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The wagons would stop by a nameless mine shaft not far from Alapaevsk, and the Red Guards would start beating the captives with their rifle butts. The old grand duchess, too. Nicky’s childhood playmate and Kschessinska’s admirer, Sergei Mikhailovich, naturally would resist. For which he would get a bullet, the old dandy. He alone would be thrown into the mine dead; the others would still be alive. Grenades would be tossed in, brush and fallen branches heaped on, and all of it set afire. For a long time local residents—this is not a pretty legend—would hear the singing of prayers from underground. Ella would be dying in agony but would have strength for more than prayer. In the dark of the mine, gasping from the smoke, the crippled grand duchess crawled to the dying Ioann and bandaged his smashed head. To the end she fulfilled the vows of the Convent of Martha and Mary.

When the Whites would take Alapaevsk later that summer, they would find these bodies in the strewn mine. An examination of the corpses would reveal the trip’s denouement. As in Michael’s case, the Cheka in Alapaevsk staged the slain Romanovs’ escape.

A telegram dated July 19, 1918, to the Sovnarkom, Moscow, from Alapaevsk: “Reporting that in Alapaevsk I have learned of an assault on the quarters where the former Romanov princes were being kept and the removal of such. My brief inquiry and examination at the scene has shown that … the attackers broke into the building, freed all the Romanovs and servants, and took them away.… Examination of the building has shown the Romanovs’ things had been packed and stowed.… I assume that the attack and flight had been previously planned. Political Representative Kobelyanko.”

This is what awaited the family on their trip.

The same scenario lay at the base of all the Romanov murders, and all of them contained an element of provocation.

Yes, Russia’s revolutionaries had grown up with the secret police’s provocations, and when they conquered they adopted the familiar methods. The immortal, all-Russian institution—the secret police—was resurrected then and there, like a phoenix from the ashes. Now it was called the Cheka. It would become more powerful than its creators. And it would kill them. In 1917 the revolutionaries destroyed the secret police, and in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the secret police would destroy the revolutionaries.

So, the general action was planned for June 13–14: the night of the long knives, the destruction of both tsarist brothers and the annihilation of the tsar’s entire family at one fell swoop.

But only Michael’s murder was accomplished.

In the heat of preparations, Avdeyev suddenly arrived and the family’s trip was postponed.

What had happened?

Most likely carrying out the executions had been a local decision made by the ferocious Ural Bolsheviks. When they conceived of destroying the Romanovs, they were on their own. To them Moscow was a distant myth.

The decision, naturally, had been made by the head of the Ural government—Beloborodov. Subsequently Chekists captured by White Guards would corroborate this fact, stating that the Romanovs in Alapaevsk had been destroyed in response to a telegram from Ekaterinburg over the signatures of Beloborodov and his assistant Safarov. But there was one more person without whom Beloborodov could not have acted: the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, the military commissar of the Urals, Comrade Filipp Goloshchekin.

Beloborodov was hot-headed, young, and fierce. Goloshchekin was much older and more circumspect. As military commissar he was directly involved in fighting the White Army. When the Bolsheviks had conceived of their proletarian vengeance—the annihilation of the Romanovs—the military situation did not yet threaten irrevocable catastrophe. Now Commissar Goloshchekin knew for certain that Ekaterinburg would fall to the White forces. Soon they would have to flee, and the only place for them to go was Moscow. If yesterday they had treated