Bullets hit the sisters but don’t harm them as the diamonds sewn into their camisoles only prolong their agony . . .
railway engineer called Nikolay Ipatiev to whom they gave just 48 hours’ notice to leave. He left most of his possessions behind, including a stuffed bear and her two cubs.
Although Alexei cannot walk very far and is suffering from a cold, he decides to go with his father and sisters, as he loves being outside with his king charles spaniel, Joy.
Alexandra, the former Tsarina, stays behind with Olga, her eldest daughter. Yurovsky, the burly secret policeman who the Romanovs have nicknamed ‘commandant Ox’, encourages the family to keep a familiar daily routine as he doesn’t want them to suspect their lives are in danger.
But the family doctor, Sergei Botkin, isn’t fooled. He senses danger. ‘My voluntary confinement here is restricted less by time than by earthly existence. In essence I am dead . . .’ he writes in a letter he will never live to send. In an outhouse, Yurovsky is checking the chest containing what remains of the Romanovs’ valuables. Some have been smuggled out by Alexandra to sympathisers to finance a rescue, other items were stolen by guards.
Yurovsky has an inventory of all the Romanovs’ possessions, even the bracelets still on Alexandra’s wrists. He doesn’t know that the family have hidden many of their most precious riches elsewhere.
Olga isn’t outside walking because she is ‘arranging their medicines’ with her mother — their code for concealing the jewellery of the Romanov dynasty.
Before they left for Ekaterinburg, three of the sisters sewed jewels into their camisoles, corsets and hats; buttons on summer dresses were removed and replaced with diamonds, and Alexei’s army uniform had jewels sewn into it.
Mother and daughter want to make sure the jewels are secure if the family is moved again.
12.30PM
YuROvSkY tells his assistant the executions will take place tonight. Yurovsky has selected 11 men for the task; one for each of the family and their four staff — Dr Botkin, their cook, maid and manservant.
He has also chosen the location — a basement room 21ft by 25ft, lit by a single naked bulb. The sounds of gunfire will be muffled down there and the blood easily cleaned from its wooden floorboards.
Yurovsky knows that preparation is essential as ‘shooting people isn’t the easy matter that it might seem to some’, he said later. Preparing the basement room is Peter Ermakov, a violent revolutionary and former bank robber who spent nine years in the Tsar’s prisons and is out for revenge. He has been given the task of disposing of the bodies.
Yesterday, he and Yurovsky had driven to the Four Brothers, an abandoned mine in the koptyaki Forest ten miles from Ekaterinburg. With them they took petrol, sulphuric acid and firewood. No fragment of the Romanovs must be left to be used as a relic to rally the counter-revolutionaries.
3PM
WHIlE the rest of the family walk in the garden, Alexandra makes lace and her daughter Tatiana reads from the Old Testament prophet Amos.
One verse declares: ‘ Thus saith the lord; for three transgressions of Moab, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because he burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime . . .’
4PM
lOcAl people have noticed that the sentries outside Ipatiev House are nervous and that machineguns are being placed on the roof. They sense that something bad is going to happen and hurry to the safety of their homes.
Out in the koptyaki Forest, Yurovsky and about a dozen other senior Bolsheviks are making one final inspection of the Four Brothers mine. villagers wandering past are ordered away.
5.50PM
THE telegraph lines to Moscow are down, so a telegram to vladimir lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is sent from Ekaterinburg via Petrograd. ‘let Moscow know that for military reasons the trial agreed upon ... cannot be put off, we cannot wait.’
‘ Trial’ is code for execution. The urgency is that about 30,000 czech soldiers, who had mutinied against the Bolsheviks and joined the counter-revolutionary White army, are advancing from the south and are days away from Ekaterinburg.
lenin has decreed that ‘citizen Romanov’ and his family must not be allowed to be rescued by these forces. He has also made sure that he has put nothing in writing to link him directly to their deaths.
8PM
WHIlE the Romanovs are having supper in their dining room, Yurovsky summons his senior guards to his office where he has collected a large arsenal of revolvers and pistols. Rifles will be too noisy and too easily spotted by the Romanovs.
‘Tonight, we have to shoot them all!’ Yurovsky tells the guards, some of whom are clearly drunk. Two men back out, refusing to kill the four girls.
Outside, no one is being allowed to walk past Ipatiev House. British diplomat Arthur Thomas passes on his way to the uk consulate,
10PM
300 yards from the house. When he doesn’t move away fast enough, he is fired at by a nervous sentry.
8.30PM
YuROvSkY informs the Romanovs that the kitchen boy lenka Sednev has been sent away. The family are distraught as lenka is a lively playmate of Alexei’s; once the boys even set off fireworks in the garden, to the fury of the guards.
Yurovsky says the boy’s uncle urgently needs him — but he is lying. The uncle was shot dead by the Bolsheviks two weeks ago and lenka has been taken to a house close by: Yurovsky just wants the boy out of the way.
He thinks he has fooled the family, but Alexandra writes in her diary: ‘Wonder whether it’s true & we shall see the boy back again!’ THE Romanov family and their servants come together for evening prayer and then retire to bed. Nicholas, Alexandra and Alexei are in one small bedroom, the four girls and their maid in a bedroom next door.
The family are constantly humiliated and intimidated; in the past few nights guards have repeatedly walked into the girls’ bedroom, making them scream in fright, and the walls of the family’s lavatory are daubed with political slogans and crude comments about Alexandra’s relationship with mystic monk Rasputin.
Downstairs, Yurovsky is agitated. The Fiat truck he ordered to carry away their bodies has not arrived. It will be light in about seven hours as the summer nights in the urals are short, so he doesn’t have much time to get the job done.
10.15PM
AlExANDRA writes a final entry in her diary, making a note of the temperature: ‘To bed. 15 degrees.’ Then in preparation for the next day’s entry she writes on the top of the following page, ‘17th July Wednesday.’
WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 1.30AM
YuROvSkY gets the call he’s been waiting for — the lorry is minutes away from Ipatiev House. It is time to put his plan into action.
He puts a colt pistol in his pocket, leaves his office and knocks on Doctor Botkin’s door. He tells him that everyone needs to get up and get dressed. Yurovsky makes up a story about trouble in the city and that if there was shooting in
the streets it would be dangerous for them to remain upstairs.
‘I will transfer you to another place,’ he says. Botkin starts to wake the family. downstairs in the guardroom, their executioners are fortifying themselves with vodka and cigarettes.
2.15AM
Having got washed and dressed, the Romanov family finally emerge from their rooms. Nicholas is carrying Alexei in his arms; both are in military uniform.
Alexandra and the girls come out next, dressed in black skirts and white blouses; Anastasia is carrying her King Charles spaniel, Jemmy.
doctor Botkin and the three servants are the last out. The family think they are leaving the house so are taking their hidden valuables. In the girls’ camisoles, Alexei’s shirt and cap and in two cushions carried by Nicholas’s valet, are the Romanov jewels.
‘Well, we’re going to get out of this place,’ Nicholas says.
2.17AM
YUROVSKY watches the Romanovs as they cross the courtyard and go through the door to the basement. ‘ There were no tears, no sobs, no questions,’ he said later. Although the girls are cheerful, Alexandra gives one of the guards, named Viktor Netrebin, a filthy look, ‘as if expecting we would bow as she passed’. Netrebin is only 17 and extremely nervous; he hopes he and his fellow guards will be accurate shots tonight.
The family are surprised to see that the basement room is empty. ‘Why is there no chair here? Is it forbidden to sit down?’ demands Alexandra. As Yurovsky instructs a guard to get two chairs, another mutters: ‘The heir wants to die in a chair. Very well, let him have one.’
Nicholas gently places Alexei on one chair and then stands in front of his son as if to shield him. Alexandra sits on the other chair.
Maria, Tatiana and Olga stand quietly behind their mother, while Anastasia stands apart from the rest. As one of his sisters places a cushion behind Alexei’s back, he watches every move the guards make with wide, curious eyes.
Facing his prisoners, for Yurovsky the room suddenly seems very small. He tells them he is going to get the truck that will take them to safety.
2.25AM
The Fiat truck is being driven into the courtyard. The former bank robber ermakov, who is now drunk, orders the driver to rev his engine to mask the sound of the slaughter that is about to begin. Below him, the window panes in the basement windows rattle from the vibration.
Yurovsky walks into the basement room with his men grouped behind him. As he orders the Romanovs to stand, he is sweating.
In his right-hand pocket, Yurovsky is gripping his Colt pistol; in his left hand is a piece of paper.
He starts reading from it in a loud voice: ‘In view of the fact that your relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Praesidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.’
Nicholas turns round to face his family, stammering ‘What? What?’ Alexandra and Olga cross themselves, then before Nicholas can turn back to face him, Yurovsky fires at him with his pistol.
All hell breaks loose as the other guards join in.
Young Alexei, gripping his chair in terror, is splattered with his father’s blood. Bullets hit the sisters, but don’t seem to harm them. ermakov fires at their mother Alexandra’s head from close range and, as Maria bangs desperately on the locked door, he shoots her in the thigh.
The guards have each been assigned a target, but all is forgotten in the chaos. The room is full of the noise of gunfire and screaming; bullets ricochet off the stone walls.
The single light bulb, gunsmoke and dust from the shattered plaster ceiling make it hard to see what’s going on.
Yurovsky yells at his men to cease fire, but by now they are so manic it takes them a while to stop. The guards leave the room to regroup.
2.30AM
Standing outside, the assassins can hear the sound of sobbing and moaning. It is clear their grisly task is far from over.
Now the smoke and dust have cleared in the room, Yurovsky sees that only Nicholas and Alexandra and two servants are dead. As doctor Botkin tries to get up, Yurovsky shoots him in the head.
Then he turns to young Alexei, who is still sitting terrified in his chair and shoots him repeatedly, but the former heir is protected by his shirt padded with diamonds.
ermakov tries unsuccessfully to finish Alexei off with his bayonet; Yurovsky finally shoots the boy in the head. He falls alongside the body of his father.
2.35AM
The four sisters are screaming and cowering against a wall. As they see Yurovsky and ermakov walking