Vasily Mikhailovich Vershinin − a Commissar of the Romanov Family and a Chronicler of the Revolution

Abstract

Vasily Mikhailovich Vershinin is a little-known participant of the February Revolution in Russia. His activities in 1917 were hardly subjected to research. Meanwhile, Vershinin was a confidant of the leader of the Provisional Government, A.F. Kerensky, also he was appointed three times as a commissar to oversee former members of the Romanov family. For the first time, as a member of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, on March 7–9, 1917, he accompanied the abdicated Emperor Nicholas II from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo. In August, already as a representative of the Provisional Government, Vershinin participated in the relocation of the former tsar's family to Tobolsk. In September, he was appointed a government commissar supervising former members of the Imperial House of Romanov in the Crimea, where the mother of Nicholas II, Maria Feodorovna, his two sisters, Olga and Xenia, and other members of the royal family were kept under arrest. In addition, V.M. Vershinin is the author and initiator of unique historic documents – the journals of Nicholas II journeys to Tsarskoe Selo and Tobolsk, as well as the «Protocol of the February Revolution». The «Protocol», the only copy of which Vershinin took into exile, was drawn up by deputies of the State Duma who were eyewitnesses of the events that took place in Petrograd and the Tauride Palace on the first days of the revolution. The article uses previously unpublished archival materials and corrects historiographic errors