Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [194]
Actually, for her that crime was a matter of pride, of course, as it was for Pavel Medvedev. The Ipatiev house guard commander must have been a reliable man, that is, fanatical, otherwise Yurovsky and Goloshchekin would not have taken him for such a post. He was making statements about the execution because he knew that others would tell the story anyway. It made no sense to refuse to talk.
The investigation continued. It was established that two more trucks went to the Koptyaki forest on July 18, bringing three barrels, which they moved onto carts and took into the forest. One of those barrels was filled with gasoline.
The investigators learned that there had been other barrels as well. They found a note from the supply commissar, “Intellectual,” P. Voikov, in the Ekaterinburg pharmacy about supplying a large quantity of sulfuric acid.
After the witnesses’ corroborating statements, the investigation came to its conclusion: on the night of July 16–17, the tsar, his family, retainers, and servants—eleven people—were shot in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house.
Then, according to the investigation’s hypothesis, the corpses were stowed in a truck and taken to an unnamed mine near the village of Koptyaki. On July 18, a large quantity of gasoline and sulfuric acid was brought to the site. The bodies of the slain were chopped up with axes (the investigation found one of the axes), doused with gasoline and sulfuric acid, and burned in bonfires whose remnants were discovered not far from the mines.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE SLAIN
But … But Sokolov never did find the bodies of the tsar’s family. There was someone’s separated finger, someone’s false teeth … and a bonfire next to an unnamed mine that he declared to be the grave and ashes of the tsar and his family.
Yes, the statements of witnesses to the execution coincided, but….
But Sokolov was a monarchist. He brought a political obsession to his work, and that made the statements he obtained highly suspect. Both sides in the Civil War learned cruelty from each other, and the cellars of White counterintelligence rivaled those of the Cheka. The interrogations may not have been altogether idyllic. May that have been why the statements coincided? Skeptics have argued that it was a biased investigation and that the conclusion—that it is indeed possible to burn eleven bodies without a trace—was debatable. For the fact was indisputable—there were no bodies.
A year and a half after the “family was executed in the Ipatiev house” (as Sokolov asserted) or “the Romanov family disappeared from the Ipatiev house” (as his opponents formulated it), “Anastasia” would appear, a mysterious woman whose fate has continued to disturb the world for seventy years.
A brief account of the well-known story:
In Berlin an unknown young woman decided to commit suicide by jumping into a canal one night in 1920, but she was saved and placed in a clinic, depressed and almost mute. In the clinic she came across a photograph of the tsar’s family, which produced a remarkable agitation in her and from which she could not be parted. Soon a rumor arose: the miraculously saved daughter of the Russian tsar, Tatiana, was there, in a Berlin hospital.
Tatiana—that was what she called herself at first. But soon after she changed her name to Anastasia.
No, there was nothing conclusive in this fact. A powerful shock may simply have burned out her memory. She did not remember who she was. She dug deep in her memory—and found herself: she was Anastasia.
She told a fantastic story about her rescue: a shot, she fell, her sister behind her, shielding her from the bullets with her body. Then, senselessness, a gap in her memory … then stars … she was being taken away on a wagon of some kind. Then the journey to Romania with the soldier who, it turned out, had saved her. The birth of a child fathered by the soldier. Her escape. And all this in incoherent waves.
Moreover, she did not speak Russian. There could be an explanation for this: the