Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [209]
Already then, in 1927, Stalin was beginning his battle against human memory. The death of the tsar’s family resurrected several names that were supposed to have been forgotten forever: the chief accuser in the proposed trial against the Romanovs, Trotsky; the chairman of the Ural Soviet, the Trotskyite Beloborodov (even if he had retracted), and so on.
As always, though, there were two models: “for them” and “for us.” For them, that is, for the “progressive world public,” everything remained as before: the execution of the bloody despot, the holy vengeance of the people’s revolution. That was why when the journalist Richard Halliburton turned up in Sverdlovsk in the 1930s, Peter Ermakov willingly told him about the execution of the Romanovs and about how he personally had shot the tsar. But we know that without the permission of the “serious institution” a meeting with a foreign journalist would have been impossible. The sly Chekist explained this by his throat cancer—he was giving his dying testament, so to speak. Ermakov laughed when he lived to thrive another twenty years after that. He had borrowed the “throat cancer” from one of his friends in the Ural Soviet, a friend whom we will talk about again.
To his dying days, the Upper Isetsk “Comrade Mauser” fought relentlessly for primacy. At innumerable Pioneer campfires, on July summer nights at yet another anniversary of the Ipatiev night, he would tell his story with enthusiasm.
From a letter of Alexei Karelin in Magnitogorsk:
“I had the opportunity to see and hear one of the ‘heroes’ who participated in the execution of the tsar’s family, P. Ermakov. This was in 1934 or 1935 at the ChTZ [Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant] Pioneer camp on a lake near Chelyabinsk. I was twelve or thirteen at the time; my youthful memory preserved perfectly everything I heard and saw at this encounter with Ermakov by a Pioneer campfire. He was presented to us as a hero.… He was given flowers. My God, how they cultivated patriotism in us! I was looking straight at Ermakov with such envy!… Ermakov ended his ‘lecture’ with especially solemn words: ‘I personally shot the tsar.’ Then he listed everyone in the tsar’s family by name and patronymic as well as some old man from the court. Ermakov said that the execution had been based on Lenin’s personal instruction.”
That night by the Pioneer campfire Ermakov told them Nicholas’s last words.
Ermakov also wrote his own memoirs and on the thirtieth anniversary of the execution gave them to the Sverdlovsk Party Archive.
I heard a great deal about Ermakov’s memoirs. Naturally, I could not read them since they were kept in a secret depository in the Sverdlovsk Party Archive. Although from my readers’ letters I already knew certain excerpts from them.
——
All this I conscientiously told my guest. He just chuckled: he knew I did not know how to listen. He continued:
“Oh well, I too got caught up in this struggle for the right to be the tsar’s assassin. And you are right, in 1947 Ermakov did write his memoirs. But even before that, while Yurovsky was still alive, he wrote about it many times.”
At that point he opened his briefcase and placed some papers before me.
“Don’t get excited, and don’t try to turn the tape recorder on without my noticing, especially since you can’t. I will leave all these documents with you. I brought them for you. Read the first to start with.”
I began to read:
“From a brief autobiography of P. Z. Ermakov:
“In late June 1918 the Ural Executive Committee put me in charge of the guard for the special house where the former Romanov tsar and his family were being held under arrest. On July 16, 1918, I carried out the Regional Executive Committee’s resolution to execute the former Romanov tsar, so the tsar himself as well as his family were executed by me. The bodies, too, were burned by me personally. When the Whites took Sverdlovsk, they were unable to find the remains of the tsar and his