My next visit to Moscow took place after Ekaterinburg had already fallen [i.e., after July 25]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing, “Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?” “Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.” “And where is the family?” “The family along with him.” “All?” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise. “All,” Sverdlov replied. “Why?” He awaited my reaction. I made no reply. “And who decided the matter?” I inquired. “We decided it here. Ilich thought that we should not leave the Whites a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances …” I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.64
Sverdlov’s offhand remark undercuts once and for all the official version that Nicholas and his family had been executed on the initiative of the Ekaterinburg authorities to prevent them from either escaping or being captured by the Czechs. The decision fell not in Ekaterinburg but in Moscow, at a time when the Bolshevik regime felt the ground giving way and feared a restoration of the monarchy—a prospect that only a year earlier would have appeared too fantastic to contemplate.*
At the end of June, Goloshchekin, the most powerful Bolshevik in the Urals and a friend of Sverdlov’s, left Ekaterinburg for Moscow. His mission, according to Bykov, was to discuss the fate of the Romanovs with the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.65 That the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks and Goloshchekin in particular wanted the Romanovs out of the way is well established: hence it can reasonably be deduced that he sought from Moscow authorization to proceed with the execution. Lenin approved this request.
The determination to execute the ex-Tsar, and possibly the rest of his immediate family, seems to have been taken in the first days of July, very likely at the meeting of the Sovnarkom in the evening of July 2. Two facts speak in favor of this hypothesis.
One of the items on the agenda of this Sovnarkom session was the nationalization of the properties of the Romanov family. A commission was appointed to draft a decree to this effect.66 This could hardly have been considered an urgent matter in those critical days, given that all the Romanovs living under Communist rule were either in jail or in exile and their properties had long been taken over by the state or distributed to peasants. It seems likely, therefore, to have been raised in connection with the decision to execute Nicholas. A decree formally nationalizing the properties of the Romanov family was signed into law on July 13, three days before the murder, but in an unusual departure from practice not published until six days later—that is, on the day the news of the murder was made public.67
The other fact which speaks in favor of this conjecture is that immediately afterward, on July 4, the responsibility for guarding the Imperial family was shifted from the Ekaterinburg Soviet to the Cheka. On July 4, Beloborodov wired to the Kremlin:
Moscow. Chairman Central Executive Committee Sverdlov for Goloshchekin. Syromolotov just departed to organize affairs in accord with center’s instructions fears groundless stop Avdeev replaced his assistant Koshkin [Moshkin] arrested instead Avdeev Iurovskii internal guard all changed replaced by others stop Beloborodov*
Iakov Mikhailovich Iurovskii, the head of the Ekaterinburg Cheka, was the grandson of a Jewish convict sentenced for an ordinary crime and exiled to Siberia long before the Revolution. After a sketchy education he was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Tomsk. During the 1905 Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks. Later he spent some time in Berlin, where he converted to Lutheranism. On returning to Russia, he was exiled to Ekaterinburg, where he opened a photographic studio said to have served as a secret meeting place for Bolsheviks. During the war, he underwent paramedical training. On the outbreak of the February Revolution, he deserted and returned to Ekaterinburg, where he agitated among soldiers against the war. In October 1917, the Ural Regional Soviet appointed him “Commissar of Justice,” following which he joined the Cheka. He was by all accounts a sinister person, full of resentment and frustration, a type that gravitated to the Bolsheviks in those days and provided prime recruits for the secret police. From interrogations of his wife and family, Sokolov obtained the portrait of a self-important, willful man, with a domineering, cruel disposition.68 Alexandra took an instant dislike to him, calling him “vulgar and unpleasant.” He had several virtues which made him valuable to the Cheka: scrupulous honesty in dealing with state property, unrestrained brutality, and considerable psychological insight.
98. The murderer of Nicholas II, Iurovskii (upper right), with his family.
