Communism, continued
The Bolshevik murder of the Czar, his immediate family, and the remnant of their entourage was the stunning denouement to the Bolshevik seizure of power.
After the Czar's abdication he and his family were held in custody at Tsarskoe Selo--the Czar's village, built by Peter the Great's wife, about fifteen miles from Petrograd--for the next several months. They were generally well treated there, were under the special protection of Alexander Kerensky, and were allowed considerable freedom. Kerensky hoped at first to get them out of Russia to England, where the Czar could be the guest of King George, his cousin and old friend. When this did not work out, and as the Petrograd Soviet became more threatening, Kerensky decided to send them to some area remote from the threatening radical revolutionary framework. He sent them to Tobolsk, a good sized provincial town in western Siberia, in the late summer of 1917. It was, as Kerensky had thought, an ideal location, had few, if any, industrial workers; most of the inhabitants were conservative and favorably disposed toward the Czar. By all accounts, the Czar was a modest and kindly man, devoted to his family, and little disposed to make trouble. His wife, the Czarina, was a deeply devout woman, whose faith grew stronger as their lot grew worse. When companions were taken from them while they were still at Tsarskoe Selo, she bade one of them farewell in this manner: "With a tremendous effort of will, she forced herself to smile; then, in a voice whose every accent bespoke intense love and deep religious conviction, she said: 'Lili, by suffering, we are purified for Heaven. This goodbye matters little. We shall meet in another world.'" When the Czar was asked by one of his custodians what he could get for him while the Royal family was at Tobolsk, the Czar asked for some logs and a saw. The logs he sawed into wood for the fireplace to help keep the family warm during the bitter cold winter.
The situation of the Royal family began to worsen after the Bolsheviks took over. In April 1918, they were moved to Ekaterinburg, a town in the Urals. There the situation was incomparably worse than it had been at Tobolsk. They were restricted to the upper rooms of the house and were closely guarded prisoners. The Bolsheviks may have planned at first to bring the deposed Czar and Czarina to Moscow for trial and probably execution. They did not wait for that, however. Civil war was brewing in Russia. A Czech army, bolstered by Russians who had joined their ranks, was making its way toward Ekaterinburg. There was not a sufficient force of Bolsheviks in the region to turn them back, but there was still time to evacuate the Royal family. According to a later account, "The decision to kill the Tsar was taken by Lenin and Sverdlov, apparently without consultation with any other members of the party." The order was probably transmitted by way of Sverdlov, who was the official in Moscow in charge of the Royal family. At any rate, the executive committee of the Soviet of the Urals "officially" made the decision and ordered it carried out.
The "execution" was carried out in the most brutal and direct way imaginable, truly worthy of a gangland killing or massacre. A Cheka (secret police) unit replaced the military guard over the Royal family to do the execution. The Czar, his family, and their attendants were herded into a small basement room of the house were they were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg and told they were going to be shot. Here is a reconstruction of what happened then:
Nicholas, his arm still around Alexis [heir to the throne, afflicted during his short life with crippling hemophilia], began to rise from his chair to protect his wife and son. He had just time to say, "What...?" before Yurovsky pointed his revolver directly at the Tsar's head and fired. Nicholas died instantly. Alexandra had time only to raise her hand and make the sign of the cross before she too was killed by a single bullet. Olga, Tatiana and Marie [three of their four daughters], standing behind their mother, were hit and died quickly. Botkin, Kharitonov and Trupp also fell in the hail of bullets. Demidova, the maid, survived the first volley, and rather than reload, the executioners took rifles from the next room and pursued her, stabbing with bayonets. Screaming, running back and forth along the wall like a trapped animal, she tried to fend them off with the cushion. At last she fell, pierced by bayonets more than thirty times. Jimmy the spaniel was killed when his head was crushed by a rifle butt.
The room, filled with smoke and stench of gunpowder, became suddenly quiet. Blood was running in streams from the bodies on the floor. Then there was a movement and a low groan. Alexis, lying on the floor still in the arms of the Tsar, feebly moved his hand to clutch his father's coat. Savagely, one of the executioners kicked the Tsarevich in the head with his heavy boot. Yurovsky stepped up and fired two shots into the boy's ear. Just at that moment, Anastasia [the youngest of the Czar's daughters], who had only fainted, regained consciousness and screamed. With bayonets and rifle butts, the entire band turned on her. In a moment, she too lay still. It was ended.--Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandria (New York: Dell, 1967), P. 515.
Life was ended, but not the gruesome scenario. Not even in death were the bodies allowed to rest in peace, nor even to be given a Christian funeral. Instead, the bodies were wrapped in sheets, loaded on a truck, and taken to another location. There they were dismembered with saws and axes, burned, and their bones dissolved with acid. What remained was then thrown down a mine shaft. This ghoulish undertaking had taken the better part of three days. The Bolsheviks tried to make a clean sweep of the extended Romanov family. They had shot Michael, the Czar's younger brother, a few days earlier than the Czar. Only three days after the murder of the Czar, a whole group of his relatives were brutally murdered. In January 1919, four more grand dukes were murdered by the Bolsheviks. Maxim Gorky had pled with Lenin to at least spare one of them who was an historian known for his liberalism. Lenin denied the request, saying, "The Revolution does not need historians." He would have had better reason to say that the Revolution does not want historians.
There was a Devilish logic to the execution, if not the brutal slaughter, of the Romanovs. Lenin and his cohorts were well versed in the history of revolutions, especially of the French revolution. They knew that revolutions were usually followed by attempts to restore monarchy, and that such attempts were often successful. Murdering the potential heirs to the throne reduced the likelihood that even attempts would be made to do so in Russia. The brutality of the slayings fit the general pattern of Communist activity. It was a way of terrorizing the population of the country and of issuing a warning to any who had ideas of restoring any aspect of the old order. Revolutions proceed on the basis of utter contempt for everything that supported the old order.
--Clarence B. Carson, Basic Communism: Its Rise, Spread and Debacle in the 20th Century (American Textbook Committee, Wadley, Alabama, 1990), Pp. 127-129.
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"
And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state to another...And all of a sudden...four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested!
And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
...Such were my first gulps of prison air.
--Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, New York (1973), Pp. 3-4.
Chapter 3, The Interrogation
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they should be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
Yes, not only Chekhov's heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century--in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared--not only one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims...
We are therefore forced to conclude that no list of tortures and torments existed in printed form for the guidance of interrogators! Instead, all that was required was for every Interrogation Department to supply the tribunal within a specified period with a stipulated number of rabbits who had confessed everything. And it was simply stated, orally but often, that any measures and means employed were good, since they were being used for a lofty purpose; that no interrogator would be made to answer for the death of an accused; and that the prison doctor should interfere as little as possible with the course of the investigation...
Apropos of the orthodox Communists, Stalin was necessary, for such a purge as that, yes, but a Party like that was necessary too; the majority of those in power, up to the very moment of their own arrest, were pitiless in arresting others, obediently destroyed their peers in accordance with those same instructions and handed over to retribution any friend or comrade-in-arms of yesterday. And all the big Bolsheviks, who now wear martyr's halos, managed to be the executioners of other Bolsheviks (not even taking into account how all of them in the first place had been the executioners of non-Communists). Perhaps 1937 was needed in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth--that ideology of which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning Russia upside down, destroying its foundations, trampling everything it held sacred underfoot, that Russia where they themselves had never been threatened by such retribution. The victims of the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1946 never conducted themselves so despicably as the leading Bolsheviks when the lightning struck them. If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principle revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly repulsive defendants--nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride and implacability.
So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared?
What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die--now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me."
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.
But how can one turn one's body to stone?
There were such people in 1937 too, people who did not return to their cell for their bundles of belongings, who chose death, who signed nothing denouncing anyone.
One can't say that the history of the Russian revolutionaries has given us any better examples of steadfastness. But there is no comparison anyway, because none of our revolutionaries ever knew what a really good interrogation could be, with fifty-two different methods to choose from. Just as oxcart drivers of Gogol's time could not have imagined the speed of a jet plane, those who have never gone through the receiving-line meat grinder of Gulag cannot grasp the true possibilities of interrogation.
We read in Izvestiya for May 24, 1959, that Yuliya Rumyantseva was confined in the internal prison of...camp while they tried to find out from her the whereabouts of her husband, who had escaped from that same camp. She knew, but she refused to tell! For a reader who is not in the know this is a model of heroism. For a reader with a bitter Gulag past it's a model of inefficient interrogation: Yuliya did not die under torture, and she was not driven insane. A month later she was simply released--still very much alive and kicking.
--Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, New York (1973), Pp. 39-65.