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By Root 2294 0

Peter Zakharovich Ermakov. He was a complicated man. Or rather, simple. His hands itched to kill. For his revolutionary ardor he was called Comrade Mauser. In tsarist times he killed a provocateur in a most original manner—you’ll never guess. He sawed off his head. According to an Ekaterinburg legend, when they decided to deform their bodies, he went to the pharmacy for a supply of sulfuric acid. The chemist was rather doubtful: Ermakov was asking for quite a lot. Peter Zakharovich was about to try to convince him, but he never did—his reflexes went into action and he fired. By the way, do you know that Ermakov told all and sundry that it was he who had killed the last tsar? And how Yurovsky reacted to that?”

That was something I knew very well.

Beginning in 1921, Yurovsky lived in Moscow, where he worked in the State Depository.

The son of Chekist Medvedev: “They often met in our apartment—all the former regicides who had now moved to Moscow.”

Yes, soon after the execution they went to Moscow for their promotions. Beloborodov would become Dzerzhinsky’s deputy in the Cheka, Goloshchekin would occupy very important posts. The masters of Ekaterinburg became the boyars of the Kremlin. Here Chekist Mikhail Medvedev proved more modest. He did not go for the brass ring but ended his life a humble colonel, a teacher in a police academy. That was why he survived. The Kremlin boyars would all perish.

But then, in the 1920s, they were all alive—and young. They loved the hospitality at Medvedev’s welcoming home. Goloshchekin, Nikulin, and of course Yurovsky came.

The son of Chekist Medvedev: “My father often made fun of his arrogance: of course he killed Nicholas. By the way, my father once proposed an experiment to me. My father had a whole collection of weapons—a Mauser, a Colt, and a Browning. So he proposed we experiment to see which of us could fire faster. From which gun. My father and I did this experiment. Naturally, the Browning fired first. First—just as it had then. Yurovsky never disputed that with my father. Moreover, he once told my father: ‘Hey, you didn’t let me finish reading—you started shooting! But when I was reading Nicholas the resolution the second time, I wanted to add that this was revenge for executing revolutionaries.’”

So they chatted and reminisced peacefully over a cup of tea about how lucky they were to have carried out a historic mission.

But if Medvedev talked at home about the shooting, then very soon another, much more dangerous rival appeared before Yurovsky: Peter Ermakov. The former Upper Isetsk commissar would proclaim far and wide from 1918 on that he had killed the tsar.

So Yurovsky began his fight for “the honor of having executed the last tsar.” That is one reason why he gave his Note to the historian Pokrovsky. The chief Soviet historian was supposed to leave the name of Yakov Yurovsky, the tsar’s assassin, in official Soviet history for good.

Meanwhile, 1927 came around. The tenth anniversary of the revolution. Yurovsky was already living in anticipation of 1928—the great anniversary—ten years since the execution of the tsars family.

It was then that he gave both his revolvers to the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, where the history of their new world was kept.

But a reply followed immediately: in 1927 Peter Ermakov also gave his Mauser to the local Museum of the Revolution.

“From an act of the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution:

“On December 10, 1927, we received from Comrade P. Z. Ermakov a Mauser revolver no. 16174 with which, according to P. Z. Ermakov’s testimony, the tsar was shot.”

Now it was Yurovsky’s move.

The son of Chekist Medvedev: “In 1927, Yurovsky gave the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee the idea of publishing a collection of documents and reminiscences from the participants in the execution (reminiscences of the participants he needed, such as Nikulin and Strekotin, those who would want to confirm his historic mission of shooting the tsar) for the tenth anniversary of the Romanovs’ execution. But through a member of the OGPU [the name for the state