THE LETTER
It happened—in June.
That morning.… They had just gotten up. Getting up early was torture for her. She had to, though: every morning Commandant Avdeyev came “to verify the presence of the prisoners.”
Nicholas was standing by the window, examining a tiny piece of paper.
With the commandant’s permission they were now being brought food from the Novotikhvinsky monastery: out of the generosity of the father superior they were brought cream, eggs, and bottles of milk. In one of the monastery bottles he had found this letter.
Dull light through the lime-smeared window. It was still morning and not yet hot. Later would come the furnace—and in the rooms it would become unbearable. They were not allowed to open the windows, though. Once he had done battle with emperors—of Japan, Germany, Austria-Hungary. Now he was doing battle for permission to open the windows in a room.
“9 [22] June. Saturday.… Today at tea 6 men walked in, probably from the Regional Soviet—to see which windows to open. The resolution of this issue has gone on for nearly 2 weeks! Often various men have come and silently in our presence examined the windows.
“The fragrance from all the town’s gardens is amazing.”
But he has forgotten all about the windows and the gardens’ fragrance. He is torturously trying to read the letter—this scrap of paper cleverly slipped into the milk stopper.
He is pacing around the room with a marching step—his unbreakable guardsman’s habit. He is thinking about the letter.
In the translucent light of morning, through the smeared window, we are trying to see him.
The same strong muscular body. But he has filled out slightly from the enforced immobility. He is not very tall (the guards were very disappointed in his height. In their simple imaginations a tsar was supposed to be great, that is to say, tall). Compared with his father, his giant uncles, and his brother Misha, he has always seemed small. (Long ago his great-great-grandmother the Princess Württemburg-Stuttgart, the wife of the unlucky Paul I, brought her family’s beauty and build into the Romanov family. Ever since, tall men had been born—Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander III.) He is of ordinary height. His body is not perfectly proportioned: his muscular torso is rather massive and his strong legs relatively short. His neck is unusually powerful for his small, neat head. A pleasant face and a small nose, reddish mustache, tobacco-yellow beard. Not long ago he had grown a beard, but thanks to Alix….
Her diary: “June 7 (20) … I cut N.’s hair.”
She managed to cut it before.
Right now, in the light of day, scattered gray hairs can already be seen in his mustache and beard. His head, cut by the empress’s firm hand, is already graying evenly. His eyes are changeable—first bluish-gray, then sky blue … and sometimes steely green. A “charmer.” The enigma of his gaze. He always felt a little like a child. Was it because of the powerful size of his father, uncles, and brother? Was it because of the strength of the women by his side? This childlike quality of his combined with the constant foreboding of future suffering—all this is in his gaze. And it is upsetting. The gaze of a helpless and gentle sacrificial lamb. Those who saw him remembered that gaze.
Many years later his lover Kschessinska, already very old, would meet a mysterious woman who declared herself to be his daughter—the miraculously saved Anastasia. In answer to a journalist’s questions she would say:
“This woman has his gaze.… No one who looked into his eyes … could ever forget….”
“And you knew those eyes?”
“Very well.… Very well,” the ninety-year-old Little K. whispered with frightening tenderness.
Now his face is darker, coarsened from the sun. His neck is red, and there are bags under his light eyes.
Finally, he hands the letter to her. But Alix never gets the chance to read it.
In walks Commandant Avdeyev, “to verify the presence of the prisoners.” Nicholas walks from behind the table toward the commandant, as he always used to greet petitioners during audiences—standing, in front of his desk. Thus he now meets the former Zlokazov worker.
As always in the mornings, Avdeyev is gloomy, having overindulged the night before. He reeks of wine—in a room with closed windows.
Nicholas cannot bear drunkards.
In an even, quiet voice (none of his ministers had ever heard him raise his voice) Nicholas greets the commandant. Finally, Avdeyev leaves.
“WAIT FOR A WHISTLE TOWARD MIDNIGHT”
Alix reads the mysterious letter, which is written in French. With suspicious mistakes. But immediately she believes in it. It is just not written by aristocrats. Where are they—those aristocrats?! They have betrayed them. Common people are writing. “Good Russian people.” She feverishly absorbs the long-awaited text: “We are a group of Russian army officers….”
This is how the letter promising them escape appeared. It was signed: “Prepared to die for you, an officer of the Russian army.” Oh, how Alix likes this signature. Her migraines are but a memory. She is once again the old spitzbube. Yes, it has come to pass. They have come. They have not abandoned their tsar! Good Russian people! They are prepared to liberate their emperor. The holy man has sent the family a “legion of angels.”
She begs Nicky to reply. As always, he calmly agrees. Yes, he will write an answer.
He does, and so this secret correspondence is established.
“Your friends do not rest,” it says in the next note, sent in another bottle from the monastery. “The hour we have waited for so long has come. With God’s help and your presence of mind we hope to achieve our goal without risking anything.”
Another letter that same day:
“… One of your windows has to be unsealed so that you can open it. I beg you to indicate to me precisely which window. In the event that the young tsarevich cannot go, matters shall be greatly complicated.… Would it not be possible, an hour or two before the time, to give the tsarevich some kind of narcotic? Let the doctor decide. Rest assured, we will not undertake anything unless we are assured of success.”
It was an escape conceived in the style of a Dumas novel.
But how to open the window? Suddenly, as if at the holy man’s behest, the window was opened.
Nicholas’s diary:
“10 [23] June. Whitsunday.… Marked by various events: one of our windows was opened this morning.… The air in the room became clean, and by evening even cool.”
The former commander-in-chief sent another message in a milk bottle, as if it were a disposition of battle.
“Second window from the corner on the square has been open for two days and even at night. Windows 7 and 8 by the main entrance are also always open. The room is occupied by the commandant and the assistants who make up the inner guard at any given moment. There are 13 men armed with rifles, revolvers, and bombs.… The commandant and his assistant come in to see us whenever they like. The guard on duty makes the rounds of the house at night twice an hour.… There is one machine gun on the balcony and another under the balcony—in the event of a disturbance. Opposite our windows on the other side of the street the guard is staying in a little house. There are 50 men. From each guard post there is a bell to the commandant’s room and a wire to the guard quarters and other points.”
These bells … they would ring that night, their last night.
“Inform us,” concluded Nicholas, “as to whether we shall be able to take our people with us.”
As always, he carefully recorded everything, revealing the secret of this plot.
Nicholas’s diary:
“14 [27] June. Our dear Marie turned 19 .… The weather was the same, tropical. 26 degrees [79°F] in the shade, and 24 [75°F] in the rooms. It is even hard to bear!… Spent an uneasy night and kept vigil fully dressed. All this because a few days ago we received two letters, one after the other, telling us to prepare to be abducted by some loyal people! The days have passed, though, and nothing has happened, and the waiting and uncertainty have been very trying.”
Now in his diary he testified before the entire world “about a monarchist plot for the purposes of the family’s escape and liberation.”
Alix was more cautious: her entry for June 27 does not say a word about the letters or a plot. But she was waiting. Oh, how she was waiting—for the next night. She listened to the nighttime silence.
As if someone were mocking them, instead of the rustle of plotters stealing up, through the open window:
“June 15 (28). Friday. At night we heard under our windows the guard strictly ordered to watch every movement in our window.”
WHO WROTE IT?
Seventy years later I am sitting in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution.
The archive file on my desk: “The Family of the (Former) Tsar Nicholas the Second 1918–1920.”
For a very long time—seventy years—this thin little file has not been released. I am one of the first (the very first perhaps) to see it upon its declassification. We shall return to its astonishing contents more than once. I will spend many hours alone with this bloody file!
In the middle of it I find the same letters signed “An officer” and once sent to the Ipatiev house in a milk bottle. They would become one of the grounds for the execution of the Romanov family.
Here is the last letter. Written neatly, in a student’s hand, in French:
“We are a group of Russian army officers who have not lost our conscience, our duty before our tsar and fatherland. We are not informing you about us in detail for reasons you can well understand, but your friends D. and T. [Dolgorukov and Tatishchev], who are already saved, know us.”
The hour of liberation was approaching and the usurpers’ days were numbered. In any event, the Czechs were getting closer and closer to Ekaterinburg. They were but a few versts from town. “Do not forget that at the last moment the Bolsheviks will be ready to commit any crime. The moment has come, we must act. Wait for a whistle toward midnight—that will be the signal. An officer.”
Dolgorukov and Tatishchev, however, “who are already saved,” had long been lying in unmarked graves.
How strangely mendacious this well-wisher was. Moreover, how well informed he was that the Romanovs knew nothing about the fate of “D. and T.”
Now, just as I became weary of the constant suspicion, I receive a letter from the historian M. M. Medvedev, the son of the Chekist M. A. Medvedev, one of the executioners of the tsar’s family. (This letter became the starting point for our many conversations.) Here is what he told me in his letter:
“In 1964, two old men arrived at Moscow Radio.
“These two were felt to be the last people living of those present at the family’s execution.
“One of these old men was Grigory Nikulin, the murderer of Prince Dolgorukov and one of the main participants in the execution of the tsar’s family. The other was I. Rodzinsky, who did not participate in the execution of the Romanovs but who was a member of the Ural Cheka in 1918.”
This conversation and the invitation to the radio station had been devised and organized by this very historian, Mikhail Medvedev. With great difficulty he managed to talk the two into recording their statements for posterity. With equal difficulty he managed to talk the authorities into it: only after he went to Nikita Khrushchev himself was this taping at Moscow Radio permitted. Medvedev asked the questions, but a “representative of the Central Committee” also took part in the conversation.
This taping took a long time, and we will return to it again. Now we are interested in the statements of the Chekist Rodzinsky:
“The letter with the signature ‘An officer,’ which Nicholas Romanov believed, was composed at the Cheka. Its author was one of the Bolshevik leaders of Ekaterinburg, Peter Voikov.”
(Peter Voikov, 1888–1927, party name “Intellectual.” Expelled for revolutionary activity first from grammar school and later from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. Participated in terrorist acts. Emigrated, lived in Switzerland, graduated from the University of Geneva, in August 1917 returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1918, people’s commissar for government supply in the Red Urals. As of 1924, Soviet ambassador to Poland. He was lucky—he didn’t live until 1938; in 1927 he was killed by a monarchist in Poland for his participation in the execution of the Romanov family.)
According to Rodzinsky’s statements, this University of Geneva graduate composed all the letters in the bottles.
But Voikov had terrible handwriting (or he may not have wanted to leave evidence of his role as a provocateur), and he suggested that Rodzinsky copy out the letters. The Chekist had good handwriting, so he did. To ensure that there could be no doubt of the truthfulness of his words, Rodzinsky left a sample of his handwriting at the radio station.
The old Chekist had evidently come not only to reminisce but to repent.
INTRIGUE
How astonishingly well thought out everything in this story is. Beginning with the food from the monastery, which the conscientious Uralites suddenly allowed to be brought to the Romanovs.
It was all done very cleverly. In early June a certain Ivan Sidorov (an obvious pseudonym) arrived in Ekaterinburg with a large sum of money from Vyrubova and other loyal friends of the tsar’s family. Through Dr. Derevenko, Sidorov made contact with the Novotikhvinsky monastery and, simultaneously, with Commandant Avdeyev. Soon after, the suddenly soft-hearted commandant allowed food to be brought from the monastery (to establish his “concern” for the family and to fatten his own pocket—with the money Dr. Derevenko offered him for the food. Thus the tsar’s family began to connect the monastery with their good, loyal friends. That was why they believed in the letters.
And how well thought out the story with the window!
A closed window meant a torturous stuffiness. It had to engender bad nerves. Even more—anger. It must have hastened the family’s consent to escape.
Then the simple-hearted Avdeyev suddenly proved surprisingly vigilant: he carefully checked all the food brought from the monastery—and “discovered” the correspondence. Finally, the finale anticipated all along: Nicholas’s entry about the plan for escape in his diary. Now the monarchist plot was in hand.
Whoever thought all this up knew Nicholas’s habit of recording everything in his diary.
Without this entry the game would not have been over. The entry provided irrefutable proof.
No, the cruel, straightforward Yurovsky does not fit here. Here a more intelligent person was acting; a psychologist had thought all this through. Someone who had studied Nicholas well.
Yes, more than likely, this was Lukoyanov, our “spy.”
After his arrival from Tobolsk, he had lived in Perm and headed the Perm Cheka, but in June he was in Ekaterinburg. At the end of June he was appointed to a new high position.
From a letter of Xenia Sorokina:
“My father, an old Bolshevik and student of local history, studied documents about Feodor Lukoyanov. A note from the KGB Museum in Sverdlovsk was left in his papers: ‘Lukoyanov, F. N., as of March 15, 1918, chairman of the Perm Province Cheka. As of June 21, 1918, chairman of the Ural Cheka. Directed the Central Executive Committee’s special mission relating to the tsar’s family.’”
He did an excellent job on the “Central Executive Committee’s special mission relating to the tsar’s family.”
I can imagine his triumph: the family went out for a walk, and he read Nicholas’s entry in the diary. Yes, he had calculated it all. He felt like an astronomer who has calculated the presence of a star and sees it through his telescope in the sky. Only later, when our “spy,” as usual, carefully put the diary back in its place so that the tsar would not notice anything—only then did he realize that he had sentenced them to death. Him, her, Tatiana, all those sweet girls. And the sick boy. This happens with gamblers. The game overshadows the goal.
Nicholas believed. Naively. Almost stupidly. And he made the fateful entry in his own diary.
But did he really believe?
WHO WAS PLAYING?
The Czech Legion was already outside Ekaterinburg. Subsequently much would be written about how furiously they and the Whites burst into Ekaterinburg.
But, they were going about their “bursting” in rather an odd fashion. Tyumen had fallen, all the major towns around had been taken—and Ekaterinburg was still standing.
Moreover, they skirted Ekaterinburg to the south: Kyshtym, Miass, Zlatoust, and Shadrinsk had already been captured. There was no “furious bursting”; they wanted to encircle it slowly and slowly choke it. It seemed as if they were in no hurry at all.
At that time in Ekaterinburg there were only a few hundred armed Red Guards, but there were many tsarist officers; the Academy of the General Headquarters, which had been evacuated from Petrograd, was there. Still, there was not a single honest attempt to free the Ipatiev prisoners!
After overthrowing the Bolsheviks, the Czechs and the anti-Bolshevik Siberian army were not about to restore tsarist rule. They would restore the rule of the Constituent Assembly.
In this strange year the former autocrat had understood a great deal. Most important: no one needed him alive. Indeed, anyone capturing him alive would doubtless have a serious problem on his hands.
But dead?
A sacrifice.… “There is no sacrifice I would not make” (his words before his abdication). Sacrifices to redeem all that had happened.
He also thought that once they had killed him they would let his family go free. His death was the only way to free them all. His death was a good in itself.
Of course, sensible Nicholas immediately realized who the “officer” was with his primitive French.
All his life they had been playing these games with him: the Department of Police, his mother, Kschessinska, Alix, the Duma, Vyrubova, Rasputin. This time it was his game. He played it himself—and won. By sending letters to the “officer,” by leaving that entry in his diary, he knew that he was sentencing himself to death. They threw the bait, but they themselves landed on his hook.
MOSCOW, JULY 1918
So, at the end of June, the Ural Soviet received proof of a monarchist plot!
Goloshchekin left for Moscow.
Moscow waited in trepidation for news from the Urals. How long could Ekaterinburg hold out, and what would happen next? “Move the maximum of workers from Peter [Petrograd], otherwise we will fall, for the situation with the Czechoslovaks is quite bad,” Lenin, wrote.
Yes, the Bolsheviks were about to fall. It seemed a matter of days. Ruin surrounded them, from the Pacific and all across Siberia and the Urals, their power had collapsed.
The Germans were in charge in the Ukraine, where a voluntary army was forming against the Bolsheviks, and the English were landing in the north. As was famine.
Arriving in Moscow, Goloshchekin would fall into a boiling caldron. There were ominous events daily.
The Fifth Congress of Soviets convened on July 4. Once this congress had intended to decide whether to put the tsar on trial. Now a trial was out of the question. The revolutionary parties were skirmishing. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had quit the government after the “treachery of the Treaty of Brest,” were giving Lenin a thrashing. The holy virgin of the Russian revolution, the famous terrorist Maria Spiridonova, had given a fanatical speech against the Bolsheviks.
On July 6 a bomb exploded in the German embassy. Two people leaped the embassy fence and rushed into a waiting automobile. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries had murdered the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach.
“The Socialist Revolutionaries have attempted to sunder the shameful Treaty of Brest”—that was the government’s official version. The unofficial version was that it was all a provocation arranged by the Bolsheviks to deal with the very dangerous opposition. It was no accident that one of Mirbach’s assassins, the Socialist Revolutionary Blyumkin, would later become an agent for Trotsky. Right after Mirbach’s assassination, the Bolsheviks arrested the entire Left Socialist Revolutionary faction at the congress. In retaliation, the Socialist Revolutionaries seized the telegraph, the telephone, and the Cheka building. Then Lenin brought out his Latvian sharpshooters—the Bolsheviks’ striking force—and the uprising was put down.
This is the Moscow—torn apart and bloodied by furious internecine war—in which Goloshchekin arrived in early July 1918.
In the future all the tsar’s Ural assassins would unanimously state that Goloshchekin discussed only the defense of Ekaterinburg in Moscow, not the fate of the tsar’s family; the Ural Soviet, they would insist, decided to execute the Romanovs on its own initiative.
This was a patent lie. How could Goloshchekin have discussed the possible fall of Ekaterinburg and not have mentioned the fate of the tsar and his family? How could he not have tried to decide what to do with them should the town be overtaken?
TROTSKY’S TESTIMONY
In his diary, Trotsky, back from the front, described his conversation with Sverdlov:
“ ‘The tsar is where?’
“ ‘Shot, of course.’ [Imagine Sverdlov’s cool triumph when he told Lev to his face that they had torn his favorite bone right out of his mouth: there would be no trial.]
“ ‘And the family is where?’
“ ‘The family as well.’
“ ‘All of them?’
“ ‘Yes. What about it?’ [Again Sverdlov’s invisible grin between the lines: “Does the fiery revolutionary Trotsky pity them?”]
“ ‘Who decided this?’ [Fury: he wants to know who dared not consult with him, and so on.]
“ ‘We all did. Ilich [Lenin] felt we could not leave them a living banner, especially given our trying conditions.’”
Yet when his anger had passed, Trotsky, who during the terrible days of the revolution had said, “We will leave, but we will slam the door so hard the world will shudder,” could not have helped but admire this superrevolutionary decision:
“In essence this decision was inevitable. The execution of the tsar and his family was necessary not simply to scare, horrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up our own ranks, show them that there was no going back. Ahead lay total victory or utter ruin.… The masses of workers and soldiers would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin had a good sense of this,” Trotsky wrote.
So, according to Trotsky, it was all decided in Moscow. That was what Goloshchekin negotiated in Moscow!
This is only Trotsky’s testimony, however. History recognizes documents—and I found one. First a clue, from a letter of O. N. Kolotov in Leningrad:
“I can tell you an interesting detail about the topic of interest to you: my grandfather often told me that Zinoviev took part in the decision to execute the tsar and that the tsar was executed on the basis of a telegram sent to Ekaterinburg from the center. My grandfather can be trusted; by virtue of his work he knew a great deal. He said that he himself took part in the shootings. He called the execution a ‘kick in the ass,’ asserting that this was in the literal sense: they turned the condemned to the wall, then brought a pistol up to the back of their head, and when they pulled the trigger they simultaneously gave them a kick in the ass to keep the blood from spattering their uniforms.”
THERE WAS A TELEGRAM!
I found it! Even though they were supposed to destroy it. The blood cries out!
Here it is lying before me. One stifling July afternoon I was sitting in the Archives of the October Revolution and looking at this telegram, sent seventy-two years before. I had run across it in an archive file with the boring label “Telegrams About the Organization and Activities of the Judicial Organs and the Cheka,” begun on January 21, 1918, and ended on October 31 of the same 1918. Behind this label and these dates lie the Red Terror. Among the terrifying telegrams—semiliterate texts on dirty paper—my attention was struck by a two-headed eagle. The tsarist seal!
This was it, On a blank left over from the tsarist telegraph service and decorated with the two-headed eagle was this telegram: a report on the impending execution of the tsar’s family. The irony of history.
At the very top of this telegram, on a piece of telegraph ribbon, is the address “To Moscow Lenin.”
Below, a note in pencil: “Received July 16, 1918, 21:22.” From Petrograd. And the number of the telegram: 14228.
So, on July 16, at 21:22, that is, before the Romanovs’ execution, this telegram arrived in Moscow.
The telegram was a long time in getting there, having been sent from Ekaterinburg to “Sverdlov, copy to Lenin.” But it was sent through Zinoviev, the master of the second capital, Petrograd—Lenin’s closest comrade-in-arms at the time. Zinoviev had sent the telegram on from Petrograd to Lenin.
The individuals who sent this telegram from Ekaterinburg were Goloshchekin and Safarov, another leader of the Ural Soviet.
Here is its text:
“To Moscow, the Kremlin, Sverdlov, copy to Lenin. From Ekaterinburg transmit the following directly: inform Moscow that the trial agreed upon with Filipp due to military circumstances cannot bear delay, we cannot wait. If your opinion is contrary inform immediately. Goloshchekin, Safarov. On this subject contact Ekaterinburg yourself.
And the signature: Zinoviev.
Knowing that Comrade Filipp is Goloshchekin’s party nom de guerre, it is easy to understand the code of this telegram sent hours before the execution of the tsar and his family. “The trial agreed upon with Filipp” is rather sly code for “the execution of the Romanovs agreed upon with Goloshchekin.” (They had been getting ready to try Nicholas, but now that the Bolsheviks had to abandon Ekaterinburg, a truly revolutionary trial against the tyrant was his execution.)
“Military circumstances”—this was Ekaterinburg’s hopeless situation; any day the town had to fall.
So the content of the telegram: through Zinoviev, the Ekaterinburg Ural Soviet informed Sverdlov and Lenin in Moscow that the execution of the tsar’s family agreed upon with Goloshchekin could not bear any further delay in view of Ekaterinburg’s deteriorating military situation and the town’s imminent surrender. If Moscow had any objections, they must inform Goloshchekin and Safarov of such immediately.
After this telegram one can speak of Goloshchekin’s mission in Moscow definitively: he discussed the fate of Ekaterinburg and agreed upon the family’s execution.
TWO “EDUCATED” MARXISTS
The telegram mentioned two others who evidently played a significant role in the fate of the tsar and his family. A photograph of the presidium of the Ural Soviet: beside Goloshchekin and Beloborodov stands a typical bespectacled intellectual with weak eyes that somehow do not mesh with his bold fur cap. This is Safarov, a member of the presidium and the chairman’s comrade. The signature of this intellectual was on the Ural Soviet’s bloodiest telegrams.
Georgy Ivanovich Safarov, son of an engineer, born 1891. The typical biography of an “educated Marxist”: exile, emigration to Switzerland.… It was during this exile that a most powerful name arose alongside Safarov—Grigory Zinoviev, a figure right behind Lenin and Trotsky in the Bolshevik hierarchy. The close tie between Zinoviev and Safarov persisted over the entire course of their lives.
They became close in Switzerland. Zinoviev introduced Safarov to Lenin. Immediately after the February Revolution, thanks to Zinoviev, Safarov arrived in Petrograd in the sealed car that Germany, Russia’s military adversary, allowed to pass through to Russia. The revolution conquered, and after September 1917 Safarov was “Comrade Chairman of the Ural Soviet.” Safarov’s actions in Ekaterinburg were highly reminiscent of those of his idol Zinoviev in Petrograd.
In Petrograd, surrounded by the Whites, Zinoviev introduced the institution of hostages. In response to a White attack he and Stalin, who had come to Petrograd, arranged a bloody bacchanalia: nighttime executions of hostages—White officers, priests, and other “formers.” In 1919 Zinoviev would carry out another bloody retaliation for the murder in Berlin of the German Communists Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Hostages were executed in the Fortress of Peter and Paul: four grand dukes—Nicholas Mikhailovich and George Mikhailovich, Paul Alexandrovich, and Dmitry Konstantinovich Romanov. (Soon after this display of international solidarity Lenin would recommend Zinoviev to run the Comintern.)
Naturally, from the beginning Zinoviev supported the Uralites’ idea of executing the Romanovs. According to his logic, that was the proper response to the Whites’ advance on Ekaterinburg. Also, he did not want a trial: he hated Trotsky. “The party has wanted to smash Trotsky’s face in for a long time,” this educated Marxist wrote sweetly of his rival in the struggle for power.
All this time the old friends remained in close contact, as they would till the very end. When in 1919 Zinoviev headed the Comintern, he took with him the head of the eastern division, his friend Safarov. After Lenin’s death, Zinoviev, the leader of Petrograd, strengthened his rear. He made the loyal Safarov director of the party newspaper, Leningrad Pravda, and when Stalin rewarded Zinoviev with a bloody “kick in the ass,” it fell upon Safarov to get even.
From a letter of Sergei Pozharsky in Rostov-on-the-Don: “Ogonyok printed your ‘Execution in Ekaterinburg’ and there in the photo is Safarov. Since you are involved with the material, perhaps you can tell me what ever happened to him. I can explain. In 1941, in Saratov, I shared a prison cell with Safarov. A most remarkable individual. According to him he was with Lenin, either as a secretary or librarian in emigration.… He was a delegate at some party congress. And a newspaper editor. Then for many years he was a witness at almost all the ‘cases’ of 1937, etc. Tell me briefly: was he all this or not, my cellmate?”
“AGREED UPON WITH MOSCOW”
Sverdlov and Zinoviev—those two in Moscow were the mighty support of the Ural Bolsheviks, who dreamed of reprisal against the Romanovs. That was the purpose of Goloshchekin’s main meeting in Moscow, his meeting with Lenin.
Might this meeting not have taken place? Might Goloshchekin—a member of the Central Committee, the leader of the dying Urals, where according to Lenin the destiny of all Bolshevik power, the matter of the tsar and his family, was being decided—not have been received by Lenin? The fact that Lenin’s journal does not indicate such a meeting may only prove his understandable disinclination to have it known.
Goloshchekin had to resolve two issues concerning the tsar and his family at this meeting, the first being to agree upon what to do with the tsar should Ekaterinburg fall. Here there was no hesitation, especially since they could show the world indisputable evidence of a monarchist plot, which Goloshchekin had brought. The other issue was to agree upon the family.
From a letter of Leopold Shmidt in Vladivostok:
“Bonch-Bruevich once recalled the words of the young Lenin, who was reveling in the successful reply of the revolutionary Nechaev, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Devils. To the question Who of the ruling house must be destroyed? Nechaev gave a precise answer: The whole litany.’ ‘Yes, the entire house of Romanovs, after all, it’s so simple, it’s ingenious!’ Lenin was thrilled.”
A murdered emperor might cast a shadow of martyrdom on his children. Alexei and his sisters could also become a “living banner.”
This must have occurred to the man who had once appreciated Nechaev’s answer.
By sentencing himself to death, Nicholas sentenced his entire family to death as well.
Evidently the fate of Ella and all the Alapaevsk prisoners was decided at one and the same time.
Naturally they agreed upon the ticklish question of how to announce the execution. Evidently they decided then that the official announcement must refer only to Nicholas. Thus this horrible formula was born: “the family has been evacuated to a safe place.” The caustic Zinoviev may well have been its author.
Yes, the family’s death had to remain a secret for the time being, but an open secret. Trotsky was right: Lenin knew that the danger of reprisals for the bloody deed must close the ranks in these terrible times for the revolution.
Also, anticipating a possible collapse, the government naturally wished to keep its distance from the execution. The decision to execute had to come from the Ekaterinburg Soviet. This was very handy: the Uralites who executed the tsar were left with only two options—victory over the Whites or death. This must have served to close the ranks of the doomed town’s defenders.
Unlike the bloody romantics Trotsky and Zinoviev, Lenin was a pragmatist. The execution of the tsar and his family was to be carried out in one instance only: if Ekaterinburg fell. Otherwise they must remain as before—a card in the future game with the great powers.
It was at the fateful meeting in Moscow that the mechanism must have been devised: the signal to initiate the family’s execution could not come from the savage Ural revolutionaries. It had to come from outside Ekaterinburg. But who on the outside? That we shall learn later.
Such was to be the outcome of the meeting between Lenin and Goloshchekin. Lenin could not have helped but feel how extraordinary it was.
July is a bad month for revolutionaries. In France, Robespierre was executed in July; in Russia, five eminent Decembrists, who had revolted against Nicholas I, were hanged in July. And now in July the hour of vengeance had come. Vengeance against the son and grandson of the man who had once killed Lenin’s brother. The revolutionaries’ age-old hunt for Russian tsars was drawing to a close.
The discussion of the tsar’s fate must have evoked some associations. During that period, when all around him was collapsing, Lenin suddenly developed an interest in implementing the decree “on the removal of monuments honoring the tsars and their servants.” (On July 9 he posed this question insistently at the Soviet of People’s Commissars.)
Lenin fought with surprising enthusiasm against the stone images of the Romanovs.
From the memoirs of Kremlin Commandant P. Malkov:
“ ‘They still haven’t removed this monstrosity’—Lenin pointed to a monument erected on the spot of the murder of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich.… Ilich [Lenin] deftly fashioned a noose and hurled it over the monument. We got down to business and very soon after, the monument was ensnared in ropes from all sides. Lenin, Sverdlov, Avanesov … and other members of the government … harnessed themselves to the ropes, bore down, pulled, and the monument crashed to the cobblestones.”
After Lenin’s death the tradition continued. While destroying one of the Kremlin’s cathedrals, the Bolsheviks would open the sarcophagi and strip them of the remains of the shrouded Muscovite tsaritsas, which they would dump onto a cart. And a horse would drag them across the Kremlin’s ancient St. John’s Square. On one cart were the mother and wife of Ivan the Terrible, the wives of the first Romanovs, the mother of Peter the Great—which would be dropped into the cellar of the Palace of Justice through a hole in the boards.
Seventy years later people in Russia would be tumbling monuments to Lenin from their pedestals—history the joker!
But let us return to 1918. In Moscow an agonizing July week was drawing to a close. Goloshchekin was on his way to Ekaterinburg; Lenin to Kuntsevo in the country, where he spent his free days with his wife and sister. And relaxed.