The assassination of Pyotr Voykov

On the morning of 7 June 1927, on a platform of the Main Station in Warsaw, a nineteen-year-old Russian émigré from Wilno (Vilnius), Boris Koverda, fatally wounded the Soviet envoy to Poland, Pyotr Voykov, with several shots from a revolver. The diplomat died in hospital an hour later. The assassin did not run. He told the police that he had taken revenge “for Russia, for millions of people”. The victim was not chosen at random: as a member of the Ural authorities, Voykov had shared responsibility for the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg in July 1918. The assassination shook Polish–Soviet relations at a time when Moscow was gripped by a war scare, and the Soviet authorities responded to it with a wave of repression at home.

The envoy from Yekaterinburg

Pyotr Voykov, a Ukrainian by origin from Kerch, was a veteran revolutionary. In his youth he had been a Menshevik; he spent 1907–1917 in exile in Switzerland, and after the February Revolution he returned to Russia and went over to the Bolsheviks in the Urals. In 1918 he was commissar for supply in the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg, where the imperial family was held in the Ipatiev House. On the night of 16–17 July 1918 Yakov Yurovsky and his men shot the Tsar, the Tsarina, their five children, their doctor and three servants. Voykov signed the order for the issue of the sulphuric acid with which an attempt was later made to destroy the bodies. According to the findings of Russian prosecutors in the 1990s, he also took part in the regional authorities’ vote on the sentence, although some historians believe his role was confined to matters of supply. Stories that he personally finished off the Tsar’s daughters and took a ring from the finger of one of them come from the diplomat Grigory Besedovsky, who defected to the West, and are not confirmed by other sources.

After the Peace of Riga Voykov led the Soviet delegation on the mixed commissions that were to return to Poland the property and cultural treasures removed by Russia, and he became known as a master of delay. In October 1924 Moscow appointed him envoy in Warsaw. The Polish government accepted him reluctantly, as his part in the Yekaterinburg affair was known, and the press protested against his appointment. Great Britain had earlier refused to accept him as Soviet representative in Canada. In Warsaw he was regarded as uncouth, but after the May Coup of 1926 he was an important channel of communication between Józef Piłsudski and the Kremlin. Poland and the USSR were at that time discussing a non-aggression pact.

Shots on the platform

The year 1927 was a disastrous one for Soviet diplomacy. In April in Beijing the Chinese police searched the Soviet embassy, and in Shanghai Chiang Kai-shek massacred his Communist allies. On 12 May British police raided the premises of the Soviet trading company Arcos in London, and on 24 May Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announced the breaking off of diplomatic relations with the USSR, which Great Britain had recognised only three years earlier. The Soviet representative expelled from London, Arkady Rosengolts, was returning to Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw.

At 9 a.m. on 7 June 1927 Voykov came to the Main Station to meet him. They drank coffee in the buffet and went out onto the platform to the express train that left for Moscow at 9.55. The first shot was fired by the sleeping car. Voykov began to run, the attacker fired after him, and the envoy drew his own revolver and fired several shots before collapsing into the arms of a policeman. At the police’s command Koverda threw down his weapon and raised his hands. Voykov, hit in the chest and arm, died at 10.40 a.m. in the Infant Jesus Hospital.

Boris Koverda was born in Wilno in 1907 into the family of a teacher, a sympathiser of the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose roots were in Podlasie. During the war he lived as a refugee with his mother in Samara and witnessed the Red Terror. After returning to Wilno he attended a Belarusian and then a Russian secondary school and worked on the staff of an anti-Communist Belarusian newspaper. During the investigation and at his trial he said that he had wanted to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia but had been unable to obtain a visa, and that he had killed Voykov “not as an envoy but as a member of the Comintern”. The court found that he had acted alone, although two men from the Wilno émigré community had helped him prepare.

Notes, executions and a verdict

The Polish government immediately expressed its regret and offered condolences. The Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, suggested in a conversation with the Polish envoy Stanisław Patek that the attack had been prompted by “a signal from London” and that anti-Soviet forces had run rampant in Poland, and then handed him a note accusing Poland of negligence and of tolerating the White emigration. A second note, of 11 June, demanded Soviet participation in the investigation and the expulsion from Poland of émigrés engaged in anti-Soviet activity. Poland expelled six activists, stressing that it was doing so of its own accord.

In the USSR itself the assassination served as a pretext for terror. On the night of 9–10 June 1927 the OGPU shot twenty people in Moscow without trial, mostly former aristocrats and officers, some of whom had already been in prison. On the same day as the killing in Warsaw, agents of the White emigration threw bombs into a party club in Leningrad. Propaganda presented all this as proof that the capitalist world was preparing a war against the USSR, and Joseph Stalin used the war scare in his struggle against the opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Voykov’s body was taken to Moscow and buried by the Kremlin Wall.

At the Soviet side’s request, and because the perpetrator had been caught in the act, Poland applied summary procedure. On 15 June 1927 a court in Warsaw, after a one-day trial in which Koverda was defended by well-known lawyers, unanimously sentenced him to life imprisonment with hard labour, while at the same time, in view of his youth, petitioning President Ignacy Mościcki to commute the sentence to 15 years. The President granted the petition. Polish public opinion, even while condemning the killing of a diplomat, largely sympathised with the young assassin. Koverda was released under an amnesty in 1937. On 31 August 1927 Moscow announced that it considered the incident closed and was returning to talks on the pact and a trade agreement.

To this day not everything about the case is clear. In 2017 the historian Sławomir Dębski published a Polish Foreign Ministry memorandum of November 1926 showing that two members of the Soviet legation staff, most probably intelligence officers, had sounded out how Warsaw would react to Voykov’s departure. At the time Voykov was facing party proceedings in Moscow. Dębski considers it possible that the assassin was inspired by the Soviet services. This is a hypothesis that has not so far been confirmed.

Significance

Voykov’s assassination froze the talks on a non-aggression pact for several years; Poland and the USSR signed it only in July 1932. It reinforced Moscow’s image of Poland as a refuge for the “Whites” and a base for hostile plots, an image that shaped Soviet policy towards its western neighbour throughout the interwar years. The war scare of 1927, of which the assassination was one element, hastened Stalin’s turn towards forced industrialisation and rearmament, intended to prepare the USSR for war with its capitalist encirclement. Koverda survived the war in exile and died in Washington in 1987. A Moscow metro station and a district of Moscow still bear Voykov’s name, and disputes over whether to commemorate an accomplice in the murder of the imperial family resurface in Russia every few years.