Alexandra (49 page)

In February, on orders from Moscow, a soviet was elected in Tobolsk, and the town was brought within the Bolshevik orbit. New soldiers from Tsarskoe Selo arrived to guard the Romanovs,
‘blackguardly-looking young men’, Gilliard thought, and a new commander was appointed.
⁶
The soviet imposed rationing, and the Tobolsk
City Food Committee issued ration card number fifty-four to ‘Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, Ex-Emperor, residing on Freedom Street, with six dependents’. It entitled him to receive,
when presented in the cooperative shop called ‘Self-Conscience,’ 190 pounds of flour, seven pounds of butter, and half a pound of sugar – when these things were available. With
the reduction in food came a reduction in the monthly stipend allotted to each of the captives, and Alix had to dismiss ten more servants.

Tobolsk was no longer a safe enclave, an obscure corner of the old Russia. It had become a battleground of sorts, where the Bolshevik government was seeking to impose
new ways of thinking and living on a conservative population. There was resistance to these new ways in the town – and in Siberia generally, where political opposition to the government was
strong. Special paramilitary groups called Red Guards were being formed to crush the counter-revolutionary forces. An armed clash was likely and, when it came, the Romanovs would be at risk.

‘Their Majesties still cherish hope that among their loyal friends some may be found to attempt their release,’ Gilliard wrote in mid-March.
⁷
The new guards were insolent and hostile, but their commander, Colonel Kobylinsky, was, Gilliard thought, ‘on our side’. The arrogant guards were strict in their
rules, but often careless; it would be relatively easy for a few resolute men, well organized and with a sound plan, to contrive an escape.

It was carnival season, and Tobolsk was full of revelry. Bells pealed, people sang and played mouth-organs and balalaikas, there were jugglers and clowns, mimes and comics. Disguised by their
costumes and masks, the ordinarily staid citizens of the town plunged into merriment, drinking and flirting without inhibition. Sleighs decorated with ribbons and banners flew along the snowy
streets, bells jangling. Work was forgotten, business set aside, politics ignored. The only imperative was enjoyment and, to heighten the enjoyment, there were plates of blinis and gingerbread and
nuts and candy, washed down with glass after glass of pepper vodka, lemon vodka, black-currant vodka, vodka in seemingly infinite variety.

‘Never was the situation more favourable for escape,’ Gilliard thought. Not only was the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk active, but another monarchist organization was at work,
and at the beginning of Lent, this group sent 250,000 roubles to the family.
⁸
Couriers brought letters from friends pledging assistance, and Alix
managed to smuggle out more of her valuables to be sold to raise funds.
⁹

Unknown to the Romanovs, the British Foreign Office was attempting a rescue plan of its own. A Norwegian steamship operator,
Jonas Lied, was recruited to coordinate the
rescue and to provide a boat. Once the ice broke on the Irtysh River, it would be possible to take the family up river via the Irtysh and the Ob and then overland to the Kara Sea, where a torpedo
boat from the British Navy would be waiting. King George was in favour of this effort, which reached the office of the director of British naval intelligence.
¹⁰
But it was abandoned – possibly because by the time the rivers were free of ice, the Romanovs were no longer in Tobolsk.

The merriment of carnival came to an abrupt end, and Lent began, the season of deprivation, purgation, cleansing. Stories swept through Tobolsk of bands of renegade sailors who were roaming at
will through Tiumen, terrorizing the populace, stealing and shooting. Late in March some Red Guards from Omsk arrived in Tobolsk and installed themselves in a makeshift barracks in the town. No one
knew whether they had been sent by some provincial authority or whether they had come on their own, to steal and kill and cause disruption.

Soon another group of Red Guards came, this time from Ekaterinburg, a leftist stronghold. This group, made up largely of workmen turned soldier, most of them Latvian, put up posters in the
streets announcing that all gold and silver and valuables must be turned over to them on pain of death.
¹¹
They went from house to house,
seizing money, jewellery, and other goods, arresting the wealthy merchants and holding them for ransom.

Conflict between the Omsk and Ekaterinburg gangs – they were little more than that – erupted, and the soldiers guarding the Governor’s House were caught in the middle. Their
obligation was to protect the Romanovs, but the prime imperative was not to let the family fall into other hands. ‘The guard announced,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote, ‘that if anyone
tried to take their prisoners, they would kill the entire imperial family themselves before they gave them up.’
¹²

Confusion escalated. Groups of renegades came and went, skirmishing among themselves, fighting for turf. At any moment they might begin to fight over the Governor’s Mansion, with its
valuable hostages. And the defenders of the mansion, not knowing what else to do amid the chaos, were sworn to eliminate their captives.

Amid this extremely tense situation, Alexei, who had caught whooping cough from his playmate Kolia Derevenko, began to haemorrhage.

‘Bright sunshine,’ Alix wrote in her diary for April 12. ‘Baby [Alexei] stays in bed as from coughing so hard has a slight haemorrhage in the abdomen.’ Later in the day
she added ‘Dined with Baby. Pains strong.’
¹³

The haemorrhage grew worse; the pain spread to Alexei’s groin and legs. Hour by hour the swelling increased and the pain became greater. ‘Baby slept badly from pain and was four
times sick,’ Alix wrote on the following day. ‘A little better for two hours in the evening and then worse again.’
¹⁴

It soon became evident that this was a severe attack, the most severe Alexei had undergone in years. His fever rose and he moaned and screamed in pain, his body grotesquely swollen, his skin
stretched tight. He ate nothing, and the pain kept him from sleeping. With his fever rising and the risk of a fatal internal infection high, Dr Derevenko cautioned Alix and Nicky that Alexei was
close to death.

Icons hung around Alexei’s bed, some of them gifts from Father Gregory, and Alix must have invoked Father Gregory’s healing powers many times as hour by hour she watched by her
son’s bedside. This was what she had been dreading ever since the starets’s death sixteen months earlier: that one day Alexei would become dangerously ill, and that Father Gregory would
not be available to heal him.

‘Sat whole day with him,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘every half-hour very strong cramp-like pains for three minutes. Towards the evening better.’
¹⁵

Suddenly, after several days of agony, he was better. Unable to find any medicines in Tobolsk, Dr Derevenko ‘tried a new remedy’, according to Sophie Buxhoeveden. Whatever the new
remedy was, it brought relief. The bleeding ceased, though Alexei’s fever was still high and he remained very weak.
¹⁶
By April 19 Alix
was able to
write in a letter to Anna Vyrubov that, though Alexei still had pains in his back and leg, he was eating a little and his fever was no longer consistently
high, though he was still ‘terribly pale and thin’ and the doctor was concerned that he might start to bleed again.

Throughout the days and nights of Alexei’s illness, Alix had watched by his bedside as she always did, relieved for an hour or two by Tatiana so that she could rest. She had become
‘like his shadow’, she told Anna in a letter, sitting there with him, holding his leg, talking to him, watching him in his fitful sleep. She was as thin, as pale as a shadow, her grey
hair drawn back carelessly off her lined face, her frayed, patched gown loose at waist and wrists.

She was worried about Alexei. He had been so robust over the winter, flinging himself down the ice mountain Nicky and Gilliard had erected in the yard (and the soldiers had torn down), piling up
the wood his father cut with such vigour that he tore his gloves, playing energetically with Kolia. She had hoped that his robustness was a good sign. Now that hope had proved illusory.

She still clung to her other hope – the hope of rescue – but worried that that too might prove illusory. Early in April she learned that Boris Soloviev had been arrested. In prison,
under torture, he might reveal the names of the others who were working for the family’s relief. She trusted that there were many others still actively making plans and arrangements on their
behalf, but so far none had done more than send money and encouraging messages. She had been told that, among the soldiers from Omsk, and others from Tiumen, there were hundreds of former officers,
devoted monarchists, who had enlisted in the ranks in order to be in a position to come to the family’s aid when the right moment came.
¹⁷
Surely, now that spring was on its way, all the plans that had been made over the winter would come to fruition.

Meanwhile she devoted herself to watching Alexei’s gradual recovery, worn out by her vigil and her anxiety.

‘I worry so much. My God! How Russia suffers,’ she wrote to Anna. ‘You know that I love it even more than you do, miserable country, demolished from within, and by the Germans
from
without.’ Russia was ‘disintegrating into bits’, she wrote. ‘I cannot think calmly about it. Such hideous pain in heart and
soul.’
¹⁸

The burden of the hideous pain made her irascible. She snapped at the servants. (‘My greatest sin is my irritability . . . You know how hot-tempered I am.’) She could endure the
cold, the privation, the humiliations of captivity and the dread of harm, even the terrible apprehension that Alexei might die. But the small, everyday strains provoked her to angry outbursts
– when a maid lied, or ‘sermonized like a preacher.’

‘I want to be a better woman, and I try,’ she wrote. ‘For long periods I am really patient, and then breaks out again my bad temper.’ She knew that she had grown cold
towards the servants and staff, and she felt guilty about it.
¹⁹

Alix’s accustomed self-scrutiny and scrupulosity of conscience were intact, as was her faith. ‘We live here on earth but we are already half gone to the next world,’ she wrote.
‘We see with different eyes.’ She looked around her, and saw not the chaos of armed bands clashing in confused struggle, not her tense, anxious husband and children and the apprehensive
staff, not nervous guards ready, if need be, to kill them all, but the benign, protective presence of the divine.

‘It’s all right,’ she told Anna Vyurubov after Boris Soloviev’s arrest. ‘Don’t worry. The Lord is everywhere and will work a miracle.’

L
ong before dawn on the morning of April 26, 1918, four wooden carts stood in Freedom Street, in front of the Governor’s Mansion. A cold wind
was blowing, and there was snow on the ground. The door of the house opened, and a cluster of people began to file out, wrapped tightly in layers of garments against the morning chill.

The commissar from Moscow, Vassily Yakovlev, stood to attention as the former tsar came out, wearing his Circassian coat, and the sentry presented arms. Yakovlev remarked to Nicky that he ought
to take an extra coat.

Eight others followed: Alix and Marie, Valia Dolgorukov, Dr Botkin, an officer of the Tobolsk guard, Matveev, and three servants, Alix’s maid Anna Demidov, Nicky’s valet Chemodurov
and the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev.

Alix was lifted into one of the carts, the only one with a hood covering it. Dr Botkin saw that there were no seats, only the bare wooden floor, and protested to Yakovlev. His patient, he said,
was not well enough to travel in such a crude conveyance; she would injure herself.

There was a delay while straw was found in a pigsty, and sprinkled over the wooden planks. A mattress, rugs and blankets were spread over the straw, and then Alix, wearing a thin coat of Persian
lamb, was lifted in. Marie climbed in beside her.

Alix had few possessions with her, but one of them was her diary, in which she wrote, later that day, that she was suffering from pain in her chest. She was miserable. She hadn’t slept the
night before,
worried over the decision she had been forced to make, whether to accompany Nicky on this journey or to stay in Tobolsk with her children.

It had been a terrible decision, the most terrible she had ever faced, as she confided to her maid Maria Toutelberg.
¹
When told that she had
to make up her mind, she paced up and down for hours, unable to choose.

‘It is the hardest moment of my life,’ she told her maid. ‘You know what my son is to me, and I must choose between him and my husband.’

Her daughters helped her to decide. They assured her that, if she left, Olga would run the household, Tatiana would nurse Alexei, and Marie would go with her, to comfort her. Anastasia too would
do what she could to help.