The Last Tsar (40 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.