The Last Tsar (39 page)

In fact, that day it was daring Red Guards riding into town from Omsk to establish Bolshevik power in Tobolsk. And on that day the idyllic period of their captivity came to an end. The post-October world invaded quiet Tobolsk, jingling, whooping, and whistling.

After his death Rasputin managed to ruin the family yet again.

“There were no officer groups to liberate the tsar’s family! There was only talk,” Tatiana Botkina, the daughter of the doctor Evgeny Sergeyevich would exclaim in her memoirs.

Already after the tsar had been forced to leave Tobolsk, she asked one of the Tobolsk “plotters”—monarchists: “Why didn’t your organization undertake anything?”

“We organized to rescue Alexei Nikolaevich.”

When the time came for Alexei and the grand duchesses to leave Tobolsk, however, once again she posed the same question.

“Have pity, after all, we could be discovered and the Red Army could catch us all.”

“There were many organizers like that,” Botkin’s daughter concluded sadly. She considered Soloviev nothing more than a provocateur—as did many in Freedom House.

But who would have dared come out against Rasputin’s son-in-law?

Was Soloviev actually a Bolshevik agent?

Hardly. More likely they simply found each other convenient, the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret service, and Soloviev: two games played with the participation of the unsuspecting family.

There was the plot game organized by Boris Soloviev, who simply robbed the family. And there was one other performance, which took advantage of Soloviev’s idea by declaring his false plot genuine—to
prove the necessity of the immediate transfer of the tsar’s family from quiet Tobolsk.

This second game had been born in the Red capital of the revolutionary Urals, in the town of Ekaterinburg.

Let us try to picture the cast, the game’s chief players.

In late April 1917, a guard of Kronstadt sailors stood outside Mathilde Kschessinska’s mansion: Lenin had assembled a conference of Bolsheviks in the palace of Nicholas’s former lover. It is telling that the poet Blok sensed their strange and terrible power even then.

Not long before, these men had been rotting in exile, wandering hopelessly in emigration through the cities of Europe. Now they were talking about ruling the largest country in the world. “The party that does not want power is unfit to call itself a party,” said Trotsky, the second in command of the Bolsheviks.

This was no utopia. The Bolsheviks had a powerful conspiratorial apparatus left over from their past struggles with the tsar. Russia at that time was the freest country imaginable—so they were able to act.

It was to this old conspiratorial organization that two old friends belonged who met at this conference in the Petrograd mansion—Yakov Sverdlov and Filipp Goloshchekin. Here he is in a photograph, Comrade Filipp. He is already over forty. By the standards of the revolution he is already an old man—a face flaccid from sleepless nights and bad food. And, of course, bearded. They all were—Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Kamenev.… Goloshchekin had been studying
to become a dentist, but he became a professional revolutionary instead: conspiratorial apartments, party cells. His most recent nom de guerre, Filipp, became his name. He had been a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee since 1912. In 1913, while Nicholas was celebrating the tricentennial of the dynasty, Goloshchekin was captured by the police and sent to the Turukhansk region, where he met another prominent Bolshevik in exile, Yakov Sverdlov. “Sverdlov and Goloshchekin were linked not only by a commonality of views but also by personal friendship,” Sverdlov’s wife wrote in her memoirs. Both friends were freed from Turukhansk in February 1917.

After the conference in Kschessinska’s palace the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, Sverdlov, was left in Petrograd to become secretary of the Central Committee. Replacing Sverdlov in the Urals was his old friend Comrade Filipp.

As leader of the Ural Bolsheviks, Goloshchekin set out for Ekaterinburg to organize a new revolution.

At that time, in April 1917, Lenin declared they would take power by peaceful means. By July, though, the Bolsheviks were already flexing their muscle: the Kronstadt sailors entered Petrograd. But the July demonstration was put down, and Lenin declared Kerensky’s government an organ of the victorious counterrevolution and the Soviets a “fig leaf” concealing the power of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was beginning to prepare for an armed uprising.

The Provisional Government initiated a judicial inquiry: the Bolsheviks were accused of mutiny and of receiving money from Russia’s enemy, Germany. But Lenin and his closest comrade-in-arms, Zinoviev, refused to appear at the trial and hid. And although many leading Bolsheviks were arrested, the party was not banned, and three hundred party members participated in the next Bolshevik congress.

Commander-in-chief General Kornilov attempted to avert a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. He demanded from Kerensky full authority to bring order to the rear and the front. General Krymov’s Cavalry Corps had advanced toward Petrograd.

Kerensky removed Kornilov and turned to the Soviets for help.

Lenin decided to enter into an alliance with the government—against Kornilov—and Kerensky accepted this gift. But it was a gift he would soon regret.

“Only developing this war [with Kornilov] can lead us to power,” Lenin wrote.
Power!
Lenin exploited the fight against Kornilov and his contact with the government magnificently for the legal arming of his own supporters in Russia’s major cities.

Comrade Filipp in Ekaterinburg was indefatigable: workers’ detachments
were armed and a Red Guard headquarters created. He made the Baltic sailor Pavel Khokhryakov, picture-perfect handsome draped in ammunition belts, chief of staff.

Neighboring Perm, too, was readied for the uprising. There Gploshchekin depended on two Bolsheviks, the Lukoyanov brothers: Mikhail, leader of the Perm Bolsheviks, and Feodor, who led the workers’ Red Guard.

By fall of 1917 the Provisional Government had become a fiction. All those brilliant intellectuals had expired in interparty struggle and were incapable of controlling the dark elements they had stirred up. “The government apparatus’s collapse was complete.… A wave of barbaric pogroms incurred by greedy, hungry muzhiks rolled over Russia.… The food situation was no better. In Petrograd we had crossed the line beyond which famine began.… All the industrial centers suffered constant strikes.… The situation on the railroad was becoming ominous.… The entire press … howled in the identically same way about imminent economic catastrophe.… Wherever bold military-revolutionary committees had appeared, there was no longer any question of legal authority,” N. Sukhanov wrote in
Notes on the Revolution
.

In early October Goloshchekin left for Petrograd as a delegate from the Urals to the Congress of Soviets. Soon after, an urgent telegram arrived in Ekaterinburg: on October 25 the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Provisional Government.

At that point the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, their “bold military-revolutionary committees,” and the Red Guard began taking over the town.

The same happened in neighboring Perm.

As soon as the Bolsheviks had won in the Urals, Red Ekaterinburg’s gaze turned on quiet Tobolsk. There, not so far away, were the tsar and his family. The revolutionaries’ holy dream—retribution visited upon Nicholas the Bloody! That was from the realm of ideas. Moreover, rumors about the incalculable Romanov treasures brought from Petersburg … that was already the prose of life: “Behind all ideas there is always a steak,” one of the Bolshevik leaders joked.

In Ekaterinburg, Goloshchekin was working on a plan.

After my first article was printed in
Ogonyok
, I received a brief message in the mail: “Honored Comrade Radzinsky! I can tell you certain details on a topic of interest to you.” The signature: “Alexander Vasilievich.” His first name and patronymic, but no last name, just a phone number. I called.

An old man’s voice: “Only talk louder. Bad telephone.” (Old people do not complain about their hearing, they complain about the telephone. During my inquiries I would have dealings mostly with very old people—and I would hear this sentence many times.)

I: “I received your letter.… I would like to meet with you.”

He: “We can do that.… I’ll come to you myself.” (How many times would I hear all this! They had been through a good school—Stalin’s school of fear. He did not want me to come to his place and find out who he was. He was afraid.)

He came himself: a frail old man with a cloud of translucent white hair. Slats of medals on his jacket. He began.

“If you decide to use what I’m going to tell you … I don’t want my name used.”

I interrupted. I spoke very loudly. He was hard of hearing.

“Don’t worry. After all, I don’t know your last name.”

He knew that very well, but he wanted to hear it from me one more time. No one anywhere else in the world could understand what he was afraid of now, but for anyone born in this country it was understandable: just in case, he was afraid.

He: “It’s just that this story torments me for some reason. In those years … you weren’t in the world yet … in those years people didn’t ask too many questions.… It wasn’t done.… So that the man … well, the man I’m going to speak of now I know very little about. This happened in the very early twenties. I know the man was from the Urals … my older brother was a famous neurologist he went to for treatment. I know this man had a relative who worked in the Central Committee—a ‘big fish in a little pond.’ Well, they called my brother in to examine him in his apartment, which he did. Privately, so to speak.

“This was how he came to our house.

“That evening at tea my brother told my father about it in my presence. I remember. You do remember everything that happened in your youth.… This man, it turned out, had worked in the Ural Cheka and had practically run the tsar’s execution. Ever since then
his nerves had been bad. Every spring he checked into a neurology clinic. Spring had come and he had an exacerbation. My brother called him the spy.”

He stopped, evidently, for me to ask a question.

I did.

“ ‘Spy’ because he’d been sent to their house in the beginning, before Ekaterinburg, when the tsar was in another town.”

“Tobolsk.”

“Maybe. You know better. But there was a big house there. He went to work as a carpenter there in that house, and he followed the tsar. That’s what he told my brother. The tsar and tsaritsa spoke English, and no one understood them, but they needed to. So they sent him and.… But someone from the Guard was helping him inside the house.”

He fell silent.

“And then?”

“Then nothing. My brother got scared. Or rather, our father said: ‘He’d better not show his face in our house.’ My father did not exactly welcome the new authority.”

“Tell me, when did you write this down? The whole story?”

“What do you mean? Who would write something like that down? All my life I’ve been afraid to talk about it. He told my brother about the execution. But my brother didn’t even want to tell us about it. All he said was: ‘The blood gushed out.’ Everything was covered in blood.”

How many times, working on these documents, have I encountered their mystical quality. It’s like that saying “The beast ran into the hunter.” I call it “evoking documents.” Soon after, while studying Goloshchekin’s comrades, I ran across an amazing biography in
Revolutionaries of Prikamie
(Perm, 1966):

“Lukoyanov, Feodor Nikolaevich (b. 1894) studied at the Perm Grammar School and in 1912 was a student at Moscow State University Law School.”

His father, an official, “senior comptroller of the treasury, died, leaving a wife and five children. As of 1913 a member of a Bolshevik student circle at Moscow University. His brother Mikhail and sisters Nadezhda and Vera were all Bolsheviks.

“… Returning to Perm, he joined a Bolshevik group at the newspaper
Perm Life
.… After the triumph of Soviet Power he began working in the Cheka and was chairman first of the Perm Provincial Cheka and then, after June 1918, of the Ural Regional Cheka.”

——

So, in July, when the Romanovs were executed, the Ural Cheka in Ekaterinburg was under the direction of Feodor Lukoyanov.

Later in the book: “A severe
neurological
disease acquired in 1918 during his work at the Cheka made itself felt more and more. In 1932 Feodor Lukoyanov was sent to the People’s Commissariat of Supply, in 1934–37 he worked on the editorial board of
Izvestia
, then in the People’s Registry Commissariat. Died in 1947; buried in Perm.”

And here was his face in a photograph—a thin, nervous, and intelligent face.

I began to search.

Soon after, I received a letter from Kira Avdeyeva in Sverdlovsk along with an excerpt from the autobiography of Feodor Lukoyanov kept in the Sverdlovsk KGB Museum, to which I did not have access. He had written the autobiography in 1942.