Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [225]
Appended to this missive was the strange patient’s letter to his wife Asya.
——
A short while later I received a call from an old man, a former prisoner, who turned out to have been in the camps with the mysterious Semyonov—all the prisoners called him “the tsar’s son,” and they all believed it absolutely.
At my request, the Central State Archive of the October Revolution made a copy of several pages of Alexei’s 1916 diary kept there. I took it, along with the letter the strange patient sent his wife Asya from the hospital in 1949, to the Institute of Criminology. They tried to help, but … but the documents proved incomparable. The letter to Asya, written in an elegant, refined hand. And the diary of thirteen-year-old Alexei, with his uneven scribbles. They were unable to say yes or no.
EPILOGUE: PARTICIPANTS IN THE EXECUTION (FATES)
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay.”
ROMANS 12:19
THE “SPY”
On the eve of the execution in the Ipatiev house, the chairman of the Ural Cheka, F. N. Lukoyanov, suddenly and unexpectedly left for Perm—to transfer the Cheka archives. The chief of the entire Ural Cheka, the man in charge of the “special mission,” was not present when his mission was carried out! Was he not able to conquer his feelings? Was he not able to be there?
In any event, he remained in Perm during the execution.
Soon after, in 1919, Feodor Lukoyanov suffered a severe nervous breakdown, which afflicted him for the rest of his life.
The former chairman of the Ural Cheka died in 1947—on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Ipatiev night. He did not survive the anniversary. He is buried in his hometown of Perm.
YUROVSKY
In the 1930s, the most prominent party members were sent to the camps, to death, one after another. In 1935 it was their families’ turn. Beautiful Rimma Yurovskaya, the Komsomol favorite, was arrested and sent to a camp. Yurovsky rushed to Goloshchekin for help, but Goloshchekin could not help him.
Now Yurovsky had to prove that the party was his family. And if the party needed his daughter….
As before, he continued to meet in Medvedev’s apartment and reminisce. About the same old thing. The execution. There was nothing else in their lives. They reminisced prosaically about the Apocalypse over a cup of tea. And they discussed who really did fire first. Yurovsky had precedence. Precedence—for the realization of his dream. He was a Jew. Once the monarchists got the ball rolling, the tsar’s murder was declared an act of Jewish revenge.
The son of Chekist Medvedev:
“Once Yurovsky arrived triumphant—he had been brought a book that had come out in the West where it was written in black and white that it was he, Yurovsky, who killed Nicholas. He was happy—he had left his mark in history.”
BELOBORODOV
Their old friend Sasha Beloborodov, then the people’s commissar for internal affairs, never came to these gatherings. Like Yurovsky’s daughter Rimma, Beloborodov had supported Trotsky. He had been excluded from the party, repented, and reformed. And he had been restored.
From a letter of Natalia Bialer:
“In the 1930s our family lived in the embassy in Paris. My father Akim Yakovlevich Bialer was secretary to the military attaché. In 1935 my father brought home a man whom he introduced as Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov. Was that his real name? I don’t know. People did not always come from the USSR under their own name. Why have I remembered him? After all, I saw quite a few people at the embassy and in our house who were famous in their day. Some came with their suites, like Chkalov [a famous Soviet pilot], Tukhachevsky and Yakir [first marshals of the Soviet army].… He had been sent to Paris personally by Voroshilov [head of the army]. To see an oncologist whose name I think