The final space was the drawing room. Here, Alexandra made an altar by covering a table with her lace bedspread and the family’s icons. Here, too, the girls played the mahogany piano left behind by Comrade Ipatiev, while Nicholas sat reading beneath an ornate chandelier of Italian glass. At night, this room became Dr. Botkin’s bedroom, while Trupp, Kharitonov, and young Leonid slept in the stairway hall. Anna Demidova was given a closet-size room toward the back of the house.
Also located on the house’s top floor, but separate from the prisoners’ rooms, was Commandant Alexander Avdeev’s office. A former factory worker, Avdeev was tall and thin-faced, and behind Nicholas’s back called him “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker.” He had gotten the job of overseeing the Romanovs’ imprisonment because of his dedication to the Bolshevik party. In the elegant office that had once belonged to Comrade Ipatiev, the commander smoked and drank and scrawled an occasional order on stationery he’d had engraved with the words “House of Special Purpose.” Between shifts, guards squeezed into the office, flinging their rifles onto the rich carpets before reclining on the sofa’s plush cushions. These guards, noted Nicholas sarcastically, “are original in both composition and dress.”
Indeed, the forty men guarding the imperial family were not professional soldiers or hardened Bolshevik revolutionaries. Most were young factory workers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three (some the same age as the grand duchesses). They did not have any fighting experience, or know how to handle guns. They had not taken the job out of hatred for the tsar but rather for the “money,” explained a twenty-one-year-old guard named Alexander Strekotin.
Young and immature, these guards made “all kinds of mistakes,” admitted Strekotin, “like sleeping at their posts, leaving their posts, [and] letting people in for a peek [at the imperial family].” One guard accidentally fired his rifle into a storeroom ceiling directly beneath the grand duchesses’ bedroom, causing the girls to scream with fear. Another dropped a hand grenade into the garden, where it exploded, rattling both windows and nerves. And one day while Anastasia stood at the prison’s one open window, hoping to catch a scrap of breeze, a bullet whizzed past her head and lodged in the wall behind her. Had one of the guards shot at her on purpose? Nicholas refused to believe it. No one would dare fire at the tsar’s daughter, not even in revolutionary Russia … would they? “In my opinion,” he said with mock bravado, “[the sentry] was just fooling around with his rifle the way guards always do.”
But was he really? Days later, according to an often-repeated but unsubstantiated story, Anastasia asked the commandant’s assistant for permission to visit the storage shed. She wanted to fetch a pair of shoes from her luggage. The assistant laughed nastily. “The shoes [you have] on,” he said, would easily “last the rest of [your] life.”
A MONOTONY OF DAYS
Days passed, each one the same. Rising between eight and nine every morning, the family dressed and joined the rest of the prisoners before the makeshift altar. After prayers (led by Alexandra), they headed into the dining room for a breakfast of black bread and tea. This was also the time when Commandant Avdeev took roll call, making sure that each prisoner was accounted for. Once in a while, the family received a cup of hot chocolate or a slice of cold meat for breakfast. But for the most part, they received the same rations as any other Russian citizen.
At first, a workplace cafeteria called a canteen delivered the family’s meals every day, usually an unvaried menu of soup and pork cutlets. In mid-June, worried about the imperial family’s diet, nuns from a nearby convent began bringing eggs, milk, cream, and bread to the house’s gates each morning, which the family’s cook, Ivan Kharitonov, turned into simple meals. The nuns also brought sausages, vegetables, and the occasional meat pie. These last items never reached the imperial table. Instead, Avdeev and his guards gobbled them up.
During the day, the family filled their hours by reading or sewing. They played cards. Anastasia taught the dogs tricks. And all the girls helped Anna Demidova with the household chores. They swept floors, washed dishes, and gathered up the family’s dirty laundry so it could be sent out for cleaning. But this last task quickly became a problem. The grand duchesses “insisted on changing their bed linen every day,” recalled Avdeev. In just a few weeks, they racked up a whopping 87-ruble laundry bill (around $428)!
When soviet officials saw the bill, they flew into a rage. It was outrageous, absurd, “astronomical!” From now on, they ordered, the imperial family would have to wash its own bed linens. After all, “a little work never hurt anyone.”
The grand duchesses were willing. But they didn’t know the first thing about doing laundry. They asked Avdeev for directions. But the commandant knew as little as they did. So he headed to the library in search of a manual. But “[I] could find no written instructions on how to do laundry.” Anxious to carry out the soviet’s order, Avdeev finally hired the girls a laundry instructor, bestowing upon him the title “Comrade Laundry Teacher to the House of Special Purpose.” Recalled the commandant, “[He] proved rather clever with this work, and got on well with the grand duchesses.”
A few weeks later, the bored grand duchesses begged Ivan Kharitonov for bread-baking lessons. With the commandant’s permission, they spent an entire morning in the upstairs kitchen, happily mixing and kneading. The results, noted Alexandra in her diary, were “excellent.”
The family’s evenings were filled with more reading, more card games, more prayers.
The only break in this routine came in the late morning and again in the afternoon. That’s when the family was allowed to walk for thirty minutes outside in the small, weed-choked garden.
Why so little time outdoors? Nicholas had asked his captors. Summer had finally come to Siberia, hot and sunny. How could they be so cruel as to leave the family trapped indoors all day with the sealed-in smells of cigarette smoke and sweat? “It [is] unbearable to [be] … locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden … and spend a fine evening outside,” Nicholas said. Couldn’t he and the children clean up the garden or chop wood?
Avdeev’s assistant denied his request.
“Why?” persisted Nicholas.
“So that this resembles a prison regime,” replied the assistant.
Still, the two youngest grand duchesses must have relished this brief chance to feel the sun on their skin. At these times, the guards heard them laugh as they chased the dogs through the scraggly flower beds or around the few trees.
Alexei, too, must have enjoyed the fresh air. Although the boy could no longer walk, Nicholas “hugged him to his broad chest” and carried him outside to a waiting wheelchair. Then Leonid Sednev, the fourteen-year-old kitchen assistant, would push Alexei into the garden. Sometimes the boys played with toy soldiers. Other times, Nicholas would bring his son pebbles or flowers to examine. “Being a child,” recalled one of the guards, “[Alexei] would look at them and then toss them into the bushes.”
When the family first arrived, all the guards (even those not on duty) had pressed into the garden to get a look at them. Soon, recalled guard Alexander Strekotin, “everyone had a chance to see [the grand duchesses].” They quickly became the topic of conversation between the young men, who “passed some sleepless nights speaking of them when they were off duty.”
“There is nothing special about them,” declared one guard.
They are “stuck up and stupid,” said another.
But Strekotin disagreed. “There was something very special about them,” he argued. “You could look at them in their old and tattered clothes … like any poor girls, but yet there was something especially sweet about them. They always looked good to me, and I thought they would not have looked better even if they had been covered in gold and diamonds.”
Strict rules prohibited prisoners and guards from talking to one another. But Anastasia and Marie didn’t care. They were used to speaking with soldiers, and felt a natural ease in their company. And so they drew the young
men into lighthearted conversations.
Flirtatious and giggling, the “Little Pair” would stroll across the garden, their spaniel, Jemmy, scampering along at their feet. Approaching a guard on duty, Anastasia would pretend to yawn. “We’re so bored!” she would say. “In Tobolsk there was always something to do. I know! Try to guess the name of this dog.”
How could the guards resist?
Some joined eagerly in the banter, answering the girls’ questions about their lives and hobbies. Others, with smiles and winks, said, “Don’t try to distract me with your smooth talk—just keep walking.”
The girls, “pretending fright,” said Strekotin, “would hurry along the path, then burst into giggles.”
Soon, “everyone relaxed more and began to talk and laugh with each other,” remembered Strekotin.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARIE
On the afternoon of June 27, the “Little Pair,” along with Tatiana and Nicholas, carrying Alexei, went for their scheduled walk in the courtyard. Noted the tsar in his diary, “Our dear Marie is 19 years old.”
One of the guards had also noted the grand duchess’s birthday, and he had smuggled in a cake for her. Somehow, after his shift ended, he managed to pull Marie aside. The two slipped away.
Where did they go? The kitchen? The hallway? One of the storerooms on the lower floor? The historical record doesn’t indicate, but obviously the other guards—sympathetic to their comrade’s feelings—looked the other way as he grabbed his chance to give Marie his gift.
They were soon discovered. Little did the guards know that local Bolshevik authorities had chosen this day to inspect the house. Walking in on the couple, the officials were outraged. Obviously, security had completely collapsed. It was time for a clampdown. Authorities called in Yakov Yurovsky.
“THE DARK GENTLEMAN”
“Today there was a change of commandant,” wrote Nicholas in his diary on July 4. That afternoon, just as the family sat down to lunch, a government official unexpectedly appeared.
“Because of an unpleasant episode that had occurred in [the] house,” the official announced, Commandant Avdeev had been dismissed. He gestured to a tall, dark-haired man standing beside him. Here was the Romanovs’ new captor—Yakov Yurovsky.
Yurovsky greeted the family politely. In fact, he was so respectful and mannerly that at first Nicholas called him “the dark gentleman.”
But behind those impeccable manners, Yurovsky burned with hatred for the imperial family. Raised in Siberia by a father who had been exiled for theft, he grew up in a cramped, stinking apartment above a butcher shop. These years of poverty and deprivation sowed the seeds for a deep-seated hatred of the tsar. When the revolution came, he backed the Bolsheviks with zealous enthusiasm, rising up quickly through the party ranks. He believed his new job—commandant in control of the imperial family’s lives—was his destiny. “It was left to me, son of a worker, to settle the Revolution’s score with the Imperial [Family] for centuries of suffering,” he later said proudly.
Making security his top priority, he replaced the young factory-worker guards with a squad of war-hardened guards. These men, like Yurovsky himself, were “all obedience and command and [they] burned with the Red Fire,” recalled one eyewitness. Talking with the prisoners was now strictly forbidden, and any unauthorized conversations were immediately reported to Yurovsky. In the courtyard, the new guards watched the family closely, constantly on the alert for any word or gesture that might mean the family was trying to signal someone on the street. In addition, Yurovsky installed a new system of alarm bells throughout the house, and reorganized the guard posts. Now a machine gun pointed straight down the street, while a second one set up in the spire of a nearby cathedral was aimed directly at the prisoners’ rooms. Last but not least, Yurovsky had the family’s one open window covered by a thick iron grate. “Always fright[ened] of our climbing out, no doubt,” Alexandra remarked sarcastically.
In fact, he was. Forty-five thousand White Army troops were advancing on Ekaterinburg. Already they had seized control of Tyumen, cutting railroad lines and creating chaos. “Constantly hear artillery passing,” Alexandra wrote in her diary on July 12. “Infantry and twice cavalry during the week.… Also troops marching with music.” The untrained Red Army could do little to stop the advance. Bolshevik officials knew the city would fall. And when it did, the White Army would free the Romanovs. Unless the Bolsheviks murdered them first.
JULY 12
Outside the iron grille of the prisoners’ only open window, thunder rumbled and rain poured down. Alexandra lay in bed with an excruciating backache. But the pain medication Dr. Botkin had brought from Tsarskoe Selo had long been used up. In hopes of soothing her mother, Marie offered to read aloud from the family’s favorite collection of sermons. But time and again, she was interrupted by the sound of marching soldiers and military bands from the street below. Both mother and daughter knew what these sounds meant—the Bolsheviks were losing their hold on Ekaterinburg.
Meanwhile, down the road at Bolshevik headquarters, an urgent meeting was taking place. Nicholas had to be “liquidated” before the city fell. But Lenin and other high-ranking Bolsheviks in Moscow refused to authorize an execution. They still thought of putting Nicholas on trial, where his crimes against the people would be broadcast to the entire country. Of course, Moscow expected the trial to end in a sentence of execution for the tsar. It was, they believed, the only proper punishment for “Bloody Nicholas.”
Even though most officials believed Alexandra was to blame for much of the country’s disintegration, they had no intention of charging her—or the children—with any crimes. Lenin was adamant on this last point. He vehemently opposed murdering the entire imperial family, not because he cared what happened to them but because he believed it would have a bad effect on public opinion across Russia and abroad. Bolsheviks, he insisted, must not be perceived as barbaric or bloodthirsty.
Ekaterinburg officials disagreed. They resented the fact that the tsar and his family were still living in relative comfort at the Ipatiev house while they continued to scrape out a meager living. After all, at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution lay the notion that all privilege must be destroyed. Moscow or no Moscow, they resolved to murder the entire family, as well as their servants. They knew Lenin’s regime, mired as it was in civil war, was not strong enough to punish them for the act.
The only decisions that remained were how and when.
The how they left up to Yurovsky. As for when, they would let him know. But with the White Army marching ever closer, it would be soon.
JULY 13
“It has to be said,” Yurovsky later noted, “that it’s no easy thing to arrange an execution, contrary to what some people may think.”
In the early-morning hours, long before the Romanovs woke, Yurovsky rode out on horseback to Koptyaki Forest, nine miles west of the city. Few people went there. Not only was the place remote, but with its dense woods, peaty swampland, and abandoned, water-filled mine shafts, it was dangerous. The perfect place, Yurovsky decided, to hide the bodies. But could one drive a truck over the muddy, potholed roads? The commandant believed so. Satisfied, he returned to the House of Special Purpose. In the guard book that day, he coolly wrote, “Everything is the same.”
Upstairs, Alexandra was experiencing a rare moment of joy. For the first time since leaving Tobolsk nine weeks earlier, Alexei felt strong enough to take a bath. “Baby … managed to get in and out alone,” she wrote in her diary. “Climb[ed] also alone in and out of bed.” Alexei still could not straighten his leg “but can only stand on one foot,” she noted.
Nicholas, too, wrote in his diary. “Today,” he noted, “we have absolutely no news from the outside.” It was his last recorded statement. After almost forty years of daily journal keeping, Nicholas Romanov simply stopped.
JULY 14
On this bright Sunday morning, just after the family finished breakfast, Father Ivan Storozhev arrived at the House of
Special Purpose. Hours earlier he’d been summoned by Yurovsky to conduct a church service for the Romanovs. This had surprised Father Storozhev. Their captors had repeatedly denied the family’s request for a priest to say Mass with them. So why now? The priest feared to ask. Donning his vestments, he made his way to the prisoners’ drawing room.
They were waiting before the makeshift altar. Propped up in his mother’s wheelchair, Alexei looked ghostlike in his paleness. Alexandra sat beside him in an overstuffed armchair, her face creased with pain. Behind them stood Nicholas and the girls. Recalled Storozhev, they “gave the impression … of being exhausted.” Even Anastasia, her hand resting on her father’s arm, appeared “in depressed spirits.” Yurovsky planted himself in a corner of the room. Crossing his arms over his chest, he never took his eyes off the group as the priest moved through the liturgy.
At last, Father Storozhev came to the part in the service where the traditional prayer for the dead is recited: “With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of your servant, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering but life everlasting.”
Spontaneously, unexpectedly, all but Alexei sank to their knees. Looking across their bowed heads, the priest realized how deeply comforted the prisoners were by the prayer. Then one by one, each came forward to kiss the cross. Tears stood in the grand duchesses’ eyes.
The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Page 21
