47. THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK INQUIRY

In November 1918, Siberian politics were transformed when Russian Army officers overthrew the pro-Komuch administration in Omsk and proclaimed Admiral Alexander Kolchak as Supreme Leader of All Russia. He despised the Komuch government and arrested or fired its surviving officials throughout western Siberia – he held them almost as culpable as the Bolsheviks for Russia’s disintegration since the February Revolution. Kolchak’s White Army immediately gained the valuable allegiance of the Czechoslovak Legion and could ready itself to wage war on the Reds. His forces immediately received financial and logistical support from the Western Allies. Kolchak himself declined to profess the monarchist cause, which he knew would alienate Allied support – and perhaps he understood that he would diminish the pool of potential recruits to his White Army if he announced the intention of restoring the Romanovs to power. Many of his commanders remained devoted to their military oath of allegiance to Nicholas II, and Kolchak encouraged the continuation of the Ekaterinburg massacre inquiry. Whatever was discovered in Ekaterinburg was bound to put the Bolsheviks in a poor light.

After bringing his forces to Ekaterinburg, Kolchak ordered a lightning westward offensive. The rest of the Urals had been in political ferment since mid-summer. The Izhevsk Steel Foundry rose against the Bolsheviks after a re-election of the Izhevsk Soviet in July replaced the Bolshevik majority. The Bolsheviks reacted by deploying Red Guards from Kazan. But it remained an explosive situation, and on 7 August the anti-Bolshevik workers rose against rule by commissar and extirpated every trace of it.1

The Reds rushed reinforcements to their Third Army in Perm to stop the Whites in their tracks. By then the Red Army had proved itself in battles by the River Volga. Red commanders warned that Perm would be no easy place to defend. Defences were dug. Troops were rallied and political commissars moved among them explaining that the October Revolution’s survival was under threat. Kolchak’s White Army, high in morale and well organized, rampaged across every obstacle. Just as the Czechoslovaks had found in the summer, the Bolsheviks did not always put up an effective resistance. A mood of panic seized the minds of party, soviet and Red Army personnel and a desperate mass escape was undertaken after defeat in the battle for the city. Perm was completely abandoned on 25 December 1918 after only the most ineffectual attempt at its defence. The result was a chaotic evacuation involving the relinquishing of vastly more assets than during the planned departure from Ekaterinburg. The Bolshevik Central Committee was horrified. Ekaterinburg had been bad but Perm was massively worse, and if the process were to be repeated, Kolchak would soon be the master in the Kremlin.

As for the Romanov inquiry, the seizure of Perm meant that many questions that had baffled Ivan Sergeev and Nikander Mirolyubov could be addressed by rounding up a group of new potential witnesses. The Whites had captured several Bolsheviks and their sympathizers who had taken part in the detention or execution of the imperial family. Mikhail Letemin had belonged to the guard detachment at the Ipatev house. According to a Soviet source, he was arrested in Ekaterinburg after being spotted taking the Romanov dog he had acquired for a walk. Apparently it had been the valet Chemodurov who recognized the animal.2 Letemin had refused to enlist in the Red Army and join in the evacuation; indeed, he had shuddered at the idea of doing any fighting: ‘I didn’t sign up for that – I signed up only for service in the guarding team at the house of special assignment.’ He claimed that he had acted to save the dog from dying of hunger. The inquiry noted his evidence but ignored his pleading, and his decision to stay on in Ekaterinburg proved fatal. When Letemin’s house was searched, it was found to contain a pile of Nicholas and Alexandra’s possessions.3 Having got out of him the information that they wanted about the Romanovs in the Ipatev house, the Whites killed him.

On 17 January 1919 Admiral Kolchak appointed General Mikhail Diterikhs to head the inquiry. Diterikhs had until recently commanded the military front and had no legal experience, but Kolchak thought that he would bring a fresh urgency to the process. Sergeev had already earned the displeasure of the military command. In Diterikhs’s eyes, the judge was drawn to Socialist-Revolutionary ideas and was no patriot. Diterikhs also believed that Sergeev lacked sympathy for Nicholas and the imperial family and showed signs of professional incompetence: he especially held against him that he had interrogated Soviet officials and Red Guard captives so lightly. Worst of all, according to Diterikhs, was the possibility that Sergeev was of Jewish descent – and the fact that he professed the Christian faith made no difference in Diterikhs’s opinion. On 25 January, he required Sergeev to hand over the files he had accumulated since the start of the investigation.4

Diterikhs brought everything he received to Omsk and looked for ways to invigorate the process. With Sergeev out of the way, he aimed to recruit another investigator with proper legal experience. Diterikhs’s choice fell upon a judge in Omsk called Nikolai Sokolov, who was known for his attentiveness to fact and detail. Above all, Sokolov was Russian born and bred, a Christian, a patriot and a monarchist who had none of the alleged softness towards Jewish Bolsheviks such as Trotsky (or Bronstein, as he called him). Sokolov had gone into hiding to evade the Red Guards during a difficult escape from Penza. On 5 February, Kolchak summoned him for interview and asked him what he would need. Sokolov returned to Kolchak next day with a list of his own practical requirements for the task. Kolchak explained that wartime conditions made for less than ideal conditions, and he asked him to take charge of the matter as best he could. Sokolov got down to work with the files that Diterikhs had passed over; he also conducted interrogations of witnesses both in Omsk and through his subordinates elsewhere.5

Diterikhs was a passionate nationalist, a believer in the greatness of the ‘Christian Russian people’ and a rabid anti-Semite.6 He was always keen to emphasize how many revolutionaries had changed their names and stressed that neither Sverdlov nor Goloshchëkin was Russian.7

It was Sokolov, however, who managed the day-to-day work, and Diterikhs let him get on with it without interference. Sokolov deeply sympathized with the murdered monarch, but once he took on his duties, he put aside most of his feelings and concentrated on establishing the verifiable facts. He quickly briefed himself about the considerable progress already made by Alexei Namëtkin and Ivan Sergeev, and threw his team into tracing new witnesses and examining fresh material. He was always fossicking for convincing proof as reports came on to his desk; his subordinates learned to avoid all sloppiness. Everyone could see that Sokolov was a true professional, punctilious about details and reluctant to accept statements at face value. He kept scrupulous records of his interrogations as well as those conducted by his subordinates. (This was not to endear him to his superiors in the longer term, especially Diterikhs, who came to want to monopolize the credit for the investigation and also disliked Sokolov’s failure to share his more simplistic assumptions about Russia in revolution.)

Despite having been relieved of his duties, Sergeev submitted his conclusions on 20 February 1919. He knew enough to damp down the rumours that anyone in the emperor’s family at the Ipatev house had survived. He also named the retainers who had perished. As for Pavel Medvedev, currently held in captivity, Sergeev was in no doubt that he had given misleading testimony and had taken an active part in the killings in the Ipatev house.8

One of the urgent necessities for Sokolov was to check out the many stories that one or more Romanovs had fled the clutches of their captors. Several witnesses had continued to repeat this or that rumour while cheerfully admitting that it was only hearsay.9 A certain Fëdor Sitnikov testified to having talked to a woman calling herself Grand Duchess Anastasia, but when pressed for corroboration, he added little that might have advanced the investigation.10 Vivid ‘evidence’ also came from the military control investigator Alexander Kirsta, who scoured Perm for people who claimed to know about what had happened to the Romanovs. Kirsta was one of the individuals ordered to extend the inquiry to the city after December 1918, when Kolchak had driven out the Perm Soviet administration. He quickly encountered people who said they had come across Anastasia or other female Romanovs, including even the former empress. Natalya Mutnykh, sister of an Ekaterinburg Bolshevik official, reported that she had caught sight of several of them under detention in Perm. In one interrogation she named four daughters, in another she mentioned only three.11

Kirsta was not the only person who refused to accept that a Bolshevik firing squad had killed all the Romanov residents of the Ipatev house. Assistant Procurator Tikhomirov was convinced that, after Nicholas’s execution, the rest of the family had been spirited off to Perm and then deeper into Soviet-occupied territory. He gave credence to the story of Anastasia’s presence in Perm and highlighted evidence that a certain Dr Utkin’s prescriptions for her medical condition had been discovered. The problem was that they proved to be written on printed forms that belonged to a Dr Ivanov.12

Steadily, Kirsta’s professional competence was called into question as were the conditions that other investigators had to contend with, one of whom, V. Iordanski, complained that the military authorities refused to lend him and his colleagues the necessary cooperation and that they sometimes kept information to themselves.13 As he investigated Kirsta’s allegations, moreover, he quickly became sceptical about Utkin’s claim to have treated Anastasia in Perm after he failed abysmally to recognize her from photographs. Iordanski could also see no reason to reject the testimony of Pavel Medvedev, who had been in the Ipatev house on the night of 16–17 July, to the effect that all seven Romanovs and their retainers who were present had been slaughtered.14 Pavel Shamarin, Perm’s own district procurator, reported his impressions to higher authority. As he got to know Kirsta face to face, he found him boastful and evasive. Kirsta, according to Shamarin, had been a fool for anyone who told him stories about how one or other Romanov had been seen under conditions of captivity at some place in Perm. Shamarin was shocked by Kirsta’s gullibility, especially when the informants were women. Natalya Mutnykh, it was reported to Shamarin, had been adept at befuddling him.15

Pretenders were not a new phenomenon. Several individuals had been appearing in Siberia who declared themselves to be Romanovs. Even when the family was under detention in Tobolsk, the London Daily Graphic had published a fantastical report that Grand Duchess Tatyana had arrived in America. Imposters vastly increased in number after the Ekaterinburg executions, and usually they were quickly exposed as bogus.16

Sokolov, however, felt he had to take Dr Utkin seriously since he was a medical professional and was making big claims. If the inquiry was to have an authoritative status, all the conflicting assertions had to be thoroughly examined. An appointment for interrogation was made, and this time it was Sokolov himself who put the questions. He was not impressed by the doctor, who yet again proved incapable of substantiating his testimony and talked in exactly the same unconvincing fashion as previous investigators had reported. Sokolov drew the obvious conclusion and sided with those calling Kirsta a fool and an incompetent.17 By 1 April 1919 he already felt able to write out his preliminary conclusions. They were little different in essentials from Sergeev’s earlier ones: Sokolov was in no doubt, on the basis of an overwhelming amount of credible evidence, that the imperial family had perished in the Ipatev house along with Dr Botkin, the servant Trupp, the cook Kharitonov and the maid Demidova. He named Yurovski as the killing team’s leader, and Nikulin and Medvedev as his main accomplices. He put the time of death between midnight and 3 a.m. His was an exemplary exposition.18

Now the civil war was turning against Kolchak. The Red Army as well as the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government regrouped after losing Perm. Centralization of authority under the party’s aegis was agreed at the party congress in March 1919, and the changes were drastic and immediate. The Bolsheviks had always been ruthless enough. Now they added organizational dependability to their armoury, and they were able to conscript from a large demographic pool and to benefit from the industrial warehouse stocks and from control of the railway arteries. In June they retook Ufa in the southern Urals; next month they reoccupied Chelyabinsk. The fighting intensified throughout the summer as Perm and Ekaterinburg fell again to the Reds after Kolchak failed in his attempt to stabilize his front line along the Tobol and Ishim rivers. By November the Whites had to fall back to Omsk. Trotsky and the Red high command were so confident of eventual victory that they were able to redeploy forces to Ukraine and southern Russia against the other great White Army, which had been formed by Alexeev and Kornilov and was commanded by General Anton Denikin after their deaths.

Sokolov kept up the work of interrogating witnesses and sifting the Bolshevik telegrams and Romanov possessions as best he could. A careful inventory was made of testimonies and material remains. Because of the Red Army’s successful offensive, he moved east along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Chita. Being no longer able to ask his team to scour Ekaterinburg and its environs for further evidence, he largely had to complete the work with the boxes of transcripts and notes he had brought with him from the Urals. White Ekaterinburg had become Red Ekaterinburg once again. His morale was tested by the uncooperativeness of the military control authority. Indeed, he had enemies among the Whites who made no secret of the fact that they intended to make an attempt on his life. Sokolov overheard some conspirators discussing their plan in the very next train compartment to his own – with characteristic sang-froid he asked them: ‘Not so loud, please, gentlemen, I happen to be next door, you know!’ Undeterred, on 7 October 1919 he wrote yet another report, still not a full one but adding important new information. He sent it to Mirolyubov, complaining at the same time about the army authorities and regretting that he had been unable to lay hands on Yurovski or Goloshchëkin. The rest of this latest report indicated the costs of maintenance for the many agents that he had to employ.19

The wartime exigencies and rivalry with the military control authority were not the only sources of tension between Sokolov and the army command. Another was the feeling among leading White officers who thought he lacked the necessary outlook of a reliable anti-Bolshevik. Diterikhs hated Jews and had little time for liberals or even moderate conservatives. Being steeped in the Orthodox Christian monarchism of his fellow commanders, he had thought Namëtkin and Sergeev tainted by association with the openness to political compromise that typified the period of rule by the Provisional Government. But Diterikhs retained a degree of confidence in Sokolov and left him to get on with his work until one of Sokolov’s security officers, Captain Pavel Bulygin, informed Diterikhs about the physical danger that Sokolov had to deal with. (This was the same Bulygin who had come to Siberia at the behest of the dowager empress.) Bulygin pointed out that if someone tossed a hand grenade at Sokolov, it might simultaneously destroy a pile of inquiry materials. Diterikhs was horrified, but on 19 December 1919, instead of reinforcing Sokolov’s protection, he peremptorily requisitioned his boxes. Sokolov could stand it no longer and wrote next day to Procurator Mirolyubov asking to be relieved of his assignment.20

As his precious boxes were removed back west along the railway to Verkhne-Udinsk, he was angry and embittered. He was convinced that Diterikhs had acted deliberately to terminate his involvement in the inquiry. In fact, as Bulygin discovered from a personal interview, Diterikhs genuinely believed that he had done the only thing that would guarantee the survival of the primary evidence. The military situation nevertheless continued to worsen for the Whites in Siberia, inducing him to transport the boxes over the Chinese border to Harbin, where the UK consulate agreed to take care of them. At the same time he asked the British to facilitate Sokolov’s safe journey to Harbin, return his boxes to him and enable him to travel on with them to Europe. Sokolov, the supreme professional, put aside his feelings of resentment and made his way out of Siberia, eventually becoming reunited with the boxes that he had last seen in Chita. By chance, Pierre Gilliard was already in Harbin, where he witnessed the confusion at the British embassy as officials came and went. Gilliard saw the need for someone to take proper charge of the boxes and concluded that French General Maurice Janin was the only individual currently with sufficient authority to arrange the transport to Vladivostok for onward dispatch to Europe.21

Sokolov was naturally reluctant to be separated again from the materials, but in the end he recognized that this was the only realistic way of conveying them safely out of Asia. After his adventures, Sokolov still had just one thing in mind, to finish the work of the inquiry from a West European base. His determination was undimmed by his travails. Even if the Reds were in sight of winning the civil war, there was no reason for them to be allowed to spread without challenge their falsehoods about the Urals executions. Establishing the historical truth became the cause of Sokolov’s life.