Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (6 page)

Two armed guards were always present on the landing near the lavatory, bathroom and kitchen, but no others were allowed upstairs into the Imperial Family’s living area and only the guards on duty upstairs were allowed to use the lavatory. Some could not resist the temptation to scribble political slogans and crude graffiti – relating mainly to the Tsaritsa’s relationship with Rasputin – in the hallway and on the lavatory walls. There were 14 more rooms located downstairs in the semi-basement, some given over to Ipatiev’s business premises, three of which were used by the external guards on duty during the day. But most of them were storerooms and lay dark and empty.

When they arrived, the family had only been allowed to bring small suitcases, but there was a great deal more luggage to follow from Tobolsk. Case upon case of it arrived at Ekaterinburg station a few days later and nearly sparked a riot from a crowd of onlookers who huddled round to view its contents as it was unloaded with revolutionary shouts of ‘Death to the tyrant!’ ‘Death to the bourgeois!’ ‘Hang them!’ ‘Drown them in the lake!’ Many of these possessions – everything from fur coats to binoculars, riding crops and – improbably – suitcases full of Alexey’s baby clothes – were promptly siphoned off at Ekaterinburg station by local commissars and Bolsheviks. After being thoroughly searched and pilfered again by the guards at the Ipatiev House, what remained had been stored in an outhouse in the interior courtyard.

Nevertheless, when finally allowed to unpack their things after
numerous rigorous inspections overseen by Avdeev, the Romanovs had crammed as many precious items as possible into their cramped living space. Essential to them were their prayer books and Bibles, novels and history books for the Tsar, toys and board games for the Tsarevich, sewing, knitting and embroidery materials for the Tsaritsa and her daughters. Surprisingly, they were still allowed to use their bed linen with personalised monograms and Imperial crest, as well as the fine porcelain dinner plates bearing the name ‘Nicholas II’. Other valuable tableware and silver from the Alexander Palace had also been packed under Alexandra’s strict instructions: faience soup plates, silver sugar tongs, clocks, letter openers and silver pencils, embroidered cushions and delicate crystal vases, all the clutter of their home at the Alexander Palace. Anything to maintain a semblance of the life they had once led.

Other indispensables were the electro-shock machines used to stimulate the Tsarevich’s weak leg muscles after long periods of enforced bed rest. Even the Tsar’s one indulgence was catered for – bath oil for his daily ablutions before dinner. So great was the Romanov predilection for copious baths that the water supply at the house regularly ran out, provoking much grumbling among the guards, for it had to be carted up the hill in barrels from the city pond and heated up. Strict rationing of this privilege was soon introduced. The Tsaritsa had also brought supplies of her favourite English eau de cologne by Brocard, as well as cold cream and lavender salts. But if one thing dominated the Romanov living quarters, it was the bottles of holy water, jars of ointments and ranks of medicine bottles. These came in every shape and size: aromatic oils, tinctures, drops, medicines and smelling salts – all specially labelled by the Imperial Court pharmacist, Rozmarin. Alexandra had her own personal medicine kit and there was a supply of Cascarine Leprince laxative to ease the Tsar’s haemorrhoids. There was morphine too, a precious supply, but not, as one might expect, to control the Tsarevich’s agonising attacks of haemophilia; this was a drug his doctor and parents resisted administering, for fear of dependency. The morphine was to dull Alexandra’s aches and pains, and sometimes Nicholas’s too. This and an array of other cocaine-based liquids and opiates betrayed the increasing physical toll imprisonment was taking on Nicholas and Alexandra, both of whom suffered from crippling headaches and insomnia.

Most precious of all were the family’s portable icons, which came in an assortment of sizes, some very simple and rustic, others in diamond-studded silver frames. Among these, by far the most valuable and treasured was the ‘Fedorovsky Mother of God’ which accompanied the devout Tsaritsa everywhere. Nor had the family been able to travel without the dozens of photograph frames in leather, silver and ormolu
that so characterised their obsessive love for each other. But their precious Box Brownie cameras and photographic equipment which, even in Tobolsk, regularly recorded their family life had now been confiscated. Sentiment had prevailed over many of the choices made about what to bring into exile, none more so than in the Tsar’s decision to bring with him the 50 volumes of neatly written diaries he had kept since the age of 14, as well as the 653 letters Alexandra had sent him during their 24 years of marriage, the bulk of them during the war years of 1914–17. Only now they both constantly worried about what would happen if all these most personal of documents, packed away in crate number 9 marked A. F. and no. 13 marked N. A., were discovered by the guards at the Ipatiev House.

At Tobolsk, the family had enjoyed regular access to the open compound surrounding the Governor’s House. Here they had been able to sun themselves on the greenhouse roof, soaking up the view of the free world beyond. Passers-by would often stop to reverentially acknowledge them. Despite the obvious boredom and monotony – especially felt by young Alexey, whose life was already tragically circumscribed by illness – the Romanovs had lived a peaceful life for eight months at Tobolsk, enduring the bitter winter in the poorly heated Governor’s House without complaint. The simple rural life paradoxically suited this cosily bourgeois family, and for a while it had lulled them into a false sense of security. Indeed Maria had confided to tutor Sidney Gibbes that she could happily live at Tobolsk for ever if only their guards would allow them to ‘walk out a little’. Beyond their own self-absorbed world, the family maintained few aspirations or interests. Even at Tsarskoe Selo outside St Petersburg they had lived relatively modestly, preferring the smaller Alexander Palace to the formal rococo splendour of the Catherine Palace next door. Imprisonment at Tobolsk had almost been a positive in their lives, a release into ordinariness and anonymity. There they had both sent and received letters. English, French and Russian newspapers had been provided, while the children enjoyed daily lessons from their German, Swiss and English tutors. Life in Siberia had opened their eyes to a different world, a world free of the hidebound court rituals and official functions that they all hated.

But here in Ekaterinburg, Maria wrote to a friend that ‘every day brings unpleasant surprises’. They were not allowed visitors. They could not enjoy the pleasures of working in the kitchen garden as they had done when confined at the Alexander Palace, or even the large exercise yard at Tobolsk, where the Tsar had vigorously sawn wood in winter. The receipt and sending of letters had soon been curtailed and in early June the Tsar no longer received his daily newspapers – the one
remaining pleasure left to him. Here they were strictly forbidden to speak any language other than Russian, something which particularly irked the Tsaritsa, who always spoke English with the children. Occasional gifts from relatives had now stopped, chocolate and coffee from the Tsaritsa’s sister Ella being the last to arrive. (Unknown to Alexandra, after being held initially in Ekaterinburg, her sister had now been incarcerated along with the Grand Princes at Alapaevsk, 93 miles away.) At the Ipatiev House there would be no more Sunday evening theatricals punctuated by the mischievous laughter of Anastasia, the family entertainer. No excursions to mass at the nearby church were permitted, and a priest had only been allowed in twice since their arrival to conduct services. Yet still the Imperial Family hoped for God’s deliverance. In her dreams the Tsaritsa had visions of monarchist knights on horseback riding to their rescue. But Nicholas was more pragmatic, increasingly recognising the impossibility of rescue or flight from this grim Bolshevik stronghold.

Daily life had become a matter of endurance. Beyond devotion to each other and to God there remained one consuming obsession in their daily lives – Alexey’s fragile state of health. Since the middle of April, the Tsarevich had been suffering from a recurring haemorrhage in a damaged knee, causing agonising pain that wrecked his sleep and crippled his leg so that he could not walk. Thin, wasting away and with no appetite, the boy no longer had the support of his tutors, the devoted Pierre Gilliard from Switzerland and the sober Cambridge graduate Sidney Gibbes, who had taken it in turns to read and talk with him during his painful attacks. The Tsaritsa and her daughters were exhausted from all-night sessions sitting by Alexey’s bed, listening to his moans of pain. The sailor Klementy Nagorny, who for years had protectively shadowed Alexey, sitting with him at nights and carrying him when too weak to walk, had been taken away on the evening of 27 May (along with the Grand Duchesses’ servant Ivan Sednev), never to return. By July even the visits of the Tsarevich’s physician Dr Vladimir Derevenko, who had been allowed to remain on call in Ekaterinburg and on whom the family relied so heavily, had been curtailed. He continued to come to the house but was refused admittance by Avdeev on the grounds that the Tsarevich was ‘well enough’ and did not need him. It was more than eight days after his arrival that the weak and sickly Alexey, his injured knee at last taken from its splint, went outside into the garden for the first time, carried by Dr Botkin. But he was never able to walk or play outside again with the others.

By early July the daily ritual of life at the Ipatiev House was rapidly taking on a numbing predictability. The family rose at eight in the morning, washed, dressed and said their prayers together. Tea and black
bread were provided by Avdeev at nine, when he made his obligatory roll call to ensure the family were all there. Cocoa was occasionally on offer, but with the Romanovs on rations like all other Soviet citizens, coffee and butter were luxuries beyond their reach; ‘they were no longer permitted to live like tsars’, Avdeev informed them. At around one in the afternoon a simple lunch of cutlets or soup with meat was delivered to the gates, sent in from a canteen run by the Ekaterinburg Soviet in the Commercial Assembly House, a short distance away on the corner of Glavny Prospket. Supper was delivered to the house around 8 p.m. From mid-June the family’s own cook, Kharitonov, had been allowed to prepare some of the family’s modest meals on a small oil stove in the upstairs kitchen, where he tried to coax the Tsaritsa’s always difficult and now rapidly fading appetite (she was a vegetarian) with the simple, bland dishes of vermicelli she preferred. In mid-June, Dr Derevenko had voiced concerns about the family’s poor diet to Commandant Avdeev and, with his consent, had gone to the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent in the city suburbs to ask the sisters to bring the family eggs, milk, cream and bread on a daily basis from their farm. Other foods were brought as well: meat, sausage, vegetables and tasty Russian pies, but much was siphoned off on arrival by Avdeev for his and the guard’s use.

During the morning there was little to do but read, which the Tsar did at length, in an increasingly desperate attempt to counter the physical frustration of his incarceration. He voraciously consumed the collected works of the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin that he had discovered on the bookshelves in the house, followed by Shilder’s biography of the Emperor Paul I. During Easter he also daily read out loud from the Gospels and other edifying spiritual works while the women sat endlessly mending their increasingly threadbare clothes, knitting or sewing. True, they had brought plenty of clothes and shoes with them, but most of these were in storage in the outbuilding to which they were persistently denied access, even when Nicholas’s boots were clearly falling apart and in need of replacement. In the beginning they had filled up their time writing letters daily to friends, but few reached their destination and even fewer were passed on when they arrived. Now, all there was were endless games of cards – patience and the French game bezique, which was a great family favourite – while Alexey played with his model ship and tin soldiers. Sometimes the women sang sacred songs together, a favourite being the ‘Cherubim’s Song’, the song of the angels from the Orthodox liturgy. Mundane new diversions were created for the girls when the Ural Regional Soviet refused to have the family’s large quantities of laundry sent out any more. Even in exile the Romanovs changed their underwear and bed linen with excessive regularity, and the Grand
Duchesses now found themselves learning to be laundresses, helping Demidova the maid. They were also taught by Kharitonov to cook and make bread. With the Tsaritsa and Tsarevich frequently sick or resting, the girls created their own amusements until afternoon tea between four and five. A final modest supper was served at eight, after which the remainder of the evening was filled with further prayers and Bible reading, more games of bezique, more embroidery and sewing until bedtime.

The only break in the monotony of it all was the recreation allowed twice daily in the garden, once in the late morning around eleven, and again in the afternoon before tea. Until mid-May Avdeev had tended to be lax applying the rules, sometimes allowing the Imperial Family as much as 90 minutes when the weather was fine. But this had now been reduced to half an hour morning and afternoon, in order, the family were told, that their life at the Ipatiev House more closely resembled ‘a prison regime’. The Romanovs had been under strict instructions not to engage in conversation with their guards, a rule which Nicholas had broken in an effort to establish relationships, particularly after he and Alexandra had recognised one of the guards, a former soldier named Konstantin Ukraintsev, as a beater who had worked for Romanov shooting parties in the Caucasus. But here there was to be none of the camaraderie of Tobolsk, where Nicholas had often gone to the guards’ room to smoke and play draughts with his captors. The hapless Ukraintsev was soon dismissed for his sympathetic response to the family, and sent to the Eastern Front.