The other fact which speaks in favor of this conjecture is that immediately afterward, on July 4, the responsibility for guarding the Imperial family was shifted from the Ekaterinburg Soviet to the Cheka. On July 4, Beloborodov wired to the Kremlin:
Moscow. Chairman Central Executive Committee Sverdlov for Goloshchekin. Syromolotov just departed to organize affairs in accord with center’s instructions fears groundless stop Avdeev replaced his assistant Koshkin [Moshkin] arrested instead Avdeev Iurovskii internal guard all changed replaced by others stop Beloborodov*
Iakov Mikhailovich Iurovskii, the head of the Ekaterinburg Cheka, was the grandson of a Jewish convict sentenced for an ordinary crime and exiled to Siberia long before the Revolution. After a sketchy education he was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Tomsk. During the 1905 Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks. Later he spent some time in Berlin, where he converted to Lutheranism. On returning to Russia, he was exiled to Ekaterinburg, where he opened a photographic studio said to have served as a secret meeting place for Bolsheviks. During the war, he underwent paramedical training. On the outbreak of the February Revolution, he deserted and returned to Ekaterinburg, where he agitated among soldiers against the war. In October 1917, the Ural Regional Soviet appointed him “Commissar of Justice,” following which he joined the Cheka. He was by all accounts a sinister person, full of resentment and frustration, a type that gravitated to the Bolsheviks in those days and provided prime recruits for the secret police. From interrogations of his wife and family, Sokolov obtained the portrait of a self-important, willful man, with a domineering, cruel disposition.68 Alexandra took an instant dislike to him, calling him “vulgar and unpleasant.” He had several virtues which made him valuable to the Cheka: scrupulous honesty in dealing with state property, unrestrained brutality, and considerable psychological insight.
98. The murderer of Nicholas II, Iurovskii (upper right), with his family.
The first thing Iurovskii did upon taking charge of Ipatev’s house was to put a stop to the stealing: this indeed presented a danger from the point of view of security, because thieving guards could be bribed to carry messages to and from the prisoners outside Cheka channels and even help them escape. On his first day, he had the Imperial family produce all the valuables in its possession (minus those which, unknown to him, the women had sewn into their undergarments). After making an inventory, he placed the jewelry in a sealed box, which he allowed the family to keep but inspected daily. Iurovskii also put a lock on the shed where the family’s luggage was stored. Nicholas, always ready to think the best of others, believed that these measures were taken for his family’s benefit:
[Iurovskii and his assistant] explained that an unpleasant incident had occurred in our house; they mentioned the loss of our belongings.… I feel sorry for Avdeev that he is guilty of not having prevented his men from stealing out of the trunks in the shed.… Iurovskii and his assistant begin to understand what sort of people had surrounded and guarded us, stealing from us.*
Alexandra’s diary confirms that on July 4 the internal guards were replaced by a fresh crew. Nicholas thought they were Latvians, and so did the captain of the guard when interrogated by Sokolov. But at the time the term “Latvians” was applied loosely to all kinds of pro-Communist foreigners. Sokolov learned that Iurovskii spoke with five of the ten new arrivals in German.69 There can be little doubt that they were Hungarian prisoners of war, some of them Magyars, some Magyarized Germans.† They had moved from the Cheka headquarters, housed at the American Hotel.70
This was the execution squad. Iurovskii assigned them to the lower floor. He himself did not move into Ipatev’s house, preferring to stay with his wife, mother, and two children. Into the commandant’s room moved his assistant, Grigorii Petrovich Nikulin.
On July 7, Lenin instructed Ekaterinburg to grant the chairman of the Ural Regional Soviet, Beloborodov, direct wire access to the Kremlin. He acted in response to Beloborodov’s request of June 28 for such access “in view of the extraordinary importance of events.”71 Until July 25, when Ekaterinburg fell to the Czechs, all communications between the Kremlin and that city on military matters and the fate of the Romanovs were conducted by means of this channel, often in cipher.
Goloshchekin returned from Moscow on July 12 carrying the death warrant. On the same day, he reported to the Executive Committee of the Soviet on “the attitude of central authority toward the execution of the Romanovs.” He said that Moscow had originally intended to try the ex-Tsar, but in view of the proximity of the front, this ceased to be feasible: the Romanovs were to be executed.72 The Committee rubber-stamped Moscow’s decision.73 Now, as afterward, Ekaterinburg assumed responsibility for the execution, pretending that it was an emergency measure to prevent the Imperial family from falling into Czech hands.‡
The following day, July 15, Iurovskii was seen in the woods north of Ekaterinburg. He was looking for a place to dispose of the bodies.
The Imperial family suspected nothing because Iurovskii maintained a strict routine at Ipatev’s and with his solicitous manner even gained its trust. On June 25/July 8, Nicholas wrote: “Our life has not changed in any respect under Iurovskii.” Indeed, in some respects it improved, for the family now received all the provisions brought by the nuns, whereas Avdeev’s guards used to steal them. On July II, workmen installed iron railings on the single open window, but this too did not strike them as unusuaclass="underline" “Always fright of our climbing out no doubt or getting into contact with the sentry,” Alexandra noted. Now that the Cheka had given up its plan of a spurious escape, Iurovskii wanted to take no chances on a genuine escape. On Sunday, July 14, he permitted a priest to come and say mass. As he was leaving, the priest thought he had heard one of the princesses whisper: “Thank you.”74 On July 15, Iurovskii, who had some medical knowledge, spent time with the bed-ridden Alexis, discussing his health. The next day he brought him some eggs. On July 16, two charwomen came to clean. They told Sokolov that the family seemed in fine spirits and that the princesses laughed as they helped them make the beds.
All this time, the Imperial family was still hoping to hear from their rescuers. The last entry in Nicholas’s diary, dated June 30/July 13, reads: “We have no news from the outside.”
Until recently, the bloody events which transpired at Ipatev’s house on the night of July 16–17 were known almost entirely from the evidence gathered by Sokolov’s commission. The Bolsheviks abandoned Ekaterinburg to the Czechs on July 25. Russians who entered the city with the Czechs rushed to Ipatev’s house: they found it empty and in disarray. On July 30 an inquiry opened to determine the fate of the Imperial family, but the investigators allowed precious months to pass without any serious effort. In January 1919, Admiral Kolchak, recently proclaimed Supreme Ruler, appointed General M. K. Diterikhs to direct the work, but Diterikhs lacked the necessary qualifications and in February was replaced by the Siberian lawyer Nicholas Sokolov. For the next two years Sokolov pursued with unflagging determination every eyewitness and every material clue. When forced to flee Russia in 1920, he carried with him the records of his investigation. These materials and the monograph he wrote on the basis of them provide the principal evidence on the Ekaterinburg tragedy.* The recent publication of the recollections of Iurovskii supplements and amplifies the depositions of P. Medvedev, the captain of the guard, and additional witnesses whom Sokolov had questioned.75