In Tobolsk the Romanovs lived in the governor’s mansion, perhaps not in imperial levels of comfort, but with a household which nevertheless included six chambermaids, ten footmen, three chefs and a wine steward. There was space to exercise, and the local people were respectful, removing their caps and crossing themselves when they saw the former tsar. The Bolshevik victory in early November 1917 hardly registered—it took a week for the news to arrive. What upset Nicholas most was that Lenin had immediately begun peace talks with Germany, an outcome the British government, whose contacts within the Bolsheviks were minimal, had dreaded. Thankfully for them, the Americans had now joined the war. Though Lenin regarded the war as a bourgeois fight foisted on the peasants and workers, the peace deal was a bitter pill even for the Bolsheviks: German military successes and the Russian army’s collapse meant that Germany got Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, the Crimea—where Nicholas’s sisters and mother were holed up—and most of the Caucasus, a million miles of Russian territory which contained virtually all its coal and oil, half its industry and a third of its population. For Nicholas, it nullified the whole justification for his abdication—a meaningful sacrifice so long as others would win the war and save Russia. “It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain,” Pierre Gilliard, who had followed the family to Siberia, wrote. When the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, Nicholas was deeply depressed by it: “It is such a disgrace for Russia and amounts to suicide … I should never have thought the Emperor William and the German Government could stoop to shake hands with these miserable traitors.”135
Captivity turned harsher that month. The soldiers became markedly less friendly, luxuries disappeared from the table. Servants and members of the suite were gradually dismissed. Two days before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed, the tutor Gilliard wrote in his diary, “Their Majesties136 still cherish hope that among their loyal friends some may be found to attempt their release.” After arguments over whether Nicholas should stand trial in Moscow—Trotsky fancied himself as principal prosecutor—the family were moved to Ekaterinburg, the centre of Bolshevik militancy in the Urals, in April 1918. They were met by an angry crowd, and imprisoned in a large house which was swiftly enclosed with a high wooden fence. The windows were painted over; the family were confined to their rooms for most of the day, and Alix and the girls were accompanied to the lavatory by guards who graffitied drawings of her and Rasputin having sex on the lavatory walls. The former empress was now barely able to walk and spent days on her bed. The daughters did the housework, and Nicholas read War and Peace for the first time in his life, and daydreamed about a nice hot bath. The top brass in Ekaterinburg wanted an execution, but the order for their murder came from Lenin in Moscow, who decided—as the counter-revolutionary White troops, representing an uneasy coalition of anti-Bolshevik groups, and a Czech regiment closed in on Ekaterinburg in July 1918—that they could not afford the tsar to be a “live banner.”137
On 3 July in the Old Style calendar (16 July by the Western one), at 1:30 in the morning, the prisoners—the tsar, his family and all that remained of his servants, his doctor, valet, cook and Alix’s maid—were woken and led down to the basement. They were told there had been shooting in the town and they would be safer there. Nicholas carried his sleepy son. At his request chairs were brought for Alix and Alexis. Anastasia brought her dog. After several minutes the local secret police chief, Yakov Yurovsky, came into the room with an eleven-man squad, one to shoot each victim. The room was too small, however, and the executioners found themselves facing the wrong people. Yurovsky read out the order to shoot the Romanovs. As Nicholas spoke an incredulous “What?”138 Yurovsky shot him point blank. His men started firing. Most of the adults died quickly, but Alexis, protected by his father’s arms, survived the first volley, as did the daughters, who were protected by the jewels they had sewn into the bodices of their dresses for safe-keeping. They were bayoneted. The bodies were taken fourteen miles from Ekaterinburg and burned, the remains thrown down a mine shaft, their faces deliberately disfigured to prevent identification if they were found. Eight days later the town fell to the Whites.
We have such a horribly vivid account of the Romanovs’ murder because one of the executioners, Medvedev, was later captured by the White Russian army and described every detail to Nikolai Sokolov, an investigator appointed by the Whites to uncover the fate of the ex-tsar. Its hideous graphicness gave the Romanovs’ deaths a terribly poignant immediacy. In death—as never in life—they stood in for the millions of victims of undescribed, anonymous murders and massacres that would be perpetrated by the Soviet regime and other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, regimes that would prove so good at killing, but little else. In death also, Nicholas would become the martyr-tsar, a useful figurehead for the Whites, who had had no use for him alive.
Over previous months there had been several tragically ineffectual attempts to plan a rescue. With Alix’s permission, the Romanovs’ English tutor, George Gibbes, who followed them to Siberia, wrote a letter meant for George, addressed to the former tsarina’s English governess, with a full plan of the family’s house in Tobolsk and details of their routine. There’s no indication it ever reached him. Several monarchist groups managed to raise funds but failed to come up with anything approaching a plan; money was sent to Tobolsk, but it never arrived. There were rumours that the German terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk included a demand that the imperial family must be handed over to Germany unharmed. Nicholas had not been able to bear the thought: “This is either a manoeuvre to discredit me or an insult.” The rumours were not, as it turned out, true. In Moscow, Nicholas’s old court chancellor, Benckendorff, brother of the former British ambassador, tried to get the German ambassador, Mirbach, to support a rescue mission. In Kiev, now occupied by the Germans, Mossolov attempted to persuade the German commanders to back a plan to travel up the Volga to Ekaterinburg. He wrote personally to the kaiser about it. He never received a reply. A former German ambassador to Petrograd told him with much embarrassment that the kaiser couldn’t reply without consulting his government, and the local German commanders refused to help.
After the war Wilhelm swore that he had tried to get the tsar out. “I did all that was139 humanly possible for the unhappy Tsar and his family, and was seconded heartily by my Chancellor,” he told General H.-H. Waters, whom he’d known as a British military attaché in Berlin, in the 1930s. He said that Bethmann-Hollweg had come to him with a Danish plan for rescuing the tsar. “How can I do that? There are two fighting lines of German and Russian troops facing each other between him and me!” Wilhelm quoted himself. “Nevertheless I ordered my Chancellor to try and get in touch with the Kerensky government by neutral channels, informing him that if a hair of the Russian Imperial family’s head should be injured, I would hold him personally responsible if I should have the possibility of doing so.” In Wilhelm’s version, Kerensky answered that he was only too happy to provide a train. Wilhelm said he had informed Bethmann-Hollweg he would order the High Commander on the Eastern Front to arrange safe conduct for the tsar’s train, and told his brother Heinrich to escort the ship holding the tsar through the minefields. “The blood of the unhappy Tsar is not at my door; not on my hands,” he told Waters, though why this foolproof plan had failed he was unable to say.
What Wilhelm certainly did do was give his permission on 24 March 1917 to allow Vladimir Lenin—a man more radical than any German Social Democrat—to travel via Germany to Russia, with the explicit intention of creating as much chaos and destabilization in Russia as possible.* The German authorities had already spent hundreds of thousands of marks on funding agents provocateurs to encourage strikes and unrest in Russia, and on Lenin’s own141 circle of Bolsheviks. Lenin was taken from the Swiss border through Germany in a “sealed” train—no passport or luggage inspections—“like a plague bacillus,” in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase.
On 16 July, the da
y of Nicholas’s murder, George went to Roehampton to watch the balloon-training wing of the RAF. The news of the former tsar’s death was officially announced three days later. The Bolsheviks claimed the rest of the family were still alive. On 25 July George decreed a month of court mourning and wrote that he and Mary had attended “a service at the Russian church in Welbeck Street in memory of dear Nicky, who I fear was shot last month by the Bolshevists [sic]. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men, a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.” Three days after that he noted that the former British vice-consul in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, had reported that “dear Nicky” had been shot by the local soviet at Ekaterinburg. “It was nothing more than a brutal murder.”142 At the end of August he wrote, “I hear from143 Russia that there is every probability that Alicky and four daughters and little boy were murdered at the same time as Nicky. It is too horrible and shows what fiends those Bolshevists are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!”
George and Stamfordham seem to have tacitly agreed on a kind of wilful amnesia. They were also quick to blame the government for the failure to act. The day of the memorial service for Nicholas, Stamfordham wrote in an outraged tone to Lord Esher:
Was there ever144 a crueller murder and has this country ever before displayed such callous indifference to a tragedy of this magnitude: What does it all mean? I am so thankful that the King and Queen attended the memorial service. I have not yet discovered that the PM … [was] even represented. Where is our national sympathy, gratitude, common decency … Why didn’t the German Emperor make the release of the Czar and family a condition of the Brest-Litovsk peace?
This was somewhat disingenuous, as only three days before, Stamfordham had told Balfour that George shouldn’t145 attend the service for fear of irritating public opinion.
George’s son, the Duke of Windsor, said that the murder shook his father’s “confidence in the innate146 decency of mankind. There was a very real bond between him and his first cousin Nicky.” He claimed that his father “had personally planned to rescue him with a British cruiser, but in some way the plan was blocked. In any case, it hurt my father that Britain had not raised a hand to save his Cousin Nicky. ‘Those politicians,’ he used to say. ‘If it had been one of their kind they would have acted fast enough.’”
Wilhelm’s time came three months after Nicholas’s death. In August 1918 Ludendorff overstretched the German army on the Western Front and the Entente—or the Allies, as it now called itself—began to break through. Wilhelm spent most of his time at German military headquarters at Spa, in Belgium, in a Marie Antoinette–esque villa that looked as if it had been built from spun sugar. He entertained himself by digging little trenches and diverting a dam. The industrialist Albert Ballin met him for the last time at the end of September when even the German High Command had admitted it was all but over. He was accompanied by a military minder.
I found the Emperor147 very misdirected and in the elated mood that he affected when a third party was present. Things had been so twisted that even the fearful failure of the offensive, that had caused a severe depression in him at first, had been turned into a success … the offensive had achieved no more than the loss of the lives of round 100,000 valuable people. The whole thing was served up to the poor monarch in such a way that he had not noticed the catastrophe at all.
In early October, with Wilhelm back in Berlin, a new chancellor, Max von Baden, a cousin of Wilhelm’s, formed a government which claimed to represent the liberal left-wing Reichstag majority for the first time, and asked the Allies for an armistice. The Allies demanded stiff terms. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, issued a series of “notes” insisting that Germany must become a full parliamentary democracy and divest itself of its emperor. “It aims directly148 at the fall of my house, and above all at the abolition of the monarch!” Wilhelm sputtered of Wilson’s note of 14 October. The fact that his abdication was being debated across Germany was kept from him.
On 29 October, encouraged by Dona and the entourage, Wilhelm left Berlin for army headquarters at Spa. It was a bad move; it looked as if the kaiser was running away to the army. Austria made terms that week, and the whole of Germany—with almost the sole exception of Wilhelm’s entourage, his family and a few of the High Command—came to believe the kaiser must go. But once in Spa Wilhelm delayed and delayed, chopping wood to calm himself down, saying that if the “Bolsheviks” tried to make him abdicate he would put himself at the head of his army, march to Berlin and hang the traitors, or at very least, “shoot up the town.”149 The army and navy chiefs were full of mad plans: a march to Berlin; a suicide cavalry charge led by Wilhelm to save the honour of the monarchy; a last-ditch “death ride” by Wilhelm’s beloved navy.
With almost exquisite irony, it was that “death ride” plan that sparked the German revolution. On 4 November, at Kiel, the sailors on Wilhelm’s precious ships mutinied. They demanded political reform and the removal of the royal family. Workers’ risings spread across Germany. By early November there was a general strike in Berlin. The revolutionaries threatened to put up barricades if Wilhelm didn’t go. The Reichstag was terrified that the workers’ councils might take over as they had in Russia. Still Wilhelm held out. On the ninth the latest war minister told the kaiser that the army would not fight for him if there was a civil war, and he must abdicate. Wilhelm stared vacantly through lunch and bit his lip. He said he would abdicate as emperor but remain King of Prussia, and sent someone off to draft the papers. Half an hour later he was wondering whether he really had to abdicate at all. The news came that Chancellor Max von Baden had lost patience. With Berlin on the verge of uproar and both the kaiser’s phones engaged, he announced that Wilhelm and his eldest son were renouncing the throne, then resigned himself, handing over power to the leader of the Reichstag Socialists, Friedrich Ebert. When he heard the news Wilhelm shouted, “Treachery, treachery,150 shameless, outrageous, treachery!”
In London George wrote in his diary:
We got the news151 that the German Emperor had abdicated, also the Crown Prince. “How are the mighty fallen.” He has been Emperor just over 30 years, he did great things for his country, but his ambition was so great that he wished to dominate the world and created his military machine for that object. No one man can dominate the world, it has been tried before, and now he has utterly ruined his Country and himself and I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war with all it’s [sic] misery.
While his generals tried to persuade him to make for neutral Holland, only thirty miles away, Wilhelm sat and smoked, refused to move, insisted that he would return to Berlin or stay with the troops, and grumbled about his former subjects. “The German people are a bunch of pigs,” he said, and “There is no other instance in History of a universal act of treachery by a nation against its ruler.”152 In Berlin the revolutionaries broke into the Berlin Schloss and somewhat appropriately stole the emperor’s clothes.
Eventually Wilhelm was persuaded to leave Spa in the small hours of 10 November. Foreign troops were said to be only a few miles away. He was quietly driven to the Dutch border in a car from which all imperial insignias had been scratched off. He reached Holland early in the morning of 11 November. He seemed completely crushed and was desperate not to be left alone, telling his entourage that he was a broken man. The message came finally that the Dutch would offer him asylum, at least temporarily. It was decided that Wilhelm should be moved by train to a small seventeenth-century manor house called Amerongen near Utrecht.
His first words at Amerongen were, “How about a153 cup of good, hot, real English tea?” As he sat down to contemplate his new life, the armistice was signed in Marshal Foch’s train in the forest of Compiègne.
“William arrived154 in Holland yesterday,” George wrote in his diary. “Today has indeed been a wonderful day, the greatest in the history of this Country.” Elsewhere in
Europe, it was not a good moment for monarchies. Within Germany, the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg had been deposed; the ruling grand dukes of Coburg, Hesse and Mecklenburg-Strelitz had all abdicated, and the latter had then shot himself. Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary, who had inherited after the death of his great-uncle Franz Joseph in 1916, had abdicated on Armistice Day. Ferdinand, self-styled “tsar” of Bulgaria, who had cast his lot in with Germany at the height of its successes, also went that month. George’s cousin “Tino,” King of Greece, had abdicated in 1917 in favour of his younger son, who would be little more than a puppet and would die of infection from monkey bites in 1920. In Turkey, Sultan Mehmed V had died in May; his brother and successor, Mehmed VI, would be deposed in 1922.
The Three Emperors Page 56
