When the party entered, [I] told the Romanovs that in view of the fact that their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet had decided to shoot them. Nicholas turned his back to the detachment and faced his family. Then, as if collecting himself, he turned around, asking “What? What?” [I] rapidly repeated what I had said and ordered the detachment to prepare. Its members had been previously told whom to shoot and to aim directly at the heart to avoid much blood and to end more quickly. Nicholas said no more. He turned again toward his family. The others shouted some incoherent exclamations. All this lasted a few seconds. Then commenced the shooting which went on for two or three minutes. [I] killed Nicholas on the spot.77
It is known from eyewitnesses that the Empress and one of her daughters barely had time to cross themselves: they too died instantly. There was wild shooting as the guards emptied their revolvers: according to Iurovskii, the bullets, ricocheting from the walls and floor, flew around the room like hail. The girls screamed. Struck by bullets, Alexis fell off the chair. Kharitonov “sat down and died.”
It was hard work. Iurovskii had assigned each executioner one victim and they were to aim straight at the heart. Still six of the victims—Alexis, three of the girls, Demidova, and Botkin—were alive when the salvos stopped. Alexis lay in a pool of blood, moaning: Iurovskii finished him off with two shots in the head. Demidova offered furious defense with her pillows, one of which had a metal box, but then she too went down, bayoneted to death. “When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through the corset,” Iurovskii complained. The whole “procedure,” as he calls it, took twenty minutes. Medvedev recalled the scene: “They had several gun wounds on various parts of their bodies; their faces were covered with blood, their clothes too were blood-soaked.”78
The shots were heard on the street even though the truck engine was running to muffle them. One of the witnesses who testified for Sokolov, a resident of Popov’s house across the street, where the external guard was billeted, recalled:
I can reconstruct well the night from the 16th to the 17th in my memory because that night I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I recall that around midnight I went into the yard and approached the shed. I felt unwell and stopped. A while later I heard distant volleys. There were some fifteen of them, followed by separate shots: there were three or four of those, but they did not come from rifles. It was after 2 a.m. The shots came from Ipatev’s house; they sounded muffled as if coming from a basement. After this, I quickly returned to my room, for I was afraid that the guards of the house where the ex-Emperor was held prisoner could see me from above. When I returned, my next-door neighbor asked: “Did you hear?” I answered: “I heard shots.” “Get it?” “Yes, I get it,” I said, and we fell silent.79
The executioners brought sheets from the upstairs rooms, and after stripping the corpses of valuables, which they pocketed, carried them, dripping with blood, on improvised stretchers across the lower floor to the truck waiting at the main gate. They spread a sheet of rough military cloth on the floor of the vehicle, piled the bodies on top of one another, and covered them with a sheet of similar cloth. Iurovskii demanded under threat of death the return of the stolen valuables: he confiscated a gold watch, a diamond cigarette case, and some other items. Then he left with the truck.
Iurovskii charged Medvedev with supervising the cleaning-up. Guards brought mops, pails of water, and sand with which to remove the bloodstains. One of them described the scene as follows:
The room was filled with something like a mist of gun-powder and smelled of gun-powder.… There were bullet holes on the walls and the floor. There were especially many bullets (not the bullets themselves but holes made by them) on one wall.… There were no bayonet marks anywhere on the walls. Where there were bullet holes on the walls and floor, around them was blood: on the walls there were splashes and stains, and on the floor, small puddles. There were also drops and pools of blood in all the other rooms which one had to cross to reach the courtyard of Ipatev’s house from the room with the bullet holes. There were similar bloodstains on the stones in the courtyard leading to the gate.80
