Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [199]
Strekotin begins with some history:
“Volunteers were being signed up in Sysert for the detachment to guard the former tsar Nicholas II and his wife, who had arrived by then in Ekaterinburg. Mostly they recruited workers. A great number were interested, and those joining the detachment included me and my older brother Andrei. Our detachment was quartered in the house opposite, the Popov house.
“… Appointed head of our detachment was our Sysert comrade Pavel Spiridonovich Medvedev—a worker and a noncommissioned officer in the tsarist army.”
He begins by describing Nicholas:
“The tsar—in my opinion he wasn’t much like a tsar. The ex-emperor was always dressed in the same outfit, his khaki uniform. He was a little above average height. A solidly built blond with gray eyes. Agile and impetuous. He liked to twirl his reddish mustache.”
Finally, Strekotin describes that night.
Another witness was found through whose eyes we will also look on that night: Alexei Kabanov, whom I learned about from the son of the Chekist Medvedev-Kudrin, at whose request, in 1964, Kabanov described that night in detail in a letter.
Finally, there was Upper Isetsk Commissar Peter Ermakov, one of the cruelest participants in the Ipatiev night. His memoirs were kept in a secret file at the Sverdlovsk Party Archives. Thanks to a reader, they found their way into my hands, given to me by a strange assistant (about whose surprising visit I will speak later in detail).
And one more witness: Chekist Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin.
I chatted at length with his son, the historian M. M. Medvedev, who had grown up around the Ekaterinburg regicides. He had detailed memories of his father, and in his house he kept the black leather Chekist jacket his father had worn that night.
From readers I received excerpts from the “Stenogram of Reminiscences of Participants in the Execution,” compiled in Sverdlovsk in 1924, as well as an excerpt from an amazing lecture given to the town’s party activists, who had gathered in the Ipatiev house, by the assassin Yurovsky.
In this way I collected the voluntary statements of five men who had been in the room and put them together with the statements of a sixth witness, Pavel Medvedev, the guard commander, whose statements were included in Sokolov’s investigation.
Six men who had been in the room described that night.
——
And something incredible happened. What was supposed to have remained a secret forever was laid out in all its details. That entire impossible, inhuman night.
Now we shall let them speak.
CHRONICLE OF THE IPATIEV NIGHT IN THE STATEMENTS OF WITNESSES
Yurovsky: “In about the middle of July, Filipp [Goloshchekin] told me we had to make preparations for the liquidation in case the front got any closer.
“On the evening of the fifteenth, I think, or the morning of the fifteenth, he came and said that we had to get going on liquidating them that day.
“On July 16 a telegram was received from Perm in code containing the order to exterminate the Romanovs.
“On the sixteenth, at six o’clock in the evening, Filipp G. ordered the decree carried out. At twelve o’clock a truck was supposed to come to take away the corpses.”
Thus, on July 15, having received a signal from Berzin—it’s time!—Goloshchekin set the execution mechanism in motion. On July 16 he telegraphed Moscow regarding the impending execution—and waited for a reply from Moscow through Zinoviev. In the meantime, at the Ipatiev house, preparations were in full swing.
Pavel Medvedev: “At eight in the evening, Yurovsky ordered all revolvers taken away from the detachment and brought to him. I took the revolvers away and brought them to the commandant’s office. Then Yurovsky said, ‘Today we are going to be killing the entire family and the doctor and servants living with them. Warn the detachment not to be alarmed if they hear shots.’ I