• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Both these rooms were directly above that half-cellar room.

Next to the daughters’ room, in the dining room “with the view on the garden,” slept Anna Demidova. In the large hall (the drawing room) slept Botkin, Chemodurov, and Sednev.

There was one more as yet sealed room—designated for Alexei.

Catercorner from the former grand duchesses was the commandant’s room—date palm wallpaper, gold baguette molding, and the head of a dead deer. And one more—next to the commandant’s—set aside for the watch.

Completing the suite was the lavatory. The porcelain vessel left over from engineer Ipatiev would be fouled by the commandant and the guards, and amid the shameless drawings on the lavatory walls depicting the tsaritsa and Rasputin, amid the obscene utterances of the guard and reflections such as “I don’t know why I wrote either, but you strangers read it,” was a note nailed to the wall: “You are implored to leave the seat as clean as you found it.”

This was the joint creation of the former tsar and his personal physician Botkin.

Entering the bedroom, Alix walked over to the right-hand window and on the jamb penciled her favorite symbol, the swastika, and the date of their arrival: 17 (30).

She drew another swastika as an incantation directly on the wallpaper over the bed where Alexei was to sleep.

17 (30). Thus she innocently signaled the start of the last game with the last tsar.

It began right away.

THE LAST GAME

When their belongings arrived they were taken out into the hall and, in the presence of the former military academy student and present member of the Ural Executive Committee Ditkovsky and the former turner and present commandant Avdeyev, the inspection began.

The captors opened the suitcases and looked through them carefully. They examined Alix’s hand luggage. They confiscated the camera she had brought from Tsarskoe Selo and also, as Commandant Avdeyev would write in his memoirs, “a detailed map of Ekaterinburg.” How could that have turned up in her bag if they had assumed they were going to Moscow? Even if it couldn’t have, though, it did. Like the two guns allegedly found on Dolgorukov.

They even opened the medicine bottles—they dug through her entire traveling pharmacy.

Nicholas’s diary:

“17 [30] April [continued].… The search of our things was like at customs: just as strict, right up to the last vial in Alix’s pharmacy. That exasperated me and I expressed my opinion sharply to the commissar.”

Alix did not understand the reason for the search. She was nervous and indignant: “This is an insult!” Her accent made the searchers smile; the impotent anger of the former empress was funny. But she continued her irate monologue; she even mentioned “Mr. Kerensky.” She cited the example of the revolutionary who was nevertheless a gentleman. The word gentleman amused the former turner Avdeyev. Finally, Nicholas blew up. He declared: “Up until now we have dealt with decent people!” This was the ultimate manifestation of anger for this most well-bred of monarchs.

Why did they make this search?

To demonstrate the conditions of their new life in the capital of the Red Urals? In part. But only in part.

They were looking for the jewels. The legendary tsarist jewels. The “spy” had not been napping. Evidently in Tobolsk he found out that Alix used the word “medicine” when talking in the presence of outsiders about the jewels (that was how she would refer to them in her letters to her daughters from Ekaterinburg). That was why they examined the vials of medicine so thoroughly and vainly, though they did not find anything.

They realized the jewels had been left in Tobolsk.

There was a third reason for the harsh examination. Since the day of the family’s arrival in Ekaterinburg they had begun to gather evidence of a “monarchist plot.” That was why they took the camera away—as evidence. That was apparently why they discovered the map of Ekaterinburg—more evidence (plus the rumor about the two guns confiscated from unlucky Valya—another link in the evidence).

This terrible game with the tsar