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There is a righteous man perishing in righteousness, and there is a wicked man living long in his evil-doing. Kohelet 7:15 |
Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky (Я́ков Миха́йлович Юро́вский; in Tomsk, Siberia, Russia – 2 August 1938 in Moscow) was an Old Bolshevik best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family in 1918, during the Russian Civil War.
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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. Shortly before fully devoting himself to the socialists' revolutionary cause, Yurovsky himself converted to Lutheranism in the early 1900s.
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.
He was a Chekist for a short period of time in 1917.
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.
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.
During and after the Russian Civil War, Yurovsky worked as a head of local Cheka in Moscow, then member of Vyatka Cheka, head of Yekaterinburg Cheka (1919). In 1921 he worked in the Rabkrin and became Chief of the Gold Department of the Soviet State Treasury. Yurovsky achieved a solid reputation by combating corruption and theft. He also worked in management at the Polytechnical Museum starting in 1928 and became its director in 1930. He died in 1938 of a peptic ulcer.
Yurovsky was survived by a wife, two sons, and a daughter.
Dates are from the Gregorian Calendar, as opposed to the Julian Calendar used before the Revolution.
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