Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  About a week later, Lyubov, having left the children behind in Tyumen, arrived in Yekaterinburg. For several days she petitioned the local commissar of justice, the Left SR Nikolai Poliakov, for a chance to see her husband, and eventually he acquiesced. No formal charges had been made against the men, and their fate was unforeseeable. Fillip Goloshchekin, the hard-line Bolshevik leader in Yekaterinburg, wanted Georgy shot, although it seems the men’s jailer, who took a liking to the old prince, found a way to keep them all alive. Lyubov had written to family and friends to request assistance from Moscow. News of their arrest shook the rest of the Golitsyn family.8

  Finally, in the middle of April a lawyer from Moscow arrived to try to gain the men’s freedom.9 The men were not freed by Easter, as they had hoped, but their jailers did allow them to move to a different part of the prison so they could hear the bells of the local church. They also permitted the men a small Easter supper and quiet service, conducted by their fellow inmate Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk. (The Reds drowned Hermogen in the Tura River two months later.)10 In May, the men were moved to a new prison, where they met Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, the former marshal of the court. Dolgoruky informed them that the emperor and several members of the royal family had recently been brought to Yekaterinburg.11

  Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and numerous servants had been sent by Kerensky in the summer of 1917 to the remote Siberian town of Tobolsk, chiefly to protect them from the increasingly radical, angry mobs in the capital. By the spring of 1918, the Soviet leaders had decided to move the Romanovs and a handful of their remaining servants to Yekaterinburg; the city was under the control of the Bolshevik Regional Soviet of the Urals, which could be relied on to guard them and was loyal to the leadership back in Moscow. Soon after the arrival of the Romanovs, Alexander, Georgy, and Nikolai were released and allowed to return to Tyumen, where they were to await trial on charges of counterrevolutionary activities. The fact that Georgy was released has never been fully explained and seems to have been either a mistake or a miracle.12 Regardless of the reasons, had the three men stayed in Yekaterinburg, they most likely would have shared the fate of the Romanovs.

  By the summer of 1918 Yekaterinburg was being threatened by an unlikely foe. During the First World War, many Czechs had refused to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though they were its subjects, preferring instead to side with the Russians, their fellow Slavs. Fearful of being caught by the advancing Central Powers in the spring of 1918, the Czech Legion received the permission of the Bolshevik government to leave Russia via Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway, going almost all the way around the globe to rejoin the battle on the western front. The legion had gotten as far east as Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains in late May 1918, when after the Czechs had rioted with Hungarian POWs there, the Soviet authorities ordered the legion disarmed and disbanded; those who resisted were to be shot on the spot. With that, fighting erupted in western Siberia between the legion and Red forces. The Czechs showed lightning success, and soon they controlled all Siberia and beyond to the Pacific Ocean. Mastery of Siberia depended on control of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the vital lifeline that stretched forty-nine hundred miles from Perm in the Urals to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. More than in any other theater of the civil war, the railway was key: controlling the rail lines meant controlling the movement of men and matériel and ultimately, controlling the war. Armored trains bristling with heavy guns and cannons served as the battleships across a sea of forests and swamps.

  At first wishing just to break through to Vladivostok on the coast, by early July the Czechs had decided to stay in Russia and to fight alongside the White forces and the Allies, who had begun landing troops in Vladivostok that spring. Some of the Czechs marched to Samara, west of the Urals on the Volga, and there supported the anti-Bolshevik government, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komúch). The legion’s success helped lead to the creation of a Provisional Siberian Government in Omsk, made up of monarchists, SRs, and Kadets. During the spring and summer of 1918, the Czech Legion rode the Trans-Siberian from west to east and back again; by the end of May they had seized Novo-Nikolaevsk, Chelyabinsk, and Tomsk, and before the end of September they had overthrown every Soviet government in Siberia.13

  It was the approach of the Czechs toward Yekaterinburg in July that sealed the fate of the Romanovs. The Bolsheviks had been planning to put Nicholas on trial, but there was concern, especially among the members of the Ural Regional Soviet, about Nicholas’s being freed by the approaching White forces. The question of who ordered the murder of the former tsar and his family continues to divide historians. Some claim the order came from Lenin himself, while others argue the decision was made by the local leaders in Yekaterinburg, acting largely on their own initiative. The evidence suggests the latter was the case.14

  In the early-morning hours of July 17, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children (Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei), their physician, Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, and three remaining servants (Anna Demidov, Ivan Kharitonov, and Alexei Trupp) were awakened by their captors in the Ipatiev House, told to dress, and then led downstairs to an empty room in the basement. Shortly after 2:15 a.m., Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the Ipatiev House, entered with a group of armed men and ordered the prisoners to stand against the wall. He then read from a piece of paper: “In view of the fact that your relatives continue their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.” None of the family seemed at first to realize what was happening. Yurovsky then pointed his revolver at Nicholas and fired. The murder of the Romanovs and their servants was bloody, chaotic, and savage. Not everyone died in the initial volley, and for nearly ten minutes the victims were shot and bayoneted until every last one had been killed.15

  The bloodshed in Yekaterinburg did not begin on July 17, however. A week earlier, the Cheka had arrested Prince Vasily Dolgoruky and shot him together with Count Ilya Tatishchev. Days later Red Army soldiers shot dozens of suspected counterrevolutionaries.16 Indeed, the killing of the Romanovs had begun a month before. On June 12, Grand Duke Mikhail (Nicholas II’s youngest brother) and his British secretary, Nicholas Johnson, had been taken from the Korolev Hotel in Perm by local Cheka agents, driven out of the city, and executed.17 The day after the massacre in the Ipatiev House, six members of the Romanov family, including Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (a cousin of Nicholas II’s) and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna (Empress Alexandra’s sister), along with two others were murdered at Alapaevsk, a mining town about a hundred miles northeast of Yekaterinburg.18 Six months later, on the night of January 27–28, 1919, Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich (Nicholas II’s uncle) and Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich, George Mikhailovich, and Dmitry Konstantinovich (all cousins of Nicholas’s) were taken out of their cells in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd, lined up in front of a ditch, and shot.19

  News of the killing of the tsar spread quickly. In Moscow, Olga Sheremetev’s husband brought home a copy of the newspaper Izvestiia on July 19 that carried an official statement confirming the death of the “crowned executioner.” According to the statement, Alexandra and Alexei had been taken to safety; no mention was made of the daughters. To Olga, the news signaled the Bolsheviks’ desperation and was a sign they were losing the war. Two days later many Moscow churches held requiems for Nicholas; large crowds attended the services, and there was much weeping. Not everyone believed Nicholas was dead, however, and rumors of his fate abounded. Some said he was safe in England. Anna Saburov was among the doubters, and she told Olga that the Bolsheviks’ days were numbered and the monarchy would be restored.20 In Bogoroditsk, the Golitsyns also learned of the murder from the newspapers. Like the Sheremetevs, they attended a memorial service in the local church. Sergei later recalled that the impact of the news on the family was “enormous.” That night Sergei secretly cried into his pillow.21 Even the mayor, always a harsh critic of the
tsar, called the execution “criminal and absurd”; he particularly regretted the fact that it would place upon Nicholas the mantle of martyrdom.22

  The reaction to the murder of the tsar among the nobility was not uniform and, not surprisingly, was most deeply felt by committed monarchists.23 Many Russians cheered the news. When the word reached a village outside Omsk, the peasants ran out into the street, dancing, singing, and shouting for joy.24

  Back with their families in Tyumen, Alexander, Georgy, and Nikolai debated what to do next. For months, the overseer of the Golitsyns’ Petrovskoe estate had been writing to beg Alexander and Lyubov to return. He described the horrific conditions there. After the poorer peasants had plundered the estate, they turned on their better-off neighbors, forcing them to come up with large sums of money as “reparations” as part of a new campaign against the “petite bourgeoisie.” By the spring of 1918, all the peasants were facing starvation. Beggars roamed the land, and people had begun fighting over meager scraps of bread. Alexander and Lyubov sent food parcels to their former servants but would not think of returning. Soon they received word that the Reds were searching for the three men again, and they decided they would have to flee. The Three Musketeers, as Nikolai called themselves, set off to find the Czech Legion.25

  On their journey the men passed through the village of Pokrovskoe, the home of Rasputin, where the villagers told them that a party of Red soldiers had come through the day before, looking for them. Convinced they needed to avoid the shifting front lines, they decided to make a four-hundred-mile detour to the north on several hired troikas. They traveled for days through fields, forests, and bogs; the mosquitoes were so thick they had to bury themselves in towels. Once they barely had time to jump down and hide in the trees on the roadside as a large detachment of Red soldiers came along from the opposite direction. After six days they reached the town of Ishim and a group of Czech soldiers. They did not stay long but boarded a train for Tomsk, farther to the east, where they hoped to be safer. Upon reaching Tomsk, they heard that the Reds had been pushed out of Tyumen, and they raced back to be reunited with their families after six weeks on the road.26 The people of Tyumen greeted the fall of the Bolsheviks with joy. For Alexander, Georgy, and Nikolai the relief they felt was clouded by the news that before the Bolsheviks retreated from Yekaterinburg, they had executed most of their former prison inmates.27

  The collapse of Soviet power across Siberia was followed by an explosion of separate, and often competing, White governments (as many as nineteen), although the two major political centers for the anti-Bolshevik movement were the Komuch and the Provisional Siberian Government in Omsk. A Siberian army was organized in 1918; under the green and white flag, symbolizing the forests and snows of Siberia, it counted almost forty thousand troops by October. The situation was complicated by the arrival of foreign troops in the Far East, first the Japanese and British, followed by the French and Americans. The Japanese eventually landed nearly seventy thousand troops, although most of them stayed on the coast; American forces numbered eight thousand. The British alone sent troops deep into Siberia—to Omsk, the Siberian capital, in mid-October 1918, although they too did not wish to become directly involved in the fighting.28

  As was true of the anti-Bolshevik groups across the former empire, those in Siberia and the Urals found it difficult to work in concert and to organize a unified, effective structure. On the night of November 17–18, 1918, a coup of right-wing forces overthrew the government in Omsk and set up a military dictatorship under Admiral Alexander Kolchak, a prominent war hero, who was declared “Supreme Ruler.” Kolchak became the leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia and (if only in name) throughout all Russia for the next fourteen months.29

  Despite his grand title, Kolchak’s power was far from absolute, even east of the Urals, where he was based. Power rested on control of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in the autumn of 1918 this was shared by various groups at different points along the route: the Czechs, the Japanese, the Americans, and also the Cossack warlords Grigory Semenov and Ivan Kalmykov. In total, these groups controlled thirty-five hundred miles of the railway, meaning Kolchak had to work with them. And although Kolchak enjoyed British support, the Americans were decidedly less convinced of his merits; the commander of the American forces, Major General William Graves, criticized what he considered the barbarity of Kolchak’s army.30

  Alexander and his family remained in Tyumen throughout the rest of 1918 and most of the following year. Prince Lvov left them for Omsk, from where he was sent by Kolchak’s government on a mission to the United States to seek aid and support from President Woodrow Wilson. Georgy did meet Wilson in late November 1918, though only briefly and without winning any pledge of support from the U.S. president.31 Lyubov and the children spent the summer of 1919 outside Tyumen at the Tatar village of Yembaevo while Alexander remained in town to work at the hospital. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Olga excitedly followed the course of the fighting. “Good news from the front,” she wrote that summer in her diary.

  If I were a boy, a man, that which I so wanted, then I would certainly go to war. [. . .] Why am I not a man! I would definitely go to war, get through to the Caucasus and just be there. It is so annoying to hear that they are fighting so heroically, while our life here is petty, uninteresting (though good), and useless. If only there were a man here that I could be proud of, for whom I could pray, and whom I could send off to the heroic deeds of war! But I’m too young and silly for this, and I can only love and pray for all of Russia and all the warriors.32

  The spring of 1919 had indeed witnessed great success for Kolchak’s army. In April, his army of 110,000 men, the largest of the anti-Bolshevik armies, pushed well beyond the Urals west into the Orenburg steppes. They had driven back the Fifth and Second Red armies and retaken almost two hundred thousand square miles of territory.33 The advance units were only fifty miles outside Kazan and close to linking up with the Russo-Allied forces in northern Russia. But this was to be the high point of Kolchak’s offensive. During the late spring and summer, the Bolsheviks sent some 100,000 party workers, Communist Youth League members, and peasants to stop Kolchak’s advance. The propaganda train October Revolution published a special appeal to rouse their fighting spirit: “Peasants! It is now your turn to defend what the Revolution has won for you. Kolchak is coming to take away your lands and to make you slaves of the landlords and village police chiefs again. Poor peasants to arms! Everyone into the battle against Kolchak!”34

  This was effective, if less than truthful, propaganda. Indeed, it was one of Kolchak’s, as well as Denikin’s, weaknesses that he assumed power and led the campaign against the Bolsheviks with no clear political program. “Neither the path of reaction nor the fatal course of partisan politics,” Kolchak stated. “My main objective will be to organize an effective army [and] to triumph over Bolshevism.”35 Trying to represent all the myriad forces opposed to the Bolsheviks, Kolchak and the other White leaders ended up representing no one, which was of crucial importance in their ultimate defeat. Kolchak soon faced unrest in his occupied territories, even in his capital of Omsk, where a revolt broke out that was brutally crushed by Kolchak’s men; more than a thousand SRs and imprisoned workers were massacred. Behind his front lines between Omsk and Lake Baikal partisans harassed Kolchak’s army.36

  The same month Olga wrote the romantic lines in her diary the fighting had turned against the White forces in the area, and the family had to make plans to move. Lyubov, the children, and a few servants, together with the Lopukhins, packed up and took the train eastward to Omsk. They did not stay there long before securing places on a packed train heading to the town of Kansk, about sixteen hundred miles farther to the east. The train was filled with soldiers, whom the Golitsyn girls Marina and Olga found most exciting, and they flirted with the young officers nearly the entire month-long journey, much to their mother’s displeasure.37

  Throughout the summer of 1919, Kolchak’s army k
ept retreating farther eastward. Confidence in Kolchak and his government eroded quickly, and his army began to disintegrate. Baron Budberg, a member of Kolchak’s War Ministry, lamented the incompetence, disorganization, self-interest, and corruption he saw around him. Many in the government, he wrote, had “taken refuge in alcohol and cocaine”; they all had been “living beyond the law” for too long to be saved, and their cause had become, in his eyes, hopeless.38 Before August was out, the Red forces had moved east of the Urals and retaken Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. By late October they had almost reached Omsk.

  Alexander had remained behind in Tyumen to help oversee the evacuation of the military hospital in advance of the Reds’ march on the city. The staff loaded the wounded men into thirty freight cars filled with nothing but straw and then headed out for Krasnoyarsk. The journey took three weeks, and the rough swaying and clanking of the cars were misery for the sick and injured men. As soon as they settled the wounded in Krasnoyarsk, Alexander left to see his family in Kansk in late August. He stayed only several days but promised to return in a few months. In fact, he was not to see his family for more than a year.39 From Kansk Alexander traveled to Omsk to work in the hospitals, then overrun with typhus. He remained until November, when the city was evacuated again. The evacuation had been announced at the end of October. Soon a mass withdrawal began; panic gripped the city, and people began to flee by whatever means possible.40 Alexander stayed with his men and made sure that all of the sick and wounded were safely placed on trains and evacuated. Alexander and part of the staff then took off across the snow on several sleighs; they could make out advance units of Tukhachevsky’s Red Fifth Army approaching on the horizon. Along with Alexander rode tens of thousands of Kolchak’s soldiers. The sight of this vast movement reminded him of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. As they rode, Alexander was comforted by the thought that they were moving closer to his family.