A Soviet participant, P. M. Bykov, in an early account of these events, published in Ekaterinburg in 1921, had told the truth about the fate of the family, but this work was promptly withdrawn from circulation.106 Only in 1926, after the appearance of Sokolov’s book in Paris had made the old version untenable, was Bykov authorized to write an official Communist account of the Ekaterinburg tragedy. This book, which Moscow had translated into the principal European languages, finally admitted that Alexandra and the children had perished along with the ex-Tsar. Bykov wrote:
Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in mud, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have duly rotted.*
Iurovskii, having escaped from Ekaterinburg ahead of the Czechs, subsequently returned but later moved to Moscow, where he worked for the government. As reward for his services he was honored with an appointment to the Collegium of the Cheka: in May 1921, he was warmly received by Lenin.† The revolver with which he killed Nicholas was placed in the special depository of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. He died a natural death in August 1938 in the Kremlin hospital.107 As a Chekist and “comrade-in-arms of Dzerzhinskii” he has earned himself a niche in the pantheon of minor Bolshevik heroes: he is the subject of a novel and of a biography, which depicts him as a “typical” Chekist: “closed, severe but with a soft heart.”108 The other principals in the Ekaterinburg tragedy fared less well. Beloborodov at first made a rapid career, being admitted in March 1919 to membership in the Central Committee and the Orgbiuro, and eventually attaining the rank of Commissar of the Interior (1923–27). But he was undone by his friendship with Trotsky: arrested in 1936, he was shot two years later. Goloshchekin was also a victim of Stalin’s purges and perished in 1941. Both were subsequently “rehabilitated.”
Ipatev’s house served for many years as a club and a museum. But the authorities grew anxious over the number of visitors who came to Ekaterinburg (now renamed Sverdlovsk) to see the building, some of them seemingly on a religious pilgrimage. In the fall of 1977, they ordered it torn down.‡
In view of the tens of thousands of lives which the Cheka would claim in the years that followed the Ekaterinburg tragedy, and the millions killed by its successors, the death at its hands of eleven prisoners hardly qualifies as an event of extraordinary magnitude. And yet, there is a deep symbolic meaning to the massacre of the ex-Tsar, his family, and staff. Just as liberty has its great historic days—the battles of Lexington and Concord, the storming of the Bastille—so does totalitarianism. The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.
To begin with, it was unnecessary. The Romanovs had willingly, indeed happily, withdrawn from active politics and submitted to every demand of their Bolshevik captors. True, they were not averse to being abducted and brought to freedom, but hope of escape from imprisonment, especially imprisonment imposed without charges or trial, hardly qualifies as the “criminal design” that it was designated by the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks to justify the execution. In any event, if the Bolshevik Government indeed feared their fleeing and turning into a “live banner” for the opposition, it had ample time to bring them to Moscow: Goloshchekin had no difficulty leaving Ekaterinburg by train for the capital with the Imperial family’s belongings three days later. There they would have been beyond the reach of Czechs, Whites, and other opponents of the Bolshevik regime.
If this was not done, the reason must be sought not in such spurious excuses as lack of time, the danger of flight, or of capture by the Czechs, but in the political needs of the Bolshevik Government. In July 1918 it was sinking to the nadir of its fortunes, under attack from all sides and abandoned by many of its supporters. To cement its deserting following it needed blood. This much was conceded by Trotsky when, reflecting on these events in exile, he concurred with Lenin’s decision seventeen years earlier to dispatch the wife and children of the ex-Tsar—an act for which he bore no personal responsibility and therefore had no need to justify:
