Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [126]
“This was how he came to our house.
“That evening at tea my brother told my father about it in my presence. I remember. You do remember everything that happened in your youth.… This man, it turned out, had worked in the Ural Cheka and had practically run the tsar’s execution. Ever since then his nerves had been bad. Every spring he checked into a neurology clinic. Spring had come and he had an exacerbation. My brother called him the spy.”
He stopped, evidently, for me to ask a question.
I did.
“ ‘Spy’ because he’d been sent to their house in the beginning, before Ekaterinburg, when the tsar was in another town.”
“Tobolsk.”
“Maybe. You know better. But there was a big house there. He went to work as a carpenter there in that house, and he followed the tsar. That’s what he told my brother. The tsar and tsaritsa spoke English, and no one understood them, but they needed to. So they sent him and.… But someone from the Guard was helping him inside the house.”
He fell silent.
“And then?”
“Then nothing. My brother got scared. Or rather, our father said: ‘He’d better not show his face in our house.’ My father did not exactly welcome the new authority.”
“Tell me, when did you write this down? The whole story?”
“What do you mean? Who would write something like that down? All my life I’ve been afraid to talk about it. He told my brother about the execution. But my brother didn’t even want to tell us about it. All he said was: ‘The blood gushed out.’ Everything was covered in blood.”
How many times, working on these documents, have I encountered their mystical quality. It’s like that saying “The beast ran into the hunter.” I call it “evoking documents.” Soon after, while studying Goloshchekin’s comrades, I ran across an amazing biography in Revolutionaries of Prikamie (Perm, 1966):
“Lukoyanov, Feodor Nikolaevich (b. 1894) studied at the Perm Grammar School and in 1912 was a student at Moscow State University Law School.”
His father, an official, “senior comptroller of the treasury, died, leaving a wife and five children. As of 1913 a member of a Bolshevik student circle at Moscow University. His brother Mikhail and sisters Nadezhda and Vera were all Bolsheviks.
“… Returning to Perm, he joined a Bolshevik group at the newspaper Perm Life.… After the triumph of Soviet Power he began working in the Cheka and was chairman first of the Perm Provincial Cheka and then, after June 1918, of the Ural Regional Cheka.”
——
So, in July, when the Romanovs were executed, the Ural Cheka in Ekaterinburg was under the direction of Feodor Lukoyanov.
Later in the book: “A severe neurological disease acquired in 1918 during his work at the Cheka made itself felt more and more. In 1932 Feodor Lukoyanov was sent to the People’s Commissariat of Supply, in 1934–37 he worked on the editorial board of Izvestia, then in the People’s Registry Commissariat. Died in 1947; buried in Perm.”
And here was his face in a photograph—a thin, nervous, and intelligent face.
I began to search.
Soon after, I received a letter from Kira Avdeyeva in Sverdlovsk along with an excerpt from the autobiography of Feodor Lukoyanov kept in the Sverdlovsk KGB Museum, to which I did not have access. He had written the autobiography in 1942.
“Throughout 1918 and early 1919 I worked in the organs of the Cheka, first as chairman of the Perm Cheka, then as chairman of the Ural Regional Cheka, where I took part in directing the execution of the Romanov family.… In the middle of 1919 I fell ill and for purposes of recovery transferred to party work.…