A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  Why did the Bolsheviks change their mind and go ahead with the murder, reversing their earlier decision to put Nicholas on trial in Moscow? The military considerations were certainly real enough, contrary to what many historians have said. The Czechs captured Ekaterinburg on 25 July, eight days after the murder; but they might easily have done so several days before, since the city was surrounded and they had many more troops than the Reds. But it is doubtful that either they, or any of the Whites, would have wanted to make such a sad and discredited figure as Nicholas their 'live banner'. A martyred Tsar was more useful to them than a live one who was politically dead. Both Denikin and Kolchak were intelligent enough to realize that a monarchist restoration was out of the question after 1917, although both had monarchists among their advisers. Perhaps the Bolsheviks did not understand this. Perhaps they were victims of their own propaganda that the Whites were monarchists to a man.

  But even so, there is no doubt that the murder was also carried out for other reasons. The party leaders were by this stage having second thoughts about the wisdom of a trial. Not that there was any real prospect of finding the ex-Tsar innocent. Trotsky was a master of the political trial, as his own in 1906 had shown, and he would no doubt show with brilliant logic how, as an autocrat who claimed the right to rule in person, Nicholas was himself to blame for the crimes of his regime. Nor was there any prospect of the ex-Tsar being allowed the legal nicety of able lawyers to defend him: the Russian equivalents of Malesherbes and de Seze — Louis XVI's lawyers at his trial — were all in prison or exile by this stage. It was rather the more fundamental problem — one raised by Saint-Just against Louis's trial — that putting the deposed monarch in the dock at all was to presuppose the possibility of his innocence. And in that case the moral legitimacy of the revolution would itself be open to question. To put Nicholas on trial would also be to put the Bolsheviks on trial. The recognition of this was the point where they passed from the realm of law into the realm of terror. In the end it was not a question of proving the ex-Tsar's guilt — after all, as Saint-Just had put it, 'one cannot reign innocently' — but

  a question of eliminating him as a rival source of legitimacy. Nicholas had to die so that Soviet power could live.

  On 4 July the local Cheka had taken over the responsibility of guarding the Romanovs at the Ipatev House. Yakov Yurovsky, the local Cheka boss who led the execution squad, was one of Lenin's most trusted lieutenants — ruthless, honest, intelligent and cruel. His brother said he 'enjoyed oppressing people'.89 The Tsar's murderer was also a Jew — a fact for which the Jews would pay in future. On the night of the murder, 16—17 July, at about 1.30 a.m., Yurovsky awoke the Tsar's physician and ordered him to rouse the rest of the prisoners. At 2 a.m. all eleven of them were led down the stairs to the basement. Nicholas carried the Tsarevich, followed by the Empress and her daughters, the Tsar's physician and the rest of the retinue. Anastasia carried the King Charles spaniel Joy. On their request, two chairs were brought in for the Empress and Alexis, who was still recovering from his recent attack of bleeding. None of them seemed aware of what was about to happen: they had been told that there had been shooting in the town and it was safer for them in the basement. After a few minutes, Yurovsky entered the room with the execution squad — six Hungarians, usually described as 'Latvians', and five Russians. Each had been assigned to shoot a particular victim, but when they entered the room it turned out that they were not facing the right person and the room was too small, with murderers and victims practically standing on each other's toes, for the necessary changes to be made: it was this that partly caused the confusion that followed. Yurovsky read out the order to shoot the Romanovs. Nicholas asked him to repeat it: his last words were 'What? What?' Then the firing began. Yurovsky shot Nicholas point blank with a Colt. The Empress also died instantly. Bullets ricocheted around the room, which filled up with smoke. When the firing finished, after several minutes, Alexis lay alive in a pool of blood: Yurovsky finished him off with two shots in the head. Anastasia, who also showed signs of life, was stabbed several times with a bayonet.90

  Given all the evidence that has come to light, it is inconceivable that any of the Romanovs survived this ordeal.* After the murder the bodies were driven off in a lorry and dumped in a series of nearby mineshafts. These turned out to be too shallow to conceal the bodies and the next day they were removed. But on the way to some deeper mines the lorry got stuck in the mud and it was decided to bury the corpses in the ground. Sulphuric acid was poured on their faces to hide the identity of the corpses should they be discovered. This proved unnecessary — and ineffective. The graves were not discovered until after the collapse of the Soviet regime. But by this time, DNA analysis of the bones,

  * The only certain survivor was the spaniel Joy.

  brought back to Britain in 1992, was enough to establish beyond doubt that they belonged to the Romanovs.91

  News of the execution reached Lenin the next day during a session of Sovnarkom. The people's commissars were engaged in a detailed discussion of a draft decree for health protection when Sverdlov came in with the news. The brief announcement of the Tsar's death was met with general silence. Then Lenin said: 'We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.'92

  The official announcement appeared in Izvestiia on 19 July. It mentioned only the death of the ex-Tsar, claiming that the 'wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place'. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were afraid to acknowledge that they had murdered the children and servants — all of them, after all, innocent people — lest it should lose them public sympathy. But in fact public reaction was remarkably subdued. 'The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference,' noted Lockhart. Rumours that the rest of the family had been killed elicited few emotions. Only the monarchists were moved. Brusilov, a monarchist of the heart and a Republican only of the mind, refused to believe that the rumours were true and prayed every night for the 'missing Romanovs'. The lie was kept going until 1926, when the publication of Sokolov's book in Paris, The Murder of the Imperial Family, based on the findings of a commission set up by Kolchak, made this no longer tenable. But in the meantime the legend had been born that perhaps not all the Romanovs had died. It is a legend that still lives today, despite the huge weight of evidence against it. All of which merely goes to show that there is more currency — and more profit — in fiction than in history.93

  Why has the murder of the Romanovs assumed such significance in the history of the revolution? It could be said that they were only a few individuals, whereas revolutions are about the millions. This is the argument of Marxist historians, who have tended to treat this episode as a minor side-show to the main event. E. H. Carr, for example, gave it no more than a single sentence in his three-volume history of the revolution. But this is to miss the deeper significance of the murder. It was a declaration of the Terror. It was a statement that from now on individuals would count for nothing in the civil war. Trotsky had once said: 'We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.' And that is what the Cheka did. Shortly after the murder Dzerzhinsky told the press:

  The Cheka is the defence of the revolution as the Red Army is; as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether it may harm particular individuals, but must take into account only one thing, the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must defend the revolution

  and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.94

  The Bolsheviks murdered other Romanovs after the execution of the former Tsar.* Six members of the old dynasty were murdered on the following night at Alapaevsk in the northern Urals. But in a sense their deaths were now just one small part of the Red Terror.

  * * * One of the most terrifying aspects of the Terror was its random nature. The knock on the door at midnight could come to almost anyone. The Bolsheviks justified the Terror as a civil war against the cou
nter-revolution. But they never made clear who those 'counter-revolutionaries' were. Indeed, in so far as the Terror was driven by the regime's own paranoiac fear that it was surrounded by hostile enemies working together to overthrow it — in this view the Kaplan plot was all part and parcel of the SR and Menshevik opposition, the White Guard reaction, the Allied intervention, Savinkov's uprising in Yaroslavl'.+ the peasant uprisings and workers' strikes — virtually anyone could qualify as a 'counter-revolutionary'. In this sense the Terror was a war by the regime against the whole of society — a means of terrorizing it into submission. 'Terror', Engels wrote, 'is needless cruelties perpetrated by terrified men.'

  A tour of the Cheka jails would reveal a vast array of different people. One former inmate of the Butyrka jail in Moscow recalls seeing politicians, ex-judges, merchants, traders, officers, prostitutes, children,++ priests, professors, students, poets, dissident workers and peasants — in short a cross-section of society. The Petrograd poetess Gippius wrote that 'there was literally not a single family that had not had someone seized, taken away, or disappear completely' as a result of the Red Terror, and for the circles in which she moved this is almost certainly true.93

  * The Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas's brother, had been killed in June.

  + Boris Savinkov, Kerensky's Deputy War Minister during the Kornilov episode, led an uprising of army officers in the town of Yaroslavl', to the north of Moscow, on 6 July. It gained the support of the local workers and peasants and spread briefly to the neighbouring towns of Murom and Rybinsk. Soviet troops regained Yaroslavl' on 21 July. They shot 350 officers and civilians in reprisal for the revolt, which was said to be the joint work of the SRs, the White Guards, the Czechs and the Allies. Savinkov's underground organization, the Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom, was linked with the National Centre in Moscow, which supported the Volunteer Army. It also received money from the Czechs and the Allies — who were both under the illusion that Savinkov's sole purpose was to raise a new Russian army to resume the war against the Central Powers. There is no evidence linking the Allies with Savinkov's plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

  ++ A government inspection of Moscow jails in March 1920 found that children under the age of seventeen comprised 5 per cent of the prison population (Izvestiia gosuiarstvenmnogo kontrolia, 4, 1920: 7-10).

  Many of the Cheka's victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up without charge and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for some alleged counter-revolutionary act. Of course most of them were not 'bourgeois' at all. The round-ups were much too crude for that, sometimes consisting of no more than the random arrest of people on a stretch of street blocked off at each end by Cheka guards. People were arrested merely for being near the scene of a 'bourgeois provocation (e.g. a shooting or a crime); or as the relatives and known acquaintances of 'bourgeois' suspects. One old man was arrested because during a general raid the Cheka found on his person a photograph of a man in court uniform: it was the picture of a deceased relative taken in the 1870s. Many people were arrested because someone (and one was enough) had denounced them as 'bourgeois counter-revolutionaries'. Such denunciations often arose from petty squabbles and vendettas. Yakov Khoelson, a military inspector, was arrested in November, for example, when two people jumped ahead of him in the queue for the Moscow Opera. They shouted 'provocation!' and complained to the doorman that Khoelson and two others had jumped the queue. The Cheka was called and Khoelson was arrested. Nikolai Kochargin, a petty official, was arrested in the same month after a dispute with a friend at work who had repaid him a loan in forged coupons. Kochargin went to the Cheka to complain — only to find himself arrested the next day when his debtor denounced him as a trader in forged coupons.96

  Arbitrary arrests were particularly common in the provinces, where the local Cheka bosses were very much their 'own men' pursuing their own civil wars of terror. But the principle urged by Lenin — that it was better to arrest a hundred innocent people than to run the risk of letting one enemy of the regime go free — ensured that wholesale and indiscriminate arrests became a general part of the system. Peshekhonov, Kerensky's Minister of Food, who was imprisoned in the Lubianka jail, recalls a conversation with a fellow prisoner, a trade unionist from Vladimir, who could not work out why he had been arrested. All he had done was to come to Moscow and check into a hotel. 'What is your name?' another prisoner asked. 'Smirnov', he replied, one of the most common Russian names:

  'The name, then, was the cause of your arrest,' said a man coming towards us. 'Let me introduce myself. My name too is Smirnov, and I am from Kaluga. At the Taganka there were seven of us Smirnovs, and they say there are many more at the Butyrka... At the Taganka they somehow managed to find out that a certain Smirnov, a Bolshevik from Kazan, had disappeared with a large sum of money. Moscow was notified and orders were issued to the militia to arrest all Smirnovs arriving in Moscow and

  send them to the Cheka. They are trying to catch the Smirnov from Kazan.'

  'But I have never been to Kazan,' protested the Vladimir Smirnov. 'Neither have I,' replied the one from Kaluga. 'I am not even a Bolshevik, nor do I intend to become one. But here I am.'97

  Reading the letters of the victims' families to Dzerzhinsky, one gets a better sense of the human tragedy that lay behind each arrest. Elena Moshkina wrote on 5 November. Her husband, Volodya, aged twenty-seven, an engineer in the Moscow Soviet, had been imprisoned as a 'bourgeois hostage' in the Butyrka because it was alleged he belonged to the Union of Houseowners. Moshkin had joined the union on behalf of his mother; but her house had been sold in 1911 and he had since resigned. Elena pleaded to take his place in jail, since they had two small children to support and only Volodya's salary to live on. They could not pay the 5,000 roubles demanded as a ransom by the local Cheka boss, who had admitted that they had no evidence against her husband and that he was merely 'a hostage of the rich'. Moshkina's letter came to nothing: it was marked in red pencil 'into the archive'.98

  Liubov Kuropatkina wrote to Dzerzhinsky on 18 November. Her husband, Pavel, had been imprisoned 'as a bourgeois hostage' in Pskov. The soldiers of his regiment had twice elected him as their officer, once after February and once after October, despite his tsarist rank as a corporal and his senior age (sixty-eight). He had led the regiment on the Pulkovo Heights against Kerensky's troops after the Bolshevik seizure of power. For this, the soldiers had allowed him to keep his savings, 50,000 roubles, which he then donated to the Soviet at Krasnoe Selo. In April 1918 Kuropatkin fell ill with malaria and the couple retired to a village near Pskov to farm a small allotment. He had been arrested before the first harvest, and his wife was now left on her own to feed seven small children and her very old father. She had two grown-up sons in the Red Army, and another who had disappeared as a prisoner of war in Hungary. 'My own health has always been poor, I cannot do physical work, and the constant worry for the safety of my husband has broken me. I cannot travel the sixty versty to the jail in Kholm to visit him.' Her letter was also marked 'into the archive'.99

  Nadezhda Brusilova was another letter writer to Dzerzhinsky. Brusilov had been arrested shortly after midnight on 13 August and imprisoned in the Lubianka. His apartment must have been under surveillance because earlier that evening he had been approached by two agents of the Komuch who had offered him a large sum of money to go with them to Samara and help to lead the fledgling People's Army. Brusilov had refused; but this did not prevent him from being arrested (nor the Komuch agents from being shot). During the raid the

  Chekists confiscated all Brusilov's medals: it must have been a torment for him to lose these final fragments of his broken past. Brusilov was never charged. Nadezhda was told that he had not even been arrested, but had merely been 'taken prisoner' to prevent him falling into the hands of the regime's opponents. 'His name is too popular,' one Chekist told her. Dzerzhinsky himself explained to Brusilov that he had been detained because they had 'evidence' that Lockhart was planning to stage a co
up in Moscow and pronounce the general a 'dictator'. Brusilov replied that he had never met the British agent, whereupon Dzerzhinsky candidly acknowledged: 'All the same, we cannot take the risk, people would rally behind your name.'* When Brusilov asked what he could do to speed up his release, the Cheka leader was just as frank again: 'Write your memoirs on the former army and abuse the old regime.' The old general was finally released in October and placed under house arrest. It is a measure of the suffering he must have gone through, without any medicine for his injured leg, that even this great patriot should beg his captors to let him and his family emigrate from Russia and settle in 'some neutral country'.100

  Conditions in the Cheka prisons were generally much worse than in any tsarist jail. A government inspection of the Moscow Taganka jail in October 1918, for example, found overcrowded cells, no water, grossly inadequate rations and heating, and sewage dumped in the courtyard. Nearly half the 1,500 inmates were chronically sick, 10 per cent of them with typhus. Corpses were found in the cells. The Peter and Paul Fortress, that great symbol of the tsarist prison state, was now an even more forbidding place. The Menshevik Dan, who had been imprisoned there in 1896, found himself once again behind its bars in the spring of 1921. Whereas before there had been one man to a cell, there were now two or three; and women were imprisoned there for the first time. Dan was held with hundreds of other prisoners in the basement, where the food stores had been previously kept. Four men shared each tiny cell. The walls 'dripped with damp', there was no light and the prisoners, fed only once a day, were never allowed out for exercise.101 Compared to this the old prison regime in the fortress had been like a holiday camp. Most of its inmates before 1917 had been allowed to receive food and cigarettes, clothing, books and letters from their relatives.