Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [212]
Of course—he was drunk! Why hadn’t I realized that before! To inflame himself, to inspire revolutionary fury? Or was it nerves—that he could not stand the anticipation, the wait for an answer from Moscow and for the truck? Or, what is more likely, was he drunk simply because that was payday, and many sharpshooters in the guard (like Proskuryakov and Stolov) had gotten drunk? The blatant, wild bestiality of Ermakov, who finished off the unfortunate girls with his bayonet in the gun smoke, was a continuation of that loutish, bestial “he was drunk.”
I told my guest about one other letter.
From a letter of Mstislav K. Afanasiev in Moscow:
“In the 1920s my father worked as an inspector for the Sapozhek Fire Department in Ryazan Province. The local priest told him a few details he had heard from one of the assassins of the Romanov family. Who this dying assassin was, he did not tell my father, but the dying man’s sins were forgiven. The dying man said that the leader of the murder had suggested they rape the grand duchesses. They were all drunk, and that day they had got their wages. They did not want to kill the women, however. ‘We’re not shooting womenfolk! Just the men!’ The chief assassin himself suffered from chronic alcoholism, and he was drunk that day. They shouted at him: ‘That’s not how you make a revolution!’”
Again my guest choked with laughter: “You mean my old friend Peter Zakharovich promised the girls? No, not to the riflemen, the priest simply misunderstood—to his own dashing lads. He promised them to his Upper Isetsk companions. Naturally, the man dying in the Ryazan town of Sapozhek was not one of the regicides, he was from Ermakov’s detachment. Ermakov’s men were present at the burial of the bodies, which is why they proudly counted themselves among the assassins. I’ve come across this before. As for the idea itself: promising rape before execution—that kind of thing happened in those days. Melgunov writes about it in The Red Terror. By the way, the Whites practiced it, too—that was nothing new. As far as Ermakov being drunk, I never doubted that. That was why Yurovsky had to go along to ‘watch over’ the interment of the bodies. Otherwise the commandant would never have dared to shadow Upper Isetsk Commissar Ermakov himself. That is why Yurovsky got into the truck—to transport the bodies. Ermakov probably drunkenly insisted on helping load the bodies too—after all, this was his job. I understood as much from my conversations with Peter Zakharovich, that he even climbed up onto the truck to direct the loading. Evidently he couldn’t get down, though, so he stayed in the back with the bodies.
“So that at a crucial moment in revolutionary history Peter Zakharovich was, to be blunt, drunk. Why then, though, in fighting with him for the honor of the execution, did Yurovsky never once take advantage of that circumstance? Or even so much as hint at it? Why did he spare the political prisoner’s honor? Or did something prevent him?
“I tried to feel out Ermakov himself many times, once I had begun guessing. But I never could find out anything precisely. I’m talking about the ride.”
Again I asked what he meant. I simply could not adapt to his mode of conversation.
“For a while I tried to calculate at what point that something might have happened to them both: the road, the truck with the bodies. That was when I began to question him carefully about the ride. To the simplest questions—well, let’s say I asked him, ‘Did the sharpshooters in the truck guard ride in the truck or on horseback?’ Even that question, though, he answered differently every