The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (33 page)

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

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

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

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

Anna Demidova was the last to die.

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

Under cover of darkness, they headed for Koptyaki Forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following spring, after the snows had melted, the detective turned his attention to Koptyaki Forest. Not only had local peasants reported seeing men in the woods around the time of the murders, but deep ruts made by a truck still showed in the dirt path that ran through the woods. Following these tracks, Sokolov came to the mine shafts Yurovsky had scoped out the previous summer.
Around the surface hole of the deepest one were hundreds of boot prints. Close by, he found evidence of two bonfires. Convinced he’d found the place where the bodies had been dumped, he ordered the water siphoned from the pit. He began to excavate.

Helping with this grim job were Sydney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard. Having rushed back to Ekaterinburg when the city fell, the men now offered to help identify anything Sokolov might find at the site.

Among the dozens of objects discovered were a child’s military belt buckle identified by the tutors as belonging to Alexei; an emerald cross worn by Alexandra; the metal case Nicholas always carried his wife’s picture in; Dr. Botkin’s glasses and the upper plate of his dentures; shoe buckles like the kind worn by the grand duchesses; and remnants of six sets of corsets. There were also some bone fragments.

But there were no bodies.

This tragic evidence, however, convinced Sokolov that the entire family had been killed. Their bodies, he hypothesized, had been burned and dissolved with sulfuric acid, and the ashes tossed into the mine shaft.

“
But the children—the children!” cried Pierre Gilliard when he heard the detective’s verdict. They couldn’t
all
be dead, could they? “
I could not believe it,” he said. “My whole being revolted at the idea.”

Without bodies, rumors of escape swirled.

Suddenly, the imperial family was spotted everywhere—in the Crimea, Japan, even America. But the most frequently sighted
family members were Alexei, Anastasia, and Marie. Fascinated by tales of miraculous survival, the public claimed to have seen the youngest Romanovs in hospitals, prisons, peasant huts, and remote monasteries. One day, Anastasia was spied strolling down Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd; the next, she was glimpsed on a streetcar in Moscow.

It wasn’t long before people began claiming to
be
the imperial children. The first Anastasia pretender appeared in Siberia in 1920, but was quickly exposed. Others stepped forward to take her place. Over the years, more than two hundred people, most saying they were Marie or Alexei, claimed they’d escaped the massacre in the cellar.

But had they?

Only time would tell.

After overthrowing their tsar, smashing two systems of government, and launching the country into what would be three years of civil war, had Russians improved their lives? Hardly. By 1920, the Bolsheviks—who had recently changed their official name to the Communist Party—were beginning to establish policies that would eventually oversee every aspect of a citizen’s daily life. Citizens became subject to “labor conscription”; that is, they had to work where, when, and at what the government told them. Factories came under the control of government managers, while in the countryside Red troops seized peasant crops and livestock at gunpoint. Shortages continued, and practically everything was rationed—food, clothing, even books and tobacco. In the cities, the government doled out food in canteens. Only those registered by the state to eat in
these canteens were allowed to line up for a meal, if one could call it that. A ladleful of gruel was the usual fare. But even this meager meal was hard to come by. People spent hours each day searching for a meal, as well as the goods their ration coupons promised. Many came up empty-handed, their bellies still grumbling.

Like food, fuel was also in short supply. To survive the freezing winters, city dwellers ripped up wooden houses and fences for firewood. They chopped down the trees in city parks and burned their own furniture and books. Electricity was rationed. In Petrograd, the city was divided into sectors. Because of the power shortage, each sector took its turn having its lights turned on in the evening. The rest of the time, citizens sat in the shadowy darkness of candles or homemade lamps. Streetlights didn’t work. Trams didn’t run. At times, the cities felt like ghost towns.

“
The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries,” wrote one Petrograd citizen. “The people walked about [the city] like living corpses; the shortage[s] … slowly sapping [it]; grim death was clutching at its heart.”

So bad did things become that in March 1921, thousands of sailors—once the most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolsheviks—openly rebelled against Communist authorities. Disillusioned by the treatment workers and peasants had received under Lenin’s dictatorship, they took to the streets, demanding freedoms the soviet government had taken away: free elections, free speech, freedom of the press, free trade unions, and freedom for the peasants to harvest their own land for their own benefit.

Lenin refused to let anyone challenge soviet power. Moving the Red Army against the sailors, he launched a bloody attack lasting several days. When it was over, thousands of sailors lay dead; hundreds more were executed later.

Always a realist, Lenin saw the rebellion as a sign of a sick
society. And he began to wonder if the soviet victory had not in fact betrayed Marx’s vision of a classless utopia. Had he simply replaced the tsar’s autocracy with a government that was just as suppressive of the common people? Far from “withering away” as Marx had hoped, the soviet government had grown, extending a totalitarian control over every aspect of an individual’s life.

Additionally, Lenin worried about who would succeed him when he died. Although he was just fifty-one years old, his health was waning; he suffered the first of three strokes in May 1922. Looking around at the soviet leadership, he was especially concerned about Joseph Stalin, a man who held the important post of general secretary of the Communist Party. In Stalin, Lenin saw a man whose thirst for power endangered everything for which Lenin had fought. “
Comrade Stalin … has concentrated in his hands unbounded power,” Lenin warned, “and I am not sure whether he will always know how to use this power cautiously enough.”

But Lenin died on January 21, 1924, and Stalin seized power. He immediately embarked on what he called a purge, eliminating all his old Bolshevik friends and rivals by exile, execution, or assassination. Now Soviet Russia would rest entirely in the hands of a man ruthlessly bent on making his country a global power—no matter what the cost in lives and freedom. For the next sixty-seven years, until communism fell in 1991, the Russian people would find themselves trapped, once again, by a totalitarian government—politically voiceless, and ruled by repression, fear, and iron-fisted control.