The Last Tsar (60 page)

She attempted to defend her right to the name of the tsar’s daughter in court and suffered defeat.

But when the mysterious “Anastasia” died, she was buried in a crypt with her Romanov relatives the princes of Leuchtenberg.

Who was she?

To me she was a woman who for terrible reasons had suffered a shock and forgotten who she was and then spent her whole life trying to remember it. She truly believed she was the tsar’s daughter, but evidently she did not know precisely which one of the four. She declared herself to be Anastasia because, of the four sisters, she looked most like her, but to the end of her life she continued to dig
painfully in her memory. So that for all her certainty, she was to some extent uncertain. That burning torment: trying to remember, going back and forth, into the monstrous past—in an attempt to meet up there, in that horror, with herself … and never to do so.

“Anastasia” declared she had been “rescued after the execution.” Subsequently books would begin appearing proving that the tsar’s daughters had not been shot at all. Only the tsar and the heir had been executed, these books asserted. The retainers and the unlucky Botkin had perished to create the appearance of the entire family’s destruction. In fact, at the demand of the Germans, on the basis of secret articles of the Treaty of Brest, the daughters and the tsaritsa were taken out of Russia. True, it is hard to believe that the second most important man in the government, Trotsky, who participated in the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest and in exile asserted that the tsar’s entire family had been shot, did not know about that. (What he would have given for it not to have been so!)

That these fantastic versions popped up was inevitable. After all, in the seventy years since the execution
not one voluntary
statement by participants in the execution in the Ipatiev house was published. The terrible night of July 16–17, 1918, remained the object of mysterious rumors and legends.

In the 1970s, at the start of my investigations, I did not believe anyone—not Sokolov and not his opponents. I set myself one goal—to find
voluntary
statements of witnesses to that terrible night. I was sure that they existed in the bowels of the Soviet secret storehouses. Only they could give the answer as to what did happen in the Ipatiev house. About one such document, the legendary “Yurovsky Note,” rumors abounded.

I began questioning my former classmates at the Historical Archival Institute, who worked in various archives. Everyone I talked to had heard of it, but no one had read it.

In the late 1970s, an old and once close friend called me. We had studied together at the Historical Archival Institute and now, after many years, we met, frightening each other with our changed faces. She got into my car and without saying a word placed a paper on my knees.

I began to read:

“To the Museum of the Revolution, Museum Director Comrade Mitskevich.

“Bearing in mind the upcoming tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the younger generation’s likely interest in seeing substantive evidence (the weapon that executed the former tsar Nicholas II, his family, and those retainers who remained loyal to him to the grave), I feel I must transfer to the museum for safekeeping two revolvers that have been in my possession: Colt no. 71905 with a cartridge clip and seven bullets, and Mauser no. 167177 with a wooden gunstock and a cartridge clip with ten bullets. The reasons for the two revolvers are as follows: I killed Nicholas on the spot with my Colt; the remaining bullets in the one loaded clip for the Colt, as well as the loaded Mauser, went to finish off Nicholas’s daughters, who were armored with corsets made of a solid mass of large diamonds, and the strange vitality of the heir, on which my assistant also spent an entire clip of bullets (the strange vitality of the heir must probably be put down to my assistant’s poor mastery of his weapon and his inevitable nerves, evoked by his long ordeal with the armored daughters).

“The former commandant of the special house in Ekaterinburg, where the former tsar Nicholas II and his family were held in 1918 (up until his execution in the same year on July 16), Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky, and the commandant’s assistant Grigory Petrovich Nikulin attest to the above.

“Ya. M. Yurovsky has been a member of the party since 1905, Party ticket no. 1500, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.

“G. P. Nikulin has been a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1917, no. 128185, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.”

So it did all happen!

She said, “This is a copy of a restricted document held by the Museum of the Revolution. I was told you want to find out how
it
happened? I’m glad I can give you the chance. But this document was copied out at my request, and I don’t want to put anyone on the spot. So you have to keep mum about it. Not that you’re very likely to be able to talk about all this any time in the next hundred years. So enjoy the abstract knowledge, that’s enough.”

“This is the Yurovsky Note?”

“What do you mean! This is just an ordinary notice Yurovsky wrote.”

(In 1989 I was finally able to look at this “ordinary notice” with
my own two eyes. It was indeed written in the commandant-assassin’s characteristic hand.)

“No, no.” She chuckled. “The Yurovsky Note is something completely different. It’s a long document. By the way, in the 1920s he gave it to Pokrovsky.”

(Mikhail Pokrovsky was the director of the Communist Academy in the 1920s, the leader of Soviet historical science.)

“You saw it? It’s in the Museum of the Revolution?”

“I don’t know,” she said dryly. “I only know that the NKVD [as the Cheka’s successor was called in the 1940s] removed those revolvers of Yurovsky’s from the museum before the war, along with all his papers. There’s a record of that there. What else could they have done? After all, his daughter was arrested.”

“Yurovsky’s daughter? Arrested?”

“Her name was Rimma. She was a Komsomol [Young Communist League] leader, apparently a secretary on the Komsomol Central Committee. She spent more than a quarter of a century in the camps. Even if the Yurovsky Note were in the museum, though, you would never get your hands on it, as you must understand. Documents about the execution of the tsar’s family are especially secret.”

She went, and I was left with his notice. The first voluntary participant statement I had obtained!

So it was all true. There was an execution. And ten years later, Yurovsky was still living that execution. He was incapable of writing an “ordinary notice.” The Ipatiev house pursued him—the armored girls, the boy they finished off. If this was an “ordinary notice,” imagine his note! I realized she was right—I would get nowhere at the museum.

Yurovsky’s biography, in the style of Soviet hagiography, published in a limited edition in Sverdlovsk as
I Am the Chekist
, by Yakov Reznik, contains the commandant’s last will and testament, in which he again turned to his loyal “son”—his assistant in the execution, G. Nikulin. As he lay dying from an excruciatingly painful ulcer, he again evoked the specter of the terrible Ipatiev house:

“To G. P. Nikulin.

“My friend, my life is at an ebb. I must dispose of what remains. You will be given a list of the basic documents and a list of my property. The documents give to the Museum of the Revolution….

“… You have been like a son to me, and I embrace you, as my son. Yours, Yakov Yurovsky.”

So, “The documents give to the Museum of the Revolution.” The circle was closed. Realizing the futility of it all, I still made a trip to the Museum of the Revolution archives. To my question there was a clear reply: We have no Yurovsky papers! We’ve never even heard of any “note.”

So I decided to compile a list of the institutions where he had worked. I began to run down the events of his life.

After the execution and his departure for Moscow, the commandant went back to the Urals. First he was instructed to take the “gold train”—the treasures of the Ural banks—from Perm to the capital.

In the nights of August 1918, his wife, his daughter the Ekaterinburg Komsomol leader Rimma, his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander, and one more “son” who had returned with him from Moscow, Nikulin, loaded endless canvas sacks of gold, silver, and platinum onto the train. Once again Yurovsky, the commandant, was commandant of the train, and once again his assistant was Nikulin.

Upon his arrival in Moscow, Yurovsky was given familiar work—in the Cheka. After the attempt on Lenin’s life by Fanya Kaplan, Yurovsky was assigned to a group ordered to ferret out Socialist Revolutionaries suspected of ties to Kaplan. He was one of the most meticulous of the investigators. To the end, though, Kaplan declared she was acting alone. Kaplan was shot.

After the Whites surrendered, Yurovsky went back to Ekaterinburg, where he was chairman of the Social Security Department and simultaneously one of the leaders of the Cheka. He was involved with all aspects of citizens’ social security. The
Ural Worker
regularly published articles under the heading “The Punishing Activity of the Provincial Cheka.”

In May 1921 he was transferred to Moscow to work in the Russian Republic’s State Depository of Valuables, where the treasures “confiscated from the enslavers” were also kept. He guarded them loyally. “A reliable Communist”—that was how Lenin referred to him in a letter to the people’s commissar of finance. At the end of his life our hero was already employed in prosaic jobs, directing the Red Warrior factory and the Polytechnic Museum.

I conscientiously inquired about his documents at every institution where the “reliable Communist” had worked. Either there was no answer or there were “no documents listed.”

This happened when the archives were only just starting to be declassified.

In a small room in the Central Archive of the October Revolution, I sorted through the formerly secret files of the All-Russian Executive Committee, once the highest organ of power in revolutionary Russia, headed by Sverdlov. One file immediately caught my attention: “File on the Family of Former Tsar Nicholas the Second, 1918–1919.”

1919?
File on the Family?
But the family had already been shot by 1919!

This meant that this file contained some document concerning the family but created in 1919—after their execution! I leafed through the file impatiently.

It began with the telegram about the former tsar removing his shoulder straps. Then came the Ural Soviet’s famous telegram to the Central Executive Committee regarding the tsar’s execution … and the documents of the “monarchist plot”—all those letters signed “Officer.”

And at the very end of the file there were two poorly typed copies of a document that had no title or signature
.

I began reading. It was a shock: the whole horrible night of July 16–17—the execution, the two days dealing with the corpses—it was all laid out thoroughly and dispassionately. The Apocalypse as recorded by a
witness!
The document was not signed, but one of its typed copies was corrected in the author’s hand. At the end of the document, also in the author’s handwriting, the terrible address had been added—the location of the grave where the corpses of the tsar and his family had been secretly buried.

By that time I had already seen several samples of Yurovsky’s handwriting. Yes, he was the author! Before me lay the legendary “Note of Yakov Yurovsky.”

That which had been hidden all these seventy years, that which I had sought all these years.

The Note’s style of exposition was surprising. The new ruling power offered yesterday’s semiliterate workers, soldiers, and sailors a tempting position as makers of history. In describing the execution, Yurovsky proudly referred to himself in the third person as “commandant” (abbreviated “com.” in the Note). For on that night there was no Yakov Yurovsky, there was a terrible commandant
—the weapon of proletarian vengeance. The weapon of history.

I decided to publish this document. It was already 1989, the triumph of glasnost. However, the issue of
Ogonyok
in which the statement of the “reliable Communist” which had been held secret for seventy years was to appear was detained by the censor. Times had changed, though, and the magazine eventually did come out. Thanks to the censor’s delay, the issue appeared on May 19 (May 6, old style). On the emperor’s birthday, this terrible account of his death and his family’s saw the light of day for the first time.

Letters started coming in, thousands of readers’ letters. Millions of my fellow citizens had learned for the first time of the bloodshed in which the dynasty that had ruled the country for three hundred years had come to its end.

The invaluable mails were very busy: I began receiving both letters and telephone calls with more new information and documents. Once lost or concealed forever, they rose up out of nonbeing, and, as in
Macbeth
, the Birnam Wood set out after the murderers.

What I had hoped for had come to pass: at the Museum of the Revolution one more copy of the Note I had already published suddenly was
found
. But it had a title and even a signature:

“Copy of a document given by my father Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky to the historian M. N. Pokrovsky in 1920.”

Yurovsky’s son, Alexander, had sent this copy and certified it with his own hand in 1964, when he himself, Alexander Yakovlevich Yurovsky, was already turning gray.

This document, however, did not include the location of the grave.

So in 1920 Yurovsky had given his Note to a historian! But it had been written earlier, as a report for the authorities. That was why I had found this document in the Central Executive Committee archives.

The historian Pokrovsky was a member of the Central Executive Committee presidium. The leader of official historical science was addressing the “initiated.” In giving Pokrovsky his Note, Yurovsky never dreamed it would be published. He had written it for posterity, for history. His contemporaries still lacked the consciousness to know the whole truth about the execution.