Filipp Isayevich Goloshchyokin

In the summer of 1918, as Military Commissar of the Ural Region, Goloshchyokin was the principal organizer of the Romanov family's execution. On 29 June, the Ural Soviet resolved to execute the entire Romanov family, and Goloshchyokin traveled to Moscow on 3 July to deliver the decision in person. Only seven members of the Central Executive Committee's Presidium remained in the capital; at a meeting with Lenin, Sverdlov, and Dzerzhinsky, the execution was approved, with discretion over the details left to the Ural Soviet.

On the evening of 16 July, with White Army forces closing on Ekaterinburg, Goloshchyokin and Georgy Safarov sent a final coded telegram to Moscow seeking approval, but the direct line was down and the message was routed through Zinoviev in Petrograd. According to Yurovsky's memoirs, the execution order signed by Sverdlov reached Goloshchyokin around 7:00 PM.

Goloshchyokin personally arrived at the Ipatiev House alongside Peter Ermakov and Stepan Vaganov to direct the execution as a representative of the Ural Soviet. He did not take part in the shooting himself, instead pacing along the palisade outside to gauge whether the gunfire could be heard beyond the walls. As the corpses were loaded onto the truck, he stooped to examine the tsar's body and murmured, "So this is the end of the Romanov Dynasty, is it..." His comrade Mikhail Kudrin replied: "No, not yet; there is still much work to be done." On 18 July at the Ekaterinburg telegraph office, when British diplomat Thomas Preston attempted to cable London with "The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night," Goloshchyokin snatched the message and struck through the words with a red pencil, rewriting: "The hangman Tsar Nicholas was shot last night — a fate he richly deserved."

On 19 February 1925 he was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party in the newly created Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and English sources record that from 1925 to 1933 he ran the Kazakh ASSR with virtually no outside interference. Russian sources put him as responsible secretary (First Secretary) of the Kazakh Kraikom of the VKP(b) from October 1925 to February 1933, while the appointment date itself is given as either 19 February 1925 or 12 September 1925. In December 1925, at the party conference in Kyzyl-Orda, he declared that no Soviet power had existed in Kazakhstan before his arrival, signaling that he would start from scratch. This was the opening of his 'Little October' course.

'Little October' was the name of the political course of the Kazakh authorities in 1926-1927, aimed at suppressing local national elites and strengthening administrative and economic control over the republic's life. For the tenth anniversary of October in 1927 he published two works justifying the escalation of emergency measures and effectively calling for civil war in the aul, and wrote to Stalin arguing for a 'Little October' in Kazakhstan and requesting approval, with the mass transition of Kazakhs to settled life as the next step. The first measure, in autumn 1928, was a confiscation campaign: 700 households were subject to confiscation, with about 150,000 head of livestock (converted to cattle) taken. By his own admission the original plans were twice as large, covering 1,500 households, but when the plan was approved in the Central Committee and the VTsIK the thresholds were adjusted (400 head for nomadic households, 300 semi-nomadic, 150 settled), cutting the total to 700 households. According to the Kazakh specialized article, land redistribution in 1926-1927 seized from wealthy households about 1,360,000 desyatins of hayfields and 1,250,000 of arable land for the poor and middle peasants, and the CC of the VKP(b) resolution of 3 May 1928 and the decree of 28 August 1928 'On the confiscation of bai households' required the confiscation and eviction of the largest stockbreeders, with 600 families to be evicted and their livestock confiscated.

Understanding that these measures would provoke protest from local communists, he fought party leaders who did not share his views. Saduakasov and Khodzhanov were accused of 'national deviation' as early as 1926, while Seifullin, Murzagaliyev, Nurmakov and Mendeshev were persecuted and many removed from the republic. From late 1928 the first arrests of his political opponents began (Baitursynov, Dulatov, Aymauytov, Zhumabayev), and two years later Tynyshpaev, the Dosmukhamedovs and many other representatives of the national intelligentsia were arrested.

After Stalin ordered forced collectivization, he ordered Kazakhstan's largely nomadic population to be forced into collective farms, which caused a deadly famine. The Kazakh famine of 1930-1933, also known as the Asharshylyq, began in late 1930 and lasted through 1933, and its victims were mostly ethnic Kazakhs. The frequently cited death range is 1.3 to 2.3 million, with other estimates around 1.75 million or above 2 million. Between 38 and 42 percent of all Kazakhs perished, the highest proportion of any ethnic group in the Soviet famines of the early 1930s, and Kazakhs fell from about 60 percent of the republic's inhabitants to 38 percent. English sources elsewhere give 1.5 million dead, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakh, with 25 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs having died or emigrated; Russian sources cite up to 1 million Kazakh victims on the official census; and the Kazakh-language article attributes about 3 million Kazakh deaths. The famine article documents the mechanism: herds were seized by the state, traditional migrations disrupted, communities forced into collective farms ill-suited to the steppe, and hunger intensified by requisitioning, excessive quotas and blacklisting of districts, while thousands of Kazakhs fleeing toward China were shot by border guards. Resistance was widespread, with 8 rebellions in 1930 alone.

As criticism mounted, in August 1932 Uraz Isayev, chairman of Kazakhstan's Council of People's Commissars, wrote to Stalin accusing Goloshchyokin of self-delusion and blaming kulaks for his own mistakes; the writer Gabit Musirepov reported corpses stacked like firewood in the Turgai district; and the West Siberian party boss Robert Eikhe complained about starving Kazakhs crossing into Siberia. On 11 November 1932 Goloshchyokin and Isayev ordered the mass arrest and deportation of peasants accused of impeding grain collection. In January 1933 he boasted of 'enormous successes' at a CC plenum, but a few days later he was suddenly sacked and publicly criticized for his handling of collectivization; Levon Mirzoyan was sent to head the party in Kazakhstan.

Assessment and responsibility remain contested. V. L. Burtsev, a historian of the revolution who knew him, called him a typical Leninist whom blood did not stop, 'the executioner, cruel, with some elements of degeneration', who 'did not count the Kazakhs as people at all'; statements that he never left the capital in seven years do not correspond to reality, since in April 1931 he personally toured ten districts of the republic. Some historians and scholars, including a Kazakh parliamentary commission chaired by Manash Kozybayev, have concluded the famine was genocide, arguing Moscow deliberately targeted Kazakhs; others see it as part of the wider Soviet famine driven by Stalin's push for industrialization and collectivization. In the early 1990s Abylkhozhin and Tatimov characterized the famine as 'Goloshchekin's genocide', attributing sole responsibility to him.