Yakov Yurovsky

Yakov (Yankel) Mikhailovich Yurovsky (OldStyleDate|June 19|1878|June 7 in Tomsk, Siberia, Russia – before 2 August 1938 in Moscow) is best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last emperor Tsar Nicholas and his family after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Biography

Early life

Yurovsky was born as the eighth of ten children in a working class Russian Jewish family in Tomsk.

He led a working class life learning the art of watchmaking. He lived in the German Empire in 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 Communist. His manner was that of a dispassionate and efficient professional.

Execution of the Imperial Family

On the night of July 16/July 17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police Cheka led by Yurovsky executed Russia's last Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and their son Alexei. Along with the family, four 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 Hungarians, 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 talked with Yurovsky in German. They were chosen because the local Cheka feared that Russian soldiers would not shoot at the tsar and his family. It is claimed that one of them was the future Hungarian politician Imre Nagy, but this is not generally accepted. [ Elisabeth Heresch. "Nikolaus II. Feigheit, Lüge und Verrat", F.A.Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, München 1992.]

In a detailed report of the killings prepared in 1934 and held in the Soviet archives, Yurovsky stated that he had shot the Tsar and his son himself, while his comrades killed the other members of the royal family. The killings were said to be have been botched by the firing squad; the bullets failed to kill the family, and the jewelry sewed into the daughters clothes acted as a bullet proof vest. [ [http://www.sundayherald.com/50542] ] 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 Nikolaevna of Russia with a single bullet through the back of her head. [King and Wilson, p. 303]

To prevent the development of a cult for the dead Tsar, 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 good reputation by combatting corruption and theft. He died in 1938 of a peptic ulcer.

Footnotes

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

External links

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II by historian Edvard Radzinsky [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385469624/]
* [http://www.romanov-memorial.com/Drama.htm A description of the execution]
* [http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/yurovmurder.html "Yurovsky's account of the execution of the Imperial Family"]
* [http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/yurovski_bio.html "Yakov Yurovski, Executioner of the Romanovs"]