Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [129]
Matveyev returned from Petrograd greatly changed.
“We spent a few days in Peter [Petrograd] and on January 11 went back to Tobolsk, having been given a specific assignment: to get rid of the Provisional Government’s commissar, the detachment having submitted, in any case, to Soviet power. We were ordered not to give up Romanov without the specific knowledge of and instruction from the Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom.… On January 23 a general meeting of the entire detachment was called. After my report … the detachment split into two parts: one for Soviet power; the other, the ‘right,’ for Kerensky.”
Now in the evenings Matveyev was disappearing from the house; he was beginning to stop in at the Soviet—to see the Tobolsk Bolsheviks. Matveyev put an enormous globe in his “lodging”: “Give us world revolution!”
According to the memoirs of the Bolshevik Koganitsky, at one of the Soviet’s evening meetings, Matveyev, “who then represented only twelve or thirteen of the guard,” swore an oath to the Soviet: “We would sooner die than let the family escape with their lives.… To ensure this, our people were to be interspersed in every shift of the guard.”
Soon afterward the committee drove out Commissar Pankratov, but it still did not dare raise a hand against Colonel Kobylinsky.
Later Peter Matveyevich would receive the following document for his activities, written on the stationery of the Tobolsk Bolshevik Soviet:
“The present certificate attests to the fact that Comrade-Citizen Peter Matveyevich Matveyev was in the Special Detachment guarding the former tsar and his family.… Moreover, he bore his service in exemplary fashion and honestly, fulfilling unquestioningly the duties placed upon him as a soldier-citizen and fighter for the Revolution, not abandoning the deed entrusted to him during all the difficult moments and stages of the Russian Revolution.… Signature—Khokhryakov, May 18 (5), Tobolsk.”
“He bore his service in exemplary fashion.” Could it have been Comrade-Citizen Peter Matveyevich Matveyev who brought the “spy” into the house?
——
Let us return to the “spy.” I am trying to imagine how he was sent.
He is called up from Perm to the capital of the Red Urals. Heading the Ural Cheka formed in February is Mikhail Efremov—a Bolshevik since 1905 who was sentenced by a tsarist court to hard labor for life. But the true leader of the Ural Cheka has been turning into more of a Bolshevik ever since that same terrible year 1905—the future regicide Yakov Yurovsky.
COMRADE YAKOV
One of many children from a poor Jewish family, his father had been a glazier and his mother a seamstress.
In 1938, exactly twenty years after the Romanovs’ murder, Yakov Yurovsky would be dying in the Kremlin Hospital from an excruciatingly painful ulcer. In his dying letter to his children he would talk about himself:
“Dear Zhenya and Shura! On July 3, new style, I will turn sixty. As it turns out, I have told you almost nothing about myself, especially my childhood and youth.… Ten children grew up in my father’s family, and with them poverty bordering on destitution. We could not break out of it, even though the children began working for masters at the age of ten, and father and mother worked to the point of exhaustion.… [He left a tailor to study with a watchmaker.] My watchmaker master got rich off the sufferings of his adolescent workers—I worked for him until I was nineteen and never knew what it meant to eat my fill. But then I was fed my fill after a strike and was thrown out as a ringleader and forbidden to enter the town’s watch and jewelry shops.”
What rage! A temperament of hatred. But after all, this was being written by an old man racked by terminal illness.
“Beginning in 1905, I never ceased working for the party for a single day.” Yes, the whole rest of his life—the jewelry business, in which he prospered, his