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By Root 2172 0

loyal to him to the grave), I feel I must transfer to the museum for safekeeping two revolvers that have been in my possession: Colt no. 71905 with a cartridge clip and seven bullets, and Mauser no. 167177 with a wooden gunstock and a cartridge clip with ten bullets. The reasons for the two revolvers are as follows: I killed Nicholas on the spot with my Colt; the remaining bullets in the one loaded clip for the Colt, as well as the loaded Mauser, went to finish off Nicholas’s daughters, who were armored with corsets made of a solid mass of large diamonds, and the strange vitality of the heir, on which my assistant also spent an entire clip of bullets (the strange vitality of the heir must probably be put down to my assistant’s poor mastery of his weapon and his inevitable nerves, evoked by his long ordeal with the armored daughters).

“The former commandant of the special house in Ekaterinburg, where the former tsar Nicholas II and his family were held in 1918 (up until his execution in the same year on July 16), Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky, and the commandant’s assistant Grigory Petrovich Nikulin attest to the above.

“Ya. M. Yurovsky has been a member of the party since 1905, Party ticket no. 1500, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.

“G. P. Nikulin has been a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1917, no. 128185, Krasnopresnenskaya Organization.”

So it did all happen!

She said, “This is a copy of a restricted document held by the Museum of the Revolution. I was told you want to find out how it happened? I’m glad I can give you the chance. But this document was copied out at my request, and I don’t want to put anyone on the spot. So you have to keep mum about it. Not that you’re very likely to be able to talk about all this any time in the next hundred years. So enjoy the abstract knowledge, that’s enough.”

“This is the Yurovsky Note?”

“What do you mean! This is just an ordinary notice Yurovsky wrote.”

(In 1989 I was finally able to look at this “ordinary notice” with my own two eyes. It was indeed written in the commandant-assassin’s characteristic hand.)

“No, no.” She chuckled. “The Yurovsky Note is something completely different. It’s a long document. By the way, in the 1920s he gave it to Pokrovsky.”

(Mikhail Pokrovsky was the director of the Communist Academy in the 1920s, the leader of Soviet historical science.)

“You saw it? It’s in the Museum of the Revolution?”

“I don’t know,” she said dryly. “I only know that the NKVD [as the Cheka’s successor was called in the 1940s] removed those revolvers of Yurovsky’s from the museum before the war, along with all his papers. There’s a record of that there. What else could they have done? After all, his daughter was arrested.”

“Yurovsky’s daughter? Arrested?”

“Her name was Rimma. She was a Komsomol [Young Communist League] leader, apparently a secretary on the Komsomol Central Committee. She spent more than a quarter of a century in the camps. Even if the Yurovsky Note were in the museum, though, you would never get your hands on it, as you must understand. Documents about the execution of the tsar’s family are especially secret.”

She went, and I was left with his notice. The first voluntary participant statement I had obtained!

So it was all true. There was an execution. And ten years later, Yurovsky was still living that execution. He was incapable of writing an “ordinary notice.” The Ipatiev house pursued him—the armored girls, the boy they finished off. If this was an “ordinary notice,” imagine his note! I realized she was right—I would get nowhere at the museum.

Yurovsky’s biography, in the style of Soviet hagiography, published in a limited edition in Sverdlovsk as I Am the Chekist, by Yakov Reznik, contains the commandant’s last will and testament, in which he again turned to his loyal “son”—his assistant in the execution, G. Nikulin. As he lay dying from an excruciatingly painful ulcer, he again evoked the specter of the terrible Ipatiev house:

“To G. P. Nikulin.

“My friend, my life is at an ebb. I must dispose of what remains. You will be given a list