The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  One of the earliest mass executions carried out by the Bolsheviks was that of the tsar, his wife, son, four daughters, doctor, cook, maid, and valet on July 17 in a basement in Ekaterinburg. The killings were ordered by Sverdlov, presumably in consultation with Lenin, and supervised in Ekaterinburg by Goloshchekin, who had visited Moscow shortly before (staying with the Sverdlovs, as usual). According to the commander of the firing squad, Mikhail Yurovsky,

  The shooting lasted for a long time, and although I had hoped that the wooden wall would prevent ricocheting, the bullets kept bouncing off of it. For a long time I was unable to stop the shooting, which had become disorderly. But when I finally managed to stop it, I saw that many of them were still alive. For example, Doctor Botkin lay on his side, leaning on his right elbow, as if he were resting. I finished him off with a shot from my revolver. Aleksei, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Olga were still alive, too. Demidova was also alive. Comrade Ermakov tried to finish them off with his bayonet, but was not able to. Only later did the reason become clear (the daughters were wearing diamond breast plates, sort of like brassieres). I had to shoot them one by one.79

  According to another executioner, “The last to fall was [Demidova], who tried to defend herself with a little pillow she had in her hands. The former heir continued to show signs of life for a very long time, even though he had been shot many times. The youngest daughter of the former tsar fell down on her back and pretended to be dead. When Comrade Ermakov noticed this, he killed her with a shot to the chest. He stood on her arms and shot her in the chest.”80

  A third member of the firing squad had run up to the attic to look out of the window. “Having come down from the attic to the place of execution, I told them that the shots and the howling of the dogs could be heard all over the city; that lights had gone on in the Mining Institute and in the house next to it; and that the shooting had to stop and the dogs, killed. After that, the shooting stopped, and three of the dogs were hanged, but the fourth, Jack, remained quiet, so he was not touched.” Goloshchekin waited outside. According to another executioner, when the body of the tsar was brought out on a blanket, he leaned over to take a look. Then “a Red Army soldier brought out Anastasia’s lapdog on his bayonet … and threw the dog’s corpse next to the tsar’s. ‘Dogs deserve a dog’s death,’ said Goloshchekin contemptuously.”81

  The White Army investigators who arrived on the scene several days later inspected the blood-stained wallpaper in the basement and found the inscription:

  Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht

  Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.

  [“Belsatzar” was, that night,

  Killed by his own knights.]

  The lines come from Heinrich Heine’s poem “Belsazar” (Belsazar ward aber in selbiger nacht / Von seinen Knechten umgebracht). The person who left the inscription dropped the aber (“but”), presumably so the lines could stand on their own, and added the “t” in “Belsazar,” perhaps to draw attention to the pun or, possibly, because German was not his native language. It is also possible that Goloshchekin, who was probably better read than the other participants, shared his friend’s love of Heine. The poem is based on the biblical story of the Babylonian king Belshazzar (Balthazar), who had offended God by drinking wine from gold and silver goblets taken from the temple in Jerusalem. A disembodied human hand put an end to the feast by writing an inscription (the original “writing on the wall”) prophesying the end of the king and his realm. Belshazzar was slain that night.82

  In his diary, Trotsky claims to have heard about the execution after the fall of Ekaterinburg:

  In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing:

  “So what about the tsar?”

  “It’s over,” he said. “He’s been shot.”

  “And the family?”

  “The family, too.”

  “All of them?” I asked, probably with a note of surprise.

  “All of them!” answered Sverdlov. “What of it?”83

  Mikhail Koltsov’s essay on the fate of the tsar begins with a reference to his essay on the fall of tsarism: “The spring flood is huge. It threatens to inundate an entire Moscow suburb. The rivers will rise mightily and carry the tired winter dirt toward the seas. Well-rested after many winters, having finally slept its fill, Russia is languidly stretching its limbs…. It was during just such a mighty and tempestuous spring that the snow melted one day in Petrograd and dissolved, without a trace, the ‘most autocratic tsars of all Russia.’” Although, as Koltsov goes on to argue, there had been nothing left to dissolve. The vanquished evil had been everywhere and nowhere. “There was a regime. And besides the regime? Nothing. Nothing at all. Zero. Just like in Gogol’s ‘The Nose’: ‘a smooth, empty place.’ It was not for nothing that the late historian M. N. Pokrovsky used to write the name ‘Romanov’ in quotation marks…. Quotation marks. Nothing in the quotation marks. An empty quote. Like a winter coat without a person inside.”

  The essay goes on to describe the late tsar as both winter dirt and nothing at all, both a cruel tyrant and a smooth, empty place. The conclusion, too, combines a victor’s glee with an ironist’s shrug:

  The Justice Minister of the Kolchak government, S. Starynkevich, sent a telegram to the allied council in Paris about the results of the investigation into the death of Nicholas and the location of his remains:

  “Eighteen versts from Ekaterinburg, some peasants uncovered a pile of ashes, which contained: a suspender buckle, four corset frames, and a finger, with regards to which doctors mentioned that the nail was very well groomed, and that it belonged to the hand of a well-bred person.”

  That’s it. All that’s left. Of Nicholas. Of the Romanovs. Of the symbol that crowned a three-hundred-year-old order of unbearable oppression in a great country.

  In this early, powerful, and ardent spring, who in Russia will remember the pile of ashes outside Ekaterinburg? Who will give another thought to Nicholas?

  No one. Who would they remember? Someone who was not even there?84

  In fact, 42 gold objects, 107 silver objects, 34 objects made of fur, and 65 other items classified as valuables were delivered to the Kremlin by Yurovsky, the commander of the execution squad. Some other property of the family was taken out of Ekaterinburg by train, in two special cars. When the Whites arrived, they found 88 items, including Alexei’s diary and cross, in the apartment of one of the guards. The guard was discovered when someone recognized his dog as Alexei’s spaniel Joy (not Jack), the dog that had not barked. Around 140 more items were found in other private apartments. Among the family things that no one had taken were sixty icons and about fifty books, mostly Christian devotional tracts. The finger found by the investigators was judged to have belonged to a middle-aged woman, and to have been cut off with a sharp blade.85

  5

  THE LAST BATTLE

  On August 30, 1918, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was assassinated. Later that day, Lenin was shot and wounded at a factory rally in Trans-Moskva. That same night, Sverdlov wrote an appeal “To all Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, and Red Army Deputies, to all the armies, to all, all, all.” The appeal, published in Pravda the next day, put the blame on the Right SRs and other “hirelings of the English and the French,” and promised that the working class would respond to the attempts on the life of its leaders “with merciless mass terror against all the enemies of the revolution.” On September 2, the Central Executive Committee adopted Sverdlov’s resolution “On the Attempt on the Life of V. I. Lenin,” which formally announced “mass red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”1

  Sverdlov looked particularly “severe” during this period. According to Novgorodtseva, “he seemed even firmer, even more determined and focused than usual.” He moved into Lenin’s office in the Kremlin and took over the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars (while remaining in charge of the Central Executive Committee and the Party secretariat). He was present at the first interrogations of t
he accused shooter, Fannie Kaplan (conducted by Yurovsky, among others). The next day, Kaplan was moved from the Cheka headquarters to a basement room beneath the Sverdlovs’ apartment in the Kremlin. The children were at the dacha in Kuntsevo at the time. On September 3, the commandant of the Kremlin, Pavel Malkov, was summoned by Sverdlov’s deputy, Varlam Avanesov, and ordered to shoot Kaplan.2

  “When?” I asked briskly.

  In Varlam Aleksandrovich’s face, usually so kind and friendly, not a muscle trembled.

  “Today. Without delay.”

  Then, after a minute’s silence:

  “And where, do you think?”

  I pondered for a moment and said:

  “Perhaps in the courtyard of the Mechanized Detachment, in the blind alley.”

  “Good.”

  “Where do we bury her?”

  Avanesov looked thoughtful.

  “We hadn’t considered that. We must ask Yakov Mikhailovich.”

  The two men walked over to Sverdlov’s office, where Avanesov repeated Malkov’s question.

  Yakov Mikhailovich looked at Avanesov, then at me. He slowly rose and, resting his hands heavily on the desk as if crushing something beneath them, leaned forward a bit and said, firmly and distinctly:

  “We are not going to bury Kaplan. The remains are to be destroyed without a trace.”

  Malkov went back to his office to fetch several “Latvian communists.”

  I ordered the commander of the Mechanized Detachment to roll out several trucks and start the engines and to park a car in the alley facing the gate. After placing two Latvians at the gate and ordering them not to let anybody in, I went to get Kaplan. Several minutes later I led her into the courtyard of the Mechanized Detachment.

  … “[Walk over] to the car!” I ordered curtly, pointing toward the car parked in the alley.

  Her shoulders twitching, Fannie Kaplan took one step, then another I raised my revolver.3

  ■ ■ ■

  The killing of Fannie Kaplan, announced in the newspapers as an execution carried out “by Cheka decree,” formally launched the Red Terror against the “bourgeoisie and its agents.” As Malkov claims to have thought on his way out of Avanesov’s office, “the Red Terror is not an empty word, not just a threat. There’ll be no mercy for the enemies of the Revolution!” The main forms of “social defense” were mass executions, mostly of random hostages. The main selection criterion was class belonging, manifested (or not) in antigovernment actions and opinions. The main markers of class belonging were in the eye of the beheader: Bukharin had listed nine categories of external enemies, including the “intelligentsia in general,” and one open-ended category of proletarians who required “coercive discipline” to the degree that they lacked “coercive self-discipline” (“the less voluntary inner discipline there is, the greater the coercion”).4

  There were no people in Russia who considered themselves to be “the bourgeoisie and its agents” and no armies or individuals who considered such a cause worth fighting for, but there was one group that combined a sense of social superiority with distinctive myths, uniforms, and institutions to allow for some coincidence of identification and self-identification: the Cossacks. The Cossacks were, traditionally, a self-governing estate of peasant warriors, who worked the land in the imperial borderlands and served in territorially raised cavalry units employed in frontier defense and regular war duty, as well as, during the last years of the empire, the suppression of internal unrest. At the time of the revolution, the Cossacks were divided into “hosts” that comprised nobles, priests, merchants, and rank-and-file Cossacks, some of whom had little or no land, had seen much service at the front, and were open to the message of millenarian egalitarianism. Most of the Bolsheviks, however, associated the Cossacks with pogroms and violent dispersals of anti-tsarist demonstrations and counted them among the plants that God had not planted. Stalin’s 1919 formula seems to have been as reflective of Bolshevik fears and expectations as it was of their experiences: “Who else could become the bastion of the Denikin–Kolchak counterrevolution if not the Cossacks—that centuries-old tool of Russian imperialism, which enjoys special privileges, is organized into a martial estate, and has long exploited the non-Russian peoples of the borderlands?”5

  The Bolshevik campaign against the Don Cossacks was the greatest single test of the Party’s commitment to apocalyptic violence, the most radical application of Marxist class analysis to a named social group, and the most serious challenge to the categorical distinction between class and nation. The fate of the revolution, rhetorically and militarily, seemed to hang in the balance.

  The Cossacks themselves were not sure. One of the first anti-Bolshevik uprisings, organized by the Don Cossack government of General Kaledin, failed for lack of popular support. As one of the founders of the White Volunteer Army, General M. Alekseev, wrote on January 27, 1918, “the Cossack regiments returning from the front are in a state of utter moral collapse. The ideas of Bolshevism enjoy wide popularity among the Cossack masses. They do not even want to fight to defend their own territory and property. They are absolutely convinced that Bolshevism is directed exclusively against the wealthy classes, the bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, and not against their region.”6 Two days earlier, the leader of the pro-Soviet frontline Cossacks, Lieutenant-Colonel Filipp Mironov, had written an appeal titled “Down with the Civil War on the Banks of the Don”:

  Socialism believes that only because of private property are there people who have large fortunes. That is why socialism, in order to put an end to such things, demands the abolition of private property….

  Citizen Cossacks! We are all socialists, except that we don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it out of obstinacy. Did not Christ, whose teaching we profess, think about the happiness of mankind? Was it not for the sake of this happiness that he died on the cross? …

  Socialists, like Christian believers, are divided into many schools and parties.… But remember one thing: the ultimate goal of all these parties is the remaking of society in accordance with the principles of socialism.

  It is toward this goal that various parties are taking different roads.

  For example. The Party of Popular Socialists says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 50 years have passed.

  The Party of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 35 years have passed.

  The Party of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 20 years have passed.

  The Party of the Social-Democrats-Mensheviks says: we will have given the people land and freedom and rights before 10 years have passed.

  But the Party of the Social-Democrats-Bolsheviks says: You can go to hell with your promises. The people should get the land, the freedom, the rights, and the power right now, not in 10, 20, 35 or 50 years!

  Everything to the working people, everything at once!7

  After several months of socialism, the Cossacks rebelled again. This time (in the spring and summer of 1918), the Cossack elite was more unified, outside help (from the advancing Germans) more effective, and forcible mass mobilization, more successful. The battle-cry of General Krasnov’s anti-Bolshevik “All-Great Don Host” was “the Don for the Don Cossacks.” Don peasants who were not Cossacks were equated with the “Bolsheviks,” and Don Cossacks who were pro-Bolshevik (about one-fifth of all Cossacks under arms) were considered non-Cossacks. Mass searches, executions, and expulsions were conducted accordingly. “Terror” came in more than one color.8

  Most participants in the Russian Civil War viewed political choices as expressions of social interests, identified social interests with “class” belonging, consigned alien classes to history’s trash heap, and saw local conflicts as fronts of a single war. The Bolsheviks emerged victorious because their sociology was all-encompassing, their apocalypse inescapable, their leader infallibl
e, their “address” unquestioned, their “record-keeping” unmatched, and their commitment to violence by numbers, absolute. Presiding over both the records and the violence was the man around whom “the intricate mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat constantly rotated.”

  On November 26, 1918, Sverdlov sent out a Central Committee circular letter to all the Party members: “Today, the Red Terror on the Southern Front is more necessary than it has ever been anywhere or anyplace—not only against direct traitors and saboteurs, but also against all cowards, self-seekers, aiders, and abetters. Not a single crime against the revolutionary military spirit and discipline will remain unpunished.” The improvement in Red Army discipline coincided with the withdrawal of the German troops and the collapse of the All-Great Don Host. As entire Cossack units were surrendering, Sverdlov wrote to the head of the political department of the Southern Front, Iosif Khodorovsky, that the release of prisoners was “absolutely impermissible.” “Organize concentration camps immediately. Make use of any mines or pits for the prisoners to work in, in their capacity as such.” The next task was to dispose of the rest of the Cossack population. On January 24, 1919, Sverdlov’s Orgburo issued a secret circular on how to proceed.9

  Considering the experience of the civil war against the Cossacks we must recognize that the only correct strategy is a merciless struggle against the whole Cossack elite by means of their total extermination. No compromises, no halfway measures are permissible. Therefore it is necessary:

  1. To conduct mass terror against the rich Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror toward all the Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power. With regard to the middle Cossacks, measures must be taken that would preclude any further attempts on their part to rise against Soviet power.10