The Last Tsar (54 page)

Sverdlov and Zinoviev—those two in Moscow were the mighty support of the Ural Bolsheviks, who dreamed of reprisal against the
Romanovs. That was the purpose of Goloshchekin’s main meeting in Moscow, his meeting with Lenin.

Might this meeting not have taken place? Might Goloshchekin—a member of the Central Committee, the leader of the dying Urals, where according to Lenin the destiny of all Bolshevik power, the matter of the tsar and his family, was being decided—not have been received by Lenin? The fact that Lenin’s journal does not indicate such a meeting may only prove his understandable disinclination to have it known.

Goloshchekin had to resolve two issues concerning the tsar and his family at this meeting, the first being to agree upon what to do with the tsar should Ekaterinburg fall. Here there was no hesitation, especially since they could show the world indisputable evidence of a monarchist plot, which Goloshchekin had brought. The other issue was to agree upon the family.

From a letter of Leopold Shmidt in Vladivostok:

“Bonch-Bruevich once recalled the words of the young Lenin, who was reveling in the successful reply of the revolutionary Nechaev, the hero of Dostoevsky’s
Devils
. To the question Who of the ruling house must be destroyed? Nechaev gave a precise answer: The whole litany.’ ‘Yes, the entire house of Romanovs, after all, it’s so simple, it’s ingenious!’ Lenin was thrilled.”

A murdered emperor might cast a shadow of martyrdom on his children. Alexei and his sisters could also become a “living banner.”

This must have occurred to the man who had once appreciated Nechaev’s answer.

By sentencing himself to death, Nicholas sentenced his entire family to death as well.

Evidently the fate of Ella and all the Alapaevsk prisoners was decided
at one and the same time
.

Naturally they agreed upon the ticklish question of how to announce the execution. Evidently they decided then that the official announcement must refer only to Nicholas. Thus this horrible formula was born: “the family has been evacuated to a safe place.” The caustic Zinoviev may well have been its author.

Yes, the family’s death had to remain a secret for the time being, but an open secret. Trotsky was right: Lenin knew that the danger of
reprisals for the bloody deed must close the ranks in these terrible times for the revolution.

Also, anticipating a possible collapse, the government naturally wished to keep its distance from the execution. The decision to execute had to come from the Ekaterinburg Soviet. This was very handy: the Uralites who executed the tsar were left with only two options—victory over the Whites or death. This must have served to close the ranks of the doomed town’s defenders.

Unlike the bloody romantics Trotsky and Zinoviev, Lenin was a pragmatist. The execution of the tsar and his family was to be carried out in one instance only: if Ekaterinburg fell. Otherwise they must remain as before—a card in the future game with the great powers.

It was at the fateful meeting in Moscow that the mechanism must have been devised: the signal to initiate the family’s execution could not come from the savage Ural revolutionaries. It had to come from outside Ekaterinburg. But who on the outside? That we shall learn later.

Such was to be the outcome of the meeting between Lenin and Goloshchekin. Lenin could not have helped but feel how extraordinary it was.

July is a bad month for revolutionaries. In France, Robespierre was executed in July; in Russia, five eminent Decembrists, who had revolted against Nicholas I, were hanged in July. And now in July the hour of vengeance had come. Vengeance against the son and grandson of the man who had once killed Lenin’s brother. The revolutionaries’ age-old hunt for Russian tsars was drawing to a close.

The discussion of the tsar’s fate must have evoked some associations. During that period, when all around him was collapsing, Lenin suddenly developed an interest in implementing the decree “on the removal of monuments honoring the tsars and their servants.” (On July 9 he posed this question insistently at the Soviet of People’s Commissars.)

Lenin fought with surprising enthusiasm against the stone images of the Romanovs.

From the memoirs of Kremlin Commandant P. Malkov:

“ ‘They still haven’t removed this monstrosity’—Lenin pointed to a monument erected on the spot of the murder of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.… Ilich [Lenin] deftly fashioned a noose and hurled it over the monument. We got down to business and very soon after, the monument was ensnared in ropes from all sides. Lenin, Sverdlov, Avanesov … and other members of the government
… harnessed themselves to the ropes, bore down, pulled, and the monument crashed to the cobblestones.”

After Lenin’s death the tradition continued. While destroying one of the Kremlin’s cathedrals, the Bolsheviks would open the sarcophagi and strip them of the remains of the shrouded Muscovite tsaritsas, which they would dump onto a cart. And a horse would drag them across the Kremlin’s ancient St. John’s Square. On one cart were the mother and wife of Ivan the Terrible, the wives of the first Romanovs, the mother of Peter the Great—which would be dropped into the cellar of the Palace of Justice through a hole in the boards.

Seventy years later people in Russia would be tumbling monuments to Lenin from their pedestals—history the joker!

But let us return to 1918. In Moscow an agonizing July week was drawing to a close. Goloshchekin was on his way to Ekaterinburg; Lenin to Kuntsevo in the country, where he spent his free days with his wife and sister. And relaxed.

In Ekaterinburg, in anticipation of Goloshchekin’s return, preparations for the end were already under way.

On July 4, Commandant Alexander Avdeyev was replaced by Chekist Yakov Yurovsky. Simultaneously the entire guard inside the house was replaced; the outer guard, however, made up of the Zlokazov workers brought in by Avdeyev, remained.

Also remaining was the husband of Avdeyev’s sister—the driver of the house automobile—Sergei Lyukhanov.

Inside the house, unfamiliar, taciturn young blond men appeared: the Cheka’s new Latvians, who occupied the entire downstairs.

Nicholas felt it immediately: the “dark man” had come. Now it would be soon.

Yurovsky had entered the Ipatiev house in the guise of a deliverer. First he had been a doctor. Now he was a battler against dishonest thievery.

He informed Nicholas of the many robberies by the former
guard. Silver spoons, which had been found buried in the garden, were returned to the family triumphantly.

At the same time, however, all the family’s property was recorded—for purposes of learning the extent of the robberies, naturally. This record began with the jewels.

The Romanovs were under arrest, and of course they were not allowed to wear jewels, such being the lot of all prisoners, explained Yurovsky. For now they must not. The experienced Chekist cleverly weighed this “for now” in his conversation.
For now
. Until the denouement. Until their fate was decided.

That was what Nicholas understood, although he did not believe him, of course.

This secretive and at the same time very trusting man. He did not know the slogan of the great revolutions: Rob the robbed. It seemed to him that for the first time an understanding had arisen between him and this altogether incomprehensible power. The town would fall, and they had decided to take his life, but in doing so, naturally, they must surrender to the family that which belonged to it, intact and preserved. The jewels—that was all they had. It was unclear where they would have to live afterward. Or how. He was the father of the family, and he was obliged to consider their future. He was happy with this unspoken gentlemen’s agreement.

Nicholas’s diary:

“21 June [4 July]. Today there was a change of commandant. During dinner Beloborodov and others came and announced that instead of Avdeyev they were appointing the man we took for a doctor, Yurovsky. In the afternoon before tea he and his assistant compiled a list of gold things: ours and the children’s. The greater part [rings, bracelets] they took with them. They explained that there had been an unpleasant story in our house.… Am sorry for Avdeyev, but he is to blame for not keeping his own people from robbing from the trunks in the shed.”

Yurovsky appreciated Nicholas’s trust. He did not even begin to conduct a search, so as not to undermine this faith. Although, why did he need to search them now, when he could do it after?

Alix did not trust the new commandant. She did not trust a single word he said. She was happy that she had prudently concealed everything most valuable.

Alix’s diary:

“June 21 (July 4). Thursday. Avdeiev is being changed a[nd] we
get new commandant (who came once to look at Baby’s leg …) with a young help who seems decent where as the others vulgar a[nd] unpleasant. All our guards inside left.… Then made us show all our jewels and the young one [the assistant] wrote them all down in detail and then they were taken from us (where to, for how long? why? don’t know) Only left me two bracelets I can’t take off.”

The commandant’s “young help,” who “seems decent” to Alix was indeed a most pleasant young man. Clear-eyed, with a clean side-buttoned shirt and a name soothing to the tsaritsa’s ears—Grigory. This was Nikulin, who in just a few days would shoot her son.

From Nikulin’s autobiography (kept in the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow):

“My father was a bricklayer, a stove-fitter, and my mother was a housewife. His education was the lowest, he completed two grades.

“Starting in 1909 I worked as a bricklayer and then at a dynamite factory (this was during the war, to get excused from military service). Ever since the factory closed in March 1918, I have worked in the Ural Regional Cheka.”

Yurovsky noticed him immediately. Nikulin did not drink, a rarity among former workers who joined the Cheka. Most important, he knew how to inspire confidence immediately. Yurovsky appreciated all this and tenderly called him “my son.” When Yurovsky became commandant, he took Grigory Nikulin for his assistant.

Alix’s diary:

“June 22 (July 5). The command[ant] came with our jewels before us.… Left them on our table a[nd] will come every day to see we have not opened the packet.”

As before, Nicholas believed in the new commandant.

Nicholas’s diary:

“23 June [6 July]. Saturday. Yesterday Commandant Yu[rovsky] brought a small box with all our stolen jewels, asked us to verify the contents, and sealed it in our presence, leaving it with us for safekeeping.… Yu. and his helper are starting to understand what type of people surrounded and guarded us, robbing us….

“25 June [8 July]. Monday. Our life has not changed a bit under Yu. He comes into the bedroom to check that the seal on the box is intact and looks out the open window.… Inside the house new Latvians are standing guard, outside it is the same—some soldiers, some workers. Rumor has it that several of Avdeyev’s men are already under arrest. The door to the shed with our baggage has been sealed—if only they had done that a month ago. Last night a storm and now even cooler.”

——

A stormy summer. He noted the storms in his diary. Lightning in the sky—and water on the land. A lot of water.

For that reason the forest roads had largely washed out and it would be hard for the truck to drive down those roads with its corpses.

Meanwhile, the house was already being readied for the final event. He paid no attention, but she took note.

“June 25 (July 8). Lunch only at 1.30 because they were repairing the electricity in our rooms.”

The jewelry had been listed and the electricity fixed.

The next day, July 9, Dr. Botkin began writing his final letter….

After the execution, Yurovsky collected in Dr. Botkin’s room the papers of the last Russian court physician.

I am looking them over: “1913 Calendar for Doctors,” “notice from main headquarters on the death of [his son Dmitry] in battle, December 1914.”

And here is his letter, which he wrote to a classmate who had graduated with him long before, in 1889. He began writing it on July 3 and evidently continued to work on it throughout the following days. Then he copied out this very long letter in his minuscule handwriting. He was copying it out on the last day when someone interrupted him in the middle of a word:

“My dear, good friend Sasha. I am making a last attempt at writing a real letter—at least
from here
—although that qualification, I believe, is utterly superfluous. I do not think that I was fated at any time to write anyone from anywhere. My voluntary confinement here is restricted less by time than by my earthly existence. In essence I am dead—dead for my children, for my work.… I am dead but not yet buried, or buried alive—whichever: the consequences are nearly identical.… My children may hold out hope that we will see each other again in this life.… but I personally do not indulge in that hope.… and I look the unadulterated reality right in the eye.… I will clarify for you with small episodes
illustrating my condition. The day before yesterday, as I was calmly reading Saltykov-Shchedrin, whom I was greatly enjoying, I suddenly saw a reduced vision of my son Yury’s face, but dead, in a horizontal position, his eyes closed. Yesterday, at the same reading, I suddenly heard a word that sounded like
papulya
[papa dear]. I nearly burst into sobs. Again—this is not a hallucination because the word was pronounced, the voice was similar, and I did not doubt for an instant that my daughter, who was supposed to be in Tobolsk, was talking to me.… I will probably never hear that voice so dear or feel that touch so dear with which my little children so spoiled me….