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The theory was a lot easier than the practice, and in practice he had sacrificed his daughter in the name of the Party … the iron commandant paid for this with a bad heart and an excruciating ulcer. A fatal ulcer ate up his insides. When he knew he was about to die, on that suffocating July day, he wrote a letter to his children.

Surrounded by countless corpses, his beloved daughter sent to the tortures of a camp, in anticipation of his closest friends dying, in the terrible year 1938, he wrote to his children … of the marvelous past, present, and future.

“Dear Zhenya and Shura! On July 3, new style, I will turn sixty. As it turns out, I have told you almost nothing about myself, especially my childhood and youth.… This I regret. Rimma may remember individual episodes in the revolution of 1905: my arrest, prison, my work in Ekaterinburg. [An awful sentence! Where was the unlucky Rimma when she recalled her father’s years in a tsarist prison? In a Soviet prison, compared to which her father’s tsarist prison was an idyll, a resort.]

“… In the storm of October, fate turned its brightest side toward me. I saw and heard Lenin many times, he received me, chatted with me, and supported me like no one else in the years I worked at the State Depository. I had the good fortune to know well Lenin’s most loyal pupils and comrades-in-arms—Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky.… To work under their leadership and be in contact with them in a family way.

“… fate has not insulted me, a man who has passed through three storms with Lenin and Lenin’s men may consider himself the happiest of mortals….

“Although I am dead tired from my illnesses, it still seems to me that I will participate with you in future coming events. I embrace you, I kiss Rimma, your wives, and my grandchildren. Father.”

As I read this new man’s deathbed letter, I kept remembering another final letter—of a man he and his comrades had killed—Dr. Botkin. These two letters are self-portraits of two worlds.

Yurovsky was dying, having achieved his goal: in the Museum of the Revolution lay his Note, which said that he had killed the last tsar. This was confirmed in numerous books that appeared in the West. He could call himself “the happiest of mortals.”

In 1952, not quite living to seventy, special pensioner Peter Zakharovich Ermakov died happily. A street was named after him in Sverdlovsk.

In 1964, Mikhail Medvedev died equally happily. Shortly before his death he gave his Browning to the Museum of the Revolution.

That same Browning—no. 389965.

The Browning had a history. At the beginning of the century in Baku they had begun to fight against provocateurs sent into the underground organizations of the Russian Social Democratic Revolutionary Party. For this purpose Medvedev had acquired this gun. At that time in Baku the leader of the Baku revolutionaries had accused Stalin of being a provocateur sent to their organization. Stalin was suddenly arrested by the secret police, though, and disappeared from Baku. So it is quite possible that had Stalin remained in Baku, the Browning’s first bullet might have gone into the first revolutionary tsar. But Stalin disappeared in the nick of time—and the Browning had to wait for the last tsar of the Romanov line.

By 1964 only two of those who had been in that terrible room were still among the living. One of these was Grigory Nikulin. After the execution, fate had been kind to Nikulin.

From Nikulin’s autobiography, written in 1923:

“In 1919, upon my arrival in Moscow, I remained in the administrative department of the Moscow Soviet, where I held the following jobs: head of jailhouses for the city of Moscow, head of MUR [Moscow Criminal Investigation].”

In 1921 the former executioner was transferred to a somewhat surprising job—head of the State Insurance Office. Those working in the insurance office would have been very surprised to learn of their boss’s recent past. Not that he ever talked about it. He did not even mention it in his autobiography.