Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [200]
Yurovsky: “The boy [Sednev] was taken away … which upset the Romanovs and their people badly.”
From the tsaritsa’s diary:
“8. Supper. Suddenly Leshka Sednev was fetched to go see his uncle & flew off—wonder whether it’s true & we shall see the boy back again.”
Yes, Yurovsky was right, she did not trust him, and of course it was she who sent the doctor to see the commandant.
Yurovsky: “Dr. Botkin came and asked the reason for this. It was stated that the boy’s uncle, who had been arrested and fled, had now come back and wanted to see his nephew. The next day the boy was sent home (apparently to Tula Province).”
Pavel Medvedev: “The little boy cook … at Yurovsky’s instruction was transferred to the Popov house—to the quarters of the sentry detachment. At about ten I warned the detachment not to be alarmed if they heard shots.”
For that night shift Alexander Strekotin was assigned to be machine gunner downstairs. The machine gun stood on the window, and Strekotin took his place by its side. This post was right next to the entry and the half-cellar room.
Strekotin was standing by his machine gun in the darkness when suddenly he heard footsteps on the stairs.
Strekotin: “Someone [Medvedev] came downstairs quickly, walked up to me silently, and also silently handed me a revolver. ‘Why do I need this?’ I asked Medvedev.
“ ‘There’s going to be shooting soon,’ he told me, and he quickly moved away.”
Medvedev disappeared in the darkness, and Strekotin remained standing by his machine gun.
From the tsaritsa’s diary:
“Played bezique with N[icholas]. 10½ to bed.”
At that moment in the courtyard the guard Deryabin was taking up post 7 (across from the railed window of the execution room). Post 8—in the garden near the window to the entry—was taken by the sharpshooter Kleshchev. From the entry the door led right to the room. The door was open to the illuminated room so he could see it clearly.
As soon as Kleshchev and Deryabin found out from Pavel Medvedev what was going to happen, they contrived to stand where they could see everything.
Two tipsy guards walked up to the Popov house—Proskuryakov and Stolov. The guard commander, Medvedev, drove both into the bathhouse in the Popov yard, where they fell asleep.
Midnight was approaching. In the commandant’s room Yurovsky was nervously waiting for Ermakov and the truck. But the truck had been detained. “Uninitiated,” Yurovsky did not know that Goloshchekin was waiting for an answer from Moscow.
Strekotin: “Soon Medvedev and Akulov or someone else, I don’t remember, went downstairs.”
(Akulov was one of Grigory Nikulin’s Cheka pseudonyms.)
“At that moment a group of six or seven men I didn’t know appeared, and ‘Akulov’ brought them into the room.… Now it was absolutely clear to me that this was the execution.”
So the detachment of Latvian sharpshooters, all six or seven of them, was already waiting in the room. Next to the other room, that room. But that room stood ready and empty, everything cleared out of it.
What were they waiting for? The same thing as Yurovsky. For the truck to come. The last participants had joined them. But Goloshchekin and Beloborodov were also waiting—for an answer from Moscow—so the truck and Ermakov were still being detained. At 21:22, the Ekaterinburg telegram, which Zinoviev sent on to Lenin, was in Moscow.
In Ekaterinburg it was 11:22. But by that time Moscow had already decided.
Akimov: “The Sovnarkom and Central Executive Committee wrote a telegram confirming the decision. Sverdlov had me take the telegram to the telegraph office, which was located then on Myasnitskaya Street.”
In Ekaterinburg, on the second floor of the Ipatiev house, the family was sleeping. Or rather, he was … but what about her? She was probably listening to the sounds outside the window, as she had every night of late … to the distant cannonade promising their speedy liberation. And waiting for sleep. Naturally, she must have heard the noise of the truck as it drove into the courtyard.
Yurovsky: “At twelve o’clock the truck