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“… You have been like a son to me, and I embrace you, as my son. Yours, Yakov Yurovsky.”

So, “The documents give to the Museum of the Revolution.” The circle was closed. Realizing the futility of it all, I still made a trip to the Museum of the Revolution archives. To my question there was a clear reply: We have no Yurovsky papers! We’ve never even heard of any “note.”

So I decided to compile a list of the institutions where he had worked. I began to run down the events of his life.

After the execution and his departure for Moscow, the commandant went back to the Urals. First he was instructed to take the “gold train”—the treasures of the Ural banks—from Perm to the capital.

In the nights of August 1918, his wife, his daughter the Ekaterinburg Komsomol leader Rimma, his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander, and one more “son” who had returned with him from Moscow, Nikulin, loaded endless canvas sacks of gold, silver, and platinum onto the train. Once again Yurovsky, the commandant, was commandant of the train, and once again his assistant was Nikulin.

Upon his arrival in Moscow, Yurovsky was given familiar work—in the Cheka. After the attempt on Lenin’s life by Fanya Kaplan, Yurovsky was assigned to a group ordered to ferret out Socialist Revolutionaries suspected of ties to Kaplan. He was one of the most meticulous of the investigators. To the end, though, Kaplan declared she was acting alone. Kaplan was shot.

After the Whites surrendered, Yurovsky went back to Ekaterinburg, where he was chairman of the Social Security Department and simultaneously one of the leaders of the Cheka. He was involved with all aspects of citizens’ social security. The Ural Worker regularly published articles under the heading “The Punishing Activity of the Provincial Cheka.”

In May 1921 he was transferred to Moscow to work in the Russian Republic’s State Depository of Valuables, where the treasures “confiscated from the enslavers” were also kept. He guarded them loyally. “A reliable Communist”—that was how Lenin referred to him in a letter to the people’s commissar of finance. At the end of his life our hero was already employed in prosaic jobs, directing the Red Warrior factory and the Polytechnic Museum.

I conscientiously inquired about his documents at every institution where the “reliable Communist” had worked. Either there was no answer or there were “no documents listed.”

THE YUROVSKY NOTE

This happened when the archives were only just starting to be declassified.

In a small room in the Central Archive of the October Revolution, I sorted through the formerly secret files of the All-Russian Executive Committee, once the highest organ of power in revolutionary Russia, headed by Sverdlov. One file immediately caught my attention: “File on the Family of Former Tsar Nicholas the Second, 1918–1919.”

1919? File on the Family? But the family had already been shot by 1919!

This meant that this file contained some document concerning the family but created in 1919—after their execution! I leafed through the file impatiently.

It began with the telegram about the former tsar removing his shoulder straps. Then came the Ural Soviet’s famous telegram to the Central Executive Committee regarding the tsar’s execution … and the documents of the “monarchist plot”—all those letters signed “Officer.”

And at the very end of the file there were two poorly typed copies of a document that had no title or signature.

I began reading. It was a shock: the whole horrible night of July 16–17—the execution, the two days dealing with the corpses—it was all laid out thoroughly and dispassionately. The Apocalypse as recorded by a witness! The document was not signed, but one of its typed copies was corrected in the author’s hand. At the end of the document, also in the author’s handwriting, the terrible address had been added—the location of the grave where the corpses of the tsar and his family had been secretly buried.

By that time I had already seen several