• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2257 0

was Professor Roccard. My father knew him. Roccard made a diagnosis—throat cancer—and refused to treat him. When Voroshilov was informed of this, he ordered that the man be given a course of treatment anyway. Ambassador V. P. Potemkin himself went to see Roccard, after which a course of treatment was prescribed, including strained, semiliquid food—five times a day. It was my mother who cooked that food for Sokolov. My mother and I drove Sokolov to his treatments, walked with him all over Paris, and generally spent all day with him.… I am writing about this in detail so that you understand why Sokolov was candid with my mother. He knew full well that his end was imminent. He told my mother that he had been in charge of the detachment that had executed the tsar’s family. He considered that a sin on his conscience.… When we returned to Moscow, my father told us that Sokolov had died in the Kremlin hospital in 1938.… My mother told me this story in the late 1960s, after my father’s death, since she had given him her word that it would remain between them forever.”

Why did Attaché Bialer extract his wife’s word never to talk about her acquaintanceship with the mysterious Sokolov? Because he had not told his wife the truth about “Sokolov’s” end, for he had decided not to frighten his wife. No, this “commander of the detachment that executed the tsar’s family” did come to an end in 1938, but not in a hospital.

“Commander of the detachment” is just as much a confusing pseudonym as Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov. The latter was an ironic pseudonym, for it was the name of the famous investigator involved in the inquiry into the murder of the tsar’s family.

So who was he?

It’s not hard to figure out. This man must have held the same rank as Comrade Voroshilov himself—the first marshal made sure the Soviet ambassador in Paris took pains over this strange patient. Of all the participants in the execution, this could only have been one man—Alexander Beloborodov. The cruel Beloborodov. The jolly but cruel young Beloborodov, who left fifteen Romanovs lying forever in the Ural hills. Now he was people’s commissar for internal affairs for the Russian republic and a mortally ill, unhappy man, swallowing with difficulty the runny food fed to him on a spoon by a soft-hearted woman. But that was not yet his end. His end was waiting for him in Moscow. In 1938 they would take the all-powerful Kremlin boyar. And in the Lubyanka, a pathetic, powerless man, his belt removed from his trousers, holding up his falling pants, in that moment, he would know … he would know a lot. Later, having passed through all the tortures of hell, the Ural Napoleon would go to that last wall. For that “kick in the ass.” Thus Alexander Beloborodov greeted the twentieth anniversary of the tsarist execution with a bullet to his heart.

GOLOSHCHEKIN AND CO.

Then came his turn.

The long string of titles for Comrade Filipp: from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Congress, a candidate for membership in the Party’s Central Committee; from the Fifteenth Congress on, a Central Committee member. Also chief state arbitrator in the Sovnarkom. With every step up he took one step closer to death.

In the 1940s, Goloshchekin went through the Kremlin boyars’ entire inevitable program: the Gulag, a firing squad, and an unmarked common grave—a pit hastily scattered with earth.

In the pit Joseph Stalin had designed for them, the executed ended their days—Ditkovsky and Safarov and Commander Berzin.

One way or another, the men who signed the Ural Soviet’s sentence of execution all died by a bullet.

But what about the indirect executioners?

Everyone whose names we know for certain died in bed.

Oh well, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” prayed the last tsar in his last moment.

THE DETACHMENT LEAVES

In 1938, the twentieth anniversary of the murder of the tsar’s family, also in July, the other main participant died from an excruciating ulcer—Yakov Yurovsky.

The son of Chekist Medvedev:

“My father used to say that at the end Yurovsky had a bad heart and suffered dreadfully