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At night a locomotive was coupled to their van, and the car with the court remnants was pulled out of Ekaterinburg to Tyumen. The Ekaterinburg Cheka was toying with them. After the Whites freed him, Gilliard would return to Switzerland, where he would marry Tegleva.

THE DARK GENTLEMAN

Nicholas’s diary:

“12 [25] May.… The children sorted out some of their things after an incredibly lengthy inspection in the commandant’s room.”

So the family had arrived. As had the “medicines.”

The jewels were in cases. They were also on the hands, ears, and necks of the Romanov women. Jewels “created by the people’s labor, sweat, and blood.” Now they had only to be taken away and put back into the hands of the people. From that moment events began to speed up.

Nicholas’s diary:

“13 [26] May. We slept well, except Alexei, whose pains continued.… Like every day of late. V. Derevenko came to examine Alexei. Today he was accompanied by a dark gentleman, whom we identified as a doctor.”

The “dark gentleman” who appeared that day in the family’s room and whom they “identified as a doctor” was the Chekist Comrade Yakov Yurovsky.

“Let us drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand”—this was a slogan at the Solovetsky labor camp.

Subsequently, in attempting to explain the inhuman event in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house, some would brand Yurovsky and his comrades murderers and sadists. Others would see in the execution of the family the Jews’ blood revenge against the Orthodox tsar (to the revenge of Goloshchekin and Yurovsky they would add that of other purely Russian names). Indeed, it was easier to explain what went on that way. Revenge for the brutal pogroms and daily humiliation!

Had it had been like that then, as horrible as it is to write, there would at least have been something in it that the human mind could understand.

But it was not.

“Our family suffered less from the constant hunger than from my father’s religious fanaticism.

“… On holidays and regular days the children were forced to pray, and it is not surprising that my first active protest was against religious and nationalistic traditions. I came to hate God and prayer as I hated poverty and the bosses.” This is what Yurovsky would write in his last letter, as he lay dying in the Kremlin hospital.

Yes, he came to hate the religion of his fathers and their God.

Yurovsky and Goloshchekin rejected their Jewishness at an early age, and they served a completely different people. This people also lived all over the world. They were called the worldwide proletariat. The people of Yurovsky, Nikulin, Goloshchekin, Beloborodov, the Latvian Berzin.… “The world must live without a Russia, without a Latvia, as one human community,” their poet Vladimir Mayakovsky proudly wrote.

The party to which they belonged promised to confirm the mastery of this people all over the land. Then mankind’s long-awaited happiness would come to pass.

This could happen, however, only through harsh struggle. They called blood and violence the “midwife of history.”

Once the nineteenth-century revolutionaries Nechaev and Tkachev had discussed how many people from the old society would have to be destroyed to create a happy future. They came to the conclusion that they should be thinking about how many to “leave.”

“The method of sorting out Communist humanity from the material of the capitalist era” (Bolshevik leader Bukharin). So they took up this work of sorting. Out of human material.

Trotsky: “We must put an end once and for all to the Papish-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.”

They did. Inexorable class hatred took possession of their souls.

“In your investigation do not look for material or proof that the accused acted in word and deed against Soviet power. The first question is … Which class does he belong to? … Herein lie the idea and essence of Red terror” (M. Latsis, Cheka board member, in the November 1, 1918, issue of Red Terror).

The murder of the Romanovs, who symbolized the overthrown classes,