Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [228]
After Yurovsky’s death, Nikulin crossed out the past in his mind for good. He married a second time. His wife was a beautiful, commanding, calm young woman.
From a letter of A. I. Vinogradova in Moscow:
“My parents were friendly with him. He was a smart, lean figure. A very pleasant, fine face. He never talked about the execution. And his wife forbade us from asking him about it. Nikulin is buried at the famous Novodevichy cemetery [the most prestigious cemetery in Moscow, where Khrushchev and all important government figures lie], not far from my parent.”
The son of Chekist Medvedev:
“At the end of his life Nikulin was in charge of Moscow’s entire water supply, the Stalin Water Supply Station. His wife boasted of their abundant life: they lived in their own private house, they even had a separate room for the dog. They really did have an enormous dog. This whole conversation took place on a visit. Rimma Yurovskaya was in the room during the story. She had just returned to Moscow from twenty years in the camps. She had nowhere to live. She joked, ‘Hey, let me live in your dog’s room.’”
Yes, the favorite of the Ekaterinburg Komsomol had served twenty years, she had passed through the entire school of Stalin’s camps, all the charms of the bright future her father so loved to dream of she had seen with her own eyes. And now, without an apartment, without her health, her life lost—the Ural Komsomol’s favorite listened to a story about the life of the new rich, the new bosses.
WHO DID KILL THE LAST TSAR? (THE END OF ONE STRUGGLE)
Let us return to Nikulin.
In 1964, the son of Chekist Mikhail Medvedev, historian M. M. Medvedev, convinced Nikulin to tape a statement for the radio.
This was no simple matter. Nikulin was used to “holding his tongue”—as Stalin had once taught him. And although Stalin had died eleven years before, the fear stuck in those people forever.
Nevertheless, the son of Chekist Medvedev was able to convince “son” Nikulin. He had played a part in the death of Medvedev’s father. Nikulin felt he was the last witness who could record this for history, who could finally name the true regicide.
M. Medvedev asked, “Did the execution begin with a general salvo?”
“No, the shooting was chaotic.”
“There was a first shot, though. Someone had to have fired it.” “Your father, Mikhail Medvedev. He fired the first shot. He killed the tsar.”
Now that Yurovsky was dead, his “son” could tell the truth. He did not have long to live.
The son of Chekist Medvedev:
“I asked him to recount the details of the execution. He said: ‘There’s no need to savor it. Let it remain with us. Let it depart with us.’”
To a question about the “Anastasia” who was causing such an uproar in the West then, Nikulin replied briefly: “They all perished.”
Evidently, Yurovsky’s son found out about this dangerous tape.
That is why in the same year 1964, the copy of his father’s note in which the commandant again declared from the grave, “I killed the last tsar,” appeared in the Museum of the Revolution.
——
Nikulin turned out not to be the last of the regicides still living in this world, however. In the same year 1964, M. M. Medvedev received a letter from distant Khabarovsk from the former Life Guard and regicide Kabanov. Alive! The old dog was alive! Having read the obituary of his old acquaintance Chekist Medvedev in Pravda, he wrote to Medvedev’s son. They began to correspond, and the old Chekist machine gunner, one of the last witnesses of the Ipatiev night still alive, answered his main question: “The fact that the tsar died from your father’s bullet was something every worker in the Ural Cheka knew at the time.”
So continued this amazing struggle “for the honor of the execution.”
In the same year 1964, when the last witnesses to the death of the family were being taped for Moscow Radio, an eighty-year-old nun was being buried in a local Orthodox cemetery. She