The Secret Wife(60)
At 2.15 a.m., Yurovsky led the party of ten down the darkened staircase to the ground floor then out into the courtyard. Nicholas carried Alexei in his arms. Another door led down twenty-three steps to a basement and they were ushered into a bare room with an unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Alexandra immediately asked for chairs: she could not stand for long because of her sciatica, and Alexei was too weak to stand at all. Two chairs were brought, and Yurovsky asked the girls and the servants to stand behind the Tsar and Tsarina, almost as if he were posing them for a photograph. He said a truck was coming to take them to safety, then left them alone while he went to check on the arrangements.
They must have been sleepy, Kitty thought, after being roused from their beds. None of them seemed unduly alarmed. Did they whisper amongst themselves? Perhaps they speculated on where their next destination might be.
Next door the guards sat drinking vodka and nervously checking their weapons. The Fiat truck Yurovsky had ordered pulled into the courtyard and, after checking it, at 2.45 a.m. he led his eight co-conspirators into the room where the Romanovs waited. They were alarmed to see faces they did not recognise, but hearing the truck outside, must have imagined their departure was imminent. Nicholas asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’
Yurovsky produced a sheet of paper and began to read: ‘In view of the fact that your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia, the presidium of the Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, has decreed that the former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty of countless bloody crimes against the people, should be shot …
Kitty tried to imagine the terror and confusion in the room. No one could have expected that, even after all the months of captivity. What kind of nation would execute their monarch without a trial?
Nicholas turned to look at his family. According to one report he cried, ‘What? What?’ before Yurovsky drew a pistol and shot him at point-blank range in the chest.He fell straight away, killed outright. The women crossed themselves as the guards began shooting, each at their designated target. A shot to Alexandra’s head blew off part of her skull. Alexei remained rigid with shock in his chair, soaked in his father’s blood, unable to try and save himself. His sisters fell to the floor, where they lay stunned and moaning in pain. The jewels they had sewn into their gowns deflected the bullets so they were badly injured but not killed. Some tried to crawl away but there was nowhere to hide in that bare room.
The air filled with smoke, making it difficult to see, and the guards panicked. They began stabbing viciously with bayonets to finish off their victims, turning the scene into a bloodbath. Some of the girls were murmuring prayers, others screaming. Bullet after bullet was pumped into little Alexei. Tatiana was shot in the back of the head as she and Olga huddled in a corner, her brain tissue spattering Olga’s face. Anastasia survived longer than the others and pleaded for her life but was finished off by frenzied bayonet thrusts.
It was an unrelentingly horrific way to die. Kitty thought of the last entry in Tatiana’s diary: although it was pessimistic, she could never have predicted such barbarity, the terror they must have experienced, the agony of the slash wounds.
Kitty’s hand shook and she put down the book. She felt sticky and could almost smell the choking fog of blood and gunpowder. Suddenly she rose and ran into the lake, wading out deep and diving beneath the surface. The water was refreshing and she felt it easing a knot of headache in her temple. She turned to float on her back under the white pulsating sun.
Could Dmitri possibly have been there when the Romanovs were killed? If so, was there nothing he could do to stop them? She thought back through his novels, searching for clues to the nature of her great-grandfather. He was obviously articulate, very romantic, and prone to melancholy. She realised there was a theme running through the novels of a terrible wrong committed in the past which overshadows his characters’ lives. Could Dmitri have been haunted by a sin he committed? She desperately wanted her great-grandfather to have been a hero, but what if he was complicit in murder? It would be horrible to learn that her ancestor had been involved in this evil assassination of innocents.
When she emerged from the water, Kitty twisted her hair into a ponytail and squeezed the water from it then sat down and read about Yurovsky’s bungled attempts to dispose of the bodies:
Out in the remote countryside, when the guards stripped the family of their clothes, they found myriad priceless jewels stitched into their seams and linings. The Tsarina had rows of fine pearls in a belt around her waist … The corpses lay, blood-soaked, limbs askew, on the boggy ground. Yurovsky ordered his men to throw them down an old mineshaft where he hoped they would be concealed, but it was soon apparent that it was too shallow. His men doused the bodies with vats of sulphuric acid, and the air filled with the smell of burning flesh, but Yurovsky had failed to realise that acid would not dissolve teeth and bones. In desperation he threw a couple of hand grenades into the mine, hoping the shaft would collapse and cover the bodies, but they did not detonate properly in such an enclosed space. At last he realised he would have to remove the family and bury them elsewhere before suspicious local people came across the hideous scene …
Kitty read that when the graves were eventually discovered in 1979, there was a jumble of bones and teeth all mixed up together and it took researchers a long time to identify them. By then there had been more than six decades of controversy about whether all the Romanovs had perished, a debate fuelled by the fact that the evidence was contaminated by scientists who handled it over the years, and that Anastasia and Alexei were in separate graves some distance away. It was only in 2008 that DNA testing proved conclusively all five Romanov children, both their parents, and three household retainers had been massacred. Scientists took a DNA sample from Britain’s Prince Philip, husband of the Queen, who was a close living relative of the Romanov family, for comparison.