The world press reported the story according to the official Bolshevik version. The New York Times broke the news on the front page of its Sunday edition, July 21, under the heading “Ex-Czar of Russia Killed by Order of the Ural Soviet. Nicholas Shot on July 16 When it was Feared that Czechoslovaks Might Seize Him. Wife and Heir in Security.” The accompanying obituary patronizingly described the executed monarch as “amiable but weak.” As Moscow had correctly anticipated from the indifference that had met rumors of Nicholas’s death the preceding month, the world took the execution in stride.
On the day when the Soviet press broke the news, Riezler met with Radek and Vorovskii. He perfunctorily protested the execution of Nicholas, which he said world opinion was certain to condemn, but stressed again his government’s concern for the “German princesses.” Radek must have exercised supreme self-control when he responded that if the German Government was truly concerned about the ex-Empress and her daughters, they could be allowed to leave Russia for “humanitarian considerations.”93 On July 23, Riezler again raised the matter of the “German princesses” with Chicherin. Chicherin did not respond immediately, but the next day told Riezler that “as far as he knew” the Empress had been evacuated to Perm. Riezler had the impression that Chicherin was lying. By this time (July 22) Bothmer knew the “horrible details” of the Ekaterinburg events, and had no doubt that the entire family had been murdered on orders of Moscow, the Ekaterinburg Soviet having been given a free hand to determine the time and manner of the execution.94 And yet as late as August 29, Radek proposed to the German Government to exchange Alexandra and her children for the arrested Spartacist, Leon Jogiches. Bolshevik officials repeated this offer on September 10 to the German Consul, but became evasive when pressed for details, claiming that the family of the ex-Tsar was cut off by military operations.95
On July 20, the Ural Soviet drafted an announcement and asked Moscow for permission to publish.96 The announcement read:
EXTRA EDITION. By Order of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies of the Urals and the Revolutionary Staff, the ex-Tsar and autocrat, Nicholas Romanov, has been shot along with his family on July 17. The bodies have been buried. Chairman of the Executive Committee, Beloborodov. Ekaterinburg, July 20, 1918, 10 a.m.*
Moscow forbade the release of this announcement because it referred to the death of Nicholas’s family. In the only known copy of this document, the words “along with his family” and “the bodies have been buried” have been crossed out by someone with an illegible signature, who scribbled: “Forbidden to publish.”
On July 20, Sverdlov wired to Ekaterinburg the text of the approved announcement which he had drafted and published in the Moscow press.97 On July 21, Goloshchekin broke the news to the Ural Regional Soviet: A week before, apparently unknown to itself, it had decided to shoot the ex-Tsar. This decision had now been duly carried out. The population of Ekaterinburg was informed of this in broadsheets that were posted on July 22 and reproduced the following day in The Ural Worker (Rabochii Urala). This newspaper ran the story under a headline: “White Guardists attempted to abduct the ex-Tsar and his family. Their plot was discovered. The Regional Soviet of Workers and Peasants of the Urals anticipated their criminal design and executed the all-Russian murderer. This is the first warning. The enemies of the people will no more achieve a restoration of autocracy than they succeeded in laying hands on the crowned executioner.”98
On July 22, the guards protecting Ipatev’s house were withdrawn: Iurovskii gave them 8,000 rubles to divide among themselves and informed them they would be sent to the front. That day Ipatev received a telegram from his sister-in-law: “Resident departed.”99
Eyewitnesses agree that the population—at any rate, the inhabitants of the cities—showed no emotion when told of the ex-Tsar’s execution. Services were held in some Moscow churches in memory of the deceased, but otherwise the reaction was muted. Lockhart notes that “the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”100 Bothmer had the same impression:
The population accepted the murder of the Tsar with apathetic indifference. Even decent and cool-headed circles are too accustomed to horrors, too immersed in their own worries and wants, to feel something special.101
Ex-Prime Minister Kokovtsov even discerned signs of positive satisfaction while riding a Petrograd streetcar on July 20:
Nowhere did I observe the slightest ray of pity or commiseration. The dispatch was read aloud, with smirks, jeers, mockeries, and with the most heartless comments.… One heard the most disgusting expressions, “It should have been done long ago” … “Eh, brother Romanov, your jig is up.”102
The peasants kept their thoughts to themselves. But we have a glimpse of their reaction, expressed with their peculiar logic, in the thoughts which an elderly peasant confided in 1920 to an intellectuaclass="underline"
Now, we know for sure that the landlords’ land was given to us by Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich. For this them ministors, Kerensky and Lenin and Trotsky and the others, first sent the Tsar off to Siberia, and then they killed him, and the Tsarevich too, so that we would have no tsar and they could rule the people forever themselves. They didn’t want to give us the land, but our boys stopped them when they came to Moscow and Petrograd from the front. And now them ministors, because they had to give us the land, choke us. But they ain’t gonna strangle us. We are strong and we will hold out. And later on, us oldsters, or our sons, or our grandchildren, it don’t make no difference, we will take care of all them Bolsheviks and their ministors. Never you mind. Our time will come.103
During the next nine years, the Soviet Government stubbornly adhered to the official lie that Alexandra Fedorovna and her children were safe: Chicherin claimed as late as 1922 that Nicholas’s daughters were in the United States.104 The lie found favor with Russian monarchists who could not reconcile themselves to the thought that the entire Imperial family had been wiped out. On reaching the West, Sokolov was cold-shouldered by monarchist circles: Nicholas’s mother, Empress Dowager Marie, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the most prominent surviving Romanov, refused even to see him.105 He died, ignored and impoverished, a few years later.
A Soviet participant, P. M. Bykov, in an early account of these events, published in Ekaterinburg in 1921, had told the truth about the fate of the family, but this work was promptly withdrawn from circulation.106 Only in 1926, after the appearance of Sokolov’s book in Paris had made the old version untenable, was Bykov authorized to write an official Communist account of the Ekaterinburg tragedy. This book, which Moscow had translated into the principal European languages, finally admitted that Alexandra and the children had perished along with the ex-Tsar. Bykov wrote:
Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in mud, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have duly rotted.*
Iurovskii, having escaped from Ekaterinburg ahead of the Czechs, subsequently returned but later moved to Moscow, where he worked for the government. As reward for his services he was honored with an appointment to the Collegium of the Cheka: in May 1921, he was warmly received by Lenin.† The revolver with which he killed Nicholas was placed in the special depository of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. He died a natural death in August 1938 in the Kremlin hospital.107 As a Chekist and “comrade-in-arms of Dzerzhinskii” he has earned himself a niche in the pantheon of minor Bolshevik heroes: he is the subject of a novel and of a biography, which depicts him as a “typical” Chekist: “closed, severe but with a soft heart.”108 The other principals in the Ekaterinburg tragedy fared less well. Beloborodov at first made a rapid career, being admitted in March 1919 to membership in the Central Committee and the Orgbiuro, and eventually attaining the rank of Commissar of the Interior (1923–27). But he was undone by his friendship with Trotsky: arrested in 1936, he was shot two years later. Goloshchekin was also a victim of Stalin’s purges and perished in 1941. Both were subsequently “rehabilitated.”