Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [210]
He continued:
“As you see, every word in these few lines is boastful invention. Wouldn’t it have been easy for Yurovsky to expose the pretenses of his lying rival once and for all?
“But from the very beginning it’s as if something were holding the iron commandant back. It’s as if he were avoiding a direct confrontation with Ermakov. Instead, on a January night in 1934 he arranged a public lecture for party activists in the Ipatiev house.”
I could picture it. The party activists sitting on the chairs of the Ipatiev house, and among them—those two chairs on which Alexei and the tsaritsa had been sitting at the moment of the murder. Mayakovsky was right; “nails should be made from those people—they’d be the strongest in the world.”
“In short, in his lecture Yurovsky defended his Note. But because of Ermakov’s pretensions, he somehow reasoned very modestly: ‘I have to say that certain comrades, I have heard, are trying to say that they killed Nicholas. Perhaps they did fire, that is correct….’
“In short, Ermakov calmly expounded his fantastic ravings right up until Yurovsky’s death. As if he knew for certain that Yurovsky would not dare expose him. As if between them stood some circumstance that precluded their confrontation.
“So after the war, in the late 1940s, this began to interest me greatly.
“By the way, apart from his memoirs about the execution, Ermakov would give the Sverdlovsk Party Archives his long autobiography. It’s all kept in a secret depository, although now, I’ve heard, there has been a proposal to publish them.” Chuckling, he added, “But until that’s decided.… In short, I have brought them to you as well … and I’ll leave them here, too.”
Imagine what came over me when I saw the memoirs! Finally, finally! I could read what I had been hunting for all these years!
“This part of the memoirs is called ‘The Execution of the Former Tsar.’ But bear in mind, not everything is here—this only goes up to the moment the truck drove out of the gates with the corpses. I’ll give you the conclusion later.”
Appended to the memoirs was a portion of Ermakov’s autobiography:
“The good fortune befell me to carry out the ultimate proletarian Soviet justice against the human tyrant, the crowned autocrat, who in his reign had tried, hanged, and shot thousands of men, for which he had to bear responsibility before the people. I was honored to fulfill my obligation before my people and country and took part in the execution of the tsar’s entire family.”
After that came Ermakov’s reminiscences about the execution: “The Ekaterinburg Executive Committee passed a resolution to shoot Nicholas, but for some reason the resolution said nothing about the family and their execution. When I was called in they told me: ‘You are a lucky man. You have been chosen to execute and bury them in such a way that no one ever finds their bodies, this is your personal responsibility, which we entrust to you as an old revolutionary.’
“I accepted the assignment and said it would be carried out precisely. I prepared the site where they would be taken and hidden, always bearing in mind the significance of the political moment.
“When I reported to Beloborodov that I was ready to carry it out, he said: ‘Do it so that all of them are shot, we have decided that.’ I did not enter into any further discussion and began doing what I was supposed to do.
“I received my orders on July 16 at eight o’clock in the evening, and came myself with two comrades—Medvedev and another Latvian (I don’t remember his name now) who served under me in my detachment—in the punitive section. I arrived at the special house at ten o’clock exactly; my vehicle came soon after, a small truck. At eleven o’clock the imprisoned Romanovs and their people confined with them were advised to go downstairs. To the suggestion that they go downstairs they asked: ‘What for?’ I said: ‘You are being taken to the center, you can’t be kept here any longer, it could get dangerous.’ ‘What about our things?’ they asked. I said: ‘We will collect your things and bring