The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (31 page)

When soviet officials saw the bill, they flew into a rage. It was outrageous, absurd,
“astronomical!” From now on, they ordered, the imperial family would have to wash its own bed linens. After all, “a little work never hurt anyone.”

The grand duchesses were willing. But they didn’t know the first
thing about doing laundry. They asked Avdeev for directions. But the commandant knew as little as they did. So he headed to the library in search of a manual. But “
[I] could find no written instructions on how to do laundry.” Anxious to carry out the soviet’s order, Avdeev finally hired the girls a laundry instructor, bestowing upon him the title “
Comrade Laundry Teacher to the House of Special Purpose.” Recalled the commandant, “
[He] proved rather clever with this work, and got on well with the grand duchesses.”

A few weeks later, the bored grand duchesses begged Ivan Kharitonov for bread-baking lessons. With the commandant’s permission, they spent an entire morning in the upstairs kitchen, happily mixing and kneading. The results, noted Alexandra in her diary, were “
excellent.”

The family’s evenings were filled with more reading, more card games, more prayers.

The only break in this routine came in the late morning and again in the afternoon. That’s when the family was allowed to walk for thirty minutes outside in the small, weed-choked garden.

Why so little time outdoors? Nicholas had asked his captors. Summer had finally come to Siberia, hot and sunny. How could they be so cruel as to leave the family trapped indoors all day with the sealed-in smells of cigarette smoke and sweat?
“It [is] unbearable to [be] … locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden … and spend a fine evening outside,” Nicholas said. Couldn’t he and the children clean up the garden or chop wood?

Avdeev’s assistant denied his request.

“
Why?” persisted Nicholas.

“So that this resembles a prison regime,” replied the assistant.

Still, the two youngest grand duchesses must have relished this brief chance to feel the sun on their skin. At these times, the guards heard them laugh as they chased the dogs through the scraggly flower beds or around the few trees.

Alexei, too, must have enjoyed the fresh air. Although the boy could no longer walk, Nicholas
“hugged him to his broad chest” and carried him outside to a waiting wheelchair. Then Leonid Sednev, the fourteen-year-old kitchen assistant, would push Alexei into the garden. Sometimes the boys played with toy soldiers. Other times, Nicholas would bring his son pebbles or flowers to examine. “Being a child,” recalled one of the guards, “[Alexei] would look at them and then toss them into the bushes.”

When the family first arrived, all the guards (even those not on duty) had pressed into the garden to get a look at them. Soon, recalled guard Alexander Strekotin, “
everyone had a chance to see [the grand duchesses].” They quickly became the topic of conversation between the young men, who “
passed some sleepless nights speaking of them when they were off duty.”

“
There is nothing special about them,” declared one guard.

They are “
stuck up and stupid,” said another.

But Strekotin disagreed. “
There was something very special about them,” he argued. “You could look at them in their old and tattered clothes … like any poor girls, but yet there was something especially sweet about them. They always looked good to me, and I thought they would not have looked better even if they had been covered in gold and diamonds.”

Strict rules prohibited prisoners and guards from talking to one another. But Anastasia and Marie didn’t care. They were used to speaking with soldiers, and felt a natural ease in their company. And so they drew the young men into lighthearted conversations.

Flirtatious and giggling, the “Little Pair” would stroll across the garden, their spaniel, Jemmy, scampering along at their feet. Approaching a guard on duty, Anastasia would pretend to yawn. “
We’re so bored!” she would say. “In Tobolsk there was always something to do. I know! Try to guess the name of this dog.”

How could the guards resist?

Some joined eagerly in the banter, answering the girls’ questions about their lives and hobbies. Others, with smiles and winks, said, “
Don’t try to distract me with your smooth talk—just keep walking.”

The girls, “
pretending fright,” said Strekotin, “would hurry along the path, then burst into giggles.”

Soon, “
everyone relaxed more and began to talk and laugh with each other,” remembered Strekotin.

On the afternoon of June 27, the “Little Pair,” along with Tatiana and Nicholas, carrying Alexei, went for their scheduled walk in the courtyard. Noted the tsar in his diary, “
Our dear Marie is 19 years old.”

One of the guards had also noted the grand duchess’s birthday, and he had smuggled in a cake for her. Somehow, after his shift ended, he managed to pull Marie aside. The two slipped away.

Where did they go? The kitchen? The hallway? One of the storerooms on the lower floor? The historical record doesn’t indicate, but obviously the other guards—sympathetic to their comrade’s feelings—looked the other way as he grabbed his chance to give Marie his gift.

They were soon discovered. Little did the guards know that local Bolshevik authorities had chosen this day to inspect the house. Walking in on the couple, the officials were outraged. Obviously, security had completely collapsed. It was time for a clampdown. Authorities called in Yakov Yurovsky.

“
Today there was a change of commandant,” wrote Nicholas in his diary on July 4. That afternoon, just as the family sat down to lunch, a government official unexpectedly appeared.

“
Because of an unpleasant episode that had occurred in [the] house,” the official announced, Commandant Avdeev had been dismissed. He gestured to a tall, dark-haired man standing beside him. Here was the Romanovs’ new captor—Yakov Yurovsky.

Yurovsky greeted the family politely. In fact, he was so respectful and mannerly that at first Nicholas called him “the
dark gentleman.”

But behind those impeccable manners, Yurovsky burned with hatred for the imperial family. Raised in Siberia by a father who had been exiled for theft, he grew up in a cramped, stinking apartment above a butcher shop. These years of poverty and deprivation sowed the seeds for a deep-seated hatred of the tsar. When the revolution came, he backed the Bolsheviks with zealous enthusiasm, rising up quickly through the party ranks. He believed his new job—commandant in control of the imperial family’s lives—was his destiny.
“It was left to
me
, son of a worker, to settle the Revolution’s score with the Imperial [Family] for centuries of suffering,” he later said proudly.

Making security his top priority, he replaced the young factory-worker guards with a squad of war-hardened guards. These men, like Yurovsky himself, were “
all obedience and command and [they] burned with the Red Fire,” recalled one eyewitness. Talking with
the prisoners was now strictly forbidden, and any unauthorized conversations were immediately reported to Yurovsky. In the courtyard, the new guards watched the family closely, constantly on the alert for any word or gesture that might mean the family was trying to signal someone on the street. In addition, Yurovsky installed a new system of alarm bells throughout the house, and reorganized the guard posts. Now a machine gun pointed straight down the street, while a second one set up in the spire of a nearby cathedral was aimed directly at the prisoners’ rooms. Last but not least, Yurovsky had the family’s one open window covered by a thick iron grate. “
Always fright[ened] of our climbing out, no doubt,” Alexandra remarked sarcastically.

In fact, he was. Forty-five thousand White Army troops were advancing on Ekaterinburg. Already they had seized control of Tyumen, cutting railroad lines and creating chaos. “
Constantly hear artillery passing,” Alexandra wrote in her diary on July 12. “Infantry and twice cavalry during the week.… Also troops marching with music.” The untrained Red Army could do little to stop the advance. Bolshevik officials knew the city would fall. And when it did, the White Army would free the Romanovs. Unless the Bolsheviks murdered them first.

Outside the iron grille of the prisoners’ only open window, thunder rumbled and rain poured down. Alexandra lay in bed with an excruciating backache. But the pain medication Dr. Botkin had brought from Tsarskoe Selo had long been used up. In hopes of soothing her mother, Marie offered to read aloud from the family’s favorite collection of sermons. But time and again, she was interrupted by the sound of marching soldiers and military bands from the street below.
Both mother and daughter knew what these sounds meant—the Bolsheviks were losing their hold on Ekaterinburg.

Meanwhile, down the road at Bolshevik headquarters, an urgent meeting was taking place. Nicholas had to be “liquidated” before the city fell. But Lenin and other high-ranking Bolsheviks in Moscow refused to authorize an execution. They still thought of putting Nicholas on trial, where his crimes against the people would be broadcast to the entire country. Of course, Moscow expected the trial to end in a sentence of execution for the tsar. It was, they believed, the only proper punishment for “Bloody Nicholas.”

Even though most officials believed Alexandra was to blame for much of the country’s disintegration, they had no intention of charging her—or the children—with any crimes. Lenin was adamant on this last point. He vehemently opposed murdering the entire imperial family, not because he cared what happened to them but because he believed it would have a bad effect on public opinion across Russia and abroad. Bolsheviks, he insisted, must not be perceived as barbaric or bloodthirsty.

Ekaterinburg officials disagreed. They resented the fact that the tsar and his family were still living in relative comfort at the Ipatiev house while they continued to scrape out a meager living. After all, at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution lay the notion that all privilege must be destroyed. Moscow or no Moscow, they resolved to murder the entire family, as well as their servants. They knew Lenin’s regime, mired as it was in civil war, was not strong enough to punish them for the act.

The only decisions that remained were how and when.

The how they left up to Yurovsky. As for when, they would let him know. But with the White Army marching ever closer, it would be soon.

“
It has to be said,” Yurovsky later noted, “that it’s no easy thing to arrange an execution, contrary to what some people may think.”

In the early-morning hours, long before the Romanovs woke, Yurovsky rode out on horseback to Koptyaki Forest, nine miles west of the city. Few people went there. Not only was the place remote, but with its dense woods, peaty swampland, and abandoned, water-filled mine shafts, it was dangerous. The perfect place, Yurovsky decided, to hide the bodies. But could one drive a truck over the muddy, potholed roads? The commandant believed so. Satisfied, he returned to the House of Special Purpose. In the guard book that day, he coolly wrote, “
Everything is the same.”

Upstairs, Alexandra was experiencing a rare moment of joy. For the first time since leaving Tobolsk nine weeks earlier, Alexei felt strong enough to take a bath. “
Baby … managed to get in and out alone,” she wrote in her diary. “Climb[ed] also alone in and out of bed.” Alexei still could not straighten his leg “but can only stand on one foot,” she noted.

Nicholas, too, wrote in his diary. “Today,” he noted,
“we have absolutely no news from the outside.” It was his last recorded statement. After almost forty years of daily journal keeping, Nicholas Romanov simply stopped.

On this bright Sunday morning, just after the family finished breakfast, Father Ivan Storozhev arrived at the House of Special Purpose. Hours earlier he’d been summoned by Yurovsky to conduct a church service for the Romanovs. This had surprised Father Storozhev. Their captors had repeatedly denied the family’s request for a priest to say Mass with them. So why now? The priest feared
to ask. Donning his vestments, he made his way to the prisoners’ drawing room.

They were waiting before the makeshift altar. Propped up in his mother’s wheelchair, Alexei looked ghostlike in his paleness. Alexandra sat beside him in an overstuffed armchair, her face creased with pain. Behind them stood Nicholas and the girls. Recalled Storozhev, they “
gave the impression … of being exhausted.” Even Anastasia, her hand resting on her father’s arm, appeared “in depressed spirits.” Yurovsky planted himself in a corner of the room. Crossing his arms over his chest, he never took his eyes off the group as the priest moved through the liturgy.

At last, Father Storozhev came to the part in the service where the traditional prayer for the dead is recited: “
With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of your servant, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering but life everlasting.”