The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  * Krasnaia niva, No. 27 (1928), 17. Avdeev in KN, No. 5 (1928), 190, confirms that Iakovlev carried a mandate from Lenin. According to I. Koganitskii (PR, No. 4, 1922, 13) Iakovlev had orders to bring Nicholas to Moscow, which suspicious local Bolsheviks authenticated by communicating with the capital.

  †For purposes of security, the communications between Iakovlev and the Kremlin referred to the ex-Tsar and his family as “merchandise.” The official in Moscow told Iakovlev to “bring only the main part of the baggage”: Iakovlev in Ural, No. 7 (1988), 160.

  *In October 1918, Iakovlev defected to the Whites and gave an interview to the newspaper Ural’skaia zhizn’; it is reprinted in the monarchist journal RL, No. 1 (1921), 150–53.

  *Nicholas’s diaries for 1918 are in KA, No. 1/26 (1928), 110-37.

  *According to a recent account by a historian with access to the archives, Iakovlev talked with Sverdlov, who then communicated with Ekaterinburg, requesting “guarantees,” presumably of the safety of the Imperial family. Ekaterinburg is said to have given these guarantees on condition that it be allowed to take charge of the prisoners: Ioffe in Sovetskaia Rossiia, No. 161/9,412 (July 12, 1987), 4.

  *A. P. Nenarokov, Vostochnyi front, 1918 (Moscow, 1969), 54, 72, 101. After defecting to the Whites later that year, Iakovlev was arrested by Czech counterintelligence. He fled to China, returned to the Soviet Union, and was arrested. After spending some time in a concentration camp at the Solovetskii Monastery, he was freed, and appointed commandant of an NKVD camp. Sometime later he was rearrested and executed. I owe this information to the Soviet writer, Mr. Vladimir Kashits.

  *Bykov, Poslednie dni, 121. Miasnikov later became one of the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition, for which he was expelled from the party in 1921 and arrested in 1923. In 1924 or 1925 he turned up in Paris, where he peddled a manuscript describing Michael’s murder. He is said to have published it in Moscow in 1924 (Za svobodu!, April 1925).

  †E.g., NVCh, No. 91 (June 17, 1918), 1. A month later the Press Bureau of the Sovnarkom issued a communiqué that Michael had fled to Omsk and was probably in London: NV, No. 124/148 (July 23, 1918), 3.

  ‡P. B.[ulygin] in Segodnia (Riga), No. 174 (July 1, 1928), 2–3. Only on June 28 did the Soviet authorities confirm that Nicholas and his family were safe, having allegedly received a wire from Ekaterinburg from the commander in chief of the Northern Urals front, that he had inspected the Ipatev house on June 21 and found its residents alive: NV, No. 104/128 (June 29, 1918), 3. Cf. M. K. Diterikhs, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i i chlenov doma Romanovykh na Urale, I (Vladivostok, 1922), 46–48. The delay of one week in reporting this information is inexplicable except in the context of deliberate dissimulation.

  *“The friends sleep no longer and hope that the hour so long awaited has arrived. The revolt of the Czechoslovaks menaces the Bolsheviks ever more seriously. Samara, Cheliabinsk and all of eastern and western Siberia are under the control of the national provisional government. The army of the Slavic friends is eighty kilometers from Ekaterinburg, the soldiers of the Red Army are not resisting effectively. Be attentive to all outside movement, wait and be of good hope. But at the same time, I implore you, be prudent because the Bolsheviks, prior to being defeated, represent for you a real and serious danger. Be ready at all hours, day and night. Make a sketch of your two rooms, the places, the furniture, the beds. Write clearly the hour when all of you go to bed. One of you ought not to sleep between 2 and 3 every night from now on. Answer in a few words, but give, I beg you, all the useful information for your friends outside. Give your reply to the same soldier who transmits to you this note in writing but say not one word.

  One who is prepared to die for you

  An officer of the Russian army.”

  *“from the corner up to the balcony. 5 windows face the street, 2 the square. All the windows are closed, sealed and painted white. The little one is still sick and in bed, and cannot walk at all—every concussion causes him pain. A week ago, because of the anarchists, thought was given to having us moved to Moscow at night. One must risk nothing without being absolutely sure of the result. We are almost all the time under careful observation.”

  The four letters smuggled to the Imperial family in late June and early July 1918, with their replies, were first published in Russian in the Moscow daily

  Vechernye Izvestiia

  , No. 208 (April 2, 1919), 1–2, and No. 209 (April 3, 1919), 1–2. In November 1919, the Communist historian Michael Pokrovskii provided photographic copies of the originals to Isaac Don Levine, who published them in English translation in the Chicago

  Daily News

  , December 18, 1919, and again in his autobiography,

  Eyewitness to History

  (New York, 1973), 138–41. Levine adopted the dating and sequence suggested to him by Soviet archivists, which, as can be established from internal evidence, cannot be correct. Letter #2 in his version should be Letter #3, and vice versa; Letter #4, which he dates June 26, had to have been written after July 4. Mrs. Levine kindly allowed me to make copies of her late husband’s materials, and the correspondence appears here in the original French for the first time.

  *It has been recently revealed that this and the subsequent letters from alleged monarchist rescuers were drafted by one P. Voikov, a member of the Ural Ispolkom and a graduate of Geneva University, and copied by another Bolshevik with neater handwriting: E. Radzinskii in Ogonëk, No. 2 (1990), 27.

  *“We do not want to and cannot FLEE. We can only be abducted by force, as it was force that carried us from Tobolsk. Thus, do not count on any active assistance from us. The commandant has many assistants, they are frequently changed and have become anxious. They attentively guard our prison as well as our lives, and are good to us. We do not want them to suffer because of us, nor you for us. Above all, for God’s sake, avoid spilling blood. Obtain information about them yourselves. It is utterly impossible to descend from the window without a ladder. Even after the descent there still exists great danger because of the open window from the room of the commandants and the machine gun on the lower floor which one enters from the inside court. [Crossed out: “Therefore give up the idea of abducting us.”] If you are watching over us, you can always come to save us in case of imminent and real danger. We are completely ignorant of what goes on outside, receiving neither newspapers nor letters. After permission has been given to open the window, the surveillance has intensified and it is prohibited even to put one’s head out of the window, at the risk of getting a bullet in the face.”

  *The Ekaterinburg massacre, once the details became known from the investigations of commissions set up by Admiral Kolchak, led to a revolting outpouring of anti-Semitic literature by some Russian publicists and historians, which found repercussions in the West. Much of this literature blamed the Ekaterinburg massacre on Jews and interpreted it as part of a worldwide “Jewish conspiracy.” In the account of the Englishman Robert Wilton, a London Times correspondent, and even more in that of his Russian friend, General Diterikhs, the Judeophobia assumed pathological dimensions. Probably nothing that happened at the time contributed more to the spread of anti-Semitism and the popularization of the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So determined were these writers to blame the tragedy on Jews, they conveniently forgot that the death sentence was passed by the Russian Lenin.

  *Sokolov, Ubiistvo, Photograph No. 129, between pp. 248 and 249. A. M. Moshkin, Avdeev’s assistant, was arrested on charges of stealing from the Imperial family.

  *According to Alexandra’s diary, on July 6 Iurovskii returned to Nicholas a stolen watch.

  †Sokolov found on a wall in Ipatev’s house an inscription in Hungarian: “Verhás András 1918 VII/15e—Örsegen” (Andras Verhas July 15, 1918—Guard). Houghton Archive, Harvard University, Sokolov File, Box 3.

  ‡in memoirs written in 1920 but published only in 1989, Iurovskii said that the coded order for the “extermination” (istreblenie) of the Romanovs was received on Jul
y 16 from Perm. Perm was the provincial capital used by Moscow as a communications center for the Urals region. According to him, the final execution order was signed by Goloshchekin at 6 p.m. the same day. Ogonëk, No. 21 (1989), 30.

  *A carbon copy of the Sokolov Commission’s inquiry, in seven typewritten folders, is on deposit at Harvard’s Houghton Library: it originally belonged to Robert Wilton, the Russian correspondent of The Times of London who accompanied Sokolov. The fate of the manuscripts, of which there were three, is discussed by Ross in Gibel’, 13–17. There is some additional evidence on the Ekaterinburg events in Diterikhs, Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i.

  *Some accounts state that the Imperial family was told they would be taken to a safe place away from Ipatev’s house, but this version is contradicted by the fact that they left their rooms without any of the items they would have been likely to take with them, including an ikon from which Alexandra never separated when traveling: Diterikhs, Ubiistvo, I, 25.

  *It could have been Nicholas’s, however: on July 4, Alexandra, referring to Iurovskii’s demand that they turn over to him all jewelry, noted that her husband’s engagement ring would not come off.

  *K. von Bothmer, Mit Graf Mirbach in Moskau (Tübingen, 1922), 104. A German scholar, defending the behavior of his country, cites the statement of Alexandra as recorded by the Tsare-vich’s tutor, Gilliard, that she would rather “die a violent death in Russia than be saved by the Germans”: Jagow in BM, No. 5 (1935), 371. This may be true, but, of course, the German Government had no way of knowing at the time that she felt this way.

  *Bruce Lockhart claims that Karakhan had told him already in the evening of July 17 that the entire Imperial family had perished: Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1935), 303–4. One wonders why it did not occur to anyone to ask in whose “hands” were Nicholas’s four daughters.

  *The text of this document has become available in the West under rather suspicious circumstances. In the spring of 1956 there appeared at the editorial offices of the West German mass-circulation weekly 7 Tage an individual who identified himself as Hans Meier. He claimed to have been directly involved, as an Austrian POW, in the Ekaterinburg decision in 1918 to execute the Imperial family, and produced documents bearing on the matter which he said he had concealed for eighteen years while living in eastern Germany. His version of the events was full of fantastic details: its main purpose seems to have been to remove any doubt that Anastasia, stories of whose alleged survival began to circulate once again in the West, had perished along with the rest of the family. Meier’s documents seem partly authentic, partly fabricated: the most probable explanation is that he acted on behalf of the Soviet security police. His account is in 7 Tage, Nos. 27–35 (July 14-August 25, 1956). The above draft announcement, which appears authentic, was reproduced in 7 Tage on August 25, 1956. On Meier’s “evidence,” see P. Paganutstsi in Vremia i my, No. 92 (1986), 220–21. The author states that a German court which inspected Meier’s documents in connection with a suit brought by the so-called Anastasia declared them a forgery.

  *Bykov, Poslednie dni, 126. It is said that the first admission of the death of the family was made in P. Iurenev’s “Novye materialy o rasstrele Romanovykh,” Krasnaia gazeta, December 28, 1925 (Smirnoff, Autour, 25).

  † Leninskaia Gvardiia Urala (Sverdlovsk, 1967), 509–14. An English officer, interested in the fate of the Imperial family, visited him in Ekaterinburg in 1919: Francis McCullagh in Nineteenth Century and After, No. 123 (September 1920), 377–427. Iurovskii kept a journal while commandant of Ipatev’s house: it remains unpublished except for brief fragments in Riabov’s article in Rodina, No. 4 (April 1989), 90–91.

  ‡The Ekaterinburg tragedy had a bizarre sequel. In September 1919, the Executive Committee of the Perm Soviet tried twenty-eight persons for the murder of the late Tsar, his family, and retainers. Although none is known to have had any connection with the event, the Left SR M. Iakhontov “confessed” to having ordered and personally participated in the murder of the Imperial family. He and four other defendants were sentenced to death for the alleged crime. The background and purpose of this mock trial cannot be determined: Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (London, 1920) 102–3, citing Rossiia (Paris), No. 1, December 17, 1919, with reference to Pravda; see also New York Times, December 7, 1919, p. 20.

  18

  The Red Terror

  Terror is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened people to reassure themselves.

  —F. Engels to K. Marx1

  Systematic state terror is hardly a Bolshevik invention: its antecedents go back to the Jacobins. Even so, the differences between Jacobin and Bolshevik practices in this respect are so profound that one can credit the Bolsheviks with having invented terror. Suffice it to say that the French Revolution culminated in terror, whereas the Russian one began with it. The former has been called a “brief parenthesis,” a “countercurrent”:2 the Red Terror constituted from the outset an essential element of the regime, which now intensified, now abated, but never disappeared, hanging like a permanent dark cloud over Soviet Russia.

  As in the case of War Communism, the Civil War, and other unsavory aspects of Bolshevism, Bolshevik spokesmen and apologists like to place the blame for terror on their opponents. It is said to have been a regrettable, but unavoidable reaction to the counterrevolution: in other words, a practice they would have shunned if given the chance. Typical is the verdict of Lenin’s friend Angelica Balabanoff:

  Unfortunate though it might be, the terror and repression which had been inaugurated by the Bolsheviks had been forced upon them by foreign intervention and by Russian reactionaries determined to defend their privileges and reestablish the old regime.

  3

  Such apologias can be dismissed on several grounds.

  If terror had indeed been “forced” on the Bolsheviks by “foreign interventionists” and “Russian reactionaries,” then they would have abandoned it as soon as they had decisively defeated these enemies—that is, in 1920. They did nothing of the kind. Although with the termination of the Civil War they did put an end to the indiscriminate massacres of 1918–19, they made certain to leave intact the laws and institutions which had made them possible. Once Stalin became undisputed master of Soviet Russia all the instruments which he required to resume the terror on an incomparably vaster scale lay at hand. This fact alone demonstrates that for the Bolsheviks terror was not a defensive weapon but an instrument of governance.

  This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the principal institution of Bolshevik terror, the Cheka, was founded in early December 1917, before any organized opposition to the Bolsheviks had had a chance to emerge and when the “foreign interventionists” were still assiduously courting them. We have it on the authority of one of the most sadistic functionaries of the Cheka, the Latvian la. Kh. Peters, that in the first half of 1918, when the Cheka began to experiment with terror, “counterrevolutionary organizations … as such were not observed.”*

  The evidence shows that Lenin, its most determined instigator, regarded terror as an indispensable instrument of revolutionary government. He was quite prepared to resort to it preventively—that is, in the absence of active opposition to his rule. His commitment to it was rooted in a deep-seated belief in the Rightness of his cause and in an inability to perceive politics in hues other than pure white and pure black. It was essentially the same outlook that had driven Robespierre, to whom Trotsky had compared Lenin as early as 1904.4 Like the French Jacobin, Lenin sought to build a world inhabited exclusively by “good citizens.” This objective led him, like Robespierre, morally to justify the physical elimination of “bad” citizens.

  From the time he formed the Bolshevik organization, for which he was proud to claim the title “Jacobin,” Lenin spoke of the need for revolutionary terror. In a 1908 essay, “Lessons of the Commune,” he made revealing observations on this subject. Having listed the achievements and failures of this first “proletarian re
volution,” he indicated its cardinal weakness: the proletariat’s “excessive generosity—it should have exterminated its enemies,” instead of trying “to exert moral influence on them.”5 This remark must be one of the earliest instances in political literature in which the term “extermination,” normally used for vermin, is applied to human beings. As we have seen, Lenin habitually described those whom he chose to designate as his regime’s “class enemies” in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of pest control, calling kulaks “bloodsuckers,” “spiders,” and “leeches.” As early as January 1918 he used inflammatory language to incite the population to carry out pogroms:

  The communes, small cells in the village and city, must themselves work out and test thousands of forms and methods of practical accounting and control over the rich, swindlers, and parasites. Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, of success and the attainment of the single objective: the

  cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, bedbugs—the rich

  , and so on.

  6

  Hitler would follow this example in regard to the leaders of German Social Democracy, whom he thought of as mainly Jews, calling them in Mein Kampf “Ungeziefer,” or “vermin,” fit only for extermination.7

  Nothing illustrates better how deeply the passion for terror was embedded in Lenin’s psyche than an incident which occurred on his first day as head of state. As the Bolsheviks were taking power, Kamenev asked the Second Congress of Soviets to abolish the death penalty for front-line deserters, which Kerensky had reintroduced in mid-1917. The congress adopted this proposal and abolished capital punishment at the front.8 Lenin, busy elsewhere, missed this event. According to Trotsky, when he learned of it, he became “utterly indignant.” “Nonsense,” he said,

  how can you make a revolution without executions? Do you expect to dispose of your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there? Prisons? Who attaches significance to that during a civil war, when each side hopes to win? … It is a mistake, he repeated, impermissible weakness, pacifist illusion, and so on.