The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  The five Hesse siblings at the Coburg wedding. Front, L–R: Irene (later Princess Henry of Prussia); Ella; the bride, Victoria Melita and Grand Duke Sergey, Ella’s husband. Back, L–R: Nicholas; Alexandra; Victoria (soon to be Marchioness of Milford Haven) and the groom, Ernst.

  The British Royal Family. King George V stands behind his daughter Mary, with Queen Mary holding John, and in front his brothers, L–R: George; Henry; David (Edward VIII) and Albert (George VI).

  The Danish princesses Dagmar (left) and Alexandra (right), now Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia and Queen Alexandra of Great Britain, with Dagmar’s husband – and Nicholas’s father – Tsar Alexander III, centre.

  The royal cousins Georgy and Nicky enjoyed close and cordial family relations in the pre-war years. Their uncanny resemblance prompted people to refer to them as ‘the heavenly twins’.

  Like the British royals, the Russian Imperial Family preferred family life at home in Tsarskoe Selo, 15 miles from St Petersburg. Here they are seen on the steps of the baroque Catherine Palace, but they lived at the more modest Alexander Palace next door.

  King Haakon, formerly Prince Carl of Denmark, accepted the vacant throne of Norway in 1905. Married to his and Nicholas II’s cousin Maud, he was one of several royal relatives who urged Nicholas to initiate political reform in the run up to the revolution.

  Nicholas after his abdication, now under house arrest, with Alexandra in the Alexander Park at Tsarskoe Selo, Spring 1917.

  In Spring 1917 all the children fell seriously ill with measles. Maria, seen here recovering with her father beside her, developed pleurisy and nearly died.

  Two of the Romanov daughters, Tatiana and Anastasia, pushing a water barrel in the Alexander Park. During their captivity at Tsarskoe Selo, the family were able to plant a vegetable garden.

  Tsarevich Alexey helping to clear snow in the Alexander Park, 1917. At Army HQ and in captivity, Alexey wore military uniform like his father. In 1916 he had been promoted to Lance Corporal and is seen here proudly displaying his Order of St George.

  The four Romanov sisters – Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga and Maria – had all been losing their hair as a result of the measles and in June 1917 decided to shave their heads. Alexey did likewise, in solidarity.

  Lord Stamfordham (Sir Arthur Bigge) enjoyed a unique position of influence over King George V as his Private Secretary and played a key role in persuading him to change his mind about the Romanov asylum.

  British ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, did his utmost to effect an early evacuation of the Romanov family after the February Revolution 1917.

  British prime minister, David Lloyd George, headed the coalition government of 1916–22 that offered temporary asylum to the Romanovs in March 1917.

  Russian liberal politician Pavel Milyukov, first foreign minister in the Provisional Government, was the driving force in securing the British asylum offer of 23 March 1917.

  Alexander Kerensky, justice minister in the Provisional Government, supervised the Romanovs’ captivity at the Alexander Palace. As prime minister, he organized the family’s removal to Tobolsk in August 1917.

  The Russian port at Murmansk (Romanov-on-Murman), July 1918. In 1917 it became a major British military supply base and was proposed as a temporary staging post for the Romanovs, should they be evacuated by sea.

  This American supply ship on the frozen White Sea at Archangel in 1919 had cut through 15 feet of ice to reach port, demonstrating how difficult a Romanov evacuation out of Russia by sea, even in May, would have been.

  Nikolay Markov, right-winger and former Duma member known as ‘Markov II’, was closely involved in plots to liberate the Romanovs from captivity.

  Cornet Sergey Markov from the Tsaritsa’s Crimean Cavalry, known as ‘Little Markov’. Devoted to the Imperial family he collaborated with Markov II and other monarchists to try and rescue the Romanovs, but his plans came to nothing.

  English tutor Sydney Gibbes took this previously unseen view of the inner courtyard of the Governor’s House at Tobolsk. The Romanovs were held here from August 1917 to the end of April 1918.

  The courtyard at the Governor’s House, in which the Romanovs and their entourage were allowed regular periods of exercise and from where they could at least still see the outside world.

  At Tobolsk the four sisters happily shared a room, sleeping on modest camp beds. They crammed it with their favourite icons, photographs and knick-knacks, but despite the large white-tiled stove the room was bitterly cold during the Siberian winter.

  Alexandra’s sitting room at the Governor’s House, Tobolsk. Beyond the parted curtains can be seen the ballroom, converted into a chapel by the family, where they had placed a portable iconostasis brought with them from Tsarskoe Selo.

  In December 1917, Sydney Gibbes wrote a letter at Alexandra’s dictation to her old governess in England, Miss Jackson, describing the family’s daily life at Tobolsk and enclosing a room plan – a desperate thinly veiled plea for help.

  The Romanov children’s three favourite tutors, Spring 1917. L–R: Swiss national Pierre Gilliard taught French; Petr Petrov taught Russian literature and language; Sydney Gibbes taught English. Gibbes and Gilliard were both with the family at Tobolsk but were refused permission to join them in Ekaterinburg.

  Prince Vasily Dolgorukov had been with Nicholas at Army HQ and joined him in Tobolsk. He passed on valuable information about the family’s wellbeing but was arrested and later shot.

  A more familiar image of the Tobolsk captivity, but a rare one in that it shows all the family together – on the greenhouse roof – bar Alexandra, who rarely went outside.

  Count Benckendorff, Grand Marshal and Master of Ceremonies of the Russian Court, served as an important link with the monarchists in Petrograd. He passed on news from his stepson, Dolgorukov, about the conditions endured by the Romanovs in Tobolsk.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II had a difficult relationship with Nicholas and Alexandra. Nevertheless, in 1917 he agreed to the idea of a British ship being allowed to evacuate the Romanovs by sea under a white flag. By Spring 1918 he had become the last hope for those seeking the family’s rescue.

  The Norwegian shipper and navigator Jonas Lied, who had extensive business connnections in Siberia, was the person best-placed to get the Romanovs out of Tobolsk. Yet his 1918 plan for a rescue downriver to the Kara Sea was greeted with indifference by the British.

  The mysterious Vasily Yakovlev, aka Konstantin Myachin, was a tough-minded Bolshevik commissar tasked with escorting Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria safely to Ekaterinburg ahead of the rest of the family at the end of April 1918.

  Major Stephen Alley, of the British Secret Service, who ran agents out of his base at Murmansk. In May 1918 he mooted a possible rescue of the Romanovs from Ekaterinburg.

  King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Probably the furthest removed of all Nicholas and Alexandra’s royal relatives, and yet the one who made the greatest efforts to secure their release.

  A secret shot snatched by Sydney Gibbes of the tarantasses waiting outside the Governor’s House to take Nicholas, Alexandra, Maria and their luggage away to a new Siberian location. The rest of the family would join them in Ekaterinburg on 24 May 1918.

  A contemporary postcard of Ekaterinburg showing the Ipatiev House (bottom left) located on Voznesensky Prospekt, and in the background the River Iset.

  The Romanov family were held at the Ipatiev House from 30 April until their murder on the night of 16/17 July 1918.

  The last photograph of Alexey and Olga. Taken by Sydney Gibbes on the steamer Rus en route from Tobolsk to join their parents and sister Maria in Ekaterinburg, May 1918.

  After months of being out of the news and almost forgotten by the world outside, the Romanovs make front page headlines when their murders were finally announced, here in the Daily Mirror for 13 September 1918.

  This chilling photograph taken inside the Ipatiev House shows the twenty-three steps down which the Romanov family were led befor
e being taken out across the yard to the basement room where they were killed.

  Acknowledgements

  Any book attempting to tread fresh ground in a familiar story needs to plough a very broad furrow in order to uncover new, unseen or overlooked sources. Yet even the Romanov story has not been fully told – certainly not in terms of its closing stages – and it was a thrill to find so much previously uncited material. In taking on the challenge of The Race to Save the Romanovs I knew that the key to new perspectives lay in foreign-language sources that had been virtually untouched in English-language studies till now. In order to find this new material I had to draw on a team of translators and researchers able to access material scattered all over the world. The task would otherwise have been impossible for me to undertake in the relatively short time I had to write the book, and bearing in mind that I was not familiar with all the languages involved.

  In the United Kingdom I called on the advice and wisdom of numerous friends and historians of long standing, but by far the most crucial contributor to this entire project was my colleague Phil Tomaselli. As an expert in World War I military and intelligence material, with many years’ knowledge of the enormous range of War Office and Foreign Office sources at the National Archives on this subject – and, crucially, how to find his way around their erratic filing system – I deferred to Phil’s greater experience in this regard. I was not disappointed. He knew where to look and saved me an enormous amount of time. At Cambridge, Peter Day kindly searched through the papers of Lord Hardinge in the University Archives; Jane Wickenden, a specialist naval librarian, offered useful advice; Nick Forder and Tim Pickles of the Cross & Cockade International First World War Aviation Historical Society both responded helpfully to my appeals for information on World War I aviation; Michael Hargreave Mawson and Norman Gooding provided information on orders and medals of the World War I period. Tim Giddings and Felix Jay shared what they knew of Stephen Alley; Philip Kerin told me of the exploits of his grandfather, Stephen Berthold Gordon-Smith, in World War I. The following writers and historians all sent helpful answers to questions: Charlotte Zeepvat, Christopher Warwick, Douglas and Susan Ronald; Dr J. F. Pollard; Hugo Vickers and Julian Fellowes.

  Once again, my fellow Russianist and brilliant French translator David Holohan helped me with Russian handwriting and French translation; my valued colleague Richard Davies, Archivist at the Leeds Russian Archive, was always ready and willing to answer any queries. Julie Crocker at the Royal Archives was most helpful and accommodating in answering my requests for material; and Emily Bourne at the Parliamentary Archives helped me locate an important document there.

  In the USA my friends Mark Andersen and Ilana Miller helped me lay hands on obscure articles and offered advice Rebecca Adaire Ramsay at Emory University, Atlanta, made a most efficient and through search of the Isaac Don Levine Archive on my behalf; I am grateful to archivist Kathy Shoemaker for introducing me to her. Tanya Chebotarev was most kind and helpful in providing material for me at the Bakhmeteff Archive in New York; and my stalwart researcher at the Hoover Institution, Ron Basich, searched long and hard for new and overlooked material. I am also grateful to fellow historians Doug Smith, Griffith Henniger and Professor Norman E. Saul for sharing information. In writing this book I have also greatly appreciated the support and interest in my work shown in the USA by John David Cofield, Dominic C. Albanese, Candace Metz-Longinette Gahring, and Paul Gilbert in Canada.

  For Russian sources I could not have managed without the indispensable contribution of my Finnish friend Rudy de Casseres, a fluent Russian speaker who on his many frequent trips to St Petersburg sought out obscure material and was always willing to make that extra effort to try and locate hard-to-find sources on my behalf. I simply could not have gone to GARF or AVPRI myself to tackle their difficult archival systems, or the Russian handwriting of original documents, and gratefully delegated this work to the wonderful Anna Erm, who found material that I could never have hoped to locate.

  In pursuing Spanish sources I was given a wonderful start by royalty historian Ricardo Javier Mateos Saínz de Medrano, who pointed me in the right direction for the best material on King Alfonso and Spanish attempts to help the Romanovs. Laura Otal at my agency, PFD, kindly gave up time to translate a long article from Spanish, before I found the wonderful Blanca Briones González, who has helped me enormously in tracking down and translating Spanish material for this story.

  Scandinavia was very much virgin territory for me and I knew none of the languages, but it was somewhere that I most particularly wanted to search for new material. I was fortunate to find translator John Irons, who helped check for potential sources and translated material from Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. John also tackled the horrendous German Foreign Ministry documents on the blurred and darkened 1940s microfilm from the National Archives at Kew – but not until Phil Tomaselli had first heroically searched through it for what looked like the most important documents. In Switzerland, Karen Roth also tried to decipher some of these pages for me, as well as translating from Danish and German sources. My Dutch friend Marianne Kouwenhoven offered many helpful leads on the Scandinavian royals, as did Professor Bent Jensen, Stig Sievback Nielsen and Trond Norén Isaksen. Tor Bomann-Larsen generously shared his knowledge of King Haakon and, with it, copies of his four-volume biography of him. Per Gisle Galåen at the Norsk Maritimt Museum kindly sent me scans of Jonas Lied’s diary; Marit Werenskiold told me of her research on Jonas Lied and sent me a copy of her book; and from Denmark, Bernadette Preben-Hansen sent me much valuable information on Harald Scavenius and advised on the difficulties of Danish royal archival sources. Anna von Lowzow also passed on her thoughts in this regard, and Nigel Holden kindly sent me his article on Harald Schou Kjeldsen.

  German royalty historian Karina Urbach generously shared her knowledge and expertise and put me in touch with Jörg Schüttler, who obtained material from the Hesse Archives for me and helped me track down the archivists at Burg Hohenzollern. I am deeply grateful to Stefan Schimmel at the Burg Hohenzollern archive for sending me scans of the relevant documents that I needed from this valuable and previously unseen source.

  In Winnipeg, Canada, my wonderful and super-efficient researcher Elizabeth Briggs looked long and hard for documents in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s archive relating to the possible Murmansk house for the Romanovs, and my thanks go to archivist Lisa Friesen for making copies available to me.

  Finally – having been determined to explore every possible avenue – I contacted Keishi Ono at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo, in my attempt to verify rumours about possible Japanese interest in helping the Romanovs. Alas, we could find nothing.

  In the case of much of the archival material I have drawn on, it is now impossible, at a remove of 100 years, to trace any surviving copyright holders, but I value being able to quote from documents provided to me by the various archives listed in the Bibliography. I am grateful to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for permission to quote from material in the Royal Archives; to SKH Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preussen for the Kaiser’s notes in the Burg Hohenzollern Hausarchiv; to Tanya Chebotarev at the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, New York; to the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid; to AVPRI and GARF in Moscow; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Hoover Institution, California; the Hudson’s Bay Company Canada Archives; Isaac Don Levine Archive at Emory University, Atlanta; the Leeds Russian Archive; the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster; the Oslo Maritime Museum; and the National Archives at Kew. Victor Buchli kindly granted permission for me to quote from Anastasia’s letters to Katya Zborovskaya held at Hoover. The executors of the John Wimbles estate – David Horbury and Sue Woolmans – generously allowed me exclusive access to these papers before they were donated to Spain.

  Several good and trusted friends, who are both Russian and Romanov specialists and enthusiasts, read and commented on the text of this book: I am indebted to Sue Woolmans, Ruth Abrahams, D
avid Horbury, Nick Nicholson, Rudy de Casseres and Phil Tomaselli for their time, their support and their helpful notes.

  Once again, I have had the pleasure of working with my American publisher Charlie Spicer at St Martin’s Press, whose never-failing enthusiasm and encouragement make it such a joy to be seeing yet another book through to publication with him. Charlie’s team at St Martin’s Press are all tremendously supportive and hard-working, and I thank April Osborn, Kathryn Hough, Jason Prince and all those in PR and marketing who put in such a phenomenal effort in the promotion of my work in the USA.