Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [171]
And how well thought out the story with the window!
A closed window meant a torturous stuffiness. It had to engender bad nerves. Even more—anger. It must have hastened the family’s consent to escape.
Then the simple-hearted Avdeyev suddenly proved surprisingly vigilant: he carefully checked all the food brought from the monastery—and “discovered” the correspondence. Finally, the finale anticipated all along: Nicholas’s entry about the plan for escape in his diary. Now the monarchist plot was in hand.
Whoever thought all this up knew Nicholas’s habit of recording everything in his diary.
Without this entry the game would not have been over. The entry provided irrefutable proof.
No, the cruel, straightforward Yurovsky does not fit here. Here a more intelligent person was acting; a psychologist had thought all this through. Someone who had studied Nicholas well.
Yes, more than likely, this was Lukoyanov, our “spy.”
After his arrival from Tobolsk, he had lived in Perm and headed the Perm Cheka, but in June he was in Ekaterinburg. At the end of June he was appointed to a new high position.
From a letter of Xenia Sorokina:
“My father, an old Bolshevik and student of local history, studied documents about Feodor Lukoyanov. A note from the KGB Museum in Sverdlovsk was left in his papers: ‘Lukoyanov, F. N., as of March 15, 1918, chairman of the Perm Province Cheka. As of June 21, 1918, chairman of the Ural Cheka. Directed the Central Executive Committee’s special mission relating to the tsar’s family.’”
He did an excellent job on the “Central Executive Committee’s special mission relating to the tsar’s family.”
I can imagine his triumph: the family went out for a walk, and he read Nicholas’s entry in the diary. Yes, he had calculated it all. He felt like an astronomer who has calculated the presence of a star and sees it through his telescope in the sky. Only later, when our “spy,” as usual, carefully put the diary back in its place so that the tsar would not notice anything—only then did he realize that he had sentenced them to death. Him, her, Tatiana, all those sweet girls. And the sick boy. This happens with gamblers. The game overshadows the goal.
Nicholas believed. Naively. Almost stupidly. And he made the fateful entry in his own diary.
But did he really believe?
WHO WAS PLAYING?
The Czech Legion was already outside Ekaterinburg. Subsequently much would be written about how furiously they and the Whites burst into Ekaterinburg.
But, they were going about their “bursting” in rather an odd fashion. Tyumen had fallen, all the major towns around had been taken—and Ekaterinburg was still standing.
Moreover, they skirted Ekaterinburg to the south: Kyshtym, Miass, Zlatoust, and Shadrinsk had already been captured. There was no “furious bursting”; they wanted to encircle it slowly and slowly choke it. It seemed as if they were in no hurry at all.
At that time in Ekaterinburg there were only a few hundred armed Red Guards, but there were many tsarist officers; the Academy of the General Headquarters, which had been evacuated from Petrograd, was there. Still, there was not a single honest attempt to free the Ipatiev prisoners!
After overthrowing the Bolsheviks, the Czechs and the anti-Bolshevik Siberian army were not about to restore tsarist rule. They would restore the rule of the Constituent Assembly.
In this strange year the former autocrat had understood a great deal. Most important: no one needed him alive. Indeed, anyone capturing him alive would doubtless have a serious problem on his hands.
But dead?
A sacrifice.… “There is no sacrifice I would not make” (his words before his abdication). Sacrifices to redeem all that had happened.
He also thought that once they had killed him they would let his family go free. His death was the only way to free them all. His death was a good in itself.
Of course, sensible Nicholas immediately realized who the “officer” was with his primitive