The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (30 page)

Days later, a letter written by Marie but dictated by Alexandra finally arrived in Tobolsk. “
It is not clear how things will be here,” read the letter. Unable to give many details about their new surroundings because all ingoing and outgoing mail was read by the Ekaterinburg guards first, the empress did warn that all their belongings had been searched, even their “medicines.”

Medicines
was the Romanovs’ code word for jewels. Before she left, Alexandra had instructed the girls to conceal the family’s jewelry if they ever received this message. Now they took up needle and thread and cleverly sewed close to $14 million worth of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls into the hems of skirts and the belts of dresses; behind jacket buttons and under hat rims, and deep inside pillows and cushions. Most of the “medicines” were concealed between double layers of cotton in the girls’ camisoles—almost nineteen pounds of diamonds alone in each of these undergarments. The jewels were all the family had left of their vast fortune, their financial future if they escaped Russia.

While they sewed, another letter arrived, this one from Marie. “
We get nasty surprises here every day,” she wrote ominously. “Who would think … we would be treated like this? We hope you have it better.”

The children didn’t. In mid-May, the Bolshevik government had sent another commissar to Tobolsk—Nicholas Rodionov. Described by one courtier as a “
right snake of a man,” Rodionov hated the imperial family and enjoyed inflicting petty humiliations on the grand duchesses. Armed from head to toe with revolvers, rifles, and knives, the new commissar stalked about the house, keeping
careful watch over his prisoners. His orders were to bring the rest of the family to Ekaterinburg as soon as Alexei could travel. In the meantime, the Governor’s Mansion would become “
a strict prison,” he announced.

On his first day, he ordered the doors inside the house to remain open at all times, even the one leading to the grand duchesses’ bedroom. Prisoners, he declared, must always be watched. When valet Volkov protested—“
Your soldiers would pass by there all the time!”—Rodionov pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the servant. “
If you do not do as I have ordered … I [will] shoot you where you stand,” he warned. From then on, the girls had little privacy.

Rodionov also instituted a daily roll call. Every morning, the prisoners were made to line up in the ballroom, facing the commissar. “
Are you Olga Nikolaevna? Tatiana Nikolaevna?” he shouted into their faces. Stepping forward, they obediently answered his questions. “Darling,” Olga wrote in one of the last letters she sent to Anna Vyrubova,
“you must know how dreadful it all is.”

These changes—so obviously and frighteningly a taste of what was to come in Ekaterinburg—forced Gibbes and Gilliard to question whether or not the children should be sent to their parents. “
We feel we ought to delay [their] departure as long as possible,” Gilliard wrote in his diary.

The girls refused to hear of it. In the three weeks since their parents’ departure, Alexei, though still unable to walk, had grown strong enough to travel. All four were eager to be reunited with their family. “
In our thoughts we are with you all the time,” Anastasia wrote Marie. “It is terribly sad and empty [here] and I have whole trainloads of things to tell you all.”

And so the prisoners began packing. “
The rooms are empty,” Alexei scrawled in his diary. “Little by little everything is [put] away. The walls look bare without their pictures.”

On their final night in the Governor’s Mansion, as a maid wrapped the last of the knickknacks, Rodionov suddenly appeared at her side. “
Life down there [in Ekaterinburg],” he whispered, “will be very different.”

On May 23, after a three-day journey, the train carrying the imperial children pulled into the Ekaterinburg station. Despite an icy drizzle, a large crowd had gathered. “
I cannot describe the faces I saw,” said one courtier. “Fat faces, lean faces, but all with deadly, intense hatred stamped on them.”

As the luggage was being taken out, one man grabbed a box and tore it open. Out spilled boots and shoes. “
Look! [The tsar] has six pairs and I have none,” cried the man. In response, the mob began chanting, “
Death to the tyrant!” and surged forward. A second box, full of Alexandra’s gowns, was ripped open. The sight further enraged the crowd. “
The dresses … of wanton women,” shrieked a woman, pointing toward the train. “Off with their heads!”

In response, the mob screamed, “
Down with them! Hang them! Drown them in the lake!”

From the train window, the children watched as the soldiers worked to hold back the mob. Finally, Rodionov ordered them out of the train. As they gathered up their things and went out into the gray Siberian day, their expressions, recalled one eyewitness, were “
a tragic symphony … nervous, emotional … trying to suppress [their] pride, but also trying to suppress [their] fear in front of hostile strangers.”

Pierre Gilliard, who had been placed in a separate car for the entire journey, saw them go. “
Nagorny the sailor … passed my
window, carrying the sick [Alexei] in his arms; behind him came the grand duchesses, loaded with valises and small personal belongings.… Tatiana Nikolaevna came last, carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining, and I saw her feet sinking into the mud at every step.” The girls climbed into a waiting carriage and drove away. Added Gilliard, “How little I suspected that I was never to see them again.”

Stretching across a cluster of small hills, Ekaterinburg was a city of iron-smelting factories, soap works, and tanneries. Its wide boulevards were lined with fine houses and golden-domed churches, as well as a natural history museum, two theaters, and even an opera house.

Near the center of this town, on an unpaved street lined with linden trees, a wealthy engineer named N. N. Ipatiev had built himself an ornate, two-story stone house. But in April, just as Nicholas and Alexandra were being taken from Tobolsk, Ipatiev had received orders from the Bolshevik government to leave. He’d had time to pack just a few belongings before workmen arrived to transform his home into a prison. Hastily, they built a tall wooden fence that not only reached the windows on the upper floors, but entirely hid the house and its garden from the street. Later, this fence would be extended even higher—all the way up to the house’s eaves. They sealed off five rooms on the upper floor as a prison and whitewashed all the windows so the captives could not see out. “
It [always] looks as if there is a thick fog outside,” complained Nicholas. Only one of these windows could be opened. Without much ventilation, the rooms, said Nicholas, were very “
hot and stuffy.” When all was
ready, the house had received its new and ominous name, the House of Special Purpose.

Now the carriages carrying the children rolled into the House of Special Purpose’s courtyard. For the last time, they saw the outside world. Then the fence’s heavy wooden doors slammed behind them, and they raced through the rain into the house, where their parents eagerly waited.

The children found themselves crammed into five interconnecting rooms with their parents and their servants—Dr. Botkin, the maid Anna Demidova, cook Ivan Kharitonov and his fourteen-year-old kitchen assistant Leonid Sednev, and footman Alexei Trupp. The empress had hoped to squeeze in Gibbes and Gilliard, too. But officials denied the men permission to enter the house. Instead, they were returned to Tobolsk, along with many of the others who had accompanied the grand duchesses.

Nicholas and Alexandra occupied the corner bedroom. With its couch and armoire, it was small but “
cosy,” said Marie. This room’s only exit was through the girls’ cramped bedroom (actually a former dressing room) with its floral wallpaper and oriental rug. Until their army cots arrived from the train station, the girls snuggled together on a mound of coats and blankets on the floor, whispering late into the night.

There was little other furniture in their room—a table, a few upright chairs, and a large mirror in one corner. As the weeks passed, the girls had less and less use for this last item. Even though they’d left Tsarskoe Selo with boxes of clothing, they hadn’t been allowed to bring most of them into the House of Special Purpose. Instead, their luggage had been tossed unopened and haphazardly into a
storage shed located behind the house. Soon, the few clothes they had grew threadbare and faded. Did they find themselves standing before the mirror, longing for the white lace dresses they used to wear?

The girls’ room was connected to the dining room with its wooden floors and solid oak furniture. At Nicholas’s insistence, all of the prisoners—royals and servants alike—sat together for meals at the big table. But there was not enough silverware to go around. This was because their fine tableware also sat unopened in the shed. Other things sat untouched in the shed, too—boxes of Alexei’s baby clothes, riding crops, binoculars, and most disappointing to the children, their beloved Brownie box cameras. Even in Tobolsk, the family had been allowed to use them. But guards had confiscated the cameras here in Ekaterinburg. There was something else in the shed, too—Nicholas’s diaries and letters, neatly stacked in crate number nine marked
A.F
. and crate number thirteen marked
N.A
.

The final space was the drawing room. Here, Alexandra made an altar by covering a table with her lace bedspread and the family’s icons. Here, too, the girls played the mahogany piano left behind by Comrade Ipatiev, while Nicholas sat reading beneath an ornate chandelier of Italian glass. At night, this room became Dr. Botkin’s bedroom, while Trupp, Kharitonov, and young Leonid slept in the stairway hall. Anna Demidova was given a closet-size room toward the back of the house.

Also located on the house’s top floor, but separate from the prisoners’ rooms, was Commandant Alexander Avdeev’s office. A former factory worker, Avdeev was tall and thin-faced, and behind Nicholas’s back called him “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker.” He had gotten the job of overseeing the Romanovs’ imprisonment because of his dedication to the Bolshevik party. In the elegant office that had once belonged to Comrade Ipatiev, the commander smoked and drank and scrawled an occasional order on stationery he’d had
engraved with the words “House of Special Purpose.” Between shifts, guards squeezed into the office, flinging their rifles onto the rich carpets before reclining on the sofa’s plush cushions. These guards, noted Nicholas sarcastically, “
are original in both composition and dress.”

Indeed, the forty men guarding the imperial family were not professional soldiers or hardened Bolshevik revolutionaries. Most were young factory workers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three (some the same age as the grand duchesses). They did not have any fighting experience, or know how to handle guns. They had not taken the job out of hatred for the tsar but rather for the “
money,” explained a twenty-one-year-old guard named Alexander Strekotin.

Young and immature, these guards made “
all kinds of mistakes,” admitted Strekotin, “like sleeping at their posts, leaving their posts, [and] letting people in for a peek [at the imperial family].” One guard accidentally fired his rifle into a storeroom ceiling directly beneath the grand duchesses’ bedroom, causing the girls to scream with fear. Another dropped a hand grenade into the garden, where it exploded, rattling both windows and nerves. And one day while Anastasia stood at the prison’s one open window, hoping to catch a scrap of breeze, a bullet whizzed past her head and lodged in the wall behind her. Had one of the guards shot at her on purpose? Nicholas refused to believe it. No one would dare fire at the tsar’s daughter, not even in revolutionary Russia … would they? “
In my opinion,” he said with mock bravado, “[the sentry] was just fooling around with his rifle the way guards always do.”

But was he really? Days later, according to an often-repeated but unsubstantiated story, Anastasia asked the commandant’s assistant for permission to visit the storage shed. She wanted to fetch a pair of shoes from her luggage. The assistant laughed nastily. “
The shoes [you have] on,” he said, would easily “last the rest of [your] life.”

Days passed, each one the same. Rising between eight and nine every morning, the family dressed and joined the rest of the prisoners before the makeshift altar. After prayers (led by Alexandra), they headed into the dining room for a breakfast of black bread and tea. This was also the time when Commandant Avdeev took roll call, making sure that each prisoner was accounted for. Once in a while, the family received a cup of hot chocolate or a slice of cold meat for breakfast. But for the most part, they received the same rations as any other Russian citizen.

At first, a workplace cafeteria called a canteen delivered the family’s meals every day, usually an unvaried menu of soup and pork cutlets. In mid-June, worried about the imperial family’s diet, nuns from a nearby convent began bringing eggs, milk, cream, and bread to the house’s gates each morning, which the family’s cook, Ivan Kharitonov, turned into simple meals. The nuns also brought sausages, vegetables, and the occasional meat pie. These last items never reached the imperial table. Instead, Avdeev and his guards gobbled them up.

During the day, the family filled their hours by reading or sewing. They played cards. Anastasia taught the dogs tricks. And all the girls helped Anna Demidova with the household chores. They swept floors, washed dishes, and gathered up the family’s dirty laundry so it could be sent out for cleaning. But this last task quickly became a problem. The grand duchesses “
insisted on changing their bed linen every day,” recalled Avdeev. In just a few weeks, they racked up a whopping 87-ruble laundry bill (around $428)!