(Continued from page 17)

Since beginning my investigation I have never understood why all of this trouble of organizing a large firing squad was necessary if the intention was to kill the entire Imperial party as quickly as possible.  Chekist guard Andrei Strekotin was manning a machine gun just down the hall.  If the motive was to eradicate all of the Romanovs then all that was needed was to turn that weapon around and point it into the room.

Each of the twelve executioners had a gun that fired a minimum of seven shots and they fired until their weapons were empty before picking up bayonets.  There should be at least eighty-four bullets.  The grave only produced fourteen and forensic evidence on the remains points to a similar number of bullet paths... so where are the other seventy?  Fourteen bullets and seven rounds per gun gives us two guns.  One slug was from a Mauser, four from a Browning, and nine were from Nagants which suggests there were two Nagant revolvers... but that still gives us only four guns.  Rifling marks on the bullets might tell us if there were more but no evidence of that type has ever been published so we are still eight guns short.

It is said that the first to fall was the Tsar Nicholas II, followed by the Empress Alexandra who was blown from her chair by the initial blasts.  Dispatching the rest of the Royal family was not so simple, as those firing the guns found that their weapons were having little effect.  Yurovsky had said that diamonds and jewels sewn into the girls' corsets deflected the bullets causing them to ricochet around the room.  He also claimed that Grigory Nikulin had emptied an entire clip of bullets firing at the girls and Alexei but they had no effect.  Trying to make this story fit with an understanding of basic physics causes some concern.

Surely, the force of inertia carried by a bullet fired at near point blank range and striking a cut diamond or similar stone dead centre would either shatter the stone or push it into the soft cloth and flesh situated directly behind it.  If the stone is struck off-centre it will be deflected away at an angle.  No matter which is the case, the inertia carried by one object striking a second of similar size and weight is carried on by that second object.  Anyone who has ever played a game of billiards knows how this works.

Something would have to dissipate the force over a wide area to deflect the bullet in a different direction and cause only bad bruising to the person it strikes.  The more likely objects to produce this effect would have been a corset's whalebone stays and, if so, those stays would have been scarred by the bullets.  The few parts of charred corsets that were found in the region of the Four Brothers Mine were not reported to have shown any such evidence.  There was a small amount of broken jewellery found in the same location, but the mineshaft is a considerable distance from the gravesite.  While fourteen bullets were found amongst the Imperial bones, not the tiniest piece of jewellery was reported to have penetrated the bodies found in the grave.

If the existence of definite physical evidence of deflected bullets can be questioned then I have to ask if the corsets and the girls wearing them had been struck by bullets at all.  The truth is that it took a continued assault by bayonets to complete the brutal deed because the guns did not do the job.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                            (Continued on page 19)