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The house was a spectacle of hasty departure. All the quarters were trashed. Pins, toothbrushes, combs, hairbrushes, empty vials, and broken photograph frames had been dropped on the floors. Empty hangers hung in the wardrobe, all the stoves in the rooms were stuffed with ashes from burned papers and possessions.

An empty wheelchair stood by the fireplace in the dining room. The old, worn-out wheelchair with three little wheels where she had spent almost all her days, her feet aching, incapacitated from constant headache. Empress Alexandra Feodorovna’s last throne.

The girls’ room was empty. A box with one fruit drop, the sick boy’s bedpan—that was all. A woolen blanket hung across the window. The grand duchesses’ camp beds were found downstairs in the guard’s rooms. No jewelry and no clothing at all. Grigory Nikulin and his friends had done a good job.

Scattered throughout the rooms and the rubbish dump of the Popov house, where the guard had lived, they found what had been most precious to the family—the icons. There were books as well. Her brown Bible with its bookmarks, a prayer book, On Suffering Grief, and of course The Life of Saint Serafim of Sarov, Chekhov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Averchenko, volumes of War and Peace—all this had been dropped in the rooms or dumped on the rubbish heap.

In the bedroom they found a well-planed board—this was the board on which the sick boy played and ate. There were also numerous vials of holy water and medicine. In the entry lay a box of the grand duchesses’ hair, which had been cut off in February when they had had the measles.

In the corner of the dining room lay the slipcover of one of the daughters’ headboards. The cover bore the bloody trace of wiped hands.

In the rubbish heap in the Popov house they found the St. George’s ribbon that the tsar had worn on his greatcoat until the last days. By that time the house’s former inhabitant, the servant Chemodurov, and the tutor Gilliard had already gone to the Ipatiev house.

Chemodurov was an old lackey, the archetype of the loyal Russian servant, a kind of devoted Chekhovian Firs who all his life walked behind his master like a child.

The tsar had brought Chemodurov to Tobolsk, but when another lackey came to the Ipatiev house with the children, young Trupp, the tsar decided to let the old man go get some rest and treatment. In those days, though, tsarist lackeys did not go for treatment—old Chemodurov was sent to prison. He grieved in prison and did not know that prison would save his life. He would wait it out there happily until the arrival of the Whites. Now he had been brought to the Ipatiev house. When Chemodurov saw the icon of the St. Feodor’s Mother of God among the holy icons scattered about the house, the old servant paled. He knew his mistress would never part with that icon as long as she lived! They also found her other favorite image—of Saint Serafim of Sarov—in the rubbish. Looking at the terrible devastation, the loyal lackey kept trying to find “his master’s personal belongings.” How many times did he enumerate for the investigator everything he had brought from Tsarskoe Selo: “one coat of officer’s cloth, another of plain soldier’s. One short fur coat from Romanov sheep, four khaki shirts, three high-collared jackets, five pairs of wide trousers and seven box calf boots, and six service caps”—the old servant remembered everything. But there were no shirts, no jackets, and no coats….

Books and icons amid “abomination and desolation”—this was the picture of what had happened.

Among the books they found one belonging to the Grand Duchess Olga—Rostand’s L’Aiglon in French. She had taken with her this story of the son of the deposed emperor Napoleon. The eldest daughter of another deposed emperor was rereading the story of a boy who remained faithful to his deposed father to the very end.

Like that boy, she idolized her father. On her chest she wore an image of Saint Nicholas. A poem copied out in Olga’s hand and inserted