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By Root 2326 0

someone indeed manage to survive—and were those stars that the woman who called herself Anastasia saw when she came to in the cart the stars of that impossible night? What did Yurovsky tell Ermakov when, as the bodies were being transferred from the truck to the carts, he discovered he was missing two corpses? And Ermakov sobering up instantly, horrified! There was no time, though, to search for the two vanished corpses. The Whites were about to enter the town. They had to finish what they were doing—and destroy the remaining bodies. And Lyukhanov? He was in the cab; he seemed not to have seen anything. He was beside the point. And Ermakov’s men were merrily drunk—so naturally did not notice anything. Almost all of them were dismissed immediately, Yurovsky wrote. Only the most loyal remained. Such was the shared secret of the two pretenders to the ‘honor of the execution.’ The two men concealed the fact that two bodies were lacking. But because he was missing two bodies Yurovsky could not make use of the camera—after all, he must have dreamed of taking a picture of the ‘liquidation’!”

“A picture?!”

“Why not? He was a photographer. How could he not want to record this supreme historic moment? It was the moment he had lived for, you might say. Especially since he had lying in the commandant’s room the confiscated camera belonging to Alexandra Feodorovna! The executed tsar’s family photographed with the tsaritsa’s camera. [Was that really the end of the photo-execution?]”

“Why do you keep talking about two?”

“Read carefully the Yurovsky Note you published. Yurovsky wrote that three of the daughters were wearing ‘diamond corsets.’ But what about the fourth? Why wasn’t the fourth?” He laughed. “There weren’t enough? Or the story with Alexei? After all, they tried to shoot him at two paces. And couldn’t. It’s unlikely even a very nervous Chekist like Nikulin could fail to hit him at two paces. That meant Alexei was wearing a ‘diamond shield’—and it saved him. He was ‘armored’ as well. That was the reason for his ‘strange vitality.’ Yurovsky didn’t write anything about this, though. Why? Because Alexei was not undressed! If they had undressed him, they would probably have found Rasputin’s amulet on him, too! The tsaritsa could not have left her son without an amulet of his savior. But Yurovsky wrote only about amulets on the tsar’s daughters. That means they didn’t undress him for sure. Why? Maybe they feared God? Funny, eh? Then why?

“Here’s your answer—it’s at the end of Yurovsky’s Note. They only burned two of them: Alexei and someone of the female sex. Why two? Why not burn the rest? Or: if they didn’t burn the rest, then why did they burn the two? Why didn’t they burn Nicholas? After all, wasn’t he much more important?” He laughed. “This is why: they were missing two corpses: a boy and a young woman. They were also missing the diamonds on them. That’s why Yurovsky thought of writing that they’d burned two of them—the boy and a female. So, who was that female? Demidova, as Yurovsky writes? Couldn’t they have gotten them mixed up in the insanity of that night? Perhaps that rescued woman was not Demidova, and the stars that the woman who later called herself Anastasia saw when she woke up in the cart were the stars of that impossible night.

Anastasia? In any event, after Anastasia’s appearance in Berlin, Ermakov’s friend and drinking companion, the Chekist Grigory Sukhorukov, who also participated in the burial, compiled some extremely noteworthy affidavits, which are now kept in the local Party archive. The affidavits repeat the version about burning two bodies, but these actually specify a new female name: Alexei and … Anastasia! Not Demidova, as Yurovsky asserted, but Anastasia. Realizing that some explanation would have to be provided for why they burned only those two, Sukhorukov invented a very clumsy explanation: “So no one would guess from the number of remaining corpses that this was the tsar’s family”!

Two may have been saved, then. And Lyukhanov, of course, saw two of them being taken off the truck. And he