They took their quarters in the lower floor of the house, and had their meals in the commandant’s room. They were in a privileged position in comparison with us. I think it would be right to say that we had three parties: the so-called Letts, the Zlokasoff and Sissert workmen. The Letts Iourovsky treated as equals. The Sissert workmen he treated a little better than us, and us worst of all. I account for the difference in his manner towards the Sissert workmen by the fact that he considered us as workmen from the Zlokasoff factory who had been discharged together with Avdeieff. Medvedeff also influenced his attitude. He ingratiated himself with Iourovsky and Nikoulin and made an effort to be very affable. That is why they had a better attitude towards the Sissert workmen. At the beginning he increased the number of posts. He mounted another machine gun in the attic of the house and established a post in the rear yard. This post in the rear yard was number ten, the post by the machine gun, eleven, and the post in the attic twelve. Duties on posts numbers one, two and twelve, after the arrival of Iourovsky, were performed exclusively by Letts. You ask me why I volunteered to guard the czar? I did not see at that time anything wrong in doing so. As I told you before, I read a little, different books. I read party pamphlets and had an idea about the views of the different parties. For example, I know the difference between the ideas of the social revolutionists and the Bolsheviki. The former believe that the peasants are a working-class and the latter consider them as bourgeoisie and believe that only workmen are real proletarians. My sympathies were with the Bolsheviki, but I did not believe that the Bolsheviki could build up by their methods of violence a “good” and “just” life. I still believe that a “good” and “just” life will exist only when there are not so many rich and so many poor people as there are at present; and this will only come when all the population are educated to the point where they understand that the life they are leading at present is not the true one. I believed the czar to be the first capitalist who would always play into the hands of capital and not into those of the workmen. For this reason I did not want a czar and thought that he ought to be kept under guard, or at least imprisoned, until the time when he could be judged by the nation and punished by it according to his crimes, after deciding: “Was he guilty before his people, or not?” I thought his imprisonment was necessary for the safety of the revolution, and if I had known before that he would be killed in the way he was, I never would have gone to guard him. I believed that he could be judged only by the whole of Russia, as he was the czar of the entire Russian nation. All that happened I consider a wicked deed, “unjust and cruel.” The murder of the rest of his family I consider still worse. For what reason were his children murdered? I must also