The dreadful night of July 16, 1918, at midnight the chief executioner Yakov “dark man”
Yurovsky, went upstairs to awaken the family. In his pocket he had a Colt pistol with a
cartridge clip containing 7 bullets, and in his coat he carried a pistol and a clip of 10
bullets. When he went and knocked on the door Dr. Bortkin, the family doctor was alert,
he was already awake writing a letter which would turn up to be his last letter. Yurovsky
explained his intrusion saying, “Because of unrest in the town, it has become necessary to
move the family downstairs,” he said. “It would be dangerous to be in the upper rooms if
there was shooting in the streets.” Botkin understood and went to awake the family and
tell them to get dressed quickly. Nicholas, 50, and Alexis, 13, dressed in simple military
shirts, trousers, boots, and cap. Alexandra, 46, and Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Marie, 19, and
Anastasia, 17, put on simple dresses without outer wraps or ruffles. Nicholas carrying his
son Alexis, Alexandra clutching a pillow, so as the other daughters, and Anastasia
holding her small King Carles spaniel, Jimmy. Following them were Trupp, Nicholas’s
valet; Demidova, the maid; and Kharitonov, the cook. From there Yurovsky led all of
them downstairs, to a bare room with no furniture. Alexandra seeing the empty room
asked, “No chairs? May we not sit?” Yurovsky, went out to get 2 chairs, while one of the
soldiers whispered to one another “The empress needs a chair...evidently she wants to die
in one.” Alexandra took one and put Alexis in the other. Then Yurovsky gave the “death
directions”--“Please, you stand here, and you here..that’s it in a row!”-- spreading them
out across the back wall. He explained that he needed a photograph because people in
Moscow were worried that they had escaped. When he finished aligning them, Yurovsky
then called in NOT photographers, but 11 armed Bolshevik soldiers. Yurovsky stood in
front of Nicholas, his right hand in his pocket and left holding a paper and reading,
"In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to......execute you."
Nicholas quickly turned looked at his family and said “What? What?” Yurovsky jerked out the Colt out of his pocket and fired at the Tsar. Soon the entire squad began to fire at the family, each of the soldiers had been told beforehand whom they were assigned to shoot and ordered to aim for the heart to avoid excessive quantities of blood. The empress and Olga each tried to make a sign of a cross as a prayer but they did not have time. Now Alexis and Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia remained alive. Bullets fired at the daughters’ chest but they seemed to bounce off, (later Historians found out the daughters sowed jewels on their dresses to act as a shield) the executioners continued to fire, in the smoke, Marie and Anastasia pressed on the wall, while Alexis grasping for support was kicked in the head by a executioner. Then the executioners stabbed Alexis, Marie, and Anastasia. Blood was everywhere.
Sheets off the beds were collected to drag out the bodies. When they picked up
Anastasia’s body and put her on a sheet she cried out. She was still alive. But then she
got still and they continued, till they got to a abandoned place in the dense forest called
To get rid of any evidence of carnage, bones, and a rotting corpse they chopped the
bodies up into fine pieces which looked like chopped meat, ...then the bodies were
destroyed with sulfuric acid and by burning on the bonfires with the aid of gasoline. The
fatty matter in the corpses melted and spread over the ground where it became mixed
with the earth.
Now, ever since the night of the Romanov massacre took place, there has been two
missing corpses which is that of Anastasia and her brother Alexis. Anastasia was the one
who executioners claimed was still alive when they put her on the sheet to drag her out.
When they dumped the bodies, the executioners could not find Anastasia’s. So they left
the situation alone and moved on. So,...if Anastasia was still alive from the shooting, and
was not buried alive because they didn’t find her body, then.....what could have
Historians believe Anastasia might have escaped and lost unconsciousness and moved on
with her life. Not knowing what had happened to her. This concept is the one they used
for the FOX movie “Anastasia”. Another concept is, that 1 of the soldiers took pity on her
and dragged her body out of danger and might have married and never told her who she
was. Another concept is that they completely did the burning bonfire job, well. But the
mystery still lives on as to what happened to.....
the Four Brothers. There they undressed the family and collected their items and the
jewels from the duchesses to resell them in a market, as shown in the animated, movie
“Anastasia”. At some point in carnage, perhaps in a attempt to make the corpses
unrecognizable, the faces had been crushed by the blows from the rifle butts. While the
diggers threw the bodies in the ditch, some of them, the despicable low-lives that they
were, actually touched the naked bodies of the duchesses. One of them said in a
interview, quote: “I felt the empress myself and she was warm” another one said “Now I
can die in peace because I have squeezed the empress’s breasts”.
happened??
Cellar where Anastasia and her family were brutally executed
