(Continued from page 14)

There is one thing that no one has ever argued.  Yakov Yurovsky stepped forward and
fired two or three shots (depending on which account you read) at the right ear of the young Crown Prince who would have been Tsar if the dynasty had been allowed to continue.  Every reconstruction to date has placed Yurovsky almost in the middle of the room, in front of his squad of armed men and facing the ex-Tsar.  What thinking man stands directly in front of eleven guns with his back to them?

In some accounts Yurovsky claimed to have shot the young Alexei in the right ear as he lay on the floor, but in 1934 he told a meeting of old Bolsheviks that he finished the boy off as he sat in the chair.  If the boy had been shot in the right ear either he was lying on the floor on his left side or, if he was sitting in the chair with Yurovsky in front of him, Yurovsky was left-handed.

A photo of Yurovsky published in John Klier's "The Quest of Anastasia, Solving the Mystery of the Lost Romanovs" shows the commandant holding what looks to be a cup of tea in his right hand and a saucer in his left.  Unless the picture has been printed backwards, Yurovsky is right handed and we have to look for another explanation if the boy was sitting in the chair.

Officially, Alexei's remains have not yet been found and only one man who claimed to have been the missing Tsarevich gave any description of having been in that room at the time.  Our Alexei said that after he heard Yurovsky give the command to fire everything went black.

Assuming that he was the boy in that room on the morning of the 17th of July 1918, his statement will tell us two things: If, as he said, everything went black right after the order to fire then he was the first to be fired upon.  His is also the only account that claims an order was given to fire.  That would suggest Yurovsky's group was an organized firing squad and not the disorganized mob that history describes.  No executioner stands in front of his own firing squad to give the order.  He stands to one side.

Let us go back to the description of that half-cellar room.  In "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter" Robert Massie gave the dimensions as eleven by thirteen feet.  It must now be remembered that a supporting pillar jutted about a foot and a half into each of the room's four corners.  Viewed from above, the room was shaped like a cross.  This might have allowed Yurovsky enough room to step out of the line of fire between the pillars by the left wall and opposite the single barred window, which is on the right.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                      (Continued on page 16)