THE PYRE AT THE BIRCH TREE
N. A. Sokolov, General Domontovich and his A. D. C. pose at the limits of the larger pyre, where most of the bodies and clothing were cremated. Alongside stands the tree with the tell-tale inscription.
THE HAND OF THE RED JEW MURDERERS
The above is a facsimile of the original message filed at the Ekaterinburg telegraph office by the local Soviet chiefs to the Moscow Tsik (Centr. Ex. Committee) on July 4, 1918, twelve days before the murder. In it, Beloborodov, the Russian “dummy” president, informs Sverdlov through Goloschekin that Syromolotov is hastening to Moscow to take final instructions for the “affair” and that the Russian Guards have been replaced by “others”, i.e. by German soldiers.
at Ekaterinburg. They were quite positive about it. They even pointed out the place where “Anastasia” had been buried. The bodies—there were many—were exhumed; the only one that was a young woman’s was unmistakably identified by the local police as that of “Nastia Vorovka” (the thief Nastia)—a well-known criminal.
The Komisar Safarov, afterwards editor of the official “Izvestiya,” wrote an article on the “execution” which figures in the dossier as an interesting sidelight on the motives of the crime and its methods. It is only fair that the accused should speak for themselves. I here give a plain, unvarnished rendering of this “defence”:
“In the places seized by the Czecho-Slovaks and bands of White-guards in Siberia and the Southern Ural, authority has fallen into the hands of Black-hundred pogromists composed of purest Monarchists by profession. The real intentions of the White-guards of the Quadruple Entente are made plain by the mere fact that at the head of them all, as supreme war-lord, stands the Tsar’s general Alexeiev, the most devoted servant of Nicholas the Sanguinary, himself a convinced blood-shedder (palách)....
“Around Nicholas all the time was spread an artful network of conspiracies. One of them was discovered during the transit from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg.” (Safarov here suggests that Yakovlev was a traitor, and passes over in silence the whole history of the interrupted journey. This compels the inference, which is borne out by scores of direct evidences that the Tsik, i.e., Sverdlov, deliberately sent the Romanovs into a death-trap.) Safarov continues: “Another plot was discovered just before the execution of Nicholas. The participants in the last conspiracy to deliver the murderer of workmen and peasants out of a peasant-workman’s prison clearly identified their hopes with the hope that the Red capital of the Ural would be occupied by Czecho-Slovak-Whiteguard pogromists.