For the time being, the external guards remained at their posts, creating the impression that nothing had changed at Ipatev’s. The purpose of the deception was to stage a mock escape attempt during an “evacuation” in the course of which the Imperial family would be said to have been killed. On July 19, the most important belongings of the Tsar and Alexandra, including their private papers, were loaded on a train and taken by Goloshchekin to Moscow.81
Aware that the Russian people assigned miraculous powers to the remains of martyrs, and anxious to prevent a cult of the Romanovs, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks went to great pains to destroy all trace of their bodies. The place that Iurovskii and his associate, Ermakov, had selected for the purpose were woods near the village Kiptiaki, 15 kilometers north of Ekaterinburg, an area full of swamps, peat bogs and abandoned mineshafts.
A few miles out of town, the truck carrying the bodies ran into a party of twenty-five mounted men with carts:
They were workers (members of the soviet, its executive committee and so on) assembled by Ermakov. They shouted: “Why did you bring them dead?” They thought they were to be entrusted with the execution of the Romanovs. They started to transfer the bodies to carts.… Right away they began to clean out [the victims’] pockets. Here too I had to threaten death by shooting and to post guards. It turned out that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia wore some kind of special corsets. It was decided to strip the bodies naked—not here, though, but where they were to be buried.
It was 6–7 a.m. when the party reached an abandoned gold mine nearly three meters deep. Iurovskii ordered the corpses undressed and burned.
When they began to undress one of the girls, they saw a corset partly torn by bullets: in the gash showed diamonds. The eyes of the fellows really lit up. [I] had to dismiss the whole band.… The detachment proceeded to strip and burn the bodies. Alexandra Fedorovna turned out to wear a pearl belt made of several necklaces sewn into linen. (Each girl carried on her neck an amulet with Rasputin’s picture and the text of his prayer.) The diamonds were collected; they weighed about half a pud [8 kilograms]…. Having placed all the valuables in satchels, other items found on the bodies were burned and the corpses themselves were lowered into the mine.82
What indignities were perpetrated on the bodies of the six women must be left to the reader’s imagination: suffice it to say that one of the guards who took part in this work later boasted that he could “die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s———.”83
It is this place, known to local peasants as “Four Brothers” for four large pines that once had grown here from a single stem, that Sokolov excavated for several months to unearth the Romanov remains. He located much material evidence—ikons, pendants, belt buckles, spectacles, and corset fastenings—all of which were identified as belonging to members of the Imperial family. A severed finger was also found, believed to be the Empress’s, probably hacked off to remove a tight ring.* A set of false teeth was identified as belonging to Dr. Botkin. The executioners had not bothered to cremate the dog, Jemmy, whose decomposed corpse was found in the shaft. They either missed or accidentally dropped a ten-carat diamond belonging to the Empress, a present from her husband, and the ex-tsar’s Ulm Cross, both left in the grass.
The remains of the victims, however, were nowhere to be found and this led for many years to conjectures that some or even most members of the Imperial family had survived the massacre. The mystery was cleared up only with the publication of Iurovskii’s memoir, from which it transpires that the bodies were buried at Four Brothers only temporarily.
Iurovskii thought the Four Brothers’ mine too shallow to conceal the grave. He returned to town to make inquiries, from which he learned of the existence of deeper mines on the road to Moscow. He soon returned with a quantity of kerosene and sulphuric acid. In the night of July 18, having closed neighboring roads, Iurovskii’s men, helped by a detachment of the Cheka, dug up the corpses and placed them on a truck. They proceeded to the Moscow road but on the way the truck got stuck in mud. The burial took place in a shallow grave nearby. Sulphuric acid was poured on the faces and bodies of the victims and the graveside covered with earth and brushwood. The place of burial remained secret until 1989.
While the murderers were concealing traces of their crime, another act of the Romanov tragedy was played out at Alapaevsk, 140 kilometers northeast of Ekaterinburg. Here, the Bolsheviks had kept in confinement since May 1918 several members of the Imperial clan: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna (the widow of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, murdered by terrorists in 1905, and sister of the ex-Empress, now a nun), Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei (Paley), and three sons of Grand Duke Constantine—Igor, Constantine, and Ivan. Attended by aides and domestics, they lived under house arrest, in a school building outside Alapaevsk guarded by Russians and Austrians.
On June 21—the very time when the prisoners in Ipatev’s house received the first communication from their alleged rescuers—the status of the Alapaevsk detainees changed. They were now put on a strict prison regime. Except for two retainers—a secretary named F. S. Remez and a nun—their companions were removed, valuables confiscated, and freedom of movement severely restricted. This was done on orders of Beloborodov, issued from Ekaterinburg, allegedly to prevent a repetition of the “escape” of Michael from Perm the week before.
On July 17, the day the Imperial family was murdered, the Alapaevsk prisoners were told they would be moved to a safer place. That evening the authorities staged a mock attack on the school building where the Romanovs were held by an armed band disguised as “White Guardists.” The prisoners were said to have taken advantage of the ensuing melee to escape. In reality, they were taken to a place called Verkhniaia Siniachikha, marched into the woods, severely beaten, and killed.
At 3:15 a.m., July 18, the Alapaevsk Soviet wired Ekaterinburg, which had staged the whole charade, that the Romanov prisoners had fled. Later that day Beloborodov cabled to Sverdlov in Moscow and Zinoviev and Uritskii in Petrograd:
Alapaevsk Executive Committee informed attack morning 18th unknown band on building where kept onetime Grand Dukes Igor Konstantinovich Konstantin Konstantinovich Ivan Konstantinovich Sergei Mikhailovich and Poley [Paley] stop despite guard resistance princes were abducted stop victims on both sides searches underway stop.84
Autopsies performed by the Whites revealed that all the victims, save for Grand Duke Sergei, who apparently resisted and was shot, were still alive when thrown into the mineshaft where they were found. The five victims and the nun companion of Grand Duchess Elizaveta perished from lack of air and water, possibly only days afterward. The postmortem revealed traces of earth in the mouth and stomach of Grand Duke Constantine.85
Even if there did not exist incontrovertible evidence that the murder of the Romanovs had been ordered in Moscow, one would have strongly suspected this to have been the case from the fact that the official news of the “execution” of Nicholas was issued not in Ekaterinburg, where the decision had allegedly been made, but in the capital. Indeed, the Ural Regional Soviet was not permitted to make a public announcement of the event until five days after it had happened, by which time it had already been publicized abroad.