Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (24 page)

What followed seemed a flabby and ill-thought-out plan which must have set the Tsar and Tsaritsa on their guard: seven people, including a sick boy with a crippled leg, were somehow to shimmy down a home-made rope they were to contrive themselves, from the first floor to where transportation would be waiting, and a miraculous escape into hiding would follow. But what about the guards who patrolled the circuit between the two palisades, and the machine-gun placement on the ground floor that watched this area at all hours? They were highly sceptical. Be that as it may, on the nights of 25 and 26 June, the family sat up anxiously, fully dressed – the women wearing their jewels concealed in bodices – in anticipation of flight and ready for rescue. But it did not come. The waiting and uncertainty had, wrote Nicholas in his diary, ‘been very trying’. The whole plan had suddenly seemed suspicious if not improbable and, clearly alarmed by this, the family had responded most emphatically on around 27 June in a letter written in crayon by the Tsaritsa: ‘We do not want to, nor can we,
escape
. We can only be
carried off
by force, just as it was force that was used to carry us from Tobolsk.’ Their rescuers were not to count on any active help from them; nor did they wish Avdeev and the guards who had been kind to them to suffer in any way as a result of their escape. They were now far too closely watched; if a rescue were to be attempted, then ‘In the name of God, avoid bloodshed above all.’

The following night they continued to watch and wait but it was all utterly hopeless. Several days elapsed before a fourth and final letter arrived from the would-be rescuers, apologising for their slow response. The changeover of commandant and guards at the house, plus the approach of the Czechs had now made things doubly difficult. The vague promises of impending rescue seemed even more implausible now, as too did the adventure-comic instruction to ‘await the whistle around midnight’. The Romanovs did not respond in the blank space provided, although they passed the letter back with a brief message in barely legible pencil on the envelope: ‘Surveillance of us is constantly increasing because of the open window.’ They knew this full well, for on the night of the 28th they had heard the sentry on duty below being specifically instructed to watch their every move at the window. Rescue was a chimera, as it had always been, the thought of it guaranteed only to
torment and demoralise, as too was the false information contained in one of the officer letters that the family’s friends ‘D[olgorukov]’ and ‘T[atishchev]’ were in safe hands. They had both already been shot.

The first letter received by the family, which Avdeev claimed to have intercepted, may have been genuine. Avdeev later stated that it had come from an Austrian army officer named ‘Mahitsch’. It is possible he was referring in fact to a Major Migich, a Serbian officer and member of the Tsar’s General Staff, who had come to Ekaterinburg in the entourage of Princess Helena of Serbia in June when she arrived to enquire about the fate of her own husband, now at Alapaevsk, as well as that of the Romanovs. Migich had been arrested along with several other members of Helena’s entourage. The other three letters, supposedly passed on to the Tsaritsa by one of the internal guards, were clearly a deliberate fabrication, composed at the behest of the Cheka. They were dictated by a man called Petr Voikov with further input from Aleksandr Beloborodov. Voikov was a local Bolshevik who had recently been appointed People’s Commissar for Food Supply in the Urals. A blond, blue-eyed intellectual with an eye for women, he had for many years lived in exile in Geneva, where he had studied chemistry and economics and had acquired the near perfect French needed to write the letters. But his handwriting was very bad, so he had dictated the letter to another loyal Chekist and Ipatiev House guard, Isay Rodzinsky. With these letters and the Romanovs’ response to them in their possession, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks now had a smoking gun – solid ‘evidence’ of an escape plan and the family’s willingness to conspire in one – which could be used, should they so wish, to justify the murder of the family during a possible ‘escape attempt’. (Yurovsky later observed that by responding to the letters, Nicholas ‘had fallen into a hasty plan by us to trap him’.) It also provided a valuable lever with the Central Executive Committee in Moscow in supporting the Ural Regional Soviet’s ongoing argument that, with the Czechs approaching and the continuing threat of rescue not abating, the time had come to do away with the Imperial Family before they fell into the wrong hands.

The desperate situation in Ekaterinburg was all too apparent to British consul Thomas Preston, who on 11 July managed to get a cipher out to a colleague at the diplomatic enclave at Vologda. For 20 days he and his fellow consuls in the city had been forbidden by the Bolshevik military authorities to send or receive telegrams. Public sympathy for the Czechs now closing in on the city in a pincer movement from the south, west and east was growing, especially since the murder of 18 hostages in the city at the end of June. Since the Revolution, more than 800 local men had been reluctantly mobilised for military service, but there was now
considerable opposition to this in the rural districts, with recruits refusing to fight against fellow Slavs – the advancing Czechs; nor did they want to fight in the Red Army alongside Austrian and German prisoners of war dragooned into service by the Bolsheviks. At the Verkh-Isetsk works outside the city, 4,000 old soldiers from the Front had today gathered in the public square demanding an end to military operations led by Lenin’s commissars. These new men, to their mind, had no sympathies with the Russian labouring classes. The protesters were quickly dispersed and several arrested by the Cheka and threatened with shooting for their act of ‘counter-revolution’. As an example to the others, five of the protesters were taken and thrown alive into a gas hole where hot slag was burned. Brutality such as this only further confirmed Preston’s view that the Bolsheviks were now holding power ‘exclusively by means of terrorism over [the] population’.

In the summer of 1918, the road out to the Koptyaki Forest – a dense area of ancient birch and pine forest nine miles north-west of Ekaterinburg – would take you past the straggling wooden suburbs of the low, flat city, and the stinking smoke stacks of the huge Verkh-Isetsk works, along a small local road that was crossed by the rail lines to Perm and Nizhni-Tagil. After that the going got tough. It certainly wasn’t an easy place to get to by motor vehicle in July 1918 because beyond the crossings the road was little more than a muddy cart track full of puddles and potholes, surrounded by wet, peaty woodland. Nor was there much cause for anyone to wish to go there except to get to the small farming and fishing village of Koptyaki, a collection of wooden peasant huts on the shores of Iset Pond that lay beyond. There was a time when they had mined for gold here – not deep mines but shallow workings, like caves. With 10 or 12 of these old mines located in the area and now overgrown, it was a dangerous place to walk – the open workings were full of fetid silt and rainwater, and beneath that a layer of permafrost. Nevertheless, at 5 p.m. that late summer afternoon of 11 July, a mining technician, Ivan Fesenko, who had been working in the area prospecting for iron ore was idly carving his name and the date of his visit on a tall birch tree. He was sitting not far from a spot known to the locals as the Four Brothers – given its name for four tall pine trees that had once stood there, of which only two stumps remained. Nearby there were a couple of disused iron ore workings, surrounded by mounds of clayey earth, not far from a small pond the locals called Ganina Yama (Ganin’s Pit).

Suddenly Fesenko noticed three men approaching on horseback in the distance. As they came nearer, he recognised one of them immediately as Commandant Yurovsky of the Ipatiev House; the other was a man called
Ermakov from the Verkh-Isetsk works; the third man looked to him like an Austrian or Magyar prisoner of war (it was probably Ermakov’s close associate, a former Kronstadt sailor, Stepan Vaganov). Seeing Fesenko, the men stopped and asked him about the state of the road and access to the village of Koptyaki beyond. Could you get a lorry up there? They needed, so they said, to transport ‘500 poods’ (about eight tons) of grain to the village. Fesenko told them he thought the road was good; you could get through by lorry. But as the men turned and rode off, he also asked himself the question: why would they want to transport such a heavy load to such a remote spot?

Back at the Ipatiev House, the guard duty book for that day was filled out, but there seemed nothing to say, except the one recurring comment of late: ‘
Vse obychno
’; ‘Everything is the same.’ In fact nothing was the same. Everything was about to change.

FRIDAY 12 JULY 1918

T
he pain Alexandra woke to on the sunny morning of 12 July was bad again; so bad that she could do nothing but remain in bed all day. Dr Botkin was running out of medicines and could do little to help. But he put in a formal request to Yurovsky to obtain the prescriptions he needed from Pozner, the local chemist. Maria volunteered to stay by her mother’s bedside while the others went outside into the garden for their recreation periods, and spent the day reading to her – mundane Christian homilies by the religious writer Grigory Dyachenko that Alexandra loved so much and which all the family regularly shared in. Occasionally Maria’s soft voice was interrupted by noises through the open window and Alexandra stilled her so she could listen. The world outside was so tantalisingly near. Dramatic changes were afoot in the city; for the last two weeks Alexandra had frequently heard the sound of troop movements, artillery had trundled past below and with it the metallic ring of horses’ hooves on cobblestones and the footfalls of marching soldiers, accompanied occasionally by military bands. The Red Army was on the move, with more and more troops – many of them ‘volunteer’ Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war – being transported to the Front against the Czech legions. Ekaterinburg had become a chaotic transit camp, full of wounded men, who were arriving daily on crowded trains from the Front for the most rudimentary medical attention before being evacuated west. This much Alexandra knew and noted in her diary, for she had heard the guards talking about it.

But what of them – the family? How much longer would they be kept here? Something surely would happen soon and this interminable imprisonment in the Ipatiev House would come to an end. Alexandra must have nursed final faint hopes that if the longed-for rescue by Russian monarchists had now faded, then it might just be possible that the Czechs would get to the family in time. In any event, God would intervene, of that she was sure. With the afternoon punctuated by rolls
of thunder and rainstorms that raged outside the iron grille of the open window in her room, Alexandra’s thoughts now were increasingly preoccupied with how and when fate would take a hand. For this she was prepared, reconciled even, as were all the Romanov family.

Meanwhile, it was turning into a long, exhausting day for the loyal Bolshevik leaders of Ekaterinburg who had gathered down the road at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. Once graced by eminent visitors such as Chekhov and the scientist Dmitri Mendeleev, the hotel now resembled a military barracks, its parquet floors muddied and scuffed by the boots and equipment of the Red Army detachment based on its ground floor, whose sinister role was to carry out reprisals against local ‘counterrevolutionaries’. Upstairs, the Ekaterinburg Cheka had taken over the first-floor rooms, but their plush interiors were no longer an oasis of rest to travellers on the long road through Siberia; rather a political nerve centre for men in leather jackets and forage caps, bristling with weapons, whose meetings now increasingly went on long into the night. All the local hard men of the party had now become familiar faces to the maids at the hotel: Goloshchekin; Beloborodov; Fedor Lukoyanov, a former journalist and head of the Cheka; Georgy Safarov, a close friend of Beloborodov and member of the URS’s presidium; Isay Rodzinsky, who had helped fake the officer letters to the Tsar; Chutskaev from the local Soviet; Yurovsky and his assistant Nikulin – they all had their own rooms in the Amerikanskaya, though none of them lived here. Some of them seemed very young – like pasty-faced students, the maids observed – but they brought their women in with them for sex and drinking sessions, and one of the waitresses, Fekla Dedyukhina, had already taken up with the commander of the detachment downstairs. It had prompted another maid, Praskovya Morozova, to have a row with her. How could she, in all conscience, go to bed with someone who had just come back from shooting people? Dedyukhina’s response had been an indifferent shrug – she didn’t care – a response symptomatic of the climate in Ekaterinburg now. Nobody cared; surviving was all that mattered. A few days later, Morozova, accused of ‘counter-revolutionary’ behaviour, had been dismissed from her job.

On the morning of the 12th, an urgent meeting had been called at the Amerikanskaya between the Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet and the Ekaterinburg Cheka. At 10 p.m. that night it was still dragging on amidst the fading imperial splendour of room no. 3 – Yurovsky’s room. The potted plants,
fin de siècle
furnishings and chandeliers seemed strangely incongruous in the thickening atmosphere of cigarette smoke, sweat and political debate. The conference table had
seen better days, littered as it now was with the detritus of discarded plates of food, packets of cigarettes, vodka bottles and endless glasses of tea from the Tula samovar. In the chair sat a thin and sickly-looking Aleksandr Beloborodov, president of the Ural Regional Soviet. A poorly educated former factory electrician, Beloborodov had all the qualities required of a dedicated party man: he was ambitious, hard-working and morally and ethically unprincipled. He had earned his spurs young, from the age of 14 working as a political agitator among his colleagues at the Nadezhdinsky factory and disseminating underground literature. Arrested in 1914, he served time in exile in Siberia. He had been rewarded for his services to the Revolution at the age of only 27, by being made president of the Ural Regional Soviet in April 1917. Today he had not long returned from an exhausting tour of Bolshevik forces at the Czech Front.