Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/139

 CHAPTER XVII

ONARCHIST circles strenuously uphold the rumour that the Tsar and his heir have been saved from a bolshevik prison. But this is a purely political speculation and an apocryphal legend. The evidence collected during Kolchak's rule by Sir George Elliot and a special Commission of Inquiry, my conversations in Omsk with the imprisoned soldiers who were present at the execution of the Imperial family, and my meeting with the brother of the actual executioner, Yurkovski, at Tientsin, have dispelled all doubts I ever had as to the execution of the whole family of the Tsar.

I may venture on a slight digression from my immediate subject in order to quote Yurkovski's story, which completely corroborated all that the soldiers confessed who had guarded the Tsar's prison, and were arrested by Kolchak in Yekaterinburg.

"Moscow sent the order to liquidate the Romanovs," related Yurkovski to me, "but this had to be managed in such a way as to throw the whole responsibility on the local Yekaterinburg Soviet, which was to keep up