The Last Tsar (61 page)

“What I will recount here shall see the light only after many years,” wrote Yakov Yurovsky subsequently.

The letters kept coming; this popular inquiry continued. I was told that in a small district archive, in a little Ural town, in a secret depository, there were the statements of Alexander Strekotin. Yes, the machine gunner Alexander Strekotin on whose account the guards Letyomin and Proskuryakov had based the story they told Investigator Sokolov about the execution.

It turned out that Strekotin himself wrote his memoirs (sent to me by two readers). I now had in my hands the
most important voluntary
statements—most important because Yurovsky was the chief actor and Strekotin’s oral tale lay at the base of Sokolov’s entire investigation.

Strekotin served in the Ipatiev house guard along with his brother. The guard frequently included relatives: Lyukhanov father and son, the Strekotin brothers, and so on.

“The personal reminiscences of Alexander Andreyevich Strekotin, former Red Guard in the sentry detachment guarding the tsarist Romanov family, and witness to their execution.” The guileless title immediately sets the tone and hints at how his story came to be written down: the poorly educated Strekotin reminisced, and someone (evidently a worker in the local museum) wrote. The memoirs were compiled for the anniversary of the execution in 1928. Not until sixty-two years later did I publish in
Ogonyok
an excerpt from them for the first time.

Strekotin begins with some history:

“Volunteers were being signed up in Sysert for the detachment to guard the former tsar Nicholas II and his wife, who had arrived by then in Ekaterinburg. Mostly they recruited workers. A great number were interested, and those joining the detachment included me
and my older brother Andrei. Our detachment was quartered in the house opposite, the Popov house.

“… Appointed head of our detachment was our Sysert comrade Pavel Spiridonovich Medvedev—a worker and a noncommissioned officer in the tsarist army.”

He begins by describing Nicholas:

“The tsar—in my opinion he wasn’t much like a tsar. The ex-emperor was always dressed in the same outfit, his khaki uniform. He was a little above average height. A solidly built blond with gray eyes. Agile and impetuous. He liked to twirl his reddish mustache.”

Finally, Strekotin describes that night.

Another witness was found through whose eyes we will also look on that night: Alexei Kabanov, whom I learned about from the son of the Chekist Medvedev-Kudrin, at whose request, in 1964, Kabanov described that night in detail in a letter.

Finally, there was Upper Isetsk Commissar Peter Ermakov, one of the cruelest participants in the Ipatiev night. His memoirs were kept in a secret file at the Sverdlovsk Party Archives. Thanks to a reader, they found their way into my hands, given to me by a strange assistant (about whose surprising visit I will speak later in detail).

And one more witness: Chekist Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin.

I chatted at length with his son, the historian M. M. Medvedev, who had grown up around the Ekaterinburg regicides. He had detailed memories of his father, and in his house he kept the black leather Chekist jacket his father had worn that night.

From readers I received excerpts from the “Stenogram of Reminiscences of Participants in the Execution,” compiled in Sverdlovsk in 1924, as well as an excerpt from an amazing lecture given to the town’s party activists, who had gathered in the Ipatiev house, by the assassin Yurovsky.

In this way I collected the voluntary statements of five men who had been in the room and put them together with the statements of a sixth witness, Pavel Medvedev, the guard commander, whose statements were included in Sokolov’s investigation.

Six men who had been in the room described that night.

——

And something incredible happened. What was supposed to have remained a secret forever was laid out in all its details. That entire impossible, inhuman night.

Now we shall let them speak.

Yurovsky: “In about the middle of July, Filipp [Goloshchekin] told me we had to make preparations for the liquidation in case the front got any closer.

“On the evening of the fifteenth, I think, or the morning of the fifteenth, he came and said that we had to get going on liquidating them that day.

“On July 16 a telegram was received from Perm in code containing the order to exterminate the Romanovs.

“On the sixteenth, at six o’clock in the evening, Filipp G. ordered the decree carried out. At twelve o’clock a truck was supposed to come to take away the corpses.”

Thus, on July 15, having received a signal from Berzin—it’s time!—Goloshchekin set the execution mechanism in motion. On July 16 he telegraphed Moscow regarding the impending execution—and waited for a reply from Moscow through Zinoviev. In the meantime, at the Ipatiev house, preparations were in full swing.

Pavel Medvedev: “At eight in the evening, Yurovsky ordered all revolvers taken away from the detachment and brought to him. I took the revolvers away and brought them to the commandant’s office. Then Yurovsky said, ‘Today we are going to be killing the entire family and the doctor and servants living with them. Warn the detachment not to be alarmed if they hear shots.’ I didn’t ask who had decided this or how.”

Yurovsky: “The boy [Sednev] was taken away … which upset the Romanovs and their people badly.”

From the tsaritsa’s diary:

“8. Supper. Suddenly Leshka Sednev was fetched to go see his uncle & flew off—wonder whether it’s true & we shall see the boy back again.”

Yes, Yurovsky was right, she did not trust him, and of course it was she who sent the doctor to see the commandant.

Yurovsky: “Dr. Botkin came and asked the reason for this. It was stated that the boy’s uncle, who had been arrested and fled, had now come back and wanted to see his nephew. The next day the boy was sent home (apparently to Tula Province).”

Pavel Medvedev: “The little boy cook … at Yurovsky’s instruction was transferred to the Popov house—to the quarters of the sentry detachment. At about ten I warned the detachment not to be alarmed if they heard shots.”

For that night shift Alexander Strekotin was assigned to be machine gunner downstairs. The machine gun stood on the window, and Strekotin took his place by its side. This post was right next to the entry and the half-cellar room.

Strekotin was standing by his machine gun in the darkness when suddenly he heard footsteps on the stairs.

Strekotin: “Someone [Medvedev] came downstairs quickly, walked up to me silently, and also silently handed me a revolver. ‘Why do I need this?’ I asked Medvedev.

“ ‘There’s going to be shooting soon,’ he told me, and he quickly moved away.”

Medvedev disappeared in the darkness, and Strekotin remained standing by his machine gun.

From the tsaritsa’s diary:

“Played bezique with N[icholas]. 10½ to bed.”

At that moment in the courtyard the guard Deryabin was taking up post 7 (across from the railed window of the execution room). Post 8—in the garden near the window to the entry—was taken by the sharpshooter Kleshchev. From the entry the door led right to the room. The door was open to the illuminated room so he could see it clearly.

As soon as Kleshchev and Deryabin found out from Pavel Medvedev what was going to happen, they contrived to stand where they could see everything.

Two tipsy guards walked up to the Popov house—Proskuryakov and Stolov. The guard commander, Medvedev, drove both into the bathhouse in the Popov yard, where they fell asleep.

Midnight was approaching. In the commandant’s room Yurovsky was nervously waiting for Ermakov and the truck. But the truck had been detained. “Uninitiated,” Yurovsky did not know that Goloshchekin was waiting for an answer from Moscow.

Strekotin: “Soon Medvedev and Akulov or someone else, I don’t remember, went downstairs.”

(Akulov was one of Grigory Nikulin’s Cheka pseudonyms.)

“At that moment a group of six or seven men I didn’t know appeared, and ‘Akulov’ brought them into the room.… Now it was absolutely clear to me that this was the execution.”

So the detachment of Latvian sharpshooters, all six or seven of them, was already waiting in the room. Next to the other room,
that
room. But that room stood ready and empty, everything cleared out of it.

What were they waiting for? The same thing as Yurovsky. For the truck to come. The last participants had joined them. But Goloshchekin and Beloborodov were also waiting—for an answer from Moscow—so the truck and Ermakov were still being detained. At 21:22, the Ekaterinburg telegram, which Zinoviev sent on to Lenin, was in Moscow.

In Ekaterinburg it was 11:22. But by that time Moscow had already decided.

Akimov: “The Sovnarkom and Central Executive Committee wrote a telegram
confirming
the decision. Sverdlov had me take the telegram to the telegraph office, which was located then on Myasnitskaya Street.”

In Ekaterinburg, on the second floor of the Ipatiev house, the family was sleeping. Or rather, he was … but what about her? She was probably listening to the sounds outside the window, as she had every night of late … to the distant cannonade promising their speedy liberation. And waiting for sleep. Naturally, she must have heard the noise of the truck as it drove into the courtyard.

Yurovsky: “At twelve o’clock the truck had not come; it did not come until one-thirty.”

(The answer from Moscow was received in the night, and only at one-thirty did the truck drive up to the Ipatiev house for the bodies.)

At the password “chimney sweep” the gates opened and the truck was let into the courtyard.

Yurovsky: “This delayed the decree’s implementation. Meanwhile, all the preparations had been made, twelve men (including six Latvians) with revolvers had been selected to carry out the sentence. Two of the Latvians refused to shoot the girls….

“At the last moment they refused to fire. I had to take them out and replace them with others….

“… When the automobile arrived everyone was sleeping.”

Pavel Medvedev: “Even before Yurovsky went to wake the tsar’s family, two members arrived from the Cheka. One was Peter
Ermakov (from the Upper Isetsk factory), and the other I didn’t know.”

i1.23
. Nicholas and Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor of Alexei, sawing firewood in Tobolsk, Siberia, 1917.

i1.24
. Revolutionary procession passing the Governors House, where the imperial family was being held in Tobolsk. The largest of the banners states in part, “The Tobolsk Council of Workers’, Soldiers’, and People’s Deputies,” 1917.

i1.25
. Members of the Ural Soviet who issued the order to the execution squad: Nikolai Tolmachev, Alexander Beloborodov, Georgy Safarov, and Filipp Goloshchekin, 1918.