Given all the evidence that has come to light, it is inconceivable that any of the Romanovs survived this ordeal.fn14 After the murder the bodies were driven off in a lorry and dumped in a series of nearby mineshafts. These turned out to be too shallow to conceal the bodies and the next day they were removed. But on the way to some deeper mines the lorry got stuck in the mud and it was decided to bury the corpses in the ground. Sulphuric acid was poured on their faces to hide the identity of the corpses should they be discovered. This proved unnecessary — and ineffective. The graves were not discovered until after the collapse of the Soviet regime. But by this time, DNA analysis of the bones, brought back to Britain in 1992, was enough to establish beyond doubt that they belonged to the Romanovs.91
News of the execution reached Lenin the next day during a session of Sovnarkom. The people’s commissars were engaged in a detailed discussion of a draft decree for health protection when Sverdlov came in with the news. The brief announcement of the Tsar’s death was met with general silence. Then Lenin said: ‘We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.’92
The official announcement appeared in Izvestiia on 19 July. It mentioned only the death of the ex-Tsar, claiming that the ‘wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place’. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were afraid to acknowledge that they had murdered the children and servants — all of them, after all, innocent people — lest it should lose them public sympathy. But in fact public reaction was remarkably subdued. ‘The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference,’ noted Lockhart. Rumours that the rest of the family had been killed elicited few emotions. Only the monarchists were moved. Brusilov, a monarchist of the heart and a Republican only of the mind, refused to believe that the rumours were true and prayed every night for the ‘missing Romanovs’. The lie was kept going until 1926, when the publication of Sokolov’s book in Paris, The Murder of the Imperial Family, based on the findings of a commission set up by Kolchak, made this no longer tenable. But in the meantime the legend had been born that perhaps not all the Romanovs had died. It is a legend that still lives today, despite the huge weight of evidence against it. All of which merely goes to show that there is more currency — and more profit — in fiction than in history.93
Why has the murder of the Romanovs assumed such significance in the history of the revolution? It could be said that they were only a few individuals, whereas revolutions are about the millions. This is the argument of Marxist historians, who have tended to treat this episode as a minor side-show to the main event. E. H. Carr, for example, gave it no more than a single sentence in his three-volume history of the revolution. But this is to miss the deeper significance of the murder. It was a declaration of the Terror. It was a statement that from now on individuals would count for nothing in the civil war. Trotsky had once said: ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ And that is what the Cheka did. Shortly after the murder Dzerzhinsky told the press:
The Cheka is the defence of the revolution as the Red Army is; as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether it may harm particular individuals, but must take into account only one thing, the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.94
The Bolsheviks murdered other Romanovs after the execution of the former Tsar.fn15 Six members of the old dynasty were murdered on the following night at Alapaevsk in the northern Urals. But in a sense their deaths were now just one small part of the Red Terror.
*
One of the most terrifying aspects of the Terror was its random nature. The knock on the door at midnight could come to almost anyone. The Bolsheviks justified the Terror as a civil war against the counter-revolution. But they never made clear who those ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were. Indeed, in so far as the Terror was driven by the regime’s own paranoiac fear that it was surrounded by hostile enemies working together to overthrow it — in this view the Kaplan plot was all part and parcel of the SR and Menshevik opposition, the White Guard reaction, the Allied intervention, Savinkov’s uprising in Yaroslavl’,fn16 the peasant uprisings and workers’ strikes — virtually anyone could qualify as a ‘counter-revolutionary’. In this sense the Terror was a war by the regime against the whole of society — a means of terrorizing it into submission. ‘Terror’, Engels wrote, ‘is needless cruelties perpetrated by terrified men.’
