The Room in Layers
Room II on the Ground Floor of the Ipatiev House, July 1918 — February 1919
The best-known image of the Romanovs case is not a photograph of a crime. It is a photograph of a wall: the east wall of the room marked as Room II, a small vaulted space on the ground floor of the Ipatiev House, known since its first printing in 1920 as the “murder” room. It has stood for a century as the place where the Russian Imperial Family died. In the photograph its lathing is laid bare and its plaster torn away; in the version the investigator N. A. Sokolov printed in his book of 1925, an ellipse with three arrows is drawn round a hole. Most who look at it take it for the room as the killers left it. It is, in fact, the room as the investigators left it: a wall from which pieces had already been cut out for examination. What’s more, in the record of 1918 that wall carries no blood at all.
The “blood” is on the floor. There, in August 1918, the investigator cut through the boards and found reddish streaks running down through the wood. A piece of one such board was sent to Perm to be tested, and the test was never made: the professor had no serum to tell human blood from any other.
No one photographed the floor. So the famous picture shows a wall with no blood on it, and the stains lie on a floor that has no picture and no result. The gap between the two was filled by an assumption: that the blood had been on the walls as well, and had been washed away. The wall that was photographed came to stand for the floor that was never proved.
How did a room with a clean wall and an untested floor become the “murder” room everyone knows?
Not in one night. Set side by side by date, the records reveal the room in layers, added one on another: one — just before the tenants and their guard left the house, another one — in the weeks after they had gone, and the last one during the investigation itself. Each was laid down by different people, with different guns, at different times.
The room and the keys
Room II, which measures 5.33 m by 4.45 m, lies between Room I, the ground-floor hall, and Room III, the owner’s storeroom. A door from Room I leads into it, and a double door in its east wall leads into Room III.
Room III belonged to the owner, the engineer N. N. Ipatiev. When he was turned out of his house at the end of April 1918, he put his carpets and other household goods there and locked it: «В нижнем этаже дома, в кладовой, смежной с той комнатой, которая на полу и на стенах носит следы выстрелов, мною были сложены ковры и другое домашнее имущество; кладовая эта также была заперта мною» (“In the lower floor of the house, in the storeroom next to the room that bears traces of shots on the floor and walls, I put the carpets and other household goods; this storeroom was also locked by me”). The Soviet commission sealed it, and later the chairman of the Executive Committee, Chutskaev, took the keys, inspected the locked rooms and sealed them again (Ipatiev to Sergeev, 30 November 1918).
The guards who speak of the room have that door sealed while the Reds held the house. The guard Mikhail Letemin, to the investigator Sergeev: «Дверь, ведущая из этой комнаты в кладовую, всегда оставалась запечатанной, и охране строго было приказано не открывать этой двери, так как в ней хранились вещи, принадлежавшие домовладельцу Ипатьеву» (“The door leading from this room into the storeroom always remained sealed, and the guard was strictly ordered not to open this door, since it held things belonging to the owner, Ipatiev”). The guard Yakimov, in May 1919: «дверь была опечатана и заперта» (“the door was sealed and locked”).
What followed can be set out by date, closely enough to fit in a table. At several points along the way, the keys changed hands.
Two things stand out. The ground floor was first examined three weeks after the Reds left. And the house was guarded by the Whites before any investigator had been inside. On the day the city fell, the officer Malinovsky says, the house was guarded by no one; then «дом Ипатьева взят под охрану, как только сформировался штаб гарнизона» (“the Ipatiev house was taken under guard as soon as the garrison staff was formed”). The guard was not posted for the owner, who was away in a village, nor for what might be inside, since no one yet knew whether anything of the Family’s was left. It was posted over the place itself. From that day the White command decided who entered the rooms.
Keep those three weeks in mind. Everything the investigator Sergeev later found in the room, he found at the end of them.
The base: three holes and a clean floor
Every layer needs something to stand on. There is only one description of Room II from 1918: the investigator Sergeev’s, made on 11–14 August. But there is one earlier sighting. On 18 July 1918, having been told of a shooting, the guard Letemin went down to see the room for himself. He did not describe it to the Criminal Investigation Department when it questioned him on 7 August. He described it to the investigator Sergeev on 18–19 October 1918, two months after Sergeev had examined the room himself.
«18-го июля я зашел в ту комнату, где был произведен расстрел, и увидел, что пол был чист» (“On 18 July I went into the room where the shooting had been done, and saw that the floor was clean”). «На стенах также никаких пятен я не обнаружил» (“On the walls, too, I found no stains”). On the back wall, to the left of the entrance, «я заметил три дырочки глубиной с сантиметр каждая» (“I noticed three little holes, each about a centimetre deep”). And: «Следов пуль или штыковых ударов на полу осмотренной мною комнаты я не заметил» (“I did not notice traces of bullets or bayonet blows on the floor of the room I looked at”). He adds that his look was brief and hurried.
So the base is not a description. It is a memory: the earliest state of Room II on record, by the date it was seen, and told three months later.
The floors had been washed on 15 July by two women from the builders’ union. Three days later the floor was clean and the wall had three shallow holes. Even these three need not be the night’s: the diaries of Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna record shooting at and near the house through May, June and July 1918, including revolver shots on the night of 12–13 July. The investigators of 1918 did not have the diaries, and could not know that holes in the house might have another source.
The base: by 18 July 1918 Room II holds three small holes in the east wall, no stains on the walls, and nothing on the floor. Everything else was laid on top of this.
The first layer: the back wall and the guard’s guns
Twenty-seven days later Room II was described for the first time, and it was not the room Letemin would remember. On 14 August 1918 the investigator Sergeev, examining the ground floor of the Ipatiev House, counted not three marks on the east wall of Room II but sixteen, between the north arch and the storeroom door, and described them as «похожие на следы проникновения пуль или на следы ударов каким-либо твердым острым орудием» (“resembling traces of the penetration of bullets or traces of blows with some hard sharp instrument”). Beside the first six he pencilled «шт», bayonet. Around nine of them the paper was rubbed: «из-под стертой бумаги обоев виднеется штукатурка» (“plaster shows through the rubbed paper”). On the floor of the north half of Room II he found «следы замывки в виде волнообразных и зигзагообразных полос из плотно присохших к нему частиц песку и мела» (“traces of washing in the form of wavy and zigzag streaks of particles of sand and chalk dried hard onto it”), thicker along the skirting. What had been washed up was sand and chalk: plaster.
The east wall of Room II is a partition, «деревянная, оштукатуренная с обеих сторон» (“wooden, plastered on both sides”), and on 20 August 1918 he had it opened. The act of that day divides the sixteen marks in two. Six, nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 9 and 10, «проникают только толщу штукатурки» (“go only into the thickness of the plaster”); the plaster was searched with every precaution, and «ни в одном из шести осмотренных участков присутствия пуль не обнаружено» (“in none of the six places examined was a bullet found”). Ten go 6.7 to 7.8 cm into the wood, and in all ten a bullet was found, which the act calls a revolver bullet. Of the whole east wall the act says: «Ни в толще штукатурки, ни в толще деревянных частей следов окрашивания не имеется» (“Neither in the thickness of the plaster nor in the thickness of the wooden parts is there any trace of colouring”).
The wall therefore holds two kinds of mark. Six never reached the wood and held no bullet; four of them are among those the investigator Sergeev marked as bayonet marks. Ten held bullets. Nine of those ten are at 71 cm or lower, and they are the ones washed round. And the wall has no blood.
Who could have fired the bullets?
The men who guarded the house were armed, and their arms are on record. They fell into three groups. The guard, on the posts round the house and the fence, carried rifles. The Nagant revolvers came with the commandant Yurovsky: the inner guard carried them, and a few went to the guard’s commanders and to the outer posts. The commandant carried a Mauser pistol.
The rifle first. The commandant’s own instruction for guard duty forbids a sentry to let go of his rifle, and orders the machine-gunners to check their guns and grenades; it names no revolver. Father Storozhev, the priest who came to the house to hold services, saw sentries on the landings and in the anteroom «вооруженных ружьями и ручными бомбами» (“armed with rifles and hand grenades”). The guard Proskuryakov: «Раньше постовые имели только одни винтовки, а за несколько дней до убийства откуда-то появились у нас револьверы Нагана» (“Earlier the sentries had only rifles, and a few days before the murder Nagant revolvers appeared among us from somewhere”). The guard Yakimov names where they went: one to him (as a razvodyashchiy, he told Sokolov), two to the orderlies, and three to posts 5, 6 and 9, which were the booth outside the big fence, the booth on Voznesensky Prospekt and the back yard: the posts that faced the street and guarded the way into the yard. The rifle was the guard’s weapon; the Nagants came with Yurovsky.
The house’s own papers name the pistols. On 17 July 1918 the commandant’s office asked the arms department of the Military Commissariat «выдать нагановских патронов 520 штук и Маузер 4 обоймы» (“to issue 520 Nagant cartridges and four Mauser clips”). The Nagant cartridges were for the guard’s revolvers. The Mauser clips were for the commandant’s pistol, or for his assistant Nikulin’s: Nikulin outranked the guards and came, like Yurovsky, from the Cheka. In all its papers, the house never ordered a cartridge for any other pistol: none for a Colt, none for a Browning.
The order says one thing more. It was made the day after the night of the alleged killing, on the same page as the pay for forty men. Five hundred and twenty cartridges is not what it takes to replace rounds spent on eleven people. It is an issue for men about to travel.
So the guns of the house were rifles, Nagants and a Mauser. When the east-wall bullets reached an expert in Omsk in February 1919, only seven of the ten were there. Five were Nagants. Two were not: they were bullets of a three-line automatic pistol, and the house had never ordered a cartridge for one. Those two belong to the next layer, and they will come back. The other three never reached Omsk at all. One piece carries Sergeev’s note «Пуля извлечена» (“bullet extracted”), and the investigator Sokolov writes that part of the bullets «была роздана Сергеевым разным лицам» (“was handed out by Sergeev to various persons”). No piece is tied to its mark, so no one can say which marks held which bullets.
Now set the east wall of Room II beside the guard. On 18 July 1918 Letemin saw three shallow holes in it. By 14 August it had sixteen marks, and the bullets in its wood were, for the most part, Nagants. Between those two dates the guard left the house, in two turns. Towards midnight on 18 July the commandant Yurovsky came out to a waiting carriage with seven pieces of luggage. As he left, he gave the order «привести все в порядок, охраны оставить 12 человек, а остальных отправить на вокзал» (“to put everything in order, to leave 12 men of the guard and send the rest to the station”). He and the inner guard went first. The rest followed to the station on 19–20 July. Twelve men stayed behind with his assistant Nikulin until the guard was taken off on 22 July.
The night of 18–19 July 1918 is the window. The guard Letemin had already looked into the room. The men who carried the Nagants and the Mauser were still in the house, and the outer guard had not yet been sent away. It did not take the whole guard: one Nagant is enough, and the Mauser was there beside it. Nor is it a task for an ordinary sentry. The men who held Nagants of their own were the guard’s commanders. Yakimov, chief of the outer guard, had one issued to him, and from 2 p.m. on 18 July he was back on duty in the house. His assistant Medvedev had one too: «У Медведева, когда я только еще поступил в охрану, был наган» (“Medvedev had a Nagant when I first joined the guard”), Yakimov told Sokolov. One of the two is the likeliest hand. The new holes can be assigned to them. They are shots fired low and close together into a wall that had held almost nothing, so that the room would look as if something had happened in it. “Put everything in order” was the last thing the commandant said on leaving.
The shots raised plaster dust, sand and chalk, and it was wiped up quickly. That left the streaks on the floor and the rubbed paper round the low marks. Whoever did it either did not take much care, or wanted the marks to be found. People who kill do not leave obvious marks; they remove them.
The first layer, the night of 18–19 July 1918: Nagant bullets low in the east wall, five of which reached the expert, fired by the house’s own guard before it was let go, the plaster dust wiped up round them, and still no blood.
The second layer: the floor and the door
On 18 July 1918 Letemin looked at the floor and saw no bullet marks in it. On 14 August the investigator Sergeev found six, all in the washed north half of the room. So the floor was shot after 18 July. The first thought is the guard: it had the Nagants, it had the house for one more night, and it had just fired into the wall. The floor could simply be more of the same. It is not, for one reason: the bullets in the floor are not Nagants.
On 18 August 1918 the floor was cut. The protocol of that day records that «все углубления представляют собой пулевые каналы, в некоторых из них пули застряли в толще дерева» (“all the hollows are bullet channels; in some of them bullets were stuck in the thickness of the wood”), and that at marks 1, 2 and 3 the sawn faces showed «красноватые пятна, спускавшиеся через всю толщу доски в виде потеков» (“reddish spots running down through the whole thickness of the board in the form of streaks”). They are called reddish spots, not blood.
Two of the floor bullets reached the expert in Omsk, and they come from a different world from the east wall’s. The bullet from floor piece 2 was measured on 26 February 1919 at 10 mm, «несомненно иностранной системы» (“undoubtedly of a foreign system”), and on 27 February at 11.43 mm and about 15 g: a Colt .45. In the same channel, beside the bullet, the investigator Sokolov had found «несколько шерстинок материи. Одна из шерстинок кремового цвета, другие — красного» (“several wool fibres of cloth, one cream-coloured, the others red”). A shot through a cushion or a rug would leave them as well as a shot through clothing; no one ever established which. The bullet from floor piece 6, flattened, was weighed at 5½ g and called a Browning «изготовленному в Европе» (“made in Europe”).
Neither gun could have come from the guard. First, the house never supplied cartridges for them. Its journal orders Nagant cartridges and Mauser clips and nothing else, and no one can keep a pistol firing without cartridges made for it. Second, these were not guns a guard of this kind would carry. The men of the Ipatiev House were factory workers from Sysert and Verkh-Isetsk. The outer posts had rifles and the inner guard had the army’s revolver. The Colt and the Browning were pistols of another class. The Colt M1911 was the American army pistol; Russia bought about 51,000 of them through Britain in 1916–17; they went to the army, chiefly to officers. The Browning was rarer still in such hands. It was the pistol a Russian officer bought for himself, as officers were allowed to from 1907, and the pistol the police and the gendarmes bought for their men. A factory worker in a Red guard had no road to either.
The house’s papers do record a Colt. On 10 July 1918 the commandant’s office was issued «кобур для револьвера “Кольт”», a holster for a Colt revolver: the gun had come without one. On the commandant’s table the investigator Nametkin found a crumpled scrap of paper: «Левольвер Радишковича», “Radishkovich’s revolver”. It is a tag for someone else’s gun, handed in or taken. And no cartridge for a Colt appears in any of the house’s orders: rifle cartridges, Nagant cartridges, Mauser clips, nothing else. Yakimov saw that Colt in the commandant’s room. It could not have fired the bullet in the floor of Room II. Whoever fired that brought a loaded Colt and its cartridges with him.
Who, then, could fire them? Once the last twelve guards left on 22 July 1918, the house passed through other hands before the investigator Sergeev came down to the ground floor on 11 August 1918. Ipatiev’s sister-in-law, E. F. Poppel, held the keys for a few days. From 25 July the White garrison staff kept the house under guard. From then on, two kinds of people could walk into its rooms: White officers, and the police.
The police is where the Browning belongs. The Criminal Investigation Department, under its head, Kirsta, was at work on the house in exactly these weeks. It searched Letemin’s flat on 6 August, took his statement on 7 August and searched six more guards on 9 August.
The officers are where the Colt belongs, and one of them says he was in the room. Captain D. A. Malinovsky headed the operations department of the garrison staff, the staff that had put the house under guard. On 30 July 1918, when the investigator Nametkin refused to drive out to the mine without the prosecutor, Malinovsky reminded him that «нас здесь 12 вооруженных офицеров» (“there are twelve armed officers of us here”).
In June 1919 he told the investigator Sokolov: «Мы там были во время осмотра дома Наметкиным. Во время нашего осмотра дома я там был раза три. В первый раз мы пришли туда, кажется, 2 августа» (“We were there during Nametkin’s inspection of the house. During our inspection I was there about three times. The first time we came, I think, on 2 August”). He calls it “our inspection”. The officers moved things about: of the mattress and cushions in the commandant’s room, «это уже мы их перевернули» (“it was we who turned them over”). And: «Были мы и в нижних комнатах дома. Я обратил внимание на одну комнату, где мы видели следы пуль в стенах и полу» (“We were also in the rooms of the ground floor. I noticed one room, where we saw traces of bullets in the walls and the floor”). He adds: «Пол этой комнаты носил следы замывки» (“The floor of this room bore traces of washing”).
So the officers stood in Room II before the investigator who would examine it. They saw the holes in the wall, the streaks of sand and plaster on the floor, and the marks in the floor itself. Yet Malinovsky’s name is in neither protocol. Nametkin lists the Tsar’s valet Chemodurov, Dr Derevenko, General Medvedev of the General Staff Academy and the assistant prosecutor Ostroumov; Sergeev lists Ipatiev and General Medvedev. The officers who were in the rooms, who moved things and who went down into Room II, are not recorded as having been in the house at all.
That fixes the floor in time. The guard Letemin saw no marks on 18 July 1918; the officers saw them on their first visit, on 2 August. The shots in the floor were fired between 22 July, when the last of the guard left, and 2 August 1918. Most likely they came in the last days of that window. On 30 July the officers forced Nametkin out to the mine, and the case was opened on the garrison’s order. The shots belong to the same energy that drove the investigation forward.
The same hands reached the east wall of Room II. The two automatic bullets found among the Nagants are short, round-headed bullets of 7.65 mm, the cartridge of the Browning. On 26 February 1919 the expert assigned the first of them, from wall piece 1, to an automatic pistol «системы Браунинга» (“of the Browning system”). On 27 February he weighed it at 4½ g and called it a three-line automatic pistol «американского изготовления» (“of American make”), and the name Browning passed to the flattened bullet in the floor. An American-made pistol in the wall, beside an American Colt in the floor. The second layer was not confined to the floor: whoever brought these pistols into the room fired into the wall as well, perhaps before they fired at the floor, over the guard’s Nagants.
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Then there is the door of the storeroom, Room III. On 14 August 1918 the investigator Sergeev found on both its leaves «остатки красной сургучной печати» (“remains of a red wax seal”): the seal the guards say was never opened had been broken. Two holes went right through the door into the storeroom, at 173 cm and 98 cm, the splinters pointing «из описанной комнаты в кладовую» (“from the room described into the storeroom”). Inside lay «свернутые ковры, картонки и ящики с имуществом, принадлежащим домовладельцу Ипатьеву» (“rolled carpets, cartons and boxes with property belonging to the owner, Ipatiev”), and on the far wall a shallow scar in the plaster two metres up. No bullet from either hole is recorded, and neither the door nor the storeroom was cut.
A seal across two door leaves is broken by opening the door, not by a shot through it. The Reds would not open a room they had sealed themselves, more than once. Poppel had no reason to open a storeroom of her relative’s that held nothing of hers. The seal was intact while the Reds held the house and broken by 14 August 1918. The officers who turned over the mattresses upstairs, pulled the rubbish from the stoves and went down into Room II are the likeliest hands to have opened the door and looked inside Room III. In the testimony we have, Ipatiev, who stood beside the investigator Sergeev at the inspection, says nothing of the broken seal or of the state of his carpets.
Now put the door and the floor together. Behind the broken seal lay Ipatiev’s rolled carpets. In the channel of the Colt bullet the investigator Sokolov later found «несколько шерстинок материи. Одна из шерстинок кремового цвета, другие — красного» (“several wool fibres of cloth, one cream-coloured, the others red”). A good carpet in 1918 was thick and made of wool. Lay one on the floor and fire through it, and the bullet reaches the board slowed down and carrying wool, as if it had passed through a clothed body. That is exactly what the expert in Omsk would conclude.
Then the reddish streaks. On 14 August 1918 the investigator Sergeev saw nothing red on the floor of Room II. The streaks appeared only when the boards were sawn on 18 August, at three of the six marks. They ran down through the whole thickness of the wood, centred on the bullet channels: liquid that had gone into the channels from above. It was not the water of the washing. The floor was washed clean by 18 July, and the plaster dust was wiped up after the wall shots of 18–19 July. The floor holes did not yet exist. Had they been there, the wiping would have left sand and chalk in them; Sergeev records none. Whatever ran into those channels was put there after they were made.
This is why the floor was shot at all. The holes were not there to show a killing; they were there to take a few drops. A floor lies flat: drops in a fresh hole sink into the wood and vanish from sight, to be found when the boards are cut. A wall stands upright: drops run down the paper and show. The wall was left clean; the floor received its colouring only inside, where no one would look until the investigator brought a saw.
It takes a particular kind of man to think of this. He must know how a criminal case is read: that an expert will ask whether a bullet passed through a body, and that blood will be looked for in the wood. He must have blood to hand, and in a town that means the morgue. Both belong to the world of the criminal police. And it must be done before any investigator describes the room, because once the floor is on paper as clean and unmarked, new holes would give themselves away. The officers were in Room II before any investigator set foot in it. As Malinovsky says of the house, «А попал я туда один из первых» (“And I got in there one of the first”).
The second layer, 22 July — 2 August 1918: the floor channels with a Colt and a “Browning” in them, two Browning-cartridge bullets in the east wall over the Nagants, two holes through the storeroom door and its seal broken. All of it was made after the Reds had gone, in a house under White guard, and before the officers’ first recorded visit. And there is still no word of blood.
The third layer: the box and Omsk, 1919
By the end of August 1918 the marks of Room II had been cut out in pieces, numbered and wrapped in paper. The third layer was not made in the house. It was made in Omsk, six months later, from those pieces, and it added three things the room had never held: the word ‘blood’, bodies, and names of guns in the mouths of witnesses.
‘Blood’. In August 1918, no one saw blood in Room II. On 18 July 1918 Letemin saw a clean floor and no stains on the walls. On 14 August the investigator Sergeev saw no stain on its floor; the one reddish spot he recorded on any floor that day was outside the room, on the front porch. The streaks at three of the floor marks appeared only inside the sawn boards, and Sergeev called them «красноватые пятна», reddish spots. The wall, opened on 20 August 1918, had no colouring anywhere.
On 18 and 20 August 1918 the investigator Sergeev cut eighteen pieces from Room II: six from the floor (five in Room II and one from the porch), ten from the east wall and two from the south wall. Each was numbered, wrapped in paper and sealed. He did not take them away. They stayed in the house, in two locked rooms on the upper floor. The man who guarded those rooms was the owner himself: the investigator Sergeev allowed Ipatiev to live in three rooms of the ground floor «с обязательством охранять запертые помещения верхнего этажа» (“on the obligation to guard the locked rooms of the upper floor”). The pieces left the house only on 8 October 1918, when the military took it over for General Gajda’s staff, and went to Sergeev’s chamber at the court.
On 23 January 1919 the room was opened again, in the presence of General Dieterichs’s party, and inscriptions were destroyed and cut out. On 25 January, with Dr Uporov, the investigator Sergeev chiselled about 6 cm² from one floor piece, described now as «пропитанной кровью» (“soaked in blood”), and sealed it separately. It is the first time the word ‘blood’ is used of anything in the room. Six months after the cutting, the reddish spots had become blood by description.
When the wood was handed over to the investigator Sokolov in Omsk on 9 February 1919, in a box under the seal of the Yekaterinburg court, Sergeev’s own inventory listed twenty-two pieces, seven of them «с пятнами крови и засевшими пулями» (“with spots of blood and bullets lodged in them”). The seal was intact, yet a letter listed in the same inventory was missing. On 17–18 February 1919 Sokolov opened the wood: «На кусках не имеется обещанных в протоколе нумераций и названий этих предметов… так что с полной и точной определенностью нельзя установить, откуда именно взят тот или иной предмет» (“The pieces do not have the numbers and names promised in the protocol… so that it cannot be established with full and exact certainty where any piece was taken from”).
The floor count is unchanged, six and six. The wall has gained a plate, two splinters and a board bearing the inscription «А. Стражнев. 10.V.18», for none of which an act of cutting is in the file. The inventory lists five floor pieces, so one floor piece sits among the seven “blood” pieces; the other six are wall pieces, from the wall Sergeev had found without colouring. The blood had reached the wall, on paper. No wall piece was ever sent for a blood test.
The piece cut as blood went to Perm. On 4 February 1919 the investigator Sergeev sent «кусок дерева» (“a piece of wood”) to Perm for an examination of its stains. On 26 February the Perm investigator replied that Professor I. P. Korovin, «за неимением у него Уленгутовской сыворотки» (“having no Uhlenhuth serum”), could not test it for human blood, and asked whether to wait two or three weeks for serum from Omsk or return the piece untested. On those same days, 22–24 February 1919, the investigator Sokolov took five floor pieces from the box to the bacteriological laboratory of the Ufa Zemstvo in Omsk. The laboratory’s act is not in the case. Sokolov’s book prints its results, with the chemist as «химиком N.» and the serum as coming «из N. университета», and prints alongside them a result for the Perm piece, with no date, no place and no examiner. So the piece cut as blood was never tested as blood. The Perm professor had no serum, and the Omsk laboratory’s act is not in the file. Yet Sokolov’s book prints a Perm result, with no date, no place and no examiner, and uses it to prove what no one ever proved.
Bodies. The bullets went to an expert whom Sokolov’s book also leaves without a name: Major-General Nikolai Vasilievich Kopansky, head of the technical artillery establishments. He was an artillery man, not a forensic examiner. His task was to say what the bullets were. What he was told before he looked at them decided what he would say about where they had been.
An expert’s opinion is worth something only if it comes from the object in front of him. He is to look at the bullet, measure it, weigh it and say what it shows, before he knows what anyone hopes it will show. Kopansky was not given that chance. His original act opens the examination of the first floor bullet with: «Эксперту были оглашены данные предварительного следствия, относящиеся к извлечению этой пули» (“The data of the preliminary investigation relating to the extraction of this bullet were read out to the expert”). He was read Sergeev’s protocols of August 1918 and Sokolov’s of February 1919. For the bullets that followed, «сообщены те же данные» (“the same data were communicated”). Before he picked up a single bullet, he had heard that it came from the room of the murder, that the boards were stained, and that wool fibres lay in the channel. He was told the story first, and then asked to read it in the lead.
He read it there. The Colt bullet, he wrote, «прошла через значительную толщу человеческого тела» (“passed through a considerable thickness of a human body”). The “Browning” «попала в дерево, пройдя через человеческое тело и задев человеческие кости» (“entered the wood after passing through a human body and striking human bones”).
Nothing in the bullets says so. The opinions rest on depth alone: a bullet able to pierce fifteen centimetres of board had stopped at two and a half, so, he reasons, it must have spent itself in a body. His act records no examination of the bullets for blood or tissue, and in 1919 no one could read a passage through a body from a bullet lodged in wood. Anything thick and soft laid over the floor would stop a bullet the same way. The channel of the Colt bullet held exactly that kind of trace: wool fibres, cream and red, the colours of a carpet, and Ipatiev’s carpets lay behind the broken seal next door. Range and angle would do the same, and so would the chisel that split the boards six months later. The expert had been told about a murder, so he found bodies.
In his book, the investigator Sokolov printed Kopansky’s weapons, but left out every one of his body opinions, and the reading of the file that came before them. Had the opinions been sound, they were the strongest physical support the case had for people killed in that room. Their absence from the book says Sokolov knew they would not stand.
Guns. The dates show where the witnesses’ guns came from. Before the expert, the only guard who names makes is Medvedev, on 12 and again on 21–22 February 1919. He gives the guard Nagants and the commandant a Mauser: the two guns the house had ordered on 17 July, and nothing else.
On 26–27 February Kopansky named his weapons: Nagants, a Colt, a Browning, an American-made automatic and, for one mark in the wall, a four-line revolver.
After that the witnesses begin to carry them. On 1–3 April 1919 Proskuryakov, questioned by Sokolov and shown the photograph of the room, gives Yurovsky a pistol «системы Браунинга или Маузера» (“of the Browning or Mauser system”). Yakimov was questioned twice. On 2 April, in Perm, by the police agent Alekseev, he names no make at all. On 7–11 May, in Yekaterinburg, by Sokolov, he gives Yurovsky «большой маузер» (“a big Mauser”) and a Nagant. Then he adds that in the commandant’s room he saw «большой револьвер, похожий по устройству на браунинг, но не браунинг… возможно, что и был кольт» (“a large revolver, like a Browning in its working, but not a Browning… possibly it was a Colt”). It is the same man five weeks apart. With the police agent he names no makes; with the investigator who held the expert’s act, he names a Colt. There was a Colt in the commandant’s room: the unloaded one, with another man’s name on its tag. What the investigation did was join that gun to the expert’s bullet, which it could not have fired.
The pistols of the second layer, fired after the Reds had gone, were put into the hands of the Reds who had left. It is the method examined in the article Fed to Be Recalled, applied first to the expert and then, through him, to the witnesses.
The photograph did the same for blood. Proskuryakov, shown it on 1 April 1919, said that round the bullet holes in the walls and the floor «была кровь» (“there was blood”). Malinovsky, in June 1919, saw on the wallpaper round the bullet channels «брызги крови, как это и отмечено у Вас на снимке» (“spatters of blood, as it is marked on your photograph”). There was no blood on that wall to see. The act of 20 August 1918 found no colouring anywhere in it, in the plaster or in the wood. Neither man was recalling the wall. Both were describing the photograph they had just been shown, with the marks drawn on it. They were fed, not recalling.
The third layer, January–May 1919: the word ‘blood’, a box of twenty-two pieces with no numbers, a Perm result that was never made, bodies read into the depth of the wood by an expert who had been told the story first, and the expert’s guns and the photograph’s blood in the mouths of the witnesses. All of it was made away from Room II, by the investigation.
What Room II records
Put the layers back together, bottom to top, and the “murder” room everyone knows appears.
The base
18 July 1918: three small holes in the wall, no stains on the walls, a clean floor. A guard’s memory of a brief look, told three months later.
The first layer
The night of 18–19 July 1918, the guard: Nagant bullets low in the east wall, fired before the guard was let go, the plaster dust wiped up in streaks of sand and chalk. No blood.
The second layer
22 July — 2 August 1918, after the Reds: six channels in the floor holding a Colt and a flattened “Browning”, wool fibres in one of them, colouring inside the boards and nowhere on their surface, two Browning-cartridge bullets in the wall over the Nagants, two holes through the storeroom door, and the seal on Ipatiev’s carpets broken. All of it in a house under White guard, before any investigator came down to the ground floor.
The third layer
January–May 1919, the investigation: “blood” by description, twenty-two pieces in place of eighteen and none of them numbered, a piece cut as blood that was never tested, a laboratory act that is missing, an expert who was read the file before he judged and found bodies in the depth of the wood, and witnesses who name the expert’s guns and the photograph’s blood.
None of these layers records eleven people killed in a night. The wall records the guard’s revolvers and a hasty wiping-up. The floor records pistols that no man of the guard could have carried, a carpet, and a few drops put where only a saw would find them. The word ‘blood’ enters the record six months later, on pieces that had lost their numbers, through a test whose act is not in the file.
The investigation began from a house that had already been entered and handled. The officers had been through the upper rooms and down into Room II before any investigator. The room beside it had been opened under a broken seal. The keys had passed through a woman who was never questioned. The investigator Sergeev recorded what he found, and what he found was the room as it stood on 14 August 1918, after three weeks in White hands. What was built on it afterwards was built in Omsk.
The cherry on top
The wall is not the only photograph in Sokolov’s book that shows one thing and is made to say another. One more belongs to this story, and it sits on top of the layers like the cherry on the cake. Plate №55 is not a picture of the room at all. It shows eleven bullets standing on two shelves: ten taken from the walls and floor of Room II, and one that was never in the room. The caption reads «Некоторыя изъ пуль, извлеченныя изъ стѣнъ и пола въ комнатѣ убійства» (“Some of the bullets taken from the walls and floor of the room of the murder”). The wall has been reprinted and circulated for a century; this plate is hardly ever cited, or even mentioned.
The glass negative survives in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF, f. 1837, op. 5, d. 32). It is the plate the photographer Divish made in Omsk on 28 February 1919, the day after the expert finished: «все эти одиннадцать (11) пуль были сняты на одной пластинке» (“all these eleven (11) bullets were photographed on one plate”). On 1 March 1919 he handed the negative to the investigator Sokolov. So the caption’s “some” is ALL of them. And the one that was never in the room is named in the file. The first bullet the expert examined was found at the mine shaft in the forest near Koptyaki. It was examined in the same sitting and stood on the same plate.
Measured on the plate, the eleven sort themselves by shape. Seven are long and flat-nosed: Nagants, six from the walls (five from the east wall, one from the south) and the one from the mine. One is large and round-headed, with its rifling showing: the Colt .45 from the floor. Two are short and round-headed, with a band round the base, about 11 mm long: the 7.65 mm Browning cartridge, the two automatic bullets from the wall. The last is squashed flat. It is the floor “Browning”, and it weighs 5½ g. A 7.65 mm Browning bullet weighs about 4.7 g; a 7.63 mm Mauser bullet weighs 5.5 g.
The expert named Nagants, a Colt and two automatics, and no Mauser. Yet the archive keeps the negative under a title of its own: «Пули из пистолета «Маузер», «Браунинг», «Кольт» и…» (“Bullets from the ‘Mauser’, ‘Browning’ and ‘Colt’ pistols and…”). Who gave it that title, and on what grounds, the file does not say. But it reads the plate as the measurements do, and corrects the expert’s list. The Mauser it names was no proof of the Reds: it was a pistol the officers carried too.
So the book’s two photographs do the same work. One is everywhere and one is almost nowhere, and they mislead equally. One shows a wall without blood and stands for a floor that was never proved. The other shows a bullet from a mine shaft and stands for the room, under a caption that calls all of them “some”. Each is a true photograph of the wrong thing.
Between them sits Room II as it was built, layer by layer: by the guard in one July night, with the revolvers it had been issued; by officers and police in the days after the Reds had gone, with pistols no guard carried, a carpet and a few drops of blood; and by an investigation in Omsk the following winter, which read the story to its expert and then to its witnesses. The photograph of the wall made it the room of the murder; the eleven bullets on two shelves added their part to the story in the book. The room itself never said so.
Seraphina Michelina Evelyna Bogomolova-Huotelin (née von Prittwitz)
A note on sources
Protocols of 1918 as collected in Н. А. Соколов, Предварительное следствие 1919–1922 гг.: Сборник материалов, сост. Л. А. Лыкова (Москва, 1998), and the author’s working set of those protocols: Sergeev’s inspection of the ground floor, 11–14 August 1918; his acts of cutting, 18 and 20 August 1918 (GA RF, f. 1837, op. 4, d. 1, l. 44, 56); his report on the taking of the house, 8 October 1918, and on the opening of the room, 23 January 1919; Nametkin’s inspection of the upper floor, 2–8 August 1918; Letemin to Kirsta, 7 August 1918, and to Sergeev, 18–19 October 1918; the searches of Letemin’s flat, 6 August 1918, and of the guards’ flats, 9 August 1918; Starodumova and Dryagina, 17 August 1918; Elkin, 5 September 1918 and to Sergeev, 18 November 1918; Storozhev to Sergeev, 8–10 October 1918; Tomilova, 4 November 1918; Maria Medvedeva to Sergeev, 9–10 November 1918; Ipatiev to Sergeev, 30 November 1918. Testimonies of 1919: Medvedev to Alekseev, 12 February 1919, and to Sergeev, 21–22 February 1919; Proskuryakov to Sokolov, 1–3 April 1919; Yakimov to Alekseev, 2 April 1919, and to Sokolov, 7–11 May 1919; Malinovsky to Sokolov, June 1919. Original acts of 1919 from the case file (GA RF, fond 1837, scans in the author’s possession): Sergeev’s protocol of 25 January 1919; the handover of 9–10 February 1919 and Sergeev’s inventory №15; Sokolov’s protocols of 17–18 and 24 February 1919; the Perm investigator to Sergeev, 26 February 1919, №48; Kopansky’s protocols of 26 and 27 February 1919; Divish’s protocols of 28 February and 1 March 1919; Gilliard, 5 March 1919. The glass negative of the bullets, GA RF, f. 1837, op. 5, d. 32. The outgoing journal of the commandant of the House of Special Purpose, entry 32, 17 July 1918; the commandant’s general instruction for guard duty and the post orders (GA RF, f. 601, op. 2, d. 23); Order №3 of the commandant (GA RF, f. 601, op. 2, d. 34, l. 34). The commandant’s supply orders of 12 and 26 June and 5, 9, 10 and 15 July 1918, from the copies published by the Фонд Памяти Новомучеников Императорского Дома Романовых (archive reference to be confirmed). Н. Соколов, Убийство Царской Семьи (Berlin, 1925), ch. 18 and plates №46 and №55. R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (New York, 1920), plate “The Ipatiev House: the Room in the Basement Where the Imperial Family Was Murdered”. Specifications of the pistols from the Wikipedia articles on the Nagant M1895, Mauser C96, M1911 pistol and FN M1900.
