Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (7 page)

Grateful for the chance to walk in the sun and breathe the summer air, the three younger Grand Duchesses had also smiled and been friendly with the guards outside, their elder sister keeping herself to herself. The scent of Ekaterinburg’s parks and gardens wafted tantalisingly close, and on these brief occasions the sound of laughter could be heard as the sisters chased their dogs Ortipo, Joy and Jimmy round in the hot sunshine or enjoyed the double swing that some of the guards had hung for them in the garden.

But this last remaining luxury was rarely indulged in by Alexandra. Plagued by migraines, heart palpitations and sciatica and intolerant of the heat, she rarely ventured outside. When she did, she donned jacket and hat while her daughters ran around bare-headed. She frequently gave in to her physical frailties, keeping one of her daughters indoors to read aloud as she lay with her head swathed in cold compresses. Her heart palpitations were now so bad that she could hardly walk; at night she was frequently tormented by insomnia. When she did, very occasionally, emerge into the garden, she was too exhausted to do anything but sit in the shade of the porch.

From here she would watch Alexey, when he was not bedridden, sit playing at toy soldiers with the kitchen boy Sednev, who, when Alexey was too frail, would push him around the garden in his mother’s wheelchair. Nicholas and the girls meanwhile would take the 40 paces walk that measured the length of the small overgrown garden, going back and forth relentlessly in the sun – as though anxious not to waste a single precious moment of recreation – amidst a few poplars, birches and limes and bushes of yellow acacia and lilac. The man who had once ruled eight and a half million square miles of empire was now master of a single room of his own and a small, scrappy garden. Free of the responsibilities of state, Nicholas seemed unengaged with the unreality of it all, but he sorely missed physical exercise and was bitterly disappointed that his requests to Avdeev to be given something active to do – clearing the garden or chopping wood – had been curtly refused, as had his request to put up a hammock for the children. Dr Botkin’s written appeal to the local soviet that the family be allowed two hours’ recreation outside daily for the sake of their health fell on deaf ears as well. During June the weather had become increasingly hot and thundery, making life inside their prison even more intolerable. The sealed, airless rooms trapped the smells of cooking and cigarette smoke, human sweat and the lavatory. They also spread germs and that most tenacious of parasites, head lice, forcing Nicholas to trim his beard and the girls to keep their hair short. ‘It’s unbearable to be locked up like this, and not to be able to go into the garden when we want to, or spend a pleasant evening in the air’, wrote Nicholas in his diary, as the humidity and sudden storms of a changeable Urals summer gathered pace.

Had Nicholas been able to see beyond his prison, he would have discovered that, from the day of his arrival in Ekaterinburg, people had been venturing up to the ‘Tsar’s House’, as the Ipatiev House rapidly became known (none of the locals using the official name), in hopes of seeing him – despite the severe warnings not to do so. The guards, rifles in hand, had pushed them away: ‘Walk on, Citizens, walk on. There’s nothing to see here’, they would say, to which came the often argumentative response: ‘If there’s nothing to see, then why can’t we just stand here if we want to?’ People tried to get the guards to take in presents and letters for the family and were all turned away, though one or two guards occasionally relented and allowed the curious to take a quick look inside the palisade. Others anxious to see the Imperial Family approached the house from a different direction – congregating at the bottom of Voznesensky Lane, near the Iset Pond. Here, in the centre of town, you could just make out the balcony overlooking the garden at the back of the Ipatiev House. A man in uniform was often seen standing
there. Word got round that it was the Tsar. Some thought they had caught a glimpse of him. But the rumours were false; the man on the balcony was only one of the guards. Yet still people came. One of the reasons for the construction of the second, higher palisade had been the discovery that when the Tsar took a turn on the swing in the garden, his booted legs flew up over the palisade and could be seen by the curious outside. That did not stop two young schoolboys, the Telezhnikov brothers, who were caught by the guards outside the Ipatiev House trying to take photographs and hauled off to the offices of the Cheka for a severe warning.

Although the lack of physical exercise was hugely stressful to him personally, Nicholas and his family had by now become long inured to isolation – an isolation that had for many years been largely self-imposed. They had always preferred their own company to anybody else’s, including that of most of their Romanov relatives. The life of a prisoner was, as it turned out, nothing new to Nicholas, for he had already observed to Chief Marshal of the Imperial Court Count Benckendorff, during his confinement at the Alexander Palace, that he was hardly less free now than formerly, adding, as he reached for the cigarette that was the ready prop in moments of stress: ‘For have I not been a prisoner all my life?’

Whilst he might still be in denial about the true nature of his imprisonment and his ultimate fate, on the morning of 4 July, the former Tsar of Russia would begin, finally, to discover what captivity in the Urals really entailed.

THURSDAY 4 JULY 1918

‘T
oday there was a change of commandant’, Nicholas noted with surprise in his diary on 4 July. That afternoon the Romanovs had had an unexpected visitor: Aleksandr Beloborodov, chair of the Ural Regional Soviet, had arrived when they were taking their modest lunch. Commandant Avdeev, he announced, had been dismissed and would not be returning. Nor, as they soon discovered, would his vulgar, drunken assistant Moshkin. Whilst they would not miss Moshkin, who had taken pleasure in humiliating them in the evenings after Avdeev had gone home off duty, the Romanovs felt a pang of regret at the loss of the disorderly Avdeev. For all his drinking, his swaggering in front of his subordinates and his occasionally crass behaviour, he had been fundamentally considerate, even kind. He’d made sure they had their own samovar so that the guards didn’t take all the hot water for tea; he’d stretched the rules on their time allowed outside in the garden. The Romanovs had grown used to him and at times Nicholas had even found him endearing. The family had sensed his conflicted feelings towards them, and a certain reluctant compassion. They knew what to expect.

The Tsar’s response was sympathetic: ‘I am sorry for Avdeev, but it was his own fault as he did nothing to keep his men from stealing things out of our trunks in the shed.’ Naively, Nicholas thought the shake-up was down to the constant pilfering by the guards from the family’s goods in the outhouse that Avdeev had turned a blind eye to, if not colluded in. But there were other, far more sinister reasons for the changeover of which Nicholas could not be aware.

In recent weeks the Ural Regional Soviet had been thrown into a state of increasing paranoia by evidence of monarchist and other groups lurking in Ekaterinburg and plotting, however ineptly, to rescue the family. In addition, reports had been published in Moscow that the Tsar had been murdered, and these had filtered through to the Western press. It had made the Bolshevik government jittery, despite assurances that the
reliable local ‘troika’ of Goloshchekin, Beloborodov and his deputy Didkovsky had made regular inspections of the house in May and June as well as bringing groups of officials to observe the Imperial Family during their recreation periods outside. Doubting the trustworthiness of the Ural Regional Soviet and the levels of security at the Ipatiev House, Lenin had ordered Reinhold Berzin, commander of the Northern Ural and Siberian Front, to travel 300 miles from Perm to make a surprise personal inspection. This had been carried out on 22 June, in the company of district military commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, under the guise of the supposed ‘window inspection’, when Nicholas had noted the presence in the house of what he thought were ‘commissars from Petrograd’.

Berzin’s report, which finally reached Moscow on the 28th by a circuitous route, such being the haphazard state of the telegraph lines, had confirmed the rumours about the Tsar’s murder as a malicious provocation. But by now the Ural Regional Soviet was becoming aware of other breakdowns in discipline at the house: unruly behaviour and bouts of drunkenness by the night guard, and worse still, a slide towards fraternisation with the Imperial Family that had been strictly forbidden. At Tobolsk the guards had been disarmed by Nicholas’s natural, friendly manner and the pattern repeated itself at Ekaterinburg. Some of the guards had even smuggled letters out for the family or brought in books. Others privately admitted to a creeping respect and pity for the Romanovs, persisting in referring respectfully to Nicholas as ‘the Tsar’ or ‘the Emperor’.

In such close contact with the family, day in, day out, the inevitable had happened. The Romanovs and their young captors had developed the classic prisoner–jailer bonds so common in such situations. Some of the guards had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the gentle, kindly face of Nicholas and his pretty daughters with the one that Bolshevik propaganda had inculcated in them. The three younger girls by now had become open and friendly to the point of flirtatiousness with some of them. They took any and every opportunity of talking and sharing jokes and cups of tea; given the levels of boredom they were enduring, this is not surprising. Their eldest sister Olga, however, did not mix. Now painfully thin and sickly, she had been withdrawing increasingly into a state of melancholy for months. As for the Tsaritsa, she was another matter altogether. Cold, reserved, bitterly proud and defensive of her privacy, she was hostile towards the guards and unrelentingly argumentative about complying with any of the commandant’s house rules. She refused point blank to ring the bell that the family were supposed to use every time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing, and was always unsmiling and
complaining. The guards found her personality difficult. But she was clearly a sick woman, as was the boy, for whom they had the greatest, overriding sympathy. So thin, so pale and waxen, Alexey seemed to some of them to be already at death’s door. In the end, many of the Romanovs’ captors, for all their revolutionary talk and Bolshevik persuasions, had succumbed to simple human compassion for what was fundamentally an ordinary, devoted family, blighted by ill health and with no real understanding of their terrible new life in captivity.

Weeks of close confinement and crushing boredom for four hormonal girls aged between 17 and 22, two of them still adolescent and all of them subject to the normal mood swings of menstruating women, must inevitably have brought tensions within those five hot, crowded rooms. Add to that a probably menopausal mother and a terminally ill brother, and the strain must at times have been intolerable. Hagiographers of the Romanovs have always claimed there was never any discord between the family, but this is extremely hard to believe given the circumstances in which they were being held and the often profound fluctuations between hope and despair that any prisoner normally goes through when kept for so long under close surveillance.

Indeed, it may well have been the immaturity and natural sexual curiosity of one of the daughters that helped precipitate the final clampdown. On 27 June, the flirtatious and attractive Maria, whom the guards had found by far the most friendly of the Grand Duchesses, had been discovered, during an inspection of the Ipatiev House by Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, in a compromising situation with guard Ivan Skorokhodov, who had smuggled in a cake for her nineteenth birthday. Skorokhodov was summarily removed to Ekaterinburg jail. Nicholas and Alexandra, as well as Maria’s older sisters, were clearly shocked by her behaviour and unsettled by the incident. The resulting introduction of a rigorous new regime at the Ipatiev House and Avdeev’s dismissal were no coincidence.

And so, on Thursday 4 July, a new commandant arrived. His name was Yakov Yurovsky, and he brought with him an assistant, an attractive young man called Grigory Nikulin, who in Alexandra’s estimation seemed ‘decent’ in comparison to his vulgar predecessor Moshkin. Little did she know that the bland-looking Nikulin was a ruthless killer who had opted to work for the Cheka rather than go to the Front.

Yurovsky was a tall, well-built man with high cheekbones and a shock of black hair. With his neatly trimmed Van Dyck beard and curled moustache, the 40-year-old looked cultured, almost dapper, and had an air of self-importance to match. He wasn’t a drinker like Avdeev. He was highly intelligent, vigilant and motivated. A clampdown was needed and
it would be draconian. Yurovsky immediately saw to it that pilfering from the Imperial Family ceased. Such money as the Tsar and Tsaritsa had left had already been confiscated. But after a search of their possessions on arrival, the 16 roubles and 17 kopeks given to Maria by Anastasia for the journey to Ekaterinburg had been taken from her for ‘safekeeping by the Ural Regional Soviet’s treasurer’. Yurovsky was more meticulous than Avdeev; he now set about making a detailed inventory of all the family’s jewellery and valuables. The priceless Imperial regalia had long since been confiscated by the new Soviet state; much of what remained of larger valuable pieces had been stolen, or smuggled out by the Tsaritsa to sympathisers in Tobolsk, in hopes of funding rescue. But the women still had with them many jewels – especially diamonds and pearls. At Tobolsk, during every spare moment, they had been carefully secreting these in their corsets, bodices, hats and buttons, as essential resources to fund their life in exile, should they ever have to leave Russia. Yurovsky knew they had more jewellery than the items he had seen and that they had probably concealed them in their clothes. He knew Moscow wanted to lay hands on it; and sooner or later he would find it. As he itemised the family’s valuables, he made few concessions: the Tsarevich was allowed to keep his watch (he would get bored without it, claimed Nicholas), the Tsar his engagement ring which he couldn’t get off, and the women only the gold bracelets they wore that fitted so tightly round their wrists that they could not be removed. The rest Yurovsky took away, and locked up in a box, to be returned to them later.