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The Murder of the Czar and His Family
From such a ubiquitous presence of Jews in the Bolshevik ranks in those terrible days and
months could not fail to follow the most severe consequences. The most searing event of that
time, to this day a fresh and bloody wound in the mind and soul of Russia, was the murder of the
royal family. Honesty compels us to admit that Jewish participation on that atrocity was not
entirely as decisive and overwhelming as the popular imagination has it, but it was sufficiently
bad to leave a permanent stain on the Jewish people for all time. The participation of Russian
Jews has always been exaggerated with glee. And this is always so: the dynamics of Jewish
involvement (and there are many) cannot be provided on the main lines of action and at crucial
points. The actual murder of the royal family was committed with the complicity of the
protective detail (and assassins) of Latvians and Russian Magyars, but two of the prominent fatal
roles were played by Shai-Philippe Goloshchekin and Yakov Yurovsky.
Let us be clear: the decision to kill was in the hands of Lenin. He dared to commit this
murder, correctly calculating and anticipating the indifference of the Allied powers (in the spring
of 1917 the English king had refused Nicholas asylum.) Their weakness not only doomed the
Czar, the prince, and the women to immediate death, but also doomed the conservative elements
of the Russian people to seven decades of tyranny.
Goloshchekin was exiled to Tobolsk province in 1912 for four years, then in 1917 to the
Urals along with Sverdlov. (By the way, in 1918 they were on a “thou” basis, as revealed in their
Ekaterinburg telegraph negotiations with Moscow.) Since 1912 Goloshchekin (together with
Sverdlov) had been a Party member and was a member of the Central Committee after the
October Revolution.
The Secretary of the Perm and Ekaterinburg Gubernia, and the voluminous Ural Regional
Committee of the party was the supreme master of all the Urals. The idea of murdering the royal
family and the choice of options matured at the top, among Lenin and his entourage, but the
deed’s execution was covertly prepared in the Urals by Goloshchekin and Beloborodova
(Chairman of the Ural Soviet).
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As it turns out, at the beginning of July 1918 Goloshchekin went with the idea to the
Kremlin, convinced them of the disadvantages of the “flight of the royal family” option which
would cause them simply to disappear, and frankly and directly advocated shooting them and
publicly declaring that fact. He came prepared to convince Lenin, but found he did not need to.
The only obstacle was that Lenin feared the reaction of the population of Russia and the West.
But there were already signs that everything would go smoothly, that the Western powers had
quietly written the Romanovs off, and that the murders could proceed without overmuch political
risk.
One would think that Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin would have been
consulted on such a decision, but not all of them were then in Moscow owing to their many
duties, except for Kamenev, and from what we know of these men there is no reason to assume
that any of them would have minded. We know that Trotsky reacted indifferently or with
approval. In 1935 he wrote in his diary that after he returned to Moscow he casually asked
Sverdlov “‘Yes, and where is the king?’
‘It’s over,’ he [Sverdlov] said. ‘Shot.’
‘And his family is where?’
‘The family with him.’
‘Is that all?’ I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
‘That’s it!’ said Sverdlov ‘But what?’ He waited for my reaction. I said nothing.
‘Who decided?’ I asked.
‘We decided here.’ I asked no more questions In fact, the decision was not only
appropriate, but necessary. The execution of the royal family was needed not simply in order to
confuse, terrify, and to deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up our own ranks, to show
that there was no retreat. Ahead lay complete victory, or else complete destruction.”
M. Heifetz has analyzed just who could be on this last Leninist Council, in an attempt to
determine whose hands were bloody. Of course there was Sverdlov himself, the Polish mass
murderer Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Vladimir Petrovsky (Cheka), Stuchka (People’s Commissariat)
and W. Schmidt. V. I. Lenin, of course, was the king of the Tribunal.
On July 12, 1918 Goloshchekin returned to Yekaterinburg, waiting for the final order
from Moscow, which he presumed would come from Lenin. And Yakov Yurovsky, the
watchmaker, the son of a criminal convict at the time exiled to Siberia where he was born, in
July 1918 was appointed commandant of the Ipatiev house, where he immediately began
planning the operation and organizing the murder technique among Hungarians and Russians,
including Pavel Medvedev and Peter Ermakov, and the concealment of the corpses. He laid in
the barrels of gasoline and sulfuric acid for the destruction of the carcasses with the help of
oblkomissar of supply P. L. Voikov.
It isnecessary to pursue those shots in the basement meat grinder of the Ipatiev House,
and whose shots proved decisive. This could help us to understand the executioners themselves.
In the future, Yurovsky with undeniable glee claimed the major credit: “Nikolai was killed on the
spot by a bullet my Colt.” But the honor was also claimed by Ermakov, “Comrade Mauser.”
Goloshchekin not looking for fame, but in the next 20 years all knew what he was—a major
killer of the king. Even in 1936, touring in Rostov-on-Don at some party conference, he still
boasted that from the podium. (A year before he himself was shot.) Yurovsky, who left after the
murder for Moscow and then spent a year “working” in the immediate vicinity of Dzerzhinsky as
an expert on wet matters, died a natural death.
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As throughout the whole revolution, the question of the nationality of the players is a
major one. So the complicity and eclectic participation of diverse nationalities in [former Czarist
prime minister] Stolypin’s assassination, of course, affected Russian feelings. But the murder of
the king’s brother, Mikhail Alexandrovich? Who was the killer? Candidates include Andrei
Markov, Gavriil Myasnikov Nicholas Zhuzhgov, Ivan Kolpashchikov. Probably all Russian.
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