In response, the Bolsheviks created their own army, known as the Red Army.
Civil war, Lenin realized, had erupted.
But how could he fight this new conflict when Russia remained at war with Germany? He knew he couldn’t.
Back when the Provisional Government was still in power, “Peace” had been Lenin’s key slogan. Workers had rallied around him because of his promise to end the war. Peace, they believed, would bring prosperity. Now, Lenin knew, he had to make good on his promise. He had to end hostilities. Otherwise, he risked being overthrown himself.
So he sent a delegation to meet with the German High Command at their military headquarters in the town of Brest-Litovsk (located in modern-day Belarus). There, on March 3, 1918, the delegates gave in to all of Germany’s demands, signing away Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and the Crimea. This amounted to 32 percent of Russia’s land, 54 percent of its factories, and 89 percent of its coal mines. It also placed more than one-third of its population—sixty million Russian citizens—into Germany’s hands. In return, Russia was allowed to put down her guns and walk away.
NICHOLAS HEARS THE NEWS
The news, when it reached Tobolsk, could not have come at a worse time. For days, Alexei had suffered with a bad cough. According to Nicholas, he “developed a pain in the groin” from it. It was, said Alexandra, “an awful internal hemorrhage … reminding me of Spala.” Day and night, the boy screamed as both the pain and swelling grew worse.
Without Rasputin, Alexandra felt helpless. “He is frightfully thin and yellow,” she wrote. “I sit all day beside him, holding his aching legs, and I have grown almost as thin as he.”
Nicholas was growing thin, too. “It is such a disgrace for Russia,” he gasped when he learned of the treaty, “and amounts to suicide.” His mood swung between anger and sadness. “To think they called [Alexandra] a traitor,” he cried indignantly one moment, only to moan in the next, “How much longer will our unfortunate motherland be torn and ripped apart? Sometimes it seems as if [I] have no more strength to stand it. I don’t even know what to hope for, what to desire.” He tried to comfort himself. “Everything is in the hands of God! He is our only recourse,” he repeated over and over.
THE BOLSHEVIK AGENT
Busy with other, more pressing issues, officials in Moscow had put off making any decisions about the imperial family. But by March 1918 they turned their attention to the Romanovs. What should be done with them? Some of Lenin’s advisers insisted on tossing Nicholas into the fortress dungeons in Petrograd. Others wanted to drag him to Moscow and put him on trial for crimes against the people. But all worried he would be rescued by the White Army now marching across Siberia. If that happened, there was a chance Nicholas would be returned to his throne. There was only one option, those closest to Lenin advised: secretly move the family to a new location. They sent Commissar Vasily Yakovlev to Tobolsk to do just that.
Yakovlev arrived at the Governor’s Mansion on April 22, 1918. There he found a weak and bedridden Alexei. The sight of the former heir lying so still in his bed shook the commissar. “The yellow-complexioned, haggard boy seemed to be passing away,” he later wrote. It was obvious Alexei could not be moved.
Hurrying to the telegraph office, Yakovlev sent a coded message to Moscow: “Only principal part of baggage can be transferred.” Baggage meant the imperial family, while principal part referred to Nicholas. What, Yakovlev asked, did the government want him to do?
Moscow answered immediately: “Removal [of] only principal part is approved.”
The following day, Yakovlev interrupted the imperial couple’s breakfast. He came right to the point. “I must tell you that … my mission is to take your family from Tobolsk, but as your son is ill, I have received a second order that says [Nicholas Romanov] alone must go.”
“I refuse to go,” said Nicholas.
“Then I must take you by force,” replied Yakovlev. He let his words sink in a moment before adding, “Be calm, I am responsible with my life for your safety. If you do not want to go alone, you can take with you any people you wish … [but] be ready. We are leaving tomorrow at four a.m.”
Alexandra’s face turned scarlet. Her fists clenched. Taking a step toward the commissar, she screamed, “You want to tear him away from his family! How can you? How? His son is sick! He can’t go, he must stay with us! This is too cruel!”
“Like an animal,” recalled Yakovlev, she began pacing back and forth. Under her breath she muttered, “If [Nicholas] is taken alone, he’ll do something stupid, like he did before. Without me, they can force him to do whatever they want.”
But how could she leave Alexei?
Rushing to her bedroom, she sent for Pierre Gilliard. When he arrived, she wailed, “I can’t let the tsar go alone.… I ought to be at his side in this time of trial.… But the boy is still so ill.… Oh, God, what a ghastly torture.… For the first time in my life I don’t know what I ought to do; I’ve always felt inspired whenever I’ve had to take a decision, but now I can’t think.”
All morning, she muttered, raged, wept, and paced.
Her behavior frightened her daughters. They’d never seen her act like this before. Even during the worst of times—Alexei’s illness in Poland, Rasputin’s murder, Nicholas’s abdication—Alexandra had kept her regal composure.
Finally, Tatiana spoke up. “Mother,” she said soothingly, “something must be decided.”
Gilliard agreed. He suggested Alexandra go with the tsar. He and the others, he promised, “would take great care of [Alexei].”
At last, Alexandra gave in. “Yes, that will be best; I’ll go with the tsar.”
But who would go with the empress and tend to her needs? Not Olga, Alexandra decided. She was too dispirited. And certainly not Tatiana. Her superior nursing skills were needed to care for Alexei. Anastasia? She was just “too young to be taken into account.” That left Marie, “an angel and the best of us.”
Their decision made, the family spent the rest of the evening together at Alexei’s bedside. It was a long, dreadful night. Faces swollen from crying, the girls clung to one another’s hands. Yakovlev had promised to fetch the rest of the family in three weeks. But could the Bolshevik be trusted? The family had never been separated this way before, and they were terrified. Again and again, one or another burst into tears.
“God won’t allow the tsar’s departure,” said Alexandra, tears streaming down her face. “It can’t be. It mustn’t be.” Bowing her head, she desperately prayed that the frozen rivers, which they would have to cross on their journey, would suddenly thaw and overflow their banks. “I know, I am convinced [it will happen],” she said. “I am sure a miracle will take place.”
But no miracle came. Just before four a.m. the next morning, an assortment of horse-pulled carts, wagons, and carriages rolled into the courtyard, followed by a long line of soldiers. Soon the front door of the Governor’s Mansion opened, and the three Romanovs stepped outside. Yakovlev escorted them and the handful of servants accompanying them to their vehicles. Then he gave the signal, and the procession moved forward—out through the wooden fence and down the frozen street, the sound of the rumbling wheels fading into the gray light.
On the steps, left behind and feeling utterly alone, stood Anastasia, Olga, and Tatiana. “[They] gazed for a long time into the distance,” recalled one witness, “then turned and slowly, one after the other, entered the house.”
As they passed their brother’s room, where Gilliard sat with a distraught Alexei, the tutor heard the girls weeping.
LEFT BEHIND
With Nicholas and Alexandra gone, “sadness … descended on the house,” said valet Alexei Volkov. The children waited nervously for news of their parents. What was happening to them? Even Anastasia turned solemn and fretful. “These days I am boring, and not pretty,” she admitted.
Finally, on May 3, a week after the family’s separation, Commissar Yakovlev cabled with news. The group was in Ek
aterinburg, a city located in the Ural Mountains.
The news stunned those in Tobolsk. “Why Ekaterinburg?” wrote one household member. “We always thought that Moscow was their destination.”
Moscow had been their destination. But while Yakovlev and his “baggage” were en route, Bolshevik officials suddenly changed their minds. They ordered Nicholas and his family to the Urals. No one knows exactly why. Certainly, leaders in Ekaterinburg—a town with fierce anti-tsarist sentiments—had pressured the government to hand over the Romanovs to them. They claimed their remote location eight hundred miles east of Moscow would keep the family safe. But Moscow also knew that Ekaterinburg’s soviet was, according to one official report made in 1918, undisciplined and violent. Many of its town leaders eagerly spoke of “finishing off the butcher [Nicholas II].” So brutal was their reputation that Commissar Yakovlev grew worried about delivering the family there. Aware that Lenin was considering putting Nicholas on trial for crimes against the Russian people, Yakovlev cabled Moscow as soon as he received the new orders. “I consider it my duty to warn [you],” he began. If the family was left in Ekaterinburg, not only would Moscow never be able to get them back, but “[the Romanovs] will be in utter danger at all times.” His warning did not change Moscow’s mind.
Days later, a letter written by Marie but dictated by Alexandra finally arrived in Tobolsk. “It is not clear how things will be here,” read the letter. Unable to give many details about their new surroundings because all ingoing and outgoing mail was read by the Ekaterinburg guards first, the empress did warn that all their belongings had been searched, even their “medicines.”
Medicines was the Romanovs’ code word for jewels. Before she left, Alexandra had instructed the girls to conceal the family’s jewelry if they ever received this message. Now they took up needle and thread and cleverly sewed close to $14 million worth of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls into the hems of skirts and the belts of dresses; behind jacket buttons and under hat rims, and deep inside pillows and cushions. Most of the “medicines” were concealed between double layers of cotton in the girls’ camisoles—almost nineteen pounds of diamonds alone in each of these undergarments. The jewels were all the family had left of their vast fortune, their financial future if they escaped Russia.
While they sewed, another letter arrived, this one from Marie. “We get nasty surprises here every day,” she wrote ominously. “Who would think … we would be treated like this? We hope you have it better.”
The children didn’t. In mid-May, the Bolshevik government had sent another commissar to Tobolsk—Nicholas Rodionov. Described by one courtier as a “right snake of a man,” Rodionov hated the imperial family and enjoyed inflicting petty humiliations on the grand duchesses. Armed from head to toe with revolvers, rifles, and knives, the new commissar stalked about the house, keeping careful watch over his prisoners. His orders were to bring the rest of the family to Ekaterinburg as soon as Alexei could travel. In the meantime, the Governor’s Mansion would become “a strict prison,” he announced.
On his first day, he ordered the doors inside the house to remain open at all times, even the one leading to the grand duchesses’ bedroom. Prisoners, he declared, must always be watched. When valet Volkov protested—“Your soldiers would pass by there all the time!”—Rodionov pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the servant. “If you do not do as I have ordered … I [will] shoot you where you stand,” he warned. From then on, the girls had little privacy.
Rodionov also instituted a daily roll call. Every morning, the prisoners were made to line up in the ballroom, facing the commissar. “Are you Olga Nikolaevna? Tatiana Nikolaevna?” he shouted into their faces. Stepping forward, they obediently answered his questions. “Darling,” Olga wrote in one of the last letters she sent to Anna Vyrubova, “you must know how dreadful it all is.”
These changes—so obviously and frighteningly a taste of what was to come in Ekaterinburg—forced Gibbes and Gilliard to question whether or not the children should be sent to their parents. “We feel we ought to delay [their] departure as long as possible,” Gilliard wrote in his diary.
The girls refused to hear of it. In the three weeks since their parents’ departure, Alexei, though still unable to walk, had grown strong enough to travel. All four were eager to be reunited with their family. “In our thoughts we are with you all the time,” Anastasia wrote Marie. “It is terribly sad and empty [here] and I have whole trainloads of things to tell you all.”
And so the prisoners began packing. “The rooms are empty,” Alexei scrawled in his diary. “Little by little everything is [put] away. The walls look bare without their pictures.”
On their final night in the Governor’s Mansion, as a maid wrapped the last of the knickknacks, Rodionov suddenly appeared at her side. “Life down there [in Ekaterinburg],” he whispered, “will be very different.”
LAST STOP
On May 23, after a three-day journey, the train carrying the imperial children pulled into the Ekaterinburg station. Despite an icy drizzle, a large crowd had gathered. “I cannot describe the faces I saw,” said one courtier. “Fat faces, lean faces, but all with deadly, intense hatred stamped on them.”
As the luggage was being taken out, one man grabbed a box and tore it open. Out spilled boots and shoes. “Look! [The tsar] has six pairs and I have none,” cried the man. In response, the mob began chanting, “Death to the tyrant!” and surged forward. A second box, full of Alexandra’s gowns, was ripped open. The sight further enraged the crowd. “The dresses … of wanton women,” shrieked a woman, pointing toward the train. “Off with their heads!”
In response, the mob screamed, “Down with them! Hang them! Drown them in the lake!”
From the train window, the children watched as the soldiers worked to hold back the mob. Finally, Rodionov ordered them out of the train. As they gathered up their things and went out into the gray Siberian day, their expressions, recalled one eyewitness, were “a tragic symphony … nervous, emotional … trying to suppress [their] pride, but also trying to suppress [their] fear in front of hostile strangers.”
Pierre Gilliard, who had been placed in a separate car for the entire journey, saw them go. “Nagorny the sailor … passed my window, carrying the sick [Alexei] in his arms; behind him came the grand duchesses, loaded with valises and small personal belongings.… Tatiana Nikolaevna came last, carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining, and I saw her feet sinking into the mud at every step.” The girls climbed into a waiting carriage and drove away. Added Gilliard, “How little I suspected that I was never to see them again.”
THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE
Stretching across a cluster of small hills, Ekaterinburg was a city of iron-smelting factories, soap works, and tanneries. Its wide boulevards were lined with fine houses and golden-domed churches, as well as a natural history museum, two theaters, and even an opera house.
Near the center of this town, on an unpaved street lined with linden trees, a wealthy engineer named N. N. Ipatiev had built himself an ornate, two-story stone house. But in April, just as Nicholas and Alexandra were being taken from Tobolsk, Ipatiev had received orders from the Bolshevik government to leave. He’d had time to pack just a few belongings before workmen arrived to transform his home into a prison. Hastily, they built a tall wooden fence that not only reached the windows on the upper floors, but entirely hid the house and its garden from the street. Later, this fence would be extended even higher—all the way up to the house’s eaves. They sealed off five rooms on the upper floor as a prison and whitewashed all the windows so the captives could not see out. “It [always] looks as if there is a thick fog outside,” complained Nicholas. Only one of these windows could be opened. Without much ventilation, the rooms, said Nicholas, were very “hot and stuffy.” When all was ready, the house had received its new and ominous name, the House of Special Purpose.
Now the carriages carrying the children
rolled into the House of Special Purpose’s courtyard. For the last time, they saw the outside world. Then the fence’s heavy wooden doors slammed behind them, and they raced through the rain into the house, where their parents eagerly waited.
IN FIVE ROOMS
The children found themselves crammed into five interconnecting rooms with their parents and their servants—Dr. Botkin, the maid Anna Demidova, cook Ivan Kharitonov and his fourteen-year-old kitchen assistant Leonid Sednev, and footman Alexei Trupp. The empress had hoped to squeeze in Gibbes and Gilliard, too. But officials denied the men permission to enter the house. Instead, they were returned to Tobolsk, along with many of the others who had accompanied the grand duchesses.
Nicholas and Alexandra occupied the corner bedroom. With its couch and armoire, it was small but “cosy,” said Marie. This room’s only exit was through the girls’ cramped bedroom (actually a former dressing room) with its floral wallpaper and oriental rug. Until their army cots arrived from the train station, the girls snuggled together on a mound of coats and blankets on the floor, whispering late into the night.
There was little other furniture in their room—a table, a few upright chairs, and a large mirror in one corner. As the weeks passed, the girls had less and less use for this last item. Even though they’d left Tsarskoe Selo with boxes of clothing, they hadn’t been allowed to bring most of them into the House of Special Purpose. Instead, their luggage had been tossed unopened and haphazardly into a storage shed located behind the house. Soon, the few clothes they had grew threadbare and faded. Did they find themselves standing before the mirror, longing for the white lace dresses they used to wear?
The girls’ room was connected to the dining room with its wooden floors and solid oak furniture. At Nicholas’s insistence, all of the prisoners—royals and servants alike—sat together for meals at the big table. But there was not enough silverware to go around. This was because their fine tableware also sat unopened in the shed. Other things sat untouched in the shed, too—boxes of Alexei’s baby clothes, riding crops, binoculars, and most disappointing to the children, their beloved Brownie box cameras. Even in Tobolsk, the family had been allowed to use them. But guards had confiscated the cameras here in Ekaterinburg. There was something else in the shed, too—Nicholas’s diaries and letters, neatly stacked in crate number nine marked A.F. and crate number thirteen marked N.A.
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 20
