Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [127]
A “spy”?! No, we dare not say that. It is much too fantastic; it smacks of literature, not science. But we can conjecture. Especially since the autobiography includes a curious detail: “Throughout 1918 and early 1919 I worked in the organs of the Cheka, first as chairman of the Perm Cheka,…” But he was not appointed chairman of the Perm Cheka until March 15. What was he doing for the first part of 1918—and where?
Feodor Lukoyanov’s party nom de guerre was Maratov (he had named himself after the most inexorable French revolutionary; the educated youths of Bolshevik circles liked the French Revolution). So we can propose that in late February Comrade Maratov was sent from Ekaterinburg to Freedom House—the “spy.”
Thus they began to implement their Ekaterinburg plan to seize the tsar’s family.
NOR DID PETROGRAD SLUMBER
The tsar’s family would indeed have been very useful for the Bolshevik Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), Lenin’s government beginning in 1917. It could become the trump in their game with the Romanovs’ powerful relatives in England and Germany. Moreover, those Romanov jewels they had heard so much about were still.… And all this lay somewhere in defenseless Tobolsk.
On November 2 the victorious Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee entertained a question about holding the Romanov family. The committee sent a proposal to the Sovnarkom to transfer the Romanovs from Tobolsk to Kronstadt, the bulwark of the revolution—to put them under the control of the bullet-strung Baltic sailors.
From a letter of Viktor A. Blokhin in Moscow:
“The brutal execution of the tsar’s family seems implausible and terrible now. I am a very old man and I saw that time.… Atrocities, brutality, frenzy—they were very common. The murder of the tsar’s family only fills in that picture. That’s all. I knew Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, a charming bespectacled civilian from a good family (his brother was a tsarist general). Dear sweet Vladimir Dmitrievich himself was responsible for the terrible Room 75 at Smolny, which was the predecessor of the bloody Cheka. Vladimir Dmitrievich loved to go on ‘about the terrible part of revolution’ and about the affairs of the revolutionary sailors. I have known many who after the revolution, after many many years had passed, reveled in how they sent White officers off to be shot. An entire generation happily went to the grave with this brutality on their souls. Or not so happily (if Comrade Stalin took an interest in them). For the West to understand us and for us to understand ourselves we have to remember that the murder of the tsar’s family did not seem strange at the time because it wasn’t terrible, it was ordinary.
“Here you have an incident with the sailors described by that same acquaintance of mine, Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich. It was quite a commonplace and frequent kind of incident during those days in 1918: sailor-anarchists from the ship Republic were detaining three officers on the street. The elder Zheleznyakov was in command of the sailors. Half-drunk, his crazed eyes staring off into space, he was sitting on a chair, making the sign of the cross in the air, and muttering from time to time: ‘De-e-eath … de-e-eath … de-e-eath’ (as Bonch-Bruevich himself described it).
“So this guy, along with the sailor boys from the Republic, put the detained officers into a car and made them an offer: either get a ransom—a few thousand rubles—or get shot. They drove the unfortunate men from one terrified Petrograd apartment to another, and the officers begged their friends to give them the money. They did give a little—they were afraid the bold sailors would think there was more to be had there. The revolutionary sailors grew bored with this fussy tribute collecting. The heroes stopped in to amuse themselves at a bordello, to put it bluntly. So that the detained officers wouldn’t get bored while they entertained themselves with the girls, they dislocated