In this way, Kostin was able to evacuate first about nine maids, all still sound of health but deafened, blinded, screaming, and utterly terrified, back to the lieutenant, who pushed and prodded them towards the kitchen. For the next two rooms, a set of toilets and a bath, the platoon sergeant did throw flash grenades inside, before entering with the intent to kill anything moving. There was nothing, however, in either place.
In all three cases, Kostin chalked a large X on each door.
“Make sure they’re all dead,” he ordered the other two men, pointing at the corpse-littered dining room. Short bursts of machine pistol fire, methodically moving from body to body, rapidly followed.
At the other end of the hallway, the three remaining men of Bogrov’s first squad stood heaving over the communist corpses in the front room and the officers’ room. From inside the room behind the officers’ room came a woman’s voice. “This is Countess Hendrikova, a friend of the empress. For the love of God don’t shoot!”
“Come out,” said Corporal Turbin.
“There are three of us!” Hendrikova warned.
“Then come the fuck out, all three of you. We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
Immediately three women, one older, two more or less of marriageable age, came out. All were in nightgowns but in the process of pulling on coats.
“Go to the lieutenant,” Turbin ordered. “He’ll direct you to safety.”
“Hey, Corporal?” asked one of the men.
“What is it, Repin?”
“You ought to see this.”
Turbin went to the window from which Repin could see out and said, “Shit.”
From the 37mm position, the platoon sergeant saw the flash of a grenade, saw the firing, very distinct from single shot rifle fire, of the MP18s, and made the proper call to the two guns. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
“Romanovs down! Romanovs down!” shouted both Sergeants Tokarev and Yumachev, along with all their men, as their squads fanned out, north and south, from the head of the stairs.
Yumachev wasn’t taking any chances with this group of Bolsheviks, He had thrown six flash grenades into the open hall into which the stairs opened. In that sudden storm of thunder and lightning, all five Bolshviks, including Lepa, were stunned silly and blinded. The six men of the squad, per the usual drill, split along the walls, firing, firing, firing, until not a Red remained standing. They then fired some more, to make sure. Yumachev then kicked open the door of the ex-tsar’s study and, with only three men, cleared it as well, all the while shouting, “Romanovs down!” From that room came two assistant cooks and a scullery maid.
In the other direction, Tokarev and his crew started clearing northward, room by room, always half expecting a female scream. The first room clearance, however, caused no screams. It was the drawing room, normally abandoned for the evening, but now containing, mostly asleep on the floor and on the couch, a half dozen of the male prisoners previously held in the Kornilov House. A door kick, a flash grenade, a quick entrance by two men, identified that none of them were armed, and at least one was recognizable, Prince Vasily Alexandrovich Dolgorukov, the Marshall of the Imperial Court. It was probably the presence of the prince that kept the rooms’s occupants from simply being massacred on the spot, as being altogether too male to be trusted.
“Come out,” ordered Tokarev. “Hands up so you don’t get shot. Feel your way to and down the stairs. Our lieutenant will tell you where to go, downstairs. Go! Go! Go!”
“God bless you,” said Dolgorukov, as he led the way onward.
The next room on the hit parade was known to be Tsarevich Alexei’s. It was a no grenade room by previous orders, too. Thus the door was kicked open and a man in a sailor’s uniform was seen standing between the door and Alexei’s bed.
“You’ll take him over my body,” said the sailor, Nagorny.
“That could be arranged easily enough,” Tokarev replied, “but it really isn’t necessary. This is a rescue, not a kidnapping.”
“Oh.”
“Now, if he can walk, get him to walk. If he can’t, carry him. Where? Downstairs to the lieutenant. He’ll direct you to safety.”
Nagorny, stunned despite the lack of a grenade, slowly turned, bent, and picked up Alexei in his stout arms. Before he’d turned back, Tokarev was gone and there was a sound of shouts—“Romanovs down!”—and explosions from both the boudoir, next door, and the royal sleeping chamber, across the hall.
“Wait, Klementi Grigorievich,” said the crown prince. “I’ll leave when my sisters and parents do. Stay here until we see them.”
Once in my life, thought Alexei, oh, please, God, just once in my life to be able to do something as brave and grand. Is that too much for someone cursed with my disease to ask for?
Kornilov House, Tobolsk
With shouts just barely able to overcome the sounds of roaring flame, screaming and burning wounded, shots, and explosions, Yurovsky managed to get all but a handful of unwounded men, with arms in their hands, plus some with grenades, assembled at the main door, fronting Great Friday Street.
“This,” he shouted, to the mass of men standing and crouching ready to charge across the street, “is an attempt by the Omsk mob to seize control of the Romanovs, hence of the revolution. We must prevent them from doing so; the future demands it. Now are you…”
Before Yurovsky could say, “ready,” a single shot smashed through the door, sending wood splinters everywhere. It then butchered half a dozen crowded men, tearing off limbs, disemboweling some of them, exposing one set of lungs, and removing one head completely, before ricocheting off the far stone wall to take out four more.
Oddly, between the fire and the shooting coming from the other three sides, the single, devastating bullet didn’t panic the men and drive them back. Instead, it panicked them into opening the door and charging across the street for the stockade around the yard in front of the Governor’s House.
Everyone in the infantry gun section not actively involved in manning the guns turned their own rifles on the Yekaterinburg men. One squad among those left with Molchalin’s platoon sergeant, to the south of the Kornilov House, were likewise able to bring fire onto them. It was not enough. Roughly one hundred and twenty men had been in the Kornilov House. Perhaps ninety or even one hundred of them massed at the door. Eighty or ninety burst through the door to charge for the stockade. At least forty-seven managed to get over the stockade. Meanwhile, the bodies of the remainder littered the street and formed a mass at the foot of the stockade.
That left forty plus inside the compound, terrified, exhausted, and unsure for the moment of what to do. Yurovsky, himself, lay unconscious in the street, his life only spared by the effect of cold in helping to clot the stump of a missing leg.
Then one of the Reds had the presence of mind to shout, “Secure the Romanovs!”
Bell Tower, Cathedral of the Annunciation, Tobolsk
Nomonkov watched the scene playing out below, rifle at the ready but having little to shoot at. He tried to take out one guard on the stockade as soon as he heard the firing erupt from Molchalin’s platoon. Whether he’d hit anything, though, was a matter of conjecture; the lights died before the first shots rang out while the Kornilov House, itself, hadn’t yet truly caught fire enough for any useful degree of illumination.
Once it had caught, though, the sniper had a bit of a field day. Down went the guard of the stockade’s eastern gate. Down went another one, on the southern side. Inside the Kornilov House’s upper floor, yet another was thrown back as the sniper’s bullet tore out his throat in a misty red spray.