Jakow Michailowitsch Jurowski

Jakow Jurowski in 1918

Yakov Yurovsky ( Russian Яков Михайлович (Янкель Хаимович) Юровский ), originally Jankel Chaimowitsch Jurowski , (born June 7 ^{. Jul} / 19th June  1878 ^greg. In Tomsk , † 2. August 1938 in Moscow ) was a Chekist and Soviet Party official. He directed the assassination of the royal family .

In the tsarist empire

Jurowski's grandfather Itzka was a rabbi in Poltava , his father Chaim was exiled to Siberia for theft , where he worked as a glazier. His mother, Ester Moishewna, was a house seamstress and he was the eighth of ten children.

Jurowski grew up in an Orthodox Jewish environment and began to attend the school of the synagogue in Tomsk, but he did not finish its first year. He was then given to a watchmaker and worked in Tobolsk and Tomsk. In 1904 two brothers emigrated to the USA, he himself married in the synagogue Mane Yankelewoi (Kaganer) and moved to Yekaterinburg . In 1905 he became a member of the Social Democrats , Bolsheviks and a friend of Sverdlov . In the same year he moved to Berlin , became a Lutheran and changed his name to Jakow Michailowitsch.

Returned to Yekaterinograd in 1907, he opened a watch shop. He was arrested for revolutionary activities, first brought to Yekaterinburg and then exiled. He opened a photo studio at his place of exile. In World War I, designed for medical assistants, paramedics, he was a company - at the front he was not.

In the Soviet Union

Jakow Jurowski in the Soviet era

In 1917 he became a deputy of a Soviet and, with the October Revolution, a member of the Bolshevik military department of Yekaterinburg, court chairman of the Ural region and its commissioner for justice, and a member of the regional Cheka of the KPR (B) .

On July 4, 1918, he became the commander of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was imprisoned , and on the same day he collected their jewels. The following morning, with the family present, he listed the items, sealed them in a package, and left them on a desk. He assured the Romanovs that he would check the seal every day. On the night of July 16-17, the family was killed in the basement of the house and on the following day Jurowski is said to have made a short report to Sverdlov about the perpetrators:

Revolutionäres Komitee Jekaterinburg
Bericht des sowjetischen Arbeiter- und Soldatenrates
REVOLUTIONÄRER STAB DES RAJON URAL
Außerordentliche Kommission (= Tscheka)

              L i s t e 
Kommando zur besonderen Verwendung im Ipatjew-Haus
/ 1. Kamyschower Schützenbrigade /

Kommandant:  Horvat          Laons
             Fischer         Anselm
             Edelstein       Isidor
             Fekete          Emil
             Nad             Imre
             Grünfeld        Viktor
             Verházi         Andras

Reg.Kom.     Waganow         Serge
             Medwedew        Pawel
             Nikulin

Stadt.Jekaterinburg 18. Juli 1918    Leiter der Tscheka
                                          Jurowski

With the withdrawal of the Red Army , Jurowski also vacated the place that the White Guards captured on July 25th. An investigation was carried out and published on Kolchak's instructions . One of the three Russian soldiers involved commented on what had happened. Jurowski was meanwhile on August 1, 1918 Commissioner of the Cheka in Moscow. As such, he and Sverdlov participated in the interrogation of the (alleged) Lenin assassin Fanny Kaplan .

From November 1918 Jurowski was appointed organizer and administrator of Moscow Oblast and a member of the capital's Cheka Committee. In June 1919 he returned as Cheka chairman, first of the Viatka district in the Urals and, after the reconquest by the Reds, in the same function in Yekaterinburg.

On July 20, 1920, Jurowski had a stomach ulcer treated in Moscow. He used the visit to the capital the next day to hand over the jewels stolen from the Romanov family after their shooting two years earlier to the commandant of the Kremlin .

Jurowski stayed in Moscow, became the administrative director of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspectorate , the socialist control body, of which Stalin was the commissioner at the time , and directed various commercial enterprises. In 1928 he was first in the management, then director of the State Polytechnic Museum . In 1933 he was released into retirement due to health reasons. Jurowski spent the end of his life in the Kremlin hospital. There he died in 1938 from a rupture of a stomach ulcer .

Jurowski had three children:

• Rimma (Rebekka) Jakowlewna Jurowskaja (1898–1980): gained fame for organizing the demolition of Orthodox churches, imprisoned in Karaganda 1938–48 ;
• Alexander Jakowlewitsch Jurowski (1904–1986): naval admiral, imprisoned in the Butyrka in 1952/53 , released with Stalin's death and retired;
• Eugen Jakowlewitsch Jurowski (1909–1991): Lieutenant Colonel in the Navy; owned a private record of the circumstances of the tsarist murder from his father's estate.

The Ipatyev House itself developed into an undesirable memorial for nationalists in the 1970s, so that Communist Party Area Secretary Boris Yeltsin had it demolished.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to other sources in Kainsk
2. ↑ Alexandra Feodorovna diary entry
3. ↑ Elisabeth Heresch: Nikolaus II. “Cowardice, Lies and Treason”. Ullstein, 1994
4. ↑ Imre Nad = Imre Nagy
5. ↑ the seven executing soldiers were predominantly Jewish Hungarians. They didn't speak Russian; Jurowski was possibly talking to them in German. Supporters of this thesis assume that the Central Committee feared that Russian soldiers would not shoot the tsar
6. ^ Pierre Gilliard: Thirteen Years of the Russian Court . A Personal Record of the Last Years and Death of Czar Nicholas II. And His Family. George H. Doran Co., New York 1921.
7. ↑ http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_yu/yurovsky.html
8. ↑ Biographies and Photos

literature

• Mark D. Steinberg, Vladimir M. Khrustalev: The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution . Yale University Press, 1995
• Е. Е. Алферьев: Письма Царской Семьи из заточения / Сост. - Джорданвиль: Свято-Троицкий монастырь. (Publ. Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, New York). 1984. (Letters from the Tsar's family from their imprisonment, in Russian)
• И. О. Плотников: команде убийц царской семьи и ее национальном составе // Урал. - 2003. - № 9. (Ivan Plotnikow: About the murderous squad of the tsarist family and their national structure. From: Literature and art magazine 'Ural'. No. 9. 2003, Russian)
• Н. А. Соколов : Окружение царской семьи чекистами // Убийство Царской Семьи . 1918. (NASolokow: Murderers of the Tsarist Family // The Chekists around the Tsarist Family. Legal investigation. 1918. Chapter 15. Russian)

Web links

Commons : Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Center for the Study of the Circumstances of the Extermination of Members of the House of Romanov Yekaterinburg, Russian
• chronological biography of Jurowski in Russian