Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (26 page)

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 Central 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.

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.