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That which had been hidden all these seventy years, that which I had sought all these years.

The Note’s style of exposition was surprising. The new ruling power offered yesterday’s semiliterate workers, soldiers, and sailors a tempting position as makers of history. In describing the execution, Yurovsky proudly referred to himself in the third person as “commandant” (abbreviated “com.” in the Note). For on that night there was no Yakov Yurovsky, there was a terrible commandant—the weapon of proletarian vengeance. The weapon of history.

I decided to publish this document. It was already 1989, the triumph of glasnost. However, the issue of Ogonyok in which the statement of the “reliable Communist” which had been held secret for seventy years was to appear was detained by the censor. Times had changed, though, and the magazine eventually did come out. Thanks to the censor’s delay, the issue appeared on May 19 (May 6, old style). On the emperor’s birthday, this terrible account of his death and his family’s saw the light of day for the first time.

“THE BIRNAM WOOD”

Letters started coming in, thousands of readers’ letters. Millions of my fellow citizens had learned for the first time of the bloodshed in which the dynasty that had ruled the country for three hundred years had come to its end.

The invaluable mails were very busy: I began receiving both letters and telephone calls with more new information and documents. Once lost or concealed forever, they rose up out of nonbeing, and, as in Macbeth, the Birnam Wood set out after the murderers.

What I had hoped for had come to pass: at the Museum of the Revolution one more copy of the Note I had already published suddenly was found. But it had a title and even a signature:

“Copy of a document given by my father Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky to the historian M. N. Pokrovsky in 1920.”

Yurovsky’s son, Alexander, had sent this copy and certified it with his own hand in 1964, when he himself, Alexander Yakovlevich Yurovsky, was already turning gray.

This document, however, did not include the location of the grave.

So in 1920 Yurovsky had given his Note to a historian! But it had been written earlier, as a report for the authorities. That was why I had found this document in the Central Executive Committee archives.

The historian Pokrovsky was a member of the Central Executive Committee presidium. The leader of official historical science was addressing the “initiated.” In giving Pokrovsky his Note, Yurovsky never dreamed it would be published. He had written it for posterity, for history. His contemporaries still lacked the consciousness to know the whole truth about the execution.

“What I will recount here shall see the light only after many years,” wrote Yakov Yurovsky subsequently.

WITNESSES AND PARTICIPANTS IN THE APOCALYPSE

The letters kept coming; this popular inquiry continued. I was told that in a small district archive, in a little Ural town, in a secret depository, there were the statements of Alexander Strekotin. Yes, the machine gunner Alexander Strekotin on whose account the guards Letyomin and Proskuryakov had based the story they told Investigator Sokolov about the execution.

It turned out that Strekotin himself wrote his memoirs (sent to me by two readers). I now had in my hands the most important voluntary statements—most important because Yurovsky was the chief actor and Strekotin’s oral tale lay at the base of Sokolov’s entire investigation.

Strekotin served in the Ipatiev house guard along with his brother. The guard frequently included relatives: Lyukhanov father and son, the Strekotin brothers, and so on.

“The personal reminiscences of Alexander Andreyevich Strekotin, former Red Guard in the sentry detachment guarding the tsarist Romanov family, and witness to their execution.” The guileless title immediately sets the tone and hints at how his story came to be written down: the poorly educated Strekotin reminisced, and someone