It had been recently decided to bring the ex-Tsar before a tribunal, to be tried for his crimes against the people, and only later occurrences led to delay in adopting this course. The Presidency of the Central Executive Committee, after having discussed the circumstances which compelled the Ural Regional Council to take the decision to shoot Nicholas Romanoff, decided as follows: The Russian Central Executive Committee, in the persons of the Presidium, accept the decision of the Ural Regional Council as being regular.
The Central Executive Committee has now at its disposal extremely important material and documents concerning the Nicholas Romanoff affair: his own diaries, which he kept almost to the last days; the diaries of his wife and children; his correspondence, amongst which are letters by Gregory Rasputin to Romanoff and his family. All these materials will be examined and published in the near future.
Thus the official legend was born: that Nicholas—and he alone—was executed because he had attempted to escape and that the decision was made by the Ural Regional Soviet rather than the Bolshevik Central Committee in Moscow.
On and immediately following July 19, when Pravda and Izvestiia carried the first announcements of the alleged decisions of the Ekaterinburg Soviet—along with the decree nationalizing Romanov properties signed into law on July 13—the Ekaterinburg Soviet still maintained a stony silence.
The world press reported the story according to the official Bolshevik version. The New York Times broke the news on the front page of its Sunday edition, July 21, under the heading “Ex-Czar of Russia Killed by Order of the Ural Soviet. Nicholas Shot on July 16 When it was Feared that Czechoslovaks Might Seize Him. Wife and Heir in Security.” The accompanying obituary patronizingly described the executed monarch as “amiable but weak.” As Moscow had correctly anticipated from the indifference that had met rumors of Nicholas’s death the preceding month, the world took the execution in stride.
On the day when the Soviet press broke the news, Riezler met with Radek and Vorovskii. He perfunctorily protested the execution of Nicholas, which he said world opinion was certain to condemn, but stressed again his government’s concern for the “German princesses.” Radek must have exercised supreme self-control when he responded that if the German Government was truly concerned about the ex-Empress and her daughters, they could be allowed to leave Russia for “humanitarian considerations.”93 On July 23, Riezler again raised the matter of the “German princesses” with Chicherin. Chicherin did not respond immediately, but the next day told Riezler that “as far as he knew” the Empress had been evacuated to Perm. Riezler had the impression that Chicherin was lying. By this time (July 22) Bothmer knew the “horrible details” of the Ekaterinburg events, and had no doubt that the entire family had been murdered on orders of Moscow, the Ekaterinburg Soviet having been given a free hand to determine the time and manner of the execution.94 And yet as late as August 29, Radek proposed to the German Government to exchange Alexandra and her children for the arrested Spartacist, Leon Jogiches. Bolshevik officials repeated this offer on September 10 to the German Consul, but became evasive when pressed for details, claiming that the family of the ex-Tsar was cut off by military operations.95
On July 20, the Ural Soviet drafted an announcement and asked Moscow for permission to publish.96 The announcement read:
E
XTRA
E
DITION
. By Order of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies of the Urals and the Revolutionary Staff, the ex-Tsar and autocrat, Nicholas Romanov, has been shot along with his family on July 17. The bodies have been buried. Chairman of the Executive Committee, Beloborodov. Ekaterinburg, July 20, 1918, 10 a.m.
*
Moscow forbade the release of this announcement because it referred to the death of Nicholas’s family. In the only known copy of this document, the words “along with his family” and “the bodies have been buried” have been crossed out by someone with an illegible signature, who scribbled: “Forbidden to publish.”
On July 20, Sverdlov wired to Ekaterinburg the text of the approved announcement which he had drafted and published in the Moscow press.97 On July 21, Goloshchekin broke the news to the Ural Regional Soviet: A week before, apparently unknown to itself, it had decided to shoot the ex-Tsar. This decision had now been duly carried out. The population of Ekaterinburg was informed of this in broadsheets that were posted on July 22 and reproduced the following day in The Ural Worker (Rabochii Urala). This newspaper ran the story under a headline: “White Guardists attempted to abduct the ex-Tsar and his family. Their plot was discovered. The Regional Soviet of Workers and Peasants of the Urals anticipated their criminal design and executed the all-Russian murderer. This is the first warning. The enemies of the people will no more achieve a restoration of autocracy than they succeeded in laying hands on the crowned executioner.”98
On July 22, the guards protecting Ipatev’s house were withdrawn: Iurovskii gave them 8,000 rubles to divide among themselves and informed them they would be sent to the front. That day Ipatev received a telegram from his sister-in-law: “Resident departed.”99
Eyewitnesses agree that the population—at any rate, the inhabitants of the cities—showed no emotion when told of the ex-Tsar’s execution. Services were held in some Moscow churches in memory of the deceased, but otherwise the reaction was muted. Lockhart notes that “the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”100 Bothmer had the same impression:
The population accepted the murder of the Tsar with apathetic indifference. Even decent and cool-headed circles are too accustomed to horrors, too immersed in their own worries and wants, to feel something special.
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Ex-Prime Minister Kokovtsov even discerned signs of positive satisfaction while riding a Petrograd streetcar on July 20:
Nowhere did I observe the slightest ray of pity or commiseration. The dispatch was read aloud, with smirks, jeers, mockeries, and with the most heartless comments.… One heard the most disgusting expressions, “It should have been done long ago” … “Eh, brother Romanov, your jig is up.”
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The peasants kept their thoughts to themselves. But we have a glimpse of their reaction, expressed with their peculiar logic, in the thoughts which an elderly peasant confided in 1920 to an intellectual:
Now, we know for sure that the landlords’ land was given to us by Tsar Nicholas Alexandrovich. For this them ministors, Kerensky and Lenin and Trotsky and the others, first sent the Tsar off to Siberia, and then they killed him, and the Tsarevich too, so that we would have no tsar and they could rule the people forever themselves. They didn’t want to give us the land, but our boys stopped them when they came to Moscow and Petrograd from the front. And now them ministors, because they had to give us the land, choke us. But they ain’t gonna strangle us. We are strong and we will hold out. And later on, us oldsters, or our sons, or our grandchildren, it don’t make no difference, we will take care of all them Bolsheviks and their ministors. Never you mind. Our time will come.
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During the next nine years, the Soviet Government stubbornly adhered to the official lie that Alexandra Fedorovna and her children were safe: Chicherin claimed as late as 1922 that Nicholas’s daughters were in the United States.104 The lie found favor with Russian monarchists who could not reconcile themselves to the thought that the entire Imperial family had been wiped out. On reaching the West, Sokolov was cold-shouldered by monarchist circles: Nicholas’s mother, Empress Dowager Marie, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the most prominent surviving Romanov, refused even to see him.105 He died, ignored and impoverished, a few years later.
A Soviet participant, P. M. Bykov, in an early account of these events, published in Ekaterinburg in 1921, had told the truth about the fate of the family, but this work was promptly withdrawn from circulation.106 Only in 1926, after the appearance of Sokolov’s book in Paris had made the old version untenab
le, was Bykov authorized to write an official Communist account of the Ekaterinburg tragedy. This book, which Moscow had translated into the principal European languages, finally admitted that Alexandra and the children had perished along with the ex-Tsar. Bykov wrote:
Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in mud, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have duly rotted.
*
Iurovskii, having escaped from Ekaterinburg ahead of the Czechs, subsequently returned but later moved to Moscow, where he worked for the government. As reward for his services he was honored with an appointment to the Collegium of the Cheka: in May 1921, he was warmly received by Lenin.† The revolver with which he killed Nicholas was placed in the special depository of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. He died a natural death in August 1938 in the Kremlin hospital.107 As a Chekist and “comrade-in-arms of Dzerzhinskii” he has earned himself a niche in the pantheon of minor Bolshevik heroes: he is the subject of a novel and of a biography, which depicts him as a “typical” Chekist: “closed, severe but with a soft heart.”108 The other principals in the Ekaterinburg tragedy fared less well. Beloborodov at first made a rapid career, being admitted in March 1919 to membership in the Central Committee and the Orgbiuro, and eventually attaining the rank of Commissar of the Interior (1923–27). But he was undone by his friendship with Trotsky: arrested in 1936, he was shot two years later. Goloshchekin was also a victim of Stalin’s purges and perished in 1941. Both were subsequently “rehabilitated.”
Ipatev’s house served for many years as a club and a museum. But the authorities grew anxious over the number of visitors who came to Ekaterinburg (now renamed Sverdlovsk) to see the building, some of them seemingly on a religious pilgrimage. In the fall of 1977, they ordered it torn down.‡
In view of the tens of thousands of lives which the Cheka would claim in the years that followed the Ekaterinburg tragedy, and the millions killed by its successors, the death at its hands of eleven prisoners hardly qualifies as an event of extraordinary magnitude. And yet, there is a deep symbolic meaning to the massacre of the ex-Tsar, his family, and staff. Just as liberty has its great historic days—the battles of Lexington and Concord, the storming of the Bastille—so does totalitarianism. The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.
To begin with, it was unnecessary. The Romanovs had willingly, indeed happily, withdrawn from active politics and submitted to every demand of their Bolshevik captors. True, they were not averse to being abducted and brought to freedom, but hope of escape from imprisonment, especially imprisonment imposed without charges or trial, hardly qualifies as the “criminal design” that it was designated by the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks to justify the execution. In any event, if the Bolshevik Government indeed feared their fleeing and turning into a “live banner” for the opposition, it had ample time to bring them to Moscow: Goloshchekin had no difficulty leaving Ekaterinburg by train for the capital with the Imperial family’s belongings three days later. There they would have been beyond the reach of Czechs, Whites, and other opponents of the Bolshevik regime.
If this was not done, the reason must be sought not in such spurious excuses as lack of time, the danger of flight, or of capture by the Czechs, but in the political needs of the Bolshevik Government. In July 1918 it was sinking to the nadir of its fortunes, under attack from all sides and abandoned by many of its supporters. To cement its deserting following it needed blood. This much was conceded by Trotsky when, reflecting on these events in exile, he concurred with Lenin’s decision seventeen years earlier to dispatch the wife and children of the ex-Tsar—an act for which he bore no personal responsibility and therefore had no need to justify:
The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.
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On one level, Trotsky’s justification is without merit. Had the Bolsheviks indeed killed the ex-Tsar’s wife and children in order to instill terror in their enemies and loyalty in their followers, they would have proclaimed the deed loud and clear, whereas in fact they denied it then and for years to come. But Trotsky’s terrible confession is correct in a deeper moral and psychological sense. Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”
When a government arrogates to itself the power to kill people, not because of what they had done or even might do, but because their death is “needed,” we are entering an entirely new moral realm. Here lies the symbolic significance of the events that occurred in Ekaterinburg in the night of July 16–17. The massacre, by secret order of the government, of a family that for all its Imperial background was remarkably commonplace, guilty of nothing, desiring only to be allowed to live in peace, carried mankind for the first time across the threshold of deliberate genocide. The same reasoning that had led the Bolsheviks to condemn them to death would later be applied in Russia and elsewhere to millions of nameless beings who happened to stand in the way of one or another design for a new world order.
*The basic account remains that of Nicholas A. Sokolov, the chairman of a special commission appointed by Admiral Kolchak to investigate the crime: Ubiistvo tsarskoi sent’i (Paris, 1925) (available in French and German translations). Of the secondary sources, the best are by Paul Bulygin, The Murder of the Romanovs (London, 1935) and S. P. Melgunov, Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia (Paris, 1957). For the fate of the other Romanovs, the main source is Serge Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs (Paris, 1928). P. M. Bykov’s Bolshevik account in its original version: “Poslednie dni poslednego tsaria,’ in N. L. Nikolaev, ed., Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale (Ekaterinburg, 1921), 3–26, is helpful. The dossiers of Sokolov’s commission deposited at the Houghton Library of Harvard University are indispensable: a scholarly selection has been edited by Nicholas Ross, Gibel’ tsarskoi sem’i (Frankfurt, 1987).
In 1989, the Soviet press began to publish important new materials. The most valuable are the recollections of Ia. M. Iurovskii, the commandant of the murder squad, published by Edvard Radzinskii in Ogonè’k, No. 21 (1989), 4–5, 30–32. The film producer Gelii Riabov, who claims to have discovered the remains of the Imperial family, brought out in Rodina (No. 4 and No. 5, for 1989) some interesting additional information; unfortunately it is edited in a very slipshod manner.
*Michael’s friend, O. Poutianine, therefore is incorrect in claiming that Michael refused to seek asylum in England in the belief that the Russian people would do him no harm: Revue des Deux Mondes, XVIII (November 15, 1923), 297–98.
†I. Steinberg, Spiridonova, Revolutionary Terrorist (London, 1935), 195. On January 12/25, 1918, Vechernii chas carried an interview with Steinberg in which he expressed confidence that a trial would take pl
ace: “As is known, it was originally proposed that the ex-Tsar be tried by the Constituent Assembly, but it now appears that his fate will be decided by the Council of People’s Commissars.” It has been confirmed since that the Council of People’s Commissars passed on January 29, 1918, a resolution to turn Nicholas II over to a court: G. Ioffe in Sovetskaia Rossiia, No. 161/9,412 (July 12, 1987), 4.
*On him see, Granat, XLI, Pt. 1, 26–29. Anti-Semitic monarchists, determined to blame the murder of the Imperial family on Jews, have decided that Beloborodov’s real name was “Weissbart,” for which there exists no evidence whatever.
†Bykov first published under the title “Poslednie dni poslednego tsaria” in N. I. Nikolaev, ed., Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale (Ekaterinburg, 1921), 3–26; this text was reprinted in ARR, XVII (1926), 302–16. He was subsequently given access to some unpublished materials, on the basis of which he drew up the official story: Poslednie dni Romanovykh (Sverdlovsk, 1926). The latter book has been translated into English, German, and French. For all its obvious tendentiousness it has value because it makes reference to documents locked up in Communist archives. Bykov was chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet after the October coup.
*Report of the Chekist F. Drugov, who says he heard it at the time (fall 1918) from a fellow Chekist, Tarasov-Rodionov: IR, No. 10/303 (February 28, 1931), 10. Drugov’s account, however, loses some of its credibility because he reports having met and talked to Tarasov-Rodionov while traveling on a nonexistent railroad from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg.
†The diaries of the ex-Empress, written in her idiosyncratic English, have never been published in entirety. The American journalist Isaac Don Levine brought out a photographic copy and published extensive excerpts in the Chicago Daily News, June 22–26 and 28, 1920, and in Eyewitness to History (New York, 1963).
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