THE LAST DAYS OF THE
ROMANOVS
BY
GEORGE GUSTAV TELBERG
PROFESSOR OF LAW IN SARATOV UNIVERSITY AND FORMER MINISTER
OF JUSTICE OF THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT
AT OMSK
AND
ROBERT WILTON
SPECIAL RUSSIAN CORRESPONDENT FOR
THE TIMES, LONDON
ILLUSTRATED
NEW
YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
During the night between the 16th and 17th of July, 1918, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his family, as well as all the persons attached to it, were murdered by the order of the Yekaterinburg soviet of workmen’s deputies. The news of this crime broke through the closed ring that surrounded Bolshevist Russia and spread over the entire world.
At the end of July, 1918, the town of Yekaterinburg was taken from the Bolsheviks by the forces of the Siberian Government. Shortly after their occupation of the district an investigation was ordered to be made of the circumstances attendant on the murder. A judicial examination therefore took place of the witnesses connected with the life of the imperial family at Czarskoe-Selo, Tobolsk and Yekaterinburg by N. A. Sokoloff, the Investigating Magistrate for Cases of Special Importance of the Omsk Tribunal.
Upon the fall of the Kolchak régime, copies of the depositions were taken from the archives by M. George Gustav Telberg, Professor of Law at the University of Saratov and Minister of Justice at Omsk, when he fled with the other ministers of the Omsk government. These combined statements reconstruct the life-story of the imperial family from the time of the emperor’s abdication until the murder of himself, his wife, his children, including the czarevitch, and their few faithful servants in Ipatieff’s house at Yekaterinburg.
The translator has endeavored to preserve the original simplicity, and in some cases the crudeness and lack of education apparent in the witnesses. Colonel Kobylinsky, M. Gilliard and Mr. Gibbes are educated men who apparently gave their evidence without displaying any outward emotion, but, though they did not exaggerate the sufferings of the imperial family, they were not eye-witnesses of the final hours of their captivity.