and he was exhausted. He went upstairs to lie down in his office for a while and recover. It was now down to Petr Ermakov to play his essential part in ensuring the efficient disposal of the bodies in the forest. But Ermakov had turned up late, and drunk (like the other guards having boozed away most of his pay the day before), and remained so for hours afterwards, his eyes bloodshot and his hair dishevelled. Could he remember the location of the site in the dark, and was he in any fit state to carry out his task at this late hour? No one seems to have given a thought beforehand as to how they would carry 11 badly bleeding bodies out to the waiting Fiat, or cope with the large bulky body of Dr Botkin, which slipped to the floor as they tried to raise it. Worse came as they moved one of the daughter’s bodies – probably Anastasia’s – on to the stretcher, for she suddenly shrieked and sat up, covering her face with her hands. Ermakov grabbed Strekotin’s rifle and started trying to finish her off with its bayonet, but finding it impossible to penetrate her chest pulled another pistol from his belt and shot her.

Outside, the Fiat truck waited in the courtyard created between the two palisades at the north end of the house. This meant that the bodies had to be carried the long way round, through the interconnecting basement rooms from the southern end to the courtyard exit then out to the waiting Fiat. Despite the guards’ crude attempts to wrap them up in sheets brought from the Romanovs’ rooms upstairs, the bodies left a trail of blood across the basement and into the courtyard as the men carted them out on a crude stretcher improvised from the shafts of a sledge in the yard. Here the corpses were thrown in a jumble on to the wooden slats of the Fiat which had been covered with military cloth from the storeroom. At 6 feet by 10 in size, there was not much room for
11 bodies in the back of the truck, but someone had at least thought to put a layer of sawdust there to absorb the blood.

All this time, Goloshchekin, and other official witnesses had been hovering in the background; the guards later talked of men from the ‘local soviet’ or the Cheka being in attendance, but they weren’t sure who. Beloborodov, as head of the Ural Regional Soviet, almost certainly would have been close by, either in the house or down the road at the Cheka HQ at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. But there was also one other essential witness, on behalf of the centre in Moscow: Aleksandr Lisitsyn of the Cheka, designated to ensure the prompt dispatch to Sverdlov in Moscow soon after the executions of the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s politically valuable – and damning – diaries and letters. These would be published in Russia as soon as possible. Goloshchekin, despite being the mastermind with Sverdlov of the murders, does not appear to have had the stomach to stand and watch once the shooting started, but went outside and paced back and forth along the perimeter palisade of the house to see if anybody could hear what was going on. As the bodies were brought out to the truck he stooped down to take a look at that of the Tsar. He pondered for a moment, then turned to Kudrin, who was in charge of loading the bodies, and remarked, ‘So this is the end of the Romanov dynasty, is it . . .’ No, not yet; there was still much work to do in the forest before the Tsar and his family could be finally obliterated from history. Meanwhile, the last pathetic remnant of the Imperial Family’s life at the Ipatiev House was brought out by a guard on the end of a bayonet – the corpse of the little lapdog Jimmy – and tossed on to the pile of bodies in the back. ‘Dogs die a dog’s death’, hissed Goloshchekin as he stood by watching.

Yurovsky by now, however, was deeply concerned at the uncontrolled behaviour of the patently drunk and incompetent Ermakov. Earlier, knowing Yurovsky was sick with tuberculosis, Goloshchekin had suggested he need not go out to the forest to witness the ‘burial’. But Yurovsky knew he would have to go with Ermakov and the others to make sure the job was done properly and the bodies didn’t fall into the hands of the approaching Whites. As Ermakov, Kudrin and Vaganov climbed up into the truck, Yurovsky and Goloshchekin, leaving Nikulin in charge at the Ipatiev House, got into a nearby motor car to follow on behind them; Beloborodov and Voikov may well have accompanied them too. Three more guards rode shotgun in the open back of the truck with the bodies rolling round under their feet, as the Fiat struggled off down Voznesensky Lane, skirted the Iset Pond and then turned north-west out past the racetrack on the Verkh-Isetsk Road, heading for the Koptyaki Forest. But it was now seriously
overloaded by as much as half a ton; it could barely pick up any speed and it was almost daylight.

When the shooting had finally stopped, the doors into the courtyard had been opened wide to let in the air as the men of the execution squad had stumbled out choking and coughing. One by one men from the external guard on duty that night had ventured in to view the murder scene, many of them reacting with profound horror and anger, others weeping. Several of the internal guard billeted downstairs who had heard the shootings but not taken part refused to sleep in the basement that night and had gone up to Yurovsky’s room to camp out there. Even Cheka men such as these were nauseated and shocked by what had happened.

Meanwhile, Medvedev went over to the Popov House to gather a contingent of guards to clean up the floors. There was so much blood now, thick, sticky and congealing in puddles, that as the Tsarevich’s tutor Gibbes was later told, they had to ‘sweep it away with brooms’. The air was heavy too with the smell of gunpowder as they struggled back and forth with buckets of cold water, washing and scrubbing as best they could with sand, sawdust having been thrown down first to help absorb the puddles of blood and tissue; no doubt a few stray bullets were swept up in it as they cleared the floor. But there were blood splashes up the walls too which the men went at ineffectually with wet rags. Hardly an efficient clean-up operation and one which today would have left a cornucopia of DNA-testable clues as to who had died in that cellar, thus circumventing 80 years of speculation and baseless claims of survival.

It took two hours for the Fiat truck to crawl the excruciatingly slow nine miles out to Koptyaki. The truck’s engine was noisy and its gears crunched and ground with every change, and Yurovsky was worried that it would draw attention to itself, even at this early hour. To make matters worse, he had now discovered that the incompetent Ermakov had only brought one shovel and no picks or other tools for the burials in the forest. ‘Perhaps someone else had brought something with them’, Ermakov ventured half-heartedly. It was now clear that the greatest moment in Russian revolutionary history was on the brink of being turned into farce.

After crossing the Perm railway line the heavily laden Fiat barely managed to negotiate a steep incline before finally getting on to the Koptyaki Road. At this point the going became even slower as the truck lurched on to what was really only a narrow, muddy rutted track leading through the forest. About half a mile further on, near crossing no. 185 on the line serving the Verkh-Isetsk works, a party of men with horses and
light carts stood waiting for them across the road. They were Ermakov’s outriders, 25 fellow workers and local Bolshevik thugs from the 2nd Ekaterinburg Squadron, who had turned up to be part of the burial detachment and, they hoped, of the lynch mob. They had all been drinking and had been expecting to have a bit of fun with the Romanov girls, whom they had assumed would be brought out to the forest alive. An angry scene ensued when they discovered their victims were already corpses. An exhausted Yurovsky had great difficulty maintaining control of the situation, but eventually got the men to shift some of the bodies from the truck on to the carts, one of them later claiming that he had taken the opportunity to put his hand up the Tsaritsa’s skirt and finger her genitals; now, he said, he could ‘die in peace’. With the mounted detachment following in the rear, the Fiat laboriously continued its journey.

A mile or so further on, not far from the Gorno-Uralsk railway line, the truck ground to a halt in an area of marshy ground as it entered the dense forest; Yurovsky ordered the men to unload all the corpses into the long wet grass so that they could try and get the truck moving again, but to no avail. Lyukhanov repeatedly gunned the engine but it rapidly overheated and he was forced to go and rouse the railway guard from her booth, near Grade Crossing 184, to get some water to cool it down. She indicated a pile of old wooden railway ties lying nearby and the men hauled these over to the Fiat and placed them across the muddy road to form a bridge. Slipping and sliding in their attempts to gain purchase in the mud, the men gave the truck an almighty push and managed to get it moving again, but the pot-holed road beyond was boggy with the heavy rainstorms of summer. When Ermakov directed Lyukhanov to turn off the road along an overgrown track in the forest surrounded by tall nettles and weeds, the vehicle lurched sideways and got stuck between two trees. They would have to give up on the truck; all of the bodies would have to be unloaded on to the carts that Ermakov’s men had brought in the rear and taken on to the site by them, leaving the Fiat to be extricated later. Yurovsky placed his men on guard at the truck, under instructions to turn back any people who might pass that way, and borrowed a couple of horses from Ermakov’s detachment in order to ride on ahead with Ermakov to ascertain the exact location of the burial site. Ermakov’s brain was still addled by drink as he struggled to remember the precise location of the Four Brothers, somewhere amidst the tall forest that loomed over them on all sides in the dark. They had no luck, and another group of men rode off up the trail to try to find the mineshaft. Eventually, with all the bodies finally hauled from the truck and on to the rickety and inadequate carts, the ghoulish funeral cortege set off
through the great watching forest to what everyone fervently hoped would be the Romanovs’ last resting place.

The sun was up by the time the long line of carts came in sight of the mineshaft at Four Brothers. A group of official witnesses from the Cheka and Ural Regional Soviet, as well as an unidentified ‘man from Moscow with a black beard’, as some witnesses later testified, arrived soon after by car. But as the cortege came closer to the mine, Yurovsky now spotted another problem: a group of local peasants were out in the very meadow they were heading for, sitting by a fire, having camped out overnight to mow the hay along the Koptyaki Road. How on earth could they hide the bodies in secret now? Farce had turned to catastrophe. It was market day in Ekaterinburg and the peasants from nearby Koptyaki village would be heading into town to sell their fish, passing right by the meadow as the men laboured at their nefarious task. Yurovsky sent the peasants who had come to mow packing and they headed back to Koptyaki with a look of terror in their eyes. He did his best to cordon the area off, sending Ermakov’s riders ahead to the village to warn its inhabitants not to venture forth, under dire warnings that the Czech legions were now very close.

With the sun coming up over the treetops and another warm July day beckoning, Yurovsky shared with his hungry men the hardboiled eggs brought the previous day by the nuns. It was all the food they were going to get that day. The men ate hastily, scattering the eggshells all around and warming themselves at the fire left by the peasants – nights in the Siberian forest are cold, even in summer. Yurovsky did not want Ermakov’s rapacious cronies from the Ekaterinburg Squadron to be part of what happened next; they’d cause too much trouble trying to lay hands on the valuables that he knew were concealed about the bodies, and he ordered them back to the city. His own men from the Ipatiev House now unloaded the bodies, and began stripping and searching them. Their clothing was piled up and burned on two huge fires which belched smoke up into the blue of the early morning sky.

It was only now that Yurovsky finally discovered what he had long suspected. There were a great number of jewels hidden in three of the girls’ camisoles as well as disguised under cloth buttons and fastenings; even the Tsarevich wore a jewel-filled undergarment, and his forage cap had gemstones sewn into it too. (Maria interestingly did not wear one, further confirmation, so Yurovsky thought, that the family had ceased to trust her ever since she had become too friendly with one of the guards back in May.) It was an extraordinary sight that chilly morning to see diamonds – one of eight carats and worth a fortune – as well as other precious stones spilling out on to the boggy earth from the Romanovs’
torn and blood-soaked clothes. The men snatched at them with their dirty hands, pulling the clothes apart and manhandling the bodies as they ripped at them, searching frantically for anything they could find, and missing many in the process (these would be found first by curious peasants searching the site, the remainder by subsequent investigators). Much to everyone’s astonishment, the Tsaritsa’s corpse yielded up several rows of fine large pearls – her favourite jewellery – concealed inside a cloth belt around her waist, as well as a great thick spiral of gold wire wrapped tight around her upper arm. More touchingly, each of the children wore round their necks an amulet containing Rasputin’s picture and the text of a prayer he had given them. It was hard to resist the temptation to pocket a souvenir or two, but Yurovsky’s eagle eyes were on them and he took an inventory of the jewellery as the men did their work.