Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  Goloshchekin was ‘very energetic’, Sverdlov informed the Uralites, commending their new military commissar to them; more importantly, he ‘holds to the party line’ and would, Sverdlov knew, ensure that they did so too. As Moscow’s man in the Urals Goloshchekin now had a powerful controlling influence in the local Cheka as well as on the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet: his colleague Beloborodov had effectively been positioned as puppet president of the URS, very much under the control of Goloshchekin and Sverdlov.

  The July talks in Moscow were the culmination of months of negotiation between Ekaterinburg and the Bolshevik leadership, with Sverdlov as go-between, over the fate of the Romanovs. In November 1917, Goloshchekin had had discussions with Lenin about the strengthening of Soviet power in the Urals and the need to step up the fight against the ‘petty bourgeois parties’ in the region. One of his first tasks after arriving in Ekaterinburg had been to lead a cadre of armed Sysert factory workers against the counter-revolutionary forces of the Cossack leader Aleksandr Dutov; some of these men later joined the guard at the Ipatiev House. Goloshchekin had quickly made his mark in the city; he held his own in the toughest, most contentious political meetings and had already initiated a local clampdown on the bourgeoisie and other anti-Bolsheviks, whom he denigrated in typical hyperbolic Leninist tones as ‘supporting the White rabble displaying its poisoned fangs’. At the Communist Party Congress in February of 1918, he had intimated to his advocate Sverdlov that the transfer of the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg would be a suitable reward for his loyalty to the centre and the unpopular treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By March 1918, talks with Moscow had turned more specifically to this issue, when Goloshchekin, in the city for the 7th Communist Party Congress, had had a meeting with Lenin, in his capacity as military commissar for the Urals, about the lax security at Tobolsk and the continuing threats of a monarchist rescue. Aleksandr Avdeev and two colleagues from Ekaterinburg were later dispatched to Tobolsk by Goloshchekin to keep an eye on the situation and report back to him personally by special courier. He had returned to Moscow for further talks about the Romanovs in May. Thereafter he remained in constant touch, holding, as he did, direct responsibility for the disposition of 3rd Army forces on the Eastern Front against the Czechs and Whites. In the spring he again emphasised his concerns over the lack of efficient security measures at Tobolsk, making clear Ekaterinburg’s fervent desire (raised at a meeting of the URS in February) to have the Imperial Family under its much more stringent control (Tobolsk falling under the control of a political rival, the southern Siberian Omsk regional district). Goloshchekin had promised his personal guarantee of responsibility in this respect, and Sverdlov had continued to press Ekaterinburg’s case ever harder with Lenin. The latest round of talks in July between Goloshchekin and the leadership, ostensibly to discuss the defence of the Urals against the onslaught of the Czechs, had by necessity been dominated by discussion about the fate of the Romanovs.

  The members of the URS meanwhile had already made up their minds, in a tense meeting held on 29 June at the Amerikanskaya Hotel, that the family should be liquidated – indeed, Left SR extremists in the city were insisting on this happening as soon as possible, accusing the Bolsheviks in Moscow of vacillation and inconsistency. When the Tsar had first arrived, radicalised workers at the Verkh-Isetsk industrial plant had announced their intention to forcibly remove him from the Ipatiev House and lynch him during the May Day celebrations; the threat of summary justice in Ekaterinburg would not go away. ‘Why are you fussing over Nicholas?’ the Verkh-Isetsk workers shouted at angry meetings. ‘It is time to be done with it!’ Either that, they threatened, or they would knock the Urals Regional Soviet ‘to pieces’. Local anarchists threatened much the same: ‘If you do not annihilate Nicholas the Bloody, we will do it!’

  The vote on the 29th for the Tsar’s execution had been unanimous and the demands of the members of the URS that the leadership pass this on to Moscow and pressure them for a decision had prompted Goloshchekin’s urgent mission. He had arrived there on 3 July with a message insisting on the execution of Nicholas. Workers in the Urals, so he said, resented the fact that the Tsar and his family seemed to be living in style at the Ipatiev House as though on holiday at a country dacha with all creature comforts. It may well be too that Goloshchekin used the ‘evidence’ of the intercepted officer letters as a lever to show Moscow that plots to rescue the Tsar also presented a real threat, thus justifying the need to execute him. In any event, essential contingency plans needed to be made for the whole family, should the situation dramatically change and the city have to be abandoned to the Czechs. It was too late now for any evacuation to safety elsewhere: the rail lines west to Moscow from the Urals were no longer safe because of the Czech advance, and territory in the north was controlled by the Whites.

  Moscow nevertheless continued to sustain a concerted web of secrecy, even within the party, about its decision on what to do with Nicholas. Lenin and Sverdlov were skilful manipulators; publicly they stuck to the official line of bringing Nicholas back to Moscow, in order to placate the Germans, who wanted the Tsar where they could keep a closer eye on him. But as for a trial – this had raised a deal of consternation in Russia: would the Bolsheviks have the nerve to bring to trial for the violation of human rights a man whose despotism paled in comparison with their own? If Nicholas were brought to Moscow, many were of the view that he would be murdered en route. Indeed, there was no judicial precedent to justify trying him for supposed ‘crimes against humanity’ – a term defined as early as 1915 by the Allied powers but not effectively prosecuted until the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals during 1945–6. There was talk, certainly, of prosecuting the Tsar for betraying the October Manifesto of 1905 in which he set up the Duma (a body he subsequently dissolved), but the Bolsheviks would be playing a very dangerous game by attempting a trial. In seeking to imitate the justice of the French Revolution, they might well become hoist by their own petard.

  Abroad, there was still talk of possible exile for the family. Herman Bernstein, home from Russia at the end of June, had been told that Nicholas was not now to be placed on trial but to be ‘exiled out of Russia’; this he reported in the New York Herald. The former tsar was now so completely discredited in Russia that nobody feared his return to the throne, least of all the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, in other official quarters the story was that, given the changing military situation, a trial would be held in Ekaterinburg at the end of July, with Trotsky travelling from Moscow to conduct it. The lie grew ever bigger and more complex and contradictory as July went on. Perhaps the smokescreen of a ‘trial’ for the Tsar was maintained to keep the fiery Trotsky’s ambitions in check. Within the party there was much rivalry between Sverdlov and Trotsky, and privately Sverdlov would have liked nothing better than to see Trotsky’s ambitious plans for a French revolutionary-style trial scotched.

  With rumour and counter-rumour flying about, everybody was left guessing, whilst in private Sverdlov and Goloshchekin continued to discuss their own very clear final strategies for the Romanovs. The presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet should organise the practical details of the family’s execution and decide the precise day on which it would take place when the military situation dictated it, and contact Moscow for final approval. Such was Sverdlov’s confidence in Goloshchekin’s loyalty, and in turn Lenin’s trust in Sverdlov’s own handling of the situation, that it was later alleged that Sverdlov had told Goloshchekin that when the situation dictated, he should ‘do whatever you think fit.’

  In the meantime, Lenin was kept constantly informed of the changing situation in Ekaterinburg. In his study on the third floor of the Kremlin’s Senate building, the Bolshevik leader was a busy man, working yet another of his brutally hard 16-hour days. The third floor of this fine eighteenth-century neoclassical building, commissioned by Catherine the Great as the venue for her advisory council, was now the hub of the Soviet government. Lenin’s office was situated at one end of the corridor
from his private apartments – work thus never being more than a stone’s throw from his modest living quarters, which he shared with his wife and his sister Mariya. Whilst one door from his study led directly into the conference room used by the Council of People’s Commissars – the principal decision-making body in the country, now controlled by the Bolsheviks – the other led into the ‘box’ – the telecommunications nerve centre from where Lenin kept in close touch with the homes and offices of the Central Committee and other government officials with whom he worked in close collaboration. He was assisted in his day-to-day paperwork by his loyal, self-effacing secretary Lidiya Fotieva and an army of undersecretaries, who flitted discreetly back and forth along the Senate’s echoing corridors.

  Lenin’s workplace was a modest office for a modest man who took no interest in his appearance and led an abstemious lifestyle – neither smoking nor drinking. He was so frugal that they called him ‘the Bolshevik who has remained poor’. He had few personal possessions or pleasures other than listening to Beethoven. He didn’t like emotional indulgence of any kind, and even music was something he rarely had time for these days. The Revolution and the cause of Bolshevism were his abiding passions, and such was his lack of interest in personal things that for the past 25 years, since completing his law studies, he had committed all his energy and political brilliance to promoting his socialist vision. Nothing but his already failing health would stop him.

  He sat at his desk in a simple wooden armchair with a wicker back and seat. The worktop was always neatly ordered, to hand a notebook in which he made his meticulous observations and instructions and entered the names of associates and officials with whom he had appointments. Nearby stood two revolving bookstands containing all the many necessary records of party congresses and conferences and the other political reference material he constantly drew on. All the available wall space in his office was filled with further bookcases containing over 2,000 essential volumes – maps and atlases, books on economics and technology, as well as political pamphlets and magazines in various languages, all in scrupulous alphabetical order, and including the seminal works of Marx and Engels, Lenin’s primary political influences, and other key French, German and Russian political thinkers who had inspired him, such as Hegel, Saint-Simon, Plekhanov, Pisarev and Belinsky.

  During these July days, Lenin had a mounting pile of political pressures to juggle, and today was no exception. He adhered to a strict daily schedule: there were letters to write; decrees to draft; an endless flood of telegrams to read and send; papers and minutes of meetings to authorise and sign; Cheka reports on the activities of Left SRs and Mensheviks in the regions to monitor; discussions to hold on the direct line with various regional soviets; a delegation from Archangel to meet and talk with about the military situation in northern Russia. In between, there were to be snatched discussions on the nationalities question with Stalin before, at 8 p.m., he chaired his daily meeting with the Council of People’s Commissars. It was a typical working day that went on late into the night for the man whose exceptional powers and forceful personality allowed him to demand and get centralised control over the vast apparatus he had created.

  The fate of 11 people locked up in a house in Ekaterinburg came very low on his list of priorities right now, though the pressure was on him to reach a decision about their fate. With rebellion having broken out among the anarchists and Left SRs, with whom his government had, in the spring, ended its brief and uneasy collaboration, and civil war against the Whites spreading across Siberia, the Revolution was in danger of collapse. Lenin was becoming increasingly impatient; his ferocious fits of anger were unpredictable and terrifying, and when it came to acts of insurrection that threatened his intellectual master plan for the remoulding of post-revolutionary Russia, he always demanded the most swingeing countermeasures. He was relentless in his drive to resolve once and for all the class and political questions relating to the old regime, and in this respect was utterly indifferent to human suffering and did not shrink at ordering the most savage measures of revenge. He of course knew nothing of the Russian masses whose future he now dictated; after years in exile abroad he was in fact a stranger to Russia and knew the common man no better than the Tsar did. But there was nevertheless an irresistible force to Lenin’s implacable revolutionary logic which made people believe that he did know what was best, and which took as its catchphrase ‘You can’t make a revolution without firing squads.’ What Lenin demanded now, in a recently published pamphlet, ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, was an ‘iron proletarian discipline’ in the cause of saving Bolshevism. But Lenin was also a clever tactician who had learned the Machiavellian arts of conspiracy through long years as an underground activist in exile, and he enjoyed the schadenfreude of subverting the intentions of the Western powers who, since Nicholas’s abdication, had been lobbying for news of the Tsar. ‘The West are wishful thinkers’, he observed to Cheka chief Dzerzhinsky. ‘We will give them what they want to think.’ Prevarication was the name of the game.

  Lenin would never be rushed into decision-making; he was a cold and cynical thinking machine with a sophisticated, flexible mind, and he enjoyed playing his enemies off against each other. So long as the Romanovs served a useful political purpose they should be kept alive. He had hoped for a while to use them as bargaining chips in extracting money from the Germans, such as reducing the crippling penalty of 300 million gold roubles made against Russia by Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But with the Ural Regional Soviet and other hardline regional soviets, such as those at Omsk and Kolomna, continuing to bombard him with telegrams demanding the execution of the Tsar, he knew that time was against him.

  The idea of regicide as an act of national vengeance for crimes against the people was not a new concept in Russia. It had been born among the Russian intelligentsia back in the days of the first great eighteenth-century Russian radical Aleksandr Radishchev, who had lambasted the repressive regime of Catherine the Great and narrowly escaped execution for his outspokenness. The tradition of intellectual protest against tsarism had lived on through the poetry of Pushkin, who was exiled to the Caucasus in 1820 for publishing an ‘Ode to Liberty’, and Lermontov, who more openly alluded to a day of popular reckoning:

  A year will come, the year of Russia, last,

  When the monarchs’ crown will be cast;

  The mob will forget its former love and faith,

  And food of many will be blood and death . . .

  It reached a high point during the Decembrist revolt of 1825, when its republican leader Pavel Pestel had advocated the entire wiping-out of the royal dynasty, including its children. But it found its most extreme form in the writings of the nihilist Sergey Nechaev, who became Lenin’s role model of the ideal conspirator, and whose ‘Catechism of a Revolutionist’, published in 1869, became the bible of the Russian revolutionary movement. Nechaevism, and its cornerstone belief that the end justifies the means, was carried forward in the hearts and minds of revolutionaries into extreme acts of political terrorism during the 1880s, culminating in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Lenin’s own brother, Aleksandr, had been involved in a revolutionary conspiracy to assassinate Nicholas II’s father, Alexander III, and was hanged at the Schlüsselburg Fortress in 1887. Lenin thus had good reason to despise the Romanovs with a vengeance, and his references to Nicholas in conversation and in his writings were always filled with the utmost venom. The monarch was ‘the most evil enemy of the Russian people’, ‘a bloody executioner’, ‘an Asiatic gendarme’, ‘a crowned robber’ who had spilt the lifeblood of Russia’s workers and revolutionaries. To Lenin’s mind, regicide and the liquidation of the Romanovs in the spirit of the Jacobinism of the French Revolution would show, as his colleague Trotsky later averred, that there was to be ‘no going back. Ahead lay total victory or utter ruin.’

  Lenin had first discussed the fate of Nicholas II soon after the Revolution, in November 1917, with other members of the C
entral Executive Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars. On 29 January 1918 he had chaired a meeting of the council at which the question of the ‘transfer of Nicholas Romanov to Petrograd in order to be brought to trial’ had been discussed. This was repeated on 20 February, again under Lenin’s chairmanship but with no location for the projected trial being decided upon. The leader maintained a continuing and controlling interest in the issue throughout the spring of 1918, though plans for the trial appear to have become increasingly enmeshed in a web of confusion and Soviet bureaucracy that waited on Lenin’s final say-so. At the end of March the chair of the Western Siberian Soviet had telegraphed him and Sverdlov expressing his concerns about the lax security arrangements at Tobolsk, insisting that a Red Army detachment should replace the present guards. By 1 April 1918 Sverdlov knew this was becoming a serious matter and had chaired a meeting of the presidium of the CEC at which members of the special detachment at Tobolsk had reported back to him on the situation there. Around this time, Sverdlov came to the conclusion that an urgent transfer of the family was needed, away from Tobolsk to the Urals, and took effective control of the situation. Four days later he was even more categorical: the Romanovs should be handed over to the more vigilant control of his colleague Goloshchekin at Ekaterinburg. However, all the time Lenin continued to prevaricate over a decision, Sverdlov could only issue orders to reinforce the guard at Tobolsk, whilst cranking up the expectations of Ekaterinburg that they would become the Tsar’s next jailers.