The Last Tsar (51 page)

Markov told how the principal organizer of Michael’s murder, Myasnikov, had chosen for his assistants Chief of Police Ivanchenko and him, Markov. But three armed men seemed too few, so they brought in two more, Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov, both workers.

“At about seven in the evening, in two closed phaetons,” recalled Markov, “we set out for Perm. The horses had been furnished us in the Cheka courtyard, so we initiated the chairman of the provincial Cheka, P. Malkov, into the affair. That was where the plan for abducting Michael Romanov was worked out in full.… Malkov stayed at the Cheka, Myasnikov left on foot for the Royal Rooms hotel, and we four—Ivanchenko and Zhuzhgov on the first horse and Kolpashchikov and I on the second—approached the front door of the Royal Rooms at about eleven. Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov went into the hotel, and Ivanchenko and I stayed outside in reserve.”

Everything went just as the grand duke’s valet had told Volkov: Michael refused to go with the men, demanding that Cheka Chairman Malkov (the “important Bolshevik”) be telephoned and citing “the decree on my free choice of residence.”

While Michael was defending his rights, the men waiting outside were growing exasperated.

“Armed with a revolver and a bomb, I entered the room, having first cut the telephone line in the hall,” Markov continued. “Michael Romanov was still being stubborn, citing illness, and demanding a doctor and Malkov. Then I ordered him taken as he was. They threw whatever came to hand on him and started to take him away, after which he began to get ready and asked whether he needed to take any things with him. I told him someone else would collect his things. Then he asked to take along at least his personal secretary, Brian Johnson. Since that was in our plans, we consented. Michael Romanov threw on a raincoat. N. V. Zhuzhgov grabbed him by the collar and told him to go outside, which he did. Johnson followed voluntarily. Michael Romanov was put in a phaeton. N. V. Zhuzhgov sat behind the coachman, and V. A. Ivanchenko next to Michael Romanov.”

They bravely grabbed the grand duke by the collar (not the shoulder as the valet had testified, concealing the gentleman’s humiliation)—five armed against three unarmed men. To his death—by the collar!

“We rode as far as the kerosene storehouses,” Markov recounted, “which is 5 versts [3.5 miles] from the village of Motovilikha. We went another verst from the storehouses and turned right into the forest.… We met no one on the road [it was night]. When we had gone 100–120 sazhens [750 feet], Zhuzhgov shouted: ‘Get out.’ I
jumped out quickly and demanded that my rider Johnson get out, too. As soon as he got up to get out of the phaeton I shot him in the temple; he swayed and fell. Kolpashchikov fired at Johnson, too, but his bullet stuck in his pistol. Zhuzhgov was doing the same thing, but he only wounded Michael Romanov. Romanov ran toward me with his arms spread open begging to say goodbye to his secretary. Zhuzhgov’s drum got stuck in his revolver [his bullets were homemade]. I had to make the second shot at a rather close distance (about a sazhen) from Michael Romanov’s head and felled him on the spot.

“… We couldn’t bury the corpses since it was growing light quickly and it was so close to the road. We just dragged them together to one side, heaped them with twigs, and returned to Motovilikha. Zhuzhgov and a very reliable policeman went back that night to do the burying.”

Tall, thin Michael, after taking a bullet, his arms spread wide, runs, begging to say goodbye, and in reply—another bullet!

After the murder Markov took the watch off the murdered Johnson, “a souvenir,” as he explained to Alikina. We will have cause to recall this tradition of murderers: taking watches off the slain.

Alikina recorded a most interesting detail at the end of the conversation. “Andrei Vasilievich Markov said at the end that after the execution of Michael Romanov he went to Moscow. With the help of Sverdlov he was received by Lenin, whom he told about the event.”

Such was the “lynching” in which the leaders of the local Cheka, the police, and the head of one of the Soviets participated. And about which they went with pride to tell the head of state.

As they put an end to Michael, the unsuspecting family was feverishly preparing for the trip to Moscow.

We now know how Michael’s individual trip went. We can also imagine how the group trip of Nicholas and his family proceeded.

——

A month later, according to the scenario worked out in Ekaterinburg, a group trip for some other Romanovs would be carried out. Alix’s sister Ella, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, the sons of Grand Duke Konstantin—Ioann, Igor, and Konstantin—young Prince Oleg Paley, and their servants had all been held since May on the outskirts of Alapaevsk.

On July 18 a local cook would see them all get into wagons
very calmly
with the Red Guards: they too had been told they were going on a trip—to a place of safety.

The wagons would stop by a nameless mine shaft not far from Alapaevsk, and the Red Guards would start beating the captives with their rifle butts. The old grand duchess, too. Nicky’s childhood playmate and Kschessinska’s admirer, Sergei Mikhailovich, naturally would resist. For which he would get a bullet, the old dandy. He alone would be thrown into the mine dead; the others would still be alive. Grenades would be tossed in, brush and fallen branches heaped on, and all of it set afire. For a long time local residents—this is not a pretty legend—would hear the singing of prayers from underground. Ella would be dying in agony but would have strength for more than prayer. In the dark of the mine, gasping from the smoke, the crippled grand duchess crawled to the dying Ioann and bandaged his smashed head. To the end she fulfilled the vows of the Convent of Martha and Mary.

When the Whites would take Alapaevsk later that summer, they would find these bodies in the strewn mine. An examination of the corpses would reveal the trip’s denouement. As in Michael’s case, the Cheka in Alapaevsk staged the slain Romanovs’ escape.

A telegram dated July 19, 1918, to the Sovnarkom, Moscow, from Alapaevsk: “Reporting that in Alapaevsk I have learned of an assault on the quarters where the former Romanov princes were being kept and the removal of such. My brief inquiry and examination at the scene has shown that … the attackers broke into the building, freed all the Romanovs and servants, and took them away.… Examination of the building has shown the Romanovs’ things had been packed and stowed.… I assume that the attack and flight had been previously planned. Political Representative Kobelyanko.”

This is what awaited the family on their trip.

The same scenario lay at the base of all the Romanov murders, and all of them contained an element of provocation.

Yes, Russia’s revolutionaries had grown up with the secret police’s provocations, and when they conquered they adopted the familiar methods. The immortal, all-Russian institution—the secret police—was resurrected then and there, like a phoenix from the ashes. Now it was called the Cheka. It would become more powerful than its creators. And it would kill them. In 1917 the revolutionaries destroyed the secret police, and in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the secret police would destroy the revolutionaries.

So, the general action was planned for June 13–14: the night of the long knives, the destruction of both tsarist brothers and the annihilation of the tsar’s entire family at one fell swoop.

But only Michael’s murder was accomplished.

In the heat of preparations, Avdeyev suddenly arrived and the family’s trip was postponed.

What had happened?

Most likely carrying out the executions had been a local decision made by the ferocious Ural Bolsheviks. When they conceived of destroying the Romanovs, they were on their own. To them Moscow was a distant myth.

The decision, naturally, had been made by the head of the Ural government—Beloborodov. Subsequently Chekists captured by White Guards would corroborate this fact, stating that the Romanovs in Alapaevsk had been destroyed in response to a telegram from Ekaterinburg over the signatures of Beloborodov and his assistant Safarov. But there was one more person without whom Beloborodov could not have acted: the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, the military commissar of the Urals, Comrade Filipp Goloshchekin.

Beloborodov was hot-headed, young, and fierce. Goloshchekin was much older and more circumspect. As military commissar he was directly involved in fighting the White Army. When the Bolsheviks had conceived of their proletarian vengeance—the annihilation of the Romanovs—the military situation did not yet threaten irrevocable catastrophe. Now Commissar Goloshchekin knew for certain that Ekaterinburg would fall to the White forces. Soon they would have to flee, and the only place for them to go was Moscow. If yesterday they had treated the capital with mocking disdain, today it was their only island of salvation. No, without Moscow, without the permission of Lenin and his old friend Sverdlov, nothing important
could be contemplated. The elimination of the tsar’s family—it was too dangerous to undertake something like that now.

At the last moment, Goloshchekin evidently rescinded his decision to proceed with the murders. He decided first to obtain Moscow’s consent.

Meanwhile he let go a trial balloon: to see how Moscow would react to Michael’s destruction.

The organizer of Michael’s murder, Myasnikov, did not want to be a guinea pig. That was why he disappeared the moment they brought Michael out of the hotel. According to Markov’s statements, Myasnikov was not involved in the actual murder at all. A shrewd man, Myasnikov. During the first postrevolutionary years he took part in the workers’ opposition and did battle with Lenin himself. When the persecutions of the workers’ opposition began in 1921–22, he managed to flee abroad and lived happily in Paris, where he forgot all about our bitter revolution. In vain. Just as he had once taken Michael away by force, so he too would be abducted by Stalin’s bold Chekists, who brought the poor forgetful man back to his homeland. And just as Michael had once been shot without trial, like a dog, so too would Myasnikov.

Or else it had all been conceived in Moscow—how to destroy both pretenders to the Russian throne—and now, when the days of Bolshevik power seemed numbered, the Central Committee panicked and decided to limit themselves to Michael and see how the world would react. They could leave the family for now, a trump card in possible negotiations with the Allied powers.

One way or another, the plan to kill the family was postponed. For now the Ural leaders decided to take the tried and true path.

Once again the days dragged on.

Nicholas’s diary:

“3 [16] June.… All week have been reading and today finished
The History of Emperor Paul the First
by Schiller [Schilder]—very interesting.”

What was he thinking about as he read the history of his unlucky ancestor? About his mother’s prophecy back in 1916, when he became commander-in-chief, that he would repeat Paul Is story? Or was he simply reading a book about a past life that had vanished so
very quickly? As if there had always been this pitiful house and these long, boring, maddeningly hot days.

“5 [18] June. Dear Anastasia has turned 17. The heat outside and inside was terrific.… The girls are learning how to cook from Kharitonov and in the evenings they knead flour and in the morning bake the bread. Not bad!”

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.