The Last Tsar (53 page)

Nicholas believed. Naively. Almost stupidly. And he made the fateful entry in his own diary.

But did he really believe?

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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?”