He called me himself and asked to meet with me. I heard his trembling old man’s voice and naturally said: “I can come see you myself.” But he immediately replied—as did many of those people of his age and generation who called me—“But why? I will come to you myself.” Then he laughed. “You mustn’t think that. No, I’m not afraid of anyone. It’s others who were afraid of me. It’s just I’m an old soldier, and I like to walk.”
Here he is sitting in my room.
He slaps his knee and laughs, pointing to his odd trousers: once green wide trousers with piping that have lost all their color and shape.
“These trousers belonged to Nicholas. I got them in 1945—in Czechoslovakia. At that time they belonged to a former legionary.… In 1918 he bought them in Ekaterinburg. He had a lot of things that were supposedly from the tsar’s family.” He chuckles. “No, naturally, I don’t believe altogether that these are the trousers of the last emperor, but it’s still something from the era. I like the trousers and allow myself this masquerade sometimes.… Right now about the matter that interests you.… I worked in a certain ‘serious institution’ [as the organs of state security have long been called in Russia] for many years.… I was living in Sverdlovsk then.… For quite a while … no, not through my work … just for myself … I was obsessed with your theme.… Or rather, I was interested in one question, which came up a long time ago, before you were ever born—and I’ve been searching for the answer to it all my life. It began with an acquaintanceship—I was rather well acquainted with Peter Zakharovich Ermakov. He was a complicated man. Or rather, simple. His hands itched to kill. For his revolutionary ardor he was called Comrade Mauser. In tsarist times he killed a provocateur in a most original manner—you’ll never guess. He sawed off his head. According to an Ekaterinburg legend, when they decided to deform their bodies, he went to the pharmacy for a supply of sulfuric acid. The chemist was rather doubtful: Ermakov was asking for quite a lot. Peter Zakharovich was about to try to convince him, but he never did—his reflexes went into action and he fired. By the way, do you know that Ermakov told all and sundry that it was he who had killed the last tsar? And how Yurovsky reacted to that?”
That was something I knew very well.
Beginning in 1921, Yurovsky lived in Moscow, where he worked in the State Depository.
The son of Chekist Medvedev: “They often met in our apartment—all the former regicides who had now moved to Moscow.”
Yes, soon after the execution they went to Moscow for their promotions. Beloborodov would become Dzerzhinsky’s deputy in the Cheka, Goloshchekin would occupy very important posts. The masters of Ekaterinburg became the boyars of the Kremlin. Here Chekist Mikhail Medvedev proved more modest. He did not go for the brass ring but ended his life a humble colonel, a teacher in a police academy. That was why he survived. The Kremlin boyars would all perish.
But then, in the 1920s, they were all alive—and young. They loved the hospitality at Medvedev’s welcoming home. Goloshchekin, Nikulin, and of course Yurovsky came.
The son of Chekist Medvedev: “My father often made fun of his arrogance: of course he killed Nicholas. By the way, my father once proposed an experiment to me. My father had a whole collection of weapons—a Mauser, a Colt, and a Browning. So he proposed we experiment to see which of us could fire faster. From which gun. My father and I did this experiment. Naturally, the Browning fired first. First—just as it had then. Yurovsky never disputed that with my father. Moreover, he once told my father: ‘Hey, you didn’t let me finish reading—you started shooting! But when I was reading Nicholas the resolution the second time, I wanted to add that this was revenge for executing revolutionaries.’”
So they chatted and reminisced peacefully over a cup of tea about how lucky they were to have carried out a historic mission.
But if Medvedev talked at home about the shooting, then very soon another, much more dangerous rival appeared before Yurovsky: Peter Ermakov. The former Upper Isetsk commissar would proclaim far and wide from 1918 on that he had killed the tsar.
So Yurovsky began his fight for “the honor of having executed the last tsar.” That is one reason why he gave his Note to the historian Pokrovsky. The chief Soviet historian was supposed to leave the name of Yakov Yurovsky, the tsar’s assassin, in official Soviet history for good.
Meanwhile, 1927 came around. The tenth anniversary of the revolution. Yurovsky was already living in anticipation of 1928—the great anniversary—ten years since the execution of the tsars family.
It was then that he gave both his revolvers to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, where the history of their new world was kept.
But a reply followed immediately: in 1927 Peter Ermakov also gave his Mauser to the local Museum of the Revolution.
“From an act of the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution:
“On December 10, 1927, we received from Comrade P. Z. Ermakov a Mauser revolver no. 16174 with which, according to P. Z. Ermakov’s testimony, the tsar was shot.”
Now it was Yurovsky’s move.
The son of Chekist Medvedev: “In 1927, Yurovsky gave the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee the idea of publishing a collection of documents and reminiscences from the participants in the execution (reminiscences of the participants he needed, such as Nikulin and Strekotin, those who would want to confirm his historic mission of shooting the tsar) for the tenth anniversary of the Romanovs’ execution. But through a member of the OGPU [the name for the state security organs in the 1930s] board, F. Goloshchekin, Stalin passed on a spoken decree: ‘Don’t print anything and keep quiet generally.’”
Already then, in 1927, Stalin was beginning his battle against human memory. The death of the tsar’s family resurrected several names that were supposed to have been forgotten forever: the chief accuser in the proposed trial against the Romanovs, Trotsky; the chairman of the Ural Soviet, the Trotskyite Beloborodov (even if he had retracted), and so on.
As always, though, there were two models: “for them” and “for us.” For them, that is, for the “progressive world public,” everything remained as before: the execution of the bloody despot, the holy vengeance of the people’s revolution. That was why when the journalist Richard Halliburton turned up in Sverdlovsk in the 1930s, Peter Ermakov willingly told him about the execution of the Romanovs and about how he personally had shot the tsar. But we know that without the permission of the “serious institution” a meeting with a foreign journalist would have been impossible. The sly Chekist explained this by his throat cancer—he was giving his dying testament, so to speak. Ermakov laughed when he lived to thrive another twenty years after that. He had borrowed the “throat cancer” from one of his friends in the Ural Soviet, a friend whom we will talk about again.
To his dying days, the Upper Isetsk “Comrade Mauser” fought relentlessly for primacy. At innumerable Pioneer campfires, on July summer nights at yet another anniversary of the Ipatiev night, he would tell his story with enthusiasm.
From a letter of Alexei Karelin in Magnitogorsk:
“I had the opportunity to see and hear one of the ‘heroes’ who participated in the execution of the tsar’s family, P. Ermakov. This was in 1934 or 1935 at the ChTZ [Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant] Pioneer camp on a lake near Chelyabinsk. I was twelve or thirteen at the time; my youthful memory preserved perfectly everything I heard and saw at this encounter with Ermakov by a Pioneer campfire. He was presented to us as a hero.… He was given flowers. My God, how they cultivated patriotism in us! I was looking straight at Ermakov with such envy!… Ermakov ended his ‘lecture’ with especially solemn words: ‘I personally shot the tsar.’ Then he listed everyone in the tsar’s family by name and patronymic as well as some old man from the court. Ermakov said that the execution had been based on Lenin’s personal instruction.”
That night by the Pioneer campfire Ermakov told them Nicholas’s last words.
Ermakov also wrote his own memoirs and on the thirtieth anniversary of the execution gave them to the Sverdlovsk Party Archive.
I heard a great deal about Ermakov’s memoirs. Naturally, I could not read them since they were kept in a secret depository in the Sverdlovsk Party Archive. Although from my readers’ letters I already knew certain excerpts from them.
——
All this I conscientiously told my guest. He just chuckled: he knew I did not know how to listen. He continued:
“Oh well, I too got caught up in this struggle for the right to be the tsar’s assassin. And you are right, in 1947 Ermakov did write his memoirs. But even before that, while Yurovsky was still alive, he wrote about it many times.”
At that point he opened his briefcase and placed some papers before me.
“Don’t get excited, and don’t try to turn the tape recorder on without my noticing, especially since you can’t. I will leave all these documents with you. I brought them for you. Read the first to start with.”
I began to read:
“From a brief autobiography of P. Z. Ermakov:
“In late June 1918 the Ural Executive Committee put me in charge of the guard for the special house where the former Romanov tsar and his family were being held under arrest. On July 16, 1918, I carried out the Regional Executive Committee’s resolution to execute the former Romanov tsar, so the tsar himself as well as his family were executed by me. The bodies, too, were burned by me personally. When the Whites took Sverdlovsk, they were unable to find the remains of the tsar and his family. August 3, 1932.”
He continued:
“As you see, every word in these few lines is boastful invention. Wouldn’t it have been easy for Yurovsky to expose the pretenses of his lying rival once and for all?
“But from the very beginning it’s as if something were holding the iron commandant back. It’s as if he were avoiding a direct confrontation with Ermakov. Instead, on a January night in 1934 he arranged a public lecture for party activists in the Ipatiev house.”
I could picture it. The party activists sitting on the chairs of the Ipatiev house, and among them—those two chairs on which Alexei and the tsaritsa had been sitting at the moment of the murder. Mayakovsky was right; “nails should be made from those people—they’d be the strongest in the world.”
“In short, in his lecture Yurovsky defended his Note. But because of Ermakov’s pretensions, he somehow reasoned very modestly: ‘I have to say that certain comrades, I have heard, are trying to say that they killed Nicholas. Perhaps they did fire, that is correct….’
“In short, Ermakov calmly expounded his fantastic ravings right up until Yurovsky’s death. As if he knew for certain that Yurovsky would not dare expose him. As if between them stood some circumstance that precluded their confrontation.
“So after the war, in the late 1940s, this began to interest me greatly.
“By the way, apart from his memoirs about the execution, Ermakov would give the Sverdlovsk Party Archives his long autobiography. It’s all kept in a secret depository, although now, I’ve heard, there has been a proposal to publish them.” Chuckling, he added, “But until that’s decided.… In short, I have brought them to you as well … and I’ll leave them here, too.”
Imagine what came over me when I saw the memoirs! Finally, finally! I could read what I had been hunting for all these years!
“This part of the memoirs is called ‘The Execution of the Former Tsar.’ But bear in mind, not everything is here—this only goes up to the moment the truck drove out of the gates with the corpses. I’ll give you the conclusion later.”
Appended to the memoirs was a portion of Ermakov’s autobiography:
“The good fortune befell me to carry out the ultimate proletarian Soviet justice against the human tyrant, the crowned autocrat, who in his reign had tried, hanged, and shot thousands of men, for which he had to bear responsibility before the people. I was honored to fulfill my obligation before my people and country and took part in the execution of the tsar’s entire family.”
After that came Ermakov’s reminiscences about the execution: “The Ekaterinburg Executive Committee passed a resolution to shoot Nicholas, but for some reason the resolution said nothing about the family and their execution. When I was called in they told me: ‘You are a lucky man. You have been chosen to execute and bury them in such a way that no one ever finds their bodies, this is your personal responsibility, which we entrust to you as an old revolutionary.’
“I accepted the assignment and said it would be carried out precisely. I prepared the site where they would be taken and hidden, always bearing in mind the significance of the political moment.
“When I reported to Beloborodov that I was ready to carry it out, he said: ‘Do it so that all of them are shot, we have decided that.’ I did not enter into any further discussion and began doing what I was supposed to do.
“I received my orders on July 16 at eight o’clock in the evening, and came myself with two comrades—Medvedev and another Latvian (I don’t remember his name now) who served under me in my detachment—in the punitive section. I arrived at the special house at ten o’clock exactly; my vehicle came soon after, a small truck. At eleven o’clock the imprisoned Romanovs and their people confined with them were advised to go downstairs. To the suggestion that they go downstairs they asked: ‘What for?’ I said: ‘You are being taken to the center, you can’t be kept here any longer, it could get dangerous.’ ‘What about our things?’ they asked. I said: ‘We will collect your things and bring them to you.’ They agreed. They went downstairs, where chairs had been set up for them along the wall.
“It is well preserved in my memory: in the first flank sat Nicholas, Alexei, Alexandra, their older daughter Tatiana, then Dr. Botkin, and after that the lady-in-waiting and all the rest. When everything had settled down, I went out and told the driver: ‘Get going.’ He knew what he had to do, the truck roared to life, and exhaust started pouring out. All this was necessary in order to drown out the shots, so that no sound could be heard at liberty. Everyone seated was expecting something to happen. They were all tense and only from time to time exchanged words. But Alexandra said a few words not in Russian. When everything was in order, I handed Yurovsky, the house commandant, the Regional Executive Committee’s resolution. He was doubtful: ‘Why all of them?’ But I told him: ‘We have to do all of them, and we can’t go on talking here for long, time is short and we have to get going.’ I went downstairs with the commandant, and I must say that it had been decided beforehand who was to shoot whom and how. For myself I took Nicholas himself, Alexandra, the daughter, and Alexei, because I had a Mauser, and you could work with that. The rest had revolvers. After we got downstairs we delayed a little. Then the commandant suggested everyone stand, which they did, but Alexei sat in a chair. Then he began reading the sentence-resolution, which said: By resolution of the Executive Committee—execution. Then Nicholas burst out with: ‘So you’re not taking us anywhere?’ We couldn’t wait any longer, and I shot him point blank. He fell immediately, as did the others. At that time a wail rose up among them, they threw themselves on each other’s necks. Then several shots rang out—and everyone fell. When I began examining their condition—the ones that were still alive I shot again. Nicholas died from a single bullet, his wife got two, and the others also several bullets. Checking their pulses, when they were already dead, I gave the order to drag them all out through the lower entrance to the truck and stow them in it, which was done, and covered them all with a tarpaulin” (archive 221, list 2, file 774).
“I noted the archive reference especially for you to preclude any doubts,” he said when I had finished reading.
Nevertheless, I did check. By then I had received a letter from a reader in Sverdlovsk with excerpts from Ermakov’s memoirs, which her husband, an army political worker who had access to the secret archive, had made at one time. The excerpts coincided exactly, down to nonessential punctuation.
Yes, before me were the genuine memoirs of one of the principal actors on that monstrous night.
“The memoirs are odd, aren’t they?” my guest continued. “Nearly every detail is wrong.”
Indeed, if Yurovsky’s Note and the statements of the other witnesses coincided, Ermakov’s story differed surprisingly in many inaccurate details.
“In the first place, he combines himself with Yurovsky, ascribing to himself everything the commandant did. But if we toss out that boastful invention, then the memoirs represent a garbled compilation of well-known facts. As soon as he gets to the details the mistakes begin. The car did not arrive at ten but at midnight old style—that is, about two in the morning new style. Ermakov wasn’t the only one with a Mauser, Yurovsky had one as well; Yurovsky read the resolution, there were only two chairs, and so on. The only truthful detail, evidently, is the story about turning on the truck’s engine. As for Nicholas’s last sentence, that is evidently another invention, Ermakov himself changed that last sentence of the tsar’s many times.”
At this point I related to my strange guest Ermakov’s story told around a Pioneer campfire about the tsar’s last sentence.
“Yes, sure, ‘They know not what they do’—those are words Peter Zakharovich could scarcely have thought up, indeed. For all his wild imagination! He was after all very far removed from those kinds of words. So that it is quite likely those were Nicholas’s last words, which suddenly surfaced in Ermakov’s memory. We’ll be coming back to that ‘surfaced.’ It’s hard to believe that a man who took an active part in the execution could not remember a single truthful detail. And was only capable of garbling well-known facts. You get the feeling he simply wasn’t there, as if he were telling it from others’ words. Or as if it were all very hazy for him, surfacing in spates. No, I understand he was there but”—he chuckled—“he was drunk!”
Of course—he was drunk! Why hadn’t I realized that before! To inflame himself, to inspire revolutionary fury? Or was it nerves—that he could not stand the anticipation, the wait for an answer from Moscow and for the truck? Or, what is more likely, was he drunk simply because that was payday, and many sharpshooters in the guard (like Proskuryakov and Stolov) had gotten drunk? The blatant, wild bestiality of Ermakov, who finished off the unfortunate girls with his bayonet in the gun smoke, was a continuation of that loutish, bestial “he was drunk.”
I told my guest about one other letter.
From a letter of Mstislav K. Afanasiev in Moscow:
“In the 1920s my father worked as an inspector for the Sapozhek Fire Department in Ryazan Province. The local priest told him a few details he had heard from one of the assassins of the Romanov family. Who this dying assassin was, he did not tell my father, but the dying man’s sins were forgiven. The dying man said that the leader of the murder had suggested they rape the grand duchesses. They were all drunk, and that day they had got their wages. They did not want to kill the women, however. ‘We’re not shooting womenfolk! Just the men!’ The chief assassin himself suffered from chronic alcoholism, and he was drunk that day. They shouted at him: ‘That’s not how you make a revolution!’”
Again my guest choked with laughter: “You mean my old friend Peter Zakharovich promised the girls? No, not to the riflemen, the priest simply misunderstood—to his own dashing lads. He promised them to his Upper Isetsk companions. Naturally, the man dying in the Ryazan town of Sapozhek was not one of the regicides, he was from Ermakov’s detachment. Ermakov’s men were present at the burial of the bodies, which is why they proudly counted themselves among the assassins. I’ve come across this before. As for the idea itself: promising rape before execution—that kind of thing happened in those days. Melgunov writes about it in The Red Terror. By the way, the Whites practiced it, too—that was nothing new. As far as Ermakov being drunk, I never doubted that. That was why Yurovsky had to go along to ‘watch over’ the interment of the bodies. Otherwise the commandant would never have dared to shadow Upper Isetsk Commissar Ermakov himself. That is why Yurovsky got into the truck—to transport the bodies. Ermakov probably drunkenly insisted on helping load the bodies too—after all, this was his job. I understood as much from my conversations with Peter Zakharovich, that he even climbed up onto the truck to direct the loading. Evidently he couldn’t get down, though, so he stayed in the back with the bodies.
“So that at a crucial moment in revolutionary history Peter Zakharovich was, to be blunt, drunk. Why then, though, in fighting with him for the honor of the execution, did Yurovsky never once take advantage of that circumstance? Or even so much as hint at it? Why did he spare the political prisoner’s honor? Or did something prevent him?
“I tried to feel out Ermakov himself many times, once I had begun guessing. But I never could find out anything precisely. I’m talking about the ride.”
Again I asked what he meant. I simply could not adapt to his mode of conversation.
“For a while I tried to calculate at what point that something might have happened to them both: the road, the truck with the bodies. That was when I began to question him carefully about the ride. To the simplest questions—well, let’s say I asked him, ‘Did the sharpshooters in the truck guard ride in the truck or on horseback?’ Even that question, though, he answered differently every time: he made out as if he couldn’t remember; the madman, he’d drunk away his memory.… Yes, he did like to drink. He kept everyone at the town beer stands entertained with stories about how he had killed the tsar. But at the beer stand, drunk as a skunk, not a word about the ride. Still, since he was very drunk.… Then I began my conversation again, and he, as always, contributed his part: how he killed them all. On his way out, he suddenly asked, ‘I can see you don’t believe they were all …?’ And he chuckled. Then he added: ‘They all perished, all of them!’ and suddenly gave me a bone-chilling look, like a wild animal.
“Before he died I paid him a visit. In my day, there was a revolutionary idea in the air that a Chekist should visit a dying man instead of a priest. In the end, even atheists need to unburden their souls, and who better to tell than the institution where one was supposed to speak only the truth? So that a special corps could have been created in the Cheka of Chekist priests. They could have been called something like Truthgatherers. It was in this capacity of ‘truth-gatherer’ that I chatted with Peter Zakharovich. But again nothing! By the way, have you ever tried to reconstruct that ride and the truck’s route?”
——
I had studied that route well. Investigator Sokolov had once attempted to reconstruct it from the tracks left by the terrible truck in the rain-wet earth and from the statements of witnesses.
The route the tsarist bodies took to their first grave turned out to have been described in detail in Commandant Yurovsky’s secret note.
Finally, two amateurs from Sverdlovsk studying the history of the execution sent me a map of the truck’s route.
In the summer of 1989 I went to Sverdlovsk and traversed on foot the entire path to that first grave of the family.
And all the statements coalesced.
The Ipatiev house gates open, and the driver Sergei Lyukhanov steers the truck out into the street. It is three in the morning. The truck sets out down Ascension Avenue, then turns down Main Street, drives past the city limits by the racetrack, and then down the road toward the village of Koptyaki.
Passing by the Upper Isetsk factory, the truck then crosses the railroad tracks to Perm and enters a dense, mixed forest that stretches all the way to Koptyaki. About 3 versts (2 miles) to the north of the Perm railway line, the truck crosses a second set of tracks—the mine-factory line—near station number 120.
These are wild places where the only structures are railway booths. Here the road forks: the truck turns toward the railroad crossing, toward booth 184, where there is a marshy, swampy place, and about 100 meters from the booth it gets stuck in a quagmire. Lyukhanov tries to get it out, but the motor overheats. Now he needs water for the engine and planks to lay over the swampy area in order to cross the marsh. Fortunately, nearby is the railroad crossing by booth 184. Lyukhanov gets out of the truck.
At this time the noise of the truck skidding in the swamp awakens the watchwoman in booth 184. There is a knock at the door; she opens it and sees Lyukhanov and the truck’s silhouette dark in the dawning sky.
The driver says his motor has overheated and asks her for some water. The watchwoman grumbles, at which Lyukhanov lashes out: “You’re sleeping here like god almighty, while we’ve been breaking our backs all night long.”
Through the open door, the watchwoman sees Red Guards around the truck and immediately begins pumping water readily for the engine. Then the Red Guards take some planks dumped around her booth and lay them over the swampy area, and the truck drives over the planks. Passing the booth, it enters the forest and drives 3 versts along the forest road to the Four Brothers, a landmark in the desolate terrain.
At this time near Koptyaki a picket of Red Guards is standing on a knoll, turning all inhabitants back to the village. Another picket is standing not far from booth 184. They let no one onto the road. They evidently meet the truck and lead it through the Four Brothers.
Yurovsky: “Having gone about 5 versts [3.3 miles] from the Upper Isetsk factory, we ran into an entire camp of about twenty-five men, some on horseback, some in droshkies, and so on. They were the workers (members of the Executive Committee Soviet) whom Ermakov had prepared. The first thing they shouted was: ‘Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?’ They thought the Romanovs’ execution would be left to them.”
The bloodthirsty, carousing, drunken crowd has been expecting the grand duchesses Ermakov had promised them, and now they are not being allowed to participate in the good deed of finishing off the girls, the boy, and the papa tsar. So they complain: “Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?”
Yurovsky: “Meanwhile, they started transferring the bodies to the droshkies, since we had to use carts. It was very awkward. They immediately started cleaning out their pockets—I had to threaten them with a firing squad then and there.”
So here too they try to rob the corpses as they move the bodies onto the carts.
Yurovsky: “Here we discovered that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia were wearing some kind of special corset. It was decided to strip the bodies naked, not there, but at the burial site.”
Not all the bodies fit on the droshkies, however. There are not enough good carts. The carts are falling apart. That is why the truck continues on toward the mine with some of the bodies.
Yurovsky: “It turned out, though, that no one knew where the mine shaft selected for this was. It was getting light. The com[mandant] sent riders to find the place, but no one could. It became clear that nothing had been prepared at all, there weren’t any shovels, etc.”
No one knows where to take them. Suddenly they have lost their destination. True, it is very hard to believe that Ermakov’s Upper Isetsk companions have lost what only the day before they knew so well. But Yurovsky penetrates this crude cunning: they are hoping he will get tired and leave. They want to be left alone with the bodies; they are dying to get a look at the “special corsets.”
Yurovsky waits patiently. They have to find the mine. And once again the awful procession sets out.
Riding ahead is Ermakov’s loyal assistant, one of the commanders of the Ermakov boys, the Kronstadt sailor Vaganov. The entire area is utterly remote and hidden from the Koptyaki road by tall forest. Here the procession of bodies encounters some Koptyaki peasants, whom Vaganov drives back. The sun is already rising when they ride up to the first turn off the road to the nameless mine Ermakov and Yurovsky have chosen. Here the truck breaks down.
Yurovsky: “Since the vehicle got stuck between two trees, it was abandoned and the procession continued on in the droshkies, the bodies covered with a cloth. They had gone sixteen and a half versts [n miles] from Ekaterinburg and stopped one and a half versts [1 mile] from Koptyaki. This was at six or seven in the morning.”
The truck breaks down at a pit that was once used for sorting ore and that forces the road very close to some large trees; Lyukhanov miscalculates and wrecks the truck.
They are two hundred paces from the mine. While some Red Army soldiers are dragging the truck out, others begin fashioning stretchers from young pines and pieces of the tarpaulin that covers the bodies. (The White Guard inquiry discovered planed, broken off branches along the road.)
Now the bodies move toward the mine—on carts and on stretchers.
Yurovsky: “In the forest we found an abandoned prospector’s mine (once mined for gold) three and a half arshins [8 feet] deep. There was an arshin of water in the mine shaft.”
Near the mine the bodies are laid out on the clayey ground, a level area right by the mine.
Yurovsky: “The commandant ordered the bodies undressed and a fire built so that everything could be burned. Riders were posted all around in order to drive away anyone who might come by. When they began undressing one of the girls, they saw a corset torn in place by bullets—and through the opening they saw diamonds. The spectators had obviously had their hearts set on.… The com[mandant] immediately decided to dismiss the entire group, keeping only a few sentries from the guard and five from the detachment. The rest dispersed.”
Next to the mine, on the clayey, rain-drenched ground, lies the tsar’s family as well as their servants and Dr. Botkin. The sun is already up when the bodies are undressed and the corsets with the sewn-in diamonds that had saved the unlucky girls for so long are removed from the grand duchesses. And the pearl belt, which had not saved the empress.
Yurovsky: “The detachment started undressing and burning them. A. F. turned out to be wearing an entire pearl belt made from several necklaces sewn into linen. The diamonds were immediately recorded, about half a pood [18 pounds] were collected.”
The clothing is burned right there on the fire. The naked corpses lie on the naked earth by the mine. The girls’ corset laces have made running knots along their bare bodies.
Yurovsky: “Each of the girls turned out to be wearing a picture of Rasputin around her neck with the text of his prayer sewn into an amulet. The ‘holy man’ was with them even after death.”
From the report of Kolchak’s Ministry of Justice:
“November 27, 1919, from N. Mirolyubov, Procurator of the Kazan Palace of Justice, regarding December 12, 1918, Omsk:
“According to Kukhtenkov’s testimony, after his military discharge he took a position as deputy leader of a workers’ club. On July 18–19, at about four in the morning, the chairman of the Upper Isetsk Executive Committee Soviet, Sergei Malyshkin, Military Commissar Ermakov, and prominent members of the party, Bolsheviks Alexander Kostousov, Vasily Levatnykh, Nikolai Partin, and Sergei Krivtsov, arrived at the club.
“At the club the abovementioned individuals met secretly.… Krivtsov asked the questions, and Levatnykh and Partin gave the answers. Levatnykh said: ‘When we arrived they were still warm. I felt the tsaritsa myself and she was warm.… Now it was no sin to die because I had felt the tsaritsa.’ [In the document the last sentence was crossed out in ink.] Then came the questions: How were the slain dressed, and were they pretty?… About their clothing Partin said that they were in civilian dress, that various jewels had been sewn into their clothing, and that none of them were beautiful: ‘There was no beauty to see in the dead.’”
Finally the bodies are covered with the tarpaulin. After much discussion it is decided to burn the clothing and throw the bodies to the bottom of the nameless mine.
Yurovsky: “Once we had gathered together everything of value into sacks, everything else we found on the bodies was burned and the bodies themselves lowered into the mine shaft. In the process some of the valuables (someone’s brooch, Botkin’s false teeth) were dropped.”
A great many diamonds and pearls are gathered, so they do not worry about the small change. They are tired.
Yurovsky: “It was all buried at Alapaevsk in the cellar of one of the little buildings. In 1919 it was dug up and taken to Moscow.”
The historic moment has passed. Life begins anew.
He has a breakfast of eggs on a tree stump. Alexei’s eggs. After Yurovsky eats, it occurs to him to toss in a few grenades.
Yurovsky: “In my attempt to collapse the mine shaft with the help of hand grenades, evidently the bodies were damaged and a few parts torn off—that is how the commandant explains the Whites (who later discovered the mine) finding there a detached finger, etc.”
After which Ermakov and his comrades go to Upper Isetsk and Yurovsky makes sure the jewels get off to Alapaevsk, where that night Ella and her companions in captivity are to be “liquidated.”
There, in a hiding place, in the cellar of an anonymous Alapaevsk house, all the jewels taken from the “Ural Romanovs” are collected.
Yurovsky: “After completing the operation and leaving a guard there, at about ten or eleven in the morning (of July 17 now), the commandant took his report to the Ural Executive Committee, where he found Safarov and Beloborodov. The commandant told them what had been found and expressed regret that he had not been allowed to conduct a search of the Romanovs sooner.”
In fact, at the Soviet Yurovsky was dealt a cruel blow, which he concealed in his Note.
The son of Chekist Medvedev:
“In the morning my father went to the bazaar and heard from the local merchants a detailed account of where and how the bodies of the tsar’s family had been hidden. That is the real reason why the bodies were buried a second time.”
Ermakov’s lads could not hold their tongues. Now they had to start all over. Find a new place, think of where to hide the bodies. They had run out of time—the Whites were on the threshold.
Yurovsky: “The commandant found out from Chutskaev (the chairman of the Municipal Executive Committee) that there were some very deep mines suitable for burying the Romanovs located at verst 9 along the Moscow highway.… The commandant started out but had only gotten partway when his car broke down. He reached the mines on foot. He did indeed find three very deep mines filled with water, where he decided to drown the bodies, having first attached stones to them. Since there were watchmen around who made awkward witnesses, it was decided that along with the truck carrying the bodies a car would come with Chekists, who on the pretext of a search would arrest all the spectators. The commandant had to drive back on a pair of horses he happened to appropriate en route. In the event the plan with the mines did not work out, it was decided to burn the bodies and bury them in the clayey, water-filled pits, after first taking the precaution of disfiguring them beyond the point of identification with sulfuric acid.
“When they finally got back to town it was nearly eight in the evening on July 17, and they began getting together everything they needed—kerosene, sulfuric acid. Driverless carts and horses were taken from the prison.… They did not set out until 12:30 on the night of July 17–18. To isolate the mines (one a prospector’s mine) for the duration of the operation, an announcement was made in Koptyaki that Czechs were hiding in the woods and the forest was going to be searched, so no one should go there for any reason. It was decreed that anyone who broke through the cordoned area would be shot on the spot.”
Steal a pair of horses from a peasant they happen to run into, shoot an inhabitant who accidentally sets foot on the protected zone—all in the name of the shining future.
At midnight, the commandant returned to the original nameless mine.
The son of Chekist Medvedev:
“They lit the mine shaft with torches. Vaganov the sailor climbed down into the mine shaft and stood below in the darkness in the icy water, which was up to his chest. A rope was lowered. He tied the bodies to it and sent them up.”
Once again the commandant saw the tsar’s entire family in torchlight. At the same time in Alapaevsk they were killing Ella and the other Ural Romanovs.
Yurovsky: “Meanwhile it was growing light. It occurred to me to bury some of the bodies right there by the mine. We started digging a pit and had almost finished when a peasant Ermakov knew rode up and explained that he could see the hole. We had to abandon that idea and decided to take the bodies to the deep mines.”
The bodies set off once again, on carts at first and then in the truck. With them went Yurovsky. For three whole days he had been living alongside these corpses, “evacuating them to a safe place.”
Yurovsky: “Since the carts proved unstable and were falling apart, the commandant went to town for some vehicles—one truck and two cars for the Chekists. We managed to get on our way only at eight in the evening; we crossed the railroad tracks about half a verst away and moved the bodies onto the truck. We had a hard time, planking over treacherous spots with boards, and still getting stuck several times. At about four-thirty on the morning of July 19 the vehicle got permanently stuck. Since we weren’t going to get as far as the mines, all we could do was either bury them or burn them.… One comrade, whose last name the commandant has forgotten, promised to take the latter upon himself, but he left without keeping his promise. We wanted to burn A[lexei] and A[lexandra] F[eodorovna], but by mistake instead of her we burned the lady-in-waiting and Alexei. They buried the remains right there under the fire and then scattered the fires in order to cover up completely any trace of digging. Meanwhile a common grave was dug for the rest. At about seven in the morning a pit two and a half arshins [6 feet] deep and three and a half arshins [8 feet] square was ready. The bodies were put in the hole and the faces and all the bodies generally doused with sulfuric acid, both so they couldn’t be recognized and to prevent any stink from them rotting [it was not a deep hole]. We scattered it with dirt and lime, put boards on top, and rode over it several times—no trace of the hole remained. The secret was kept—the Whites did not find this burial site.”
At the end of his Note, Yurovsky added a notation indicating the precise location of that secret grave:
“Koptyaki, 18 v[ersts] [12 miles] from Ekaterinburg to the northwest. The railroad tracks pass 9 versts between Koptyaki and the Upper Isetsk factory. From where the railroad tracks cross they are buried about 100 sazh[ens] [700 feet] in the direction of the Isetsk factory.”
The guest chuckled. “You tell the burial story the way Yurovsky described it in his Note. But after all, there was one other equally important witness, my friend Peter Zakharovich [Ermakov], After all, he too described how the burial came about. So two descriptions exist. True, in the 1950s yet a third description by a witness appeared in the West.”
“You’re talking about Iogann Meyer’s pamphlet?”
“Absolutely correct. But that’s a fake, full of mythical people who never existed.… So Peter Zakharovich’s manuscript is one of two existing authentic documents attributable to the pen of actual participants. Moreover, not just participants, but the men in charge of that terrible burial, if you can call the horror they undertook a burial.”
After this tirade my guest again opened his briefcase and gave me the conclusion to Ermakov’s memoirs laboriously copied out by hand:
“When this operation was over, the vehicle with the bodies set out for the forest through Upper Isetsk in the direction of the Koptyaki road, where I had chosen a site for burying the bodies.
“I had considered in advance, however, the fact that we shouldn’t dig, for I was not alone, but had comrades with me. Generally speaking, I could scarcely entrust anyone with this matter, especially since I had told everyone beforehand that I had decided to burn them, for which I had gotten together sulfuric acid and kerosene; I had anticipated everything. Without tipping anyone off, I said: ‘Let’s drop them into the mine shaft,’ and that was what we decided. Then I ordered them all undressed, so we could burn the clothes, which was done. When they started taking their dresses off, medallions with a picture of Rasputin inserted were found on ‘herself’ [Alexandra Feodorovna] and the daughters. Further under their dresses, next to their bodies, were specially altered double corsets inside the padding in which precious stones had been placed and stitched in. This was for ‘herself’ and her four daughters. All this was handed over piece by piece to Yurovsky, the Ural Soviet member. I really wasn’t interested in what was there right then for I had no time. The clothing was burned then and there. The bodies were carried about 50 meters and dropped down a mine shaft. It wasn’t deep, about 6 sazhens [14 yards], for I know all those mines well. So we would be able to pull them out for further operations with them. All this I did in order to hide my tracks from any extra comrades of mine present. When all this was over it was already full dawn, about four o’clock in the morning [July 17]. This place was located about 3 versts [2 miles] off the road.
“When everyone was gone, I remained in the forest, which no one knew. On the night of July 17–18, I went to the forest again, brought a rope, and was lowered into the mine. I began tying up each one individually (the bodies, that is), and two men pulled them out (the bodies). When they were all out I ordered them put on a two-wheeled cart, carried them away from the mine, unloaded them onto three stacks of firewood, doused them with kerosene, and then themselves (the bodies, that is) with sulfuric acid. The bodies burned to ash, which was buried. All this took place at twelve o’clock on the night of July 17–18, 1918. After all of which I reported on July 18. Now I am finished with everything. October 29, 1947. Ermakov.”
I asked him: “May I publish this?”
My guest shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t care, I’m old. Soon, very soon, I’ll be meeting up with them. So that before I go I leave you all this with pleasure.” (Soon after, I published in Ogonyok these memoirs of Ermakov, which were being kept in secret storage.) “But you’ve got a dangerous topic there—it will eat up your life the way it did mine. But I’m disappointed in your question. In your place I would be interested in something completely different. Discounting Peter Zakharovich’s ordinary boastfulness and his habit of ascribing to himself everything others did, consider the most important point: according to Ermakov there was no second burial—the bodies were burned not far from Koptyaki. He has a completely different reading from Yurovsky, moreover on an important fact. And here Ermakov repeats what Sokolov arrived at: the graves do not exist; the bodies of the family vanished in the flames of the fire. Much as I regretted it, I thought that maybe because Peter Zakharovich was drunk they simply didn’t take him to the second burial. No, Yurovsky, recounting the events of July 18, wrote very clearly in his Note: ‘A peasant Ermakov knew rode up to him.’ So Ermakov was there, and he saw it through to the end. So what’s going on? That is why I kept questioning him and he in reply kept repeating, ‘We burned the bodies!’
“That is why I met with a third man.”
“In 1943, when I saw him for the first time, the third man was living in Perm [then Molotov]. That’s what I called him, ‘Comrade Charon.’ But he didn’t laugh. Even when I explained to him that Charon ferried the Greeks to the kingdom of death. He never laughed and never talked on the topic of interest to us. I saw him in 1953, not long before his death. A dried-out old man, short, with a narrow, predatory nose and sparse hair, our Charon went around wearing pathetic ear flaps and a threadbare winter coat. The man who had driven the truck carrying the tsarist bodies lived in a tiny room in a horrible shack. And behind a curtain in the same little room lived his youngest son with his wife. This shack was located on Twenty-fifth Anniversary of October Street. That was where he died. This old Bolshevik died in a dirty barracks on a street named after his own revolution.
“Have you figured out who I’m going to tell you about? Sergei Ivanovich Lyukhanov, the third witness to that terrible trip. His biography is most curious. Unlike all the regicides, he never mentioned his participation in the great proletarian mission of regicide and never fought for any privileges. Moreover, his son told me that he never ever mentioned that he had been in Ekaterinburg in 1918. All in all, for all our meetings, he never did say a word about it. Oh, it was very hard to talk with this taciturn man. I remember I invited him to a restaurant. He sat the whole evening in silence, then picked up the check, which I paid, and said, ‘Too bad, I could live on this for an entire month.’ And he left. Everything I learned about him I learned from his youngest son, whose name was Alexei, like the heir, and who did tell me about his papa. It turns out, having lived to age eighty, he was not even receiving a pension—his son explained that Lyukhanov apparently didn’t realize that he was entitled to one. Odd? A Bolshevik since 1906 didn’t know that in the country of victorious socialism old men receive pensions? A great deal about his life was odd. For example, those constant moves from town to town. Immediately after the execution he quit Ekaterinburg with the retreating Bolsheviks, but after the return of Soviet power to Ekaterinburg Lyukhanov did not go back there but went to Osa—which he soon quit as well. There followed frequent moves, as if he were dashing about the Urals, forever changing places. No sooner did he get used to a place then look out, he refused a good position and off he went! It was as if he were afraid of something. But the most interesting part was his relationship with his wife, Avgusta.
“The schoolteacher Avgusta was the sister of the first Ipatiev house commandant, Avdeyev. In 1918, she joined the ruling powers. By the way, in the cemetery she lies under a star rather than a cross—one of the first in the Ekaterinburg cemetery. Soon after the execution, this “ideological atheist” left Lyukhanov and returned to Ekaterinburg, where she held a party position administering all the children’s homes and died from typhus in 1924. Before her death she forgave her husband, her son Alexei told me.
“So, our Charon did something that made her leave him with four children! And for which she had to forgive him before her death. (We can exclude any other romantic entanglement for him at the time—he did not remarry until two years later.) No, something else was going on here, something the ‘ideological’ sister of the former Ipatiev house commandant could not brook. Evidently fearing what he had done—Lyukhanov dashed around the country and later hid himself away so well that he was even afraid to apply for a pension. I saw a 1918 photograph of him—a gentleman! And his last—a poor, pathetic old man.”
“Enough omissions!” My guest chuckled. “I will tell you what—in my opinion, I emphasize—in my opinion happened.
“This could have happened only in one place, where the truck drove up to railway booth 184, where the watchwoman was sleeping. It drove up and got stuck. Somewhere not far from this booth (as Yurovsky wrote) they were supposed to be met by a picket of Ermakov’s men. By this time Ermakov must have passed out drunk—worn out from the bumpy road. Yurovsky woke him up, and the two men went off to look for Ermakov’s detachment. At this point the driver Lyukhanov went to the booth to wake the watchwoman and ask for water for his overheated engine.
“The stranded truck stayed where it was, as did the Red Guards accompanying it. How many were there? Three or four, probably. And the half gloom of dawn. Can you picture the situation? The Whites were about to take the town. Soviet power, it seemed, would be done and gone. The officers would be hanged for the tsar’s family. So it was no simple matter for them to have gone in the truck. After all, the tsar’s slain family was lying under the tarpaulin. While Ermakov was passed out, they must have heard … those moans from under the tarpaulin. And when the dazed Ermakov went off into the woods with Yurovsky to look for his men and Lyukhanov went to wake the watchwoman—that is when it could have happened.
“Here was a chance for the Red Guards left with the truck. Participation in this terrible affair had condemned them to death, but here—to save some of the family! Had they already agreed on this on the way, when they heard the moans? Or did they understand each other without saying anything? How did they drag the two who had not been killed from the truck? How did they carry them off into the forest, for there was dense forest all around? Did Lyukhanov see this from the window of the booth? Or did he not, continuing to quarrel with the watchwoman? All this I can only guess. As I can the rest. Did those Red Guards run away immediately? Probably not. That would be suspicious. More likely they returned to the truck and started laying boards over the swampy spot. Then Ermakov and Yurovsky appeared: they had found Ermakov’s men.
“What happened to the Red Guards later? Did they manage to escape on the way to the mines? Or return to the forest to the two they had rescued? Did the rescued pair die immediately—there in the forest? Or did someone indeed manage to survive—and were those stars that the woman who called herself Anastasia saw when she came to in the cart the stars of that impossible night? What did Yurovsky tell Ermakov when, as the bodies were being transferred from the truck to the carts, he discovered he was missing two corpses? And Ermakov sobering up instantly, horrified! There was no time, though, to search for the two vanished corpses. The Whites were about to enter the town. They had to finish what they were doing—and destroy the remaining bodies. And Lyukhanov? He was in the cab; he seemed not to have seen anything. He was beside the point. And Ermakov’s men were merrily drunk—so naturally did not notice anything. Almost all of them were dismissed immediately, Yurovsky wrote. Only the most loyal remained. Such was the shared secret of the two pretenders to the ‘honor of the execution.’ The two men concealed the fact that two bodies were lacking. But because he was missing two bodies Yurovsky could not make use of the camera—after all, he must have dreamed of taking a picture of the ‘liquidation’!”
“A picture?!”
“Why not? He was a photographer. How could he not want to record this supreme historic moment? It was the moment he had lived for, you might say. Especially since he had lying in the commandant’s room the confiscated camera belonging to Alexandra Feodorovna! The executed tsar’s family photographed with the tsaritsa’s camera. [Was that really the end of the photo-execution?]”
“Why do you keep talking about two?”
“Read carefully the Yurovsky Note you published. Yurovsky wrote that three of the daughters were wearing ‘diamond corsets.’ But what about the fourth? Why wasn’t the fourth?” He laughed. “There weren’t enough? Or the story with Alexei? After all, they tried to shoot him at two paces. And couldn’t. It’s unlikely even a very nervous Chekist like Nikulin could fail to hit him at two paces. That meant Alexei was wearing a ‘diamond shield’—and it saved him. He was ‘armored’ as well. That was the reason for his ‘strange vitality.’ Yurovsky didn’t write anything about this, though. Why? Because Alexei was not undressed! If they had undressed him, they would probably have found Rasputin’s amulet on him, too! The tsaritsa could not have left her son without an amulet of his savior. But Yurovsky wrote only about amulets on the tsar’s daughters. That means they didn’t undress him for sure. Why? Maybe they feared God? Funny, eh? Then why?
“Here’s your answer—it’s at the end of Yurovsky’s Note. They only burned two of them: Alexei and someone of the female sex. Why two? Why not burn the rest? Or: if they didn’t burn the rest, then why did they burn the two? Why didn’t they burn Nicholas? After all, wasn’t he much more important?” He laughed. “This is why: they were missing two corpses: a boy and a young woman. They were also missing the diamonds on them. That’s why Yurovsky thought of writing that they’d burned two of them—the boy and a female. So, who was that female? Demidova, as Yurovsky writes? Couldn’t they have gotten them mixed up in the insanity of that night? Perhaps that rescued woman was not Demidova, and the stars that the woman who later called herself Anastasia saw when she woke up in the cart were the stars of that impossible night.
Anastasia? In any event, after Anastasia’s appearance in Berlin, Ermakov’s friend and drinking companion, the Chekist Grigory Sukhorukov, who also participated in the burial, compiled some extremely noteworthy affidavits, which are now kept in the local Party archive. The affidavits repeat the version about burning two bodies, but these actually specify a new female name: Alexei and … Anastasia! Not Demidova, as Yurovsky asserted, but Anastasia. Realizing that some explanation would have to be provided for why they burned only those two, Sukhorukov invented a very clumsy explanation: “So no one would guess from the number of remaining corpses that this was the tsar’s family”!
Two may have been saved, then. And Lyukhanov, of course, saw two of them being taken off the truck. And he hung back, bickering with the watchwoman, so there would be time to remove them. After all, he had a younger son named Alexei, too. The son said that Lyukhanov liked to say: ‘God can do anything.’ Evidently, though, he later told his wife everything. He kept silent for a long time, but he couldn’t hold back—he told her. Commandant Avdeyev’s sister could not understand him, though! She was a person of ideas. Like Yurovsky, like all of them. The most she could do was not inform on the father of her four children. But live with him—that she couldn’t do. So he lost his ideological Avgusta. However, the suffering in her dying hour evidently pried something half-open for her. And she forgave him.”
We were silent for a while.
I said: “But in the White Guard investigation, someone told a story from one of Ermakov’s men that he saw Alexei’s body at the mine.”
“Exactly: someone told a story from someone else….”
“By the way, Yurovsky was alarmed too; evidently the rumors about Anastasia moved him to take action as well. In 1920, when this mysterious, ‘miraculously saved’ woman appeared in Berlin, he gave the historian Pokrovsky his Note, the idea behind which was ‘They all died.’”
“Can it really be that despite all your clearly major opportunities, you never attempted to open the grave? After all, you knew where it was, didn’t you?”
He chuckled, then said, “Whether I tried to or not—it’s a horrible place, believe me. How that grave draws you all! In 1928 Mayakovsky came to Sverdlovsk and immediately wanted to see the grave of the tsar and his family. The chairman of the Ural Soviet at the time was a certain Paramonov. Later, of course, he was repressed, but—a rare case—not executed. After his rehabilitation Paramonov came back alive. He used to tell me how they took Mayakovsky to the place ‘where the family’s bodies were burned’—which was how Paramonov referred to the ‘grave.’ This was his favorite story—how he searched at the ‘burning place’ for ‘notches left in a birch.’ That day, when he took Mayakovsky, there was a hard frost and the trees were hoary, and he searched for a long time but didn’t find any notch.
As for the notches in the birches and Paramonov, all of it was confirmed later in a letter I received.
From a letter of literary scholar Kirill Sherstok in Frunze:
“When I was working on my thesis about Mayakovsky, Paramonov told me how Mayakovsky visited him twice and how they went to the last Russian emperor’s final refuge.… Paramonov said that in the poem ‘The Emperor’—about the tsar’s grave—Mayakovsky made a mistake, asserting that the emperor had been buried ‘under a cedar.’ He was buried between three birches. I asked, ‘And where is this place?’ He answered that there were two men left who knew it: he, Paramonov, and one more man, whom he did not name. I recalled Paramonov saying, ‘No one must know this,’ and adding, ‘so that there are no pilgrimages.’”
As he was leaving, my guest said: “This whole story is like a polemic with Dostoevsky. Starting with the question to Alyosha Karamazov: ‘If to erect the edifice of a happy mankind it were necessary to torture just one small child, would you agree to base this edifice on his tear?’ One Alyosha was asked this question and with the help of another slain Alyosha [Alexei] they answered.” He fell silent. “One thing, though, is clear: he will come back to us.”
I asked him to repeat that.
“I mean the sovereign emperor. It’s a banal story, though. Killing the family, those idiots preempted his return. ‘In my end is my beginning’—those words were once embroidered by his relative Mary Stuart. By the way, after this relative had her head cut off and her headless body was taken away, her wide dress rustled, and a tiny little dog jumped from it, howling. It was exactly that kind of little dog—the same breed—that a few centuries later turned up hidden—also during a murder—in the sleeve of Mary Stuart’s descendant—a grand duchess. Everything comes back, everything.”
“In my end is my beginning.” A sacrifice. Did the last emperor really understand that?
——
Of course, I tried to believe my guest’s story. In Perm I was able to find Sergei Lyukhanov’s aged son—that same Alexei, the heir’s namesake.
In the cramped, pitiful little room where the driver of the terrible truck had lived and died I wrote down from Alexei’s words his father’s biography:
“My father, Sergei Ivanovich Lyukhanov, was born in 1875, in Chelyabinsk District, in a peasant family. A fourth-grade education. Beginning in 1894 worked in the Stepanov brothers’ mill. In 1900 moved to Chelyabinsk, where he worked until 1916 for the Pokrovsky Brothers Company running an electric telephone station. He worked too as the Pokrovskys’ personal driver and would go to Petersburg with them. In 1899 he married Avgusta Dmitrievna Avdeyeva (she was four years younger than he, had finished grammar school, and worked as a teacher).
“In 1900 their oldest son Valentin was born, who served with his father in the Ipatiev house guard. Then came Vladimir, myself (in 1910), and a daughter Antonina. In 1907 he joined the Bolshevik Party. In the summer of 1916 he got a job in the Zlokazov brothers’ factory as a machinist. Later Avgusta’s brother, Alexander Avdeyev, the future commandant of the Ipatiev house, came there from Chelyabinsk. Lyukhanov set him up at the factory as machinist’s assistant and did all his work, since Avdeyev didn’t know how to do anything.
“My father never reminisced or talked about the Ekaterinburg period of his life.
“After the surrender of Ekaterinburg in 1918, the Lyukhanovs went to Osa in Perm District, where my father got a job at a lumber mill.
“Soon after that he and my mother separated over something. In 1921 she returned to Ekaterinburg with all the children and worked there as the director of children’s homes. On March 23, 1924, she died of typhus. Dying, she asked Serzh (as she called father) to be told that she had been wrong. Her oldest son did not carry out her request and only shortly before his death did my father learn from me about my mother’s last words. What I said greatly agitated him, and he was very upset not to find about it until the end of his life.
“Avgusta Dmitrievna is buried in Sverdlovsk in the Mikhailov Cemetery. After her death I was given up to a children’s home, and my uncle—Avdeyev—took my sister Antonina to Moscow. From 1918 to 1926 my father worked in Osa, where he was in charge of an electric station. In 1923 he married a second time to a German, a German language teacher, Galina Karlovna (who died in 1928). Between 1926 and 1939 my father moved many times—he had jobs in various towns in the Urals—but wherever he worked he was a mechanic. Finally, in 1939, he reached Perm. After the war and up until 1952 he worked as a lathe operator in an infectious hospital there. He worked hard and long and was always fixing all sorts of household utensils for the hospital workers. (He never took more than a ruble for his work.) He worked until he was eighty, and he never suspected he was entitled to a pension. He was very taciturn, he spoke rarely. Beginning in 1944 he lived with me and my second wife in our room at 30 Twenty-fifth of October Street. He died in 1954 and is buried in an old cemetery in Perm.”
All this was nearly a word-for-word repetition of what my guest had already told me. When I asked about my guest, Lyukhanov’s son replied vaguely: “I think someone did come and meet with Father.… I think he was here again after my father died, too.” That was all eighty-year-old Alexei could tell me. In parting, Alexei Lyukhanov gave me all his father’s remaining documents. Among them was a “Certificate” issued to Sergei Lyukhanov by the Pokrovsky Brothers Company in 1899, decorated with a tsarist medal and a profile of the man whose body he drove in his truck. And a photograph. One of the last. In which the former truck driver is a pathetic little old man.
I never saw my guest again, but I often think of him. And about what he told me. It was all too entertaining. As a rule, the truth is very boring.
Although … although at times I think my guest knew a lot more than he told me. And then I recall Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet).
In any event, I thought of my strange guest again when I received this letter from a psychiatrist, Dr. D. Kaufman of Petrozavodsk:
“This will be about a man who for a time was in treatment in a psychiatric hospital in Petrozavodsk, where I worked on staff from September 1946 to October 1949, after graduating from the Second Leningrad Medical Institute, now a medical hygiene institute.
“… Our patient load consisted of both civilians and prisoners, whom we were sent during those years for treatment or for legal-psychiatric examination.
“… In 1947 or 1948 in the wintertime another prisoner came to us as a patient. He was suffering from severe psychosis of the type called hysterical psychogenic reaction. His mind was not clear, he was disoriented, he did not understand where he was.… He waved his arms about and tried to run away.… Amid incoherent utterances in a mass of other expressive exclamations the name ‘Beloborodov’ flashed by two or three times. At first we paid no attention to it, since it didn’t mean anything to us. From his accompanying documents … we found out he had been in the camps for a long time and that his psychosis had developed suddenly, when he had attempted to defend a woman (prisoner) from being beaten by a guard. He was tied up and, naturally, ‘worked over.’ Although as far as I recall no visible bodily injuries were noted when he entered the hospital. His documents indicated his date of birth as 1904; as for his first and last names, I can’t remember them exactly. The variations I recall are the following: Semyon Grigorievich Filippov, or Filipp Grigorievich Semyonov. After one to three days, as usually happens in these cases, the manifestation of severe psychosis had disappeared completely. The patient became calm, in full contact. Clear awareness and proper behavior were maintained from then on for his entire stay at the hospital. His appearance, as far as I can say, was like this: a rather tall man, somewhat stout, sloping shoulders, slightly round-shouldered, and so on. A long, pale face, blue or gray, slightly bulging eyes, a high forehead receding into a balding head, the remaining hair chestnut with gray….”
(After this she talked about how the patient was sincere with her.)
“… So, it became known to us that he was the heir to the crown, that during the hasty execution in Ekaterinburg his father had hugged and pressed his face to him so that he wouldn’t see the rifle barrels aimed at him. In my opinion, he had not even realized that something terrible was going on since the commands to fire were uttered unexpectedly, and he didn’t hear the sentence read. All he remembered was the name Beloborodov.… Shots rang out, he was wounded in the buttocks, he lost consciousness, and he collapsed on a common heap of bodies. When he woke up, he found he had been saved, someone had dragged him out of the cellar, carried him out, and ministered to him for a long time.”
Then followed the story of his further life and the stupidities that led him to the camp. But the most interesting part came at the end of this long letter.
“Gradually we began to look at him with other eyes. The persistent hematuria he suffered from found an explanation. The heir had had hemophilia. On the patient’s buttocks was an old cross-shaped scar.… Finally we realized who the patient’s appearance reminded us of—the famous portraits of Nicholas, not only Nicholas I but Nicholas II … Dressed in a quilted jacket and striped pajama trousers over felt boots instead of a hussar’s uniform.
“… At that time consultants used to come to us from Leningrad for two or three months at a time.… Professor S. I. Gendelevich was consulting with us then. The best psychiatric practitioner I ever met. Naturally, we showed him our patient.… For two or three hours he ‘pursued’ him with questions we could not have asked, since we were not conversant, but it turned out he was. So, for example, the consultant knew the layout and use of every room in the Winter Palace and the country residences in the early part of the century. He knew the names and titles of all the members of the tsar’s family and the branched network of the dynasty, all the court positions,… and so on. The consultant also knew the accepted protocol for all the court ceremonies and rituals as well as the dates of the various name days in the tsar’s family and other ceremonies marked in the Romanov family circle. To all these questions the patient responded utterly accurately and without the slightest thought. For him it was as elementary as a primer.… From a few answers it was clear that he possessed wider knowledge in this sphere.… His behavior was as always: calm and dignified. Then the consultant asked the women to leave and he examined the patient below the waist, in front and in back. When we walked in (the patient had been dismissed) the consultant was blatantly dismayed. It turned out that the patient had a cryptorchidism (one testicle had not descended), which the consultant knew had been noted in the dead heir Alexei. We had not known that….
“… The consultant explained the situation to us: there was a dilemma and we needed to make a joint decision—either put a diagnosis of ‘paranoia’ in a stage of good remission with the possibility of employing the patient in his former occupations at his place of confinement, or consider the case unresolved and in need of additional observation in the hospital. In that case, however, we would be obliged to motivate our decision carefully for the organs of procuratorial oversight, which would inevitably send a special investigator from Moscow.… Having weighed these possibilities, we considered it to the patient’s good to give him a definite diagnosis of paranoia, of which we were not entirely certain, and return him to camp.… The patient agreed with our decision about returning to camp (naturally he was not told his diagnosis) and we parted friends.”
Dr. Kaufman’s letter was so eloquent that I wondered whether I wasn’t a victim of mystification. I believed her.
Here is a letter from the deputy chief physician of Psychiatric Hospital Number 1 in the Karelian ASSR, V. E. Kiviniemi, who verified this patient’s medical history, which is kept in the hospital archives:
“In my hands is medical history no. 64 for F. G. Semyonov, born 1904, admitted to psychiatric hospital January 14, 1949. Noted in red pencil ‘prisoner.’ … Released from the hospital April 22, 1949, to ITK [corrective labor camp] No. 1 (there is the signature of the convoy head, Mikheyev).
“Semyonov was admitted to the hospital from the ITK clinic. The doctor’s order … describes the patient’s acute psychotic condition and indicates that Semyonov kept ‘cursing someone named Beloborodov.’ Entered the psychiatric hospital in a weakened physical condition, but without acute signs of psychosis.… From the moment he entered was polite, sociable, behaved with dignity and modesty, neat. A doctor in the medical history notes that in conversation he did not conceal his origins. ‘His manners, tone, and conviction speak to the fact that he was familiar with the life of high society before 1917.’ F. G. Semyonov told how he was tutored at home, that he was the son of the former tsar, that he had been rescued during the time when the family perished, was taken to Leningrad, where he lived for a certain period of time, served in the Red Army as a cavalryman, studied at an economics institute (evidently in Baku), after graduating worked as an economist in Central Asia, was married, his wife’s name was Asya, and then said that Beloborodov knew his secret and was blackmailing him.… In February 1949 was examined by a psychiatrist from Leningrad, Gendelevich, to whom Semyonov declared that he had nothing to gain from appropriating someone else’s name, that he was not expecting any privileges, since he understood that various anti-Soviet elements might gather around his name and so as not to cause any trouble he was always prepared to leave this life. In April 1949 Semyonov underwent a forensic psychiatric examination and was declared emotionally ill and in need of placement in an Internal Affairs Ministry psychiatric hospital. This last must be regarded as a humanitarian act toward Semyonov for that time, since there is a difference between a camp and a hospital. Semyonov himself regarded it positively.”
Appended to this missive was the strange patient’s letter to his wife Asya.
——
A short while later I received a call from an old man, a former prisoner, who turned out to have been in the camps with the mysterious Semyonov—all the prisoners called him “the tsar’s son,” and they all believed it absolutely.
At my request, the Central State Archive of the October Revolution made a copy of several pages of Alexei’s 1916 diary kept there. I took it, along with the letter the strange patient sent his wife Asya from the hospital in 1949, to the Institute of Criminology. They tried to help, but … but the documents proved incomparable. The letter to Asya, written in an elegant, refined hand. And the diary of thirteen-year-old Alexei, with his uneven scribbles. They were unable to say yes or no.