Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [232]
“It is not hard to gather from this note that the envelope once held a certain secret telegram sent from Ekaterinburg early on the morning of July 17, that is, immediately following the murder.
“Also on the envelope was the signature of Lenin himself: ‘Received. Lenin.’
“And there was a note saying a copy of this telegram had been sent to Sverdlov.
“But the telegram itself was not in the envelope: the envelope was empty.”
At the time I decided against publishing the letter without first verifying it. But I couldn’t. The Central Party Archives categorically refused to admit me.
Times have changed (for long?). I am sitting in the former Central Party Archives of the Communist Party.
Before me lies that same empty envelope from the secret telegram with Lenin’s signature of receipt.
And although the telegram has been removed as a precaution, I can guess the subject of this telegram from Ekaterinburg, which arrived the morning after the execution addressed to the individual who had given the order for that execution.
I can even imagine its content, because of that day, July 17, Ekaterinburg informed yet another initiator of the execution—Yakov Sverdlov—about the “extermination of the Romanovs.”
That telegram was preserved, though. It was found and deciphered, as we recall, by Investigator Sokolov. “Moscow, Kremlin…. Tell Sverdlov that the same fate has befallen the entire family as has its head. Officially the family will perish in the evacuation.”
There is something terrible in this remaining witness to the murder; this empty envelope with its timorously removed telegram and very clear notes.
Yet another very important set of documents turned up in Russia, volumes that had been held for nearly half a century in the secret archives! Eight volumes of documents.
Four volumes had been kept in the Party Archives with a note on the cover: “Do not release to reading room.”
The other four volumes were in the archives of the Military Prosecutor of the former USSR.
The title printed on each volume:
“Preliminary investigation carried out by Special Judicial Investigator N. A. Sokolov.”
Yes, these were the actual volumes from the famous Sokolov investigation into the murder of the Romanovs!
All the testimony in the case had been signed personally by the witnesses Sokolov had questioned. It was on the basis of this file that he wrote his book, The Murder of the Tsar’s Family, in which he frequently cited documents from this file.
How did these volumes ever wind up in the archives of the Military Prosecutor and the Communist Party?
More than likely they came out of German archives the Soviet Army captured in Berlin. How did they come to be in Germany? By way of occupied France, of course, where Sokolov lived in emigration, conducting his endless inquiry right up until his death.
An inquiry so enticing to begin but scarcely possible to conclude.
I am leafing through the testimony of the witnesses, and it is like a parade of the characters in our book: N. N. Ipatiev, Evgeny Kobylinsky, Prince Lvov, Alexander Kerensky, Alexander Guchkov, Prince Felix Yusupov, Matryona Rasputin, Gilliard and Gibbes, Tatiana Melnik-Botkina, the tsaritsa’s maid Sasha Tegleva, and so on.
And although historians have quoted much of this testimony many times, there is a kind of magic in authentic documents. Certain fine points, certain details, read completely differently in them.
There is the testimony of Prince Georgy Lvov.
How mocking history is: Prince Lvov, prime minister of the Provisional Government, which overthrew and arrested the last tsar, was himself arrested by the Bolsheviks after the October coup! Moreover, in 1918 Prince Lvov was in prison in Ekaterinburg very near the house that had been a prison for the tsar he had arrested the year previous. The former prime minister describes his encounter there with his Petersburg acquaintance