Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [181]
The remaining daughters and retainers were left to another Medvedev, Pavel Medvedev, the head of the guard in the Ipatiev house, another Chekist, Alexei Kabanov, and six Latvians from the Cheka.
Yurovsky agreed: at exactly midnight a truck was to drive into the courtyard. Peter Ermakov was to come with the truck, which they planned to take from the Soviet’s garage. And replace the driver.
The truck was to be driven by Sergei Lyukhanov—the Ipatiev house driver. This truck would take away the bodies.
The town was restless, which was why Yurovsky designated a password. The password on the day of the execution was “chimney sweep.”
They adored revolutionary rhetoric. They chose “chimney sweep” because they were planning to clean out the dirty chimneys of history.
Now it remained to decide where to carry out the execution. The commandant did not hesitate. Next to the storeroom was a room—he had noticed it right away. The room let out onto Ascension Lane, which was a dead end. There was a grating on the window, and the window jutted out into a slope, so that the room was a half-cellar, and if they turned on a lamp—a bare bulb at the ceiling—the light would not be visible at all from the street because of the high fence.
It was a hungry time. They had to work all night. Yurovsky allowed the nuns from the monastery to bring milk and a basket of eggs for Alexei. And he asked them to pack the eggs better so they wouldn’t break. He took pains with everything.
THE LAST DAY
On that last day, July 16, they got up at nine. As always, they gathered in the room of the father and mother and prayed together.
Before they had often sung religious songs together. But this last day for some reason they did not sing.
At nine in the morning, as always, Commandant Yurovsky arrived at the house. At ten they had tea and the commandant walked around the room, verifying the prisoners’ presence.
He also brought the eggs and milk.
Yurovsky informed Alix of this; he was pleased with this idea of his—in any event they would be in a good mood. And the eggs would come in handy. Later.
He allowed them to walk for an hour that day, as always. They walked half an hour in the morning and half an hour before dinner.
On their walk they saw the guard Yakimov, who said that only the tsar and his daughters walked; he did not see Alexei or the tsaritsa.
She did not go out but spent the entire day in her room.
From Yurovsky’s Note:
“July 16, 1918. The telegram arrived from Perm in the code language containing the decree to exterminate the Romanovs. At six o’clock in the evening Filipp Goloshchekin ordered the decree executed.”
What was this telegram? And where did this word decree come from? Who could issue a decree to Goloshchekin, the military commissar of the entire Ural district?
Even earlier, in late June, when a false rumor had spread in Moscow about the execution of Nicholas II, the Sovnarkom had sent an inquiry to the Urals. The reply—“All information about the murder of Nicholas Romanov is a provocation—arrived over the signature “Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Ural-Siberian Front R. Berzin.”
After Muraviev’s betrayal, power in the Urals had been given to the Latvian revolutionary commanding the front against the advancing Czechs—Reinhold Berzin, whom Moscow had evidently instructed to set the family’s execution in motion. This was logical; he could be a guarantee that the Ural Soviet did not do this before Ekaterinburg’s fate at the hands of the Czechs had been decided. Only he, the commander of the army, could know this fateful hour precisely. Only he, the commander-in-chief, could issue an order to a military commissar. On July 16, realizing that the town’s situation was hopeless, Berzin clearly gave his order, sentencing eleven people to death—including