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of Avdonin, he had located the eldest son of Yakov Yurovsky, the chief executioner of the Imperial family. In 1978, Alexander Yurovsky, a retired vice admiral in the Soviet Navy, lived in Leningrad. When Ryabov went to see him, the younger Yurovsky did something extraordinary: he gave the filmmaker a copy of his father’s report to the Soviet government on the execution of the Romanovs and the disposition of their bodies. The original of this report lay in the secret files of the Central Archive of the October Revolution in Moscow; a copy had gone to the Soviet historian Michael Pokrovsky, who had never been permitted to publish a word. Alexander Yurovsky’s reason for giving his own, handwritten copy of this document to Ryabov was that he wanted to repent for “the most horrible page” in his father’s life.
    Yurovsky’s report filled in gaps and corrected errors made by Sokolov and Bykov. This is a synopsis of the account, hidden for sixty years, that Ryabov and Avdonin read in 1978–79:
    On the morning of July 17, 1918, after killing the Romanovs and dumping their bodies down the Four Brothers mine shaft, Yurovsky returned to Ekaterinburg to make his report. To his horror, he found the city buzzing with stories describing where the bodies of the tsar’s family had been hidden; Ermakov’s men, obviously, had been unable to hold their tongues. A new burial site was needed quickly; the White Army was close. Ignoring Ermakov, Yurovsky asked for help from other local officials. He was told that there were very deep mines along the Moscow highway twenty miles away. He went to investigate. His car broke down, and he had to finish the trip on foot, but eventuallyhe found three deep mines filled with water. He decided to bring the bodies there, attach stones to them, and throw them in. If there was time, he would burn the bodies first, then bury whatever remained in the water after disfiguring everything beyond recognition with sulfuric acid.
    When Yurovsky finally returned to Ekaterinburg—he started by walking, then commandeered a horse from an unlucky peasant—it was nearly 8:00 P.M. He began assembling the things he needed—more gasoline and sulfuric acid. He and his men did not set out until 12:30 A.M. on July 18. Returning to the Four Brothers, they lighted the original mine shaft with torches. One of Yurovsky’s men climbed down and stood in the darkness, icy water up to his chest, surrounded by bodies. A rope was lowered. He tied it around the bodies, one by one, and sent them up.
    Yurovsky thought for a while of burying some of the bodies in the earth right by the mine shaft and started digging a pit, but he gave it up when he realized how easily such a grave could be seen. By this time, most of the day had been lost. At 8:00 P.M. on the evening of July 18, the bodies set off in carts for the deep mines. Soon the carts began to break down. Yurovsky halted the procession and went back to town to find a truck. When the truck arrived, the bodies were transferred and the journey resumed. The truck had a hard time, bouncing and slithering through muddy ruts, several times getting stuck in holes filled with water.
    “At about 4:30 on the morning of July 19,” Yurovsky wrote,
    the vehicle got permanently stuck. Since we weren’t going to get as far as the deep mines, all we could do was either bury them or burn them. We wanted to burn Alexis and Alexandra Feodorovna, but by mistake instead of her we burned the lady-in-waiting [Demidova] and Alexis. We buried the remains right there under the fire, then shoveled clay on the remains, and made another bonfire on the grave, and then scattered the ashes and the embers in order to cover up completely any trace of digging. Meanwhile, a common grave was dug for the rest. At about seven in the morning, a pit six feet deep and eight feet square was ready. The bodies wereput in the hole and the faces and all the bodies generally doused with sulfuric acid, both so they