The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In Ekaterinburg, Yurovsky, who had not slept for two entire nights, loaded paraffin and sulphuric acid into a truck then headed back to the Four Brothers mine to retrieve the frozen bodies. There was gawping at, and groping of, the naked bodies. At 4.30 a.m. on 19 July, he burned two of them, Alexei and Maria, buried their remains and moved on, seventy yards away, to a clearing in the forest where, after digging a pit, he poured acid on to the bodies and buried them. Once the grave had been smoothed over, Yurovsky gathered his men and ordered them ‘never to speak of what had taken place’. They must ‘forget all they had seen’.

  The next day in Vologda prison, Bimbo and his two fellow grand dukes heard that Sovnarkom had announced the execution of the tsar, claiming his family had been ‘evacuated’. The three were sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd where they were joined by the last son of Alexander II, the fifty-eight-year-old Pitz.

  On the night of 27 January 1919,* Bimbo, his brother Georgi and cousin Dmitri, KR’s son, were awoken in the middle of the night, ordered to strip to the waist and marched out into the courtyard in front of the cathedral. Paul was too ill to stand so he was carried out on a stretcher. In a trench before the cathedral lay thirteen dead bodies. Bimbo and the others were ordered to stand before the trench and shot. Paul was killed on his stretcher, and all were tossed into the mass grave. Eighteen Romanovs had been killed by the Bolsheviks.* But the dowager empress, wife and mother of emperors, was still in Russia.14

  Minny and her relatives stayed at the family estates in Crimea under the kaiser’s protection – until in November 1918 Germany collapsed and Wilhelm abdicated. As German troops withdrew from Crimea, civil war intensified. In December, Sandro left on a British battleship, but Minny and the others agonised over what to do. Finally, in April 1919, the British offered to rescue them all. The dowager empress, accompanied by her daughter Xenia, Nikolasha, Peter, the Crows and the Yusupovs, an entourage of fifty altogether, sailed aboard HMS Marlborough into exile. All were to die in the West,† where their many descendants are spread across America and Europe.

  As the surviving grand dukes bickered about their legacy, sought refuge with royal relatives, and sold memoirs and jewels to maintain their fraying lifestyles,† the senior surviving Romanov, the unstable Kyril, son of Vladimir and Miechen, declared himself tsar.15

  *

  The bodies of the murdered Romanovs made their own journey. Less than a week after the murders, Ekaterinburg fell to the Whites who immediately started to investigate. Later they appointed a judge, Nikolai Sokolov, who concluded that the Romanovs had been executed even though he was unable to find the bodies.

  In September 1918, Alapaevsk also fell to the Whites, who discovered the bodies of Ella and the others in their mineshaft. The coffins of the victims were placed in Alapaevsk Cathedral until July 1919, when the Bolsheviks were advancing again, and a priest transported them to Irkutsk; then, as the Reds approached once more, to Harbin in Manchuria and next on to Beijing. When Victoria Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven, elder sister of Ella and Alexandra, discovered that the nun’s body was in China, she arranged for her and Sister Varvara to be transported to Jerusalem. At Port Said, the Milford Havens met them and accompanied them to Palestine. In January 1921, ‘two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train’, wrote Lord Milford Haven, who helped carry them. ‘The little cavalcade wound its way, sadly, unobtrusively to the Mount of Olives. Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.’ Ella and Sister Varvara were placed in glass-topped white sarcophagi in the very Slavic, gold-onion-domed Church of Mary Magdalene, which had been inaugurated by Sergei and Ella in 1888. In 1992 Ella was canonized.16

  In 1977, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, proposed that the Ipatiev House, which could become ‘the object of serious attention’ from ‘anti-Soviet circles in the West’, should be demolished. On Politburo orders, Boris Yeltsin, first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist Party, bulldozed the Ipatiev House.

  In May 1979, two amateur historians, after analysing photographs taken by Yurovsky on the site of the tsar’s hidden grave, began digging in the Koptyaki woods outside Sverdlovsk. They found skulls and bones, but this was the height of Leonid Brezhnev’s re-Stalinized stagnation and their discovery was too early politically. They reburied the bones. The KGB had known the site all along, for their files contained Yurovsky’s original report. But in 1991 the fall of the Soviet Union ended Communist rule. On 11 July, an official expedition of the Russian Federation exhumed the bones, which were divided into nine skeletons. Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh and consort of Elizabeth II, whose mother Alice was the daughter of Alexandra’s sister Victoria, gave his DNA, which proved the empress’s identity, while DNA from three relatives identified the tsar. But after much forensic inquiry, it was agreed that the bodies of Alexei and Maria were missing.

  On 17 July 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the murders, President Boris Yeltsin attended the funeral of the emperor, his family, his doctor and the three retainers at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Petersburg, along with thirty Romanov descendants. ‘It was a deeply emotional scene,’ recalls Prince Michael of Kent, descended from a daughter of Grand Duke Vladimir. ‘Very touching. A dignified occasion with a sense of finality.’

  ‘It’s a historic day for Russia,’ declared Yeltsin. ‘We have long been silent about this monstrous crime . . . The Ekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful episodes in our history. We want to atone for the sins of our ancestors. We are all guilty . . . Many glorious pages of Russian history are connected with the Romanovs. But this name is connected to one of the most bitter lessons.’ Then he drew the great moral of the terrible twentieth century: ‘any attempt to change life by violence is condemned to failure. This is our historic chance.’ After the service, the coffins were buried in the tomb of the Romanovs. The Cathedral of the Saviour of Spilled Blood was built on the site of the Ipatiev House, and smaller chapels at the site of the burials. In 2000, Nicholas and his family were canonized. ‘It was the closing of a chapter,’ thought Prince Michael. ‘But not the end of the story.’

  Far from it. The patriarch refused to participate, partly because Yeltsin’s decision was so political, but also because of the incomplete line-up of the family and anxieties about identifying some of the girls’ bodies.

  In 2007, the partial remains of two skeletons, damaged by fire and acid, were discovered at the site of the bonfire mentioned in Yurovsky’s memoirs. Most experts agreed these were the bodies of Alexei and Maria but again the Orthodox Church, keen to assert its power in modern Russia, remained unconvinced and for eight years, the bones were stored in boxes at the State Archives. In 2015, the Investigation Committee of the Interior Ministry reopened the inquiry to allow the Church a final check on the identity of all the family, using DNA provided by Nicholas and Alexandra (who were briefly exhumed), Ella (who lies in Jerusalem), Alexander II (using his bloodstained tunic in the Hermitage) and Alexander III. Finally, the Romanovs can be reunited.

  * One Romanov had remained in high office: Nikolasha was again commander-in-chief, so respected in the army that General Alexeev asked the premier to keep him in office. But the Romanovs were hated in Petrograd. On 6 March, Lvov dismissed Nikolasha. The dowager empress returned to Kiev, then travelled to Crimea accompanied by her daughters, Olga and Xenia, and Sandro, as well as the Yusupovs. Joined by Nikolasha and his brother Peter along with the Crows, these Romanovs stayed at their Crimean estates.

  * Afterwards, Hercules the American and his fellow Nubians almost vanish from history, stranded in revolutionary Petersburg. The French ambassador Paléologue recalled that in spring 1917 ‘walking in the Summer Gardens I met one of the Ethiopians who had so many times let me into the emperor’s study. He looks sad. We walk together 20 paces: he had tears in his eyes. I say words of comfort and shake his hand . . .’ Years later, during the 1920s, an American visitor to Moscow spotted a tall
black man wandering through the streets still wearing shabby imperial court dress.

  † Rasputin’s body was secretly removed on Kerensky’s orders, quickly buried again, then dug up and burned with gasoline. His alleged penis had a longer life. Many Rasputin penises have been bought and sold, none of them genuine.

  * Many of their shrinking retinue opted to accompany them, including Marshal of the Court Prince Vasily Dolgoruky and Adjutant-General Count Ilya Tatishchev, doctors Botkin and Derevenko, the Swiss tutor Gilliard and Alexei’s devoted sailor Nagorny, plus Alix’s ladies-in-waiting Countess Anastasia Hendrikova and Baroness Isa Buxhoeveden. The English tutor Charles Sydney Gibbes promised to join them. Frederiks, Benckendorff and Naryshkina (‘Farewell darling motherly friend,’ Alix wrote to her, ‘my heart is too full to write more)’ were too old or too ill. And of course the family took their dogs.

  * The dowager empress and many of the family remained in Crimea. When the Bolsheviks signed Brest-Litovsk, the German army occupied Crimea. The kaiser ordered them to rescue Minny and the other Romanovs there. In the panic, the Yalta Soviet ordered the execution of all the Romanovs in the Crimea, so they would not fall into German hands. But they were saved by a friendly commissar who moved all of them, forty-five including servants, into Grand Duke Peter’s Dulber Palace, a domed, crenellated, clifftop arabesque fantasia, which now became a comfortable Romanov prison. As Soviet troops raced to kill the Romanovs, the Romanovs prepared to defend Dulber. A firefight broke out, but the Germans saved them. They were now free. Minny moved to live at Harax, the palace of Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich, who was under arrest in Vologda. She lived there for eleven months, refusing the kaiser’s offers of asylum and insisting on remaining in Russia. Sandro returned to his estate Ai-Todor. Nikolasha and his brother remained at Dulber.

  * Lenin’s secret police was the Cheka, an acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

  * It was Yurovsky who as a boy in 1891 had seen Caesarovich Nicholas passing through Tomsk on his way home from his world tour. A Jewish glazier’s son, one of ten children, his father had been exiled so he was ‘born in prison’. Trained as a watchmaker and photographer, he served as a medical orderly in the war. Once he had worshipped the tsar. Intelligent and capable, he now loathed the Romanov ‘bloodsuckers’. He had served time in prison for murder, but was now a married father of three children living in a small apartment with his widowed mother.

  * Knowing this was a deed that would scrutinized by history, Lenin and Sverdlov were both careful not to order the killing specifically in writing and Lenin himself was protected by being kept out of the correspondence completely. Sverdlov was a superb manager, Lenin made policy, and the two decided everything together. Even during the civil war, Lenin was a control freak who tried to leave as little to local comrades as possible, and it is unthinkable he would have left such a major decision to provincials. The decision to conceal and muddy these orders was deliberate and almost certainly orchestrated by Lenin. After Lenin’s death, it was imperative that this saintly paterfamilias should not be tainted by the murder of innocents.

  * It has been a canard of anti-semites, particularly a certain type of Russian nationalist, that the murder was the work of Jews, a narrative that perfectly suited the Bolsheviks who wished to ensure Lenin was not blamed. In fact, the murder squad, except for the Jewish Yurovsky, was almost entirely ethnic Russian, though there were probably two or three who were Lettish or Austro-Hungarian. Sverdlov, Goloshchekin and Yurovsky were indeed Jews by birth though fanatical atheists, which reflects that the fact that minorities – Jews, Georgians, Poles, Letts – were disproportionately represented among the Bolsheviks. They share the guilt with the overwhelming number of Russians on the Urals Soviet, the Ipatiev guards and the hit squad. But it is Lenin who bears the ultimate responsibility.

  * The lapdog Jemmy was bayonetted too, but Alexei’s adored King Charles spaniel, Joy, ran away during the murders. He returned to await his master, was adopted by a guard, then by a member of the Allied intervention forces and taken to England where he lived out his life near Windsor Castle.

  * Many of those responsible for the murders were themselves consumed by the Revolution. In 1927, Goloshchekin approached Stalin on behalf of Yurovsky for permission to write his memoirs. ‘Not a word on the Romanovs,’ replied Stalin. Goloshchekin rose to first secretary of Kazakhstan, where he directed the forced collectivization and starvation of millions of Kazakhs. But Stalin had loathed him ever since they met in Siberian exile and had him shot in 1941. Beloborodov, who supported Trotsky, was shot in 1938. Yurovsky served as an economics official, giving interviews and occasional speeches about the murders, dying naturally in 1938. Ermakov gave lectures in schools and factories, dying in 1952. Misha’s murderer, Myasnikov, went into opposition and exile, but in 1945 the Soviet secret police brought him back to Russia where he was shot. Sverdlov died of influenza in March 1919. Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk. Lenin lies honoured in his Mausoleum; Sverdlov is buried in the Kremlin Wall. Voikov became Soviet ambassador to Warsaw where he was assassinated in 1927.

  * In Moscow, the writer Maxim Gorky appealed to Lenin for the life of Bimbo, ‘the historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich’. Lenin replied, ‘The revolution has no need of historians,’ but Gorky claims that he agreed to spare their lives. Gorky rushed to the station to catch a train, until he saw the newspaper headlines: ‘Romanovs Shot’. But his story is suspect. Lenin could have saved them with one telegram. He must have known they were already dead.

  * Only one Romanov was indulged by the Bolsheviks. In February 1917, Grand Duke Nikola, still thriving in his little empire in Tashkent, was, ironically, the only Romanov who was liberated by the revolution. Nikola congratulated Kerensky. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks confiscated his businesses, leaving only the cinema, and ordered him to leave the country – but he was too ill. He asked the Bolsheviks to allow his wife to become director of his palace museum, where she continued to work until the 1930s. In 1918, while the Bolsheviks were executing his cousins, this quixotic radical, scientific researcher, prolific builder, art collector, cinematic impresario and priapic romantic died at sixty-seven of pneumonia, receiving an official funeral, that was attended by thousands of ordinary people in Tashkent.

  † Empress Maria Fyodorovna, known as Minny, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, returned to Copenhagen where she died in 1928 aged eighty. Nikolasha settled in the south of France where he died in 1929, followed by his brother Peter in 1931 and wife Stana in 1935. Militsa lived on into another age. Joining her sister Queen Elena of Italy, she settled in Tuscany until the Nazi invasion in 1943, when she received asylum in the Vatican. When the Americans arrived, she rejoined Queen Elena until the end of the Italian monarchy in 1946 when she accompanied her sister and nephew King Umberto to Egypt. She died in 1951. Finally, the ballerina Mathilde Kshessinskaya, mistress of a tsar and two grand dukes, married her lover Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, whose brother Kyril gave her the title Princess Romanovsky-Krasinsky. She founded a ballet school, dying in 1971.

  † The murderers of Rasputin enjoyed a lurid notoriety. Dmitri escaped to London and Paris where he became a lover of Coco Chanel before marrying an American heiress, Audrey Emery Kyril. Dmitri died in 1932; later his son Prince Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky became mayor of Palm Beach. Felix Yusupov and his wife, Irina, the tsar’s niece, left with two Rembrandts and a cache of jewels. Settling in Paris, they founded a fashion house. Felix’s memoirs became an international bestseller, but he lost much of his fortune in the Wall Street Crash. He died in 1967. Irina lived on in Paris. ‘She always smoked French fags with a long cigarette holder,’ recalls her niece Princess Olga Romanoff, ‘always smelt lovely of Chanel No. 5, had an incredible sense of humour, a deep voice and was so elegant – never without her beautiful pearls in her ears and round the neck!’

  EPILOGUE

  Red Tsars/White Tsars

  When Tsarevich Alexei was
told that his father had abdicated, he asked, ‘Then who’s going to rule Russia?’ Marx wrote that ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’ This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present. No tsars were to rule Russia after 1917, yet each of Nicholas’s successors, who ruled the same empire with many of the same challenges in entirely different circumstances, channelled, adapted and blended the prestige of the Romanovs with the zeitgeist of their own times.

  Lenin had lost Ukraine, the Caucasus and much else at Brest-Litovsk – and without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power. But ultimately Lenin shrewdly reassembled the Romanov empire, losing only Finland, Poland and the Baltics.*

  Even as Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals to succeed Lenin,† he privately believed that Russia needed a ‘tsar’: in April 1926, he mused that, although the Party ruled, ‘the people understand little of this. For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist . . . accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.’ He studied Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great particularly. ‘The people need a tsar,’ he said in the 1930s, ‘whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.’ He carefully crafted his own image to create a new template of tsar, fatherly and mysterious, industrial and urban, the leader of an internationalist mission yet the monarch of the Russians. As the Germans advanced in 1941, he studied 1812 and, in 1942–3, restored ranks, gold braid and epaulettes – and promoted tsarist heroes Kutuzov and Suvorov. Stalin’s Terror allowed him to perform total reversals of policy, such as his pact with Hitler, to survive colossal self-inflicted disasters and force astonishing sacrifices from the Russians. His personal authority, homicidal brutality, Marxist-nationalistic propaganda, breakneck industrialization and command economy meant that he could deploy resources that would have been unimaginable to Nicholas. Stalin was a murderous tyrant, the Soviet experience a dystopian tragedy for the Russians, yet he out-performed the tsars, defeating Germany, leaving Russia as ruler of eastern Europe and a nuclear superpower. He always measured himself against the Romanovs. In 1945, when the US ambassador Averell Harriman congratulated him on taking Berlin, Stalin riposted: ‘Yes, but Alexander I made it to Paris.’