Pyotr Voykov

Pyotr Voykov was one of the hundreds of revolutionaries whom the Bolshevik seizure of power lifted from exile into government, and he would have remained a secondary figure but for two episodes. In July 1918, as a member of the Ural authorities, he shared responsibility for the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg. Nine years later, as the Soviet Union’s envoy in Warsaw, he was killed by a young White émigré who was avenging precisely the Tsar’s family. His death on the platform of Warsaw’s Main Station heightened Polish–Soviet tensions just as the two states were discussing a non-aggression pact, and in the USSR it became the pretext for a wave of repression. To this day his name, given in Soviet times to streets, factories and a Moscow metro station, is a subject of dispute in Russia.

Youth and exile

He was born on 13 August 1888 (1 August in the Julian calendar) in Kerch in the Crimea, into a family of Ukrainian origin. His father, who had been expelled from the St Petersburg Mining Institute, was a mathematics teacher and later a foreman and engineer at industrial works. His mother had graduated from an institute for young ladies of noble birth. Historians reject the claims of the extreme right that Voykov was of Jewish origin; they stem from confusing him with another member of the Ural authorities.

Pyotr joined the underground early. He was expelled for revolutionary activity from the gymnasium in Kerch and then from the one in Yalta. Around 1903 he joined the Social Democrats – the Mensheviks, to be precise – and during the revolution of 1905 he belonged to a party fighting squad. In July 1906 he was one of those involved in a failed bomb attack on the police chief of Yalta, in which two of the attackers were killed. When the affair came to light he had to go into hiding, and in 1907 he left Russia on someone else’s passport.

From 1908 he lived in Geneva, studying physics and mathematics at the university there. There he met Vladimir Lenin, but he remained a Menshevik internationalist and an opponent of the war. In 1914 he married a medical student, Adelaida Belenkina, with whom he had a son, Pavel.

The Urals, 1917–1918

After the February Revolution he returned to Russia with one of the groups of émigrés whom Germany allowed to travel through its territory. He worked first in the Provisional Government’s Ministry of Labour as a commissar settling disputes between workers and employers. After the July crisis he went to the Urals, and there he went over to the Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution he was a member of the Yekaterinburg Military Revolutionary Committee, in December 1917 chairman of the city duma, and from January 1918 Commissar for Supply of the Ural Regional Soviet. He organised the shipment of metals and food supplies, including through requisitions of grain from the peasants, which provoked resistance and hunger.

In the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks moved the former Tsar and his family to Yekaterinburg and held them in the house of the engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, whom Voykov knew. The Chekists wrote provocative letters in French to the prisoners, purportedly from officers planning to free them, and the Romanovs’ replies later served to justify the crime. According to accounts given by Chekists in the 1960s, these letters were translated by Voykov, who knew French from his time in Geneva. On the night of 16–17 July 1918 a squad under Yakov Yurovsky shot Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, their five children, their doctor and three servants in the cellar of the Ipatiev House. As Commissar for Supply, Voykov signed the order for the release from a pharmacy of the sulphuric acid with which the killers tried to destroy the bodies, and according to Yurovsky’s memoirs he also supplied him with petrol and spades.

The extent of his involvement is disputed. The White commission of inquiry under Nikolai Sokolov, which worked in 1919, mentioned him only in connection with the acid. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, in its investigation in the 1990s, established that Voykov took part in the regional authorities’ vote on the sentence and wrote out the order for the acid, but did not otherwise take part in the crime. The most lurid stories – that he finished off the Tsar’s daughters with a bayonet and took a ruby ring from the finger of one of them – come from the diplomat Grigory Besedovsky, who defected to the West in 1929 and whose credibility many historians question.

Official and diplomat

After the Whites took Yekaterinburg in July 1918, Voykov was evacuated with the regional authorities to Perm, and after the fall of Perm in December 1918 he was transferred to Moscow. He worked in the Commissariat of Food Supply, in the cooperative central union Tsentrosoyuz, and from October 1920 on the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade. At that time, together with Maxim Gorky, he prepared the work of a commission that valued works of art and decided what could be sold abroad. The great sales of the imperial treasures, including the Fabergé eggs, came only after his death, however.

In October 1921 he became head of the delegation of Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine to the mixed commissions set up under the Peace of Riga, which were to return to Poland the rolling stock, archives, libraries and works of art carried off by Russia since the Partitions, as well as thousands of bells and items of equipment taken during the Great War. Surviving documents show that he deliberately used delaying tactics and kept returns to a minimum. Poland recovered its most valuable treasures but never saw most of its property. In 1922 Moscow wanted to send Voykov as its representative to Canada, but the British refused, citing his part in the murder of the Tsar’s family.

Envoy in Warsaw

In October 1924 Voykov was appointed Soviet envoy to Poland, taking up the post in November. The Polish authorities received him reluctantly. The press recalled Yekaterinburg, and the Foreign Minister even asked the British envoy whether it was proper to receive such a person. Voykov had no feel for diplomatic custom and took badly the social coldness with which he was treated, but in time he learned to confine himself to official contacts. After the May Coup of 1926 he twice discussed the future of Polish–Soviet relations with Józef Piłsudski, and in Warsaw he was regarded as a useful channel of communication with the Kremlin. The two states then began talks on a non-aggression pact. In Moscow his position was weakening: according to Besedovsky’s memoirs, the Central Control Commission was investigating money missing from the legation’s funds and his carelessness in keeping secret documents.

On the morning of 7 June 1927 Voykov went to the Main Station in Warsaw to meet Arkady Rosengolts, the Soviet representative expelled from London after Britain broke off relations. On the platform he was shot by nineteen-year-old Boris Koverda, a Russian émigré from Wilno (Vilnius). Voykov returned fire, but he had been hit in the chest and died in hospital an hour later. The assassination led to an exchange of notes between Moscow and Warsaw, and in the USSR to the retaliatory shooting of twenty hostages and mass arrests. Koverda was sentenced by a summary court to life imprisonment, commuted to 15 years. Voykov’s body was taken to Moscow and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Memory

In the Soviet Union Voykov became a martyr of the revolution and of diplomacy. His name was given to a foundry in Moscow, a metallurgical works in Kerch, mines, ships and the Voykovskaya metro station, after which a whole district of the city was named. After the fall of the USSR and the canonisation of the Tsar’s family by the Orthodox Church in 2000, there were growing calls for these names to be removed. In Ukraine they disappeared as part of decommunisation; in Russia many of them have survived. The dispute over Voykov is a dispute over how present-day Russia judges the revolution and its crimes.

On the road to the Second World War his life and death show how heavily the civil war and revolutionary terror weighed on the USSR’s relations with its neighbours. The killing in Warsaw fed into the war scare of 1927, which Stalin exploited to crush the opposition and to speed up rearmament, and it reinforced Moscow’s image of Poland as a base for hostile plots. The non-aggression pact that Voykov had discussed with Piłsudski was not signed until 1932, and in 1939 the Soviet Union declared it, together with the Peace of Riga, no longer binding.