Robert Wilton

Robert Wilton told us that "According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik state, including the above-mentioned, in 1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews."

From The Fate of the Romanovs
17   Russians
2     Ukrainians
11   Armenians
35   Latvians
15   Germans
1     Hungarian
10   Georgians
3     Poles
3     Finns
1     Czech
1     Karaim
457 Jews
556 Total    82% Jews

 

Jews May Have Killed Russia's Last Czar Nicholas II In Ritual Murder, Investigators Claim   [ By Cristina Maza On 29 November 2017 ]
QUOTE
The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church is launching an investigation into whether the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his family were victims of a ritual murder carried out by angry Jews in 1918, Church leaders revealed in a statement Tuesday.

"A large share of the church commission members have no doubts that the murder was ritual,” Father Tikhon Shevkunov, the Orthodox bishop heading the panel, told The Associated Press.

Historical consensus says the czar was killed by Bolsheviks, but the conspiracy theory that he was actually killed by Jews has been promoted for years among far-right, anti-Semitic groups that often conflate Jews with communists. Conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the communist revolution were also popular among post-revolution Russian emigres and Russian Orthodox Church members abroad.  

In reality, some important Bolshevik leaders were Jews [ Make that 82%, a convincing majority in fact - Editor ], but the majority of Russia's Jewish population did not support the Bolsheviks. [ See #Why Did Russian Jews Support the Bolshevik Revolution for the lie direct - Editor ]

Jews in Russia expressed concern that these anti-Semitic myths are now being peddled by religious leaders, and experts say the investigation shows anti-Semitism remains a persistent problem in Russia.

“There is a big old tradition of anti-Semitism in Russia, a forgery in the Czarist period outlining a fictitious [ sic ] Jewish plan for world domination. [ See The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion - Ed. ]

So the attempt to identify the Bolsheviks as Jewish started quite early, during the Civil War after the [1917] Revolution, but didn't have any real basis,” Gerard Livingstone, a history and philosophy professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom, told Newsweek. [ He lies - Ed. ]

“Anti-Semitism persisted in the Communist era. And of course the characterization of the Bolsheviks as Jews was taken up by the Nazis, and after them by the Far Right ever since," he said.

Bishop ikhon, an influential religious figure with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has specifically singled out Yakov Yurovsky, a Bolshevik organizer of the czar's execution who happened to be Jewish [ See #The executioner Yurovsky's account - Blog & Alexander Palace Time Machine ], to support his theories of a ritual killing. Tikhon claims Yurovsky took special pleasure in the killings as an act of revenge.

Yakov Sverdlov, another Bolshevik involved in the killing of the last czar, was also Jewish [ See #Yakov Sverdlov – Russiapedia Leaders Prominent Russians ], conspiracy theorists point out. Previously, the young pro-Putin parliamentarian Natalia Poklonskaya [ A forthright lass - Ed. ] also claimed the Czar's execution had “evil” religious motives.
UNQUOTE
Newsweek is tip toeing round the truth & nervous about annoying Jews. Or is it run by Jews?

 

 

https://non.to/jluFqS - Jews May Have Killed Russia's Last Czar Nicholas II In Ritual Murder, Investigators Claim

Strange that one can’t find the list of the shooters like Isidor Edelstein,
Viktor Grünfeld or Anselm Fischer only in the German Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Yurovsky   - jew He was best known as the chief executioner of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his family, and four retainers on the morning of July 17, 1918. 
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakow_Michailowitsch_Swerdlow  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Sverdlov jew
https://www.akg-images.co.uk/archive/-2UMDHUFI0L2Q.html  - Nicholas II / Skulls of Tsar’s family

 

 

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/247752/why-did-russian-jews-support-the-bolshevik-revolution

Why Did Russian Jews Support the Bolshevik Revolution – Tablet Magazine
QUOTE
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd on Oct. 25, 1917, the vast majority of Russia’s Jews opposed that takeover. Five years later, when the USSR was created at the end of a treacherously bloody civil war, the situation was reversed—not, as the Hebrew cliché has it, out of the love of Mordecai, but out of hatred of Haman.

It is difficult to paint a precise picture of the political views of Russian Jews at the time of the Revolution for the simple reason that we have relatively little precise information on the subject: From 1905 to 1917 the Jews voted in elections for the four parliaments (called Dumas) that were created in response to the 1905 Revolution. None of these elections were based on universal suffrage, first and foremost because women could not vote, and so we have no firm data whatsoever on the views of half of the Jewish population. Moreover, the franchise was more and more restricted as the years went by, and so the number of Jews voting for and being elected to the Duma went down, rather than up, during the 12 years of the parliaments’ existence. Twice in 1917, the Jews voted again, this time with female suffrage, but we still lack data on a very significant chunk of the Jewish population.

From the voting data we do have it is possible to conclude several crucial points: First, the Bolsheviks had very little support among the Jewish population, possibly the lowest amount of any of the multiple parties vying for support “on the Jewish street.” And this was despite the fact that many of the Bolsheviks’ most important leaders were Jews—though Jews who viewed their Jewishness as an incidental artifact of their birth, with no meaning for them either religiously (as they were atheists) or nationally (as they regarded themselves as internationalists). Most famously, when Leon Trotsky was asked what his nationality was, he replied “socialist.” More Jews, though hardly a great number, supported the Mensheviks, the less radically Marxist half of the Russian Social Democratic Party, headed by a Jew, Julius Martov, who opposed Lenin’s stance on violent revolution but shared the Bolsheviks’ anti-nationalist stance.  Far more Jews, though still a relatively small percentage of the population, supported the Bund—the Jewish socialist party whose stance on socialism was all but identical to the Mensheviks, but slowly adopted an idiosyncratic form of Jewish nationalism based on national cultural autonomy for the Jews of the Empire and dedication to Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people.

Thus, in toto, the Jewish population broadly rejected socialism in any guise, Jewish or not, as the solution to the problems of the Jews in Russia.

Far more Jews, though still a minority, supported the liberal party known as the Kadets (the acronym for the Constitutional Democrats), who were dedicated to liberal constitutionalism, universal suffrage, and equal rights for the minorities of the Empire. In its early years, the party included several prominent Jewish intellectuals and lawyers in its leadership ranks, a matter which attracted a great deal of support from the Jewish population as a whole. But in the years before the Revolution the Kadets became more and more conservative, often siding with the Octobrists, a right-wing party that supported the monarchy, and therefore lost a good deal of its appeal among Jews. A small specifically Jewish liberal party—the Folkspartei—shared the Kadets’ liberalism, to which they added support for national cultural autonomy similar to that of the Bund. They appealed to a very small sliver of the Jewish community—basically academics and other intellectuals.

Far more complicated to assess is the degree of support for Zionism at that time in the Russian Jewish community. To be sure, when Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, the majority of his followers were from the Russian Empire, and the movement as a whole gained a large amount of support in Russia in the subsequent two decades. But what exactly it meant to belong to a Zionist party is far from clear: Many Jews bought the symbolic shekel which gained them a membership card, but that did not mean much in terms of their actual worldviews. And almost from the start, Russian Zionism split into a number of opposing factions: the “political Zionists,” who supported Herzl and his goal of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine; “cultural” or “spiritual” Zionists, led by Ahad Ha’am, who opposed mass Jewish migration to Palestine and the immediate creation of a state in favor of a cultural revolution among the Jews based on a radically secular new Hebraic culture; various socialist Zionist parties which attempted to synthesize conflicting views of social-democracy and Marxism with Zionism. And finally there was the tiny Mizrachi, the Orthodox Zionist party founded in Vilnius in 1902, attempting against all odds to combine fealty to Orthodox Judaism alongside Zionism—an almost impossible task at the time, since the vast majority of Russia’s rabbis vehemently denounced Zionism as a heretical movement led by sinners and degenerates who would bring the Jewish people to doom. Indeed, there was an even tinier movement of what would later be called “ultra-Orthodox” Judaism, which advocated working within the political system—any political system!—to guarantee the religious rights of the Orthodox Jewish population; in 1916 the international ultra-Orthodox movement “Agudat Yisrael” was founded in Germany but was essentially led by both Hasidic and non-Hasidic rabbinical figures from the Russian Empire.

Of all these groupings, the only one pledged to the unilateral support of the czarist monarchy was the ultra-Orthodox, who for the last decade of tsarism made common cause with the autocracy to combat the spread of socialism and Zionism among the Jewish population. At the other end of the political spectrum, only the Bolsheviks were pledged to a violent revolution to topple the tsars. The vast majority of the Jewish community fell somewhere between these two stools, neither admiring Nicholas II and his highly controversial wife Alexandra nor wishing for their immediate demise. As the Yiddish proverb has it, “Never pray for a new king”—the Jews had learned from their history that the greatest danger to them was political chaos and instability.

To be sure, the years before the Revolution witnessed an enormous amount of both insecurity and chaos: several waves of pogroms broke out in 1881-1882, 1903, and 1905; and World War I, fought on the territory in which the majority of the world’s Jews lived, caused enormous suffering and dislocation, including a massive flight of refugees both across the border to the Austrian Empire and back into the interior of Russia itself. So large was this population flight that the czarist government actually abolished the Pale of Settlement in 1916 because there were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in places in which they were officially forbidden./p>

But on the other side of the coin, hundreds of thousands of Jews fought in the Russian Army in WWI—estimates range as high as 600,000—and it would be reckless to assume that they were not, on some level, loyal to the regime for which they fought and died. Indeed, all the political movements just mentioned save the Bolsheviks, supported the war effort—even the Zionists, who in theory ought to have opposed support of the Russian state as an expression of the chimerical goals of Jewish emancipation and integration.

And so when the February Revolution erupted in early 1917 and Nicholas II unexpectedly abdicated the throne and Russia was declared a republic, run by a provisional government, the Jews—like the rest of the population—were shocked, as no one (not even Lenin) had predicted this result. But almost immediately, the new government proceeded to rule the vast former empire in a way congenial to the Jewish population. Most importantly, one of the first acts of the provisional government was to abolish all legal restrictions based on religion, race, or nationality: In one stroke, the 5-and-a-half million Russian Jews were emancipated, free and equal citizens of the realm. Soon, all restrictions on the freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of religion, disappeared, and the Jews (like everyone else in the new state) reveled in these new rights, issuing a plethora of new publications, artistic creations, newspapers, political platforms from left to right. Admittedly the new government was shaky and divided, but its leaders represented precisely those elements of the pre-Revolutionary world—the moderate left and center—that the Jews found to their liking. And there is no evidence to suggest that they changed their minds—including still supporting the War effort—in the fall of 1917, when the provisional government began to fall apart, more and more replaced by the Petrograd Soviet, made up of workers, soldiers, and professional revolutionaries—the latter, once more, including a good number of Jews who rejected their own Jewishness.

And so, as the October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks turned into the Russian Revolution, almost all Russian Jews did not support the new regime. Soon, elections were called for a Congress of Russian Jews and then for a Constituent Assembly promised by the Bolsheviks; in both these votes, the Jews stuck to their pattern in the earlier elections, supporting coalitions of Jewish parties representing the broad center of the political spectrum; the Bolsheviks still garnered only a small percentage of the Jewish vote.

So what happened? In the simplest terms, as the civil war broke out, the anti-Bolshevik forces soon became more and more dominated by the right wing and its blatantly and violently anti-Semitic supporters. Although early on there were some pogroms waged by Red Army troops, these were quickly and firmly condemned by the Bolshevik leaders (again, especially Trotsky, who was, after all, the head of the Red Army). In sharpest contrast, the White Army soldiers conducted massive pogroms against the Jews. And the clash was not only between the Reds and the Whites but soon also between the Red Army and the various Ukrainian and Polish forces, who also carried out an enormous number of pogroms against the Jewish population.

Often, it was difficult to tell which side was worse: In his remarkable short story Gedali, Isaac Babel portrays an old but noble shopkeeper in the destroyed city of Zhitomir, remarking to the narrator that he can’t tell the difference between the various armies occupying and destroying his town: “The Pole shoots, because he is the counter-revolution. And you shoot because you are the Revolution. But Revolution is happiness. And happiness does not like orphans in its house. A good man does good deeds. The Revolution is the good deed done by good men. But good men do not kill. Hence the Revolution is done by bad men. But the Poles are also bad men. Who is going to tell Gedali which is the Revolution and which the counterrevolution?”

But Isaac Babel had, in fact, made his choice, falling in line with the new Soviet authorities, as did scores of other Jewish writers, painters, sculptors, novelists, short-story writers, who saw in the Revolution vast opportunities for creative liberation. And the vast Jewish masses, whether previously supporters of the Zionists or the Bund, the Agudah or the Kadets, had no hesitation in making a simple, life-defining decision: the White Army and its allies attacked, murdered, and destroyed Jewish lives and homes; the Red Army attacked the pogromshchiki, made anti-Semitism a crime against the state, outlawed pogroms, and even prosecuted anti-Semitism in its ranks. True, the economic system the new regime introduced—“War Communism”—destroyed the very basis of Jewish life in Eastern Europe for centuries—the market economy—as well as the free liberal professions that Jews had entered into en masse in recent decades. Gedali’s little shop “as if out of a page of Dickens,” could not be restored. But as the author of Deuteronomy had counseled the Israelites long before: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” And choosing life meant siding with the Bolsheviks.

Certainly, there were many Jews who, in their heart of hearts, still maintained their fealty to their old political parties, their old way of life, their Zionism, their Bundism, their liberalism, their religious Orthodoxy. Many would fight as best they could for these causes in the next two decades, largely underground. But as the new Soviet Union rose from the ashes of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Soviet-Ukrainian War, the Soviet-Polish War, and more, the Jews made their peace, or more, with the new Communist state which committed itself against the forces of reaction and anti-Semitism. Their subsequent fate under Soviet socialism—and its ultimate descent into the lunacy of the Stalinist terror—was not foreseen.

Q
UNQUOTE
Q

 

http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/yurovmurder.html

The executioner Yurovsky's account - Blog & Alexander Palace Time Machine
QUOTE
Murder of the Imperial Family - The executioner Yurovsky's account
YUROVSKY'S ACCOUNT
OF
THE EXECUTION OF THE IMPERIAL FAMILY

February 1, 1934:

On the 16th in the morning I dispatched the little cook, the boy Sednev, under the pretext that there would be a meeting with his uncle who had come to Sverdlovsk. It caused anxiety among the prisoners. Botkin, the usual intermediary, and then one of the daughters asked about Sednev - where, why and for how long he had been taken away - because Alexei missed him. Having received an explanation, they went away apparently calmed down. I prepared 12 revolvers and designated who would shoot whom. Comrade Filipp [Goloshchyokin] told me that a truck would arrive at midnight; the people coming would say a password; we would let them pass and hand over the corpses to them to carry away and bury. At about 11 o'clock at night on July 16 I assembled the men again, handed out the revolvers and announced that soon we had to begin liquidating the prisoners. I told Pavel Medvedev he had to check the guard outside and inside thoroughly. He and the guard commander had to keep constant watch over the area around the house and in the house where the external guard was stationed and to maintain communications with me. I also told him that at the last moment, when everything was ready for the execution, he had tell the guards and the others in the detachment not to worry about any shots they might hear from the house, and not to leave the premises. If there were any unusual amount of unrest, he was to notify me through the established line of communication.

The truck did not arrive until half past one. The extra wait caused some anxiety - waiting in general, and the short night especially. Only when the truck had arrived (or after telephone calls that it was on the way) did I go to wake the prisoners. Botkin slept in the room nearest to the entrance. He came out and asked me what the matter was. I told him to wake everybody, because there was unrest in the town and it was dangerous for them to remain on the top floor. I said I would move them to another place. Gathering everybody consumed a lot of time, about 40 minutes. When the family had dressed, I led them to the room in the basement that had been designated earlier. It must be said here that when Comrade Nikulin and I thought up our plan, we did not consider beforehand that, one, the windows would let out noise; two, the victims would be standing next to a brick wall; and finally, three (It was impossible to foresee this), the firing would occur in an uncoordinated way. That should not have happened. Each man had one person to shoot and so everything should have been all right. The causes of the disorganized firing became clear later. Although I told [the victims] through Botkin that they did not have to take anything with them they collected various small things - pillows, bags and so on and, it seems to me, a small dog.

Having gone down to the room (At the entrance to the room, on the right there was a very wide window), I ordered them to stand along the wall. Obviously, at that moment they did not imagine what awaited them. Alexandra Feodrovna said "There are not even chairs here." Nicholas was carrying Alexei. He stood in the room with him in his arms. Then I ordered a couple of chairs. On one of them, to the right of the entrance, almost in the corner, Alexandra Feodrovna sat down. The daughters and Demidova stood next to her, to the left of the entrance. Beside them Alexei was seated in the armchair. Behind him Dr. Botkin, the cook and the others stood. Nicholas stood opposite Alexei. At the same time I ordered the men to go down and to be ready in their places when the command was given. Nicholas had put Alexei on the chair and stood in such a way, that he shielded him. Alexei sat in the left corner from the entrance, and so far as I can remember, I said to Nicholas approximately this: His royal and close relatives inside the country and abroad were trying to save him, but the Soviet of Workers' Deputies resolved to shoot them. He asked "What?" and turned toward Alexei. At that moment I shot him and killed him outright. He did not get time to face us to get an answer. At that moment disorganized, not orderly firing began. The room was small, but everybody could come in and carry out the shooting according to the set order. But many shot through the doorway. Bullets began to ricochet because the wall was brick. Moreover, the firing intensified when the victims shouts arose. I managed to stop the firing but with great difficulty.

A bullet, fired by somebody in the back, hummed near my head and grazed either the palm or finger (I do not remember) of somebody. When the firing stopped, it turned out that the daughters, Alexandra Feodrovna and, it seems, Demidova and Alexei too, were alive. I think they had fallen from fear or maybe intentionally, and so they were alive. Then we proceeded to finish the shooting. (Previously I had suggested shooting at the heart to avoid a lot of blood). Alexei remained sitting petrified. I killed him. They shot the daughters but did not kill them. Then Yermakov resorted to a bayonet, but that did not work either. Finally they killed them by shooting them in the head. Only in the forest did I finally discover the reason why it had been so hard to kill the daughters and Alexandra Feodrovna.

After the shooting it was necessary to carry away the corpses, but it was a comparatively long way. How could we do it? Somebody came up with an idea: stretchers. (We did not think about it earlier.) We took shafts from the sledges and, it seems, put sheets on them. Having confirmed they were dead, we began to carry them out. It was discovered that traces of blood would be everywhere. I said to get some smooth woolen military cloth immediately and put some of it onto the stretchers and then line the truck with it. I directed Mikhail Medvedev to take the corpses. He was a Cheka man then and currently works in the GPU. He and Pyotr Zakharovich Yermakov had to take the bodies and take them away. When they had removed the first corpse somebody said (I do not remember exactly who it was) that someone had taken some valuables. Then I understood that evidently there had been valuables in the things that they had brought with them. I stopped the removal immediately, assembled the men and demanded the valuables be returned. After some denial, two men returned the valuables they had taken.

After I threatened the looters with shooting, I removed those two and ordered Comrade Nikulin (as far as I remember) to escort the bodies, having warned him about valuables. I first collected everything - the things they had taken and other things as well - and I sent all of it to the commandant's office.

Comrade Filipp [Goloshchyokin], apparently sparing me (My health was not very good), told me not to go to the "funeral" but I worried very much about disposing of the corpses properly. So I decided to go personally, and it turned out I did the right thing. Otherwise, all the corpses would wind up in the hands of the White Guards. It is easy to imagine how they would have exploited the situation.

After instructions were given to wash and clean everything, at about three o'clock or even a little later, we left. I took several men from the internal guards. I did not know where the corpses were supposed to be buried, as I have said. Filipp Goloshchyokin had assigned that to Comrade Yermakov (By the way it seems it was Pavel Vedvedev who told me that night that he had seen Comrade Filipp, when he was running to the team. Comrade Filipp was walking back and forth all the time near the house, apparently because he was anxious about how everything would turn out). Yermakov drove us somewhere at the Verkh-Isetsky Works. I was never at that place and did not know it. At about two-three versts (or maybe more) from the Verkh-Isetsky Works, a whole escort of people on horseback or in carriages met us. I asked Yermakov who these people were, why they were there. He answered that he had assembled those people. I still do not know why there were so many. I heard only shouts "We thought they would come here alive, but it turns out they are dead." Also, it seems about three-four versts farther our truck got stuck between two trees. There where we stopped several of Yermakov's people were stretching out girls' blouses. We discovered again that there were valuables and they were taking them. I ordered that men be posted to keep anyone from coming near the truck.

The truck was stuck and could not move. I asked Yermakov, "Is it still far to the chosen place?" He said "Not far, beyond railroad beds." And there behind the trees was a marsh. Bogs were everywhere. I wondered "Why had he herded in so many people and horses. If only there had been carts instead of carriages." But there was nothing we could do. We had to unload to lighten the truck, but that did not help. Then I ordered them to load the carriages, because it was already light and we did not have time to wait any longer. Only at daybreak did we come to the famous "gully". Several steps from the mine where the burial had been planned, peasants were sitting around the fire, apparently having spent the night at the hayfield. On the way me met several people. It became impossible to carry on our work in sight of them. It must be said, the situation had become difficult. Everything might come to nothing. At that moment I still did not know that the mine would not meet our needs at all. And those damned valuables! Just then I did not know that there was so much of them or that the people Yermakov had recruited were unsuitable for the project. Yes, it was too much! I had to disperse the people. I found out we had gone about 15-16 versts from the city and had driven to the village of Koptyaki, two or three versts from there. We had to cordon the place off at some distance, and we did it. Besides that, I sent an order to the village to keep everybody out, explaining that the Czech Legion was not far away, that our units had assembled here and that it was dangerous to be here. I ordered the men to turn back anybody to the village and to shoot any stubborn, disobedient persons if that did not work. Another group of men was sent to the town because they were not needed. Having done all of this, I ordered [the men] to load the corpses and to take off the clothes for burning, that is, to destroy absolutely everything they had, to remove any additional incriminating evidence if the corpses were somehow discovered. I ordered bonfires. When we began to undress the bodies, we discovered something on the daughters and on Alexandra Feodrovna. I do not remember exactly what she had on, the same as on the daughters or simply things that had been sewed on. But the daughters had on bodices almost entirely of diamonds and [other] precious stones. Those were not only places for valuables but protective armor at the same time. That is why neither bullets nor bayonets got results. By the way, only they had guilt in their dying agony. The valuables turned out to be about one-half pud. Greed was so great that on Alexandra Feodrovna, by the way, there was simply an enormous piece of round gold wire, turned out as a sheer bracelet and weighing about one pound. All the valuables were ripped out immediately, so that it would not be necessary to carry the bloody rags around with us. Valuables discovered by the White Guards were undoubtedly related to those sewed into other things. After burning, they remained in the ashes. Several diamonds were handed over to me the next day by Comrades who had found them there. How did they overlook the other valuables? They had enough time for it. Most likely they simply did not figure it out. By the way, one has to suppose that some valuables will be returned to us through Torgsin ["Trade with foreigners" stores], because they were probably picked up by the peasants of the Koptyaki village after our departure. The valuables had been collected, the things had been burned and the completely naked corpses had been thrown into the mine. From that very moment new problems began. The water just barely covered the bodies. What should we do? We had the idea of blowing up the mines with bombs to cover them, but nothing came of it. I saw that the funeral had achieved nothing and that it was impossible to leave things that way. It was necessary to begin all over again. But what should we do? Where should we put the corpses? About at 2 p.m. I decided to go to the town, because it was clear that we had to extract the corpses from the mine and to carry them to another place. Even the blind could discover them. Besides, the place was exposed. People had seen something was going on there. I set up posts, guards in place, and took the valuables and left. I went to the regional executive committee and reported to the authorities how bad things were. Comrade Safarov and somebody else (I do not remember who) listened but said nothing. Then I found Filipp [Goloshchyokin] and explained to him we had to transfer the corpses to another place. When he agreed I proposed to send people to raise the corpses. At the same time I ordered him to take bread and food because the men were hungry and exhausted, not having slept for about 24 hours. They had to wait for me there. It turned out to be difficult to get to the corpses and lift them out. The men got very exhausted doing it. Apparently they were at it all night because they went there late.

I went to the town executive committee, to Sergei Yergerovich Chutskayev who was its chairman at the time to ask for advice. Maybe he knew of a place. He proposed a very deep abandoned mine on the Moscow high road. I got a car, took someone from the regional Cheka with me, Polushin, it seems, and someone else and we left. But one and a half versts away from the appointed place the car broke down. The driver was left to repair it, and we went on foot. We looked over the place and decided it was good. The only problem was to avoid onlookers. Some people lived near the place and we decided to come and take them away to the town and after the project let them come back. That was our decision. We came back to the car but it had to be towed. I decided to wait for a passing car. A while later some people rode up on two horses. I stopped them. The fellows seemed to know me. They were hurrying to the plant. With great reluctance they gave us the horses.

While we rode another plan took shape: burn the corpses. But nobody knew how to do it. Polushin seems to have said they already knew that because nobody really knew how it would come out. I was still considering the mines on the Moscow high road and then transportation. I decided to get carts. The plan came to me at the thought of failure in burying them in groups in different places. The road leading to Koptyaki is clay near that gully. If we buried them there without onlookers, not even the devil would find them. To bury them and to drive by with the string of carts would result in a mishmash and that would be that. So there were three plans. There was nothing to drive, there was no car. I went to the head of the military transportation garage to find out if there were any cars. There was a car, but it was the chief's. I forgot his surname; it turned out he was a scoundrel and, it seems, he was executed in Perm. Comrade Pavel Petrovich Gorbunov, who is now deputy chairman of the state bank, was the manager of the garage or deputy chairman of military transportation. I do not remember which. I told him I needed a car urgently. He said "I know what for." He gave me the chairman's car. I drove to Voikov, head of supply in the Urals, to get petrol or kerosene, sulphuric acid too (to disfigure the faces) and, besides that, spades. I commandeered ten carts without drivers from the prison. Everything was loaded on and we drove off. The truck was sent there. I stayed to wait for Polushin, the main "specialist" in burning who had disappeared somewhere. I waited for him at Voikov's. I waited for him in vain until 11 p.m. Then I heard he had ridden off on horseback to come to me but he fell off the horse, hurt his foot, and he could not ride. Since we could not afford to get stuck with the car again, I rode off on horseback about midnight with a comrade (I don't remember who) to the place the corpses were. But I also had back luck. The horse hesitated, dropped to its knees and somehow fell on its side and come down on my foot. I lay there an hour or more until I could get on the horse again. We arrived late at night. The work extracting [the corpses] was going on. I decided to bury some corpses on the road. We began to dig a pit. At dawn it was almost ready, but a comrade came to me and said that despite the order not to let anybody come near, a man acquainted with Yermakov had appeared from somewhere and had been allowed to stay at a distance. From there it was possible to see some kind of digging because there were heaps of clay everywhere. Though Yermakov guaranteed that he could not see anything, another Comrade (not the one who had spoken to me) began to demonstrate that from where he had stood it was impossible not to see.

So that plan was ruined too. We decided to fill in the pit. Waiting for evening, we piled into the cart. The truck waited for us in a place where it seemed impossible to get stuck. (The driver was Zlokazov's worker Lyukhanov.) We headed for the Siberian high road. Having crossed the railroad, we transferred two corpses to the truck, but it soon got stuck again. We struggled for about two hours. It was almost midnight. Then I decided that we should do the burying somewhere around there, because at that late hour nobody actually could see us. Only the watchman of the passing track saw several men, because I sent for ties to cover the place where the corpses would be put. The explanation for needing ties was: The ties had to be laid for a truck to pass over. I forgot to say that we got stuck twice that evening or, to be precise, that night. About two months ago, I was looking through the book by Sokolov, the preliminary investigator of the extremely important cases under Kolchak, when I saw a photo of those stacked ties. It was mentioned that the ties had been laid there to let a truck pass. So, having dug up the entire area, they did not think to look under the ties. It is necessary to say that all our men were so tired. They did not want to dig a new grave. But as it always happens in such cases, two or three men started working, then the others began. A fire was made and while the graves where being prepared we burned two corpses: Alexei and Demidova. The pit was dug near the fire. The bones were buried, the land was leveled. A big fire was made again and all the traces were covered with ashes. Before putting the other corpses into the pit we poured sulpheric acid over them. The pit was filled up and covered with the ties. The empty truck drove over the ties several times and rolled them flat. At 5 - 6 o'clock in the morning, I assembled everybody and stated the importance of the work completed. I warned everybody to forget the things they saw and never speak about them with anybody. Then we went back to the town. Having lost us, the fellows from the regional Cheka, such as Comrades Isay Rodzinsky, Gorin and somebody else arrived when we had already finished everything.

In the evening of the 19th I went to Moscow with my report.

Documentation Centre of the Social Organization of the Sverdlosk Region (DCSOSR) F. 41 Op. 1.D. 151, L. 10-22. Original.

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Our thanks to Rob Moshein for transcribing the account as printed in "The Last Act of a Tragedy" by V.V. Aleskeyev, Yekaterinburg, 1996. ISBN 5-7691-0394-9; 5-7691-0597-6.

This information is for educational purposes only and is protected by copyright belonging to V.V. Alekseyev and the Interregional Fund "Russian Heritage" 1996. It may not be reproduced or used commercially without prior written approval of the copyright holders.

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Yakov Sverdlov – Russiapedia Leaders Prominent Russians
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“Andrey”, “Max”, Smirnov", "Permyakov". This is only a few of the false names and pseudonyms used by Yakov Sverdlov during his underground revolutionary activity in various parts of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. At the age of 32 he was one of the key figures behind the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was a close ally of Vladimir Lenin and until 1919 he was the official head of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.

“Defending” the working class   
Yakov Sverdlov was born in 1885 in the city of Nizhny Novgorod into the family of a Jewish engraver. The family lived from hand to mouth. Yakov’s father Mikhail (or Moishe, as they called him) took a second underground job forging various documents and stamps for revolutionaries to pay for his children’s education. His forgeries were so good the police could never tell one of his fakes from the real article.

On April 30, 1896, at the age of 11, Sverdlov was admitted into the first grade of the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Gymnasium. Yakov’s relationship with his teachers was far from perfect. Many times he protested against the school regulations, which irritated many of his tutors. Eventually tiring of the combative Sverdlov, they expelled him after finishing only five grades.  

His young age notwithstanding, Yakov developed an intense desire to devote all his energy to defending the rights of the working class. After he was expelled from school, Sverdlov found work as an apprentice in a pharmacist’s shop in the township of Kanavin near Nizhny Novgorod. The town was the site of a big lumberyard and a huge number of workers. There Yakov came into contact with workers who always shared stories about the hardships of their everyday life, and Sverdlov eventually spoke to his father about his revolutionary ideas. By that time, the home of the Sverdlovs in Nizhny Novgorod was used as a hiding-place for visiting revolutionaries, and the half-century old idea of toppling the monarchy was gaining popularity in the region. Later on Yakov’s father began to sell illegal literature and even arms. 

In 1902 Sverdlov joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. He distributed social-democratic literature and raised funds for party needs. In addition, he set up an underground printing press. In 1903, when the party was divided into the moderate Mensheviks and more radical Bolsheviks, Sverdlov decided to join the Bolshevik faction. From then on, he always displayed his ardent support for Vladimir Lenin. Sverdlov took part in the 1905 Russian Revolution. By that time he had been placed in charge of several Bolshevik organizations in the Ural Mountains region. During that period he developed a reputation as one of the party's leading public speakers. The same year he and his wife Elizaveta Schmidt had their daughter, Elena.

Arrest, exile, and a bit of freedom
In 1906 Sverdlov was arrested for his illegal activity for the first time. This was the beginning of a period of time from 1906 until 1917 when he was mostly either imprisoned or exiled. All in all, Sverdlov was arrested 14 times. 

During his first years in prison, Sverdlov was allowed time to read and educate himself. He also tried to plan various escapes, occasionally succeeding. During one of his periods on the run, he married his second wife Klavdia Novgorodtseva, who bore him two children and stayed with Sverdlov until the end of his days. During one of his successful escapes in 1912, he managed to get to St. Petersburg, where he became a member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. 

However, in 1913 Sverdlov’s whereabouts were discovered by police agent Roman Malinovsky. Yakov was exiled to Turukhansk in Eastern Siberia. For three years he shared his flat with another exiled revolutionary, Joseph Stalin, the future notorious Soviet ruler. At the beginning of their time together, both of them were quite tolerant of each other. But later on, their relationship became significantly strained, and they often had quarrels. Yakov, in spite of the poverty he experienced during his youth, was brought up in the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, and found Stalin’s manners lacking.

For example, Sverdlov would wash his dishes after every meal, but Stalin did not bother to, occasionally giving his plate to his dog to lick it clean. Additionally irksome was that Stalin’s dog was called Yashka, a diminutive nickname for Yakov.

Revolutionary years
After the 1917 February Revolution, Sverdlov returned to the capital which at that time had been renamed Petrograd. He took an active part in the propaganda campaign against Russia’s participation in WWI, the Bolsheviks calling the conflict “imperialistic”. In April, Sverdlov went to the Urals to oversee the party activity in the city of Ekaterinburg. He returned to Petrograd in June and he was a key figure in organizing the subversive activities of Vladimir Lenin against the provisional government. As of August 1917, Sverdlov controlled the organizational bureau of the Central Committee and its secretariat. Along with Felix Dzerzhinsky, he was the head of the Central Committee's military commission. In Lenin's absence, it was Sverdlov who presided at the Central Committee meetings. In all critical circumstances Sverdlov displayed unquestionable loyalty to Lenin. 

In the fall of 1917, it was Yakov Sverdlov who was responsible for the so-called “workflow of the Revolution”.  At the beginning of October he personally recruited people for the revolutionary committee. Close to the day of the Bolshevik Revolution, he supervised the actions of the Russian Provisional Government members (On the first day of the uprising they were arrested in their residence in the Winter Palace). After the Bolsheviks had taken power, at the assembly of the Second Congress of the Soviets, Sverdlov was elected Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He personally supervised the process of sending telegrams all over the country with the news that the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia. 

At the time, Sverdlov was the official head of the country, but in reality he always took orders from Lenin. However, he saved Lenin several times, as there were moments when Sverdlov was the only member of the Central Committee to support the mastermind of the revolution, and all the deputies only later took his side. In January 1918, Sverdlov played an important role in persuading the Bolshevik leaders to support the closure of the Russian Parliament, a constituent assembly that represented various political parties. He led the campaign to create the peace treaty admitting Russia’s defeat in World War I, known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Many eyewitnesses said that Lenin merely put forward theories of the revolution, leaving Sverdlov to apply them in practice. He supported acts of violence against those loyal to the Tsar, a policy later known as “The Red Terror”.  Some modern historians, journalists, and investigators managed to obtain documents proving it was Yakov Sverdlov behind the execution of the royal family that took place near the city of Ekaterinburg on July 16, 1918.

Death and aftermath
There are still many versions of Sverdlov’s mysterious death on March, 16, 1919.  Some researchers are sure that he died of influenza which he caught in the city of Oryol on one of his business trips. Others say that he died of tuberculosis (that was Stalin’s version, which suited him because it portrayed Sverdlov as a martyr who caught the dangerous disease in exile). According to a third version, he was heavily hit by a worker at a Moscow factory. Many historians however tend to believe that his death was not linked to illness, despite the fact that his health was failing. It was only after his death that Stalin, the person who had a negative relationship with Sverdlov during their time in exile in Siberia, began to rise to the highest echelons of power. At Sverdlov’s funeral, held in the Necropolis close to the Kremlin wall, Lenin spoke for 2 hours about key issues every revolutionary had to keep in mind. He realized that he had lost his biggest ally in the power struggle within Bolshevik circles.

In 1924 the city of Ekaterinburg was renamed into Sverdlovsk. In 1991, Russian President Boris Yelstin who was born in that part of the country returned the city’s original name. However, to this day the region around Ekaterinburg is still called the “Sverdlovsk region”. 

Written by Oleg Dmitriev, RT
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