Wonder if the Windsors remember...
Excerpted
At first, during the spring of 1917, the ex-imperial family was allowed to live in relative comfort at a favorite residence, the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, not far from Petrograd. Nicholas's cousin, King George V of England, offered him sanctuary, but then changed his mind and withdrew the offer. It was not the finest moment for the House of Windsor, but it is unlikely that it made any difference. The window of opportunity was short; demands for the ex-tsar to stand trial were growing.
Alexander Kerensky, first justice minister and then prime minister of the provisional government, moved the royals to the governor's mansion in Tobolsk, in distant Siberia, to keep them safe. Their stay there was bearable but depressing. Boredom turned to danger when Kerensky was overthrown by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Lenin famously said that "revolutions are meaningless without firing squads," and he was soon considering, along with lieutenant Yakov Sverdlov, whether to place Nicholas on public trial—to be followed by his execution—or just kill the entire family.
The Bolsheviks faced a desperate civil war against the Whites, counterrevolutionary armies backed by Western powers. Lenin responded with unbridled terror. He decided to move the family from Tobolsk closer to Moscow, to which he had relocated the Russian capital. A trusted Bolshevik factotum was dispatched to bring the Romanovs westward, and in April 1918 they endured a terrifying trip by train and carriage.
The teenage Alexei suffered an attack of bleeding and had to be left behind; he came to Ekaterinburg three weeks later with three of his sisters. The girls, meanwhile, were sexually molested on the train. But eventually the family was reunited in the gloomy, walled mansion of a merchant named Ipatiev in the center of the city, whose leaders were the most fanatical of Bolsheviks.
The mansion was ominously renamed the House of Special Purpose and converted into a prison fortress with painted-over windows, fortified walls and machine gun nests. The Romanovs received limited rations and were watched by hostile young guards. Yet the family adapted. Nicholas read books aloud in the evening and tried to exercise. The eldest daughter, Olga, became depressed, but the playful and spirited younger girls, especially the beautiful Maria and the mischievous Anastasia, began to interact with the guards. Maria began an illicit romance with one of them, and the guards discussed helping the girls escape. When this was uncovered by Bolshevik boss Filipp Goloshchekin, the guards were changed, regulations were tightened. All of this made Lenin even more anxious.
By the beginning of July 1918 it was clear that Ekaterinburg was going to fall to the Whites. Goloshchekin rushed to Moscow to get Lenin's approval, and it is certain that he got it, though Lenin was clever enough not to put the order on paper: The killing was planned under the new commandant of the House of Special Purpose, Yakov Yurovsky, who decided to recruit a squad to murder the royals all together in one session and then burn the bodies and bury them in the woods nearby. Just about every detail of the plan was ill conceived and would be grotesquely bungled in practice.
Early on that July morning, the bleary-eyed Romanovs and their loyal retainers stood in the cellar as the heavily armed murder squad filed into the room. Yurovsky suddenly read out a death sentence. Then the men used their weapons. Each was meant to fire at a different family member, but many of them secretly wished to avoid shooting the girls, so they all aimed at the loathed Nicholas and Alexandra, killing them almost instantly.
The firing was wild; the killers managed to wound one another as the room filled with swirling dust and smoke and screams. When the first volley was done, most of the family was still alive, wounded, crying and terrified, their suffering made worse by the fact that they were in effect wearing bulletproof vests.
The Romanovs were famed for their collection of jewelry, and they had left Petrograd with a large cache of diamonds hidden their baggage. During the last months they had sewn the diamonds into specially made underwear in case they needed to fund an escape. On the night of the execution the children had pulled on this secretly bejeweled underwear, which was reinforced with the hardest material in existence. Tragically, ironically, the bullets bounced off these garments. Finally the murderers waded into the gruesome scene of wounded, bleeding children (one of the killers compared it to a slippery ice rink awash with blood and brains) and stabbed them manically with bayonets or shot them in the head.
The mayhem lasted 20 agonizing minutes. When the bodies were being carried out, two of the girls turned out to still be alive, spluttering and coughing before being stabbed into silence. This was surely the origin ofthe legend that Anastasia, the youngest daughter, had survived, a story that inspired so many impostors to impersonate the murdered grand duchess.
Now that the deed was done, drunken assassins and Bolshevik thugs argued about who was to move the bodies and where. They mocked the deceased royals, pillaged their treasures, and then failed to conceal or bury them. Eventually the bodies were piled into a truck, which soon broke down. Out in the woods, where the Romanovs were stripped naked and their clothing burned, it turned out that the mineshafts that had been selected to receive the bodies were too shallow. In a panic Yurovsky improvised a new plan, leaving the bodies and rushing into Ekaterinburg for supplies.
He spent three days and three nights, sleeplessly driving back and forth to the woods, collecting sulfuric acid and gasoline to destroy the bodies, which he finally decided to bury in separate places to confuse anyone who might find them. He was determined to obey his orders that "no one must ever know what had happened" to the Romanov family. He pummeled the bodies with rifle butts, doused them with sulfuric acid, and burned them with gasoline. Finally, he buried what was left in two graves.
Yurovsky and his killers later wrote detailed, boastful, and confused accounts for the Cheka, a precursor to the KGB. The reports were sequestered in the archives and never publicized, but during the 1970s renewed interest in the murder site led Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB (and future leader of the USSR), to recommend that the House of Special Purpose be bulldozed.
Should have been the Windsors jnstead