The Resurrection of the Romanovs (13 page)

Basement storeroom in the Ipatiev House, where the Romanovs were executed.

Ekaterinburg fell to the advancing forces of the White Army and Czechoslovak troops on July 25, just eight days after the supposed execution. Rushing to the Ipatiev House, they found that its former inhabitants had vanished, the floors strewn with a few pathetic remnants of clothing and possessions, and a room in the cellar pocked with bullet holes and signs of blood. The only hint of what may have happened came in the Bolshevik announcement that Nicholas II had been killed; starting from this presumption, judicial and military investigators began a search for the missing imperial family. In January 1919, the third and last of the official White Army investigators, Nicholas Sokolov, was appointed to determine precisely what had become of the Romanovs and, building on evidence collected by his predecessors, developed a circumstantial case that all had perished. Sokolov produced what, for most of the twentieth century, history believed to be the truth about the end of the Romanovs; it was, however, only a theory, deeply flawed, riddled with conjecture, and often at odds with science, facts that led many to question his conclusions and fed the mythology of survival.

There was, to be sure, the bloodstained and bullet-marked basement room in the Ipatiev House, which certainly pointed toward some violence, particularly after the Romanovs disappeared, but it offered no definitive proof of their fate. More concrete was the discovery of a Bolshevik telegram in which the Ural Regional Soviet had informed Moscow that the entire family had “suffered the same fate” as Nicholas II. Because Soviet authorities had already publicly admitted to the execution of the former emperor, this, too, suggested the worst, but the first real evidence of what had taken place in that ominous basement room in the early morning hours of July 17 came when several former Ipatiev House guards recounted that the imperial family had been killed. Altogether four men gave statements, although only one claimed to have actually seen the bodies.

The area surrounding the Four Brothers Mine in the Koptyaki Forest outside Ekaterinburg, where the corpses of the Romanovs were taken following their execution.

Nicholas Sokolov, who headed the last White Army investigation into the fate of the Romanovs.

Publication of these statements in 1920 gave the world its first glimpse at what was said to have happened to the imperial family. Yurovsky, according to these accounts, woke the prisoners sometime after midnight, saying that they would have to be immediately evacuated as the White Army approached Ekaterinburg. They dressed quickly, and Yurovsky led them through the house and down a staircase to the basement. Nicholas came first, carrying Alexei in his arms, followed by the empress, the four grand duchesses, Botkin, Kharitonov, Trupp, and finally Demidova, who carried a pillow concealing a box of jewelry.
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At the southern end of the ground floor, Yurovsky ushered them into an empty room, directly beneath that used by the grand duchesses; chairs were brought for Nicholas, Alexandra, and the sick tsesarevich, and the commandant told them to wait.
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When he reappeared, Yurovsky was accompanied by an execution squad armed with pistols and revolvers. “Nicholas Alexandrovich,” he said to the emperor, “your relatives are trying to save you; therefore we are compelled to shoot you!”
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“What?” Nicholas asked.

“This is what!” Yurovsky said, ordering his men to open fire.
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As the shots rang out, there were “loud cries” and screams.
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“Death had been instantaneous,” reported Robert Wilton, for Nicholas, Alexandra, the three oldest grand duchesses, Botkin, Kharitonov, and Trupp.
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Alexei, said guard Paul Medvedev, “was still alive and moaned. Yurovsky went up and fired two or three more shots at him. The heir grew still.”
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Anastasia, still alive, “rolled about and screamed,” Wilton wrote, “and, when one of the murderers approached, fought desperately with him till he killed her.”
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She finally fell, “pierced by bayonets.”
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Demidova was the last to die. The soldiers grabbed rifles from the corridor, chasing her back and forth across the rear of the cellar room and repeatedly stabbing her with bayonets as she screamed in vain.
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All of the Romanovs, remembered Medvedev, were “on the floor, with many wounds on their bodies. The blood was running in streams.”
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On learning of Bolshevik roadblocks and the comings and goings of soldiers in the nearby Koptyaki Forest immediately following the executions, investigators searched the area. In a clearing called the Four Brothers, they found easily recognizable artifacts near and in several disused mine shafts. Gilliard, Gibbes, Tegleva, and other former retainers who had survived the Bolsheviks readily identified these items as having belonged to the Romanovs. There were jewels—large diamonds, an emerald cross given to Alexandra by her mother-in-law, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, pearls, and fragments of sapphires, rubies, and other gems that bore signs of having been subjected to sharp blows; scorched pieces of cloth, belt buckles, buttons, hooks, and eyes that had come from clothing and coats worn by the imperial family; burned bones, clasps, and stays of six corsets believed to have been worn by Alexandra, her four daughters, and Anna Demidova; three small icons and crushed glass vials for smelling salts carried by the grand duchesses; the gold frame of Dr. Botkin’s pince-nez and his upper plate of dentures; a badge from the jubilee of Empress Alexandra’s military regiment; and the corpse of the spaniel Jemmy, one of the three dogs the Romanovs had brought with them to Siberia.
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There were, though, no bodies. Intensive searches of the Four Brothers found only a severed finger, two pieces of skin, and some forty-odd chopped and burned bone fragments that could not even be established as human.
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Eleven presumed victims had been killed in the Ipatiev House, but their bodies had simply disappeared. Even Sokolov was troubled by the lack of remains, saying, “They must be hidden somewhere.”
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He—and twentieth-century history—found an answer on learning that large quantities of sulfuric acid and gasoline had been delivered to the Koptyaki Forest following the executions; from this, and from the evidence that jewelry and clothing had been subjected to chopping and burning, Sokolov developed a theory. The corpses, the public was told, had been taken to the forest and there hacked apart, doused with gasoline, and burned; whatever remained was dissolved in acid. This was the theory that filtered out of Siberia, first published in the
Times
of London in 1919 and quickly reprinted around the world as fact.
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There was, declared Wilton, “not the shadow of a doubt as to what happened.”
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But there were doubts, and they took wing even before the official investigations had ended. Conflicting rumors and the absence of any corpses soon gave rise to tales of escape and survival that spread first across Siberia and then throughout the world. Nicholas II, it was said, had been dragged away, bound in chains, aboard a mysterious train; Alexei supposedly died from fright after a bomb exploded at the Ipatiev House. Stories declared that the entire family had escaped to Japan; that Kaiser Wilhelm II or King George V had forced the Soviet government to hand over their crowned cousins; even that Pope Benedict XV had organized a rescue of the prisoners and granted them asylum in the Vatican. International journalists, military aides, heads of Allied missions in Siberia, intelligence operatives, and diplomats all eagerly seized upon and disseminated the latest rumors with few attempts at verification, creating an impenetrable web of innuendo that only hinted at some great, unknown mystery.

Rumors were kept alive not only by the possibility that one or more of the Romanovs might have escaped and by the absence of any bodies, but also by the appearance of the first claimants in the case. Princess Elena of Serbia, whose Romanov husband was one of those thrown alive down a mine shaft in Alapayevsk, confronted one early claimant in the autumn of 1918, when the Bolsheviks asked her to meet a young woman said to be a rescued Anastasia. Elena denounced her as a fraud, but this was merely the first of many such putative Romanovs.
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Just six months after the presumed execution in Ekaterinburg, a woman hiding in a Siberian convent let it be known that she was really Empress Alexandra; the young boy and girl with her, she said, were Alexei and Anastasia. She attracted a fair amount of local attention before the Bolsheviks exposed her as an impostor.
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A year after the executions, a young man named Alexei Poutziado appeared in Siberia, claiming to be Tsesarevich Alexei. White Army officials at first ignored the story; after learning that collections were being taken on his behalf by worshipful crowds, however, they had him brought to the city of Omsk and arranged for Pierre Gilliard to confront him. “The door of the next room was opened a little,” Gilliard recalled, “and I was able to observe, unknown to him, a boy, taller and stronger than the Tsesarevich, who seemed to me fifteen or sixteen years old. His sailor’s suit, the color of his hair, and the way it was arranged, were all vaguely reminiscent of Alexei Nikolaievich but there the resemblance ended. . . . The boy was introduced to me and I put several questions to him in French: he remained silent. When a reply was insisted upon, he said that he understood everything I had said but had his own reasons for only speaking Russian. I then addressed him in that language. This, too, brought no results.”
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In the end, Poutziado confessed, to the surprise of no one, that he was not the tsesarevich.

The five Hessian siblings during the 1910 visit to Germany. From left: Irene, Princess Heinrich of Prussia; Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig; Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna; Princess Victoria of Battenberg (later Marchioness of Milford Haven); and Empress Alexandra.

Then there were stories that the Bolsheviks had evacuated the empress and her daughters to the Siberian city of Perm. Rudolf Gaida, who headed the Czechoslovak forces that took Ekaterinburg with the Whites in July 1918, launched his own inquiry into the Romanov case. This uncovered tales, often of Bolshevik origin, in which “witnesses” had encountered the empress and her daughters, caught fleeting glimpses by candlelight of supposed grand duchesses, and even a doctor who claimed that he had treated a battered Anastasia after she had been captured following an escape attempt.
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None of this was deemed convincing by the White Army—which, after all, hoped to use the dead Romanovs as anti-Bolshevik propaganda—but it did contribute to the growing mythology that surrounded the disappearance and fate of the imperial family.