The fact that the Civil War broke out in Russia in 1917 is also the fault of the last Russian emperor Nicholas II. But it so happened that of the ten million victims of this war, it was he who became the most famous.
On July 17, 1918, in the basement of the house of engineer Ipatiev in Yekaterinburg, the last Russian emperor Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Fedorovna, four grand duchesses: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, Tsarevich Alexei and several people close to the royal family were shot.
During the Civil War in Russia, when blood was flowing like a river, the murder of the royal family in society was not considered a terrible atrocity. During the period of socialism, this crime was even presented as a kind of just act, and the streets of cities, especially Sverdlovsk, were named after the regicides. And only in the last two decades the tragedy of this event became clear. No matter how bad the last Russian tsar was, neither he, nor his wife, and even more so his children did not deserve such a terrible fate.
Characters
However, a certain higher justice has long passed its verdict. It can be said without much exaggeration that the highest punishment fell on the heads of the regicides. Moreover, a kind of curse affected not so much the performers as those who made the decision to liquidate the Romanovs.
True, from a historical point of view, the question of who exactly made this decision is not completely clear. According to the generally accepted version, the decision was taken by the Ural authorities, but agreed with the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies Yakov Sverdlov. One way or another, but direct responsibility for the decision to liquidate the Romanovs escaped both the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Lenin, and the main Ural Bolshevik Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, who since May 1918 served as chairman of the presidium of the Ural regional committee of the RCP (b).
It is officially believed that the decision to shoot the royal family was made on July 14 at a meeting of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers' Deputies by the following comrades: Chairman of the Council of Deputies Alexander Beloborodov, member of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Committee of the RCP (b) Georgy Safarov, military commissar of Yekaterinburg Philip Goloshchekin, Uraloblso-vete supply commissar Pyotr Voikov, chairman of the regional Cheka Fedor Lukoyanov, member of the Council, commandant of the "house of special purpose" (Ipatiev house) Yakov Yurovsky and a number of others.
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The plan for the murder of the Romanovs was developed by Yurovsky, his assistant Grigory Nikulin, the Chekist Mikhail Medvedev (Kudrin) and a member of the executive committee of the Ural Soviet, head of the Red Guard unit of the Verkh-Isetsky plant, Pyotr Ermakov.
These same people became the main characters directly during the execution of the Romanovs. It is not easy to reconstruct the course of events: who shot whom. But one gets the impression that the old revolutionary militant Pyotr Ermakov was especially zealous, who fired from three revolvers and finished off the wounded with a bayonet. The sovereign-emperor, again, according to the generally accepted version, was shot by Yurovsky.
Bullets for organizers
In general, I must say that representatives of all revolutionary parties in the Middle Urals, not only the Bolsheviks, but also the Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, spoke out for the shooting of the tsar. Only one opposed - Pavel Bykov, who insisted on the betrayal of Nikolai Romanov to the people's tribunal. It is curious that while on the hands of Bykov was almost more blood than other revolutionaries who were deciding the fate of the tsar.
In October 1917, Bykov organized the shelling of the Winter Palace from the Peter and Paul Fortress and participated in its storming, led the operation to suppress the uprising of the cadets of the Vladimir School. However, his protest against regicide may have become an indulgence for all sins. Pavel Bykov lived a long and rather successful life. He wrote several books, including "The Last Days of the Romanovs", which tells about the murder of the royal family, for 11 years he headed the Leningrad film factory "Sovkino".
The fate of those who advocated the elimination of the Romanovs, on the contrary, were tragic. It is symbolic that most of them also died from a bullet.
The military commissar of Yekaterinburg Philip (Shaya Isaakovich) Goloshchekin played a key role in the decision to destroy the royal family. It was he who discussed this issue in Petrograd with Sverdlov, and on the basis of his report a decision was made to shoot. At first, Goloshchekin's career was very successful, suffice it to say that for seven years he was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). But this did not save him from execution. He was shot as a "Trotskyist" on October 28, 1941 near the village of Barbosh in the Kuibyshev region.
Alexander Beloborodoye presided over the fateful meeting of the executive committee, at which a resolution was adopted on the execution of Nicholas II and his entire family.
It looks like he got it. In 1921 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Dzerzhinsky, and later, in the period from 1923 to 1927, he himself headed the NKVD of the RSFSR. Ruined his connection with the Trotskyist opposition. White-bearded was shot on February 10, 1938. Also in 1938, his wife, Francis Yablonskaya, was shot.
The editor-in-chief of the Uralsky Rabochy newspaper, Georgy Safarov, was far from the last person in the Bolshevik party. Suffice it to say that in 1917 he arrived in Russia from emigration together with Lenin in a "sealed carriage". And in the Urals he spoke louder than others for the execution of the Romanovs. After the Civil War, Safarov worked as secretary of the executive committee of the Comintern, then was the chief editor of Leningradskaya Pravda. But his commitment to Zinoviev ruined him. For this he was first sentenced to exile, and then to five years in the camps.
One of those with whom he was serving time in a separate camp at Adzva said that Safarov's family disappeared after the arrest, and he suffered severely. In the camp, Georgy worked as a water carrier. "Small in stature, in glasses, dressed in prisoner's rags, with a homemade whip in his hands, belted with a rope instead of a belt, silently endured grief." But when Safarov served his term, he did not find freedom. He was shot on July 27, 1942.
Petr Voikov also arrived in a "sealed carriage" from Germany to make a revolution in Russia. He not only took part in deciding the fate of members of the royal family, but also actively engaged in the destruction of their remains. In 1924 he was appointed the plenipotentiary representative of the USSR in Poland. And he found his bullet in a foreign land. On June 7, 1927, Voikov was shot dead by a white émigré Boris Koverda at the Varshavsky railway station. This guy was also a revolutionary idealist terrorist. Only he set himself the goal of the struggle not against the autocracy, but against Bolshevism.
Fyodor Lukoyanov got off relatively easy - in 1919 he fell ill with a severe nervous breakdown that followed him all his life, until his death in 1947.
The fate of the performers
Fate treated the perpetrators of the crime more leniently, probably believing that they were less guilty - they followed the order. Only a few people who were in secondary roles ended their days tragically, from which it can be concluded that they suffered for other sins. For example, Ermakov's assistant, the former Kronstadt sailor Stepan Vaganov, did not manage to leave Yekaterinburg before the arrival of the Kolchakites and hid in his cellar.
There he was found by the relatives of the people he had killed and literally torn to pieces.
Ermakov, Medvedev (Kudrin), Nikulin and Yurovsky lived in high esteem to their old age, speaking at meetings with stories about their "feat" of regicide. However, higher powers sometimes act in a very sophisticated way. In any case, it is very likely that the Yakov Yurovsky family was haunted by a real curse.
During his lifetime, for Yakov, an ideological Bolshevik, the repression suffered the family of his daughter Rimma. She was also a Bolshevik, from 1917 she headed the "Socialist Union of Working Youth" in the Urals, and then made a good career in the party line. But in 1938, Rimma was arrested along with her husband and sent to the camps, where she spent about 20 years. In fact, the arrest of his daughter brought Yurovsky to the grave - his stomach ulcer worsened from his experiences. And he did not wait for the arrest of his son Alexander in 1952, who at that time was a rear admiral. Neither did he find the curse that persecuted his grandchildren.
By a fatal coincidence, all of Yurovsky's grandchildren died tragically, the girls mostly died in infancy. One of the grandchildren, named Anatoly, was found dead in the car in the middle of the road. Two grandchildren fell from the roof of the shed, got stuck between the boards and suffocated, two more were burned down in a fire in the village. Yurovsky's niece Maria had 11 children, but only the eldest survived, whom she abandoned, and the boy was adopted by the mine manager's family.
Oleg LOGINOV