COMRADE FILIPP
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.
COMRADE MARATOV
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 thenhis 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 ofIzvestia, 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.
“Throughout 1918 and early 1919 I worked in the organs of the Cheka, first as chairman of the Perm Cheka, then as chairman of the Ural Regional Cheka, where I took part in directing the execution of the Romanov family.… In the middle of 1919 I fell ill and for purposes of recovery transferred to party work.… My health did not improve, though, and in early 1922 the Bolshevik Central Committee placed me in a Moscow sanitarium.”
A “spy”?! No, we dare not say that. It is much too fantastic; it smacks of literature, not science. But we can conjecture. Especially since the autobiography includes a curious detail: “Throughout 1918 and early 1919 I worked in the organs of the Cheka, first as chairman of the Perm Cheka,…” But he was not appointed chairman of the Perm Cheka until March 15. What was he doing for the first part of 1918—and where?
Feodor Lukoyanov’s party nom de guerre was Maratov (he had named himself after the most inexorable French revolutionary; the educated youths of Bolshevik circles liked the French Revolution). So we can propose that in late February Comrade Maratov was sent from Ekaterinburg to Freedom House—the “spy.”
Thus they began to implement their Ekaterinburg plan to seize the tsar’s family.
NOR DID PETROGRAD SLUMBER
The tsar’s family would indeed have been very useful for the Bolshevik Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), Lenin’s government beginning in 1917. It could become the trump in their game with the Romanovs’ powerful relatives in England and Germany. Moreover, those Romanov jewels they had heard so much about were still.… And all this lay somewhere in defenseless Tobolsk.
On November 2 the victorious Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee entertained a question about holding the Romanov family. The committee sent a proposal to the Sovnarkom to transfer the Romanovs from Tobolsk to Kronstadt, the bulwark of the revolution—to put them under the control of the bullet-strung Baltic sailors.
From a letter of Viktor A. Blokhin in Moscow:
“The brutal execution of the tsar’s family seems implausible and terrible now. I am a very old man and I saw that time.… Atrocities, brutality, frenzy—they were very common. The murder of the tsar’s family only fills in that picture. That’s all. I knew Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, a charming bespectacled civilian from a good family (his brother was a tsarist general). Dear sweet Vladimir Dmitrievich himself was responsible for the terrible Room 75 at Smolny, which was the predecessor of the bloody Cheka. Vladimir Dmitrievich loved to go on ‘about the terrible part of revolution’ and about the affairs of the revolutionary sailors. I have known many who after the revolution, after many many years had passed, reveled in how they sent White officers off to be shot. An entire generation happily went to the grave with this brutality on their souls. Or not so happily (if Comrade Stalin took an interest in them). For the West to understand us and for us to understand ourselves we have to remember that the murder of the tsar’s family did not seem strange at the time because it wasn’t terrible, it was ordinary.
“Here you have an incident with the sailors described by that same acquaintance of mine, Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich. It was quite a commonplace and frequent kind of incident during those days in 1918: sailor-anarchists from the ship Republic were detaining three officers on the street. The elder Zheleznyakov was in command of the sailors. Half-drunk, his crazed eyes staring off into space, he was sitting on a chair, making the sign of the cross in the air, and muttering from time to time: ‘De-e-eath … de-e-eath … de-e-eath’ (as Bonch-Bruevich himself described it).
“So this guy, along with the sailor boys from the Republic, put the detained officers into a car and made them an offer: either get a ransom—a few thousand rubles—or get shot. They drove the unfortunate men from one terrified Petrograd apartment to another, and the officers begged their friends to give them the money. They did give a little—they were afraid the bold sailors would think there was more to be had there. The revolutionary sailors grew bored with this fussy tribute collecting. The heroes stopped in to amuse themselves at a bordello, to put it bluntly. So that the detained officers wouldn’t get bored while they entertained themselves with the girls, they dislocated the jaw of one of them with the butt of a revolver. True, they did not get to do anything else: the madam would not let them drip blood on her rug. The sailors spent their time with the girls—and got bored again. So they sat the officers in the car, drove to some remote spot, and ordered them to get out. They did. ‘Take off your coats’—they surrounded the officers and seized their revolvers, all the while cursing obscenities. The officers took them off. They ordered one of them to take the coats to the automobile. He did. While he was at the automobile he heard shots. Then the sailors returned. ‘Ah, son of a bitch! How could we have forgotten about you? Ah, to hell with you. You’re still good for something. Tomorrow we’ll all drive around again’ (that is, from apartment to apartment). They shoved him under their feet between the seats and beat the prostrate man with their heels all the way—they were having a good time. This I am quoting almost word for word from the published memoirs of my friend Vladimir Dmitrievich. When you start getting horrified about the execution of the tsar’s family or the execution of Michael Romanov—don’t forget that remote spot where they killed those officers like dogs. Don’t forget the elder Zheleznyakov, who made the sign of the cross in the air and kept muttering, ‘Death … death … death.’ By the way, Zheleznyakov was a very famous name in the history of the October Revolution because the ‘bad’ elder Zheleznyakov, with his bad sailors from the Republic, was the brother of the ‘good’ younger Zheleznyakov, who dispersed the Constituent Assembly, the first and last free Russian parliament, with good sailors from the same Republic. Only History could dream up something like that! ‘De-e-eath … de-e-eath … de-e-eath.”
The revolutionary Kronstadt sailors wanted to seize the tsar’s family, especially with those innocent virgins and the jewels into the bargain. “De-e-eath, de-e-eath, de-e-eath.” But the Bolshevik Sovnarkom already had its misgivings about the “pride and glory of the Russian revolution.”
The Sovnarkom declared the transfer “untimely.”
Bolshevik pragmatists did, however, discuss how best to exploit the tsar’s family. The new government had its romantics. Romantics mad about the French Revolution. The romantics were in favor of bringing the family to Moscow immediately—for a great show trial to be arranged featuring the people against the deposed tyrant, and the principal orator of the revolution, Lev Trotsky, was eager to act as plaintiff. Oh, how popular Lev Davydovich was then.… A comb of black hair, blue eyes, fervent speeches. “The perpetually excited Lev Davydovich,” his enemies said with sarcasm—or rather envy, for that was the peak of Trotsky’s popularity. And the face of Lev—the “lion” of the revolution—hung like an icon in the houses of all true revolutionaries.
He would destroy the pathetic, fork-tongued tsar before all progressive humanity. It would be the triumph of the revolution! The idea of trying the tsar in Moscow won out, which was all well and good—but how were they to get the tsar to the capital? “Three hundred thirty armed guards picked from the tsar’s former soldiers” were guarding the Tobolsk house. They passed the matter on to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the highest organ of power in the Republic.
“HE BORE HIS SERVICE IN EXEMPLARY FASHION”
At that time someone we already know stood at the head of the Central Executive Committee: Sverdlov. In January 1918 Sverdlov received representatives from the detachment guarding the Romanovs. Chief among them was Peter Matveyev (the author of the Notes).
Matveyev was a typical figure from the early years of the revolution: a gray overcoat that sensed power. Chosen chairman of the soldiers’ committee, yesterday’s tsarist sergeant-major hung a thick tablet on his door: “Lodging of Peter Matveyevich, Comrade Matveyev.”
From Matveyev’s Notes:
“The first news about the fall of the Provisional Government came to us on about November 20.… But Commissar Pankratov … tried to prove that the Bolsheviks had been driven out of Petrograd a long time ago.… I managed to convince the guard, to prove that … we must immediately send a delegation to Petrograd to obtain more accurate information from the Center.”
Matveyev returned from Petrograd greatly changed.
“We spent a few days in Peter [Petrograd] and on January 11 went back to Tobolsk, having been given a specific assignment: to get rid of the Provisional Government’s commissar, the detachment having submitted, in any case, to Soviet power. We were ordered not to give up Romanov without the specific knowledge of and instruction from the Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom.… On January 23 a general meeting of the entire detachment was called. After my report … the detachment split into two parts: one for Soviet power; the other, the ‘right,’ for Kerensky.”
Now in the evenings Matveyev was disappearing from the house; he was beginning to stop in at the Soviet—to see the Tobolsk Bolsheviks. Matveyev put an enormous globe in his “lodging”: “Give us world revolution!”
According to the memoirs of the Bolshevik Koganitsky, at one of the Soviet’s evening meetings, Matveyev, “who then represented only twelve or thirteen of the guard,” swore an oath to the Soviet: “We would sooner die than let the family escape with their lives.… To ensure this, our people were to be interspersed in every shift of the guard.”
Soon afterward the committee drove out Commissar Pankratov, but it still did not dare raise a hand against Colonel Kobylinsky.
Later Peter Matveyevich would receive the following document for his activities, written on the stationery of the Tobolsk Bolshevik Soviet:
“The present certificate attests to the fact that Comrade-Citizen Peter Matveyevich Matveyev was in the Special Detachment guarding the former tsar and his family.… Moreover, he bore his service in exemplary fashion and honestly, fulfilling unquestioningly the duties placed upon him as a soldier-citizen and fighter for the Revolution, not abandoning the deed entrusted to him during all the difficult moments and stages of the Russian Revolution.… Signature—Khokhryakov, May 18 (5), Tobolsk.”
“He bore his service in exemplary fashion.” Could it have been Comrade-Citizen Peter Matveyevich Matveyev who brought the “spy” into the house?
——
Let us return to the “spy.” I am trying to imagine how he was sent.
He is called up from Perm to the capital of the Red Urals. Heading the Ural Cheka formed in February is Mikhail Efremov—a Bolshevik since 1905 who was sentenced by a tsarist court to hard labor for life. But the true leader of the Ural Cheka has been turning into more of a Bolshevik ever since that same terrible year 1905—the future regicide Yakov Yurovsky.
COMRADE YAKOV
One of many children from a poor Jewish family, his father had been a glazier and his mother a seamstress.
In 1938, exactly twenty years after the Romanovs’ murder, Yakov Yurovsky would be dying in the Kremlin Hospital from an excruciatingly painful ulcer. In his dying letter to his children he would talk about himself:
“Dear Zhenya and Shura! On July 3, new style, I will turn sixty. As it turns out, I have told you almost nothing about myself, especially my childhood and youth.… Ten children grew up in my father’s family, and with them poverty bordering on destitution. We could not break out of it, even though the children began working for masters at the age of ten, and father and mother worked to the point of exhaustion.… [He left a tailor to study with a watchmaker.] My watchmaker master got rich off the sufferings of his adolescent workers—I worked for him until I was nineteen and never knew what it meant to eat my fill. But then I was fed my fill after a strike and was thrown out as a ringleader and forbidden to enter the town’s watch and jewelry shops.”
What rage! A temperament of hatred. But after all, this was being written by an old man racked by terminal illness.
“Beginning in 1905, I never ceased working for the party for a single day.” Yes, the whole rest of his life—the jewelry business, in which he prospered, his strange trip abroad, his acceptance there of Catholicism—everything was a cover for his main, secret occupation. A successful watchmaker, a rich jeweler, and a photographer, he in fact maintained conspiratorial apartments for the Bolsheviks. In 1912 he was arrested—but he was a marvelous conspirator. The police came up with only circumstantial evidence, and he was sent to Ekaterinburg, where he opened a photography studio. In 1915, Yakov Yurovsky was drafted, but he got out of the front by completing medic training and taking a job in the surgical department of the local hospital.
Then came the February Revolution. The hospital elected him to the Soviet. With Goloshchekin he began to prepare for the Bolshevik seizure of the town. And then—the October Revolution of 1917: the Soviet became the government of the Urals, and he became deputy justice commissar, a common route for Bolshevik leaders. Beginning in early 1918 he worked in the Cheka as chairman of the terrible commission of inquiry under the Revolutionary Tribunal. This was the man: former medic and photographer, now arbiter of human fates in the cruel Ural Cheka—Comrade Yakov Yurovsky.
The Cheka occupied the luxurious American Rooms hotel. Yurovsky settled in the most luxurious—Room 3: mirrors, rugs, the receding luxury of the richest Ural merchants. Downstairs was a famous restaurant where not long before those merchants had boozed it up.
All this—the merchants and the food—vanished in an instant under the new power. But the ravishing smells of that rich restaurant lingered strangely and upset the Chekists.
It was in Room 3 of the “American hotel” that Yurovsky evidently received Feodor Lukoyanov.
I am trying to listen in on their conversation:
He began the conversation, of course, with an exhortation. Like many not very literate people, Comrade Yakov loved to hold forth.
“When Lenin named Felix Dzerzhinsky leader of the Cheka, he said: ‘We need a good proletarian Jacobin for this post.’ … And an educated Jacobin.… That’s the kind of man we are looking for to be chairman of the whole Ural Cheka. As you know, Comrade Finn [the party nom de guerre of Efremov, who was then head of the Cheka] did not complete university.… And I have no education at all.… But in Petrograd professors sit in the government.… You studied at the university, my son [that was what he called all the young Chekists], you even studied law.… That is just what we need for the head of the Cheka … in order to placate our ‘public’ [Yurovsky’s favorite word]. The question about you has been more or less decided.… There’s nothing for you to do in Perm—you’ll become the leader of all the Urals. However, my son, we are going to give you a trial run.… Comrade Filipp [Goloshchekin] is in Moscow right now. He is planning to propose there—in view of the presence in Tobolsk of a monarchist plot—moving the Romanovs here, to Ekaterinburg. Actually, we need proof of the plot.” He fell silent and added distinctly, “That is what you can get for us.… You speak English and German … so you can understand what they’re talking about.… And one more important thing: the jewels.Figure out what and how many they are. Everything must be returned to the working people.”
THE NIGHTMARE OF BREST
Let us return to Tobolsk. While the family’s fate was being decided elsewhere, in the snow-covered quiet house their old monotonous life went on. Only it had become frightening to read the papers.
Nicholas took the Russian papers and foreign magazines (French—with very frivolous cartoons that so intrigued the guard that they reached the tsar only with great delay).
But he received the papers promptly and followed events closely. As before, he considered himself responsible for Russia’s destiny.
The papers told of the Constituent Assembly’s brief fate. The Bolshevik government had also called itself “provisional” and was supposed to rule until the people elected a parliament—a Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had declared as much in a decree.
In January 1918 the Constituent Assembly was convened, the “first freely elected Russian parliament,” but the Bolsheviks had no intention of ceding power. The Bolshevik government prepared for the opening of the parliament as if for battle. They created a special military headquarters and divided Petrograd into districts; patrols of sailors and soldiers controlled the streets. At the Tauride Palace, where the Constituent Assembly was to convene, the Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky was named commandant. When the Constituent Assembly did convene, sailors from the battleship Republic were led into the hall under the command of Zheleznyakov the younger. To them fell the honor of cutting short the history of Russian parliamentarism. At the opening of the first day of sessions, Zheleznyakov the younger approached the chair, banged his fist on the table, and uttered these historic words: “The guard is tired, we cannot protect you anymore. Close down the meeting.”
Thus Lenin rid his government of that extra “provisional.” The power of Bolshevik rule combined in a surprising way with impotence, though. When Uritsky appeared to disperse the Constituent Assembly, he looked very unhappy and very cold. Out on the street, which the Bolshevik sailors were patrolling, the terrible commandant had his fur coat stolen by bandits! And when Lenin, the head of the Sovnarkom, bitterly quit the Constituent Assembly, having prescribed its closing, he discovered that the pockets of his coat had been cleaned out and his automatic pistol stolen! The fact of which the robbed Lenin indignantly informed the robbed Uritsky. This split between the authorities and the brigandage of the streets did not end in 1917 by any means. In March 1918, when Lenin’s government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, it was still going on. In December 1919, in Sokolniki, Lenin’s wife was waiting for her husband for the children’s New Year’s party, but the leader of the country arrived very confused. En route robbers had stopped his automobile. The evildoers had taken away weapons and papers—from him, the guard, and the driver. They also took the automobile. When the leader of the world proletariat announced to his attackers, “I am Lenin. Here are my documents,” the reply was unexpected: “We don’t care who you are!”
Echoes of these horrors, these lawless anecdotes of this Time of Troubles, reached Nicholas accurately from papers and letters (despite the destruction and chaos, the mails were working). The parliament’s disbanding might still elicit a sarcastic chuckle from the man who had fought with the Duma for so many years, but the actions of the new authorities in February and March 1918 truly shook the former commander-in-chief.
In March the Bolsheviks concluded the Treaty of Brest with the Germans. Russia admitted defeat in war.
Nicholas’s diary (now he kept his diary with double dates, as putting the new style in parentheses):
“12 (25) February. Monday. Today telegrams arrived informing us that the Bolsheviks, or the Sovnarkom, as they call themselves, must agree to a peace on the German government’s humiliating terms in view of the fact that enemy forces are advancing and there is no way to stop them! It is a nightmare!”
This was indeed a nightmare for him, a hallucination. The Baltics, Poland, part of Belorussia, part of the Caucasus—all this was lost to Russia. The empire he had received from his father no longer existed.
Nicholas was a typical Taurus, with all the qualities of that astrological sign. Sluggish, stubborn, and secretive, taciturn, adoring of his children and family. He had been deprived of one Taurean quality, however: force—the ability to fall into a frenzy. “Would you please finally get angry, Your Excellency!” one of his ministers pleaded in vain.
Yes, he was a special Taurus, a golden calf, a calf born for sacrifice, Job the Long-Suffering.
That day, though, as he read the report on the Treaty of Brest, he felt the fury of a Taurus.
She would echo him in a letter to Anya: “March 3rd [16th] 1918.… God save Russia & help her.… one great humiliation & horror.… I cant reconcile myself, cant think about this without a terrible pain in my heart.”
Exactly one year after his renunciation, he cursed all his sacrifices, thousands upon thousands of lives—all in vain.
Lenin had been preparing for the Treaty of Brest for a long time. Only by concluding peace with the Germans could he demobilize the army—a dangerous force—and reinforce the power his party had so easily taken. When the Bolsheviks disbanded the first Russian parliament, Lenin saw his dream before him—the Treaty of Brest, which the Constituent Assembly had never ratified.
Many in the party considered the treaty humiliating. The second most powerful Bolshevik leader, Trotsky, was adamantly opposed. But Lenin broke his opponents by convening a special party congress and, in exhausting debates and votes, won. All this time, his shadow was Yakov Sverdlov, his loyal executor. (When Sverdlov died, Lenin would search feverishly for a “new Sverdlov”—and would find him: Stalin. But this time Lenin miscalculated: the shadow would become independent and in the end would vanquish his master.)
Thus peace was concluded. The former tsar now had plenty of time to ponder events.
A religious man, he consoled himself. He knew it was God’s will. Only with the passage of time, when they could step back from events, when the revolution and the catastrophe that had overtaken Russia had drifted off into oblivion, would the intention of He who creates history be revealed. That was why he would read so attentively Lev Tolstoy’s reflections on history—that “part of War and Peace that I had not known before”: “Marie and I have been caught up reading War and Peace.”
But Alix was incredulous: what about their allies? How could they stand for this? No, she felt something had to happen. Might this horrible peace with the Germans somehow change their fate as well? Alix was right. It was at this time in Moscow that their fate was being decided.
AN AGREEMENT AMONG OLD FRIENDS
In February in Moscow, the congress’s seventh session, during which the Treaty of Brest was discussed, was attended by the head of the Ural Bolsheviks: Filipp Goloshchekin.
With Lenin, he voted for the Treaty of Brest. Against Trotsky, against those who did not understand the need for a respite. It did not really matter; once they were strong they could repudiate all of it. The Bolsheviks had already established the principle: concluding an agreement, they immediately began to think about how to break it later. “Policy is nothing more than a saving lie—in the name of revolution.”
At the same time, immediately after the Leninists’ victory, Goloshchekin had a conversation with another supporter of the Treaty of Brest, his old friend the chairman of the Central Executive Committee Sverdlov. This conversation concerned, of course, what most upset the Uralites: the transfer of the tsar’s family to Ekaterinburg.
Goloshchekin had the right to a reward for his loyalty to the Leninist line, for his loyalty to the Brest peace. He asked his old friend, the Uralites’ old friend, for his support.
What about Sverdlov? Sverdlov probably sketched out the situation for him: as chairman of the Central Executive Committee he must (and would) insist on the transfer of the tsar’s family to Moscow. That had been the decision: supremely powerful Trotsky was organizing a trial against Nicholas Romanov.
(Sverdlov knew that the “perpetually excited Lev Davydovich” was eager to turn that trial to his own benefit. But did the chairman of the Central Executive Committee need to do anything more for Lev? Yes. Brawls had already broken out between yesterday’s allies, and if previously the formation of factions inside the party had meant a contest of ideas, now it meant a contest of power in the guise of ideas.)
They understood each other virtually without words, Sverdlov and Goloshchekin. Sverdlov would carry out Moscow’s line, but … but if the Urals were sufficiently energetic, the Central Executive Committee would (could) accede.
Having received Sverdlov’s assurance, Goloshchekin reported to the presidium of the Central Executive Committee about the current lack of supervision over the tsar’s family and the threat of a monarchist plot in Tobolsk. He proposed moving the tsar and his family to Ekaterinburg under the strict supervision of the capital of the Red Urals.
Upon his return to Ekaterinburg Goloshchekin began his own turbulent activities and evidently made contact with the “spy.”
The “spy.” I can picture his first meeting with Matveyev in Freedom House. Lukoyanov would find out that the family had already begun to know great need. Soloviev had extracted huge sums “for the plot,” and now the tsar’s family did not have enough money. The new government of workers and peasants was not about to give them any. Kobylinsky, Tatishchev, and Dolgorukov had gone around to the merchants of Tobolsk borrowing money. At first they gave willingly—they did not expect the new authorities to last—but now they were not giving at all.
The abundant meals in the house continued, however. As before, the empress’s only walk was out to the yard, where the ducks and geese roamed and she carried on entertaining conversations with the chef, Kharitonov. In captivity, food is entertainment. They ate and ate, and the smells of the scraps lingered in the back yard.
But now the aroma had faded: there was no more money. To Matveyev’s delight, the Moscow government had put the family on soldiers’ rations. Nicholas Romanov had been given a soldier’s ration card.
The new, meager meals were served as before by servants in livery. But the servants had begun to rebel, too: no wages.
Nicholas’s diary:
“14 (27) February. We have had to cut our expenditures for food and servants significantly. These last few days we have been busy figuring out the minimum for us to make ends meet….
“15 (28) February. For this reason we must part with many of our people, since we cannot support everyone who is in Tobolsk; this naturally is very hard, but unavoidable.”
Just then the “spy” appeared in the house.
A conversation in Freedom House:
“What can you do?” (This is Matveyev.)
“I’m a carpenter. You can set up a workshop in the building next to the storeroom. Where the Romanov things are kept. That way they’ll be safer.”
He searched the storeroom for the first time late that night. The house was long since asleep. Matveyev brought a great clutch of keys and began opening the innumerable trunks and suitcases. Just what wasn’t there in those trunks! Multitudes of the odd and useless—you could see they had packed clumsily, in haste. There was a suitcase filled with riding crops, a trunk with tiny children’s booties—evidently for Alexei when he was little. Many dresses and linens. No jewels, of course. Those were kept upstairs. But there was a large brown leather suitcase stuffed with papers, black notebooks covered in a precise handwriting—the tsar’s diary! Lukoyanov immediately sensed how important this brown suitcase would be for him.
Later there was a ball in honor of their departing “people.” The drunken servants made a racket all night long. The family locked themselves in their rooms.
“AT TIMES IT SEEMS I HAVEN’T THE STRENGTH TO GO ON”
Nicholas’s diary:
“9 (22) March. Today is the anniversary of my arrival at Tsarskoe Selo and my confinement with my family at Alexander Palace. Cannot help but remember this difficult year gone by—and what lies in store for us? All is in God’s hands, all our hopes are on Him.”
Now he could only recall anniversaries of his confinement.
The guard had been changing before his very eyes. After Matveyev’s return, many “good riflemen” were dismissed.
“During my morning walk said goodbye to our best riflemen, who are going home. They are leaving now in the winter unwillingly and would gladly stay on until the opening of navigation.”
From Matveyev’s Notes:
“The rightist diehards got their wolf passports [indicating their political unreliability] in the teeth and were told to clear the hell out.”
With the appearance of the “spy,” matters accelerated. Kobylinsky was barely managing with the remaining riflemen and was already begging the tsar to let them go home: “I can no longer be of use to you.” Nicholas asked him to stay on: “We are enduring it and you will too.” He stayed on.
Soon after, Lukoyanov was able to report to the capital of the Red Urals: “The guard’s mood has changed. It’s time!”
COMRADE LYUKHANOV AND COMRADE AVDEYEV
At the Urals’ Zlokazov Factory (named after the owners, the Zlokazov brothers) there was a machinist, a short man, middle-aged, with an unprepossessing, pimply face: Sergei Lyukhanov. He was a remarkable worker, a jack-of-all-trades. He was married to an “educated woman”—a teacher with the exotic name Avgusta. Before the revolution Avgusta’s brother—a certain Alexander Avdeyev—had come to the factory. Lyukhanov made him his assistant and did all his work for him. Avdeyev had not come to the factory to work. He was a professional revolutionary and occupied himself with Bolshevik agitation—at which he was very good. Tall, blond, mustached Avdeyev soon became a favorite with the Zlokazov workers. Immediately after October 1917, the workers seized the factory under his leadership: Sergei Lyukhanov’s former assistant became the factory commissar. It was he who took the former boss away on a cart, saying, “I’m taking him to jail.” But no one ever saw the boss again. A serious man was Avdeyev. “Smacking” and “liquidating” were favorite words in 1918. At the factory he formed his own armed detachment.
Now at the end of February 1918 Avdeyev was called to meet with the Cheka at the “American hotel,” where he was awaited by Pavel Khokhryakov, head of the Red Guard and now a leader of the Cheka: light brown curls, a rosy flush suffusing his face. The Baltic sailor was a handsome man and in possession of the most terrible strength. Strength and revolutionary ardor.
Here at the Cheka they discussed Goloshchekin’s plan: Khokhryakov and Avdeyev, along with his Zlokazov workers, must secretly enter Tobolsk, throw over the old rule there, and establish a new Bolshevik rule, after which they would enter into contact with Freedom House and, taking advantage of the guard’s mood, move the family to the capital of the Red Urals.
THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM HOUSE
They entered the town at night in small groups. As Avdeyev himself would later describe, “the first to filter in were the secret agents, Pavel Khokhryakov and the Bolshevik Tanya Naumova.” They pretended to be lovers and one can only guess how much happiness the handsome sailor and the young girl accrued from this game, which later ended in marriage (although they would not be happy in that marriage for long—the frenzied Khokhryakov would perish the same year in the Civil War).
Then Avdeyev’s group entered Tobolsk—sixteen men. Cleverly, though, they spread a rumor about a thousand Bolsheviks surrounding the town. Tobolsk’s frightened inhabitants seized on the rumor and the thousand turned into thousands. But Avdeyev’s men were too late.
Yet another pretender to the title of jailer to the tsar’s family had entered the game: Omsk, the revolutionary capital of western Siberia. Its men too had come to Tobolsk—for the tsar’s family and their jewels.
Nicholas’s diary:
“14 (27) March.… The arrival of this Red Guard [from Omsk], as any armed unit is now called, has provoked all sorts of conjectures and fears here.… The commandant and our detachment have also been disturbed—the guard has been strengthened and the cannon brought in as of yesterday. It is good that people have come to trust one another at the present time.”
The Omsk men attempted to force the guard to let the detachment into the house. The house was surrounded. But Kobylinsky and the detachment had brought out the cannon. Freedom House remained under guard.
Goloshchekin sent through Tyumen for one more detachment from Ekaterinburg. But the Omsk men were stronger.
Nicholas’s diary:
“22 March [Nicholas went back to the old style. From now until the end of his diary he would remain true to the old style, the style of his world]. In the morning we heard from outside the Bolshevik brigands from Tyumen leaving Tobolsk.… In 15 troikas, jingling, whistling, and whooping away. The Omsk detachment drove them out of here.”
The Omsk men had celebrated their victory prematurely, however. Ekaterinburg dealt a new blow. A third armed detachment of Ekaterinburg men under Zaslavsky entered the town. Simultaneously the Ekaterinburg men seized power in the Soviet. Now Khokhryakov became chairman of the Soviet and Avdeyev and Zaslavsky its most influential members. The Soviet of Ekaterinburg men began to run Tobolsk, but their expectations were not borne out. Despite the fact that they were now the municipal authority, despite all Matveyev’s efforts, they were not allowed into Freedom House either.
Kobylinsky announced to the Soviet: “We have been sent here by the central authorities, and we will hand over the tsar and his family only to the central authorities.”
A battle of telegrams began around the house. The Omsk Soviet telegraphed Moscow to order the “old guard” replaced by an Omsk detachment. The Tobolsk Soviet demanded that Moscow replace the old guard with the Ekaterinburg Red Guard.
Simultaneously Goloshchekin was sending Moscow “accurate information” obtained from Lukoyanov about the monarchist Soloviev’s plot and the flight being readied for the family “as soon as the rivers open.” He even specified that the escape was supposed to be accomplished on the vessel Maria. But Moscow was enigmatically silent.
Meanwhile in Tobolsk, the Red Guard detachments were waiting for someone to approach the house. They were afraid of the guard’s excellently armed, tsarist-trained riflemen. They were afraid of each other.
Finally Moscow decided to intervene.