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

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

There is also no unity among lawyers as to whether the execution was sanctioned by the highest Soviet leadership. If forensic expert Yu. Zhuk considers it an undeniable fact that the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council acted in accordance with the instructions of the first persons of the Soviet state, then the senior investigator for special important matters UPC Russian Federation V. N. Solovyov, who since 1993 had been investigating the circumstances of the murder of the royal family, in his interviews in 2008-2011, argued that the execution of Nicholas II and his family was carried out without the sanction of Lenin and Sverdlov.

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

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

background

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

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

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

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

Course of events

Link to Yekaterinburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imprisonment in the Ipatiev House

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

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

The royal family spent 78 days in their last home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are also reports of the theft of royal things by the guards. The guards also stole food sent to the arrested by the nuns of the Novo-Tikhvin convent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replacing Commandant Avdeev with Yurovsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending cook Leonid Sednev

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

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

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

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

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

Execution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question about the composition of the firing squad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

disinformation campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fate of the Romanovs

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

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

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

The prince was released.

The murder of Mikhail Alexandrovich in Perm

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

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

Alapaevskoe murder

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

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

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

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

Execution of the Grand Dukes in Petrograd

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

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

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

Testimony of contemporaries

Memoirs of Trotsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the diary of V. P. Milyutin

V. P. Milyutin wrote:

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

Memories of participants in the execution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G. P. Nikulin testified:

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

Yurovsky's memories

Yurovsky's memoirs are known in three versions:

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

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

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

Diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destruction and burial of the remains

Death of the Romanovs (1918-1919)

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

Yurovsky's version

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

From the memoirs of Yurovsky (spelling preserved):

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

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

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

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

Analysis of the investigator Solovyov

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

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

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

Reaction to the shooting

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

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

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

Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The further fate of the persons involved in the execution

Members of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council:

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

Direct performers:

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

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

Perm murder:

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

Canonization and church veneration of the royal family

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

Alternative theories

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

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

Rumors about the "miraculous salvation" of all or part of the royal family, and even the king himself, began to spread almost immediately after the execution. Thus, the adventurer B. N. Solovyov, the former husband of Rasputin’s daughter Matryona, claimed that allegedly “the Sovereign escaped by flying to Tibet to the Dalai Lama”, and the witness Samoilov, referring to the guard of the Ipatiev House A. S. Varakusheva, claimed that allegedly the royal family was not shot, but "loaded into a wagon."

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

Exhibitions

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

In art

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

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

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

From renunciation to execution: the life of the Romanovs in exile through the eyes of the last empress

On March 2, 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne. Russia was left without a king. And the Romanovs ceased to be a royal family.

Perhaps this was Nikolai Alexandrovich's dream - to live as if he were not an emperor, but simply the father of a large family. Many people said that he soft temper. Empress Alexandra Feodorovna was his opposite: she was seen as a sharp and domineering woman. He was the head of the country, but she was the head of the family.

She was prudent and stingy, but humble and very pious. She knew how to do a lot: she was engaged in needlework, painted, and during the First World War she looked after the wounded - and taught her daughters to make dressings. The simplicity of the royal upbringing can be judged by the letters of the Grand Duchesses to their father: they easily wrote to him about the "idiotic photographer", "nasty handwriting" or that "the stomach wants to eat, it is already cracking." Tatyana in letters to Nikolai signed "Your faithful Ascensionist", Olga - "Your faithful Elisavetgradets", and Anastasia did this: "Your daughter Nastasya, who loves you. Shvybzik. ANRPZSG Artichokes, etc."

A German who grew up in the UK, Alexandra wrote mostly in English, but she spoke Russian well, albeit with an accent. She loved Russia - just like her husband. Anna Vyrubova, maid of honor and close girlfriend Alexandra, wrote that Nikolai was ready to ask his enemies for one thing: not to expel him from the country and let him live with his family "the simplest peasant." Perhaps the imperial family would really be able to live by their work. But the Romanovs were not allowed to live a private life. Nicholas from the king turned into a prisoner.

"The thought that we are all together pleases and comforts..."Arrest in Tsarskoye Selo

"The sun blesses, prays, holds on to her faith and for the sake of her martyr. She does not interfere in anything (...). Now she is only a mother with sick children ..." - the former Empress Alexandra Feodorovna wrote to her husband on March 3, 1917.

Nicholas II, who signed the abdication, was at Headquarters in Mogilev, and his family was in Tsarskoye Selo. The children fell ill one by one with the measles. At the beginning of each diary entry, Alexandra indicated what the weather was like today and what temperature each of the children had. She was very pedantic: she numbered all her letters of that time so that they would not get lost. The wife's son was called baby, and each other - Alix and Nicky. Their correspondence is more like the communication of young lovers than a husband and wife who have already lived together for more than 20 years.

“At first glance, I realized that Alexandra Fedorovna, a smart and attractive woman, although now broken and irritated, had an iron will,” wrote Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government.

On March 7, the Provisional Government decided to place the former imperial family under arrest. The attendants and servants who were in the palace could decide for themselves whether to leave or stay.

"You can't go there, Colonel"

On March 9, Nicholas arrived in Tsarskoye Selo, where he was first greeted not as an emperor. "The officer on duty shouted: 'Open the gates to the former tsar.' (...) When the sovereign passed by the officers gathered in the vestibule, no one greeted him. The sovereign did it first. Only then did everyone give him greetings," wrote valet Alexei Volkov.

According to the memoirs of witnesses and the diaries of Nicholas himself, it seems that he did not suffer from the loss of the throne. “Despite the conditions in which we now find ourselves, the thought that we are all together is comforting and encouraging,” he wrote on March 10. Anna Vyrubova (she stayed with the royal family, but was soon arrested and taken away) recalled that he was not even offended by the attitude of the guard soldiers, who were often rude and could say to the former Supreme Commander: “You can’t go there, Mr. Colonel, come back when you they say!"

A vegetable garden was set up in Tsarskoye Selo. Everyone worked: the royal family, close associates and servants of the palace. Even a few soldiers of the guard helped

On March 27, the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, forbade Nikolai and Alexandra to sleep together: the spouses were allowed to see each other only at the table and speak to each other exclusively in Russian. Kerensky did not trust the former empress.

In those days, an investigation was underway into the actions of the couple's inner circle, it was planned to interrogate the spouses, and the minister was sure that she would put pressure on Nikolai. "People like Alexandra Feodorovna never forget anything and never forgive anything," he later wrote.

Alexei's mentor Pierre Gilliard (he was called Zhilik in the family) recalled that Alexandra was furious. "To do this to the sovereign, to do this disgusting thing to him after he sacrificed himself and abdicated in order to avoid a civil war - how low, how petty!" she said. But in her diary there is only one discreet entry about this: "N<иколаю>and I'm only allowed to meet at mealtimes, not to sleep together."

The measure did not last long. On April 12, she wrote: "Tea in the evening in my room, and now we sleep together again."

There were other restrictions - domestic. The guards reduced the heating of the palace, after which one of the ladies of the court fell ill with pneumonia. The prisoners were allowed to walk, but passers-by looked at them through the fence - like animals in a cage. Humiliation did not leave them at home either. As Count Pavel Benkendorf said, "when the Grand Duchesses or the Empress approached the windows, the guards allowed themselves to behave indecently in front of their eyes, thus causing the laughter of their comrades."

The family tried to be happy with what they have. At the end of April, a garden was laid out in the park - the turf was dragged by the imperial children, and servants, and even guard soldiers. Chopped wood. We read a lot. They gave lessons to the thirteen-year-old Alexei: due to the lack of teachers, Nikolai personally taught him history and geography, and Alexander taught the Law of God. We rode bicycles and scooters, swam in a pond in a kayak. In July, Kerensky warned Nikolai that, due to the unsettled situation in the capital, the family would soon be moved south. But instead of the Crimea they were exiled to Siberia. In August 1917, the Romanovs left for Tobolsk. Some of the close ones followed them.

"Now it's their turn." Link in Tobolsk

“We settled far from everyone: we live quietly, we read about all the horrors, but we won’t talk about it,” Alexandra wrote to Anna Vyrubova from Tobolsk. The family was settled in the former governor's house.

Despite everything, the royal family remembered life in Tobolsk as "quiet and calm"

In correspondence, the family was not limited, but all messages were viewed. Alexandra corresponded a lot with Anna Vyrubova, who was either released or arrested again. They sent parcels to each other: the former maid of honor once sent "a wonderful blue blouse and delicious marshmallow", and also her perfume. Alexandra answered with a shawl, which she also perfumed - with vervain. She tried to help her friend: "I send pasta, sausages, coffee - although fasting is now. I always pull greens out of the soup so that I don’t eat the broth, and I don’t smoke." She hardly complained, except for the cold.

In Tobolsk exile, the family managed to maintain the old way of life in many ways. Even Christmas was celebrated. There were candles and a Christmas tree - Alexandra wrote that the trees in Siberia are of a different, unusual variety, and "it smells strongly of orange and tangerine, and resin flows all the time along the trunk." And the servants were presented with woolen vests, which the former empress knitted herself.

In the evenings, Nikolai read aloud, Alexandra embroidered, and her daughters sometimes played the piano. Alexandra Fedorovna's diary entries of that time are everyday: "I drew. I consulted with an optometrist about new glasses", "I sat and knitted on the balcony all afternoon, 20 ° in the sun, in a thin blouse and a silk jacket."

Life occupied the spouses more than politics. Only the Treaty of Brest really shook them both. "A humiliating world. (...) Being under the yoke of the Germans is worse Tatar yoke", Alexandra wrote. In her letters, she thought about Russia, but not about politics, but about people.

Nikolai loved to do physical labor: cut firewood, work in the garden, clean the ice. After moving to Yekaterinburg, all this turned out to be banned.

In early February, we learned about the transition to new style chronology. "Today is February 14. There will be no end to misunderstandings and confusion!" - wrote Nikolai. Alexandra called this style "Bolshevik" in her diary.

On February 27, according to the new style, the authorities announced that "the people do not have the means to support the royal family." The Romanovs were now provided with an apartment, heating, lighting and soldiers' rations. Each person could also receive 600 rubles a month from personal funds. Ten servants had to be fired. "It will be necessary to part with the servants, whose devotion will lead them to poverty," wrote Gilliard, who remained with the family. Butter, cream and coffee disappeared from the tables of the prisoners, there was not enough sugar. The family began to feed the locals.

Food card. “Before the October coup, everything was plentiful, although they lived modestly,” recalled the valet Alexei Volkov. “Dinner consisted of only two courses, but sweet things happened only on holidays.”

This Tobolsk life, which the Romanovs later recalled as quiet and calm - even despite the rubella that the children had had - ended in the spring of 1918: they decided to move the family to Yekaterinburg. In May, the Romanovs were imprisoned in the Ipatiev House - it was called a "house of special purpose." Here the family spent the last 78 days of their lives.

Last days.In "house of special purpose"

Together with the Romanovs, their close associates and servants arrived in Yekaterinburg. Someone was shot almost immediately, someone was arrested and killed a few months later. Someone survived and was subsequently able to tell about what happened in the Ipatiev House. Only four remained to live with the royal family: Dr. Botkin, footman Trupp, maid Nyuta Demidova and cook Leonid Sednev. He will be the only one of the prisoners who will escape execution: on the day before the murder he will be taken away.

Telegram from the Chairman of the Ural Regional Council to Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov, April 30, 1918

“The house is good, clean,” Nikolai wrote in his diary. “We were given four large rooms: a corner bedroom, a dressing room, a dining room next to it with windows to the garden and overlooking the low-lying part of the city, and, finally, a spacious hall with an arch without doors. "The commandant was Alexander Avdeev - as they said about him," a real Bolshevik "(later he will be replaced Yakov Yurovsky.) The instructions for protecting the family said: "The commandant must bear in mind that Nikolai Romanov and his family are Soviet prisoners, therefore, an appropriate regime is being established in the place of his detention."

The instruction ordered the commandant to be polite. But during the first search, a reticule was snatched from Alexandra's hands, which she did not want to show. “Until now, I have dealt with honest and decent people,” Nikolai remarked. But I received an answer: "Please do not forget that you are under investigation and arrest." The tsar's entourage was required to call family members by their first and patronymic names instead of "Your Majesty" or "Your Highness". Alexandra was truly pissed off.

The arrested got up at nine, drank tea at ten. The rooms were then checked. Breakfast - at one, lunch - about four or five, at seven - tea, at nine - dinner, at eleven they went to bed. Avdeev claimed that two hours of walking were supposed to be a day. But Nikolai wrote in his diary that only an hour was allowed to walk a day. To the question "why?" the former king was answered: "To make it look like a prison regime."

All prisoners were forbidden any physical labor. Nicholas asked permission to clean the garden - refusal. For a family that spent the past few months only chopping firewood and cultivating beds, this was not easy. At first, the prisoners could not even boil their own water. Only in May, Nikolai wrote in his diary: "They bought us a samovar, at least we will not depend on the guard."

After some time, the painter painted over all the windows with lime so that the inhabitants of the house could not look at the street. With windows in general it was not easy: they were not allowed to open. Although the family would hardly be able to escape with such protection. And it was hot in summer.

House of Ipatiev. “A fence was built around the outer walls of the house facing the street, quite high, covering the windows of the house,” wrote its first commandant Alexander Avdeev about the house.

Only towards the end of July one of the windows was finally opened. "Such joy, finally, delicious air and one window pane, no longer smeared with whitewash," Nikolai wrote in his diary. After that, the prisoners were forbidden to sit on the windowsills.

There were not enough beds, the sisters slept on the floor. They all dined together, and not only with the servants, but also with the Red Army soldiers. They were rude: they could put a spoon into a bowl of soup and say: "You still get nothing to eat."

Vermicelli, potatoes, beet salad and compote - such food was on the table of the prisoners. Meat was a problem. “They brought meat for six days, but so little that it was only enough for soup,” “Kharitonov cooked a macaroni pie ... because they didn’t bring meat at all,” Alexandra notes in her diary.

Hall and living room in the Ipatva House. This house was built in the late 1880s and later bought by engineer Nikolai Ipatiev. In 1918, the Bolsheviks requisitioned it. After the execution of the family, the keys were returned to the owner, but he decided not to return there, and later emigrated

"I took a sitz bath as hot water could only be brought in from our kitchen," Alexandra writes of minor domestic inconveniences. Her notes show how gradually for the former empress, who once ruled over "a sixth part of the earth", everyday trifles become important: "great pleasure, a cup of coffee", "good nuns now send milk and eggs for Alexei and us, and cream ".

Products were really allowed to be taken from the women's Novo-Tikhvinsky monastery. With the help of these parcels, the Bolsheviks staged a provocation: they handed over in the cork of one of the bottles a letter from a "Russian officer" with an offer to help them escape. The family replied: "We do not want and cannot RUN. We can only be kidnapped by force." The Romanovs spent several nights dressed, waiting for a possible rescue.

Like a prisoner

Soon the commandant changed in the house. They became Yakov Yurovsky. At first, the family even liked him, but very soon the harassment became more and more. "You need to get used to living not like a king, but how you have to live: like a prisoner," he said, limiting the amount of meat that came to prisoners.

Of the monastery transfers, he allowed to leave only milk. Alexandra once wrote that the commandant "had breakfast and ate cheese; he won't let us eat cream anymore." Yurovsky also forbade frequent baths, saying that they did not have enough water. He confiscated jewelry from family members, leaving only a watch for Alexei (at the request of Nikolai, who said that the boy would be bored without them) and a gold bracelet for Alexandra - she wore it for 20 years, and it was possible to remove it only with tools.

Every morning at 10:00 the commandant checked whether everything was in place. Most of all, the former empress did not like this.

Telegram from the Kolomna Committee of the Bolsheviks of Petrograd to the Council of People's Commissars demanding the execution of representatives of the Romanov dynasty. March 4, 1918

Alexandra, it seems, was the hardest in the family to experience the loss of the throne. Yurovsky recalled that if she went for a walk, she would certainly dress up and always put on a hat. "It must be said that she, unlike the rest, with all her exits, tried to maintain all her importance and the former," he wrote.

The rest of the family was simpler - the sisters dressed rather casually, Nikolai walked in patched boots (although, according to Yurovsky, he had enough whole ones). His wife cut his hair. Even the needlework that Alexandra was engaged in was the work of an aristocrat: she embroidered and wove lace. The daughters washed handkerchiefs, darned stockings and bed linen together with the maid Nyuta Demidova.

Nicholas II and his family

The execution of Nicholas II and his family members is one of the many crimes of the terrible twentieth century. Russian Emperor Nicholas II shared the fate of other autocrats - Charles I of England, Louis XVI of France. But both were executed according to the verdict of the court, and their relatives were not touched. The Bolsheviks destroyed Nikolai along with his wife and children, even his faithful servants paid with their lives. What caused such animal cruelty, who was its initiator, historians are still guessing

The man who was unlucky

The ruler should be not so much wise, just, merciful as lucky. Because it is impossible to take everything into account, and many important decisions are made guessing. And this is a hit or miss, fifty-fifty. Nicholas II on the throne was no worse and no better than his predecessors, but in matters of fate for Russia, choosing this or that path of its development, he was mistaken, he simply did not guess. Not out of malice, not out of stupidity, or out of unprofessionalism, but solely according to the law of heads and tails

“This means dooming hundreds of thousands of Russian people to death,” the Emperor hesitated. “I sat opposite him, carefully following the expression of his pale face, on which I could read the terrible internal struggle that was going on in him at that moment. Finally, the sovereign, as if pronouncing the words with difficulty, said to me: “You are right. There is nothing left for us to do but to expect an attack. Give the Chief of the General Staff my order to mobilize "(Foreign Minister Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov on the beginning of the First World War)

Could the king choose a different solution? Could. Russia was not ready for war. And, in the end, the war began with a local conflict between Austria and Serbia. The first declared war on the second on July 28. There was no need for Russia to intervene drastically, but on July 29, Russia began a partial mobilization in the four western districts. On July 30, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia demanding that all military preparations be stopped. Minister Sazonov persuaded Nicholas II to continue. July 30 at 17:00 Russia began a general mobilization. At midnight from July 31 to August 1, the German ambassador informed Sazonov that if Russia did not demobilize on August 1 at 12 noon, Germany would also announce mobilization. Sazonov asked if this meant war. No, the ambassador replied, but we are very close to her. Russia did not stop the mobilization. On August 1, Germany began mobilization.

On August 1, in the evening, the German ambassador again came to Sazonov. He asked if the Russian government intended to give a favorable answer to yesterday's note to stop the mobilization. Sazonov answered in the negative. Count Pourtales was showing signs of growing agitation. He took a folded paper out of his pocket and repeated his question once more. Sazonov again refused. Pourtales asked the same question a third time. "I can't give you any other answer," Sazonov repeated again. “In that case,” said Pourtales, breathless with excitement, “I must give you this note.” With these words, he handed Sazonov the paper. It was a note declaring war. The Russo-German War Began (History of Diplomacy, Volume 2)

Brief biography of Nicholas II

• 1868, May 6 - in Tsarskoye Selo
• 1878, November 22 - Nikolai's brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich was born
• 1881, March 1 - death of Emperor Alexander II
• March 2, 1881 - Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich was declared heir to the throne with the title "Tsesarevich"
• 1894, October 20 - death of Emperor Alexander III, accession to the throne of Nicholas II
• 1895, January 17 - Nicholas II delivers a speech in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. Policy Continuity Statement
• 1896, May 14 - coronation in Moscow.
• 1896, May 18 - Khodynka disaster. More than 1,300 people died in a stampede on the Khodynka field during the coronation holiday

The coronation festivities continued in the evening at the Kremlin Palace, and then with a ball at the reception of the French ambassador. Many expected that if the ball was not canceled, then at least it would take place without the sovereign. According to Sergei Alexandrovich, although Nicholas II was advised not to come to the ball, the tsar spoke out that although the Khodynka disaster was the greatest misfortune, it should not overshadow the coronation holiday. According to another version, the entourage persuaded the king to attend a ball at the French embassy due to foreign policy considerations.(Wikipedia).

• 1898, August - Nicholas II's proposal to convene a conference and discuss the possibilities of "putting a limit on the growth of armaments" and "protecting" world peace
• 1898, March 15 - Russian occupation of the Liaodong Peninsula.
• 1899, February 3 - Nicholas II signed the Manifesto on Finland and published the "Basic Provisions on the Drafting, Consideration and Promulgation of Laws Issued for the Empire with the Inclusion of the Grand Duchy of Finland".
• 1899, May 18 - the beginning of the "peace" conference in The Hague, initiated by Nicholas II. The conference discussed the issues of limiting arms and ensuring a lasting peace; representatives of 26 countries took part in its work
• 1900, June 12 - decree on the abolition of exile to Siberia for a settlement
• 1900, July - August - the participation of Russian troops in the suppression of the "Boxer Rebellion" in China. Occupation of all Manchuria by Russia - from the border of the empire to the Liaodong Peninsula
• 1904, January 27 - beginning
• 1905, January 9 - Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg. Start

Diary of Nicholas II

— January 6th. Thursday.
Until 9 o'clock. let's go to the city. The day was gray and quiet at -8° below zero. Changed clothes at home in the Winter. AT 10 O'CLOCK? went into the halls to greet the troops. Until 11 o'clock. moved to the church. The service lasted an hour and a half. We went out to Jordan in a coat. During the salute, one of the guns of my 1st cavalry battery fired buckshot from Vasiliev [sky] Ostr. and doused it with the area closest to the Jordan and part of the palace. One policeman was wounded. Several bullets were found on the platform; the banner of the Naval Corps was pierced.
After breakfast, the ambassadors and envoys were received in the Golden Room. At 4 o'clock we left for Tsarskoye. Walked. Engaged. We had lunch together and went to bed early.
— January 7th. Friday.
The weather was calm and sunny with wonderful frost on the trees. In the morning I had a conference with D. Alexei and some ministers on the case of the Argentine and Chilean courts (1). He had breakfast with us. Hosted nine people.
Let's go together to venerate the icon of the Sign Mother of God. I read a lot. The evening was spent together.
— January 8th. Saturday.
Clear frosty day. There were many cases and reports. Fredericks had breakfast. Walked for a long time. Since yesterday, all plants and factories have gone on strike in St. Petersburg. Troops were called in from the surrounding area to reinforce the garrison. The workers have been calm so far. Their number is determined at 120,000 hours. At the head of the workers' union is some kind of priest - the socialist Gapon. Mirsky came in the evening to report on the measures taken.
— January 9th. Sunday.
Hard day! Serious riots broke out in St. Petersburg as a result of the desire of the workers to reach the Winter Palace. The troops had to shoot in different parts of the city, there were many killed and wounded. Lord, how painful and hard! Mom came to us from the city right in time for Mass. We had breakfast with everyone. Walked with Misha. Mom stayed with us for the night.
— January 10th. Monday.
Today there were no special incidents in the city. There were reports. Uncle Alexei had breakfast. He accepted a deputation of the Ural Cossacks who came with caviar. Walked. We drank tea at Mom's. To unite actions to stop the unrest in St. Petersburg, he decided to appoint Gen.-m. Trepov as governor-general of the capital and province. In the evening I had a conference on this subject with him, Mirsky and Hesse. Dabich (dej.) dined.
— January 11th. Tuesday.
During the day there were no special disturbances in the city. Had the usual reports. After breakfast, he received Rear Adm. Nebogatov, appointed commander of an additional detachment of the Pacific squadron. Walked. It was a cold gray day. Did a lot. We spent the evening together, reading aloud.

• January 11, 1905 - Nicholas II signed a decree on the establishment of the St. Petersburg Governor General. Petersburg and the province were transferred to the jurisdiction of the governor-general; all civil institutions were subordinated to him and the right to call in troops independently was granted. On the same day, the former Moscow police chief D.F. Trepov was appointed to the post of governor general.
• 1905, January 19 - Reception in Tsarskoe Selo by Nicholas II of the deputation of the workers of St. Petersburg. On January 9, the Tsar allocated 50 thousand rubles from his own funds to help the families of those killed and wounded.
• 1905, April 17 - signing of the Manifesto "On the approval of the principles of religious tolerance"
• 1905, August 23 - the conclusion of the Portsmouth Peace, which put an end to the Russo-Japanese War
• 1905, October 17 - the signing of the Manifesto on political freedoms, the establishment of the State Duma
• 1914, August 1 - the beginning of World War I
• 1915, August 23 - Nicholas II assumed the duties of the Supreme Commander
• 1916, November 26 and 30 - The State Council and the Congress of the United Nobility joined the demand of the deputies of the State Duma to eliminate the influence of "dark irresponsible forces" and create a government ready to rely on a majority in both chambers of the State Duma
• 1916, December 17 - the murder of Rasputin
• 1917, end of February - Nicholas II decided on Wednesday to go to Headquarters, located in Mogilev

The palace commandant, General Voeikov, asked why the emperor made such a decision when it was relatively calm at the front, while there was little calm in the capital and his presence in Petrograd would be very important. The emperor replied that the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Alekseev, was waiting for him at Headquarters and wanted to discuss some issues .... Meanwhile, Chairman of the State Duma Mikhail Vladimirovich Rodzianko asked the emperor for an audience: with my most loyal duty as chairman of the State Duma to report to you in full on the danger threatening the Russian state. The emperor accepted him, but rejected the advice not to dissolve the Duma and form a "ministry of trust" that would enjoy the support of the whole society. Rodzianko called on the emperor in vain: “The hour that decides the fate of yours and your homeland has come. Tomorrow it may be too late ”(L. Mlechin“ Krupskaya ”)

• February 22, 1917 - the imperial train left Tsarskoye Selo for Headquarters
• February 23, 1917 - Began
• 1917, February 28 - adoption by the Provisional Committee of the State Duma of the final decision on the need to abdicate the king in favor of the heir to the throne under the regency of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich; departure of Nicholas II from Headquarters to Petrograd.
• 1917, March 1 - the arrival of the royal train in Pskov.
• 1917, March 2 - signing of the Manifesto on abdication for himself and for Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich in favor of his brother - Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich.
• 1917, March 3 - Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich's refusal to accept the throne

Family of Nicholas II. Briefly

• 1889, January - the first acquaintance at a court ball in St. Petersburg with his future wife, Princess Alice of Hesse
• 1894, April 8 - the engagement of Nikolai Alexandrovich and Alice of Hesse in Coburg (Germany)
• 1894, October 21 - chrismation of the bride of Nicholas II and the naming of her "Blessed Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna"
• 1894, November 14 - the wedding of Emperor Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna

In front of me stood a tall, slender lady of about 50 in a simple gray sister's suit and a white scarf. The empress greeted me affectionately and asked me where I was wounded, in what business and on what front. A little worried, I answered all Her questions without taking my eyes off Her face. Almost classically correct, this face in youth was undoubtedly beautiful, very beautiful, but this beauty was obviously cold and impassive. And now, aged with age and with small wrinkles around the eyes and corners of the lips, this face was very interesting, but too stern and too thoughtful. I thought so: what a correct, intelligent, strict and energetic face (memories of the empress ensign of the machine-gun team of the 10th Kuban plastun battalion S.P. Pavlov. Being wounded in January 1916, he ended up in Her Majesty's Own infirmary in Tsarskoye Selo)

• 1895, November 3 - the birth of a daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna
• 1897, May 29 - the birth of a daughter, Grand Duchess Tatyana Nikolaevna
• 1899, June 14 - the birth of a daughter, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna
• 1901, June 5 - the birth of a daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna
• 1904, July 30 - the birth of a son, heir to the throne, Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexei Nikolaevich

Diary of Nicholas II: “An unforgettable great day for us, on which the mercy of God so clearly visited us,” Nicholas II wrote in his diary. - Alix had a son, who was named Alexei during prayer ... There are no words to be able to thank God enough for the consolation sent down by Him in this time of difficult trials!
The German Kaiser Wilhelm II telegraphed Nicholas II: “Dear Niki, how nice that you offered me to be your boy's godfather! Well, what is long awaited, says the German proverb, so be it with this dear little one! May he grow up to be a brave soldier, a wise and strong statesman, may the blessing of God always keep his body and soul. May he be the same ray of sunshine for both of you all his life, as he is now, during the trials!

• 1904, August - on the fortieth day after his birth, Alexei was diagnosed with hemophilia. The palace commandant, General Voeikov: “For the royal parents, life has lost its meaning. We were afraid to smile in their presence. We behaved in the palace as in a house where someone had died.”
• 1905, November 1 - the acquaintance of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna with Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin somehow positively influenced the well-being of the Tsarevich, therefore Nicholas II and the Empress favored him

The execution of the royal family. Briefly

• 1917, March 3–8 - stay of Nicholas II in Headquarters (Mogilev)
• 1917, March 6 - decision of the Provisional Government to arrest Nicholas II
• 1917, March 9 - after wandering around Russia, Nicholas II returned to Tsarskoye Selo
• 1917, March 9-July 31 - Nicholas II and his family live under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo
• 1917, July 16-18 - July days - powerful spontaneous popular anti-government demonstrations in Petrograd
• 1917, August 1 - Nicholas II and his family went into exile in Tobolsk, where he was sent by the Provisional Government after the July days
• 1917, December 19 - formed after. The Soldiers' Committee of Tobolsk forbade Nicholas II to attend church
• 1917, December - The Soldiers' Committee decided to remove the epaulettes from the king, which was perceived by him as a humiliation
• 1918, February 13 - Commissioner Karelin decided to pay from the treasury only soldiers' rations, heating and lighting, and everything else - at the expense of prisoners, and the use of personal capital was limited to 600 rubles per month
• 1918, February 19 - an ice slide built in the garden for riding the royal children was destroyed at night with picks. The pretext for this was that from the hill it was possible to "look over the fence"
• March 7, 1918 - Church ban lifted
• April 26, 1918 - Nicholas II and his family set off from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg

The royal family spent 78 days in their last home.

Commissioner A. D. Avdeev was appointed the first commandant of the House of Special Purpose.

Preparations for the shooting

According to the official Soviet version, the decision to execute was made only by the Ural Council, Moscow was notified of this only after the death of the family.

In early July 1918, the Ural military commissar Filipp Goloshchekin went to Moscow to resolve the issue of the future fate of the royal family.

At its meeting on July 12, the Ural Council adopted a resolution on execution, as well as on methods for destroying corpses, and on July 16 transmitted a message (if the telegram was genuine) about this by direct wire to Petrograd - G. E. Zinoviev. At the end of the conversation with Yekaterinburg, Zinoviev sent a telegram to Moscow:

There is no archive source for the telegram.

Thus, the telegram was received in Moscow on July 16 at 21:22. The phrase “trial agreed with Filippov” is an encrypted decision on the execution of the Romanovs, which Goloshchekin agreed upon during his stay in the capital. However, the Ural Council asked once again to confirm this earlier decision in writing, referring to "military circumstances", since Yekaterinburg was expected to fall under the blows of the Czechoslovak Corps and the White Siberian Army.

Execution

On the night of July 16-17, the Romanovs and the servants went to bed, as usual, at 22:30. At 11:30 p.m., two special representatives from the Ural Council came to the mansion. They handed the decision of the executive committee to the commander of the security detachment P.Z. Ermakov and the new commandant of the house, Commissioner of the Extraordinary Investigation Commission Yakov Yurovsky, who replaced Avdeev in this position on July 4, and suggested that the execution of the sentence be started immediately.

Awakened, family members and staff were told that due to the advance of the white troops, the mansion could be under fire, and therefore, for security reasons, it was necessary to go to the basement.

There is a version that the following document was drawn up by Yurovsky to carry out the execution: Revolutionary Committee under the Yekaterinburg Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies REVOLUTIONARY HEADQUARTERS OF THE URAL DISTRICT Extraordinary Commission C and o to the Special Forces to the house of Ipatiev / 1st Kamishl Rifle Regiment / Commandant: Gorvat Laons Fischer Anzelm Zdelshtein Isidor Fekete Emil Nad Imre Grinfeld Victor Vergazi Andreas Prob.Com. Vaganov Serge Medvedev Pav Nikulin City of Ekaterinburg July 18, 1918 Chief of the Cheka Yurovsky However, according to V.P. Kozlov, I.F. Plotnikov, this document, once provided to the press by former Austrian prisoner of war I.P. Meyer, first published in Germany in 1956 and, most likely, fabricated, does not reflect the real shooter list. According to their version, the execution team consisted of: a member of the collegium of the Ural Central Committee - M.A. Medvedev (Kudrin), the commandant of the house Y.M. Yurovsky, his deputy G.P. Nikulin, the security commander P.Z. Ermakov and ordinary soldiers of the guard - Hungarians (according to other sources - Latvians). In the light of I. F. Plotnikov’s research, the list of those who were shot may look like this: Ya. M. Yurovsky, G. P. Nikulin, M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin), P. Z. Ermakov, S. P. Vaganov, A. G Kabanov, P. S. Medvedev, V. N. Netrebin, Ya. M. Tselms and, under a very big question, an unknown student miner. Plotnikov believes that the latter was used in the Ipatiev house for only a few days after the execution, and only as a jewelry specialist. Thus, according to Plotnikov, the execution of the royal family was carried out by a group consisting almost entirely of ethnic Russians, with the participation of one Jew (Ya. M. Yurovsky) and, probably, one Latvian (Ya. M. Celms). According to surviving information, two or three Latvians refused to participate in the execution. , The fate of the Romanovs In addition to the family of the former emperor, all members of the Romanov House were destroyed, who for various reasons remained in Russia after the revolution (with the exception of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, who died in Tashkent from pneumonia, and two children of his son Alexander Iskander - Natalia Androsova (1917-1999 ) and Kirill Androsov (1915-1992), who lived in Moscow). Memoirs of contemporaries Memoirs of Trotsky My next visit to Moscow fell after the fall of Yekaterinburg. In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: Yes, where is the king? - It's over, - he answered, - shot. - Where is the family? - And the family with him. - All? I asked, apparently with a hint of surprise. - That's it - Sverdlov answered, - but what? He was waiting for my reaction. I didn't answer. - And who decided? I asked. - We decided here. Ilyich believed that it was impossible to leave us a living banner for them, especially in the present difficult conditions. Memoirs of Sverdlova Somehow in mid-July 1918, shortly after the end of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, Yakov Mikhailovich returned home in the morning, it was already dawn. He said that he was late at the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, where, among other things, he informed the members of the Council of People's Commissars about the latest news he had received from Yekaterinburg. - Haven't you heard? - Yakov Mikhailovich asked. - After all, the Urals shot Nikolai Romanov. Of course, I haven't heard anything yet. The message from Yekaterinburg was received only in the afternoon. The situation in Yekaterinburg was alarming: the White Czechs were approaching the city, the local counter-revolution was stirring. The Ural Council of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, having received information that Nikolai Romanov, who was being held in custody in Yekaterinburg, was preparing to escape, issued a decision to shoot the former tsar and immediately carried out his sentence. Yakov Mikhailovich, having received a message from Yekaterinburg, reported on the decision of the regional council to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which approved the decision of the Ural Regional Council, and then informed the Council of People's Commissars. V. P. Milyutin, who participated in this meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, wrote in his diary: “I returned late from the Council of People's Commissars. There were "current" cases. During the discussion of the project on public health, the report of Semashko, Sverdlov entered and sat down in his place on a chair behind Ilyich. Semashko finished. Sverdlov went up, leaned over to Ilyich and said something. - Comrades, Sverdlov is asking for the floor for a message. “I must say,” Sverdlov began in his usual tone, “a message was received that in Yekaterinburg, by order of the regional Soviet, Nikolai was shot ... Nikolai wanted to run away. The Czechoslovaks advanced. The Presidium of the Central Executive Committee decided to approve ... - Now let's move on to reading the project article by article, - suggested Ilyich ... " Destruction and burial of the royal remains Investigation Sokolov's investigation Sokolov painstakingly and selflessly conducted the investigation entrusted to him. Kolchak had already been shot, Soviet power returned to the Urals and Siberia, and the investigator continued his work in exile. With the materials of the investigation, he made a dangerous journey through all of Siberia to the Far East, then to America. In exile in Paris, Sokolov continued to take testimony from surviving witnesses. He died of a ruptured heart in 1924 without completing his investigation. It was thanks to the painstaking work of N. A. Sokolov that the details of the execution and burial of the royal family became known for the first time. The search for royal remains The remains of members of the Romanov family were discovered near Sverdlovsk back in 1979 during excavations led by Geliy Ryabov, a consultant to the Minister of the Interior. However, then the found remains were buried at the direction of the authorities. In 1991, the excavations were resumed. Numerous experts have confirmed that the remains found then are most likely the remains of the royal family. The remains of Tsarevich Alexei and Princess Maria were not found. In June 2007, realizing the world historical significance of the event and the object, it was decided to carry out new survey work on the Old Koptyakovskaya road in order to find the alleged second hiding place for the remains of the members of the Romanov imperial family. In July 2007, the bones of a young man aged 10-13 years old, and a girl aged 18-23 years old, as well as fragments of ceramic amphoras with Japanese sulfuric acid, iron angles, nails, and bullets were found by Ural archaeologists near Yekaterinburg, not far from burial places of the family of the last Russian emperor. According to scientists, these are the remains of members of the Romanov imperial family, Tsarevich Alexei and his sister, Princess Maria, hidden by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Andrey Grigoriev, Deputy CEO Research and Production Center for the Protection and Use of Monuments of History and Culture of the Sverdlovsk Region: “I learned from the Ural local historian V.V. Shitov that the archive contains documents that tell about the stay of the royal family in Yekaterinburg and its subsequent murder, and also about the attempt to hide their remains. Until the end of 2006, we were unable to start prospecting. On July 29, 2007, as a result of the search, we stumbled upon finds.” On August 24, 2007, the General Prosecutor's Office of Russia resumed the investigation into the criminal case of the execution of the royal family in connection with the discovery near Yekaterinburg of the remains of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria Romanov. Traces of cutting were found on the remains of the children of Nicholas II. This was announced by the head of the department of archeology of the research and production center for the protection and use of monuments of history and culture of the Sverdlovsk region Sergey Pogorelov. “Traces of the fact that the bodies were chopped up were found on a humerus belonging to a man and on a fragment of a skull identified as female. In addition, a fully preserved oval hole was found on the man's skull, possibly a trace from a bullet,” Sergey Pogorelov explained. 1990s investigation The circumstances of the death of the royal family were investigated as part of a criminal case initiated on August 19, 1993 at the direction of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. The materials of the Government Commission for the study of issues related to the study and reburial of the remains of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and members of his family have been published. Reaction to the shooting Kokovtsov V.N.: “On the day the news was printed, I was twice on the street, rode a tram, and nowhere did I see the slightest glimpse of pity or compassion. The news was read loudly, with grins, mockery and the most ruthless comments... Some kind of senseless callousness, some kind of boasting of bloodthirstiness. The most disgusting expressions: - it would have been so long ago, - come on, reign again, - cover Nikolashka, - oh, brother Romanov, danced. Heard all around, from the youngest youth, and the elders turned away, indifferently silent. Rehabilitation of the royal family In the 1990s-2000s, the question of the legal rehabilitation of the Romanovs was raised before various authorities. In September 2007, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation refused to consider such a decision, since it did not find "accusations and relevant decisions of judicial and non-judicial bodies vested with judicial functions" on the fact of the execution of the Romanovs, and the execution was "a premeditated murder, albeit politically tinged, committed by persons not endowed with appropriate judicial and administrative powers". At the same time, the lawyer of the Romanov family notes that "As you know, the Bolsheviks transferred all power to the councils, including the judiciary, so the decision of the Ural Regional Council is equated to judgment". On November 8, 2007, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized the decision of the prosecutor's office as legal, considering that the execution should be considered exclusively within the framework of a criminal case. The decision of the Ural Regional Council dated July 17, 1918, which decided to carry out the execution, was attached to the materials provided by the side of the rehabilitated to the bodies of the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, and then to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. This document was presented by the lawyers of the Romanovs as an argument confirming the political nature of the murder, which was also noted by representatives of the prosecutor's office, however, according to the Russian legislation on rehabilitation, the decision of bodies endowed with judicial functions is required to establish the fact of repression, which the Ural Regional Council de jure was not. Since the case was considered by a higher court, representatives of the Romanov family intended to challenge the decision of the Russian court in the European Court. However, on October 1, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized Nikolai and his family as victims of political repression and rehabilitated them,,. As the lawyer of the Grand Duchess Maria Romanova Herman Lukyanov stated: According to the judge, According to the procedural norms of Russian legislation, the decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation is final and not subject to review (appeal). On January 15, 2009, the case of the murder of the royal family was closed. . . In June 2009, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate six more members of the Romanov family: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Romanov, Elizaveta Fedorovna Romanova, Sergey Mikhailovich Romanov, Ioan Konstantinovich Romanov, Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov and Igor Konstantinovich Romanov, class and social characteristics, without being charged with a specific crime...“. In accordance with Art. 1 and pp. "c", "e" art. 3 of the Law of the Russian Federation “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions”, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Varvara Yakovleva, Ekaterina Petrovna Yanysheva, Fyodor Semenovich (Mikhailovich) Remez, Ivan Kalin, Krukovsky, Dr. Gelmerson and Nikolai Nikolaevich Johnson ( Brian). The issue of this rehabilitation, unlike the first case, was actually resolved in a few months, at the stage of applying to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, no trials were required, since the prosecutor's office revealed all the signs of political repression during the audit. Canonization and ecclesiastical cult of the royal martyrs Notes Multatuli, P. To the decision of the Supreme Court of Russia on the rehabilitation of the royal family. Yekaterinburg initiative. Academy of Russian History(03.10.2008). Retrieved November 9, 2008. The Supreme Court recognized members of the royal family as victims of repression. RIA News(01/10/2008). Retrieved November 9, 2008. Romanov Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,

The commandant of the House of Special Purpose, Yakov Yurovsky, was entrusted with the execution of the members of the family of the former emperor. It was from his manuscripts that they later managed to restore the terrible picture that unfolded that night in the Ipatiev House.

According to the documents, the execution order was delivered to the place of execution at half past one in the night. Forty minutes later, the entire Romanov family and their servants were brought to the basement. “The room was very small. Nikolai stood with his back to me, - he recalled. —

I announced that the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies of the Urals had decided to shoot them. Nicholas turned and asked. I repeated the order and commanded: "Shoot." I shot first and killed Nikolai on the spot.

The emperor was killed the first time - unlike his daughters. The commander of the execution of the royal family later wrote that the girls were literally “booked in bras made of a solid mass of large diamonds,” so the bullets bounced off them without causing harm. Even with the help of a bayonet, it was not possible to break through the “precious” bodice of the girls.

Photo report: 100 years since the execution of the royal family

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“For a long time I could not stop this shooting, which had taken on a careless character. But when I finally managed to stop, I saw that many were still alive. ... I was forced to shoot everyone in turn, ”wrote Yurovsky.

That night, even the royal dogs could not survive - together with the Romanovs, two of the three pets belonging to the emperor's children were killed in the Ipatiev House. The corpse of Grand Duchess Anastasia's spaniel, preserved in the cold, was found a year later at the bottom of a mine in Ganina Yama - the dog's paw was broken and its head was pierced.

The French bulldog Ortino, who belonged to Grand Duchess Tatiana, was also brutally killed - presumably hanged.

Miraculously, only Tsarevich Alexei's spaniel named Joy was saved, who was then sent to recover from what he had experienced in England to the cousin of Nicholas II - King George.

The place "where the people put an end to the monarchy"

After the execution, all the bodies were loaded into one truck and sent to the abandoned mines of Ganina Yama in the Sverdlovsk region. There, at first, they tried to burn them, but the fire would have been huge for everyone, so it was decided to simply dump the bodies into the shaft of the mine and throw them with branches.

However, it was not possible to hide what had happened - the very next day, rumors spread around the region about what had happened at night. As one of the members of the firing squad, forced to return to the site of the failed burial, later admitted, ice water washed away all the blood and froze the bodies of the dead so that they looked like they were alive.

The Bolsheviks tried to approach the organization of the second burial attempt with great attention: the area was first cordoned off, the bodies were again loaded onto a truck, which was supposed to transport them to a more secure place. However, even here they were in for a failure: after a few meters of the way, the truck was firmly stuck in the swamps of the Porosenkov Log.

Plans had to be changed on the fly. Some of the bodies were buried right under the road, the rest were filled with sulfuric acid and buried a little further away, covered with sleepers from above. These cover-up measures proved to be more effective. After Yekaterinburg was occupied by Kolchak's army, he immediately gave the order to find the bodies of the dead.

However, the forensic investigator Nikolai y, who arrived at Porosenkov log, managed to find only fragments of burnt clothes and a cut off female finger. “This is all that remains of the August Family,” Sokolov wrote in his report.

There is a version that the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the first to know about the place where, in his words, "the people put an end to the monarchy." It is known that in 1928 he visited Sverdlovsk, having previously met with Pyotr Voikov, one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family, who could tell him secret information.

After this trip, Mayakovsky wrote the poem "Emperor", which contains lines with a fairly accurate description of the "Romanovs' grave": "Here the cedar was touched with an ax, notches under the root of the bark, at the root under the cedar there is a road, and the emperor is buried in it."

Confession of execution

At first, the new Russian authorities tried with all their might to assure the West of their humanity in relation to the royal family: they are all alive and in a secret place in order to prevent the implementation of the White Guard conspiracy. Many high-ranking politicians of the young state tried to avoid answering or answered very vaguely.

So, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs at the Genoa Conference of 1922 told reporters: “The fate of the daughters of the king is not known to me. I read in the papers that they were in America."

Pyotr Voikov, answering this question in a more informal setting, cut off all further inquiries with the phrase: "The world will never know what we did to the royal family."

Only after the publication of the investigation materials of Nikolai Sokolov, which gave a vague idea of ​​the massacre of the imperial family, did the Bolsheviks have to admit at least the very fact of the execution. However, the details and information about the burial still remained a mystery, shrouded in darkness in the basement of the Ipatiev House.

Occult version

It is not surprising that a lot of falsifications and myths appeared regarding the execution of the Romanovs. The most popular of them was a rumor about a ritual murder and about the severed head of Nicholas II, which was allegedly taken away for storage by the NKVD. This, in particular, is evidenced by the testimony of General Maurice Janin, who oversaw the investigation of the execution from the Entente.

Supporters of the ritual nature of the murder of the imperial family have several arguments. First of all, attention is drawn to the symbolic name of the house in which everything happened: in March 1613, who laid the foundation for the dynasty, he ascended the kingdom in the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma. And after 305 years, in 1918, the last Russian Tsar Nikolai Romanov was shot in the Ipatiev House in the Urals, requisitioned by the Bolsheviks specifically for this.

Later, engineer Ipatiev explained that he bought the house six months before the events unfolding in it. There is an opinion that this purchase was made on purpose to give symbolism to the gloomy murder, since Ipatiev communicated quite closely with one of the organizers of the execution, Pyotr Voikov.

Lieutenant General Mikhail Diterikhs, who investigated the murder of the royal family on behalf of Kolchak, concluded in his conclusion: “It was a systematic, premeditated and prepared extermination of the members of the Romanov House and those who were exceptionally close to them in spirit and beliefs.

The direct line of the Romanov Dynasty ended: it began in the Ipatiev Monastery in the Kostroma province and ended in the Ipatiev House in the city of Yekaterinburg.

Conspiracy theorists also drew attention to the connection between the murder of Nicholas II and the Chaldean ruler of Babylon, King Belshazzar. So, some time after the execution in the Ipatiev House, lines from Heine's ballad dedicated to Belshazzar were discovered: "Belzatsar was killed that night by his servants." Now a piece of wallpaper with this inscription is stored in the State Archives of the Russian Federation.

According to the Bible, Belshazzar, like him, was the last king of his kind. During one of the celebrations in his castle, mysterious words appeared on the wall, predicting his imminent death. That same night, the biblical king was killed.

Prosecutorial and ecclesiastical investigation

The remains of the royal family were officially found only in 1991 - then nine bodies were discovered buried in the Piglet Meadow. Nine years later, the missing two bodies were discovered - severely burned and mutilated remains, presumably belonging to Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria.

Together with specialized centers in the UK and the USA, she conducted many examinations, including molecular genetics. With its help, DNA isolated from the found remains was deciphered and compared, and samples of the brother of Nicholas II Georgy Alexandrovich, as well as his nephew, the son of Olga's sister Tikhon Nikolaevich Kulikovsky-Romanov.

The examination also compared the results with the blood on the king's shirt, stored in. All researchers agreed that the found remains really belong to the Romanov family, as well as their servants.

However, the Russian Orthodox Church still refuses to recognize the remains found near Yekaterinburg as authentic. According to officials, this was due to the fact that the church was not initially involved in the investigation. In this regard, the patriarch did not even come to the official burial of the remains of the royal family, which took place in 1998 in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

After 2015, the study of the remains (which had to be exhumed for this) continues with the participation of a commission formed by the patriarchate. According to the latest conclusions of experts, published on July 16, 2018, complex molecular genetic examinations “confirmed the identity of the discovered remains ex-emperor Nicholas II, members of his family and persons from their entourage.

The lawyer of the imperial house, German Lukyanov, said that the church commission would take into account the results of the examination, but the final decision would be announced at the Bishops' Council.

The canonization of the martyrs

Despite the unceasing disputes over the remains, back in 1981 the Romanovs were canonized as martyrs of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. In Russia, this happened only eight years later, since from 1918 to 1989 the tradition of canonization was interrupted. In 2000, the murdered members of the royal family were given a special church rank - passion-bearers.

As the scientific secretary of the St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute, church historian Yulia Balakshina told Gazeta.Ru, the martyrs are a special rite of holiness, which some call the discovery of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“The first Russian saints were also canonized precisely as passion-bearers, that is, people who humbly, imitating Christ, accepted their death. Boris and Gleb - from the hands of their brother, and Nicholas II and his family - from the hands of the revolutionaries, ”Balakshina explained.

According to the church historian, it was very difficult to rank the Romanovs among the saints in fact of life - the family of rulers was not distinguished by pious and virtuous deeds.

It took six years to complete all the documents. “In fact, there are no terms for canonization in the Russian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, disputes about the timeliness and necessity of the canonization of Nicholas II and his family are ongoing to this day. The main argument of the opponents is that by transferring the innocently murdered Romanovs to the level of celestials, the Russian Orthodox Church deprived them of elementary human compassion, ”said the church historian.

There were also attempts to canonize the rulers in the West, Balakshina added: “At one time, the brother and direct heir of the Scottish Queen Mary Stuart turned to such a request, citing the fact that at the hour of her death she demonstrated great generosity and commitment to faith. But she is still not ready to positively resolve this issue, referring to the facts from the life of the ruler, according to which she was involved in the murder and accused of adultery.