Yekaterinburg. At the place of execution of the royal family. Holy Quarter June 16th, 2016

Immediately behind you can not miss this high temple and a number of other temple buildings. This is the Holy Quarter. By the will of fate, three streets bearing the names of revolutionaries are limited. Let's go to him.

On the way - a monument to the Holy Blessed Peter and Fevronia of Murom. Installed in 2012.

The Church-on-the-Blood was built in 2000-2003. on the spot where on the night of July 16 to July 17, 1918, the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family were shot. At the entrance to the temple, their photographs.

In 1917, after February Revolution and abdication, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family, by decision of the Provisional Government, were exiled to Tobolsk.

After the Bolsheviks came to power and the start of the civil war, in April 1918, permission was received from the Presidium (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) of the fourth convocation to transfer the Romanovs to Yekaterinburg in order to deliver them to Moscow from there in order to conduct a trial of them.

In Yekaterinburg, a large stone mansion, confiscated from the engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, was chosen as the place of imprisonment for Nicholas II and his family. On the night of July 17, 1918, in the basement of this house, Emperor Nicholas II, along with his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, children and close associates, were shot, and after that their bodies were taken to the abandoned Ganina Yama mine.

September 22, 1977 on the recommendation of the chairman of the KGB Yu.V. Andropov and the instructions of B.N. Yeltsin's Ipatiev house was destroyed. Later, Yeltsin would write in his memoirs: "...sooner or later we will all be ashamed of this barbarity. We will be ashamed, but we won't be able to fix anything...".

When designing, the plan of the future temple was superimposed on the plan of the demolished Ipatiev house in such a way as to create an analogue of the room where the Tsar's family was shot. At the lower level of the temple, a symbolic place for this execution was envisaged. In fact, the place of execution of the royal family is outside the temple in the area of ​​​​the carriageway of Karl Liebknecht Street.

The temple is a five-domed structure with a height of 60 meters and a total area of ​​3000 m². The architecture of the building is designed in the Russian-Byzantine style. The vast majority of churches were built in this style during the reign of Nicholas II.

The cross in the center is part of the monument to the royal family descending into the basement before being shot.

Adjacent to the Church-on-the-Blood is the Church in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker with the spiritual and educational center "Patriarchal Compound" and the museum of the royal family.

Behind them you can see the Church of the Ascension of the Lord (1782-1818).

And in front of him is the Kharitonov-Rastorguev estate of the early 19th century (architect Malakhov), which became the Palace of Pioneers in the Soviet years. Now - the City Palace of Creativity for Children and Youth "Giftedness and Technology".

What else is in the vicinity. This is the Gazprom Tower, which has been under construction since 1976 as the Tourist Hotel.

The former office of the now defunct airline Transaero.

Between them - buildings of the middle of the last century.

Residential house-monument of 1935. Built for railroad workers. Very beautiful! Athletes' Street, on which the building is located, has been gradually built up since the 1960s, as a result, by 2010 it was completely lost. This residential building is the only building listed on a virtually non-existent street, the house has number 30.

Well, now we are going to the Gazprom tower - an interesting street begins from there.

At one in the morning on July 17, 1918, the former Russian Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, their five children and four servants, including a doctor, were taken to the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, where they were held in custody, where they were brutally shot by the Bolsheviks, and subsequently burned body.

The eerie scene continues to haunt us to this day, and their remains, which for most of the century lay in unmarked graves, the location of which was known only to the Soviet leadership, are still surrounded by an aura of mystery. In 1979, enthusiastic historians discovered the remains of some members of the royal family, and in 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, their identity was confirmed using DNA analysis.

The remains of two more royal children, Alexei and Maria, were discovered in 2007 and subjected to a similar analysis. However, the ROC questioned the results of the DNA tests. The remains of Alexei and Maria were not buried, but transferred to a scientific institution. In 2015, they were again subjected to analysis.

The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts these events in detail in his book 'The Romanovs, 1613-1618', published in this year. El Confidential has already written about her. In the Town & Country magazine, the author recalls that the official investigation into the murder of the royal family was resumed last fall, and the remains of the king and queen were exhumed. This gave rise to conflicting statements from the government and representatives of the Church, again putting this issue in the public eye.

According to Sebag, Nikolai was good-looking, and apparent weakness hid an imperious man who despised the ruling class, a fierce anti-Semite who did not doubt his sacred right to power. She and Alexandra married for love, which was then a rare occurrence. She brought to family life paranoid thinking, mystical fanaticism (just remember Rasputin) and another danger - hemophilia, which was passed on to her son, heir to the throne.

Wounds

In 1998, the reburial of the remains of the Romanovs took place in a solemn official ceremony designed to heal the wounds of Russia's past.

President Yeltsin said that political change should never again be forced. Many Orthodox again expressed their disagreement and perceived this event as an attempt by the president to impose a liberal agenda in the former USSR.

In 2000, the Orthodox Church canonized royal family, as a result of which the relics of its members became a shrine, and according to the statements of its representatives, it was necessary to conduct their reliable identification.

When Yeltsin left his post and nominated an unknown Vladimir Putin, a KGB lieutenant colonel who considered the collapse of the USSR “the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century,” the young leader began to concentrate power in his hands, put up barriers to foreign influence, help strengthen Orthodox faith and pursue an aggressive foreign policy. It seemed—Sebag reflects ironically—he decided to continue the political line of the Romanovs.

Putin is a political realist, and he is moving along the path outlined by the leaders of a strong Russia: from Peter I to Stalin. These were bright personalities who opposed the international threat.

The position of Putin, who questioned the results of scientific research (weak echo cold war: there were many Americans among the researchers), calmed the Church and created a breeding ground for conspiracy, nationalist and anti-Semitic hypotheses regarding the remains of the Romanovs. One of them was that Lenin and his followers, many of whom were Jews, moved the bodies to Moscow with orders to mutilate them. Was it really the king and his family? Or did someone manage to escape?

Context

How did the kings return to Russian history

Atlantico 19.08.2015

304 years of Romanov rule

Le Figaro 05/30/2016

Why both Lenin and Nicholas II are “good”

Radio Prague 14.10.2015

What did Nicholas II give the Finns?

Helsingin Sanomat 07/25/2016 During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks declared the Red Terror. They took the family away from Moscow. It was a terrible journey by train and horse-drawn carts. Tsarevich Alexei suffered from hemophilia, and some of his sisters were sexually abused on the train. Finally, they ended up in the house where their life path. It, in fact, was turned into a fortified prison and machine guns were installed around the perimeter. Whatever it was, but royal family tried to adapt to new conditions. Eldest daughter Olga was depressed, and those who were younger played, not really understanding what was happening. Maria had an affair with one of the guards, and then the Bolsheviks replaced all the guards, tightening the rules of the internal order.

When it became obvious that the White Guards were about to take Yekaterinburg, Lenin issued an unspoken decree on the execution of the entire royal family, entrusting the execution to Yakov Yurovsky. At first it was supposed to secretly bury everyone in the nearby forests. But the assassination was poorly planned and even worse executed. Each member of the firing squad had to kill one of the victims. But when the basement of the house was filled with smoke from the shots and the screams of people being shot, many of the Romanovs were still alive. They were wounded and wept in terror.

The fact is that diamonds were sewn into the clothes of the princesses, and the bullets bounced off them, which confused the killers. The wounded were finished off with bayonets and shots to the head. One of the executioners later said that the floor was slippery with blood and brains.

scars

Having completed their work, drunken executioners robbed the corpses, loaded them onto a truck that stalled along the way. In addition, at the last moment it turned out that all the bodies did not fit in the graves dug in advance for them. The dead were stripped of their clothes and burned. Then the frightened Yurovsky came up with another plan. He left the bodies in the forest and went to Yekaterinburg for acid and gasoline. For three days and nights, he brought containers of sulfuric acid and gasoline into the forest to destroy the bodies, which he decided to bury in different places in order to confuse those who set out to find them. No one was supposed to know about what happened. The bodies were doused with acid and gasoline, they were burned, and then buried.

Sebag wonders how 2017 will mark the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. What will happen to the royal remains? The country does not want to lose its former glory. The past is always viewed in a positive light, but the legitimacy of autocracy continues to generate controversy. New research, initiated by the Russian Orthodox Church and carried out by the Investigative Committee, led to the re-exhumation of the bodies. Was held comparative analysis DNA with living relatives, in particular with British prince Philip, one of whose grandmothers was Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna Romanova. Thus, he is the great-great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas II.

That the Church is still deciding on such important issues, attracted attention in the rest of Europe, as well as the lack of openness and a chaotic series of burials, exhumations, DNA tests of certain members of the royal family. Most political observers believe that Putin will make the final decision on what to do with the remains on the 100th anniversary of the revolution. Will he finally be able to reconcile the image of the revolution of 1917 with the barbaric massacre of 1918? Will he have to hold two separate events to please each side? Will the Romanovs be given royal or ecclesiastical honors like saints?

In Russian textbooks, many Russian tsars are still presented as heroes covered in glory. Gorbachev and last king The Romanovs recanted, Putin said he would never do that.

The historian claims that in his book he did not omit anything from the materials he studied on the execution of the Romanov family ... with the exception of the most disgusting details of the murder. When the bodies were taken to the forest, the two princesses groaned, and they had to be finished off. Whatever the future of the country, it will be impossible to erase this terrible episode from memory.

Bolsheviks and the execution of the royal family

Per last decade the topic of the execution of the royal family became relevant in connection with the discovery of many new facts. Documents and materials reflecting this tragic event began to be actively published, causing various comments, questions, and doubts. That is why it is important to analyze the available written sources.

Emperor Nicholas II

Perhaps the earliest historical source is the materials of the investigator for especially important cases of the Omsk District Court during the period of the Kolchak army in Siberia and the Urals, N.A. Sokolov, who, in hot pursuit, conducted the first investigation of this crime.

Nikolai Alekseevich Sokolov

He found traces of fires, fragments of bones, pieces of clothing, jewelry, and other fragments, but did not find the remains of the royal family.

According to a modern investigator, V.N. Solovyov, manipulations with the corpses of the royal family due to the sloppiness of the Red Army would not fit into any schemes of the smartest investigator for especially important cases. The subsequent advance of the Red Army shortened the search time. N.A. version Sokolov was that the corpses were dismembered and burned. Those who deny the authenticity of the royal remains rely on this version.

Another group of written sources are the memoirs of the participants in the execution of the royal family. They often contradict each other. They clearly show a desire to exaggerate the role of the authors in this atrocity. Among them - “a note by Ya.M. Yurovsky”, which was dictated by Yurovsky to the chief keeper of party secrets, Academician M.N. Pokrovsky back in 1920, when information about the investigation by N.A. Sokolov has not yet appeared in print.

Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky

In the 60s, the son of Ya.M. Yurovsky donated copies of his father's memoirs to the museum and archive so that his "feat" would not be lost in the documents.
Also preserved are the memoirs of the head of the Ural workers' squad, a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1906, an employee of the NKVD since 1920. P.Z. Ermakov, who was instructed to organize the burial, for he, as local knew the area well. Ermakov reported that the corpses were burned to ashes, and the ashes were buried. His memoirs contain many factual errors, which are refuted by the testimony of other witnesses. Memories date back to 1947. It was important for the author to prove that the order of the Yekaterinburg Executive Committee: “to shoot and bury them so that no one ever found their corpses” was fulfilled, the grave does not exist.

The Bolshevik leadership also created considerable confusion by trying to cover up the traces of the crime.

Initially, it was assumed that the Romanovs would await trial in the Urals. Materials were collected in Moscow, L.D. was preparing to become a prosecutor. Trotsky. But Civil War aggravated the situation.
At the beginning of the summer of 1918, it was decided to take the royal family out of Tobolsk, since the Socialist-Revolutionaries headed the council there.

transfer of the Romanov family to Yekaterinburg Chekists

This was done on behalf of Ya.M. Sverdlov, the Extraordinary Commissar of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Myachin (aka Yakovlev, Stoyanovich).

Nicholas II with his daughters in Tobolsk

In 1905, he became famous as a member of one of the most daring gangs that robbed trains. Subsequently, all the militants - Myachin's associates - were arrested, imprisoned or shot. He manages to escape abroad with gold and jewels. Until 1917 he lived in Capri, where he was acquainted with Lunacharsky and Gorky, sponsored underground schools and printing houses of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Myachin tried to direct the royal train from Tobolsk to Omsk, but a detachment of Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks accompanying the train, learning about the change in route, blocked the road with machine guns. The Ural Council repeatedly demanded that the royal family be placed at its disposal. Myachin, with the approval of Sverdlov, was forced to yield.

Konstantin Alekseevich Myachin

Nicholas II and his family were taken to Yekaterinburg.

This fact reflects the confrontation in the Bolshevik environment over the question of who and how will decide the fate of the royal family. In any alignment of forces, one could hardly hope for a humane outcome, given the mood and track record of the people who made the decisions.
Another memoir appeared in 1956 in Germany. They belong to I.P. Meyer, who was sent to Siberia as a captured soldier of the Austrian army, but the Bolsheviks released him, and he joined the Red Guard. Since Meyer knew foreign languages, he became confidant International Brigade in the Urals Military District and worked in the mobilization department of the Soviet Ural Directorate.

I.P. Meyer was an eyewitness to the execution of the royal family. His memoirs supplement the picture of the execution with essential details, details, including the names of the participants, their role in this atrocity, but do not resolve the contradiction that arose in previous sources.

Later, written sources began to be supplemented by material ones. So, in 1978, geologist A. Avdonin found a burial. In 1989, he and M. Kochurov, as well as screenwriter G. Ryabov, spoke about their discovery. In 1991, the ashes were removed. 19 August 1993 prosecutor's office Russian Federation initiated a criminal case in connection with the discovery of Yekaterinburg remains. The investigation began to be conducted by the prosecutor-criminalist of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation V.N. Solovyov.

In 1995 V.N. Solovyov managed to get 75 negatives in Germany, which were made in hot pursuit in the Ipatiev House by the investigator Sokolov and were considered lost forever: toys of Tsarevich Alexei, the bedroom of the Grand Duchesses, the execution room and other details. Unknown originals of N.A.’s materials were also delivered to Russia. Sokolov.

Material sources made it possible to answer the question of whether there was a burial of the royal family, and whose remains were found near Yekaterinburg. For this, numerous scientific studies were carried out, in which more than a hundred of the most authoritative Russian and foreign scientists took part.

The latest methods were used to identify the remains, including DNA testing, which was assisted by some of the current reigning persons and other genetic relatives of the Russian emperor. To eliminate any doubts in the conclusions of numerous examinations, the remains of Georgy Alexandrovich were exhumed, sibling Nicholas II.

Georgy Alexandrovich Romanov

Modern achievements of science have helped to restore the picture of events, despite some discrepancies in written sources. This made it possible for the government commission to confirm the identity of the remains and adequately bury Nicholas II, the Empress, the three Grand Duchesses and courtiers.

There is another controversial issue related to the tragedy of July 1918. For a long time it was believed that the decision to execute the royal family was made in Yekaterinburg local authorities at your own risk, and Moscow found out about it after the fait accompli. This needs to be clarified.

According to the memoirs of I.P. Meyer, on July 7, 1918, a meeting of the Revolutionary Committee was held, which was chaired by A.G. Beloborodov. He offered to send F. Goloshchekin to Moscow and get a decision Central Committee The RCP (b) and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, since the Ural Council cannot independently decide the fate of the Romanovs.

It was also proposed to give Goloshchekin an accompanying paper outlining the position of the Ural authorities. However, the resolution of F. Goloshchekin was adopted by a majority of votes, that the Romanovs deserve death. Goloshchekin, as an old friend Ya.M. Sverdlov, was nevertheless sent to Moscow for consultations with the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov.

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov

On July 14, F. Goloshchekin, at a meeting of the revolutionary tribunal, made a report on his trip and on negotiations with Ya.M. Sverdlov about the Romanovs. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee did not want the tsar and his family to be taken to Moscow. The Ural Soviet and the local revolutionary headquarters must decide for themselves what to do with them. But the decision of the Ural Revolutionary Committee had already been made in advance. This means that Moscow did not object to Goloshchekin.

E.S. Radzinsky published a telegram from Yekaterinburg, in which, a few hours before the assassination of the royal family, V.I. Lenin, Ya.M. Sverdlov, G.E. Zinoviev. G. Safarov and F. Goloshchekin, who sent this telegram, asked to be informed immediately if there were any objections. Judging by what happened next, there were no objections.

The answer to the question, but by whose decision the royal family was put to death, was also given by L.D. Trotsky in his memoirs relating to 1935: “The liberals were inclined, as it were, to the fact that the Ural executive committee, cut off from Moscow, acted independently. This is not true. The decision was made in Moscow. Trotsky reported that he proposed a public trial in order to achieve a wide propaganda effect. The progress of the process was to be broadcast throughout the country and commented on every day.

IN AND. Lenin reacted positively to this idea, but expressed doubts about its feasibility. There might not be enough time. Later, Trotsky learned from Sverdlov about the execution of the royal family. To the question: “Who decided?” Ya.M. Sverdlov replied: “We decided here. Ilyich believed that it was impossible to leave us a living banner for them, especially in the current difficult conditions. These diary entries by L.D. Trotsky were not intended for publication, did not respond "to the topic of the day", were not expressed in polemics. The degree of reliability of the presentation in them is great.

Lev Davydovich Trotsky

There is another clarification by L.D. Trotsky concerning the authorship of the idea of ​​regicide. In the drafts of the unfinished chapters of the biography of I.V. Stalin, he wrote about the meeting between Sverdlov and Stalin, where the latter spoke in favor of a death sentence for the tsar. At the same time, Trotsky did not rely on his own memories, but quoted the memoirs of the Soviet functionary Besedovsky, who had defected to the West. This data needs to be verified.

Message from Ya.M. Sverdlov at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 18 about the execution of the Romanov family was greeted with applause and recognition that in the current situation the Ural Regional Council did the right thing. And at a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, Sverdlov announced this by the way, without causing any discussion.

Trotsky outlined the most complete ideological justification for the execution of the royal family by the Bolsheviks with elements of pathos: “In essence, the decision was not only expedient, but also necessary. The severity of the reprisals showed everyone that we would fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the royal family was needed not only to confuse, horrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up their own ranks, to show that there was no retreat, that complete victory or complete death lay ahead. There were probably doubts and shaking of heads in the intelligent circles of the party. But the masses of workers and soldiers did not doubt for a moment: they would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin felt this very well: the ability to think and feel for the masses and with the masses was highly characteristic of him, especially at great political turns ... "

The fact of the execution of not only the king, but also his wife and children, the Bolsheviks tried to hide for some time, and even from their own. So, one of the prominent diplomats of the USSR, A.A. Ioffe, officially reported only the execution of Nicholas II. He did not know anything about the wife and children of the king and thought that they were alive. His inquiries to Moscow yielded no results, and only from an informal conversation with F.E. Dzerzhinsky, he managed to find out the truth.

“Let Ioffe know nothing,” said Vladimir Ilyich, according to Dzerzhinsky, “it will be easier for him to lie there, in Berlin ...” The text of the telegram about the execution of the royal family was intercepted by the White Guards who entered Yekaterinburg. Investigator Sokolov deciphered and published it.

The royal family from left to right: Olga, Alexandra Feodorovna, Alexei, Maria, Nicholas II, Tatyana, Anastasia

The fate of the people involved in the liquidation of the Romanovs is of interest.

F.I. Goloshchekin (Isai Goloshchekin), (1876-1941), Secretary of the Ural Regional Committee and member of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), Military Commissar of the Ural Military District, was arrested on October 15, 1939 at the direction of L.P. Beria and was shot as an enemy of the people on October 28, 1941.

A.G. Beloborodoe (1891-1938), chairman of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council, participated in the twenties in the inner-party struggle on the side of L.D. Trotsky. Beloborodoe provided Trotsky with his accommodation when the latter was evicted from the Kremlin apartment. In 1927, he was expelled from the CPSU (b) for factional activities. Later, in 1930, Beloborodov was reinstated in the party as a repentant oppositionist, but this did not save him. In 1938 he was repressed.

As for the direct participant in the execution, Ya.M. Yurovsky (1878-1938), a member of the board of the regional Cheka, it is known that his daughter Rimma suffered from repression.

Yurovsky's assistant in the "House of Special Purpose" P.L. Voikov (1888-1927), People's Commissar for Supply in the government of the Urals, when appointed in 1924 as the USSR ambassador to Poland, for a long time could not receive an agrement from the Polish government, since his personality was associated with the execution of the royal family.

Pyotr Lazarevich Voikov

G.V. Chicherin gave the Polish authorities a characteristic explanation on this matter: “... Hundreds and thousands of fighters for the freedom of the Polish people, who died over the course of a century on the royal gallows and in Siberian prisons, would have reacted differently to the fact of the destruction of the Romanovs, than this could be concluded from your messages." In 1927 P.L. Voikov was killed in Poland by one of the monarchists for participating in the massacre of the royal family.

Of interest is another name in the list of persons who took part in the execution of the royal family. This is Imre Nagy. The leader of the Hungarian events of 1956 was in Russia, where in 1918 he joined the RCP (b), then served in the Special Department of the Cheka, and later collaborated with the NKVD. However, his autobiography refers to his stay not in the Urals, but in Siberia, in the region of Verkhneudinsk (Ulan-Ude).

Until March 1918, he was in the prisoner of war camp in Berezovka, in March he joined the Red Guard, and participated in the battles on Lake Baikal. In September 1918, his detachment, located on the Soviet-Mongolian border, in Troitskosavsk, was then disarmed and arrested by the Czechoslovaks in Berezovka. Then he ended up in a military town near Irkutsk. From curriculum vitae It can be seen how mobile the life of the future leader of the Hungarian Communist Party was in Russia during the execution of the royal family.

In addition, the information indicated by him in his autobiography did not always correspond to personal data. However, direct evidence of the involvement of Imre Nagy, and not his probable namesake, in the execution of the royal family, on this moment are not tracked.

Imprisonment in the Ipatiev House

Ipatiev house

The Romanovs and their servants in the Ipatiev house

The Romanov family was placed in a "special purpose house" - the requisitioned mansion of a retired military engineer N. N. Ipatiev. Doctor E. S. Botkin, chamber footman A. E. Trupp, maid of the Empress A. S. Demidov, cook I. M. Kharitonov and cook Leonid Sednev lived here with the Romanov family.

The house is good and clean. Four rooms were assigned to us: a corner bedroom, a dressing room, a dining room next to it with windows overlooking the garden and a view of the low part of the city, and, finally, a spacious hall with an archway without doors. We were seated as follows: Alix [Empress], Maria and I three in the bedroom, a shared bathroom, N[yuta] Demidova in the dining room, Botkin, Chemodurov and Sednev in the hall. Near the entrance is the guard officer's room. The guard was placed in two rooms near the dining room. To go to the bathroom and W.C. [water closet], you need to pass by the sentry at the door of the guardhouse. A very high plank fence was built around the house, two fathoms from the windows; there was a chain of sentries, in the garden too.

The royal family spent 78 days in their last home.

A. D. Avdeev was appointed commandant of the "house of special purpose".

Execution

From the memoirs of the participants in the execution, it is known that they did not know in advance how the “execution” would be carried out. Various options were offered: to stab the arrested with daggers during sleep, to throw grenades into the room with them, to shoot them. According to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the issue of the procedure for carrying out the "execution" was resolved with the participation of employees of the UraloblChK.

At 1:30 a.m. from July 16 to 17, a truck for transporting corpses arrived at Ipatiev's house, an hour and a half late. After that, doctor Botkin was awakened, who was told that everyone urgently needed to go downstairs due to the alarming situation in the city and the danger of staying on the top floor. It took about 30-40 minutes to get ready.

Evgeny Botkin, life medic Ivan Kharitonov, cook Alexei Trupp, valet Anna Demidova, maid

moved to the basement room (Alexei, who could not walk, was carried by Nicholas II in his arms). There were no chairs in the basement, then, at the request of Alexandra Feodorovna, two chairs were brought. Alexandra Fedorovna and Alexei sat on them. The rest were placed along the wall. Yurovsky brought in the firing squad and read out the verdict. Nicholas II only had time to ask: “What?” (other sources report last words Nicholas as "Huh?" or “How, how? Re-read"). Yurovsky gave the command, indiscriminate shooting began.

The executioners did not manage to immediately kill Alexei, the daughters of Nicholas II, the maid A.S. Demidov, Dr. E.S. Botkin. There was a cry from Anastasia, the maid Demidova rose to her feet, Alexei remained alive for a long time. Some of them were shot; the survivors, according to the investigation, were finished off with a bayonet by P.Z. Ermakov.

According to Yurovsky's memoirs, the shooting was erratic: many were probably shooting from the next room, over the threshold, and the bullets ricocheted off the stone wall. At the same time, one of the shooters was slightly wounded (“A bullet from one of the shooters from behind buzzed past my head, and one, I don’t remember, either hand, palm, or touched a finger and shot through”).

According to T. Manakova, during the execution, two dogs of the royal family, who raised a howl, were also killed - Tatiana's French bulldog Ortino and Anastasia's royal spaniel Jimmy (Jammy) Anastasia. The third dog, Aleksey Nikolaevich's spaniel named Joy, was spared his life because she did not howl. The spaniel was later taken in by the guard Letemin, who because of this was identified and arrested by the whites. Subsequently, according to the story of Bishop Vasily (Rodzianko), Joy was taken to the UK by an immigrant officer and handed over to the British royal family.

after the execution

The basement of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was shot. GA RF

From the speech of Ya. M. Yurovsky before the old Bolsheviks in Sverdlovsk in 1934

The younger generation may not understand us. They may reproach us for killing the girls, for killing the boy-heir. But to today girls-boys would grow up ... into what?

In order to muffle the shots, a truck was brought near the Ipatiev House, but the shots were still heard in the city. In Sokolov's materials, in particular, there are testimonies about this by two random witnesses, the peasant Buivid and the night watchman Tsetsegov.

According to Richard Pipes, immediately after this, Yurovsky harshly suppresses the attempts of the guards to plunder the jewelry they discovered, threatening to be shot. After that, he instructed P.S. Medvedev to organize the cleaning of the premises, and he left to destroy the corpses.

The exact text of the sentence pronounced by Yurovsky before the execution is unknown. In the materials of the investigator N. A. Sokolov, there are testimonies of Yakimov, the guard guard, who claimed, with reference to the guard Kleshchev who was watching this scene, that Yurovsky said: “Nikolai Alexandrovich, your relatives tried to save you, but they didn’t have to. And we are forced to shoot you ourselves.”

M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) described this scene as follows:

Mikhail Alexandrovich Medvedev-Kudrin

- Nikolai Alexandrovich! Attempts by your like-minded people to save you were unsuccessful! And so, in a difficult time for the Soviet Republic... - Yakov Mikhailovich raises his voice and cuts the air with his hand: - ... we have been entrusted with the mission to put an end to the house of the Romanovs!

In the memoirs of Yurovsky's assistant G.P. Nikulin, this episode is stated as follows: Comrade Yurovsky uttered such a phrase that:

"Your friends are advancing on Yekaterinburg, and therefore you are sentenced to death."

Yurovsky himself could not remember the exact text: “... I immediately, as far as I remember, told Nikolai something like the following, that his royal relatives and relatives both in the country and abroad tried to release him, and that the Council of Workers' Deputies decided to shoot them ".

On July 17, in the afternoon, several members of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council contacted Moscow by telegraph (the telegram is marked that it was received at 12 o’clock) and reported that Nicholas II had been shot and his family had been evacuated. The editor of the Uralsky Rabochiy, a member of the executive committee of the Ural Regional Council V. Vorobyov, later claimed that they “were very uneasy when they approached the apparatus: the former tsar was shot by a decree of the Presidium of the Regional Council, and it was not known how he would react to this“ arbitrariness ” central government... The reliability of this evidence, wrote G.Z. Ioffe, cannot be verified.

Investigator N. Sokolov claimed that he had found a ciphered telegram from the chairman of the Ural Regional Executive Committee A. Beloborodov to Moscow, dated 21:00 on July 17, which allegedly was deciphered only in September 1920. It reported: “To the Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars N.P. Gorbunov: tell Sverdlov that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head. Officially, the family will die during the evacuation.” Sokolov concluded: it means that on the evening of July 17, Moscow knew about the death of the entire royal family. However, the minutes of the meeting of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 18 speak only of the execution of Nicholas II.

Destruction and burial of the remains

Ganinsky ravines - the burial place of the Romanovs

Yurovsky's version

According to Yurovsky's memoirs, he went to the mine at three o'clock in the morning on July 17th. Yurovsky reports that Goloshchekin must have ordered P. Z. Ermakov to carry out the burial. However, things did not go as smoothly as we would like: Ermakov brought too many people as a funeral team (“Why so many of them, I still don’t know , I heard only isolated cries - we thought that they would give us them alive, but here, it turns out, they are dead ”); truck stuck; jewels sewn into the clothes of the Grand Duchesses were discovered, some of Yermakov's people began to appropriate them. Yurovsky ordered to put guards on the truck. The bodies were loaded onto spans. On the way and near the mine planned for burial, strangers met. Yurovsky assigned people to cordon off the area, as well as to inform the village that Czechoslovaks were operating in the area and that it was forbidden to leave the village under threat of execution. In an effort to get rid of the presence of an overly large funeral team, he sends some people to the city "as unnecessary." Orders to make fires to burn clothes as possible evidence.

From the memoirs of Yurovsky (spelling preserved):

The daughters wore bodices so well made of solid diamond and other valuable stones, which were not only receptacles for valuables, but at the same time protective armor.

That is why neither the bullet nor the bayonet gave results when shooting and hitting the bayonet. By the way, no one is to blame for these death throes of theirs, except for themselves. These values ​​turned out to be only about (half) a pood. Greed was so great that Alexandra Fedorovna, by the way, was just a huge piece of round gold wire, bent in the form of a bracelet, weighing about a pound ... Those parts of the valuables that were discovered during excavations undoubtedly belonged to separately sewn things and remained after burning in the ashes of the fires.

After seizing valuables and burning clothes on fires, the corpses were thrown into the mine, but “... a new hassle. The water covered the bodies a little, what to do here? The funeral team unsuccessfully tried to bring down the mine with grenades (“bombs”), after which Yurovsky, according to him, finally came to the conclusion that the burial of the corpses had failed, since they were easy to detect and, in addition, there were witnesses that something was happening here . Leaving the guards and taking valuables, at about two o'clock in the afternoon (in the earlier version of the memoirs - "at 10-11 am") on July 17, Yurovsky went to the city. I arrived at the Ural Regional Executive Committee and reported on the situation. Goloshchekin summoned Ermakov and sent him to retrieve the corpses. Yurovsky went to the city executive committee to its chairman, S. E. Chutskaev, for advice on a place for burial. Chutskaev reported on deep abandoned mines on the Moscow Trakt. Yurovsky went to inspect these mines, but he could not get to the place right away due to a car breakdown, he had to walk. Returned on requisitioned horses. During this time, another plan appeared - to burn the corpses.

Yurovsky was not quite sure that the incineration would be successful, so the plan to bury the corpses in the mines of the Moscow Tract remained an option. In addition, he had the idea, in case of any failure, to bury the bodies in groups in different places on a clay road. Thus, there were three options for action. Yurovsky went to Voikov, the Commissar of Supply of the Urals, to get gasoline or kerosene, as well as sulfuric acid to disfigure faces, and shovels. Having received this, they loaded it onto carts and sent it to the location of the corpses. A truck was sent there. Yurovsky himself stayed behind to wait for Polushin, "the 'specialist' incineration," and waited for him until 11 pm, but he never arrived because, as Yurovsky later learned, he had fallen off his horse and injured his leg. At about 12 o'clock in the night, Yurovsky, not counting on the reliability of the car, went to the place where the bodies of the dead were, on horseback, but this time another horse crushed his leg, so that he could not move for an hour.

Yurovsky arrived at the scene at night. Work was underway to retrieve the bodies. Yurovsky decided to bury several corpses along the way. By dawn on July 18, the pit was almost ready, but a stranger appeared nearby. I had to abandon this plan. After waiting for the evening, we boarded the cart (the truck was waiting in a place where it should not get stuck). Then they were driving a truck, and it got stuck. Midnight was approaching, and Yurovsky decided that it was necessary to bury him somewhere here, since it was dark and no one could be a witness to the burial.

... everyone was so devilishly tired that they no longer wanted to dig a new grave, but, as always happens in such cases, two or three got down to business, then others set to work, immediately lit a fire, and while the grave was being prepared, we burned two corpses: Alexei and by mistake, instead of Alexandra Feodorovna, they apparently burned Demidov. A hole was dug at the place of burning, the bones were laid down, leveled, a large fire was lit again and all traces were hidden with ashes.

Before putting the rest of the corpses in the pit, we doused them with sulfuric acid, filled up the pit, covered it with sleepers, the truck passed empty, compacted the sleepers a little and put an end to it.

I. Rodzinsky and M. A. Medvedev (Kudrin) also left their memories of the burial of corpses (Medvedev, by his own admission, did not personally participate in the burial and retold the events from the words of Yurovsky and Rodzinsky). According to the memoirs of Rodzinsky himself:

The site where the remains of the alleged bodies of the Romanovs were found

We have now cleared this quagmire. She is deep God knows where. Well, here a part of these same darlings was decomposed and they began to fill it with sulfuric acid, they disfigured everything, and then it all turned into a quagmire. There was a railroad nearby. We brought rotten sleepers, laid a pendulum through the very quagmire. They laid out these sleepers in the form of an abandoned bridge over a quagmire, and the rest at some distance they began to burn.

But now, I remember, Nikolai was burned, there was this same Botkin, I can’t tell you for sure now, now that’s a memory. How many we burned, either four, or five, or six people were burned. Who, I don't remember exactly. I do remember Nicholas. Botkin and, in my opinion, Alexei.

The execution without trial and investigation of the king, his wife, children, including minors, was another step along the path of lawlessness, neglect human life, terror. Many problems of the Soviet state began to be solved with the help of violence. The Bolsheviks who unleashed terror often became its victims themselves.
The burial of the last Russian emperor eighty years after the execution of the royal family is another indicator of the inconsistency and unpredictability of Russian history.

“Church on Blood” on the site of the Ipatiev House

On the night of July 16-17, 1918 in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the basement of the house of mining engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, their children - Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, the heir Tsarevich Alexei, as well as the life medical doctor Evgeny Botkin, valet Alexei Trupp, room girl Anna Demidova and cook Ivan Kharitonov.

The last Russian emperor, Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicholas II), ascended the throne in 1894 after the death of his father, Emperor Alexander III, and ruled until 1917, when the situation in the country became more complicated. On March 12 (February 27, old style), 1917, an armed uprising began in Petrograd, and on March 15 (March 2, old style), 1917, at the insistence of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, Nicholas II signed the abdication of the throne for himself and his son Alexei in favor of the younger brother Mikhail Alexandrovich.

After his abdication from March to August 1917, Nikolai and his family were under arrest in the Alexander Palace of Tsarskoye Selo. A special commission of the Provisional Government studied materials for the possible trial of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna on charges of treason. Not finding evidence and documents that clearly denounced them in this, the Provisional Government was inclined to deport them abroad (to Great Britain).

The execution of the royal family: a reconstruction of eventsOn the night of July 16-17, 1918, Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family were executed in Yekaterinburg. RIA Novosti offers you a reconstruction of the tragic events that took place 95 years ago in the basement of the Ipatiev House.

In August 1917, the arrested were transferred to Tobolsk. The main idea of ​​the Bolshevik leadership was an open trial of the former emperor. In April 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to transfer the Romanovs to Moscow. For judgment on former king Vladimir Lenin spoke out, it was supposed to make Leon Trotsky the main accuser of Nicholas II. However, information appeared about the existence of "White Guard plots" to kidnap the tsar, the concentration of "officers-conspirators" in Tyumen and Tobolsk for this purpose, and on April 6, 1918, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided to transfer the royal family to the Urals. The royal family was moved to Yekaterinburg and placed in the Ipatiev house.

The uprising of the White Czechs and the offensive of the White Guard troops on Yekaterinburg accelerated the decision to execute the former tsar.

It was entrusted to the commandant of the House of Special Purpose Yakov Yurovsky to organize the execution of all members of the royal family, Dr. Botkin and the servants who were in the house.

© Photo: Museum of the History of Yekaterinburg

The execution scene is known from investigative protocols, from the words of participants and eyewitnesses, and from the stories of direct perpetrators. Yurovsky spoke about the execution of the royal family in three documents: "Note" (1920); "Memoirs" (1922) and "Speech at a meeting of old Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg" (1934). All the details of this atrocity, transmitted by the main participant in different time and under completely different circumstances, agree on how the royal family and its servants were shot.

By documentary sources you can set the time of the beginning of the murder of Nicholas II, members of his family and their servants. The car that delivered the last order to destroy the family arrived at half past two in the night from July 16 to 17, 1918. After that, the commandant ordered the life doctor Botkin to wake the royal family. It took the family about 40 minutes to get ready, then she and the servants were transferred to the semi-basement of this house, overlooking Voznesensky Lane. Nicholas II carried Tsarevich Alexei in his arms, because he could not walk due to illness. At the request of Alexandra Feodorovna, two chairs were brought into the room. She sat on one, on the other Tsarevich Alexei. The rest lined up along the wall. Yurovsky led the firing squad into the room and read the sentence.

This is how Yurovsky himself describes the execution scene: “I suggested that everyone stand up. Everyone stood up, occupying the entire wall and one of the side walls. The room was very small. Nikolai stood with his back to me. Urala decided to shoot them. Nikolai turned and asked. I repeated the order and ordered: "Shoot." I fired the first shot and killed Nikolai on the spot. The firing lasted a very long time and, despite my hopes that the wooden wall would not ricochet, the bullets bounced off it "For a long time I was unable to stop this shooting, which had taken on a careless character. But when, finally, I managed to stop, I saw that many were still alive. For example, Dr. Botkin was lying, leaning on his elbow right hand, as if in the pose of a rester, finished him off with a revolver shot. Alexei, Tatyana, Anastasia and Olga were also alive. Demidova was also alive. Tov. Ermakov wanted to finish the job with a bayonet. But, however, it did not work. The reason became clear later (the daughters were wearing diamond shells like bras). I had to shoot each one in turn."

After the statement of death, all the corpses began to be transferred to the truck. At the beginning of the fourth hour, at dawn, the corpses of the dead were taken out of the Ipatiev house.

The remains of Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia Romanov, as well as those from their entourage, who were shot in the House of Special Purpose (Ipatiev House), were discovered in July 1991 near Yekaterinburg.

On July 17, 1998, the remains of members of the royal family were buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

In October 2008, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and members of his family. The Prosecutor General's Office of Russia also decided to rehabilitate members of the imperial family - the Grand Dukes and Princes of the Blood, who were executed by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. The servants and close associates of the royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks or were subjected to repression, were rehabilitated.

In January 2009, the Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation stopped investigating the case on the circumstances of the death and burial of the last Russian emperor, members of his family and people from his entourage, who were shot in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918, "due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for bringing to criminal liability and death of the persons who committed the deliberate murder" (subparagraphs 3 and 4 of part 1 of article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR).

The tragic history of the royal family: from execution to restIn 1918, on the night of July 17 in Yekaterinburg, in the basement of the house of mining engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their children - Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, heir Tsarevich Alexei were shot.

On January 15, 2009, the investigator issued a decision to dismiss the criminal case, but on August 26, 2010, the judge of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow decided, in accordance with Article 90 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation, to recognize this decision as unfounded and ordered to eliminate the violations committed. On November 25, 2010, the decision of the investigation to dismiss this case was canceled by the Deputy Chairman of the Investigative Committee.

On January 14, 2011, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced that the decision was brought in accordance with court decision and the criminal case on the death of representatives of the Russian Imperial House and persons from their entourage in 1918-1919 was terminated. Identification of the remains of members of the family of the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II (Romanov) and persons from his retinue has been confirmed.

On October 27, 2011, the decision to close the investigation into the case of the execution of the royal family was. The ruling on 800 pages contains the main conclusions of the investigation and indicates the authenticity of the discovered remains of the royal family.

However, the question of authentication still remains open. The Russian Orthodox Church, in order to recognize the found remains as the relics of the royal martyrs, the Russian Imperial House supports the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in this matter. The director of the Chancellery of the Russian Imperial House emphasized that genetic expertise is not enough.

The Church canonized Nicholas II and his family and on July 17 celebrates the feast day of the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources

After the execution on the night of July 16-17, 1918, the bodies of members of the royal family and their entourage (11 people in total) were loaded into a car and sent towards Verkh-Isetsk to the abandoned mines of Ganina Yama. At first they unsuccessfully tried to burn the victims, and then they threw them into the shaft of the mine and threw them with branches.

Discovery of remains

However, the next day, almost the entire Verkh-Isetsk knew about what had happened. In addition, according to Medvedev, a member of the firing squad, “the icy water of the mine not only washed away the blood completely, but also froze the bodies so much that they looked like they were alive.” The conspiracy clearly failed.

The remains were promptly reburied. The area was cordoned off, but the truck, having driven only a few kilometers, got stuck in the swampy area of ​​the Porosenkov Log. Without beginning to invent anything, one part of the bodies was buried right under the road, and the other - a little to the side, after filling them with sulfuric acid. Sleepers were placed on top for reliability.

Interestingly, the forensic investigator N. Sokolov, sent by Kolchak in 1919 to search for a burial site, found this place, but he did not think of raising the sleepers. In the area of ​​Ganina Yama, he managed to find only a severed female finger. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the investigator was unequivocal: “Here is all that remains of the August Family. Everything else was destroyed by the Bolsheviks with fire and sulfuric acid.”

Nine years later, perhaps it was Porosenkov Log that Vladimir Mayakovsky visited, as can be judged from his poem “The Emperor”: “Here the cedar was touched with an ax, notches under the root of the bark, at the root under the cedar there is a road, and the emperor is buried in it.”

It is known that shortly before his trip to Sverdlovsk, the poet met in Warsaw with one of the organizers of the execution of the royal family, Pyotr Voikov, who could show him the exact place.

Ural historians found the remains in the Piglet Log in 1978, but permission for excavations was received only in 1991. There were 9 bodies in the burial. During the investigation, some of the remains were recognized as "royal": according to experts, only Alexei and Maria were missing. However, many experts were confused by the results of the examination, and therefore no one was in a hurry to agree with the conclusions. The House of Romanov and the Russian Orthodox Church refused to recognize the remains as authentic.

Alexei and Maria were found only in 2007, guided by a document compiled from the words of the commandant of the "House of Special Purpose" Yakov Yurovsky. "Yurovsky's note" initially did not inspire much confidence, nevertheless, the place of the second burial was indicated correctly in it.

Falsifications and myths

Immediately after the execution, representatives of the new government tried to convince the West that the members of the imperial family, or at least the children, were alive and in a safe place. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G. V. Chicherin in April 1922 at the Genoa Conference, to the question of one of the correspondents about the fate of the Grand Duchesses, vaguely answered: “The fate of the tsar's daughters is not known to me. I read in the papers that they were in America."

However, P. L. Voikov, in an informal setting, stated more specifically: "the world will never know what we did to the royal family." But later, after the publication in the West of the materials of the Sokolov investigation, the Soviet authorities recognized the fact of the execution of the imperial family.

Falsifications and speculations around the execution of the Romanovs contributed to the spread of enduring myths, among which the myth of the ritual murder and the severed head of Nicholas II, which was in the special storage of the NKVD, was popular. Later, stories about the “miraculous salvation” of the Tsar’s children, Alexei and Anastasia, grew into myths. But all this has remained a myth.

Investigation and expertise

In 1993, Vladimir Solovyov, an investigator from the General Prosecutor's Office, was entrusted with the investigation into the discovery of the remains. Given the importance of the case, in addition to the traditional ballistic and macroscopic examinations, additional genetic studies were carried out together with British and American scientists.

For these purposes, blood was taken from some of the Romanov relatives living in England and Greece for analysis. The results showed that the probability that the remains belonged to members of the royal family was 98.5 percent.
The investigation considered this insufficient. Solovyov managed to obtain permission to exhume the remains of the tsar's brother, George. Scientists confirmed the "absolute positional similarity of mtDNA" of both remains, which revealed a rare genetic mutation inherent in the Romanovs - heteroplasmy.

However, after the discovery in 2007 of the alleged remains of Alexei and Maria, new studies and examinations were required. The work of scientists was greatly facilitated by Alexy II, who, before the burial of the first group of royal remains in the tomb of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, asked the investigators to remove bone particles. “Science is developing, it is possible that they will be needed in the future,” these were the words of the Patriarch.

To remove the doubts of skeptics for new examinations, the head of the laboratory of molecular genetics at the University of Massachusetts Evgeny Rogaev (who was insisted on by representatives of the House of Romanov), the chief geneticist of the US Army Michael Cobble (who returned the names of the victims of September 11), as well as an employee of the Institute of Forensic Medicine from Austria, Walter Parson.

Comparing the remains from the two burials, the experts once again rechecked the previously obtained data, and also conducted new studies - the previous results were confirmed. Moreover, the “blood-splattered shirt” of Nicholas II (Otsu incident) found in the Hermitage funds fell into the hands of scientists. And again, a positive answer: the genotypes of the king “on the blood” and “on the bones” coincided.

Results

The results of the investigation into the case of the execution of the royal family refuted some pre-existing assumptions. For example, according to experts, “under the conditions in which the destruction of corpses was carried out, it was impossible to completely destroy the remains using sulfuric acid and combustible materials.”

This fact rules out Ganina Yama as the final burial site.
True, the historian Vadim Viner finds a serious gap in the conclusions of the investigation. He believes that some finds belonging to a later time, in particular coins of the 30s, were not taken into account. But as the facts show, information about the place of burial very quickly "leaked" to the masses, and therefore the burial ground could be repeatedly opened in search of possible values.

Another revelation is offered by the historian S. A. Belyaev, who believes that “the family of the Yekaterinburg merchant could have been buried with imperial honors,” though without providing convincing arguments.
However, the conclusions of the investigation, which was carried out with unprecedented scrupulousness using the latest methods, with the participation of independent experts, are unequivocal: all 11 remains clearly correlate with each of those shot in the Ipatiev house. Common sense and logic dictate that it is impossible to accidentally duplicate such physical and genetic correspondences.
In December 2010, the final conference dedicated to latest results expertise. Reports were made by 4 groups of geneticists who worked independently in different countries. Opponents of the official version could also express their views, however, according to eyewitnesses, “having listened to the reports, they left the hall without uttering a word.”
The Russian Orthodox Church still does not recognize the authenticity of the "Ekaterinburg remains", but many representatives of the Romanov dynasty, judging by their statements in the press, accepted the final results of the investigation.