Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky

Soviet secret policeman

• Born: June 19, 1878
• Birthplace: Tomsk, Siberia, Russian Empire (now in Russia)
• Died: August 2, 1938
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Cause of notoriety: Yurovsky executed Czar Nicholas II and the royal family during the Russian Civil War.

Active: July 17, 1918

Locale: Yekaterinburg, Siberia, Soviet Union (now Russia)

Early Life

Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky(YA-kof mihk-HAY-loh-vihch yer-OF-skee) was born in the Siberian city of Tomsk to a working-class family whose values included a strong loyalty to the Romanov Dynasty. Yurovsky’s father was a glazier, and his mother was a seamstress. Yakov was the eighth of ten children; with so many mouths to feed, his hardworking parents never had much to spare. The family, however, was not totally destitute and even had a dacha on the banks of the Ob River out of town. Little more than a wooden hut, it was nonetheless an escape from the summer swelter that would turn their regular abode over a butcher shop into a sweatbox. Even so, what they had seemed only to underline what they lacked and bred in Yurovsky a sense of resentment both of the hardships of his life and of the folk piety that regarded life’s travails as sent from heaven.

His father forced him to leave school early and to enter a trade, apprenticing him to the city’s best watchmaker. Yurovsky remained in that profession for ten years, until he became swept up in the 1897 strikes and as a result was blacklisted. Unable to find work in Tomsk, he wandered about Siberia, eventually settling in Yekaterinburg, where he found work and a wife. However, in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution, he decided to take definite action against his frustration and joined the Bolshevik Party. He subsequently had to flee the country and lived in Berlin for a time, developing an interest in photography. When he returned to Russia in 1912 he was quickly arrested, but instead of prison he received exile back to Yekaterinburg. After a brief stint in the army as a medical orderly during World War I, Yurovsky deserted.

Political Career

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Yurovsky quickly established himself as a political leader in Yekaterinburg, helping to found the Ural Regional Soviet. He also joined the regional Cheka, or secret police. By 1918, the situation in Bolshevik Russia was becoming increasingly desperate because of the civil war against the White Russians, or counterrevolutionaries. Thanks to efforts by monarchists to rescue them, the deposed Czar Nicholas II and his family had been moved repeatedly to areas more distant from the capital, ultimately ending up in Yekaterinburg. However, by July of 1918, much of Siberia was in White hands, and Yekaterinburg was in danger. Rather than let the royal family be recaptured by the Whites, the Bolsheviks decided to execute them all, and that duty fell to Yurovsky.

In the early hours of July 17, 1918, Yurovsky marched the royal family into a basement room of the House of Special Purpose, their prison for the past several months, and lined them up against a wall. There he read them the orders condemning them to death. Nicholas, never overly quick on the uptake, could not understand what was happening until Yurovsky shot him in the chest. At that point, all Yurovsky’s men opened fire, but in an undisciplined way that turned the execution into a brutal massacre. Several of the royals were wearing large numbers of jewels sewn into their clothes, which served as bulletproof vests. As a result, they had to be bludgeoned to death. Yurovsky then had the bodies taken to a nearby pit for a crude burial.

Although Yurovsky was richly rewarded and ultimately moved to Moscow, he became a pariah for his role in the deaths of the Romanovs. However proud the Soviets might have been of their revolution, there remained a sense of guilt about that act of regicide, and Yurovsky became its principal scapegoat. Near the end of his life, he came to regret bitterly his actions. He died on August 2, 1938, in the Kremlin hospital and was buried at the Novodevechy Cemetery outside Moscow.

Impact

By killing the czar and the rest of the immediate royal family, Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky eliminated a possible rallying point for White forces during the Russian Civil War. As a result, the White forces were disunited and frequently worked at cross-purposes, a factor that furthered the Bolshevik victory. The Soviet Union would not face another serious threat to its existence until the Nazi invasion in World War II.

Furthermore, the loss of all Czar Nicholas’s children meant that any possibilities for a royal restoration following the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union would have to fall back upon the collateral heirs who had escaped to the West and their descendants. Because of questions about the relative strengths of the various claims and arguments that some heirs had become disqualified for the throne, there was no real chance that the various monarchist groups in post-Soviet Russia would agree on any one heir to support. As a result, the Russian Federation remained republican in its form of government by default.

Bibliography

Grabbe, Paul, and Beatrice Grabbe. The Private World of the Last Tsar. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. A photographic record of Czar Nicholas II and the royal family, including many personal pictures.

King, Greg, and Penny Wilson. The Fate of the Romanovs. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2003. A reexamination of the last days of the Russian royal family, taken from previously secret Soviet archival documents.

Maylunas, Andrei, and Sergei Mironenko. A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra, Their Own Story. New York: Doubleday, 1997. A biography of the last czar and his wife.

Perry, John Curtis, and Constantine Pleshakov. The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Describes members of both the immediate and extended royal family of Russia and their fates.