The Last Tsar (58 page)

They descended from the second floor of the house to the first—the guard’s rooms. Here the same garbage predominated.

But one room.… To get to that half-cellar room from the second floor where the family’s rooms were, they first had to go downstairs, then outside, then through the garden, in by another door, and through the whole suite of first-floor rooms where the guard lived, to reach the small entry.

This entry had a window onto the garden. Out the window they saw trees and the joy of the July summer’s day.

The door from the entry led to that room. It was a small room, 100–115 square feet, hung in checkered wallpaper. The room was dark, its window jutted out into the slope, and the shadow of the high fence lay on the floor. A heavy railing had been installed over its sole window.

This room was in perfect order: everything had been washed.

It adjoined the storeroom and was separated from it by a partition; the storeroom door was nailed shut. This entire partition and
the nailed door were sown with bullet holes. It was obvious: this was where they had been shot.

Along the baseboards were traces of washed blood. Bullet holes fanned across the other two walls: evidently the people doing the shooting had rushed about the room.

The floor had dents from bayonet blows (where some of the family were stabbed), and two bullet holes gaped in the brown floor, where they had fired at someone lying down.

Most of the bullets in the room had been shot from a revolver, but there were also bullets from a Colt and a Mauser.

On one wall someone had scratched a line from Heine in German: “This night Belshazzar was murdered by his fellows.”

By this time the Whites had dug up the garden near the house, searched the pond, and dug up the communal graves in the cemetery, where a special contractor had brought bodies from the Cheka, but no traces of the eleven people who had lived in the house could be found. They had vanished.

The investigation began.

The ideas of the February Revolution were strong in the Ural government. In instituting an investigation the government worried that it might be providing “the givens for reactionary principles … fuel for monarchist plots.”

The first two investigators, Nametkin and Sergeyev, were quite cautious. But Kolchak, the supreme ruler of that part of Russia under White control, replaced the Ural government, and a third investigator was named—thirty-six-year-old Nikolai Sokolov.

Before the revolution he had been a special investigator. After the October Revolution he had attempted to dissolve into the peasantry and had left for the countryside. When Soviet power collapsed in Siberia, he made his way to the Urals in his peasant clothes. Appointed by Kolchak as the new investigator in the case of the tsar and his family, he brought to the investigation passion and fanaticism. After Kolchak was shot in 1920 and Soviet rule returned to the Urals and Siberia, he continued his work. In emigration in Paris he took down countless statements from surviving witnesses. He died from a heart attack, in France, while continuing his endless investigation.

——

From a letter of Peter Aminev in Kuibyshev:

“In 1918 I was living in Irbit. Irbit had been occupied by the Whites and life followed its prerevolutionary course.
The Irbit District News
came out with a report that upset our town. I am sending you a cutting from that newspaper (1918, no. 18):

“ ‘To the Fate of Nicholas II

“ ‘New York Times
correspondent Ackerman reported in his paper the following news, written by the abdicated tsar’s personal servant.

“ ‘“Late on the night of July 16–17, the guard commissar walked into the tsar’s room and announced: ‘Citizen Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, you are to come with me to a meeting of the Ural Soviet.’ … Nicholas Alexandrovich did not return for nearly two and a half hours. He was very pale and his chin was trembling.

“ ‘“ ‘Give me some water, old man.’

“ ‘“I did and he gulped down a large glass.

“ ‘“ ‘What happened?’ I asked.

“ ‘“ ‘They informed me that in three hours they would come to shoot me,’ the tsar told me.

“ ‘“After Nicholas’ return from that meeting Alexandra Feodorovna and the tsarevich went in to him and both were crying. The tsaritsa fainted and the doctor was called in. When she came to, she fell on her knees before the soldiers and begged for mercy, but the soldiers responded that this was not in their power.

“ ‘“ ‘For the love of Christ, Alice, calm yourself,’ said Nicholas several times in a quiet voice. He made the sign of the cross over his wife and son, called me over, and said, kissing me: ‘Old man, do not abandon Alexandra Feodorovna and Alexei.’

“ ‘“… They took the tsar away, but no one knew where. That same night he was shot by twenty Red Guards.”’”

That was how people imagined what had happened when they still believed: “The family has been evacuated to a safe place.”

Soon after Ekaterinburg was liberated, Lieutenant Sheremetievsky appeared before the military commandant.

Before the Whites’ arrival, the lieutenant had hidden in the village of Koptyaki—18 versts (12 miles) from Ekaterinburg on the shores of Lake Isetsk. Not far from this little village, surrounded by ancient forest, there were old abandoned mines. The lieutenant recounted:

“On July 17 a few peasants from this village were detained while
walking through the forest by a picket of Red Guards. And were turned back. They had been detained near an obscure area of the forest known as the Four Brothers. They were told that the forest had been cordoned off and maneuvers were going on—there would be shooting. Indeed, as they were walking home, they heard muffled hand grenade explosions.

“After the fall of Ekaterinburg, when the Bolshevik detachments were retreating from the town toward Perm, the Koptyaki peasants immediately went to the Four Brothers to see what had happened there.

“Four Brothers”—the name had been given to the spot because of four tall pines that had once stood within the ancient woods. The pines had long since fallen down and died; only two half-ruined stumps remained. And the old name, Four Brothers. Not far from those pathetic stumps, 4 versts [2.5 miles] from the village itself, were some old mines concealed by trees. At one time prospectors had dug for gold here, but all the gold had been taken away long before, and the old mines had filled with rain. A small pond had formed in one of them, which had been given the name “Ganya’s Pit.” About 50 sazhens [350 feet] from Ganya’s Pit there was another mine, but without a name. This nameless mine was filled with water also. This is where the peasants went, to the deep forest, to the abandoned mines.

Fresh branches and burned wood were floating on the surface of the nameless mine. The mine edge showed evidence of grenade explosions. The entire clearing by the mine had been trampled by horses’ hooves—and carts had left deep ruts in the wet earth.

They found traces of two bonfires, one by the nameless mine and the other right on the forest road under a birch. These were strange fires. In one of them the Koptyaki peasants glimpsed charred human bones. When touched, the bones immediately disintegrated. Digging in the forest, the peasants found a charred emerald cross, topaz beads, a child’s military buckle, an eyeglass lens, buttons, hooks, and so on. They also found a large diamond.

The investigation compared the items with those in the Ipatiev house—the same buttons, hooks, and shoe buckles. It was obvious that they had burned the clothes here. Did that mean the bodies had been thrown in the mine?

They decided to pump the water out of this nameless mine and the mine next to it, Ganya’s Pit. They found nothing in Ganya’s Pit, but in the nameless mine they reached bottom, panned, and found an amputated manicured finger with a long nail, false teeth that
were soon recognized as belonging to Dr. Botkin, his tie clasp, and a pearl earring from a pair the empress wore. In the mine they found the body of a tiny dog and the frame of the photograph of Alix that Nicholas always carried and the dented icons his daughters wore for the journey—as well as Olga’s icon of Nicholas the Miracleworker. The gilded silver military badge discovered in the silt—the insignia of the regiment of which the empress was colonel-in-chief—had been given to her by the regiment’s commander, her mystical friend Adjutant General Orlov.

It was strange to say the words “Her Highness’s Regiment” and “adjutant general” while standing on the edge of that dirty hole digging in the stinking silt. All that was left of her life was a large piece of a blood-spotted tarpaulin hauled up from the mine pit.

But they found no bodies.

Afterward they trampled over and dug up that entire remote area—but there were no bodies.

At that point a mining technician came forward and said that in mid-July he had come across the commandant of the Ipatiev house in this remote area. Yurovsky had asked him whether a very heavy truck could use the Koptyaki road.

Details about the truck became clear as well. On the evening of July 16, a truck was taken from the Soviet’s garage on orders from the Cheka. The truck’s driver was replaced, and the truck was driven out of the garage by a short, hook-nosed middle-aged man. One of the drivers in the garage recognized him as Sergei Lyukhanov, the driver for the Ipatiev house. The truck was not returned until the nineteenth, and it was utterly filthy. The back had been wiped but there were clearly visible traces of blood.

Now it was obvious to the investigation which truck this was and what it had taken to the mine.

The tracks of this truck were still evident on the storm-washed road to Koptyaki.

They also found witnesses to the truck’s journey down the Koptyaki road.

The guard in railway booth number 184, where the road crossed the mining factory railway line, said that at dawn on July 17 she was wakened by the sound of an approaching truck. She heard the truck skid in the marshy place not far from her booth. Then there was a knock at the door, and she opened it and saw the driver and the truck’s shadowy silhouette in the dawning sky.

The driver said that the motor had overheated and asked for some water. The guard started to grumble in her usual way when the driver suddenly turned nasty for some reason. “You here are sleeping like lords … and we’ve been breaking our backs all night long.”

The watchwoman was going to say that she saw the figures of Red Guards around the truck—but instantly fell silent. “We’ll forgive you the first time. But don’t do it again,” the driver threatened in parting. She saw them placing poles on the marshy ground—they had taken them from around her booth—and then the truck continued on.

Other statements were forthcoming. At dawn on July 17, men had set out for town from Koptyaki.

Coming out on the road, they had seen a strange procession. Someone by the name of Vaganov, dressed in a sailor’s striped shirt, had been galloping in the lead. He was a Kronstadt sailor who worked for the Cheka. Some of the residents recognized him immediately. Behind the mounted Chekist came some carts covered with a tarpaulin. Seeing the peasants, the sailor shouted furiously, “Get back there! Turn around. And don’t look back.” He cursed and cursed at them and drove the shocked and terrified peasants back toward the village, chasing them for a third of a mile.

Searches and arrests were being made all over town.

Pavel Medvedev, who had commanded the entire guard at the Ipatiev house, had not been able to leave with the Reds. He had been ordered to blow up the bridge, but he did not blow up the bridge and he did not get out of town. Shortly afterward Medvedev was being questioned by the investigator. They also arrested the guard Proskuryakov. The head of the guard, Yakimov, who had posted the sentries on the night of July 16–17, was also arrested. As was the guard Letyomin. Alexei’s dog, the rust-colored spaniel Joy, had given him away. He had taken the dog home—“So that he wouldn’t die of hunger,” as he later explained to the investigator. But the dog proved dangerous. Photographs of the heir with the spaniel were well known all over Russia. So they arrested Letyomin. Other things besides the dog were also uncovered at his house: Alexei’s diary begun at Tsarskoe Selo in March 1917—immediately after their arrest—and completed in Tobolsk in November 1917.

Letyomin had also taken the holy relics from Alexei’s bed and the icon he carried.

By that time many tsarist objects had been found in various Ekaterinburg
quarters. The guards had given them to their wives and lovers. Goloshchekin and Beloborodov too had given some to their friends and retinue—savage souvenirs of the world they had so thoroughly eradicated. They found the empress’s black silk parasol and a white linen one, her lilac dress, even the pencil with her initials that she always used to write in her diary, and the grand duchesses’ little silver rings. The valet Chemodurov went from apartment to apartment like a bloodhound. Tsarist possessions became dangerous. Many people were packed off to the investigator.

Filipp Proskuryakov the guard. The same man who had come home drunk on the night of July 16–17 and fallen asleep in the bathhouse with his fellow guard Stolov. He and Stolov had been scheduled to go on duty at five in the morning.

At three in the morning Pavel Medvedev woke them.

He brought them into the half-cellar room. What greeted them there sobered them up immediately.

Smoke—gunsmoke—still filled the room. On the walls were distinct bullet holes. And blood. Everywhere. Spots and splashes on the walls and small puddles on the floor, as well as many traces of blood in the other rooms. It must have dripped as the slain were carried out. The people carrying them out tracked blood too from their boots.

Medvedev ordered the two guards to clean the room. They began by cleaning the floor with sawdust and water and then wiped it off with wet rags. With them worked two Latvians from the Cheka, three other guards, and Medvedev himself.