Another group of ‘terrorists’ took Dzerzhinsky hostage – so much for the sword and shield’s own security arrangements – and locked him up in the SRs’ headquarters in the palatial Morozov Mansion, along with other Bolshevik officials like the President of the Moscow Soviet, Pyotr Smidovich. A third detachment took over Moscow’s Central Post Office and sent two cables to telegraph offices, provincial Bolshevik headquarters and government agencies throughout the country. One reported the assassination of Mirbach; another said there had been a government takeover and ordered them to stop all telegrams signed by Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov.
The Bolsheviks had few reliable troops or Red Guards in Moscow at the time and Lenin knew that General Mikhail Muravyov, a former Tsarist officer turned Bolshevik, commander of the Red forces in Ukraine, had changed sides again and joined the SRs.
The Spiridonova coup might have succeeded if the Lefts really wanted power, or if they had allied with the Mensheviks and joined forces with the Right SRs. But ‘we were never really serious, we wanted to make a show more than make a real revolution. We never really wanted to bring down the government,’ Steinberg, one of the leaders of the revolt, said later. It was ‘less a coup d’état and more a coup de théâtre’, said another.
Trotsky was put in charge of suppressing the uprising. He co-opted a corps of 700 Latvian troops to storm Spiridonova’s headquarters, retake the Post Office and free the prisoners. Sporadic fighting went on for a few hours. In the Kremlin at around midnight Lenin was seriously worried and ‘the atmosphere was like the front in a theatre of war’, said the commander of the defending troops, General Jukums Vatsetis. He kept being asked by Lenin, ‘Comrade, can we hold out till morning?’
But by 9 a.m. ‘the crisis was over’, Trotsky reported. The leading SRs gave themselves up and were arrested. Around 200 were executed in the next weeks and 600 jailed. Muravyov either committed suicide or was shot trying to escape after he was arrested – depending on which version of his death, SR or Bolshevik, you believe. Spiridonova was treated comparatively leniently, considering how ruthlessly the Soviets usually dealt with their enemies. She was jailed for a year, was freed, but then sent to a psychiatric hospital. She was released in early 1921 on condition that she never took any part in politics again. She kept to the bargain.*4, 5
*1 The word kulak means, literally, ‘fist’ and refers to ‘tight-fisted’ people. So it was an easy transfer to suggest ‘profiteers’ and exploiters.
*2 Vyacheslav Molotov, for years a loyal lickspittle of both Lenin and Stalin, had no hesitation in saying towards the end of his life (in the 1970s) that both leaders were ‘hard men…harsh and stern. But without a doubt Lenin was harsher.’
*3 All kinds of conspiracy theories surfaced at the time and for many years later that Lenin orchestrated the Mirbach murder. The ambassador was sending reports back to Berlin, which Soviet spies knew about, saying that the Bolsheviks would not last long and the Revolution had already proved a failure: ‘Lenin is finished,’ he wrote in a letter to the Kaiser in mid-June. The conspiracy version was given credence by the fact that later the assassin, Blumkin, remained in the Cheka, was given membership of the Communist Party and rose in its ranks. However, it is hard to see how Lenin could have gained from killing the ambassador. The Germans might have been enraged enough to invade Russia again and at this point it was not at all certain that they wouldn’t win the war in the West. Why deliberately antagonise them? No evidence has surfaced in nearly a hundred years that has established Lenin had anything to do with the murder, and plenty to suggest it made life more difficult.
*4 She couldn’t survive Stalin’s Great Purge though. She was arrested in 1937, sent to the Gulag and was executed in 1941.
43
Regicide
‘The decision…[to kill the Romanovs] was not only expedient but necessary. It showed everyone that we would continue to fight, stopping at nothing. It was needed not only to frighten, horrify and instil a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.’
Leon Trotsky, 1935
‘In England and France they executed their kings some centuries ago, but we were late with ours.’
Lenin, 1919
The grisly deed was not performed as the English had arranged for the death of Charles I or the French for Louis XVI. There was no trial, however cursory or stage-managed. There was no public execution to give it a semblance of judicial and State authority. The monarch was allowed no opportunity to perform his final act with regal dignity. Tsar Nicholas II and his immediate family were butchered in secret by a group of thugs, some of them drunk, in a squalid basement, their remains were burned and thrown down a mineshaft – and then the men who ordered the murder lied about it.
There is no paper trail proving that Lenin gave the orders to kill the Tsar. It is unlikely that he would ever have signed such a warrant, and even if he had, he would surely have covered his tracks most carefully. If any evidence had existed, the Soviet magnates who succeeded him would have destroyed it. But there is no doubt that Lenin gave the order – almost certainly verbally to his then second-in-command, Sverdlov, and probably at a meeting in the Kremlin on 12 July 1918. The timing and details were left to others – Sverdlov and his henchmen – but the decision to kill all the Romanovs and to do so in secret was Lenin’s. It is likely that apart from Lenin and Sverdlov, most of the Red magnates did not know the murders had taken place until two days after they had happened.
At around 4 p.m. on 18 July members of the Sovnarkom gathered for their routine meeting in the room adjoining Lenin’s private office on the third floor of the Great Kremlin Palace. Lenin was in the chair, but before the commissars got down to the agenda they heard a prepared statement from Sverdlov. ‘After a White Guard attempt to abduct the Romanov family, on the night of 16 July the Ekaterinburg Soviet had ordered the execution of Nicholas Romanov. The rest of the family have been evacuated to a safe place.’ There was little reaction among the thirty-three Communist officials sitting around the table. Sverdlov then urged comrades to approve the decision taken by the local Communists. There was silence.
Lenin was writing a note to Foreign Commissar Chicherin, but broke off and asked, ‘Any questions for Comrade Sverdlov?’ Only one comrade raised his voice to speak, though the name was not recorded in the minutes. ‘And the family was taken away?’ it asked. No reply was recorded.
Lenin paused for a moment and then asked, ‘What decision should we take?’ But it needed no discussion. They approved the action taken by the comrades in Ekaterinburg. The brief minute reads that ‘Comrade Sverdlov’s report was received and noted.’ They then went on with the rest of the agenda of twenty items which included the reorganisation of the Red Cross, a draft Decree on Health Protection and a report on collecting government statistics. Lenin looked around the table again and said, ‘We shall now proceed to read the Draft Decree from the Health Commissariat, article by article.’
The official government newspaper Izvestia reported the next day that ‘the former Emperor Romanov has been executed…the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place’. The lie was believed even by some commissars for several days. Trotsky was not in Moscow until a week after the meeting and recorded in his diary his conversation with Sverdlov when he arrived at the Kremlin. Sverdlov told him about the Tsar ‘almost in passing’, according to Trotsky.
‘And where is the family?’
‘The family along with him?’
‘All?’
‘Yes all,’ Sverdlov replied.
‘Why…who decided the matter?’
‘We decided it here. Ilyich thought that we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present circumstances.’1
—
The Tsar had been guaranteed safety under the Provisional Government. ‘He must not be made a martyr,’ said Kerensky, who visite
d him several times at Tsarskoe Selo, where he remained for a few weeks after he abdicated. ‘He seemed to be genuinely enjoying his new manner of life…as though the shackles of a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders,’ Kerensky added, though we know from his diary how miserable Nicholas really was – if not at that stage scared for his family’s safety. At first the Provisional Government believed the former Tsar and Empress would seek refuge in Britain. But, having originally said the Romanovs were welcome, his cousin King George V shabbily changed his mind. He thought it would be a highly unpopular move and reflect badly on him, so he reneged on his commitment with weasel words and let Lloyd George – who was happy to allow the Romanovs to go to Britain – take the blame.
The Romanovs were moved to the Siberian town of Tobolsk in the spring of 1917. Kerensky believed they might be attacked and harmed if they remained near Petrograd. They lived in comfort in the former governor’s mansion, ‘with some favourite courtiers, six chambermaids, two valets and three cooks, a wine steward and two pet spaniels’.
Lenin first discussed what to do with the royal family a few days after the coup, in early November 1917, but came to no firm decision. Most of the comrades wanted the former Tsar to face trial and voted on several Sovnarkom resolutions to bring him to court. They proposed no legal action against the rest of the family. Trotsky was especially keen on a great show trial like Louis XVI’s, with him, theatrically, as the chief prosecutor, taking the centre-stage role of Saint-Just. Lenin played along with the idea, but prevaricated. All the time he and Sverdlov had known the fate they envisaged for the Emperor; it was a question of how and when his execution would take place and whether Nicholas alone would die. Lenin had no conscience about regicide. To him, the Tsar was a ‘very particular class enemy’ and the Romanovs were a ‘300-year-old disgrace’. His dilemma was fear of what the Germans and Kaiser Wilhelm would do if the Bolsheviks murdered his close cousins. He wasn’t at all worried about popular opinion inside Russia. He was sure that few people cared what happened to the Tsar and his family.
There was a tussle between Bolsheviks in two regions as to who should have the ‘revolutionary honour’ of dealing with Nicholas. Sverdlov made sure that his old friend from Siberian exile, Filipp Goloshchekin, head of the Urals Soviet and Communist chieftain in Ekaterinburg, would get the nod. Lenin agreed. Goloshchekin, forty-two, had been jailed for two years in the forbidding fortress of Schlüsselberg (where Sasha Ulyanov had been executed) and met Lenin in exile in Paris. Sverdlov described his friend as ‘cold…very energetic’, and Lenin thought him ‘useful and efficient’.
The former Emperor and his family were moved to Ekaterinburg in June 1918. They lived in a generously proportioned neo-classical building, the Ipatiev House, but the living conditions were no longer good.
Goloshchekin wanted the Tsar murdered, so that he could claim credit. Lenin wanted to wait. But time was now pressing and Lenin could put off a decision no longer. Ekaterinburg was surrounded by an army of troops from a Czech legion at war with Austria-Hungary. These were soldiers who were supposed to be crossing Russia so they could return to Western Europe by ship from the Far East, but who had begun to fight against the Bolsheviks. If they captured the town they could free the Tsar, so Goloshchekin told Sverdlov they had to act fast.*1 He went to Moscow to get final authorisation to kill the entire family – which was given after that 12 July meeting in the Kremlin.
Goloshchekin had already picked the man who would be in charge of doing the dirty business: Yakov Yurovsky, whom he had appointed commandant of Ipatiev House.*2, 2
—
A tall, well-built forty-year-old ‘with a shock of black wavy hair, dapper and cultured, with a well-trimmed Van Dyck beard’, Yurovsky was a highly intelligent, puritanical Bolshevik, burning with bitterness against the bourgeoisie and particularly the royal family. One of ten children, he had been brought up in extreme poverty and had faced discrimination because of his Jewish roots which he blamed directly on the Romanovs and the Russian aristocracy. He thirsted for revenge and as a leading figure in the local Cheka he was in a position to exact plenty of it. Goloshchekin knew his man and believed Yurovsky would ‘do an efficient job’. He left the practical details in Yurovsky’s hands.
Yurovsky had selected an execution squad days earlier, and the method.*3 He had toured the area close to town and found the best spot to cremate the bodies of the eleven victims and inter the ashes – an abandoned mineshaft near the village of Koptyaki, twelve kilometres from Ekaterinburg.
At 1.30 a.m. on 16 July, Yurovsky woke Dr Evgeny Botkin, the loyal family physician who had been part of the Tsar’s retinue for many years, and told him to rouse the others. He said there was ‘unrest in the city and [out of] concern for their safety they would be moved’ to the basement. The explanation was convincing, as they had heard shooting for the last few nights from their rooms.
It took the prisoners half an hour to wash and dress. At around 2 a.m., in semi-darkness, they descended the steep, narrow staircase. Yurovsky led the way. Next came Nicholas, with the Tsarevich Alexis in his arms. Both wore military shirts and caps. Then came the former Empress, holding her pet King Charles spaniel, Jemmy, followed by her four daughters and then Botkin. The maid Demidova carried two large pillows, in one of which she had concealed a box containing jewellery. Behind them came the valet, Trup, and the cook, Kharitonov. According to Pavel Medvedev, who wrote a detailed account, the ‘family appeared calm as if expecting no danger’.
They were taken, through a courtyard, to a basement room at the opposite end of the house, which had previously been occupied by the guards, five metres wide and six metres long. It had one small oval-shaped window, barred with a grille. All furniture had been removed. None of the prisoners knew that the execution squad was in an adjoining room.
Alexandra asked why there were no chairs and two were brought in. Nicholas placed his son on one of them; Alexandra sat in the other. The rest were told to line up against one of the walls. There they waited for a few minutes before Yurovsky re-entered with the executioners.
As he described it some years later, ‘I told the Romanovs that “in view of the fact that their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet had decided to shoot them”. Nicholas turned his back to…[us] and faced his family. Then, as if collecting himself, he turned round, asking, “What? What?” I rapidly repeated what I had said and ordered the detachment to prepare. Its members had previously been told whom to shoot and to aim directly at the heart to avoid too much blood and to end it all more quickly. Nicholas said no more. He turned again towards his family. The others shouted some incoherent exclamations. All this lasted a few seconds. Then the shooting started. It went on for two or three minutes. I shot Nicholas on the spot. The Empress barely had time to cross herself before she was shot. She died instantly. Elsewhere in the room there was bloody carnage as the guards lost control and shot wildly. The shots ricocheted from the walls to the floor and around the room like hailstones. Alexis fell off the chair, shot in the leg, still alive. Kharitonov sat down and died.’
The guards made a complete mess of their job. Six of the victims were still alive when the salvo of shooting stopped. Alexis lay in a pool of blood, moaning. Yurovsky finished him off with two bullets to the head. Demidova offered some resistance with her pillows. But she went down, bayoneted to death. ‘When one of the girls was stabbed, the bayonet would not go through the corset,’ Yurovsky said. The whole ‘procedure’, as he called it, took more than twenty minutes. A trained firing squad would have finished the task in seconds.
Medvedev recalled the scene: ‘They had several gunshot wounds on various parts of their bodies; their faces were covered with blood; their clothes too were blood-soaked.’
The executioners brought sheets from an adjoining room, and after stripping the corpses of valuables – which they pocketed – carried them, dripping with blood, on improvised stretchers across the
lower floor to a Fiat truck waiting at the main gate. The vehicle’s engines had been running from the moment the Romanovs had been woken, in an attempt to mask the noise of the shooting. They piled the corpses on top of each other.
Yurovsky was ruthless, a cold-hearted killer, but he had moral qualms about the theft of ‘people’s property’. He demanded, under threat of death, the return of loot stolen from the bodies. He confiscated a gold watch, a cigarette case encrusted with diamonds and some other items.
Medvedev was in charge of the clean-up operation. Guards brought mops, pails of water and sand to remove the bloodstains. One of them described the scene: ‘The room was filled with something like a mist of gunpowder…there were bullet holes on the walls and the floor…especially many on one wall…puddles of blood on the floor. There were also pools of blood in other rooms they had to cross to get to the courtyard…leading to the gate.’
The detail drove to the ‘burial ground’ Yurovsky had chosen. When they began to undress the corpses they found yet more treasure. The ‘girls and women wore some kind of corset…filled with jewels embedded inside’. Alexandra had worn a pearl belt made of several necklaces sewn into linen. Yurovsky put the jewels in a bag – the diamonds alone weighed more than eight kilos. The bodies were burned and lowered into the mine.
Yurovsky was worried that the shaft would be too shallow to conceal the remains of the Romanovs for long. He searched a broader area and found some deeper mines a few kilometres along the road towards Moscow. The following night he and a group of Cheka officials returned with some petrol and sulphuric acid. They dug up the bodies, placed them on a truck and drove them to their new resting place, a shallow grave nearby. Acid was poured over them and the grave was covered with earth and brushwood.*4, 3
Lenin Page 49
