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 The Romanovs had willingly, indeed happily, withdrawn from active politics and submitted to every demand of their Bolshevik captors.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:
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.