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By Root 2249 0

the family had already gathered. Alexei was sitting in the wheelchair; he was quite grown up, but his face was pale after his long illness spent in stuffy rooms. Alexandra Feodorovna was in the same lilac dress she had worn when Father Storozhev had seen her during the first service. She was sitting in a chair beside the heir. Nicholas was standing, dressed as he had been the last time—in a field shirt, khaki trousers, and boots. The daughters were standing, dressed in white tops and dark skirts. Their hair had grown out and reached to their shoulders. In the back, behind the arch, stood Dr. Botkin, the servants, and the little cook Sednev.

According to the vespers ceremony, they had to read the prayer “Rest with the Saints.”

Naturally he was the first to drop to his knees. He was the tsar, who always knew that the tsar’s lot “is in the hands of God.”

He also knew: Soon! Very soon.

On the way back the deacon told Father Storozhev, “Something has happened to them. They are different.”

THE SOLICITOUS COMMANDANT

During that period Yurovsky was often away from the house. He was taking trips with Upper Isetsk Commissar Ermakov to the Koptyaki countryside, 18 versts (12 miles) from Ekaterinburg. There, not far from the village, in the deep woods, were abandoned mines.

Yurovsky knew that the execution of the Romanovs was only the beginning of his job. Then came the hardest part: burying them so that they could not be found.

“The family has been evacuated to a safe place.” Yurovsky and Ermakov were searching for that safe place.

Alix’s diary: “July 2 (15). Monday. Greyish morning. Later sunshine. Lunched on the couch in the big room, as women came to clean the floors, then lay on my bed again & read with Maria … Ezra 26–31. They went out twice as usual. In the morning T[atiana] read to me the Spiritual Reading. At 6½ Baby had his second bath. Bezique [a card game]. Went to bed 10¼.… Heard the report of an artillery shot in the night & several revolver shots.”

The women who washed the floor on the next to last day later told how they were ordered to wash all the floors—in the family’s rooms and downstairs, on the first floor, where the guard lived. They also washed the floor in the half-cellar room.

They had repaired the electricity, put in railings, and washed the floors. Yurovsky had thought of everything.

During that period he was finishing up the entries in the sentry journal:

“July 10. Notification of Nicholas Romanov about opening the windows to air out the rooms, which he had been refused.

“July 11. The family had its usual walk: Tatiana and Marie asked for their camera, which the commandant naturally refused them.”

Yes, there was a camera in the house. The one that had been confiscated from the tsaritsa when she first entered the Ipatiev house. The camera was lying in the room of the commandant—commandant and former photographer Yakov Yurovsky.

The Chekist’s son Mikhail Medvedev:

“My father said that during that time Yakov Yurovsky held a meeting in the American hotel. Participation in the execution was voluntary, and the volunteers gathered in his room, no, 3. They agreed to aim for their hearts, so that they wouldn’t suffer. And then and there they figured out who would shoot whom. Peter Ermakov took the tsar for himself. By rank he was the Upper Isetsk military commissar. He had people who were supposed to help bury the bodies.

“Most important, Ermakov was the only one among the execudoners who had done hard labor as a political prisoner. This was one of the most honored pasts for a revolutionary. Anyone who did hard labor was for the revolution!

“Yurovsky took the tsaritsa, Nikulin Alexei, my father got Marie.”

(Mikhail Medvedev could have felt insulted. The next most honored past for a revolutionary was political prisoner, which Mikhail Medvedev had been—a professional revolutionary, a former sailor, who had served in a tsarist prison, although he had not done hard labor. His real name was Kudrin. Medvedev was his party pseudonym, from one of the countless false passports he had used during his