The Last Tsar (50 page)

“Let us drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand”—this was a slogan at the Solovetsky labor camp.

Subsequently, in attempting to explain the inhuman event in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house, some would brand Yurovsky and his comrades murderers and sadists. Others would see in the execution of the family the Jews’ blood revenge against the Orthodox tsar (to the revenge of Goloshchekin and Yurovsky they would add that of other purely Russian names). Indeed, it was easier to explain what went on that way. Revenge for the brutal pogroms and daily humiliation!

Had it had been like that then, as horrible as it is to write, there would at least have been something in it that the human mind could understand.

But it was not.

“Our family suffered less from the constant hunger than from my father’s religious fanaticism.

“… On holidays and regular days the children were forced to pray, and it is not surprising that my first active protest was against religious and nationalistic traditions. I came to hate God and prayer
as I hated poverty and the bosses.” This is what Yurovsky would write in his last letter, as he lay dying in the Kremlin hospital.

Yes, he came to hate the religion of his fathers and their God.

Yurovsky and Goloshchekin rejected their Jewishness at an early age, and they served a completely different people. This people also lived all over the world. They were called the worldwide proletariat. The people of Yurovsky, Nikulin, Goloshchekin, Beloborodov, the Latvian Berzin.… “The world must live without a Russia, without a Latvia, as one human community,” their poet Vladimir Mayakovsky proudly wrote.

The party to which they belonged promised to confirm the mastery of this people all over the land. Then mankind’s long-awaited happiness would come to pass.

This could happen, however, only through harsh struggle. They called blood and violence the “midwife of history.”

Once the nineteenth-century revolutionaries Nechaev and Tkachev had discussed how many people from the old society would have to be destroyed to create a happy future. They came to the conclusion that they should be thinking about how many to “leave.”

“The method of sorting out Communist humanity from the material of the capitalist era” (Bolshevik leader Bukharin). So they took up this work of sorting. Out of human material.

Trotsky: “We must put an end once and for all to the Papish-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.”

They did. Inexorable class hatred took possession of their souls.

“In your investigation do not look for material or proof that the accused acted in word and deed against Soviet power. The first question is …
Which class does he belong to?
… Herein lie the idea and essence of Red terror” (M. Latsis, Cheka board member, in the November 1, 1918, issue of
Red Terror)
.

The murder of the Romanovs, who symbolized the overthrown classes, was to become a private declaration of the Red terror. Of worldwide class war.

“At least a hundred Romanovs must have their heads chopped off in order to unlearn their descendants of crimes” (Lenin). That is why the tsar and his family were doomed the moment they arrived at the Ekaterinburg station.

Yakov Yurovsky in 1918: a high-cheekboned face on a short neck; important, unhurried speech; a black leather jacket, black beard, black hair—he really was the “dark gentleman.” He evidently had already learned from the “spy” that Nicholas was keeping a diary in
the old style. That was why he came to the door on the thirteenth “old style.” He knew that the mystic tsar noted omens. He appeared before him, the “dark gentleman” did, on that unlucky day like an ominous augury. Like advancing vengeance. He went to see him in the guise of a physician. As a medic, it was easy for him to play that role. Even Derevenko, a doctor, believed it and would later say how professionally he had examined the heir’s leg. In fact, this was more of the same revolutionary symbolism. They were healing this world with revolvers. Carrying out the great mission bequeathed to them in the name of the future by their teacher Marx: “Hasten the agony of the outlived classes.” In the name of this bright future, the tsar’s family had to die.

They began to prepare the Romanovs for the end.

“14 [27] May.… The guard under our window shot at our house when he thought someone was moving by the window after 10 at night. In my opinion he was just fooling around with his rifle the way guards always do.”

I am leafing through a big black notebook in the archive. This is the watch journal: “June 5 at post no. 9 guard Dobrynin fired accidentally, having left off the safety. The bullet went through the ceiling and stuck without causing any damage.

“8 June. Due to the incaution of the guard on duty a bomb exploded. No victims or injuries.”

The comrades handled their weapons artlessly and freely. So the tsar was correct in his entry.

But the guard’s “fooling around” immediately turned into a story about the tsar’s daughters giving someone signals from the windows and a vigilant rifleman immediately shooting at the window. That was how Avdeyev described the incident in his memoirs.

They were making their case.

The valiant Nagorny and the servant Sednev were taken from the house.

“14 [27] May [continued]. After tea Sednev and Nagorny were called in for questioning to the District Soviet.”

At that time, hanging around the Ipatiev house, Gilliard saw Red Army soldiers putting the arrested Nagorny and Sednev into droshkies.
They silently exchanged looks but did nothing to betray the Swiss’s presence.

They never came back.

“16 [29] May. Supper at 8 in daylight. Alix went to bed earlier because of migraine. No word about Sednev or Nagorny.”

The Cheka was already at work, combing and weeding out, cutting back the doomed company around the family. To minimize confusion on the decisive night. It was approaching—
that
night!

They lived their usual life. And kept their diaries.

He: “20 May [2 June]. At 11 o’clock we had vespers. Alexei attended, lying in bed. The weather was magnificent, hot.… It was unbearable to sit that way, locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden when you wanted and spend a fine evening outside. The prison regime!”

She: “May 23 (June 5). Wednesday. Get up at 6.30, now at 8.30 by the watch. [That day they changed the clock to the new time.] Glorious morning. Baby did not sleep well. Leg ached probably more because Vlad[imir] Nik[olaevich, Dr. Derevenko] carried him out before the house and put him in my wheeling chair. I sat out with him in the sun … he went to bed as leg ached much for dressing and carrying about. Lunch only brought at 3 o’clock, are putting yet higher planks before all our windows so that not even the top of trees can be seen.”

So, they were “putting yet higher planks before all our windows.” The house was already being readied for something, but what?

At that point Nicholas took to his bed. From the constant sitting in the rooms. He loved his walks, not only because he liked walking. He had hereditary hemorrhoids. They got worse.

He: “24 May [6 June]. All day suffered from the pain of hem[orrhoids], therefore went to bed, since it is more convenient to apply compresses. Alix and Alexei spent half an hour in the fresh air, and we spent an hour after them. The weather was marvelous.”

She: “May 25 [June 7]. Friday. Beautiful weather. Nicholas] stayed in bed all day since he slept poorly last night due to the pains. P—
a
[these two Latin letters conceal the Russian word for “bottom,” which she modestly shortened to insert in her English text] is better when he lies quietly….

“… Vladimir Nikolaevich did not come today either.”

Dr. Derevenko was no longer allowed to see Alexei.

He: “27 May [9 June]. Finally got up and quit my bed, it was a summer’s day, walked twice. The green is very fine and lush, a pleasant smell.”

Again Nicholas felt something was going on. Something was about to happen.

“28 May [10 June].… Outward relations … have changed lately. Our jailers are trying not to talk to us, as if they did not feel right, and one senses alarm and worry in them! Incomprehensible!”

But beyond the limits of the Ipatiev house, everything was quite comprehensible. In the middle of May there was an uprising against the Bolsheviks by former tsarist war prisoners—the Czech Legion, who were joined by Cossack units. Chelyabinsk fell. Now they were advancing on the capital of the Red Urals.

The town was expecting them. On June 10 there were sinister riots. The night before, June 8–9, a certain Ensign Ardatov and his detachment had gone over to the Whites. Now the chief support of the Ural Soviet in the town was the detachment of Upper Isetsk workers led by Commissar Peter Ermakov. A huge, shouting crowd gathered on Ascension Square. Ermakov and his Isetsk detachment, Yurovsky and his Chekists, and Commissar Goloshchekin had a hard time dispersing the mutinous crowd. They just did not have enough loyal soldiers. Meanwhile, how many Red Guards were guarding the “tyrant and his family.”

He: “31 May [13 June]. This afternoon we were let out into the garden for some reason. Avdeyev came and talked for a long time with E. S. [Botkin], According to him, he and the Regional Soviet are worried about anarchist acts and therefore we may be facing a hasty departure, probably to Moscow. He asked us to prepare for departure. We immediately began to pack, but quietly, so as not to attract attention from the sentry officers, at Avdeyev’s special request. At about 11 at night he returned and said that we would remain another few days. Therefore on the 1st [14th] of June we stayed bivouacked, not unpacking anything. Finally after dinner Avdeyev, slightly tipsy, told Botkin that the anarchists had been captured, the danger had passed, and our departure had been postponed. After all the preparations it was rather tiresome.”

The former tsaritsa wrote obscurely that day:

“May 31 [June 13]. Pray morning. Sunshine.

“12.30 Avd[eyev]no walk.… said to pack up as any moment….

“At night Av[deyev] again … said not before several days.”

——

What a strange story. Not long before, the Ural Soviet had done battle with Moscow, explaining how dangerous it was to transport the Romanovs by rail. Now, frightened by anarchists, the Urals themselves wanted to take the tsar and his family to Moscow. Now—when the Czechs were advancing on the town. When there was an uprising in the town itself, when the land around Ekaterinburg was burning! And all this out of concern for the bloody tyrant?

No, something is not right here. It is hard to believe in this sudden concern on the part of the Uralites. This was a very strange trip for Moscow being planned.

Let us recall a conversation between Commissar Yakovlev and the commander of the Ekaterinburg detachment—Busyatsky—en route to Tobolsk, when the latter suggested to Yakovlev: “During the Romanovs’ trip, en route, stage an attack and kill them.”

Kill them on a trip?

If only Nicholas had known, when he heard the “concerned” Uralites’ proposal to travel to Moscow, what had happened the previous night. If only he had known the “trip” that had already been taken. He never would, though, not even on the day he died.

On the night of June 12–13, three strangers appeared at a Perm hotel owned by a merchant named Korolev and presented an order from the Cheka to take away Nicholas’s brother Michael and his secretary, Brian Johnson.

When he was sent away from Gatchina, Michael had gone to live in a hotel in Perm, where, as Moscow confirmed several times in letters to the Perm Soviet, he enjoyed “all the rights of a citizen of the republic.”

With him in the hotel were his secretary, the Englishman Brian Johnson, his valet, and his driver (the grand duke was a passionate motorist—witness his daring trip through the Alps with his bride-to-be). But that day he had a very different trip ahead of him. The three strangers went up to the grand duke’s room and when they went back down beside them walked the tall grand duke and his short, fat secretary, who looked like Mr. Pickwick.

The grand duke, the secretary, and their three escorts got into two droshkies and drove away.

All that transpired in the hotel room was recounted to Alexander Volkov by the grand duke’s valet, Chelyshev, when the two were in prison together.

The visitors woke Michael, who did not want to go with them and demanded an important Bolshevik: “I know him, not you.” The one in charge swore and grabbed the former grand duke by the shoulder.

“Oh, you Romanovs! We’re sick and tired of it all!”

After which Michael dressed silently. His valet said: “Your Highness, do not forget to take your medicine.” The visitors swore again and took them away without the medicine.

In the morning the Cheka announced that they had issued no orders and that Michael had been abducted. A telegram went to Petrograd. “Tonight, unidentified men dressed as soldiers abducted Michael Romanov and his secretary Johnson. Searches have yet to yield results. The most energetic measures are being taken.”

Soon after, however, rumors spread that the role of the “unidentified men” had been filled by some very well known people: Myasnikov, who was chairman of the Motovilikha Soviet, and his comrades. They took Michael and his secretary away—and shot them. Their action was proclaimed an act of proletarian vengeance. The rumors were confirmed. The Perm Cheka and local authorities called it “an anarchistic lynching” and firmly distanced themselves from it.

In 1965, in Moscow, in his declining years, a deserving man died, a holder of the Red Banner of Labor: Andrei Vasilievich Markov.

A year before his death, he met with the head of the Perm Party Archives, N. Alikina, who had compiled the biographies of the Perm Bolsheviks, to make known the most glorious deed of his life. Before telling his story the old man showed her an unusually shaped silver watch, resembling a segment of a cut hard-boiled egg. Markov said that the watch had run without repair for nearly fifty years, and then he told her the whole story. Until recently these statements of Markov were kept in classified storage in the Perm Party Archives.