The Last Tsar (70 page)

Why did Attaché Bialer extract his wife’s word never to talk about her acquaintanceship with the mysterious Sokolov? Because he had not told his wife the truth about “Sokolov’s” end, for he had decided not to frighten his wife. No, this “commander of the detachment that executed the tsar’s family” did come to an end in 1938, but not in a hospital.

“Commander of the detachment” is just as much a confusing pseudonym as Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov. The latter was an ironic pseudonym, for it was the name of the famous investigator involved in the inquiry into the murder of the tsar’s family.

So who was he?

It’s not hard to figure out. This man must have held the same rank as Comrade Voroshilov himself—the first marshal made sure the Soviet ambassador in Paris took pains over this strange patient. Of all the participants in the execution, this could only have been one man—Alexander Beloborodov. The cruel Beloborodov. The jolly but cruel young Beloborodov, who left fifteen Romanovs lying forever in the Ural hills. Now he was people’s commissar for internal affairs for the Russian republic and a mortally ill, unhappy man, swallowing with difficulty the runny food fed to him on a spoon by a soft-hearted woman. But that was not yet his end. His end was waiting for him in Moscow. In 1938 they would take the all-powerful Kremlin boyar. And in the Lubyanka, a pathetic, powerless man, his belt removed from his trousers, holding up his falling pants, in that moment, he would know … he would know a lot. Later, having passed through all the tortures of hell, the Ural Napoleon would go to that last wall. For that “kick in the ass.” Thus Alexander Beloborodov greeted the twentieth anniversary of the tsarist execution with a bullet to his heart.

Then came his turn.

The long string of titles for Comrade Filipp: from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Congress, a candidate for membership in the Party’s Central Committee; from the Fifteenth Congress on, a Central Committee member. Also chief state arbitrator in the Sovnarkom. With every step up he took one step closer to death.

In the 1940s, Goloshchekin went through the Kremlin boyars’ entire inevitable program: the Gulag, a firing squad, and an unmarked common grave—a pit hastily scattered with earth.

In the pit Joseph Stalin had designed for them, the executed ended their days—Ditkovsky and Safarov and Commander Berzin.

One way or another, the men who signed the Ural Soviet’s sentence of execution all died by a bullet.

But what about the indirect executioners?

Everyone whose names we know for certain died in bed.

Oh well, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” prayed the last tsar in his last moment.

In 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the murder of the tsar’s family, also in July, the other main participant died from an excruciating ulcer—Yakov Yurovsky.

The son of Chekist Medvedev:

“My father used to say that at the end Yurovsky had a bad heart and suffered dreadfully over his daughter. But there was nothing he could do. There was no way he could help her.”

The theory was a lot easier than the practice, and in practice he had sacrificed his daughter in the name of the Party … the iron commandant paid for this with a bad heart and an excruciating ulcer. A fatal ulcer ate up his insides. When he knew he was about to die, on that suffocating July day, he wrote a letter to his children.

Surrounded by countless corpses, his beloved daughter sent to the tortures of a camp, in anticipation of his closest friends dying, in the terrible year 1938, he wrote to his children … of the marvelous past, present, and future.

“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.… This I regret. Rimma may remember individual episodes in the revolution of 1905: my arrest, prison, my work in Ekaterinburg. [An awful sentence! Where was the unlucky Rimma when she recalled her father’s years in a tsarist prison? In a Soviet prison, compared to which her father’s tsarist prison was an idyll, a resort.]

“… In the storm of October, fate turned its brightest side toward me. I saw and heard Lenin many times, he received me, chatted with me, and supported me like no one else in the years I worked at the State Depository. I had the good fortune to know well Lenin’s most loyal pupils and comrades-in-arms—Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky.… To work under their leadership and be in contact with them in a family way.

“… fate has not insulted me, a man who has passed through three storms with Lenin and Lenin’s men may consider himself the happiest of mortals….

“Although I am dead tired from my illnesses, it still seems to me that I will participate with you in future coming events. I embrace you, I kiss Rimma, your wives, and my grandchildren. Father.”

As I read this new man’s deathbed letter, I kept remembering another final letter—of a man he and his comrades had killed—Dr. Botkin. These two letters are self-portraits of two worlds.

Yurovsky was dying, having achieved his goal: in the Museum of the Revolution lay his Note, which said that
he
had killed the last tsar. This was confirmed in numerous books that appeared in the West. He could call himself “the happiest of mortals.”

In 1952, not quite living to seventy, special pensioner Peter Zakharovich Ermakov died happily. A street was named after him in Sverdlovsk.

In 1964, Mikhail Medvedev died equally happily. Shortly before his death he gave his Browning to the Museum of the Revolution.

That same Browning—no. 389965.

The Browning had a history. At the beginning of the century in Baku they had begun to fight against provocateurs sent into the underground organizations of the Russian Social Democratic Revolutionary Party. For this purpose Medvedev had acquired this gun. At that time in Baku the leader of the Baku revolutionaries had
accused Stalin of being a provocateur sent to their organization. Stalin was suddenly arrested by the secret police, though, and disappeared from Baku. So it is quite possible that had Stalin remained in Baku, the Browning’s first bullet might have gone into the first revolutionary tsar. But Stalin disappeared in the nick of time—and the Browning had to wait for the last tsar of the Romanov line.

By 1964 only two of those who had been in that terrible room were still among the living. One of these was Grigory Nikulin. After the execution, fate had been kind to Nikulin.

From Nikulin’s autobiography, written in 1923:

“In 1919, upon my arrival in Moscow, I remained in the administrative department of the Moscow Soviet, where I held the following jobs: head of jailhouses for the city of Moscow, head of MUR [Moscow Criminal Investigation].”

In 1921 the former executioner was transferred to a somewhat surprising job—head of the State Insurance Office. Those working in the insurance office would have been very surprised to learn of their boss’s recent past. Not that he ever talked about it. He did not even mention it in his autobiography. Only Yurovsky’s authority could force his “son” to sign that statement in 1927—about the transfer of the commandant’s sinister weapon to the Museum of the Revolution.

After Yurovsky’s death, Nikulin crossed out the past in his mind for good. He married a second time. His wife was a beautiful, commanding, calm young woman.

From a letter of A. I. Vinogradova in Moscow:

“My parents were friendly with him. He was a smart, lean figure. A very pleasant, fine face. He never talked about the execution. And his wife forbade us from asking him about it. Nikulin is buried at the famous Novodevichy cemetery [the most prestigious cemetery in Moscow, where Khrushchev and all important government figures lie], not far from my parent.”

The son of Chekist Medvedev:

“At the end of his life Nikulin was in charge of Moscow’s entire water supply, the Stalin Water Supply Station. His wife boasted of their abundant life: they lived in their own private house, they even had a separate room for the dog. They really did have an enormous dog. This whole conversation took place on a visit. Rimma Yurovskaya was in the room during the story. She had just returned to Moscow from twenty years in the camps. She had nowhere to live. She joked, ‘Hey, let me live in your dog’s room.’”

Yes, the favorite of the Ekaterinburg Komsomol had served twenty years, she had passed through the entire school of Stalin’s camps, all the charms of the bright future her father so loved to dream of she had seen with her own eyes. And now, without an apartment, without her health, her life lost—the Ural Komsomol’s favorite listened to a story about the life of the new rich, the new bosses.

Let us return to Nikulin.

In 1964, the son of Chekist Mikhail Medvedev, historian M. M. Medvedev, convinced Nikulin to tape a statement for the radio.

This was no simple matter. Nikulin was used to “holding his tongue”—as Stalin had once taught him. And although Stalin had died eleven years before, the fear stuck in those people forever.

Nevertheless, the son of Chekist Medvedev was able to convince “son” Nikulin. He had played a part in the death of Medvedev’s father. Nikulin felt he was the last witness who could record this for history, who could finally name the true regicide.

M. Medvedev asked, “Did the execution begin with a general salvo?”

“No, the shooting was chaotic.”

“There was a first shot, though. Someone had to have fired it.” “Your father, Mikhail Medvedev. He fired the first shot. He killed the tsar.”

Now that Yurovsky was dead, his “son” could tell the truth. He did not have long to live.

The son of Chekist Medvedev:

“I asked him to recount the details of the execution. He said: ‘There’s no need to savor it. Let it remain with us. Let it depart with us.’”

To a question about the “Anastasia” who was causing such an uproar in the West then, Nikulin replied briefly: “They all perished.”

Evidently, Yurovsky’s son found out about this dangerous tape.

That is why in the same year 1964, the copy of his father’s note in which the commandant again declared from the grave, “I killed the last tsar,” appeared in the Museum of the Revolution.

——

Nikulin turned out not to be the last of the regicides still living in this world, however. In the same year 1964, M. M. Medvedev received a letter from distant Khabarovsk from the former Life Guard and regicide Kabanov. Alive! The old dog was alive! Having read the obituary of his old acquaintance Chekist Medvedev in
Pravda
, he wrote to Medvedev’s son. They began to correspond, and the old Chekist machine gunner, one of the last witnesses of the Ipatiev night still alive, answered his main question: “The fact that the tsar died from your father’s bullet was something every worker in the Ural Cheka knew at the time.”

So continued this amazing struggle “for the honor of the execution.”

In the same year 1964, when the last witnesses to the death of the family were being taped for Moscow Radio, an eighty-year-old nun was being buried in a local Orthodox cemetery. She had become a nun, but she had not lived in a convent, and she had taken her vows in secret. The secret nun left behind many amazing photographs—Tsarskoe Selo, the palace at Livadia—the whole antediluvian world that had drowned in eternity. She also left watercolors drawn in the last empress’s hand, as well as drawings by the last tsarevich and letters from the tsaritsa and her children. This was Anya. Having lived more than half the twentieth century, Anna Vyrubova departed this life.

With her went an era.

A
mountain of new readers’ letters—agonizing letters. I keep trying to put an end to the book, but they keep coming.

The niece of Elizaveta Ersberg, the tsar’s family’s parlormaid, wrote again: “A few words about my aunt’s fate after the execution of the tsar’s family. When Kolchak took Tobolsk, Elizaveta was called in for questioning to the commission of the jurist Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov (who turned out to have been a schoolmate of my father’s at the Third Grammar School). Elizaveta arrived in Ekaterinburg with the advance White troops. She hired a boatman and searched for the bodies in a pond and in some swamp (she had received information) but found nothing. Then through the Red Cross mission she traced—via the Far East, Japan, America, France, and Denmark—the tsar’s mother, Empress Marie Feodorovna, who gave her a subsidy, then went to Russia via Switzerland and Czechoslovakia in November 1928. She was allowed back into her homeland at my father’s personal request to Molotov. At the border Liza was given a written undertaking to appear at the Cheka in twenty-four hours. When she came, she was given a written undertaking about not disclosing the facts of the life of the tsar’s family and the circumstances connected therewith….

“Now about the story of my aunt’s friend, Anna Demidova, apparently shot in the Ipatiev house.