Filipp Isayevich Goloshchyokin, born Shaya Itsikovich Goloshchyokin (March 9 [O.S. February 26] 1876 – October 28, 1941), was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and apparatchik-party functionary.
A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1903 and a founding member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), he was a participant in the Revolution of 1905 and the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War he was a major figure in the establishment of Soviet power in the Urals and Siberia, acting as the People's Commissar for Military Affairs for the Ural Region, and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Council of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies, more commonly known as the Ural Soviet, as well as a member of the Perm Central Executive Committee. He was one of the primary perpetrators in the murder of the Romanov family.
Following the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, in his capacity as a senior figure in the Communist Party, he was elected as a Full and Candidate Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1934, First Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party from 1925 to 1933, and Chief State Arbiter of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR from 1933 to 1939. He played a deadly role in the Sovietization of Kazakhstan, (Small October), (Russian: Малый Октябрь, a reference to the "Great October"), leading to the Kazakh famine of 1932–1933, in which 1.5 million people died, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 25 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died or emigrated, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Other sources state that as many as 1 to 2.3 million died.
An active participant in Stalinist repression during the Great Purge (1936–1938), he was arrested after the fall of Nikolai Yezhov in 1939, and later shot without trial by the NKVD in 1941. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1961, 20 years after his death, after de-Stalinization.
Born 9 March [O.S. 26 February] 1876 in Nevel to a family of Jewish contractors, his middle name has been spelt as, Isai (Yiddish: Shaya or Shai) and Isak, Isayevich, Isaakovich, Itskovich are indicated as real names. After graduating from a dental school in Riga, Goloshchyokin worked for a time as a dental technician.
In 1903 he joined the RSDLP. He conducted revolutionary work in St. Petersburg, Kronstadt, Sestroretsk, Moscow and other cities. He took part in the Revolution of 1905–1907. From 1909, he worked in the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP and directed it. In 1909 he was arrested and exiled to the Narym region, and fled in 1910.
In 1912, he was a delegate to the Bolshevik Congress in Prague, at which Vladimir Lenin formalized the break with the Mensheviks and created a separate Bolshevik organization with its own Central Committee, of which Goloshchyokin was a founding member. He assumed the alias Filipp, also transliterated Philipp or Philippe, as his party cryptonym.
In 1913 he was again arrested by the Russian authorities and deported to the Turukhansk Territory in Siberia, and released only after the February Revolution in 1917. In May, Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, sent Goloshchyokin to the Ural Region, informing the local Bolsheviks: "Comrade Philippe has gone to the Urals; a man; very energetic; with the right party line". He served as a member of the Perm Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, then a member of the Regional Committee.
As a delegate to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Goloshchyokin arrived in Petrograd. He joined the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and participated in the October Revolution. At the Second Congress of Soviets, he was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Goloshchyokin recalled that before his departure for the Urals, Lenin aimed at delaying the convocation and the subsequent dispersal of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.
After the success of the October Revolution and the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, he was elected to the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, based in Ekaterinburg, and was elected Military Commissar of the Urals, where he formed and headed the Red Guard in the region and oversaw the activities of the Red Army Reserve District in Ekaterinburg. In Spring 1918, he proposed to execute Prince Georgy Lvov, who had served as Chairman of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, and was a prisoner in Ekaterinburg, but was ordered not to by the People's Commissar for Justice, a Left Socialist Revolutionary, during the period when the Left SRs were in coalition with the Bolsheviks.
While he was in Moscow in the spring of 1918, Goloshchyokin decided to first suggest to Yakov Sverdlov that the former Emperor Nicholas II should be moved to Ekaterinburg, where there was less chance of his being rescued by the anti-Bolshevik White Army. Sverdlov and Lenin were reluctant to agree because they planned to put the former emperor on trial in a grand public spectacle, with Leon Trotsky acting as Chief Prosecutor, and they suspected that the militant Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks would lynch him instead, but ultimately agreed that the prisoner and his family should pass through Ekaterinburg on the way to Moscow.
Upon arrival in Ekaterinburg, the family and their retainers were imprisoned in the Ipatiev House on the suggestion of Pyotr Voykov, a member of the Ural Soviet, with Yakov Yurovsky, a ranking member of the Ekaterinburg Cheka, appointed as commandant of the Ipatiev House by the decision of the Soviet. Though Yurovsky held direct command on the grounds, overall command was ultimately held by Goloshchyokin as Military Commissar of the Ural Region. In this capacity, he frequently oversaw the dismissal of guardsmen believed too sympathetic to the family and their replacement with more hardened, ruthless Bolshevists. When one of the guards, Ivan Skorokhodov, who was smitten with the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, smuggled a birthday cake to the grand duchess for her 19th birthday and was caught fraternizing with the same, Goloshchyokin had him arrested and tightened security.
In a special session on 29 June the Ural Soviet met at the Cheka headquarters in the Amerikanskaya Hotel and agreed that the entire Romanov family should be executed. Goloshchyokin arrived in Moscow on 3 July with a message insisting on the tsar's death. Only seven of the 23 members of the Central Executive Committee were in attendance at the time, three of whom were Lenin, Sverdlov and Felix Dzerzhinsky, where it was seemingly agreed the tsar should be killed without delay, with the details and preparations being left to the discretion of the Ural Soviet.
Yurovsky detailed his interactions with Goloshchyokin in great detail in his memoirs, stating: “In about the middle of July, Filipp told me we had to make preparations for the liquidation in case the [White] front got any closer." On 15 or 16 July, Yurovsky was informed by the Ural Soviet that Red Army contingents were retreating in all directions, and the executions could not be delayed any longer. A coded telegram seeking final approval was sent by Goloshchyokin and Georgy Safarov at around 6:00 PM to Lenin and Sverdlov in Moscow, but the lines were down and they could not get a direct connection, leaving them with no choice but to send the telegram on the direct line to Petrograd instead addressed to Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Petrograd Soviet, based in the Smolny Institute, with a request to forward a copy to Sverdlov in Moscow. Zinoviev duly forwarded the telegraph to Moscow, noting that he had done so by 5:50 PM Petrograd time. There is no surviving documented record of a final answer from Moscow, although Yurovsky insisted that an order from the Central Executive Committee to move forward signed by Sverdlov had been passed on to him by Goloshchyokin at around 7:00 PM.