Mikhail Kudrin was born in the village of Dedyukhino in the
Sarapul District, into a Russian peasant family. In 1900 he graduated from the parish school in the village of Izgar, and from 1900 to 1908 he lived in
Chistopol, where he began to study at the school of artisan students, but after the second grade he was forced to leave school due to the difficult financial situation of the family. In 1908, Kudrin moved to
Perm, where he worked at a power plant, then as a locksmith at an oil warehouse, and finally as an oiler on a tugboat. In September 1911, he left for
Baku, where he got a job in the engine crew of a tanker in the
Caspian Sea and joined the "Union of Non-Industrial Workers" and met the
Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1912, Kudrin joined the
RSDLP and plunged headfirst into party work. In 1912, he became a member of the illegal Bolshevik "Trade Union of Seamen of the Caspian Merchant Fleet". In February 1914, Kudrin was arrested, along with a group of Baku Bolsheviks, and until September 1916 was held in a Baku prison. After having freed himself, he received a passport from the Bolshevik underground in the name of "Mikhail Sidorov", went into hiding, and returned to Perm. In the summer of 1917 following the
February Revolution, Medvedev, at the invitation of an old acquaintance from the Baku underground, came to
Yekaterinburg and got a job at a power plant. After the creation of the local
soviet at the plant, he became its secretary, and later, was elected its chairman.
Execution of the Romanovs In 1918, Medvedev became a member of the collegium of the Ural Regional Cheka in Yekaterinburg. In early July 1918, he was assigned to the internal security of the
House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinburg, and on the night of July 17 he participated in the execution of the royal family. According to Medvedev's own recollections, it was he who first started shooting and killed the Tsar. According to his testimony, when the commandant
Yakov Yurovsky told the condemned that they would be shot, they did not expect such words, and
Dr. Botkin asked: “So they won't take us anywhere?” Then, without waiting for the commandant to repeat the verdict of the Ural Soviet, he began shooting and released a hail of five bullets. After Medvedev opened fire, the rest of the executioners began to shoot.
Grigory Nikulin, who also participated in the execution, later agreed that the Tsar was killed precisely by Medvedev's shots. This was contested, however, by Yurovsky's own report and memoirs, who, describing the killings, testified he had opened fire first and had fatally shot the Tsar.
Peter Ermakov, one of the other shooters, alternatively claimed at different points in various accounts that either he, or Yurovsky, had killed Nicholas, but did not mention Medvedev. According to
Helen Rappaport, and
Greg King and Penny Wilson, all of the Romanovs were fatally shot by either Yurovsky or Ermakov, as the bullets of the other shooters hit but failed to kill their targets.
Further life and death Between 1919 and 1922, Medvedev worked as a
Captain in the
OGPU and a
Commissar in a Red Army Battalion as well as in the Gulag system. After 1922, Medvedev worked as a
Major in the
NKVD in
Saranpaul and
Tver in the Second Directorate responsible for monitoring the Church. For a time between 1927 and 1929, he was posted as Commander of a
OGPU Border Troops Battalion in the
Azeri SSR. After 1929, Medvedev was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and worked in Baku and Tbilisi as Assistant Chief of the Fourth Directorate tasked with surveilling industrial plants and the Soviet Iranian and Soviet Turkish Border. In 1933, he was transferred to head the bureau responsible for surveilling naval shipyards in
Leningrad. Concurrently, he was a guest lecturer in the
NKVD Academy and in the
Higher Party School. In 1938, Medvedev was appointed assistant to the head of the 1st Branch of the Department of the High Commissioner of the
NKVD of the
Soviet Union, and was given the rank of Colonel. For much of the War, he was an instructor in the
NKVD Academy and then in various other intelligence schools. From 1946 onwards he continued to be assistant to the head of the 1st Branch of the Department of the High Commissioner of the
NKVD as well as a teacher in the Higher Party School, and retired in 1951 In July 1962, nearing the end of his life, he turned to the party archives of the Sverdlovsk
Regional Committee of the
CPSU with a request "to confirm his direct participation in the execution of the former Tsar Nicholas II and his family." Before his death, Medvedev left a memoir about the murder of the imperial family, personally addressed to
Nikita Khrushchev, entitled "Through Hostile Whirlwinds." These memoirs have not been published and are currently kept in the
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. Medvedev died in Moscow on January 13, 1964. He was buried with full military honors at the
Novodevichy Cemetery. In his will, he asked his son Mikhail to gift to Khrushchev the
Browning M1911, with which he claimed he had killed the Tsar, and to give to
Fidel Castro a
Colt which he used in during the
civil war in 1919. == Claims of the destruction of the remains ==