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 said that he had a gentle character. 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 how to dress. 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, Alexandra's maid of honor and close friend, 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 Feodorovna, 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 duty officer shouted: “Open the gates to the former tsar.” (…) When the sovereign passed the officers gathered in the vestibule, no one greeted him. The sovereign did it first.

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 guards, 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 Feodorovna'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 than the 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 a new style of 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 Revolution, 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 life in Tobolsk, 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 assigned four large rooms: a corner bedroom, a bathroom, a dining room next to it with windows overlooking 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 Yakov Yurovsky would replace him). The instructions for protecting the family said: "The commandant must keep 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.

With the death of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and members of his family, the history of the reign of the great Romanov dynasty on the Russian throne ended.

The reign of Nikolai Alexandrovich, nicknamed the Bloody by the people, began with sad events on the Khodynka field (at the beginning of the 20th century it was located in the northwestern part of Moscow, at the beginning of modern Leningradsky Prospekt): May 18, 1894, during the distribution of royal gifts on the occasion of the coronation of Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Fedorovna, a strong crush began on the field. According to official sources, 1,389 people died on Khodynka that day, and 1,300 people received injuries of varying severity.

The fate of the last emperor of the once great Russian Empire can hardly be called happy. He married his beloved woman, from this marriage they had five girls and a boy, heir to the throne, named Alexei. However, the name given to the child has long been considered cursed among Russian emperors, perhaps this curse manifested itself in the future fate of the royal family.

History gives a number of proofs that by his unsuccessful domestic (implementation of the Stolypin agrarian reform) and foreign policy, the emperor himself discriminated against himself in the eyes of society. It was under Nicholas II that Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the sad result of which was the loss of South Sakhalin and the loss of rights to the Liaodong Peninsula with the strategically important points Dalniy and Port Arthur.

By his unreasonable actions, the emperor allowed Russia, which had not yet recovered from the defeat in the previous war and the revolutionary uprisings of the working masses, to be drawn into a new, even more difficult war, which went down in history as the First World War.

The result of all these failures was the forced abdication of the throne in the last days of February 1917. The emperor and all members of his family were arrested by the Bolsheviks.

For several months, which seemed like an eternity to the representatives of the imperial family, the arrested were kept in Yekaterinburg, in the house of the engineer Ipatiev. All this time, the question of the future fate of the royal family was being decided.

The civil war put the Bolsheviks before a choice: destroy only Nicholas II or execute all representatives of the once reigning dynasty. A decisive role in the decision was played by fears that the offspring of the Romanovs would ever begin to claim power in the country. Soon, Nicholas II and his family were sentenced to death, on the night of July 16-17, 1918 they were shot.

For a long time, the fact of the destruction of the royal family was a mystery behind seven seals.

Despite the abundance of written sources, literature and oral presentations on this issue, it still remains one of the most mysterious mysteries of Russian history today.

There are several versions about the murder of the royal family, but they all differ significantly from each other.

According to the official version of the Bolsheviks, the decision to execute Nicholas II and his family members was made as early as the first days of July 1918. In the course of later studies, it was found that the Ural Executive Committee, which today bears all responsibility for this crime, acted on its own initiative, but with the consent of the central authorities of the Land of Soviets (including V. I. Lenin and Ya. M. Sverdlov). The organization of the planned event was allegedly entrusted to the worker-revolutionary Pyotr Zakharovich Ermakov.

The speed of execution and the destruction of the bodies of the executed were explained by the threat of an open demonstration by supporters of the monarchical regime, which, according to some sources, was planned for mid-July 1918.

In addition to the former Emperor Nicholas II, members of his family were executed - his wife, the former Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, five daughters and the heir to the throne Alexei, as well as the Romanovs' family doctor, a former maid of honor and several servants - a cook, a maid and Alexei's uncle.

The commandant of the Special Purpose House, Yakov Yurovsky, supervised the execution of the condemned. Late in the evening of July 16, 1918, he instructed Dr. Botkin to wake up the sleeping members of the royal family, force them to dress and go out into the corridor.

When all the representatives of the Romanov house and their escorts were ready, the commandant announced that units of the White Army were advancing on Yekaterinburg and all the inhabitants of the Ipatiev House were being transferred to the basement in order to prevent the death of any member of the royal family during shelling.

Soon, those arrested were taken under escort to a corner semi-basement room measuring 6 x 5 m. Nikolai did not suspect anything about the impending execution. He even asked permission to take two chairs to the basement, for himself and his beloved wife, and the emperor himself carried his sick son in his arms to the death room.

As soon as the members of the imperial family went down the stairs, a team of executors of the sentence appeared in the basement. In a solemn tone, Yakov Yurovsky said: “Nikolai Alexandrovich! Your relatives tried to save you, but they did not have to. And we are forced to shoot you…”

Then he began to read out the decision of the Ural Executive Committee. The former emperor did not immediately understand what the commandant was talking about. But the gun barrels aimed at Nikolai and his family members turned out to be more eloquent than words.

One of the guards later recalled: “The queen and daughter Olga tried to make the sign of the cross, but did not have time. Shots rang out ... The king could not stand the single bullet of the revolver, fell back with force. The other ten people also fell. A few more shots were fired at the lying ones ... "

Another eyewitness testified: “The shooting was stopped. The doors of the room were opened to clear the smoke. They brought a stretcher, began to remove the corpses. When they put one of the daughters on a stretcher, she screamed and covered her face with her hand. Others were also alive.

It was no longer possible to shoot: with the doors open, shots could be heard in the street. Ermakov took a rifle with a bayonet from me and stabbed everyone who turned out to be alive.

Everything was completed by one in the morning on July 17, 1918. The bodies of the dead were loaded into the back of a car and taken under cover of darkness to a suburban forest located in the area of ​​the Verkh-Isetsky plant and the village of Palkino. According to some eyewitnesses, the next day the corpses were cremated.

Despite the fact that the Ipatiev mansion was located almost in the very center of the city, the Bolsheviks managed to execute the royal family in secret from everyone.

Even the guards who were in the house at the time of the execution were in the dark for two days. The fact is that under the windows of the house that night there was a truck intended for transporting corpses, and the noise produced by its engine drowned out all the shots.

According to Bykov, one of the members of the Ural Executive Committee, the emperor's brother Mikhail Alexandrovich and other relatives were also shot. However, this information, not documented, raises doubts about their truth.

The version about the murder of members of the royal family, presented by the participants in the white movement, largely coincides with the official one, according to which all members of the ruling Romanov family were shot.

It is worth noting that the plans of the Bolsheviks included holding a trial in the case of Emperor Nicholas II, the role of the main accuser was to be played by Leon Trotsky. But the threat of the capture of members of the royal family by parts of the white army forced the Ural authorities to act at their discretion.

The question arises: who directly made the decision to execute the royal family? According to some sources, the main role here was played by Philip Goloshchekin, the military commissar and at the same time a member of the presidium of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council.

It is known that before the brutal execution, in early July 1918, this man came to Moscow to discuss the fate of the members of the royal family. This fact casts doubt on the version that the Ural Executive Committee took an independent decision to exterminate representatives of the Romanov dynasty.

The desire of the central authorities to shift all responsibility for the murder of the imperial family to the local authorities is explained by the unwillingness of the Bolsheviks to conflict with the German Kaiser, who was related to members of the royal family.

The death of the Empress and her children could be the reason for the termination of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty signed in March 1918, although shameful for Russia, it allowed her to get out of the burdensome First World War. The German ambassador Wilhelm Mirbach repeatedly warned the Soviet government about this.

Apparently, special attention to these circumstances forced researchers to put forward a version according to which the Bolsheviks wanted to shoot only one Nicholas II and leave the rest of the members of the royal family alive. However, the left SRs were ardent opponents of Lenin and Sverdlov in this matter. Opposing the signing of the shameful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and pursuing one single goal - to rehabilitate Russia in the eyes of the world powers, they sought to resume hostilities by any means.

Probably, in the murder of the Empress, as well as the daughters and son of Nicholas II, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries saw a convenient way to solve two problems at once: to remove from power both the Bolsheviks and possible applicants from the imperial family. Apparently, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had significant influence in the Ural Executive Committee ...

After the capture of Yekaterinburg by parts of the White Army, an investigation into the murder of the imperial family was launched, and it was carried out very carefully.

Unfortunately, the data on the persons actually shot on that terrible night turned out to be rather contradictory. There are a number of eyewitness accounts, according to which Alexandra Feodorovna and her daughters escaped the sad fate of Nicholas II and Tsarevich Alexei.

But researchers to this day find it difficult to answer the question: did any of the direct descendants of the Romanov dynasty survive? Finding out the truth is not possible, since the testimony of eyewitnesses is very contradictory. The statements of several elderly ladies that each of them is Anastasia Romanova also seem unconvincing.

The fate of the people involved in the execution of the royal family is as sad as the fate of their victims. Many of the executioners ended their lives under mysterious circumstances.

It is known that V. Khotimsky and N. Sakovich were executed by whites, but there is no evidence for this; P. Medvedev, according to investigator N. Sokolov and Major Lazi, died of typhus between two interrogations; A. Nametkin and I. Sergeev were shot by the verdict of the revolutionary tribunal.

The cruelty and inhumanity with which the representatives of the Romanov dynasty were dealt with is amazing. But even more surprising is the fact that so far no one has claimed responsibility for the murder of the imperial family, although both the Reds and the Whites recognized the fact of the execution of all the direct descendants of Nicholas II and his wife back in 1918.

According to the American historian Richard Pipes, the murder of the royal family marked the beginning of the so-called Red Terror in Russia. The victims of this senseless destruction were thousands of people who were executed for the simple reason that their death was necessary for the establishment of a new government.

Pipes notes that the execution in Yekaterinburg marked the entry of all mankind into a qualitatively new moral era, the main feature of which was the government's appropriation of the right to kill people, based not on specific laws, but on its own concept of expediency.

Thus, the entire system of humane values, created over a number of millennia by civilization, has been retired.

In 1998, the mortal remains of the last Russian emperor were reburied in the Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas II among its saints.

I bring to the attention of readers very interesting information from the book "The Way of the Cross of the Holy Royal Martyrs"
(Moscow 2002)

The murder of the Royal Family was prepared in the strictest secrecy. Even many high-ranking Bolsheviks were not privy to it.

It was carried out in Yekaterinburg on orders from Moscow, according to a long-planned plan.

The main organizer of the murder, the investigation calls Yankel Movshevich Sverdlov, who served as chairman of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive. Committee of the Congress of Soviets, the all-powerful temporary ruler of Russia in this era.

All the threads of the crime converge to him. Instructions came from him, received and carried out in Yekaterinburg. His task was to give the murder the appearance of an unauthorized act of the local Ural authorities, thus removing the responsibility of the Soviet government and the real initiators of the atrocity.

The accomplices of the murder from among the local Bolshevik leaders were the following persons: Shaya Isaakovich Goloshchekin - a personal friend of Sverdlov, who seized the de facto power in the Urals, the military commissar of the Ural region, the head of the Cheka and the chief executioner of the Urals at that time; Yankel Izidorovich Weisbart (he called himself a Russian worker A.G. Beloborodov) - Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Council; Alexander Moebius - Chief of the Revolutionary Staff - Special Representative of Bronstein-Trotsky; Yankel Chaimovich Yurovsky (calling himself Yakov Mikhailovich, - Commissar of Justice of the Ural Region, member of the Cheka; Pinkhus Lazarevich Vainer (who called himself Pyotr Lazarevich Voikov (the modern station of the Moscow metro Voikovskaya bears his name) - Commissar of Supply of the Ural Region, - the closest assistant to Yurovsky and Safarov is Yurovsky's second assistant, all following instructions from Moscow from Sverdlov, Apfelbaum, Lenin, Uritsky, and Bronstein-Trotsky (in his memoirs, published abroad in 1931, Trotsky accused himself, cynically justifying the murder of the entire Imperial Family, including including the August Children).

In the absence of Goloshchekin (he went to Moscow to Sverdlov for instructions), the preparations for the murder of the Royal Family began to take a concrete form: they removed unnecessary witnesses - the internal guard, because. she was almost completely disposed towards the Royal Family and was unreliable for the executioners, namely on July 3, 1918. - Avdeev and his assistant Moshkin (he was even arrested) were suddenly expelled. Instead of Avdeev, the commandant of the "House of Special Purpose", Yurovsky became his assistant, Nikulin (known for his atrocities in Kamyshin, working in the Cheka) was appointed his assistant.

All guards were replaced by selected Chekists seconded by the local emergency department. From that moment and during the last two weeks, when the Royal Prisoners had to live under the same roof with their future executioners, Their Life has become continuous torment...

On Sunday, July 1/14, three days before the assassination, at the request of the Sovereign, Yurovsky allowed the invitation of Archpriest Fr. John Storozhev and Deacon Bumirov, who, even earlier on May 20/June 2, had served a dinner for the Royal Family. They noticed the change that had taken place in the state of mind of Their Majesties and the August Children. According to O. John, They were not in "oppression of the spirit, but still gave the impression of being tired." On this day, for the first time, none of the members of the Royal Family sang during the service. They prayed in silence, as if foreseeing that this was Their last church prayer, and as if it had been revealed to them that this prayer would be extraordinary. And indeed, a significant event took place here, the deep and mysterious meaning of which became clear only when it had receded into the past. The deacon began to sing “God rest with the saints,” although according to the order of the Mass, this prayer is supposed to be read,” recalls Fr. Ioann: “... I also began to sing, somewhat embarrassed by such a deviation from the charter, but as soon as we sang, I heard that the members of the Romanov Family standing behind me knelt down ...”. So the Royal Prisoners, without suspecting it themselves, prepared for death, having accepted the funeral parting words ...

Meanwhile, Goloshchekin brought an order from Moscow from Sverdlov to execute the Royal Family.

Yurovsky and his team of executioners quickly prepared everything for execution. On the morning of Tuesday 3/16 July 1918 he removed from the Ipatiev house the apprentice cook little Leonid Sednev - the nephew of I.D. Sednev (children's lackey).

But even in these dying days, the Royal Family did not lose courage. On Monday 2/15 July, four women were sent to the Ipatiev house to wash the floors. One later showed the investigator: "I personally washed the floors in almost all the rooms reserved for the Royal Family ... The princesses helped us clean and move the beds in Their bedroom and talked merrily among themselves ...".

At 7 pm, Yurovsky ordered the revolvers to be taken away from the Russian outer guard, then he distributed the same revolvers to the participants in the execution, Pavel Medvedev helped him.

On this last day of the life of the Prisoners, the Sovereign, the Heir Tsesarevich and all the Grand Duchesses went out for their usual walk in the garden and at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, during the change of guards, returned to the house. They didn't come out anymore. The evening routine was not disturbed by anything ...

Without suspecting anything, the Royal Family went to bed. Shortly after midnight, Yurovsky entered Their rooms, woke everyone up and, under the pretext of the danger threatening the city from the approaching white troops, announced that he had orders to take the Prisoners to a safe place. After a while, when everyone was dressed, washed and prepared for departure, Yurovsky, accompanied by Nikulin and Medvedev, led the Royal Family to the lower floor to the outer door overlooking Voznesensky Lane.

Yurovsky and Nikulin walked in front, holding a lamp in his hand to illuminate the dark narrow staircase. The emperor followed them. He carried in his arms the Heir Alexei Nikolaevich. The Leg of the Heir was bandaged with a thick bandage, and with every step He groaned softly. The Sovereign and the Grand Duchesses followed the Sovereign. Some of Them had a pillow with Them, and the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna carried her beloved dog Jimmy in her arms. This was followed by the life physician E.S. Botkin, the room girl A.S. Demidova, the footman A.E. Trupp and the cook I.M. Kharitonov. The procession was brought up by Medvedev. Going downstairs and passing through the entire lower floor to the corner room - this was the front room with the exit door to the street - Yurovsky turned left into the adjacent middle room, just under the Grand Duchesses' bedroom, and announced that they would have to wait until the cars were brought. It was an empty basement room 5 1/3 long and 4 1/2 meters wide.

Since the Tsarevich could not stand, and the Empress was unwell, at the request of the Sovereign, three chairs were brought. The Sovereign sat in the middle of the room, seating the Heir next to Himself and embracing Him with his right arm. Behind the Heir and a little to the side of Him stood Dr. Botkin. The Empress sat down on the left hand of the Sovereign, closer to the window and one step behind. On Her chair, and on the chair of the Heir, they put a pillow. On the same side, even closer to the wall with a window, in the back of the room, stood the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and a little further, in the corner near the outer wall, Anna Demidova. Behind the chair of the Empress was one of the senior V. Princesses, probably Tatyana Nikolaevna. On Her right hand, leaning against the back wall, stood V. Princesses Olga Nikolaevna and Maria Nikolaevna; next to Them, a little ahead, A. Trupp, holding a blanket for the Heir, and in the far left corner from the door, cook Kharitonov. The first half of the room from the entrance remained free. Everyone was calm. They seem to be accustomed to such nocturnal alarms and movements. In addition, Yurovsky's explanations seemed plausible, and some "forced" delay did not arouse any suspicion.

alt Yurovsky came out to make the last orders. By this time, all 11 executioners who had shot the Royal Family and Her faithful servants that night had gathered in one of the neighboring rooms. Here are their names: Yankel Khaimovich Yurovsky, Nikulin, Stepan Vaganov, Pavel Spiridonovich Medvedev, Laons Gorvat, Anselm Fischer, Isidor Edelstein, Emil Fekte, Imre Nad, Viktor Grinfeld and Andreas Vergazi - Magyar mercenaries.

Each had a seven-shot revolver. Yurovsky, moreover, had a Mauser, and two of them had rifles with attached bayonets. Each murderer chose his victim in advance: Gorvat chose Botkin. But at the same time, Yurovsky strictly forbade all others to shoot at the Sovereign Emperor and the Tsesarevich: he wanted - or rather, he was ordered - to kill the Russian Orthodox Tsar and His Heir with his own hand.

Outside the window came the sound of the engine of a four-ton Fiat truck, ready to transport the bodies. Shooting to the sound of a running truck engine to drown out the shots was a favorite trick of the Chekists. This method has been applied here as well.

It was 1 o'clock. 15m. Nights in solar time, or 3h. 15m. according to summer time (translated by the Bolsheviks two hours ahead). Yurovsky returned to the room, along with the entire team of executioners. Nikulin moved closer to the window, opposite the Empress. Gorvat settled down facing Dr. Botkin. The rest split up on either side of the door. Medvedev took up a position on the threshold.

Approaching the Sovereign, Yurovsky said a few words, announcing the impending execution. This was so unexpected that the Sovereign, apparently, did not immediately understand the meaning of what was said. He got up from his chair and asked in astonishment: “What? What?" The Empress and one of the V. Princesses managed to cross themselves. At this moment, Yurovsky raised his revolver and fired several times at point-blank range, first at the Sovereign and then at the Heir.

Almost simultaneously, others began to shoot. The Grand Duchesses, who were standing in the second row, saw how Their Parents fell, and began to scream in horror. They were destined to outlive Them for a few terrible moments. The shot fell one by one. Within only 2-3 minutes, about 70 shots were fired. Wounded princesses were pierced with bayonets. The heir groaned weakly. Yurovsky killed him with two shots to the head. The wounded Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was finished off with bayonets and rifle butts.

Anna Demidova thrashed about until she fell under the blows of the bayonets. Some of the victims were shot and stabbed to death before all was quiet.

... Through the bluish fog that filled the room from many shots, with the weak illumination of one electric light bulb, the picture of the murder was a terrifying sight.

The Emperor fell forward, close to the Empress. Next to him lay on his back the Heir. The Grand Duchesses were together, as if they were holding each other's hands. Between Them spread the corpse of little Jimmy, whom the Great Anastasia Nikolaevna pressed to her until the last moment. Dr. Botkin took a step forward before falling prone with his right arm raised. Anna Demidova and Alexey Trupp fell near the back wall. Ivan Kharitonov was lying on his back at the feet of the Grand Duchesses. All those killed had several wounds, and therefore there was especially a lot of blood. Their faces and clothes were covered in blood, it stood in puddles on the floor, covered the walls with splashes and stains. It seemed that the whole room was filled with blood and was a slaughterhouse (the Old Testament altar).

On the night of the martyrdom of the Royal Family, Blessed Mary of Diveyevo raged and shouted: “Tsarevna with bayonets! Damned Jews! She raged terribly, and only then did they understand what she was screaming about. Under the arches of the Ipatiev cellar, in which the Royal Martyrs and their Faithful servants completed their way of the cross, inscriptions left by the executioners were discovered. One of them consisted of four cabalistic signs. It was deciphered as follows: “Here, by order of the satanic forces, the King was sacrificed for the destruction of the State. All nations are informed of this."

“... At the very beginning of this century, even before the First World War, small shops in the kingdom of Poland were selling from under the floor rather crudely printed postcards depicting a Jewish “tzaddik” (rabbi) with a torah in one hand and a white bird in the other. The bird had the head of Emperor Nicholas II, with the imperial crown. Below ... was the following inscription: "Let this sacrificial animal be my purification, it will be my replacement and purification sacrifice."

During the investigation into the murder of Nicholas II and His Family, it was established that the day before this crime, a special train arrived in Yekaterinburg from Central Russia, consisting of a steam locomotive and one passenger car. In it came a person in black clothes, similar to a Jewish rabbi. This person examined the basement of the house and left a Kabbalistic inscription on the wall (above-comp.) ... "Christography", the journal New Book of Russia.

... By this time, Shaya Goloshchekin, Beloborodov, Mobius and Voikov arrived at the "House of Special Purpose". Yurovsky and Voikov engaged in a thorough examination of the dead. They turned everyone on their backs to make sure there were no signs of life left. At the same time, they removed jewelry from their victims: rings, bracelets, gold watches. They took off the shoes from the Princesses, which they then gave to their mistresses.

Then the bodies were wrapped in a pre-prepared overcoat and transferred on a stretcher made of two shafts and sheets to a truck parked at the entrance. Lyukhanov, a worker from Zlokazovsky, was driving. Yurovsky, Ermakov and Vaganov sat with him.

Under the cover of night, the truck drove away from Ipatiev's house, went down Voznesensky Prospekt towards Glavny Prospekt and left the city through the suburb of Verkh-Isetsk. Here he turned onto the only road leading to the village of Koptyaki, located on the shores of Lake Iset. The road there goes through the forest, crossing the Perm and Tagil railway lines. It was already dawn when, about 15 versts from Yekaterinburg and, not reaching four versts to Koptyakov, in the deep forest in the Four Brothers tract, the truck turned left and reached a small forest clearing near a row of abandoned mine shafts, called Ganina Yama. Here the bodies of the Royal Martyrs were unloaded, chopped up, doused with gasoline and thrown on two large fires. The bones were destroyed with sulfuric acid. For three days and two nights, the killers, assisted by 15 responsible party communists specially mobilized for this purpose, did their diabolical work under the direct supervision of Yurovsky, on the instructions of Voikov and under the supervision of Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, who several times came from Yekaterinburg to the forest. Finally, by the evening of July 6/19, it was all over. The killers carefully destroyed the traces of the fires. The ashes and all that was left of the burnt bodies were thrown into the shaft, which was then blown up with hand grenades, and the ground around was dug up and covered with leaves and moss to hide the traces of the crime committed here.

alt Beloborodov immediately telegraphed Sverdlov about the murder of the Royal Family. However, this latter did not dare to reveal the truth not only to the Russian people, but even to the Soviet government. At a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, which took place on July 5/18 under the chairmanship of Lenin, Sverdlov made an emergency statement. It was a bunch of lies.

He said that a message had been received from Yekaterinburg about the execution of the Sovereign Emperor, that he had been shot by order of the Ural Regional Council, and that the Empress and the Heir had been evacuated to a "safe place." He kept silent about the fate of the Grand Duchesses. In conclusion, he added that the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved the decision of the Ural Council. After listening in silence to Sverdlov's statement, the members of the Council of People's Commissars continued the meeting ...

The next day it was announced in Moscow in all the newspapers. After long negotiations with Sverdlov over a direct wire, Goloshchekin made a similar report in the Ural Soviet, which was published in Yekaterinburg only on July 8/21, since the Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks, who allegedly shot the Royal Family without permission, in reality did not even dare to issue a message without Moscow's permission about the shooting. Meanwhile, with the approach of the front, a stampede of the Bolsheviks from Yekaterinburg began. On July 12/25, he was taken by the troops of the Siberian Army. On the same day, guards were assigned to Ipatiev's house, and on July 17/30, a judicial investigation began, which restored the picture of this terrible atrocity in almost all details, and also established the identity of its organizers and perpetrators. In subsequent years, a number of new witnesses appeared, and new documents and facts became known, which further supplemented and clarified the materials of the investigation.

Investigating the ritual murder of the Royal Family, investigator N.A. Sokolov, who literally sifted the whole earth at the site of the burning of the bodies of the Royal Family and found numerous fragments of crushed and burnt bones and extensive greasy masses, did not find a single tooth, not a single fragment of them, but As you know, teeth don't burn in fire. It turned out that after the murder, Isaak Goloshchekin immediately went to Moscow with three barrels of alcohol ... He brought with him to Moscow these heavy barrels, sealed in wooden boxes and wrapped with ropes, and in the passenger compartment, without touching the contents in them, there was absolutely no place in the cabin. Some of the accompanying guards and train servants inquired about the mysterious cargo. Goloshchekin answered all questions that he was carrying samples of artillery shells for the Putilov factory. In Moscow, Goloshchekin took the boxes, went to Yankel Sverdlov and lived with him for five days without returning to the car. What documents in the literal sense of the word, and for what purpose, could be of interest to Yankel Sverdlov, Nahamkes and Bronstein?

It is quite possible that the murderers, destroying the Tsar's bodies, separated their honest heads from them, in order to prove to the leadership in Moscow that the entire Tsar's Family had been liquidated. This method, as a form of "reporting", was widely used in the Cheka, in those terrible years of massacres by the Bolsheviks of the defenseless population of Russia.

There is a rare picture: in the days of the February turmoil, the Tsar's children, sick with measles, upon recovery, all five were removed with shaved heads - so that only heads are visible, and they all have the same face. The empress burst into tears: five children's heads seem to be cut off ...

That it was a ritual murder is beyond doubt. This is evidenced not only by ritual Kabbalistic inscriptions in the basement room of the Ipatiev House, but also by the killers themselves.

The wicked knew what they were doing. Their speeches are remarkable. One of the regicides M.A. Medvedev (Kudrin) described in December 1963 the night of July 17:

… Went down to the first floor. Here's that room, "very small." "Yurovsky and Nikulin brought three chairs - the last thrones of the condemned Dynasty."

Yurovsky declares aloud: “... we have been entrusted with the mission to put an end to the House of Romanov!”

And here is the moment immediately after the massacre: “Near the truck I meet Philip Goloshchekin.

Where were you? I ask him.

Walked around the square. Heard shots. It was heard. — Bent over the King.

The end, you say, of the Romanov Dynasty?! Yes…

A Red Army soldier brought Anastasia's lap dog on a bayonet - when we walked past the door (to the stairs to the second floor), a long, plaintive howl was heard from behind the wings - the last salute to the Emperor of All Russia. The dog's corpse was thrown next to the royal one.

Dogs - dog death! said Goloshchekin contemptuously.

After the fanatics initially threw the bodies of the Royal Martyrs into the mine, they decided to take them out of there in order to set them on fire. “From the 17th to the 18th of July,” recalled P.Z. Ermakov, - I again arrived in the forest, brought the rope. I was lowered into the mine. I began to tie each one individually, and two guys pulled out. All the corpses were obtained (sik! - S.F.) from the mine in order to put an end to the Romanovs and so that their friends would not think to create HOLY RELIGIONS.

Already mentioned by us M.A. Medvedev testified: “Before us lay ready-made“ MIRACLES POWERS ”: the icy water of the mine not only completely washed away the blood, but also froze the bodies so much that they looked like they were alive - a blush even appeared on the faces of the Tsar, girls and women.”

One of the participants in the destruction of the royal bodies, Chekist G.I. Sukhorukov recalled on April 3, 1928: “In order that if the whites even found these corpses and did not guess by the number that this was the Royal Family, we decided to burn two pieces at the stake, which we did, the first Heir fell on OUR ALTAR and the second is the youngest daughter Anastasia ... ".

Member of the regicide M.A. Medvedev (Kudrin) (December 1963): “With the deep religiosity of the people in the provinces, it was impossible to allow the enemy to leave even the remains of the Royal Dynasty, from which the clergy would immediately fabricate “HOLY MIRACLES”…”.

Another Chekist G.P. Nikulin in his conversation on the radio on May 12, 1964: "... Even if a corpse was discovered, then, obviously, some kind of POWER was created from it, you know, around which some kind of counter-revolution would be grouped ...".

The same was confirmed the next day by his comrade I.I. Rodzinsky: “… It was a very serious matter.<…>If the White Guards discovered these remains, do you know what they would do? POWERS. Religious processions would use the darkness of the village. Therefore, the question of hiding traces was more important than even the execution itself.<…>That was the most important…”

No matter how distorted the bodies are, M.K. Dieterikhs, - Isaac Goloshchekin perfectly understood that for a Russian Christian it is not the discovery of a physical whole body that matters, but the most insignificant remains of Them, as sacred relics of those bodies whose soul is immortal and cannot be destroyed by Isaac Goloshchekin or another similar fanatic from the Jewish people ".

Verily, even the demons believe and tremble!

... The Bolsheviks renamed the city of Yekaterinburg to Sverdlovsk - in honor of the main organizer of the murder of the Royal Family, and thereby not only confirmed the correctness of the accusation of the judiciary, but also their responsibility for this greatest crime in the history of mankind, committed by the world forces of evil ...

The very date of the savage murder is not accidental - July 17th. On this day, the Russian Orthodox Church honors the memory of the holy noble prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, who, with his martyr's blood, consecrated the autocracy of Russia. According to the chroniclers, the Jewish conspirators "accepted" Orthodoxy and benefited by Himself, killed him in the most cruel way. Saint Prince Andrei was the first to proclaim the idea of ​​Orthodoxy and Autocracy as the basis of the statehood of Holy Russia and was, in fact, the first Russian Tsar.

By God's providence, the Royal Martyrs were taken from earthly life all together. As a reward for boundless mutual love, which tightly bound Them into one indivisible whole.

The sovereign courageously ascended Golgotha ​​and, with meek obedience to the Will of God, accepted martyrdom. He left as a legacy the unclouded Monarchical Beginning as a precious Pledge received by Him from his Royal ancestors.

Yekaterinburg. At the place of execution of the royal family. Holy Quarter June 16th, 2016

Immediately behind you can not miss this high temple and a number of other temple buildings. This is the Holy Quarter. By the will of fate, three streets bearing the names of revolutionaries are limited. Let's go to him.

On the way - a monument to the Holy Blessed Peter and Fevronia of Murom. Installed in 2012.

The Church-on-the-Blood was built in 2000-2003. on the spot where on the night of July 16 to July 17, 1918, the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family were shot. At the entrance to the temple, their photographs.

In 1917, after the February Revolution and abdication, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family were exiled to Tobolsk by decision of the Provisional Government.

After the Bolsheviks came to power and the start of the civil war, in April 1918, permission was received from the Presidium (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) of the fourth convocation to transfer the Romanovs to Yekaterinburg in order to deliver them to Moscow from there in order to conduct a trial of them.

In Yekaterinburg, a large stone mansion, confiscated from the engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, was chosen as the place of imprisonment for Nicholas II and his family. On the night of July 17, 1918, in the basement of this house, Emperor Nicholas II, along with his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, children and close associates, were shot, and after that their bodies were taken to the abandoned Ganina Yama mine.

September 22, 1977 on the recommendation of the chairman of the KGB Yu.V. Andropov and the instructions of B.N. Yeltsin's Ipatiev house was destroyed. Later, Yeltsin would write in his memoirs: "...sooner or later we will all be ashamed of this barbarity. We will be ashamed, but we won't be able to fix anything...".

When designing, the plan of the future temple was superimposed on the plan of the demolished Ipatiev house in such a way as to create an analogue of the room where the Tsar's family was shot. At the lower level of the temple, a symbolic place for this execution was envisaged. In fact, the place of execution of the royal family is outside the temple in the area of ​​​​the carriageway of Karl Liebknecht Street.

The temple is a five-domed structure with a height of 60 meters and a total area of ​​3000 m². The architecture of the building is designed in the Russian-Byzantine style. The vast majority of churches were built in this style during the reign of Nicholas II.

The cross in the center is part of the monument to the royal family descending into the basement before being shot.

Adjacent to the Church-on-the-Blood is the Church in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker with the spiritual and educational center "Patriarchal Compound" and the museum of the royal family.

Behind them you can see the Church of the Ascension of the Lord (1782-1818).

And in front of him is the Kharitonov-Rastorguev estate of the early 19th century (architect Malakhov), which became the Palace of Pioneers in the Soviet years. Now - the City Palace of Creativity for Children and Youth "Giftedness and Technology".

What else is in the vicinity. This is the Gazprom Tower, which has been under construction since 1976 as the Tourist Hotel.

The former office of the now defunct airline Transaero.

Between them - buildings of the middle of the last century.

Residential house-monument of 1935. Built for railroad workers. Very beautiful! Athletes' Street, on which the building is located, has been gradually built up since the 1960s, as a result, by 2010 it was completely lost. This residential building is the only building listed on a virtually non-existent street, the house has number 30.

Well, now we are going to the Gazprom tower - an interesting street begins from there.

After the execution on the night of July 16-17, 1918, the bodies of members of the royal family and their entourage (11 people in total) were loaded into a car and sent towards Verkh-Isetsk to the abandoned mines of Ganina Yama. At first they unsuccessfully tried to burn the victims, and then they threw them into the shaft of the mine and threw them with branches.

Discovery of remains

However, the next day, almost the entire Verkh-Isetsk knew about what had happened. In addition, according to Medvedev, a member of the firing squad, “the icy water of the mine not only washed away the blood completely, but also froze the bodies so much that they looked like they were alive.” The conspiracy clearly failed.

The remains were promptly reburied. The area was cordoned off, but the truck, having driven only a few kilometers, got stuck in the swampy area of ​​the Porosenkov Log. Without beginning to invent anything, one part of the bodies was buried right under the road, and the other - a little to the side, after filling them with sulfuric acid. Sleepers were placed on top for reliability.

Interestingly, the forensic investigator N. Sokolov, sent by Kolchak in 1919 to search for a burial site, found this place, but he did not think of raising the sleepers. In the area of ​​Ganina Yama, he managed to find only a severed female finger. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the investigator was unequivocal: “Here is all that remains of the August Family. Everything else was destroyed by the Bolsheviks with fire and sulfuric acid.”

Nine years later, perhaps it was Porosenkov Log that Vladimir Mayakovsky visited, as can be judged from his poem “The Emperor”: “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.”

It is known that shortly before his trip to Sverdlovsk, the poet met in Warsaw with one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family, Pyotr Voikov, who could show him the exact place.

Ural historians found the remains in the Piglet Log in 1978, but permission for excavations was received only in 1991. There were 9 bodies in the burial. During the investigation, some of the remains were recognized as "royal": according to experts, only Alexei and Maria were missing. However, many experts were confused by the results of the examination, and therefore no one was in a hurry to agree with the conclusions. The House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church refused to recognize the remains as authentic.

Alexei and Maria were found only in 2007, guided by a document compiled from the words of the commandant of the "House of Special Purpose" Yakov Yurovsky. "Yurovsky's note" initially did not inspire much confidence, nevertheless, the place of the second burial was indicated correctly in it.

Falsifications and myths

Immediately after the execution, representatives of the new government tried to convince the West that the members of the imperial family, or at least the children, were alive and in a safe place. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G. V. Chicherin in April 1922 at the Genoa Conference, to the question of one of the correspondents about the fate of the Grand Duchesses, vaguely answered: “The fate of the tsar's daughters is not known to me. I read in the papers that they were in America."

However, P. L. Voikov, in an informal setting, stated more specifically: "the world will never know what we did to the royal family." But later, after the publication in the West of the materials of the Sokolov investigation, the Soviet authorities recognized the fact of the execution of the imperial family.

Falsifications and speculations around the execution of the Romanovs contributed to the spread of enduring myths, among which the myth of the ritual murder and the severed head of Nicholas II, which was in the special storage of the NKVD, was popular. Later, stories about the “miraculous salvation” of the Tsar’s children, Alexei and Anastasia, grew into myths. But all this has remained a myth.

Investigation and expertise

In 1993, Vladimir Solovyov, an investigator from the General Prosecutor's Office, was entrusted with the investigation into the discovery of the remains. Given the importance of the case, in addition to the traditional ballistic and macroscopic examinations, additional genetic studies were carried out together with British and American scientists.

For these purposes, blood was taken from some of the Romanov relatives living in England and Greece for analysis. The results showed that the probability that the remains belonged to members of the royal family was 98.5 percent.
The investigation considered this insufficient. Solovyov managed to obtain permission to exhume the remains of the tsar's brother, George. Scientists confirmed the "absolute positional similarity of mtDNA" of both remains, which revealed a rare genetic mutation inherent in the Romanovs - heteroplasmy.

However, after the discovery in 2007 of the alleged remains of Alexei and Maria, new studies and examinations were required. The work of scientists was greatly facilitated by Alexy II, who, before the burial of the first group of royal remains in the tomb of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, asked the investigators to remove bone particles. “Science is developing, it is possible that they will be needed in the future,” these were the words of the Patriarch.

To remove the doubts of skeptics for new examinations, the head of the laboratory of molecular genetics at the University of Massachusetts Evgeny Rogaev (who was insisted on by representatives of the House of Romanov), the chief geneticist of the US Army Michael Cobble (who returned the names of the victims of September 11), as well as an employee of the Institute of Forensic Medicine from Austria, Walter Parson.

Comparing the remains from the two burials, the experts once again rechecked the previously obtained data, and also conducted new studies - the previous results were confirmed. Moreover, the “blood-splattered shirt” of Nicholas II (Otsu incident) found in the Hermitage funds fell into the hands of scientists. And again, a positive answer: the genotypes of the king “on the blood” and “on the bones” coincided.

Results

The results of the investigation into the case of the execution of the royal family refuted some pre-existing assumptions. For example, according to experts, “under the conditions in which the destruction of corpses was carried out, it was impossible to completely destroy the remains using sulfuric acid and combustible materials.”

This fact rules out Ganina Yama as the final burial site.
True, the historian Vadim Viner finds a serious gap in the conclusions of the investigation. He believes that some finds belonging to a later time, in particular coins of the 30s, were not taken into account. But as the facts show, information about the place of burial very quickly "leaked" to the masses, and therefore the burial ground could be repeatedly opened in search of possible values.

Another revelation is offered by the historian S. A. Belyaev, who believes that “the family of the Yekaterinburg merchant could have been buried with imperial honors,” though without providing convincing arguments.
However, the conclusions of the investigation, which was carried out with unprecedented scrupulousness using the latest methods, with the participation of independent experts, are unequivocal: all 11 remains clearly correlate with each of those shot in the Ipatiev house. Common sense and logic dictate that it is impossible to accidentally duplicate such physical and genetic correspondences.
In December 2010, the final conference dedicated to the latest results of the examinations was held in Yekaterinburg. Reports were made by 4 groups of geneticists who worked independently in different countries. Opponents of the official version could also express their views, however, according to eyewitnesses, “having listened to the reports, they left the hall without uttering a word.”
The Russian Orthodox Church still does not recognize the authenticity of the "Ekaterinburg remains", but many representatives of the Romanov dynasty, judging by their statements in the press, accepted the final results of the investigation.