Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [164]
On the night of June 12–13, three strangers appeared at a Perm hotel owned by a merchant named Korolev and presented an order from the Cheka to take away Nicholas’s brother Michael and his secretary, Brian Johnson.
When he was sent away from Gatchina, Michael had gone to live in a hotel in Perm, where, as Moscow confirmed several times in letters to the Perm Soviet, he enjoyed “all the rights of a citizen of the republic.”
With him in the hotel were his secretary, the Englishman Brian Johnson, his valet, and his driver (the grand duke was a passionate motorist—witness his daring trip through the Alps with his bride-to-be). But that day he had a very different trip ahead of him. The three strangers went up to the grand duke’s room and when they went back down beside them walked the tall grand duke and his short, fat secretary, who looked like Mr. Pickwick.
The grand duke, the secretary, and their three escorts got into two droshkies and drove away.
All that transpired in the hotel room was recounted to Alexander Volkov by the grand duke’s valet, Chelyshev, when the two were in prison together.
The visitors woke Michael, who did not want to go with them and demanded an important Bolshevik: “I know him, not you.” The one in charge swore and grabbed the former grand duke by the shoulder.
“Oh, you Romanovs! We’re sick and tired of it all!”
After which Michael dressed silently. His valet said: “Your Highness, do not forget to take your medicine.” The visitors swore again and took them away without the medicine.
In the morning the Cheka announced that they had issued no orders and that Michael had been abducted. A telegram went to Petrograd. “Tonight, unidentified men dressed as soldiers abducted Michael Romanov and his secretary Johnson. Searches have yet to yield results. The most energetic measures are being taken.”
Soon after, however, rumors spread that the role of the “unidentified men” had been filled by some very well known people: Myasnikov, who was chairman of the Motovilikha Soviet, and his comrades. They took Michael and his secretary away—and shot them. Their action was proclaimed an act of proletarian vengeance. The rumors were confirmed. The Perm Cheka and local authorities called it “an anarchistic lynching” and firmly distanced themselves from it.
THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE GRAND DUKE’S MURDER
In 1965, in Moscow, in his declining years, a deserving man died, a holder of the Red Banner of Labor: Andrei Vasilievich Markov.
A year before his death, he met with the head of the Perm Party Archives, N. Alikina, who had compiled the biographies of the Perm Bolsheviks, to make known the most glorious deed of his life. Before telling his story the old man showed her an unusually shaped silver watch, resembling a segment of a cut hard-boiled egg. Markov said that the watch had run without repair for nearly fifty years, and then he told her the whole story. Until recently these statements of Markov were kept in classified storage in the Perm Party Archives.
Markov told how the principal organizer of Michael’s murder, Myasnikov, had chosen for his assistants Chief of Police Ivanchenko and him, Markov. But three armed men seemed too few, so they brought in two more, Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov, both workers.
“At about seven in the evening, in two closed phaetons,” recalled Markov, “we set out for Perm. The horses had been furnished us in the Cheka courtyard, so we initiated the chairman of the provincial Cheka, P. Malkov, into the affair. That was where the plan for abducting Michael Romanov was worked out in full.… Malkov stayed at the Cheka, Myasnikov left on foot for the Royal Rooms hotel, and we four—Ivanchenko and Zhuzhgov on the first horse and Kolpashchikov and I on the second—approached the front door of the Royal Rooms at about eleven. Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov went into the hotel,