[The following is in regards to the execution of the Romanov family during the Russian Revolution. If you would like more detail and backstory, I’ve provided that in an earlier post. This is a retelling from different source material.]
Alexandra wondered why there were no chairs. Iurovskii, as always obliging, ordered two chairs to be brought in, on one of which Nicholas placed his son; Alexandra took the other. The rest were told to line up. A few minutes later, Iurovskii reentered the room in the company of ten armed men. He thus describes the scene that ensued:
When the party entered, [I] told the Romanovs that in view of the fact that their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet had decided to shoot them. Nicholas turned his back to the detachment and faced his family. Then, as if collecting himself, he turned around, asking “What? What?” [I] rapidly repeated what I had said and ordered the detachment to prepare. Its members had been previously told whom to shoot and to aim directly at the heart to avoid much blood and to end more quickly. Nicholas said no more. He turned again toward his family. The others shouted some incoherent exclamations. All this lasted a few seconds. Then commenced the shooting which went on for two or three minutes. [I] killed Nicholas on the spot.
It is known from eyewitnesses that the Empress and one of her daughters barely had time to cross themselves: they too died instantly. There was wild shooting as the guards emptied their revolvers: according to Iurovskii, the bullets, ricocheting from the walls and floor, flew around the room like hail. The girls screamed. Struck by bullets, Alexis fell off the chair. Kharitonov [the cook] “sat down and died.”
It was hard work. Iurovskii had assigned each executioner one victim and they were to aim straight at the heart. Still six of the victims – Alexis, three of the girls, Demidova, and Botkin – were alive when the salvos stopped. Alexis lay in a pool of blood, moaning: Iurovskii finished him off with two shots in the head. Demidova offered furious defense with her pillows, one of which had a metal box, but then she too went down, bayoneted to death. “When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through the corset,” Iurovskii complained. The whole “procedure,” as he calls it, took twenty minutes.
Medvedev recalled the scene: “They had several gun wounds on various parts of their bodies; their faces were covered with blood, their clothes too were blood-soaked.”
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Murder of the Imperial Family." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 775-76. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Ogonëk, No. 21 (1989), 30.
Sokolov, Ubiistvo, 232.
Further Reading:
[Alix of Hesse and by Rhine / Александра Фёдоровна (Alexandra Feodorovna) / Saint Alexandra the Passion Bearer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Feodorovna_(Alix_of_Hesse)
Я́ков Миха́йлович Юро́вский (Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky)
Николай II Алекса́ндрович (Tsar Nicholas II of Russia)
Алексе́й Никола́евич (Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia)
What a shitty way to die. Those executioners should have been punished for doing such a piss poor job.