Eye of the Red Tsar (35 page)

Nicholas II abdicates, naming his brother Mikhail as the heir to the Russian throne and passing over his own son, Alexei, whom he believes to be too young and frail to withstand the strain of leading the country.

Mikhail, believing the situation to be already too far gone, refuses to accept the throne.

Nicholas II and his family are placed under house arrest at the Tsarskoye Selo estate outside Petrograd. A plan is worked out to transport the family into exile in Britain. After a wave of public protest, the British government rescinds the offer.

Protests and strikes continue. Food and fuel shortages lead to widespread looting.

The Russian Army launches an all-out assault on the Austro-Hungarian front. This attack turns into a major defeat for the Russians.

With conditions worsening in Petrograd, the provisional government decides to move the Romanov family, along with their personal doctors, nurses, and private tutors for the children, to the Siberian city of Tobolsk. By August 6, the family is living in a mansion belonging to the former governor of Tobolsk.

Russia begins surrender talks with Germany.

The Revolutionary Government orders the restructuring of the army. All officers are to be elected democratically and the military ranking system is abolished.

Pravda
, the Communist Party newspaper, demands stricter conditions of confinement for the Romanovs. The Romanov family is placed on army rations and told that they will be moved to an even more remote location—the town of Ekaterinburg, east of the Ural mountains.

Policed by Red Guards under the command of Commissar Yakovlev, the Romanovs and a few members of their household staff arrive by train in Ekaterinburg. At the station they are met by a large and hostile crowd, who demand that the Romanovs be killed. The Romanovs are interned in the house of a local merchant named Ipatiev. A tall stockade fence is built around the house, and the windows on the upper floors are whitewashed to prevent anyone from seeing in or out. Guards for the Ipatiev house are recruited from among local factory workers in Ekaterinburg.

The Czechoslovakian Legion, having joined forces with the many disparate anti-Bolshevik groups known as the White Army, refuses an order by the Revolutionary Government to lay down its arms. Many of these soldiers are deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army who chose to fight with the Russians during the First World War. Unable to return to their own country, they march almost the entire length of Russia, to Vladivostok. From there, they are to be transported halfway around the world to France, to join the fighting on the Western Front on the side of their French, British, and American allies. The White Army numbers more than 30,000 men, an unstoppable force, which begins to make its way east, following the path of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Mikhail, the brother of the Tsar, is being held prisoner in the city of Perm. Lodging at the Hotel Korolev, renamed “Hotel No. 1” by the Bolsheviks, he and his valet, Nicholas Johnson, are permitted to wander the streets as long as they do not leave the city. On this night, Grand Duke Mikhail and Johnson are ordered out of their rooms by a Cheka death squad under the command of Ivan Kolpaschikov, taken to a wooded area known as Malaya Yazovaya, and shot. The Bolsheviks do not announce his death, reporting instead that he has been rescued by White Russian officers. In the coming months, “sightings” of the Grand Duke will pour in from all corners of the world. His body and the body of Nicholas Johnson have never been found.

The local guards are dismissed after they are accused of stealing from the Romanovs. Their place is taken by Cheka officer Yurovsky and a contingent of “Latvians” who are in fact mostly Hungarians, Germans, and Austrians. From now on, the only guards allowed inside the Ipatiev house belong to the Cheka. Guards are posted all over the house, even outside the bathrooms. The Romanovs live on the second floor. They are permitted to do their own cooking, relying on a diet of army rations and donations from the nuns of the Novotikvinsky Convent in Ekaterinburg.

With the White Army approaching the region of Ekaterinburg, Commissar Yurovsky receives a telegram ordering that the Romanovs be put to death, rather than risk having them be rescued by the White Army. This telegram was presumably sent by Lenin, although its origin is still unclear.

Yurovsky immediately orders his guards to hand in their issue Nagant revolvers. He then loads the weapons, returns them to their owners, and notifies them that the Romanovs are to be shot that night. Two of the Latvians refuse to shoot women and children in cold blood.

Yurovsky details one guard for every member of the Romanov family and their entourage, so that each man will be responsible for a single execution. The total number of guards is eleven, which corresponds to the number of people in the Romanov family, plus the Tsarina’s lady-in-waiting, Anna Demidova; a cook named Kharitonov; their physician Dr. Botkin; and a footman named Trupp, who are also to be shot.

At midnight Yurovsky wakes the Romanov family and orders them to get dressed. He tells them that there is disorder in the town. Approximately one hour later, the entourage is led down to the basement, which Yurovsky has chosen as the place of execution.

When the Romanovs reach the basement, the Tsarina Alexandra requests chairs, and three are brought in. The Tsarina sits in one of them, Alexei in another, and the Tsar himself in the third.

A truck that has been ordered for the purpose of transporting the dead after the executions does not show up until almost 2 A.M. When the truck arrives, Yurovsky and the guards descend to the basement and enter the room where the Romanovs have been waiting. It is so crowded that some of the guards are forced to remain standing in the doorway. Yurovsky informs the Tsar that he is to be executed.

According to Yurovsky, the Tsar’s reply is “What?” He then turns to speak to his son, Alexei. At this moment, Yurovsky shoots him in the head.

The guards then begin firing. Although Yurovsky has planned for an orderly sequence of events, the scene rapidly deteriorates. The women are screaming. Bullets ricochet off the walls and, it appears, off the women themselves. One guard is shot in the hand.

Having failed to kill the women, the guards then try to finish them off with bayonets, but are unsuccessful. Finally, the women are each shot in the head.

The last to die is Alexei, who is still sitting in his chair. Yurovsky shoots him several times at point-blank range.

The bodies are brought up into the courtyard of the Ipatiev house, carried on improvised stretchers made from blankets laid across harness beams removed from horse carriages. The dead are loaded into a truck and covered with a blanket.

At this point Yurovsky realizes that the guards have robbed the Romanovs of the valuables they were carrying in their pockets. He orders the items returned. Under threat of execution, the guards return the objects to Yurovsky. The truck drives towards an abandoned mine which has been chosen as the burial site for the Romanovs and their entourage. Before reaching its destination, however, the truck encounters a group of about twenty-five civilians who have been detailed by another member of the Cheka as a burial crew. The civilians are angry because they were expecting to execute the Romanovs themselves. They unload the bodies from the truck and immediately begin robbing the dead. Yurovsky threatens to shoot them unless they stop.

Yurovsky then realizes that no one in the group, including himself, knows exactly where the mine shaft is located. Nor has anyone thought to provide digging equipment for the burials.

Yurovsky loads the bodies back onto the truck and searches for another burial site. By dawn he has located another abandoned mine near the village of Koptyaki, which is about three hours’ walking distance from Ekaterinburg.

The bodies of the Romanovs are unloaded once again from the truck. They are stripped and a fire is prepared for burning the clothes prior to hiding the bodies in the mine. As the bodies are being undressed, Yurovsky discovers that the Romanovs are wearing waistcoats into which hundreds of diamonds have been sewn, which explains why the bullets failed to kill the Romanov women. The valuables are hidden and later transported to Moscow. After the clothing is burned, Yurovsky orders the bodies to be thrown into the mine shaft and then attempts to collapse the mine with hand grenades. The effort is only partially successful and Yurovsky realizes that he will have to re-inter the bodies somewhere else.

After reporting to his superiors, he is advised by a member of the Ural Soviet Committee that the bodies could be hidden in one of several deep mines located near the Moscow Highway, not far from the original burial place. The mines are filled with water, so Yurovsky decides to weight the bodies with stones before throwing them in. He also conceives of a backup plan to burn the bodies, then pour sulfuric acid on them and bury the remains in a pit.

On the evening of July 17, the bodies are exhumed, loaded onto carts, and transported towards the Moscow Highway mines.

The carts carrying the bodies break down on the way to the mine. Yurovsky orders a pit to be dug, but halfway through the digging, he is informed that the hole can be seen too easily from the road. Yurovsky abandons the pit and orders trucks to be requisitioned so that the group can continue to the deep mines on the Moscow Highway.

On this day,
Pravda
announces that the Tsar has been executed, but that the Tsarina Alexandra and his son, Alexei, have been spared and moved to a safe location. There is no mention of the Tsar’s four daughters or their household staff. The article implies that the executions were carried out on the initiative of the Ekaterinburg guards and not on orders from Moscow.

In the early hours, the trucks that have been requisitioned as replacements for the broken carts also break down on the rough roads.

Yurovsky orders another pit to be dug. In the meantime he burns the bodies.

The remains are thrown into the pit and acid is poured on top of them. The pit is filled in and railway sleepers—wooden beams set beneath the iron rails—are laid out over the burial site. The trucks are then wheeled back and forth over the sleepers to hide any evidence of burial.

By dawn, the work has been completed. Before departing the burial site, Yurovsky swears the participants to silence.

The bones remain hidden, in spite of an extensive search launched by the White Army when it overruns Ekaterinburg a few days later. The Whites are eventually forced out and control of Ekaterinburg returns to the Red Army.

In the months that follow, stories surface about the survival of the Tsarina and her daughters. Witnesses report seeing them on a train heading for the city of Perm. Another story involves the appearance of a young woman, one of the daughters, who is reported to have lived for a short while with a family in the woods before being handed over to the Cheka, who then killed her. A tailor named Heinrich Kleibenzetl claims to have seen the Princess Anastasia, badly wounded, being treated by his landlady in a house directly opposite the Ipatiev residence immediately after the shootings. An Austrian prisoner of war, Franz Svoboda, claims to have personally rescued Anastasia from the Ipatiev house.

A woman attempts to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. She is committed to a Dalldorf mental institution, where it is discovered that she has numerous wounds that resemble those made by bullets, and one that appears to have been made by the cruciform blade of a Russian Mosin-Nagant bayonet. The woman appears to be suffering from amnesia and is referred to by the hospital staff as Fräulein Unbekannt (“Jane Doe”).

Fräulein Unbekannt confides in one of the Dalldorf nurses, Thea Malinovsky, that she is in fact the Princess Anastasia. She claims to have been rescued from execution by a Russian soldier named Alexander Tschaikovsky. Together, they fled to Bucharest, where Tschaikovsky was killed in a fight.

The woman claiming to be Anastasia is released from the asylum and taken in by Baron von Kleist, who believes her story.

In the years that follow, the woman is visited by numerous friends and relatives of the Romanovs, including the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Nicholas II, and Pierre Gilliard, private tutor of the Romanov children, both of whom declare her to be a fraud. Based on a dental mold of her teeth, the dentist of the Romanov family, Dr. Kostrizky, also declares the woman’s claim to be false. Not all of those who meet the woman believe her to be lying, though. In Germany, the nephew and niece of the Romanov family physician, Dr. Botkin, vigorously support her claim amid accusations that they are simply after the missing Romanov family fortune, by today’s standards said to be worth in excess of $190 million (approximately £90 million).

The legal battle that ensues becomes the longest-running case in German history.

A private detective, Martin Knopf, claims that based on his investigation, the woman is actually a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska and that the wounds on her body came from an explosion at the munitions plant where she had been employed.

Schanzkowska’s brother, Felix, is brought in to identify the woman. He immediately declares her to be his sister but then mysteriously refuses to sign an affidavit to that effect.