Chapter XIV: The Burial of the Tsar (1)

The beautiful little village of Kopchiki is situated about a dozen miles to the north-east of Ekaterinburg and close to a magnificent forest. Despite the vicinity of the railway, Kopchiki was, in the middle of the year 1918, a comparatively secluded place, for it only contained a small number of inhabitants, and the forest, formerly frequented by miners, who had driven about a dozen shafts into the ground at various points, had been left entirely to the hares, foxes, and wolves. Early on the morning of July 17 in that year Kopchiki Wood presented an appearance of primeval calm. The sun shone down the glorious forest glades, the hares ran about among the trees, and there was not a soul in sight. Suddenly there was a disturbance, trifling probably in the opinion of the elders among the forest animals who remembered the days when miners used to come, but really of supreme and permanent importance, for it meant that Kopchiki Forest would henceforward be one of the tragic places of the world. This disturbance was caused by the appearance of five carts and one motor-lorry, the former filled with Red soldiers and some kind of baggage wrapped in white blankets, the latter containing also soldiers, five civilians, and two barrels. Instead of continuing straight on to the village, this strange procession turned off the road and on to the grass, for there was no side-track, and entered the beautiful sunlit recesses of the forest. The heavy lorry stuck fast, however, in a swamp near the road; and, after several ineffectual attempts to dislodge it, the civilian passengers got out and led the carts further into the wood, until they reached a birch-tree, on which the following words were carved: “Mining Mechanic I. A. Fesenko, 11th July, 1918.” Close by this tree was a disused shaft, known locally as the “Isetsky Mine,” about fifteen feet deep, with water and mud at the bottom. Near the tree the five civilians consulted together: their names were Yurovsky, Goloshokin, Lovatnykh, Nicholas Partin, and Alexander Kostusov. Meanwhile, in obedience to Yurovsky’s orders, the soldiers moved outwards into the forest in a circle, with ever-widening intervals between each man, until they halted at a distance of about 500 yards from the marked tree. Their object was to prevent any intrusion, but none took place, though the villagers soon became aware of their presence. The first peasant to notice that something mysterious was taking place in the wood was Andrew Sheremetievsky, who, while on his way into Ekaterinburg, was stopped on the road by the soldiers who were trying to extricate the lorry, and turned back, with fierce injunctions not, on peril of his life, to venture out of his village till the Reds had gone away. Andrew, on his return, told the other villagers, with the result that several of the bolder spirits amongst them crept cautiously for some distance into the forest, but, seeing that sentries had been posted there, returned promptly to their houses. The curiosity of the whole village was now roused to the highest pitch, but their fear of the Red Guards was greater than their inquisitiveness, more especially as they knew that they had made themselves liable to terrible punishment at the hands of the Bolsheviks for sheltering in their hamlet a Tsarist officer, Captain Pometkovsky, who was living amongst them dressed as a _muzhik_ with the object of getting in touch with the Imperial Family in Ekaterinburg. Feeling sure that this strange invasion of their forest was connected in some way with the presence of Pometkovsky, they urged that officer to flee, but he refused, pointing out that the Reds could not possibly have come on account of him, as, if they had, they would have marched straight to the village. The peasants remained awake all that night in a state of great trepidation, for the wiping out of villages by both Reds and Whites is unfortunately a common incident of the present Civil War in Russia. They did not go outside their houses, but they could see from their doors the reflection in the heavens of a great fire which the Bolsheviks had kindled in Kopchiki Wood. Many were the speculations in which they indulged as to what unholy rites the Terrorists could be engaged on at that hour of the night, most of the villagers being inclined to believe that it was human sacrifice, a practice to which the Russian _muzhik_ believes the Jews to be peculiarly addicted. How near they came to the truth!

Next day the soldiers were still in the forest, but, though their curiosity increased daily, the villagers made no further effort to ascertain what they were doing there. On July 19 a peasant boy reported that the Reds had all gone, whereupon Captain Pometkovsky, accompanied by Andrew Sheremetievsky, Michael Alferov, and several other peasants, walked down the road to the point where the lorry had stuck, and found that all the soldiers had indeed disappeared. Seeing that, from the above-mentioned point, a freshly trampled path had been made by the Reds into the forest, the peasants followed it up until they came to the marked tree, the Isetsky Mine, and, two paces from the mine, a very large pile of ashes, evidently, judging by the _débris_ that had been left unconsumed, the remains of a burnt-out fire of sticks, boards, and branches of trees. There seemed to be nothing very mysterious in all this. The fire had doubtless been used for cooking food, though certainly it must have been a huge fire. Captain Pometkovsky first examined the inscription on the tree: there was nothing suspicious in it. Then he turned again to the fire. Siberians light small fires for boiling kettles of water, but never fires of such dimensions as that. And why should they have come out from Ekaterinburg, where they had all the kitchens they wanted, in order to light such an enormous bonfire with great secrecy in a lonely wood? They had evidently been burning something. Pometkovsky at once sprang forward and began scattering the ashes with his stick, and the peasants, who had been looking in astonishment at the fire from the beginning, helped him vigorously. A moment later Alferov picked up, from the blackened ground underneath the ashes, a Maltese Cross set with green stones, and handed it to the officer, who grew pale as he examined it, for it was a decoration that could only have been worn by a high personage in the Imperial service. And, for Pometkovsky, there was only one such personage in Ekaterinburg. “Good God!” gasped the officer. “_Did they burn him alive?_”

By the time he had recovered himself the peasants had found a number of other things, four corset steels, a brass buckle, burnt slippers, buttons, dress fasteners, and four beads, all indicative of the fact that women had been burnt there as well as men. “God Almighty!” exclaimed Pometkovsky, turning a ghastly face to heaven, “Merciful Christ! Can they have burned the whole family alive?”

The peasants heard him, but, though they did not fully understand, they felt they were in the presence of a horror beyond conception, and continued their gruesome search in tense silence, broken only by whispers. The next place for them to examine was obviously the shaft, whose mouth, fringed with recently disturbed weeds, gaped black in the sunlight. One of the peasants was lowered by means of a rope into the mine, but the discoveries he made were not important, being, to quote his own story, “floating sticks, pieces of bark, boards, fresh pine-needles, and a spade.” Then the surrounding ground claimed examination, and a close search revealed further evidence of crime. Under a pile of ashes and half-burnt sticks close to the shaft, and evidently thrown over there from the main pile, they found a lady’s handbag, old and charred. Eighty-four feet from the shaft they found burnt rags, bits of lace, and “some sort of bright, black fragments.” Whether or not these latter were precious objects that had been melted by the heat of the fire I do not know. Captain Pometkovsky discovered, however, an object which was undoubtedly precious, and which confirmed his worst suspicions. It was described, not very clearly, by the peasants as “a very dirty stone, the colour of water,” and they added, still less clearly, that “it was of considerable size, with a flat centre and with a white setting, in which there were a number of small, sparkling stones.” These stones, I may say, were afterwards examined by an expert jeweller, who declared them to be “diamonds of great value, worth at least one thousand pounds sterling.” Not far from the spot where Captain Pometkovsky found this beautiful but terrible piece of evidence, the peasants picked up “two small and dirty fragments” of ornaments set with “emeralds and pearls, also a torn piece of dress material with a strong smell of paraffin.”

Here ends the testimony of the peasants of Kopchiki. These humble men, all of them Imperialists, not in an active and modern but in a passive and mediæval sense, went back to their work filled with a great sorrow for “Nicholas Our Tsar,” to whom, judging from the grief of Captain Pometkovsky, some evil had apparently befallen. That burnt patch in the forest they regard with superstitious awe, for though two springs have passed since then, the grass refuses to grow on it, all the roots having, as will be seen hereafter, been destroyed by the sulphuric acid which the Reds poured over the corpses, but the _muzhiks_ refuse to accept this explanation, and maintain that the place is under a curse. They kept none of the jewels that they found, but it is doubtful if the same can be said of the peasants from other villages and of the workmen from the Isetsky factory, who, having heard wonderful stories of this amazing pile of ashes, came to examine it for themselves and found more jewels in it. There are in Russia to-day, as a result of the Ippatievsky tragedy, Commissars, Red soldiers, and peasants, with Crown Jewels worth an Emperor’s ransom in their possession, but without the possibility of disposing of those treasures either inside or outside Russia. And I might here remark that there are also many Russians with hidden hoards of valuables from other sources, which for a long time past they have been trying to smuggle out of the country. One man whom I know, and who is at present starving, has concealed in a secret place over nine hundred thousand pounds’ worth of money and valuables, without which he will not go abroad, and which he can never take with him, for I happened to learn, after I was arrested a few months ago in Moscow by the Extraordinary Commission, that the eye of that terrible organization is fixed on this man. All the romances that I have read since I was a child pale into insignificance before the tragic romances of present-day Russia.

It may be asked how this jewelry came to be in the ashes. The answer is furnished by M. Peter Gialliard, the Tsarevich’s French tutor, who has testified before a Court of Enquiry that, at Tobolsk, “the Empress concealed her jewelry in the hats, buttons, and dresses of the Grand Duchesses and the members of her household.” And, according to a Bolshevik authority, the cushions which the Imperial party had brought down into the cellar with them, where they became so soaked with blood that Yurovsky insisted on their being thrown into the lorry with the corpses, were found to be stuffed with diamonds and paper money of very high denominations.

The following is a list of the objects that were discovered when, later on, a more systematic investigation was conducted by order of Admiral Kolchak:

Several strips of cloth from a petticoat; more steel parts of ladies’ corsets; a number of brooches and pearl earrings; pearls, diamonds, and other precious stones; and Dr. Botkin’s false teeth. A small decoration belonging to the Emperor was found in the presence of an officer of General Knox’s Mission who knew the Emperor personally, and who identified the decoration as belonging to him. This officer also saw in the wood the skeleton of the Grand Duchess Tatiana’s dog with a bullet-hole through the skull, and he heard that the dead body of the sailor Derevenko who attended on the Crown Prince had also been found in the wood.

The following human remains were found: (1) Several small, charred bones and a piece of the lower part of a human spine; (2) a finger which the Bolsheviks are supposed to have cut off in order to remove a ring and to have then thrown aside.

These meagre relics are all that is left of the mighty Romanovs; and, as such, they were given solemn burial. The finger was supposed to be that of the doctor, and afterwards to be that of the Empress; but, as a matter of fact, neither it nor the bones could be identified, and, if I may say so reverently—and God forbid that I should treat this awful subject with anything but reverence—they may all have belonged to the cook or the housemaid. The bones of the very humblest among the Tsar’s menials may thus, in the event of a successful Reaction, be buried with the Russian Emperors in the fortress church of Saints Peter and Paul, while the steels from a servant-girl’s stays, buttons from her clothes, and strips from her petticoat may be enshrined in gold and regarded with almost religious veneration by generations of restored Romanovs. And they will deserve this veneration.

To give now, from the Bolshevik side, a description of how the bodies were disposed of. Accompanied by the Reds whom I have already mentioned, they were first brought to the Isetsky factory,[1] where the corpses were transferred into carts. From the Isetsky factory the carts set out along with one motor-lorry carrying Yurovsky, Goloshokin, Lovatnykh, Partin, Kostusov, some soldiers, and the two barrels of petrol. The other lorries remained in the factory till 5 o’clock the following morning, July 18, when one lorry returned to town with a number of prominent Bolsheviks who had walked from Ekaterinburg to Isetsky during the night of July 17 in order to learn how the work was progressing, and who were accompanied back to town by the lorry which had brought Yurovsky to Kopchiki and which now carried to Ekaterinburg four of Yurovsky’s companions and a number of Red soldiers, as well as two empty petrol barrels. The chauffeur of that lorry had left word at Isetsky that Yurovsky wanted the lorry which had carried the dead bodies—“the one with the blood on it”—to be sent on immediately and without fail to Kopchiki as he wanted it for his own use. On July 18, during the course of the day, most of the soldiers who had gone to Kopchiki arrived at Isetsky in carts and went from that place to Ekaterinburg in two other lorries. Early on July 19 Yurovsky himself returned to Ekaterinburg along with Goloshokin and the remainder of the soldiers, all of them travelling in that blood-stained lorry—wherein the principal murderer was particularly anxious to travel as he wanted to see with his own eyes that all traces of blood were removed from it before it was sent back to the garage.

To return, however, to the journey with the bodies from Isetsky to Kopchiki, Yurovsky was in such a state of nerves that he could not decide where to bury the bodies. He stopped once on the way and even had the bodies removed from the carts, only to come to the decision, immediately afterwards, that the place was too exposed. After he reached the Isetsky Mine in Kopchiki Wood, he wanted to go further into the forest, but, as time was being lost and the soldiers were becoming impatient, Goloshokin finally insisted on the cremation being carried out at the Isetsky Mine. A pile of wood was then collected and the bodies were placed on it, that of the Tsar being on the top. The carcass of the dog was thrown down by a soldier into some bushes, and was afterwards discovered and identified by a former domestic of the Imperial family. Yurovsky then made one soldier fill with sulphuric acid a jug which he had brought, while another uncovered the anointed head of Nicholas, once Autocrat of all the Russias, Ruler of the Russian Church, Holy Orthodox Tsar, exposing the ashy face, the glassy eyes, the hair and beard stiff with blood. Bending gently down like a priest in the act of performing a solemn religious rite, Yurovsky carefully pressed the lip of the jug against that cold brow, slightly tilted the bottom of the vessel upwards, and then poured the burning and obliterating liquid over the dead man’s features.

Had this frightful scene been presented to the Emperor in the days of his greatness, when he followed with intense interest all attempts of wizards to unveil the future by unlawful and forbidden means, had a seer warned him as Lochiel was warned in the Scots poem, he would, like Lochiel, have scoffed at the prophecy. The seer might have said: “I see a mighty forest and a man lying in a blood-stained shroud on a pile of wood. He is very white and still, but his features are hidden from me. And I see a Jew bending over him with a vessel, while a circle of Russian soldiers look on with a strange indifference. Is that Jew some Good Samaritan with refreshing drink? Is he going to pour precious ointment or cold, reviving water on that pallid brow? Good God! No! The fiery liquid that he pours out burns the fizzling flesh. It is a Black Baptism of Hell. And, lo! before the features are obliterated for ever, that face is revealed to me. O Tsar! O Father! that face is thine!”

_Drawn from Memory_]

Yurovsky left the obliteration of the other faces to one of the soldiers; and, when this revolting part of the ghastly work was done, the two barrels of petrol, which had been brought from the lorry in a cart, were emptied over the corpses, soaking their clothes, and wetting the ground and the funeral pyre. A soldier suggested that they should burn the barrels as well, but, with the shopkeeper’s instinctive dislike for waste, Yurovsky declined this suggestion and said that he would return the barrels to Ekaterinburg.

Everybody then stood back and the pile was lighted, the flames shooting up to a height of twenty feet. After the corpses had been all but consumed, Yurovsky noticed that one blackened and grinning skull was distinguished from the others by a callosity due to the wound which the Emperor had received in Japan; and, fearing that this would lead to subsequent identification, he smashed the skull to pieces with a spade and threw the fragments back on the fire, where they were entirely reduced to ashes. Before treating the other skeletons in the same way the soldiers made themselves some tea, for it was now late in the afternoon, and none of the party had had anything to eat that day. In order to boil their kettle, they removed from the fire with a spade a pile of burning and unburnt sticks among which a lady’s handbag was afterwards found. They drank vodka as well as tea, ate bread, and then the soldiers who had had their tea relieved those who were on guard in order that they also should eat. After that the whole party lay down on the ground to rest and smoke, and some of them fell asleep. Night was coming on when they resumed their ghastly labours by piling fresh fuel on the fire in order to consume some bones which still remained; and several of the soldiers who went to collect wood were scared on more than one occasion by dogs and prowling nocturnal animals probably attracted to the spot by the smell of burning flesh. By the red flames of this mysterious fire in the forest, Yurovsky moved about ceaselessly, like a restless fiend by the fires of Hell, his left hand in a sling, and his right constantly occupied in picking up bones, jewelry, human teeth, trinkets, bits of cloth, and buttons, all of which he threw into the flames. Noticing that one of the objects which the chief murderer threw away glowed like a ruby, Lovatnykh began to assist him in his search, and Partin, Kostusov, the chauffeur, and several of the others soon did the same. Becoming very interested in the work, they even raked the ashes and the heart of the fire, ostensibly for the purpose of finding bones to destroy, but really with a different object in view, for the pockets of all of them were soon bulging with precious stones. Neither Yurovsky nor Goloshokin noticed anything, however; the former being like a man moving about in an hypnotic trance, and the latter being asleep.

About 3 o’clock in the morning the fire had burnt itself out, after having apparently effaced every trace of the great crime; and Lovatnykh as well as the other diamond-gatherers expressed a strong desire to go home, the chauffeur asserting that his machine, which had by this time been extricated from the bog, was in need of immediate repairs. Yurovsky, still like a man in a trance, agreed, but then, as if struck by a sudden thought, asked the chauffeur if it was his lorry that had brought the bodies from Ekaterinburg. When the chauffeur answered in the negative, Yurovsky said: “Oh, yes, I remember. It was Lovatnykh’s. Then tell Lovatnykh to bring his lorry here. No other. The one with the blood on it.”

Accordingly, at about 3 o’clock in the morning, Lovatnykh, Partin, Kostusov, and as many of the soldiers as the lorry would hold, went to Isetsky, while Yurovsky, Goloshokin, and the rest of the soldiers remained behind owing to Yurovsky’s determination to stay in the forest all next day in order to see by daylight whether any traces of the bodies still existed. As a matter of fact, he was there till the following night, and even then Goloshokin had to drag him away from the unhallowed spot, which seemed to have a horrible fascination for him. During the daytime he lighted the fire again in order to burn several pieces of cloth, a slipper, and other things which he discovered; and, towards nightfall, he and his companions began shovelling the ashes down the shaft and scattering them about in the forest. Yurovsky found at the last moment many human teeth, with which he walked long distances into the forest in order to conceal them in the brushwood or to cast them into far-off shafts, where they still lie. Then they all left together in Lovatnykh’s lorry, “the one with the blood on it.”

Peter Alexeivich Lenov, manager of the Bolshevik garage in Ekaterinburg, has testified that two of the lorries which he supplied on the order of Yurovsky, given through Gorbunov, returned to the garage on the morning of July 18, and that in them were the empty petrol barrels. Two of them returned later the same day, and the last returned in the following circumstances. Gorbunov ordered it to go to the Amerikansky Dom, a large hotel near the Roman Catholic church, which was the H.Q. of the Extraordinary Commission, as it became, later, the H.Q. of the Czechs. Lukhanov the chauffeur and Labashev his assistant were sent straight home, and a new chauffeur from the Amerikansky Dom brought the motor-lorry to the garage. There Lenov saw at once that it had been recently scoured with sand and washed with water. Curious to know why this had been done he examined the machine closely, and found distinct traces of blood on it. He does not seem to have ever met Lukhanov or Labashev again. These men were probably sent away from Ekaterinburg as they knew too much, and great secrecy had been observed in preventing the identification of the bodies. Only one chauffeur, Lukhanov, had been allowed to enter the courtyard of the Ippatievsky house, and he only saw bodies wrapped in white blankets being put into his lorry. The other chauffeurs had waited outside. Similar secrecy had been observed at the Isetsky factory, where the chauffeurs were separated from one another and guards placed over them, but it was impossible, of course, to prevent most of them, and especially Lovatnykh and the man who drove to Kopchiki, from learning everything.

Before returning to Ekaterinburg to describe what was going on there all this time, I shall stop half-way, at the Isetsky factory, in order to give an account of a terrible scene which took place there during the night of July 17. But, first of all, I must introduce to the reader Comrade Prokofy Kukhtenkov, a Red soldier, one of the few Red soldiers whose hands are not red with blood.

Prokofy had been one of the guards at Ippatievsky in May, 1918, but had been allowed to retire from military service in the same month, and had been given the post of secretary and manager in the Red Workmen’s Club at the Verkh Isetsky Factory. At 4 a.m. on the morning of July 18 a number of prominent Bolsheviks from Ekaterinburg came to the Club, roused Prokofy from his bed, and asked him to prepare the samovar and make tea for them. They were:

1. The President of the Executive Committee of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, Sergius Pavlov Mamyshkin.

2. The Military Commissar, Peter Ermakov.

3. Alexander Kostusov.

4. Basil Lovatnykh.

5. Nicholas Partin.

6. Alexander Krivtsov.

Three of these, Lovatnykh, Partin, and Kostusov, had just taken part in the cremation and the others had come out from Ekaterinburg to see how things had gone. Kukhtenkov was unaware of this at the time, but his curiosity was excited by the wild appearance of Lovatnykh, Partin, and Kostusov, by the fact that so many of the leading Bolsheviks had met in such an out-of-the-way place, and by their evident desire to keep their conversation from reaching the ears of the Club secretary. They went into the Committee-room of the Club, where they would not be likely to be disturbed by other visitors, and when Prokofy brought them the samovar he found, to use his own words, that “they were secretly discussing something.” Krivtsov was eagerly questioning the three men who had come back from Kopchiki Wood. Partin and Lovatnykh were answering him. The Club secretary overheard the words: “They were thirteen in all[2]—the thirteenth was the doctor.” Then they conversed in low tones for a while, glancing suspiciously from time to time at Prokofy, who was pretending to be very busy at the other end of the room; but finally, being afraid that the secretary overheard them after all, they rose from the table, went out into the garden, and continued their conversation there. Prokofy “being,” as he said himself, “interested in their conversation,” followed them unnoticed, on all fours, through the long grass and the shrubs. Then he heard distinctly the following extraordinary sentences:

KOSTUSOV: This is the second time that we have had all this bother. We buried them yesterday, and we buried them again to-day.

(_Partin then speaks callously and brutally, boasting of what he had done._)

LOVATNYKH: When we came ... they were still warm. I myself ... I can now die happy, for I have....

KRIVTSOV: How were they dressed?

PARTIN: Oh, they were all dressed in civilian clothes, and in their dresses were sewn jewels and diamonds.

MAMYSHKIN: How many did you say there were?

LOVATNYKH: I told you before that there were thirteen. The doctor was the thirteenth.

ERMAKOV: Were they pretty?

PARTIN: There was not a pretty face among them.

A MAN (_whom Prokofy could not identify from his voice_): You cannot find beauty in the dead.

From the subsequent conversation Prokofy gathered that they had been buried in two places. First they were buried in one place beyond Ekaterinburg, and then taken up and buried in another place, where it was not stated. As a matter of fact, however, they were not buried the first time, but only taken out of the carts, and on the second occasion they were cremated. One of the speakers enumerated the names of the Tsar, the Tsarina, the Tsarevich, the Grand Duchesses and Madame Vyrobova (?). He could not catch the names of the others, but the list ended with the phrase which had already been used: “The thirteenth was the doctor.”

According to Prokofy all the Bolsheviks who took part in this strange conclave fled from Ekaterinburg before it was taken by the Czechs. Metvietev was the next to flee, then Yurovsky and Goloshokin. But I am anticipating events and must now return to Ippatievsky House, where Metvietev, who had been left in charge by Yurovsky, was entrusted with the work of destroying all trace of the crime in the villa itself. It was a hard, nay, an impossible task, for not only had gallons of blood congealed on the floor, but large quantities of blood had dripped through the bullet-holes as well as through the interstices in the planks and soaked into the ground beneath, where it was afterwards examined and identified as human. Metvietev had the cellar floor covered with clay and sand taken from the garden, and then he had all this clay and sand removed after it had soaked up all the blood. Finally he had the floor of the cellar washed thoroughly with water. When I reached Ekaterinburg two months later, the hole from which the sand was taken could still be seen, and the small quantities of soil which yet remained in the corners of the cellar corresponded exactly to the soil which composed the ground where the hole had been made.

While Metvietev was supervising this work in the cellar, the soldiers upstairs were, by his orders, collecting into the dining-room all the effects of the deceased. Among those engaged on this task were two brothers, both Red soldiers, Kouzma Ivanovich Letemin and Michael Ivanovich Letemin. On ripping open a cushion with his bayonet, Kouzma found it stuffed with banknotes of high denominations and also with diamonds. This amazing discovery led at once to a wild scene of looting. The ikons which the Emperor always carried about with him and which he had inherited from his grandfather were found to be studded with precious stones, which were all removed, the pictures being then thrown away and subsequently shot, along with a number of other objects which were regarded as valueless, into a rubbish-pit in the courtyard. They were afterwards found there by the Whites, and with them were found the Tsar’s epaulettes, a little flag of his regiment which he always carried about with him, and a number of unimportant letters of the Tsarina. Some of those letters were in English, and were addressed from Ekaterinburg to the Crown Prince in Tobolsk. In one of them she went into such minute details about the way to wear a certain ikon as to indicate that, though she only entered the Greek Church on the occasion of her marriage, she had become, at the time of her death, what even religious Russians would regard as a distinctly superstitious votary of it. She frequently referred to herself pathetically in those letters as “an old, old woman.”

A homely touch is lent to the tragedy by the evidence of two Russian charwomen, Staroduma and Vassa Dryagina, who turned up at Ippatievsky on July 19 to get paid for having washed the floors there on July 15, the day before the tragedy. The town was then in a state of excitement on account of the further advance of the Czechs, and such of the murderers as were not trying to repose after their debauch of Imperial blood were dispatching to Perm as many trains full of gold and platinum as they possibly could before the time came for them to run. Staroduma and Vassa took as a rule no interest in high politics: the murder of Emperors and the disappearance of dynasties left them cold. But even as the drummer-boy in the novel comes for a moment into the cyclonic orbit of Napoleon, so do these two old charwomen hobble rapidly across that gory stage in Ekaterinburg which will be a theme for so many writers yet unborn and a subject for so many future painters. Having heard rumours to the effect that the Imperial Family had been sent away and that Yurovsky had fled, they decided not to wait as usual till the end of the month for payment, but to go at once for their money. They knocked in vain, however, at the door of Ippatievsky, then tried the door and found that it was locked. The sentry who ordinarily stood there was absent; but there were some Red soldiers standing close by, and to these Staroduma and Vassa spoke of the money that was owing them, and of the necessity of their getting it at once owing to the price of bread having gone up, and to the fact that they had, between them, eleven small children to feed. The soldiers said that the house was empty, as “everybody had been taken away to Perm”; and so Staroduma and Vassa Dryagina both disappear, grumbling, from history.

Meanwhile the Bolshevik leaders, who were all suffering from a reaction of fright after the terrible deed they had done, began feverishly to circulate reports to the effect that the Imperial Family had all been sent to Perm. They feared a rising in the town if the truth got about. They feared that they might be cut off and captured by the Czechs. They feared that such of their own Red soldiers as were Russian might revolt against them. Consequently the word went forth from the Amerikansky Dom: “Say that the Tsar and his family have all left for Perm.”

Despite the fact that, in the absence of Goloshokin, Yurovsky, and the other Red leaders on July 17, the local Bolshevik newspaper had imprudently come out with an “extra” announcing the “execution” of “Nicholas Romanov,” this rumour that the Tsar had simply been sent to Perm was vigorously circulated by the Communists in various ingenious ways. Knowing that a barber is the most talkative of human beings, Gulyaev, the Bolshevik Commissar at the railway station, went on July 16 into the shop of Feodor Ivanov, a “tonsorial artist,” as he describes himself, whose little shop still stands, with Feodor inside it, close to the railway station, and found it as usual pretty full of customers, some reading the newspapers and smoking, some being professionally attended to by Feodor and his boy-assistant. After exchanging the usual greeting with the barber, of whom he was an old customer, Gulyaev complained that he was getting very much work to do during those last few days.

“What sort of work is it?” asked Feodor.

“Well, for one thing, we are sending off Nicholas Romanov and his family to-day,” replied the Commissar in a casual tone.

He did not say where the ex-Tsar was being sent to, and the barber did not like to ask him “as there were people in the shop,” although, as a matter of fact, it was mostly for the benefit of those people that Gulyaev was speaking.

The curiosity of Feodor having been aroused to the highest pitch, he took an opportunity, later on, of getting the Commissar aside, where he could not be overheard, and asking him if the Tsar had already been sent.

“He cannot have been sent from this station,” quoth the barber, “for I have seen every train that went out for the last two days.”

“Oh,” replied Gulyaev, “he was sent from station No. 2”—the old Ekaterinburg station, situated at some distance from the present one. The loquacious barber hungered for more information on the subject, but Gulyaev, who is not an imaginative man, could not think of anything else to add. “He gave no particulars,” said the barber, who promised to keep the matter quiet as the Commissar hurried off, rather afraid that Feodor would keep it quiet. He had no reason for fear on that score, however, and the tale was all over the town before evening. Some people who heard this and similar stories not only believed them but passed them on with amplifications of their own, and even averred in some cases that they had actually seen the Imperial train.

These rumours, spread by the Bolsheviks, made very difficult the subsequent work of investigation, and carried the investigators off on side issues which always proved in the end to be blind alleys, leading nowhere. But it is extraordinary to what an extent they misled for a long time the royal and imperial relatives of the murdered Emperor. Even when I was in Copenhagen on my way from Moscow in June, 1920, I was told that the Tsar’s mother still believed implicitly in these unfounded tales, and I was asked to write a statement which put an end, alas! to all her hopes.

Alexander Samoilov, a conductor on the Omsk railway, said that he asked Alexander Varakovshev, a soldier of the Red Army who occupied part of the flat in which he lived at Ekaterinburg, if there was any truth in the rumours that the Tsar had been shot. Varakovshev replied that there was no truth in those rumours, which had been circulated, he said, by “that dog Goloshokin.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Varakovshev, “Nicholas Romanov as well as his wife have been put in irons and taken to the station to be sent to Perm.”

“What!” exclaimed Samoilov. “Is that really true? Can I see them?”

According to Samoilov’s story Varakovshev then accompanied him to the railway station, where he showed him a train made up of first and second class carriages, and standing on the fifth or sixth track.

One of the carriages had black blinds which were drawn down, and the carriage itself was surrounded by Red soldiers. “In that very carriage,” said Varakovshev impressively, “is the man Nicholas Romanov and his wife.”

That carriage, as a matter of fact, was the one in which Countess Gendrikova, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, as well as Prince Dolgoruki and Count Tatishchev, who had both been in the suite of the Emperor, were afterwards sent off to Perm, where they were all murdered three weeks later along with the Grand Duke Michael.

Only two members of the Imperial party were left alive—the Tsar’s valet, who was taken to Perm (and probably murdered there), and a little boy of thirteen who assisted the cook. This boy was driven from Ippatievsky by Yurovsky just before the murder, and though at the time the boy probably thought it very cruel treatment, it was the only act of kindness which the Reds showed on this occasion. On July 17 the soldier Kouzma Ivanovich Letemin, of whom I have already spoken, entered the guard-house opposite Ippatievsky and went into the room occupied by Metvietev, who was working at the time in the cellar of Ippatievsky. He found in the room two soldiers and this little boy, whose presence in that house astonished him, for he knew that the lad belonged to the Tsar’s household, and was never, therefore, allowed to leave Ippatievsky. Turning to one of his comrades, Kouzma asked, “What is the meaning of this? Why is this boy here?” The soldier to whom he put the question “brushed it aside with a wave of his hand, and said nothing”—to use Kouzma’s own expression—but another soldier called Streokin, who had been on duty during the night, told him that “the Tsar, together with his wife and children, his footman, his cook and the ladies-in-waiting were shot last night in the lower room of Ippatievsky,” adding afterwards that “the Tsar was shot by Yurovsky.”

Kouzma maintained that this was the first news he heard of the murder as he had not been on guard during the night; and he seems, after this, to have immediately gone to Ippatievsky and started looting the murdered Emperor’s belongings.

The boy, I was told, is a very simple peasant lad who knows nothing of what happened except what he heard the soldiers say. He is now living in the Tsar’s former palace of Tsarskoe Selo, which has been converted into an orphanage, where he is being carefully brought up as a Communist with an intense hatred of Christianity and the middle classes. The mercy that spared him was therefore the mercy of a demon who saves the body in order that he may ruin the soul.

Before I leave the subject of the murder and go on to give some details of the life the Tsar and his family led before their assassination, I should like to say that, though the death of Nicholas the Second and his wife and children at Ekaterinburg on the night of July 16, 1918, is as well authenticated as the death of King Charles the First of England, there are minor discrepancies in the evidence.

Anatoly Yakimov, a soldier of the Red Army who was on guard at Ippatievsky on the night of the 10th of July, said that “Nicholas Romanov, all his family, his doctor, the ladies-in-waiting, and the Imperial servants were killed that night. Towards 1 o’clock they were awakened and asked to go downstairs. The former Emperor and his son were killed first. The others were only wounded at first and had to be shot at again. They were also pierced with bayonets and struck with the butt-ends of rifles.” The rest of his evidence corresponds to what I have given elsewhere save that he says it was the Grand Duchess Anastasia who fell in a faint, and not Tatiana. “The shooting was done by Lettish soldiers, by some Red Russian soldiers, and by five of the leading Bolsheviks. There was much blood” (on the floor). Another soldier, Streokin, says that “the killing was done by Yurovsky, some Lett soldiers and Metvietev, the Sergeant of the Guard.” Streokin was on duty at Post No. 4 on the night of July 16 and witnessed the massacre. According to Yakimov the motor-cars went off with the bodies at 6 a.m. on the morning of the 17th of July, but it is improbable that they went so late. They probably went off at about 3 a.m. A Russian soldier’s ideas of time are seldom accurate.

Now for a few facts which I gathered in Ekaterinburg as to the treatment meted out to the Tsar and his family by their jailers during the first two weeks of July.

During those two weeks the Imperial party were badly treated by the Reds, who used to come into the dining-room, put their fingers on the Empress’s food and eat from her plate, saying, “There is too much here for you.” The Red soldiers used also to sit in the dining-room, often in an intoxicated condition, while the prisoners were having their food, and used to tell disgusting stories. A priest whom I afterwards met said Mass in the house every Sunday, but only on the understanding that he would never speak to any of the prisoners. This priest said that the Emperor was always very calm and that all the family prayed very much and very fervently. They were not allowed to confess, but presumably the priest gave them each time he said Mass a general absolution which was, in the circumstances, of equal efficacy to the absolution given in the confessional.

According to this clergyman, the Emperor had changed very much, having become very thin. His beard too had grown rather long; and this, combined with his pallor, gave him the appearance of a man who had had a long illness. He trimmed his beard a few days before his death.

The Tsarevich could not stand owing to his lameness, which was evidently getting worse. He sat all the time during Mass and always looked very ill. “He looked,” said the priest, “like a child who could not possibly live long.” According to other accounts the Crown Prince had got over his illness and even his lameness at the time of his murder.

The Commissars told the priest that, if ever he spoke to the Emperor or made any sign to him, he himself as well as the Tsar and all his family would be shot. He always said Mass, therefore, under most trying conditions, for the various signs and movements of the hands which are prescribed in the rubrics of the Mass might easily have been misinterpreted by the Jewish Commandant who was always present, always watching intently, and who knew nothing of Christian ceremonies. The last time this priest said Mass was two days before the Emperor was murdered, and this was also the last occasion on which he saw the family. As he was leaving the room, after Mass, the four Grand Duchesses were standing near the door, and one of them said: “Thank you, Father, for saying Mass.” These were the first and the last words he heard from any of the family; and, though they were few and unobjectionable and remained, moreover, unanswered, they brought down Yurovsky’s wrath on the poor clergyman. “Why did you let these people talk to you?” growled the Commissar; “they had no right to do so.”

Several of the Red soldiers always attended Mass as well as Yurovsky, but it was to curse and jeer, not to pray; and in the first place, of course, to keep a sharp watch.

They used to laugh at the Tsar for attending the service, and the clergyman heard them asking him on one occasion: “Why do you want to have all this nonsensical rigmarole? Your God won’t help you.” On other occasions they mocked at all religion, but the Emperor never answered them or took any notice of what they said. They used to sneer at the priest during the service.

Some nuns from a neighbouring convent were allowed to bring milk to the Imperial Family, and certain members of the Tsar’s suite sent letters with these nuns, but those letters never reached their destination.

The members of the Imperial Family never had an opportunity to get a bath, though baths were very desirable owing to the heat of the weather, for June and July are always hot months in Ekaterinburg. When they asked for water, dirty water was brought to them and they could not use it.

When he first came to Ekaterinburg the Tsar was much better treated, and I was also able to collect some information in Ekaterinburg about those happier days.

In conversation, I was told, he never expressed any regret for the past, but was apparently quite convinced that everything which he had done during his reign was perfectly right, that he had been right in summoning the Duma, right in the way he had treated the Duma, and right in abdicating. The only exercise he got was in a very small garden, where he sometimes walked and sometimes sawed wood with a saw mounted on a wooden frame. I saw a photograph of him engaged in this work; and I walked in the garden, which was no larger than that attached to many a poor man’s house in Battersea.

The different Commissars who had charge of the ex-Emperor were much impressed by his politeness and formality. Whenever a new Commissar appeared in the house the ex-Tsar always introduced him to the members of his family as if he were still Emperor and were presenting an ambassador. The scene would be one for a great painter—the small darksome dining-room, so different from the spacious halls of Tsarskoe Selo; the plain deal table with a pile of unwashed plates, cups, and saucers on it, but no tablecloth; the shaggy Bolshevik envoy, standing half awed, half defiant, in the centre of the room in muddy high boots; the Emperor in faded uniform and with the courtly manners which had become natural to him during fifty years passed in Imperial courts and twenty-three years passed as the most powerful autocrat on earth; the pale nervous Empress who had been the immediate cause of all this ruin sitting half frightened, half indignant, holding her little son by the hand; the daughters, clustered together, wholly frightened, in the background.

THE OPINION OF ONE OF THE TSAR’S JAILERS ON THE TSAR AND THE ROMANOV FAMILY.

It has not often occurred in recent history that a monarch born in the purple has been subjected for months together to the unrestrained scrutiny of an ordinary working man of strong republican sympathies and in a position to speak openly of all that he has seen, or that a rough and half-educated miner has found himself in a position to see at close quarters the intimate, everyday life of a very exclusive Court. I, for one, cannot recollect a similar instance even during the last few years of runaway Royalties and escaped Emperors. The last Tsar of Russia was watched over, however, in Tobolsk by a revolutionary Commissar called V. S. Pankratov, and I propose to give here the result of his observations. Pankratov was, as will be seen, naïve, prejudiced, and often grossly unjust; and if it is very evident that he could not speak quite freely owing to the strong feeling against Nicholas the Second that prevails among the Revolutionists in Russia, it must be borne in mind that few people can speak or write with perfect freedom in any part of the world at the present critical stage of human history.

The story of Pankratov is very piquant; and, like the self-confident, semi-educated workman that he is, he misses altogether the greatness of the tragedy and, while coarsely criticizing the Imperial Family for their attention to minutiæ, gets lost amid a mass of unimportant minutiæ himself. His narrow-mindedness and illiberality are shown by the fact that he gives us, unconsciously it is true, more about his own character than about the character of the illustrious persons of whom he had charge. He seems to have studied some selections from Pushkin and Lermontov as well as two standard Russian histories at school. In later life, he evidently read some stories by Chekhov and committed to memory some poems by the democratic poet Nekrasov. He apparently thinks, however, that this exiguous amount of scholarship fits him to pass judgment on the educational qualifications of the Tsar and his children, who were, as a matter of fact, highly cultured. Those children seem, however, to have been unable to refrain from having their little joke at the expense of the horny-handed and dogmatic miner, and one can hardly blame them, for the temptation must have been irresistible.

In some places Pankratov is glaringly and, I am afraid, consciously unjust, as, for example, where he attacks Mr. Gibbs, the Tsaritsa’s English tutor, a Cambridge graduate whom I happen to have met and whose scholarship, industry, and high character need no testimonial from me. If he is utterly wrong in this matter, as I know he is wrong, his evidence with regard to other matters is of little value save that it gives the Russian revolutionary workman’s view of the Imperial Family, which, after all, it is important that we should know. Pankratov, it will be seen, found his intellectual level among the lower servants of the Imperial household, including the sailor Derevenko, on whom he makes a long and violent attack. Derevenko was undoubtedly an ignorant man, but, in point of character, he was far above the Commissar, and his unselfish devotion to the little Tsarevich is one of the few bright spots in the whole sordid tragedy. The Commissar accuses Derevenko of having been animated by purely selfish motives in the efforts he made to join the Crown Prince. Well, the old sailor seems to have succeeded in those efforts, and the only reward he got was death. Colonel Rodzianko, a Russian officer attached to General Knox’s staff, tells me that Derevenko’s body was found in Kopchiki Wood with a bullet-hole in the head. The other members of the Tsar’s suite also deserve some credit for having allied their fortunes to those of their fallen master when they might very easily have gone abroad and lived comfortably to this day.

Russian history is full of dramatic situations, but I do not think that we can find in it any more dramatic situation than that of this workman philosophizing, wrongly as a rule, but sometimes not inaptly, about those cloaked and belted figures which have, up to the present, played such a great part in the history of man, those mysterious beings who wear crowns and sit on thrones and are brought up in a manner so different from other mortals. Much of the glamour that surrounded them has been destroyed by the Great War, and for the last half-century there has been a strong tendency in European historical literature to minimize the influence which Kings have had in the past, but there can be no denying the fascination they have exercised from the earliest times over the imagination of mankind, and in particular over the imagination of our own Shakespeare.

But it is now time to let Comrade Pankratov speak for himself.

_Commissar Pankratov’s Statement._