The Last Tsar (68 page)

“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.”