The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

by Candace Fleming

  Surging into the streets, the people attacked any and all tsarist symbols, toppling statues and burning double-headed eagles. In the Winter Palace, Nicholas’s official portrait was slashed with bayonets. A huge demonstration of soldiers marched to demand an end to the Romanov dynasty. Their angry expressions and loaded rifles quickly convinced the new government that keeping the monarchy (as Britain had) was impossible. If a new tsar was forced on the people, there would surely be further violence, perhaps even a civil war.

  Convinced all the Romanovs had to go, Rodzianko, along with Alexander Kerensky, set out to persuade Grand Duke Michael to also abdicate.

  Michael listened closely to their arguments. Then he turned to Kerensky. Could the new government guarantee his safety if he took the throne?

  No, answered Rodzianko.

  Wanting time to think, Michael stepped out of the room. But only five minutes later, he returned. Tears in his eyes, he said simply, “I have decided to decline the throne.”

  Rodzianko pulled out a prepared document, and Michael signed it. With that, 304 years of Romanov rule came to an end.

  SCENES OF REJOICING

  The end of Romanov rule was greeted by joyous demonstrations in Petrograd. Crowds hung red flags from roofs, balconies, windows, and statues. There was singing, parades, and rousing speeches. Cannons boomed. Bells pealed.

  The revolution had taken place entirely in Petrograd, unknown to the rest of the country. But as news spread to Moscow and other cities and towns in the last days of March, reaction was much the same. “The entire city became like a wild street carnival that one could not wait to get outside to see,” recalled one citizen.

  The soldiers at the front were wild with joy, too. When the news arrived, a mighty “Huzzah!” rose from the trenches like a song. Flinging their caps into the air, they pounded each other on the back. Some even fired a few precious rounds of ammunition into the air. Overnight, red ribbons appeared on almost everything—rifle butts, horse saddles, cannons. Most hoped that revolution also meant the end of the war. As a fighting force, the Russian army had completely collapsed. It hadn’t launched an offensive since June 1916, and its war aims had been reduced to protecting its borders. With news of the revolution, tens of thousands of peasant soldiers, tired of sitting around with empty bellies, simply walked away from the war. Others, believing the revolution put them on an equal footing with their officers, formed committees to decide whether or not to obey a command. Some refused to salute; others insisted on choosing their own officers. Explained one soldier to his fellow troops, “Haven’t you understood? Don’t you know what a revolution is? It’s when the people take all the power. And what’s the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It’s obvious—it means that the power belongs to us!”

  The news, as it slowly spread across the vast and remote countryside, frightened some of the villagers. “The church was full of crying peasants,” one citizen recalled. “What will become of us?” others wailed. “They have taken the tsar away from us.” But as the weeks passed, and their lives went on as usual, many peasants celebrated. “Our [village] burst into life,” recalled one. “Everyone felt enormous relief, as if a heavy rock had suddenly been lifted from our shoulders.” Remembered another, “People kissed each other from joy and said that life from now on would be good.” They praised God for “the divine gift of the people’s victory.” Like that, the reign of the Romanovs vanished.

  BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:

  “YE TYRANTS QUAKE, YOUR DAY IS OVER”

  In his autobiography, Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky vividly recalls the moment his little town of Yefremov—located 640 miles south of Petrograd—received word of the revolution weeks after it happened:

  It was one o’clock in the night, a time when Yefremov was usually fast asleep. Suddenly, at this odd hour, there sounded a short, booming peal of the cathedral bell. Then another, and a third. The pealing grew faster, its noise spread over the town, and soon the bells of all the outlying churches started to ring.

  Lights were lit in all the houses. The streets filled with people. The doors of many houses stood open. Strangers, weeping openly, embraced each other. The solemn, exultant whistling of locomotives could be heard from the direction of the station. Somewhere far down one street there began, first quietly, then steadily louder … singing:

  Ye tyrants quake, your day is over,

  Detested now by friend and foe!

  The singing brass sounds of a band joined the human voices in the chorus.

  BACK AT THE PALACE

  On the evening of March 16—one day after Nicholas’s abdication—his uncle Grand Duke Paul arrived at the Alexander Palace. He went straight to Alexandra with the news.

  “It’s all lies!” she cried when he finished. “The newspapers invented it. I believe in God and the army.”

  “God and the army are on the side of the revolution now,” replied the grand duke.

  Minutes later, recalled Lili Dehn, “the study door opened and the empress appeared. Her face was distorted with agony, her eyes were full of tears.”

  Stumbling forward, Alexandra grabbed the edge of a nearby table to steady herself. “Abdiqué,” she croaked, using the French word for abdicated. And then, in a whispered sob, she added, “The poor dear … all alone down there … what he has gone through, oh my God, what he has gone through.… And I was not there to console him.”

  You are filled with anguish

  For the suffering of others.

  And no one’s grief

  Has ever passed you by.

  You are relentless

  Only to yourself,

  Forever cold and pitiless.

  But if only you could look upon

  Your own sadness from a distance,

  Just once with a loving soul—

  Oh, how you would pity yourself.

  How sadly you would weep.

  —Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna Romanova,

  poem dedicated to her mother, April 23, 1917

  WHAT TO TELL THE CHILDREN?

  On March 21, the day before Nicholas returned to Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra summoned Pierre Gilliard to her drawing room. The children had to be told about the abdication. Would the tutor explain to Alexei?

  Gilliard said he would.

  “I am going to tell the girls myself,” said the empress. Calm, but pale, she climbed the stairs to their sickroom. What she said is not known, but the news caused them all to burst into tears.

  Across the hall, Pierre Gilliard sat beside Alexei. He began by telling the twelve-year-old boy that his father would never be returning to Stavka.

  “Why?” asked Alexei.

  “Your father does not want to be Commander-in-Chief anymore,” replied Gilliard. Then he added, “You know, your father does not want to be tsar anymore.”

  “What? Why?” cried Alexei.

  “He is very tired and has had a lot of trouble lately,” answered the tutor.

  Alexei struggled to understand. “But who’s going to be tsar then?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Gilliard. “Perhaps nobody now.”

  “But if there isn’t a tsar,” said Alexei, fidgeting beneath his blankets, “who’s going to govern Russia?”

  Gilliard explained about the Provisional Government.

  What he didn’t tell Alexei was that they were all prisoners of this new government. Just that morning, the entire family had been placed under house arrest!

  ARRESTED

  Their arrest was purely for security reasons, a representative of the Provisional Government, General L. G. Kornilov, had explained to Alexandra earlier that day. It was the only way to protect her and the children from the angry mobs. As for Nicholas, he was headed home as they spoke, accompanied (for safety’s sake) by an armed guard. Once back at the palace, he, too, would be placed under house arrest. It was the government’s plan, Kornilov continued, to send the whole family to England as soon as the children’s health imp
roved. In the meantime, they would all remain together under guard at Tsarskoe Selo.

  After speaking with Alexandra, General Kornilov dismissed the few troops still remaining at the palace. He replaced them with soldiers faithful to the new regime. Then he spoke with the servants and courtiers. They, too, should leave, he advised. Otherwise, they would be placed under house arrest with the imperial family. His words sent most people scurrying for the door. But nearly one hundred of the more than five hundred who had worked at the palace—ladies-in-waiting, valets, grooms, cooks, tutors, maids, and footmen—remained. This included the empress’s friend Anna Vyrubova, Pierre Gilliard, and the devoted Dr. Botkin. They were, noted Anna, “like survivors of a shipwreck.”

  Not long afterward, soldiers of the Provisional Government closed and locked the high iron fence surrounding the Imperial Park. In the palace, all entrances except the kitchen and front door were sealed shut. Sentries were posted in the hallways, and all letters going in and out of the palace were examined. Use of the telephone and telegraph was prohibited. “No longer was there the coming and going of the outside world,” recalled one courtier. “The pulse of life had stopped.”

  WELCOME HOME, NICHOLAS

  March 22 dawned bitter cold and overcast. Nerves on edge, Alexandra sat beside Alexei’s bed, whispering prayers and watching the clock. Every so often, the still-recuperating boy called out the minutes until “Papa” arrived.

  Finally, there came the crunch of tires on the ice-crusted driveway. Minutes later, the door to the family’s private rooms flew open. “His Majesty the Emperor,” announced the family’s faithful butler, refusing to acknowledge recent events. Then Nicholas pounded up the stairs. Alexandra gave a little squeal as she leaped from her chair to meet him.

  Together at last, husband and wife clung to one another. Tears streaming, Alexandra reassured him of her love. “My beloved, Soul of my soul … I wholly understand your action, oh my hero.”

  And Nicholas broke down. Recalled Anna Vyrubova, “He sobbed like a child on the breast of his wife.”

  CHANGES

  Silver strands now streaked forty-eight-year-old Nicholas’s beard, and dark shadows circled his blue eyes. And yet, to those around him, he acted “like a schoolboy on vacation.” Walking. Sawing wood. Breaking ice. This was how the former tsar filled his days. And he felt invigorated. No more meetings with ministers. No more war reports to read or documents to sign. The only thing he admitted to missing about his old life was visiting with his mother and sisters. Otherwise, he reveled in spending time with his family and having “plenty of [hours] to read for my own pleasure.” When told that they might be imprisoned at Tsarskoe Selo for several months, he replied, “A pleasant thought.”

  Forty-four-year-old Alexandra found life less pleasant. She spent most of her days on her sofa. Whatever glue had been holding her together since the start of the war seemed to vanish overnight. Now the family had the sickly Alexandra back. Her features suddenly aged and gaunt, her hair almost completely gray, she constantly grumbled about the hardships imposed on the family. In truth, changes in their material lifestyle were few. Footmen in elaborate livery still bowed and served meals; expensive wines from the imperial cellar still appeared on the table; maids still came to help her change into lace gowns and lengths of pearls. It was the mental strain Alexandra found intolerable. Suddenly, she was a prisoner in her own home, with parts of the palace and its grounds completely off-limits.

  Far worse were the family’s walks. For a few hours each day, the Romanovs were allowed outside. But every afternoon, just before they stepped out, angry crowds gathered along the iron fence. They shouted insults and obscenities. Some even hurled sticks and clods of dirt.

  The soldiers did little to stop this. Not long ago, just a glimpse of the tsar would have sent them to their knees. But years of hardship had left them with little sympathy for Nicholas. “Too many hard, terrible things had been connected in the past with his name,” explained one soldier. One could hardly blame them for their gaping and mocking. Sometimes they went even further, poking him in the back with their bayonets, and turning rudely away when he offered to shake hands. Once a soldier even stuck a rifle into the spokes of his bicycle as he pedaled past. The tsar flew over the handlebars, crashing to the ground. He managed to accept it all without complaint.

  The soldiers targeted the others, too. They snatched away Alexei’s toy rifle, told crude jokes about Alexandra within her earshot, and made fun of the way the girls spoke. “What an ‘appetizing book’ you have in your hand,” one soldier drawled in imitation of Anastasia, who was overheard complaining about lunch. “One is tempted to eat it.”

  At first, these incidents humiliated Alexandra and her children. But Nicholas helped them get over it by laughing at his new title. “Don’t call me a tsar anymore,” he would joke. “I am only an ex.” Soon the rest of the family began using the expression. One day when an overcooked ham was placed on the lunch table, Nicholas declared, “Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it’s nothing but an ex-ham.” Everyone—even Alexandra—giggled.

  And so, slowly, the empress began to accept her fate. “It is necessary to look more calmly on everything,” she said three months after her husband’s abdication. “What is to be done? God has sent us such trials, evidently he thinks we are prepared for it. It is a sort of examination—to prove we are ready for His grace.”

  LENIN’S RETURN

  Just before midnight on April 16, 1917, a train pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station. In the waiting area, hundreds of workers and soldiers buzzed with excitement. After twelve years in exile, Vladimir Lenin was coming home!

  He’d been following events in Russia closely. “It’s staggering!” he’d exclaimed when he learned of Nicholas’s abdication. “It’s so incredibly unexpected!” With the tsar gone, Lenin believed now was the time for the soviet to finally seize power.

  It took six weeks and lots of political wrangling for Lenin to cross the war zone from Switzerland. But at long last, he arrived, his well-tailored wool coat and formal felt hat contrasting sharply with the workers’ gray tunics. Catching sight of him, the crowd cheered as a military band struck up a revolutionary anthem:

  We renounce the old world,

  We shake its dust off our feet,

  And we don’t need a Golden Idol,

  And we despise the Tsarist Devil.

  Hurrying out into the station square where even more workers waited, Lenin climbed onto the hood of an armored car. He declared the war a “shameless imperialist slaughter,” and called the Provisional Government who still supported the war “capitalist pirates” full of “lies and frauds.” Bolsheviks should not, he shouted, “support in any way the new government.”

  The crowd cheered.

  But just because Lenin had been greeted as a returning hero did not mean the Petrograd Soviet—the majority of whom were more moderate Mensheviks—agreed with him. Only two months earlier, it had agreed to support the Provisional Government. Thus many were flabbergasted when Lenin appeared before the soviet’s members the morning after his arrival and demanded an immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. “We don’t need any parliamentary republic!” Lenin shouted. “We don’t need any [rich man’s] democracy! We don’t need any government but the Soviet of worker and soldiers!”

  Boos and whistles met his words. “That is raving!” hollered one listener. “That is the raving of a lunatic!” It seemed Lenin, who had lived comfortably in Europe, did not understand how hard they’d struggled to reach this place. “[He] is,” snorted one member, “a hopeless failure.”

  But Lenin, who loved a fight, now launched what he called his “drive to power.” Through the spring and summer of 1917, he appeared before Petrograd crowds, giving passionate speeches. Even though he could not pronounce his Rs, his use of easy slogans and repetition made his message memorable. “Bread, peace, land, and all power to the Soviets. That is what we … want. That is what we … des
erve. Bread, peace, land, and all power to the Soviets.” Thumbs shoved under his armpits, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of his staccato words, Lenin possessed, said a listener, “a curious, hypnotic power.”

  His message was strengthened by the continued ineffectiveness of the Provisional Government. The cost of living had continued to skyrocket; food supplies remained scarce; and no steps had been taken to help the peasants toward their hearts’ desire of more land. The war, citizens believed, was to blame for all these problems. So why weren’t their new leaders doing something about the conflict? Could those rich, upper-class ministers in the cabinet be continuing the war for their own purposes? Mistrust growing, the Petrograd Soviet demanded to know the government’s war policy.

  In early April, leaders responded with their Declaration on War Aims. Russia’s role in the conflict, the document claimed, would be purely defensive. She would protect her borders and nothing more.

  But the soviet was not entirely assured. It insisted the Provisional Government send a diplomatic note to their allies declaring the same.

  Government leaders agreed.

  But just weeks later, on May 3, newspapers defiantly published the contents of that note. And it contradicted what leaders had told the soviet. Instead, the government’s foreign minister, P. N. Milyukov, had assured allies that Russia would go on fighting Germany to the bitter end.

  The next day, mass demonstrations broke out in Petrograd and Moscow. Angry mobs carrying guns and banners denounced the foreign minister. They declared the government deceitful and hypocritical. They demanded change.

  To calm the chaos, Milyukov quickly resigned. But it wasn’t enough. The people demanded more representation in the new government. After a long and heated debate, the Petrograd Soviet decided, much to Bolshevik members’ disgust, to participate in the Provisional Government. Five moderate members of the soviet now joined the reorganized ministry.