Yakov Yurovsky

Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky (Russian: Я́ков Миха́йлович Юро́вский; 19 June [O.S. 7 June] 1878 in Tomsk, Siberia, Russia – 2 August 1938 in Moscow) was an Old Bolshevik activist. A Chekist for a period after the October Revolution of 1917, Yurovsky is best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last czar, Nicholas II, and his family during the Civil War.

Biography

Early life

Yurovsky was born as the eighth of ten children in a working class family in Tomsk, where his father was a glazier. His mother was employed as a seamstress. The Yurovsky family was of Jewish origin but its relation to the Jewish faith seems ambiguous: the historian Helen Rappaport writes that the young Yurovsky studied the Talmud in his early youth, while the family seems to have later attempted to distance themselves from their Jewish roots; this may have been prompted by the prejudice toward Jews frequently exhibited in Czar Nicholas II's Imperial Russia.^[1] Shortly before fully devoting himself to the socialists' revolutionary cause, Yurovsky himself converted to Lutheranism in the early 1900s.^[1]

A watchmaker by trade, he lived in emigration in the German Empire during 1904.

After returning to Russia during the Russian Revolution of 1905, he joined the Bolsheviks. Arrested several times over the years, he became a devoted Marxist.

Execution of the Imperial Family

On the night of 16/17 July 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police (Cheka), led by Yurovsky, executed Russia's last emperor, Czar Nicholas II, along with his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and son Alexei. Along with the family, four servants (their physician Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, a lady-in-waiting, and two other servants) were also killed. All were shot in a half-cellar room (measured to be 25 feet x 21 feet) of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains region, where they were being held prisoner. The execution squad comprised three more local Bolsheviks and seven soldiers. The latter were Hungarian prisoners-of-war. As communists, they had joined the Red Army and were serving in the 1st Kamishlov Rifle Regiment. They didn't speak Russian and spoke with Yurovsky in German. They were chosen because the local Cheka feared that Russian soldiers would not shoot at the czar and his family.^{[citation needed]} It has been claimed that one of them was the future Hungarian politician Imre Nagy, but this is not generally accepted.^[2]

In a detailed report of the killings prepared in 1934 and held in the Soviet archives, Yurovsky stated that he had shot the czar and his son himself, while his comrades killed the other members of the royal family. The killings were said to have been botched by the firing squad; the bullets failed to kill the family, as the jewelry sewn into the daughters' clothes acted as a bullet proof vest.^[3] The daughters were finished off with close range shots to the head, after attempts to bayonet them also failed. Recently, it has been discovered that Yurovsky himself killed Grand Duchess Tatiana with a single bullet through the back of her head.^[4]

To prevent the development of a personality cult for the dead czar, the bodies were removed to the countryside. The bodies of Nicholas and his family were long believed to have been disposed of down a mineshaft at a site called the Four Brothers. Initially, this was true; they had indeed been disposed of there on the night of 17 July. The following morning, when rumors spread in Yekaterinburg regarding the disposal site, Yurovsky removed the bodies and concealed them elsewhere. When the vehicle carrying the bodies broke down on the way to the next chosen site, he made new arrangements and buried most of the bodies in a sealed and concealed pit on Koptyaki Road, a since-abandoned cart track 12 miles north of Yekaterinburg.

After the Civil War

After the Russian Civil War, Yurovsky worked as a Chief of Soviet State Treasury (GosHran), where he achieved a solid reputation by combatting corruption and theft. He died in 1938 of a peptic ulcer.

Yakov Yurovsky had a wife and had three children, two sons and one daughter.

Footnotes

Dates are from the Gregorian Calendar, as opposed to the Julian Calendar used before the Revolution.

^ ^a ^b Rappaport, Helen. The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg. ISBN 0312379765, ISBN 9780312379766. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009. P. 32.
^ Elisabeth Heresch. "Nikolaus II. Feigheit, Lüge und Verrat", F.A.Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, München 1992.
^ [1]^{[dead link]}
^ King and Wilson, p. 303

External links

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II by historian Edvard Radzinsky

[Rappaport_32-1] Rappaport, Helen. The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg. ISBN 0312379765, ISBN 9780312379766. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009. P. 32.

[2] Elisabeth Heresch. "Nikolaus II. Feigheit, Lüge und Verrat", F.A.Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, München 1992.

[3] [1]^{[dead link]}

[4] King and Wilson, p. 303

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