The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (26 page)

Finally, there came the crunch of tires on the ice-crusted driveway. Minutes later, the door to the family’s private rooms flew open. “His Majesty the Emperor,” announced the family’s faithful butler, refusing to acknowledge recent events. Then Nicholas pounded up the stairs. Alexandra gave a little squeal as she leaped from her chair to meet him.

Together at last, husband and wife clung to one another. Tears streaming, Alexandra reassured him of her love. “
My beloved, Soul of my soul … I wholly understand your action, oh my hero.”

And Nicholas broke down. Recalled Anna Vyrubova, “
He sobbed like a child on the breast of his wife.”

Silver strands now streaked forty-eight-year-old Nicholas’s beard, and dark shadows circled his blue eyes. And yet, to those around him, he acted “
like a schoolboy on vacation.” Walking. Sawing wood. Breaking ice. This was how the former tsar filled his days. And he felt invigorated. No more meetings with ministers. No more war reports to read or documents to sign. The only thing he
admitted to missing about his old life was visiting with his mother and sisters. Otherwise, he reveled in spending time with his family and having “
plenty of [hours] to read for my own pleasure.” When told that they might be imprisoned at Tsarskoe Selo for several months, he replied, “
A pleasant thought.”

Forty-four-year-old Alexandra found life less pleasant. She spent most of her days on her sofa. Whatever glue had been holding her together since the start of the war seemed to vanish overnight. Now the family had the sickly Alexandra back. Her features suddenly aged and gaunt, her hair almost completely gray, she constantly grumbled about the hardships imposed on the family. In truth, changes in their material lifestyle were few. Footmen in elaborate livery still bowed and served meals; expensive wines from the imperial cellar still appeared on the table; maids still came to help her change into lace gowns and lengths of pearls. It was the mental strain Alexandra found intolerable. Suddenly, she was a prisoner in her own home, with parts of the palace and its grounds completely off-limits.

Far worse were the family’s walks. For a few hours each day, the Romanovs were allowed outside. But every afternoon, just before they stepped out, angry crowds gathered along the iron fence. They shouted insults and obscenities. Some even hurled sticks and clods of dirt.

The soldiers did little to stop this. Not long ago, just a glimpse of the tsar would have sent them to their knees. But years of hardship had left them with little sympathy for Nicholas. “
Too many hard, terrible things had been connected in the past with his name,” explained one soldier. One could hardly blame them for their gaping and mocking. Sometimes they went even further, poking him in the back with their bayonets, and turning rudely away when he offered to shake hands. Once a soldier even stuck a rifle into the spokes of his bicycle as he pedaled past. The tsar flew over the handlebars,
crashing to the ground. He managed to accept it all without complaint.

The soldiers targeted the others, too. They snatched away Alexei’s toy rifle, told crude jokes about Alexandra within her earshot, and made fun of the way the girls spoke.
“What an ‘appetizing book’ you have in your hand,” one soldier drawled in imitation of Anastasia, who was overheard complaining about lunch. “One is tempted to eat it.”

At first, these incidents humiliated Alexandra and her children. But Nicholas helped them get over it by laughing at his new title. “
Don’t call me a tsar anymore,” he would joke. “I am only an ex.” Soon the rest of the family began using the expression. One day when an overcooked ham was placed on the lunch table, Nicholas declared, “
Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it’s nothing but an ex-ham.” Everyone—even Alexandra—giggled.

And so, slowly, the empress began to accept her fate. “
It is necessary to look more calmly on everything,” she said three months after her husband’s abdication. “What is to be done? God has sent us such trials, evidently he thinks we are prepared for it. It is a sort of examination—to prove we are ready for His grace.”

Just before midnight on April 16, 1917, a train pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station. In the waiting area, hundreds of workers and soldiers buzzed with excitement. After twelve years in exile, Vladimir Lenin was coming home!

He’d been following events in Russia closely. “
It’s staggering!” he’d exclaimed when he learned of Nicholas’s abdication. “It’s so incredibly unexpected!” With the tsar gone, Lenin believed now was the time for the soviet to finally seize power.

It took six weeks and lots of political wrangling for Lenin to cross the war zone from Switzerland. But at long last, he arrived, his well-tailored wool coat and formal felt hat contrasting sharply with the workers’ gray tunics. Catching sight of him, the crowd cheered as a military band struck up a revolutionary anthem:

Hurrying out into the station square where even more workers waited, Lenin climbed onto the hood of an armored car. He declared the war a “
shameless imperialist slaughter,” and called the Provisional Government who still supported the war “capitalist pirates” full of “lies and frauds.” Bolsheviks should not, he shouted, “support in any way the new government.”

The crowd cheered.

But just because Lenin had been greeted as a returning hero did not mean the Petrograd Soviet—the majority of whom were more moderate Mensheviks—agreed with him. Only two months earlier, it had agreed to support the Provisional Government. Thus many were flabbergasted when Lenin appeared before the soviet’s members the morning after his arrival and demanded an immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. “
We don’t need any parliamentary republic!” Lenin shouted. “We don’t need any [rich man’s] democracy! We don’t need any government but the Soviet of worker and soldiers!”

Boos and whistles met his words. “
That is raving!” hollered one listener. “That is the raving of a lunatic!” It seemed Lenin, who had lived comfortably in Europe, did not understand how hard they’d
struggled to reach this place. “[He] is,” snorted one member, “
a hopeless failure.”

But Lenin, who loved a fight, now launched what he called his “
drive to power.” Through the spring and summer of 1917, he appeared before Petrograd crowds, giving passionate speeches. Even though he could not pronounce his
R
s, his use of easy slogans and repetition made his message memorable. “
Bread, peace, land, and all power to the Soviets. That is what we … want. That is what we … deserve. Bread, peace, land, and all power to the Soviets.” Thumbs shoved under his armpits, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of his staccato words, Lenin possessed, said a listener, “
a curious, hypnotic power.”

His message was strengthened by the continued ineffectiveness of the Provisional Government. The cost of living had continued to skyrocket; food supplies remained scarce; and no steps had been taken to help the peasants toward their hearts’ desire of more land. The war, citizens believed, was to blame for all these problems. So why weren’t their new leaders doing something about the conflict? Could those rich, upper-class ministers in the cabinet be continuing the war for their own purposes? Mistrust growing, the Petrograd Soviet demanded to know the government’s war policy.

In early April, leaders responded with their Declaration on War Aims. Russia’s role in the conflict, the document claimed, would be purely defensive. She would protect her borders and nothing more.

But the soviet was not entirely assured. It insisted the Provisional Government send a diplomatic note to their allies declaring the same.

Government leaders agreed.

But just weeks later, on May 3, newspapers defiantly published the contents of that note. And it contradicted what leaders had told the soviet. Instead, the government’s foreign minister, P. N.
Milyukov, had assured allies that Russia would go on fighting Germany to the bitter end.

The next day, mass demonstrations broke out in Petrograd and Moscow. Angry mobs carrying guns and banners denounced the foreign minister. They declared the government deceitful and hypocritical. They demanded change.

To calm the chaos, Milyukov quickly resigned. But it wasn’t enough. The people demanded more representation in the new government. After a long and heated debate, the Petrograd Soviet decided, much to Bolshevik members’ disgust, to participate in the Provisional Government. Five moderate members of the soviet now joined the reorganized ministry.

But the people’s trust in their government was evaporating. By midsummer 1917, Bolshevik slogans began to resonate with many soviet members. Recalled one soviet member, “
[Lenin] was followed unquestioningly as [the Bolsheviks’ chosen] leader … a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause.”

In May—as Lenin fanned the flames of insurrection against the Provisional Government—Nicholas and his children planted a vegetable garden. Happily, they moved sod, turned soil, and poked seeds into muddy furrows. Their clothing grew dirt-streaked and their fingernails turned black. But they didn’t care. Working in the sunshine was bliss. And incredibly, some soldiers even offered to help. After weeks of standing over the Romanovs, they began to see them as ordinary people. Soon, wrote Gilliard in his diary, “
several guards even [came] to help us!” Hatred softening, they laid down
their rifles and picked up hoes. Before long, the family was chatting with the soldiers as they all weeded and tilled together.

While the Romanovs tended their cabbages, the Provisional Government wrestled with the question of what to do with the family. At first, everyone believed they would be sent to England. Not only was King George V related to Nicholas and Alexandra (he was first cousin to both of them), he had even offered them refuge in his country. That spring, however, King George received thousands of letters from incensed British citizens. With the war against Germany and Austria still raging, they saw German-born Alexandra as an enemy. Worried that public opinion might boil over as it had in Russia, King George withdrew his invitation.

The next best thing to do, decided Alexander Kerensky, was to move the Romanovs someplace far from Petrograd. Just an hour’s car ride away, the capital seethed with angry citizens. Seeking revenge, many demanded the family be imprisoned in the small, dark cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Shouts of “To the palace! To the palace!” were repeatedly heard in the streets. Kerensky feared a vengeful mob might attack the family.

The city’s atmosphere grew even more dangerous in July 1917, when the Provisional Government decided to launch a military offensive against the Austrians. It had been two years since the Russian army had gone on the attack. Morale among the soldiers had never been lower; mass desertions continued and many refused to fight. The Provisional Government, however, was encouraged by the United States’ entry into the war. This powerful new ally, they hoped, would somehow help Russia defeat Germany. Kerensky—who
had recently become minister of war—toured the front, making eloquent speeches to rally the troops. The offensive began in early July and soon turned into a rout, not for the Austrians and the Germans who helped them, but for the Russians, as hundreds of thousands of peasant soldiers were killed.

Passionate antiwar feelings erupted. In Petrograd, half a million people took to the streets on July 16 and 17. “
Down with the war!” they shouted. “Down with the Provisional Government!” Among them marched twenty thousand sailors, many of them Bolsheviks, armed with rifles and revolvers. Eager for instructions from the man whom they considered their leader, they headed to Lenin’s house. If he approved, they intended to march on the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was now headquartered, round up the ministers, and proclaim soviet power. But when they arrived, Lenin refused to even speak to them. Finally persuaded to say a few words, he stepped onto the balcony and mumbled briefly about the future of soviet power. Why didn’t he fire up the crowds to topple the government? No one knows for sure. Minutes later, the discouraged sailors marched away. That’s when soldiers of the Provisional Government began firing on them from rooftops and the upper windows of buildings. When it was over, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded. Recalled one witness, “
It is clear that the crowds on the street had absolutely no idea of what they were doing—it was all a nightmare. Nobody knew the aims of the uprising or its leaders. Were there any leaders at all? I doubt it.”

This uprising convinced Kerensky that the imperial family needed to be moved immediately. “
The Bolsheviks are after me,” he told Nicholas, “and then will be after you.” But where could the family live safely?

Nicholas and Alexandra wanted to be sent to their palace in the Crimea. But Kerensky knew this was impossible. Their train would have to pass through Central Russia, where angry peasants
were burning down manor houses and killing landowners. After much thought, Kerensky picked a quiet river town called Tobolsk in western Siberia. “
I chose Tobolsk because it was an out-and-out backwater,” Kerensky later wrote, “[with a] population which was prosperous and contented.… In addition … the climate was excellent and the town boasted a very passable Governor’s residence where the family could live with some measure of comfort.”

On August 11, Kerensky visited Tsarskoe Selo. “
Start packing,” he told the royal couple. “Be prepared to leave … within a few days.”

“
Where are we going?” asked Alexandra.

“
For your safety, it must remain a secret,” replied Kerensky.

Kerensky kept his secret from almost everyone else, too. “
Only five or six men in all of Petrograd knew about it,” he later wrote. “I made all the plans to move the family myself.”