The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.109
On one level, Trotsky’s justification is without merit. Had the Bolsheviks indeed killed the ex-Tsar’s wife and children in order to instill terror in their enemies and loyalty in their followers, they would have proclaimed the deed loud and clear, whereas in fact they denied it then and for years to come. But Trotsky’s terrible confession is correct in a deeper moral and psychological sense. Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”
When a government arrogates to itself the power to kill people, not because of what they had done or even might do, but because their death is “needed,” we are entering an entirely new moral realm. Here lies the symbolic significance of the events that occurred in Ekaterinburg in the night of July 16–17. The massacre, by secret order of the government, of a family that for all its Imperial background was remarkably commonplace, guilty of nothing, desiring only to be allowed to live in peace, carried mankind for the first time across the threshold of deliberate genocide. The same reasoning that had led the Bolsheviks to condemn them to death would later be applied in Russia and elsewhere to millions of nameless beings who happened to stand in the way of one or another design for a new world order.
*The basic account remains that of Nicholas A. Sokolov, the chairman of a special commission appointed by Admiral Kolchak to investigate the crime: Ubiistvo tsarskoi sent’i (Paris, 1925) (available in French and German translations). Of the secondary sources, the best are by Paul Bulygin, The Murder of the Romanovs (London, 1935) and S. P. Melgunov, Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia (Paris, 1957). For the fate of the other Romanovs, the main source is Serge Smirnoff, Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs (Paris, 1928). P. M. Bykov’s Bolshevik account in its original version: “Poslednie dni poslednego tsaria,’ in N. L. Nikolaev, ed., Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale (Ekaterinburg, 1921), 3–26, is helpful. The dossiers of Sokolov’s commission deposited at the Houghton Library of Harvard University are indispensable: a scholarly selection has been edited by Nicholas Ross, Gibel’ tsarskoi sem’i (Frankfurt, 1987).
In 1989, the Soviet press began to publish important new materials. The most valuable are the recollections of Ia. M. Iurovskii, the commandant of the murder squad, published by Edvard Radzinskii in Ogonè’k, No. 21 (1989), 4–5, 30–32. The film producer Gelii Riabov, who claims to have discovered the remains of the Imperial family, brought out in Rodina (No. 4 and No. 5, for 1989) some interesting additional information; unfortunately it is edited in a very slipshod manner.
*Michael’s friend, O. Poutianine, therefore is incorrect in claiming that Michael refused to seek asylum in England in the belief that the Russian people would do him no harm: Revue des Deux Mondes, XVIII (November 15, 1923), 297–98.
†I. Steinberg, Spiridonova, Revolutionary Terrorist (London, 1935), 195. On January 12/25, 1918, Vechernii chas carried an interview with Steinberg in which he expressed confidence that a trial would take place: “As is known, it was originally proposed that the ex-Tsar be tried by the Constituent Assembly, but it now appears that his fate will be decided by the Council of People’s Commissars.” It has been confirmed since that the Council of People’s Commissars passed on January 29, 1918, a resolution to turn Nicholas II over to a court: G. Ioffe in Sovetskaia Rossiia, No. 161/9,412 (July 12, 1987), 4.
