A guard who entered Ipatev’s house the next day found it in complete disarray: clothing, books, and ikons lay scattered pell-mell on tables and floors, after they had been ransacked for hidden money and jewelry. The atmosphere was gloomy, the guards uncommunicative. He was told that the Chekists had refused to spend the rest of the night in their quarters on the lower floor and moved upstairs. The only living reminder of the previous residents was the Tsarevich’s spaniel, Joy, who somehow had been overlooked: he stood outside the door to the princesses’ bedroom, waiting to be let in. “I well remember,” one of the guards testified, “thinking to myself: you are waiting for nothing.”
For the time being, the external guards remained at their posts, creating the impression that nothing had changed at Ipatev’s. The purpose of the deception was to stage a mock escape attempt during an “evacuation” in the course of which the Imperial family would be said to have been killed. On July 19, the most important belongings of the Tsar and Alexandra, including their private papers, were loaded on a train and taken by Goloshchekin to Moscow.81
Aware that the Russian people assigned miraculous powers to the remains of martyrs, and anxious to prevent a cult of the Romanovs, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks went to great pains to destroy all trace of their bodies. The place that Iurovskii and his associate, Ermakov, had selected for the purpose were woods near the village Kiptiaki, 15 kilometers north of Ekaterinburg, an area full of swamps, peat bogs and abandoned mineshafts.
A few miles out of town, the truck carrying the bodies ran into a party of twenty-five mounted men with carts:
They were workers (members of the soviet, its executive committee and so on) assembled by Ermakov. They shouted: “Why did you bring them dead?” They thought they were to be entrusted with the execution of the Romanovs. They started to transfer the bodies to carts.… Right away they began to clean out [the victims’] pockets. Here too I had to threaten death by shooting and to post guards. It turned out that Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia wore some kind of special corsets. It was decided to strip the bodies naked—not here, though, but where they were to be buried.
It was 6–7 a.m. when the party reached an abandoned gold mine nearly three meters deep. Iurovskii ordered the corpses undressed and burned.
When they began to undress one of the girls, they saw a corset partly torn by bullets: in the gash showed diamonds. The eyes of the fellows really lit up. [I] had to dismiss the whole band.… The detachment proceeded to strip and burn the bodies. Alexandra Fedorovna turned out to wear a pearl belt made of several necklaces sewn into linen. (Each girl carried on her neck an amulet with Rasputin’s picture and the text of his prayer.) The diamonds were collected; they weighed about half a pud [8 kilograms]…. Having placed all the valuables in satchels, other items found on the bodies were burned and the corpses themselves were lowered into the mine.82
What indignities were perpetrated on the bodies of the six women must be left to the reader’s imagination: suffice it to say that one of the guards who took part in this work later boasted that he could “die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s———.”83
It is this place, known to local peasants as “Four Brothers” for four large pines that once had grown here from a single stem, that Sokolov excavated for several months to unearth the Romanov remains. He located much material evidence—ikons, pendants, belt buckles, spectacles, and corset fastenings—all of which were identified as belonging to members of the Imperial family. A severed finger was also found, believed to be the Empress’s, probably hacked off to remove a tight ring.* A set of false teeth was identified as belonging to Dr. Botkin. The executioners had not bothered to cremate the dog, Jemmy, whose decomposed corpse was found in the shaft. They either missed or accidentally dropped a ten-carat diamond belonging to the Empress, a present from her husband, and the ex-tsar’s Ulm Cross, both left in the grass.
The remains of the victims, however, were nowhere to be found and this led for many years to conjectures that some or even most members of the Imperial family had survived the massacre. The mystery was cleared up only with the publication of Iurovskii’s memoir, from which it transpires that the bodies were buried at Four Brothers only temporarily.
