Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (4 page)

The Urals in 1918 were far from the romanticised, ersatz Russia set in stone in the Western public imagination by David Lean’s 1964 film
Dr Zhivago
. Ekaterinburg was filled with tough, remorseless men. Newly formed radical workers’ committees, convinced that attempts would be made to rescue the Tsar, were ready, if given half the chance, to take him out and lynch him. Escalating violence, looting, famine and looming civil
war across the country had brought the city to the edge of the abyss. Ten thousand Red Army soldiers and deserters now roamed its streets, and it was bristling too with convicts and exiles on the run from Siberia. There were spies everywhere.

By June, Russia had been engulfed in civil war between Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionary and monarchist forces, led by Aleksandr Kolchak and known as the ‘Whites’, who had fought their way inland from the Pacific and were pushing into Western Siberia, their ranks bolstered by about 25,000 Czech deserters and prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army. These troops had been on their way east out of Russia by rail to be reunited, via America, with Czech troops on the Western Front, but had mutinied when Russia’s German allies demanded they be stopped and disarmed. On 26 May, fighting their way back westwards, the Czechs had taken the major Siberian city of Chelyabinsk. Now they were closing in on Ekaterinburg, a city of crucial industrial and strategic importance. Tension in the Urals was rising. With wild rumours of last-ditch attempts to save the Imperial Family still swirling round, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks determined that their valuable prisoners would not be stolen from them. Something had to be done to secure the situation.

Two days before Nicholas and Alexandra’s arrival, a house in the centre of Ekaterinburg belonging to a retired engineer named Nikolay Ipatiev had been summarily requisitioned by the local soviet (the Bolshevik-dominated city council) as the Romanovs’ new place of detention. Within hours its reassuring bourgeois gentility had been disfigured by the construction of a rude wooden palisade which blocked out the city, turning the Ipatiev House into a prison. From now on it would be referred to by an ominous Bolshevik euphemism as the
Dom osobogo naznacheniya
– ‘The House of Special Purpose’. Quite what purpose was implied in the title was never explained, but the local hard men of the Ural Regional Soviet knew full well the house’s ultimate, sinister purpose.

Nicholas and his exhausted wife arrived in Ekaterinburg on 30 April, accompanied by their 18-year-old daughter Maria, the Tsar’s aide Prince Vasily Dolgorukov, the Imperial family’s physician Dr Evgeny Botkin and a severely reduced quota of three servants. The uncertainties of their journey had prompted the Tsar and Tsaritsa to travel only with Maria, the most adaptable of their children. The others – Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Alexey – were due to follow later, when the Tsarevich had fully recovered from a severe attack of haemophilia.

Meanwhile, on Saturday 29 June 1918, the six-man presidium of the Ekaterinburg Soviet held an urgent meeting in the opulent surroundings
of the Amerikanskaya Hotel. It had been requisitioned in early June as the headquarters of Ekaterinburg’s newly created branch of the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya – the Soviet secret police. Better known as the Cheka, this organisation was soon to become the implacable agent of state terror. Beyond the city, the faint sound of artillery fire could be heard. The well-armed and disciplined Czechs were now edging ever closer along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Ekaterinburg was spiralling into anarchy and chaos and could hold out for another couple of weeks at best. With the lines of communication to Moscow becoming increasingly unreliable, Alexander Beloborodov, the chair of the Ural Regional Soviet, sent urgent messages to Moscow demanding direct cable access to Lenin at the Kremlin in the crucial days to come. He and his group of dedicated Communists were facing a critical moment in their ‘revolutionary path’. The Red Urals were in ‘mortal danger’ and there was considerable risk that the former Tsar would fall into the hands of the Czechs or other counter-revolutionaries and be ‘used to their benefit’.

All through that humid summer afternoon the atmosphere inside room No. 3, the biggest and best room that the Amerikanskaya had to offer, crackled with tension. There was only one pressing topic on the agenda. What was to be done with the Romanovs? The following day, 30 June 1918, Filipp Goloshchekin, a member of the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet and the newly appointed regional commissar for war, headed out of Ekaterinburg on the train to Moscow to confer with Lenin and his right-hand man Yakov Sverdlov about their fate.

Meanwhile, Ekaterinburg, once the jewel of the Ural Mountains, was in a state of siege; its infrastructure collapsing, its citizens in the grip of a mounting reign of terror.

30 APRIL–3 JULY 1918

I
t took five days of bone-rattling travel by
tarantass
– a crude springless carriage – for the Romanovs to get from Tobolsk to Tyumen. During the journey, Alexandra and Maria huddled together and shivered as they were jolted across rivers and through spring floods and quagmires of mud. Drained and exhausted, Alexandra had been glad of the company of Maria, who had volunteered to come with them as a comfort to her. Nicholas, in contrast, seemed cheerful, glad to be on the move and out in the fresh frosty air.

Faced with the choice of accompanying her husband to Moscow, as she thought, and defending his position, or staying behind to nurse the sick Alexey in Tobolsk, Alexandra had agonised over her decision, torn between the overwhelming emotional pull of her son and her ingrained fears for Nicholas. Eventually she resolved that her first duty was to the Tsar, if only for her malleable husband’s own protection.

At Tyumen the royal party transferred to the heavily guarded first-class carriage of Special Train No. 8 VA, commandeered by Vasily Yakovlev. En route Yakovlev continued to give the official line that Nicholas was being sent back to the capital to be put on trial. Privately, the Tsar and the Tsaritsa were convinced that fate would intervene and that this would be but the first stage in the Imperial Family’s safe passage out of Russia. After a series of delays, the train arrived at Omsk, the junction of two major lines on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the couple were suddenly gripped by alarm. Where would they be taken next? Eastwards across Siberia to Vladivostok and out of Russia via Japan? Or west towards Moscow and a public trial? Nothing was said as the train idled for hours in a siding at Lyubinskaya while Yakovlev parlayed over the telegraph with Moscow. Finally a change of plan was agreed. The train moved off, back in the direction of Tyumen. The Tsar and Tsaritsa were to be escorted not to Moscow after all, but to Ekaterinburg, where the Ural Regional Soviet would take custody of them.

At 8.40 a.m. on Tuesday 30 April, the train pulled into the city with its blinds drawn. As it did, Nicholas and Alexandra’s anxiety levels rocketed. For here, at last, they encountered the full, ugly force of Russia in revolution. As the Tsaritsa later recalled in her diary, the day might have been ‘gloriously warm and sunny’, but the welcoming committee had been decidedly frosty. Rumours of the imminent arrival of the hated Tsar and Tsaritsa had spread like wildfire and an angry mob had gathered at the main railway station demanding that they be paraded before them. Fearful of a lynching, the Urals military commissar, Filipp Goloshchekin, who had been waiting to receive the Romanovs, decided to send the train on to the city’s freight station No. 2 at Shartash, on the eastern outskirts. The Romanovs’ first sight of Ekaterinburg was, after several hours kept sitting in the train, a goods siding at four in the afternoon. Waiting for them on the platform was a group of stony-faced Bolsheviks – Aleksandr Beloborodov, chair of the Ural Regional Soviet, Boris Didkovsky, his deputy, and Sergey Chutskaev, a member of the Ekaterinburg Soviet and the local secret police, the Cheka.

The Tsar and his family were now received into the hands of the Ural Regional Soviet for ‘detention under surveillance’, along with Dr Evgeny Botkin, their maid Anna Demidova, the valet Terenty Chemodurov and footman Ivan Sednev. With a bureaucratic flourish, Beloborodov signed the official receipt for them, like so much baggage. Aleksandr Avdeev, who with Yakovlev had accompanied the Tsar and Tsaritsa from Tobolsk, was appointed commandant of the Romanovs’ new place of confinement. Later that hot summer afternoon the party made the short journey to Voznesensky Prospekt along eerily deserted streets, in closed motor cars, escorted by a truck bristling with armed soldiers. As their car pulled into the courtyard of the Ipatiev House, the former Tsar and his wife looked their last on Russia and the outside world. It was Passion Week and the bells – the beautiful bells that had so beguiled Anton Chekhov – were ringing out across the city. But they could not drown out the sound of the heavy wooden courtyard gates as they slammed shut behind them.

The Tsar and Tsaritsa moved to enter the Ipatiev House, to be greeted at the entrance by Goloshchekin, who had gone on ahead to meet them and now turned to his former monarch and declared: ‘Citizen Nicholas Romanov, you may enter.’ Impervious to insult, reconciled to his fate, Nicholas did not react, but the slight cut the Tsaritsa to the quick. Though Alexandra would continue, stubbornly, to take exception to Bolshevik disrespect, from now on there would be no more acknowledgement of Romanov status and titles, which, even in Tobolsk, had still been part of the daily protocol observed by staff and guards alike.
The former Tsar of Russia was now an ordinary Soviet citizen like any other, with his own ration card. While he may have looked on their life at Tobolsk as a kind of house arrest, here Nicholas finally found himself in prison, within that vast annexe of the Russian empire that was itself a prison: Siberia.

Via emphatic instructions sent from Moscow by Yakov Sverdlov to the Ural Regional Soviet, it was the clear intention of the Kremlin leadership that the family should now be confined ‘in the strictest way’. Seething with class hatred and desire for revenge on ‘Nicholas the Bloody’, the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks delighted in withdrawing comforts previously accorded the Imperial Family. If the relative idyll in Tobolsk had prevented them taking their fate seriously, then now, surely, their presence in Ekaterinburg was for Nicholas and Alexandra a stark awakening. On her arrival it prompted the Tsaritsa to inscribe the date and a reverse swastika on the bedroom wall, a last faint gesture that this ancient symbol of faith, love and hope might eventually bring release.

Together with Maria, the Tsar and Tsaritsa spent their first three weeks at the Ipatiev House cooped up together in a single bedroom with only the use of the bathroom and sitting room, where Dr Botkin and the servants Chemodurov and Sednev slept; Anna Demidova occupied a small room in the back. The electricity supply was sporadic, but when she could, Alexandra wrote endless letters to the children in Tobolsk, as Nicholas read aloud from the Gospels. Despite the glorious sunshine, heavy snowfalls had continued well into May and emotional comforts were few until, at 11 a.m. on the unseasonably cold and snowy morning of the 23rd, the remaining four children arrived from the city station. But the 27-strong Tobolsk entourage who had travelled with them were informed that they could go no further. The Ekaterinburg Soviet had no wish to burden itself with the additional expense of their maintenance. They were left sitting on the train at Ekaterinburg station, to be later dispersed, a few to freedom but most to prison (where the Tsar’s loyal aide Prince Dolkorukov had already been taken on arrival in April). Only three more servants, the cook Ivan Kharitonov, the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev (the nephew of Ivan Sednev) and the manservant Alexey Trupp, were allowed to follow the Imperial Family into the Ipatiev House, bringing with them Alexey’s beloved pet spaniel, Joy, and Tatiana’s two dogs, Jimmy and Ortipo.

The arrival of Alexey, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia from Tobolsk, of which the Tsar and Tsaritsa were forewarned only a few hours before their arrival, greatly lifted the family’s flagging spirits. There was no doubt, Nicholas noted in his diary, that the four children had all suffered personally and spiritually when left in Tobolsk on their own. But the
closely interdependent family unit was once more reunited and what greater joy could there be than for it to be during Passion Week – the most sacred festival in the Orthodox calendar. That evening they gathered together in front of their treasured icons and said fervent prayers of thanks. But Alexandra had already noted with alarm that her son was worryingly frail and wasted, having lost 14 pounds since his latest attack of haemophilia. That same first evening, all it took was one small slip and twist of the knee getting into bed and Alexey spent the whole of the night in unremitting pain. The Tsaritsa lay nearby, sleepless and watchful, listening to the boy’s moans, as she had done for so many long nights now over the last 13 years.

But at least the family had each other again – and God. Their only line of resistance to the new and far more draconian regime imposed on them was to turn in on themselves and draw on their intense religious faith. It would sustain them through the days to come as they entered into a new, strange state of suspended animation. Existing but not living; locked in the deadening familiarity of a narrow, tedious daily ritual which day by day led them ever closer to – what? Release? Escape? Rescue? Whatever their ultimate fate might be, of one thing this strangely insular family were certain. God would take a hand in their fate.

And he was doing so already in that of several of their Romanov relatives now, unbeknown to the Imperial Family, being held in the city. The Tsaritsa’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth (known as Ella), Grand Duke Sergey, the Tsar’s cousin, and Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich and Igor Konstantinovich (three Romanov brothers descended from Konstantin, the second son of Nicholas I), together with Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, had all been brought to Ekaterinburg in May and shut up in the Atamanov lodging house. But at least they had been allowed out to celebrate midnight mass in the cathedral at Easter, a privilege denied the Imperial Family. Here they had stood holding lighted candles of red wax, praying that the transcendent beauty of the Easter liturgy would bring hope and release. Prince Paley, himself a soulful and talented poet, wrote home to his mother of his anguish for his Romanov cousins. He had ventured up to the Ipatiev House in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Imperial Family, but the palisade was too high and the windows at that time were covered with newspaper. Meek, calm, submissive to his fate, he confided to officer’s wife Madame Semchevsky his personal anguish for ‘our poor Russia’. The country had, for him, become like some once majestic and powerful ship, now being engulfed by the waves and vanishing into the darkness. The great pools of Prince Paley’s melancholy eyes spoke volumes for his sense of loss, remembered Semchevskaya, reflected in the lines of a poem
he read that evening: ‘Our near and dear ones are so terrifyingly far away; our enemies so terrifyingly near . . .’ – sentiments no doubt shared by his Romanov relatives a few streets away.