Filipp Goloshchyokin

Filipp Isayevich Goloshchyokin (Russian: Филипп Исаевич Голощёкин, birth name Isay Isaakovich Goloshchyokin) was a Russian revolutionary, Old Bolshevik, and Soviet party functionary, member of the Bolshevk Central Committee (1927-1934). He is known for taking part in the murder of the Romanov family and for the devastating role in Sovietization of Kazakhstan (Small October, Russian: Малый Октябрь, a hint to the Great October) which resulted in deadly famine in Kazakhstan of 1932–33, which took between 1 and 2 million lives and known in Kazakshan as "Goloshchekin genoicide" (Kazakh: Голощёкинский геноцид).^[1]

At a telegraph office in Ekaterinburg on 18 July 1918, he caught Sir Thomas Preston, a diplomat at the British consulate, attempting to cable Arthur Balfour in London with the message, "The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night."^[2] Goloshchyokin snatched it and struck out the words of Preston's text with a red pencil, rewriting on the paper, "The hangman Tsar Nicholas was shot today - a fate he richly deserved."^[2] Ironically, Goloshchyokin was himself arrested in June 1941, during the Great Purge, and shot that October in an NKVD prison in Kuybyshev (now Samara, Russia), and was consigned to an unmarked grave.^[3]

Name

The surname is often written as Goloshchekin, a transliteration of the surname written without diacritics: Голощeкин.

He is also often referred to as Shaya Goloshchekin (Шая) by the diminutive from the name Isay in Yidish. "Filipp" is his party cryptonym.

References

1. Қазақстан тарихы: Аса маңызды кезеңдері мен ғылыми мәселелері. Жалпы білім беретін мектептің қоғамдык- гуманитарлық бағытындағы 11-сыныбына арналған оқулық / М.Қойгелдиев, Ә.Төлеубаев, Ж.Қасымбаев, т.б. — Алматы: «Мектеп» баспасы, 2007. — 304 бет,суретті. ISBN 9965-36-106-1
2. Rappaport, p. 200"
3. Helen Rappaport, p. 215"

• Helen Rappaport. The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg. St. Martin's Griffin, 2010. ISBN 978-0312603472