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Searches and arrests were being made all over town.

Pavel Medvedev, who had commanded the entire guard at the Ipatiev house, had not been able to leave with the Reds. He had been ordered to blow up the bridge, but he did not blow up the bridge and he did not get out of town. Shortly afterward Medvedev was being questioned by the investigator. They also arrested the guard Proskuryakov. The head of the guard, Yakimov, who had posted the sentries on the night of July 16–17, was also arrested. As was the guard Letyomin. Alexei’s dog, the rust-colored spaniel Joy, had given him away. He had taken the dog home—“So that he wouldn’t die of hunger,” as he later explained to the investigator. But the dog proved dangerous. Photographs of the heir with the spaniel were well known all over Russia. So they arrested Letyomin. Other things besides the dog were also uncovered at his house: Alexei’s diary begun at Tsarskoe Selo in March 1917—immediately after their arrest—and completed in Tobolsk in November 1917.

Letyomin had also taken the holy relics from Alexei’s bed and the icon he carried.

By that time many tsarist objects had been found in various Ekaterinburg quarters. The guards had given them to their wives and lovers. Goloshchekin and Beloborodov too had given some to their friends and retinue—savage souvenirs of the world they had so thoroughly eradicated. They found the empress’s black silk parasol and a white linen one, her lilac dress, even the pencil with her initials that she always used to write in her diary, and the grand duchesses’ little silver rings. The valet Chemodurov went from apartment to apartment like a bloodhound. Tsarist possessions became dangerous. Many people were packed off to the investigator.

PRISONERS’ STATEMENTS

Filipp Proskuryakov the guard. The same man who had come home drunk on the night of July 16–17 and fallen asleep in the bathhouse with his fellow guard Stolov. He and Stolov had been scheduled to go on duty at five in the morning.

At three in the morning Pavel Medvedev woke them.

He brought them into the half-cellar room. What greeted them there sobered them up immediately.

Smoke—gunsmoke—still filled the room. On the walls were distinct bullet holes. And blood. Everywhere. Spots and splashes on the walls and small puddles on the floor, as well as many traces of blood in the other rooms. It must have dripped as the slain were carried out. The people carrying them out tracked blood too from their boots.

Medvedev ordered the two guards to clean the room. They began by cleaning the floor with sawdust and water and then wiped it off with wet rags. With them worked two Latvians from the Cheka, three other guards, and Medvedev himself.

When they had cleaned up the room, Medvedev and the guard Strekotin told them everything that had happened. (Strekotin had been posted at the machine gun in the downstairs rooms and had seen everything.)

From Proskuryakov’s testimony:

“Both of them [Medvedev and Strekotin] said the same thing: “At twelve o’clock Yurovsky began waking the tsar’s family.… According to Medvedev, Yurovsky gave them some kind of explanation about the night being dangerous … it would be dangerous to be upstairs if there were shooting on the streets so he demanded they all go downstairs. The family complied.

“Downstairs Yurovsky began reading a paper. The sovereign didn’t quite hear and asked, ‘What?’ Yurovsky, according to Medvedev, raised his hand and revolver and answered the sovereign, ‘This is what!’

“Medvedev said he himself took two or three shots at the sovereign and the other people they were shooting at.

“When they had all been shot, Andrei Strekotin, as he himself told it, stripped off the jewels, which Yurovsky immediately took away, however, and brought upstairs. After that the slain were dumped onto a truck and taken away somewhere. Lyukhanov was the driver.”

The guard Letyomin did not see the execution himself either, but he gave the investigator statements based on what Strekotin had told him:

“On July 17 he went on duty