Secret Lives of the Tsars (44 page)

*
2
Grand Duke Paul, uncle of Nicholas II, had been exiled because he married a commoner without the emperor’s approval.

*
3
It should be noted that the murder was not universally celebrated. “For the peasants Rasputin has become a martyr,” one noble, recently returned from the countryside, related to Paléologue. “He was from the people, he made the voice of the people known to the tsar; he defended the people against the court, and so courtiers killed him! That’s what is being said in all the
izbas
[traditional countryside dwellings, usually constructed of logs].”

*
4
In reaction to the ferocious anti-German agitation among the Russians during the war, Nicholas II changed the name of the capital from St. Petersburg to the more Slavic Petrograd. For similar reasons in Britain, King George V replaced the royal family surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha with the thoroughly English “Windsor.”

*
5
In the midst of rising antimonarchical sentiment, Michael almost immediately renounced the throne as well. “He was frail and gentle,” Shulgin wrote of the grand duke, “not born for such difficult times, but he was sincere and humane. He wore no masks. It occurred to me: ‘What a good constitutional monarch he would have been.’ ” Michael was murdered by the Bolsheviks just a few weeks before his brother.

^*6
“As God is in heaven,” generations of Russians had been taught, “so great is our Tsar on earth.”

*
7
Dowager Empress Marie, once so beloved by the Russian people, would endure a degrading captivity by the Bolsheviks in the Crimea, along with her daughters and other members of the extended family. “Here, we are looked at as if we were real criminals and very dangerous people,” she wrote. “It is difficult to believe in this.”

*
8
On March 20, the Provisional Government resolved “to deprive the deposed emperor and his consort of their liberty.” The following day, both Nicholas and Alexandra were under arrest.

*
9
See previous chapter,
this page
.

*
10
Kerensky also formed a favorable impression of Nicholas, whose violent overthrow he had once advocated. The socialist leader of the Provisional Government later acknowledged that he had been affected by his “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm, which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful.… It cannot be said that my talks with the Tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former Emperor never once lost his equilibrium, never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.”

*
11
Lili Dehn was quickly released after her arrest, but Anna Vyrubova remained imprisoned for five months at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where, due to widespread speculation about a sexual relationship with Rasputin, she underwent a mortifying gynecological exam that finally proved she was actually a virgin.

*
12
The British government had actually arranged sanctuary for the Russian royal family, until the king, cousin “Georgie,” stepped in to revoke it. With his own throne imperiled by a rising tide of republicanism in wartime Britain, George V feared the impression it might make if he were to give shelter to a fallen autocrat. Still, he was saddened by his cousin’s fate the following year. “It was a foul murder,” the king wrote in his diary. “I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.”

*
13
They would be joined three weeks later by their five children, and the remnants of their retinue—most of whom were then either shot or dismissed. It was at this time that the loyal Gilliard was separated from the family forever.

*
14
The four loyal companions murdered along with the imperial family were Dr. Eugene Botkin; Alexandra’s maid, Anna Demidova; the valet, Alexis Trupp; and their cook, Ivan Kharitonov.

Aftermath

As the Romanovs either lay moldering in unmarked graves or scattered into exile, relics of the imperial past remained. Crowns, orbs, and scepters were unceremoniously stashed away, but the Bolsheviks never saw fit to destroy all the grand monuments erected to the glory of long-dead monarchs. Thus the massive figure of Peter the Great could still be seen proudly mounted on his horse, while Catherine the Great stood imperiously overlooking what had become Leningrad—semideities, frozen in bronze, lingering in what now was an officially godless state. Their splendid palaces were preserved, but entirely devoid of the passion and intrigue that made them uniquely Romanov—merely elaborate shells, occupied only by ghosts.

Dowager Empress Marie, who had once enchanted Russia as the vivacious wife of Alexander III, barely managed to escape the Bolsheviks with her life. And, while she endured in exile, clashing with her cheap nephew King Christian X of Demark over such trivia as electricity bills, she stoutly refused to accept that her son and his family had been slaughtered. Indeed, upon arriving in England after leaving Russia, she tore off a black armband that the future King Edward VIII was wearing in honor of his fallen kinsmen. “It was clear,”
recalled Marie’s loyal bodyguard Timofei Yaschik, “the Empress wanted to underline the fact that she did not believe and did not want to believe the news about the murder of the Imperial family.”

Marie was far from alone in this, for almost as soon as the bodies of Nicholas II and his family had been dumped in their makeshift grave did reports emerge of the miraculous escape of at least some of them. Romantic legends were born, particularly about the impish Anastasia, youngest of the four grand duchesses. One of the most enduring revolved around a woman, known to the world as Anna Anderson, who in 1920 emerged dazed and confused from a Berlin canal she had fallen into and gradually began to reveal herself as Russia’s lost tsarevna. Hers was a riveting tale of escape, and her resemblance to Anastasia was uncanny enough to convince some Romanov associates that she was indeed Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughter.

The woman’s amazing story of survival captured the imagination of millions; Ingrid Bergman played her in the Hollywood movie. Even after many decades, when Anna Anderson was just an eccentric cat lady living a decidedly unregal existence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the legend persisted. It was only DNA that ultimately destroyed it: After her death in 1984, a preserved tissue sample from the claimant was compared to a blood sample taken from one of the real Anastasia’s royal relatives, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip. Anna Anderson was a fraud.

“I think it’s a shame,” her biographer Peter Kurth told author Robert K. Massie, “that a great legend, a wonderful adventure, an astonishing story that inspired so many people, including myself, should suddenly be reduced to a little glass dish.”

Yet almost as soon as the myth of Anastasia’s astonishing escape imploded, a Romanov revival of sorts began with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, a collection of skeletal remains—discovered and reburied outside Ekaterinburg in 1978—were once again unearthed and forensically examined by several sets of scientists. All came to the conclusion that the bones were indeed the remains of Nicholas II, his family, and four servants. The murderers’ attempt to destroy the identities of their victims had failed in the face of science. But the evidence of their brutal efforts still remained apparent more than eight decades later. Dr. Ludmilla Koryakova, a professor of archeology at the Ural State University, had examined many skeletons over the course of her career. “But never,” she told the Sunday
Times
, “so many that were so badly damaged—so violated. I was ill.”

On July 17, 1998, the remains of Nicholas and Alexandra, along with three of their five children, were at last ceremoniously laid to rest at St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the imperial mausoleum since the interment there of Peter the Great in 1725. Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, paid tribute to the massacred family with a stirring apology:

“All these years, we were silent about this horrible crime. Those who perpetuated this crime and those who for decades have been finding excuses for it are guilty. All of us are guilty. One cannot lie to oneself and explain away wanton cruelty as political necessity.… We are all responsible to the historic memory of the nation. That’s why I should come here as a person and as president. I bow my head before the victims of a senseless murder.”

Eight years after the formal burial of Russia’s last imperial family, Dowager Empress Marie joined them in perpetuity.
She had been laid to rest in her native Denmark after her death in 1928, but her wish had been to remain beside her husband, Alexander III. “Having fallen deeply in love with the Russian people, the empress devoted a great deal of effort for the benefit of the Russian fatherland,” Orthodox Patriarch Alexis II said at the reinterment ceremony. “Her soul ached for Russia.”

The family circle at the cathedral was still not quite complete, though. Only the remains of three of Nicholas and Alexandra’s children had been found in the forest grave, once again giving rise to the hope that perhaps the others had survived. But the executioner’s record was clear on this: two of the corpses were burned near the burial place of the rest. DNA analysis of charred bone and tooth fragments found at the site proved conclusively in 2011 that they belonged to Tsarevitch Alexis and his sister Marie. The siblings still await burial with the rest of their family.

Meanwhile, history took one of its strange turns in 2000 when Russia’s last emperor and empress—once reviled as “Bloody Nicholas” and “the German Bitch”—were canonized, along with their five children, as saints.

Dedicated with love and appreciation
to the Foote/Rupp/Maloney clan—
Always
in there pitching!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply indebted to my editorial team at Random House, Ryan Doherty and Anne Speyer, for their thoughtful guidance and encouragement, and to Ann Marie and Robert Lynch, as well as Bill Millard, for their generous research assistance.

I am also most grateful for the love and encouragement of my family and friends. I feel truly blessed.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, John T.
Catherine the Great: Life and Legend
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Anisimov, Evgenii V.
Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia
. Translated by Kathleen Carroll. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Buchanan, George.
My Mission to Russia
. London: Cassell, 1923.

Buchanan, Meriel.
Dissolution of an Empire
. London: Murray, 1932.

Buxhoeveden, Sophie.
The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia
. New York: Longmans, Green, 1928.

Bergamini, John D.
The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.