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(The answer from Moscow was received in the night, and only at one-thirty did the truck drive up to the Ipatiev house for the bodies.)

At the password “chimney sweep” the gates opened and the truck was let into the courtyard.

Yurovsky: “This delayed the decree’s implementation. Meanwhile, all the preparations had been made, twelve men (including six Latvians) with revolvers had been selected to carry out the sentence. Two of the Latvians refused to shoot the girls….

“At the last moment they refused to fire. I had to take them out and replace them with others….

“… When the automobile arrived everyone was sleeping.”

Pavel Medvedev: “Even before Yurovsky went to wake the tsar’s family, two members arrived from the Cheka. One was Peter Ermakov (from the Upper Isetsk factory), and the other I didn’t know.”

i1.23. Nicholas and Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor of Alexei, sawing firewood in Tobolsk, Siberia, 1917.

i1.24. Revolutionary procession passing the Governors House, where the imperial family was being held in Tobolsk. The largest of the banners states in part, “The Tobolsk Council of Workers’, Soldiers’, and People’s Deputies,” 1917.

i1.25. Members of the Ural Soviet who issued the order to the execution squad: Nikolai Tolmachev, Alexander Beloborodov, Georgy Safarov, and Filipp Goloshchekin, 1918.

i1.26. Ipatiev house, Ekaterinburg, the last residence of the imperial family, 1918.

i1.27. Alexei in bed in the Ipatiev house during his last illness before his execution.

i1.28. last letter written by Alexei before his death.

i1.29. Joy, Alexei’s spaniel, Ekaterinburg.

i1.30. The dining room of the Ipatiev house, Ekaterinburg, where the imperial family took their last meal.

i1.31. The half-cellar room in the Ipatiev house, the scene of the assassination.

i1.32. The grand duchesses’ bedroom in the Ipatiev house after their deaths.

i1.33. Participants in the murder of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich: Markov, Zhuzhgov, Myasnikov, Ivanchenko, and Kolpashchikov, in the Urals. The assassins had this photograph taken as a keepsake of their “exploit.”

i1.34. Yakov Yurovsky, commander of the execution squad.

i1.35. Chekist Grigory Nikulin, Yurovsky’s deputy, taken at the time of the murder of the tsar and his family, Ekaterinburg.

i1.36. Sergei Lyukhanov (seated, center), who drove the truck bearing the lifeless bodies of the tsar’s family from the Ipatiev House to the burial site. Photo taken in Osa, 1918.

i1.37. Jergei Lyukhanov, just before his death in 1952.

i1.38. White Russians returning to the burial site near Koptyaki to retrieve the bodies of the imperial family.

i1.39. At the burial site.

The name of the man Medvedev didn’t know was revealed by Ermakov himself.

Ermakov: “Received an execution decree on July 16 at eight in the evening.… myself arrived with two of my comrades, Medvedev and another Latvian whose last name I don’t recall.”

Medvedev, who came with Ermakov, was actually Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin, a former sailor and board member of the Ural Cheka.

(Once in Baku, Medvedev-Kudrin had been in the same underground organization of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party as Myasnikov. On the day of the Romanov tricentennial, they put out a broadside sentencing Nicholas to death. A month before, Myasnikov had carried out this sentence partially—he had organized the murder of Nicholas’s brother. Now it was Medvedev-Kudrin’s turn to keep his promise.)

THE DETACHMENT

The detachment was assembled.

Six Latvians from the Cheka—two had refused to join it. One who did not refuse, according to legend, was Imre Nagy, the future leader of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Nagy’s eventual death (executed without trial by Soviet troops invading Budapest) fits our story quite well. Joining the Latvians were Yurovsky, Nikulin, Ermakov, the two Medvedevs—Pavel, the guard commander, and the Chekist Medvedev-Kudrin.

There would be one more. A most curious person. Before the shooting began he would come down from