and Yakov Yurovsky (the Chekist who directed the execution and later claimed to have personally shot the tsar, formerly a watchmaker and photographer). It was meant to be a secret operation, but after the Whites reoccupied Ekaterinburg, they ordered an official investigation, the results of which, including the Jewish identities of the main perpetrators, were published in Berlin in 1925 (and eventually confirmed). At the end of the civil war, in late 1920– early 1921, Béla Kun (the chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee) and R. S. Zemliachka (Rozaliia Zal-kind, the head of the Crimean Party Committee and the daughter of a well-off Kiev merchant) presided over the massacre of thousands of refugees and prisoners of war who had stayed behind after the evacuation of the White Army. For her part in the operation, Zemliachka received the highest Soviet decoration: the Order of the Red Banner. She was the first woman to be thus honored. 110 But Jewish revolutionaries did not just tower over city squares—they were prominent in the revolutionary remaking of those squares. Natan Altman, who had begun his artistic career by experimenting with Jewish themes, became the leader of “Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” the founder of artistic “Leniniana” (Lenin iconography), and the designer of the first Soviet flag, state emblem, official seals, and postage stamps. In 1918, he was put in charge of an enormous festival marking the first anniversary of the October Revolution in Petrograd. Fourteen kilometers (8.7 miles) of canvas and enormous red, green, and orange cubist panels were used to decorate—and reconceptualize—the city’s main square in front of the Winter Palace. The spatial center of imperial statehood was transformed into a stage set for the celebration of the beginning of the end of time. El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich [Mordukhovich] Lisitsky) also abandoned the attempt to create a Jewish national form in order to embrace the international artistic revolution and the world revolution as a work of art. His much celebrated “prouns” (the Russian acronym for “projects for the affirmation of the new”) included designs for “Lenin’s podiums” (huge leaning towers meant to soar above city squares) and the most iconic of all revolutionary posters: “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” (the Whites being represented by a white circle). 111 The revolutionary rebirth was accompanied by revolutionary renamings, which reflected the degree of Jewish prominence. In Petrograd alone, Palace Square, decorated by Natan Altman, became Uritsky Square; the Tauride Palace, where the Provisional Government had been formed and the Constituent Assembly dispersed, became Uritsky Palace; Liteinyi Avenue became Volodarsky Avenue; the palace of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich became