The Last Tsar (59 page)

When they had cleaned up the room, Medvedev and the guard Strekotin told them everything that had happened. (Strekotin had been posted at the machine gun in the downstairs rooms and had seen everything.)

From Proskuryakov’s testimony:

“Both of them [Medvedev and Strekotin] said the same thing: “At twelve o’clock Yurovsky began waking the tsar’s family.… According to Medvedev, Yurovsky gave them some kind of explanation about the night being dangerous … it would be dangerous to be upstairs if there were shooting on the streets so he demanded they all go downstairs. The family complied.

“Downstairs Yurovsky began reading a paper. The sovereign
didn’t quite hear and asked, ‘What?’ Yurovsky, according to Medvedev, raised his hand and revolver and answered the sovereign, ‘This is what!’

“Medvedev said he himself took two or three shots at the sovereign and the other people they were shooting at.

“When they had all been shot, Andrei Strekotin, as he himself told it, stripped off the jewels, which Yurovsky immediately took away, however, and brought upstairs. After that the slain were dumped onto a truck and taken away somewhere. Lyukhanov was the driver.”

The guard Letyomin did not see the execution himself either, but he gave the investigator statements based on what Strekotin had told him:

“On July 17 he went on duty at eight in the morning. He stopped in at the barracks and saw a boy who was in the service of the tsar’s family [the little cook Leonid Sednev]. And he asked him why he was there. Strekotin just waved his hand and, taking him to one side, told him that the night before the tsar and tsaritsa, their whole family, the doctor, the cook, and lackey, and the woman in attendance with them had been killed. According to Strekotin, that night he had stood by the machine gun post downstairs.

“During his shift [from twelve midnight to four in the morning] the tsar and tsaritsa, all the tsar’s children, and the servant were brought downstairs … and taken to that room next to the storeroom. Strekotin explained that he saw Commandant Yurovsky read a piece of paper and say, ‘Your life is over.’

“The tsar didn’t quite hear and asked him to repeat it, and the tsaritsa and one of their daughters crossed themselves. At that moment Yurovsky shot the tsar, killing him on the spot, then the Latvians and the guard commander began firing.”

In the barracks on July 18, Letyomin saw the driver Lyukhanov, who told him that he had taken the slain away in the truck and added that they had almost not made it: “It was dark and there were lots of little stumps.” But where he took the corpses, Lyukhanov did not say.

The investigator interviewed Yakimov, the head of the guard:

“At dawn, at four o’clock, Yakimov was awakened by the guards Kleshchev and Deryabin and told the following:

“Medvedev and Dobrynin had come to them at their posts and warned them the tsar would be shot that night. At this news, they both went over to the windows.

“Kleshchev went to the window of the downstairs entry, next to his post. Through that window, looking toward the garden, he could
see the door to the room where they were going to be shooting. The door was open, and Kleshchev could see everything going on in the room.

“Deryabin’s post was next to the other window, the only barred window of the execution room. He saw what happened, too.

“Through their windows they saw men going into the room from the courtyard. In front were Yurovsky and Nikulin, behind them the sovereign, his wife and daughters, as well as Botkin, Demidova, the lackey Trupp, and the cook Kharitonov. Nicholas was carrying the heir. In the rear walked Medvedev and the Latvians, whom Yurovsky had signed out from the Cheka. They arranged themselves like this: to the right of the entrance was Yurovsky, to the left of him stood Nikulin, the Latvians stood right in the doorway, and behind them was Medvedev [Pavel]. Through the window Deryabin could see part of Yurovsky’s body but primarily his arm. He saw Yurovsky saying something and waving his arm. What exactly he said Deryabin could not tell. He said he could not hear the words. Kleshchev, though, stated positively that he did hear Yurovsky’s words: ‘Nicholas Alexandrovich, your relatives have tried to save you, but they have not succeeded, and we are forced to shoot you ourselves.’ Immediately after Yurovsky spoke several shots rang out, followed by a woman’s wail, shouts, and several female voices. Those being shot began to fall one after the other: first the tsar, after him the heir. Demidova was rushing about. Both of them told Yakimov that she shielded herself with a pillow. According to them she was stabbed with bayonets.

“When all had fallen, they began to examine them and finish off a few of them with a shot or a stab. But of those with the name Romanov, they cited only Anastasia as being stabbed with bayonets. When they all had fallen, someone brought a few sheets from the family’s rooms. They began winding the slain in the sheets and carrying them out to the truck, where they put the corpses on a cloth from the storeroom and covered them all with that same cloth.”

But again, these are not eyewitness statements. This is still a story at second hand.

At long last, though, the investigation took the first and only statement from someone who himself had been in that half-cellar room.

——

From the investigator’s interview with Pavel Medvedev, guard commander:

“He went on duty on the evening of July 16, and at eight o’clock Commandant Yurovsky ordered him to take away all the detachment’s revolvers and bring them to him.… Yurovsky said, ‘Today we are going to shoot the entire family and the doctor and servant, too—warn the detachment not to worry if they hear shots.’

“The little boy cook was moved to the Popov house—to the sentry detachment’s quarters—at six in the morning, on Yurovsky’s instruction. At about ten I warned the detachment not to be alarmed if they heard shots. At about twelve at night (old style)—two o’clock new [daylight saving time]—Yurovsky woke the tsar’s family. He told them why he was disturbing them and where they must go. Medvedev did not know….

“About an hour later the tsar’s entire family, the doctor, the maid, and two servants got up, washed, and dressed. Even before Yurovsky went to wake the family, two members of the Cheka had arrived at the Ipatiev house: Peter Ermakov [from the Upper Isetsk factory] and someone else he did not know.… The tsar, the tsaritsa, the tsar’s four daughters, the doctor, the cook, and the lackey came out of their rooms. The tsar was carrying the heir in his arms. The sovereign and the heir were wearing field shirts and forage caps. The empress and her daughters wore dresses but not wraps. The sovereign walked ahead with the heir. In my presence there were no tears, no sobs, and no questions. They went downstairs, out into the courtyard, and from there through the second door into the downstairs quarters. They were led into the corner room adjacent to the sealed storeroom. Yurovsky ordered chairs brought in.

“The empress sat down by the wall where the window was, closer to the rear column of the arch. Behind her stood three of her daughters. The emperor was in the middle, next to the heir, and behind him stood Dr. Botkin. The maid, a tall woman, stood by the left jamb of the storeroom door. With her stood one of the daughters. The maid had a pillow in her arms. The tsar’s daughters had brought small pillows; they put one on the seat of the heir’s chair, the other on their mother’s. Simultaneously, eleven men walked into the room: Yurovsky, his assistant, the two from the Cheka, and seven Latvians. According to Medvedev, Yurovsky told him: ‘Go out to the street and see whether anyone’s there and the shots will be heard.’

“He walked out and heard the shots. By the time he returned to the house, two or three minutes had passed. Walking into the room he saw all the members of the tsar’s family lying on the floor with numerous wounds to their bodies.

“The blood was gushing … the heir was still alive—and moaning. Yurovsky walked over to him and shot him two or three times at point blank range. The heir fell still. The scene made me want to vomit.

“… The corpses were brought out to the truck on stretchers made of a sheet stretched on shafts taken from the sleigh standing in the yard. The driver was Sergei Lyukhanov. The blood in the room and yard was washed off. By three o’clock it was all over.”

The investigator asked him about Strekotin.

“I do remember—he really was at the machine gun. The door from the room where the machine gun was into the entry was open, and so was the door from the entry into the room where the execution was carried out,” stated Medvedev.

From this the investigation concluded that Strekotin and Kleshchev really could have seen what happened—witnesses of the Apocalypse.

Medvedev denied that he himself had done any shooting, but his wife established his guilt:

“According to Pavel, all those awakened got up, washed, dressed, and were led downstairs, where they were put into a room where a paper was read to them that said: ‘The revolution is dying, and so shall you.’ After that they started firing, and they killed them, one and all. My husband fired, too.”

Proskuryakov, to whom he had also recklessly recounted how he fired at the tsar and “emptied two or three bullets into him,” also established Medvedev’s guilt. He must have told his wife as well that he had fired
at the tsar
. But she did not want to establish her husband’s guilt in such a heinous crime.

Actually, for her that crime was a matter of pride, of course, as it was for Pavel Medvedev. The Ipatiev house guard commander must have been a reliable man, that is, fanatical, otherwise Yurovsky and Goloshchekin would not have taken him for such a post. He was making statements about the execution because he knew that others would tell the story anyway. It made no sense to refuse to talk.

The investigation continued. It was established that two more trucks went to the Koptyaki forest on July 18, bringing three barrels, which they moved onto carts and took into the forest. One of those barrels was filled with gasoline.

The investigators learned that there had been other barrels as well. They found a note from the supply commissar, “Intellectual,”
P. Voikov, in the Ekaterinburg pharmacy about supplying a large quantity of sulfuric acid.

After the witnesses’ corroborating statements, the investigation came to its conclusion: on the night of July 16–17, the tsar, his family, retainers, and servants—eleven people—were shot in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house.

Then, according to the investigation’s hypothesis, the corpses were stowed in a truck and taken to an unnamed mine near the village of Koptyaki. On July 18, a large quantity of gasoline and sulfuric acid was brought to the site. The bodies of the slain were chopped up with axes (the investigation found one of the axes), doused with gasoline and sulfuric acid, and burned in bonfires whose remnants were discovered not far from the mines.

But … But Sokolov never did find the bodies of the tsar’s family. There was someone’s separated finger, someone’s false teeth … and a bonfire next to an unnamed mine that he declared to be the grave and ashes of the tsar and his family.

Yes, the statements of witnesses to the execution coincided, but….

But Sokolov was a monarchist. He brought a political obsession to his work, and that made the statements he obtained highly suspect. Both sides in the Civil War learned cruelty from each other, and the cellars of White counterintelligence rivaled those of the Cheka. The interrogations may not have been altogether idyllic. May that have been why the statements coincided? Skeptics have argued that it was a biased investigation and that the conclusion—that it is indeed possible to burn eleven bodies without a trace—was debatable. For the fact was indisputable—there were no bodies.

A year and a half after the “family was executed in the Ipatiev house” (as Sokolov asserted) or “the Romanov family disappeared from the Ipatiev house” (as his opponents formulated it), “Anastasia” would appear, a mysterious woman whose fate has continued to disturb the world for seventy years.

A brief account of the well-known story:

In Berlin an unknown young woman decided to commit suicide by jumping into a canal one night in 1920, but she was saved and placed in a clinic, depressed and almost mute. In the clinic she came
across a photograph of the tsar’s family, which produced a remarkable agitation in her and from which she could not be parted. Soon a rumor arose: the miraculously saved daughter of the Russian tsar, Tatiana, was there, in a Berlin hospital.

Tatiana—that was what she called herself at first. But soon after she changed her name to Anastasia.

No, there was nothing conclusive in this fact. A powerful shock may simply have burned out her memory. She did not remember who she was. She dug deep in her memory—and found herself: she was Anastasia.

She told a fantastic story about her rescue: a shot, she fell, her sister behind her, shielding her from the bullets with her body. Then, senselessness, a gap in her memory … then stars … she was being taken away on a wagon of some kind. Then the journey to Romania with the soldier who, it turned out, had saved her. The birth of a child fathered by the soldier. Her escape. And all this in incoherent waves.

Moreover, she did not speak Russian. There could be an explanation for this: the Russian spoken during the monstrous murder, as she lay there heaped with the bodies of her family, may have created a kind of permanent taboo in her consciousness. She could not pronounce her native sounds; they brought the horror back to her consciousness. But this circumstance was very heartening to her opponents. (In our opinion, a woman who does not speak Russian and has decided to declare herself a Russian grand duchess either has to be crazy or must truly believe herself to be Anastasia.)

There was also, however, her amazing likeness to the photograph of the Russian tsar’s daughter. She even had the trace of a birthmark right where a birthmark had been removed from the young Anastasia, and the shape of her ears, and a similar handwriting. And, finally, the mysterious woman spoke freely about the details of the family’s life.