Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (41 page)

Back in 1998, travel writer Colin Thubron noted on a visit to a far less commercial Ekaterinburg that the whole Romanov story was already drowned in a ‘mist of holiness’. That mist has now become an inundation. As time goes on, it is the sanitised commercial image of the Romanovs as saints and ‘Holy Passion Bearers’ that will increasingly prevail, no matter what historians may argue, or the archives yield up to us. Ganina Yama is the obligatory place of pilgrimage for any Russian believer, and the high point for any foreign tourist visiting what Russian tour websites now call ‘The Romanov Golgotha’. The legend has simply become irresistible; too powerful, too emotive, forever perpetuated in the hearts and minds of the many thousands of sincere believers who find their way here. Indeed, their numbers are increasing so rapidly that soon the very basic infrastructure at Ganina Yama, as well as the overstretched
facilities at the Church on the Blood, will not be able to cope, inundated by an influx of pilgrims and seekers after God – the needy, the hopeful, the despairing – who now see in their reverence for the martyred Imperial Family a way of atoning for the past, for the depredations of 73 years of Communism, for the loss of Russian national and spiritual identity. For them it is a way of building hopes for the restoration of faith, and with it a better life.

Attempting, as one inevitably does on contemplating the lilies of Ganina Yama, to imagine the true events of that violent and chaotic night in July 1918, it is those inescapably romantic, evocative images of the Imperial Family that inevitably twist and turn into view. No matter how hard one tries to resist, they nag at one’s consciousness . . . a boy in a sailor suit . . . girls in white dresses . . . untainted, murdered children . . . a devoted family destroyed . . . all of them now forever young, forever innocent and, as they all so fervently wished for in their many prayers, ‘At Rest with the Saints’.

This book is a synthesis and retelling of a large number of Russian and English sources, many of the former published in Ekaterinburg (and Sverdlovsk, under its Soviet name) and difficult to access in the West. It is not a political history, nor does it set out to evaluate the reign of Nicholas II or his vices and virtues as a monarch. It seeks to tell the story of the Romanov family within the dynamic of those extraordinary last 14 days. For this reason, with the predominance of material coming from difficult-to-locate Russian-language sources, and also by virtue of the nature of the story’s telling, it was decided to write this book without the intrusion of footnotes. The priority was to create a strong historical narrative that did not enter into academic digression or interrupt the story with debate about contentious issues. There are, of course, many controversial points of interpretation in the story of the Romanov murders, but in the end this book, as much as any other on a real, historical topic, is a subjective one, based on my own evaluation of the material available to me. At all times I have stayed with historical truth in so far as it has been possible to substantiate the facts in the face of much contradictory material, but there have, inevitably, been moments when I have had to take my own leaps of faith as a historian and come to my own conclusions.

There is a vast wealth of material, both written and visual, on the Romanov family, but one has to treat much of the written record with caution. Many contemporary memoirs by members of the Imperial Court are little more than unbridled hagiography based on extremely personal, subjective views of the family; similarly, in the years since the Romanovs were canonised, a welter of sentimental literature – both in Russia and among the now huge Russian Orthodox émigré community – has sought to detach the family as real people from the context of their story and their very violent times, and present them as plaster saints, above criticism. And whilst much revisionist literature on the political career of Nicholas II now concentrates on pointing the finger at his treatment of the Jews and the endemic tsarist anti-Semitism in which he was brought up, there is, at the polar opposite of this, a strong anti-Semitic strain to many books about the murder of the Romanovs from
the 1920s onwards (notably those of the early investigators Melgunov, Diterikhs, Wilton and Sokolov). Some of these seek, in an often extremely distasteful manner, to emphasise the Jewishness of many of the leading Bolsheviks of the day (not just those involved in the murders) and take this as a stepping-off point for blaming all of Russia’s woes, from the Revolution to the murders in Ekaterinburg, on a darkly seditious Jewish cabal. The simple fact is that with the strong traditional value placed on knowledge and learning within the Jewish faith, education has always been a priority; hence the large numbers of Russian Jews who by default were drawn into the intellectual elite of the Russian revolutionary movement.

It is thus something of a minefield steering one’s way through the two opposing camps of the sycophantically pro-tsarist and violently anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik sources relating to the Romanov story. It prompted me, as much as possible, to stick as closely as I could to those sources written nearest to the time of the events themselves by people who were there, in Russia. This related in particular to early accounts of Lenin and the Soviet leadership before they were tainted by Stalin’s post-1924 cult of the personality that created a Leninist hagiography that even today has barely been dented. This was very much the line taken by Professor Ivan Plotnikov, who urged me when I met him in July 2007 to go back to the earliest accounts I could find, in particular those of Yakov Yurovsky, and stay as much as I could with them.

At the beginning of this project I made the decision not to spend precious research time, on a very limited budget, going over the extensive Russian archival sources on the subject; these have been very well picked over by a host of other scholars and are now largely available. Practically all the seminal material relating to the regime at the Ipatiev House, members of the execution squad and eyewitnesses to the murders and burials in the forest has now been republished in a range of Russian collections – sources such as Alekseev (1993), Aksyuchits (1998), Buranov & Khrustalev (1992), Ross (1987), a valuable collection of very rare testimony, Nikulin & Belokurov (1999), Lykova (2007), as well as the Tsar’s diaries for the period (Zakharov, 2007). In English, King & Wilson (2003) have done much ground-breaking work, as too Steinberg & Khrustalev (1995) in making primary sources available. Instead, I decided to take a lateral approach to the story, exploring new and unseen eyewitness accounts of the situation in Siberia in 1918 and in Ekaterinburg itself, written by American and British observers who were there at the time or soon after – either as diplomats, or independent journalists, or with the Allied Intervention Forces (see list of Archival Sources). In particular the eyewitness accounts of the British consul in
Ekaterinburg, Thomas Preston (he did not inherit his baronetcy of Beeston St Lawrence, as Sir Thomas, until after the events in this story), had, I felt, been seriously underrated and underused. His full typescript memoirs in the Leeds Russian Archive contain much valuable detail not included in the published version
Before the Curtain
, as too do his extensive official memoranda and reports in the Public Record Office at Kew and the article he wrote for the
Daily Telegraph
to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary in 1968. Other hunches turned up unexpectedly interesting material: the Belusov letter from the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society at Cambridge came after I discovered that Ekaterinburg had been home to a major depository for the Society’s onward dissemination of religious literature across Siberia. The archive of the outstanding Russianist and historian Sir Bernard Pares, who was in Siberia after the Romanov murders, also threw up some valuable nuggets of information. Similarly, a search in the much underrated Tyrkova-Williams collection of revolutionary and civil war pamphlets printed in Russia – many of them so extraordinarily rare that the surviving copies are unique to this collection – threw up Debogory-Mokrievich’s fascinating account of the Bolsheviks in Perm and Ekaterinburg 1917–18.

Pride of place, however, must go to the now forgotten Herman Bernstein – a Russian-born Jew and US Russia correspondent for the
New York Herald
and the
Washington Post.
I flew to New York to conduct an entirely speculative search of his archive and I was not disappointed. It is an absolute treasure trove of material – letters, photographs, articles and newspapers cuttings charting Bernstein’s passionate love–hate relationship with Russia during his numerous trips there, his contact with many distinguished Russians and several variant accounts of his visit to Ekaterinburg and his interview with Judge Sergeev and other eyewitnesses. The archive charts Bernstein’s own personal journey from violently anti-tsarist, as a leading critic of the Jewish pogroms in Russia, through ecstatic welcome of the Revolution as the big New Idea, to bitter disillusion and anger at the Bolshevik abuse of human and civil rights during the civil war. Bernstein’s invaluable archive, whilst being somewhat haphazard in its organisation and often in a very poor state (crumbling newspaper cuttings, often undated and unattributed), deserves much wider recognition and study.

In the West, it was Robert K. Massie’s
Nicholas and Alexandra
, first published in 1967, that set the Romanov industry on a roll that has at times so romanticised the story as to lose all perspective on the real, flawed characters of Nicholas and Alexandra. I must therefore commend the enormous labour of love that is Greg King and Penny Wilson’s
The Fate of the Romanovs
, which is exhaustive in its attention to detail and
absolutely invaluable in its accessing of eyewitness testimony from Russian archives. Whilst I have come to my own often different conclusions,
The Fate of the Romanovs
is an absolutely indispensable source, which I recommend to any reader wishing to follow the story further – particularly in terms of the Sokolov investigation, the later rediscovery of the grave in the Koptyaki Forest and the whole contentious issue of identification of the remains. It is a matter of great regret that King and Wilson’s Romanovs magazine
Atlantis: In the Court of Memory
is now sadly defunct and also seemingly unavailable in any British library.

Ultimately, though, I have to single out Professor Ivan Plotnikov in Ekaterinburg, whose work, as far as I can ascertain, has until now been entirely overlooked in the West, no doubt because it is all in Russian and has only been published in Ekaterinburg and is thus extremely difficult to get hold of. The professor is an outstanding expert on Urals history, particularly during the civil war, and in his
Gibel’ Tsarskoy Semi
(2003) he has summarised his exhaustive research in obscure Russian provincial archives that no Westerner would have a hope of accessing. As I write, the professor is working on an ambitious four-volume account of the murder of the Romanovs, which will draw on his extensive archive and a lifetime’s research. I sincerely hope that his frail health will allow him to complete it. Meanwhile, the recent work of Lyudmila Anatol’evna Lykova has filled in a few more valuable parts of the archival jigsaw and is also to be commended to any Russian speaker wishing to read more.

My interest in the Romanovs does not of course end here; I shall continue to monitor new material becoming available with great interest in hopes of perhaps returning to the story or some aspect of it at a later date. I will therefore be only too happy to respond to enquiries from readers wishing to know about any specific references consulted in the writing of this book. I would also greatly value hearing from readers with any new or interesting information of their own to offer, so do please contact me via my website,
www.helenrappaport.com
, or c/o my publishers:

Hutchinson

The Random House Group

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

London SW1V 2SA

Archival Sources

Herman Bernstein, ‘The Murder of the Romanoffs’ (dated Ekaterinburg, November 1918), TS RG 713/3335A (a fuller version of his newspaper articles), Herman Bernstein papers, Yivo Institute, Center for Jewish Studies, New York

Margaret Bibikova papers, Liddle Collection, RUS 03, Leeds University Library

Mr Bjelousoff (K. Belousov) letter from Ekaterinburg, 11 January 1919, in Papers of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Cambridge University

Sir Charles Eliot, ‘Fate of the Russian Imperial Family’, report in FO 371/3977, Public Record Office, Kew

Lloyd George papers, Parliamentary Archives, London

Charles Sidney Gibbes papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Stephen Locker Lampson, ‘Nothing to Offer but Blood’, TS biography of Oliver Locker-Lampson, in Liddle Collection, RUS 30, Leeds University Library

Sir Bernard Pares, ‘Siberian Diary, January–October, 1919’, Sir Bernard Pares Papers, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, PAR/6/9/2

— Report on Bolshevik Atrocities in Siberia, PAR/6/9/4

— Report of Frances McCullagh, PAR 6/15/1

Lieutenant Patterson RNA, ‘Armoured Car Brigade in Russia 1916–17’, TS memoirs, Liddle Collection, RUS 30, Leeds University Library

Sir Thomas Preston papers, Liddle Collection, RUS 37, Leeds University Library

Sir Thomas Preston diplomatic correspondence from Ekaterinburg and reports on Siberia, in FO 538/1, PRO Kew (some published in ‘A Collection of Reports . . .’, 1919, below)

Sir Thomas Preston, ‘Witness Statements in English, French and Russian sworn before HM Consul at Ekaterinburg giving details of Pillage and Murders committed by Bolsheviks’, FO 538/1, PRO Kew

Paul J. Rainey, ‘General Observations on the Situation in Russia’,
c
.
September 1918, Paul James Rainey papers, Wichita State University, Kansas, MS 88-07