Given the Bolshevik government’s more pressing other problems, it is not surprising that it failed to allot great priority to what to do with the Romanovs. The conditions of their detention grew stricter, and Nicholas must have heard that it was intended to give him a show trial in Moscow. Petty restrictions increased: he was forbidden to wear epaulettes on his uniform and the princesses were the constant target of insults from the guards. On 1 March 1918, the whole family was placed on military rations, excluding butter and coffee, and were deprived of most of their household servants. In April 1918 the government in Moscow moved Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughter Princess Maria westwards back to Ekaterinburg, but Alexei was too ill to travel with them and remained in Tobolsk with the other three princesses until May, when the family was reunited in a villa at Ekaterinburg belonging to an industrialist named Ipatyev, which had been requisitioned that April by the Ural Soviet and designated with deliberate ambiguity ‘Dom osobovo naznacheniya’ – the house of a special purpose. The building was fortified with several machine-gun posts and surrounded by a palisade to prevent anyone outside seeing what was happening in the house or garden, or even who was there. Armed sentries patrolled both inside and outside the fence.
It was perversely the success of the anti-Bolshevik Czech Legion advancing westwards along the Trans-Siberian to capture Ekaterinburg for its armaments factories and as an important rail junction that terminated this situation. In June 1918 the Czech force was reported to be only 30 miles away with every likelihood of reaching the town in the near future. So far as is known, its mission was not to rescue the royal family, but to secure that stretch of the Trans-Siberian and exploit the arms factories and the mineral deposits of the Urals. So unstable was the military situation generally in the region that the Ural Soviet’s commissar Yakov M. Yurovsky, who was in command of the prison house, decided on 29 June 1918 to send a representative to Moscow for instructions what to do with the royal family. By then, after moving the Romanovs several times during their house arrest of sixteen months, any original idea there may have been of letting the Western Allies ransom them, for money or in some kind of prisoner exchange, had palled.
When the matter was discussed by the Central Committee in Moscow there were just seven members present, three of them being Lenin, Dzherzhinsky and Sverdlov. Alarmed at the news of the Czechs’ approach, they ordered Yurovsky to organise and arm a dozen comrades to help kill the Tsar and his family after arrangements had been made for the disposal of the bodies, so that the Romanovs’ remains could not become objects of veneration for any revanchist group. Their remaining servants were also to be killed, so that no witnesses were left.
On 12 July Yurovsky’s representative reported back to Ekaterinburg. It is not necessary to reconstruct what must have happened at the Ipatyev villa because, to clear his name against accusations of personal benefit in stealing any of the royal family’s valuables, in 1934 Yurovsky wrote a full account of his actions, taking the trouble to point out anything of which he was not certain. The report makes clear what a messy and disorganised way this was, in which to kill a dozen very important hostages:
At about 11 o’clock at night on 16 July I assembled the men again, handed out the revolvers and announced that soon we had to begin liquidating the prisoners. I told Pavel Medvedev he had to check the guard outside and inside [the villa Ipatyev] thoroughly. He and the guard commander had to keep constant watch over the area around the house and in the house and to maintain communications with me. I also told him that at the last moment, when everything was ready for the execution, he had tell the guards and the others in the detachment not to worry about any shots they might hear from the house, and not to leave the premises. If there were any unusual amount of unrest [in the town], he was to notify me through the established line of communication.
The truck [which should have arrived at 11 p.m.] did not arrive until half past one. The extra wait caused some anxiety. Only when the truck had arrived – or after telephone calls that it was on the way – did I go up to waken the prisoners. [The Tsar’s doctor] Botkin slept in the room nearest to the [stairs]. He came out and asked me what the matter was. I told him to wake everybody, because there was unrest in the town and it was dangerous for them to remain on the top floor of the villa. I said I would move them to another place. Gathering everybody consumed a lot of time, about 40 minutes. When the family had dressed, I led them [and Dr Botkin, Alouzy Tropp, the Tsar’s valet, and Ivan Kharitonov, the cook] to the room in the basement that had been designated earlier. It must be said here that when Comrade Nikulin and I thought up our plan, we did not consider beforehand that (1) the windows would let out noise; (2) the victims would be standing next to a brick wall [with the risk of ricochets]; and finally, (3) it was impossible to foresee that the shooting would occur in an uncoordinated way. That should not have happened. Each man had one person to shoot and so everything should have been all right. The causes of the disorganized firing became clear later. Although I told [the victims] through Botkin that they did not have to bring anything with them they collected various small things – pillows, bags and so on and, I think, a small dog.
I ordered them to stand along the wall. Obviously, at that moment they did not imagine what awaited them. Alexandra Feodorovna [the Tsarina] said ‘There are not even chairs here.’ Nicholas was carrying [Crown Prince] Alexei. He stood in the room with him in his arms. Then I ordered a couple of chairs to be brought. On one of them, to the right of the entrance, almost in the corner, Alexandra Feodorovna [the Tsarina] sat down. The daughters and [Anna S.] Demidova [the Tsarina’s personal maid] stood next to her, to the left of the entrance. Beside them Alexei was seated in the armchair. Behind him Dr. Botkin, the cook and the others stood. Nicholas stood opposite Alexei. At the same time I ordered the men to go down and to be ready in their places when the command was given. Nicholas had put Alexei on the chair and stood in such a way, that he shielded him. Alexei sat in the left corner from the entrance, and so far as I can remember, I said to Nicholas approximately this, [that] his royal and close relatives inside the country and abroad were trying to save him, but the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies had decided to shoot them. He asked ‘What?’ and turned toward Alexei. At that moment I shot him and killed him outright. He did not get time to face us to get an answer. At that moment disorganized, not orderly, firing began. The room was small, but everybody could come in and carry out the shooting according to the set order. But many shot through the doorway. Bullets began to ricochet because the wall was brick. Moreover, the firing intensified when the victims’ shouts rang out. I managed to stop the firing but with great difficulty.
A bullet, fired by somebody in the back, hummed near my head and grazed either the palm or finger – I do not remember which – of somebody. When the firing stopped, it turned out that the daughters, [the Tsarina] Alexandra Feodorovna and, it seems, Demidova and Alexei too, were alive. I think they had fallen from fear or maybe intentionally, and so they were alive. Then we proceeded to finish the shooting. Previously I had suggested shooting at the heart to avoid a lot of blood. Alexei remained sitting petrified. I killed him. They shot the daughters but did not kill them. Then Yermakov resorted to a bayonet, but that did not work either. Finally they killed them by shooting them in the head. Only in the forest did I finally discover the reason why it had been so hard to kill the daughters and Alexandra Feodorovna.
After the shooting it was necessary to carry away the corpses, but it was a comparatively long way [to the truck]. How could we do it? Somebody came up with an idea: stretchers. We did not think about it earlier. We took shafts from the sledges and, I think, put sheets on them. Having confirmed they were dead, we began to carry them out, when it was discovered that traces of blood would be everywhere. I said to get some smooth woollen military cloth immediately and put some of it onto the stretchers and then line the truck with it. I directed Mikhail Medvedev to take the corpses. He was a Cheka man then and currently works in the GPU. He and Pyotr Zakharovich Yermakov had to take the bodies away. When they had removed the first corpse, somebody – I do not remember exactly who – said that someone had taken some valuables. Then I understood that evidently there had been valuables in the things that [the Romanovs] had brought with them. I stopped the removal immediately, assembled the men and demanded the valuables be returned. After some denial, two men returned the valuables they had taken.
After I threatened the looters with shooting, I got rid of those two and ordered Comrade Nikulin – as far as I remember – to escort the bodies, having warned him about valuables. I first collected everything – the things they had taken and other things as well – and I sent all of it to the commandant’s office. Comrade Filipp Goloshchyokin, apparently sparing me [because] my health was not very good, told me not to go to the ‘funeral’ but I worried very much about disposing of the corpses properly. So I decided to go personally, and it turned out I did the right thing. Otherwise, all the corpses would have wound up in the hands of the White Guards [or the Czechs]. It is easy to imagine how they would have exploited the situation.
After instructions were given to wash and clean everything, at about three o’clock or even a little later, we left. I took several men from the indoor guards [at the villa]. I did not know where the corpses were supposed to be buried. As I have said, Filipp Goloshchyokin had assigned that to Comrade Yermakov. Yermakov drove us somewhere at the Verkh-Isetsky Works. I was never at that place and did not know it. At about two-three versts, or maybe more [say, a couple of miles] from the Verkh-Isetsky Works, a whole escort of people on horseback or in carriages met us. I asked Yermakov who these people were, why they were there. He answered that he had assembled those people. I still do not know why there were so many. I heard only shouts ‘We thought they would come here alive, but it turns out they are dead.’ Also, it seems about three-four versts farther our truck got stuck between two trees. There where we stopped, several of Yermakov’s people were stretching out girls’ blouses. We discovered again that there were valuables and they were taking them. I ordered that men be posted to keep anyone from coming near the truck.
The truck was stuck and could not move. I asked Yermakov, ‘Is it still far to the chosen place?’ He said ‘Not far, beyond the railroad embankment.’ And there behind the trees was a marsh. Bogs were everywhere. I wondered ‘Why had he herded in so many people and horses? If only there had been carts instead of carriages.’ But there was nothing we could do. We had to unload to lighten the truck, but that did not help. Then I ordered them to load the carriages, because it was already light and we did not have time to wait any longer. Only at daybreak did we come to the famous gully. Several steps from the mine where the burial had been planned, peasants were sitting around the fire, apparently having spent the night at the hayfield. On the way we met several people. It became impossible to carry on our work in sight of them. It must be said, the situation had become difficult. Everything might come to nothing. At that moment I still did not know that the mine would not meet our needs at all. And those damned valuables!
Just then I did not know that there was so much of them or that the people Yermakov had recruited were unsuitable for the project. Yes, it was too much! I had to disperse the people. I found out we had gone about 15-16 versts [about 10 miles] from the city and had driven to the village of Koptyaki, two or three versts from there. We had to cordon the place off at some distance, and we did it. Besides that, I sent an order to the village to keep everybody out, explaining that the Czech Legion was not far away, that our units had assembled here and that it was dangerous to be here. I ordered the men to send everybody back to the village and to shoot any stubborn, disobedient persons, if that did not work. Another group of men was sent to the town because they were not needed. Having done all of this, I ordered [the men] to load the corpses and to take off the clothes for burning, that is, to destroy absolutely everything they had, to remove any additional incriminating evidence if the corpses were somehow discovered. I ordered bonfires [to be lit].
When we began to undress the bodies, we discovered something on the daughters and on Alexandra Feodorovna. I do not remember exactly what she had on, the same as on the daughters or simply things that had been sewed on. But the daughters had on bodices [into which had been sewn] diamonds and [other] precious stones. Those were not only places for valuables but protective armour at the same time. That is why neither bullets nor bayonets got results. By the way, only they were responsible for their dying agony [because the jewels prevented them being killed by the first shots]. The valuables turned out to weigh about one-half pud [8 or 9 kilos]. Greed was so great that on Alexandra Feodorovna, by the way, there was simply an enormous piece of round gold wire, turned out as a sheer bracelet and weighing about one pound. All the valuables were ripped out immediately, so that it would not be necessary to carry the bloody rags around with us.
Valuables discovered by the White Guards later had undoubtedly been sewn into other clothes, after burning which, they remained in the ashes. Several diamonds were handed over to me the next day by comrades who had found them there. How did they overlook the other valuables? They had enough time for it. Most likely they simply did not figure it out. By the way, one has to suppose that some valuables will be returned to us through Torgsin183 because they were probably picked up by the peasants of the Koptyaki village after our departure. The valuables had been collected, the [clothes and other] things had been burned and the completely naked corpses had been thrown into the mine. From that very moment new problems began. The water [in the shaft] just barely covered the bodies. What should we do? We had the idea of blowing up the mines with bombs to cover them, but nothing came of it. I saw that the funeral had achieved nothing and that it was impossible to leave things that way.
It was necessary to begin all over again. But what should we do? Where should we put the corpses? About at 2 p.m. I decided to go to the town, because it was clear that we had to extract the corpses from the mine and to carry them to another place. Even the blind could discover them. Besides, the place was exposed. People had seen something was going on there. I set up posts, guards in place, and took the valuables and left. I went to the regional executive committee and reported to the authorities how bad things were. Comrade Safarov and somebody else, I do not remember who, listened but said nothing. Then I found Filipp Goloshchyokin and explained to him we had to transfer the corpses to another place. When he agreed I proposed to send people to raise the corpses. At the same time I ordered him to take bread and food because the men were hungry and exhausted, not having slept for about 24 hours. They had to wait for me there. It turned out to be difficult to get to the corpses and lift them out. The men got very exhausted doing it. Apparently they were at it all night because they went there late.
I went to the town executive committee, to Sergei Yergerovich Chutskayev, who was its chairman at the time, to ask for advice. Maybe he knew of a place. He proposed a very deep abandoned mine on the Moscow high road. I got a car, took someone from the regional Cheka with me – Polushin, I think – and someone else and we left. But one and a half versts away from the appointed place the car broke down. The driver was left to repair it, and we continued on foot. We looked over the place and decided it was good. The only problem was to avoid onlookers. Some people lived near the place and we decided to take them away to the town and after the project allow them to come back. That was our decision. We came back to the car but it had to be towed. I decided to wait for a passing car. A while later some people rode up on two horses. I stopped them. The fellows seemed to know me. They were hurrying to the plant. With great reluctance they gave us the horses.
While we rode, another plan took shape: burn the corpses. But nobody knew how to do it. The plan came to me of burying them in groups in different places. The road leading to Koptyaki is clay near that gully. If we buried them there without onlookers, not even the devil would find them. To bury them and to drive over them several times with the string of carts would result in a mishmash and that would be that. So there were three plans. There was nothing to drive, there was no car. I went to the head of the military transportation garage to find out if there were any cars. There was a car, but it was the chief’s. I forgot his surname; it turned out he was a scoundrel and, it seems, he was executed in Perm. Comrade Pavel Petrovich Gorbunov, who is now deputy chairman of the state bank, was the manager of the garage or deputy chairman of military transportation. I do not remember which. I told him I needed a car urgently. He said ‘I know what for.’ He gave me the chairman’s car. I drove to Voikov, head of supply in the Urals, to get petrol or kerosene, sulphuric acid too (to disfigure the faces) and, besides that, spades. I commandeered ten carts without drivers from the prison. Everything was loaded on and we drove off. The truck was sent there. I stayed to wait for Polushin, the main ‘specialist’ in burning, who had disappeared somewhere. I waited for him at Voikov’s. I waited for him in vain until 11 p.m. Then I heard he had ridden off on horseback to come to me but he fell off the horse, hurt his foot, and he could not ride. Since we could not afford to get stuck with the car again, I rode off on horseback about midnight with a comrade – I don’t remember who – to the place the corpses were. But I also had bad luck. The horse hesitated, dropped to its knees and somehow fell on its side and came down on my foot. I lay there an hour or more until I could get on the horse again. We arrived late at night. The work extracting [the corpses] was going on. I decided to bury some corpses on the road. We began to dig a pit. At dawn it was almost ready, but a comrade came to me and said that despite the order not to let anybody come near, a man acquainted with Yermakov had appeared from somewhere and had been allowed to stay at a distance. From there it was possible to see some kind of digging because there were heaps of clay everywhere. Though Yermakov guaranteed that he could not see anything, another comrade began to demonstrate that from where he had stood it was impossible not to see.
So that plan was ruined too. We decided to fill in the pit. Waiting for evening, we piled into the cart. The truck waited for us in a place where it seemed impossible to get stuck. We headed for the Siberian high road. Having crossed the railway line, we transferred two corpses to the truck, but it soon got stuck again. We struggled for about two hours. It was almost midnight. Then I decided that we should do the burying somewhere around there, because at that late hour nobody actually could see us. Only the watchman of the passing track saw several men, because I sent for railway sleepers to cover the place where the corpses would be put. The explanation for needing these was that the sleepers had to be laid for a truck to pass over. I forgot to say that we got stuck twice that evening or, to be precise, that night. It is necessary to say that all our men were so tired. They did not want to dig a new grave.
But as it always happens in such cases, two or three men started working, then the others began. A fire was made and while the graves were being prepared we burned two corpses: Alexei and Demidova. The pit was dug near the fire. The bones were buried, the land was leveled. A big fire was made again and all the traces were covered with ashes. Before putting the other corpses into the pit we poured sulphuric acid over them. The pit was filled up and covered with the railway sleepers. The empty truck drove over the sleepers several times and rolled them flat. At 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, I assembled everybody and stated the importance of the work completed. I warned everybody to forget the things they had seen and never speak about them with anybody. Then we went back to the town. Having lost us, the fellows from the regional Cheka, such as Comrades Isay Rodzinsky, Gorin and somebody else arrived when we had already finished everything.
In the evening of the 19th I went to Moscow with my report.184
On 19 July 1918 Izvestiya announced the death of the Tsar, but reported that the ‘wife and son of Nicholas Romanov’ had been sent to ‘a safe place’. Even in the widespread bloodshed of the civil war, Lenin shied away from admitting the murders of the entire family although, as Trotsky remarked, leaving any of Nicholas’ children alive would have created a pretender to the throne of all the Russias, so it was important that the Romanov line be completely extinguished. Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich had been shot in Perm and, in the week following the massacre in the Villa Ipatyev, seven other members of the Romanov family were executed by firing squads in the Urals region. The killing of the doctor and household servants simply because they were witnesses, would have caused no comments in Russia at the time, after all the deaths in combat or, after arrest, by Cheka firing squads.
There were many conspiracy theories. One was that the villa had been built on the site of a church – which was true – with a secret tunnel linking it with the building used as the British consulate; that a clandestine team of British agents used the tunnel to rescue one of the princesses, injuring her arm in the process. Another was that all the family were rescued in this way and that the Tsar had been recognised much later disguised as a priest or monk, and so on. The most famous ‘survival story’ was of Anna Anderson, whose claim to be the Grand Duchess or Princess Anastasia was supported by several relatives and intimates of the royal family, and who had a comprehensive knowledge of family matters that survived many traps set for her, in which she corrected false information for several decades after first surfacing.185
Less than a week after the murders, the Czech Legion column closed in on Ekaterinburg, which they occupied on 25 July, still believing that some of the Romanovs were alive. The reluctance of the Soviet government to admit to the killings continued until July 1977, when Mikhail A. Suslov, a Politburo member with a record of organising genocidal deportations, ordered that the villa be razed to the ground, to remove any possibility that forensic work might reveal traces of the murders. The work was allegedly supervised by Boris Yeltsin, who was then first secretary of the regional party machine. In 1990 the site was returned to the Orthodox church, which built a new church there, consecrated in 2003.
With Yuritsky’s report being a state secret, like so many other things in the Soviet Union, it was to be more than five decades before the graves of the Romanovs were discovered by amateur archeologists in 1976, in a birch forest six miles north of Ekaerinburg. Two of the bodies, however, were missing until July 2007, when 46-year-old builder and amateur historian Sergei Plotnikov was exploring an overgrown hollow near the excavated graves of the rest of the family. After his metal prod hit something hard under the ground, he and a friend started to dig, unearthing several bones and a fragment of a child’s cranium. They called in a team of archeologists, who continued the excavation of human remains which had been attacked by acid and burned in a fire.
A few weeks later the remains were identified by a forensic pathologist as being from a young teenage boy and a woman in her early twenties. Dr Pogorelov, deputy director of the Sverdlovsk archeological institute, revealed at a press conference that a total of forty-four bone fragments, ranging from a few millimetres to several centimetres, had been recovered, plus seven teeth, three bullets of various calibres, a piece of dress material and other artifacts. In the circumstances, it seemed probable that these were the remains of Prince Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria. A local journalist working for Komsomolskaya Pravda questioned how Plotnikov had succeeded where professional archeologists had dug extensively in 1991. It appeared that they had run out of money and left an 8-metre square plot unexplored – which included the awkward hollow where Mr Plotnikov, made the new find. He, a man of as few words as Vladimir Putin, said simply, ‘We got lucky.’186
Subsequent DNA tests on the remains of the Romanov bodies confirmed the identities by comparison with those of surviving relatives, including the Duke of Edinburgh. Fragments of the Tsar’s neck vertebra and lower jaw were also matched to bloodstains on a shirt he had been wearing when a police bodyguard attacked him with a sabre during a state visit to Japan while he was still Crown Prince in March 1894. The mitochondrial DNA of the adult female remains matched the blood of female descendants of the Tsarina’s grandmother Queen Victoria. Bones belonging to Nicholas, Alexandra and three of the princesses were reburied in July 1998 in the Cathedral within St Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, which had featured in the 1917 revolutions. The burial in a specially dug crypt in a side chapel of the cathedral, in the presence of members of the Romanov family, was ironically also supervised by Boris Yeltsin, at the time the bottom-pinching President of the Russian Federation. The ceremonial ended with a nineteen-gun salute – two short of the traditional imperial salute because Nicholas had abdicated before his murder. After DNA analysis of the remains discovered by Plotnikov confirmed that they came from Alexei and Maria, they were also laid to rest in the crypt.