Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [173]
“In essence this decision was inevitable. The execution of the tsar and his family was necessary not simply to scare, horrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up our own ranks, show them that there was no going back. Ahead lay total victory or utter ruin.… The masses of workers and soldiers would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin had a good sense of this,” Trotsky wrote.
So, according to Trotsky, it was all decided in Moscow. That was what Goloshchekin negotiated in Moscow!
This is only Trotsky’s testimony, however. History recognizes documents—and I found one. First a clue, from a letter of O. N. Kolotov in Leningrad:
“I can tell you an interesting detail about the topic of interest to you: my grandfather often told me that Zinoviev took part in the decision to execute the tsar and that the tsar was executed on the basis of a telegram sent to Ekaterinburg from the center. My grandfather can be trusted; by virtue of his work he knew a great deal. He said that he himself took part in the shootings. He called the execution a ‘kick in the ass,’ asserting that this was in the literal sense: they turned the condemned to the wall, then brought a pistol up to the back of their head, and when they pulled the trigger they simultaneously gave them a kick in the ass to keep the blood from spattering their uniforms.”
THERE WAS A TELEGRAM!
I found it! Even though they were supposed to destroy it. The blood cries out!
Here it is lying before me. One stifling July afternoon I was sitting in the Archives of the October Revolution and looking at this telegram, sent seventy-two years before. I had run across it in an archive file with the boring label “Telegrams About the Organization and Activities of the Judicial Organs and the Cheka,” begun on January 21, 1918, and ended on October 31 of the same 1918. Behind this label and these dates lie the Red Terror. Among the terrifying telegrams—semiliterate texts on dirty paper—my attention was struck by a two-headed eagle. The tsarist seal!
This was it, On a blank left over from the tsarist telegraph service and decorated with the two-headed eagle was this telegram: a report on the impending execution of the tsar’s family. The irony of history.
At the very top of this telegram, on a piece of telegraph ribbon, is the address “To Moscow Lenin.”
Below, a note in pencil: “Received July 16, 1918, 21:22.” From Petrograd. And the number of the telegram: 14228.
So, on July 16, at 21:22, that is, before the Romanovs’ execution, this telegram arrived in Moscow.
The telegram was a long time in getting there, having been sent from Ekaterinburg to “Sverdlov, copy to Lenin.” But it was sent through Zinoviev, the master of the second capital, Petrograd—Lenin’s closest comrade-in-arms at the time. Zinoviev had sent the telegram on from Petrograd to Lenin.
The individuals who sent this telegram from Ekaterinburg were Goloshchekin and Safarov, another leader of the Ural Soviet.
Here is its text:
“To Moscow, the Kremlin, Sverdlov, copy to Lenin. From Ekaterinburg transmit the following directly: inform Moscow that the trial agreed upon with Filipp due to military circumstances cannot bear delay, we cannot wait. If your opinion is contrary inform immediately. Goloshchekin, Safarov. On this subject contact Ekaterinburg yourself.
And the signature: Zinoviev.
Knowing that Comrade Filipp is Goloshchekin’s party nom de guerre, it is easy to understand the code of this telegram sent hours before the execution of the tsar and his family. “The trial agreed upon with Filipp” is rather sly code for “the execution of the Romanovs agreed upon with Goloshchekin.” (They had been getting ready to try Nicholas, but now that the Bolsheviks had to abandon Ekaterinburg, a truly revolutionary trial against the tyrant was his execution.)
“Military circumstances”—this was Ekaterinburg’s hopeless situation; any day the town had