“Why didn’t you bring them alive?” they complained.
Yurovsky placated the angry men and ordered them to move the bodies from the truck into the carts. While doing so, the workers seized the opportunity to rob the victims. Yurovsky put a stop to this by the threat of a summary firing squad.
The procession made its way slowly down the narrow track to the Four Brothers, only arriving there after sunrise. According to Yermakov, the bodies were stripped and the jewels discovered. Eight pounds (3.6 kg) of diamonds and other jewels were removed and, on the orders of Yurovsky, the corpses were flung down an abandoned mine shaft. But when word spread in Yekaterinburg that the Romanovs had been killed, the executioners feared their crime would be discovered. They retrieved the bodies. Two of them were burnt. But that took too long. So, deeper in the forest, a pit was dug. Rock was close to the surface there, so the executioners had to make do with a broad, shallow grave. The bodies were dumped in it, their faces smashed beyond recognition. They were doused with sulphuric acid, then covered with earth. Clearly, the killers hoped that the evidence of their crime would remain undiscovered for ever. This was very effective. Throughout the Soviet era, no one was sure what had happened to the Romanovs. As late as 1976, two British journalists, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, related in their book,
File on the Tsar
, the theory that the massacre at Yekaterinburg had been an elaborate fabrication. Only the tsar and his son had been executed. The Tsarina Alexandra, who was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and German-born, and the rest of the family had been kept alive – no one knew for how long – as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Germans, with whom the Soviets had only just made peace.
Years before, Sokolov had concluded that all the Romanovs were dead because a telegram had been intercepted, in which the Bolsheviks confirmed that the entire imperial family had been executed. Several eyewitnesses stated that they had seen the Romanovs and their entourage dead and nobody had seen them alive after that night. Most of those who visited the crime scene were convinced.
Pierre Gilliard, the children’s Swiss tutor, who reached Yekaterinburg in August 1918, said: “I went down to the ground floor, the greater part of which was below the level of the ground. It was with intense emotion that I entered the room . . . Its appearance was sinister beyond all expression. The only daylight filtered in through a barred window at the height of a man’s head. The walls and floors showed numerous traces of bullets and blows with bayonets. A first glance showed that an odious crime had been perpetrated there, and that several people had been killed.”
He stayed on in Siberia to assist Sokolov in his investigations.
In October 1918, the English diplomat Sir Charles Eliot was sent to Russia to investigate the murder of the Romanovs. He inspected the Ipatiev House thoroughly and found seventeen bullet holes in the walls of the basement. But, he reported: “Browning revolver bullets were found and some of them were stained with blood. Otherwise no traces of blood were visible . . . There is no real evidence as to who or how many the victims were, but it is supposed that they were five, namely, the tsar, Dr Botkin, the empress’s maid and two lackeys. No corpses were discovered, nor any trace of their being disposed of by burning or otherwise, but it is stated that a finger bearing a ring believed to have belonged to Dr Botkin was found in a well.”
However, Carl Ackerman, a reporter with the
New York Times
who visited Yekaterinburg in November 1918, said he did not believe that the Romanovs had been killed there. While he found twenty bullet holes in the basement wall and some blood on the floor, there are “no pools of blood, and it seemed doubtful to me that seven persons should die such a horrible death and leave only small ‘blood-clots’ in the bullet holes and small bloodstains on the floor”.
According to Sokolov, who did not arrive in Yekaterinburg until February 1919, Sergeyev, despite producing an otherwise detailed description of the crime scene, “did not notice the splotches of blood which I discovered on the south and east walls”. Meanwhile, Sokolov’s assistant Captain, Pavel Bulygin, said that there was “so much blood that it had even soaked through the floor and stained the ground beneath it. There was blood on the floor in every room through which the bodies had been carried, blood on the gate, blood on the front steps, and blood outside where the lorry stood waiting.”
The
Times
journalist Robert Wilton, who visited Yekaterinburg in 1919, said: “So much blood had flowed that the marks of the redden-stained swabs were visible a year later.”
Sergeyev’s boss, General Mikhail Dieterikhs, wrote of investigators finding table linen, towels and napkins with a “large thick bloodstain”, which the murderers had wiped their hands on. He also said that the bodies were burnt and that clothes, jewels and other personal possessions were found on the spot where this had happened. Near there, at the bottom of a mine permanently covered with 3 ft (1 m) of water, he found the carcass of Tatiana’s dog, dentures and a finger. He concluded that there was no grave and that the bodies of the Romanovs had been utterly destroyed. He had to flee later that year when the Bolsheviks retook Yekaterinburg.
After examining the evidence that Sergeyev had collected and Ipatiev House, Sokolov went out in search of the bodies. He headed to the Four Brothers, which Dieterikhs had already visited. In the nearby village of Koptyaki, he talked to Nastasya Zykova. Early in the morning of 17 July 1918, she had been on her way to Yekaterinburg with her son Nicholas and his wife Maria. She had been carrying fish to sell in town while her son had been called up by the Red Army. When they passed the mine and approached the Four Brothers, they saw a procession of carts and what they took to be Bolsheviks. As soon as they were seen, two horsemen detached themselves from the cortege and rode up to them.
“Two horses rode to meet us,” said Nastasya Zykova. “One was in sailor’s uniform and I recognized him. He was the sailor Vagano from Verkh-Isetsk. The other was in army uniform – in soldier’s greatcoat and military cap. The horsemen came towards us quickly with Vaganov in front, the soldier behind. As they came up to us, Vagano shouted: ‘Turn back!’ He took out his revolver and held it over my head. We turned our horses quickly. Our wagon nearly turned over. They pranced about us and Vagano shouted: ‘Don’t look back . . . I’ll shoot.’ Our horse raced off with all the spirit that was in him. They escorted us, Vaganov all the while keeping his revolver over my head and crying: ‘Don’t look back, citizens . . .’ In this fashion we raced to a place beyond which lies the Big Meadow. They continued with us for about half a verst [a third of a mile], or three-quarters of a verst, and then fell back. We did not look back, of course, after they told us.”
They warned other travellers to turn back. An officer from Koptyaki named Lieutenant Andrei Sheremetevsky rode out with some peasants to investigate. They found the grass on an old pathway into the forest trampled down. They were about to go down the trail when a Red Army soldier came out armed with a rifle, two pistols, a sabre and grenades. He warned them that there was going to be bomb-throwing practice at the mine and ordered them to leave. The road was then closed until 6 a.m. on 19 July.
After the Bolsheviks withdrew from Yekaterinburg on 25 July, two peasants from Koptyaki went to Verkh-Isetsk and reported the shutting off of the mine to the military authorities there. Seven peasants from the village then went to investigate. They were followed by a local forester and, on 30 July, the court investigator Nametkin turned up, accompanied by Doctor Vladimir Derevenko, the valet Chemodurov and a number of officers. According to Sokolov: “Several valuable discoveries were made.”
Nametkin found no bodies and left after half an hour. He did not even take the road to the Four Brothers, the way Yurovsky and the Bolsheviks had gone. Instead, they travelled back and forth by train as a railway line passed nearby. Sergeyev did not even bother to visit the mine.
Sokolov himself arrived there on 23 May 1919 and, on 6 June, excavations were begun on the orders of Admiral Kolchak. It was clear from Sokolov’s questioning of local witnesses that the tracks of a truck had been seen heading to the mine as well. He discovered tracks that showed a truck had skidded near the mine and had almost fallen in. A truck that had been despatched to the local headquarters of the Cheka – the secret police, headed in Yekaterinburg by Yurovsky – returned on 19 July.
“The entire platform of the truck was stained with blood,” said Peter Leonov, who worked in the garage at Yekaterinburg. “It was apparent that the platform had been washed and swept with a broom. But the blood, nevertheless, was clearly visible on the floor of the platform.”
His brother Alexander, who also worked at the garage, said: “I remember very well that the platform had a large, washed bloodstain.”
Many small bonfires were found around the mine whose smoke would have protected the horses from mosquitoes and gadflies. According to Alexander Zudikhin: “It was apparent that horses had been tied there; the trees were broken and chewed.”
Nicholas Zubritsky concurred: “They had dug up the earth with their hooves. It seemed to me at the time that a smudge had been lit near a small pine to protect them from mosquitoes.”
Sokolov found evidence of this – small pine boards what were charred. The forest was damp thereabouts and off-cuts of board would have been used as kindling. Rope was also found along with the remnants of boxes. Sokolov discovered that, on the day following the murders, an employee of the commissariat of supply, named Zimin, had appeared at the chemist shop of the Russian Company in Yekaterinburg and delivered a written requisition for sulphuric acid in the name of the local commissar, Peter Voikov, who was on Lenin’s staff. On the evening of 17 July and during the day of 18 July, some 358 lbs (162 kg) of sulphuric acid was delivered to the mine in wooden boxes by soldiers of the Red Army and personnel from the commissariat of supply.
An engineer named Kotenev told Sokolov that he had been travelling out from Yekaterinburg towards Koptyaki on 18 July, when he was stopped at the level crossing near the mine. There he saw a truck carrying a large drum of gasoline.
“Gasoline is always put in such drums,” he said. “I can tell you exactly the quantity of gasoline that the drum on the truck should contain. It was a 10 to 11 pood [360 to 400 lbs; 163 to 181 kg] drum.”
The watchman at the level crossing said he saw it pass by at around 7 a.m., but it stopped about 1,050 ft (320 m) from the crossing,
“I did not see very well just what was on it,” he said. “It looked to me as if there was drums or boxes on it.”
After dinner he saw another truck pass by and stop in the same place.
“This time I saw clearly that in this truck they were carrying gasoline in drums. I took a mind to ask for some gasoline, got a bottle and went to the place the trucks were standing on the Koptyaki road; and this time I did see clearly what was on the first truck, the one that came first. On the second there were about three drums of gasoline, or maybe two. The drums were all of metal. There were about five people near the two trucks . . . I asked them to pour me out a little gasoline. They gave me a bottle.”
The Bolsheviks had appropriated all motor vehicles in Yekaterinburg at the time, so the trucks could only have come from the Soviet garage.
Sokolov estimated, from the testimony of eyewitnesses, that about 40 poods (1,290 lbs; 585 kg) of gasoline were brought to the mine. Some way from the mine, there was evidence of two large bonfires.
He went on to list all the things that were found in the mine. These included religious miniatures, some smashed, and red and white pieces of wax and candles of the same colour and type as those found in the possession of the guard Ivan Starkov.
“Their household articles at Tobolsk included red wax candles,” said Alexei Volkov, the tsarina’s
valet de chambre
. “They had acquired such candles from the monastery and the cathedral.”
There was a portrait frame made in leather and lined with silk, bearing the mark of “Edward Akkerman, Berlin”. Members of the imperial household said that the family had many such frames, which they took with them when they travelled. The lady of the bedchamber Maria Tutelberg said that the tsar had a portrait of the tsarina in one.
A military badge that the tsarina wore on a bracelet was found, along with belt buckles belonging to the tsar and tsarevich; jewelled ladies’ shoe buckles of the type worn by the tsarina and the grand duchesses – one of which had been exposed to intense heat; a lens from a pair of spectacles – the tsarina had been prescribed glasses in Tobolsk; the frame and holder from a lorgnette; two lenses from pince-nez of the type worn by Dr Botkin; false teeth – Dr Botkin wore dentures; a collar button; a scorched brush of the type Dr Botkin used to tend his beard and moustache; a tie clasp of the type Dr Botkin wore; scorched elastic and silk corsets including six pairs of front stays, side bones, clasps, fasteners and hooks of the quality worn by the tsarina, her daughters and the servant Demidova; more than forty pieces of burnt high-quality footwear; an iron boot guard; seven men’s buckles from breeches and vests, all but one foreign-made; coil springs and a buckle from a man’s suspenders that had been destroyed by fire; two badly scorched buckles from belts belonging to Demidova and either the tsarina or a grand duchess; six military-style buttons from the expensive Vunder plant in St Petersburg, damaged by fire; buttons and parts of button from the sleeves of the grand duchesses and the garter of the tsarina, damaged by fire; hooks, eyes and buttons from Brissac, dressmaker to the tsarina and the grand duchesses; pieces of cloth roughly torn from the apparel of the tsarina, the grand duchesses, Demidova and Dr Botkin, many half-burnt; burnt cloth from the tsarevich’s overcoat; khaki-colour fabric from the tsarevich’s knapsack; pieces of lead foil, four nails, a spent revolver bullet, two copper coins of two kopeck denomination – all things that Alexei collected and would be found in his pockets; an American suitcase key; parts of a small handbag or purse; a penknife; a safety pin; splinters of glass thought to come from a watch, small picture frame or smelling salt vial; a jewelled cross made of platinum, carrying emeralds, brilliants and pearls; a large brilliant weighing ten carats, made of platinum and green gold, and studded with diamonds – both the brilliant and the cross belonged to the tsarina, given to her by the tsar and his mother respectively; an earring made in platinum and gold, carrying a pearl and a brilliant, belonging to the tsarina; parts of a pearl and a broken gold ornament, thought to be the remains of the matching earring; parts of a very large pearl; thirteen round pearls thought to have come from a string – the tsarina and grand duchesses had many; parts of a broken gold and silver ornament with brilliants, thought to have been part of a brooch belonging to the tsarina; thirteen splinters from a very large emerald thought to have come from an egg belonging to the tsarina; two splinters of a sapphire; two brilliants, a ruby, two admandines and two adamants thought to have come from a bracelet belonging to the tsarina; two gold chains – the tsarina and grand duchesses had many; part of a gold ring that had been smashed; two parts of gold ornaments, thought to have come from an earring and a bracelet; a gold ornament with three diamonds thought to be an eyelet for fastening jewellery belonging to the tsarina; and topazes such as those worn in necklaces belonging to the tsarina and grand duchesses. Sokolov believed that all this jewellery was found in the mine because it had been sewn into the women’s clothes. Alexandra Tegleva, the children’s nanny and later the wife of tutor Pierre Gilliard, testified to this.