The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In February 1918 the chill of the Bolsheviks reached the family. Friendly guards were replaced by ‘a pack of blackguardly looking young men’. Lenin’s fragile regime struggled for survival. While foreign commissar Leon Trotsky negotiated peace, the kaiser’s army drove deep into Russia. ‘The socialist fatherland is in danger,’ warned Lenin and must be defended to ‘the last drop of blood’. Enemies must be ‘shot on the spot’. The greater the crisis of the regime, the greater danger to the Romanovs.

  As Nicky and Alix corresponded with friends like Anna in Petrograd and with family in Crimea, Bolshevik factions tried to storm Freedom House to kill them, while tsarist officers hatched plots to rescue them. This alarmed Lenin.

  On 20 February, the Council of People’s Commissars, known by the acronym Sovnarkom, chaired by Lenin, ordered that Nicholas be put on trial at a place to be decided. But Filipp Goloshchekin, an ex-dentist now military commissar of the Ural Soviet Executive Committee, suggested that the Romanovs be moved to Ekaterinburg in the Urals.

  The Romanovs sensed the new peril. ‘Life here is nothing, eternity is everything,’ Alix told Anna on 2 March, ‘and what we are doing is preparing our souls for the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus nothing after all is terrible. If they take everything from us they cannot take our souls.’ All were delighted by the latest clothes from Vyrubova. ‘The children put on your lovely blouses. The pink jacket is far too pretty for an old woman like me but the hat is alright for my grey hair.’ Alexandra was only forty-five.

  On 1 April, Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the Central Executive Committee and Party secretary, Lenin’s chief henchman, slight, dark, with black bouffant hair, round spectacles and a deep voice known as The Trumpet, strengthened the guards at Tobolsk and decided to bring the family to Moscow – the Bolsheviks had just moved the government back to the Kremlin. Lenin planned to try Nicholas publicly and Trotsky proposed himself as prosecutor. Days later, Sverdlov despatched Vasily Yakovlev, a peasant’s son, and experienced revolutionary, escorted by the so-called Special Purpose Detachment of 150 Red Guards, to move ‘Nicholas to the Urals. Our opinion is that you should settle him in Ekaterinburg for now.’ The Ural Bolsheviks were as divided about what to do with the former tsar as was the leadership in Moscow, but knowing that there were elements that wanted to kill him immediately, Sverdlov specified: ‘Yakovlev’s assignment is to deliver Nicholas to Ekaterinburg alive’ and hand him over to Goloshchekin, forty-two, a trusted Central Committee member appointed by Lenin and Sverdlov to run the Urals – known as ‘the eye of the Kremlin’. Their deepest intentions are obscure. Most likely they wanted to bring Nicholas to Moscow, but, given the crisis, the Romanovs would be parked in the Bolshevik stronghold of Ekaterinburg ‘for now’ and if in doubt, they could be killed. Lenin and Sverdlov were not afraid of bloodletting. The Nihilist Nechaev had asked, ‘Which member of the ruling dynasty should be destroyed? The entire ruling house.’ This delighted Lenin: ‘This is simplicity to the point of genius.’ He believed that ‘revolution is meaningless without firing squads’ and had argued in a 1911 essay that ‘If in such a cultured country as England, it is necessary to behead one crowned criminal . . . then in Russia, it is necessary to behead at least one hundred Romanovs.’

  ‘The atmosphere around us is fairly electrified,’ Alix wrote to Anna on 21 March. Alexei set off a severe haemorrhage by riding down the staircase on a sled and banging his groin. ‘I would like to die, Mama,’ he cried in agony. Alexandra wrote to Anna: ‘Though the storm is coming nearer and nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.’

  It was her last letter. ‘I have come here knowing quite well that I shan’t escape with my life,’ Count Tatishchev told Dr Botkin. ‘All I ask is to be permitted to die with my emperor.’

  On 23 April, Yakovlev inspected Freedom House.

  ‘Does the guard satisfy you?’ Yakovlev asked.

  ‘Very pleased,’ replied Nicholas, ‘rubbing his hands and grinning stupidly’, according to Yakovlev’s report.

  He inspected the former tsarevich. ‘Alexei really did seem very ill,’ he reported. ‘The yellow-complexioned haggard boy seemed to be passing away.’ Yakovlev decided that the ex-tsar must leave at once. The others could follow later.

  ‘Citizen Romanov,’ he told Nicholas. ‘I’ve been assigned by Sovnarkom to remove you from Tobolsk.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Nicholas. ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘What are you doing with him!’ shrieked Alix. ‘He has an ill son. He can’t go. This is too cruel! I don’t believe you’ll do this!’

  Lenin and Trotsky had signed their peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk that ceded Ukraine and the Baltics to puppet regimes, controlled by the triumphant kaiser. ‘I imagine they want to force me to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,’ Nicholas said. ‘But I’d rather cut off my hand.’* Alexandra feared that ‘if he’s taken alone, he’ll do something stupid like he did before. Without me, they can force him to do whatever they want.’

  The dilemma was heartbreaking. ‘This is a most difficult moment for me,’ said Alix. ‘You know what my son means to me. And now I have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my choice and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life or my death with my husband.’ But they decided on a division of labour: Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia remained in Tobolsk – to nurse Alexei, to run the household and to ‘cheer everyone up’ respectively; Maria would go with her parents. ‘We spent the evening in grief,’ wrote Nicholas. ‘Horrible suffering,’ noted Alix in her diary.

  At tea before bed, all ‘did their best to hide their feelings’, recalled Gilliard, knowing that ‘for one to give way would cause all to break down’. Alexandra managed to say goodbye to Alexei calmly, but tears rolled down her cheeks. Nicky himself admitted that ‘To leave the rest of the children and Alexei – sick as he was – was more than difficult . . . No one slept that night.’

  At dawn on 26 April, Nicky, Alix and Maria, swathed in lambskin coats, climbed into carriages, followed by Prince Dolgoruky and Dr Botkin, and galloped away. At Tyumen, ‘the Baggage’ – the chilling Bolshevik codename for the Romanovs – got on to Special Train No. 8. ‘Travelling in comfort,’ Alexandra telegraphed Freedom House. ‘How is the boy? God be with you.’

  Unbeknown to the prisoners, the Special Purpose Detachment had just foiled an attempt by Ekaterinburg Bolshevik units to murder the Baggage. Yakovlev reported this to Moscow and refused to hand over the Baggage to the Urals boss, Goloshchekin: ‘Your detachments have the single wish of destroying the Baggage . . . Do you guarantee the preservation of this Baggage?’

  Yakovlev suspected a Uralite plot and, when he got to Tyumen, he pleaded for and received Sverdlov’s sanction to make for Omsk while Sverdlov negotiated with the Uralites. When they gave the necessary assurances, Sverdlov ordered Yakovlev to turn around and head back: ‘I reached an understanding with the Uralites,’ he explained on 29 April. ‘Hand over all the Baggage in Tyumen to the chairman of the Urals regional committee; this is essential.’ Nicholas watched the stations passing; he realized they were retracing their steps. ‘Is it definitely settled we will remain in Ekaterinburg? I would have gone anywhere but the Urals. Judging by the papers, the workers there are bitterly hostile to me.’

  At 8.40 a.m. on 30 April, they arrived at Ekaterinburg station where a howling mob – ‘Hang them here!’ – waited to lynch the tsar. Setting up machine guns, Yakovlev refused to hand them over. After a three-hour stand-off, Goloshchekin presided over a motorcade that took the Baggage to their new home, commandeered from a local engineer Nikolai Ipatiev, which was now designated the House of Special Purpose. Already a high fence had been built around it. On arrival on 17 April, they were subjected to a minute search of all their trunks. ‘I blew up at this,’ wrote Nicholas. Realizing that they were entering a dangerous new phase, Alexandra drew her talismanic sign, the swastika, on to the windowsill for luck. She would need it. At the station, Prince Valya Dolgoruky was se
parated from the group and later arrested, bearing maps and cash, clearly planning the family’s escape.

  The three girls and Alexei waited anxiously in Tobolsk. It was only on 3 May that they discovered their parents and sister had arrived not in Moscow but in Ekaterinburg, 354 miles south-west of Tobolsk.

  ‘Here there are unpleasant surprises every day,’ Maria told her sisters. Nicholas added a PS for Anastasia: ‘I am lonesome without you, my dear. I miss you pulling funny faces at the table.’ The first surprise was ‘some sort of big fuss’ in which a motley new posse, many of them Lettish workers or Hungarian prisoners-of-war from the local factories, took over as guards while there was a crackdown on fraternization with the Romanovs. Nicholas’s walk was reduced to one hour a day. When he challenged this, the guards explained that this was meant to ‘resemble a prison regime’. The next day, a housepainter arrived to whitewash all the windows.

  ‘We suffer a great deal in our souls for you, my darlings,’ wrote Tatiana to her parents. Realizing that the Ekaterinburg captivity would be harsh, the three sisters were frantically sewing their cache of jewels into their corsets, camisoles, belts and hats – an activity the family codenamed ‘arranging the medicines’. The buttons on their summer dresses became diamonds and not only Alexei’s underwear but even his army cap was woven with jewels. When the three girls pulled on this diamond-encrusted underwear, it weighed as much as four and a half pounds.

  ‘It’s difficult to write anything pleasant,’ replied Maria from Ekaterinburg. ‘There is little of that here. But on the other hand God does not abandon us, the sun shines and the birds sing . . . All that matters is to be together again soon.’7

  On 20 May the three girls and Alexei set off for Ekaterinburg, travelling by steamer and train. On the terrifying journey, the guards got drunk and tried to molest the girls to the sound of their ‘terrified screams’. Olga was shaken, and was growing thinner and sadder. Finally arriving at Ekaterinburg, Gilliard and Gibbes, as well as the ladies-in-waiting and others, were left on the platform and told they could not accompany the family. The decision saved the lives of the tutors, who were then freed. Gilliard and Gibbes courageously stayed in the town, often walking past the house.

  The family was delighted to be reunited at the Ipatiev House. The house was airless in the heat and only after complex negotiations was a tiny window opened, though first it had to be covered with a metal grille. The evenings were dreary, filled with games of bezique; Alexei was ill again; and Nicky now suffered haemorrhoids so painful he had to lie in bed, though he read War and Peace aloud to the family, and a biography of Emperor Paul. Olga was depressed but walked arm in arm with her father; Tatiana nursed everyone, giving the ailing Dr Botkin morphine injections. Food and walks were rationed. Their belongings were pilfered.

  Yet the commandant became increasingly kind to the family – and did not stop his guards from fraternizing with the girls. Some of the guards started to sympathize with the meek ex-tsar and they smuggled in letters, books and food from outside. The guards were mainly teenagers themselves. ‘They were just like all girls,’ recalled one of the guards, ‘quite lively and very friendly to us.’ Anastasia was ‘very friendly and full of fun’, recalled another guard, while a third thought her ‘a very charming devil . . . mischievous . . . lively and fond of performing comic mimes with the dogs’. The most beautiful, Maria, with her big eyes – ‘Maria’s saucers’ – was their favourite: ‘a girl who loved to have fun’, said guard Alexander Strekotin. As time passed, ‘Everyone relaxed more and began to talk and laugh . . . We were especially keen to talk to the daughters, except Olga.’ The chats always started with the girls exclaiming things like ‘We’re so bored . . . I know! Try to guess the name of this dog?’ Soon they were ‘whispering flirtatiously with us, giggling as they went’.

  ‘Their personalities were fascinating to us, topics of discussion between two or three of us who passed sleepless nights,’ recalled a guard, ‘There was something especially sweet about them. They always looked good to me.’ Another, Ivan Kleshchev, aged twenty-one, declared that he would marry one of the girls and if her parents objected, they would elope. ‘All in all,’ Strekotin said, ‘we felt that we wouldn’t mind so much if they were allowed to escape.’

  A guard named Ivan Skorokhodov started to get closer to Maria. Alix and Olga disapproved. Alix reprimanded her ‘in severe whispers’ for flirting, and Olga, noticed Strekotin, ‘refused to associate with her younger sisters’. On 14 June ‘our Maria’, wrote Nicholas, ‘turned nineteen’. After lunch, when the family celebrated in the blistering heat, Skorokhodov emerged with a birthday cake which he had smuggled in for Maria. The two flirted and disappeared together.

  Already Goloshchekin was worried about security. The nascent Soviet Republic seemed to be disintegrating. A corps of ex-Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war trained to form a Czech Corps, mutinied against the Bolsheviks and advanced along the Trans-Siberian Railway. By June, of the major cities between the Pacific and the Volga, only Perm and Ekaterinburg remained in Bolshevik hands. Plots mushroomed around the Ipatiev House. The family began to receive secret French messages from ‘an officer of the Russian army’ who proposed their escape. These were provocations written by a Bolshevik member of the Urals Soviet, Peter Voikov, a vain womanizer with a taste for wearing eyeshadow who, having studied in Paris, could write French. His comrades nicknamed him ‘The Intellectual’. It would have been convenient if the family could be shot trying to escape, but the Romanovs did not fall for it. ‘We don’t want to nor can we escape. We can only be carried off by force,’ answered a member of the family, probably Olga, in French.

  On 13 May, Nicholas noticed a ‘dark-complexioned gentleman whom we took to be a doctor’ examining Alexei with Dr Derevenko (who, kept in town, was allowed to visit occasionally). In fact, this visitor was Yakov Yurovsky, a leader of the local Cheka,* and member of the Urals Soviet. He identified the cause of the security lapses: Anastasia, he noted, was ‘very attractive, rosy cheeks, a quite lovely face’, while Maria ‘didn’t behave at all like her elder sisters. Her sincere modest character was very attractive to the men and she spent most of her time flirting with her jailers.’ Yurovsky warned that the guards would soon be helping the girls to escape.

  On the very day of Maria’s birthday, as she and young Skorokhodov playfully celebrated somewhere in the house, Goloshchekin arrived to make a surprise inspection and most likely discovered Maria alone with Skorokhodov. The young man was arrested. Alexandra and Olga were furious with Maria, who ‘seemed closed off from most of her family.’ After the flirtation, Alix and Olga ‘treated her like an outcast.’8

  Nicky and his family were not the only Romanovs near by. The Urals Soviet was collecting Romanovs. This was unlikely to be coincidental. Lenin and Sverdlov had started rounding up Romanovs in March. By May, six other Romanovs were also being held in the Palais Royale Hotel in Ekaterinburg: Ella, Alix’s sister, along with her fellow nun Sister Varvara Yakovleva, Sandro’s brother Sergei Mikhailovich, three sons of KR and a son of Paul. On 20 May, they were moved to a school in Alapaevsk, north-west of Ekaterinburg.

  Meanwhile Misha, the last emperor, was also in the Urals. On 7 March 1918, he had been arrested with his Anglo-Russian secretary Nicholas Johnson and brought to Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute, where amazingly his wife Natasha managed to blag her way in to see Lenin himself. ‘Saying it did not only depend on him,’ Lenin left the room. That evening, when the government met, they agreed to exile ‘ex-Grand Duke M. A. Romanov’ to the Urals.

  Misha was placed under house arrest at the Korolev Hotel in Perm, where Natasha was allowed to come for dinner. But he was now in the domain of the Urals Soviet, which had already decided to collect and exterminate the Romanovs. As the Czech Legion threatened Perm, a local Chekist, Gavril Myasnikov, aged twenty-nine, in cahoots with Goloshchekin and the Ekaterinburg comrades, recruited four ruffians who in his words ‘were ready to bite through someone’s throat
with their teeth’. At midnight on 12 June, Misha and his secretary Johnson were kidnapped by the Chekists from the hotel, driven in carriages to a wood outside town and murdered with shots to the head. After Misha’s silver watch had been pilfered, the bodies were burned with paraffin. Myasnikov announced that Misha had escaped and vanished; but, informed after the fact, Lenin and Sverdlov approved. Misha was the first Romanov to be killed.9

  *

  In Ekaterinburg, the Cheka picked off the ex-tsar’s companions. Count Ilya Tatishchev joined Dolgoruky in Ekaterinburg prison. The sailor Nagorny, who always carried Alexei, was removed. Gilliard and Gibbes saw him driven off – before they themselves were told to leave the town. This time they obeyed. Nagorny was shot.

  The Czech Legion was approaching Ekaterinburg. Two days after Goloshchekin’s surprise inspection of the House of Special Purpose, he, Alexander Beloborodov, chairman of the Presidium of the Ural Soviet, and Peter ‘The Intellectual’ Voikov met in Room 3 of the marble-floored Amerika Hotel with Yurovsky and Myasnikov, who had just murdered Misha. This committee of murderers resolved as follows:

  The Ural Regional Soviet categorically refuses to take responsibility for transferring Nicholas Romanov in the direction of Moscow and considers it necessary to liquidate him. There is grave danger Citizen Romanov will fall into the hands of Czechoslovaks and other counter-revolutionaries . . . We cannot turn away from our duty to the Revolution. Romanov’s family . . . must also be liquidated.

  So must Ella and their cousins. As Goloshchekin rushed to Moscow to get Lenin’s approval, British, French and American troops landed in Murmansk, the start of the Western intervention in a savage civil war between the Reds – the Bolsheviks – and their enemies, the Whites. On 5–6 July, the SRs, who had been junior partners in Lenin’s government, launched an uprising. Lenin crushed the rebels, but the Soviet Republic was in desperate straits: a reign of remorseless terror was seen as fully justified.