Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [218]
I asked him: “May I publish this?”
My guest shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t care, I’m old. Soon, very soon, I’ll be meeting up with them. So that before I go I leave you all this with pleasure.” (Soon after, I published in Ogonyok these memoirs of Ermakov, which were being kept in secret storage.) “But you’ve got a dangerous topic there—it will eat up your life the way it did mine. But I’m disappointed in your question. In your place I would be interested in something completely different. Discounting Peter Zakharovich’s ordinary boastfulness and his habit of ascribing to himself everything others did, consider the most important point: according to Ermakov there was no second burial—the bodies were burned not far from Koptyaki. He has a completely different reading from Yurovsky, moreover on an important fact. And here Ermakov repeats what Sokolov arrived at: the graves do not exist; the bodies of the family vanished in the flames of the fire. Much as I regretted it, I thought that maybe because Peter Zakharovich was drunk they simply didn’t take him to the second burial. No, Yurovsky, recounting the events of July 18, wrote very clearly in his Note: ‘A peasant Ermakov knew rode up to him.’ So Ermakov was there, and he saw it through to the end. So what’s going on? That is why I kept questioning him and he in reply kept repeating, ‘We burned the bodies!’
“That is why I met with a third man.”
CHARON
“In 1943, when I saw him for the first time, the third man was living in Perm [then Molotov]. That’s what I called him, ‘Comrade Charon.’ But he didn’t laugh. Even when I explained to him that Charon ferried the Greeks to the kingdom of death. He never laughed and never talked on the topic of interest to us. I saw him in 1953, not long before his death. A dried-out old man, short, with a narrow, predatory nose and sparse hair, our Charon went around wearing pathetic ear flaps and a threadbare winter coat. The man who had driven the truck carrying the tsarist bodies lived in a tiny room in a horrible shack. And behind a curtain in the same little room lived his youngest son with his wife. This shack was located on Twenty-fifth Anniversary of October Street. That was where he died. This old Bolshevik died in a dirty barracks on a street named after his own revolution.
“Have you figured out who I’m going to tell you about? Sergei Ivanovich Lyukhanov, the third witness to that terrible trip. His biography is most curious. Unlike all the regicides, he never mentioned his participation in the great proletarian mission of regicide and never fought for any privileges. Moreover, his son told me that he never ever mentioned that he had been in Ekaterinburg in 1918. All in all, for all our meetings, he never did say a word about it. Oh, it was very hard to talk with this taciturn man. I remember I invited him to a restaurant. He sat the whole evening in silence, then picked up the check, which I paid, and said, ‘Too bad, I could live on this for an entire month.’ And he left. Everything I learned about him I learned from his youngest son, whose name was Alexei, like the heir, and who did tell me about his papa. It turns out, having lived to age eighty, he was not even receiving a pension—his son explained that Lyukhanov apparently didn’t realize that he was entitled to one. Odd? A Bolshevik since 1906 didn’t know that in the country of victorious socialism old men receive pensions? A great deal about his life was odd. For example, those constant