УДК: 94 (47):323.2:929

YAKOV SVERDLOV – THE GRAY CARDINAL OF LENIN

Kildeev Adel

Zhdanov A. Leningrad State University (1990)

Philosophiæ Doctor in Law

ORCID: 0009-0001-2211-4944

Abstract: The article is devoted to the political biography of Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov (1885–1919), one of the most influential and at the same time the most radical figures of the early Soviet state. On the basis of documentary sources and critical historiography, his path from participation in underground combat groups and the organization of terrorist actions to the leadership of the party apparatus, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the system of punitive bodies is revealed. Its key role in unleashing mass terror, creating mechanisms of repression, escalating violence in the countryside and the political decision to liquidate the Royal Family is shown. The reasons for the rapid growth of his influence, connections with foreign structures and the ambiguous circumstances of his death are analyzed.

Keywords: Yakov Sverdlov, Bolshevism, political history of Russia, the revolution of 1917, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Cheka, the Red Terror, relations between Lenin and Sverdlov, the murder of the Romanovs, the Soviet apparatus of power, the inner-party struggle.

Y.M. Sverdlov in his youth

1. Nationality, origin and social environment

Entry No 15, made by the official rabbi of Nizhny Novgorod B.I. Zakhoder in the Metrical Book of the Jewish Rabbi of Nizhny Novgorod for 1885 with a record of the birth of Yakov-Aaron Sverdlov on May 23, 1885 in Nizhny Novgorod “a male baby, named Yakov-Aaron”. Parents: a bourgeois of the Vitebsk province of the city of Polotsk Mosha Svetlov (crossed out and written above “Sverdlov”) and his wife Ita-Leia. Below is a postscript: “instead of “Svetlov” read “Sverdlov”. Corrected in accordance with the order of the Nizhny Novgorod provincial government of November 19, 1893 for No 647. Rabbi S. Y. Nadelman.” The rite of circumcision was performed by Itzhok Podisko.

Yakov-Aаron Moiseevich Sverdlov was born on May 22 (June 3), 1885 in Nizhny Novgorod. He grew up and was brought up in a simple Jewish family. His father, Moisey Izrailevich, worked as an engraver, and also owned a printing house. His mother, Elizaveta Solomonovna, was engaged in housekeeping. In addition to Yakov, two more girls and 3 boys were born in the Sverdlov family. The future revolutionary graduated from 4 classes of the local gymnasium, but after that he was forced to quit his studies, since his father no longer had the means to pay for the education of his sons. By that time, Yakov’s mother had died, after her death, Moisey Izrailevich Sverdlov converted to Orthodoxy and married Maria Alexandrovna Kormiltseva for the second time, in this marriage two more sons were born. As a teenager, Yakov and his brothers began to work. However, Yakov did not go to work at the factory, like many of his peers. He became an apprentice pharmacist.

The Sverdlov family, however, did not belong to the “poor” traditionally present in Soviet biography. The Sverdlov family had stable handicraft and credit-cooperative ties in Nizhny Novgorod. Other relatives of Sverdlov on the maternal side had connections with the banking structures of the Volga region. Thus, the social origin of the future Bolshevik leader was much more complex than the official Soviet version.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Movsha Sverdlov took as his apprentice engraver a young man named Hershel Gershelevich Yehuda, who later turned into Genrikh Genrikhovich Yagoda, the future bloody head of the OGPU. Yagoda, despite the fact that he robbed his master twice, managed to become related to the Sverdlov family, marrying Yankel’s niece, Ida Averbakh.^[1]

The figure of Zinovy (Yeshua-Solomon) Peshkov, Y. M. Sverdlov’s paternal brother and godson of A. M. Gorky, who later became an officer of the French army and a diplomat, and who fought against the Soviet regime, deserves special mention. Historian Roy Medvedev in his essay “The Sverdlovs. The Glory and Tragedy of One Family” writes about him as follows: “Zinovy, the godson of Maxim Gorky, met the October Revolution with hostility. During the Civil War, Zinovy visited Soviet Russia more than once as an emissary of the French government and intelligence.” Zinovy served in Omsk as an adviser to the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak. In early 1919, a French military emissary sent a telegram to his brother threatening to hang Yakov and Lenin for what they had done to Russia. After the Siberian campaign ended with the victory of the Red Army, Zinovy went to the disposal of General Wrangel, but only found the evacuation of his army from the Crimea to Turkey.^[2]

As for Yakov’s second brother, Veniamin (Benjamin, Ben, Beni) Sverdlov, he left for the United States before the revolution and opened a bank there. After the revolution, American political agents gave the following information about V. M. Sverdlov: “The Office of Special Agents of the New York Branch. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (confidential). Mr. Bannerman Chief Special Agent. Washington.

Reilly has business relations with Veniamin Mikhailovich Sverdlov. On January 15, 1916, Sverdlov arrived in the United States aboard the steamer St. Paul. He brought with him a sealed package from Colonel Belyaev, a Russian, addressed to General Germonius, who was connected with some Russian delegations in the United States. Sverdlov was engaged in revolutionary activities in Russia in the past. He lived in England for four years and visited Russia in 1915. He knows Siberia well.

While in the U.S., he worked at the Flint & C office at 120 Broadway, which owned the building. He is the brother of a prominent communist from Soviet Russia – Sverdlov. While in London, in a private conversation, he said that he was going with two people to New York to buy ammunition, but would sail to America separately from these persons.

He received about one thousand dollars for the trip. He arrived in Flint & Co. with the recommendations of his partner T. Marshall from London, whose interests were financed by money received from the sale of Ural oil. At the beginning of the war, Marshall and Sverdlov often had information about the movement of troops, military operations in England and Russia.”^[3]

2. Early revolutionary activity (1902–1917)

According to official historiography, since 1902, at the age of 15, Sverdlov joined the work of the RSDLP, occupying mainly organizational positions. A couple of years later, he became a professional revolutionary, conducting successful Bolshevik propaganda in various cities. And what exactly did the young Yakov do in the RSDLP? We will now omit the official historiography, its value is equal to the value of the Short Course of the History of the Military-Industrial Complex (Bolsheviks), just as fabricated and fake.

The reasons that led Sverdlov to the revolution are vague. The tired lie about “official Russian anti-Semitism” is refuted by Sverdlov himself, who wrote in one of his letters: “I personally have never known national oppression, I have never been persecuted as a Jew.”^[4] No, the reason for Sverdlov’s revolutionary spirit was hatred, and a hatred that was deep and ancient, a feeling that his father undoubtedly cultivated in young Yakov. Hatred for Russia, the Russian people.

What revolutionary organizations did Sverdlov join? This question is very confusing and mysterious, as, by the way, is the whole life of Sverdlov. According to the official Soviet canonical biography of Sverdlov, he acted as a member of the Bolshevik Party from the very beginning. However, there is no evidence that Sverdlov was a member of the RSDLP before 1917.

In his leaflets, he signed himself as a “social democrat”, or “group of social democrats”. Most likely, in those years, Sverdlov had nothing to do with the Bolsheviks. He represented the interests of secret organizations in the West, specifically the inhabitants of the skyscraper on Broadway-120, the same Schiff, Leibe, Colonel House, and so on. It was this force that organized entire armed groups of its fighters in Russia.

In the Urals, on the eve of the revolution of 1905, Sverdlov created an organization called the Combat Detachment of People’s Armament (BONV), which became one of the most criminal and bloody organizations of the revolution of 1905-07. This organization was formally subordinate to the combat center, which included M. Lurie, E. S. Kadomtsev, and M. I. Gubelman (Yaroslavsky).

But in fact, the absolute master in it was Sverdlov, who acted under the nicknames “Comrade Andrei” and “Mikhailovich”. In BONV, “as in the classical mafia or in the Masonic orders, several levels of initiation into the secret of the organization were created. Sverdlov was the leader of all anti-government actions in the Urals.

The head of the Perm Okhrana department wrote to his superiors that “Comrade Andrei” or “Mikhailovich” “after the announcement of the Most Merciful Manifesto on October 17, 1905, led all the riots that took place in Yekaterinburg and constantly presided over and oratored at all the meetings of a revolutionary nature that took place there…”^[5]

In the leadership of the militants, Sverdlov relied on monstrous cruelty. When one of the members of the organization, Ivan Bushenov, expressed disapproval of Sverdlov’s methods, he said in an ominously calm voice: “Do you, Vanyusha, want to make a revolution in white gloves? Without blood, without shots, without defeats?”^[6]

All members of the Yekaterinburg organization of the RSDLP who did not agree with Sverdlov’s bloody methods were in one way or another pushed out of business.

Many accomplices in the Yekaterinburg crime of 1918 went through the Sverdlovsk school. He gladly attracted criminals and any anti-social element to his ranks. O. A. Platonov cites the memoirs of the Social Democrat N. A. Chedyntsev, who was in prison with Sverdlov: “Sverdlov does not disdain to enter into friendly relations with inveterate criminals. Whispers to them. He agrees on something.”^[7]

“Desperate Urkagans,” writes E. Khlystalov, “with aces of diamonds on their backs, were afraid of the frail bespectacled Sverdlov. He did not forgive insults. In the surviving photograph, Sverdlov is sitting in a prison cell on a bunk bed in front of the thieves in law, folding his legs in the Turkish way, according to the thieves’ tradition.^[8]

Of course, at that time Sverdlov acted independently, without relying on any Bolshevik structures, which actually did not exist in the Urals at that time.

It was during the years of the first Russian revolution that Yakov Sverdlov created and organized his own forces in the Urals, which would play an important role in organizing the murder of the Royal Family.

After the defeat of the revolution, in 1906, Sverdlov was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. In March 1910, Sverdlov was exiled to the Narym Territory for a period of three years. In the same year, he wrote a petition to replace his period of stay in exile with exile abroad, which is very similar to returning to his own people after completing the task.

Sverdlov was refused, and he was exiled to Narym, where he met Sh. I. Goloshchekin, who later became Sverdlov’s closest accomplice in organizing the Yekaterinburg crime.

In July of the same 1910, Sverdlov escaped from exile, he was caught, returned back, he escaped again, he was again caught and exiled for five years to the Turukhansk region, where he met I. V. Stalin.

By the way, mutual rejection immediately arose between Sverdlov and Stalin. In the Turukhansk region, Sverdlov was caught by the February “revolution”. In March 1917, he left Turukhansk for Krasnoyarsk. There, according to Sverdlov’s official Soviet biography, he “exposes the Menshevik-SR compromisers.” In this regard, the researcher German Nazarov writes very correctly: “Who among the Bolsheviks in Krasnoyarsk knew Sverdlov, who had been in exile with short breaks for about seven years?

It is known that in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in the days of the February Revolution there were 14,000 workers, almost 6,200 employees, a little more than 1,800 peasants and 1,500 representatives of other social strata.

In a number of cities and regions of the country, especially in non-industrial centers, the Bolsheviks were members of joint organizations with the Mensheviks. And in Krasnoyarsk there were almost none.”^[9]

After spending a very short time in Krasnoyarsk, Sverdlov left for Petrograd, and then for Yekaterinburg. After staying in the city for only two weeks, Sverdlov organized a single party organization there.

According to Sverdlov himself, he showed ebullient energy in Ekaterinburg, and the Bolshevik party organization grew during April from several hundred to 14 thousand members.^[10]

This raises great doubts. First, why did the workers rush so massively into the ranks of the Bolsheviks, an organization more than small and unpopular in those days? Secondly, from the documents of that era, it is nowhere seen that Sverdlov associated himself as a Bolshevik-Leninist.

He was even elected to the All-Russian April Conference of the RSDLP(B), not as a Bolshevik, but as “the favorite of the Ural workers.” It seems that Sverdlov arrived in Yekaterinburg to unite his bandits from 1905 into a legal organization.

Thus, with all his activities, Sverdlov rendered great assistance to the revolution. At the same time, being under the banner of social democracy, Sverdlov pursued his own far-reaching goals, known only to a small circle of people.

To do this, he used a Bolshevik signboard. Sverdlov’s Soviet biographers Gorodetsky and Sharapov, apparently without suspecting it, very aptly characterized this activity of Sverdlov: “For a decade and a half until October 1917, Sverdlov worked in Russia.

He did not have a chance to attend a single party congress, although he was an all-Russian worker. His work before the revolution was invisible, according to the apt definition of Lunacharsky. This was precisely the daily work that gradually prepared the revolution.”^[11]

Returning to Petrograd again, Sverdlov participated in the 7th April Conference of the RSDLP(b), where he met Lenin for the first time. At the conference, Sverdlov was elected secretary of the Central Committee, which caused sharp opposition from Lenin.

Trotsky writes that later, when Lenin “appreciated” Sverdlov, he said: “But at first we were against his introduction into the Central Committee, we underestimated the man to such an extent! There were considerable disputes on this score, but from below we were corrected at the Congress and turned out to be completely right.”^[12]

In fact, it is still unclear who “corrected” Lenin and persuaded him, or forced him, to include Sverdlov in the party leadership. Perhaps these are the forces that brought Lenin, the German spy, to power. But it was from this moment that the rapid career growth of Yakov Sverdlov began.

Being neither a major organizer and theoretician of the party, nor an outstanding orator, the thirty-two-year-old Sverdlov immediately and firmly moved to the forefront of the Bolshevik leadership.

Although, from his report to the Sixth Party Congress, it is obvious that he was poorly versed in the party alignment of forces and even did not know well who the Bolsheviks were, this word is never found in Sverdlov’s report. Sverdlov was more oriented towards the so-called “Mezhraiontsy”, among whom were Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Ioffe, Manuilsky. Sverdlov was clearly promoted by some force to which neither Lenin nor most of the Bolsheviks had a direct relation.

From the very beginning, Sverdlov’s dictatorial habits manifest themselves. He clearly set himself the task of becoming the first person in the party. It came to the point that Sverdlov ignored Lenin. Together with Trotsky, he did everything to prevent Lenin from entering the premises of the Smolny on the eve of the October Revolution.

4. Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee: Actual Role in Management

On October 27 (November 9), 1917, on the second day after the coup, at the first meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, L. V. Kamenev (Rosenfeld) was elected Chairman. But Kamenev did not stay in his position for a very long time. Eleven days later, he was removed from his post, in connection with “a disorganizing policy and insubordination to the Central Committee.” On November 8 (21), 1917, Lenin, unexpectedly for everyone, proposed Sverdlov’s candidacy for the post of chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

From that moment on, Sverdlov acquired a de facto equal position with Lenin, and in some issues, of course, he had more power than Lenin. Karl Radek (Sobelson) recalled: “When I arrived in Petrograd in November 1917 and talked with Vladimir Ilyich about the state of affairs abroad, I asked him with whom to talk about all the work, he answered me simply: “With Sverdlov.”^[13]

Lenin and Sverdlov

It is no accident that Lenin, delivering a speech in memory of Sverdlov on March 18, 1919, said the following: “None of those who knew intimately, who observed the constant work of Yakov Mikhailovich, can doubt that in this sense Yakov Mikhailovich is irreplaceable. The work which he did alone in the field of organizing, selecting people, appointing them to responsible posts in all the various specialties — this work will now be within our power only if you put forward whole groups of people for each of the large branches in which Comrade Sverdlov was in charge alone, who, following in his footsteps, would be able to approach the point where what one person was doing.”^[14]

Interestingly, it was Sverdlov who was perceived by many foreign circles as the most influential person in the Soviet hierarchy. And this was not at all caused by the fact that he officially held the post of head of the Soviet state.

Almost all the leading powers of the world, with the exception of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, did not recognize the Bolshevik regime. But, nevertheless, some of them, immediately after the October Revolution, hastened to assure the leaders of this regime of their respect. In March 1918, U.S. President Wilson sent a telegram of greetings to Sverdlov to the Congress of Soviets that opened in Moscow. In essence, it was the recognition by the U.S. government of the Bolshevik regime as the legitimate Russian government.

But, what the Frenchman Noulens took as an “unsuccessful initiative” of President Wilson, in fact, was an expression of support from the same Broadway-120 protégés in Russia. But it was not only the American president who singled out Sverdlov from the total number of Soviet figures. The main thing is that Sverdlov had already been appointed to replace Lenin by businessmen from Wall Street.

The German ambassador, despite the fact that Lenin and not Sverdlov was a creature of Germany, nevertheless “conducted the most important business mainly with Sverdlov, and not with Lenin. Mirbach was given a detailed report of the Extraordinary Commission on a daily basis, which gave it a complete picture of what was happening in the country.”^[15]

Despite this, Sverdlov behaved even with Mirbach as an authoritative ruler. Mirbach himself wrote to Berlin about his impression of the meeting with Sverdlov during the presentation of his credentials: “The presentation of my credentials took place not only in the simplest, but also in the coldest. In his response, the Chairman expressed the expectation that I would “be able to remove the obstacles that still stand in the way of genuine peace”. There was a hint of indignation in these words. At the end of the official ceremony, he did not invite me to sit down and did not deign to give me a private conversation.”^[16]

“With each passing month,” writes Y. G. Felshtinsky, “Sverdlov’s power grew stronger and stronger. Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, member of the Central Committee, secretary of the Central Committee, Sverdlov gradually concentrated all party work in his hands.

His signature appears under documents more often than others. From July 1918, he signed with the titles: Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) or even just “Secretary”; “for the secretary” is signed by K. Novgorodtseva, Sverdlov’s wife; more and more often letters are sent to the localities in the name of the “Secretariat of the Central Committee” (and not the Central Committee, as was customary before August 1918 and after September 1918).^[17]

On April 8, 1918, Sverdlov virtually single-handedly abolished the national Russian white-blue-red flag, approved as the state flag by Emperor Nicholas II at the beginning of the First World War, and approved as a new one a red cloth with Masonic-occult symbols: a pentagram and a hammer.

5. Relations with the Cheka and the policy of repression

Formally, the Cheka was subordinate to the Council of People’s Commissars and Dzerzhinsky. But the political line of the Cheka in 1918 was largely determined by Sverdlov as chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which is recorded in a number of documents.^[18]

Sverdlov personally approved the leaders of the regional Cheka; coordinated punitive measures; supported the introduction of emergency powers. It was Sverdlov who played a key role in the transition from targeted repressions to the systemic “red terror”.

It is Sverdlov who introduces the terrifying Chekist leather uniform. Sverdlov himself, according to Trotsky, “walked in leather from head to toe, i.e. from boots to a leather cap.”

On July 6, under the most mysterious circumstances, the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, was killed. Adventurer V. N. Orlov, who posed as a White counterintelligence officer who illegally operated in the Cheka in 1918 and for unknown reasons had close ties with the Bolshevik leadership, recalled: “In July 1918, when I was interrogating agents in the Cheka building, a messenger brought a telegram addressed to Dzerzhinsky, who was next to me. He read it quickly, turned pale as death, jumped to his feet, and, exclaiming, “They’re acting again without consulting me!” rushed out of the room. What happened? The whole Cheka was agitated. Shouts, exclamations, calls merged into a single hubbub! Dzerzhinsky hurried to the Kremlin. What happened for the sake of all that is holy? The next day we learned the news. The imperial family was shot without the knowledge of the Cheka! Independently, on the instructions of Sverdlov and one of the top bosses in the Central Committee of the Communist Party!

According to the general opinion in the Cheka, in the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Kremlin, the decision to kill was made and implemented by the authorities of Sverdlov. He carried out the preparations in secret from his comrades and only after the execution did he present them with a fait accompli.”^[19] On the very eve of the murder, in July 1918, Sverdlov became an ardent supporter of the widespread use of the death penalty.^[20]

In May 1918, Sverdlov initiated the beginning of a fratricidal war in the countryside. In his report “On the Tasks of the Soviets in the Countryside,” Sverdlov said: “We must most seriously pose to ourselves the question of stratification in the countryside, the question of the creation in the countryside of two opposing hostile forces, and set ourselves the task of opposing the poorest strata of the population in the countryside to the kulak elements. Only if we succeed in splitting the countryside into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we can stir up the same civil war there that was going on not so long ago in the towns, if we succeed in rousing the rural poor against the rural bourgeoisie, only then can we say that we are doing to the countryside what we have been able to do for the towns. (…) I have no doubt that we will be able to raise the work in the countryside to the proper level.”^[21] And the work was put “at the proper level”: scenes of unprecedented arbitrariness and violence began in the villages.

Sverdlov clearly sought to seize power. He clearly became the main protégé of the world backstage, the person who was supposed to become the leader of a new state formation that would arise in the place of Russia. The murder of the Royal Family seemed to give Sverdlov the “green light” to prepare a new, and, as he assumed, final victorious round of the struggle for power.

On August 26, 1918, Sverdlov sent a letter to the Vologda Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), signing it with a new title: “Chairman of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party Y. Sverdlov.”^[22] This was the time when it was Sverdlov, not Lenin, who was called the “Red Tsar”.

6. The attempt on Lenin’s life and the growth of Sverdlov’s influence

Sverdlov’s role during the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 is very confusing and strange.

The Russian researcher V. E. Shambarov directly points to Sverdlov’s attempt to kill Lenin in order to completely seize power. “If you look at who benefited from the elimination of Lenin at that moment, Sverdlov benefited the most. After the assassination attempt, Sverdlov was the first to arrive at the Kremlin. Sverdlov’s wife reports that that same evening he occupied Lenin’s office, crushing the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central Committee, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.”^[23]

R. Medvedev writes the same in his article: “When Lenin was seriously wounded by the SR Kaplan, Sverdlov became the de facto head of the Soviet state for several weeks.”^[24]

It is Sverdlov who conducts a hasty investigation into the “case” of F. Kaplan, and it is on his order that Kaplan is quickly shot and burned in a barrel on the territory of the Kremlin. By the way, this method of covering up traces in the Sverdlovsk way, that is, the burning of corpses, unwittingly leads us to Ganina Yama.

Of course, Sverdlov was not able to act alone. It was in those days that Sverdlov unleashed a monstrous terror against the Russian people, which he called the “red terror” and it was under the rule of Sverdlov that the Cossacks (mass repressions against the Cossacks and their families) were carried out.

Sverdlov was very close to the “red coronation”. The fact that it was Sverdlov who was to become the head of the “new Khazaria” was openly said by such a well-known Jewish communist as Louis Aragon: “Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov,” he wrote, “is the most loyal comrade of Lenin, who became the first chairman of the Central Executive Committee, that is, the first head of the new Soviet state, and who, to the misfortune of the whole world, was to die of the Spanish flu at the age of thirty-four. I said ‘to the misfortune of the whole world’ because, of course, if he had survived, Sverdlov, not Stalin, would have succeeded Lenin.”^[25]

In case of failure, Sverdlov was ready to disappear from the blood-soaked country at any moment. It is quite possible that this was part of the plans of their foreign masters. Drained of blood, robbed and dismembered, Russia was supposed to receive a protégé of the secret forces of the West. Who it would be: the Bolshevik leader, or the White general – in general did not matter to them.

The main thing is that both continue to ensure control over Russia for the West, pumping out natural and material resources from it. Hints of such a decision can be heard in a letter from J. Schiff, which he wrote to the editor of the Paris newspaper La Tribune Juive: “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that if we do not help those elements who are fighting so heroically today in Russia to defeat the forces of anarchy and disorder that have established themselves today as the Russian government, and if we do not contribute to the establishment of a genuinely democratic government in place of these forces, which alone can save Russia, the present regime, which cannot be eternal, will be replaced by a reactionary power, as intolerable as the Romanovs, whose autocracy has brought so much poverty and suffering to the Russian people.”^[26]

But Lenin, having miraculously survived the assassination attempt, struck back at Sverdlov. On March 3, 1919, Sverdlov, after returning from the city of Oryol, where, according to one official version, he caught a cold while speaking at a rally, and according to another, he was beaten to death by workers, died suddenly, and died in severe agony, in constant delirium (The official version is the Spanish flu (Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, March 17, 1919).

However, numerous researchers note anomalies:

absence of autopsy;

lack of investigation;

incomplete documentation;

the rapid transfer of powers to Stalin;

closed nature of the funeral.

Five years later, Lenin followed Sverdlov and power completely passed into the hands of Stalin. Look for who benefits…

On July 27, 1935, the People’s Commissar of the NKVD G.G. Yagoda handed over to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) I.V. Stalin the following secret note: “Sov. secretly. Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Comrade Stalin. In the inventory warehouses of the commandant of the Moscow Kremlin, the fireproof cabinet of the late Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was kept locked. The keys to the wardrobe were lost.

On July 26 of this year, we opened this cabinet and it turned out:
1. Gold coins of the tsarist mintage in the amount of one hundred eight thousand five hundred and twenty-five (108,525) rubles.
2. There are seven hundred and five (705) pieces of gold, many of them with precious stones.
3. Seven blank forms of passports of the tsarist sample.
4. Seven passports completed in the following names:
a) Sverdlov Yakov Mikhailovich
b) Gurevich-Cecilia Olga
c) Grigorieva Ekaterina Sergeevna
d) Princess Baryatinskaya Elena Mikhailovna
e) Polzikov Sergey Konstantinovich
f) Romanyuk Anna Pavlovna
g) Klenochkin Ivan Grigorievich
5. One-year passport in the name of Adam Antonovich Goren
6. A German passport in the name of Elena’s Steel.
In addition, royal credit notes were found for only seven hundred and fifty thousand (750,000) rubles.

People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR (Yagoda)

July 27, 1935

No56568”.^[27]

7. Conclusion

Yakov Sverdlov is a figure who stood at the foundation of Soviet statehood. He was not only Lenin’s “gray cardinal,” but the structural architect of power, the man who created an apparatus that outlived both him and Lenin. His brief political biography demonstrates the transition of the revolution from ideology to apparatus; the formation of a centralized management model; the mechanisms of violence as an instrument of policy; conflict between two types of leadership – ideological and administrative.

For the analysis of the nature of the Bolshevik power, the figure of Sverdlov is key. And in an alternative version of history, he could well have led the Soviet state, eliminating all the other leaders: Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and arranging an even greater genocide of the Russian people than even Comrade Stalin. But history does not have a subjunctive mood, and it should not be patriotic, as Mr. Medinsky claims, but should be true. Only then it is a real historical science, and not propaganda.

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