• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Hear?”

“Yes.”

“Understand?” “Yes.”

Oh, life was dangerous in those years, and people were wary, they learned well: only the wary survived. So they said no more to each other and hid in their rooms until morning.

Later they told their White Guard investigator about this nighttime conversation—on that warm, “garden fragrant” night of July 16–17.

——

July 17: dawn.

From a letter of Peter Lyurtsov in Kuibyshev:

“In 1918 my grandfather Peter Nikolaevich Lyurtsov was working in a Soviet institution in Ekaterinburg. On July 15 they were paid, and he went out with his friends. Toward morning they decided to go home. It was a warm night. He was walking not far from the racetrack. Dawn was already breaking. A truck was driving down the empty street, and in it were armed men. Calculating the look of the Red Guards in the cab, my grandfather decided to make himself scarce just in case. When the Whites came, everyone starting talking about the execution. My grandfather immediately realized what that truck had been. Later he told us, ‘Well, what’s so savage and horrible about that—a truck, but for some reason I can’t forget it, and whenever I want to think about that terrible thing—I think about that dark truck in the dawn.’”

July 17: morning in the Ipatiev house. The morning was overcast. But again the gardens had blossomed—“the fragrance of the gardens,” as he had written.

As always, sentries were posted around the Ipatiev house. A novice came from the monastery that morning again and, like the day before, brought eggs and cream. They did not let the novice into the house; she was met on the porch by the commandant’s young assistant Nikulin. He did not take the food but said: “Go back and don’t bring anything else.”

The head of the guard, Yakimov, arrived at the Ipatiev house early in the morning. The Latvians were not inside the house anymore. The sentries were only outside. Yakimov was told the Latvians had gone back to the Cheka that morning and only two remained. But after what had happened last night they hadn’t wanted to sleep downstairs, so they were sleeping in the commandant’s room on the second floor. Yakimov walked to the commandant’s room and saw the Latvians sitting on the grand duchesses’ camp beds (which had been brought from their rooms). Yurovsky was not there, and Nikulin and Pavel Medvedev were sitting at the table, which was strewn with jewels, some of which were in open boxes and some simply dumped on the cloth. Medvedev and Nikulin seemed rather tired, depressed even. They were silently putting the jewels away in the boxes. The door to the family’s room was closed.

The spaniel Joy stood quietly, poking its nose at the closed door. And waiting. Not a sound came from the family’s room, although usually you could hear voices and steps.

That is what Guard Commander Yakimov later told the White Guard investigator.

On July 17, Beloborodov acted out his amusing play entitled “Informing Unsuspecting Moscow about the Execution” for the uninitiated members of the Ural Soviet Executive Committee.

One of those uninitiated—the editor of the Ural Worker, V. Vorobiev—conscientiously described this scene in his memoirs:

“In the morning I was given the text of the official announcement of the Romanovs’ execution for the newspaper at the district soviet presidium. ‘Don’t show it to anyone yet,’ they told me. ‘The execution announcement text has to be coordinated with the center [Moscow].’ I was discouraged; anyone who has ever been a newspaper worker will understand how much I wanted to scoop such unusual and sensational news in my newspaper: it’s not every day we have events like the execution of a tsar!

“… Every other minute I kept calling to find out whether they had gotten Moscow’s consent to publish. My patience was seriously undermined by this ordeal. Only the next day, that is, on July 18, was I able to get a direct line through to Sverdlov. Beloborodov and some other member of the presidium went to the telegraph office to talk with him. I couldn’t stand it and went too. The telegraph