The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Read Online Free Page A

emigres: Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Although Marie had made a financial contribution to Sokolov’s work when he was in Siberia, once she learned that he believed the entire family was dead, she refused to see him or to receive his dossier or box of relics. Until the day of her death in October 1928, Marie insisted that her son and his family remained alive.
    Obsessed, Sokolov continued interviewing and writing. For a while, he was supported by Prince Nicholas Orlov, who moved the investigator and his papers from the Hotel du Bon La Fontaine in Paris to an apartment in Fontainebleau. Here, Sokolov finally completed his book. A few months after its publication, he suffered a heart attack and died, still only forty-two. Sokolov’s reward was posthumous: for six and a half decades, until 1989, his work was the accepted historical explanation of how the Russian Imperial family had died and what had happened to their bodies.

    Publication and worldwide acceptance of Sokolov’s book forced the Soviet government to change its story about the fate of the empress and her children. By 1926, after eight years of denying any knowledge as to their whereabouts, Moscow’s credibility on the subject had been unraveled by the details and photographs in Sokolov’s book. In addition, times had changed: German concern for a former German princess no longer existed; Lenin was dead; Stalin, his successor, possessed an even greater appreciation of the tonic nature of ruthlessness. Accordingly, a Soviet version of Sokolov’s book,
The Last Days of Tsardom
, was authorized. Written by Pavel M. Bykov, a new chairman of the Ural Soviet, and largely plagiarized from Sokolov’s work, it admitted that Alexandra, with her son and daughters, had been murdered along with Nicholas.
    Now Reds and Whites agreed that the entire Imperial family was dead. But to Sokolov’s description of the destruction of the bodies, Bykov added what seemed a minor editorial variation:
    Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in a swampy place, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have rotted.
    In a single sentence, Bykov had offered five fresh clues: There were
remains which had survived the fires;
these
remains had been buried;
they had been buried
“quite far away from the mines”; “in a swampy place”; “in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate.”
In other words, something had been hidden, but it was nowhere near the Four Brothers site where Sokolov had searched.

    Bolshevism’s grip on Russia intensified, and the revolution appeared permanent. Famous cities were renamed after its heroes: St. Petersburg became Leningrad, Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad, Ekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk. Lesser men sought recognition of their revolutionary heroism in recording their personal participation in the massacre in the cellar. In 1920, Yakov Yurovsky gave the Soviet historian Michael Pokrovsky a detailed account of what he had done in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 “so history would know.” In 1927, he presented his two revolvers, the Colt and the Mauser, to the Museum of the Revolution on Red Square. Peter Ermakov, the local Ural commissar, sometimes challenged Yurovsky for “the honor of having executed the last tsar” and gave his revolver, also a Mauser, to the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution. In the early 1930s, near Sverdlovsk, Ermakov liked to appear before groups of boys gathered around campfires on summer nights. His enthusiasm fueled by a bottle of vodka, he would describe how he had killed the tsar. “I was twelve or thirteen,” recalled one of these listeners, a member of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Pioneer Camp in 1933. “He was presented to us as a hero. He was given flowers. I watched him with envy. He ended his