[4] An active participant in Stalinist repression during the Great Purge (1936–1938), he was arrested after the fall of Nikolai Yezhov in 1939, and later shot without trial by the NKVD in 1941.

Goloshchyokin recalled that before his departure for the Urals, Lenin aimed at delaying the convocation and the subsequent dispersal of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.

[5] While he was in Moscow in the spring of 1918, Goloshchyokin decided to first suggest to Yakov Sverdlov that the former Emperor Nicholas II should be moved to Ekaterinburg, where there was less chance of his being rescued by the anti-Bolshevik White Army.

[7] In a special session on 29 June the Ural Soviet met at the Cheka headquarters in the Amerikanskaya Hotel and agreed that the entire Romanov family should be executed.

[8] Only seven of the 23 members of the Central Executive Committee were in attendance at the time, three of whom were Lenin, Sverdlov and Felix Dzerzhinsky, where it was seemingly agreed the tsar should be killed without delay, with the details and preparations being left to the discretion of the Ural Soviet.

On 15 or 16 July, Yurovsky was informed by the Ural Soviet that Red Army contingents were retreating in all directions, and the executions could not be delayed any longer.

A coded telegram seeking final approval was sent by Goloshchyokin and Georgy Safarov at around 6:00 PM to Lenin and Sverdlov in Moscow, but the lines were down and they could not get a direct connection, leaving them with no choice but to send the telegram on the direct line to Petrograd instead addressed to Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Petrograd Soviet, based in the Smolny Institute, with a request to forward a copy to Sverdlov in Moscow.

There is no surviving documented record of a final answer from Moscow, although Yurovsky insisted that an order from the Central Executive Committee to move forward signed by Sverdlov had been passed on to him by Goloshchyokin at around 7:00 PM.

While Beloborodov and Safarov remained at the local Cheka Headquarters at the Amerikanskaya Hotel nearby, Goloshchyokin arrived personally at the Ipatiev House along with Peter Ermakov and Stepan Vaganov as a representative of the Ural Soviet to direct the executions, but did not appear to physically participate in the shooting himself, and instead remained outside with the other guardsmen while Yurovsky personally led the assembled death squad.

Goloshchyokin is said to have nervously paced back and forth along the perimeter palisade erected around the Ipatiev House in an attempt to determine whether anyone could hear what was going on from outside as one of the guardsmen revved the engines of the fiat truck waiting outside to mask the sounds of the gunfire and barking dogs.

When it was clear that the gunfire could be discerned even from outside the palisade walls, one of the guards, Alexei Kabanov, told the killers to cease fire and to use their bayonets and gun butts.

At a telegraph office in Ekaterinburg on 18 July, he caught Thomas Preston, a diplomat at the British Consulate, attempting to cable Sir Arthur Balfour in London with the message, "The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night.

"[13] 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 last night – a fate he richly deserved.

"[14] On 19 July, Goloshchyokin announced at the Opera House on Glavny Prospekt that "Nicholas the Bloody" had been shot and his family taken to a secure location.

Violent measures were taken to enable the transfer of nomads to sedentary lifestyles, which led to massive casualties, mainly among the indigenous Kazakh population.

Abzhanov, Director of the Institute of History and Ethnology, give significantly higher estimates of the number of victims of the famine and violence: "Hunger killed at least 3 million Kazakhs.

Goloshchekin did not have time to appear in Kazakhstan, as he stated that there is no Soviet power, and it is "necessary" to orchestrate a "Small October".Statements that, in seven years, he never went outside the capital and was not interested in how the people lived, did not correspond to reality.

In August 1932, the second most senior communist in Kazakhstan, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Uraz Isayev, wrote to Stalin accusing Goloshchyokin of believing his own myth that every single Kazakh had decided to join the collective farms, and of blaming his own mistakes on 'kulaks'.

In October, a prominent Kazakh writer, Gabit Musirepov reporting finding corpses stacked like firewood by the roadside in the Turgai district of Kazakhstan.

In January 1933, at a plenum of the Central Committee, he boasted of the "enormous successes" of the Five year Plan in Kazakhstan[21] – but a few days later, he was suddenly sacked, and was subject to widespread public criticism for his handling of collectivization.

He was one of 20 'especially dangerous' prisoners, who included 14 high-ranking military officers, who were executed by firing squad on 28 October 1941 on the direct orders of Lavrentiy Beria near the village of Barbysh and consigned to an unmarked grave.