Iurovskii thought the Four Brothers’ mine too shallow to conceal the grave. He returned to town to make inquiries, from which he learned of the existence of deeper mines on the road to Moscow. He soon returned with a quantity of kerosene and sulphuric acid. In the night of July 18, having closed neighboring roads, Iurovskii’s men, helped by a detachment of the Cheka, dug up the corpses and placed them on a truck. They proceeded to the Moscow road but on the way the truck got stuck in mud. The burial took place in a shallow grave nearby. Sulphuric acid was poured on the faces and bodies of the victims and the graveside covered with earth and brushwood. The place of burial remained secret until 1989.
While the murderers were concealing traces of their crime, another act of the Romanov tragedy was played out at Alapaevsk, 140 kilometers northeast of Ekaterinburg. Here, the Bolsheviks had kept in confinement since May 1918 several members of the Imperial clan: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna (the widow of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, murdered by terrorists in 1905, and sister of the ex-Empress, now a nun), Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei (Paley), and three sons of Grand Duke Constantine—Igor, Constantine, and Ivan. Attended by aides and domestics, they lived under house arrest, in a school building outside Alapaevsk guarded by Russians and Austrians.
On June 21—the very time when the prisoners in Ipatev’s house received the first communication from their alleged rescuers—the status of the Alapaevsk detainees changed. They were now put on a strict prison regime. Except for two retainers—a secretary named F. S. Remez and a nun—their companions were removed, valuables confiscated, and freedom of movement severely restricted. This was done on orders of Beloborodov, issued from Ekaterinburg, allegedly to prevent a repetition of the “escape” of Michael from Perm the week before.
On July 17, the day the Imperial family was murdered, the Alapaevsk prisoners were told they would be moved to a safer place. That evening the authorities staged a mock attack on the school building where the Romanovs were held by an armed band disguised as “White Guardists.” The prisoners were said to have taken advantage of the ensuing melee to escape. In reality, they were taken to a place called Verkhniaia Siniachikha, marched into the woods, severely beaten, and killed.
At 3:15 a.m., July 18, the Alapaevsk Soviet wired Ekaterinburg, which had staged the whole charade, that the Romanov prisoners had fled. Later that day Beloborodov cabled to Sverdlov in Moscow and Zinoviev and Uritskii in Petrograd:
Alapaevsk Executive Committee informed attack morning 18th unknown band on building where kept onetime Grand Dukes Igor Konstantinovich Konstantin Konstantinovich Ivan Konstantinovich Sergei Mikhailovich and Poley [Paley] stop despite guard resistance princes were abducted stop victims on both sides searches underway stop.84
Autopsies performed by the Whites revealed that all the victims, save for Grand Duke Sergei, who apparently resisted and was shot, were still alive when thrown into the mineshaft where they were found. The five victims and the nun companion of Grand Duchess Elizaveta perished from lack of air and water, possibly only days afterward. The postmortem revealed traces of earth in the mouth and stomach of Grand Duke Constantine.85
Even if there did not exist incontrovertible evidence that the murder of the Romanovs had been ordered in Moscow, one would have strongly suspected this to have been the case from the fact that the official news of the “execution” of Nicholas was issued not in Ekaterinburg, where the decision had allegedly been made, but in the capital. Indeed, the Ural Regional Soviet was not permitted to make a public announcement of the event until five days after it had happened, by which time it had already been publicized abroad.
Although the evidence is inconclusive, it appears that Moscow ordered Ekaterinburg to withhold the announcement because of the very sensitive issue of the fate of the Empress and children.
