Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (22 page)

Having proclaimed his intention relentlessly to prosecute the war until the German invader was driven from the soil of the Russian motherland, Nicholas rode in a coach along the banks of the River Neva in St Petersburg to tumultuous cheers from the crowds. Later, he appeared with Alexandra on a balcony at the Winter Palace to publicly declare war on
Germany and acknowledge the packed Alexander Square below. A tiny figure, dwarfed by the grandeur of the great columns of the Winter Palace on all sides, he had nevertheless inspired the swelling crowd of tens of thousands below to spontaneously kneel down and join in singing the Russian national anthem ‘Bozhe, Tsarya Khrani’:

God save the noble Tsar!

Long may he live, in pow’r,

In happiness,

In peace to reign!

Dread of his enemies,

Faith’s sure defender,

God save the Tsar!

Composed in 1833, the melody had become an integral part of Russian national identity after it was incorporated by Tchaikovsky into his
1812 Overture
in 1882. Uplifted by this profound moment of communion with his people, Nicholas had stood and wept. Russia loved him; the nation needed its
batyushka-tsar
; the people would never desert their monarch and Russia once more would be a great nation led by a great tsar. Alexandra had reiterated it time and again: the reign of their son would inaugurate a great and golden new era for the country.

A similar moment of epiphany had followed in Moscow, on 23 August, where Nicholas had attended a long and solemn service thick with the smell of incense and candles at the historic Uspensky Cathedral to pray for victory. He did so with ‘a holy fervour which gave his pale face a movingly mystical expression’, according to French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, who noted how Alexandra seemed physically intoxicated by the experience, her gaze ‘magnetic and inspired’. Afterwards the couple joined the crowds outside to hear the cathedral’s great bells pealing out a Russian message of defiance across the ancient Kremlin walls. Later that day, Nicholas acknowledged another vast, hushed crowd from the steps of the Kremlin’s Red Porch, decorated with its stone lions – the place where Russia’s rulers at momentous times in history had appeared before their people – recreating an almost medieval scene from an idealised Little Mother Moscow, the holy city of old, amid the glittering onion domes and spires of Moscow’s ancient churches.

And so, comforted by this false image of national unity, the concerted pattern of denial continued, with Nicholas and Alexandra remaining stubbornly blind to the dramatic changes going on within the nation. Only a few months later this upsurge of xenophobia and national unity was dissipated by the devastating losses on the Eastern Front. The Russian
people, whom both Nicholas and Alexandra had believed had boundless love for their tsar as the being ‘from whom all charity and fortune derive’, turned their backs on him, their devotion fatally undermined by the political and economic strains that, having reached a high point in 1905, had bubbled on through the Rasputin scandal and now into a disastrous war. The monarchy which Nicholas had believed was the only viable form of government for Russia’s huge cross-section of races, classes and religions thereafter rapidly lost the support of the two most powerful elements that had always, traditionally, shored it up: the peasantry, called on to make the economic sacrifices to provide food and men for the Front; and the army, called on to continue fighting a war in Europe whilst revolution raged at home.

Nicholas and Alexandra, and their children too, never ceased to agonise over the fate of their ‘poor Russia’. The anguish stayed with them even during their final months in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. If anything, it increased, for they were now completely isolated from the Russia they thought they knew. Alexandra’s blind faith in miracles had never let her accept the finality of the Revolution and the Romanov removal from power. It was all a terrible mistake, a nightmare that surely would pass. All that was needed was to pray more and more fervently for God’s intervention. Even when asylum for the family had been discussed in the early days after the abdication, it had been done in terms only of a temporary arrangement – until the war was over, after which the family made clear their wish to return and live in retirement in the Crimea. To be forced to leave Russia for ever would for them be a spiritual death, which other Russians – notably creative artists and writers – have also rejected. It would break their ‘last link with the past, which would then be dead for ever’. The Tsar and Tsaritsa had made it clear that they would rather die in Russia than be forced to live permanently in exile, and their children shared their sentiments.

But today, 10 July, a very new and irrevocably changed Soviet Russia was about to be inaugurated at the 2,000-seater Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow, where the main auditorium was packed for the ratification of the newly composed Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. After more than six months of preparation under Sverdlov, Lenin’s government was ready to unveil a constitution that it believed would be the first in the world ‘to give expression . . . to the hopes of the workers, the peasants and the oppressed and to abolish political and economic inequality once and for all’. This constitution, combined with the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People, approved in January 1918, set out to destroy the old bourgeois regime and the exploitation of man by man, by disenfranchising those
who had so rapaciously exploited Russia – capitalists, the clergy and the aristocracy – depriving them of their civil rights, and creating a form of government where the wealth produced by the country’s workers would be shared by them. Divested of ‘every form of force, coercion, and oppression’, the new state would set an example for the whole world and oppressed peoples everywhere.

The reality, however, was already somewhat different: the erosion of the power of the recently formed regional soviets and with it the destruction of independent political parties in Russia had begun in June with the outlawing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists and Mensheviks and the domination over them of the Bolsheviks in local government. The creation of the Cheka further fuelled the suppression of any independent political action in the regions. Since the assassination of Mirbach on 6 July, arrests and executions of political opponents had escalated across Russia’s regional soviets such as Kursk, Tambov, Kaluga, Tula, Vladimir and Nizhni-Novgorod. One by one, Left SR committees in these cities were dissolved, and their representatives – and with them representation in the main of the Russian peasantry – removed. Left SRs in positions of responsibility were being driven from their posts as well as excluded from delegations to central government, and many rank-and-file party members were being arrested and interrogated. The process was further accelerated on the 10th: a telegram sent out by People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Grigory Petrovsky (who worked hand-in-glove with the Cheka) ordered provincial soviets ‘immediately to take all measures [to] apprehend and detain’ anyone who had taken part in the recent Left SR uprising, hand them over to military-revolutionary courts and shoot anyone who resisted.

For a brief while, the messianism of revolution and popular anger at an age-old class system based on privilege had driven the motor of change in Russia, but by the summer of 1918 it mattered little to Russia’s hungry and dispossessed who now was in power. And the fate of their former tsar, now vanished from view, mattered even less. The promise of political equality laid down by the new constitution was something the hungry could not comprehend, any more than the concept of their collective responsibility to the state. It was all so new and baffling to a peasantry with no real sense of a national consciousness. Yes, a constitution and a republic were all very fine and good, they observed, provided always that there was a wise tsar too, someone to whom they could doff their caps, as they had always done. In the old days they had been taught to answer only to the tsar and to God; the idea now of answering to their newly constituted country when all most of them knew was their immediate village was beyond their comprehension. The
vast majority of Russia’s ordinary peasants (85 per cent of the population) were confused about the nature of this new democracy and highly resistant to the forced requisitioning of their grain which they thought the Revolution had brought them the right to keep. This was all part, they were told, of the necessary Socialist transformation of the village. But all the peasants wanted was peace and quiet, independence and the right to farm the ‘three acres per soul’ that the Duma had long since promised them. For a while they had been persuaded to place their faith in Lenin’s 1917 promise of ‘peace, bread and land’ that would come once the bourgeoisie had been disarmed of its own land and property in the name of the state. But now, suddenly, the labouring masses found themselves facing the imposition of enforced labour on all, under the constitution’s ominous watchword, ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ It soon became clear that the land was not to be divided out equally among the peasantry but collectively worked for the nation as a whole, its produce benefiting the local communes. A new kind of official ideology, summarised in the constitution, was about to ensure that the state rather than the tsar was all, and the individual, once again, as he had been under the old feudal system, was enchained by economic slavery in a system where he counted for nothing.

The institution of so many rapid and draconian changes had meant that by July of 1918 the country’s infrastructure was collapsing. Industry was in shutdown, the factories closed because of a shortage of materials; shops were boarded up, the urban food supply in crisis. The railway system had collapsed, credit had been destroyed, on top of which much of the Russian territory in the Baltic and Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. There was no firewood, no electricity, no gas, no oil for lamps. Soon there would be no candles. With supply lines disrupted, nothing was obtainable except by the card system, and with those supplies rapidly becoming exhausted, things increasingly could only be got on the black market, with hoarders realising huge profits on their goods.

Writing that day to Geoffrey Robinson, his editor at the
Times
in London, Russia correspondent Robert Wilton had no doubts of the desperateness of the situation:

I wish to say most emphatically that, unless we immediately intervene in Russia with a large force . . . and unless
we
establish a Russian government (on non-party lines) under a virtual dictator, who shall be backed up with all the force, military and moral, of the allied powers, the Germans will be in Moscow before the snow falls and will set up a Monarchy (Romanov or Hohenzollern) and this new authority, representing law and order, will compel and receive
the adhesion of the Russian people. Russia (and Siberia) will then become German colonies and our position in India will be seriously menaced.

British interests, as ever, devolved ultimately not to royal blood ties with the Romanovs, or the interests of the Russian people, but to the security of Empire. Sixty years previously, Britain had fought a disastrous war in the Crimea for similar reasons.

In statute number 23 of its new constitution, the Soviet government had asserted that ‘Guided by the interests of the working class as a whole, the [state] deprives individuals or separate groups of any privileges which they may use to the detriment of the socialist revolution.’ It was now six weeks since the arrest of Count Ilya Tatishchev and Prince Vasily Dolgorukov by the Cheka as potential ‘enemies of the socialist revolution’. The family had repeatedly asked about their welfare, having no idea that all this time Tatishchev had been languishing in Ekaterinburg jail. Dolgorukov, who had initially been allowed to stay in the city when he arrived at the end of April, had been arrested after compromising maps of the region showing river routes were found when his lodgings were searched. Accused of trying to plot the Romanov family’s escape, Dolgorukov, together with Tatishchev, was taken by the Cheka on 10 July to a favourite killing place beyond the city’s Ivanovskoe cemetery. Here a single revolver shot to the back of the head – the favoured Cheka method of execution – ended their lives, after which their bodies were thrown into a pit.

Over at the Ipatiev House the afternoon had been warm and sunny. Alexandra, although still suffering a lot of pain in her back and legs, had gone out into the garden for an hour and a half with the others to enjoy the warm air, little knowing that across the city the man who had today pulled the trigger on her loyal servant Vasily Dolgorukov was none other than Commandant Yurovsky’s eager young assistant Grigory Nikulin.

THURSDAY 11 JULY 1918

F
or six weeks now, day in, day out, the devoted sisters of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent in Ekaterinburg had made their way from the southern outskirts of the city to the Ipatiev House bringing food – eggs, flour, cream, milk, butter – for the Romanov family. They had never been allowed into the house but had had to deliver their goods to the commandant at the front door. Although they found the experience intimidating, they would not abandon their
batyushka-tsar.

The convent had a long and eminent reputation for philanthropy; established in the late eighteenth century, it had, since 1822, been one of the wealthiest in Russia, with a complex containing eight churches set in a landscaped park with ponds, a hospital and almshouse and an orphanage for girls. The high quality of the handicrafts produced by its 900 sisters was famous: candle-making, icon-painting, needlework and embroidery. Sister Agnes, mistress of the novices who undertook the daily trip to the Ipatiev House, had instructed them to go in civilian dress – this being acceptable as they had not yet taken their vows – in order not to antagonise the Bolshevik guards, who otherwise derided them for their black nun’s habits. Before his dismissal, Avdeev had regularly helped himself to the vast majority of the food, sharing it with his favourites. It was only after he was gone that Nicholas had discovered it was being systematically pilfered; yet the pilfering still went on. This morning Yurovsky had kept the Romanovs waiting for their morning inspection as he sat and tucked into the cheese brought by the nuns. He had recently told the family they would not be getting any more cream from the convent hereafter. Their meat ration was being drastically reduced too – the latest delivery, supposedly for six days, was, complained Alexandra, barely enough for the soup.