EXTRA EDITION. By Order of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies of the Urals and the Revolutionary Staff, the ex-Tsar and autocrat, Nicholas Romanov, has been shot along with his family on July 17. The bodies have been buried. Chairman of the Executive Committee, Beloborodov. Ekaterinburg, July 20, 1918, 10 a.m.*
Moscow forbade the release of this announcement because it referred to the death of Nicholas’s family. In the only known copy of this document, the words “along with his family” and “the bodies have been buried” have been crossed out by someone with an illegible signature, who scribbled: “Forbidden to publish.”
On July 20, Sverdlov wired to Ekaterinburg the text of the approved announcement which he had drafted and published in the Moscow press.97 On July 21, Goloshchekin broke the news to the Ural Regional Soviet: A week before, apparently unknown to itself, it had decided to shoot the ex-Tsar. This decision had now been duly carried out. The population of Ekaterinburg was informed of this in broadsheets that were posted on July 22 and reproduced the following day in
On July 22, the guards protecting Ipatev’s house were withdrawn: Iurovskii gave them 8,000 rubles to divide among themselves and informed them they would be sent to the front. That day Ipatev received a telegram from his sister-in-law: “Resident departed.”99
Eyewitnesses agree that the population—at any rate, the inhabitants of the cities—showed no emotion when told of the ex-Tsar’s execution. Services were held in some Moscow churches in memory of the deceased, but otherwise the reaction was muted. Lockhart notes that “the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”100 Bothmer had the same impression:
The population accepted the murder of the Tsar with apathetic indifference. Even decent and cool-headed circles are too accustomed to horrors, too immersed in their own worries and wants, to feel something special.101
Ex-Prime Minister Kokovtsov even discerned signs of positive satisfaction while riding a Petrograd streetcar on July 20:
Nowhere did I observe the slightest ray of pity or commiseration. The dispatch was read aloud, with smirks, jeers, mockeries, and with the most heartless comments.… One heard the most disgusting expressions, “It should have been done long ago” … “Eh, brother Romanov, your jig is up.”102
The peasants kept their thoughts to themselves. But we have a glimpse of their reaction, expressed with their peculiar logic, in the thoughts which an elderly peasant confided in 1920 to an intellectual:
Now, we know for sure that the landlords’ land was given to us by Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich. For this them ministors, Kerensky and Lenin and Trotsky and the others, first sent the Tsar off to Siberia, and then they killed him, and the Tsarevich too, so that we would have no tsar and they could rule the people forever themselves. They didn’t want to give us the land, but our boys stopped them when they came to Moscow and Petrograd from the front. And now them ministors, because they had to give us the land, choke us. But they ain’t gonna strangle us. We are strong and we will hold out. And later on, us oldsters, or our sons, or our grandchildren, it don’t make no difference, we will take care of all them Bolsheviks and their ministors. Never you mind. Our time will come.103
During the next nine years, the Soviet Government stubbornly adhered to the official lie that Alexandra Fedorovna and her children were safe: Chicherin claimed as late as 1922 that Nicholas’s daughters were in the United States.104 The lie found favor with Russian monarchists who could not reconcile themselves to the thought that the entire Imperial family had been wiped out. On reaching the West, Sokolov was cold-shouldered by monarchist circles: Nicholas’s mother, Empress Dowager Marie, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the most prominent surviving Romanov, refused even to see him.105 He died, ignored and impoverished, a few years later.
