• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Yurovsky: “Having gone about 5 versts [3.3 miles] from the Upper Isetsk factory, we ran into an entire camp of about twenty-five men, some on horseback, some in droshkies, and so on. They were the workers (members of the Executive Committee Soviet) whom Ermakov had prepared. The first thing they shouted was: ‘Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?’ They thought the Romanovs’ execution would be left to them.”

The bloodthirsty, carousing, drunken crowd has been expecting the grand duchesses Ermakov had promised them, and now they are not being allowed to participate in the good deed of finishing off the girls, the boy, and the papa tsar. So they complain: “Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?”

Yurovsky: “Meanwhile, they started transferring the bodies to the droshkies, since we had to use carts. It was very awkward. They immediately started cleaning out their pockets—I had to threaten them with a firing squad then and there.”

So here too they try to rob the corpses as they move the bodies onto the carts.

Yurovsky: “Here we discovered that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia were wearing some kind of special corset. It was decided to strip the bodies naked, not there, but at the burial site.”

Not all the bodies fit on the droshkies, however. There are not enough good carts. The carts are falling apart. That is why the truck continues on toward the mine with some of the bodies.

Yurovsky: “It turned out, though, that no one knew where the mine shaft selected for this was. It was getting light. The com[mandant] sent riders to find the place, but no one could. It became clear that nothing had been prepared at all, there weren’t any shovels, etc.”

No one knows where to take them. Suddenly they have lost their destination. True, it is very hard to believe that Ermakov’s Upper Isetsk companions have lost what only the day before they knew so well. But Yurovsky penetrates this crude cunning: they are hoping he will get tired and leave. They want to be left alone with the bodies; they are dying to get a look at the “special corsets.”

Yurovsky waits patiently. They have to find the mine. And once again the awful procession sets out.

Riding ahead is Ermakov’s loyal assistant, one of the commanders of the Ermakov boys, the Kronstadt sailor Vaganov. The entire area is utterly remote and hidden from the Koptyaki road by tall forest. Here the procession of bodies encounters some Koptyaki peasants, whom Vaganov drives back. The sun is already rising when they ride up to the first turn off the road to the nameless mine Ermakov and Yurovsky have chosen. Here the truck breaks down.

Yurovsky: “Since the vehicle got stuck between two trees, it was abandoned and the procession continued on in the droshkies, the bodies covered with a cloth. They had gone sixteen and a half versts [n miles] from Ekaterinburg and stopped one and a half versts [1 mile] from Koptyaki. This was at six or seven in the morning.”

The truck breaks down at a pit that was once used for sorting ore and that forces the road very close to some large trees; Lyukhanov miscalculates and wrecks the truck.

They are two hundred paces from the mine. While some Red Army soldiers are dragging the truck out, others begin fashioning stretchers from young pines and pieces of the tarpaulin that covers the bodies. (The White Guard inquiry discovered planed, broken off branches along the road.)

Now the bodies move toward the mine—on carts and on stretchers.

Yurovsky: “In the forest we found an abandoned prospector’s mine (once mined for gold) three and a half arshins [8 feet] deep. There was an arshin of water in the mine shaft.”

Near the mine the bodies are laid out on the clayey ground, a level area right by the mine.

Yurovsky: “The commandant ordered the bodies undressed and a fire built so that everything could be burned. Riders were posted all around in order to drive away anyone who might come by. When they began undressing one of the girls, they saw a corset torn in place by bullets—and through the opening they saw diamonds. The spectators had obviously had their