Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (27 page)

In the end it was the pressing argument of the Czech advance that won the day and the sanctioning of this ultimate act of political expediency. It was not just a matter of preventing the Romanovs falling into enemy hands but also a response to continuing pressure from Germany: if the Tsar fell into Czech hands and became a rallying point for an anti-German resurgence in Russia, then the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and with it the bolstering-up of the Soviet government, would be dead in the water. But there was an added complication. It was one thing to kill the Tsar, but foreign policy dictated that it was essential to keep any liquidation of the Romanov
family
a state secret. It would be bad politically to be seen to be killing innocent women and children, and the spilling of the Tsaritsa’s German blood and by association that of her children would antagonise the Kaiser.

Be that as it may, Lenin’s revolution was different: it had to show no mercy. There should be no ‘living banner’ – among neither the Romanov family nor their immediate relatives in Alapaevsk, around whom a White or counter-revolutionary movement could rally ordinary Russians against the Soviets. Human considerations were not part of either Lenin’s or the Bolshevik mindset, only political logic. As Trotsky would later explain: ‘The Tsar’s family was a victim of the principle that forms the very axis of monarchy: dynastic inheritance.’ For that reason alone their deaths were a necessity.

Lenin had always looked upon the House of Romanov as a very particular class enemy, as ‘monarchist filth’ and their dynasty a ‘300-year disgrace’. The Revolution demanded that they be exterminated – along with other undesirables and ‘bloodsuckers’: speculators, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks. It wasn’t enough to cut off the head of the king alone, as Cromwell’s revolution in England in 1649 had done with Charles I; revolution in Russia, according to Lenin, demanded the cutting-off of ‘a hundred Romanov heads’ in order to achieve the new democracy. Lenin always looked to draconian measures; he never thought in terms of individuals, only in terms of the bigger picture – entire classes and groups. For a start, it was quicker and more efficient; he was impatient to see all these class enemies wiped out wholesale, destroyed at the root. Not quite genocide but a new kind of necessary, ideological murder, in defence of the greater good of the proletariat. Under his successor, Stalin, it would be perfected on the grand scale. Eradicating the Romanovs, destroying tsarism and everything it represented was a fundamental part of Lenin’s policy of ‘cleansing’ Russia of everything linked to the old system.

But the written record taking the chain of command and ultimate responsibility for the fate of the Romanovs back to Lenin was, from the beginning, either never made or cleverly concealed. Most likely, the
decision was conveyed verbally. When it came to ordering any draconian measures, Lenin was a coward. He always operated with extreme caution, his favoured method being to issue such instructions in coded telegrams (insisting that the original and even the telegraph ribbon on which it was sent be destroyed). Elsewhere, it was by confidential notes or anonymous directives made in the collective name of the Council of People’s Commissars; it is more than likely too that he often gave verbal instructions via his trusted right-hand man Sverdlov. Thus a whole host of party ‘errand boys’ were regularly designated to do his dirty work for him, and in all such decisions he made a point of regularly insisting that no written evidence be preserved, as recently uncovered documents in Archive No. 2 (Lenin) and Archive No. 86 (Sverdlov) as well as the archives of the Sovnarkom and the CEC have revealed. With this in mind, the 55 volumes of Lenin’s enormous collected works were scrupulously censored; the memoirs of those involved in events in Ekaterinburg are also suspiciously silent, emphasising the primary roles of Sverdlov and Goloshchekin. (It is no accident either that as Jews, they were both singled out in the virulently anti-Semitic Western literature on the subject after 1918 by Sokolov, Wilton and Diterikhs, all of whom blamed Russia’s woes on the Jews.) It is as though Lenin’s role in the fate of the Romanovs has been airbrushed from the record. The task of Soviet historiography through 73 years of Communism would be to protect his reputation at all costs and thus ensure that no discredit was brought on the architect of the Revolution. And in this respect the Bolsheviks of Ekaterinburg played directly into Sverdlov’s hands. Notorious they might be for their hot-headedness, but the men at the top in Ekaterinburg were nevertheless dedicated party men who understood only too well that the Bolshevik centre in Moscow did not and would not tolerate autonomous action. They kowtowed to a very clearly defined party hierarchy and the ultimate sanction of its indisputable despotic leader, Lenin, through his intermediary, Sverdlov. The Ekaterinburgers had no difficulty in taking personal responsibility for what was to come in order to keep the revered leader’s hands clean. Indeed, it was a matter of revolutionary pride to take that responsibility upon themselves, and one which many of them traded on for years afterwards. Ekaterinburg would carry out the necessary liquidation and, in the absence of documentation to prove otherwise, would also carry the blame in the eyes of the world. Within the new Soviet Russia, the kudos for this historic act of national vengeance would be enormous.

The Ural Regional Soviet and the Ekaterinburg Cheka had thus known from early July that the liquidation of the Romanovs would be their responsibility – it was simply a matter of when, and now they were
about to decide. During the day, from their stuffy meeting room at the Amerikanskaya Hotel, they had sent word to Red Army commanders at the Front for clarification of the present military situation. How much longer could Ekaterinburg hold out? The Czechs were intent on cutting the city off from European Russia. Red Army forces in the area were insufficient. As they awaited word from the Front, Yurovsky was now formally entrusted with the final preparations for the execution, codenamed, improbably,
trubochist
–‘chimney sweep’. All he had to do now, as Goloshchekin assured him, was wait for the signal from Moscow.

SATURDAY 13 JULY 1918

S
aturday 13 July brought joy to the Ipatiev House, albeit on a minor scale. It was a landmark for the Tsarevich Alexey and his delighted mother. Although Alexandra had been forced to spend yet another day lying on her bed with agonising backache, she had at least been cheered by the fact that her son at last had managed to take a bath – his first since leaving Tobolsk nine weeks previously. What joy for her that her beloved ‘Baby’, whose leg had been in plaster for much of the time since his arrival, and who could still not straighten it at the knee, had ‘managed to get in & out alone’. Such now were the increasingly trivial highlights of the family’s imprisonment at the Ipatiev House: so small, so insignificant, when all the time chaos mounted not far from their door. Down in Ekaterinburg’s market, goods were now in such short supply that the trade in shoes and leather had been forbidden; these would no doubt be requisitioned for the Red Army now fighting it out against the Czechs. Protest against the increasingly oppressive Bolshevik government in Ekaterinburg still continued sporadically. Across the road from the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s bedroom window, a demonstration of ‘Evacuated Invalids’ had been staged in Voznesensky Square by a hotch-potch of Red Army soldiers, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists attempting to capitalise on the absence at the Front of the majority of the city’s Red Army garrison, and demanding the dismissal of the local Ekaterinburg Soviet and the transfer of control of the city to them. What few Red Guards remained quickly suppressed this mini-rebellion; a detachment of Bolshevik thugs from the Verkh-Isetsk factory, led by Petr Ermakov, had been called in to deal with it and had opened fire on the protesters. A spate of arrests and shootings of suspected counter-revolutionaries had followed that night – Alexandra herself heard several shots as she lay in bed. The city’s leaders had later made use of this episode to suggest it had been a monarchist-led rebellion that threatened the security of their captives at the Ipatiev House.

In London, meanwhile,
The Times
was full of stories about ‘Distracted Russia’, as one leader described the country. News was ‘fragmentary’ and often untrustworthy, but in the West reports were now claiming that the influence of the ‘Bolshevists’ was waning; Lenin and Trotsky were ‘undergoing an eclipse’ and losing control in the regions. Their collusion with Germany was shameful; enforced conscription had brought together a raggle-taggle army mainly comprised of German POWs ‘whose discipline is a farce and whose one common idea seems to be to avoid fighting at all costs’. Meanwhile, the Germans still had 47 divisions occupying Russia, from Finland in the north to the Black Sea on Russia’s southern border – their objective in all regions to milk them for their economic resources, most particularly the rich grain fields of the Don valley in the south. With an Allied force gathering at Murmansk, the Czechs were now only 350 miles from Moscow and asserting themselves as a ‘new power in Russia and Siberia’. They had proved ‘what resolution and coherence can achieve in a Russia torn by dissensions and pillaged by the greed of its temporary masters’. Having now seized the railway across most of Siberia, the Czechs had created rallying points from which the German invasion could be checked. The last word now rested with the United States for supplies of rolling stock and railway material. President Wilson,
The Times
assured its readers, ‘has been watching the Siberian situation more closely than is commonly supposed’.

Page 5 of the paper further endorsed the sense of a country about to implode. There was an ominous silence in the capital, Moscow, an atmosphere of muted feelings, the faces of passers-by so often now ingrained with a look of deep, rankling hatred. The once great neoclassical city of St Petersburg, under its new name Petrograd, was swarming with refugees. It was, according to British diplomat William Gerhardie, a ‘wild, depressed, anarchic city’. Herman Bernstein noted the same desperate situation wherever he went. There was no joy on the streets of Russia any more. An anonymous report from an English nurse recently returned to England after serving for more than three years with the Russian Red Cross at the Front talked in much the same terms, of a beaten, quiescent population, ‘so passive, so indifferent to famine and the fratricidal warfare around them’. ‘A kind of stupor’ lay on the population of Russia, she observed, the people ‘bowed the head and submitted’, whilst daily the Soviet powers issued endless decrees ‘commanding, demanding, threatening’, all of which ‘were read through meekly’. Everywhere there was an outspoken contempt for human rights. With the two elemental forces of hunger and hatred at work across Russia, the people were at breaking point. Landowners had been driven from their estates, country houses pillaged and burned – not just by the Bolsheviks
but by the starving and land-hungry local peasantry, now acting according to the Bolshevik diktat of ‘rob that which was robbed’. The long-dormant volcano of the agrarian question had finally erupted. The old noble families of Russia were fleeing for their lives and seeking refuge in the towns, where they were forced to sweep the streets, or sell newspapers or their last possessions on corners for the price of a loaf of bread. In Moscow, Trotsky was now driving around in Nicholas II’s favourite motor car, while all over Russia railway stations and even churches were filling with homeless refugees with dim, haggard eyes who had been drifting aimlessly for weeks in search of food and refuge and would remain camped out indefinitely, whole families herded together in filthy and foul-smelling conditions that spread typhus.

The Bolshevists meanwhile had announced that the hour had come to ‘starve the bourgeoisie’ and with them their children. Whilst workers received a healthy pound of bread a day, the ration for those people deemed to be class enemies was four ounces. With such utter despair engulfing them, Russia’s former nobility and intelligentsia were openly referring to the German invasion as their only chance of salvation from the systematic victimisation they were suffering under the Bolsheviks. The Germans might at least deliver them from their own rapacious army, who even now were accosting ordinary travellers at railway stations and stealing their luggage and eatables, or ransacking homes and confiscating everything they could find, only to sell it later on Moscow’s streets. ‘At a wave of the hand a soldier could sell you a herring, one rouble, a pair of galoshes, 30 roubles, and a Maxim gun, 75 roubles.’ Herman Bernstein concurred: there was nothing one could not get ‘by bribing a commissary, from a passport to a battleship’. With industry disrupted, only the presses turning out virtually worthless Soviet paper money were still working. People asked themselves why the Allies didn’t come to help the Russians in their hour of need. ‘How can England look on so calmly when the existence of our country is at stake?’

How too could the English king look on knowing that his cousin Nicholas was incarcerated in Siberia awaiting an uncertain future? With the British press largely indifferent to the fate of the Romanovs, back in May of 1918, on the occasion of Nicholas’s fiftieth birthday, the
Washington Post
had been the only Western paper to comment on the Tsar’s desperate situation, ‘neglected by his allies, his life in peril’, and that it must be a source of ‘great regret and compunction to Great Britain and the other powers associated with her, that no provision should have been made for his personal safety and for that of the other members of his more immediate family’. ‘Today’, concluded the
Post
’s correspondent, ‘it is too late to save his family from without.’ Too late certainly
for Nicholas, and too late even for the children. Nicholas’s cousin, King George V, his mind preoccupied with the Western Front, was taken up with daily gestures of solidarity with the nation, such as today attending a cricket match at Lord’s in aid of the King George’s Fund for Sailors, and, in the evening, accompanying Queen Mary to a special service for Woolwich munitions workers at St Paul’s Cathedral. The question of the Romanov family and, more specifically, the German-born Tsaritsa, had been a political hot potato he had not wanted to handle.