But the people’s trust in their government was evaporating. By midsummer 1917, Bolshevik slogans began to resonate with many soviet members. Recalled one soviet member, “[Lenin] was followed unquestioningly as [the Bolsheviks’ chosen] leader … a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause.”
SPRING DAYS
In May—as Lenin fanned the flames of insurrection against the Provisional Government—Nicholas and his children planted a vegetable garden. Happily, they moved sod, turned soil, and poked seeds into muddy furrows. Their clothing grew dirt-streaked and their fingernails turned black. But they didn’t care. Working in the sunshine was bliss. And incredibly, some soldiers even offered to help. After weeks of standing over the Romanovs, they began to see them as ordinary people. Soon, wrote Gilliard in his diary, “several guards even [came] to help us!” Hatred softening, they laid down their rifles and picked up hoes. Before long, the family was chatting with the soldiers as they all weeded and tilled together.
ENTER KERENSKY
While the Romanovs tended their cabbages, the Provisional Government wrestled with the question of what to do with the family. At first, everyone believed they would be sent to England. Not only was King George V related to Nicholas and Alexandra (he was first cousin to both of them), he had even offered them refuge in his country. That spring, however, King George received thousands of letters from incensed British citizens. With the war against Germany and Austria still raging, they saw German-born Alexandra as an enemy. Worried that public opinion might boil over as it had in Russia, King George withdrew his invitation.
The next best thing to do, decided Alexander Kerensky, was to move the Romanovs someplace far from Petrograd. Just an hour’s car ride away, the capital seethed with angry citizens. Seeking revenge, many demanded the family be imprisoned in the small, dark cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Shouts of “To the palace! To the palace!” were repeatedly heard in the streets. Kerensky feared a vengeful mob might attack the family.
The city’s atmosphere grew even more dangerous in July 1917, when the Provisional Government decided to launch a military offensive against the Austrians. It had been two years since the Russian army had gone on the attack. Morale among the soldiers had never been lower; mass desertions continued and many refused to fight. The Provisional Government, however, was encouraged by the United States’ entry into the war. This powerful new ally, they hoped, would somehow help Russia defeat Germany. Kerensky—who had recently become minister of war—toured the front, making eloquent speeches to rally the troops. The offensive began in early July and soon turned into a rout, not for the Austrians and the Germans who helped them, but for the Russians, as hundreds of thousands of peasant soldiers were killed.
Passionate antiwar feelings erupted. In Petrograd, half a million people took to the streets on July 16 and 17. “Down with the war!” they shouted. “Down with the Provisional Government!” Among them marched twenty thousand sailors, many of them Bolsheviks, armed with rifles and revolvers. Eager for instructions from the man whom they considered their leader, they headed to Lenin’s house. If he approved, they intended to march on the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was now headquartered, round up the ministers, and proclaim soviet power. But when they arrived, Lenin refused to even speak to them. Finally persuaded to say a few words, he stepped onto the balcony and mumbled briefly about the future of soviet power. Why didn’t he fire up the crowds to topple the government? No one knows for sure. Minutes later, the discouraged sailors marched away. That’s when soldiers of the Provisional Government began firing on them from rooftops and the upper windows of buildings. When it was over, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded. Recalled one witness, “It is clear that the crowds on the street had absolutely no idea of what they were doing—it was all a nightmare. Nobody knew the aims of the uprising or its leaders. Were there any leaders at all? I doubt it.”
This uprising convinced Kerensky that the imperial family needed to be moved immediately. “The Bolsheviks are after me,” he told Nicholas, “and then will be after you.” But where could the family live safely?
Nicholas and Alexandra wanted to be sent to their palace in the Crimea. But Kerensky knew this was impossible. Their train would have to pass through Central Russia, where angry peasants were burning down manor houses and killing landowners. After much thought, Kerensky picked a quiet river town called Tobolsk in western Siberia. “I chose Tobolsk because it was an out-and-out backwater,” Kerensky later wrote, “[with a] population which was prosperous and contented.… In addition … the climate was excellent and the town boasted a very passable Governor’s residence where the family could live with some measure of comfort.”
On August 11, Kerensky visited Tsarskoe Selo. “Start packing,” he told the royal couple. “Be prepared to leave … within a few days.”
“Where are we going?” asked Alexandra.
“For your safety, it must remain a secret,” replied Kerensky.
Kerensky kept his secret from almost everyone else, too. “Only five or six men in all of Petrograd knew about it,” he later wrote. “I made all the plans to move the family myself.”
First, he handpicked the men who would accompany the family and act as guards once they reached their destination—loyal men who would follow Kerensky’s orders to the letter. “Behave like gentlemen, not like cads,” he advised them. “Remember, [Nicholas] is a former Emperor and neither he nor his family must suffer any hardships.”
Next he made the travel arrangements. Knowing he could not transport the family in their easily recognizable blue imperial train, he had an ordinary one fitted out with Japanese flags and placards that read “Japanese Red Cross Mission.” Kerensky hoped this disguise would reduce the chances of the family being recognized and captured.
BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:
THE “TSAR’S SURPRISE PARTY”
In the summer of 1917, American journalist Albert Rhys Williams was traveling across Siberia when his train came to an abrupt stop. In his book Through the Russian Revolution, he reported what happened next:
Suddenly from behind a snow-bank a figure shoots up … and comes running violently for the train.… From other snow-piles and bushes and from the far horizon, more and more figures keep emerging, until the whole plain is dotted with men racing headlong for the train … carrying … guns and grenades.… They are a harsh, determined lot. Many of them are grimy, nearly black. All of them have black looks for the train.…
[I] thrust my head out [the train window] and … address [their leader.] … “Where did all these men suddenly spring from? Why is the train held up?”
[He replied, laughing,] “These men are miners from the great coal mines less than half a mile away, and peasants from the village. Thousands more will be along directly.… We [intend] … to take off of it the Tsar and the Royal Family.”
“Tsar and Royal Family? On this train? Here?” [I] shouted.
“We don’t know that for sure.… [But] every man dropped his tools, snatched up his gun and rushed for the train.… You see how deeply we feel for our Tsar? Only twenty minutes advance notice, and we got this nice, big [surprise] party ready for him. He likes military displays. Well, here it is. Not in regulation style, but quite impressive, is it not?”
It was! Never have I seen such a beweaponed set of men.… In their hands were missiles enough to blow a thousand Tsars into eternity, and in their hearts and eyes vengeance enough to annihilate ten thousand.… They combed the train from end to end, opening trunks, ransacking beds, even shifting the logs on the engine tender to see if His Imperial Majesty might be hidden in the woodpile. There were two white-bearded peasants who … would run their guns under [each train car], ram their bayonets around, and then withdraw them, shaking their heads sadly. The Tsar of All the Russias they hoped to find riding the bumpers.… Each time disappointed, they would hope for better luck at the next car and repeat
the proddings. But there was no Tsar, and so their bayonets did not puncture him.
FAREWELL, TSARSKOE SELO
How does one choose among the belongings of a lifetime? In his study, Nicholas sorted through his papers. Some he destroyed. Others he locked in a file cabinet, taking the key into exile with him. And still others—all fifty of his diaries as well as the over six hundred letters Alexandra had written to him since their courtship—went into two crates marked A.F. (for Alexandra Feodorovna) and N.A. (Nicholas Alexandrovich).
In her dressing room, Alexandra emptied the contents of her closets onto the floor. Then she picked through the huge mound of clothing, making two piles. Into the smallest one went the items she was taking along; the other, much larger pile would be donated to war victims. Afterward, she packed her family photographs, prayer books, and icon collection. Unlike Nicholas, she had no diaries or letters to pack. She had burned these during the tense days just before Nicholas’s abdication.
Overhead, the children bustled about. Along with their clothes, the girls packed books, art supplies, photograph albums, and their Brownie box cameras. Alexei added his tin soldiers, a chessboard, and his toy gun. Even the army cots with their thin mattresses and satin comforters would be folded up and taken along.
August 13, 1917, was their last day at Tsarskoe Selo. While Alexandra did some last-minute packing, the children drifted through the palace for the final time. Already, the rooms felt empty, the dustcloth-covered furniture looking like forlorn ghosts. They rowed across the pond to visit Children’s Island one last time, and walked between the furrows of the now lush vegetable garden. “What shall the future bring for my poor children?” Alexandra wondered that day. “My heart breaks thinking of them.”
As ordered, at five o’clock that evening, the family gathered in the semicircular hall to wait for word that the train arranged for by Kerensky had arrived at the station. Around them, fifty soldiers grunted and cursed as they moved the family’s mountain of luggage. Besides clothing, toys, and personal papers, there were crates of books, rolled-up Turkish rugs, reams of bed linen marked with the imperial crest, silverware, fine porcelain dinner plates, clocks, fragile vases, silver pencils, and velvet cushions. Anything to preserve the appearance of their former luxurious lives. Other necessary items included the tsar’s portable chin-up bar, Alexandra’s nursing kit, and the electroshock machine Dr. Botkin used on Alexei’s weak leg muscles. There were vials of holy water; boxes of smelling salts; laxatives, morphine, and even a year’s supply of bath oil and cologne.
But more than luggage accompanied the family. In addition to several courtiers who had chosen to share their exile, the Romanovs went with two valets, six chambermaids, ten footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a clerk, a nurse, a doctor, a barber, a butler, a wine steward, two pet spaniels, and a bulldog.
Now the Romanovs sat among the detritus of their lives, and waited. But as the hours passed with no word of the train, the family grew more and more nervous. Finally, at eleven p.m., Kerensky arrived to take the situation in hand. He found the grand duchesses huddled together “weeping copiously” while the tsar stood at one of the windows stonily smoking cigarette after cigarette. Even the usually stoic Alexandra was affected by the nerve-racking delay. Sitting in her wheelchair, “she wept and worried like any ordinary woman,” recalled Kerensky.
As the hours continued to pass, Kerensky also grew pale and tense. The train ordered for one a.m. did not arrive. It did not come at two a.m. either. When three a.m. came and went, Kerensky picked up the phone. The problem, he learned, was the rail workers. On strike, they refused to couple the cars together. Kerensky desperately tried to work out a deal with them, but two anxious hours passed before the group finally heard cars pull into the driveway. Their train was ready, Kerensky told them. It was time to head to the station.
Alexandra, her face ashy white, took Nicholas’s arm and walked out the door. Behind them came the children, all five of them in tears. Overhead, the sky was a rosy pink, the first rays of sunlight bathing the palace and the park in a golden haze. As the cars pulled away, the family turned and watched until their beloved Tsarskoe Selo faded into the distance.
They would never see it again.
TOBOLSK
The journey to Tobolsk took a week, the train clacking over a ribbon of rails that stretched across the empty Siberian grasslands before crossing the Ural Mountains and chugging into the river town of Tyumen. Here the family transferred to a steamer for the last leg of their trip down the Tura River. It took forty hours to cover the last two hundred miles. Nicholas and the children spent most of their waking hours on the steamer’s upper deck, playing with the dogs, basking in the sunshine, and gazing out across the barren landscape. It was all so different from the ornate palaces and manicured parks they knew. The countryside seemed to stretch forever, broken only by an occasional village of mud roads and simple log huts. Just before sunset on the first day, the steamer passed the village of Pokrovskoe, where Rasputin had lived. Years earlier, the starets had predicted they would see it for themselves. Now, standing at the boat’s railing, the entire family watched as his village glided past. Alexandra was especially moved. Crossing herself, she took the sight as a sign of her destiny.
Finally, Tobolsk came into view. As the boat slipped into the wharf, the passengers saw a town of dirt roads and whitewashed churches, log huts and wooden plank sidewalks. It was a far cry from cosmopolitan Petrograd some two thousand miles away.
The Romanovs’ new home was a two-story mansion that had once belonged to the governor of the province. The family and their servants quickly decorated it with the furniture, rugs, and other items they had brought with them. It was “arranged all quite cozily,” said Olga.
Even though the mansion had fourteen rooms, it could not house everyone who’d accompanied the Romanovs. The imperial family took up the entire first floor, the grand duchesses sharing a corner room next door to their parents while Alexei lived opposite, and Pierre Gilliard settled into the study on the ground floor. Most of the servants had to live across the street in a sprawling pink house that had been commandeered from a wealthy merchant.
Both houses sat on a dusty avenue that the townspeople of Tobolsk had renamed Freedom Street after the revolution. Sometimes they even called the Governor’s Mansion the Freedom House. But without a doubt, the place was now a prison. Armed guards stood at all the entrances, and not long after the family moved in, a tall wooden wall was built. Extending all the way around the house, the wall also enclosed the greenhouse and a little-used side street meant as a sort of courtyard for exercise. The Romanovs were used to living behind fences. But always before they’d been erected to keep people out. This was the first one built specifically to keep the family in.
Still, life was far from uncomfortable. Just as Kerensky had said, the townspeople remained respectful of the tsar. Whenever they walked past the house, they removed their hats and crossed themselves. Just a glimpse of Nicholas sent them to their knees. Spotting Alexandra in her second-story window, they bowed. And whenever the grand duchesses stepped out onto the second-floor balcony, so many people gathered below on the sidewalk that the guards were forced to wave their rifles to shoo them away. Recalled one resident, “We were all amazed at the girls.”
So attached to the imperial family were some of the shopkeepers that they regularly sent gifts of bread and meat. Peasant farmers arrived with fresh butter and eggs. And to dessert-loving Anastasia’s joy, nuns from the local convent brought sugar and cakes. While much of the country starved, the youngest grand duchess grew “very fat … round and fat to the waist,” remarked her mother.
Perhaps Anastasia overate because she was bored. The family tried everything it could think of to keep busy. They sawed and chopped wood. They snapped photographs of each other, played card games, knit or did needlework, and listened as Nicholas read aloud from The Three Musketeers or The Scarlet Pimpernel. He even built a small wooden platform on top
of the greenhouse roof, where he and the children could sit, secluded and above it all. There in the sunlight, they could close their eyes and conjure up images of Tsarskoe Selo’s shaded footpaths and sweet-smelling lilacs. They could dream about home and freedom.
Still, time dragged. “The whole day was just like yesterday,” Alexei complained time and again in his diary. “Everything is the same!” “Boring!!!” “It’s still boring.”
What a relief it was when the children’s English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, arrived.
A FACE FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Gibbes had been away when the Romanovs were placed under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. Returning to the Alexander Palace, he discovered he’d been locked out. Dismayed, he repeatedly petitioned the Provisional Government for permission to rejoin the family. Seven months later, in October 1917, he finally received it. Taking the first available train to Siberia, the tutor arrived in Tobolsk just before winter did.
The tsar, who had been lunching with the children when Gibbes turned up at the Governor’s Mansion, hurried forward to grip the tutor’s hand. “He absolutely pounced on me,” recalled Gibbes, so eager was he to hear the most recent war news. (Nicholas received newspapers weeks, sometimes even months, late.) Were the Germans being held back? How many troops had the Americans, who’d entered the conflict in April 1917, sent to Europe? As Gibbes spoke, he couldn’t help but notice how “extremely … cheerful” the tsar looked. He still depended on Alexandra for even the most trivial decisions. “I will ask my wife; her wishes are mine,” he said whenever he was asked for an opinion. But months of working outdoors had left him looking fit and healthy.
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 18
