THE MURDER OF THE TSAR
No structural changes have been made in the house which the Tsar occupied
in Ekaterinburg, and which is now used as the office of the Bolshevik
Political Department. The Red flag flies over it as it did when the
Emperor lived there; but high up on the front of it, near the roof, is a
new feature in the shape of a huge painting representing in lurid colours
the defeat of Kolchak by the Red Army, which is depicted as charging
across a frozen steppe through battle-smoke and falling snow.
Built by a merchant called Ippatiev and consequently known as Ippatievsky
Dom, it is a substantial-looking edifice of brick and white plaster of a
rococo style of architecture, and is situated half-way up the long street
leading from the railway station to the town and not far from the British
Consulate. East of it is a large open space called “Ascension Square,”
but now renamed by the Bolsheviks “the Square of National Vengeance.” On
the east side of this square stands the Church of the Ascension. On the
west side and fifteen yards off the street is Ippatievsky House, from
which the ground slopes sharply downwards to a lake six hundred yards
distant. Owing to this steep fall of the ground, the roadway is flush
with the second-storey windows, and a steep bank five feet in height
falls from the road to the level on which the house is built. On top of
this bank and near the south-east corner of the house there still stands
a little wayside shrine of St. Nicholas, surmounted by a gilt dome and
a cross. Owing to its peculiar position on a slope, the house has a
sunken appearance and seems to have only one storey. The main entrance
leads to the first-floor, and the room on the ground-floor, wherein
the Tsar was killed, served as a cellar. Mr. Ippatiev was allowed by
the Bolsheviks to live in the other ground-floor rooms, but preferred
to live in the country, and was absent from the house when the murder
took place. On the south side of the house is a short street, Ascension
Lane, leading down to the lake; and on the other side of this street
from Ippatievsky, is another house which was used as a barrack for the
thirty-six soldiers who guarded the Tsar. In this house there also lived
one civilian Bolshevik who, in accordance with the loose military system
that prevailed among the Reds at this time, commanded those soldiers with
the title of Sergeant of the Guard, though not himself in the Red Army,
which he joined, however, after the murders. His name was Paul Metvietev,
and he had formerly been a workman in the Sysertsk factory. Metvietev, a
repulsive individual with whom I afterwards travelled from Ekaterinburg
to Moscow, was the right-hand man of Yurovsky, a shopkeeper and civilian,
who was “commandant” of Ippatievsky House and, as such, responsible for
the “safety” of the Tsar, whom he ultimately murdered with his own hand.
The evidence against him is overwhelming and conclusive. Not only did
all the trustworthy testimony collected by Admiral Kolchak’s Government
indicate that it was Yurovsky personally who had fired the fatal shot,
but all the Bolsheviks whom I consulted on the subject, while I was
living last March in Red Ekaterinburg, unanimously pointed him out to
me as the Tsar’s murderer. I had, by the way, a strange and terrible
interview with him which I will describe later.
[Illustration: IPPATIEVSKY DOM, EKATERINBURG. _To face p. 124._]
On the north side of Ippatievsky House a large wooden gate leads into
an ample courtyard. The front door, which faced east, was known by the
Bolsheviks as Post No. 1, and was always guarded by some of the Lett
soldiers who lived in the house. Post No. 2, on the balcony, was also
guarded by Letts, but how verses in Russian came to be written on the
wall there I cannot explain except on the supposition that Russian
soldiers went there also. Posts Nos. 3 and 4 were guarded only by Russian
soldiers from the house opposite. Post No. 3 opened into the yard, and
was the door through which the dead bodies were carried into the yard
after the massacre. Post No. 4 was the name given to the side entrance
from Ascension Lane.
A steep flight of steps descended into the cellar from the dining-room.
The cellar is now used as a Bolshevik club, and the entrance to it is
from Post No. 4. Over this entrance is a large Bolshevik signboard giving
the name of the club, but containing no reference to the murder, which
the Reds seem anxious to forget. The only reference to it in Ekaterinburg
is contained in the name of the square, which I have already given.
When the ex-Emperor was first brought to Ekaterinburg, Ippatievsky House
was surrounded by the Bolsheviks with a high wooden fence to prevent the
inmates from looking out and outsiders from looking in. All that the
Tsar could see from his window was the cross on the lofty dome of the
church opposite, and, beyond that, the sky—a symbolism that probably did
not escape that superstitious mind, ever on the lookout for omens. But,
to such as cared to look for them, there were plenty of omens. From the
roof of the church, for example, several Bolshevik machine-guns were
permanently pointed at the Tsar’s place of internment. The little stone
shrine in the street outside the bedroom of the Emperor was dedicated
to his patron Saint, St. Nicholas. Lastly, the name of the house,
Ippatievsky, was the same as the name of the monastery where the boyars
had elected Michael, the first of the Romanovs, to rule over Muscovy.
[Illustration: ROUGH PLAN OF IPPATIEVSKY HOUSE, EKATERINBURG
_Drawn from Memory_]
The house looked fairly large from the outside, but really contained, on
the first-floor at least, only four or five living-rooms reached by six
stone steps at the end of the vestibule. There was a balcony at the back
of the house, but the Imperial party were not allowed to use it. Several
soldiers were always there, and it is probably to them that we owe the
lascivious verses and pornographic drawings which still adorn the door
and walls of the balcony. A large room near the entrance was occupied by
Yurovsky, who slept there every night, though he had elsewhere in the
town a shop and a house of his own, where he lived with his mother, his
wife, one son and one daughter. A small room at the south-east corner was
assigned to the Tsar, the Tsarina, and the Tsarevich, who slept in three
beds, which were as many as the room could hold. The one door in this
room led into the bedroom occupied by the four Grand Duchesses and their
maid Demedova. Dr. Botkin, the medical attendant of the Imperial party,
and the other members of Nicholas the Second’s sadly diminished suite,
slept with the guards in another room, so that the Tsar and his family
had only two small rooms to themselves, and the use, in the daytime,
of the dining-room and of a drawing-room which was used on Sundays as
a chapel. Guards, all of them Lettish, slept in the room next to the
dining-room, and no Russian slept in the house, Yurovsky being a Jew.
The thirty-six soldiers who were quartered in the house on the other
side of Ascension Lane were not forbidden to enter Ippatievsky Dom, and
they frequently passed through the dining-room; while the Commissars and
the Lettish soldiers were in the habit of entering the bedrooms of the
Imperial Family as often as they liked, day or night. This privilege they
exercised very frequently during the week before the murder, so that the
prisoners got very little sleep. The girls were sometimes heard to scream
at night, but there is no evidence that any assault was ever committed on
them, and the most likely explanation of their screams is that they woke
up at night frightened at finding somebody in their bedroom. The back
room, which was used as a dining-room by the prisoners, was always rather
dark, as it opened on to a covered balcony.
The only records left by the Imperial prisoners were childish scribblings
on the bare, whitewashed wall of the Tsar’s room; a mass of hair, mostly
cut from the heads of the Grand Duchesses, and found in a stove; and, in
the cellar underneath, tragic evidences of the final butchery. The Crown
Prince had written with a pencil the date of his arrival in Ekaterinburg,
and, in another place, the name “Jesus Christ” thrice repeated, once in
French and twice in Russian. In another place he wrote in French the
words _Les Anges Gardiens_; and, near the door, he had marked the height
of his parents with a pencilled line on the wall, adding after one line
the words “Maman,” and after the other “Papa.” Papa seemed, however,
from this record to be much higher than he really was, but probably he
insisted in fun on wearing a high Cossack busby. As is well known, he was
extremely fond of children, and, in the days of his greatness, called
down on himself the reproaches of the Grand Dukes for the familiarities
he always encouraged their infant children to take with him—familiarities
which sometimes went so far as their riding on his back while he went
around the nursery on all fours. The only references to the Tsar’s
daughters were contained in the lascivious doggerel spoken of above,
doggerel illustrated by a number of rude and extremely indecent sketches
drawn in pencil on the walls.
Mr. Thomas, who was with the British Consul, Mr. Preston, in Ekaterinburg
when the tragedy occurred, told me that as the Czechs drew nearer in
July, the alarm of the Bolsheviks grew greater, though they tried to
reassure the people by printing proclamations to the effect that they
would never leave the town, and by shooting men who remarked casually in
the street and elsewhere that they probably would leave, since they were
certainly sending away trainload after trainload of gold and platinum.
Meanwhile the very air around the sunken house became heavy with a
sense of impending tragedy. According to all the neighbours this
feeling reached its climax on the night of July 16, 1918, the night of
the murder. Although all traffic on the streets was not stopped till
midnight, the obvious nervousness of the sentries and the fact that
machine-guns were being placed all around the villa as well as on the
roof and on the balcony drove most people indoors, where they cowered
till daybreak. All of them heard firing inside the house during the
night, and some of them heard screams as well. Late in the evening, as
Mr. Thomas passed Ippatievsky on the way to his Consulate, which is only
three hundred yards further on, he was ordered by a sentry, who seemed
to be labouring under some strong emotion, to walk on the other side of
the street, and was nearly shot because he did not obey the order quickly
enough. This excitement of the guard was in strong contrast to the
absence of all military precautions at the same point next day and to the
deserted appearance of the house, but the reason for this change was soon
apparent.
The Reds had been in the habit, at this crisis in their history, of
keeping up their courage by holding Communist Revival meetings, as I may
call them, in the great municipal theatre; and on July 19 Goloshokin,
the leading Commissar of the town, was the principal speaker. He did not
conceal the gravity of the situation. “The Czechs,” he said, “those
hirelings of French and British capitalists, are close at hand. The old
Tsarist Generals are with them; the Cossacks also are coming; and they
all think that they will get back their Tsar again. But they never shall.”
He pronounced these last words slowly and solemnly, and then paused for
a moment while a deep hush fell on the audience. Mastering himself by a
strong effort, the orator then shouted out at the top of his voice those
terrible and historic words: “We shot him last night.” This was the first
public and official announcement of the fact that Nicholas Romanov, the
last Tsar of Russia, had ceased to exist, but its effect on his audience
was so different from what Goloshokin had expected that he quickly added:
“And we have sent his wife and family to a place of safety.” Taking their
cue from Goloshokin many of the Bolsheviks then circulated reports of the
Tsar and all his family having been sent to Perm, with the result that
many simple people were deceived, and that, until quite recently, some of
the relatives of the Tsar refused to believe that he was dead.
The following account of how the Emperor and his family were murdered is
put together from the evidence of various eyewitnesses seen at different
places in Ekaterinburg and from Russian official reports never before
published. These accounts all corroborate one another on the main facts,
though they differ sometimes on minor details, so that the description
here given may be taken as, on the whole, authentic.
At about 1 o’clock on the night of the murder Yurovsky entered the
bedroom of the Tsar, awoke him, and told him that the Czechs were
expected in the town before daybreak. “Get up,” he said, “and dress. It
would be better for you and your family to come down into the cellar, as
there may be fighting in the streets, and stray bullets may come through
these windows. I will wake up the others and wait for you all outside.”
Yurovsky then added in a lower tone something that could not be
distinctly heard by those in the dining-room. The Tsar, who seemed to
have immediately jumped out of bed, spoke disjointedly to Yurovsky and to
the Empress as he dressed himself. Most of what he said was inaudible,
but he was understood to say “Are they so near?” and then to thank
Yurovsky twice, with the great courtesy which he had shown all his life
to everybody around him. He afterwards asked if all were going below and
if, in that case, it would not be better for them to bring their personal
belongings with them. To this Yurovsky answered “No. It is not necessary,
but you can take your cushions if you like. It would be just as well.”
What those cushions contained I shall tell afterwards. The story is
one that would be incredible were not this an epoch when nothing is
incredible.
Yurovsky, who seemed to have become unusually nervous and polite, then
brought to the Grand Duchesses the same message as he had brought to
the Tsar, and, having done so, waited in the dining-room where several
Lettish soldiers were standing with rifles and fixed bayonets. Along
with them were five civilian Bolsheviks, Commissar Goloshokin, Commissar
Mrachkovsky, Paul Metvietev, “the Sergeant of the Guard,” and two
others whose names I cannot ascertain. They had come, at the request of
Yurovsky, to carry out the execution themselves in case the soldiers
failed them; but only Yurovsky, Mrachkovsky, and Metvietev went into the
cellar, the others remaining in the dining-room until word was brought
them that the deed was done. Though Mrachkovsky was present at the
butchery he does not seem to have taken part in it.
After leaving the Grand Duchesses’ room Yurovsky took up a position apart
from the others, who were grouped in the centre of the chamber. He stood
close to the door leading into the Imperial apartments, his head bent,
listening in deep silence and with trembling limbs; and when I visited
him on March 8, I was horrified to see him standing waiting for me at
the end of a dark passage in exactly the same attitude. All the rest of
the party were equally silent, and the scene was lighted up by several
stable-lanterns, some of them held in the shaky hands of the soldiers,
some of them resting on the dining-room table. Seeing that something
unusual was afoot, several Russian soldiers of the outer guard had
drifted into the room and stood looking on, open-mouthed.
Finally all the party, eleven in number, came out into the dining-room,
fully dressed, the Tsar coming first. With him came his wife, son, and
four daughters, Dr. Botkin, Demedova the maid, one male servant, and
lastly the cook. The former Autocrat of All the Russias was so thin
and haggard as to be hardly recognizable. I have this description from
the priest who said Mass in the house a few days before. He wore a
khaki-coloured military blouse belted at the waist, loose blue cavalry
breeches, soft leather high boots, but no cap. The Bolsheviks had
deprived him some time before of his epaulettes and his George’s Cross,
so that he had no badges of military rank. A few days previously the
Empress had cut his hair owing to the verminous condition of the house
and to the great difficulty the prisoners experienced in getting water
for washing purposes, and he himself had trimmed his beard so that it was
shorter when he died than it had been for twenty years. All the others
had had their hair cut close for the same reason, the Tsarevich having
had his locks shorn off by his mother, and the Grand Duchesses having
cut off each other’s luxuriant tresses. As it was wellnigh impossible
to get the rooms cleaned out, all this hair was collected into a bundle
and stuffed into a disused stove, where it was afterwards found by the
Whites, and identified by former servants of the Imperial Family.
The Tsarina held her little crippled son by the hand, and the Grand
Duchess Tatiana carried in her arms her little Pekingese dog. The
Tsarevich had also had a dog, but, as if it had some foreknowledge of the
impending tragedy, it had deserted the house on the previous day and was
lost for some time. An officer of General Knox’s Mission afterwards found
it and brought it to England with him.
All the party then descended into the cellar in silence, one of the
Grand Duchesses carrying her little brother in her arms as, owing to
his lameness, he could not easily descend the steps, the Grand Duchess
Tatiana raising her dress with her left hand as she stretched one foot
cautiously downwards in the darkness while holding in her right arm the
little dog, which affectionately licked her face.
It was a pathetic procession mainly composed of helpless women and
of a crippled invalid child of fourteen years, the most helpless of
them all. There were two women among them and four gentle girls, who,
if they had not been born in the purple, would nevertheless have been
celebrated for their great personal beauty even in that land of beautiful
women. There was Tatiana, twenty-one years of age, a talented and kindly
young woman already destined by Court gossips to be the future Queen of
England; Olga, twenty-three; Maria, nineteen; and Anastasia, seventeen;
the last-named fragile and lovely as an opening flower, serene with
the divine innocence of childhood and radiant with the bright charm
of girlhood and health. It was a procession such as always makes any
man, no matter how humble, sincerely desirous of assisting in some way,
of carrying something, of rendering some little unselfish service, a
tribute of the male sex to that sex which God has made delicate, soft,
and dependent. One of the soldiers held up his lantern to light the way
down those dark and narrow stairs which led to death, but none of them
made any other attempt to help their victims. The Tsar gave his arm to
his wife, the last time he was ever to perform that act of courtesy.
Even in that appalling descent to darkness and doom, the Imperial party
automatically preserved the order of precedence which long practice had
made a second nature with them, and which even the inconveniences of
prison life had never caused them to neglect. The Emperor and his wife
went first, arm-in-arm, dignified but trembling, as if to meet a greater
Monarch than themselves. Then came the little Tsarevich, carried by Olga,
his eldest sister. Then Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia; then the others in due
order of their respective rank, with the humble, faithful cook bringing
up the rear. The cook, the manservant, and the maid Demedova would have
been spared if they had not exhibited in all their conversations with the
Commissars an unalterable fidelity to the doomed family which they had
served so long. Let us honour the memory of these poor people, though,
except in the case of Demedova, their names are unknown to us.
After the cook came the representatives of a different world, headed by
Yurovsky, gloomy and preoccupied, his brow dark with thoughts of murder,
his right hand in his coat-pocket, grasping a revolver. He was followed
by the Russian soldiers whom I have already referred to, and whose
numbers had now been increased by the arrival of several others who were
on guard at Post No. 4 and had come to the door of the cellar to see what
was going on, little expecting, however, to find that their special duty
at Ippatievsky had come to an end and they would never again be called
upon to mount sentry over their imprisoned Gosudar. These soldiers saw
through the open door everything that afterwards took place, and it is
the testimony of several, especially Anatoly Yakimov and Streokin, that I
am principally using. They corroborate one another in the most remarkable
manner, though they sometimes differ on minor details, and their evidence
is confirmed by that of other witnesses.
The Tsar and his party clustered together at one end of this underground
chamber, Tatiana still holding the little Pekingese in her arms, while
the Lett soldiers, as well as Yurovsky, Mrachkovsky, and Metvietev,
remained in deep silence at the other end, the soldiers looking
with strained and expectant eyes, now at Yurovsky, now at the Tsar.
Mrachkovsky and Metvietev drew their revolvers; and it must have been at
once evident to the victims that something terrible was going to happen.
It is a significant fact that there were only two Russians present
amongst the executioners, and that there was not a single Russian soldier.
The cellar is about seventeen feet long by fourteen feet wide, and has
one little half-moon window, protected by iron bars, high up in its outer
wall. It had previously been frequented by the soldiers, some of whom
had drawn on the walls indecent pictures of the Empress and Rasputin,
with the names written underneath so that there should be no mistake.
These rude and filthy drawings were the last pictures of any kind that
the unfortunate Tsarina saw. In her simple bedroom at Tsarskoe Selo,
where she had probably expected to die at a green old age, her dying gaze
would have been fixed on mediæval Madonnas painted by the very greatest
of the Italian masters. She never imagined that her death-chamber would
be ornamented with caricatures so hideous and so obscene that they might
have been the handiwork of degraded and impure demons from the lowest
pit. If she was imprudent, she has suffered for her imprudence. But
perhaps it was better for her soul that she died as she did instead of
in her bedroom at Tsarskoe Selo, surrounded by the highest ecclesiastics
and the holiest relics in Russia, for, according to the testimony, not
only of the priest who frequently said Mass in the house, but even of a
hostile witness whom I shall quote hereafter, she led a very exemplary
and religious life during her imprisonment. May Christ have mercy on her
even as in His lifetime He had mercy always on the afflicted.
The Empress took one swift, frightened look at those dreadful pictures,
then at the revolvers in front of her and the pitiless countenances
behind them, and her eyes dilated with horror. Crossing herself, she
bent her head and covered her face with her hands. I may add that those
pornographic representations were still to be seen on that wall when I
reached Ekaterinburg two months later.
Meanwhile Yurovsky, whose face had become white, had drawn forth a paper
and begun to read it by the light of a lantern which one of the soldiers
held up. He grasped the paper in his left hand and clutched a revolver
in his right. The reading did not take more than three seconds, for the
document was very brief. It was simply an order of the Soviet Republic
to execute “Nicholas Romanov, the Bloody, and all his family.” Yurovsky
shouted it out rather than read it, and, while doing so, he hardly
glanced at the paper, the contents of which he knew by heart, for he and
Goloshokin had written it only an hour before.
Crossing herself again the Empress now fell on her knees, and was
followed by all the rest of the doomed party, who also crossed themselves
devoutly. The Emperor alone remained standing, and while Yurovsky was
still shouting out the final words, “By Order of the Soviet of Workmen’s,
Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies,” he stepped quickly in front of his
wife and children as if to shield them with his own body, at the same
time saying something which was drowned by the sound of Yurovsky’s voice
re-echoing dreadfully in that small chamber, then pointing to his
little ones, crouching together, terror-stricken, on their knees, but
his words were quite inaudible. Yurovsky who, as I know from personal
experience, is extremely quick in his mental processes, saw at once what
that gesture meant, and instantly determined to prevent all possibility
of Nicholas Romanov making such a moving, human appeal for his young
girls and his little crippled boy as might touch even the hard hearts of
the executioners and lead to the lives of those innocents being spared.
His right hand rose like a flash: he fired; and at the same instant the
Emperor reeled and fell, shot through the brain.
The Tsar had undoubtedly meant to beg that his wife and children might
not be butchered; but now, as ever, he was too late; and, though the
noble gesture came, the words had not time to follow. The grisly shape
that had dogged him all his life rushed on him like a thunderbolt, and
the greatest historical tragedy that Europe has seen since the execution
of Louis the Sixteenth was consummated. The extraordinary prophecy made
by the Tsarevich Alexis as he was being tortured to death by his own
father, Peter the Great, was fulfilled. The last of the Tsars had died in
his own blood.
This fatal shot was the signal for the others to begin shooting, which
they did, wildly; and in five minutes from the time Yurovsky had begun
reading the death-warrant, all of the Imperial party save the Grand
Duchess Tatiana and the maid Demedova had been killed. Tatiana, who was
wounded, had fainted and lay on the floor like one dead, her little dog
standing on top of her and barking furiously at the soldiers until one of
them killed it.
After having shot the Tsar, the chief assassin began discharging his
revolver into the terrified group huddled close together in front of him
with faces expressing the extremity of human fear. Only he and God know
whether or not he also killed the little crippled Tsarevich and some
of his young sisters; and it was this dreadful secret, I think, which
weighed on Yurovsky when I met him. Those who watched at the door could
not tell exactly what happened in this brief space of time. Their minds
were paralyzed by the swiftness and the appalling greatness of the
tragedy. The lamps crashed on the ground, where some of them were broken
and some of them flared up, filling the cellar with a yellow, smoky
glare. The close, murky atmosphere was lit by flashes of firearms and,
in the confined space, the noise of the explosions was deafening. From
the descriptions given by eyewitnesses, the soldiers were mad with rage
and drunk with blood. They not only bayoneted bodies already dead, but
beat in the skulls of corpses with the butt-ends of their rifles. One of
the soldiers, who was there as a spectator, says that “the murder was so
cruel that it was difficult to watch it, and I felt so faint that I had
to go out many times into the open air to recover.” Even by the evening
of the next day, July 17, Yakimov, one of those soldier-spectators who
came to say good-bye to his brother-in-law, Gregory Agafonov, before
running away from Ekaterinburg for ever, was described by Agafonov as
follows: “He was haggard, the pupils of his eyes were dilated, and, while
he talked to me, his lower lip trembled. It was easy to see that during
the night he had been through a terrible experience. On the same day he
went to the railway station and has never been heard of since.” Yakimov’s
last words were, “The killing was done by Yurovsky, some Lett soldiers,
and the Sergeant of the Guard.”
Until she fell dead herself the maid Demedova used her cushion vigorously
to beat up the muzzles of the rifles which were pointed at the children,
so that half a dozen bullets struck the upper part of the wall or
ricochetted from one wall to another, making marks which are still
visible. One of these stray bullets took off the tips of three fingers of
Yurovsky’s left hand, and the Commissar then moved towards the threshold,
where one of the Russian soldiers standing there bound up the wounds
with a dirty handkerchief. Yurovsky seemed on the point of mounting the
cellar steps to have his hand better attended to upstairs, when suddenly
there was a shriek from the beautiful Grand Duchess Tatiana who, having
suddenly regained consciousness, sat up, shouting “Mother! Mother!” Two
or three of the soldiers instantly jumped towards her, and, while some
of them ran their bayonets through her, others beat in her head with
the butts of their rifles. There were seventeen deep dents made in the
cellar floor by bayonets. There are sixteen bullet-holes in the wall,
and sixteen bullets were extracted from them by the Whites after they
arrived. Some of those bullets must have gone through the bodies of the
victims before embedding themselves in the plaster. Several, which had
penetrated for a short distance into the floor, must have passed through
the corpses as they lay on the ground. Nearly all the bullets struck the
wall low down, showing that they had been fired at people who were on
their knees.
The bodies were then wrapped in white blankets taken from the beds of the
murdered, carried upstairs, brought out through the kitchen door, and
thrown into a military motor-lorry which was waiting in the courtyard.
Four other lorries were waiting outside the yard gate. It may seem
strange that the corpses were not carried out through Post No. 4 and that
the lorries were not made to wait in Ascension Lane, but the explanation
is that the entrance through the barricade in Ascension Lane was too
narrow to permit of a lorry passing through it, and that Yurovsky was
morbidly afraid of prying eyes from the surrounding houses. The lorry
chosen to bring Nicholas the Second on his last Imperial progress was
in charge of a workman from the Zlokazov Factory called Lukhanov, and
his assistant was Leonidas Labashev. Of Lukhanov and his lorry I have
a strange story to tell later. Even the blood-stained cushions and the
body of the Pekingese dog were also brought in deference to Yurovsky’s
frenzied appeals not to leave the slightest clue behind. Ever since
the murder had been decided on, the Commandant of Ippatievsky had felt
very much the appalling isolation of his position and the supreme
magnitude of the crime which he was commissioned to perpetrate. Hence,
despite his extreme hatred of the Tsar on racial and political grounds,
he had insisted on all the members of the Ekaterinburg Soviet signing
the death-warrant, and this document he afterwards brought with him
to Moscow and showed to Lenin, who, however, only laughed at it—one
of his hard and mirthless laughs. Yurovsky felt very keenly that he
belonged to a race which is held in detestation by the great majority
of Russians, and that he was surrounded by a hundred million people who
would regard the killing of the Autocrat as not only murder but also
sacrilege. Consequently, even before the crime was committed, he had
declared that he would do what murderers always manifest an overpowering
desire to do, though they seldom succeed in their object even when they
have blast-furnaces and pools of molten lead at their disposal—that he
would destroy the corpses so completely that not the slightest trace of
them would remain any more than if they had never existed. He therefore
mapped out beforehand a scheme by means of which this could, he thought,
be done. On July 16 he asked Gorbunov, the Commissar for Supplies to
the Front, to send that night to Ippatievsky five motor-lorries and two
barrels of petrol: and Gorbunov, who knew what was afoot, immediately
passed on the order to Peter Alexeivich Lenov, who had charge of the
Bolshevik garage. Yurovsky provided at his own expense a large quantity
of sulphuric acid, for a purpose which will be revealed hereafter.
Despite all these precautions, however, Yurovsky, like nearly every other
murderer who has tried to annihilate absolutely the mangled bodies of his
victims, did not quite succeed, for, as will be seen, portions of the
corpses were afterwards found.
While the lorry was being filled with its ghastly freight, Yurovsky was
getting his injured hand attended to. Being badly shaken by his wound
and by the events of the night, he was pressed to remain behind as the
work had been done, but he refused, declaring fiercely that he must see
with his own eyes that the bodies were utterly destroyed and that not a
shred of evidence against him was left in existence. With many oaths and
blasphemies which shocked even his companions and were rendered still
more terrible by the feebleness of his step and the death-like pallor of
his face, he said that he would trust this work to no one, that he would
see it carried out himself. The determination to annihilate those mute
witnesses of his crime had grown into a mania, an almost insane obsession.
As to the exact time at which the motor-lorries left Ippatievsky there is
a difference of opinion among the witnesses. Some say 6 o’clock on the
morning of July 17, but Victor Boivoud, a Russian of French descent who
lived near Ippatievsky House, says that, on hearing the sound of firing
evidently proceeding from the cellar of Ippatievsky, he went out into his
own courtyard to listen and, twenty minutes later, heard the gate of the
Ippatievsky courtyard open and a motor-lorry come out. He was evidently
afraid to go outside his own courtyard, however, and had to trust
entirely to his ears, so that what he heard was probably Lukhanov’s lorry
entering the yard. Most likely the ghastly funeral procession of the
dead Emperor left Ippatievsky at about 3 o’clock on the morning of July
17; and it is certain that Yurovsky, Goloshokin, Lovatnykh, Partin, and
Kostusov, as well as a number of soldiers, probably Letts, took part in
this last terrible parade, travelling in four motor-lorries. It was broad
daylight when they set out, but there was not a soul in the street save
the sentries, who had had strict orders to keep every civilian indoors
and to shoot anyone who disobeyed. Needless to say, no rifle rose to the
salute as the Imperial cortège rushed past, though, four years earlier,
the death of the Tsar would have caused millions of soldiers all over
Russia to march in funeral processions with arms reversed and muffled
drums. The Red Guards, who were touched by the tragedy, but whose names
it would be inadvisable to give, remained indoors, pallid and trembling,
till the noise of the motor-lorries had died away in the distance.
One is led to surmise whether if, on his way down into the cellar, the
Tsar had appealed to those Russian soldiers on behalf of his family,
they might not have saved at least some of the children. But Nicholas
the Second had evidently no very strong suspicion of the fate to which
he was being conducted. He had made a special study of premonitions
and spiritualistic phenomena, and is even said to have once spoken to
the ghost of his own grandfather, summoned by unlawful incantations to
that tragic room in the Winter Palace where that grandfather had died,
shattered by a bomb, summoned in order that he might unveil for his
grandson the secrets of the future. But now, when a warning from the
other world should have come, if ever, no warning came. And perhaps it
was as well, for an appeal on the Tsar’s part could have done no good
either way. It would probably have failed, for the minds of the Russian
soldiers have been poisoned and brutalized. The men who could cover the
walls of the balcony with filthy drawings in the hope that the Tsar’s
innocent children might see them, and who could carry on indecent
conversations in the dining-room while the family were at table, could
never be touched by any appeal to their manhood. Had it not failed, a
fate worse than death would have overtaken those innocents. It was a
mercy of God that they all died together.
I might here add that the horrors which I have just described are tame in
comparison with the other horrors which have taken place all over Russia
for the last two years, and of which thousands of humble families have
been the innocent victims. The murder of a poor workman or shopkeeper
with his wife and children excites my sympathy more than the murder of
an Emperor and his family, for the mighty enjoy great privileges if
they are, on the other hand, exposed to great perils, whereas the poor,
who have few privileges, should be safe at least from butchery; but as
descriptions of wholesale massacre are not read by the public, and as the
murder of Royalty excites special attention, I confine myself to this one
typical case. The personal drama of the individual has always a greater
appeal for the public than massed horrors. The people of England now
understand thoroughly the awful realities of war, but I do not think they
all realize the no less awful realities of Revolution.
Yurovsky and Goloshokin returned to Ekaterinburg three days afterwards,
both of them in such a state of extreme exhaustion that they had to go
at once to bed. Yurovsky was apparently satisfied that he had left not a
trace of the bodies in existence, but he has since developed an intense
fear of vengeance. This dread of future vengeance, mixed perhaps with
feelings of remorse and horror, and the dreadful consciousness of having
committed a crime which has placed him apart for ever from all other
men, has been the predominant trait in his character ever since.... “The
Man who murdered the Tsar.” ... Till the day of his death he will hear
these words whispered as he passes people in the street. In restaurants
and public places men and women will make way for him with a readiness
savouring of panic. Children will look at him speechless and round-eyed,
and he will think of that gentle crippled boy of fourteen weltering in
blood on the cellar floor. Innocent girls will shudder when they meet his
eye, and he will see the limp, white corpses of those four young women
who never did him any harm. He can never talk again to any human being
who knows him without reading in their eye an unspoken query. I feel sure
of this, for I have talked to him myself.
I was surprised to notice that even the Bolsheviks shun him. They have
given him a good house, money, food, everything he asks for; but they
avoid him and do not like even to speak about him. The Government post
they have given him is the Inspectorship of Life Insurance for all
Ekaterinburg Province. The house they have given him, one of the best
houses in Ekaterinburg, is situated in Karl Liebknecht Street, opposite
the former British Consulate, and only three hundred paces from the house
in which the Tsar was butchered. Yurovsky can see that ghastly mansion
every time he looks out of his drawing-room window. What superstitious
or supernatural force is it that so often drags murderers back to the
scene of their crime though, like Yurovsky, they loathe the sight of it?
He could have had a post anywhere in Russia that he wanted, but unseen
hands brought him back to Ekaterinburg and placed him in a house nearly
opposite Ippatievsky. He told me that, after leaving Ekaterinburg, he
fled at once to Moscow. He stopped for a time in Perm, but, afraid that
the Czechs would follow him thither, he continued his journey. Not quite
sure of how he would be received in Moscow he hastened to see Lenin
in order to render him an account of his stewardship. What a dreadful
picture for an historical painter would be the meeting of these two
men! Russian artists need no longer go back to the reign of Ivan the
Terrible for scenes of unimaginable horror, nor need they leave the
sinister precincts of the Kremlin. The gorgeous barbaric costumes of the
Tsars and the boyars are not there now, but the well-worn tweed coats of
the Red leaders cover hearts as inhuman as any that ever beat beneath
the embroidered _kaftans_ of savage Muscovite Princes. One can imagine
Comrade Lenin’s bare room in the Kremlin and the Red Dictator seated
on his stiff, wooden chair before a desk piled with papers, while he
listens with emotionless unconcern and an occasional hard laugh to the
tale poured forth in a husky whisper by the travel-stained and hysterical
Tsaricide. The Red Leader is little interested, as he has already got
the main facts from Trotsky. He is thinking most of the time of more
pressing matters, and is twice interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone
on his desk. But he does notice with rather contemptuous amusement
that his visitor seems to have lost his nerve and is making excuses
where none are necessary. They make a strange pair: Yurovsky leaning
forward, eager, red-eyed, and dishevelled; Lenin with his comfortable
stoutness; bald head; broad plebeian face; eyes far apart, and a trick
of occasionally closing one of them and bringing the other to bear like
a gimlet on Yurovsky; appearance, dress, and mannerisms of a small but
respectable shopkeeper; habit of tilting himself comfortably back in his
chair, crossing one leg over the other, and inserting his thumbs in the
arm-holes of his waistcoat while giving vent at the same time to that
terrible mirthless laugh. He reassures Comrade Yurovsky as a benignant
father-confessor might reassure a scrupulous but unblemished penitent;
and, as he is rather bored by the interview, gets up at last, shakes the
hand of the murderer warmly and shows him out at the door. Then, when
the door closes, Lenin stands close to it for a fraction of a second
and—chuckles.
Yurovsky afterwards fled to Petrograd, he told me, but he seems to
have thought that Petrograd was hardly safe enough for him as he again
returned to Moscow. Haunted with the curse of murder, he has been almost
constantly in motion since the night of the butchery. “Does he hear
voices?” I seriously asked myself, after having seen him. “Is he driven
from place to place by the ghosts of his victims? and is it they who have
dragged him hither?”
He could, if he had liked, have lived in Moscow unknown and under another
name, but he must needs come back to a little provincial town where
everybody knows him. And yet he hates to be pointed out, and has tried to
change his appearance by shaving off his beard.
No record has been found to show that the Bolshevik Government ordered
the murder, which was probably due to Yurovsky’s fear that the Tsar might
be rescued by the Czecho-Slovaks. The last telegram received from Moscow
warned Goloshokin and Yurovsky that they would answer for the Tsar’s
safety with their heads, and both Goloshokin and Yurovsky probably took
this to mean that, if the Tsar were rescued, they two would be put to
death. Then came the rapid advance of the Czechs. The whole Bolshevik
organization seemed to be breaking up; communication with Moscow was
interrupted; and the Ekaterinburg Soviet was in a state of great anxiety
about their prisoner. If they took him away by railway, the train might
be captured. In that case the Tsar would perhaps be released, and,
whether his keepers were captured or not, their lives were in any case
forfeit. Long conferences took place in the Soviet’s headquarters at the
Amerikansky Dom, not that there was ever any opposition to the proposal
that the Tsar should be put to death, but because there still remained
the questions of (1) Where the deed was to be done? (2) How many of
the Imperial Family were to be slaughtered? (3) Could the Red Russian
soldiers be trusted to do the killing?
When the death-warrant was at last signed and Yurovsky entrusted with
the task of executing it, he had a moment of horrible fear. He felt
that he was going to do a deed that would shock one hundred millions of
Russians, and all the civilized world outside—he, a Jew, not sure of
being supported even by the Bolshevik Government, which might feel itself
obliged to disown him and punish him. And, to crown all, that Government
was actually tottering: it might already have disappeared.
On March 8, 1920, Yurovsky had, like everybody else in Ekaterinburg,
decorated his house in honour of Trotsky’s visit, but all the decorations
had been blown off save a single circle of melancholy evergreen, looking
exactly like a funeral wreath, which hung from the knocker of his front
door. Even before I had learned who lived in it I felt that there was
something uncanny about that house, for the door on which that ominous
sign hung was never opened, and at night the windows remained darkened,
only a feeble, mysterious glimmer like that of a nightlight coming from
the far interior. I was not surprised when a prominent Bolshevik said
to me, “Do you know who lives there? Yurovsky, the man who murdered the
Tsar.” “Then I must visit him,” said I, remembering that I was supposed
to be a journalist. “Won’t you come with me?” But he very hastily
declined, with a shudder. I asked others to come, but they one and all
declined. “No, I would rather not go,” said one. “It was a horrible
business,” said another, “I wouldn’t like to go near that man.” They
would accompany me anywhere else I liked, and they went to great pains
to show me everything, but the mere mention of Yurovsky’s name always
caused a shadow to pass across the faces of the most bloodthirsty of
them, and they suddenly remembered that they had an engagement elsewhere.
Sergiev, the hunchbacked war correspondent of the _Pravda_, and one of
the most callous and thoroughgoing Bolsheviks in Russia, came all the
way from Moscow to see Yurovsky, but, when he arrived in Ekaterinburg
and was pointed out that shunned and darkened house, he decided to send
his assistant to photograph the regicide, and never once crossed the
threshold himself. I saw the photographer in question, and found him
to be a young ex-sailor of the Black Sea Fleet, a poor photographer
but fanatical Bolshevik, who must have taken part in the brutal murder
of many naval officers, and who regarded Yurovsky as the greatest hero
in history. But even he refused to go again, and he warned me that the
regicide would not speak to anyone of his crime, and had not spoken about
it even to him. Everyone else who knew Yurovsky told me the same thing.
He has a morbid dislike of saying anything on the subject; a look of
horror crosses his face when any reference is made to it, and he becomes
perfectly silent.
In these circumstances I became rather reluctant to go myself, but I felt
that, as a chronicler, however humble, of the tragic history of man, it
was my duty to enter that dreadful abode and probe that terrible secret.
Was it right, however, that I, an officer of the King, should grasp that
hand? But, after all, it would not be as a British officer that I would
visit him; and hand-shaking meant nothing. If I refused to shake hands
with murder, to what Bolshevik could I give my hand? Nevertheless I found
it hard to go. On at least a dozen occasions I set out from my railway
carriage with the determination to get it over, but the sight of that
gloomy building so unnerved me that I always walked on past it. Having
gone past, I frequently summoned up sufficient courage to retrace my
steps, but those blank windows and that closed door with the sinister
funeral wreath hanging on it were always too much for me, and I continued
my walk as far as the railway station. Finally one day, knowing that
my stay in Ekaterinburg was rapidly drawing to a close, I approached
the front door and knocked loudly. The sound reverberated through the
house, but though I waited a long time and knocked again, nobody came
to open the door. Then I came into the yard on the side of the house,
and, finding a side-door ajar, I walked boldly in and found myself in a
thoroughly up-to-date kitchen provided with a cooking-range on which a
large variety of dishes were fizzling and boiling. I had only just time
to glance at these unaccustomed delicacies, when a middle-aged woman
who was standing in the middle of the floor with a spoon in her hand
and who was apparently the cook, asked me in a tone of deep suspicion
what I wanted. I replied cheerfully that I wanted to see Comrade
Yurovsky, whereupon she shuffled into a passage opening off the kitchen,
glancing distrustfully at me over her shoulder as she disappeared. She
was away some minutes, and meanwhile I noted mechanically the culinary
preparations that were going on and the appetizing odours that filled
the air. Among the dishes that were being cooked were _borsh_, _kasha_,
chicken, vegetables, pudding, and coffee. Not even Trotsky’s table
was as good as Yurovsky’s—yet nobody visited Yurovsky. When the cook
returned, her face was still gloomier than before, as if she had been
communing with some dark spirit, and she asked me sharply and with the
air of one repeating a lesson learnt by heart, what precisely was the
business I wanted to discuss with her master, what was my name, and
who had sent me. Recollecting an official report on his Life Insurance
activity for the previous six months that Yurovsky had published in that
morning’s paper, I replied that I was a journalist, and wanted to speak
to Comrade Yurovsky on the subject of Life Insurance. I also mentioned
the name of a powerful Bolshevik who had given me permission to say that
he had sent me, though he had refused emphatically to accompany me, and
I gave of course my own name and some particulars about myself. When she
left again, still unmollified and once more glancing at me darkly over
her shoulder, it suddenly struck me that the regicide might see something
sarcastic in a request to be consulted about life insurance; but luckily
it was not so, for the cook soon returned with a smiling face and invited
me to “Step this way, please.”
It was with a certain amount of constriction at the heart that I
accepted her invitation and walked into the passage, making no noise
in my Canadian felt boots. The passage was long and dark, but led into
a well-lighted room, and in that room at the end of the passage a man
stood, slightly bent and in a suspicious and expectant attitude. From his
photographs I at once saw that it was Yurovsky the Tsaricide. It was in
exactly the same attitude that this terrible monster had waited outside
the door of the Tsar’s bedroom at 1 o’clock on the night of July 16-17,
1918.
I knew beforehand that he was a man of about forty years of age, but as I
came nearer I saw that he was greyish, wrinkled, and looking much older.
He wore an unkempt, greyish moustache and uncombed brown hair, and from
the stubble on his cheeks and chin I saw that he had not shaved for some
days. His face was sallow, square, and not distinctively Jewish; and
his eyes were greenish in hue and filled with a hard look of distrust.
He wore a great black fur coat or _shuba_ which reached to the ground,
and underneath it were pyjamas, for apparently he had not dressed. On
his feet he wore cloth slippers, and his whole appearance gave me the
impression that he had been asleep when I knocked; for, perhaps, like
Cromwell, he does not sleep well o’ nights. I tried to overcome a strong
feeling of repugnance which suddenly swept over me as I reached out my
hand and clasped the limp, clammy, and rather unwilling hand which hung
by his side, the hand which had murdered the Tsar.
I introduced myself and began to speak with rather hectic haste about
his report, trying at the same time to convey the impression that I took
a deep and expert interest in Life Insurance—a subject of which, by the
way, I know absolutely nothing. About some obscure points in his report I
was extremely anxious, I said, to get further information.
For about two minutes he continued to stand and did not invite me to sit
down. But gradually his distrust began to diminish, though it never quite
disappeared throughout the course of our interview and flared up several
times in an ominous manner. He talked to me about the Bolshevik whose
name I had used as a talisman, said he knew him by sight, but complained
somewhat wistfully that they had never spoken. Then he recollected that
he had heard of me, and asked me to sit down.
He himself collapsed heavily into an armchair from which he had evidently
risen when I was announced, and remained silent for a few seconds. Then
he apologized for his costume; saying that he was ill, suffering from
heart disease. I was going to ask him since when he had suffered from
that complaint, but refrained in a sudden panic, just as the words were
on the tip of my tongue, for I felt that it was probably since the night
of July 16. To judge from his face, he is not long for this world. He
may be dead even now, and, if so, one of the last of the men who took
a leading part in the murder of the Tsar and his family will have gone
to render an account of his deeds. He told me that his former colleague
Goloshokin, the Commissar who had signed the Tsar’s death-warrant, had
died of typhus in Samara on the 7th of March, and that, only a week ago,
his own mother had died in the house where we were sitting. Sergiev, the
war correspondent of the _Pravda_ whom I have already mentioned, had
shown me the photograph of this old lady, whose face looked like that of
a prematurely aged young man, and had made my blood curdle by telling
me how savagely proud this old Jewess had been of the fact that her son
had now a secure place in the history of the world, and that the humble
name Yurovsky will be till the end of time linked with the mighty name
of Romanov. The Tsaricide spoke for a long time and with evident feeling
about his mother, whose death seemed to have given him a great shock.
He had left her behind in Ekaterinburg when he himself fled to Moscow,
and the Whites when they came had arrested her; but, when they evacuated
Ekaterinburg, they had forgotten to take her with them as she happened
to be lying ill of typhus at the time in a local hospital. The disease
to which she finally succumbed was also typhus, of which she had had a
second attack.
Yurovsky then began to speak of the atrocities committed by the Whites
throughout Ekaterinburg Government and in Perm. He was very vehement on
this subject, and I know that there was truth in what he said. He told
me incidentally that the first post he had held in Ekaterinburg when he
returned to it was that of President of the Extraordinary Commission, and
he said that in that capacity he had put to death sixty White suspects.
“What are sixty men?” he asked contemptuously, and this terrible question
made me suddenly realize what I was beginning to forget, that I was
in the lair of a human tiger, that I was face to face with a devil
incarnate. I thought of a graveyard near Ekaterinburg where they are
buried—most of them in their everyday clothes, some of them wrapped in
blood-stained blankets, very few of them in coffins—hundreds of victims
of the Bolsheviks, executed during the first half of 1918, and of the
awful tales told by a family living in a lonely farmhouse close by.
Every night after dark they used to hear the creak of cartwheels bearing
a fresh burden of dead bodies, and this went on for hours; while many
executions took place against the cemetery wall. On one occasion a
man who was thought to be dead got up and staggered away in the early
morning. He was a well-known inhabitant of the town and is still
alive—but not in Ekaterinburg. What monstrous children will grow up in
houses like these! I have seen Siberian infants playing among the naked,
frozen corpses of Kolchak’s soldiers, stripped by their comrades for the
sake of their warm clothes. What a monstrous generation is growing up
in Russia! How much has he to answer for who, without the most extreme
necessity, kindles the fires of Revolution and Civil War!
I had not heard before that the regicide had been head of the
Extraordinary Commission. He had, it appears, been too bloodthirsty
in that capacity even for the Bolsheviks, and had been transferred,
evidently by someone with a grim sense of humour, from the department of
death insurance to the department of life insurance.
But though Yurovsky speaks lightly of large numbers done to death, he
cannot bear to speak of the eleven deaths about which I was anxious to
get details. He always referred to his Imperial victim as the “Autocrat,”
and a baleful light came into his eyes every time he used the word. But
he has the same reluctance to speak of the murder in the cellar as a man
suffering from partial insanity sometimes has to speak of his delusions.
Approach the subject and he trembles with rage or horror or incipient
insanity. As my own precarious position made it impossible for me to
probe too deeply into that festering mental wound, I got no information
on the murder from him during the whole course of this strange interview.
I got a great deal of information from him, however, about the Life
Insurance system which the Bolsheviks have established, and which
embraces Old Age pensions, maternity benefits, workmen’s compensation,
and a number of allied subjects. Among other things he talked about the
maternity classes that had been started by him in the town, in order
to teach intending mothers how to care for their children, and thus to
reduce “the high infant mortality.” When he used this phrase I started
and looked at him. He looked at me and read my thoughts. Then he raised
himself slowly to his feet and said that he would go into another room to
get me some statistics which he had compiled. While he was gone I looked
around me for the first time since I had entered the room, and saw that
it was well and tastefully furnished. The house had belonged, in fact, to
a wealthy Jewish newspaper proprietor whom I had known, and who, though
he was a Social Revolutionist, had fled with Kolchak. It contained a
large piano, open, and with some sheets of Russian music on the holder.
When he had shuffled back again he handed me some papers with his left
hand and, as he did so, I noticed that he had lost the tips of three
fingers. As if he again read my thoughts he at once held up his hand
for my inspection, and explained rapidly that this mutilation was due
to an accident which had happened to him while he was a _subbotnik_.
_Subbotniki_, I should explain, are workmen who work on Saturday
(_Subbota_) for the benefit of the Government: there is quite a large
_subbotnik_ movement in Russia. I said, “Yes, yes,” without listening
to a word that he was saying, and tried to look sympathetic, but my
voice sounded hollow and unnatural and my face was strained. I looked
up from his hand to his eyes, and he looked at me and saw that I knew
all. The papers which he had given me seemed to vanish like things which
one receives in a dream, and I probably left them behind.... He told
me that he was a Siberian, born in Tomsk, and that he had served his
apprenticeship as a watchmaker. He is an intelligent man, has studied
Bolshevik “literature” a good deal, and evidently peruses the Bolshevik
newspapers very carefully. He looks at foreign politics from the extreme
Bolshevik point of view, and cannot understand how the workmen of England
allow themselves to be duped and exploited by the _bourgeoisie_. He has
only contempt for what he considers to be the extreme moderation and
self-restraint of men like Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. J. R. Clynes. To
him this moderation is only servility, and there is no salvation save
in violence and terror, bloodshed and revolution, “red ruin and the
breaking up of laws.” In short, he is the quintessence of Bolshevism, an
infernal machine charged with diabolical forces of destruction; and his
frightful theories were only rendered all the more frightful by reason
of the contrast between their violence and his own physical weakness. We
talked about indifferent subjects, but the thoughts of each of us were
in that dark cellar, and we hardly heard what we were saying. He saw in
my mind the question: “Did _you_ kill the little boy also?” as clearly
as if I had spoken it aloud. Suddenly I became aware that a little boy
was standing motionless beside me, and jumped hastily to my feet. He was
about fourteen years of age. If he had been also lame I would almost have
lost my reason. But it was only Yurovsky’s son, a dark handsome lad of
marked Jewish type, and not lame. Would it not be terrible, I thought, if
I asked his age, and it turned out that he was really fourteen? Then a
very handsome girl, also of strongly Jewish type and of about seventeen
years of age, came into the room. She was Yurovsky’s daughter, a very
energetic Bolshevik and a fluent public speaker. She is head of the
local branch of the League of Communist Youth, an organization which
the Bolsheviks have started all over Russia with the object of bringing
up all the rising generation in strict Socialist and anti-Christian
principles. A few days later she spoke from the same platform as Trotsky
at a great meeting of her neophytes, but her father did not come and
Trotsky never saw him during his stay in Ekaterinburg.
Glad of this interruption, I hastily took leave of the Tzaricide, who was
so fatigued that he could not rise from his armchair. And I was fatigued,
too, though the interview had been the most barren that I had ever had in
the whole course of my life. It was an interview in which both parties
used words only in order to conceal their thoughts; but in which they
were so unsuccessful that the entire sitting had been like a hair-raising
spiritualistic _séance_ at which men read each other’s thoughts written
on their foreheads and see corpses rise from their graves.