Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [172]
All his life they had been playing these games with him: the Department of Police, his mother, Kschessinska, Alix, the Duma, Vyrubova, Rasputin. This time it was his game. He played it himself—and won. By sending letters to the “officer,” by leaving that entry in his diary, he knew that he was sentencing himself to death. They threw the bait, but they themselves landed on his hook.
MOSCOW, JULY 1918
So, at the end of June, the Ural Soviet received proof of a monarchist plot!
Goloshchekin left for Moscow.
Moscow waited in trepidation for news from the Urals. How long could Ekaterinburg hold out, and what would happen next? “Move the maximum of workers from Peter [Petrograd], otherwise we will fall, for the situation with the Czechoslovaks is quite bad,” Lenin, wrote.
Yes, the Bolsheviks were about to fall. It seemed a matter of days. Ruin surrounded them, from the Pacific and all across Siberia and the Urals, their power had collapsed.
The Germans were in charge in the Ukraine, where a voluntary army was forming against the Bolsheviks, and the English were landing in the north. As was famine.
Arriving in Moscow, Goloshchekin would fall into a boiling caldron. There were ominous events daily.
The Fifth Congress of Soviets convened on July 4. Once this congress had intended to decide whether to put the tsar on trial. Now a trial was out of the question. The revolutionary parties were skirmishing. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had quit the government after the “treachery of the Treaty of Brest,” were giving Lenin a thrashing. The holy virgin of the Russian revolution, the famous terrorist Maria Spiridonova, had given a fanatical speech against the Bolsheviks.
On July 6 a bomb exploded in the German embassy. Two people leaped the embassy fence and rushed into a waiting automobile. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries had murdered the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach.
“The Socialist Revolutionaries have attempted to sunder the shameful Treaty of Brest”—that was the government’s official version. The unofficial version was that it was all a provocation arranged by the Bolsheviks to deal with the very dangerous opposition. It was no accident that one of Mirbach’s assassins, the Socialist Revolutionary Blyumkin, would later become an agent for Trotsky. Right after Mirbach’s assassination, the Bolsheviks arrested the entire Left Socialist Revolutionary faction at the congress. In retaliation, the Socialist Revolutionaries seized the telegraph, the telephone, and the Cheka building. Then Lenin brought out his Latvian sharpshooters—the Bolsheviks’ striking force—and the uprising was put down.
This is the Moscow—torn apart and bloodied by furious internecine war—in which Goloshchekin arrived in early July 1918.
In the future all the tsar’s Ural assassins would unanimously state that Goloshchekin discussed only the defense of Ekaterinburg in Moscow, not the fate of the tsar’s family; the Ural Soviet, they would insist, decided to execute the Romanovs on its own initiative.
This was a patent lie. How could Goloshchekin have discussed the possible fall of Ekaterinburg and not have mentioned the fate of the tsar and his family? How could he not have tried to decide what to do with them should the town be overtaken?
TROTSKY’S TESTIMONY
In his diary, Trotsky, back from the front, described his conversation with Sverdlov:
“ ‘The tsar is where?’
“ ‘Shot, of course.’ [Imagine Sverdlov’s cool triumph when he told Lev to his face that they had torn his favorite bone right out of his mouth: there would be no trial.]
“ ‘And the family is where?’
“ ‘The family as well.’
“ ‘All of them?’
“ ‘Yes. What about it?’ [Again Sverdlov’s invisible grin between the lines: “Does the fiery revolutionary Trotsky pity them?”]
“ ‘Who decided this?’ [Fury: he wants to know who dared not consult with him, and so on.]
“ ‘We all did. Ilich [Lenin] felt we could not leave them a living banner, especially given our trying conditions.’”
Yet when his anger had passed, Trotsky, who during the terrible days of the revolution