The Romanovs how they were killed. How the royal family of the Romanovs lived the last days before the execution

The main condition for the existence of immortality is death itself.

Stanislav Jerzy Lec

Execution royal family Romanovs on the night of July 17, 1918, this is one of the most important events of the era of the civil war, the formation of Soviet power, as well as Russia's exit from the First World War. The murder of Nicholas 2 and his family was largely predetermined by the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. But in this story, not everything is as simple as it is commonly said. In this article, I will present all the facts that are known in this case in order to assess the events of those days.

History of events

We should start with the fact that Nicholas 2 was not the last Russian emperor, as many believe today. He abdicated (for himself and for his son Alexei) in favor of his brother, Mikhail Romanov. So he is the last emperor. This is important to remember, we will return to this fact later. Also, in most textbooks, the execution of the royal family is equated with the murder of the family of Nicholas 2. But these were far from all the Romanovs. To understand how many people we are talking about, I will give only data on the last Russian emperors:

• Nicholas 1 - 4 sons and 4 daughters.
• Alexander 2 - 6 sons and 2 daughters.
• Alexander 3 - 4 sons and 2 daughters.
• Nicholas 2 - son and 4 daughters.

That is, the family is very large, and any of the list above is a direct descendant of the imperial branch, which means a direct contender for the throne. But most of them also had children of their own ...

Arrest of members of the royal family

Nicholas 2, having abdicated the throne, put forward quite simple requirements, the implementation of which the Provisional Government guaranteed. The requirements were as follows:

• Safe transfer of the emperor to Tsarskoe Selo to his family, where at that time Tsarevich Alexei was more.
• The safety of the whole family at the time of their stay in Tsarskoye Selo until the full recovery of Tsarevich Alexei.
• The safety of the road to the northern ports of Russia, from where Nicholas 2 and his family should cross to England.
• After the end of the Civil War, the royal family will return to Russia and live in Livadia (Crimea).

It is important to understand these points in order to see the intentions of Nicholas 2 and later the Bolsheviks. The emperor abdicated the throne so that the current government would provide him with a safe exit to England.

What is the role of the British government?

The provisional government of Russia, after receiving the demands of Nicholas 2, turned to England with the question of the consent of the latter to host the Russian monarch. A positive response was received. But here it is important to understand that the request itself was a formality. The fact is that at that time an investigation was underway against the royal family, for the period of which it was impossible to leave Russia. Therefore, England, giving consent, did not risk anything at all. Something else is much more interesting. After the complete justification of Nicholas 2, the Provisional Government again makes a request to England, but more specific. This time the question was no longer posed abstractly, but concretely, because everything was ready for the move to the island. But then England refused.

So when today Western countries and people screaming at every corner about the innocently killed, talk about the execution of Nicholas 2, this only causes a reaction of disgust at their hypocrisy. One word from the British government that they agree to accept Nicholas 2 with his family, and in principle there would be no execution. But they refused...

In the photo on the left is Nicholas 2, on the right is George 4, King of England. They were distant relatives and had an obvious resemblance in appearance.

When was the royal family of the Romanovs executed?

Michael's murder

After the October Revolution, Mikhail Romanov approached the Bolsheviks with a request to remain in Russia as an ordinary citizen. This request was granted. But the last Russian emperor was not destined to live "quietly" for long. Already in March 1918 he was arrested. There is no reason for the arrest. Until now, not a single historian has been able to find a single historical document explaining the reason for the arrest of Mikhail Romanov.

After his arrest, on March 17 he was sent to Perm, where he lived for several months in a hotel. On the night of July 13, 1918, he was taken away from the hotel and shot. This was the first victim of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks. The official reaction of the USSR to this event was ambivalent:

• It was announced to its citizens that Mikhail shamefully fled from Russia abroad. Thus, the authorities got rid of unnecessary questions, and, most importantly, received a legitimate reason to toughen the maintenance of the rest of the members of the royal family.
• For foreign countries, it was announced through the media that Mikhail was missing. They say he went out on the night of July 13 for a walk and did not return.

The execution of the family of Nicholas 2

The backstory here is quite interesting. Immediately after the October Revolution, the Romanov royal family was arrested. The investigation did not reveal the guilt of Nicholas 2, so the charges were dropped. At the same time, it was impossible to let the family go to England (the British refused), and the Bolsheviks really did not want to send them to the Crimea, because there were “whites” very close by. Yes, and throughout almost the entire Civil War, Crimea was under the control of the white movement, and all the Romanovs who were on the peninsula were saved by moving to Europe. Therefore, they decided to send them to Tobolsk. The fact of secrecy of the dispatch is noted in his diaries by Nikolay 2, who writes that they were taken to ONE of the cities in the depths of the country.

Until March, the royal family lived relatively calmly in Tobolsk, but on March 24 an investigator arrived here, and on March 26 a reinforced detachment of Red Army soldiers arrived. In fact, since that time, enhanced security measures have begun. The basis is the imaginary flight of Michael.

Subsequently, the family was moved to Yekaterinburg, where she settled in the Ipatiev house. On the night of July 17, 1918, the Romanov royal family was shot. Together with them, their servants were also shot. In total that day died:

• Nicholas 2,
• His wife, Alexandra
• The emperor's children are Tsarevich Alexei, Maria, Tatiana and Anastasia.
• Family doctor - Botkin
• Maid - Demidova
• Personal chef - Kharitonov
• Footman - Troupe.

In total, 10 people were shot. The corpses, according to the official version, were thrown into the mine and filled with acid.

Who killed the family of Nicholas 2?

I have already said above that since March, the protection of the royal family has been significantly increased. After moving to Yekaterinburg, it was already a full-fledged arrest. The family was settled in the house of Ipatiev, and a guard was presented to them, the head of the garrison of which was Avdeev. On July 4, almost the entire composition of the guard was replaced, as was his chief. In the future, it was these people who were accused of murdering the royal family:

• Yakov Yurovsky. Supervised the execution.
• Grigory Nikulin. Yurovsky's assistant.
• Peter Ermakov. Head of the Emperor's Guard.
• Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin. Cheka representative.

These are the main persons, but there were also ordinary performers. It is noteworthy that all of them significantly survived this event. Most later took part in the Second World War, received a pension from the USSR.

Reprisal against the rest of the family

Since March 1918, other members of the royal family have been gathering in Alapaevsk (Perm province). In particular, Princess Elizabeth Feodorovna, Princes John, Konstantin and Igor, as well as Vladimir Paley are imprisoned here. The latter was the grandson of Alexander 2, but had a different surname. Subsequently, all of them were transported to Vologda, where on July 19, 1918 they were thrown alive into the mine.

The latest events in the destruction of the Romanov dynastic family date back to January 19, 1919, when princes Nikolai and Georgy Mikhailovich, Pavel Alexandrovich and Dmitry Konstantinovich were shot in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Reaction to the assassination of the Romanov imperial family

The murder of the family of Nicholas 2 had the greatest resonance, which is why it needs to be studied. There are many sources indicating that when Lenin was informed about the murder of Nicholas 2, he did not seem to even react to it. It is impossible to check such judgments, but you can refer to archival documents. In particular, we are interested in Protocol No. 159 of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars of July 18, 1918. The protocol is very short. Heard the question of the murder of Nicholas 2. Decided - to take note. That's it, just take note. There are no other documents regarding this case! This is complete absurdity. In the yard of the 20th century, but not a single document is preserved regarding such an important historical event, except for one note "Take note" ...

However, the underlying reaction to the murder is investigation. They started

Investigations into the murder of the family of Nicholas 2

The leadership of the Bolsheviks, as expected, began an investigation into the murder of the family. The official investigation began on 21 July. She conducted an investigation quickly enough, since Kolchak's troops approached Yekaterinburg. The main conclusion of this official investigation is that there was no murder. Only Nikolai 2 was shot by the verdict of the Yekaterinburg Soviet. But there are a number of very weak points that still cast doubt on the veracity of the investigation:

• The investigation began a week later. In Russia, the former emperor is being killed, and the authorities react to this a week later! Why was this week of pause?
• Why conduct an investigation if there was a shooting on the orders of the Soviets? In this case, right on July 17, the Bolsheviks were supposed to report that “the execution of the Romanov royal family took place on the orders of the Yekaterinburg Soviet. Nikolai 2 was shot, but his family was not touched.
• There are no supporting documents. Even today, all references to the decision of the Yekaterinburg Council are oral. Even in Stalin's times, when they were shot by the millions, documents remained, they say, "by the decision of the troika and so on" ...

On the 20th of July 1918, Kolchak's army entered Yekaterinburg, and one of the first orders was to begin an investigation into the tragedy. Today everyone is talking about investigator Sokolov, but before him there were 2 more investigators with the names Nametkin and Sergeev. No one has officially seen their reports. Yes, and Sokolov's report was published only in 1924. According to the investigator, the entire royal family was shot. By this time (back in 1921), the Soviet leadership had voiced the same data.

The sequence of the destruction of the Romanov dynasty

In the story of the execution of the royal family, it is very important to observe the chronology, otherwise it is very easy to get confused. And the chronology here is this - the dynasty was destroyed in the order of contenders for succession to the throne.

Who was the first pretender to the throne? That's right, Mikhail Romanov. I remind you again - back in 1917, Nicholas 2 abdicated the throne for himself and for his son in favor of Mikhail. Therefore, he was the last emperor, and he was the first claimant to the throne, in the event of the restoration of the Empire. Mikhail Romanov was killed on July 13, 1918.

Who was next in line of succession? Nicholas 2 and his son, Tsarevich Alexei. The candidacy of Nicholas 2 is controversial here, in the end he renounced power on his own. Although in his attitude everyone could play the other way, because in those days almost all laws were violated. But Tsarevich Alexei was a clear contender. The father had no legal right to relinquish the throne for his son. As a result, the entire family of Nicholas 2 was shot on July 17, 1918.

Next in line were all the other princes, of whom there were quite a few. Most of them were gathered in Alapaevsk and killed on July 19, 1918. As they say, rate the speed: 13, 17, 19. If we were talking about random murders that were not related to each other, then there would simply not be such a similarity. In less than 1 week, almost all pretenders to the throne were killed, and in order of succession, but history today considers these events isolated from each other, and absolutely not paying attention to disputed places.

Alternative versions of the tragedy

A key alternative version of this historical event is set forth in Tom Mangold and Anthony Summers' book The Murder That Wasn't. It hypothesizes that there was no execution. In general terms, the situation is as follows ...

• The reasons for the events of those days should be sought in the Brest peace treaty between Russia and Germany. The argument is that despite the fact that the secrecy stamp from the documents has long been removed (it was 60 years old, that is, in 1978 there should have been a publication) there is not a single full version this document. An indirect confirmation of this is that the “executions” began precisely after the signing of the peace treaty.
• It is a well-known fact that the wife of Nicholas 2, Alexandra, was a relative of the German Kaiser Wilhelm 2. It is assumed that Wilhelm 2 introduced a clause into the Treaty of Brest, according to which Russia undertakes to ensure the safe departure to Germany of Alexandra and her daughters.
• As a result, the Bolsheviks extradited women to Germany, and Nicholas 2 and his son Alexei were left hostage. Subsequently, Tsarevich Alexei grew up in Alexei Kosygin.

A new round of this version was given by Stalin. It is a well-known fact that one of his favorites was Alexei Kosygin. There are no big reasons to believe this theory, but there is one detail. It is known that Stalin always called Kosygin nothing more than "tsarevich".

Canonization of the royal family

In 1981 the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, she canonized Nicholas 2 and his family as great martyrs. In 2000, this happened in Russia as well. To date, Nicholas 2 and his family are great martyrs and innocently killed, therefore they are saints.

A few words about the Ipatiev house

The Ipatiev House is the place where the family of Nicholas 2 was imprisoned. There is a very well-reasoned hypothesis that it was possible to escape from this house. Moreover, unlike the unfounded alternative version, there is one significant fact. So, the general version is that there was an underground passage from the basement of the Ipatiev house, which no one knew about, and which led to a factory located nearby. Proof of this has already been provided in our day. Boris Yeltsin gave the order to demolish the house and build a church in its place. This was done, but one of the bulldozers during the work fell into this same underground passage. There is no other evidence of a possible escape of the royal family, but the fact itself is curious. At the very least, it leaves room for thought.

To date, the house has been demolished, and the Church on the Blood has been erected in its place.

Summarizing

In 2008, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized the family of Nicholas 2 as a victim of repression. Case is closed.

The execution of the royal family(former Russian emperor Nicholas II and his family) was carried out in the basement of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918 in pursuance of the decision of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Soviet of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, headed by the Bolsheviks. Together with the royal family, members of her retinue were also shot.

Most modern historians agree that the fundamental decision to execute Nicholas II was made in Moscow (in this case, they usually point to the leaders of Soviet Russia, Sverdlov and Lenin). However, there is no unity among modern historians on the issues of whether the sanction was given for the execution of Nicholas II without trial (which actually happened), and whether the sanction was given for the execution of the entire family.

There is also no unity among lawyers as to whether the execution was sanctioned by the highest Soviet leadership. If forensic expert Yu. Zhuk considers it an undeniable fact that the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council acted in accordance with the instructions of the first persons of the Soviet state, then the senior investigator for especially important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation V.N. investigation into the circumstances of the murder of the royal family, in his interviews in 2008-2011, he argued that the execution of Nicholas II and his family was carried out without the sanction of Lenin and Sverdlov.

Since, before the decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of Russia dated October 1, 2008, it was believed that the Ural Regional Council was not a judicial or other body that had the authority to pass a sentence, the events described for a long time were considered from a legal point of view not as political repressions, but as a murder, which prevented the posthumous rehabilitation of Nicholas II and his family.

Remains of five members imperial family, as well as their servants, were found in July 1991 near Yekaterinburg under the embankment of the Old Koptyakovskaya road. During the investigation of the criminal case, which was conducted by the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, the remains were identified. On July 17, 1998, the remains of members of the imperial family were buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. In July 2007, the remains of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria were found.

background

As a result February Revolution Nicholas II abdicated the throne and, together with his family, was under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. As A.F. Kerensky testified, when he, the Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government, only 5 days after his abdication, ascended the rostrum of the Moscow Soviet, he was showered with a hail of shouts from the place demanding the execution of Nicholas II. He wrote in his memoirs: The death penalty Nicholas II and sending his family from the Alexander Palace to the Peter and Paul Fortress or Kronstadt - these are the furious, sometimes frantic demands of hundreds of all sorts of delegations, deputations and resolutions that appeared and presented them to the Provisional Government ... ". In August 1917, Nicholas II and his family were deported to Tobolsk by decision of the Provisional Government.

After the Bolsheviks came to power, in early 1918, the Soviet government discussed a proposal to hold an open trial of Nicholas II. The historian Latyshev writes that the idea of ​​a trial of Nicholas II was supported by Trotsky, but Lenin expressed doubts about the timeliness of such a process. According to the People's Commissar of Justice Steinberg, the issue was postponed indefinitely, which never came.

According to the historian V. M. Khrustalev, by the spring of 1918, the Bolshevik leaders developed a plan to gather all representatives of the Romanov dynasty in the Urals, where they would be kept at a considerable distance from external dangers in the face of the German Empire and the Entente, and on the other hand, the Bolsheviks who have strong political positions here, could keep the situation with the Romanovs under their control. In such a place, as the historian wrote, the Romanovs could be destroyed if they found a suitable reason for this. In April - May 1918, Nicholas II, together with his relatives, was taken under guard from Tobolsk to the "red capital of the Urals" - Yekaterinburg - where by that time there were already other representatives of the Romanov imperial house. It was here that in mid-July 1918, in the midst of a rapid offensive by anti-Soviet forces (the Czechoslovak Corps and the Siberian Army), approaching Yekaterinburg (and actually capturing it eight days later), the royal family was massacred.

As one of the reasons for the execution, the local Soviet authorities called the disclosure of a conspiracy, allegedly aimed at the release of Nicholas II. However, according to the memoirs of I. I. Rodzinsky and M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), members of the collegium of the Ural Regional Cheka, this conspiracy was actually a provocation organized by the Ural Bolsheviks in order, according to modern researchers, to obtain grounds for extrajudicial reprisals.

Course of events

Link to Yekaterinburg

The historian A.N. Bokhanov writes that there are many hypotheses why the tsar and his family were transferred from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and whether he was going to flee; at the same time, A.N. Bokhanov considers it a definite fact that the move to Yekaterinburg stemmed from the desire of the Bolsheviks to toughen the regime and prepare for the liquidation of the tsar and his family.

At the same time, the Bolsheviks did not represent a homogeneous force.

On April 1, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to transfer the royal family to Moscow. The Ural authorities, who categorically objected to this decision, offered to transfer her to Yekaterinburg. Perhaps, as a result of the confrontation between Moscow and the Urals, a new decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of April 6, 1918 appeared, according to which all those arrested were sent to the Urals. Ultimately, the decisions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee were reduced to orders to prepare an open trial of Nicholas II and to move the royal family to Yekaterinburg. The organization of this move was entrusted to the specially authorized All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Vasily Yakovlev, whom Sverdlov knew well from joint revolutionary work during the years of the first Russian revolution.

Commissar Vasily Yakovlev (Myachin), sent from Moscow to Tobolsk, headed secret mission for the export of the royal family to Yekaterinburg with a view to its subsequent transfer to Moscow. In view of the illness of the son of Nicholas II, it was decided to leave all the children, except for Mary, in Tobolsk in the hope of reuniting with them later.

On April 26, 1918, the Romanovs, guarded by machine gunners, left Tobolsk; on April 27, they arrived in Tyumen in the evening. On April 30, a train from Tyumen arrived in Yekaterinburg, where Yakovlev handed over the imperial couple and daughter Maria to the head of the Ural Council, A. G. Beloborodov. Together with the Romanovs, Prince V. A. Dolgorukov, E. S. Botkin, A. S. Demidova, T. I. Chemodurov, and I. D. Sednev arrived in Yekaterinburg.

There is evidence that during the move of Nicholas II from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg, the leadership of the Ural region tried to carry out his assassination. Later, Beloborodov wrote in his unfinished memoirs:

According to P. M. Bykov, at the 4th Ural Regional Conference of the RCP (b) that was taking place at that time in Yekaterinburg, “in a private meeting, the majority of delegates from the field spoke in favor of the need for the speedy execution of the Romanovs” in order to prevent attempts to restore the monarchy in Russia.

The confrontation that arose during the move from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg between the detachments sent from Yekaterinburg and Yakovlev, who became aware of the intention of the Urals to destroy Nicholas II, was resolved only through negotiations with Moscow, which were conducted by both sides. Moscow, in the person of Sverdlov, demanded from the Ural leadership guarantees for the security of the royal family, and only after they were given, Sverdlov confirmed the order previously given to Yakovlev to take the Romanovs to the Urals.

On May 23, 1918, the rest of the children of Nicholas II arrived in Yekaterinburg, accompanied by a group of servants and officials of the retinue. A. E. Trupp, I. M. Kharitonov, I. D. Sednev’s nephew Leonid Sednev and K. G. Nagorny were admitted to Ipatiev’s house.

Immediately upon arrival in Yekaterinburg, the Chekists arrested four people from among the persons accompanying the royal children: the adjutant of the tsar, Prince I. L. Tatishchev, the valet Alexandra Fedorovna A. A. Volkov, her chamber-maid of honor, Princess A. V. Gendrikova and the court lecturer E. A. Schneider. Tatishchev and Prince Dolgorukov, who arrived in Yekaterinburg with the royal couple, were shot in Yekaterinburg. Gendrikova, Schneider and Volkov, after the execution of the royal family, were transferred to Perm due to the evacuation of Yekaterinburg. There they were sentenced by the organs of the Cheka to execution as hostages; On the night of September 3-4, 1918, Gendrikova and Schneider were shot, Volkov managed to escape directly from the place of execution.

According to the work of a participant in the events of the communist P. M. Bykov, Prince Dolgorukov, who, according to Bykov, behaved suspiciously, was found to have two maps of Siberia with the designation of waterways and “some special marks”, as well as a significant amount of money. His testimony convinced that he intended to organize the escape of the Romanovs from Tobolsk.

Most of the remaining members of the retinue were ordered to leave the Perm province. The doctor of the heir, V. N. Derevenko, was allowed to stay in Yekaterinburg as a private person and examine the heir twice a week under the supervision of Avdeev, the commandant of the Ipatiev house.

Imprisonment in the Ipatiev House

The Romanov family was placed in a "house of special purpose" - the requisitioned mansion of a retired military engineer N. N. Ipatiev. Doctor E. S. Botkin, the chamber footman A. E. Trupp, the maid of the Empress A. S. Demidov, the cook I. M. Kharitonov and the cook Leonid Sednev lived here with the Romanov family.

The house is good and clean. Four rooms were assigned to us: a corner bedroom, a dressing room, a dining room next to it with windows overlooking the garden and a view of the low part of the city, and, finally, a spacious hall with an archway without doors.<…> We were seated as follows: Alix [Empress], Maria and I, the three of us in the bedroom, a shared bathroom, in the dining room - N[yuta] Demidova, in the hall - Botkin, Chemodurov and Sednev. Near the entrance there is a guard [aul] officer's room. The guard was placed in two rooms near the dining room. To go to the bathroom and W.C. [water closet], you need to pass by the sentry at the door of the guardroom. A very high plank fence was built around the house, two fathoms from the windows; there was a chain of sentries, in the garden too.

The royal family spent 78 days in their last home.

A. D. Avdeev was appointed commandant of the “house of special purpose”.

Investigator Sokolov, who was instructed by A.V. Kolchak in February 1919 to continue the case of the murder of the Romanovs, managed to recreate a picture of the last months of the life of the royal family with the remnants of the retinue in the Ipatiev house. In particular, Sokolov reconstructed the system of posts and their placement, compiled a list of external and internal guards.

One of the sources for investigator Sokolov was the testimony of a miraculously surviving member of the royal retinue, valet T.I. Not entirely trusting his testimony “I admitted that Chemodurov might not be completely frank in his testimony to the authorities, and found out that he was telling other people about life in the Ipatiev House”), Sokolov rechecked them through the former head of the royal guard Kobylinsky, valet Volkov, as well as Gilliard and Gibbs. Sokolov also studied the testimony of several other former members of the royal retinue, including Pierre Gilliard, a French teacher originally from Switzerland. Gilliard himself was transported by the Latvian Svikke (Rodionov) to Yekaterinburg with the remaining royal children, but he was not placed in the Ipatiev house.

In addition, after Yekaterinburg passed into the hands of the Whites, some of the former guards of the Ipatiev house were found and interrogated, including Suetin, Latypov and Letemin. Detailed testimony was given by the former security guard Proskuryakov and the former guard guard Yakimov.

According to T. I. Chemodurov, immediately after the arrival of Nicholas II and Alexandra Fedorovna at the Ipatiev house, they were searched, and “one of those who carried out the search snatched the reticule from the hands of the Empress and caused the Emperor’s remark:“ Until now, I have dealt with honest and decent people."

According to Chemodurov, the former head of the tsarist guard, Kobylinsky, said: “a bowl was placed on the table; spoons, knives, forks were missing; the Red Army men also participated in the dinner; some one will come and climb into the bowl: “Well, that’s enough for you.” The princesses slept on the floor, as they did not have beds. There was a roll call. When the princesses went to the restroom, the Red Army soldiers, supposedly for guard duty, followed them ... ". Witness Yakimov (at the time of the events - leading the guard) said that the guards sang songs, "which, of course, were not pleasant for the tsar": "Together, comrades, in step", "Let's renounce the old world", etc. Investigator Sokolov also writes that “the Ipatiev house itself speaks more eloquently than any words, how the prisoners lived here. Unusual in terms of cynicism, inscriptions and images with the same theme: about Rasputin. To top it all, according to the testimony of witnesses interviewed by Sokolov, the working boy Fayka Safonov defiantly sang indecent ditties right under the windows of the royal family.

Sokolov very negatively characterizes part of the guards of the Ipatiev house, calling them "propagandized scum from among the Russian people", and the first commandant of the house Ipatiev Avdeev - "the most prominent representative of these dregs of the working environment: a typical rally screamer, extremely stupid, deeply ignorant, a drunkard and a thief".

There are also reports of the theft of royal things by the guards. The guards also stole food sent by the arrested women's nuns. Novo-Tikhvin Monastery.

Richard Pipes writes that the thefts of royal property that had begun could not but disturb Nicholas and Alexandra, since, among other things, there were boxes with their personal letters and diaries in the barn. In addition, writes Pipes, there are many stories about the rough treatment of members of the royal family by the guards: that the guards could afford to enter the princesses' rooms at any time of the day, that they took away food and even that they pushed the former king. " Although such stories are not unfounded, they are much exaggerated. The commandant and guards were no doubt rude, but there is no evidence to support open abuse."Noted by a number of authors, the amazing calmness with which Nikolai and members of his family endured the hardships of captivity, Pipes explains with a sense of dignity and" fatalism rooted in their deep religiosity».

Provocation. Letters from an "officer of the Russian army"

On June 17, those arrested were informed that the nuns of the Novo-Tikhvin Monastery were allowed to bring eggs, milk and cream to their table. As R. Pipes writes, on June 19 or 20, the royal family found a note in French in a cork in one of the bottles of cream:

Friends do not sleep and hope that the hour they have been waiting for has come. The uprising of the Czechoslovaks poses an increasingly serious threat to the Bolsheviks. Samara, Chelyabinsk and all of eastern and western Siberia are under the control of the National Provisional Government. The friendly army of the Slavs is already eighty kilometers from Yekaterinburg, the resistance of the Red Army soldiers is unsuccessful. Be attentive to everything that happens outside, wait and hope. But at the same time, I beg you, be careful, because the Bolsheviks, while they have not yet been defeated, they represent a real and serious danger to you. Be ready at all times, day and night. Make a blueprint your two rooms: location, furniture, beds. Write exact hour when you all go to bed. One of you must be awake from 2 to 3 every night from now on. Answer in a few words, but give, I beg you, the necessary information to your friends outside. Give the answer to the same soldier who will hand you this note, in writing, but don't say a word. Someone who is willing to die for you. Officer of the Russian army.

Original note Les amis ne dorment plus et espèrent que l'heure si longtemps attendue est arrivée. La revolte des tschekoslovaques menace les bolcheviks de plus en plus sérieusement. Samara, Tschelabinsk et toute la Sibirie orientale et occidentale est au pouvoir de gouvernement national provisoir. L'armée des amis slaves est à quatre-vingt kilometres d'Ekaterinbourg, les soldats de l armée rouge ne résistent pas efficassement. Soyez attentifs au tout mouvement de dehors, attendez et esperez. Mais en meme temps, je vous supplie, soyez prudents, parce que les bolcheviks avant d'etre vaincus represent pour vous le peril reel et serieux. Soyez prêts toutes les heures, la journée et la nuit. Faite le croquis des vos deux chambres, les places, des meubles, des lits. Écrivez bien l'heure quant vous allez coucher vous tous. L un de vous ne doit dormir de 2 à 3 heure toutes les nuits qui suivent. Répondez par quelques mots mais donnez, je vous en prie, tous les renseignements utiles pour vos amis de dehors. C'est au meme soldat qui vous transmet cette note qu'il faut donner votre reponse par écrit mais pas un seul mot. Un qui est prêt à mourir pour vous L'officier de l'armée Russe.

In the diary of Nicholas II, there is even an entry dated June 14 (27), which reads: “The other day we received two letters, one after the other, [in which] we were informed that we should prepare to be kidnapped by some loyal people!”. The research literature mentions four letters from the "officer" and the answers of the Romanovs to them.

In the third letter, received on June 26, the "Russian officer" asked to be on the alert and wait for the signal. On the night of June 26-27, the royal family did not go to bed, "they were awake dressed." In Nikolai's diary, an entry appears that "the expectation and uncertainty were very painful."

We do not want and cannot RUN. We can only be kidnapped by force, as we were brought from Tobolsk by force. Therefore, do not count on any of our active help. The commandant has many assistants, they often change and become anxious. They vigilantly guard our prison and our lives and treat us well. We would not want them to suffer because of us or you to suffer for us. Most importantly, for God's sake, avoid shedding blood. Gather information about them yourself. It is absolutely impossible to go down from the window without the help of a ladder. But even if we go down, there remains a huge danger, because the window of the commandant's room is open and on the lower floor, the entrance to which leads from the courtyard, there is a machine gun. [Crossed out: "Therefore, leave the thought of kidnapping us."] If you are watching us, you can always try to save us in case of imminent and real danger. We do not know at all what is happening outside, since we do not receive any newspapers or letters. After we were allowed to open the window, the surveillance intensified and we cannot even put our head out the window without the risk of getting shot in the face.

Richard Pipes draws attention to obvious oddities in this correspondence: the anonymous "Russian officer" clearly had to be a monarchist, but he addressed the tsar with "you" ("vous") instead of "Your Majesty" ( "Votre Majeste"), and it is not clear how the monarchists could slip the letters into the traffic jam. The memoirs of the first commandant of the Ipatiev house, Avdeev, have been preserved, who reports that the Chekists allegedly found the real author of the letter, the Serbian officer Magic. In reality, as Richard Pipes emphasizes, there was no Magic in Yekaterinburg. There was indeed a Serbian officer with a similar surname, Mičić Jarko Konstantinovich, in the city, but it is known that he arrived in Yekaterinburg only on July 4, when most of the correspondence had already ended.

The declassification in 1989-1992 of the memoirs of the participants in the events finally clarified the picture with the mysterious letters of the unknown "Russian officer". M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), a participant in the execution, admitted that the correspondence was a provocation organized by the Ural Bolsheviks in order to test the readiness of the royal family to flee. After the Romanovs spent two or three nights dressed, according to Medvedev, this readiness became apparent to him.

The author of the text was P. L. Voikov, who lived for some time in Geneva (Switzerland). Letters were copied cleanly by I. Rodzinsky, since he had better handwriting. Rodzinsky himself in his memoirs states that " my handwriting is there in these documents».

Replacing Commandant Avdeev with Yurovsky

On July 4, 1918, the protection of the royal family was transferred to a member of the collegium of the Ural Regional Cheka, Ya. M. Yurovsky. In some sources, Yurovsky is erroneously called the chairman of the Cheka; in fact, this position was held by F. N. Lukoyanov.

G. P. Nikulin, an employee of the regional Cheka, became the assistant to the commandant of the “special purpose house”. The former commandant Avdeev and his assistant Moshkin were removed, Moshkin (and, according to some sources, Avdeev as well) was imprisoned for theft.

At the first meeting with Yurovsky, the tsar mistook him for a doctor, as he advised the doctor V.N. Derevenko to put a plaster cast on the leg of the heir; Yurovsky was mobilized in 1915 and, according to N. Sokolov, graduated from the medical assistant's school.

Investigator N. A. Sokolov explained the replacement of commandant Avdeev by the fact that communication with prisoners had changed something in his “drunk soul”, which became noticeable to the authorities. When, according to Sokolov, preparations began for the execution of those in the house for special purposes, Avdeev's guards were removed as unreliable.

Yurovsky described his predecessor Avdeev extremely negatively, accusing him of “decomposition, drunkenness, theft”: “there is a mood of complete licentiousness and laxity all around”, “Avdeev, referring to Nikolai, calls him Nikolai Alexandrovich. He offers him a cigarette, Avdeev takes it, they both light up, and this immediately showed me the established “simplicity of morals.”

The brother of Yurovsky Leib, interviewed by Sokolov, described Ya. M. Yurovsky as follows: “Yankel's character is quick-tempered, persistent. I studied watchmaking with him and I know his character: he likes to oppress people.” According to Leya, the wife of another brother of Yurovsky (Ele), Ya. M. Yurovsky is very persistent and tyrannical, and his characteristic phrase was: "He who is not with us is against us." At the same time, as Richard Pipes points out, soon after his appointment, Yurovsky harshly suppresses the theft that has spread under Avdeev. Richard Pipes considers this action to be appropriate from a security point of view, since theft-prone guards could be bribed, including to escape; as a result, for some time the content of those arrested even improved, since the theft of products from the Novo-Tikhvinsky monastery stopped. In addition, Yurovsky compiles an inventory of all the arrested jewelry (according to the historian R. Pipes - except for those that women secretly sewed into underwear); the jewels are placed by him in a sealed box, which Yurovsky gives them for safekeeping. Indeed, in the diary of the king there is an entry dated June 23 (July 6), 1918:

At the same time, Yurovsky's arrogance soon began to irritate the tsar, who noted in his diary that "we like this type less and less." Alexandra Feodorovna described Yurovsky in her diary as a "vulgar and unpleasant" person. However, Richard Pipes notes:

Last days

Bolshevik sources preserved evidence that the "working masses" of the Urals expressed concern about the possibility of the release of Nicholas II and even demanded his immediate execution. Doctor historical sciences GZ Ioffe believes that these testimonies are probably true, and characterize the situation, which was then not only in the Urals. As an example, he cites the text of a telegram from the Kolomna District Committee of the Bolshevik Party, received by the Council of People's Commissars on July 3, 1918, with the message that the local party organization "unanimously decided to demand from the Council of People's Commissars the immediate destruction of the entire family and relatives of the former tsar, because the German bourgeoisie, together with Russian restore the tsarist regime in the captured cities. “In case of refusal,” it was reported in it, “it was decided to enforce this decision on our own.” Ioffe suggests that such resolutions coming from below were either organized at meetings and rallies, or were the result of general propaganda, an atmosphere filled with calls for class struggle and class revenge. The "lower classes" readily picked up the slogans emanating from the Bolshevik orators, especially those representing the left currents of Bolshevism. Almost the entire Bolshevik elite of the Urals was on the left. According to the memoirs of Chekist I. Rodzinsky, A. Beloborodov, G. Safarov and N. Tolmachev were left communists among the leaders of the Ural Regional Council.

At the same time, the left Bolsheviks in the Urals had to compete in radicalism with the left SRs and anarchists, whose influence was significant. As Ioffe writes, the Bolsheviks could not afford to give their political rivals a pretext for reproaches of "sliding to the right." And there were such accusations. Later, Spiridonova reproached the Bolshevik Central Committee for "dissolving the tsars and sub-tsars in ... the Ukraine, Crimea and abroad" and "only at the insistence of the revolutionaries", that is, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, raised his hand against Nikolai Romanov. According to A. Avdeev, in Yekaterinburg a group of anarchists tried to pass a resolution on the immediate execution of the former tsar. According to the memoirs of the Urals, the extremists tried to organize an attack on the Ipatiev house in order to destroy the Romanovs. Echoes of this are preserved in the diaries of Nicholas II for May 31 (June 13) and Alexandra Feodorovna for June 1 (14).

On June 13, the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich was committed in Perm. Immediately after the assassination, the authorities of Perm announced that Mikhail Romanov had fled and put him on the wanted list. On June 17, the message about the "flight" of Mikhail Alexandrovich was reprinted in the newspapers of Moscow and Petrograd. In parallel, there are rumors that Nicholas II was killed by a Red Army soldier who arbitrarily burst into Ipatiev's house. In fact, Nikolai was still alive at that time.

Rumors about the lynching of Nicholas II and the Romanovs generally spread beyond the Urals.

On June 18, the Presovnarkom Lenin, in an interview with the liberal newspaper Nashe Slovo, which was opposed to Bolshevism, stated that Mikhail, according to his information, allegedly really fled, and nothing was known about the fate of Nikolai Lenin.

On June 20, V. Bonch-Bruyevich, head of the affairs of the Council of People's Commissars, asked Yekaterinburg: “Information has spread in Moscow that the former Emperor Nicholas II has allegedly been killed. Please provide any information you have."

Moscow sends to Yekaterinburg for inspection the commander of the Severoural group of Soviet troops, the Latvian R. I. Berzin, who visited the Ipatiev house on June 22. Nikolai in his diary, in an entry dated June 9 (22), 1918, reports the arrival of "6 people", and the next day a note appears that they turned out to be "commissars from Petrograd". On June 23, representatives of the Council of People's Commissars again reported that they still did not have information about whether Nicholas II was alive or not.

R. Berzin in telegrams to the Council of People's Commissars, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs reported that “all members of the family and Nicholas II himself are alive. All information about his murder is a provocation.” On the basis of the responses received, the Soviet press refuted the rumors and reports that appeared in some newspapers about the execution of the Romanovs in Yekaterinburg several times.

According to the testimony of three telegraph operators from the Yekaterinburg post office, later received by the Sokolov commission, Lenin, in a conversation with Berzin over a direct wire, ordered "to take the entire royal family under his protection and prevent any violence against her, answering in this case his own life". According to the historian A. G. Latyshev, the telegraph connection maintained by Lenin with Berzin is one of the proofs of Lenin's desire to save the life of the Romanovs.

According to the official Soviet historiography, the decision to execute the Romanovs was made by the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council, while the central Soviet leadership was notified after the event. During the period of perestroika, this version began to be criticized, and by the beginning of the 1990s an alternative version was formed, according to which the Ural authorities could not make such a decision without a directive from Moscow and assumed this responsibility in order to create a political alibi for the Moscow leadership. In the post-perestroika period, the Russian historian A. G. Latyshev, who was investigating the circumstances surrounding the execution of the royal family, expressed the opinion that Lenin really could have secretly organized the murder in such a way as to shift responsibility to the local authorities, in much the same way as, according to According to Latyshev, this was done a year and a half later in relation to Kolchak. And yet in this case, the historian believes, the situation was different. In his opinion, Lenin, not wanting to spoil relations with the German Emperor Wilhelm II, a close relative of the Romanovs, did not authorize execution.

In early July 1918, the Ural military commissar F. I. Goloshchekin went to Moscow to resolve the issue of the future fate of the royal family. According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, he was in Moscow from July 4 to 10; July 14 Goloshchekin returned to Yekaterinburg.

Based on the available documents, the fate of the royal family as a whole was not discussed in Moscow at any level. Only the fate of Nicholas II, who was supposed to be judged, was discussed. According to a number of historians, there was also a principled decision, according to which the former king was to be sentenced to death. According to investigator V.N. Solovyov, Goloshchekin, referring to the complexity of the military situation in the Yekaterinburg region and the possibility of the capture of the royal family by the White Guards, proposed to shoot Nicholas II without waiting for the trial, but received a categorical refusal.

According to a number of historians, the decision to destroy the royal family was made upon Goloshchekin's return to Yekaterinburg. S. D. Alekseev and I. F. Plotnikov believe that it was adopted on the evening of July 14 "by a narrow circle of the Bolshevik part of the executive committee of the Ural Council." The fund of the Council of People's Commissars of the State Archives of the Russian Federation has preserved a telegram sent on July 16, 1918 to Moscow from Yekaterinburg via Petrograd:

Thus, the telegram was received in Moscow on July 16 at 21:22. G. Z. Ioffe suggested that the “trial” referred to in the telegram meant the execution of Nicholas II or even the Romanov family. No response from the central leadership to this telegram was found in the archives.

Unlike Ioffe, a number of researchers understand the word “judgment” used in the telegram in a literal sense. In this case, the telegram refers to the trial of Nicholas II, regarding which there was an agreement between the central government and Yekaterinburg, and the meaning of the telegram is as follows: “inform Moscow that the court agreed with Philip due to military circumstances ... we cannot wait. The execution is urgent." This interpretation of the telegram allows us to consider that the issue of the trial of Nicholas II has not yet been removed on July 16. The investigation believes that the brevity of the question posed in the telegram indicates that central authorities were familiar with this issue; at the same time, there is reason “to believe that the issue of the execution of members of the royal family and servants, excluding Nicholas II, was not agreed with either V. I. Lenin or Ya. M. Sverdlov.”

A few hours before the execution of the royal family, on July 16, Lenin prepared a telegram as a response to the editors of the Danish newspaper National Tidende, which turned to him with a question about the fate of Nicholas II, in which rumors about his death were refuted. At 4 pm the text was sent to the telegraph, but the telegram was never sent. According to A. G. Latyshev, the text of this telegram “ means that Lenin did not even imagine the possibility of the execution of Nicholas II (not to mention the whole family) the next night».

Unlike Latyshev, according to whom the decision to execute the royal family was made by the local authorities, a number of historians believe that the execution was carried out at the initiative of the Center. This point of view was defended, in particular, by D. A. Volkogonov and R. Pipes. As an argument, they cited a diary entry by L. D. Trotsky, made on April 9, 1935, about his conversation with Sverdlov after the fall of Yekaterinburg. According to this entry, by the time of this conversation, Trotsky knew neither about the execution of Nicholas II, nor about the execution of his family. Sverdlov informed him about what had happened, saying that the decision was made by the central government. However, the reliability of this testimony of Trotsky is criticized, since, firstly, Trotsky is listed among those present in the minutes of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars of July 18, at which Sverdlov announced the execution of Nicholas II; secondly, Trotsky himself in his book "My Life" wrote that until August 7 he was in Moscow; but this means that he could not have been unaware of the execution of Nicholas II, even if his name was in the protocol by mistake.

According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the official decision to execute Nicholas II was made on July 16, 1918 by the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies. The original of this decision has not been preserved. However, a week after the execution, the official text of the verdict was published:

Decree of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council of Workers', Peasants' and Red Army Deputies: In view of the fact that Czecho-Slovak gangs threaten the capital of the Red Urals, Yekaterinburg; in view of the fact that the crowned executioner can avoid the court of the people (a conspiracy of the White Guards had just been discovered, which had the aim of kidnapping the entire Romanov family), the Presidium of the Regional Committee, in pursuance of the will of the people, decided: to shoot the former Tsar Nikolai Romanov, guilty before the people of countless bloody crimes. The Romanov family was transferred from Yekaterinburg to another, more correct place. Presidium of the Regional Council of Workers, Peasants and Red Army Deputies of the Urals

Sending cook Leonid Sednev

As R. Wilton, a member of the investigative team, stated in his work “The Murder of the Tsar’s Family”, before the execution, “the cook Leonid Sednev, the playmate of the Tsarevich, was removed from the Ipatiev House. He was placed at the Russian guards in Popov's house, opposite Ipatiev. Memoirs of participants in the execution confirm this fact.

Commandant Yurovsky, according to M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), a participant in the execution, allegedly, on his own initiative, offered to send the cook Leonid Sednev, who was in the royal retinue, under the pretext of a meeting with his uncle who allegedly arrived in Yekaterinburg. In fact, the uncle of Leonid Sednev, the footman of the Grand Duchesses I. D. Sednev, who accompanied the royal family in exile, was under arrest from May 27, 1918 and in early June (according to other sources, in late June or early July 1918) was shot.

Yurovsky himself claims that he received an order to release the cook from Goloshchekin. After the execution, according to Yurovsky, the cook was sent home.

It was decided to liquidate the remaining members of the retinue along with the royal family, since they “declared that they wanted to share the fate of the monarch. Let them share." Thus, four people were appointed for liquidation: the life physician E. S. Botkin, the chamber footman A. E. Trupp, the cook I. M. Kharitonov and the maid A. S. Demidova.

Of the members of the retinue, valet T. I. Chemodurov managed to escape, on May 24 he fell ill and was placed in a prison hospital; during the evacuation of Yekaterinburg in turmoil, he was forgotten by the Bolsheviks in prison and released by the Czechs on July 25.

Execution

From the memoirs of the participants in the execution, it is known that they did not know in advance how the “execution” would be carried out. Offered different variants: stab the arrested with daggers during sleep, throw grenades into the room with them, shoot them. According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the issue of the procedure for carrying out the "execution" was resolved with the participation of employees of the UraloblChK.

At 1:30 a.m. from July 16 to 17, a truck for transporting corpses arrived at Ipatiev's house, an hour and a half late. After that, doctor Botkin was awakened, who was told that everyone urgently needed to go downstairs due to the alarming situation in the city and the danger of staying on the top floor. It took about 30-40 minutes to get ready.

moved to the basement room (Alexei, who could not walk, was carried by Nicholas II in his arms). There were no chairs in the basement, then, at the request of Alexandra Feodorovna, two chairs were brought. Alexandra Fedorovna and Alexei sat on them. The rest were placed along the wall. Yurovsky brought in the firing squad and read out the verdict. Nicholas II only had time to ask: “What?” (other sources report last words Nicholas as "Huh?" or “How, how? Re-read"). Yurovsky gave the command, indiscriminate shooting began.

The executioners did not manage to immediately kill Alexei, the daughters of Nicholas II, the maid A.S. Demidov, Dr. E.S. Botkin. There was a cry from Anastasia, the maid Demidova rose to her feet, Alexei remained alive for a long time. Some of them were shot; the survivors, according to the investigation, were finished off with a bayonet by P.Z. Ermakov.

According to Yurovsky's memoirs, the shooting was erratic: many were probably shooting from the next room, over the threshold, and the bullets ricocheted off the stone wall. At the same time, one of the executioners was slightly wounded ( “A bullet from one of those who shot from behind buzzed past my head, and one, I don’t remember, either an arm, a palm, or a finger touched and shot through”).

According to T. Manakova, during the execution, two dogs of the royal family, who raised a howl, were also killed - Tatyana's French bulldog Ortino and Anastasia's royal spaniel Jimmy (Jammy) Anastasia. The third dog, Aleksey Nikolayevich's spaniel named Joy, was spared his life because she didn't howl. The spaniel was later taken in by the guard Letemin, who because of this was identified and arrested by the whites. Subsequently, according to the story of Bishop Vasily (Rodzianko), Joy was taken to the UK by an immigrant officer and handed over to the British royal family.

From the speech of Ya. M. Yurovsky before the old Bolsheviks in Sverdlovsk in 1934

The younger generation may not understand us. They may reproach us for killing the girls, for killing the boy-heir. But by today, girls-boys would have grown into ... what?

In order to muffle the shots, a truck was brought near the Ipatiev House, but the shots were still heard in the city. In Sokolov's materials, in particular, there are testimonies about this by two random witnesses, the peasant Buivid and the night watchman Tsetsegov.

According to Richard Pipes, immediately after this, Yurovsky harshly suppresses the attempts of the guards to plunder the jewelry they discovered, threatening to be shot. After that, he instructed P.S. Medvedev to organize the cleaning of the premises, and he left to destroy the corpses.

The exact text of the sentence pronounced by Yurovsky before the execution is unknown. In the materials of the investigator N. A. Sokolov, there are testimonies of Yakimov, the guard guard, who claimed, with reference to the guard Kleshchev who was watching this scene, that Yurovsky said: “Nikolai Alexandrovich, your relatives tried to save you, but they didn’t have to. And we are forced to shoot you ourselves.”.

M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) described this scene as follows:

In the memoirs of Yurovsky's assistant G.P. Nikulin, this episode is described as follows:

Yurovsky himself could not remember the exact text: “... I immediately, as far as I remember, told Nikolai something like the following, that his royal relatives and close ones both in the country and abroad tried to release him, and that the Council of Workers' Deputies decided to shoot them”.

On July 17, in the afternoon, several members of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council contacted Moscow by telegraph (the telegram is marked that it was received at 12 o’clock) and reported that Nicholas II had been shot and his family had been evacuated. The editor of the Uralsky Rabochy, a member of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council V. Vorobyov, later claimed that they “were very uneasy when they approached the apparatus: the former tsar was shot by a decree of the Presidium of the Regional Council, and it was not known how he would react to this“ arbitrariness ” central government... The reliability of this evidence, wrote G.Z. Ioffe, cannot be verified.

Investigator N. Sokolov claimed that he had found a ciphered telegram from the chairman of the Ural Regional Executive Committee A. Beloborodov to Moscow, dated 21:00 on July 17, which allegedly was deciphered only in September 1920. It reported: “To the Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars N.P. Gorbunov: tell Sverdlov that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head. Officially, the family will die during the evacuation.” Sokolov concluded: it means that on the evening of July 17, Moscow knew about the death of the entire royal family. However, the minutes of the meeting of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 18 speak only of the execution of Nicholas II. The next day, the Izvestia newspaper reported:

On July 18, the first meeting of the Presidium of the Central I.K. of the 5th convocation took place. Comrade presided. Sverdlov. Members of the Presidium were present: Avanesov, Sosnovsky, Teodorovich, Vladimirsky, Maksimov, Smidovich, Rozengolts, Mitrofanov and Rozin. Chairman comrade. Sverdlov announces a message just received via a direct wire from the Regional Ural Council about the execution of the former Tsar Nikolai Romanov. AT last days the capital of the Red Urals, Yekaterinburg, was seriously threatened by the danger of the approach of the Czecho-Slovak gangs. At the same time, a new conspiracy of counter-revolutionaries was uncovered, with the aim of wresting from the hands of Soviet power crowned executioner. In view of this, the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council decided to shoot Nikolai Romanov, which was carried out on July 16th. The wife and son of Nikolai Romanov were sent to a safe place. Documents about the revealed conspiracy were sent to Moscow with a special courier. Having made this message, comrade. Sverdlov recalls the story of the transfer of Nikolai Romanov from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg after the disclosure of the same organization of the White Guards, which was preparing the escape of Nikolai Romanov. AT recent times it was supposed to bring the former king to justice for all his crimes against the people, and only recent events prevented this from being carried out. The Presidium of the Central I.K., having discussed all the circumstances that forced the Ural Regional Council to decide on the execution of Nikolai Romanov, decided: The All-Russian Central I.K., represented by its Presidium, recognizes the decision of the Ural Regional Council as correct.

On the eve of this official press release, on July 18 (perhaps on the night of July 18 to 19), a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars was held, at which this decision of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee was "taken into account."

The telegram, about which Sokolov writes, is not in the files of the Council of People's Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. “Some foreign authors,” writes historian G.Z. Ioffe, “carefully even expressed doubts about its authenticity.” ID Kovalchenko and GZ Ioffe left open the question whether this telegram was received in Moscow. According to a number of other historians, including Yu. A. Buranov and V. M. Khrustalev, L. A. Lykov, this telegram is genuine and was received in Moscow before the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars.

On July 19, Yurovsky took "documents of the conspiracy" to Moscow. The time of Yurovsky's arrival in Moscow is not exactly known, but it is known that the diaries of Nicholas II brought by him on July 26 were already with the historian M.N. Pokrovsky. On August 6, with the participation of Yurovsky, the entire archive of the Romanovs was delivered to Moscow from Perm.

Question about the composition of the firing squad

Memoirs of a participant in the execution Nikulin G.P.

... Comrade Ermakov, who behaved rather indecently, appropriating himself after the leading role, that he did it all, so to speak, on his own, without any help ... In fact, there were 8 performers of us: Yurovsky, Nikulin, Mikhail Medvedev, Pavel Medvedev four, Ermakov Peter five, so I'm not sure that Ivan Kabanov is six. And two more I can't remember their names.

When we went down to the basement, we didn’t even think at first to put chairs there to sit down, because this one was ... he didn’t go, you know, Alexei, we had to put him down. Well, then immediately, so they brought it. It’s like when they went down to the basement, they began to look at each other in bewilderment, they immediately brought in, which means chairs, sat down, which means Alexandra Fedorovna, they planted the heir, and Comrade Yurovsky uttered such a phrase that: “Your friends are advancing on Yekaterinburg and therefore you are condemned to death.” It didn’t even dawn on them what was the matter, because Nikolai said only immediately: “Ah!”, And at that time, our volley was immediately already one, second, third. Well, there is someone else, so, so to speak, well, or something, was not quite completely killed yet. Well, then I had to shoot someone else ...

The Soviet researcher M. Kasvinov, in his book “23 Steps Down”, first published in the Zvezda magazine (1972-1973), actually attributed the leadership of the execution not to Yurovsky, but to Ermakov:

However, later the text was changed, and in the following editions of the book, published after the death of the author, Yurovsky and Nikulin were named the leaders of the execution:

The materials of the investigation of N. A. Sokolov in the case of the murder of Emperor Nicholas II and his family contain numerous testimonies that the direct perpetrators of the murder were "Latvians" led by a Jew (Yurovsky). However, as Sokolov notes, the Russian Red Army called "Latvians" all non-Russian Bolsheviks. Therefore, opinions about who these “Latvians” were differ.

Sokolov further writes that an inscription in Hungarian "Verhas Andras 1918 VII/15 e örsegen" and a fragment of a letter in Hungarian written in the spring of 1918 were found in the house. The inscription on the wall in Hungarian translates as "Vergazi Andreas 1918 VII/15 stood on the clock" and is partially duplicated in Russian: "No. 6. Vergash Karau 1918 VII/15". The name in different sources varies as “Vergazi Andreas”, “Verhas Andras”, etc. (according to the rules of Hungarian-Russian practical transcription, it should be translated into Russian as “Verhas Andras”). Sokolov referred this person to the number of "executioners-Chekists"; researcher I. Plotnikov believes that this was done "recklessly": post number 6 belonged to the external guard, and the unknown Vergazi Andras could not participate in the execution.

General Dieterichs "by analogy" also included the Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war Rudolf Lasher among the participants in the execution; according to the researcher I. Plotnikov, Lasher was actually not involved in the protection at all, being engaged only in economic work.

In the light of Plotnikov’s research, the list of those who shot may look like this: Yurovsky, Nikulin, member of the board of the regional Cheka M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), P. Z. Ermakov, S. P. Vaganov, A. G. Kabanov, P. S. Medvedev, V. N. Netrebin, possibly Ya. M. Tselms and, under a very big question, an unknown student-miner. Plotnikov believes that the latter was used in the Ipatiev house for only a few days after the execution, and only as a jewelry specialist. Thus, according to Plotnikov, the execution of the royal family was carried out by a group that consisted almost entirely of Russians in ethnic composition, with the participation of one Jew (Ya. M. Yurovsky) and, probably, one Latvian (Ya. M. Celms). According to surviving information, two or three Latvians refused to participate in the execution.

There is another list of supposedly a firing squad, compiled by the Tobolsk Bolshevik, who transported the royal children who remained in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg, by the Latvian J. M. Svikke (Rodionov) and consisting almost entirely of Latvians. All the Latvians mentioned in the list actually served with Svikke in 1918, but apparently did not participate in the execution (with the exception of Celms).

In 1956, the German media published documents and testimonies of a certain I.P. Meyer, a former Austrian prisoner of war, in 1918 a member of the Ural Regional Council, which stated that seven former Hungarian prisoners of war, including a man whom some authors have identified as Imre Nagy, the future political and statesman Hungary. These testimonies, however, were subsequently found to be falsified.

disinformation campaign

AT official communication of the Soviet leadership about the execution of Nicholas II, published in the newspapers Izvestia and Pravda on July 19, it was argued that the decision to shoot Nicholas II ("Nikolai Romanov") was made in connection with the extremely difficult military situation that had developed in the Yekaterinburg region, and the disclosure a counter-revolutionary conspiracy aimed at freeing the former tsar; that the decision to execute was taken by the presidium of the Ural Regional Council independently; that only Nicholas II was killed, and his wife and son were transferred to a “safe place”. The fate of other children and persons close to the royal family was not mentioned at all. For a number of years, the authorities stubbornly defended the official version that the family of Nicholas II was alive. This misinformation fueled rumors that some family members managed to escape and escape.

Although the central authorities should have learned from a telegram from Yekaterinburg on the evening of July 17, "... that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head", in the official resolutions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of July 18, 1918, only the execution of Nicholas II was mentioned. On July 20, negotiations between Ya. M. Sverdlov and A. G. Beloborodov took place, during which Beloborodov was asked the question: “ … can we notify the population with a known text?". After that (according to L.A. Lykova, on July 23; according to other sources, on July 21 or 22), a message was published in Yekaterinburg about the execution of Nicholas II, repeating the official version of the Soviet leadership.

On July 22, 1918, information about the execution of Nicholas II was published by the London Times, on July 21 (due to the difference in time zones) - by the New York Times. The basis for these publications was official information from the Soviet government.

Disinformation of the world and Russian public continued both in the official press and through diplomatic channels. Materials have been preserved about the negotiations between the Soviet authorities and representatives of the German embassy: on July 24, 1918, adviser K. Ritzler received information from People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G. V. Chicherin that Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters were transported to Perm and nothing threatens them. The denial of the death of the royal family continued further. Negotiations between Soviet and German governments about the exchange of the royal family were conducted until September 15, 1918. The Ambassador of Soviet Russia in Germany A. A. Ioffe was not informed about what happened in Yekaterinburg on the advice of V. I. Lenin, who instructed: “... do not tell A. A. Ioffe anything, so that it would be easier for him to lie”.

In the future, official representatives of the Soviet leadership continued to misinform the world community: diplomat M. M. Litvinov declared that the royal family was alive in December 1918; G. Z. Zinoviev in an interview with the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle July 11, 1921 also claimed that the family was alive; People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G.V. Chicherin continued to give false information about the fate of the royal family - so, already in April 1922, during the Genoa Conference, to the question of a newspaper correspondent Chicago Tribune about the fate of the Grand Duchesses, he replied: “The fate of the daughters of the king is unknown to me. I read in the papers that they were in America". A prominent Bolshevik, one of the participants in the decision to execute the royal family, P. L. Voikov, allegedly declared in the ladies' society in Yekaterinburg, "that the world will never know what they did to the royal family."

P. M. Bykov told the truth about the fate of the entire royal family in the article “The Last Days of the Last Tsar”; the article was published in the collection "The Workers' Revolution in the Urals", published in Yekaterinburg in 1921 in 10,000 copies; shortly after its release, the collection was "withdrawn from circulation". Bykov's article was reprinted in the Moscow newspaper Communist Trud (future Moskovskaya Pravda). In 1922, the same newspaper published a review of the collection The Workers' Revolution in the Urals. Episodes and facts”; in it, in particular, it was said about P.Z. Ermakov as the main executor of the execution of the royal family on July 17, 1918.

The Soviet authorities recognized that Nicholas II was shot not alone, but together with his family, when the materials of the Sokolov investigation began to circulate in the West. After Sokolov's book was published in Paris, Bykov received the task from the CPSU(b) to present the history of the Yekaterinburg events. This is how his book “The Last Days of the Romanovs” appeared, published in Sverdlovsk in 1926. The book was republished in 1930.

According to the historian L. A. Lykova, lies and misinformation about the murder in the basement of the Ipatiev house, its official registration in the relevant decisions of the Bolshevik Party in the first days after the events and silence for more than seventy years gave rise to distrust of the authorities in society, which continued to affect and in post-Soviet Russia.

The fate of the Romanovs

In addition to the family of the former emperor, in 1918-1919, “a whole group of Romanovs” was destroyed, who for one reason or another remained in Russia by that time. The Romanovs survived, who were in the Crimea, whose lives were guarded by the commissioner F. L. Zadorozhny (the Yalta Soviet was going to execute them so that they would not be with the Germans, who occupied Simferopol in mid-April 1918 and continued the occupation of Crimea). After the occupation of Yalta by the Germans, the Romanovs found themselves outside the power of the Soviets, and after the arrival of the Whites, they were able to emigrate.

Two grandchildren of Nikolai Konstantinovich, who died in 1918 in Tashkent from pneumonia (some sources mistakenly mention his execution), also survived - the children of his son Alexander Iskander: Natalya Androsova (1917-1999) and Kirill Androsov (1915-1992) who lived in Moscow.

Thanks to the intervention of M. Gorky, Prince Gabriel Konstantinovich also managed to escape, who later emigrated to Germany. On November 20, 1918, Maxim Gorky addressed V.I. Lenin with a letter stating:

The prince was released.

The murder of Mikhail Alexandrovich in Perm

The first of the Romanovs to die was Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. He and his secretary Brian Johnson were killed in Perm, where they were exiled. According to available evidence, on the night of June 12-13, 1918, several armed men came to the hotel where Mikhail lived, took Mikhail Alexandrovich and Brian Johnson into the forest and shot him dead. The remains of those killed have not yet been found.

The murder was presented as the kidnapping of Mikhail Alexandrovich by his supporters or a secret escape, which was used by the authorities as a pretext for tightening the regime for the detention of all the exiled Romanovs: the royal family in Yekaterinburg and the grand dukes in Alapaevsk and Vologda.

Alapaevskoe murder

Almost simultaneously with the execution of the royal family, the murder of the grand dukes, who were in the city of Alapaevsk, 140 kilometers from Yekaterinburg, was committed. On the night of July 5 (18), 1918, the arrested were taken to an abandoned mine 12 km from the city and thrown into it.

At 3:15 in the morning, the executive committee of the Alapaevsky Soviet telegraphed to Yekaterinburg that the princes had allegedly been kidnapped by an unknown gang that had raided the school where they were kept. On the same day, the chairman of the Ural Regional Council, Beloborodov, conveyed the corresponding message to Sverdlov in Moscow and to Zinoviev and Uritsky in Petrograd:

The handwriting of the Alapaevsky murder was similar to that of Yekaterinburg: in both cases, the victims were thrown into an abandoned mine in the forest, and in both cases, attempts were made to bring down this mine with grenades. At the same time, the Alapaevsk murder differed significantly about more cruelty: the victims, with the exception of Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who resisted and was shot dead, were thrown into the mine, presumably after striking blunt object on the head, while some of them were still alive; according to R. Pipes, they died of thirst and lack of air, probably after a few days. However, the investigation conducted by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation concluded that their death occurred immediately.

G. Z. Ioffe agreed with the opinion of the investigator N. Sokolov, who wrote: "Both the Yekaterinburg and Alapaevsk murders are the product of the same will of the same persons."

Execution of the Grand Dukes in Petrograd

After the "escape" of Mikhail Romanov, the Grand Dukes Nikolai Mikhailovich, Georgy Mikhailovich and Dmitry Konstantinovich, who were in exile in Vologda, were arrested. Grand Dukes Pavel Alexandrovich and Gabriel Konstantinovich, who remained in Petrograd, were also transferred to the position of prisoners.

After the announcement of the Red Terror, four of them ended up in the Peter and Paul Fortress as hostages. January 24, 1919 (according to other sources - January 27, 29 or 30) Grand Dukes Pavel Alexandrovich, Dmitry Konstantinovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich and Georgy Mikhailovich were shot. On January 31, the Petrograd newspapers briefly reported that the Grand Dukes were shot “by order of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Profiteering of the Union of the Commune of the Northern O[blast]”.

It was announced that they were shot as hostages in response to the murders in Germany of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. On February 6, 1919, the Moscow newspaper Always Forward! published an article by Y. Martov “Shameful!” with a sharp condemnation of this extrajudicial execution of the “four Romanovs”.

Testimony of contemporaries

Memoirs of Trotsky

According to the historian Yu. Felshtinsky, Trotsky, already abroad, adhered to the version according to which the decision to execute the royal family was made by the local authorities. Later, using the memoirs of the Soviet diplomat Besedovsky, who defected to the West, Trotsky tried, in the words of Yu. Felshtinsky, "to shift the blame for regicide" onto Sverdlov and Stalin. In the drafts of the unfinished chapters of the biography of Stalin, which Trotsky worked on in the late 1930s, there is the following entry:

In the mid-1930s, entries about the events connected with the execution of the royal family appeared in Trotsky's diary. According to Trotsky, back in June 1918, he proposed to the Politburo to still organize a show trial over the deposed tsar, and Trotsky was interested in wide propaganda coverage of this process. However, the proposal did not meet with great enthusiasm, since all the Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky himself, were too busy with current affairs. With the uprising of the Czechs, the physical survival of Bolshevism was in question, and it would be difficult to organize a trial of the tsar under such conditions.

In his diary, Trotsky claimed that the decision to execute was made by Lenin and Sverdlov:

The white press once very heatedly debated the question, by whose decision the royal family was put to death ... The liberals seemed to be inclined to the fact that the Ural executive committee, cut off from Moscow, acted independently. This is not true. The decision was made in Moscow. (…) My next visit to Moscow fell after the fall of Yekaterinburg. In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: Yes, where is the king? It's over, - he answered, - shot. Where is the family? And his family is with him. All? I asked, apparently with a hint of surprise. Everything, - Sverdlov answered, - but what? He was waiting for my reaction. I didn't answer. And who decided? I asked. We have decided here. Ilyich believed that it was impossible to leave us a living banner for them, especially in the present difficult conditions.

The historian Felshtinsky, commenting on Trotsky's memoirs, believes that the diary entry of 1935 is much more credible, since the entries in the diary were not intended for publicity and publication.

The senior investigator for especially important cases of the General Prosecutor's Office of Russia, V.N. Solovyov, who led the investigation of the criminal case into the death of the royal family, drew attention to the fact that in the minutes of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, at which Sverdlov announced the execution of Nicholas II, the surname appears among those present Trotsky. This contradicts his recollections of a conversation “after arriving from the front” with Sverdlov about Lenin. Indeed, Trotsky, according to the protocol of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars No. 159, was present on July 18 at the announcement by Sverdlov about the execution. According to some sources, he, as Commissar of the Navy, was on the front near Kazan on July 18. At the same time, Trotsky himself writes in his work “My Life” that he left for Sviyazhsk only on August 7th. It should also be noted that Trotsky's said statement refers to 1935, when neither Lenin nor Sverdlov was alive. Even if Trotsky's name was entered into the minutes of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars by mistake, automatically, information about the execution of Nicholas II was published in the newspapers, and he could not know only about the execution of the entire royal family.

Historians are critical of Trotsky's testimony. So, the historian V.P. Buldakov wrote that Trotsky had a tendency to simplify the description of events for the sake of the beauty of the presentation, and the historian-archivist V.M. Khrustalev, pointing out that Trotsky, according to the protocols preserved in the archives, was among the participants in that very meeting Council of People's Commissars, suggested that Trotsky in his mentioned memoirs was only trying to distance himself from the decision taken in Moscow.

From the diary of V. P. Milyutin

V. P. Milyutin wrote:

“I returned late from the Council of People's Commissars. There were "current" cases. During the discussion of the draft on public health, Semashko's report, Sverdlov entered and sat down in his place on a chair behind Ilyich. Semashko finished. Sverdlov went up, leaned over to Ilyich and said something. - Comrades, Sverdlov is asking for the floor for a message. “I must say,” Sverdlov began in his usual tone, “a message was received that in Yekaterinburg, by order of the regional Soviet, Nikolai was shot ... Nikolai wanted to run away. The Czechoslovaks advanced. The Presidium of the CEC decided to approve... “Now let’s move on to the article-by-article reading of the project,” suggested Ilyich ... " Quoted from: Sverdlov K. Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov

Memories of participants in the execution

The memoirs of the direct participants in the events of Ya. M. Yurovsky, M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), G. P. Nikulin, P. Z. Ermakov, and also A. A. Strekotin (during the execution, apparently, provided external protection at home), V. N. Netrebin, P. M. Bykov (apparently, he did not personally participate in the execution), I. Rodzinsky (he did not personally participate in the execution, participated in the destruction of corpses), Kabanova, P. L. Voikov, G. I. Sukhorukov (participated only in the destruction of corpses), Chairman of the Ural Regional Council A. G. Beloborodov (personally did not participate in the execution).

One of the most detailed sources is the work of the Bolshevik figure in the Urals P. M. Bykov, who until March 1918 was the chairman of the Yekaterinburg Council, a member of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council. In 1921, Bykov published the article "The Last Days of the Last Tsar", and in 1926 - the book "The Last Days of the Romanovs", in 1930 the book was republished in Moscow and Leningrad.

Other detailed sources are the memoirs of M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), who personally participated in the execution, and, in relation to the execution, the memoirs of Ya. M. Yurovsky and his assistant G. P. Nikulin addressed to N. S. Khrushchev. More brief are the memoirs of I. Rodzinsky, an employee of the Cheka Kabanov, and others.

Many participants in the events had their own personal claims against the tsar: M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), judging by his memoirs, was in prison under the tsar, P. L. Voikov participated in the revolutionary terror in 1907, P. Z. Ermakov for participating in expropriations and the murder of a provocateur was exiled, Yurovsky's father was exiled on charges of theft. In his autobiography, Yurovsky claims that he himself was exiled to Yekaterinburg in 1912 with a ban on settling "in 64 points in Russia and Siberia." In addition, among the Bolshevik leaders of Yekaterinburg was Sergei Mrachkovsky, who was generally born in prison, where his mother was imprisoned for revolutionary activities. The phrase uttered by Mrachkovsky “by the grace of tsarism, I was born in prison” was subsequently erroneously attributed to Yurovsky by the investigator Sokolov. Mrachkovsky during the events was engaged in selecting the guards of the Ipatiev House from among the workers of the Sysert plant. The chairman of the Ural Regional Council, A. G. Beloborodov, was in prison before the revolution for issuing a proclamation.

The memories of the participants in the execution, while mostly coinciding with each other, differ in a number of details. Judging by them, Yurovsky personally finished off the heir with two (according to other sources - three) shots. Yurovsky's assistant G. P. Nikulin, P. Z. Ermakov, M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) and others also take part in the execution. According to Medvedev's memoirs, Yurovsky, Ermakov and Medvedev personally shot at Nikolai. In addition, Ermakov and Medvedev finish off the Grand Duchesses Tatyana and Anastasia. Yurovsky, M.A. Medvedev (Kudrin) (not to be confused with another participant in the events P.S. Medvedev) and Ermakov, Yurovsky and Medvedev (Kudrin) seem to be the most likely in Yekaterinburg itself during the events it was believed that the tsar was shot by Yermakov.

Yurovsky, in his memoirs, claimed that he personally killed the tsar, while Medvedev (Kudrin) attributes this to himself. Medvedev's version was also partially confirmed by another participant in the events, an employee of the Cheka Kabanov. At the same time, M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) in his memoirs claims that Nikolai "fell from my fifth shot", and Yurovsky - that he killed him with one shot.

Ermakov himself in his memoirs describes his role in the execution as follows (spelling preserved):

... I was told that it was your lot to shoot and bury ... I accepted the order and said that it would be carried out exactly, prepared the place where to lead and how to hide, taking into account all the circumstances of the importance of the political moment. When I reported to Beloborodov what I could do, he said to make sure that everyone was shot, we decided this, I didn’t enter into arguments further, I began to do it the way it was necessary ... ... When everything was in order, then I gave the commandant of the house in the office a decree of the regional executive committee to Yurovsky, then he doubted why everyone was, but I told him above all and there was nothing to talk about for a long time, time is short, it's time to start .... ... I took Nikalai himself, Alexandra, daughters, Alexei, because I had a Mauser, they can work faithfully, the astal ones were revolvers. After the descent, we waited a little on the lower floor, then the commandant waited for everyone to get up, everyone stood up, but Alexei was sitting on a chair, then he began to read the verdict of the decree, which said, on the decision of the executive committee, to shoot. Then a phrase broke out from Nikolai: how they wouldn’t take us anywhere, it was impossible to wait any longer, I fired a shot at him point-blank, he fell immediately, but the rest also, at that time a cry arose between them, then they gave several shots to one another brasalis on the neck, and everyone fell.

As you can see, Ermakov contradicts all the other participants in the execution, completely attributing to himself all the leadership of the execution, and the liquidation of Nikolai personally. According to some sources, at the time of the execution, Yermakov was drunk, and armed with a total of three (according to other sources, even four) pistols. At the same time, investigator Sokolov believed that Yermakov did not actively participate in the execution, he supervised the destruction of the corpses. In general, Ermakov's memoirs stand apart from the memoirs of other participants in the events; the information reported by Ermakov is not confirmed by most other sources.

On the issue of coordinating the execution by Moscow, the participants in the events also disagree. According to the version set out in Yurovsky's note, the order "to exterminate the Romanovs" came from Perm. “Why from Perm? - asks the historian G. Z. Ioffe. - Was there no direct connection with Yekaterinburg then? Or was Yurovsky, writing this phrase, guided by some considerations known only to him? Back in 1919, investigator N. Sokolov established that shortly before the execution, due to the deteriorating military situation in the Urals, Goloshchekin, a member of the Presidium of the Council, went to Moscow, where he tried to agree on this issue. Nevertheless, a participant in the execution, M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), in his memoirs, claims that the decision was made by Yekaterinburg and was approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee already retroactively, on July 18, as Beloborodov told him, and during Goloshchekin’s trip to Moscow, Lenin did not agree execution, demanding to take Nikolai to Moscow for trial. At the same time, Medvedev (Kudrin) notes that the Uraloblsovet was under powerful pressure from both embittered revolutionary workers, who demanded the immediate execution of Nikolai, and fanatical left-wing socialist-revolutionaries and anarchists, who began to accuse the Bolsheviks of inconsistency. There is similar information in Yurovsky's memoirs.

According to the story of P. L. Voikov, known in the presentation of the former adviser Soviet embassy in France, G. Z. Besedovsky, the decision was made by Moscow, but only under the stubborn pressure of Yekaterinburg; according to Voikov, Moscow was going to “cede the Romanovs to Germany”, “... they especially hoped for the opportunity to bargain for a reduction in the indemnity of three hundred million rubles in gold, imposed on Russia under the Brest Treaty. This indemnity was one of the most unpleasant points of the Brest Treaty, and Moscow would very much like to change this point”; in addition, “some of the members of the Central Committee, in particular Lenin, also objected on principled grounds to the execution of children,” while Lenin cited the Great French Revolution as an example.

According to P. M. Bykov, when shooting the Romanovs, the local authorities acted “at their own peril and risk.”

G. P. Nikulin testified:

The question often arises: “Was it known ... to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov or other leading our central workers in advance about the execution of the royal family?” Well, it’s hard for me to say whether they knew beforehand, but I think that since ... Goloshchekin ... went to Moscow twice to negotiate the fate of the Romanovs, then, of course, it should be concluded that this was exactly what was discussed. ... it was supposed to organize a trial of the Romanovs, at first ... in such a broad, perhaps, order, like such a nationwide court, and then, when all kinds of counter-revolutionary elements were already grouping around Yekaterinburg, the question arose of organizing such a narrow, revolutionary court. But this was not done either. The trial as such did not take place, and, in essence, the execution of the Romanovs was carried out by decision of the Ural Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Council ...

Yurovsky's memories

Yurovsky's memoirs are known in three versions:

• a brief “Yurovsky note” dated 1920;
• a detailed version dated April-May 1922, signed by Yurovsky;
• the abridged edition of the memoirs, which appeared in 1934, created on the instructions of the Uralistpart, includes a transcript of Yurovsky's speech and a text prepared on its basis, which differs in some details from it.

The reliability of the first source is questioned by some researchers; investigator Solovyov considers it authentic. In the Note, Yurovsky writes about himself in the third person ( "commandant"), which is apparently explained by the insertions of the historian Pokrovsky M.N., recorded by him from the words of Yurovsky. There is also an expanded second edition of the "Notes", dated 1922.

The Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yu. I. Skuratov believed that “Yurovsky’s note” “is an official report on the execution of the royal family, prepared by Ya. M. Yurovsky for the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.”

Diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra

The diaries of the tsar and tsarina themselves have also reached our time, which, among other things, were kept right in the Ipatiev House. The last entry in the diary of Nicholas II is dated Saturday June 30 (July 13 - Nicholas kept a diary according to the old style) 1918 entry “Alexei took the first bath after Tobolsk; his knee is recovering, but he cannot straighten it completely. The weather is warm and pleasant. We have no news from outside.”. The diary of Alexandra Feodorovna reaches the last day - Tuesday, July 16, 1918 with the entry: “... Every morning the Komend[ant] comes to our rooms. Finally, after a week, eggs were again brought for Baby [the heir]. ... They suddenly sent for Lenka Sednev to go and see his uncle, and he hurriedly ran away, wondering if all this is true and whether we will see the boy again ... "

The tsar in his diary describes a number of everyday details: the arrival of the tsar’s children from Tobolsk, changes in the composition of the retinue (“ I decided to let my old man Chemodurov go for a rest and instead take the Troupe for a while”), the weather, the books read, the features of the regime, my impressions of the guards and the conditions of detention ( “It’s unbearable to be so shut up and not be able to go out into the garden when you want and spend a good evening in the open air! Prison mode!!”). The tsar also inadvertently mentioned a correspondence with an anonymous “Russian officer” (“the other day we received two letters, one after the other, in which we were informed that we should prepare to be kidnapped by some loyal people!”).

From the diary, you can find out Nikolai's opinion about both commandants: he called Avdeev a "bastard" (entry dated April 30, Monday), who once was "a little tipsy." The king also expressed dissatisfaction with the plundering of things (entry dated May 28 / June 10):

However, the opinion about Yurovsky remained not the best: “We like this type less and less!”; about Avdeev: "It's a pity for Avdeev, but he is to blame for not keeping his people from stealing from the chests in the barn"; “According to rumors, some of the Avdeevites are already under arrest!”

The entry dated May 28 / June 10, according to the historian Melgunov, reflects the echoes of events that took place outside the Ipatiev House:

In the diary of Alexandra Feodorovna there is an entry regarding the change of commandants:

Destruction and burial of the remains

Death of the Romanovs (1918-1919)

• The murder of Mikhail Alexandrovich
• The execution of the royal family
• Alapaevsk martyrs
• Execution in the Peter and Paul Fortress

Yurovsky's version

According to Yurovsky's memoirs, he went to the mine at three o'clock in the morning on July 17th. Yurovsky reports that Goloshchekin must have ordered P. Z. Ermakov to carry out the burial. However, things did not go as smoothly as we would like: Ermakov brought too many people as a funeral team ( “Why there are so many of them, I still don’t know, I heard only separate cries - we thought that they would give us them alive, but here, it turns out, they are dead”); truck stuck; jewels sewn into the clothes of the Grand Duchesses were discovered, some of Yermakov's people began to appropriate them. Yurovsky ordered to put guards on the truck. The bodies were loaded onto spans. On the way and near the mine planned for burial, strangers met. Yurovsky assigned people to cordon off the area, as well as to inform the village that Czechoslovaks were operating in the area and that it was forbidden to leave the village under threat of execution. In an effort to get rid of the presence of an overly large funeral team, he sends some people to the city "as unnecessary." Orders to make fires to burn clothes as possible evidence.

From the memoirs of Yurovsky (spelling preserved):

After seizing valuables and burning clothes on fires, the corpses were thrown into the mine, but “... a new hassle. The water covered the bodies a little, what to do here? The funeral team unsuccessfully tried to bring down the mine with grenades (“bombs”), after which Yurovsky, according to him, finally came to the conclusion that the burial of the corpses had failed, since they were easy to detect and, in addition, there were witnesses that something was happening here . Leaving the guards and taking valuables, at about two o'clock in the afternoon (in an earlier version of the memoirs - "at 10-11 am") on July 17, Yurovsky went to the city. I arrived at the Ural Regional Executive Committee and reported on the situation. Goloshchekin summoned Ermakov and sent him to retrieve the corpses. Yurovsky went to the city executive committee to its chairman, S. E. Chutskaev, for advice on a place for burial. Chutskaev reported on deep abandoned mines on the Moscow Trakt. Yurovsky went to inspect these mines, but he could not get to the place right away due to a car breakdown, he had to walk. Returned on requisitioned horses. During this time, another plan appeared - to burn the corpses.

Yurovsky was not quite sure that the incineration would be successful, so the plan to bury the corpses in the mines of the Moscow Tract remained an option. In addition, he had the idea, in case of any failure, to bury the bodies in groups in different places on a clay road. Thus, there were three options for action. Yurovsky went to the commissar of supply of the Urals, Voikov, to get gasoline or kerosene, as well as sulfuric acid to disfigure faces, and shovels. Having received this, they loaded it onto carts and sent it to the location of the corpses. A truck was sent there. Yurovsky himself stayed behind to wait for Polushin, "the 'specialist' incineration," and waited for him until 11 pm, but he never arrived because, as Yurovsky later learned, he had fallen off his horse and injured his leg. At about 12 o'clock in the night, Yurovsky, not counting on the reliability of the car, went to the place where the bodies of the dead were, on horseback, but this time another horse crushed his leg, so that he could not move for an hour.

Yurovsky arrived at the scene at night. Work was underway to retrieve the bodies. Yurovsky decided to bury several corpses along the way. By dawn on July 18, the pit was almost ready, but a stranger appeared nearby. I had to abandon this plan. After waiting for the evening, we boarded the cart (the truck was waiting in a place where it should not get stuck). Then they were driving a truck, and it got stuck. Midnight was approaching, and Yurovsky decided that it was necessary to bury him somewhere here, since it was dark and no one could be a witness to the burial.

I. Rodzinsky and M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) also left their memories of the burial of corpses (Medvedev, by his own admission, did not personally participate in the burial and retold the events from the words of Yurovsky and Rodzinsky). According to the memoirs of Rodzinsky himself:

Analysis of the investigator Solovyov

V. N. Solovyov, senior prosecutor-criminalist of the Main Investigation Department of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, conducted a comparative analysis of Soviet sources (memoirs of participants in the events) and Sokolov's investigation materials.

Based on these materials, investigator Solovyov made the following conclusion:

A comparison of the materials of the participants in the burial and destruction of corpses and documents from the investigation file of Sokolov N.A. on the routes of movement and manipulations with corpses give grounds for the assertion that the same places are described, near mine # 7, at crossing # 184. Indeed , Yurovsky and others burned clothes and shoes at the site investigated by Magnitsky and Sokolov, sulfuric acid was used for burial, two corpses, but not all, were burned. A detailed comparison of these and other materials of the case gives grounds for asserting that there are no significant, mutually exclusive contradictions in the “Soviet materials” and the materials of N. A. Sokolov, there is only a different interpretation of the same events. Solovyov also pointed out that, according to the study, “... under the conditions in which the destruction of the corpses was carried out, it was impossible to completely destroy the remains using sulfuric acid and combustible materials indicated in the investigation file of N. A. Sokolov and the memoirs of the participants in the events.”

Reaction to the shooting

The collection The Revolution is Defending (1989) says that the execution of Nicholas II complicated the situation in the Urals, and mentions the riots that broke out in a number of areas of the Perm, Ufa and Vyatka provinces. It is argued that under the influence of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the petty bourgeoisie, a significant part of the middle peasantry and individual sections of the workers revolted. The rebels brutally cracked down on communists, civil servants and their families. So, in the Kizbangashevskaya volost of the Ufa province, 300 people died at the hands of the rebels. Some rebellions were quickly suppressed, but more often the rebels put up a long resistance.

Meanwhile, the historian G.Z. Ioffe in the monograph “The Revolution and the Fate of the Romanovs” (1992) writes that, according to reports from many contemporaries, including those from the anti-Bolshevik environment, the news of the execution of Nicholas II “generally went unnoticed, without manifestations protest." Ioffe quotes the memoirs of V. N. Kokovtsov: “... On the day the news was printed, I was twice on the street, I rode a tram and nowhere did I see the slightest glimpse of pity or compassion. The news was read loudly, with grins, mockery and the most ruthless comments ... Some kind of senseless callousness, some kind of boasting of bloodthirstiness ... "

A similar opinion is expressed by the historian V.P. Buldakov. In his opinion, at that time few people were interested in the fate of the Romanovs, and long before their death there were rumors that none of the members of the imperial family were already alive. According to Buldakov, the townspeople received the news of the assassination of the tsar "with stupid indifference", and the wealthy peasants - with amazement, but without any protest. Buldakov cites a fragment from the diaries of Z. Gippius as a typical example of a similar reaction of the non-monarchist intelligentsia: “It’s not a pity for the frail officer, of course, ... he has been with the dead for a long time, but the disgusting ugliness of all this is unbearable.”

Investigation

On July 25, 1918, eight days after the execution of the royal family, units of the White Army and detachments of the Czechoslovak Corps occupied Yekaterinburg. The military authorities launched a search for the disappeared royal family.

On July 30, an investigation into the circumstances of her death began. For the investigation, by the decision of the Yekaterinburg District Court, an investigator for the most important cases, A.P. Nametkin, was appointed. On August 12, 1918, the investigation was entrusted to a member of the Yekaterinburg District Court, I. A. Sergeev, who examined the Ipatiev house, including the basement room where the royal family was shot, collected and described the material evidence found in the "Special Purpose House" and at the mine. Since August 1918, A. F. Kirsta, appointed head of the criminal investigation department of Yekaterinburg, joined the investigation.

On January 17, 1919, to oversee the investigation into the murder of the royal family, the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, appointed the commander-in-chief Western Front Lieutenant General M.K. Dieterikhs. On January 26, Diterichs received the original materials of the investigation conducted by Nametkin and Sergeev. By order of February 6, 1919, the investigation was entrusted to the investigator for especially important cases of the Omsk District Court N. A. Sokolov (1882-1924). It was thanks to his painstaking work that the details of the execution and burial of the royal family became known for the first time. Sokolov continued his investigation even in exile, until his sudden death. Based on the materials of the investigation, he wrote the book "The Murder of the Royal Family", which was published in French in Paris during the author's lifetime, and after his death, in 1925, published in Russian.

An investigation of the late 20th and early 21st centuries

The circumstances of the death of the royal family were investigated as part of a criminal case initiated on August 19, 1993 at the direction of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. The materials of the Government Commission for the study of issues related to the study and reburial of the remains of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and members of his family have been published. Forensic scientist Sergei Nikitin in 1994 performed a reconstruction of the appearance of the owners of the found skulls using the Gerasimov method.

The investigator for especially important cases of the Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation V.N. the conclusion that in the description of the execution they do not contradict each other, differing only in minor details.

Solovyov said that he did not find any documents that would directly prove the initiative of Lenin and Sverdlov. At the same time, when asked whether Lenin and Sverdlov were guilty of the execution of the royal family, he replied:

Meanwhile, the historian A. G. Latyshev notes that if the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, chaired by Sverdlov, approved (recognized as correct) the decision of the Ural Regional Council to execute Nicholas II, then the Council of People's Commissars headed by Lenin only "took note" of this decision.

Solovyov completely rejected the "ritual version", pointing out that most of the participants in the discussion of the method of murder were Russians, only one Jew (Yurovsky) took part in the murder itself, and the rest were Russians and Latvians. Also, the investigation refuted the version promoted by M.K. Diterhis about “chopping off heads” for ritual purposes. According to the conclusion forensic medical examination, on the cervical vertebrae of all skeletons there are no traces of postmortem detachment of heads.

In October 2011, Solovyov handed over to the representatives of the Romanov dynasty a decision to close the investigation of the case. The official conclusion of the Investigative Committee of Russia, announced in October 2011, indicated that the investigation did not have documentary evidence of the involvement of Lenin or someone else from the top leadership of the Bolsheviks in the execution of the royal family. Modern Russian historians indicate the inconsistency of the conclusions about the alleged non-involvement of the Bolshevik leaders in the murder on the basis of the absence of documents in modern archives direct action: Lenin practiced the personal acceptance and issuance of the most cardinal orders to the places secretly and in the highest degree conspiratorially. According to A. N. Bokhanov, neither Lenin nor his entourage gave and would never give written orders on the issue related to the murder of the royal family. In addition, A.N. Bokhanov noted that "very many events in history are not reflected in documents of direct action", which is not surprising. The historian-archivist V. M. Khrustalev, having analyzed the correspondence between various government departments of that period concerning representatives of the Romanov dynasty, which is available to historians, wrote that it is quite logical to assume that the Bolshevik government had “double record keeping” in the semblance of “double bookkeeping”. Director of the office of the House of Romanov Alexander Zakatov on behalf of the Romanovs also commented on this decision in such a way that the leaders of the Bolsheviks could not give written orders, but verbal orders.

After analyzing the attitude of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government to resolving the issue of the fate of the royal family, the investigation noted the extreme aggravation of the political situation in July 1918 in connection with a number of events, including the murder on July 6 by the left SR Ya. G. Blyumkin of the German ambassador V. Mirbach in order to lead to a break in the Brest Peace and an uprising of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Under these conditions, the execution of the royal family could have Negative influence on further relations between the RSFSR and Germany, since Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters were German princesses. The possibility of the extradition of one or more members of the royal family of Germany in order to mitigate the severity of the conflict that arose as a result of the assassination of the ambassador was not ruled out. According to the investigation, the leaders of the Urals had a different position on this issue, the Presidium of the Regional Council of which was ready to destroy the Romanovs back in April 1918 during their transfer from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg.

V. M. Khrustalev wrote that the fact that historians and researchers still do not have the opportunity to study archival materials relating to the death of representatives of the Romanov dynasty contained in the special stores of the FSB, both central and regional level. The historian suggested that someone's experienced hand purposefully "cleaned out" the archives of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), the collegium of the Cheka, the Ural Regional Executive Committee and the Yekaterinburg Cheka for the summer and autumn of 1918. Looking through the scattered agendas of the meetings of the Cheka, available to historians, Khrustalev came to the conclusion that documents were seized that mentioned the names of representatives of the Romanov dynasty. The archivist wrote that these documents could not be destroyed - they were probably transferred for storage to the Central Party Archive or "special depositories". The funds of these archives at the time the historian wrote his book were not available to researchers.

The further fate of the persons involved in the execution

Members of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council:

• Beloborodov, Alexander Georgievich - in 1927 he was expelled from the CPSU (b) for participation in the Trotskyist opposition, in May 1930 he was reinstated, in 1936 he was again expelled. In August 1936, he was arrested, on February 8, 1938, by the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to death, and the next day he was shot. In 1919, Beloborodov wrote: "... The basic rule in the reprisal against counter-revolutionaries is that the captured are not tried, but massacres are carried out with them." G. Z. Ioffe notes that after some time the Beloborodov rule regarding counter-revolutionaries began to be applied by some Bolsheviks against others; this Beloborodov “apparently could no longer understand. In the 1930s, Beloborodov was repressed and shot. The circle is closed."
• Goloshchekin, Philip Isaevich - in 1925-1933 - Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee of the CPSU (b); carried out violent measures aimed at changing the lifestyle of nomads and collectivization, which led to huge casualties. On October 15, 1939 he was arrested, on October 28, 1941 he was shot.
• Didkovsky, Boris Vladimirovich - worked at the Ural State University, the Ural Geological Trust. On August 3, 1937, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR as an active participant in the anti-Soviet terrorist organization of the right in the Urals. Shot. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. A mountain peak in the Urals is named after Didkovsky.
• Safarov, Georgy Ivanovich - in 1927, at the XV Congress of the CPSU (b), he was expelled from the party "as an active member of the Trotskyist opposition", exiled to the city of Achinsk. After the announcement of a break with the opposition, by decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, he was reinstated in the party. In the 30s he was again expelled from the party, was repeatedly arrested. In 1942 he was shot. Posthumously rehabilitated.
• Tolmachev, Nikolai Gurevich - in 1919, in a battle with the troops of General N. N. Yudenich near Luga, he fought, being surrounded; in order not to be captured, he shot himself. Buried in the Field of Mars.

Direct performers:

• Yurovsky, Yakov Mikhailovich - died in 1938 in the Kremlin hospital. Yurovsky's daughter Yurovskaya Rimma Yakovlevna was repressed on false charges, from 1938 to 1956 she was imprisoned. Rehabilitated. Yurovsky's son, Yurovsky Alexander Yakovlevich, was arrested in 1952.
• Nikulin, Grigory Petrovich (Yurovsky's assistant) - survived the purge, left memories (recording of the Radio Committee on May 12, 1964).
• Ermakov, Pyotr Zakharovich - retired in 1934, survived the purge.
• Medvedev (Kudrin), Mikhail Alexandrovich - survived the purge, left detailed memories of the events before his death (December 1963). He died on January 13, 1964, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
• Medvedev, Pavel Spiridonovich - February 11, 1919 was arrested by an agent of the White Guard Criminal Investigation S. I. Alekseev. He died in prison on March 12, 1919, according to some sources, from typhus, according to others - from torture.

• Voikov, Pyotr Lazarevich - was killed on June 7, 1927 in Warsaw by a white emigrant Boris Koverda. In honor of Voikov, the Voikovskaya metro station in Moscow and a number of streets in the cities of the USSR were named.

Perm murder:

• Myasnikov, Gavriil Ilyich - in the 1920s he joined the "workers' opposition", in 1923 he was repressed, in 1928 he fled the USSR. Shot in 1945; according to other sources, he died in prison in 1946.

Canonization and church veneration of the royal family

In 1981, the royal family was glorified (canonized) by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Alternative theories

There are alternative versions regarding the death of the royal family. These include versions about saving someone from the royal family and conspiracy theories. According to one of these theories, the murder of the royal family was ritual, carried out by "Jewish Freemasons", as allegedly evidenced by "kabbalistic signs" in the room where the execution took place. In some versions of this theory, it is said that after the execution, the head of Nicholas II was separated from the body and alcoholized. According to another, the execution was carried out at the direction of the German government after Nicholas refused to create a pro-German monarchy in Russia headed by Alexei (this theory is given in R. Wilton's book).

The fact that Nicholas II was killed, the Bolsheviks announced to everyone immediately after the execution, but at first the Soviet authorities were silent about the fact that his wife and children were also shot. The secrecy of the murder and burial sites led a number of individuals to subsequently claim to be one of the "miraculously saved" family members. One of the most famous imposters was Anna Anderson, who posed as a miraculously survived Anastasia. Several feature films have been made based on Anna Anderson's story.

Rumors about miraculous rescue"of all or part of the royal family, and even the king himself, began to spread almost immediately after the execution. So, the adventurer B. N. Solovyov, ex-husband Rasputin’s daughter Matryona, claimed that allegedly “the Sovereign escaped by flying to Tibet to the Dalai Lama”, and the witness Samoilov, referring to the guard of the Ipatiev House A.S. railway carriage".

American journalists A. Summers and T. Mangold in the 1970s. studied a previously unknown part of the archives of the investigation of 1918-1919, found in the 1930s. in the USA, and published the results of their investigation in 1976. In their opinion, N. A. Sokolov’s conclusions about the death of the entire royal family were made under pressure from A. V. Kolchak, who, for some reason, was beneficial to declare all family members dead. They consider the investigations and conclusions of other investigators of the White Army (A.P. Nametkina, I.A. Sergeev and A.F. Kirsta) to be more objective. In their (Summers and Mangold) opinion, it is most likely that only Nicholas II and his heir were shot in Yekaterinburg, while Alexandra Fedorovna and her daughters were transported to Perm and their further fate is unknown. A. Summers and T. Mangold are inclined to believe that Anna Anderson was indeed Grand Duchess Anastasia.

Exhibitions

• Exhibition “The death of the family of Emperor Nicholas II. A century-long investigation." (May 25 - July 29, 2012, Exhibition Hall of the Federal Archives (Moscow); from July 10, 2013, Center for Traditional folk culture Middle Urals (Yekaterinburg)).

In art

The theme, unlike other revolutionary plots (for example, "The Capture of the Winter Palace" or "Lenin's Arrival in Petrograd") was in little demand in the Soviet fine arts of the twentieth century. However, there is an early Soviet painting by V. N. Pchelin “Transfer of the Romanov family to the Ural Council”, written in 1927.

Much more often it is found in the cinema, including in the films: "Nikolai and Alexandra" (1971), "The Tsar Killer" (1991), "Rasputin" (1996), "The Romanovs. Crowned family "(2000), the television series" White Horse "(1993). The film "Rasputin" begins with the scene of the execution of the royal family.

The play "House of Special Purpose" by Edvard Radzinsky is devoted to the same theme.

The question "Who shot the royal family?" in itself is immoral and can only interest lovers of "fried" and fans of conspiracy theories. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church was only interested in the identification of the remains, which is why the canonization of the royal family was carried out only in 2000 (19 years later than in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), and all its members were canonized as Russian New Martyrs. At the same time, the question of who gave the order and was the executor of the execution is not exaggerated in church circles. In addition, to this day there is no exact list of the persons of the "firing" team. In the twenties and thirties of the last century, many people involved in this act of vandalism vied with each other to boast about their participation (like the anecdotal associates of V.I. Lenin, who helped him drag the log on the first subbotnik) and wrote memoirs about it. However, almost all of them were shot during the Yezhov purges of 1936-1938.

Today, almost everyone who recognizes the execution of the royal family believes that the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg was the place of execution. According to most historians, the following people were directly involved in the execution:

• member of the collegium of the Ural Regional Extraordinary Commission Ya.M. Yurovsky;
• head of the "Flying Squad" of the Ural Cheka G.P. Nikulin;
• Commissioner M.A. Medvedev;
• Ural security officer, head of the guard service P.Z. Ermakov;
• Vaganov S.P., Kabanov A.G., Medvedev P.S., Netrebin V.N., Tselms Ya.M. are considered ordinary participants in the execution.

As can be seen from the above list, there was no dominance of "Jewish Masons" or Balts (Latvian shooters) in the firing squad. Some researchers also question the number of people directly involved in the execution. The execution cellar had dimensions of 5 × 6 meters, and such a number of executioners simply would not have fit there.

Speaking about who from the top leadership gave the order for the execution, it can be said with confidence that neither V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky did not know about the upcoming execution. Moreover, in early July, Lenin ordered the transfer of the entire royal family to Moscow, where it was supposed to organize a demonstrative people's trial of Nicholas II, and the “fiery tribune” L.D. Trotsky. The question of what Ya.M. knew about the upcoming execution. Sverdlov, also debatable, but not indisputable. The fact that the order was given by I.V. Stalin, let it be on the conscience of the democrats of the times of perestroika and glasnost. In those years, Joseph Stalin was not a prominent figure in the top of the Bolsheviks and most of the time he was absent from Moscow, being at the fronts.

At one time, rumors started by Ya.M. Yurovsky, that one of the participants in the execution was brought to Moscow to be shown to V.I. To Lenin and L.D. Trotsky, the alcoholized head of the last emperor. And only the burial found and the genetic examinations carried out dispelled this heresy.

According to the "Jewish" version, the immediate leader and main executor was Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky (Yankel Khaimovich Yurovsky). The "execution" team consisted mainly of foreigners: according to one version - Latvians, according to another - Chinese. Moreover, the execution itself was organized as a ritual action. A rabbi was invited to it, who was responsible for the religious correctness of the ceremony. The walls of the execution cellar were painted with Kabbalistic signs. However, after, on the orders of the First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee B.N. Yeltsin, the house of special maintenance (Ipatiev House) was demolished in 1977, you can invent and invent anything.

In all these theories, it is not clear why the relatives of Emperor Nicholas II - neither "cousin" Willy (German Kaiser Wilhelm II), nor the King of England, cousin of the Russian autocrat George V - insisted to the Provisional Government on granting political asylum to the royal family. And here there are many conspiracy theories why neither the Entente, nor Germany and Austria-Hungary needed the Romanov dynasty. However, this is a topic for a separate study.

In addition, there is a group of historians-researchers of the question "Who shot the royal family?", who believe that there was no execution, but only its imitation. And no genetic examinations and skull reconstructions can convince them otherwise.

AT the poll about the murder of the royal family, despite all the tragedy, is of little concern to anyone. Here, “everything” is already known, everything is clear. - The execution of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his family and servants took place in the basement of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918, by order of the Ural Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, headed by the Bolsheviks, with the sanction of the Council of People's Commissars (headed by V. .I. Lenin) and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Chairman - Ya.M. Sverdlov). The commissioner of the Cheka Ya.M. Yurovsky.

AT On the night of July 16-17, the Romanovs and the servants went to bed, as usual, at 22:30. At 11:30 p.m., two special representatives from the Ural Council came to the mansion. They handed the decision of the executive committee to the commander of the security detachment P. Z. and the new commandant of the house, Yermakov Commissar of the Extraordinary Investigation Commission, Ya. M. Yurovsky, and suggested that the execution of the sentence be started immediately.

R The awake family members and staff were told that due to the advance of the white troops, the mansion could be under fire, and therefore, for security reasons, it was necessary to go to the basement. Seven members of the family - the former Russian emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich, his wife Alexandra Fedorovna, daughters Olga, Tatyana, Maria and Anastasia and son Alexei, as well as doctor Botkin and three voluntarily remaining servants Kharitonov, Trupp and Demidov (except for cook Sednev, who was removed from home the day before ) descended from the second floor of the house and moved to the corner semi-basement room. When everyone was seated in the room, Yurovsky announced the verdict. Immediately after this, the royal family was shot.

O the official version of the reason for the execution is the approach of the white army, it is impossible to take out the royal family, therefore, so that it is not released by the whites, it must be destroyed. Such was the motive of Soviet power in those years.

H Is everything known, is everything clear? Let's try to compare some facts. First of all, on the same day that the tragedy occurred in the Ipatiev House, two hundred kilometers from Yekaterinburg (near Alapaevsky), six closest relatives of Nicholas II were brutally murdered: Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Prince John Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich, Count Vladimir Paley (son of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich). On the night of July 17-18, 1918, on the night of July 17-18, 1918, under the pretext of moving to a more "quiet and safe" place, they were secretly taken to an abandoned mine. Here the Romanovs and their servants, blindfolded, were thrown alive into the shaft of an old mine about 60 meters deep. Sergei Mikhailovich resisted, grabbed one of the killers by the throat, but was killed by a bullet in the head. His body was also thrown into the mine.

W then the mine was thrown with grenades, the top of the mine opening was covered with sticks, brushwood, deadwood and set on fire. The unfortunate victims died in terrible suffering, and they remained alive underground for another two or three days. The executioners who organized the murder tried to present everything to the local residents as if the Romanovs had been kidnapped by a White Guard detachment.

BUT a month before this tragedy, the brother of Nicholas II, Mikhail, was shot dead in Perm. The Perm Bolshevik leadership (the Cheka and the police) took part in the murder of the brother of the last emperor. According to the stories of the executioners, Mikhail, together with his secretary, was taken out of the city and shot dead. And then the participants in the execution tried to present everything as if Mikhail had fled.

X I would like to draw attention to the fact that neither Alapaevsk, nor, moreover, Perm was threatened by the offensive of the Whites at that time. Currently known documents indicate that the action to destroy all the Romanovs, who are close relatives of Nicholas II, was planned by date and controlled from Moscow, most likely personally by Sverdlov. This is where the main mystery arises - why organize such a cruel action, kill all the Romanovs. There are many versions about this - both fanaticism (supposedly ritual murder), and the pathological cruelty of the Bolsheviks, etc. But one thing should be noted, fanatics and maniacs will not be able to manage a country like Russia. And the Bolsheviks not only ruled, but also won. And one more fact - before the murder of the Romanovs, the Red Army suffers defeats on all fronts, but after - its victorious march begins, and the defeat of Kolchak in the Urals, and Denikin's troops in southern Russia. This fact is categorically ignored by the media.

H did the death of the Romanovs really inspire the Red Army? Belief in victory is a powerful factor in any army, but not the only one. In order to fight, soldiers need ammunition, weapons, uniforms, food, transport is needed to move troops. And all this requires money! Until July 1918, the Red Army retreated precisely because it was naked and hungry. And from August the offensive begins. The Red Army soldiers have enough food, they have new uniforms, and they do not spare shells and cartridges in battle (as evidenced by the memoirs of former officers). Moreover, we note that it was at this time that the White armies began to experience serious problems with the supply of material assistance from their allies - the Entente countries.

And yeah, let's think about it. Before the assassination, the Red Army is retreating, it is not secured. The White Army is advancing. The murder of the Romanovs is a well-planned action, controlled from the center. After the murder - the Red Army has ammunition and food "like a fool's shag", it comes. The whites retreat, the allies do not actually help them.

E then new riddle. A few facts to reveal it. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the royal families of Europe (Russia, Germany, Great Britain) created a single monetary fund from their family (not state) funds - a prototype of the future International Monetary Fund. The monarchs here acted as private individuals. And in a sense, their money was something like private savings. The greatest contribution to this fund was made by the Romanov family.

AT later other rich people of Europe, mainly France, also took part in this fund. By the beginning of World War I, this fund had become the largest bank in Europe, the main share of the capital of which continued to be the contribution of the Romanov family. It is very interesting that the media do not write about this fund, it seems that it did not exist.

E Another interesting fact is that the Bolshevik government announced its refusal to pay the debts of the tsarist government, and Europe swallowed it calmly. More than strange, but in response to this, the Europeans could simply freeze Russian assets in their banks, but for some reason they did not.

H In order to somehow explain this and combine these facts, suppose, firstly, that the Soviet government and the Entente (represented by representatives of the fund) made a deal; secondly, under the terms of this deal, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee must guarantee that the main investors of the fund will never claim its property (in other words, all relatives of Nicholas II who have the right to inherit his property must be liquidated); thirdly, in turn, the fund writes off the debts of the tsarist government, fourthly, it opens up the possibility of supplying the Red Army, and, fifthly, at the same time creates problems in supplying the White armies.

E Economic and political relations between Russia and Europe have always been difficult. And it cannot be said that Russia was the winner in these relations. Regarding the debt of the tsarist government, it should apparently be recognized that we paid it twice - the first time with the blood of the innocent Romanovs, and the second time in the 90s with money. And both times it brought shocks to Russia - in 1918, a protracted civil war, and in 1998 - a financial crisis. I wonder if we will pay this debt again?

Were everyone who, in one way or another, approached the case of the execution of the royal family? Why is it impossible to trust the books of Sokolov (the seventh! investigator in this case), published after his murder? These questions are answered by the historian of the royal family, Sergei Ivanovich.

The royal family was not shot!

The last Russian tsar was not shot, but possibly left as a hostage.

Agree: it would be foolish to shoot the tsar without first squeezing honestly earned money from him from the capsules. So they didn't shoot him. However, it was not immediately possible to get money, because it was too turbulent time ...

Regularly, by the middle of summer of each year, loud lamentation for the tsar, who was killed for nothing, resumes. NicholasII, whom Christians also “canonized as saints” in 2000. Here is Comrade. Starikov, exactly on July 17, once again threw "firewood" into the furnace of emotional lamentations about nothing. I was not interested in this issue before, and would not pay attention to another dummy, BUT... At the last meeting with readers in his life, Academician Nikolai Levashov just mentioned that in the 30s Stalin met with NikolaiII and asked him for money to prepare for a future war. Here is how Nikolai Goryushin writes about this in his report “There are prophets in our fatherland too!” about this meeting with readers:

“... In this regard, the information related to the tragic fate of the last Emperor Russian Empire Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov and his family ... In August 1917, he and his family were sent to the last capital of the Slavic-Aryan Empire, the city of Tobolsk. The choice of this city was not accidental, since the highest degrees of Freemasonry are aware of the great past of the Russian people. The exile to Tobolsk was a kind of mockery of the Romanov dynasty, which in 1775 defeated the troops of the Slavic-Aryan Empire (Great Tartary), and later this event was called the suppression of the peasant revolt of Emelyan Pugachev ... In July 1918 Jacob Schiff gives command to one of his confidants in the leadership of the Bolsheviks Yakov Sverdlov for the ritual murder of the royal family. Sverdlov, after consulting with Lenin, orders the commandant of the Ipatiev house, a Chekist Yakov Yurovsky bring the plan to fruition. According to official history, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, Nikolai Romanov, along with his wife and children, was shot.

At the meeting, Nikolai Levashov said that in fact NikolaiII and his family were not shot! This statement immediately raises many questions. I decided to look into them. Many works have been written on this topic, and the picture of the execution, the testimony of witnesses, look plausible at first glance. The facts obtained by the investigator A.F. do not fit into the logical chain. Kirsta, who joined the investigation in August 1918. During the investigation, he interviewed Dr. P.I. Utkin, who said that at the end of October 1918 he was invited to the building occupied by the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution to provide medical assistance. The victim was a young girl, presumably 22 years old, with a cut lip and a tumor under her eye. To the question "who is she?" the girl replied that she was daughter of the Sovereign Anastasia". During the course of the investigation, investigator Kirsta did not find the corpses of the royal family in Ganina Yama. Soon, Kirsta found numerous witnesses who told him during interrogations that in September 1918, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Grand Duchesses were kept in Perm. And the witness Samoilov stated from the words of his neighbor, the guard of the house of Ipatiev Varakushev, that there was no execution, the royal family was loaded into a wagon and taken away.

After receiving these data, A.F. Kirsta is removed from the case and ordered to hand over all materials to investigator A.S. Sokolov. Nikolai Levashov said that the motive for saving the life of the Tsar and his family was the desire of the Bolsheviks, contrary to the orders of their masters, to take possession of the hidden wealth of the dynasty Romanovs, about the location of which Nikolai Aleksandrovich certainly knew. Soon the organizers of the execution in 1919, Sverdlov, die in 1924, Lenin. Nikolai Viktorovich clarified that Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov communicated with I.V. Stalin, and the wealth of the Russian Empire was used to strengthen the power of the USSR ... "

Speech by Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Veniamin Alekseev.
Yekaterinburg remains - more questions than answers:

If this were the first lie of comrade. Starikov, it would be quite possible to think that a person knows little yet and was simply mistaken. But Starikov is the author of several very good books and is very savvy in matters of recent Russian history. From this follows the obvious conclusion that he is lying on purpose. I won’t write about the reasons for this lie here, although they lie right on the surface ... I’d rather give a few more evidence that the royal family was not shot in July 1918, and the rumor about the execution was most likely launched for the “report” to customers - Schiff and other comrades who financed the coup d'état in Russia in February 1917…

Nicholas II met with Stalin?

There are suggestions that Nicholas II was not shot, and the entire female half of the royal family was taken to Germany. But the documents are still classified...

For me, this story began in November 1983. I then worked as a photojournalist for a French agency and was sent to the summit of heads of state and government in Venice. There I accidentally met an Italian colleague who, having learned that I was Russian, showed me a newspaper (I think it was La Repubblica) dated the day of our meeting. In the article, which the Italian drew my attention to, it was about the fact that in Rome, at a very old age, a certain nun, Sister Pascalina, died. I later learned that this woman held an important position in the Vatican hierarchy under Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), but that is not the point.

The Secret of the Iron Lady of the Vatican

This sister Pascalina, who earned the honorary nickname of the “iron lady” of the Vatican, before her death called a notary with two witnesses and in their presence dictated information that she did not want to take with her to the grave: one of the daughters of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II - Olga- was not shot by the Bolsheviks on the night of July 16-17, 1918, but lived long life and was buried in a cemetery in the village of Marcotte in northern Italy.

After the summit, I went to this village with an Italian friend, who was both a driver and an interpreter for me. We found the cemetery and this grave. On the plate was written in German:

« Olga Nikolaevna, eldest daughter of the Russian Tsar Nikolai Romanov"- and dates of life: "1895-1976".

We talked with the cemetery watchman and his wife: they, like all the villagers, perfectly remembered Olga Nikolaevna, knew who she was, and were sure that the Russian Grand Duchess was under the protection of the Vatican.

This strange find interested me greatly, and I decided to find out for myself all the circumstances of the execution. And in general, was he?

I have every reason to believe that there was no shooting. On the night of July 16-17, all the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers left by rail for Perm. The next morning, leaflets were pasted around Yekaterinburg with the message that the royal family was taken away from the city, and so it was. Soon the whites occupied the city. Naturally, a commission of inquiry was formed "on the case of the disappearance of Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress, the Tsarevich and the Grand Duchesses", which did not find any convincing traces of execution.

Investigator Sergeev in 1919 he said in an interview with an American newspaper:

“I don’t think that everyone was executed here - both the king and his family. In my opinion, the Empress, the Tsarevich and the Grand Duchesses were not executed in the Ipatiev House. This conclusion did not suit Admiral Kolchak, who by that time had already proclaimed himself "the supreme ruler of Russia." And really, why does the “supreme” need some kind of emperor? Kolchak ordered a second investigative team to be assembled, which got to the bottom of the fact that in September 1918 the Empress and the Grand Duchesses were kept in Perm. Only the third investigator, Nikolai Sokolov (conducted the case from February to May 1919), turned out to be more understanding and issued a well-known conclusion that the whole family had been shot, the corpses dismembered and burned on fires. “The parts that did not succumb to the action of fire,” Sokolov wrote, “were destroyed with the help of sulfuric acid».

What, then, was buried in 1998. in the Peter and Paul Cathedral? Let me remind you that soon after the start of perestroika, some skeletons were found on the Piglet Log near Yekaterinburg. In 1998, they were solemnly reburied in the family tomb of the Romanovs, after numerous genetic examinations had been carried out before that. Moreover, the secular power of Russia in the person of President Boris Yeltsin acted as a guarantor of the authenticity of the royal remains. But the Russian Orthodox Church refused to recognize the bones as the remains of the royal family.

But let's go back to the Civil War. According to my information, the royal family was divided in Perm. The path of the female part lay in Germany, while the men - Nikolai Romanov himself and Tsarevich Alexei - were left in Russia. Father and son were kept near Serpukhov for a long time. former dacha merchant Konshin. Later, in the reports of the NKVD, this place was known as "Object No. 17". Most likely, the prince died in 1920 from hemophilia. I can't say anything about the fate of the last Russian emperor. Except one: in the 30s "Object No. 17" twice visited Stalin. Does this mean that in those years Nicholas II was still alive?

The men were held hostage

To understand why such incredible events from the point of view of a person of the 21st century became possible and to find out who needed them, you will have to go back to 1918. Remember from school course stories about the Brest peace? Yes, March 3 in Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russia on the one hand, and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey on the other, a peace treaty was concluded. Russia lost Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and part of Belarus. But it was not because of this that Lenin called the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk “humiliating” and “obscene.” By the way, the full text of the treaty has not yet been published either in the East or in the West. I believe that because of the secret conditions in it. Probably the Kaiser, who was a relative of Empress Maria Feodorovna, demanded that all the women of the royal family be handed over to Germany. The girls had no right to the Russian throne and, therefore, could not threaten the Bolsheviks in any way. The men remained hostages - as guarantors that german army will not stick to the east further than it is written in the peace treaty.

What happened next? How was the fate of women exported to the West? Was their silence a necessary condition for their immunity? Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers.

Interview with Vladimir Sychev on the Romanov case

An interesting interview with Vladimir Sychev, who refutes the official version of the execution of the royal family. He talks about the grave of Olga Romanova in northern Italy, about the investigation of two British journalists, about the conditions of the Brest Peace of 1918, according to which all the women of the royal family were transferred to the Germans in Kyiv ...

Author - Vladimir Sychev

In June 1987 I was in Venice with the French press accompanying François Mitterrand to the G7 summit. During the breaks between pools, an Italian journalist approached me and asked me something in French. Realizing from my accent that I was not French, he looked at my French accreditation and asked where I was from. “Russian,” I replied. – Is that how? my interlocutor was surprised. Under his arm, he held an Italian newspaper, from where he translated a huge, half-page article.

Sister Pascalina dies in a private clinic in Switzerland. She was known throughout the Catholic world, because. passed with the future Pope Pius XXII from 1917, when he was still Cardinal Pacelli in Munich (Bavaria), until his death in the Vatican in 1958. She had such a strong influence on him that he entrusted the entire administration of the Vatican to her, and when the cardinals asked for an audience with the Pope, she decided who was worthy of such an audience and who was not. This is a short retelling of a large article, the meaning of which was that we had to believe the phrase uttered at the end and not by a mere mortal. Sister Pascalina asked to invite a lawyer and witnesses, as she did not want to take her to the grave the secret of your life. When they arrived, she only said that the woman buried in the village Morcote, not far from Lake Maggiore - indeed daughter of the Russian Tsar - Olga!!

I convinced my Italian colleague that this was a gift from Fate and that it was useless to resist it. Having learned that he was from Milan, I told him that I would not fly back to Paris on the presidential press plane, but we would go to this village for half a day. We went there after the summit. It turned out that this was no longer Italy, but Switzerland, but we quickly found a village, a cemetery and a cemetery watchman who led us to the grave. On the gravestone is a photograph of an elderly woman and an inscription in German: Olga Nikolaevna(without a surname), the eldest daughter of Nikolai Romanov, Tsar of Russia, and dates of life - 1985-1976 !!!

The Italian journalist was an excellent translator for me, but he clearly did not want to stay there for the whole day. I had to ask questions.

When did she move in here? - In 1948.

- She said that she was the daughter of the Russian Tsar? “Of course, and the whole village knew about it.

Did it get into the press? - Yes.

- How did the other Romanovs react to this? Did they sue? - Served.

And she lost? Yes, I lost.

In this case, she had to pay the opposing party's legal costs. - She paid.

- She worked? - Not.

Where does she get the money from? “Yes, the whole village knew that the Vatican was keeping her!”

The ring is closed. I went to Paris and began to look for what is known on this issue ... And quickly came across a book by two English journalists.

II

Tom Mangold and Anthony Summers published a book in 1979 "Dossier on the king"(“The Case of the Romanovs, or the execution that never happened”). They began with the fact that if the secrecy stamp is removed from state archives after 60 years, then in 1978 60 years from the date of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles expire, and you can “dig up” something there by looking into the declassified archives. That is, at first there was an idea just to look ... And they very quickly got on telegrams the British ambassador to your Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the royal family was taken from Yekaterinburg to Perm. There is no need to explain to professionals from the BBC that this is a sensation. They rushed to Berlin.

It quickly became clear that the Whites, having entered Yekaterinburg on July 25, immediately appointed an investigator to investigate the execution of the royal family. Nikolai Sokolov, whose book everyone still refers to, is the third investigator who received the case only at the end of February 1919! Then a simple question arises: who were the first two and what did they report to the authorities? So, the first investigator named Nametkin, appointed by Kolchak, having worked for three months and declaring that he is a professional, is a simple matter, and he does not need additional time (and the Whites were advancing and had no doubts about their victory at that time - i.e. all the time is yours, don’t rush, work!), puts a report on the table that there was no shooting, but there was a staged execution. Kolchak this report - under the cloth and appoints a second investigator by the name of Sergeev. He also works for three months and at the end of February gives Kolchak the same report with the same words (“I am a professional, it’s a simple matter, no extra time is needed,” there was no shooting- there was a staged execution).

Here it is necessary to explain and remind that it was the Whites who overthrew the tsar, and not the Reds, and they sent him into exile in Siberia! Lenin in these February days was in Zurich. Whatever ordinary soldiers say, the white elite are not monarchists, but republicans. And Kolchak did not need a living tsar. I advise those who have doubts to read Trotsky's diaries, where he writes that "if the whites put up any tsar - even a peasant one - we would not have lasted even two weeks"! These are the words of the Supreme Commander of the Red Army and the ideologist of the Red Terror!! Please believe.

Therefore, Kolchak already puts "his" investigator Nikolai Sokolov and gives him a task. And Nikolai Sokolov also works for only three months - but for a different reason. The Reds entered Yekaterinburg in May, and he retreated along with the Whites. He took the archives, but what did he write?

1. He did not find the bodies, and for the police of any country in any system “no bodies - no murder” is a disappearance! After all, when arresting serial killers, the police demand to show where the corpses are hidden !! You can say whatever you want, even at yourself, and the investigator needs material evidence!

And Nikolai Sokolov "hangs the first noodles on his ears":

“thrown into a mine, filled with acid”.

Now they prefer to forget this phrase, but we heard it until 1998! And for some reason no one ever doubted. Is it possible to flood the mine with acid? But acid is not enough! In the local history museum of Yekaterinburg, where the director Avdonin (the same, one of the three who “accidentally” found bones on the Starokotlyakovskaya road, cleared to them by three investigators in 1918-19), hangs a certificate about those soldiers on the truck that they had 78 liters of gasoline (not acid). In July, in the Siberian taiga, having 78 liters of gasoline, you can burn the entire Moscow zoo! No, they went back and forth, first they threw it into the mine, poured it with acid, and then they took it out and hid it under the sleepers ...

By the way, on the night of the “execution” from July 16 to July 17, 1918, a huge train with the entire local Red Army, the local Central Committee and the local Cheka left Yekaterinburg for Perm. The Whites entered on the eighth day, and Yurovsky, Beloborodov and his comrades shifted the responsibility to two soldiers? The inconsistency, - tea, they did not deal with a peasant revolt. And if they shot at their own discretion, they could have done it a month earlier.

2. The second "noodle" of Nikolai Sokolov - he describes the basement of the Ipatievsky house, publishes photographs where it is clear that bullets are in the walls and in the ceiling (this is apparently what they do when staging an execution). Conclusion - women's corsets were stuffed with diamonds, and the bullets ricocheted! So, like this: the king from the throne and into exile in Siberia. Money in England and Switzerland, and they sew diamonds into corsets to sell to peasants in the market? Well well!

3. In the same book by Nikolai Sokolov, the same basement in the same Ipatiev house is described, where in the fireplace lies clothes from each member of the imperial family and hair from each head. Were they sheared and changed (undressed??) before being shot? Not at all - they were taken out by the same train on that very “night of execution”, but they cut their hair and changed clothes so that no one would recognize them there.

III

Tom Magold and Anthony Summers intuitively realized that the clue to this intriguing detective story must be sought in Agreement on Brest World . And they began to look for the original text. And what?? With all the removal of secrets after 60 years of such official document nowhere! It is not in the declassified archives of London or Berlin. They searched everywhere - and everywhere they found only quotes, but nowhere could they find the full text! And they came to the conclusion that the Kaiser demanded the extradition of women from Lenin. The tsar's wife is a relative of the Kaiser, the daughters are German citizens and did not have the right to the throne, and besides, the Kaiser at that moment could crush Lenin like a bug! And here are Lenin's words that "the world is humiliating and obscene, but it must be signed", and the July coup attempt of the Socialist-Revolutionaries with Dzerzhinsky who joined them at the Bolshoi Theater take on a completely different look.

Officially, we were taught that the Trotsky treaty was signed only on the second attempt and only after the start of the offensive of the German army, when it became clear to everyone that the Republic of Soviets could not resist. If there is simply no army, what is “humiliating and obscene” here? Nothing. But if it is necessary to hand over all the women of the royal family, and even to the Germans, and even during the First World War, then ideologically everything is in its place, and the words are read correctly. What Lenin did, and the entire ladies' section was handed over to the Germans in Kyiv. And immediately the murder of the German ambassador Mirbach in Moscow and the German consul in Kyiv makes sense.

"Dossier on the Tsar" is a fascinating investigation into one cunningly tangled intrigue of world history. The book was published in 1979, so the words of Sister Pascalina in 1983 about Olga's grave could not get into it. And if there were no new facts, then simply retelling someone else's book here would not make sense.

10 years have passed. In November 1997, in Moscow, I met the former political prisoner Geliy Donskoy from St. Petersburg. The conversation over tea in the kitchen also touched the king and his family. When I said that there was no execution, he answered me calmly:

- I know it wasn't.

- Well, you are the first in 10 years,

I answered him, almost falling off my chair.

Then I asked him to tell me his sequence of events, wanting to find out up to what point our versions agree and at what point they start to diverge. He did not know about the extradition of women, believing that they died somewhere in different places. There was no doubt that they were all taken out of Yekaterinburg. I told him about the "Dossier on the Tsar", and he told me about one seemingly insignificant find, which he and his friends drew attention to in the 80s.

They came across the memoirs of the participants in the "execution", published in the 30s. In them, except known facts about the fact that two weeks before the "execution" a new guard arrived, it was said that a high fence was built around the Ipatievsky house. For execution in the basement, he would be useless, but if the family needs to be taken out unnoticed, then he is just the way. The most important thing - which no one had ever paid attention to before them - the head of the new guard spoke with Yurovsky in a foreign language! They checked the lists - the head of the new guard was Lisitsyn (all participants in the "execution" are known). It seems nothing special. And here they were really lucky: at the beginning of perestroika, Gorbachev opened hitherto closed archives (my fellow Sovietologists confirmed that this had been the case for two years), and then they started searching in declassified documents. And found! It turned out that Lisitsyn was not Lisitsyn at all, but the American Fox !!! I have been ready for this for a long time. I already knew from books and from life that Trotsky came to make a revolution from New York on a steamer full of Americans (everyone knows about Lenin and two carriages with Germans and Austrians). The Kremlin was full of foreigners who did not speak Russian (there was even Petin, but an Austrian!) Therefore, the guards were from Latvian riflemen, so that the people would not even think that foreigners had seized power.

And then my new friend Helium Donskoy completely captivated me. He asked himself one very important question. Fox-Lisitsyn arrived as the head of the new guard (in fact, the head of the royal family) on July 2. On the night of the "execution" on July 16-17, 1918, he left by the same train. And where did he get a new appointment? He became the first head of the new secret facility No. 17 near Serpukhov (on the estate of the former merchant Konshin), which Stalin visited twice! (why?! More on that below.)

I have been telling this whole story with a new continuation to all my friends since 1997.

On one of my visits to Moscow, my friend Yura Feklistov asked me to visit his school friend, and now a candidate of historical sciences, so that I could tell him everything myself. That historian named Sergei was the press secretary of the Kremlin commandant's office (scientists were not paid salaries in those days). At the appointed hour, Yura and I climbed the wide Kremlin stairs and entered the office. Just like now in this article, I started with Sister Pascalina, and when I got to her phrase that “the woman buried in the village of Morcote is indeed the daughter of the Russian Tsar Olga,” Sergei almost jumped: “Now it’s clear why The patriarch did not go to the funeral! he exclaimed.

It was also obvious to me - after all, despite the strained relations between different confessions, when it comes to persons of this rank, information is exchanged. I just didn’t understand and there is the position of the “working people”, who from faithful Marxist-Leninists suddenly became orthodox Christians, do not put a penny on a few statements of His Holiness himself. After all, even I, visiting Moscow only on short visits, even twice heard the Patriarch say on central television that the examination of royal bones cannot be trusted! I heard it twice, but what, no one else?? Well, he could not say more and announce publicly that there was no execution. This is the prerogative of the highest state officials, not the church.

Further, when I told at the very end that the tsar and the tsarevich were settled near Serpukhov on the estate of Konshin, Sergey shouted: - Vasya! You have all the movements of Stalin in the computer. Well, tell me, was he in the Serpukhov area? - Vasya turned on the computer and answered: - There were two times. Once at the dacha of a foreign writer, and another time at the dacha of Ordzhonikidze.

I was prepared for this turn of events. The point is that in Kremlin wall not only John Reed (journalist-writer of one book) is buried, but 117 foreigners are buried there! And this is from November 1917 to January 1919!! These are the same German, Austrian and American communists from the Kremlin offices. The likes of Fox-Lisitsyn, John Reed, and other Americans who left their mark on Soviet history after the fall of Trotsky were legalized as journalists by official Soviet historians. (An interesting parallel: the expedition of the artist Roerich to Tibet from Moscow was paid for in 1920 by the Americans! So there were a lot of them). Others fled - they are not children and knew what awaited them. By the way, apparently, this Fox was the founder of the XX Century Fox movie empire in 1934 after Trotsky was expelled.

But back to Stalin. I think few people will believe that Stalin traveled 100 km from Moscow to meet a "foreign writer" or even Sergo Ordzhonikidze! He received them in the Kremlin.

He met the King there! With the man in the iron mask!!!

And that was in the 30s. That's where the fantasy of writers could unfold!

These two meetings are very intriguing to me. I'm sure they seriously discussed at least one topic. And Stalin did not discuss this topic with anyone. He believed the king, not his marshals! This is the Finnish war - the Finnish campaign, as it is shyly called in Soviet history. Why the campaign - after all, there was a war? Yes, because there was no preparation - a campaign! And only the tsar could give such advice to Stalin. He has been in prison for 20 years. The tsar knew the past - Finland has never been a state. The Finns really defended themselves to the last. When the order for a truce came, several thousand soldiers came out of the Soviet trenches, and only four from the Finnish ones.

Instead of an afterword

About 10 years ago I told this story to my Moscow colleague Sergey. When he reached Konshin's estate, where the tsar and the prince were settled, he got excited, stopped the car and said:

Let my wife speak.

I dialed a number on my mobile and asked:

- Dear, do you remember how we were students in 1972 in Serpukhov in the Konshin estate, where local history museum? Tell me, why were we shocked then?

And my dear wife answered me on the phone:

“We were completely horrified. All graves were opened. We were told that they were looted by bandits.

I think that not the bandits, but that even then they decided to deal with the bones at the right moment. By the way, in the Konshin estate there was the grave of Colonel Romanov. The king was a colonel.

June 2012, Paris - Berlin

The Romanov case, or the execution that never happened

A. Summers T. Mangold

translation: Yuri Ivanovich Senin

The case of the Romanovs, or the Execution, which was not

The story described in this book can be called a detective, although it is the result of a serious journalistic investigation. Dozens of books spoke with great persuasiveness about how the Bolsheviks shot the Tsar's family in the basement of the Ipatiev House.

It would seem that the version of the execution of the Royal Family has been unambiguously proven. However, in most of these works, in the "bibliography" section, the book of American journalists A.Summers, T.Mangold "The file on the tsar", published in London in 1976, is mentioned. Mentioned, and nothing more. No comments, no links. And no translations. Even the original of this book is hard to find.