The last day of the Romanovs historical facts. The last royal family

“On the conscience of Lenin, as the main organizer, is the destruction of the royal family: the former Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated the throne, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children - son Alexei and daughters Olga, Maria, Tatyana and Anastasia. Together with them, Dr. B.S. Botkin, Demidov's room girl, the servant Trup and the cook Tikhomirov were killed. This monstrous action was committed in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918" - Arutyunov A. A. "VLADIMIR ULYANOV (LENIN) Documents. Facts. Evidence. Research".

At night, a detachment of Latvians, which replaced the former guards, received an order from Yurovsky, who had completed the corresponding course of study in Germany before the revolution, to shoot all the prisoners. The Forsaken Emperor, his wife, son, daughters and ladies-in-waiting were summoned from their bedrooms under the pretext of immediate evacuation from Yekaterinburg. When they all went out to the Latvians in a room 8 arshins long and 6 arshins wide, they were told that everyone would be shot immediately. Approaching the Sovereign, Yurovsky said coldly: "Your relatives wanted to save you, but they failed. We will kill you now." The sovereign did not have time to answer. Astonished, he whispered, "What? what?" Twelve revolvers fired almost simultaneously. Volleys followed one after another.

All the victims have fallen. The death of the Sovereign, the Empress, three children and the footman Troupe was instantaneous. Tsarevich Alexei was at his last breath, the younger Grand Duchess was alive. Yurovsky finished off the Tsesarevich with several shots of his revolver, the executioners finished off Anastasia Nikolaevna with bayonets, who screamed and fought back. When everything calmed down, Yurovsky, Voikov and two Latvians examined the executed, firing a few more bullets at some of them to be sure, or piercing them with bayonets. Voikov said that it was a terrible picture.

The corpses lay on the floor in nightmarish poses, their faces disfigured from horror and blood. The floor became completely slippery... Only Yurovsky was calm. He coolly examined the corpses, removing all the jewels from them... Having established the death of all, they began to clean up... , "stranded with brooms." By three (six) o'clock in the morning, everything in this respect was completed. (From the testimony of M. Tomashevsky, data from the commission of I.A. Sergeev).

Yurovsky ordered, and the Latvians began to carry the corpses across the yard to a truck parked at the entrance. ... We set off out of town to a pre-prepared place near one of the mines. Yurovsky left with the car. Voikov remained in the city, as he had to prepare everything necessary for the destruction of the corpses. For this work, 15 responsible members of the Yekaterinburg and Upper Iset party organizations were allocated. All were equipped with new sharpened axes of the type used in butcher shops for cutting carcasses. Voikov, in addition, prepared sulfuric acid and gasoline ...

The hardest work was chopping up corpses. Voikov recalls this picture with an involuntary shudder. He said that when this work was completed, near the mine lay a huge bloody mass of human stumps, arms, legs, torsos, heads. This bloody mass was doused with gasoline and sulfuric acid and immediately burned. Burned for two days. There were not enough taken stocks of gasoline and sulfuric acid. I had to bring new supplies from Yekaterinburg several times ... It was a terrible picture, - Voikov finished. - Even Yurovsky, and he could not stand it at the end and said that a few more days like this, and he would have gone crazy.

In the end, we began to hurry. They raked everything that was left of the burnt remains of the executed, threw several hand grenades into the mine to break through the never-melting ice in it, and threw a bunch of burnt bones into the hole formed ... At the top, on the site near the mine, they dug up the ground and they threw leaves and moss over it to hide the traces of the fire .... Yurovsky left immediately after July 6 (19), taking with him seven large chests full of Romanov's goods. He undoubtedly shared the booty in Moscow with his friends.

One of the even more monstrous versions about the last days of the Romanovs is described in the historical chronicle of S. A. Mesyats “SEVEN COMMENTS ON THE COMMUNIST PARTY” (Commentary 5 HISTORY OF THE MURDERS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY): “Shortly before the execution of the tsar, the Bolsheviks committed a monstrous crime. They raped members of the imperial family, including the emperor himself. They were supposed to rape the boy Alexei, but the act of pedophilia did not happen: Nicholas II, for the sake of saving the prince, took upon himself the torment and humiliation for the second time. This may seem incredible, and for a long time I myself did not believe that such a thing was possible. ... But read the officially published Diaries of Emperor Nicholas II (M., 1991, p. 682).

There is not a word about the most mentioned crime, but what do the records of May 24 and 25, 1918 mean: “I suffered pain from hemorrhoids all day ... Dear Alix (wife - S.M.) spent his birthday in bed with severe pain in his legs and in other places!” The emperor, neither before nor after this, does not express a single complaint about hemorrhoids, and yet this is a long and painful illness, lasting for months and years. And what is this "dr. places"? Why did the emperor not dare to name them even in his personal diary? Why marked them with a meaningful exclamation point?

After these entries, 3 days in a row were missed, although Nicholas II made entries every day for 24 years, without missing a single day. Even the abdication of the throne did not affect this rule - an event that disrupted the natural course of events in the imperial family and throughout Russia. (Perhaps the rapists tore out several pages incriminating them from the diary: it is hard to believe that the emperor's punctuality was so suddenly violated). What was so extraordinary that happened on the 20th of May 1918? Since there are no intelligible answers to these questions, we are forced to accept that nightmarish version.

First, the Provisional Government agrees to fulfill all conditions. But already on March 8, 1917, General Mikhail Alekseev informs the tsar that he "may consider himself, as it were, under arrest." After some time, from London, which had previously agreed to accept the Romanov family, a notification of refusal comes. On March 21, former Emperor Nicholas II and his entire family were officially taken into custody.

A little more than a year later, on July 17, 1918, the last royal family of the Russian Empire will be shot in a cramped basement in Yekaterinburg. The Romanovs were subjected to hardships, getting closer and closer to their gloomy finale. Let's look at rare photos of members of Russia's last royal family, taken some time before the execution.

After the February Revolution of 1917, the last royal family of Russia, by decision of the Provisional Government, was sent to the Siberian city of Tobolsk to protect them from the wrath of the people. A few months earlier, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated, bringing to an end more than three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty.

The Romanovs began their five-day journey to Siberia in August, on the eve of Tsarevich Alexei's 13th birthday. The seven members of the family were joined by 46 servants and a military escort. The day before reaching their destination, the Romanovs sailed past Rasputin's home village, whose eccentric influence on politics may have contributed to their gloomy end.

The family arrived in Tobolsk on August 19 and began living in relative comfort on the banks of the Irtysh River. In the Governor's Palace, where they were placed, the Romanovs were well fed, and they could communicate a lot with each other, without being distracted by state affairs and official events. The children put on plays for their parents, and the family often went to the city for religious services - this was the only form of freedom allowed to them.

When the Bolsheviks came to power at the end of 1917, the regime of the royal family slowly but surely began to tighten. The Romanovs were forbidden to visit the church and generally leave the territory of the mansion. Soon coffee, sugar, butter and cream disappeared from their kitchen, and the soldiers assigned to protect them wrote obscene and offensive words on the walls and fences of their dwelling.

Things went from bad to worse. In April 1918, a commissar, a certain Yakovlev, arrived with an order to transport the former tsar from Tobolsk. The empress was adamant in her desire to accompany her husband, but Comrade Yakovlev had other orders that complicated everything. At this time, Tsarevich Alexei, suffering from hemophilia, began to suffer from paralysis of both legs due to a bruise, and everyone expected that he would be left in Tobolsk, and the family would be divided during the war.

The commissar's demands for the move were adamant, so Nikolai, his wife Alexandra and one of their daughters, Maria, soon left Tobolsk. They eventually boarded a train to travel via Yekaterinburg to Moscow, where the headquarters of the Red Army was located. However, Commissar Yakovlev was arrested for trying to save the royal family, and the Romanovs got off the train in Yekaterinburg, in the heart of the territory captured by the Bolsheviks.

In Yekaterinburg, the rest of the children joined their parents - they were all locked in the Ipatiev house. The family was placed on the second floor and completely cut off from the outside world, boarding up the windows and placing guards at the doors. The Romanovs were allowed to go out into the fresh air for only five minutes a day.

In early July 1918, the Soviet authorities began to prepare for the execution of the royal family. Ordinary soldiers on guard were replaced by representatives of the Cheka, and the Romanovs were allowed to go to worship for the last time. The priest who conducted the service later admitted that none of the family spoke a word during the service. For July 16 - the day of the murder - five truckloads of barrels of benzidine and acid were ordered to quickly dispose of the bodies.

Early in the morning of July 17, the Romanovs were gathered and told about the advance of the White Army. The family believed that they were simply being transferred to a small lighted basement for their own protection, because soon it would not be safe here. Approaching the place of execution, the last tsar of Russia passed by trucks, one of which will soon contain his body, not even suspecting what a terrible fate awaits his wife and children.

In the basement, Nikolai was told that he was about to be executed. Not believing his own ears, he asked again: "What?" - immediately after which the Chekist Yakov Yurovsky shot the tsar. Another 11 people pulled their triggers, flooding the basement with the blood of the Romanovs. Aleksey survived after the first shot, but Yurovsky's second shot finished him off. The next day, the bodies of members of the last royal family of Russia were burned 19 km from Yekaterinburg, in the village of Koptyaki.

Beloborodov's secret telegram to SNK Secretary Gorbunov dated July 17, 1918 reads: "Tell Sverdlov that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head, officially the family will die during the evacuation." The history of the tragic death of the royal family today has acquired many legends, versions and opinions. It is practically impossible to establish certain facts to the end, taking into account the fact that initially all the information was completely classified by the Bolsheviks and deliberately distorted. And in this article we only provide information from various historical and literary sources. “On the conscience of Lenin, as the main organizer, is the destruction of the royal family: the former Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated the throne, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children - son Alexei and daughters Olga, Maria, Tatyana and Anastasia. Together with them, Dr. B.S. Botkin, Demidov's room girl, the servant Trup and the cook Tikhomirov were killed. This monstrous action was committed in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918" - Arutyunov A. A. "VLADIMIR ULYANOV (LENIN) Documents. Facts. Evidence. Research". Execution. After sending the cook Sednev, the commandant of the Ipatiev House, Yurovsky Ya. Then Yurovsky proposes to transfer the arrested to the basement under the pretext of ensuring security, since anarchists allegedly could attack the house. In fact, shortly before this, the Bolsheviks had already defeated the Yekaterinburg headquarters of the anarchists. As an option, they also considered collecting all the victims in one room and throwing grenades at it (“throw bombs there”), but this option is rejected as too noisy: the population could perceive the explosions pomegranate, as an entry into the city of the Czechoslovaks. After the arrested nevertheless went to bed, a truck arrived at Ipatiev's house to transport corpses under the control of the driver S. Lyukhanov. Yurovsky wakes up the doctor Botkin and invites him to wake the others and go downstairs. The arrested went down from the second floor of the house and went into the corner basement room. There were no chairs in the basement, after which, at the request of Alexandra Fedorovna, they were brought, the arrested were lined up in two rows. The king held the heir in his arms. When everyone was seated in the room, Yurovsky read out the resolution on the execution, and the firing squad immediately opened fire, and the tsar had only time to ask: “What? ". Other sources portray Nicholas' last words as "Huh?" or “How, how? Re-read.” The firing squad failed to immediately kill the heir, and difficulties arose with women: Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, Grand Duchesses Tatiana and Anastasia, maid Demidova. Demidova, with the beginning of the shots, blocked herself with a pillow (into which a metal box was sewn), in which several bullets were stuck, and was then finished off by the firing squad. Also, apparently, Yurovsky personally finishes off the slightly wounded heir Alexei. The difficulties with the execution of the tsarina and the grand duchesses were explained immediately after the execution: the women, unnoticed by the guards, were able to sew jewelry into their linen, which worked like a protective shell during the execution. The firing squad finished off the women with bayonets and shots to the head. At about two in the morning on July 17, the execution was completed. During the execution, the pet dogs of Alexandra Fedorovna, Tatyana and Anastasia were also killed. Alexei's spaniel, nicknamed Joy, was taken in by a security guard. R. Wilton, a member of the investigative team of the Siberian government, in his work “The Murder of the Royal Family” described the execution as follows: “There was dead silence. In a room 8 arshins long and 6 arshins wide, the victims had nowhere to go: the killers stood two steps away. Approaching the Sovereign, Yurovsky said coldly: “Your relatives wanted to save you, but they did not succeed. We will kill you now." The sovereign did not have time to answer. Astonished, he whispered, “What? What?” Twelve revolvers fired almost simultaneously. Volleys followed one after another. All the victims have fallen. The death of the Sovereign, the Empress, three children and the footman Troupe was instantaneous. The son was at his last breath; the younger Grand Duchess was alive: Yurovsky finished off the Tsesarevich with a few shots from his revolver; the executioners finished off Anastasia Nikolaevna with bayonets, who screamed and fought back. Kharitonov and Demidov were killed separately.” In order to muffle the shots, the Bolsheviks drove a Ford car near the Ipatiev House, but shots were still heard in the city. . Sokolov's materials contain the testimony of witness Yakimov that this resolution looked like this: “Nikolai Alexandrovich, your relatives tried to save you, but they did not have to. And we are forced to shoot you ourselves.” Rehabilitation of the royal family. On October 1, 2008, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized Nikolai and his family as victims of political repression and rehabilitated them. In 1981, the royal family was glorified (canonized) by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia. On September 20, 1990, the City Council of Yekaterinburg decided to allocate the site on which the demolished house of Ipatiev stood, the Yekaterinburg and Verkhotursk Eparchy . Here, in the 2000s, a temple was built "in memory of the innocently killed." The reign of Nicholas II was marked by the economic development of Russia and, at the same time, the growth of socio-political contradictions in it, the revolutionary movement. But Nikolai Romanov was a true patriot of his homeland, a loving husband and caring father. Neither he, nor his relatives and entourage deserved the cruelty, mercilessness and humiliation that accompanied them in the last days of their lives. The October Revolution destroyed the autocracy and inflicted enormous damage on Orthodoxy - the foundations of the state and moral structure of Russia.

Vasily Komlev

The last days of the family of Emperor Nicholas II

Entire volumes of research have been written about the terrible tragedy of the family of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his inner circle, and many different versions have been put forward, but in all the works known to me on this tragic topic, the same mistakes of the first versions of the 20s are repeated, which were in their time, researchers are forced to adhere to because of the political requirements of that time and, therefore, to lead society in a false direction, beneficial to very many. Often repeated false versions have become so ingrained in the general consciousness that any other unusual point of view can cause understandable rejection and rejection. Now, as far as I noticed, two main opinions have been created on the issue under consideration: the opinion of the absolute supporters of the investigator N.A. Sokolov, who draw their irrefutable conclusions from his book “The Murder of the Royal Family”, and the opinion of with the study and reburial of the remains of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and members of his family, ”and the conclusions of investigator V.N. Solovyov. no matter how it was, few people believed it, especially in the Orthodox environment.

But I found myself, to some extent, in my research, as if between two fires: one will be crucified, the other will be laughed at. For the sake of the search for truth, one must give up conventional wisdom and try to convey a completely different view and a different opinion. I sometimes wonder if people need the truth that was given to me so hard and mentally painfully painful? Do they really need fairy tales, myths, internal delusions and lies approved by the enemy? And I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that people, by their constitution, are better at accepting the fabulous than the true. Do they need the truth about the last days of the life of the Royal Family - no, they need an icon. Do they need the king and his family who usually lived - no, they need saints. I am deeply convinced that I have the last dissenting opinion on the Yekaterinburg tragedy. And it doesn't belong to me personally.

It so happened that I turned out to be the owner of information of the last days of the life of the Royal Family of a slightly different content and direction than was known to all those interested in this issue until now. Therefore, I was forced to independently conduct a voluminous analysis of all the materials available to me relating to the last Russian imperial family, reconstructing, as it were, anew the events of the past. And an attempt was made to decipher this tragic event for the whole of Russian history from a different point of view, an attempt to see more clearly and show others from a different angle the life revealed to me hidden behind half-truthful documents and outright lies. And therefore I came to somewhat different results and conclusions than those that were known to everyone until recently. No matter how cunningly they hide the truth, the time has come to know it! In vain, it turns out, comrade Voikov confidently boasted that “the world will never know about THIS!”

It all started with the fact that one day, in 1993, I was surprised to write in my diary, where I sometimes wrote down my most vivid mystical visions: “And today I visited the royal family, which should be shot ...”. Somehow, in a subtle dream, my consciousness was included, as it were, in the parallelism of the consciousness of Tsarevich Alexei, and all his thoughts and feelings that he was experiencing at the moment became available to my consciousness. Among the mystics, this state is called "transference of consciousness", but in our Orthodox literature, persons who have such visions are called "mystery viewers". Until that day, my attitude towards the last Emperor Nicholas II as the head of state was not very flattering, but here the deeply felt transcendent experience of the inner life of the Royal Family, passed on to me by a boy who lived 80 years ago, made me rethink a lot, reevaluate and even live in a completely different way. That is why I tried to find and compare everything transmitted: what I saw, heard and felt in well-known literature and, of course, to pass it on to the public. Based on my conclusions and conclusions, I do not claim in absolute terms that this was the case, too big Forces are interested in hiding the truth, but it will be quite difficult to convince me in this world, not to mention the many false documents and myths launched to confuse the reality of what happened events. The version I propose should help to some extent in a professional and objective investigation into the murder of the Royal Family. I think that thoughtful Russian people will agree with me in many respects, because. everything I wrote is more like the truth than fiction. Historical truth, apparently, was looking for ways to manifest itself ...

In presenting the given study, I am compelled to be brief in many respects, because the meaning of the presented version is not in the known details, wandering from one author to another, but in a different view of the events that took place. I inserted dialogues of members of the Royal Family, which are not in any publication, but approximately what they were in reality, based on the situation under consideration. For many of those who read these lines, it will take some mental effort to believe what is written. deep negative feedback works great not only in the world of electronics, but also in the world of thought. An “undesirable” thought will be so imperceptibly suppressed from the world of thought of one camp, perhaps even to the point of disgust for the material being read, that without “support” from the other camp it will not even be able to manifest itself and hold on.

Like any experienced reader, it is easy for me to consider some of the human and spiritual qualities of someone who writes something from himself, which is not something exceptional and therefore other characteristics are given based on my subjective assessments.

Let's start with the notorious personality of Boris Nikolaevich Solovyov and his role in the release of the Royal Family from imprisonment in the city of Tobolsk, where they were sent after Kerensky's arrest by the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917. It’s a pity that I didn’t see his photographic images, but based on those diary passages that got into print, we can firmly conclude that this person is not capable of being the first violin in the escape organization being prepared by the last faithful people! Sluggishness just creeps out of every phrase he writes. Therefore, I agree with some versions that claim that he is not capable of being an independent organizer of any major event! He can only be the executor of another external, strong will. And so, in August 1917, following the Family, he arrives in Tobolsk and, through Archbishop Hermogenes, tries to establish contact with Emperor Nicholas II, which for some reason fails. And there is only one reason - Nicholas II, having an excellent, almost absolute visual memory, remembered a document drawn up by Russian counterintelligence, which said which of those circling around Grigory Rasputin was recruited and by what intelligence. Solovyov B.N. worked, it seems, for the Germans. For the second time, this Soloviev (stubbornly) appears already as the husband of Rasputin's daughter, Matryona, and as the personal representative of the only friend of the Empress, Anna Vyrubova, which should cause unpleasant moments in the house on Svoboda Street, where the Family was then housed. The one whom Alexandra Fedorovna believed and trusted more than anyone else in the world turned out to be “under the hood” of her main enemies - the Germans. In the late evenings, when the guards considered their royal prisoners already asleep, they gathered in the dark living room for family councils, where all the issues of concern to the Family were discussed, not being afraid of being overheard by someone. Usually children reported to their parents everything they heard during the day. At that time Alexandra Fyodorovna paced the dark room with surprising energy and very agitation, and almost in an orderly tone convinced her husband: “You are wrong, you cannot remember it, it was not in that document!”, to which Nikolai Alexandrovich, standing in one place, completely calmly and calmly answered: “I remember, I remember well his last name on the list”. Now, with such recommendations, it was no longer possible to drive Solovyov away. If the Germans have started their own game, let them play through the “exposed” agent. Poor, naive Anna! She will live until 1964 with the idea that it is she who is most guilty of the death of the Royal Family.

Solovyov, on the other hand, is brought together with another “devoted” person - the priest Vasilyev, who served the Family very much by ringing the bells on the day of accession to the throne, October 21, from the church to the house, and during the liturgy, on the first day of Christmas, he proclaimed many years to the emperor, the consequences of which for those arrested were not very pleasant. If, after the first incident, the Family decided to attribute the incident to an unfortunate oversight of a provincial, the second incident aroused suspicion and distrust. It turned out to be a nice couple - two provocateurs. So it's safer and quieter.

Back in the days of “free” life, when the Family lived under the colossal pressure of palace gossip and intrigues against Them from the Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna and the uncle of Nicholas II - Nicholas Nikolaevich and their supporters, when every word was overheard, heard and distorted, when there were almost no there were sincerely devoted and faithful people, everyone developed a certain style of behavior, when you must always monitor your actions and be responsible for every word uttered in front of a stranger. Once, in a close family circle, Emperor Nicholas II said: "They interfere more than the Duma and the parties all put together."

In Tobolsk, the situation has not changed, the Family knows perfectly well that it is being watched everywhere and everywhere, and therefore behaves accordingly in conversations with outsiders, and diary entries are kept by everyone with such consideration, as if they were read by both Bolshevik and German agents. What was the fatal error in the calculations of Tsar Nicholas. Confident that all the Bolsheviks were dancing to the tune of the German General Staff and their actions were to some extent coordinated at the highest level, he did not take into account the very independent third force that had built its nest on the Ural Mountains. Black crows, in anticipation of a rich profit, carefully circled over their doomed victim. When an escape was conceived and almost organized, which was not part of the plans of the Yekaterinburg Chekists, they were able to stop it. And they learned about this plan only from a person close enough to the Family. And it could not have been a guard soldier, as some researchers claim. Many of the servants took on the role of volunteer detectives and spies. An observant friend of the Family, Alexei's mentor and French teacher, Monsieur Gilliard writes in his diary:

"March 17. Maslenitsa... Children sadly look at all these people having fun. After some time, they begin to get bored and are burdened by their imprisonment ...

26 March. A detachment of more than a hundred Red Guards arrived from Omsk ... Her Majesty told me, however, that she had reason to think that among these people there were many officers who entered the Red Army as soldiers, she also claimed without explaining how she knew this that 300 officers have been assembled in Tyumen.”

The naive Gilliard, who had lived among the Family for so many years, never learned to understand the intricacies of palace intrigues. So, somewhere between March 19 and 26, the Family decided to escape. The escape plan, long proposed by Solovyov (German), at Nikolai Alexandrovich, who knew the impenetrability of his wife in a decision once made, lay under a thick, thick cloth. Alexandra Fedorovna sincerely, not even hiding, despised her imperial German relatives for the use by the German side in the war with Russia of vile, low, unworthy of respect methods of conducting it.

Once, while walking with Alexei around the house, Nikolai Alexandrovich answered his question: “Is there really no one in all of Russia who would like to rescue us?”- answered: “What is it, many want, but their plans are unrealistic. And who has a real one - we do not want it, since it is German. They also offer in the spring, as soon as the rivers open, on the sea schooner “Saint Maria”, which is now wintering in the port of Tobolsk, to leave along the Irtysh, Ob to the Kara Sea, and then - the alleged freedom”. Alexei shares the secret of the “German” escape with his sisters. And the children are pressing on their father : “Is it possible to escape on this schooner and stay in Russia?” - "Can, - answers the father, - but it is necessary after we pass the confluence of the Irtysh into the Ob, to make a small coup on the ship, where basically there should be a team devoted to us and, turn it back, but already along the Ob, hiding for some time in one of its deaf taiga tributaries, waiting out the dangerous time. But since our passage will be controlled along the entire route, it will be necessary, under the cover of night, imperceptibly, to slip through the control point at the confluence of the Irtysh and the Ob. And the children, tired of imprisonment, persuade their father for a double escape. . "What, you mom" persuade me. In front of Alexei, who knew perfectly well his power over his mother, all the principles of his mother collapsed. A short happy time of preparation for the escape ...

And on March 26, a strange detachment of Red Guards arrived from Omsk under the command of red officers: Demyanov and Dektyarev, who were well known in Tobolsk. They said about Degtyarev in the city that in his youth he was distinguished by extreme monarchist views. Botkina showed investigator Sokolov: “For the entire time of their stay in Tobolsk, this detachment of Red Guards did not make a single search, did not make a single execution, did not intervene in a single scandalous story.” But since it will be impossible to hide the preparation for the escape from the servants, then a rumor is started through Monsieur Gilliard of the wrong direction of the escape - Tyumen. The princesses, standing at the door, were arguing about who would approach Gilliard to launch disinformation, until Alexandra Feodorovna interrupted them: “Okay, I’ll talk to him myself,”- and slowly went to Monsieur, looking lonely through the dark window opening.

Before the arrival of the Omsk detachment, on March 24, a certain Dutsman arrived from Omsk as a commissar of Tobolsk and the Royal Family, who did not trouble himself with anything, except for observing the Family and the very fact of her stay in the house. Investigator N.A. Sokolov writes: “ 3.5 weeks before the arrival of Yakovlev in it(Tobolsk - V.K.) suddenly, as if by the wave of someone's baton, a turbulent life suddenly began to boil. Somewhere around this time, Russian monarchists were negotiating with German diplomats. The Germans reassured them: “You can be completely calm, the Royal Family is under our protection and supervision.”

April 11 The family receives a secret message, most likely from Solovyov, that a commissar with incomprehensible powers will soon arrive from Moscow, it is possible to go to court in Moscow, escape is under threat, and it is necessary by any means to hold out in Tobolsk until the rivers open. Telegrams from Yekaterinburg Chekists, who revealed through a traitor the plan of the right direction of escape, had an effect on Moscow. The secretary of the Central Committee of the party for the Urals and Siberia, Shaya Goloshchekin, convinces Sverdlov of the reliability of the information received from the spy - the conspiracy of the monarchist Solovyov is a complete reality and the Family is preparing to escape on the ship "Maria" as soon as the rivers open. Moscow decides: “The Council of People's Commissars decided to take the Romanovs to the Urals for the time being. In Tobolsk, - Y. Sverdlov spoke to Commissioner Vasily Yakovlev, - such a mess, you need to clear it up as soon as possible ... You have to settle all this. And the most important thing is that you must complete your mission extremely quickly. Soon there will be a thaw and if the ice breaks, then transportation will have to be postponed until a steamship connection with Tyumen is established, and this is by no means undesirable...” From January 1918, Yakovlev, according to the received mandate, was the military commissar of the Urals. But, not having time to take office, this mandate was canceled by the chairman of the All-Russian Collegium for the Formation of the Red Army N. Podvoisky and Sh. Goloshchekin.

In order to stay in Tobolsk until the opening of the rivers, the Family develops and implements its own plan of action. Of course, this is not Chekhov's play, which was recently staged in a house on Svoboda Street, but the performance, played very cleanly, turned out. It was getting late, everyone went home for a walk. But soon the instructed Alexei returns alone. He first swings on a swing, but there is no one who would pay attention to him. Never in his life did Tsarevich Alexei feel so vigorous and healthy as this winter, but now he must act out the illness, as in Spala in the autumn of 1912. For complete faith, witnesses of his “injury” are needed, very needed. But no one goes out into the yard and then he finds entertainment worthy of a family minion - moving several times on a wooden trough along the steps leading from the second floor of the house to the yard. The roar was incredible, which was certainly heard by all the inhabitants of the house, thus providing a complete alibi for the necessary illness. The father jumped out, fully aware of the deadly entertainment of his son with hemophilia, only when he shouted to the whole neighborhood: “Daddy, daddy!” A warned doctor gives a conclusion: - a severe bruise in both legs, the boy is bedridden for a long time. Alexei’s “illness” preceded the return of the soldier from Moscow with an order from the Bolshevik Central Executive Committee by only one day, preventing, as it were, the possible receipt from him of the secret part of Sverdlov’s decision to take the entire Royal Family out of Tobolsk. According to the document brought by the soldier, the content of prisoners is being tightened from this day, April 12; General Tatishchev, Prince Dolgorukov, Mr. Gibbs, Countess Gendrikova and Mrs. Schneider are arrested, who had previously lived freely in Kornilov's house, which stood across the street opposite. And on April 13, after the first detachment was expelled from Yekaterinburg, a detachment of the “evil Jew” Zaslavsky, equal in number to Omsk, arrives, as if blocking it. Demyanov agreed with Kobylinsky; in which case, in the help of his squad. Then Commissar Yakovlev also took the side of the Omsk people. If only they knew each other's secret tasks!

In the house on Svoboda Street, a performance began, in which the whole world is still being persuaded to believe as in a real event. Palace life is like life on stage. And only those who knew how to play talentedly and subtly lead the intrigue survived. They played great, but too big Forces played against them.

April 22, late in the evening, Commissar Yakovlev arrives to fulfill his main mission in life - to take away and save the Family with his armed detachment of 150 fighters.

April 24, The family is already aware of the external purpose of his arrival and asks via telegram for advice from the Moscow monarchist group of Krivoshein. Those recommend “only yield as a last resort to the categorical prescription of doctors.”

April 25, the second act of the performance. Yakovlev asks for an audience with Nicholas II through Colonel Kobylinsky and General Tatishchev. Nikolai Alexandrovich makes an appointment after breakfast, at 2 o'clock, knowing perfectly well what they will be talking about. And his harsh phrase, spoken royally : "I'm not going anywhere!", was an elementary test - whether Yakovlev had the authority to postpone the departure. Yakovlev did not have them.

The next scene, again played out in front of Gilliard, who is invited by the tsar's daughter Tatyana to listen to the well-known monologue of the empress: why does she leave the "dangerously ill", beloved son and goes with her husband. Alexandra Fedorovna so selflessly and to some extent madly loved her son that if he were truly dangerously ill, then no reason could tear her away from him. And, to know, the Family’s favorite, the simple-hearted Gilliard, had a weakness on the tongue, and the Family, who had studied him to the subtleties, was sure that he would not stand it and would definitely write everything down in his diary or quietly blurt out to someone about what he heard. And he believes everything that His Majesties seriously tell him. At the end of the monologue, Alexandra Fedorovna, in despair, as if blurts out: - “However, the Lord will not allow this departure, it cannot and should not take place! I'm sure that tonight the river will start to ice…” But the real reason why Alexandra Fedorovna decided to go, she told Mrs. Tutelberg: "I must leave the boy and share the life or death of my husband." Perhaps, in order to further divert suspicions from the impending escape, in the center of which the Heir now stands, she offers to volunteer to go with any of her daughters. She can't order them when release is so close. While the others pondered, sacrificial Mary agreed with tears in her eyes.

On the last night before departure, the last instructions to Alexei - now he, with the rights of the Heir, command the coup on the schooner. The father is very worried - whether the boy will be able to insist on changing the route. They agree on a cipher for censored correspondence: seemingly ordinary sentences take on an unusual inner meaning, understandable only to the initiated. In my opinion, the most important and most important was placed at the end of the message.

The family says goodbye AS FOREVER! And they were completely sure of it then. The faces of the Grand Duchesses were swollen with tears. Gilliard notes in his diary:

“Thursday, April 25 ... The Empress, saying goodbye, asks me not to go downstairs and stay with Alexei Nikolaevich. I go to him, he is crying in his bed. The Grand Duchesses return to their upstairs and pass, sobbing, past the doors of their brother...”

Let's add - mortally ill according to the official version. And what kind of grief is this, saying goodbye to their parents and sister only during the illness of their brother and knowing that their separation depends only on his recovery, they are so killed, not paying attention to Alexei, to his suffering? No, just in genuine grief they forgot about his fake illness, and Monsieur Gilliard is too close and naive to strain in front of him in the continuation of the performance. Catch up from your brother the next day they still got it.

On May 3, the head of security, Colonel Kobylinskiy, received a telegram informing him that his parents and sister had been detained in Yekaterinburg. Yakovlev, realizing that he was waiting for the arrested in this city, having made a false maneuver towards Yekaterinburg, was taking them in the opposite direction - to Omsk. Alexandra Fedorovna writes in her diary:

“April 16 (29) ... Omsk Sov. dep. does not allow us to pass through Omsk, as they are afraid that they will want to take us to Japan.”

Unable to resist the onslaught of the Ural Chekists, moreover, declared by them "outside the ranks of the revolutionaries", Yakovlev is forced to send the train on the way back, previously having warned Sverdlov by telegram about the imminent mortal danger awaiting the tsar in Yekaterinburg:

“... Another consideration: if you send luggage (i.e. Nikolai Romanov - V.K.) to the Simsky district (Ufa province. - V.K.), then you can always and freely take it to Moscow or wherever you want. If the luggage is taken along the first route (to Yekaterinburg - VK), then I doubt whether you will be able to get it out of there. Neither I, nor Guzakov, nor Avdeev from Yekaterinburg - none of us doubt it; just as we have no doubt that luggage is always in danger. So, we warn you for the last time and disclaim any moral responsibility for future consequences....”

Just before Yekaterinburg, from the side of Omsk, there is a railway line towards Chelyabinsk, where, saving the tsar from lawlessness, Yakovlev once again tried to send his train. No, he failed to snatch the tsar from the fetters of the Ural spiders. It is to this moment in his life that the memoirs of Yakovlev's wife should be cited: “... how often he did not sleep at night, how he suffered and constantly exclaimed: “What have I done!” Yes, he almost had a chance ... It was not by chance that Yakovlev, a prominent revolutionary, was personally acquainted with the chairman of the Tobolsk Soviet, the Baltic sailor P. Khokhryakov, and the chairman of the Omsk Council, V. Kosarev ... Friendly ties did not help.

On the day of her arrival at the Ipatiev House, Alexandra Fedorovna drew a “swastika” sign on the window of the room she occupied and put the date of arrival on April 17/30. 1918, which later gave some reason to accuse her of fascism. As a mystic, I would rather assume the opposite: fascism, in some part, in some way turned out to be a consequence of the murder of the Royal Family. It was a terrible crime in the eyes of God. Everyone got...

Tobol went to Strastnaya, which means May 2. And again Gilliard observes: "May 4th. Sad Easter Eve. EVERYONE IS DISAPPOINTED...” Yes, they were betrayed again, for the umpteenth time. The departure of Tsar Nicholas II changed the plans of the organizers of the escape. They did not want to take risks because of some royal children. They don't need them. Archbishop Germogen of Tobolsk, partly privy to the plan of the operation, tried to make an unsuccessful attempt during the procession to free the prisoners, but without powerful military support, she was doomed.

May 7, received the first letter from Yekaterinburg. Children are not so stupid as not to understand the gloomy joke of the Yekaterinburg Chekists, who settled their parents with their sister in the house of engineer Ipatiev. They could not help but understand - from this house without external help, which is so helpless, they will not get out alive!!! And then, shocked by the totality of all events, they decided on their own, again unnoticed escape. Given the nature of the restless Anastasia, passionately desiring to live, the imaginary illness of Alexei and the hopelessness of the situation in which they found themselves, this plan, which, of course, came from the younger ones, actually existed. Anastasia cried to her brother: “ It’s easier for them (sisters) to die, they fell in love with them and they fell in love, but for me to die and I don’t know what it is. Together they persuaded Tatyana, and the three of them already Olga. The common misfortune, and indeed the whole life, blinded them so tightly to each other, h then even to run, saving their lives, they could only together. The escape plan, of course, was developed by “front-line soldier” Aleksey, who had only one game during the entire time of imprisonment - he mentally organized various escape options. Father, preparing his Heir, took him with him to the front in October 1915, where he introduced him to the work of the Headquarters, explained how the generals think over, decide and put military plans into action. And then, having escaped for the first time in his life from women's skirts, Alexei perceived, like a sponge, everything he saw and everything he heard. His father, a passionate hunter, taught him how to spend the night in the forest and how to lead the beast. Alexey urged the sisters: “I’ll hide you like that, they will pass by and not notice you”. “Sick” Aleksey leads the changing of the guards scheme, and the sisters have fun on the swings for days, eavesdropping through the fence on everything that the loud-voiced simple-hearted Tobolsk residents say, because. it is necessary to decide where to run, because the chase will rush to the only Ivanovo convent known to them. They start conversations with their childishly naive guards, asking them questions that seem to mean nothing, psychological portraits are drawn up according to the English book they have, you need to know for sure who “does not notice” the moment of their flight, and if he notices, he will not shoot . At first there was doubt, what if THEY would understand the inner meaning of the questions. Then someone said: - And none of them read in English. They only understand German. Who did they mean - guards or servants? Anastasia rushed around the house and yard like a madwoman, so that later she could run into the room to report to her brother, fall on his chest from a run and, with a frantic patter, blurt out everything she had seen and heard in his ear. And the “escape window” is calculated, the path is drawn up, the escape night is determined. as if Heaven itself was on their side,- the weather in Tobolsk was then summer. And all the jewels have already been distributed to faithful people and hidden in hiding places, while stubbornly repeating that they will take everything with them to their parents. They know that they are being listened to very carefully on this topic. Tatyana hid the last jewelry box in the basement of the house, deftly deceiving the guard : “I hid it so that no one will find it except me!”

And here is the decisive night, when the most irresponsible and kind guard stood up according to the schedule. All dressed in winter tracksuits gather together in the Princess's room. But, at a crucial moment, Olga, paralyzed by the strongest fear that came upon her, “fails her legs.” As an older sister, she cancels, postpones the escape. And the escape fails. Apparently, then, for the first time in his life, the “little” brother raised his voice to her, as far as the situation allowed. Although he was very scared, but she violated the unwritten family rule - what is accepted by everyone - becomes a law for everyone to fulfill. It had no effect on her. “Now the nights are still cold(as if they were supposed to spend two nights in the taiga), - was her female argument , - let's run to the next watch of this guard. They did not wait for the next watch of this guard. Then there, in Yekaterinburg, aware of the general doom, while walking with the sick, sitting on a wheelchair Alexei, she, deeply suffering, as if asking him for forgiveness in conversations for that moment of her weakness, which had a terrible price - their lives: “ If I only knew that we then had the only chance for our salvation, if I only knew! ”, - she often repeated. The sisters internally fenced themselves off from Olga, condemning her weakness. Maria took their side, which was not observed with Alexei. Even in his diary, her father never mentioned her after arriving in Yekaterinburg, she is the eldest, she is responsible. Witnesses testified that Olga looked like a person experiencing severe internal trauma.

On May 17, the detachment of Colonel Kobylinsky was disbanded and replaced by Rodionov's Red Guards. That rigidity, rather special, with which Rodionov took up his post, made it clear to the children: they now have one path - Yekaterinburg. Gilliard will write that day:

“General Tatishchev and I have the feeling that we should, as far as possible, delay our departure; but the Grand Duchesses are in such a hurry to see their parents that we have no moral right to oppose their fiery desire.”

Three days later they sailed for Tyumen. Was there any point in replacing the detachment of Colonel Kobylinsky because of some three days? No, it's just that the departure from Tobolsk itself was the result of a change in detachment, and three days were needed only to prepare the departure. Three days later, gloomy Yekaterinburg met them with snow and slush, as if Heaven lowered its reins, mourning their road to death. The escorts were separated: some to the Ipatiev House, others to prison, and the third were not touched.

“Even now I cannot understand what guided the Bolshevik commissars in the choice that saved our lives. Why, for example, was it necessary to imprison Countess Gendrikov and at the same time leave at large Baroness Buxhoeveden, the same lady-in-waiting to the Empress? Why them and not us?”- the same Gilliard asks naively. The answer, I think, is that the Yekaterinburg Chekists did not really believe in their legal longevity and assumed that after their own, almost inevitable, imminent defeat, a very serious investigation would be conducted into the case of the execution of the Family. By imprisoning some and not touching others, they diverted attention from their main provocateur, thanks to whom they managed to thwart the escape and whom they must save his life for later use. They knew: a well-organized investigation would look for him! Going through the inner circle of the Family, well, the valet of Her Majesty Volkov is asking for this role. His book "Near the Imperial Family" gives grounds for this suspicion. Of course, the hand of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, under whom Volkov lived in Copenhagen, went through the manuscript, so her veiled hatred for her daughter-in-law and annoyance with her son are felt there. A person fundamentally devoted to the Family would not have allowed such corrections. In addition, the valet Volkov was in Tobolsk a secret liaison between Solovyov and the former Emperor Nicholas II. It is very likely that he had already organized an escape at the Yekaterinburg railway station, when the unlucky guard suddenly left them, disappearing for a long time in the hustle and bustle of the railway station. But Gendrikova and Schneider refused to run. Nevertheless, he managed to escape when they, 11 sentenced, were led on the night of September 3-4 to the execution of 22 guards. Volkov was then 59 years old. He devotes more than half of the content of his “Memoirs ...” to a detailed description of his escape, as if afraid that he would not be believed and would be checked. But with all my suspicions, I'll be glad if I'm wrong.

From the duty book:

"22nd of May. The Romanov family of (4) four people arrived at the Special Purpose House: Olga Nikolaevna, Tatyana Nikolaevna, Anastasia Nikolaevna, Alexei Nikolaevich and with them the cook Ivan Mikhailovich Kharitonov, the boy Leonid Ivanovich Sednev ...”

Arrival, even in a new prison, is still a joy for children. They are together again. But the new prison is more dangerous and stricter, and again a whisper in Alexei's ear: “Darling, suffer more, we love you very much!” How one does not want to be sick all his life, but this is necessary for the whole Family. Since this sacrifice is needed, he goes to it, hitting everyone during playful maneuvers among the laid out things with his right knee. Father writes in his diary 23 (May 10 : “In the evening, as if on purpose, he hurt his knee and suffered greatly all night and prevented us from sleeping”. I wrote, laughed and went to ask advice from those who were not sleeping the whole first night relatives - you can’t correct a mistake, tear out a piece of paper too. We decided to hide the diary for a few days, then THEY, “secretly” reading the diary, would not understand the mistake. And no one has understood until now: - how can you want to sleep on the first night after a tense separation! Alexandra Feodorovna, even on that day, did not make the usual entry in her diary. The whole first night they spent in the analysis of everything that happened to them for all the time they were apart. The psychological approach to security, based on the results of inconspicuous psychological testing, which made it possible to identify with a high probability a person prone to good or evil, was approved and successfully applied to the guards of the commandant of the special purpose house (DON) Avdeev.

Quite quickly, the arrested won over their guards. This, most likely, saved them later, on June 13, when the Family was suddenly ordered to prepare for departure and they were in tense waiting until 11 pm, until they were told about the cancellation of the move. This was the first attempt to execute the Royal Family in Yekaterinburg, which failed due to the refusal of the guards to carry out the lawless order of the Ural Cheka and those who stood behind them. On this night, from June 12 to 13, the younger brother of Nicholas II, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, was shot in Perm.

In the duty book it is written:

12 June. The usual walk of the Romanov family. Doctor Derevenko was received, who stated that rumors were circulating in the city that Aleksey Romanov had been killed and buried tonight, the statement was made before the commandant [ant] was received.

From the diary of Nicholas II: “May 28 (old style). (June 10) ... Disgusting! External relations have also changed in recent weeks: the jailers are trying not to talk to us, as if they are uncomfortable, and one feels, as it were, anxiety or fear of something in them! Unclear!(Everything was clear to him, since thoughts were read openly on the naive faces of the soldiers).

May 31 (old style) (June 13) Ascension. ... In the afternoon, for some reason, they didn’t let us out into the garden. Avdeev came and talked for a long time with Evg. Serg. [Botkin]. According to him, he and the regional council are afraid of the actions of the anarchists, and therefore, perhaps, we will have to leave soon, probably - to Moscow! He asked to be prepared for departure. They immediately began to pack, but quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the guards, at the special request of Avdeev. Around 11 o'clock. In the evening he returned and said that we would stay a few more days. Therefore, on the 1st of June, we stayed at the bivouac camp, without laying out anything. The weather was good; The walk took place, as always, in two turns. Finally, after dinner, Avdeev, slightly tipsy, announced to Botkin that the anarchists had been captured and that the danger had passed and our departure had been cancelled! After all the preparations, it even became boring!

A little later, the Family found out what intentions the Yekaterinburg Cheka had - to bring everyone into the forest and shoot them. The plan is exactly the same as in the case of the murder of the sovereign's brother Mikhail Alexandrovich, the Bolsheviks did not have much imagination. Subsequently, everyone was already sure that as long as they were guarded by Avdeev’s guards and as long as he was the commandant of the house for special purposes, they were completely safe, he and Moshkin would not allow lawlessness. Through Avdeev, the Family knew a lot about everything that was happening in the wild, from him she also learned about the tragedy in Perm.

A scratch on Alexei's knee gave a connection with the will, because. Dr. Derevenko, who had been left at liberty, was sometimes admitted to him. Researchers are strenuously highlighting the disease of the Heir, which was not so dangerous then, while forgetting about the illness of Alexandra Feodorovna, from which she suffered very, very much. She did not want THEM to know about her severe headaches, severe migraine attacks, and Dr. Derevenko was the only one who could compose and bring the right medicine. In addition, a person was needed for a possible connection with the monarchists. On May 26, one of the chief specialists of the Ural Cheka, Yankel Yurovsky, appeared for the first time. From the diary of Nikolai Alexandrovich: - “May 13(26). Sunday. ... Like all the last days, V.N. Derevenko came to examine Alexei, today he was accompanied by a black gentleman, in a cat. we recognized the doctor.”

He must have thought himself a good psychologist, but in the depths of himself he hid elementary sadistic tendencies. It seems that he wanted to imagine himself as a well-fed cat, lazily playing with terrified mice to death before eating them. But for some reason the mice were not afraid of either him or the approaching death, which they clearly realized and it was very interesting for him to watch. He apparently went through a once good revolutionary school and understood why the Family needed a doctor and, allowing him to see Alexei, was always present at the same time, standing at the head of the bed, not taking his eyes off Derevenko's fingers, cutting off any opportunity to convey something. either or say. Having played enough of this game, he generally forbids the doctor from appearing in the special purpose house. He also figured out the idea with the swing, swinging on which you can hear street conversations, and therefore ordered the house to be surrounded by a second fence so that not a single sound from the street could reach the ears of the prisoners. Officially announcing the cutoff of the curious flowing to the fence slots.

On June 26 (13), the Family receives the first letter from an "officer" who is very much to be believed. For a return message, the Family gathers at night in the Princesses' room by their only moonlit window. Aleksey, limping, got out of bed on his own and settled down near the door frame. The answer is written by one of the sisters, which means that Nikolai Alexandrovich admits a provocation. “My hand is a document!”- he says, not excluding the possibility of a revolutionary trial of himself and realizing what danger this letter, written by his own hand, can represent in this case. All the children, knowing their mother's jealousy of their father's former power, turned in her direction with curiosity and slight irony. Alexandra Fyodorovna hesitated a little and repeated after her husband: “Of course, my hand is also a document.” “If you watch over us, you can always save us in case of danger INEVITABLE AND REAL...”- is written in response to the alleged liberators of one of the sisters under the dictation of the father. On June 27 (14) the tsar will write in his diary: “... we spent an anxious night and were awake dressed ... All this happened from the fact that the other day we received two letters, one after the other, in a cat. we were told to get ready to be kidnapped by some loyal people!”. I wrote it down because I figured it out - the game of provocateurs and this record became necessary. The Chekist who reads his diary must believe in the sincerity of the entries.

The appearance of the Princess is not particularly liked by one guard soldier. Their villagers in royal dresses would have been more beautiful. Another marks the boy's black eyes, not knowing that before he fell into the Ipatiev trap, he had gray-blue eyes. THEY didn't see the tears! The children-prisoners knew very well that every day could be the last in their lives. The strict mother at first severely forbade anyone to cry, but when death appeared in its full inevitability, she lifted her ban. And they, when no stranger saw them, embraced, wept, calling on the Lord, if death is inevitable, then let it come faster. The faces of the sisters changed noticeably, the weeping eyes sunk and dried up. What is the beauty of waiting for death?

Before the Ural Cheka clearly the task was to destroy the entire Royal Family, but the Bolshevik Avdeev suddenly stood in the way of their plan, as the commandant of the DON. They will remove him from this position on July 4 and his position will have to take Ya. Yurovsky. Avdeev's deputy Moshkin is arrested, all the "unreliable" Russian internal guards of the Ipatiev House are replaced by Austro-Hungarians. Sh. Goloshchekin, secretary of the Central Committee of the party for the Urals and Siberia, went to Moscow for instructions to Sverdlov, where on July 5 the German embassy was provocatively blown up by the Left SRs under the leadership of Blumkin. At the moment of the explosion, Ambassador Wilhelm Mirbach, with whom the monarchists successfully negotiated the release of the Royal Family, dies.

And on July 11, bars were placed on the windows of the Ipatiev House at 10:30, and at that time, near the village of Koptyaki, in the area of Ganina Yama, Yurovsky and Ermakov were noticed, who had chosen a mine (about 2.5-3 meters deep) for burial their victims. On July 12, the Ural Council decides on execution. The next day, Nikolai Alexandrovich, during a walk, someone whispered about him, fulfilling Yurovsky’s order rather than out of “kindness of soul”, he really wanted to observe how those doomed from such news would behave. The doomed, having received such terrible news, behaved like true Christians - they order a priest for the next day, and Alexei takes his first bath after Tobolsk. Nikolai Alexandrovich makes the last entry in his diary on July 13: “... No news”. Until now, no one can understand that when the Family plays its game, one should not take what is written or said literally, but the opposite meaning or other subtext is quite possible. And the last phrase should be understood that such “news” has been received, after which it no longer makes sense to keep a diary, which was kept almost daily for 36 years. Based on diary entries, the attitude towards Avdeev and Moshkin is still prejudiced, not taking into account the fact that the Sovereign specifically wrote about them in a negative way, in order to somehow remove from them the suspicions of mutual sympathy that had arisen.

On July 14, Father Storozhev, summoned, came with Deacon Vasily Buimirov to celebrate Mass. During the service, the father deacon, instead of reading, mistakenly sang “With the Saints, rest in peace” and at that moment all the members of the Royal Family knelt down... “You know, father archpriest,- said Deacon Buimirov, when after the service they left the house, “Something happened to them there: they are all different for sure, and no one sings.” And one thing happened - the Family said goodbye to the world.

July 15 - the last flash of hope. From the will came women to wash the floors . “The princesses helped us clean and move the beds in their bedroom and talked merrily among themselves,”- said one of them, Starodumova. They had a hard time with this fun. Yurovsky, of course, carefully observed the scene of washing the floors, while kindly talking with Alexei, knowing that the children knew about their imminent execution, while outwardly nothing in their behavior spoke of this. Then Alexandra Fedorovna strictly scolded her daughters that they played poorly and could not intercept the news from the outside. She simply could not believe that the external will of the monarchists was so paralyzed that they did not even look for attempts to contact them. And the sisters justified themselves together with their brother: he distracted with questions, they spun, covering each other: “There was no news, they didn’t have any note, if they had, they would have said with their eyes, but they took them away.” one of them said.

The damage to the telegraph connection with Moscow on the evening of July 16 looks strange, but for some reason the Yekaterinburg Chekists need Moscow’s sanction for execution, and they request it through Zinoviev from St. Petersburg, and the answer-permission came to Yekaterinburg in a roundabout way by phone from Perm . My assumption: some of the Bolshevik leadership of Yekaterinburg sabotaged the decision of the Ural Council as best they could and insisted on confirmation from Moscow of an additional order-confirmation on the execution of the entire Royal Family and their entourage, perhaps not seeing an urgent need for this. Although in some cases the Yekaterinburg Chekists did not even consider Lenin himself, shortly before this demand for execution, they killed his uncle Ardashev and arrested his two nephews.

The night call from July 16 to 17, 1918 for the arrested Royal Family was no longer unexpected, they were waiting for it for the second day, they had already internally prepared for it and knew where their lawlessness awaited. Even the day before, on July 15, it was clearly audible how, under the room of the Princesses, the guards were freeing the room from things and hired women from the street came to wash the floors. There was absolutely no need to explain to those ILLEGALLY arrested and sentenced to death why the soldiers were clearing the basement of things and why women suddenly came from the street to thoroughly clean the Ipatiev House. Prepare to face death. Hidden in the lavatory behind the pipes is a notebook with the key to the family cipher. Alexey said about pillows - his imagination was once impressed that a bullet penetrating a thick board cannot penetrate a simple down pillow. How is it - soft, stronger than hard? Anna Demidova even took two out of excitement: it’s scary to die, even if you believe that after death you will be met by angels. All who deeply believed in the Lord, they believed that after death they would be together again, all 11 souls killed: Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their children: Olga - 22 years old, Tatiana - 20 years old, Maria - 18 years old, Anastasia - 16 years old, Alexei - 14 years old and Dr. Botkin E.S., cook Kharitonov I.M., servant - Trupp A.E. and Demidov A.S. But the Lord decreed differently ... (Yurovsky in his testimony indicated 12 shot, for which he prepared exactly 12 revolvers for 12 regicides, but the execution on the night of July 15-16 breaks down, and on July 16 the boy Sednev is taken away from Ipatiev at home, the decision to execute was made on July 12, the execution itself Goloshchekin planned for 12 at night. “Tov. Philip [Goloshchekin] warned me- Yurovsky recalls , - that a truck will arrive at 12 o’clock at night, those who arrived will say the password, let them through and hand over the corpses that they will take away to bury”. On the night of June 12-13, the younger brother of Nicholas II, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, was shot in Perm, and on the 13th the first attempt was made to shoot the Royal Family.

On duty of the commandant Sidorov on May 15, it was recorded: “There were no incidents on my watch. Except after the changing of the guard, hidden knives were found in the yard 12 pcs. The above persons under my jurisdiction have been completely surrendered. The windows were covered with paint”. And this is before the arrival of other children and accompanying people from Tobolsk. Yurovsky recalls in 1934: “ He(Goloshchekin) he told me: individual comrades think in order to carry it out more reliably and silently, it is necessary to do it at night, right in their beds, when they are sleeping.” And here is what Mikhail Medvedev “remembered” about the options for the murder of the Royal Family, allegedly discussed on the evening of July 16: - "Hot. We can't think of anything. Maybe, when they fall asleep, throw grenades into the rooms? Not good - a roar for the whole city, they will still think that the Czechs broke into Yekaterinburg. Yurovsky suggested the second option: to stab everyone with daggers in their beds. They even distributed who to finish off whom.” Here Nikulin recalls in 1964: “The question is how? There was a directive: do it without noise, do not advertise it, calmly. How? Well, we had several options. Or approach each by the number of members and just shoot in the bed.

- Sleeping, huh?

- Sleeping, yes. Either invite them in order to check into one of the rooms, throw bombs there.

An interesting entry in the duty book of the Members of the Special Purpose Detachment for the Protection of Nicholas dated June 1: “At about one o’clock in the afternoon, a statement was received by cook Kharitonov that something was lying on a cabinet in the room where citizens Sednev and Nagorny had previously been placed, upon my arrival there, it turned out that there were eight charged bombs on the cabinet indicated by Kharitonov: five of of them are bottle-shaped for No. 35, 73, 92. The remaining two are without No. No., two round bombs and one egg-shaped No. 11, which were discharged upon bringing to the duty room. Isn't it strange to find first 12 knives on the 12 prisoners and later eight grenades. Once again I emphasize that there were originally 12 prisoners.

Alexandra Fedorovna, due to her illness caused by a deep internal overstrain, lately retreating more and more often into the depths of her contemplation-experiences, was the only one who was completely unaware of what was happening, she was not told about their immediate fate. She, one might say, was asleep on the go and she was not awakened at that moment. Father and doctor Botkin, worried that at the time of the execution Alexei might not be able to restrain himself and show THEM a fear of death, persuaded him to behave courageously, although the Princesses, who had huddled in a frightened group, needed more reassurance and support. Alexei could and wanted to walk on his own, but his father asked him to let him carry him for the last time: “It will make it easier for me to walk.” “And me with Jimmy!”- said Anastasia, pressing her tiny dog to her heart. The rest of the sisters each took a pillow. Everyone knew where to go.

“With me, - testified at the investigation P. Medvedev , - none of the members of the Royal Family offered any questions to anyone. There were also no tears or sobs. Going down the stairs leading from the second hallway to the lower floor, we entered the courtyard, and from there through the second door (counting from the gate) into the interior of the lower floor, adjacent to the sealed pantry. Yurovsky ordered the chairs to be brought; his assistant brought three chairs. One chair was given to the Empress, another to the Sovereign, and the third to the Heir. The empress sat down by the wall where the window was, closer to the back pillar of the arch. Three daughters stood behind her (I know them all very well by sight, since [as] every day I saw them for a walk, but I don’t know well what each of them was called). The heir and the sovereign sat side by side, almost in the middle of the room. Dr. Botkin stood behind the Heir's chair (and put his hand on the Heir's right shoulder - V.K.). The maid (what her name is - I don't know, a tall woman) stood at the left jamb of the door leading to the sealed pantry. One of the king's daughters got up with her. Two servants stood in the left (from the entrance) corner, against the wall adjacent to the pantry. The maid had a pillow in her hands. Small pillows were brought with them and the royal daughters. One of the pillows was placed on the seat of the Empress's chair, the other on the seat of the Heir's chair. . Apparently, everyone guessed about their fate, but no one made a single sound”.

M. Medvedev describes the Tragedy very closely : “Yurovsky and Nikulin brought three chairs - the last thrones of the condemned dynasty. On one of them, closer to the right arch, the queen sat on a cushion, followed by her three eldest daughters. For some reason, the youngest, Anastasia, went to the maid, who was leaning against the jamb of the locked door to the next pantry room. A chair was placed in the middle of the room for the heir, Nicholas II sat on a chair to the right, and Dr. Botkin stood behind Alexei's chair. The cook and the footman respectfully moved to the pillar of the arch in the left corner of the room and stood against the wall. The light of the bulb is so weak that the two female figures standing at the opposite closed door at times seem to be silhouettes, and only in the hands of the maid are two large pillows distinctly white. The Romanovs are completely calm- no suspicion. Nicholas II, the tsarina and Botkin are carefully examining me and Ermakov as new people in this house.

The firing squad, headed by Yurovsky, consisted of 12 people: Y.Kh. Yurovsky, G.P. Nikulin, P.Z. Ermakov, P.S. Fakete, Anzelm Fischer, Iledor Edelstein), through the doorway and basement windows, the execution was observed by A.A. Strekotin, Deryabin and I.N. Kleshcheev standing on duty. True, in 1934 Yurovsky said: “... at the last moment, two of the Latvians refused - they could not stand the character.”

Several more people claim to be among the regicides and witnesses of the execution, such as, for example, Chekist Mikhail Medvedev. He “remembers” that the fate of the boy Sednev was decided on the evening of July 16, when it was established for sure that he was released in the morning. And Nikulin claims in 1964 : “In fact, there were 8 performers of us: Yurovsky, Nikulin, Mikhail Medvedev, Pavel Medvedev - four, Peter Ermakov - five, so I'm not sure that Ivan Kabanov - six. And I don't remember the names of two more."

Thinking about Yurovsky's surprising attachment to Nikulin in the times following the execution, I see the reason in the sobriety of the latter. Nikulin did not drink. And on that tragic night, he was the only one of the firing squad who was sober. It is a terrible thing to participate in lawlessness. And they were paid their wages that day. The guards Proskuryakov and Stolov get so drunk that the head of security, Medvedev, locks them in a bathhouse in the courtyard of Popov's house, where the guards were stationed. According to Yekaterinburg rumors, the Tsar's Family was shot by "bandits drunk to the point of bestiality."

Yurovsky, entering the room, moved to the right of the door frame. With a slurred drunken tongue, dangling from side to side, shaking his revolver in his right hand, and a note in his left, Yankel Yurovsky shouted a deathly lawless sentence. His unforgettable face was distorted beyond recognition with fear, wet with sweat and seemed black in the semi-darkness. “How, I didn’t understand? Read it again"- the Sovereign asked him calmly and with irony, but in response, random shots rang out, depriving even the unwounded of consciousness. After reading the verdict, he took a step to the left, standing opposite the Heir - he was, apparently, a kind of mystery to him, and everyone was sure that the revolution would write everything off. In the second of the execution, the eyes of Yurovsky and Naslednik met, and instead of plaintive fear, he read in surprise: "You? Me?"- the boy did not think that it was he, who had so many intimate conversations with him, who would want to become his killer. Maybe it was his first shot at the Sovereign, but it was clear that his main goal was the Heir. A drunken revolutionary hand trembled ... And Anna rushed about the room, hiding behind a pillow ...

When the order was given to carry out the executed and load them into the back of a truck, Alexei should be carried out first, as the lightest and closest to the door. Anastasia, covered in blood, was the last to be carried. Most likely, Yurovsky is lying that he went with Ermakov in a truck to the burial of corpses. It's not his job now. How he lies in his memoirs about all the events that followed after the execution : “Where the corpses were supposed to be buried, I did not know(he was seen in the area of the Ganina pits a week before the tragedy - V.K.) , this matter, as I said above, was apparently entrusted by Philip [Goloshchekin] Comrade Ermakov (by the way, Comrade Philip, as Pavel Medvedev told me that same night, he saw him when he was running in team, walked all the time near the house, probably worrying a lot about how everything would go here), who took us somewhere to the V [up]-Isetsky plant. I have not been to these places and did not know them.” The chief of security P. Medvedev does not lie, cannot lie on trifles when he testifies to the investigator Sergeyev: “The driver of the car was the Zlokazovsky worker Lyukhanov. P. Yermakov and another member of the emergency commission got on the truck and took away the corpses...” From the memoirs of Yurovsky from the age of 34: “I instructed Mikhail Medvedev to take the corpses, he is a former Chekist and is currently an employee of the GPU. It was he, together with Ermakov Petr Zakharovich, who had to accept and take away the corpses. Mikhail Medvedev recalls: “Yermakov sits down to the driver, several people from the guards with rifles climb into the back”, and everything, as if he didn’t go himself, his further story, as if not present, further contradictions even more. When the car got stuck outside the city in front of the railway siding and the soldiers went to the lineman's house, Anastasia woke up from a deep faint. She wasn't even hurt. The bullet fired at her heart lodged in the skull of her beloved dog, causing the Grand Duchess to pass out. Having jumped unnoticed from the truck, she cannot escape from it. If she survived the execution, maybe God helped someone else and someone else passed the cup of death. She pursues the truck all the way to the mine (without any transfer of the bodies to the cabs, - Yurovsky lied again) and watches from the forest across the clearing, holding back sobs, as drunken “heroes” throw people closest to her right from the back of the truck into the well of the mine. A photograph of investigator Sokolov has been preserved, where he sits next to the mine, at the edge of which a trace from the tread of a heavy truck is still visible. This is exactly what Yurovsky and Ermakov planned when they explored the road and asked the mining engineer I.A. Fesenko on July 11 whether a heavy truck with a load would pass here. I think that Alexei was the last one, since he was one of the first to be loaded onto a truck. Therefore, it does not fall on the bodies immersed in water, but on the fallen branches and leaves of trees that have accumulated at the edge of the well in recent years. Here is how Mikhail Medvedev describes: “After Verkh-Isetsk, a few miles from the village of Koptyaki, the car stopped at big clearing, on which some overgrown pits were blackened. They dumped the corpses, and then: " They made a fire to warm themselves - those who were riding in the back of the truck were chilled. Further forced lie: Then they began to take turns carrying the corpses to an abandoned mine, tearing off their clothes. Ermakov sent the Red Army soldiers to the road so that no one would be let through from the nearby village. On ropes they lowered the executed into the shaft of the mine”.

In order to fill up the well, as the original plan of the regicides suggested, they throw 2 grenades there, not at all afraid that they might be heard in the nearby village of Koptyaki (from this we can conclude that they did not have any order about the secrecy of the burial). One of the grenades explodes too early and tears the shaft lining near the surface, the other too late and breaks already in the thick of bodies. When examined by Captain Pometkovsky: ... at the very edge of a wide mine, in clay, a small fragment of a rifled hand bomb was found, while descending into the mine, traces of a hand bomb burst were found on its walls .. Then again, the faith of many Yurovsky, who later claimed that this burial was initially chosen as temporary. Why spend so much effort on a temporary burial filled with ice water and, having chosen it a week before the execution, look for the main secret burial place after the execution for a few more days? Why would they, half-drunk, unload the corpses from the truck and bury the well in the icy water, then, after a few hours, get them back? Think, well, why?!

But the fighters are tired, they did not even notice the loss of one “corpse”, and under the birch at the entrance to the clearing, a fire is already burning and a snack is laid out. They leave the full collapse of the mine for later, or maybe the drunk Yurovsky simply forgot to load the prepared box of grenades. And besides, for some incomprehensible purpose, they were ordered to be near the burial. Lyukhanov, as the driver, remained asleep in the car and from the cab he could hear how quietly weeping into the open mouth of the miner's mine, the girl who had quietly crept in and remained alive. It was not for nothing that he then stubbornly repeated all his nomadic life during the times of militant atheism: "There is a God in the world!". Alexey woke up from large tears that fell on his face. From the depths of the well, he calmed his beloved sister: "I'm alive!", she wailed in a joyful patter: “I call and call and no one answers! Maybe someone else is alive? Alexei looked around. "No, I am alone..." - "They are close. Can you get out?" - "I can..."

The head, surprisingly, worked calmly and clearly, the decision on how to get out of the well itself comes almost instantly: above the head, somewhere at a height of 2 meters, boards twisted out by the explosion from the casing of the mine were sticking out. With naughty fingers, Aleksey unfastens the waist belt from his father’s half-submerged body, removes the belt from himself, connects them together, makes a loop at one end, which he throws with several attempts at the skin knocked out by a grenade. Firmly grasping the belt ligament, straining all his strength and will, fearing severe pain in his knee, he gets to the twisted boards. Standing on them, then he calmly, with the help of his sister, gets out. The well of the mine ended almost flush with the ground. It was already quite light. Behind the mine, a young forest immediately begins, smoothly turning into a dense forest, in front and on the right - a large, heavy truck, and immediately behind the truck - a clearing, 10-12 meters wide, which is easily visible from the fire by the guards located on the right, 30 meters from the mine , under a birch. Alexei really wants to rush to run back to the nearby forest, but his sister stubbornly insists on the path through the clearing - there is a road, she knows and quickly runs across the clearing being viewed. Aleksey, overpowering the strongest fear that had stuck around him, ran after her. After 200 meters of running through the young forest, they reach the Koptyakovskaya road, which has not yet been blocked. Alexei's shock had passed, he could no longer walk on his own because of the unbearable pain in his stomach. Having nevertheless reached the road, they decide to wait for some kind of cart, on which they could quickly leave these terrible places. Anastasia, who has sat down on the other side of the road from her brother, stops the cart of a Koptyakov peasant who is heading to the city for the market. He, having listened to her, agreed to help the surviving royal children by a miracle. He put them on his cart and, turning the shafts in the opposite direction, drove them to his estate, prudently then turning right from the main road leading to the center of the village of Koptyaki, onto the bypass road. Therefore, his return to the village remained unnoticed by any of the local residents.

It was light enough and the sailor Stepan Vaganov, responsible for security, wanted to look into the mine. And he saw a bunch of straps dangling on the beam, recklessly left by the boy. From this moment the mystery of the Koptyakovsky forest begins. The fighters were sure - a boy hid in the forest, he could not go far on one leg. The thought simply did not fit in their heads that he could get through the clearing being viewed and, moreover, his leg was in perfect order. Here, apparently, Vaganov was interrupted by the loud voice of the peasant woman Nastasya Zykova, hurrying to the market in Yekaterinburg, from gloomy thoughts and unsuccessful searches. In a rage, he rushes to her, turns back and, threatening with a revolver near the very temple of a peasant woman frightened to death, drives her to the very Koptyakov. No, Vaganov does not think that Alexei is already hidden in a boat shed on the shore of Lake Iset, and even with his sister. He is sure - Alexei is in the forest. And from that moment on, the whole forest was blocked by the Red Guard team of Pyotr Ermakov, and explosions of hand grenades began to be heard in it - then the soldiers tore the found fox holes. Zykova, on the other hand, instilled fear in the entire village of Koptyaki, and Anastasia was forced to part with her sick brother, leaving him in the care of a cautious peasant. Washed and dressed in simple clothes, in broad daylight, the surviving Anastasia was transported on a fishing boat to the other side of Lake Iset. The two women explained in detail, all too eagerly, how to get to the two railway stations from which one could get to Perm or Moscow. She said aloud that she would go to her uncle in Perm (knowing full well about his death), and with her brother they agreed to meet in Moscow, with faithful people so unloved by Romanov's relatives that they simply would not guess to look for her there. It was dangerous to go to the Kolchakites, because. father believed that Kolchak was at one with THEM. Here is what the security officer Rodzinsky I.I. says in 1964: We spent another 8 days in Yekaterinburg. I must say, we left Yekaterinburg, no one fired at us. The enemy was organized that we were still in the city, and the tenants were already walking around the city (Kolchak's) ...

As Anastasia suggested, the peasant women could not stand it and blabbed somewhere (possibly in the Cheka, because in Koptyaki themselves, the old-timers confidently say - "They shot everyone"), starting a rumor about her alleged whereabouts. According to the testimony of Natalya Mutnykh, conflicting rumors circulated in Perm in the autumn of 1918 about the fate of the youngest tsar's daughter Anastasia, who had fled from the escort to Perm.

When Lyukhanov (or maybe someone else) arrived in the city with bad news, he probably found the very lean, hungover faces of treasure hunters sitting over a small pile of jewelry. Witnesses testify that they saw Lyukhanov during the day in Yekaterinburg, but also witnesses claim that his truck remained in the clearing to the last. The news of Alexei's escape did not please them at all. The non-drinking Nikulin reminded Yurovsky who shot Alexei. The rest could forget with a frenzy. Now Nikulin, who also took upon himself the execution of the Heir, is Yurovsky's best friend to the grave. The news scalded them hard, they had to urgently change the previously conceived plan. Acid and kerosene are urgently received in the pharmacy. The official Leontiev testified that it was on July 17, 1918 that the Commissar for Supply of the Front, Gorbunov, urgently requested 5 trucks, one of which had two barrels of gasoline. Guard Yakimov shows: “After 2 o'clock in the afternoon I went into the commandant's room. There I found Nikulin and two Latvians - non-Russians. They were all sad, preoccupied, depressed.” How, according to the laws of the revolutionary time (and no one canceled the dry law), they were all threatened with execution.

Meanwhile, a telegram from Yekaterinburg was already on the table of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee: “Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Comrade. Lenin. Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Comrade. Sverdlov. At the office of the Presidium of the Regional Council of the Workers' and Peasants' Government. In view of the approach of the enemy to Yekaterinburg and the disclosure by the Extraordinary Commission of a large White Guard conspiracy aimed at kidnapping the tsar and his family (the documents are in our hands), by order of the Presidium of the Regional Council on the night of the sixteenth of July Nikolai Romanov was shot ... On the night of July 16, 1918, the sentence was carried out…”. From this we can conclude that the twice given number of the execution indicates not a spelling error, but an unforeseen transfer of the execution to the next day, and in the confusion they forgot to correct the date from a pre-prepared telegram. Yurovsky in 1934 says : “On the morning of July 15, Philip [Goloshchekin] arrived and said that tomorrow the case should be liquidated. … On the 15th, I started preparations, because I had to do it all quickly.” And tomorrow, it's already the 16th. Mikhail Medvedev testifies in 1963 that “Goloshchekin failed to obtain sanctions from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the execution of the Romanov family ... At parting, Sverdlov said to Goloshchekin: - Say so, Philip, comrades - the All-Russian Central Executive Committee official does not give a sanction for execution.” An incomprehensible discrepancy in the testimony, but it becomes understandable if Goloshchekin was someone else, whose order is higher than the order of Lenin and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

And the fury of Commissar Sh.I. Goloshchekin, forced to give a new order for the already complete, without a trace destruction of the bodies of the executed Royal Family, becomes clearer. In 1919, Sokolov's commission of inquiry discovered a strange burial of five corpses in Austro-Hungarian uniforms in the vicinity of the Koptyakov forest. It is possible that the Bolsheviks got back by shooting some of the “Latvians” who took part in the execution. Guard Yakimov sees only two “Latvians” out of seven who took part in the execution.

The first from the well, according to an eyewitness, was the body of the former king. If Alexei's body was there, they would be the first to lift it, this is how a man with laziness is arranged - first, which is closer and easier (I think that every immediate supervisor, V.K., observed this worldly axiom). The workers did the farming. No one gave witness evidence that Alexei's body was taken out of the mine, except perhaps the false witness of the Chekist Sukhorukov. They took out the bodies and saw that one more female was missing. Since Demidova's face was disfigured by the explosion of a grenade thrown into the well, and the sober Strekotin standing on guard claimed that Anastasia (Strekotin made a mistake with Maria in the dark - V.K.) was stabbed by Ermakov's bayonet of his rifle, and Demidova had stab wounds on her body , then at first they decided that the room girl was missing. It wasn't so scary for them. Then, in 1920, Yurovsky, uninitiated in all details, in his famous “Note”, explaining the absence of two bodies in a common burial, dictated to the historian Pokrovsky : “They wanted to burn A (lexey) and A (lexandra) F (yodorovna), but by mistake instead of the latter with A (lexey) they burned the maid of honor.” Let's note that not the tsar's daughter.. Although even here one can wonder why the hangover revolutionaries, tired of sleepless nights, should dig an extra grave for only two, and not for three or half of those who were shot? And I very much doubt that they, who went into the revolution, would want to dig an extra burial.

True, after the appearance in Berlin in October 1922 of Anastasia Chaikovskaya-Anderson, a friend of the regicide Yermakov, Chekist Sukhorukov G.I. left his “memories” in 1928, where he claimed that he personally raised Alexei from the well, then he was present at the burning of the corpses - Alexei and Anastasia. And here is how Nikulin recalls: 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 ...

"Remember who wasn't completely dead yet?"

- Well, here was this one ... Anastasia and this one ... closed herself, here, with a pillow - Demidova. Demidova covered herself with a pillow, I had to pull the pillow off and shoot her.

- And the boy?

- The boy was right there right away ... Well, it’s true, he tossed and turned for a long time, in any case, it was over with him and the boy. Fast. A strange memory of a participant in a crime whose events cannot simply be erased from memory.

Here I will give the very first document compiled by the investigators 4 days after the Bolshevik detachments left Yekaterinburg: “On July 30 (17), 1918, in the city of Yekaterinburg, Deputy Prosecutor Kutuzov compiled a record of a statement to him by a citizen of the aforementioned city, Fyodor Nikiforovich Gorshkov, that from the investigator Tomashevsky, who learned about that, in turn, from a person, as from a former eyewitness or close to the Soviet authorities, he knows the following details of the murder of the sovereign and his family.

The entire royal family, together with b. Tsar Nicholas II, was gathered in the dining room, where they were announced that they would all be shot, and soon a volley of Latvians followed, after which they all fell to the floor. After that, the Latvians began to check whether they were all killed, and it turned out that b. Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and when they touched her, she screamed terribly. After that, she was hit on the head with the butt of a gun and, in addition, two bayonet wounds.

This record of Gorshkov's statement served as the basis for initiating a preliminary investigation, which I.d. the prosecutor of the court by fellow prosecutor Kutuzov and was proposed to the judicial investigator for the most important cases Nametkin ...- from this we can conclude that then everyone was completely sure of the death of Anastasia, from that time to the present, the Grand Duchess Maria is confused who is too consciously, and who is unconsciously with her sister.

On the afternoon of July 17, the former guard of the Royal Family, Anatoly Yakimov, came to Sister Kapitolina Agafonova and spoke about the execution of all the royal prisoners, his appearance was tired. He told his sister: …followed by shots and the first to be killed were the Sovereign and the heir; the rest were only wounded, and therefore, according to Yakimov, they “had” to be shot, finished off with rifle butts and pinned with bayonets. Especially a lot of "fuss" was with the maid of honor. She kept running and covered herself with a pillow, then 2 wounds appeared on her body. VK. Anastasia Nikolaevna fainted. When they began to examine her, she “screamed wildly”, after which she was finished off with bayonets and rifle butts ... ” Investigator Sergeev will write down: “This “confession” of Anatoly, according to Grigory Agafonov, could not be trusted, since even by the evening of the same day, that is, after the execution, when he came to say goodbye to us, his appearance was “directly amazing”: a haggard face, pupils dilated, lower lip trembled during conversation. Let's ask ourselves a question - why did such a metamorphosis occur with the village boy Anatoly Yakimov only by the evening of July 17? Who or what shocked him so much? Let us ask ourselves why only subsequent evidence will say in different versions that the Heir was the last to be killed?

After an unsuccessful search in the forest for Alexei and after the destruction and secret burial of the bodies, the Yekaterinburg Chekists face an obligatory revolutionary task : the whole world should know - the last Russian Emperor with the Heir and the whole Family were killed in the Ipatiev House. According to their original plan, the world should have been informed about this from Kolchak's investigators, who would have removed and identified the executed Royal Family from the mine, as they found and identified the Grand Dukes and the sister of the Empress - Elizabeth Feodorovna, who were shot and thrown into the mine on the night of July 17-18 in Alapaevsk according to the same plan. They, according to the laws of Darkness, wanted to leave their victims without burial and destruction. But the Highest intervention confused their plans - the Heir and the royal daughter disappeared from the mine. “ According to Prokopy Kukhtenkov, November 13, 1918, - wrote investigator Sergeev, - in May, he took the post of head of the household of the workers' club at the Verkh-Isetsky plant (members of the club had the right to visit him throughout the night: in view of this, members of the presidium were on night duty). On July 18-19, at 4 am, the following people came to the club: Chairman of the Verkh-Isetsky Executive Committee, s.r. and k.d. Sergei Pavlovich Mlyshkin (Malyshkin), military commissar Pyotr Ermakov and prominent members of the Bolshevik Party: Alexander Kostousov, Vasily Levatnykh, Nikolai Partin and Alexander Krivtsov. The head of the club managed to hear fragments of their conversation: “... the second day you have to mess around, yesterday they buried, and today they reburied.”.. He, a witness, heard someone say that they said about the heir that he died in Tobolsk but he's here too." The dissatisfied phrase was buried yesterday, and today we are reburying it, which also confirms the first burial, as was originally accepted, as the main and final one. Something forced them to make a second, secret burial. And the heard phrase about the death of Alexei speaks more likely that they thought out a variant of the rumor about the death of Alexei in Tobolsk. Nikulin recalls: Z They asked the following question: “Why all of them? What for?" Well, I explained why: so that there were, firstly, no applicants for anything.

- Well, yes, any of the members of the family could become a contender.

- Well, yes, even if a corpse were found, then, obviously, some kind of relics were created from it, you understand, around which some kind of counter-revolution would be grouped .... And I will remind you once again that then, at that moment in time, the Bolsheviks were more than sure that they could hold on to power for only a few months, they did not even dream of the years of Soviet power.

If the bodies are securely hidden, and the traces of the burial are repeatedly tangled, the walls of the Ipatiev House are scribbled and painted with nasty things, then one of the participants in the execution must be captured by the Kolchakites in order to be believed. And this “honorable mission” is assigned to the one who overslept Alexei. But the former Kronstadt sailor and member of the Ural Cheka, Stepan Vaganov, could not be captured by the White Czechs for the reason that he got out of his cellar too early (I don’t know if the royal jewels given for ransom were preserved there) and he was killed by Verkhisetsky workers, instead in order to hand over into the hands of the new authorities, as planned by the Yekaterinburg Chekists. Then Yurovsky, taught by bitter experience, "surrenders" his friend, the executioner Pavel Medvedev, not in his native city of Yekaterinburg, but in Perm. Medvedev, being captured, sincerely tells the truth about everything that he remembered and that he was ordered to remember - everyone was killed! He allegedly was not present during the murder itself, but I saw how Yurovsky shot Alexei at point-blank range: “... Yurovsky sent me away, saying : “Go outside, is there anyone there and will shots be heard?” I went out into the yard fenced off by a large fence and, without going out into the street, I heard the sounds of shots. He immediately returned to the house (only 2-3 minutes had passed) and saw that all members of the Royal Family: the King, the Queen, 4 daughters and the Heir were already lying on the floor with numerous wounds on their bodies. Blood flowed in torrents. A doctor, a maid and two servants were also killed. When I appeared, the Heir was still alive - he was moaning. Yurovsky approached him and shot him point-blank 2 or 3 times. The heir is quiet...” Having given the necessary testimony, he (according to the documents) dies of typhus a month later in one of the Yekaterinburg prisons.

Medvedev (Kudrin) Mikhail Alexandrovich, who lived until the 60s, did not appear in any document for a long time, claimed that he was a participant in the execution of the Royal Family, was a member of the Ural Collegium of the Cheka (in August 1917, he acted as chairman of the Executive Committee of the Yekaterinburg Council of Workers and soldier's deputies - V.K.). According to all the documents of the investigators Sergeev (killed on 01/29/19) and Sokolov, only Medvedev, Pavel Spiridonovich, who led the guard team of the Ipatiev House, passes. Although the "laurels" of the regicides in Soviet times were ready to hang on themselves completely uninvolved in these events people. The “evidence” left by M.A. Medvedev (Kudrin) still requires a separate study, they are detailed, polished and literary, and somewhere they diverge from the testimonies of actual eyewitnesses. For example, he understandably hushed up the participation in the execution of such a proven figure as Stepan Vaganova, but claims that the “Latvians” used rifles during the execution, when it is officially believed that Yurovsky prepared 12 revolvers for execution in a cramped room (about 20 sq.m.). But it is impossible not to believe him completely in everything, it is very likely that he was initiated into the history of regicide in sufficient detail.

A serious investigator, N. Sokolov, may have unraveled the Koptyakov secret. Exploring the remains of burnt things in the forest, he also finds things belonging to Alexei: his belt buckle and shreds of his unburned overcoat, as well as unburned parts of his duffel bag. They were in a hurry when they burned, not everything was thought through to the end. And a serious investigator should think - what does the overcoat and duffel bag have to do with it? They were not there at the time of the execution on Alexei. This means that the version of the burning of bodies only on the basis of this cited and proven fact should be recognized by everyone as false! As well as the fact that even then the body of Alexei was not among the rest. The only thing the regicides had was a belt! Sokolov also knew about the time when the forest was blocked, but he did not indicate in the book. It turns out that he understood the reason for such a late blocking of the forest - someone survived and escaped, already being in the Koptyakov forest. Therefore, perhaps, the investigator Nikolai Alekseevich Sokolov suddenly died in the town of Salbery in France on November 23, 1924, as they say, from a broken heart. Only two months will survive him, the correspondent of the Times newspaper R. Wilton, who helped him in the investigation, did not get tired of repeating: “Even if they are alive, it must be said that they are dead!” And this phrase of his becomes, as it were, a binding that, according to one of the secret versions of the investigation, more than one person was saved.

Those Forces that started and organized the execution of the Russian Emperor and his Family also organized a whole bunch of false royal children. Most of all, they launched false Alekseev and false Anastasius into life, as if warning the appearance of real ones, who would find it difficult to break through the false ones, zombified by deep hypnosis (or simply possessed by fallen spirits) or forced to make “confessions” under torture. The testimony of the Permian doctor Utkin, given by him on February 10, 1919, has been preserved. According to him, at the end of September 1918, he was unexpectedly summoned to the Permian Cheka to provide medical assistance to a badly beaten young woman, who, either falling into unconsciousness or regaining consciousness, managed to say: “I am the daughter of Sovereign Anastasia.” It was for this confession that an unknown girl was beaten. Then a rumor was launched that this woman, who called herself Anastasia, was subsequently shot and even the place of her “secret” burial was indicated.

A “duck” was put into practice about the secret export on October 3, 1918 of the queen and three (?) Tsar’s daughters from Perm to Moscow, and then abroad, where they lived separately under fictitious names. All false princesses, for example, Princess Maria de Durazzo (!), have confidence in themselves as a saved royal daughter and how they were saved, but no one, except for Anastasia Tchaikovsky-Anderson, has memories related to intimate aspects the life of the Family. And how one must not understand the Family in order to believe that one of them made a deal with the Bolsheviks - none of them would have agreed to a separate or secret life even under pain of death, which they, as people very much believers were not afraid of it in the way that those in whom the body is primary, but the soul does not exist, are afraid of it. It seems that Grand Duke Kirill played like the Bolsheviks, asking the Romanian queen "for family reasons" not to mention that the princesses Anastasia and Maria were passing through Romania in 1919. But investigator Sergeev left a document that puts an end to the salvation of the entire Family: “Despite all the facts proving the undoubted presence of a heinous murder, a number of people claim that members of the royal family were not shot, but were transported from Yekaterinburg to Perm or Verkhoturye. In view of this, a special investigation was carried out, which, however, did not confirm these rumors, since not a single person was found who himself would have seen the departure of the royal family ... ”

The descriptions of the execution in the basement of the Ipatiev House by various witnesses necessarily, too convexly and even intrusively, emphasize the death of the Heir and Anastasia, while for some reason it turns out differently for everyone.

Of all the pseudo-Anastasius known to me, of course, Anna Chaikovskaya-Anderson is most impressed. In her actions and behavior there is something from the handwriting of the Family. Anastasia could play such a role. If she could act out a scene of cheerful cleaning of the premises in front of Yurovsky, knowing about the imminent and inevitable death, any other role in life would no longer frighten her. Her appearance on the foreign stage was well thought out and organized in the spirit of palace intrigue: in the fall of 1922, a titled gentleman arrives in Berlin from Paris and starts a rumor about the escaped Anastasia. Shortly after his arrival in the early morning, not far from the policeman on duty, a young girl rushes into the Landwehrkanal. Of course, they save her, but she does not answer any questions and she is placed in a hospital for the mentally ill - in the town of Dahldorf near Berlin. All metropolitan newspapers write about this case. Anastasia is simply obliged to lose the memory of the most terrible days in her biography in order to save her life. If she remembered everything, thought and spoke as it was in her real life in Yekaterinburg and the moment of her salvation with her brother, then I doubt that she could remain among those living on earth for a long time - this is according to my magical-mystical version. She remembered everything in fits and starts: a shot, insensibility, a blackout ... then the stars ... then she was being taken somewhere on a peasant cart ... And, according to ordinary political logic, she must “forget” a lot about Russia and “unlearn how to ” to speak Russian, while understanding it, saving lives from trouble to those who saved her and the possible life of her brother. “I asked her questions in Russian, and she answered me in German. During the operation, the patient spoke English, ”professor Rudnev, who treated her, testified. Apparently, there were too many reasons to recognize the surviving Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in the “imposter”. She was recognized by most of the Romanovs who survived and lived abroad - the Emperor's sisters Olga Alexandrovna and Xenia Alexandrovna, the Grand Dukes Boris and Andrei Vladimirovich and others, except for the "Emperor" Kirill Vladimirovich who declared himself the head of the Russian Imperial House and his entourage, as well as " leader” of foreign monarchists Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. That is, it was not recognized only by those who claimed to become the next emperor in the event of the restoration of the monarchy in Russia. Even the outward photographic resemblance, the structure of the auricles, the trace of a reduced mole on the body where they had once reduced a mole from young Anastasia, and the handwriting examination, which gave positive results, did not convince them. During one of the trials, she forced the tsarina's brother Ernst of Hesse to take a back seat, reminding him how during the war he, a German general, came to Petrograd incognito. Her teacher, Monsieur Gilliard, at the first meeting, recognized Anastasia in Anderson, but a year later he renounces his recognition. One can understand his smart, but weak character, by imagining how much pressure with danger to life fell on him, and, on the other hand, his dream came true and he, nevertheless, overcoming his ridiculous complexes, got married. His wife was the former nanny of the royal children Tyagleva A.A. Did he know with what joy the Grand Duchesses (Alexey was not allowed to do such an adult business) in Tobolsk picked up a bride for him and imperceptibly brought them together? He didn't even notice it. But Anderson did not recognize Volkov's valet. I suppose that the first commandant of the Ipatiev House, Avdeev, who secretly, together with his deputy Moshkin, sided with the Sovereign, could tell Nicholas II who had betrayed their escape from Tobolsk. John of Kronstadt once said to one of the tsar's servants instead of a blessing: "And hell to you." Volkov himself, feeding from the table of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, writes about his meeting 7 years after the Yekaterinburg tragedy in a streamlined way: “I found in Tchaikovsky (Anderson) little resemblance to Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and I myself was not recognized as Tchaikovsky ...”

“The Romanovs treated Anastasia more cruelly than the Bolsheviks,” one Soviet diplomat commented on this story in an interview with Botkin Jr. ... (In modern media, it was first announced that among the found remains of the Royal Family, there were not enough remains of Alexei and Anastasia, but soon Anastasia for some reason was replaced by Maria). The well-known American scientist of world renown, forensic anthropologist Dr. Mapes arrived in Yekaterinburg on July 22, 1992 with his team. Based on his professional experience, he concluded that the age of the remains of the youngest woman lies in the range of 18-20 years. Anna Anderson-Tchaikovsky-Monaghan died quite recently, in 1984, her body was cremated. She did not have children, but after herself she left notes of her memories, which, we hope, will someday appear in our press.

Alexei did not even live to see his 14th birthday - August 12th. From a severe bruise due to an unsuccessful fall into the mine, he apparently began a strong internal hemorrhage. And he, a few days after the tragedy in the Ipatiev House, in unprecedented agony and loneliness, not daring to shout a word from pain, so as not to bring trouble to the peasant who hid him, dies at night in a wooden boat shed that stood on the shore of Lake Isetskoye.

In Orthodox literature, the following testimony of Archpriest Stefan (Lyashevsky) has been preserved: “During the glorification of the Monk Seraphim of Sarov in 1903, a famous all of Russia for the sake of Christ, the holy fool, blessed Pasha Sarovskaya... The blessed one, while waiting for the sovereign, did not order any special preparations, but asked to make 9 soldiers out of clay and cook a pot of potatoes in their uniforms... Paraskeva Ivanovna, when the sovereign entered, took a wand and knocked the heads of all the soldiers, predicting their martyrdom, and offered potatoes in their uniforms for the meal, which meant the severity of their last days. Really blessed without meaning made of clay 9 toy soldiers ". You can’t speak plainly to fools, these are the unwritten laws of those living in the visible and invisible world at the same time, so as not to spill pearls in front of enemies ...

The journalist Wilton wrote: “On the very edge of the window sill, three (!) Inscriptions were made in ink one above the other:

In the first line, the year of execution is clearly understood, in the second 9 signs they talk about the number of people killed in this bloodied room in order to bind their souls posthumously as close to the earth as possible. And the third of the 5 signs speaks of the death of 5 very high persons, where one number “7” is a masculine number, and four “8” numbers are feminine numbers.

One source says: “The mystical letters, alphabets and numbers found in the sections and subsections of the Kabbalah are perhaps the most dangerous parts in it, and especially the numbers. We say dangerous because they are the most capable of producing effects and results...” Let us note that since September 1917, according to the Jewish calendar, the year was 5678. The cabalists prayed for this year, they were sure that their false messiah would come in this very year. According to numerology, if you add up the numbers of the year: 5+6+7+8=26, where 26 is the number of Jehovah. Such a combination of numbers could not be missed by them, since such a combination of numbers with such a summable result could only happen once in the calendar history of the Jewish calendar. True, the year 1999 according to the Jewish calendar is 5759 = 26, and we see a considerable similarity between the present time and the revolutionary one. There are too many parallels to ignore.

Yes, the mystical Ipatiev circle of the Russian royal family of the Romanovs, which began with the Ipatiev Monastery, something does not close at the house of the engineer Ipatiev, as dreamed by the dark secret forces that fell upon autocratic Russia. They did not get into their shaggy paws for the dark outrage of the body of the Heir and the youngest royal daughter Anastasia. According to some laws still incomprehensible to me, even such an outcome carried enormous significance for Orthodox Russia, for its future ...

The Russian elders-seers of the beginning of the century saw in their insights the End of the World, the end of OUR History as a clear inevitability already in the 20s of this century. The mystical power of the Retainer-Derzhavu (if we look for comparisons, then in a rough approximation, this is similar to the village belief that the sorcerer's deathbed transfer of his gift to a person close by blood through the obligatory touch) mysteriously passed from Tsar Nicholas II after death to his son Alexei, who was not killed no one then, on July 17, 1918, and who died later due to his natural illness, having escaped the black posthumous ritual. After the death of Alexei, the Derzhava was mystically handed over to Stalin. This sacrament is forgotten... If this had not happened, what the elders were talking about would have happened - the end of OUR history. None of the researchers could suggest that the strange sealed barrels could also contain ritually charmed water to destroy the invisible royal clothes and symbols. General Dieterichs writes: “At about 9 o'clock in the morning (July 18-19 -?) a truck arrived with a supply of gasoline and a large barrel of kerosene, 10-12 pounds. A few hours later another truck came to the same place; there were 2 or 3 barrels on it, but it is not known with what...”

The playwright E. Radzinsky asked his mysterious Guest: “Didn't you... with your, apparently, great opportunities, not try to check and open the grave indicated by Yurovsky? And open the riddle?.. Did you know where it was?..” He (the old Chekist - V.K.) grinned, then said: “Whether I tried or not, but this is a terrible place, believe me ... and first I must go there come the priest...” Maybe that’s why comrade Pinkhus Voikov boasted so confidently that “the world will never know about this!” too close to her...

The destruction of not only the tsar, but also the mystical power of the Retainer, acquired by the Russian tsars, prayed to by the entire Russian nation for centuries, must necessarily entail the destruction of an independent national state, which did not happen during the subsequent civil catastrophe. But Russia had to pay a very big sacrifice of blood and suffering for the preservation of its independence. A modern mystical source states as follows: “The issue of the use of power is very painful and relevant in human society. Power is usurped by man everywhere in all spheres of life on the basis of traditionally established ideas. According to these notions, the threads of guiding the life of society fell into the hands of people who, in essence, are direct antagonists of the true bearers of power, who from ancient times were called the Anointed of God... the monarchical principle of building a society, magically sealed by the blood of the Russian tsar and his family... Such a violent break... cannot but affect the future fate of mankind.”

Yes, it's hard to believe everything. But I believe that only the archives of both our special services and foreign ones can confirm or refute everything. Let's hope they get published someday.

Portal for the student. Self-training

RELATED ARTICLES