+----------------------------------------------------+ |Some minor typographical errors have been corrected.| |The spelling of names has not been normalized. | | Etext transcriber's note. | +----------------------------------------------------+ THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMANOVS GEORGE GUSTAV TELBERG AND ROBERT WILTON [Illustration: H. I. M. NICHOLAS II, EMPEROR OF RUSSIA ] THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMANOVS BY GEORGE GUSTAV TELBERG PROFESSOR OF LAW IN SARATOV UNIVERSITY AND FORMER MINISTER OF JUSTICE OF THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT AT OMSK AND ROBERT WILTON SPECIAL RUSSIAN CORRESPONDENT FOR _THE TIMES_, LONDON ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHER’S NOTE During the night between the 16th and 17th of July, 1918, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his family, as well as all the persons attached to it, were murdered by the order of the Yekaterinburg soviet of workmen’s deputies. The news of this crime broke through the closed ring that surrounded Bolshevist Russia and spread over the entire world. At the end of July, 1918, the town of Yekaterinburg was taken from the Bolsheviks by the forces of the Siberian Government. Shortly after their occupation of the district an investigation was ordered to be made of the circumstances attendant on the murder. A judicial examination therefore took place of the witnesses connected with the life of the imperial family at Czarskoe-Selo, Tobolsk and Yekaterinburg by N. A. Sokoloff, the Investigating Magistrate for Cases of Special Importance of the Omsk Tribunal. Upon the fall of the Kolchak régime, copies of the depositions were taken from the archives by M. George Gustav Telberg, Professor of Law at the University of Saratov and Minister of Justice at Omsk, when he fled with the other ministers of the Omsk government. These combined statements reconstruct the life-story of the imperial family from the time of the emperor’s abdication until the murder of himself, his wife, his children, including the czarevitch, and their few faithful servants in Ipatieff’s house at Yekaterinburg.