Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (21 page)

Throughout June, the high-minded President had been besieged day in, day out by a stream of influential visitors with a plethora of moral arguments and the same ultimate thought in mind – American intervention in Russia. British and French diplomats had been in constant attendance, as too had Tomas Masaryk, the respected exiled leader of the Czech independence movement; Lady Muriel Paget arrived fresh from her humanitarian work at the British Hospital in Petrograd, in her wake an assortment of Russian émigrés, former tsarist ministers and members of Kerensky’s ill-fated provisional government – all of them fiercely lobbying for US support and urgent economic aid to Russia. Even Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable former suffragette rebel and now staunch conservative, was in town, angling to give the President her pennyworth on the Russian situation. America, it seemed, was Russia’s only hope of salvation. Wilson was a good and patient listener and gave everyone his ear. Bolshevism in Russia was now facing its darkest hour, he was assured; the Soviet government was politically isolated, confronted by nationwide famine and anarchy, with an inadequate Red Army to face off the German Imperial forces on its doorstep and the gathering White advance across Siberia. Many were predicting the new Soviet state’s imminent demise: ‘it has been a corpse for four or five weeks’, US ambassador to Russia David Francis reported back to Washington, ‘but no one has had the courage to bury it’. At an
impromptu party he had thrown for the American, British, French and Italian diplomatic corps at Vologda – a railway junction halfway between Moscow and the northern port of Murmansk – Francis had issued a statement promising that America would ‘never stand idly by and see the Germans exploit the Russian people and appropriate to Germany’s selfish ends the immense resources of Russia’. Since 7 July he had been urging Washington that the projected US landings in northern Russia and Siberia be brought forward. All that was needed, so it seemed, was to raise the Allied flags in Russia, and the people would rally to the cause and overthrow the Soviet government.

Wilson meanwhile was finding it hard to stick to his guns and his decision announced on the 6th to send in a limited American relief mission only, to augment work already being done in the USA by the Red Cross and the American YMCA. As a believer in the self-determination of nations and the moral force of America in helping support such aspirations, he wanted to do the right thing. Archangel was now in British and French hands; the Czechs were holding sway along the Trans-Siberian Railway and a small intervention force of Japanese troops had landed at Vladivostok and was in control of Eastern Siberia beyond Irkutsk. All of this facilitated the arrival in Russia of the projected US mission, but Wilson was adamant that any American action should not involve force, even though the progress of the Czech legions across Siberia had now materially altered the situation by ‘introducing a sentimental element’ into the question of American duty towards the Slav peoples.

As a devout Presbyterian, a man of conscience and probity, Wilson was driven by his desire to offer American solidarity with the Russian and Czech people. It was all part of the ambitious peace plan he had initiated in January when he had unveiled his Fourteen Points for a new world order of peace and the establishment of a peace-making organisation to promote it: the League of Nations. It was his sincere hope that the US and Czech presence in Russia would provoke a spontaneous democratic response on the part of the people of Siberia, the vast majority of whom were anti-Communist, that would spread across Russia.

Today, 10 July, the beleaguered President could expect to be further assaulted by even more persuasive pleas for help in Russia, for after a meeting with his war cabinet, he was due to meet Russia’s most unlikely and most impassioned envoy: Lieutenant Colonel Mariya Bochkareva, the 30-year-old former commander of the volunteer 1st Women’s Battalion of Death, that had served on the Eastern Front. Small, dumpy and large-bosomed, with a round Russian face framed by close-cropped dark hair, Bochkareva was an intimidating sight in her male army tunic,
jodhpurs and high boots along with a chest full of medals. In the West she was looked upon as Russia’s very own Joan of Arc, a parallel observed by Mrs Pankhurst, who called her ‘the greatest woman of the century’. Semi-literate and of stoical peasant stock, Bochkareva had been born into poverty and a large family before marrying at the age of 15 and becoming the victim of an abusive husband. She had had a tough life but remained a passionate patriot who cut to the simple truths of life, and whilst having no quarrel with the theories and social aspirations of Bolshevism, she had become appalled by what it had mutated into: a rule of terror and the mob. Back in 1914 Bochkareva had shared in the popular belief that the outbreak of war would pull Russia back from the brink of political disaster by drawing its disparate peoples together in a great tide of national unity. Determined to do her part and shame those men who were reticent about volunteering for the Front, she had in November that year sent a telegram to Nicholas II, telling him of her moral purpose and her desire to defend Russia and asking his permission to be allowed to join up. The Tsar had agreed to her request and she had initially joined the 25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion. With the permission of Kerensky’s provisional government, she later organised and commanded the Women’s Battalion in action in June 1917, as a response to the breakdown of morale and discipline in the Russian Army. She and all her female troops had carried vials of potassium cyanide in case of capture and rape. Leading from the front, Bochkareva herself was gassed, suffered shell shock and was wounded three times – plagued ever after with pain caused by a piece of shrapnel lodged in her side. The Russian government later awarded her the St George’s cross and several other honours for her bravery under fire. After being beaten up and mocked by male Russian soldiers, and narrowly missing execution by the Bolsheviks, in 1918 she had got out of Russia via Vladivostok, thanks to 500 roubles from the British consul in Moscow, intending to rally support in London for Russia’s suffering masses through her contacts established with Mrs Pankhurst. Sailing across the Pacific, Bochkareva had arrived in San Francisco in June and made public appearances in New York before travelling to Washington DC, where she was sponsored by the wealthy socialite and civic dignitary Florence Harriman, a close friend of the President.

Everywhere she went Bochkareva created a furore: she stopped the traffic marching down Fifth Avenue in her military garb; people were mesmerised by her vivid accounts of her harsh childhood, her terrifying experiences in the front lines, of how she had commanded the last loyal unit to defend Kerensky’s provisional government at the Winter Palace when the Bolsheviks had seized power, and, more darkly, of the later
Bolshevik atrocities she had witnessed. She was, she said, tired of the ‘river of words’ about Russia fuelling the Western press and wanted to see active, practical help for her country, now racked by profound moral and social internal disorder. Bochkareva had already met with former president Theodore Roosevelt, who thought her a ‘remarkable woman’ ‘abounding in natural wisdom and determination’. On 25 June she had requested a meeting with the President, seeing him, as many did in Russia, as the embodiment of its hope and salvation. Ahead of her meeting, she had sent him a gift – a small icon of St Anne which she herself had worn at the Front; Wilson had been touched and had written a warm response.

Bochkareva’s reputation as a magnetic personality and born actress, despite having to use an interpreter, went before her. Ushered into Wilson’s presence at 4.30 that afternoon, she did not stand on ceremony. She was a Russian and Russians speak without inhibition, from the heart. She was highly articulate, and once she got started in her inimitable husky-voiced way she couldn’t be stopped. Nor could her hapless interpreter keep pace with the torrent of words that gushed forth as Bochkareva’s tongue ‘went like a runaway horse’, hitting the highs of passion one minute and the lows of abject despair the next, in a wild semaphore of flamboyant gestures that left the President and his aides transfixed. So impassioned were her pleas that she threw herself on the floor in floods of tears, clasping her arms tight around Wilson’s knees, begging him to help poor Russia, to send food, and troops to intervene against the Bolsheviks. Her demands were extravagant – she wanted to see a combined US, French, British and Japanese force of 100,000 sent in to serve as the nucleus of a Russian fighting army of a million ‘free sons of Russia’ that she believed would rise up against Germany without reference to party or politics. An Allied army would, Bochkareva asserted, be met with joy by the Russian peasants and soldiers. If the Allies failed to help then she would be forced to return to Russia and tell her people that she had begged in vain and that the Allies were no better friends to Russia than the Germans.

Woodrow Wilson, a man known for his restraint and austerity, had not been able to resist this emotional tirade from Bochkareva. He sat there with tears streaming down his cheeks and did his best to assure her of his sympathy and support. A week later Bochkareva left Washington for London and an audience with King George V, leaving behind two ‘legacies’, as she called them, with her American friends: the story of her life, which she had dictated to the American journalist Isaac Don Levine, who translated and published it in 1919; and, somewhat alarmingly, her 15-year-old sister Nadya, for her patrons ‘to keep until Russia is safe for
her’. Bochkareva did not want the innocent Nadya to be exposed to the ideas of free love ‘and all the other horrible things that the Bolsheviks teach’. A year later a homesick Nadya went back to Russia. Bochkareva herself clearly made an indelible impression on American sentiment, for in August 1918 Theodore Roosevelt gave $1,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to her ‘as a token of my respect for those Russians who have refused to follow the Bolsheviki in their betrayal to Germany of Russia, of the Allies, and of the cause of liberty throughout the world’.

In all her speeches across America, Mariya Bochkareva made no reference to the fate of the Tsar who had allowed her to fight like a man. But Nicholas and Alexandra, so far away in Ekaterinburg, would have been proud of her moral fibre, her virulent anti-German sentiments and her spirited defence of Mother Russia at the White House that day. For like her, they loved Russia with a passion and still prayed daily to God to save the country from the brink of destruction. Alexandra had adopted all that was Russian with the fierce, visceral passion of a mother protecting her young: ‘How I love my country, with all its faults. It grows dearer and dearer to me, and I thank God daily that He allowed us to remain here and did not send us farther away.’ She constantly urged her husband and friends to keep faith in the people: ‘The nation is strong, and young, and as soft as wax’, she asserted. There was hope for Russia yet ‘in spite of all its sins and horrors’.

But the Russia that Alexandra thought she knew was far more complex and conflicted than she ever could have imagined;
her
‘Russia’ was a chimera, a product of her own imagination, created in isolation at Tsarskoe Selo and in exile. The idealised Russia of loyal, God-fearing ordinary people whom she and Nicholas had convinced themselves were devoted to them had never really existed; it was an abstraction. Yet when Nicholas had abdicated in March 1917 it had been in the firm belief that his sacrifice ‘for the sake of the true well-being and salvation of our Mother Russia’ would save the country from the violence and anarchy into which it had been descending since the February Revolution. Since childhood he had been taught to believe in the mystical relationship between tsar and people and his divine right to be master of the fate of a country that was his own personal patrimony handed down by God. He had made a solemn undertaking on the day of his coronation to act as ‘little father’ to his people and had entered into a sacred trust to toil unceasingly in their service, no matter that his disposition was entirely unsuited to the role.

But the hope that the God-centred Russian
narod
(nation) would respond positively, in the spirit of traditional ‘Holy Russia’, to his sacrifice had been smashed. The problem of Russia had been far too big
for Nicholas to resolve, and the war, instead of uniting tsar and people, had only intensified the many difficulties Nicholas faced. His long-term vision of his role – like that being carved out for President Wilson – as an apostle of world peace in the coming post-war years crumbled with it.

The Russian nation – exhausted, hungry, war-weary, and perverted by centuries of cruelty, absolutism and deceit – had failed to respond to the Tsar’s last-ditch gestures in 1905, in 1914 and again in 1917, just as it did in the main to the rhetoric of Bolshevism later. Despair, poverty and the dislocations of war gave birth to idleness, criminality and indifference after the first flush of hunger had goaded the masses into revolutionary action. Martial law, the suppression of a free press and courts of law and now, in the summer of 1918, the introduction of mass conscription had seen many of the new hoped-for liberties stripped away. Autocracy had been replaced by a new and insidious ‘commissarocracy’, as Herman Bernstein observed.

But Holy Russia – that mythical fusion of tsar, faith and people – had, under Nicholas, once enjoyed an all too brief resurgence, first during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913, when Nicholas and Alexandra had made a rare appearance
en famille
, the Tsar seeming, to British observer Bruce Lockhart, ‘a small figure in the centre of the procession . . . more like a sacred ikon to be kept hidden with Oriental exclusiveness by the High Priests and to be shown to the public on feast days’. That same sense of reverence at the visible presence of a monarch who for so much of the time had remained hidden from his public came again during the heady days of mobilisation for war in July 1914. During a great sombre ceremonial on the 20th of that month, it had seemed, for one brief day, as though tsar and people were truly united in a single objective: the repulsion of the German invader. Flags had flown from every window and balcony in Russia’s two great cities, St Petersburg and Moscow. Processions of the faithful had carried the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s portraits through the streets, had pressed round the couple during public appearances, reaching out and kissing their clothes, their hands. Vast congregations had gathered in Russia’s churches to pray, light candles and kiss the icons in a euphoria of national solidarity that had not been seen since Napoleon’s Grand Armée was driven from Russia in 1812. Here at last the spirit of a great and invincible Russia depicted in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
was briefly reincarnated.