*Dekrety, I, 227–28. In the final, published version of this decree, Lenin’s spurious rationale for these fiscal measures was omitted (p. 230): apparently its absurdity struck even Lenin.
*Tsiurupa defined as “surplus” all grain in excess of 12 puds of grain or flour (196 kilograms) per person and 1 pud (16.3 kilograms) of groats; he also established norms of feed for horses and livestock: Izvestiia, No. 185/440 (August 28, 1918), 5.
*One student of the subject makes the convincing case that in terms of numbers involved and the threat posed “the magnitude of the Bolshevik war with peasants on the internal front eclipsed by far the front-line civil war with the Whites”: Vladimir Brovkin, “On the Internal Front: The Bolsheviks and the Greens,” paper delivered at the 20th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 1988, 1.
*Information on “disturbances,” whether by workers or peasants, was censored and newspapers which published it were often fined and even suspended. By early 1919, all such information had to be cleared by military censors, who routinely removed it from the handful of non-Bolshevik papers still allowed to appear: DN, No. 2 (March 21, 1919), 1. The only scholarly monograph on the subject is Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia krest’ianskikh vosstanii v Rossii 1918–1921 gg. (Jerusalem, 1988). The 1918–19 uprisings are treated here in Chap. 4, pp. 73–111.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 39–41. Cf. Robespierre: “If the rich farmers persist in sucking the people’s blood, we will turn them over to the people themselves. If we find too many obstacles in dealing out justice to these traitors, the conspirators, the profiteers, then we will have the people deal with them.” Ralph Korngold, Robespierre and the Fourth Estate (New York, 1941), 251.
*This resembled the authority vested in the 1880s in tsarist governors, by virtue of which they were empowered to remove elected zemstvo officials unable to satisfy the monarchy’s criteria of “reliability.”
†E. H. Carr, (The Bolshevik Revolution, II, London, 1952,159) errs, therefore, when he says that the dissolution order proved the failure of kombedy, inasmuch as they had been intended from the outset as transitional institutions.
*LS, XVIII, 158n. But Lenin, (PSS, XXXVII, 419) claimed that the regime obtained 67 million puds.
*“When I put a question to [Lenin] about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guifaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.” Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (New York, 1950), 171.
17
Murder of the Imperial Family
On the night of July 16–17, 1918, at approximately 2:30 a.m. in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg, a squad of Chekists murdered, in the basement of a private home, the ex-Emperor, Nicholas II, his wife, their son and four daughters, the family physician, and three servants. This much is known with certainty. The steps that led to this tragedy, however, remain obscure, despite the immense literature, and will remain such until all the pertinent archives are thrown open to scholars.*
Two other European monarchs had lost their lives in consequence of revolutionary upheavals: Charles I in 1649 and Louis XVI in 1793. Yet, as is the case with so much that concerns the Russian Revolution, while the superficial features of events are familiar, all else is unique. Charles I was tried by a specially constituted High Court of Justice, which lodged formal charges and gave him an opportunity to defend himself. The trial was held in the open and its records were published while it was still in progress; the execution took place in public view. The same held true of Louis XVI. He was tried before the Convention, which sentenced him to death by a majority vote after a long debate, in the course of which a lawyer defended the king. The trial records, too, were published. The execution was carried out in broad daylight in the center of Paris.
Nicholas II was neither charged nor tried. The Soviet Government, which had condemned him to death, has never published the relevant documents: such facts as are known of the event are mainly the result of the efforts of one dedicated investigator. In the Russian case, the victims were not only the deposed monarch but also his wife, children, and staff. The deed, perpetrated in the dead of night, resembled more a gangster-type massacre than a formal execution.
The Bolshevik seizure of power at first brought no significant change to the ex-Tsar’s family and its retainers living in Tobolsk, where they had been exiled by Kerensky. In the winter of 1917–18, life in the Governor’s House and its annexes went on much as before. The family was allowed to take walks, to attend religious services in a nearby church, to receive newspapers and correspond with friends. In February 1918, their state subvention was cut off and their allowance reduced to 600 rubles a month, but even so they lived in reasonable comfort. The Bolsheviks, who had their hands full with more urgent matters, gave little thought to the Romanovs, all of whom had withdrawn from public affairs. They discussed what to do with the ex-Tsar as early as November 1917 but took no decision.1
The situation began to change in March, in connection with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The treaty brought terrible odium to the Bolshevik regime. In this atmosphere attempts at restoration could not have been precluded, the more so that the Bolsheviks were aware of pro-monarchist sentiments among German generals. To avoid trouble, precautions were taken to remove the Romanovs from the scene. On March 9, Lenin signed a decree ordering into exile Grand Duke Michael, the putative heir to the Russian throne. Michael had shown no interest in politics since rejecting the crown offered him by Nicholas in March 1917. He lived quietly on his estate at Gatchina, near Petrograd, shunning politics and keeping out of the public eye.2 How unconcerned he was with political events may be gathered from the fact that a few days after turning down the throne, he appeared before the astonished officials of the Petrograd Soviet with a request for permission to hunt on his estate.3 In the summer of 1917 he asked the British Ambassador for a visa to England, but was turned down with the explanation that “His Majesty’s Government do not wish members of the Imperial Family to come to England during the war.”* 4 At the end of 1917, Michael’s petition to Lenin for permission to change his royal name to that of his wife’s, Countess Brasova, received no response.5
Michael was now placed under arrest, first at Smolnyi and then at the Cheka headquarters. On March 12, following the departure of Lenin and the rest of the government for Moscow, he was sent under guard to Perm, not far from Tobolsk. Because the Bolsheviks feared that the Germans might occupy Petrograd and get hold of members of the Imperial family, they decided to remove them from this exposed area. On March 16, Uritskii, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, ordered all members of the family in Petrograd and vicinity to register.6 Later that month, he issued a further order that all these individuals were to be deported to the provinces of Perm, Vologda, or Viatka, at their choice. Once there, they were to report to the local soviet and receive from it residential permits.7 As it turned out, all the Romanovs, except those who were in prison or lived outside Bolshevik control, ended up in Perm. This region had the largest concentration of Bolshevik Party members after Petrograd and Moscow who could be relied upon to keep a sharp eye on the Imperial clan.