Leader
Yakov Yurovsky
Yankel Khaimovich Yurovsky · 1878–1938
Photograph, 1918. Wikimedia Commons.
Yurovsky commanded the cellar killing of Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children, and four retainers on the night of 16–17 July 1918, and wrote the perpetrator’s account of it.
Origin and religion
Born Yankel Khaimovich Yurovsky in Kainsk, Tomsk governorate, to a Jewish glazier’s family. Member of the Cheka. Commandant of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg.
Jewish family. Born Yankel Khaimovich Yurovsky.
Responsibilities
- Commandant of the Ipatiev house, July 1918
- Commander of the squad that shot the Romanovs and their retainers
- Author of the 1920 note on the killing
The Ural Soviet placed him over the guard. He read the execution decision aloud in the basement, fired the first shots, and directed the disposal of the bodies at Ganina Yama and then on the Koptyaki road. The political decision sat with the Ural Soviet and was accepted in Moscow by Sverdlov. Yurovsky carried it out.
The record
His note of 1920, written for the historian Pokrovsky, is the executioner’s record: the order, the weapons, the smoke, the jewels sewn into the clothing, the acid, and the second burial. He later held economic posts. He died of a perforated ulcer in 1938, still inside the system he had served.
What they said
I told the Romanovs that in view of the fact that their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee had decided to shoot them.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
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