Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  On 6 April a new resolution was made by the presidium of the CEC to transfer the Romanovs to the Urals. Three days later, Sverdlov, as Chair of the CEC, sent a telegraph to Goloshchekin confirming that a special commissar, Vasily Yakovlev, was being sent from Moscow to transfer Nicholas to the Urals: ‘our opinion is that you should settle him in Ekaterinburg for now’, he wrote, suggesting that it be in some kind of private house requisitioned for the purpose. As far as Sverdlov was concerned, Ekaterinburg was to be the end of the Romanovs’ journey, but publicly he still had to contend with German demands that the Tsar be brought back to Moscow.

  In order to keep all his options open, Sverdlov boxed clever: Yakovlev would be ordered ostensibly to bring the Tsar back to Moscow, thus following the government’s official line, announced in the papers in April, that Nicholas would be brought to trial in the capital. The interception of Yakovlev’s special train by renegade Bolsheviks in the Urals and its final detour to Ekaterinburg – acting on a tip-off from Sverdlov – would by necessity be seen as a unilateral act. Such apparent insubordination by the Ekaterinburgers would leave the central government in the clear and not answerable to German reprimands. Once Ekaterinburg had control of the Romanovs, Sverdlov knew there would be no going back; Lenin, who was still vacillating, would have to accede to their demands. The transfer of the majority of the Romanovs held captive by the Bolsheviks to locations in the Urals that summer reinforces the fact that Moscow trusted Sverdlov’s Urals colleague Goloshchekin, and his right-hand man Beloborodov, to act with ruthless efficiency and keep them all safe until Lenin decided the moment had come to be rid of them. Had there been a threat to the Tsar’s security on the road to Ekaterinburg, they had Moscow’s permission, Beloborodov later asserted, to kill the Tsar then and there rather than lose charge of him. The inner circle of Urals Bolsheviks knew of Goloshchekin’s close relationship with Lenin and Sverdlov and deferred to him. Had they been likely not to do so, Sverdlov would hardly have entrusted the Romanovs to them.

  As things turned out, Yakovlev himself, sensing Moscow’s double game and concerned for the safety of his charges, had become worried by the extremely threatening behaviour of the Uralites in Tobolsk and along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and had not acted according to plan. Having been ordered to bring the Romanovs back in one piece, he took his moral responsibility seriously and decided to seize control of the situation, overriding Moscow’s orders and taking the train to safety further east, to Omsk. Here he had contacted Sverdlov on the direct line and asked permission to take the Tsar and Tsaritsa even further away, to the more remote Simsky Gorny district in Ufa province, where he would hide them in the mountains. Some commentators have suggested that at this point, Yakovlev, in a crisis of conscience, might even have decided to attempt to take his prisoners east to Vladivostok and out of Russia altogether.

  The Uralites meanwhile were furious; having sensed a double-cross when Yakovlev skirted Ekaterinburg and took the train on to Omsk, they had immediately got on the line to Moscow, demanding his total subordination to their control. Having been promised the Romanovs, they now demanded a straight answer about what was going on and guarantees from Sverdlov and Lenin that Nicholas would be delivered to them. The detailed Biographical Chronicle of Lenin’s political life shows that first Lenin (between 6 and 7 p.m.) and then Lenin and Sverdlov together (between 9.30 and 11.50 p.m.) had had direct telegraph contact with Beloborodov and Safarov about Yakovlev’s change of route, at the end of which Sverdlov instructed Yakovlev (despite his conscientious warnings that ‘the baggage’ would be destroyed if he did so) to deliver his charges up to Ekaterinburg.

  With the Romanovs now imprisoned at the Ipatiev House, Sverdlov had been upping the ante since May, regularly tabling discussion about their ultimate fate in meetings attended by Lenin. On 9 May, at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee, Sverdlov made a statement in which he outlined the government’s awareness of the various plots in Tobolsk. A ‘mass of documents’ had been found showing that ‘the flight of Nicholas Romanov was being organised’, he alleged. The question of the former tsar’s fate would, he promised, ‘soon be taken up and settled’. At a plenary session of the CEC on 19 May, Sverdlov again emphasised that it was essential the party decided ‘what to do with Nicholas’, because it was well known that the Uralites were having their own independent discussions about his ‘future fate’. But it is likely that Lenin remained undecided, right up until Goloshchekin’s visit to Moscow in early July. He wanted to keep the Tsar alive until they had squeezed absolutely the last drop of political capital out of him. Whatever important discussions did take place, or direct orders given by Lenin, the official record – the protocols and memoranda of the CEC and the daily chronology of Lenin’s official appointments – is predictably silent on the subject. The network of Bolshevik deception ensured that it remained so. Discussions must have inevitably extended to the fate of the Imperial Family, sufficient enough for the shake-up at the Ipatiev House to have been ordered by Goloshchekin before his departure and confirmed to him in Moscow by Beloborodov by telegraph. The inefficient Avdeev had been replaced by Yurovsky on 4 July, in the run-up to what was now a planned ‘liquidation’.

  ‘Liquidation’: it was such an unemotional, no-nonsense word. At first it had been used to refer to the liquidation of tsarist institutions, of private property, of religion, customs and age-old habits. Then it had become an increasingly popular euphemism used by the Bolsheviks for the suppression and murder of political opponents; now it was being broadened even further as a cover for extensive social cleansing. Clean, quiet, efficient, scientific even, it was to become the workaday method of the newly created Cheka. In the chaos of civil war and the disruption of communications across Russia with the onward rush into organised terror, the ideals of the Revolution would finally and irrevocably lose sight of any humane boundaries of behaviour. There would be no time for acts of mercy, of singling out one victim whilst showing pity on others. Executing the Tsar alone was simply not a practical or viable proposition this late in the game. What would the Uralites then do with the women and the boy in the present escalating political situation, at a time when the Bolsheviks were barely hanging on to power? Those who had chosen to accompany the doomed monarch into exile would now have to share in his fate. It was a simple matter of expediency.

  It is possible that the Soviet leadership may originally have intended to go through the motions of an open debate about the fate of the Tsar at the 5th Congress of Soviets which had opened in Moscow on 4 July, but the assassination of Mirbach and the Left SR rebellion had put paid to that. As late as the 9th there was still talk of a trial for the Tsar, according to the chair of the Petrograd Cheka Moisey Uritsky. But it was all part of a systematic policy of confusion and disinformation – even within the party itself. A trial might lend an air of fake legality to the proceedings but Lenin wanted an end to the dynasty. The time had long since passed for a proper trial to be held and he knew it. But he wanted to be sure that his name would not be in any way tainted with the killing of the Romanovs – judicial or otherwise. What is certainly clear is that it was the enigmatic Sverdlov – the man who really ran the party machinery – who pulled the strings over the final fate of the Imperial Family, in continuous direct discussion with the Urals Bolsheviks. They were Sverdlov’s men, guided by discipline, fanaticism and a close observance of party diktat and dogma. And the man for job had already been appointed – Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the Ipatiev House. He would be ably assisted in his important revolutionary task by his deputy Grigory Nikulin, a young man who only a few days ago had had no compunction about pulling the trigger on Prince Dolgorukov.

  In the end it was the pressing argument of the Czech advance that won the day and the sanctioning of this ultimate act of political expediency. It was not just a matter of preventing the Romanovs falling into enemy hands but also a response to continuing pressure from Germany: if the Tsar fell into Czech hands and became a rallying point f
or an anti-German resurgence in Russia, then the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and with it the bolstering-up of the Soviet government, would be dead in the water. But there was an added complication. It was one thing to kill the Tsar, but foreign policy dictated that it was essential to keep any liquidation of the Romanov family a state secret. It would be bad politically to be seen to be killing innocent women and children, and the spilling of the Tsaritsa’s German blood and by association that of her children would antagonise the Kaiser.

  Be that as it may, Lenin’s revolution was different: it had to show no mercy. There should be no ‘living banner’ – among neither the Romanov family nor their immediate relatives in Alapaevsk, around whom a White or counter-revolutionary movement could rally ordinary Russians against the Soviets. Human considerations were not part of either Lenin’s or the Bolshevik mindset, only political logic. As Trotsky would later explain: ‘The Tsar’s family was a victim of the principle that forms the very axis of monarchy: dynastic inheritance.’ For that reason alone their deaths were a necessity.

  Lenin had always looked upon the House of Romanov as a very particular class enemy, as ‘monarchist filth’ and their dynasty a ‘300-year disgrace’. The Revolution demanded that they be exterminated – along with other undesirables and ‘bloodsuckers’: speculators, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks. It wasn’t enough to cut off the head of the king alone, as Cromwell’s revolution in England in 1649 had done with Charles I; revolution in Russia, according to Lenin, demanded the cutting-off of ‘a hundred Romanov heads’ in order to achieve the new democracy. Lenin always looked to draconian measures; he never thought in terms of individuals, only in terms of the bigger picture – entire classes and groups. For a start, it was quicker and more efficient; he was impatient to see all these class enemies wiped out wholesale, destroyed at the root. Not quite genocide but a new kind of necessary, ideological murder, in defence of the greater good of the proletariat. Under his successor, Stalin, it would be perfected on the grand scale. Eradicating the Romanovs, destroying tsarism and everything it represented was a fundamental part of Lenin’s policy of ‘cleansing’ Russia of everything linked to the old system.

  But the written record taking the chain of command and ultimate responsibility for the fate of the Romanovs back to Lenin was, from the beginning, either never made or cleverly concealed. Most likely, the decision was conveyed verbally. When it came to ordering any draconian measures, Lenin was a coward. He always operated with extreme caution, his favoured method being to issue such instructions in coded telegrams (insisting that the original and even the telegraph ribbon on which it was sent be destroyed). Elsewhere, it was by confidential notes or anonymous directives made in the collective name of the Council of People’s Commissars; it is more than likely too that he often gave verbal instructions via his trusted right-hand man Sverdlov. Thus a whole host of party ‘errand boys’ were regularly designated to do his dirty work for him, and in all such decisions he made a point of regularly insisting that no written evidence be preserved, as recently uncovered documents in Archive No. 2 (Lenin) and Archive No. 86 (Sverdlov) as well as the archives of the Sovnarkom and the CEC have revealed. With this in mind, the 55 volumes of Lenin’s enormous collected works were scrupulously censored; the memoirs of those involved in events in Ekaterinburg are also suspiciously silent, emphasising the primary roles of Sverdlov and Goloshchekin. (It is no accident either that as Jews, they were both singled out in the virulently anti-Semitic Western literature on the subject after 1918 by Sokolov, Wilton and Diterikhs, all of whom blamed Russia’s woes on the Jews.) It is as though Lenin’s role in the fate of the Romanovs has been airbrushed from the record. The task of Soviet historiography through 73 years of Communism would be to protect his reputation at all costs and thus ensure that no discredit was brought on the architect of the Revolution. And in this respect the Bolsheviks of Ekaterinburg played directly into Sverdlov’s hands. Notorious they might be for their hot-headedness, but the men at the top in Ekaterinburg were nevertheless dedicated party men who understood only too well that the Bolshevik centre in Moscow did not and would not tolerate autonomous action. They kowtowed to a very clearly defined party hierarchy and the ultimate sanction of its indisputable despotic leader, Lenin, through his intermediary, Sverdlov. The Ekaterinburgers had no difficulty in taking personal responsibility for what was to come in order to keep the revered leader’s hands clean. Indeed, it was a matter of revolutionary pride to take that responsibility upon themselves, and one which many of them traded on for years afterwards. Ekaterinburg would carry out the necessary liquidation and, in the absence of documentation to prove otherwise, would also carry the blame in the eyes of the world. Within the new Soviet Russia, the kudos for this historic act of national vengeance would be enormous.

  The Ural Regional Soviet and the Ekaterinburg Cheka had thus known from early July that the liquidation of the Romanovs would be their responsibility – it was simply a matter of when, and now they were about to decide. During the day, from their stuffy meeting room at the Amerikanskaya Hotel, they had sent word to Red Army commanders at the Front for clarification of the present military situation. How much longer could Ekaterinburg hold out? The Czechs were intent on cutting the city off from European Russia. Red Army forces in the area were insufficient. As they awaited word from the Front, Yurovsky was now formally entrusted with the final preparations for the execution, codenamed, improbably, trubochist–‘chimney sweep’. All he had to do now, as Goloshchekin assured him, was wait for the signal from Moscow.

  11

  ‘Absolutely No News from Outside’

  SATURDAY 13 JULY 1918

  Saturday 13 July brought joy to the Ipatiev House, albeit on a minor scale. It was a landmark for the Tsarevich Alexey and his delighted mother. Although Alexandra had been forced to spend yet another day lying on her bed with agonising backache, she had at least been cheered by the fact that her son at last had managed to take a bath – his first since leaving Tobolsk nine weeks previously. What joy for her that her beloved ‘Baby’, whose leg had been in plaster for much of the time since his arrival, and who could still not straighten it at the knee, had ‘managed to get in & out alone’. Such now were the increasingly trivial highlights of the family’s imprisonment at the Ipatiev House: so small, so insignificant, when all the time chaos mounted not far from their door. Down in Ekaterinburg’s market, goods were now in such short supply that the trade in shoes and leather had been forbidden; these would no doubt be requisitioned for the Red Army now fighting it out against the Czechs. Protest against the increasingly oppressive Bolshevik government in Ekaterinburg still continued sporadically. Across the road from the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s bedroom window, a demonstration of ‘Evacuated Invalids’ had been staged in Voznesensky Square by a hotch-potch of Red Army soldiers, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists attempting to capitalise on the absence at the Front of the majority of the city’s Red Army garrison, and demanding the dismissal of the local Ekaterinburg Soviet and the transfer of control of the city to them. What few Red Guards remained quickly suppressed this mini-rebellion; a detachment of Bolshevik thugs from the Verkh-Isetsk factory, led by Petr Ermakov, had been called in to deal with it and had opened fire on the protesters. A spate of arrests and shootings of suspected counter-revolutionaries had followed that night – Alexandra herself heard several shots as she lay in bed. The city’s leaders had later made use of this episode to suggest it had been a monarchist-led rebellion that threatened the security of their captives at the Ipatiev House.

  In London, meanwhile, The Times was full of stories about ‘Distracted Russia’, as one leader described the country. News was ‘fragmentary’ and often untrustworthy, but in the West reports were now claiming that the influence of the ‘Bolshevists’ was waning; Lenin and Trotsky were ‘undergoing an eclipse’ and losing control in the regions. Their collusion with Germany was shameful; enforced conscription had brought together a raggle-taggle army mainly comprised of German PO
Ws ‘whose discipline is a farce and whose one common idea seems to be to avoid fighting at all costs’. Meanwhile, the Germans still had 47 divisions occupying Russia, from Finland in the north to the Black Sea on Russia’s southern border – their objective in all regions to milk them for their economic resources, most particularly the rich grain fields of the Don valley in the south. With an Allied force gathering at Murmansk, the Czechs were now only 350 miles from Moscow and asserting themselves as a ‘new power in Russia and Siberia’. They had proved ‘what resolution and coherence can achieve in a Russia torn by dissensions and pillaged by the greed of its temporary masters’. Having now seized the railway across most of Siberia, the Czechs had created rallying points from which the German invasion could be checked. The last word now rested with the United States for supplies of rolling stock and railway material. President Wilson, The Times assured its readers, ‘has been watching the Siberian situation more closely than is commonly supposed’.