The Murder of the Romanovs

In tumultuous times, great stories are often lost to the larger sweep of history.

The events unleashed by the Russian Revolution are the most tumultuous of the twentieth century. And one story often “lost” within the revolution is the epic misadventure of an ad hoc army of Czechs and Slovaks cast adrift inside revolutionary Russia. Against their will, they found themselves fighting the new Soviet regime and winning – seizing all of Siberia in 1918. Yet they also inadvertently precipitated the murder of the tsar and his family.

Ninety percent of enemy troops captured by tsarist Russia during World War I were subjects of Austria-Hungary, a multinational empire held together by Vienna’s Habsburg dynasty. The Hungarians were the strongest minority, having forced the Habsburgs to grant them equal status with the Austrians in 1867, but the Czechs were the most unruly nationality, often rioting in Prague and in the Viennese parliament for autonomy and equal rights.

Without political motives, in August 1914, 750 Czech and Slovak émigrés then living in Russia (just 16 were Slovak) created a special unit in the Russian Imperial Army. As the war dragged on, large numbers of Czechs and Slovaks in the Austro-Hungarian Army (opposing Russia, France and England) defected to this unit, or were recruited into it from Russia’s 300 POW camps.

In fact, by the time of Russia’s February 1917 revolution, there were 2.1 million Austro-Hungarian POWs, 210,000-250,000 of them Czech or Slovak (predominantly Czech). Seeing these men as potential recruits, a fugitive philosophy professor from Prague, Tomas G. Masaryk, traveled to Russia to ask Russia’s new Provisional Government and its French Allies to free the Czech and Slovak POWs, create a volunteer Czecho-Slovak Legion, and ship them via Vladivostok to bolster French forces on the Western Front. What did Masaryk want in return from the Allies? An independent Czecho-Slovakia.

Agreement was reached, and the legionnaires began their perilous journey across Siberia in over 70 trains. But then the new Bolshevik regime began issuing orders to stop their trains, and local soviets demanded the soldiers’ weapons in return for safe passage. Often they also demanded their locomotives. And all the while, Bolshevik activists were attempting to convince the 50,000 legionnaires to join the new Red Army as “Internationalists.”

By May 1918, the legionnaires’ trains stretched 5,000 miles from Penza, west of the Urals, to Vladivostok – the distance between New York and Honolulu. At this point an assault on one of the legionnaires at Chelyabinsk led to a brawl, a lynching, arrests, and deadly threats from Moscow, all of which prompted the legionnaires to launch a full-fledged revolt in self-defense. Before long, thanks to the significance of the Trans-Siberian Railway, they controlled most of Siberia.

Meanwhile, by May former Tsar Nicholas II and his family were under arrest in Yekaterinburg, about 120 miles north of Chelyabinsk. The Bolsheviks were holding them in the house of a retired engineer, Nikolay Ipatiev, at No. 49 Voznesensky Prospekt, which they had surrounded with a stockade and designated with a code name, “The House of Special Purpose.” About three dozen of the family’s courtiers and servants were dismissed; the Romanovs were joined only by the family physician, Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, and three servants. Fifty-six combat-tested Bolsheviks guarded the exterior of the property, and 16 men were stationed inside the house.

By June, the faint explosions of distant artillery fire could be heard on the streets of Yekaterinburg as the Czecho-Slovaks, having conquered Omsk on June 7, approached. Fear, anger, and paranoia gripped the Bolsheviks, who were surrounded and increasingly cut off from Moscow. They turned to violence, killing more than 200 peasants, 45 Orthodox priests, and 18 of Yekaterinburg’s most prominent citizens.

By July, four detachments of legionnaires, numbering 10,000 and led by Lieutenant Colonel Sergey N. Voytsekhovsky, began closing in on Yekaterinburg, heartened by news that the United States had agreed to land troops in Siberia to support them (an exaggeration; US troops were sent only to help the legionnaires evacuate Russia). The Bolsheviks placed the city under martial law. Some residents tried to flee and panic gripped those who remained. The roster of guards around The House of Special Purpose was increased to three hundred.

The city was swamped with troops, many of them Austro-Hungarian Internationalists, moving toward the eastern front. Wounded soldiers also littered the city. In Moscow, Vladimir Lenin and his aides urgently discussed what to do with the Romanovs, but they were very careful not to allow evidence of their deliberations to survive.

According to historian Helen Rappaport, “it was the pressing argument of the Czech advance that won the day and the sanctioning of this ultimate act of political expediency.” By the time Yakov Yurovsky arrived on July 4 as the new commandant of The House of Special Purpose, the decision to liquidate the family and their servants had been made by Lenin in Moscow. Yurovsky was entrusted with the preparations for the execution, code-named “Chimney Sweep.” Meanwhile, the artillery fire grew louder; the legionnaires were now only 20 miles south of the city.

At 1:30 a.m. on July 17, Yurovsky awakened the Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, and the servants, and led them to the basement, ostensibly for their own safety. They were lined up at one end of a room, some seated, the rest standing; they appeared to believe they were waiting for transportation out of Yekaterinburg. Yurovsky and perhaps eight others walked into the room, standing opposite the family. Yurovsky asked them to stand. He stepped forward, brandishing a sheet of paper and read out the sentence of death, announcing, in part, “in view of the fact that the Czecho-Slovaks are threatening the Red capital of the Urals – Yekaterinburg – and in view of the fact that the crowned executioner might escape the people’s court, the presidium of the Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, has decreed that the former Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty of countless bloody crimes against the people, should be shot.”

Yurovsky pulled a Colt revolver from his pocket and shot the tsar in the chest at point-blank range. The other men opened up with their own weapons in a furious fusillade that filled the room with acrid smoke. The victims were then stabbed repeatedly.

That evening, a coded telegram was sent to Moscow by the Ural Regional Soviet, confirming that “the entire family suffered the same fate as its head.” While news of the tsar’s execution quickly spread across the globe, Moscow insisted that his wife and children had been spared and “sent to a place of safety.”

The men of the Czecho-Slovak Legion finally took Yekaterinburg just over a week later, on the night of July 25-26, after a battle at the train station. The next day they paraded through the city’s streets, greeted by grateful Russians waving flags and throwing flowers at their feet to the pealing of church bells.

The legionnaires were stunned to learn that the Romanovs had been murdered in Yekaterinburg just days before. And years later Masaryk took umbrage at the idea that a chain of causation could be drawn between the advance of the legionnaires on Yekaterinburg and Moscow’s decision to execute the tsar, that the legionnaires were in any way culpable for the murders.

“They never had the slightest intention of liberating the tsar,” Masaryk said.

In fact, most of the legionnaires were socialists, and their overriding objective was to rid themselves of the oppressive Habsburg dynasty; so it has never been adequately explained why they would embrace or even assist a Russian dynasty, one that had already been deposed.

In any case, full responsibility for the Romanov murders has always rested with Lenin and his associates.  RL