Hidden in the bushes, I stared off at the black sky, seeing nothing, neither star nor moon, but seeing again that which I had just witnessed: those twenty minutes. Hearing them too. Da, da, da, hearing their screams. Ever since, for eight decades now, I have daily seen this cinema of horror in my mind’s eye, and I watch it from this angle, from that, and nearly go insane.
I find myself so angry. Angry at all the tsars of my Rossiya for driving my homeland down the dead-end path of autocracy. Angry at the Bolsheviki for not realizing that kommunizm is naught but a gorgeous dream that can never be. Angry at Aleksandra for being a supreme mother not to her country but her invalid son. Angry at Nikolai for not signing that one piece of paper that would have averted all. Sure, Russia in its own clumsy, inevitable way was stumbling toward a constitutional monarchy, and because Nikolai could not see this, because he could not sign a simple paper granting a ministry appointed not by him but by his parliament, he and his family as well as about forty million others were slaughtered.
The thick, acrid smoke had yet to clear before the henchmen were upon their victims, Red vultures picking at the Imperial Family as if they were carrion. While Yurovsky was going from body to body, verifying pulses and the sort, two of the guards were in the hall, still vomiting not because of the gore but because of the foul smoke from those old-fashioned bullets. The rest of the guards forgot every bit of their ideology and searched pockets and wrists and necks for trinkets and treasures. Greed was their strongest urge, and these henchmen fed furiously upon their victims. They wanted more for themselves, and so they feasted upon those they had killed for possessing too much. Only Yurovsky stood as the pillar of the ideal revolutionary, and he flushed with disdain upon seeing the joyful looting.
He shouted, “You are to take nothing! Nothing! Now I want half of you to go upstairs and gather all the sheets you can, and I want the other half to go out to the shed and gather the shafts from the troikas.” When he saw hesitation among them, Yurovsky raised his gun. “Go!”
For a long moment, none of the guards left. Realizing he was losing control, Yurovsky took aim at one of the men.
“Leave!”
One by one, the assassins departed. Shaken by the disobedience, Yurovsky stood there, pistol raised as he guarded his royal kill. And because of this challenge, he never finished verifying the dead, specifically Anastasiya, Kharitonov, and Maria. Minutes later his men returned, and according to Yurovsky’s directions the sheets were suspended between the harnessing shafts and the bodies loaded up. With the noisy engine of the motor lorry masking the commotion, the Romanovs and their small retinue were then carted out one by one and heaved into the back of the vehicle.
The entire time I sat there, hidden in the darkness, watching, seeing with my own two eyes, and yet not believing. Not a tear did I shed, not even then. Not a whimper did I cry. Somehow fear steeled me, protected me, for had I started crying I would have been pulled from my hiding place and killed as well.
Once the last of the bodies was heaped upon the pile in the back of the truck, the biggest of the guards pulled himself onto the truck. He scrambled over the dead, pawed at them like a mad dog, and laughing, reached into a pile of Romanovs. He threw aside an arm, tugged at a bloody dress, and seized upon a fleshy prize. A moment later he leapt up and held out his cupped hand as if it were full of gold.
“Now that I have touched the Empress’s pussy I can die in peace!” he laughed and shrieked.
His joy was a call to chaos, and his comrades hooted with fiendish delight. All at once the lot of them climbed and clambered aboard, once again pulling at boots and necklaces, eyeglasses and especially watches, which Russians have always sought as a souvenir of death. Though they failed to discover the fortune of diamonds hidden in the royal corsets, the guards clambered over the carcasses of their history, desperately pawing for riches of any kind.
Suddenly Yurovsky charged out of the house, cocked his gun, and shouted, “The next man who takes anything gets a bullet in the head! Drop everything you’ve taken and get back inside – now!”
The frenzy came to an immediate but uncomfortable pause, followed by grumbling and some reluctant movement.
“I’ll be checking each and every one of you, and should I find that you’ve taken anything – anything! – you’ll be executed immediately!”
All of a sudden things began to fall. A bracelet. An amulet. Dr. Botkin’s glasses. One of the traveling pillows. The guards dropped them back onto the bodies, and these things landed with soft plops upon the still-warm flesh. From where I hid, I sensed the bodies shifting as the guards clambered over them. The next moment I saw an arm slip out from beneath the canvas top, the gold watch on that arm sparkling in the night.
The guards did as they were told. All it took was terror to whip them into control, of course, and this team of executioners leaped to the ground and hurried inside. Thereupon big buckets of sawdust were carted into the cellar room. Brooms too. And mops. They had to obliterate all signs of the crime. The Whites would take the city any day, and the Reds couldn’t leave any trace of the bodies or even the murders; all along the greatest danger to their cause had not been the possibility of Nikolai being restored to the throne – neither Red nor White wanted that – but the very real possibility of the Whites seizing the dead Tsar and his family and resurrecting them as martyrs to their cause. But of course there could be no martyrs if there were no bodies.
While all of this cleaning up was going on, I stared at the dead arm swinging back and forth, the gold watch on that arm ticking this way and that against the side of the Fiat lorry. As if mesmerized by Rasputin himself, I was drawn out of the darkness, and I inched forward. They say that a Russian cannot believe with his eyes what he cannot touch with his hand, and against my own will I was drawn forward. Without even thinking, I reached out. I reached out and clutched the arm of Batyushka, the Dear Father. I held onto his muscular arm for but a moment. And then I pulled at his watch. When my hands came away, not only did I clutch something as brilliant as the sun, but my fingers were sticky red with his death.
Minutes later, after great confusion, the motor lorry finally made its departure. Once again I trotted after it, hiding in the vehicle’s night shadow as it passed through the gates. Of course I should have fled, but that never occurred to me. Not once. I should have taken off across the square, but somewhere I understood that the end of the tale had not yet come. And so like a pathetic dog I trotted after my dead master as the lorry moved through the dark, muddy streets of Yekaterinburg.
Da, da, da, like a faithful dog I chased after that motor truck that was overflowing with all those troopy, those bodies. With a driver, a single guard, and Yurovsky seated up front, the vehicle proceeded so very slowly that I had no trouble keeping up, and when it drove all the way around the far side of the race track, I took the shortcut and actually had to wait for it to pass. When it headed northward on the dirt lane to the village Koptyaki, I trotted after it. Usually it was only carts and wagons that moved along here, peasants bringing their fish or game to sell in town. But not tonight… not tonight…
I had no idea of its destination, but I ran after the motor lorry, and the vehicle barely creaked along, certainly not faster than a cart itself. A few versts from town one of the wheels sank into a deep hole, then rose quickly out of it, hit a stone, and the whole back of the lorry bounced violently. That very instant a black heap of something was thrown from the rear of the truck, landing with a near silent thud on the dirt road. At first I couldn’t imagine, but then it bolted through me, seized my heart. Gospodi, Dear Lord, one of the bodies had been hurled from the lorry onto the ground.
I froze in horror, then bolted forward, hurried to this sack of death lying so still in the rutted road to Koptyaki. Da, da, it was a body. That much was clear. And not Dr. Botkin. And not one of the ladies. No, it was the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich. A rag doll of a body… that was all that was left. He was the mirror of me, this boy was. We were about the same height, the same age, and there he lay, twisted and crumpled, his military tunic torn, his face so… so…
Gospodi, Dear Lord, when I knelt to him I saw the side of his head all black and shattered. His right ear was gone, blasted away by the two bullets that Yurovsky had fired point blank into the side of his head. Da, da, the bullets had pierced the skull, not blowing it apart, really, but surely exploding through his brains and out the other side. But his face…itwas…
My stomach turned, slithered like a snake up the back of my throat. I turned away, then immediately looked back. Yes, it was him, there was no doubt, even though it was almost impossible to tell, for they had slashed his face with bayonets, beaten it with rifle butts. Mother of God, this boy, who had so yearned to play shahmaty, well, there was nothing left to gaze at but slaughtered meat and bone hanging, dripping, into the earth of Siberia, so… so mutilated was he.
I couldn’t move. I stared down at this grossly killed boy, the Heir to the throne of Russia, and the blackest of terrors filled my every pore. I wanted to die. I wanted someone to blow my own brains out, to blast this sight from my mind, but then… then the truck started picking up speed, started moving quicker. And all of a sudden another one fell out. I looked up the road and saw another body tumble from the back of the truck. It just… just fell like a sack of wheat onto the road.
I didn’t know what to do. Once again I looked down to the Heir, saw his perforated body, knew that the future of Russia was dead beyond a doubt, and then I gazed up the road at the next dark pile that was yet another Romanov. I started moving, started running to the second body. The truck, oblivious, rumbled on into the madness of the night. Unbelievably, the second body moved and quivered and… and I wanted to scream out, to beg to God. It was the third child, Grand Duchess Maria who by some miracle was not only still alive, but trying to get up. She hadn’t fallen from the truck but thrown herself, and when I reached her she was trying to push herself to her knees. Her long, dark skirt was torn, grossly soiled, her light blouse ripped and stained, but she wasn’t crying. No, she had quite literally risen from the dead and she was as stunned as a newborn, shocked, even horrified, to find herself here on this earth.
Hearing my quick steps, Maria shook with fear. This most beautiful of girls, this protected princess, opened her mouth to scream. I saw that she was going to howl to the sky and moon and back, and I charged forward. As quickly as I could, I threw my hand over her mouth, gagged her fear, kept it bottled up inside the poor thing.
“Eto ya!” It’s me, I hissed into her ear. “Eto ya!”
I gently lowered her back to the road, and Grand Duchess Maria fell weak and silent beneath my youthful power. She attempted to struggle but then, gazing up at me with those rich eyes, fell still.
“Leonka…” she gasped, clutching my arm.
Like the sternest of schoolmasters, I ordered, “Keep quiet or they’ll come after us both!”
She understood, of course. At the same time I saw her eyes strain after the lorry that was carting away her family.
“Papa… Mama…” she moaned, her body now falling flaccid in my arms.
Only as I held her did I realize how badly she was bleeding. I didn’t know if it was a bayonet wound or if a bullet had grazed her temple, but she was bleeding most profusely from the side of her head, from just above her ear. I touched her temple, sensed a long, deep wound, and then tore a swath of material from her skirt, which I wrapped around her head. Fearful that the truck would turn around and come back, I tried to help her get up.
“We’ve got to get off the road and into the woods,” I said.
But when she moved, she clutched her side and cried out, “I can’t!”
The bullets meant to kill her had instead struck her diamond-studded corset, the force of which had broken a number of her ribs. She started gasping for air, and as I held her, I saw she was bleeding terribly from her left leg as well. Raising her skirt, I saw two wounds in her left thigh, one on the front, the other the back. A bullet had apparently gone through her leg, perhaps shattering the bone. As she leaned upon me, I tore more of her skirt, then tied that strip around the top of her leg, tightening the tourniquet to stem the blood. I glanced way down the road, saw the vague, dark shape of the lorry slowing. Or had it stopped? Panic seized my throat. Had they discovered that not one but two of the Romanovs had fallen from the back of the vehicle? Were the Reds about to return and hunt us out? I had to get Maria Nikolaevna off the road and hide her in the woods. Somehow I found this strength. She was a big girl, and I turned around, pulled her up on my back. It was then, as I half-dragged her off the road, that she saw the other body.
“Aleksei…”
There was no way to soften the truth, not on that night, and I said, “Ew-bili.” They killed him.
I kept moving, carrying the Grand Duchess into the woods, which were not really that thick. Behind a clump of bushes I found a pine, and there I placed Maria, lowering her to the sandy ground and then propping her up against the tree.
“My brother,” she begged.
“Ew-bili,” I repeated.
I wondered if we shouldn’t just leave him for the guards to find. A decoy. And she understood this, the Grand Duchess did, for she saw the hesitation on my face.
“Bring him to me.”
In all the time that I’d spent in The House of Special Purpose I’d never heard any of the Royal Family issue a command, particularly none of the children. Yet Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna so ordered me. Dead or alive, she would not abandon her brother. And so wasting no time, I darted through the wood and back onto the road. I glanced into the distance and sure enough, there was the truck, stopped or perhaps stuck. There was little time, and so I grabbed Aleksei by the shoulders and pulled the boy out of the road and into the pine wood, leaving a swerving tail of blood behind. Reaching the trees, I stopped and took off my light jacket, which I in turn draped over the boy’s mutilated head. I then dragged him on, all the way to Maria, whereupon I laid him by her side. She immediately took his hand, then started to pull away my jacket.
It was my turn to order, and this I did, catching her hand, pushing it back, and commanding, “Nyet-s!”
She understood quite clearly, and she laid back, holding his hand, which she pinned to her chest. Her eyes blinked quite heavily as if she were about to fall into the most permanent sleep.
Suddenly her mouth moved, and she begged, “Please, you must go after them, after… after Tatyana…”
Tatyana? It couldn’t be. My mind exploded – I’d seen her shot, I’d seen that guard attack her with a bayonet, or was I all wrong?! Could she have been protected by her corset as well?
I demanded, “She lives as well?”
She gazed weakly at me. “You must go. You must bring her.”
She slipped away then, Maria did. At first I thought she’d simply expired on the spot, but then I saw her chest rise and fall, albeit quite slowly. Whether she was passing into some kind of shock or she was about to die I couldn’t tell, but this much I knew – I had to find out if indeed the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana, was still alive.
And so I said, “I’ll be back.”
Her head slowly rose and fell.
“Trust me, I’ll be back to take care of you. Just don’t try to move. Just wait. I’ll go see if your sister is… is…”
“Go,” she pleaded with the last of her strength. “Go now.”
“I’ll be back,” I chanted yet again, making a pledge as much to myself as to the Princess.
Those were my last words to her before I scrambled out of the woods. I had no idea how much blood she’d already lost, just as I had no idea how much longer Maria would live. I was so young and knew so little of such things.
So… I left her. I did exactly as the Grand Duchess begged, no more, no less. I abandoned her, which of course turned out to be the stupidest thing. I followed her command, hurried to the road, whereupon I saw all that blood pooled like motor oil on the dirt. I knew I couldn’t leave such an obvious sign, so I returned to the edge of the wood and took a large branch. And this branch I dragged over the blood of Aleksei and Maria so as to obscure it. Which I did. I swirled the dirt around, buried the redness as best I could, and then… well, then I threw the bloodied pine bough into the bushes and started running after the motor lorry, the engine of which coughed and sputtered in the distance. Already the depth of darkness had passed, and in the faintest of early light I could see it, that clumsy truck laden with all the bodies.
I ran and ran, my mind on fire. The vehicle passed over a railway embankment, and I was just catching up when suddenly I heard all this commotion. I heard shouting voices, the stomp of many horses, and I ducked behind a clump of birches. From nowhere a convoy of men, as many as twenty, charged out of the night. Most of them were on horseback, a few in small horse-pulled carts, and they were shouting with the drunken revelry of revolution. And murder.
“Give us Nikolashka!”
“Off with his capitalist head!”
“Death to the blood drinker!”
I quickly understood that this haphazard detachment of Reds had been told they would get the honor of killing the royal ones, not simply burying them. When they found out, however, that their hated Nikolashka and his traitress whore, the German bitch, were already dead, there was a fiery roar of disappointment and anger.
One of the men shouted, “We were told you would bring them to us alive!”
“We wanted to kill them!”
“You tricked us!”
They were so angry and so drunk that a second blood bath – Komendant Yurovsky’s very own – began to quickly boil. Someone fired a shot into the air. Another lowered his pistol and fired into the back of the truck itself.
Fearing the worst, Yurovsky shouted, “Long live the revolution!”
With that he ordered the driver, Comrade Lyukhanov, to move on. The convoy of men had no choice but to follow the motorized transport. And neither did I. Once they were all well under way, I emerged from behind the birches and ran after them. It was easier, of course, than ever to follow them, for the road was in terrible condition, which forced them to drive slowly. Plus the men made such racket. In such a way did I follow them for another twenty, thirty minutes when suddenly the lorry came to a sudden halt. The road had narrowed and the truck itself had become horribly stuck in the mud between two trees. They couldn’t budge it, not an inch, for the vehicle had sunk so deep. Sure, there’d been so much rain and now there was much mud. A whirlwind of shouting ensued – everyone had an opinion, of course – and Yurovsky and the other fellow in the cab of the truck climbed out. A great effort was made. Everyone pushed, but to no avail.
By this time I was able to get quite close. Too close, really, but I was desperate to find out if Tatyana lived as well. I positioned my young body behind a pine, and in the gray morning light I watched as first one, then two men jumped onto the back of the truck. I think they just wanted to see the bodies with their own eyes. But then one of the peasant men, groping for the touch of a royal bosom, reached into the bodice of a grand duchess and came up not with a breast, but a handful of bloody jewels.
“Brillianty!” he screamed with shocked glee.
With the diamonds finally discovered, a handful of men swarmed over the bodies like hungry maggots. Panicking, Yurovsky started jumping around, shaking his pistol overhead and screaming. He fired once into the air, and the comrades slithered off the truck like scared rats.
As for the lorry, it was quite obvious the vehicle was going nowhere. Yurovsky was desperate. Things couldn’t be going much worse, and he waved his gun around and ordered the men to transfer the bodies from the lorry to the carts. Because the horse-drawn carts were so small, however, they had to split up the bodies – two on that cart, three on that, one over there – and in that way Yurovsky didn’t realize that Aleksei and Maria were missing. Nyet, nyet, nyet, the komendant was so busy waving around his pistol and trying to control these men that he didn’t even count all the troopy, not just then, not just yet. And as soon as he was told the bodies had all been reloaded, off they went in single file through the woods.
The morning light was filtering softly through the trees by this time, and soon the mistakes began flowing like a mountain brook. Not five minutes passed before this line of murderers and murdered took a wrong path and became lost in the wood. To complicate matters even more, they came upon a group of peasants from the nearby village Koptyaki.
Threatening these simple people with his pistol, Yurovsky shouted, “There are Whites everywhere out here, so you’d better get home before we shoot you all!”
Finally, just as the northern morning sun was climbing into the sky, this convoy of carts and horses and men reached the ruins of the Four Brothers Mine, named after a cluster of old pines, where gold had once been sought.
“I want you three men,” Yurovsky shouted, his pistol ever in hand, “to patrol the area and shoot anyone on sight.”
Hearing this, I slunk into some deep bushes, crouched down, and watched the Red bastards handle the Imperial Family like slaughtered animals.
It was a fiasco, a farce right from the beginning. This area, this place, was only a few versts from village Koptyaki, a hamlet of a few dozen wood huts, and before the Romanovs were even stripped of their clothing the entire village knew that their Tsar had been murdered and where he was to be buried. Furthermore, the Four Brothers was an open mine, not a tunnel, but a big hole. It was a pitshaft, actually, and not very deep, not really, maybe some twenty feet at most, and the bottom of it was filled with water, very cold water. In short, it was the stupidest place to think of burying anyone, be he peasant or king.
Komendant Yurovsky ordered the bodies unloaded, and the men eagerly swarmed upon Nikolai, Aleksandra, the girls, the others. They dragged the Imperial Family and their attendants off the carts and threw them in a pile like game from an imperial hunt. It was then that I realized they were dead, all dead, including of course Tatyana. I saw her heaved atop and knew without doubt that she was gone.
“I don’t want anyone to be able to identify these bodies,” shouted the komendant. “So I want you to strip them all. What you can’t pull off, we’re going to have to cut away.”
And this these animalmen did, pulling and slicing boots and jackets, blouses and shirts from the hated Romanovs. Soon there were diamonds spilling from the corsets into the mud, which sent an electric charge through the men all over again. Working with great frenzy, they found the gold on Aleksandra’s wrist and the ropes of pearls around her waist. When one of the men couldn’t get a ring off Aleksandra’s finger – the one given her by her Uncle Leo – he took out his knife and cut the finger clean away. Sure. I watched as he yanked the ring free, secretly stuffed it in his pocket, then tossed aside the manicured finger; months upon months later, Investigator Sokolov, whom the Whites brought in to try find the imperial remains, found this very finger, which to this day remains preserved in a jar of alcohol in Paris.
Altogether it didn’t take the Red barbarians long to strip their victims, and soon the Imperial Family and their servants were lying about this way and that, naked in the mud. Yurovsky then ordered a big bonfire built, and this his men did as well. They built this fire and threw the clothing into the flames.
It was then of course that they discovered that two of the Romanovs were missing. Yurovsky… he went crazy. He started running around screaming. He counted the bodies over and over. Then he… he called for two guards. He gave them two horses and told them to ride off and…
Oi, I have lied so much and for so long that I have almost forgotten the real truth, which is so difficult to let pass my lips. But… but I… I started running then. I looked back only once. Big Dr. Botkin – two men started to drag his naked body toward the opening of the mine. They each had him by a foot, and they were pulling him face down. Later, much later, this Sokolov man also found Botkin’s dentures all caked with mud. Eggshells too. Sokolov found lots of eggshells, which turned out to be the very ones the good Sister Antonina and Novice Marina had brought. Hard cooked, the eggs meant for food for the Romanovs had instead nourished their killers.
As for the bodies…
Well, they were never found there. Later, once Yurovsky and his men had burned all the clothing and had tossed the troopy – the carcasses – into the mine, the guards hurled in hand grenades. But they couldn’t seal it up. It was impossible, for the ground was too tough. And this terrible thing that was supposed to be so secret? Well, the Four Brothers Mine proved to be only the first grave of Tsar Nikolai, his family, and faithful. And it turned out to be their grave for less than thirty hours.
Da, da, da, and as those awful men dragged along faithful Dr. Botkin, I ran. I ran through the wood and straight to her, straight to Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, whom I had left bleeding there in a wood and against a pine.