Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (35 page)

‘Well here we all are,’ said Nicholas, stepping forward to face Yurovsky, thinking that the truck they could hear revving outside had now arrived to take them to safety ‘What are you going to do now?’

His right hand clutching sweatily at the Colt in his trouser pocket, his left holding a piece of paper, Yurovsky asked the family to stand. Alexey, of course, could not and stayed where he was, as the Tsaritsa, muttering her complaints, struggled to her feet. Suddenly the room seemed to shrink in on him as Yurovsky stepped forward, brandishing his sheet of paper. It had been drafted by the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet and given to him by Goloshchekin that day. Here, at last, was the commandant’s personal moment in history. Yurovsky had rehearsed his statement many times and raised his voice in order to be heard more clearly.

‘In view of the fact that your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia,’ he began portentously, gazing straight at Nicholas, ‘the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has sentenced you to be shot . . .’

The Tsar registered blank incomprehension; turning his back to Yurovsky to face his family, he managed an incredulous stutter – ‘What? What?’ – as those around him were rooted to the spot in absolute terror.

‘So you’re not taking us anywhere?’ ventured Botkin, unable also to comprehend what had just been said.

‘I don’t understand. Read it again . . .’ the Tsar interrupted, his face white with horror. Yurovsky picked up where he had left off:

. . . in view of the fact that the Czechoslovaks are threatening the red capital of the Urals – Ekaterinburg – and in view of the fact that
the crowned executioner might escape the people’s court, the presidium of the Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, has decreed that the former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty of countless bloody crimes against the people, should be shot . . .

Instinctively, the Tsaritsa and Olga crossed themselves; a few incoherent words of shock or protest were heard from the rest. Yurovsky, having finished reading the decree, pulled out his Colt, stepped forward and shot the Tsar at point-blank range in the chest. Ermakov, Kudrin and Medvedev, not to be outdone and wanting their moment of personal revenge and glory too, immediately took aim and fired at Nicholas as well, followed by most of the others, propelling an arc of blood and tissue over his terrified son beside him.

For a moment the Tsar’s body quivered on the spot, his eyes fixated and wide, his chest cavities, ripped open by bullets, now frothing with oxygenated blood, his heart speeding up, all in a vain attempt to pump blood round his traumatised body. Then he quietly crumpled to the floor.

But at least Nicholas was spared the sight of seeing what happened to his wife and family. For in that moment, Ermakov had turned and fired his Mauser at the Tsaritsa only six feet away from him as she tried to make the sign of the cross, hitting her in the left side of the skull, spraying brain tissue all around, as a hail of bullets from the other assassins hit her torso. Alexandra crumpled sideways on to the floor, her warm, sticky blood and brain tissue spreading across it in a mist of steam. Next to her, poor lame Alexey, too crippled even to get up and run, sat there transfixed, clutching in terror at his chair, his ashen face splattered with his father’s blood.

The other victims meanwhile had fallen first to their knees and then to the floor in an instinctive attempt to protect themselves, some of them convulsing from the trauma of flesh wounds received from bullets aimed at the Tsar and Tsaritsa that had missed, others crawling in desperation in the impenetrable smoke, trying to find a way out. Trupp had gone down quickly, his legs shattered, and was finished off by a final shot to the head. Kharitonov, his body riddled with bullets, crumpled to the floor and died beside him.

Within minutes there was such chaos in the basement room that Yurovsky was forced to stop the shooting because of the choking conditions; he did so with great difficulty, for by now the men had been overtaken by the frenzy of getting the job done. The air was thick with a nauseating cocktail of blood and bodily fluids – the faeces, urine and vomit precipitated from bodies in moments of extreme trauma. The
killers were all choking and coughing from the caustic smoke of burnt gunpowder as well as showers of dust from the plaster ceiling caused by the reverberation of bullets. Their eyes were streaming too and they were all temporarily deafened by the delayed noise of the gunshots.

As Yurovsky’s men staggered from the storeroom, shaking and disorientated, to gasp at the cool night air, some of them vomited. But it wasn’t over. Once the deafening roar of firearms had ceased and the smoke had abated, the moans and whimpers they could hear inside made it all too apparent that they had botched the job. Many of their victims were still alive, horribly injured and suffering in agony.

Dr Botkin had already been hit twice in the abdomen when a bullet aimed at his legs had shattered his kneecaps, knocking him to the ground. From here he had lifted himself up on his right elbow and tried to reach towards the Tsar in one final, protective act. Seeing Botkin was still alive as he re-entered the room, Yurovsky took aim with his Mauser and shot him in the left temple as the doctor turned his head away in terror. His wish had been fulfilled: he had, at least, been permitted to die with his Emperor.

None of the Romanov girls – those pretty girls whom none of the guards had really wanted to have to kill – had died a quick or painless death. Maria had earlier been felled by a bullet in the thigh from Ermakov as she had pounded hysterically at the locked storeroom doors, and was now lying on the floor moaning. Her three sisters had suffered terribly, filling the room with their screams as they shrieked out for their mother, Olga and Tatiana doing what came instinctively, pressing themselves into each other’s arms in the darkest corner for protection. Realising that the two older girls were still alive, Ermakov lunged at them with the eight-inch bayonet he had stuffed in his belt, stabbing at their torsos. But, drunk and uncoordinated as he was, he had trouble penetrating the girls’ chests.

It was the cool and collected Yurovsky who strode though the smoke and shot Tatiana in the back of the head as she struggled to her feet to escape his approach, the brains and blood from her shattered skull showering her hysterical sister. A wild-eyed Ermakov shot Olga through the jaw as she tried to rise to her feet too and run; in her death throes she fell across Tatiana’s body.

Anastasia meanwhile had taken refuge near the wounded Maria. Realising that the two youngest girls were still cowering alive in the corner, Ermakov again resorted to his bayonet and stabbed Maria repeatedly in the torso, but his weapon would not go through and Yurovsky had to step over and deliver the
coup de grâce
with a bullet to her head. Anastasia suffered horribly too: Ermakov lunged at her like a
wild animal, again attempting to pierce her chest with his bayonet as he rained blows down on the helpless girl, before finally taking his gun to her head.

Yurovsky and the other killers later claimed that the bullets from the Nagants ricocheted off the layers of jewels sewn into the girls’ bodices, which appear to have acted as primitive flak jackets; the bayonet thrusts failed to penetrate them too. It is more likely, however, that the force of the bullets, fired at random, simply propelled the jewels into the girls’ torsos, causing numerous flesh wounds, or shattered the pearls, of which there were a great many, on impact.

Incredibly, Yurovsky now saw that the Tsarevich was still alive (for, as it later turned out, the boy too was wearing an undergarment sewn with jewels). He could not comprehend the sick boy’s ‘extraordinary vitality’ and watched in disbelief as a shaky Nikulin spent the entire clip of bullets from his Browning on him.

But the fatally flawed blood of the haemophiliac boy still continued to pump round his body, keeping him alive when on so many occasions in the past it had nearly killed him. Yurovsky, having fired the last bullets from his Mauser, could do no better than Nikulin. Frenzied stabs by Ermakov with his bayonet again had little success at penetrating the layer of jewels surrounding the boy’s torso. In the end Yurovsky pulled a second gun, his Colt, from his belt to give the dying boy the
coup de grâce
as he lay on the chair which had fallen sideways on to the floor. Alexey’s body then finally slumped and rolled silently against that of his father.

Miraculously, the maid Demidova had somehow survived till now, wounded in the thigh, having fainted while those all around her were being put to death. When the shooting died down, she came to and staggered to her feet screaming, ‘Thank God, I am saved!’

Immediately Ermakov turned on her with his bayonet as Demidova found superhuman strength in the face of imminent death. She had been frightened of what the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg might do to them all; she had said so when she left Tobolsk. And now she resisted violently, turning this way and that, fending off bayonet thrusts with her reinforced cushions – the Tsaritsa’s jewels that she had so carefully protected now protecting her – until one of the assassins pulled them from her. In desperation Demidova made a final attempt to defend herself against the bayonet, hysterically swiping at it with her bare hands until she was finished off.

Yurovsky had seen plenty of death and mutilation during his time as a medical orderly in the war. He had a stronger stomach for the grisly spectacle of the basement room than most of the men there that night, and now the medical man in him took over as he went round checking
pulses to make sure the victims were all dead. Ermakov meanwhile, his drunken brain reeling from this orgy of killing, staggered and stumbled and slipped as he crossed back and forth in the room, flailing at bodies with his bayonet, wreaking his personal hatred on the bullet-ridden bodies of the Tsar and Tsaritsa and cracking their rib cages.

It had taken 20 minutes of increasingly frenzied activity to kill the Romanovs and their servants. Professional marksmen given the same task would have taken 30 seconds. What should have been a quick, clean execution had turned into a bloodbath. Prior to the execution, Yurovsky had told the members of the squad who was to kill whom and to aim straight for the heart. That way there would be less blood and they would die quicker, he told them. Ermakov would later claim that they all knew exactly what they were supposed to do ‘so there’d be no mistake’; he was the only one designated two targets: the Tsaritsa and Dr Botkin. But once Yurovsky had fired the first shot at the Tsar, the men behind him opened fire in a fusillade of noise, smoke and fumes, making it impossible to be certain who exactly shot whom; later accounts are confused and contradict each other. Once the killers broke from the co-ordinated firing plan, the ratio of wild, inaccurate firing became ever greater, with the men taking pot shots at each other’s designated target. Many of the shots fired would have missed their targets altogether or only caused flesh rather than fatal wounds; none of them were absorbed by the wooden, plaster-covered walls as Yurovsky had hoped. With their victims panicking, screaming and crawling on the floor, the uncoordinated frenzy of the killers would have escalated. It is surprisingly easy for untrained marksmen to miss a target, even at relatively close range, if one takes into account a lack of expertise, compounded by the stress of waiting and too much to drink. Yurovsky later admitted to Nikulin’s ‘poor mastery of his weapon and his inevitable nerves’. Visibility would have been a major problem too: the level of smoke from the guns had rapidly fogged out the light from the one feeble electric bulb, making the room so murky that it was almost impossible for anyone to see what they were doing except by the light of momentary firearm flashes. In addition, with eight or nine killers crowded into the doorway in three rows, one shooting over the shoulder of the other, rather than spreading out across the room, many of those firing might well have been grazed by bullets or their aim skewed by the recoil from the arm of the man in front of them. Others got singed by the residue from the guns. All of the killers, within seconds of the adrenalin kicking in, would have been overtaken by that strange phenomenon of tunnel vision, when time goes into slow motion, and would not have been able to take account of the real situation in the room as a whole and act accordingly. Their victims too would have gone
into a state of trauma, seeing only the barrels of the guns in front of them, until the classic fight-or-flight response took over.

Some of the old Nagants may well have jammed and proved useless because they had been loaded with the wrong bullets and the men using them were not used to handling them, thus explaining the relatively low number of bullets found here and at all three subsequent gravesites: about 57 in all out of a possible 70 bullets – roughly seven bullets per assassin from the mainly 0.32-calibre gun clips emptied that night, as subsequent investigations calculated. It has also been suggested that when the moment came, after taking revenge on Nicholas, most of the killers lost their nerve about killing the women and fired mainly at the men or above the heads of their victims, leaving the few tough nuts – Yurovsky, Nikulin and Ermakov – to kill the others.

Up in the Romanovs’ quarters, the two dogs left behind had instinctively sensed danger when not allowed to accompany the family downstairs and had started whimpering the moment they were taken away. Once the shooting started down in the basement they would have barked in a frenzy of fear; and the sound of it would have been heard for some distance. Alexey Kabanov, who had left his machine-gun post in the attic to come down and take part in the killings, had run out on to the street to check the noise levels. He heard the dogs barking and also the sound of gunshots loud and clear despite the noise from the Fiat’s engine; many of the neighbours later testified to hearing the shooting too. Kabanov had hurried back in and told the men to stop firing and finish their victims off with their gun butts or bayonets to reduce the noise; they should kill the dogs too.