Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [188]
PRAYER
Send us, Lord, the patience
In this year of stormy, gloom-filled days,
To suffer popular oppression
And the tortures of our hangmen.
Give us strength, oh Lord of Justice,
Our neighbor’s evil to forgive
And the Cross so heavy and bloody
With Your humility to meet.
And in upheaval restless,
In days when enemies rob us,
To bear the shame and humiliation,
Christ our Savior, help us.
Ruler of the world, God of the universe,
Bless us with prayer
And give our humble soul rest
In this unbearable, dreadful hour.
At the threshold of the grave
Breathe into the lips of Your slaves
Inhuman strength—
To pray meekly for our enemies.
They descended from the second floor of the house to the first—the guard’s rooms. Here the same garbage predominated.
But one room.… To get to that half-cellar room from the second floor where the family’s rooms were, they first had to go downstairs, then outside, then through the garden, in by another door, and through the whole suite of first-floor rooms where the guard lived, to reach the small entry.
This entry had a window onto the garden. Out the window they saw trees and the joy of the July summer’s day.
The door from the entry led to that room. It was a small room, 100–115 square feet, hung in checkered wallpaper. The room was dark, its window jutted out into the slope, and the shadow of the high fence lay on the floor. A heavy railing had been installed over its sole window.
This room was in perfect order: everything had been washed.
It adjoined the storeroom and was separated from it by a partition; the storeroom door was nailed shut. This entire partition and the nailed door were sown with bullet holes. It was obvious: this was where they had been shot.
Along the baseboards were traces of washed blood. Bullet holes fanned across the other two walls: evidently the people doing the shooting had rushed about the room.
The floor had dents from bayonet blows (where some of the family were stabbed), and two bullet holes gaped in the brown floor, where they had fired at someone lying down.
Most of the bullets in the room had been shot from a revolver, but there were also bullets from a Colt and a Mauser.
On one wall someone had scratched a line from Heine in German: “This night Belshazzar was murdered by his fellows.”
By this time the Whites had dug up the garden near the house, searched the pond, and dug up the communal graves in the cemetery, where a special contractor had brought bodies from the Cheka, but no traces of the eleven people who had lived in the house could be found. They had vanished.
MR. SOKOLOV
The investigation began.
The ideas of the February Revolution were strong in the Ural government. In instituting an investigation the government worried that it might be providing “the givens for reactionary principles … fuel for monarchist plots.”
The first two investigators, Nametkin and Sergeyev, were quite cautious. But Kolchak, the supreme ruler of that part of Russia under White control, replaced the Ural government, and a third investigator was named—thirty-six-year-old Nikolai Sokolov.
Before the revolution he had been a special investigator. After the October Revolution he had attempted to dissolve into the peasantry and had left for the countryside. When Soviet power collapsed in Siberia, he made his way to the Urals in his peasant clothes. Appointed by Kolchak as the new investigator in the case of the tsar and his family, he brought to the investigation passion and fanaticism. After Kolchak was shot in 1920 and Soviet rule returned to the Urals and Siberia, he continued his work. In emigration in Paris he took down countless statements from surviving witnesses. He died from a heart attack, in France, while continuing his endless investigation.
——
From a letter of Peter Aminev in Kuibyshev:
“In 1918 I was living in Irbit. Irbit had been occupied by the Whites