Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (39 page)

In the days immediately after the Imperial Family’s murder, Ekaterinburg teetered on the precipice. Thomas Preston was now in considerable danger at the British consulate, with the Ural Regional Soviet becoming increasingly hostile about his perceived interference in local affairs. With the Czechs about to take the city, he had been warned that all foreigners, including himself and his family, were to be taken hostage and bartered. Receiving a tip-off that a mob was coming to get him, Preston barricaded his family into the consulate and went out to confront them. Several tins of Virginia cigarettes seemed to win them round; the crowd hadn’t seen such a thing for months. Preston handed hundreds of them out as he argued about ‘Britain, politics, the Revolution’, until he heard shouts that the Whites were in the city suburbs, after which the crowd suddenly melted away.

Ekaterinburg finally fell to the Czechs on the night of 25/26 July after a relatively short engagement at the main Ekaterinburg railway station at
the top of Voznesensky Prospekt. After a couple of days of sporadic street fighting and a second skirmish at the Mikhailovsky cemetery at the southern end of the city, the Bolsheviks finally fled. But not without having first emptied the city’s banks and treasury, taking huge amounts of looted goods with them in a vast convoy of lorries that Thomas Preston heard trundling past his consulate until late into the night.

As the liberating Czechs and Whites paraded down the city streets to a rousing German march, they were greeted by waving flags and flowers thrown by the exultant population and the sound of church bells pealing. Preston had a front-row seat on the balcony of his consulate, from where he shouted, at the top of his voice, ‘Long Live the Constituent Assembly’ (the slogan of the Socialist Revolutionary anti-Communists). Soon afterwards, the Red Flag was hauled down and the white and green of Admiral Kolchak’s new Siberian government was flying over Ekaterinburg. The city’s liberation was, wrote Preston later, ‘like the opening of a door into the sunshine from a huge cave in which we had been kept prisoner for nearly nine months’.

Now at last people felt safe to make their way up to the Ipatiev House, as the palisades were pulled down, to stand and stare and whisper in disbelief at what had happened there. White officers came to inspect the basement murder room and examine the last pathetic, charred and tattered remnants of the Romanov family’s possessions, left scattered in their upstairs apartments. Within days an investigation was initiated under the auspices of the General Staff of the Ekaterinburg Military Academy, led by Captain D. Malinovsky, soon to be replaced by a short-lived one led by a White Russian officer, Aleksandr Nametkin. On 7 August a new White Russian investigation was set up under the presiding judge of the supreme court of Ekaterinburg, Ivan Sergeev.

In October 1918 the Ipatiev House was handed over to Czech leader General Gaida as his HQ. In January 1919 Admiral Kolchak appointed yet another investigator, General Diterikhs, to continue the investigation into the Romanov murders, but it was not until April 1919 that special investigator Nikolay Sokolov of the Omsk Regional Court began his exhaustive and historic investigation, which would take five years and accumulate photographic and eye-witness evidence filling eight volumes. It was published in French shortly after his death in 1924 as the
Enquête judiciaire sur l’assassinat de la famille impériale Russe
. Sokolov was unofficially ‘assisted’ in the early stages by Robert Wilton, Russia correspondent of
The Times
since 1909, who after an absence had managed to return to Russia via Siberia in October 1918 and who in 1920 serialised his own virulently anti-Semitic account of the Romanov murders in his newspaper.

Meanwhile the euphoria of liberation brought with it an orgy of anarchy and reprisal in the Urals by the retreating Bolsheviks, who tortured and murdered as they went. For all too short a while, Ekaterinburg, the strong arm of the Red Urals, became the centre of anti-Bolshevik activity in Russia, but Kolchak’s White regime proved equally as repressive and brutal as the one he had ousted. Barely a year later, the Bolsheviks retook the city, as the chaos of the civil war continued.

The catalogue of Romanov murders did not end at Ekaterinburg. The big Moscow meeting in early July had taken account of the fate not only of the Imperial Family, but also of their closest relatives, as part of the systematic destruction of the dynasty. Only one day after the murders at the Ipatiev House, on the night of 18/19 July, 90 miles away at Alapaevsk, Alexandra’s sister Ella, her companion Sister Barbara and the five Romanov Grand Dukes and Princes being held with them suffered an even more horrific death at the hands of the ruthless Urals Cheka. That night, men came for the prisoners at the schoolhouse where they were being held, took them by cart out into the nearby forest under cover of darkness and made them walk to the mouth of a disused mine. Here, the victims were beaten about the head with rifle butts and then one by one hurled down into the waterlogged pit. Only Grand Duke Sergey, who had struggled at the surface and been shot in the head, died quickly. Grand Duchess Ella and her companions were left to die a slow, agonising death from a combination of traumatic injury, thirst and starvation. But at least their bodies were found – only three months later.

Across Russia as a whole, the murder of the Romanovs marked the beginning of an orgy of terror, murder and bloody reprisal that would characterise the savage Russian civil war – a war which would claim 13 million lives. The signal to crank up repressive measures against counter-revolutionary activity came in August, first with the murder of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisey Uritsky, and then with a failed assassination attempt on Lenin on the 30th. The rapidly expanding Cheka was now given free rein for acts of revenge; whole families of hostages, such as the wives and children of Red Army officers who went over to the Whites, were imprisoned in prototype concentration camps (created that autumn) and many were murdered. From now on the sons would be held accountable for the political sins of their fathers. Such acts of retribution escalated during the civil war and became endemic under Stalin. The cold-blooded murder of the Romanov children and with it an attempt at the systematic liquidation of the entire dynasty had been the ultimate litmus test of the amorality of Bolshevik policy. Some historians
have seen it as being a turning point in the history of the twentieth century, laying the foundations for far greater acts of organised genocide later, during the Holocaust, in Africa and in Yugoslavia.

The fate of Mariya Bochkareva, the stout-hearted soldier who wanted to save her country single-handed, was typical. After making her way back to Russia via the Allied-held port of Archangel in August 1918, she tried to establish another women’s battalion but came up against opposition from the Allies and Admiral Kolchak’s White government. Kolchak also turned down her request to establish a women’s medical battalion and sent her back to Tomsk, where she was captured by the Bolsheviks when they retook the city. Thrown into jail at Krasnoyarsk, Bochkareva was held for four months and interrogated. Finally she was taken out and shot by a Cheka firing squad on 16 May 1920; in one of the many cruel ironies that so characterise the irrationality of the times, she was condemned as an ‘enemy of the peasant-worker republic’.

There was at least one happy outcome – Alexey’s Spaniel Joy, who had run away from the house in terror as the bodies were being taken away after the murders and then returned to wait patiently for his master, was later found at the home of guard Mikhail Letemin. A member of the Allied Intervention Force, Colonel Paul Rodzianko, took Joy back to the British Military Mission based at Omsk, where Alexandra’s former lady-in-waiting, Baroness von Buxhoeveden, visited him. The dog seemed to recognise her, although he was now almost blind. At the end of the campaign, Rodzianko took Joy home to England with him, where he lived out his life at the colonel’s stables near Windsor Castle.

As for the men who were directly complicit in the murders of the Imperial Family, they largely escaped punishment for their crimes in the immediate months after the murders, such being the dislocations of the civil war period. Late in 1918, Stepan Vaganov fell victim to summary peasant justice: he was set upon and murdered, not for his part in the Romanov killings, but for his participation in local acts of brutal repression by the Cheka. Pavel Medvedev was captured by the Whites in Perm in February 1919. During his interrogation he denied taking part in the murders in order to try and save his skin, but soon afterwards caught typhus and died in prison. Yakov Sverdlov, the mastermind, a man who clearly had been positioning himself as Lenin’s successor, remained at the centre of the Communist Party machinery until his untimely death in March 1919 during the flu pandemic. Petr Voikov worked in the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Trade until posted as ambassador to Warsaw in 1924, where he was assassinated by a Russian monarchist on 7 July 1927 in revenge for his role in the Romanov murders.

But in the end, the great maw of the Revolution began to consume its
own: Georgy Safarov of the presidium of the URS joined the leftist opposition to the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and lost all his government posts. Arrested as a Trotskyist in 1927, he was expelled from the party and then reinstated; it was the beginning of Stalin’s drive against the old guard. In 1934 Safarov was arrested again and in 1942 was shot. The war years were a favourite time for the disappearance of Stalin’s political opponents, their deaths being lost in the vast fog of war casualties. Safarov’s colleague Aleksandr Beloborodov held a succession of political posts until he too was expelled from the party as a Trotskyist in 1927. Released in 1930, he went the same way as Safarov: repentance, rehabilitation and ultimate rearrest. He was shot in the cellars of Moscow’s notorious Lyubyanka prison in 1938. The same fate awaited Beloborodov’s deputy Boris Didkovsky, who became a career Bolshevik until he too was shot at the height of the Stalinist purges in 1938.

For a while Filipp Goloshchekin rode the wave of favour with Moscow, and was rewarded for his loyalty to the centre in the liquidation of the Romanovs with a seat on the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1924. He also held a key position at the Moscow headquarters of the Cheka and its successor organisations. A bisexual, he had a relationship with Nikolay Ezhov, the man who later headed Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, during the most ferocious period of the purges. But Goloshchekin’s life as a career politician ended in 1941 when Stalin finally caught up with him. He was arrested in June and shot that October in an NKVD prison in Kuibishev (now Samara), and like all the other victims of Stalin’s terror was consigned to an unmarked grave. In this at least there was some justice.

Petr Ermakov, amazingly, survived unscathed in Ekaterinburg after the murders, despite the arrival of the Whites. He fought in a Red Army battalion in the Urals during the civil war, after which he returned to Ekaterinburg to work for the militia and later in the prison camp system in the Urals area. He was pensioned off in 1934 as not being up to his position of responsibility; no doubt by now the alcohol had got to him. Unlike the other killers he was given no awards or advancements and because of that grew bitter and began to inflate his role, not just in the Romanov murders but in the Revolution itself. In 1934 he took part in a deliberately stage-managed act of misinformation when he was set up by the secret police to meet US traveller and journalist Richard Halliburton, in Russia hungry for a scoop about the Romanov murders. Halliburton proved a very willing dupe, taken in completely by the sight of the supposedly terminally ill Ermakov as he listened to his highly bowdlerised ‘deathbed confession’, a story which was widely disseminated in Halliburton’s
Seven League Boots
of 1936.

Ermakov had the good fortune to die in his bed – in Ekaterinburg in 1952. As too did the man at the centre of it all, Yakov Yurovsky. After leaving Ekaterinburg three days after the murders, he reported to Lenin on the events of that night and soon after was rewarded with an appointment to the Moscow City Cheka. He returned to Ekaterinburg in 1919 to head the Cheka there after the city was retaken, but was something of a pariah when visited in 1920 by British army officer Francis McCullagh. People looked and whispered when Yurovsky passed on the street; there went ‘the man who murdered the Tsar’, they told each other. Even the Bolsheviks shunned him, so McCullagh was told, and it was hard to square the sight of the now scrawny, red-eyed, nervous man in carpet slippers with a mass murderer. In 1920 Yurovsky returned to Moscow, where he held a succession of key economic and party posts and fattened out like the good well-fed apparatchik he became – in middle age looking not unlike Stalin. Death at the age of 60 spared him the inevitable bullet in the back of the skull from the NKVD, his daughter Rimma already having been sent to the Gulag in 1935 (she was released 20 years later).

Fortunately for him, Yurovsky, whose health had always been bad, died of a gastric ulcer in the comfort of the Kremlin Hospital in 1938, having donated the guns with which he killed the Imperial Family to the Museum of the Revolution and leaving three different and valuable accounts of the events of July 1918. In a final letter to his children, he reminisced on his revolutionary career and how ‘the storm of October’ had ‘turned its brightest side’ towards him. He had met and served Lenin, and Lenin’s men after him, and he considered himself to be ‘the happiest of mortals’, a loyal Bolshevik to the end.

In 1964, the 70-year-old Grigory Nikulin was persuaded to take part in a radio interview conducted by the son of fellow killer Mikhail Kudrin. But he did so grudgingly and refused to be drawn into any more than superficial detail. ‘There’s no need to savour it’, he grunted. ‘Let it remain with us. Let it depart with us.’ Shortly afterwards, the only other survivor, Alexey Kabanov, confirmed what Nikulin told Kudrin’s son that day – that it was Kudrin who had killed the Tsar and not Yurovsky. ‘The fact that the Tsar died from your father’s bullet was something every worker in the Ural Cheka knew at the time.’ Whether that was true or not we shall never know. What really happened that night at the Ipatiev House was, from the very first, distorted by a systematic web of official lies, confusion, poor memory and disinformation, fuelled by the deliberate feeding to gullible Western reporters of entirely spurious stories about the fate of the family. By October 1918 the first intrepid American journalists were making their way to the city, travelling in
from Vladivostok with the American intervention forces. Carl Ackerman of the
New York Times
arrived first and was elated to land what he thought was a massive scoop about the Tsar’s final hours. He hastily dispatched it to the paper in December 1918 and it was syndicated across America. It told a lurid tale of the Tsar’s midnight execution by firing squad, in a state of collapse, propped up against the firing post, the text accompanied by a drawing of a distraught Tsaritsa and Alexey at the killers’ feet, begging for mercy. The story, related by the Tsar’s ‘personal servant’, a man called ‘Parfen Dominin’, who had supposedly been with him in the Ipatiev House, was hardly credible. It has been suggested that it came from the elderly Chemodurov, who had fallen sick in May and had been taken from the house to the local hospital, but had since become senile. To the jaundiced eye of any New York newspaper editor, however, it was great copy.