Bolsheviks and the execution of the royal family

Over the past decade, the topic of the execution of the royal family has become relevant due to the discovery of many new facts. Documents and materials reflecting this tragic event began to be actively published, causing various comments, questions, and doubts. This is why it is important to analyze the available written sources.

Emperor Nicholas II

Perhaps the earliest historical source- these are the materials of the investigator for particularly important cases of the Omsk District Court during the period of activity of the Kolchak army in Siberia and the Urals N.A. Sokolov, who, hot on the heels, conducted the first investigation of this crime.

Nikolai Alekseevich Sokolov

He found traces of fireplaces, fragments of bones, pieces of clothing, jewelry, and other fragments, but did not find the remains of the royal family.

According to the modern investigator, V.N. Solovyov, manipulations with the corpses of the royal family due to the sloppiness of the Red Army soldiers would not fit into any schemes of the smartest investigator in especially important cases. The subsequent advance of the Red Army shortened the search time. Version N.A. Sokolov was that the corpses were dismembered and burned. This version is relied upon by those who deny the authenticity of the royal remains.

Another group of written sources are the memoirs of participants in the execution of the royal family. They often contradict each other. They clearly show a desire to exaggerate the role of the authors in this atrocity. Among them is “a note from Ya.M. Yurovsky,” which was dictated by Yurovsky to the chief keeper of party secrets, Academician M.N. Pokrovsky back in 1920, when information about the investigation of N.A. Sokolov has not yet appeared in print.

Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky

In the 60s, the son of Ya.M. Yurovsky donated copies of his father’s memoirs to the museum and archive so that his “feat” would not be lost in the documents.
The memoirs of the head of the Ural Workers' Squad, a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1906, and an employee of the NKVD since 1920, P.Z., have also been preserved. Ermakov, who was entrusted with organizing the burial, for he, as a local resident, knew the surrounding area well. Ermakov reported that the corpses were burned to ashes, and the ashes were buried. His memoirs contain many factual errors, which are refuted by the testimony of other witnesses. The memories go back to 1947. It was important for the author to prove that the order of the Yekaterinburg Executive Committee: “to shoot and bury so that no one would ever find their corpses” was fulfilled, the grave does not exist.

The Bolshevik leadership also created significant confusion, trying to cover up the traces of the crime.

Initially, it was assumed that the Romanovs would await trial in the Urals. Materials were collected in Moscow, L.D. was preparing to become the prosecutor. Trotsky. But the civil war aggravated the situation.
At the beginning of the summer of 1918, it was decided to take the royal family out of Tobolsk, since the local council was headed by the Socialist Revolutionaries.

transfer of the Romanov family to Yekaterinburg security officers

This was done on behalf of Ya.M. Sverdlova, Extraordinary Commissioner of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Myachin (aka Yakovlev, Stoyanovich).

Nicholas II with his daughters in Tobolsk

In 1905, he became famous as a member of one of the most daring train robbing gangs. Subsequently, all the militants - Myachin's comrades-in-arms - were arrested, imprisoned or shot. He manages to escape abroad with gold and jewelry. Until 1917, he lived in Capri, where he knew Lunacharsky and Gorky, and sponsored underground schools and printing houses of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Myachin tried to direct the royal train from Tobolsk to Omsk, but a detachment of Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks accompanying the train, having learned about the change in route, blocked the road with machine guns. The Ural Council repeatedly demanded that the royal family be placed at its disposal. Myachin, with the approval of Sverdlov, was forced to concede.

Konstantin Alekseevich Myachin

Nicholas II and his family were taken to Yekaterinburg.

This fact reflects the confrontation in the Bolshevik environment over the question of who and how will decide the fate of the royal family. In any scenario, one could hardly hope for a humane outcome, given the mood and achievement list people who made decisions.
Another memoir appeared in 1956 in Germany. They belong to I.P. Meyer, who was sent to Siberia as a captured soldier of the Austrian army, was released by the Bolsheviks and joined the Red Guard. Since Meyer knew foreign languages, he became a confidant of the international brigade in the Ural Military District and worked in the mobilization department of the Soviet Ural Directorate.

I.P. Meyer was an eyewitness to the execution of the royal family. His memoirs complement the picture of the execution with significant details, details, including the names of the participants, their role in this atrocity, but do not resolve the contradictions that arose in previous sources.

Later, written sources began to be supplemented by material ones. So, in 1978, geologist A. Avdonin found a burial place. In 1989, he and M. Kochurov, as well as film playwright G. Ryabov, spoke about their discovery. In 1991, the ashes were removed. August 19, 1993 prosecutor's office Russian Federation opened a criminal case in connection with the discovery of Yekaterinburg remains. The investigation began to be conducted by prosecutor-criminologist of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation V.N. Solovyov.

In 1995 V.N. Solovyov managed to obtain 75 negatives in Germany, which were made in hot pursuit in the Ipatiev House by investigator Sokolov and were considered lost forever: the toys of Tsarevich Alexei, the bedroom of the Grand Duchesses, the execution room and other details. Unknown originals of N.A.’s materials were also delivered to Russia. Sokolova.

Material sources made it possible to answer the question of whether there was a burial place for the royal family, and whose remains were discovered near Yekaterinburg. For this purpose, numerous Scientific research, in which more than one hundred of the most authoritative Russian and foreign scientists took part.

To identify the remains, the latest methods were used, including DNA testing, in which some of the current reigning persons and other genetic relatives assisted Russian Emperor. To eliminate any doubts about the conclusions of numerous examinations, the remains of Georgy Alexandrovich, the brother of Nicholas II, were exhumed.

Georgy Alexandrovich Romanov

Modern advances in science have helped restore the picture of events, despite some discrepancies in written sources. This made it possible for the government commission to confirm the identity of the remains and adequately bury Nicholas II, the Empress, three Grand Duchesses and courtiers.

There is another controversial issue related to the tragedy of July 1918. For a long time it was believed that the decision to execute the royal family was made in Yekaterinburg by the local authorities at their own peril and risk, and Moscow learned about it after the fact. This needs to be clarified.

According to the memoirs of I.P. Meyer, on July 7, 1918, a meeting of the Revolutionary Committee was held, chaired by A.G. Beloborodov. He proposed sending F. Goloshchekin to Moscow and obtaining a decision from the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, since the Ural Council cannot independently decide the fate of the Romanovs.

It was also proposed to give Goloshchekin an accompanying paper outlining the position of the Ural authorities. However, a majority vote adopted F. Goloshchekin’s resolution that the Romanovs deserved death. Goloshchekin as an old friend Ya.M. Sverdlov, was nevertheless sent to Moscow for consultations with the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov.

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov

On July 14, F. Goloshchekin, at a meeting of the revolutionary tribunal, made a report on his trip and negotiations with Ya.M. Sverdlov about the Romanovs. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee did not want the Tsar and his family to be brought to Moscow. The Ural Council and the local revolutionary headquarters must decide for themselves what to do with them. But the decision of the Ural Revolutionary Committee had already been made in advance. This means that Moscow did not object to Goloshchekin.

E.S. Radzinsky published a telegram from Yekaterinburg, in which, a few hours before the murder of the royal family, V.I. was informed about the upcoming action. Lenin, Ya.M. Sverdlov, G.E. Zinoviev. G. Safarov and F. Goloshchekin, who sent this telegram, asked to urgently inform me if there were any objections. Judging by subsequent events, there were no objections.

The answer to the question, but whose decision was the royal family put to death, was also given by L.D. Trotsky in his memoirs dating back to 1935: “The liberals seemed to be inclined to believe that the Ural executive committee, cut off from Moscow, acted independently. This is not true. The decision was made in Moscow.” Trotsky reported that he proposed an open trial in order to achieve a broad propaganda effect. The progress of the process was to be broadcast throughout the country and commented on every day.

IN AND. Lenin reacted positively to this idea, but expressed doubts about its feasibility. There might not be enough time. Later, Trotsky learned from Sverdlov about the execution of the royal family. To the question: “Who decided?” Ya.M. Sverdlov replied: “We decided here. Ilyich believed that we should not leave them a living banner, especially in the current difficult conditions.” These diary entries by L.D. Trotsky were not intended for publication, did not respond “to the topic of the day,” and were not expressed in polemics. The degree of reliability of the presentation in them is great.

Lev Davydovich Trotsky

There is another clarification by L.D. Trotsky regarding the authorship of the idea of ​​regicide. In the drafts of unfinished chapters of the biography of I.V. Stalin, he wrote about Sverdlov’s meeting with Stalin, where the latter spoke out in favor of a death sentence for the tsar. At the same time, Trotsky did not rely on his own memories, but quoted the memoirs of the Soviet functionary Besedovsky, who defected to the West. This data needs to be verified.

Message by Ya.M. Sverdlov at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 18 about the execution of the Romanov family was met with applause and recognition that in the current situation the Ural Regional Council acted correctly. And at a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, Sverdlov announced this incidentally, without causing any discussion.

The most complete ideological justification for the shooting of the royal family by the Bolsheviks with elements of pathos was outlined by Trotsky: “In essence, the decision was not only expedient, but also necessary. The severity of the reprisal showed everyone that we would fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the royal family was needed not just to confuse, terrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up one’s own ranks, to show that there was no retreat, that complete victory or complete destruction lay ahead. In the intelligent circles of the party there were probably doubts and shakes of heads. But the masses of workers and soldiers did not doubt for a minute: they would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin felt this well: the ability to think and feel for the masses and with the masses was extremely characteristic of him, especially at great political turns...”

For some time the Bolsheviks tried to hide the fact of the execution of not only the Tsar, but also his wife and children, even from their own people. Thus, one of the prominent diplomats of the USSR, A.A. Joffe, only the execution of Nicholas II was officially reported. He knew nothing about the king’s wife and children and thought that they were alive. His inquiries to Moscow yielded no results, and only from an informal conversation with F.E. Dzerzhinsky managed to find out the truth.

“Let Joffe know nothing,” Vladimir Ilyich said, according to Dzerzhinsky, “it will be easier for him to lie there in Berlin...” The text of the telegram about the execution of the royal family was intercepted by the White Guards who entered Yekaterinburg. Investigator Sokolov deciphered and published it.

The royal family from left to right: Olga, Alexandra Feodorovna, Alexei, Maria, Nicholas II, Tatiana, Anastasia

The fate of the people involved in the liquidation of the Romanovs is of interest.

F.I. Goloshchekin (Isai Goloshchekin), (1876-1941), secretary of the Ural Regional Committee and member of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), military commissar of the Ural Military District, was arrested on October 15, 1939 at the direction of L.P. Beria and was shot as an enemy of the people on October 28, 1941.

A.G. Beloborodoye (1891-1938), chairman of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council, participated in the internal party struggle on the side of L.D. in the twenties. Trotsky. Beloborodoye provided Trotsky with his housing when the latter was evicted from his Kremlin apartment. In 1927, he was expelled from the CPSU (b) for factional activities. Later, in 1930, Beloborodov was reinstated in the party as a repentant oppositionist, but this did not save him. In 1938 he was repressed.

As for the direct participant in the execution, Ya.M. Yurovsky (1878-1938), a member of the board of the regional Cheka, it is known that his daughter Rimma suffered from repression.

Yurovsky’s assistant for the “House of Special Purpose” P.L. Voikov (1888-1927), People's Commissar of Supply in the government of the Urals, when appointed USSR Ambassador to Poland in 1924, could not obtain an agrement from the Polish government for a long time, since his personality was associated with the execution of the royal family.

Pyotr Lazarevich Voikov

G.V. Chicherin gave the Polish authorities a characteristic explanation on this matter: “...Hundreds and thousands of fighters for the freedom of the Polish people, who died over the course of a century on the royal gallows and in Siberian prisons, would have reacted differently to the fact of the destruction of the Romanovs than could be concluded from Your messages." In 1927 P.L. Voikov was killed in Poland by one of the monarchists for participating in the massacre of the royal family.

Another name on the list of people who took part in the execution of the royal family is of interest. This is Imre Nagy. The leader of the Hungarian events of 1956 was in Russia, where in 1918 he joined the RCP (b), then served in the Special Department of the Cheka, and later collaborated with the NKVD. However, his autobiography speaks of his stay not in the Urals, but in Siberia, in the area of ​​Verkhneudinsk (Ulan-Ude).

Until March 1918, he was in a prisoner of war camp in Berezovka; in March he joined the Red Guard and took part in the battles on Lake Baikal. In September 1918, his detachment, located on the Soviet-Mongolian border, in Troitskosavsk, was then disarmed and arrested by the Czechoslovaks in Berezovka. Then he ended up in a military town near Irkutsk. From the biographical information it is clear what an active lifestyle the future leader of the Hungarian Communist Party led in Russia during the period of execution of the royal family.

In addition, the information he provided in his autobiography did not always correspond to his personal data. However, direct evidence of the involvement of Imre Nagy, and not his probable namesake, in the execution of the royal family, on this moment are not traceable.

Imprisonment in Ipatiev's house

Ipatiev's house

The Romanovs and their servants in Ipatiev's house

The Romanov family was placed in a “special purpose house” - the requisitioned mansion of retired military engineer N. N. Ipatiev. Doctor E. S. Botkin, chamberlain A. E. Trupp, Empress' maid A. S. Demidova, cook I. M. Kharitonov and cook Leonid Sednev lived here with the Romanov family.

The house is nice and clean. We were assigned four rooms: a corner bedroom, a restroom, next to it a dining room with windows into the garden and a view of the low-lying part of the city, and, finally, a spacious hall with an arch without doors. We were accommodated as follows: Alix [the Empress], Maria and the three of me in the bedroom, a shared restroom, in the dining room - N[yuta] Demidova, in the hall - Botkin, Chemodurov and Sednev. Near the entrance is the guard officer's room. The guard was located in two rooms near the dining room. To go to the bathroom and W.C. [water closet], you need to pass by the sentry at the door of the guardhouse. A very high board fence was built around the house, two fathoms from the windows; there was a chain of sentries there, and in the kindergarten too.

The royal family spent 78 days in their last home.

A.D. Avdeev was appointed commandant of the “special purpose house”.

Execution

From the memoirs of the participants in the execution, it is known that they did not know in advance how the “execution” would be carried out. Various options were offered: to stab those arrested with daggers while they slept, to throw grenades into the room with them, to shoot them. According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the issue of the procedure for carrying out the “execution” was resolved with the participation of employees of the UraloblChK.

At 1:30 a.m. on July 16-17, a truck for transporting corpses arrived at Ipatiev’s house, one and a half hours late. After this, doctor Botkin was awakened and informed that everyone urgently needed to go downstairs due to the alarming situation in the city and the danger of staying on the top floor. It took about 30 - 40 minutes to get ready.

went to the semi-basement room (Alexei, who could not walk, was carried by Nicholas II in his arms). There were no chairs in the basement; then, at Alexandra Feodorovna’s request, two chairs were brought. Alexandra Fedorovna and Alexey sat on them. The rest were located along the wall. Yurovsky brought in the firing squad and read out the verdict. Nicholas II only had time to ask: “What?” (other sources report last words Nicholas like “Huh?” or “How, how? Re-read"). Yurovsky gave the command, and indiscriminate shooting began.

The executioners failed to immediately kill Alexei, the daughters of Nicholas II, the maid A.S. Demidova, and doctor E.S. Botkin. Anastasia's scream was heard, Demidova's maid rose to her feet, and Alexei remained alive for a long time. Some of them were shot; the survivors, according to the investigation, were finished off with a bayonet by P.Z. Ermakov.

According to Yurovsky's recollections, the shooting was indiscriminate: many probably shot from the next room, through the threshold, and the bullets ricocheted off the stone wall. At the same time, one of the executioners was slightly wounded (“A bullet from one of the shooters from behind buzzed past my head, and one, I don’t remember, hit either his arm, palm, or finger and was shot through”).

According to T. Manakova, during the execution, two dogs of the royal family, who started howling, were also killed - Tatyana’s French bulldog Ortino and Anastasia’s royal spaniel Jimmy (Jemmy). The life of the third dog, Alexey Nikolayevich’s spaniel named Joy, was saved because she did not howl. The spaniel was later taken in by the guard Letemin, who because of this was identified and arrested by the whites. Subsequently, according to the story of Bishop Vasily (Rodzianko), Joy was taken to Great Britain by an emigrant officer and handed over to the British royal family.

after the execution

The basement of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was shot. Civil Aviation of the Russian Federation

From the speech of Ya. M. Yurovsky to the old Bolsheviks in Sverdlovsk in 1934

The younger generation may not understand us. They may blame us for killing the girls and killing the boy heir. But by today, girls-boys would have grown into... what?

In order to muffle the shots, a truck was driven near the Ipatiev House, but shots were still heard in the city. In Sokolov’s materials there are, in particular, testimonies about this from two random witnesses, the peasant Buivid and the night watchman Tsetsegov.

According to Richard Pipes, immediately after this, Yurovsky harshly suppresses the security guards’ attempts to steal the jewelry they discovered, threatening to shoot him. After that, he instructed P.S. Medvedev to organize the cleaning of the premises, and he himself went to destroy the corpses.

The exact text of the sentence pronounced by Yurovsky before the execution is unknown. In the materials of investigator N.A. Sokolov there is testimony from the guard guard Yakimov, who claimed, with reference to the guard Kleshchev who was observing this scene, that Yurovsky said: “Nikolai Alexandrovich, your relatives tried to save you, but they didn’t have to. And we are forced to shoot you ourselves.”

M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) described this scene as follows:

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Medvedev-Kudrin

- Nikolai Alexandrovich! The attempts of your like-minded people to save you were unsuccessful! And now, in a difficult time for Soviet republic... - Yakov Mikhailovich raises his voice and chops the air with his hand: - ... we have been entrusted with the mission of ending the house of the Romanovs!

In the memoirs of Yurovsky’s assistant G.P. Nikulin, this episode is described as follows: Comrade Yurovsky uttered the following phrase:

“Your friends are advancing on Yekaterinburg, and therefore you are sentenced to death.”

Yurovsky himself could not remember the exact text: “...I immediately, as far as I remember, told Nikolai approximately the following, that his royal relatives and loved ones both in the country and abroad tried to free him, and that the Council of Workers' Deputies decided to shoot them "

On the afternoon of July 17, several members of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council contacted Moscow by telegraph (the telegram was marked that it was received at 12 o’clock) and reported that Nicholas II had been shot and his family had been evacuated. The editor of the Ural Worker, member of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council V. Vorobyov later claimed that they “felt very uncomfortable when they approached the apparatus: former king was shot by a resolution of the Presidium of the Regional Council, and it was unknown how the central government would react to this “arbitrariness.” The reliability of this evidence, wrote G. Z. Ioffe, cannot be verified.

Investigator N. Sokolov claimed that he had found an encrypted telegram from the Chairman of the Ural Regional Executive Committee A. Beloborodov to Moscow, dated 21:00 on July 17, which was allegedly only deciphered in September 1920. It said: “To the Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars N.P. Gorbunov: tell Sverdlov that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head. Officially, the family will die during the evacuation.” Sokolov concluded: this means that on the evening of July 17, Moscow knew about the death of the entire royal family. However, the minutes of the meeting of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 18 speak only about the execution of Nicholas II.

Destruction and burial of remains

Ganinsky ravines - burial place of the Romanovs

Yurovsky's version

According to Yurovsky’s recollections, he went to the mine at about three in the morning on July 17. Yurovsky reports that Goloshchekin must have ordered the burial of P.Z. Ermakov. However, things did not go as smoothly as we would like: Ermakov brought too many people as the funeral team (“Why are there so many of them, I still don’t know , I only heard isolated shouts - we thought that they would be given to us here alive, but here, it turns out, they are dead"); the truck got stuck; Jewels were discovered sewn into the clothes of the Grand Duchesses, and some of Ermakov’s people began to appropriate them. Yurovsky ordered guards to be assigned to the truck. The bodies were loaded onto carriages. On the way and near the mine designated for burial, strangers were encountered. Yurovsky allocated people to cordon off the area, as well as to inform the village that Czechoslovaks were operating in the area and that leaving the village was prohibited under threat of execution. In an effort to get rid of the presence of an overly large funeral team, he sends some of the people to the city “as unnecessary.” Orders fires to be built to burn clothing as possible evidence.

From Yurovsky’s memoirs (spelling preserved):

The daughters wore bodices, so well made of solid diamonds and other valuable stones, which were not only containers for valuables, but also protective armor.

That is why neither the bullets nor the bayonet produced results when fired and struck by the bayonet. By the way, no one is to blame for these death throes of theirs except themselves. These valuables turned out to be only about (half) a pound. The greed was so great that Alexandra Fedorovna, by the way, was wearing just a huge piece of round gold wire, bent into the shape of a bracelet, weighing about a pound... Those parts of the valuables that were discovered during the excavations undoubtedly belonged to things sewn up separately and remained when burned in the ashes of fires.

After the confiscation of valuables and burning of clothes on fires, the corpses were thrown into the mine, but “... a new hassle. The water barely covered the bodies, what should we do?” The funeral team unsuccessfully tried to bring down the mine with grenades (“bombs”), after which Yurovsky, according to him, finally came to the conclusion that the burial of the corpses had failed, since they were easy to detect and, in addition, there were witnesses that something was happening here . Leaving the guards and taking the valuables, at approximately two o'clock in the afternoon (in an earlier version of the memoirs - “at about 10-11 am”) on July 17, Yurovsky went to the city. I arrived at the Ural Regional Executive Committee and reported on the situation. Goloshchekin called Ermakov and sent him to retrieve the corpses. Yurovsky went to the city executive committee to its chairman S.E. Chutskaev for advice regarding the burial place. Chutskaev reported about deep abandoned mines on the Moscow highway. Yurovsky went to inspect these mines, but could not get to the place immediately due to a car breakdown, so he had to walk. He returned on requisitioned horses. During this time, another plan emerged - to burn the corpses.

Yurovsky was not entirely sure that the incineration would be successful, so the option still remained of burying the corpses in the mines of the Moscow Highway. In addition, he had the idea, in case of any failure, to bury the bodies in groups in different places on the clay road. Thus, there were three options for action. Yurovsky went to the Commissar of Supply of the Urals, Voikov, to get gasoline or kerosene, as well as sulfuric acid to disfigure faces, and shovels. Having received this, they loaded them onto carts and sent them to the location of the corpses. The truck was sent there. Yurovsky himself remained waiting for Polushin, the ““specialist” in burning,” and waited for him until 11 o’clock in the evening, but he never arrived, because, as Yurovsky later learned, he fell from his horse and injured his leg. At about 12 o'clock at night, Yurovsky, not counting on the reliability of the car, went to the place where the bodies of the dead were, on horseback, but this time another horse crushed his leg, so that he could not move for an hour.

Yurovsky arrived at the scene at night. Work was underway to extract the bodies. Yurovsky decided to bury several corpses along the way. By dawn on July 18, the pit was almost ready, but a stranger appeared nearby. I had to abandon this plan too. After waiting until evening, we loaded onto the cart (the truck was waiting in a place where it shouldn’t get stuck). Then we were driving a truck and it got stuck. Midnight was approaching, and Yurovsky decided that it was necessary to bury him somewhere here, since it was dark and no one could witness the burial.

...everyone was so damn tired that they didn’t want to dig a new grave, but, as always happens in such cases, two or three got down to business, then others started, immediately lit a fire, and while the grave was being prepared, we burned two corpses: Alexei and by mistake they apparently burned Demidova instead of Alexandra Fedorovna. They dug a hole at the burning site, stacked the bones, leveled them, lit a large fire again and hid all traces with ash.

Before putting the rest of the corpses in the pit, we doused them with sulfuric acid, filled the pit, covered it with sleepers, drove an empty truck, compacted some sleepers and called it a day.

I. Rodzinsky and M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) also left their memories of the burial of the corpses (Medvedev, by his own admission, did not personally participate in the burial and retold the events from the words of Yurovsky and Rodzinsky). According to the memoirs of Rodzinsky himself:

The place where the remains of the supposed bodies of the Romanovs were found

We have now dug out this quagmire. She's deep God knows where. Well, then they decomposed some of these same little darlings and began pouring sulfuric acid into them, disfigured everything, and then it all turned into a quagmire. There was a railway nearby. We brought rotten sleepers and laid a pendulum through the very quagmire. They laid out these sleepers in the form of an abandoned bridge across the quagmire, and began to burn the rest at some distance.

But, I remember, Nikolai was burned, it was this same Botkin, I can’t tell you for sure now, it’s already a memory. We burned as many as four, or five, or six people. I don’t remember exactly who. I definitely remember Nikolai. Botkin and, in my opinion, Alexey.

The execution without trial of the tsar, his wife, children, including minors, was another step along the path of lawlessness and neglect human life, terror. Many problems of the Soviet state began to be solved with the help of violence. The Bolsheviks who unleashed terror often became its victims themselves.
The burial of the last Russian emperor eighty years after the execution of the royal family is another indicator of the contradictory and unpredictability of Russian history.

“Church on the Blood” on the site of Ipatiev’s house

The commandant of the Special Purpose House, Yakov Yurovsky, was entrusted with commanding the execution of members of the former emperor’s family. It was from his manuscripts that it was subsequently possible to reconstruct the terrible picture that unfolded that night in the Ipatiev House.

According to the documents, the execution order was delivered to the execution site at half past one in the morning. Just forty minutes later, the entire Romanov family and their servants were brought into the basement. “The room was very small. Nikolai stood with his back to me, he recalled. —

I announced that the Executive Committee of the Councils of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies of the Urals had decided to shoot them. Nikolai turned and asked. I repeated the order and commanded: “Shoot.” I shot first and killed Nikolai on the spot.”

The emperor was killed the first time - unlike his daughters. The commander of the execution of the royal family later wrote that the girls were literally “armored into bras made of a solid mass of large diamonds,” so the bullets bounced off them without causing harm. Even with the help of a bayonet it was not possible to pierce the “precious” bodice of the girls.

Photo report: 100 years since the execution of the royal family

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“For a long time I was unable to stop this shooting, which had become careless. But when I finally managed to stop, I saw that many were still alive. ... I was forced to shoot everyone in turn,” Yurovsky wrote.

Even the royal dogs could not survive that night—along with the Romanovs, two of the three pets belonging to the emperor’s children were killed in the Ipatiev House. The corpse of Grand Duchess Anastasia's spaniel, preserved in the cold, was found a year later at the bottom of a mine in Ganina Yama - the dog's paw was broken and its head was pierced.

The French bulldog Ortino, which belonged to Grand Duchess Tatiana, was also brutally killed - presumably hanged.

Miraculously, only the spaniel of Tsarevich Alexei, named Joy, was saved, who was then sent to recover from his experience in England to the cousin of Nicholas II, King George.

The place “where the people put an end to the monarchy”

After the execution, all the bodies were loaded into one truck and sent to the abandoned mines of Ganina Yama in the Sverdlovsk region. There they first tried to burn them, but the fire would have been huge for everyone, so the decision was made to simply throw the bodies into the mine shaft and throw them with branches.

However, it was not possible to hide what happened - the very next day rumors spread throughout the region about what had happened at night. As one of the members of the firing squad, forced to return to the site of the failed burial, later admitted, ice water washed away all the blood and froze the bodies of the dead so that they looked as if they were alive.

The Bolsheviks tried to approach the organization of the second burial attempt with great attention: the area was first cordoned off, the bodies were again loaded onto a truck, which was supposed to transport them to a more reliable place. However, failure awaited them here too: after just a few meters of travel, the truck got stuck firmly in the swamps of Porosenkova Log.

Plans had to be changed on the fly. Some of the bodies were buried directly under the road, the rest were doused with sulfuric acid and buried a little further away, covered with sleepers on top. These cover-up measures proved to be more effective. After Yekaterinburg was occupied by Kolchak’s army, he immediately gave the order to find the bodies of the dead.

However, forensic investigator Nikolai U, who arrived at Porosenkov Log, managed to find only fragments of burnt clothing and a severed woman’s finger. “This is all that remains of the August Family,” Sokolov wrote in his report.

There is a version that the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the first to learn about the place where, in his words, “the people put an end to the monarchy.” It is known that in 1928 he visited Sverdlovsk, having previously met with Pyotr Voikov, one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family, who could tell him secret information.

After this trip, Mayakovsky wrote the poem "Emperor", which contains lines with quite accurate description“The graves of the Romanovs”: “Here the cedar has been disturbed with an ax, there are notches under the root of the bark, at the root there is a road under the cedar, and the emperor is buried in it.”

Confession of execution

New for the first time Russian authorities tried with all her might to assure the West of her humanity in relation to the royal family: they say that they are all alive and are in a secret place in order to prevent the implementation of the White Guard conspiracy. Many high-ranking political figures of the young state tried to avoid answering or answered very vaguely.

Thus, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs at the Genoa Conference in 1922 told correspondents: “The fate of the Tsar’s daughters is not known to me. I read in the newspapers that they are in America.”

Pyotr Voikov, who answered this question in a more informal setting, cut off all further questions with the phrase: “The world will never know what we did to the royal family.”

Only after the publication of Nikolai Sokolov’s investigation materials, which gave a vague idea of ​​the massacre of the imperial family, did the Bolsheviks have to admit at least the very fact of the execution. However, details and information about the burial still remained a mystery, shrouded in darkness in the basement of the Ipatiev House.

Occult version

It is not surprising that a lot of falsifications and myths have appeared regarding the execution of the Romanovs. The most popular of them was the rumor about a ritual murder and the severed head of Nicholas II, which was allegedly taken for safekeeping by the NKVD. This is evidenced, in particular, by the testimony of General Maurice Janin, who oversaw the investigation into the execution by the Entente.

Supporters of the ritual nature of the murder of the imperial family have several arguments. First of all, attention is drawn to the symbolic name of the house in which everything happened: in March 1613, who laid the foundation for the dynasty, ascended to the kingdom in the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma. And 305 years later, in 1918, the last Russian Tsar Nikolai Romanov was shot in the Ipatiev House in the Urals, requisitioned by the Bolsheviks specifically for this purpose.

Later, engineer Ipatiev explained that he purchased the house six months before the events that unfolded there. There is an opinion that this purchase was made specifically to add symbolism to the grim murder, since Ipatiev communicated quite closely with one of the organizers of the execution, Pyotr Voikov.

Lieutenant General Mikhail Diterichs, who investigated the murder of the royal family on behalf of Kolchak, concluded in his conclusion: “This was a systematic, premeditated and prepared extermination of Members of the House of Romanov and persons exclusively close to them in spirit and belief.

The direct line of the Romanov Dynasty is over: it began in the Ipatiev Monastery in the Kostroma province and ended in the Ipatiev House in the city of Yekaterinburg.”

Conspiracy theorists also drew attention to the connection between the murder of Nicholas II and the Chaldean ruler of Babylon, King Belshazzar. Thus, some time after the execution, lines from Heine’s ballad dedicated to Belshazzar were discovered in the Ipatiev House: “Belzazzar was killed that same night by his servants.” Now a piece of wallpaper with this inscription is stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

According to the Bible, Belshazzar, like , was the last king of his family. During one of the celebrations in his castle, mysterious words appeared on the wall, predicting his imminent death. That same night the biblical king was killed.

Prosecutor's and church investigation

The remains of the royal family were officially found only in 1991 - then nine bodies were discovered buried in Piglet Meadow. After another nine years, the missing two bodies were discovered - severely burnt and mutilated remains, presumably belonging to Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria.

Together with specialized centers in the UK and the USA, she conducted many examinations, including molecular genetics. With its help, DNA extracted from the found remains and samples of Nicholas II’s brother Georgy Alexandrovich, as well as his nephew, the son of Olga’s sister Tikhon Nikolaevich Kulikovsky-Romanov, were deciphered and compared.

The examination also compared the results with the blood on the king's shirt, stored in the. All researchers agreed that the found remains indeed belonged to the Romanov family, as well as their servants.

However, the Russian Orthodox Church still refuses to recognize the remains found near Yekaterinburg as authentic. This was because the church was not initially involved in the investigation, officials said. In this regard, the patriarch did not even come to the official burial of the remains of the royal family, which took place in 1998 at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

After 2015, the study of the remains (which had to be exhumed for this purpose) continues with the participation of a commission formed by the Patriarchate. According to the latest expert findings, released on July 16, 2018, comprehensive molecular genetic examinations “confirmed that the discovered remains belonged to the former Emperor Nicholas II, members of his family and people from their entourage.”

The lawyer of the imperial house, German Lukyanov, said that the church commission will take into account the results of the examination, but the final decision will be announced at the Council of Bishops.

Canonization of the Passion-Bearers

Despite the ongoing controversy over the remains, back in 1981 the Romanovs were canonized as martyrs of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. In Russia, this happened only eight years later, since from 1918 to 1989 the tradition of canonization was interrupted. In 2000, the murdered members of the royal family were given a special church rank - passion-bearers.

As the scientific secretary of the St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute, church historian Yulia Balakshina told Gazeta.Ru, passion-bearers are a special order of holiness, which some call the discovery of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“The first Russian saints were also canonized precisely as passion-bearers, that is, people who humbly, imitating Christ, accepted their death. Boris and Gleb - at the hands of their brother, and Nicholas II and his family - at the hands of the revolutionaries,” Balakshina explained.

According to the church historian, it was very difficult to canonize the Romanovs based on the fact of their lives - the family of rulers was not distinguished for pious and virtuous actions.

It took six years to complete all the documents. “In fact, in the Russian Orthodox Church there are no deadlines for canonization. However, debates about the timeliness and necessity of the canonization of Nicholas II and his family continue to this day. The main argument of opponents is that by transferring the innocently murdered Romanovs to the level of celestials, the Russian Orthodox Church deprived them of elementary human compassion,” said the church historian.

There were also attempts to canonize rulers in the West, Balakshina added: “At one time, the brother and direct heir of the Scottish Queen Mary Stuart made such a request, citing the fact that at the hour of death she demonstrated great generosity and commitment to the faith. But she is still not ready to positively resolve this issue, citing facts from the life of the ruler, according to which she was involved in the murder and accused of adultery.”

Hundreds of books have been published about the tragedy of the family of Tsar Nicholas II in many languages ​​of the world. These studies fairly objectively present the events of July 1918 in Russia. I had to read, analyze and compare some of these works. However, many mysteries, inaccuracies and even deliberate untruths remain.

Among the most reliable information are interrogation protocols and other documents of the Kolchak court investigator for especially important cases N.A. Sokolova. In July 1918, after the capture of Yekaterinburg by White troops, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of Siberia, Admiral A.V. Kolchak appointed N.A. Sokolov was the leader in the case of the execution of the royal family in this city.

ON THE. Sokolov

Sokolov worked in Yekaterinburg for two years, interrogated a large number of people involved in these events, and tried to find the remains of executed members of the royal family. After the capture of Yekaterinburg by Red troops, Sokolov left Russia and in 1925 in Berlin he published the book “The Murder of the Royal Family.” He took with him all four copies of his materials.

The Central Party Archives of the CPSU Central Committee, where I worked as a leader, kept mostly original (first) copies of these materials (about a thousand pages). How they got into our archive is unknown. I read them all carefully.

For the first time, a detailed study of materials related to the circumstances of the execution of the royal family was carried out on instructions from the CPSU Central Committee in 1964.

The detailed information “on some circumstances related to the execution of the Romanov royal family” dated December 16, 1964 (CPA Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee, fund 588 inventory 3C) documents and objectively examines all these problems.

The certificate was then written by the head of the sector of the ideological department of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, an outstanding political figure in Russia. Not being able to publish the entire reference mentioned, I will cite only some passages from it.

“The archives did not reveal any official reports or resolutions preceding the execution of the Romanov royal family. There is no indisputable information about the participants in the execution. In this regard, materials published in the Soviet and foreign press, and some documents from Soviet party and state archives were studied and compared. In addition, the stories of the former assistant commandant of the Special Purpose House in Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was kept, G.P., were recorded on tape. Nikulin and former member of the board of the Ural Regional Cheka I.I. Radzinsky. These are the only surviving comrades who had one way or another to do with the execution of the Romanov royal family. Based on the available documents and memories, often contradictory, it is possible to create the following picture of the execution itself and the circumstances surrounding this event. As you know, Nicholas II and members of his family were shot on the night of July 16-17, 1918 in Yekaterinburg. Documentary sources indicate that Nicholas II and his family were executed by decision of the Ural Regional Council. In protocol No. 1 of the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of July 18, 1918, we read: “Listen to: Report on the execution of Nikolai Romanov (telegram from Yekaterinburg). Resolved: Based on the discussion, the following resolution is adopted: The Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee recognizes the decision of the Ural Regional Council as correct. Instruct tt. Sverdlov, Sosnovsky and Avanesov to draw up a corresponding notice for the press. Publish about the documents available in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - (diary, letters, etc.) of the former Tsar N. Romanov and instruct Comrade Sverdlov to form a special commission to analyze these papers and publish them.” The original, stored in the Central State Archive, is signed by Y.M. Sverdlov. As V.P. writes Milyutin (People's Commissar of Agriculture of the RSFSR), on the same day, July 18, 1918, a regular meeting of the Council of People's Commissars was held in the Kremlin late in the evening ( Council of People's Commissars.— Ed. ) chaired by V.I. Lenin. “During Comrade Semashko’s report, Ya.M. entered the meeting room. Sverdlov. He sat down on a chair behind Vladimir Ilyich. Semashko finished his report. Sverdlov came up, leaned towards Ilyich and said something. “Comrades, Sverdlov asks to speak for a message,” Lenin announced. “I must say,” Sverdlov began in his usual even tone, “a message has been received that in Yekaterinburg, by order of the regional Council, Nikolai was shot.” Nikolai wanted to run. The Czechoslovaks were approaching. The Presidium of the Central Election Commission decided to approve. Silence of everyone. “Let’s now move on to an article-by-article reading of the draft,” suggested Vladimir Ilyich.” (Spotlight Magazine, 1924, p. 10). This is a message from Ya.M. Sverdlov was recorded in minutes No. 159 of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars of July 18, 1918: “Listen to: An extraordinary statement by the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Comrade Sverdlov, on the execution of the former Tsar Nicholas II by the verdict of the Yekaterinburg Council of Deputies and on the approval of this verdict by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee. Resolved: Take note." The original of this protocol, signed by V.I. Lenin, kept in the party archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. A few months before this, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the issue of transferring the Romanov family from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg was discussed. Ya.M. Sverdlov speaks about this on May 9, 1918: “I must tell you that the question of the position of the former tsar was raised in our Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee back in November, at the beginning of December (1917) and since then has been raised several times, but we did not accept no decision, taking into account the fact that it is necessary to first become acquainted with exactly how, in what conditions, how reliable the security is, how, in a word, the former Tsar Nikolai Romanov is kept.” At the same meeting, Sverdlov reported to the members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee that at the very beginning of April, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee heard a report from a representative of the committee of the team guarding the Tsar. “Based on this report, we came to the conclusion that it was impossible to leave Nikolai Romanov in Tobolsk any longer... The Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to transfer the former Tsar Nicholas to a more reliable point. The center of the Urals, Yekaterinburg, was chosen as such a more reliable point.” Old Ural communists also say in their memoirs that the issue of transferring Nicholas II’s family was resolved with the participation of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Radzinsky said that the initiative for the transfer belonged to the Ural Regional Council, and “the Center did not object” (Tape recording dated May 15, 1964). P.N. Bykov, a former member of the Ural Council, in his book “The Last Days of the Romanovs,” published in 1926 in Sverdlovsk, writes that at the beginning of March 1918, the regional military commissar I. went to Moscow specifically for this occasion. Goloshchekin (party nickname “Philip”). He was given permission to transfer the royal family from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg.”

Further, in the certificate “On some circumstances related to the execution of the Romanov royal family”, terrible details of the brutal execution of the royal family are given. It talks about how the corpses were destroyed. It is said that about half a pound of diamonds and jewelry were found in the sewn-up corsets and belts of the dead. I would not like to discuss such inhumane acts in this article.

For many years, the world press has been spreading the assertion that “the true course of events and the refutation of the “falsifications of Soviet historians” are contained in Trotsky’s diary entries, which were not intended for publication, and therefore, they say, are especially frank. They were prepared for publication and published by Yu.G. Felshtinsky in the collection: “Leon Trotsky. Diaries and Letters" (Hermitage, USA, 1986).

I give an excerpt from this book.

“April 9 (1935) The White Press once very hotly debated the question of whose decision the royal family was put to death. The liberals seemed inclined to believe that the Ural executive committee, cut off from Moscow, acted independently. This is not true. The decision was made in Moscow. This happened during a critical period of the civil war, when I spent almost all my time at the front, and my memories of the affairs of the royal family are fragmentary.”

In other documents, Trotsky talks about a Politburo meeting a few weeks before the fall of Yekaterinburg, at which he defended the need for an open trial, “which was supposed to unfold the picture of the entire reign.”

“Lenin responded in the sense that it would be very good if it were feasible. But there may not be enough time. There were no debates because I did not insist on my proposal, being absorbed in other matters.”

In the next episode from the diaries, the most frequently quoted, Trotsky recalls how, after the execution, when asked about who decided the fate of the Romanovs, Sverdlov replied: “We decided here. Ilyich believed that we should not leave them a living banner, especially in the current difficult conditions.”

“They decided” and “Ilyich believed” can, and according to other sources, should be interpreted as the adoption of a general fundamental decision that the Romanovs cannot be left as a “living banner of counter-revolution.”

And is it so important that the direct decision to execute the Romanov family was made by the Ural Council?

I present another interesting document. This is a telegraphic request dated July 16, 1918 from Copenhagen, in which it was written: “To Lenin, member of the government. From Copenhagen. Here a rumor spread that the former king had been killed. Please provide the facts over the phone.” On the telegram, Lenin wrote in his own hand: “Copenhagen. The rumor is false, the former tsar is healthy, all rumors are lies of the capitalist press. Lenin."

We were unable to find out whether a reply telegram was sent then. But this was the very eve of that tragic day when the Tsar and his relatives were shot.

Ivan Kitaev- especially for Novaya

reference

Ivan Kitaev is a historian, candidate of historical sciences, vice-president of the International Academy of Corporate Governance. He went from a carpenter working on the construction of the Semipalatinsk test site and the Abakan-Tayshet road, from a military builder who built a uranium enrichment plant in the taiga wilderness, to an academician. Graduated from two institutes, the Academy of Social Sciences, and graduate school. He worked as secretary of the Togliatti city committee, Kuibyshev regional committee, director of the Central Party Archive, deputy director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. After 1991, he worked as head of the main department and head of a department of the Russian Ministry of Industry, and taught at the academy.

Lenin is characterized by the highest measure

About the organizers and those who ordered the murder of Nikolai Romanov’s family

In his diaries, Trotsky does not limit himself to quoting the words of Sverdlov and Lenin, but also expresses his own opinion about the execution of the royal family:

"Essentially, the decision ( about execution. — OH.) was not only expedient, but also necessary. The severity of the reprisal showed everyone that we would fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the royal family was needed not just to intimidate, terrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up one’s own ranks, to show that there was no retreat, that complete victory or complete destruction lay ahead. There were probably doubts and shaking of heads in the party's intellectual circles. But the masses of workers and soldiers did not doubt for a minute: they would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin felt this well: the ability to think and feel for the masses and with the masses was extremely characteristic of him, especially at great political turns...”

Regarding the extreme measure characteristic of Ilyich, Lev Davidovich, of course, is the arch-right. Thus, Lenin, as is known, personally demanded that as many priests as possible be hanged, as soon as he received a signal that the masses in some localities had shown such an initiative. How can the people's power not support the initiative from below (and in reality the basest instincts of the crowd)!

As for the trial of the Tsar, which, according to Trotsky, Ilyich agreed to, but time was running out, then this trial would obviously end with Nikolai’s death sentence. Only in this case, unnecessary difficulties could arise with the royal family. And then how nice it turned out: the Ural Soviet decided - and that’s it, bribes are smooth, all power to the Soviets! Well, maybe only “in the intellectual circles of the party” there was some confusion, but it quickly passed, like with Trotsky himself. In his diaries, he cites a fragment of a conversation with Sverdlov after the Yekaterinburg execution:

“- Yes, where is the king? “It’s over,” he answered, “he was shot.” -Where is the family? - And his family is with him. - All? - I asked, apparently with a tinge of surprise. - All! - answered Sverdlov. - And what? He was waiting for my reaction. I didn't answer. - Who decided? “We decided here...”

Some historians emphasize that Sverdlov did not answer “they decided,” but “they decided,” which is supposedly important for identifying the main culprits. But at the same time they take Sverdlov’s words out of the context of his conversation with Trotsky. But here it is: what is the question, such is the answer: Trotsky asks who decided, so Sverdlov answers, “We decided here.” And then he speaks even more specifically - about the fact that Ilyich believed: “we cannot leave them a living banner.”

So in his resolution on the Danish telegram of July 16, Lenin was clearly disingenuous when speaking about the lies of the capitalist press regarding the “health” of the Tsar.

In modern terms, we can say this: if the Ural Soviet was the organizer of the murder of the royal family, then Lenin was the orderer. But in Russia, organizers rarely, and those who ordered crimes, almost never end up in the dock.

In 1894, succeeding his father Alexandra III, Nicholas II ascended the Russian throne. He was destined to become the last emperor not only in the great Romanov dynasty, but also in the history of Russia. In 1917, at the proposal of the Provisional Government, Nicholas II abdicated the throne. He was exiled to Yekaterinburg, where in 1918 he and his family were shot.

mystery of the death of the royal Romanov family

The Bolsheviks feared that enemy troops might enter Yekaterinburg any day now: the Red Army clearly did not have enough strength to resist. In this regard, it was decided to shoot the Romanovs without waiting for their trial. On July 16, the people appointed to carry out the sentence came to Ipatiev’s house, where the royal family was under the strictest supervision. Closer to midnight, everyone was transferred to the room intended for the execution of the sentence, which was located on the ground floor. There, after the announcement of the resolution of the Ural Regional Council, Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their children: Olga (22 years old), Tatyana (20 years old), Maria (18 years old), Anastasia (16 years old), Alexey (14 years old), and also doctor Botkin, cook Kharitonov, another cook (his name is unknown), footman Trupp and indoor girl Anna Demidova were shot.

That same night, the corpses were carried in blankets to the courtyard of the house and placed in a truck, which drove out of the city onto the road leading to the village of Koptyaki. About eight versts from Yekaterinburg, the car turned left onto a forest path and reached abandoned mines in an area called Ganina Yama. The corpses were thrown into one of the mines, and the next day they were removed and destroyed...

The circumstances of the execution of Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918, as well as Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich in Perm on June 10 and a group of other members of the Romanov family in Alapaevsk on July 18 of the same year were investigated back in 1919-1921 N. A. Sokolov. He accepted the investigative case from the investigative group of General M.K. Diterichs, led it until the retreat of Kolchak’s troops from the Urals and subsequently published a complete selection of case materials in the book “The Murder of the Royal Family” (Berlin, 1925). The same factual material was covered from different angles: interpretations abroad and in the USSR differed sharply. The Bolsheviks did everything possible to hide information regarding the execution and exact location burial of remains. At first, they persistently adhered to the false version that everything was fine with Alexandra Fedorovna and her children. Even at the end of 1922, Chicherin stated that the daughters of Nicholas II were in America and they were completely safe. The monarchists clung to this lie, which was one of the reasons why there is still debate about whether any of the members of the royal family managed to avoid a tragic fate.

For almost twenty years, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences A. N. Avdodin was investigating the death of the royal family. In 1979, he, together with film-dramatist Geliy Ryabov, having established the place where the remains were supposed to be hidden, dug up part of them on the Koptyakovskaya road.

In 1998, in an interview with a correspondent for the newspaper “Arguments and Facts,” Geliy Ryabov said: “In 1976, when I was in Sverdlovsk, I came to Ipatiev’s house and walked around the garden among the old trees. I have a rich imagination: I saw them walking here, heard them talking - it was all imagination, a mess, but nevertheless it was a strong impression. Then I was introduced to local historian Alexander Avdodin... I found Yurovsky’s son - he gave me a copy of his father’s note (who personally shot Nicholas II with a revolver - Author). Using it, we established the burial site, from which we took out three skulls. One skull remained with Avdodin, and I took two with me. In Moscow, he turned to one of the senior officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with whom he had once started his service, and asked him to conduct an examination. He did not help me because he was a convinced communist. For a year, the skulls were kept at my house... The next year we gathered again in Piglet Log and returned everything to its place.” During the interview, G. Ryabov noted that some of the events that took place in those days could not be called anything other than mysticism: “The next morning after we unearthed the remains, I came there again. I approached the excavation - believe it or not - the grass grew ten centimeters overnight. Nothing is visible, all traces are hidden. Then I transported these skulls in a service Volga to Nizhny Tagil. It started to rain mushrooms. Suddenly a man appeared out of nowhere in front of the car. Driver -
The steering wheel turned sharply to the left, and the car skidded downhill. They turned over many times, fell on the roof, and all the windows flew out. The driver has a small scratch, I have nothing at all... During another trip to Porosenkov Log, I saw a series of foggy figures at the edge of the forest...”
The story associated with the discovery of remains on the Koptyakovskaya road received public outcry. In 1991, for the first time in Russia, an attempt was officially made to reveal the secret of the death of the Romanov family. For this purpose, a government commission was created. During her work, the press, along with publishing reliable data, covered a lot of things in a biased manner, without any analysis, sinning against the truth. There were disputes all around about who actually owned the exhumed bone remains that had lain for many decades under the deck of the old Koptyakovskaya road? Who are these people? What caused their death?
The results of research by Russian and American scientists were heard and discussed on July 27-28, 1992 in the city of Yekaterinburg at the international scientific-practical conference“The last page of the history of the royal family: results of the study of the Yekaterinburg tragedy.” Organized and conducted this conference coordination council. The conference was closed character: only historians, doctors and criminologists, who had previously worked independently of each other, were invited to it. Thus, adjustment of the results of some studies to others was excluded. The conclusions that scientists from both countries came to independently of each other turned out to be almost the same and with a high degree of probability indicated that the discovered remains belonged to the royal family and its entourage. According to expert V.O. Plaksin, the results of research by Russian and American scientists coincided on eight skeletons (out of nine found), and only one turned out to be controversial.
After numerous studies both in Russia and abroad, after labor-intensive work with archival documents, the government commission concluded: the discovered bone remains indeed belong to members of the Romanov family. Nevertheless, the controversy surrounding this topic does not subside. Some researchers still strongly refute the official conclusion of the government commission. They claim that the “Yurovsky note” is a fake, fabricated in the bowels of the NKVD.
On this occasion, one of the members of the government commission, the famous historian Edward Stanislavovich Radzinsky, giving an interview to a correspondent of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, expressed his opinion: “So, there is a certain note from Yurovsky. Let's say we don't know what it's about. We only know that it exists and that it talks about some corpses, which the author declares to be the corpses of the royal family. The note indicates the place where the corpses are located... The burial referred to in the note is opened, and as many corpses as indicated in the note are found there - nine. What follows from this?..” E. S. Radzinsky believes that this is not just a coincidence. In addition, he indicated that DNA analysis is -99.99999...% probability. British scientists, who spent a year studying fragments of bone remains using molecular genetic methods at the forensic center of the UK Ministry of Internal Affairs in the city of Aldermaston, came to the conclusion that that the bone remains found near Yekaterinburg belong specifically to the family of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II.
Before today From time to time, reports appear in the press about people who consider themselves descendants of members of the royal house. Thus, some researchers have suggested that in 1918, one of the daughters of Nicholas II, Anastasia, passed away. Her heirs immediately began to appear. For example, Afanasy Fomin, a Red Ufa resident, counts himself among them. He claims that in 1932, when his family lived in Salekhard, two military men came to them and began to interrogate all family members in turn. Children were brutally tortured. The mother could not stand it and admitted that she was Princess Anastasia. She was dragged out into the street, blindfolded and hacked to death with sabers. The boy was sent to an orphanage. Afanasy himself learned about his belonging to the royal family from a woman named Fenya. She said that she served Anastasia. In addition, Fomin told unknown facts from the life of the royal family in the local newspaper and presented his photographs.
It was also suggested that people loyal to the Tsar helped Alexandra Fedorovna cross the border (to Germany), and she lived there for more than one year.
According to another version, Tsarevich Alexei survived. He has as many as eight dozen “descendants”. But only one of them asked for an identification examination and judicial trial. This man is Oleg Vasilyevich Filatov. He was born in Tyumen region in 1953. Currently lives in St. Petersburg, works in a bank.
Among those who became interested in O.V. Filatov was Tatyana Maksimova, a correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. She visited Filatov and met his family. She was struck by the amazing resemblance eldest daughter Oleg Vasilyevich Anastasia with Grand Duchess Olga, sister Nicholas II. And the face of the youngest daughter Yaroslavna, says T. Maksimova, strikingly resembles Tsarevich Alexei. O. V. Filatov himself says that the facts and documents that he has suggest that Tsarevich Alexei lived under the name of his father Vasily Ksenofontovich Filatov. But, according to Oleg Vasilyevich, the final conclusion must be made by the court.
...His father met his future wife at the age of 48. They were both teachers in the village school. The Filatovs first had a son, Oleg, then daughters, Olga, Irina, and Nadezhda.
Eight-year-old Oleg first heard about Tsarevich Alexei from his father while fishing. Vasily Ksenofontovich told a story that began with Alexey waking up at night on a pile of dead bodies in a truck. It was raining and the car skidded. People got out of the cabin and, swearing, began to drag the dead to the ground. Someone's hand put a revolver into Alexei's pocket. When it became clear that the car could not be pulled out without a tow, the soldiers went to the city for help. The boy crawled under the railway bridge. By railway he reached the station. There, among the carriages, the fugitive was detained by a patrol. Alexey tried to escape and fired back. All this was seen by a woman who worked as a switchman. The patrolmen caught Alexei and drove him towards the forest with bayonets. The woman ran after them screaming, then the patrolmen began shooting at her. Fortunately, the switchwoman managed to hide behind the carriages. In the forest, Alexey was pushed into the first hole he came across, and then a grenade was thrown. He was saved from death by a hole in the pit where the boy managed to sneak through. However, a fragment hit the left heel.
The boy was pulled out by the same woman. Two men helped her. They took Alexei on a handcar to the station and called a surgeon. The doctor wanted to amputate the boy’s foot, but he refused. From Yekaterinburg, Alexey was transported to Shadrinsk. There he was settled with the shoemaker Filatov, laid on the stove together with the owner's son, who was in a fever. Of the two, Alexey survived. He was given the first and last name of the deceased.
In a conversation with Filatov, T. Maksimova noted: “Oleg Vasilyevich, but the Tsarevich suffered from hemophilia - I can’t believe that wounds from bayonets and grenade fragments left him a chance of survival.” To this Filatov replied: “I only know that the boy Alexei, as his father said, after Shadrinsk, was treated for a long time in the north near the Khanty-Mansi with decoctions of pine needles and reindeer moss, forced to eat raw venison, seal, bear meat, fish and as if bull's eyes." In addition, Oleg Vasilyevich also noted that hematogen and Cahors were never transferred to them at home. All his life, my father drank an infusion of bovine blood, took vitamins E and C, calcium gluconate, and glycerophosphate. He was always afraid of bruises and cuts. He avoided contact with official medicine, and had his teeth treated only by private dentists.
According to Oleg Vasilyevich, the children began to analyze the oddities of their father’s biography when they had already matured. So, he often transported his family from one place to another: from the Orenburg region to the Vologda region, and from there to the Stavropol region. At the same time, the family always settled in remote rural areas. The children wondered: where did the Soviet geography teacher get his deep religiosity and knowledge of prayers? What about foreign languages? He knew German, French, Greek and Latin. When the children asked where their father knew languages, he answered that he learned them at the workers' school. My father also played the keyboard very well and sang. He also taught his children to read and write music. When Oleg entered Nikolai Okhotnikov’s vocal class, the teacher did not believe that the young man was taught at home - the basics were taught so skillfully. Oleg Vasilyevich said that his father taught musical notation using the digital method. After the death of his father, in 1988, Filatov Jr. learned that this method was the property of the imperial family and was inherited.
In a conversation with a journalist, Oleg Vasilyevich spoke about another coincidence. From his father’s stories, the name of the Strekotin brothers, “Uncle Andrei” and “Uncle Sasha,” was etched into his memory. It was they, together with the switchwoman, who pulled the wounded boy out of the pit and then took him to Shadrinsk. In the State Archive, Oleg Vasilyevich found out that the Red Army brothers Andrei and Alexander Strekotin actually served as guards at Ipatiev’s house.
At the Research Center for Law at St. Petersburg State University, they combined portraits of Tsarevich Alexei, aged from one and a half to 14 years, and Vasily Filatov. A total of 42 photographs were examined. Research conducted with high degree reliability suggests that these photographs of a teenager and a man depict the same person in different age periods his life.
Graphologists analyzed six letters from 1916-1918, 5 pages of the diary of Tsarevich Alexei and 13 notes of Vasily Filatov. The conclusion was as follows: we can say with complete confidence that the studied records were made by the same person.
Doctoral student of the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Military Medical Academy Andrey Kovalev compared the results of the study of the Yekaterinburg remains with the structural features of the spines of Oleg Filatov and his sisters. According to the expert, Filatov’s blood relationship with members of the Romanov dynasty cannot be ruled out.
For a final conclusion, additional research is needed, in particular DNA. In addition, the body of Oleg Vasilyevich’s father will need to be exhumed. O. V. Filatov believes that this procedure must certainly take place within the framework of a forensic medical examination. And for this you need a court decision and... money.

According to official history, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, Nikolai Romanov, along with his wife and children, was shot. After opening the burial and identifying the remains in 1998, they were reburied in the tomb Peter and Paul Cathedral St. Petersburg. However, then the Russian Orthodox Church did not confirm their authenticity.

“I cannot exclude that the church will recognize the royal remains as authentic if convincing evidence of their authenticity is discovered and if the examination is open and honest,” Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, said in July of this year.

As is known, the Russian Orthodox Church did not participate in the burial of the remains of the royal family in 1998, explaining this by the fact that the church is not sure whether the original remains of the royal family are buried. The Russian Orthodox Church refers to a book by Kolchak investigator Nikolai Sokolov, who concluded that all the bodies were burned.

Some of the remains collected by Sokolov at the burning site are kept in Brussels, in the Church of St. Job the Long-Suffering, and they have not been examined. At one time, a version of Yurovsky’s note, who supervised the execution and burial, was found - it became the main document before the transfer of the remains (along with the book of investigator Sokolov). And now, in the coming year of the 100th anniversary of the execution of the Romanov family, the Russian Orthodox Church has been tasked with giving a final answer to all the dark execution sites near Yekaterinburg. To obtain a final answer, research has been carried out for several years under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church. Again, historians, geneticists, graphologists, pathologists and other specialists are rechecking the facts, powerful scientific forces and the forces of the prosecutor's office are again involved, and all these actions again take place under a thick veil of secrecy.

Genetic identification research is carried out by four independent groups of scientists. Two of them are foreign, working directly with the Russian Orthodox Church. At the beginning of July 2017, the secretary of the church commission for studying the results of the study of the remains found near Yekaterinburg, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Yegoryevsk announced: it has opened a large number of new circumstances and new documents. For example, Sverdlov’s order to execute Nicholas II was found. In addition, based on the results of recent research, criminologists have confirmed that the remains of the Tsar and Tsarina belong to them, since a mark was suddenly found on the skull of Nicholas II, which is interpreted as a mark from a saber blow he received while visiting Japan. As for the queen, dentists identified her using the world's first porcelain veneers on platinum pins.

Although, if you open the conclusion of the commission, written before the burial in 1998, it says: the bones of the sovereign’s skull are so destroyed that the characteristic callus cannot be found. The same conclusion noted severe damage to the teeth of Nikolai’s presumed remains due to periodontal disease, since this person had never been to the dentist. This confirms that it was not the tsar who was shot, since the records of the Tobolsk dentist whom Nikolai contacted remained. In addition, no explanation has yet been found for the fact that the height of the skeleton of “Princess Anastasia” is 13 centimeters greater than her lifetime height. Well, as you know, miracles happen in the church... Shevkunov did not say a word about genetic testing, and this despite the fact that genetic studies in 2003 conducted by Russian and American specialists showed that the genome of the body of the supposed empress and her sister Elizabeth Feodorovna did not match , which means no relationship

In addition, in the museum of the city of Otsu (Japan) there are things left after the policeman wounded Nicholas II. They contain biological material that can be examined. Using them, Japanese geneticists from Tatsuo Nagai’s group proved that the DNA of the remains of “Nicholas II” from near Yekaterinburg (and his family) does not 100% match the DNA of biomaterials from Japan. During the Russian DNA examination, second cousins ​​were compared, and in the conclusion it was written that “there are matches.” The Japanese compared relatives of cousins. There are also the results of a genetic examination of the president International Association forensic doctors Mr. Bonte from Dusseldorf, in which he proved: the found remains and doubles of the Nicholas II Filatov family are relatives. Perhaps, from their remains in 1946, the “remains of the royal family” were created? The problem has not been studied.

Earlier, in 1998, the Russian Orthodox Church, on the basis of these conclusions and facts, did not recognize the existing remains as authentic, but what will happen now? In December, all conclusions of the Investigative Committee and the ROC commission will be considered by the Council of Bishops. It is he who will decide on the church’s attitude towards the Yekaterinburg remains. Let's see why everything is so nervous and what is the history of this crime?

This kind of money is worth fighting for

Today some Russian elites Suddenly, interest awoke in one very piquant story of relations between Russia and the United States, connected with the Romanov royal family. Briefly, this story is as follows: more than 100 years ago, in 1913, the Federal Reserve System (FRS) was created in the United States - the central bank and printing press for the production of international currency, still in operation today. The Fed was created for the newly created League of Nations (now the UN) and would be a single global financial center with its own currency. Russia contributed 48,600 tons of gold to the “authorized capital” of the system. But the Rothschilds demanded that Woodrow Wilson, who was then re-elected as US President, transfer the center to their private ownership along with the gold. The organization became known as the Federal Reserve System, where Russia owned 88.8%, and 11.2% belonged to 43 international beneficiaries. Receipts stating that 88.8% of gold assets for a period of 99 years are under the control of the Rothschilds were transferred in six copies to the family of Nicholas II.

The annual income on these deposits was fixed at 4%, which was supposed to be transferred to Russia annually, but was deposited in the X-1786 account of the World Bank and in 300 thousand accounts in 72 international banks. All these documents confirming the right to the gold pledged to the Federal Reserve from Russia in the amount of 48,600 tons, as well as income from leasing it, were deposited by the mother of Tsar Nicholas II, Maria Fedorovna Romanova, for safekeeping in one of the Swiss banks. But only heirs have conditions for access there, and this access is controlled by the Rothschild clan. Gold certificates were issued for the gold provided by Russia, which made it possible to claim the metal in parts - the royal family hid them in different places. Later, in 1944, the Bretton Woods Conference confirmed Russia's right to 88% of the Fed's assets.

This “golden” question was once proposed to be addressed by two well-known Russian oligarch– Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. But Yeltsin “didn’t understand” them, and now, apparently, that very “golden” time has come... And now this gold is remembered more and more often - though not at the state level.

Some suggest that the surviving Tsarevich Alexei later grew into Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin

People kill for this gold, fight for it, and make fortunes from it.

Today's researchers believe that all wars and revolutions in Russia and in the world occurred because the Rothschild clan and the United States did not intend to return gold to the Federal Reserve System of Russia. After all, the execution of the royal family made it possible for the Rothschild clan not to give up the gold and not pay for its 99-year lease. “Currently, out of three Russian copies of the agreement on gold invested in the Fed, two are in our country, the third is presumably in one of the Swiss banks,” says researcher Sergei Zhilenkov. – In a cache in the Nizhny Novgorod region, there are documents from the royal archive, among which there are 12 “gold” certificates. If they are presented, the global financial hegemony of the USA and the Rothschilds will simply collapse, and our country will receive huge money and all the opportunities for development, since it will no longer be strangled from overseas,” the historian is sure.

Many wanted to close the questions about the royal assets with the reburial. Professor Vladlen Sirotkin also has a calculation for the so-called war gold exported to the First World War and Civil War to the West and East: Japan - 80 billion dollars, Great Britain - 50 billion, France - 25 billion, USA - 23 billion, Sweden - 5 billion, Czech Republic - 1 billion dollars. Total – 184 billion. Surprisingly, officials in the US and UK, for example, do not dispute these figures, but are surprised at the lack of requests from Russia. By the way, the Bolsheviks remembered Russian assets in the West in the early 20s. Back in 1923, People's Commissar foreign trade Leonid Krasin ordered a British investigative law firm to evaluate Russian real estate and cash deposits abroad. By 1993, this company reported that it had already accumulated a data bank worth 400 billion dollars! And this is legal Russian money.

Why did the Romanovs die? Britain did not accept them!

There is a long-term study, unfortunately, by the now deceased professor Vladlen Sirotkin (MGIMO) “Foreign Gold of Russia” (Moscow, 2000), where the gold and other holdings of the Romanov family, accumulated in the accounts of Western banks, are also estimated at no less than 400 billion dollars, and together with investments - more than 2 trillion dollars! In the absence of heirs from the Romanov side, the closest relatives are members of the English royal family… These are whose interests may be behind many events of the 19th–21st centuries...

By the way, it is not clear (or, on the contrary, it is clear) for what reasons the royal house of England denied asylum to the Romanov family three times. The first time in 1916, in the apartment of Maxim Gorky, an escape was planned - the rescue of the Romanovs by kidnapping and internment of the royal couple during their visit to an English warship, which was then sent to Great Britain. The second was Kerensky's request, which was also rejected. Then the Bolsheviks’ request was not accepted. And this despite the fact that the mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters. In surviving correspondence, Nicholas II and George V call each other “Cousin Nicky” and “Cousin Georgie” - they were cousins ​​with a smaller age difference three years, and in their youth these guys spent a lot of time together and were very similar in appearance. As for the queen, her mother, Princess Alice, was the eldest and beloved daughter of Queen Victoria of England. At that time, England held 440 tons of gold from Russia’s gold reserves and 5.5 tons of Nicholas II’s personal gold as collateral for military loans. Now think about it: if the royal family died, then who would the gold go to? To the closest relatives! Is this the reason why cousin Georgie refused to accept cousin Nicky's family? To obtain gold, its owners had to die. Officially. And now all this needs to be connected with the burial of the royal family, which will officially testify that the owners of untold wealth are dead.

Versions of life after death

All versions of the death of the royal family that exist today can be divided into three. First version: the royal family was shot near Yekaterinburg, and its remains, with the exception of Alexei and Maria, were reburied in St. Petersburg. The remains of these children were found in 2007, all examinations were carried out on them, and they will apparently be buried on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. If this version is confirmed, for accuracy it is necessary to once again identify all the remains and repeat all examinations, especially genetic and pathological anatomical ones. Second version: the royal family was not shot, but was scattered throughout Russia and all family members died a natural death, having lived their lives in Russia or abroad; in Yekaterinburg, a family of doubles was shot (members of the same family or people from different families, but similar on members of the emperor's family). Nicholas II had doubles after Bloody Sunday 1905. When leaving the palace, three carriages left. It is unknown which of them Nicholas II sat in. The Bolsheviks, having captured the archives of the 3rd department in 1917, had data of doubles. There is an assumption that one of the families of doubles - the Filatovs, who are distantly related to the Romanovs - followed them to Tobolsk. Third version: the intelligence services added false remains to the burials of members of the royal family as they died naturally or before opening the grave. To do this, it is necessary to very carefully monitor, among other things, the age of the biomaterial.

Let us present one of the versions of the historian of the royal family Sergei Zhelenkov, which seems to us the most logical, although very unusual.

Before investigator Sokolov, the only investigator who published a book about the execution of the royal family, there were investigators Malinovsky, Nametkin (his archive was burned along with his house), Sergeev (removed from the case and killed), Lieutenant General Diterichs, Kirsta. All these investigators concluded that the royal family was not killed. Neither the Reds nor the Whites wanted to disclose this information - they understood that American bankers were primarily interested in obtaining objective information. The Bolsheviks were interested in the tsar's money, and Kolchak declared himself the Supreme Ruler of Russia, which could not happen with a living sovereign.

Investigator Sokolov was conducting two cases - one on the fact of murder and the other on the fact of disappearance. Conducted an investigation at the same time military intelligence in the person of Kirst. When the Whites left Russia, Sokolov, fearing for the collected materials, sent them to Harbin - some of his materials were lost along the way. Sokolov's materials contained evidence of financing the Russian revolution American bankers Schiff, Kuhn and Loeb, and Ford, who was in conflict with these bankers, became interested in these materials. He even called Sokolov from France, where he settled, to the USA. When returning from the USA to France, Nikolai Sokolov was killed.

Sokolov’s book was published after his death, and many people “worked” on it, removing many scandalous facts from it, so it cannot be considered completely truthful. The surviving members of the royal family were observed by people from the KGB, where a special department was created for this purpose, dissolved during perestroika. The archives of this department have been preserved. The royal family was saved by Stalin - the royal family was evacuated from Yekaterinburg through Perm to Moscow and came into the possession of Trotsky, then the People's Commissar of Defense. To further save the royal family, Stalin carried out an entire operation, stealing it from Trotsky’s people and taking them to Sukhumi, to a specially built house next to the former house of the royal family. From there, all family members were distributed to different places, Maria and Anastasia were taken to the Glinsk Hermitage (Sumy region), then Maria was transported to the Nizhny Novgorod region, where she died of illness on May 24, 1954. Anastasia subsequently married Stalin’s personal security guard and lived very secludedly on a small farm; she died on June 27, 1980 in the Volgograd region.

The eldest daughters, Olga and Tatyana, were sent to Serafimo-Diveevsky convent– the empress was settled not far from the girls. But they did not live here for long. Olga, having traveled through Afghanistan, Europe and Finland, settled in Vyritsa Leningrad region, where she died on January 19, 1976. Tatyana lived partly in Georgia, partly in the territory Krasnodar region, buried in the Krasnodar region, died on September 21, 1992. Alexey and his mother lived at their dacha, then Alexey was transported to Leningrad, where they “did” a biography on him, and the whole world recognized him as party and Soviet leader Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin (Stalin sometimes called him Tsarevich in front of everyone). Nicholas II lived and died in Nizhny Novgorod(December 22, 1958), and the queen died in the village of Starobelskaya, Lugansk region on April 2, 1948 and was subsequently reburied in Nizhny Novgorod, where she and the emperor have a common grave. Three daughters of Nicholas II, besides Olga, had children. N.A. Romanov communicated with I.V. Stalin, and wealth Russian Empire were used to strengthen the power of the USSR...

Yakov Tudorovsky

Yakov Tudorovsky

The Romanovs were not executed

According to official history, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, Nikolai Romanov, along with his wife and children, was shot. After opening the burial and identifying the remains in 1998, they were reburied in the tomb of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. However, then the Russian Orthodox Church did not confirm their authenticity. “I cannot exclude that the church will recognize the royal remains as authentic if convincing evidence of their authenticity is discovered and if the examination is open and honest,” Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, said in July of this year. As is known, the Russian Orthodox Church did not participate in the burial of the remains of the royal family in 1998, explaining this by the fact that the church is not sure whether the original remains of the royal family are buried. The Russian Orthodox Church refers to a book by Kolchak investigator Nikolai Sokolov, who concluded that all the bodies were burned. Some of the remains collected by Sokolov at the burning site are kept in Brussels, in the Church of St. Job the Long-Suffering, and they have not been examined. At one time, a version of Yurovsky’s note, who supervised the execution and burial, was found - it became the main document before the transfer of the remains (along with the book of investigator Sokolov). And now, in the coming year of the 100th anniversary of the execution of the Romanov family, the Russian Orthodox Church has been tasked with giving a final answer to all the dark execution sites near Yekaterinburg. To obtain a final answer, research has been carried out for several years under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church. Again, historians, geneticists, graphologists, pathologists and other specialists are rechecking the facts, powerful scientific forces and the forces of the prosecutor's office are again involved, and all these actions again take place under a thick veil of secrecy. Genetic identification research is carried out by four independent groups of scientists. Two of them are foreign, working directly with the Russian Orthodox Church. At the beginning of July 2017, the secretary of the church commission for studying the results of the study of the remains found near Yekaterinburg, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Yegoryevsk, said: a large number of new circumstances and new documents have been discovered. For example, Sverdlov’s order to execute Nicholas II was found. In addition, based on the results of recent research, criminologists have confirmed that the remains of the Tsar and Tsarina belong to them, since a mark was suddenly found on the skull of Nicholas II, which is interpreted as a mark from a saber blow he received while visiting Japan. As for the queen, dentists identified her using the world's first porcelain veneers on platinum pins. Although, if you open the conclusion of the commission, written before the burial in 1998, it says: the bones of the sovereign’s skull are so destroyed that the characteristic callus cannot be found. The same conclusion noted severe damage to the teeth of Nikolai’s presumed remains due to periodontal disease, since this person had never been to the dentist. This confirms that it was not the tsar who was shot, since the records of the Tobolsk dentist whom Nikolai contacted remained. In addition, no explanation has yet been found for the fact that the height of the skeleton of “Princess Anastasia” is 13 centimeters greater than her lifetime height. Well, as you know, miracles happen in the church... Shevkunov did not say a word about genetic testing, and this despite the fact that genetic studies in 2003 conducted by Russian and American specialists showed that the genome of the body of the supposed empress and her sister Elizabeth Feodorovna did not match , which means no relationship.