Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (29 page)

Publicly, therefore, George would appear to have washed his hands of the affair in April 1917. Besides, by that summer he was far too preoccupied with the concerted democratisation of his own monarchy in order to save it, making concessions to rabid anti-German public feeling in Britain. He removed the Kaiser’s honorary banner from St George’s Chapel at Windsor and regretfully accepted the resignation of his First Sea Lord, Admiral Prince Louis Battenberg (a close relative of the Tsaritsa’s from the royal House of Hesse), even though Battenberg was now a naturalised British citizen and soon after changed his name to Mountbatten. Yet still people were not satisfied: ‘Once a Hun, always a Hun’, yelled the gutter press. George was incensed that his patriotism should be in doubt: he considered himself to be ‘wholly and impregnably British’. Nevertheless, such were the political pressures that on 17 July 1917, Buckingham Palace announced that the British royal family was abandoning its Saxe-Coburg name and with it all German honorifics and titles, in future to be ‘styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor’. It was Lord Stamfordham who had, in a stroke of genius, come up with the Windsor surname, the choice symbolising a very obvious and emotive link with ancient British history.

But did King George in fact abandon all hope of saving his dear cousin Nicky? As late as 4 June 1917, he confided to his diary, on hearing rumours that Nicky and Alexandra might be confined in the Fortress of St Peter and Paul in St Petersburg, that if this was the case, then he feared ‘he will not come out alive’. On the surface, however, the official British records were and remain silent on the matter; indeed, there is virtually no official correspondence enquiring about the plight of Nicholas II and
his family during the crucial period 1917–18, though it is known that Alexandra’s other sister, Victoria, married to Lord Battenberg and settled on the Isle of Wight, had also written to Foreign Secretary Balfour expressing anxiety about the safety of both her sisters and suggesting mediation by either neutral Sweden or Spain. Having also spoken to George and Mary privately at Buckingham Palace, she contacted King Alfonso of Spain, drawing yet another European royal into the political dynamic. The bonds across the royal houses of Europe, populated in large part by the children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, were many and complex. Privately, the King – and Queen Mary, who was also now making her own personal representations to King Alfonso to intervene – may well have had a crisis of conscience (as George did later over the safety of other imperilled royal relatives in Austro-Hungary and Greece). Under private pressure from his relatives, he might, in a last-minute turnaround, have sought advice on the possibility of an unofficial rescue by British secret service agents, bypassing the need for government sanction. Constitutional monarch he might be, but as head of the armed services he was, during the war, in regular contact with the War Office and its secret service operatives. Unsubstantiated suggestions have been made by Michael Occleshaw and by Tom Mangold and Anthony Summers that British agents had private meetings with the King in the spring of 1918 at which plans for a rescue were discussed. This might explain also a telegraph sent via the Foreign Office on 3 May 1918 to Bruce Lockhart, a British agent based at the British embassy in Moscow, which in rather formal, veiled terms observed that ‘the King is greatly distressed by the reports which have reached him about the family’s treatment [in Tobolsk]’ and that ‘if it were generally believed here that they were the victims of unnecessary cruelty the impression produced would be most painful’. It was thus left to the intelligence service’s discretion to judge whether rescue might be viable; to do so publicly would risk not just failure but with it dangerous embarrassment to the King and the British government.

The curious fact remains that as late as November/December 1917, evidence in Canadian archives shows that money had been spent by the British in commissioning the Hudson’s Bay Company at Murmansk to construct a house to accommodate the Romanov family on land near the British consulate there, should their evacuation out of Russia via the Arctic eventually be effected, suggesting that private attempts, under the control of the British military or secret service, to get the Romanovs out of Russia were still ongoing. Hudson’s Bay Company records show that Allied intelligence operatives in Murmansk had been involved in building a house large enough to accommodate seven people. As late as
March 1918 a Hudson’s Bay trouble-shooter called Henry Armistead, who also worked for the British secret service and whose family were well-known traders in Riga, was said to have set up a Romanov rescue bid in collaboration with a Norwegian Arctic shipping merchant, Jonas Lied, aimed at getting the family out of Tobolsk, via the River Enisei in Siberia to Murmansk. The rescue plan had still been under consideration even after the family were moved to Ekaterinburg, and might explain why British agent Major Stephen Alley had sent an undercover mission into the city in May to recce the Ipatiev House. The rescue plan he had mooted, using British agents and local Russian monarchist officers, had foundered partly because the British government would not stump up the money to fund it, but also because the Ipatiev House proved utterly impregnable and Alley’s associates in Ekaterinburg too closely watched by the local Cheka.

Despite King George’s apparent withdrawal of support, diplomatic and other attempts by foreign royals to obtain asylum abroad for the Romanovs date back to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918, when King Christian of Denmark had contacted the Kaiser urging his intercession. They had continued on into 1918 from neutral Copenhagen, the Danish royal family having close links to the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna (Alexandra, the British Queen Mother, was the Dowager’s sister, and like her, King Christian of Denmark’s aunt), their lobbying bolstered by Alexandra’s brother, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, who had also entered the campaign. On 17 March 1918 the Kaiser had responded to King Christian’s latest request, stating that he could well understand his concern and that in spite of all the painful things he and his people had suffered at the hands of his former friends the Romanovs, he could not but feel sympathy for them. However, he had to tread carefully, for any attempt he made to intercede on their behalf could be misinterpreted by his Bolshevik allies as an attempt to reinstate the Tsar. For similar reasons, Wilhelm had vetoed sanctuary in Germany for Grand Duke Kyrill Romanov and his wife, who after they fled to Coburg were obliged to move on to France. Wilhelm’s opinion was that the best course of diplomatic action lay with the neutral Nordic states, such as Sweden.

From Ekaterinburg itself, the British consul, Thomas Preston, meanwhile had continued to urge his Foreign Office to try and get the Romanovs out, if only to prevent them falling into German hands, where they ‘would be a trump card for a future Germanophil monarchical orientation’ in Russia. The new British consul-general in Petrograd, Arthur Woodhouse, argued along much the same lines. The general view among Germany’s enemies was that, should the Kaiser
choose to topple the Bolshevik government, which was perfectly possible in the summer of 1918, he might well restore a puppet monarchy in a Russia reduced to a German satellite state – though not with Nicholas (who would never for one moment have agreed anyway) but rather a lesser Romanov grand duke or possibly even a regency for Alexey under Alexandra’s brother, the Duke of Hesse.

The Germans had clearly been very active in their demands for the Romanovs’ safety, for very good reasons. Kaiser Wilhelm had always been deeply jealous of the close relationship between King George and Nicholas and became even more paranoid about it when they became military allies against him in the war. With George failing to intercede on Nicholas’s behalf, it would have been a matter of great personal satisfaction to the bombastic Kaiser to succeed where his cousin had failed, particularly as he believed the British had connived in the Tsar’s overthrow in the first place, in order to prevent him making peace with Germany and pulling out of the war. In exile in the 1930s, having now also lost his own throne, Wilhelm continued to take the moral high ground, confiding to his old friend General Wallscourt Waters his readiness in 1917–18 to help the Tsar, having ordered the German Chancellor von Bethmann and his ambassador to Russia, Count Mirbach, to press the Bolsheviks hard over the issue. Prior to his murder on 6 July 1918, Mirbach had repeatedly assured Russian monarchists that the Germans had the Romanov situation in hand. He had been in regular contact with the Council of People’s Commissars, reiterating to them on 10 May the expectation that the German princesses would be treated ‘with all possible consideration’; he assured the Romanovs’ anxious relatives that the family remained under their protection and that ‘when the time comes, the Imperial German Government will take the necessary measures’.

Kaiser Wilhelm had certainly given his blessing to the British offer of safe passage by sea to England and had ordered his navy and army not to hinder such an evacuation. By the summer of 1918, with the British king out of the picture, the Germans alone, it would seem, were the only ones in a position to save the Imperial Family. Rumours had in fact abounded since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that a secret codicil had guaranteed that the Romanovs would be handed over to the Germans. The problem was that the Tsar and Tsaritsa would not be saved by Germany at any price. With the family now in Ekaterinburg, such German intentions that remained were no longer to do with saving the Tsar, with whom Wilhelm had always had an uneasy relationship (their links being mainly by marriage rather than blood). No: the fate of the Tsar was now a matter for the Russian people; in the end what counted were the chivalric
impulses that the Kaiser still nursed to do right by his own kith and kin – Alexandra and her sister Ella, a favourite of the Kaiser’s, both of the House of Hesse, and by association the four Romanov daughters. The question of Alexey as Tsarevich and heir to the Romanov throne was again a politically sensitive matter. Nor were the Imperial Family the only German royals in Russia to whom the Kaiser had to extend his protection: Maria, the widow of Grand Duke Vladimir, a princess of the House of Mecklenburg, and Elizaveta, the widow of Grand Duke Konstantin, a princess of the House of Saxe-Altenburg, were both still resident there, and the three sons of Konstantin and Elizaveta – the children of a German mother like the Romanov children – had now been incarcerated at Alapaevsk.

In May 1918 the sense of urgency increased once the Czech legions began advancing on Ekaterinburg and after false reports circulated in June of the Tsar’s death. After Mirbach’s murder, his replacement, Dr Kurt Riezler, was officially designated to keep up the pressure on the Bolshevik government, but during the crucial July days he was sick and out of action and it was impossible for the German government to gain any independent information about the situation at the Ipatiev House, they like everybody else being at the mercy of the Byzantine web of prevarication and disinformation spun by the Bolsheviks. Behind the scenes German agents, convinced that Lenin’s government was moribund, continued to associate with monarchist groups in fomenting a counter-revolution in Russia. But if the Kaiser had given up on the Romanovs agreeing voluntarily to accept German asylum, only one option now lay open to him if he was not to lose face and be seen to be abandoning his relatives: their abduction, against their will. Rumour has it that the Swiss section of the League for the Restoration of the Russian Empire was approached in June with a plan hatched in Berlin to kidnap the Tsar and bring him to Germany. German intelligence operatives were active across the Urals and others were based in Ekaterinburg at the time under the guise of a Red Cross mission, but no conclusive evidence has come to light indicating any viable German plans for a last-ditch rescue.

In the end, all the various royal initiatives to free the Romanovs were stymied by a flabbiness of will, disunity, internal and international politics, and a conflict of political loyalties and agendas. The official German archives on the Romanov matter are, like the British ones, almost silent about the real role of the Kaiser; the Danish archives have yet to reveal any role their royal family played in the scenario. Whatever these final initiatives might have been, it was a case of too little, too late. The inability of foreign governments to take concerted action over the fate of the Romanovs played straight into the hands of the Bolsheviks,
making them all ultimately the dupes of Bolshevik double-talk and phoney reassurances. In the midst of all this, the Imperial Family were reduced to the status of helpless pawns in a political game that took no account of their personal fate as human beings but only of the bigger political picture.

That evening, as a rainstorm lashed the windows, Nicholas and Alexandra retired to their room to write their diaries before bed. Alexandra noted that, in response to her repeated enquiries, they had been finally told that Nagorny and Sednev, who had been taken away from them back in May, ‘had been sent out of this government’, i.e. out of the jurisdiction of Ekaterinburg and Perm province. It was of course a typical Bolshevik lie; the two men were dead, shot by the local Cheka with a group of other hostages in reprisal for the death of local Bolshevik hero and commissar for labour, Ivan Malyshev, who had been captured and shot by the Whites on 23 June.

Across the city, Aleksandr Beloborodov of the Ural Regional Soviet had been on the direct wire with Moscow and the chair of the Council of People’s Commissars – Lenin himself. The Ekaterinburg edition of
Izvestiya
noted the following day that their discussion had turned on a review of the tense military situation in the Urals and the security of the former tsar. Yurovsky and several others from the execution squad had been out to the Koptyaki forest again that afternoon, only this time by car; local peasants had seen them. Plans for the liquidation of the Romanovs were now well in hand.

At the White House, President Woodrow Wilson had been disappointed to miss his usual game of golf because of the rain. But after being at the receiving end of relentless lobbying by Russian sympathisers, he had relished the peace of an appointment-free day. The war on the Western Front was in its final stages; he now had time, together with his aide, Colonel House, to begin drafting his ambitious plans for a convention to establish a League of Nations in the post-war world. Its stated goal would be to preserve the integrity and political independence of large and small nations alike. Yet, puzzlingly, it would say nothing at all about the all-important defence of human rights, in particular those of prisoners of war, such as the Romanovs might be deemed to be. It would take many more deaths, particularly in Russia, and another cataclysmic world war – bringing with it a Holocaust of the Jewish people – before the United Nations charter of 1945 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 would address this pressing issue.