Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (32 page)

Ermakov had seen the Tsar the day he had arrived at Ekaterinburg station: ‘there wasn’t a thing royal about him’, he said; he could have
taken him and wrung his neck then and there. The Tsaritsa, in his opinion, had looked like a ‘sharp-tongued German housewife’ who immediately, even at the Ipatiev House, had tried to run everything. ‘But we soon fixed
her
’, Ermakov later recalled with glee. He had relished the thought of the haughty former empress made to eat rations like everybody else. She had been the only one to kick up a fuss about their imprisonment. The Tsar, he said, kept quiet and smoked cigarettes all day.

The weather had started grey that morning, later turning to torrential rain, making a quagmire of the country roads around Ekaterinburg as the two men rode back to the Ipatiev House. Inside, the Romanovs had gone about their usual routine, Alexandra being read to by one or other of the girls when the others went outside, despite the rain. But there had at least been the diversion at 10.30 that morning of the unexpected arrival of four local women, sent by the Union of Professional Housemaids, to wash the floors at the Ipatiev House. It was all part and parcel of the subtle game Yurovsky was now playing with his victims, an obvious psychological ploy designed to create a sense of normality, of routine continuing uninterrupted (it wasn’t the first time women had come to wash the floors), so that the doomed family should not think things were in any way different.

Mariya Starodumova, Evdokiya Semenova, Varvara Dryagina and the other, unnamed woman would be the last Ekaterinburg civilians to see the family alive. Early that morning they had washed the floors over at the Popov House where the external guard was billeted, noting that it was dirty and untidy, with sunflower seed shells strewn all over the floors. It was hard work, Evdokiya Semenova later related; the guards had ‘turned their quarters into a stable with their muddy boots’ and the women had had to ‘scrape and scrub’ to get it clean. The commander of the guard, Pavel Medvedev, had then escorted them over to the Ipatiev House. They noticed that some of the guards were foreigners – not Russians; they had to wash the floors in the basement of the house first where these men had their beds, but there were some women in the rooms with them, so they didn’t do all of them.

When the cleaning women were taken up to the first floor, the Imperial Family had all been sitting in the dining room ‘as though they were having a meeting’ – in fact playing one of their endless games of bezique at the table, the Tsarevich sitting in the wheelchair. The family had all greeted them with smiles, the women responding with silent deep bows. They could only nod and smile, having been forbidden, like the priests the day before, to speak to the family. Yurovsky – that ‘weasel’ of a man, as Semenova called him – had paced up and down by the open
door, watching all the time. The Grand Duchesses, she and Starodumova both remembered, had all seemed very bright and cheerful and had helped the women move the beds in their room in order to get at the floors. Evdokiya Semenova, known by her pet name of ‘Avdotyushka’ to her friend Starodumova, had been very excited by this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of seeing the Imperial Family close to. A simple peasant woman with an honest heart, already sick with TB (she died not long after), she had been one of many local people still devoted to the Tsar who had sent in cakes and gifts for the Imperial Family at Easter, fearing however that the guards would keep them for themselves. She had long nursed her own naïve, romantic dreams about the family and especially the Tsar’s four beautiful daughters: one would marry the King of England, another the King of France, a third the King of Germany. Like most of the ordinary Russian population she had been beguiled by those romantic publicity images of girls in white dresses. But here in the Ipatiev House, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia did not look like princesses from fairy stories as she had imagined them; they were dressed in simple black skirts and white silk blouses – the same few clothes now left to them that they had worn the previous day. Nevertheless, Semenova had been struck by their happiness, their eyes bright, their short hair ‘tumbled and disorderly’, their cheeks ‘rosy like apples’. In the girls’ bedroom the women ventured to exchange a few comments with the Romanov daughters in low voices. When Yurovsky momentarily left the room, the irrepressible Anastasia, true to form, stuck out her tongue and cocked a snook at his back. It was a most precious experience for Semenova; every look the girls gave them was ‘a gift’, as she later remarked. Despite all the humiliation they were now enduring, the Grand Duchesses had seemed so vivacious, so natural. They ‘breathed a love of life’ and had even got down on their knees to help the women scrub the floor of their room. They had in truth welcomed this brief opportunity for physical exertion, so they whispered to them, adding that their father was ‘suffering the most’ for lack of it. ‘We used to enjoy work of the hardest kind with the greatest of pleasure’, they told the women. They had loved sawing wood with their father at Tobolsk and piling up the logs – ‘Washing up dishes is not enough for us.’ But although Olga was now thin and sick, Maria was still capable of hard work and was as strong as a man, they claimed. In an atmosphere of light-heartedness and camaraderie, the four girls took great pleasure in sharing a few covert jokes with these ordinary women from the outside world.

Before completing their task, Semenova managed to whisper to one of the eldest girls, ‘Please God you will not have to suffer under the yoke of these monsters for much longer.’ ‘Thank you my dear for your kind
words’, the Grand Duchess had responded. ‘We also hold out great hope . . .’ Their faith gave them hope even now, but the strain of constantly lifting each other’s flagging morale as well as that of their brother and parents was clearly taking its toll. That morning, in the face of so much desperate uncertainty, the four Grand Duchesses had demonstrated the simple good nature and profound loyalty towards each other that was their great abiding virtue and one inculcated by their parents. It had enabled them to contain their own deep fears and make of a mundane event a moment’s diversion – even joy.

Semenova was, however, bitterly disappointed when she saw the Tsar and Tsaritsa: ‘all my dreams evaporated in an instant’, she remarked. She had grown up with an entirely rosy view of the Imperial couple, picturing them in her mind in vestments of gold, with music playing in the background and coloured drapes fluttering in the breeze, as flower petals floated down on them from above and great church bells chimed. The Tsar had been ‘a figure of divinity’ for her, a giant among men; the Tsaritsa too she imagined as a rosy-faced Russian beauty with a voice ‘like a flute from paradise’. Now suddenly, Evdokiya Semenova discovered that her former monarchs had feet of clay. The Tsar was not the Godlike being she had imagined: what she saw that morning was ‘a small and drab man, much smaller than his wife, and much simpler [in manner] than she’. He behaved like a man of the people; he was just like them and far from being a paragon of physical perfection, his hair was thinning – he had a large bald patch – and his legs were too short for his body. Alexandra, for all her paleness and physical frailty, was however still very much the proud Tsaritsa, but her eyes told Semenova how much she was suffering. As the women had moved from room to room to wash the floors, Nicholas had gently lifted and carried Alexey from bed to wheelchair to bed again. The sight of the frail and sickly Tsarevich had given Semenova profound pause for thought: here before her was the boy whom the Romanov publicity machine had led her to believe was the hope of Russia, a ‘strong and flourishing cherub’ as she put it, but instead what she saw was a thin, delicate child with great dark circles under his eyes, his face waxen. And even though he frequently smiled, his eyes seemed full of sadness.

Starodumova and Semenova both remembered quite clearly that at one point Yurovsky had sat down next to the Tsarevich and enquired of his health, asking the opinion too of Dr Botkin. It had seemed a most solicitous gesture to them, as it might have done to any other observer. It was of course all part of the softening-up process, but coming from a man who had trained as a medical orderly, in the knowledge of what was to come it seems particularly cruel. Did Yurovsky take pleasure or power,
one wonders, from such an act – knowing that he alone was in control of the sick boy’s last hours on earth? Ignorant of this fact, Semenova went away an hour and a half later convinced of one thing: the boy, in comparison to his vibrant sisters, ‘was no longer of this world’. The experience had greatly moved her; she left with a love for the Imperial Family so profound, she said, that it would not leave her till the day she died. They were not the divine beings she had always supposed them to be; ‘they were not gods, they were actually ordinary people like us, simple mortals’.

The women who came to the Ipatiev House that morning were never paid for their work; four days later, when they went to see Medvedev at the Popov House to collect their money, there was no one there except a few Red Army guards who were packing up to go to the Front. Then a very drunk Medvedev drove up in a troika. There was nobody at the Ipatiev House, they were told, the house was shut up. They had all ‘gone to Perm’.

TUESDAY 16 JULY 1918

I
t was another quiet, uneventful day, the Romanov family’s seventy-eighth day in the Ipatiev House. ‘Baby’ had a slight cold and was still weak but went out with the others in the garden in the morning. And after a week of no supplies from the nuns, there came a wonderful gift of eggs for Alexey – the boy’s last supper, had he known it. The remainder of Yurovsky’s requisition of 50 would be gorged later by the family’s murderers out in the forest, leaving the scattered eggshells as proof to later investigators.

At around nine, while the family sat taking the same dreary tea and black bread for breakfast that every other Soviet citizen was reduced to, Beloborodov arrived at the Ipatiev House in an official car belonging to the Ekaterinburg Cheka. Soon afterwards he left with Yurovsky to attend yet another meeting of the Central Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet, followed by consultations with the Cheka at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. Yurovsky was now getting very nervous, and seemed even more so when he returned at eleven, when he went through the daily ritual of checking that the box containing the Romanovs’ valuables had not been tampered with. Soon afterwards, in the privacy of his office next door, he informed his assistant Nikulin that the ‘liquidation’ was to take place tonight. There could be no more delays and it was paramount that they ensure that the family did not suspect anything in advance.

But had they made the right decision about how to kill them all? The simple fact was that Yurovsky, despite being utterly ruthless about fulfilling his task, had no idea how best to kill 11 people, nor had he come to grips with the logistics of disposing efficiently with that many bodies. Executing the Tsar was one thing, but to kill the whole family and their servants and manage, as instructed, to keep quiet about the fact was quite another. And then there was the added pressure of ensuring that no remains would later be found by monarchists who would exploit
the ignorance of the devout among the peasantry by using them as a ‘sacred miraculous relic’ to rally anti-Bolshevik support.

The preferred killing method of the Cheka was to take victims out into the forest and shoot them in the back of the head; Petr Voikov suggested that they do this in the forest beyond the Verkh-Isetsk plant and then weight the bodies with lumps of metal and drop them in Iset Pond. This method might work for single victims at a time, but trying to perform an efficient execution of 11 terrified people and then, as Yurovsky was forced to take into account, prevent those involved from raping the girls or searching the bodies for jewels, might provoke mayhem. Besides, there was always the chance of local peasants stumbling on the scene – even out at that remote spot. No, the execution had to be
in situ
, in the house. Yurovsky’s associates had suggested killing the family at night in their sleep – either by shooting or stabbing them. Someone even suggested putting them together in one room and throwing hand grenades in on them. But that could prove noisy and messy, and they might easily lose control of the situation. The only viable way was to get the family into a closely confined space from which they could not escape and where the noise levels from guns could be minimised. The basement rooms of the Ipatiev House were the only option. These were currently in use by the internal guards, and whichever room was selected would have to be cleared of its furniture. Yurovsky settled on one of the two rooms located furthest into the hillside into which the house had been built. It was presently occupied by the Ipatiev House machine-gun squad, led by Mikhail Kabanov, who were moved along with their beds into another room.

With the city being evacuated from the main rail station only half a mile away at the top of Voznesensky Prospekt, there was a lot of traffic passing back and forth in front of the house. The liquidation would have to be carried out late, after the traffic had died down. The hillside room would muffle the noise despite having a large arched window, which was barred and faced on to Voznesensky Lane; the double palisade would absorb some noise too. Out on the street the window and its light would not be visible. The room chosen was 25 by 21 feet, with a vaulted ceiling, large enough for 11 prisoners, Yurovsky thought; its stone walls were covered in plaster, with striped wallpaper on top of that, and should be a good buffer for any stray bullets. As too would be the wooden skirting boards. The plain wooden floor would be easy to wash clean after the event. One set of double doors opened into the room; the men would take aim at their victims from the doorway; another set of doors at the room’s opposite end led into a storeroom beyond stacked full of excess furniture, but was firmly locked. In another nearby room a guard was
always on duty at a Colt machine gun. There was no way out but straight into the line of fire.