The Last Tsar (38 page)

“He was quite depressed, but depressed most of all by the looting of the wine cellars in the Winter Palace! ‘Couldn’t Mr. Kerensky have put a stop to that license?’

“ ‘Obviously not. A mob, Nicholas Alexandrovich, is always a mob.’

“ ‘How can that be?’ the tsar asked with sudden bile. ‘Alexander
Feodorovich was put in by the people. A real favorite of the soldiers.… Regardless of what happened—why tear apart a palace, why allow the plunder and destruction of riches?’”

The old revolutionary and the former tsar did not understand one another. The tsar was not talking about cellars, he was talking about “plunder,” about the “senseless and merciless Russian insurrection.”

Gilliard recalled how during the first days of captivity the tsar had been strangely pleased. But as soon as he learned of Kornilov’s rout, and then the fall of the Provisional Government, Nicholas regretted his abdication more and more. It was a Time of Troubles.

Their last New Year’s had come. The cold was so fierce the boy went to bed wrapped up in all his blankets, the grand duchesses’ room turned into an icebox, and they all sat in Alix’s room—where a small fire burned—until late into the night. “It is boring! Today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today. God help us! God have mercy on us!” Alexei wrote in his diary.

“Today was grey and not too cold.… Today our boredom is green!” his father wrote on January 2.

They put the New Year’s tree right on the table. A Siberian spruce—but no toys. Their severe tree of 1918. Their last tree. For Christmas they made each other small gifts. Tatiana gave her mother a homemade notebook for a diary: a pathetic quadrille note pad inside a cloth cover she had sewn herself—in her mother’s favorite color, lilac (from a scrap of the empress’s scarf).

On the cover she embroidered a swastika, her mother’s favorite symbol.

I am opening the lilac cover. On the back of the cover Tatiana wrote in English: “To my sweet darling Mama dear with my best wishes for a happy new year. May God’s blessings be upon you and guard you for ever. Yr own loving girl Tatiana.”

Now Alix began a diary that she too would be fated not to finish.

On New Year’s Eve she wrote in this diary: “Thank God we are saved & together & He has protected us & all who are dear to us this year.”

If the legends are to be believed, this was supposed to be a fateful year for them.

In the Tobolsk house the tsar was reading a book by Sergei Nilus.
(He wrote about this in his diary on March 27, 1918.) The wife of Nilus was known to the empress. When the Niluses were wed, Alix had given them an icon and a samovar with her own initials in blessing.

All this is to the point because the Niluses had entrée to the imperial court and knew a great deal. In the book Nicholas was reading,
On the Banks of God’s River
, Nilus recorded a legend told to him by the empress’s lady-in-waiting Mrs. Geringer.

A small chest was kept at Gatchina Palace, locked and sealed. Inside was something put there by the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul I, Maria Feodorovna, who had instructed that the chest be opened by the emperor who ruled Russia one hundred years after her husband’s murder. That day came in 1901. The tsar and tsaritsa—at the time still very young people—prepared for their journey to retrieve the chest as if it were an amusing outing. But they returned, according to the lady-in-waiting, “extremely thoughtful and sad.… After that, I heard that the sovereign had mentioned 1918 as a fateful year for him and the dynasty.”

This may be merely an ingenious legend. Nevertheless: the cold house, the empty tree on the large table. There was something fateful in the gathering of this, their last year—1918.

Indeed, by then it had already begun.

This happened on New Year’s Eve:

In the Church of the Protective Veil of the Virgin, where the family went on the first day of Christmas of the first revolutionary year, under convoy, the holiday service was coming to an end in the overfilled church when suddenly some very familiar, not yet forgotten words were heard. The deacon solemnly proclaimed: “Their Excellencies the Sovereign Emperor and the Sovereign Empress,” followed by the names of their children and all their old titles. At the end the deacon’s bass uttered powerfully: “A long life!” Thus in the Tobolsk church, for the first time since the February Revolution, the ancient “wish for a long life” for the tsar’s family was proclaimed.

The church responded with a rumble. The senior officer of the convoy and Commissar Pankratov waited till the end of the service and called for the deacon, who cited the instructions of his superior, Father Alexei. “Drag him out of the church by his braids!” the convoy’s rifleman raged.

The next day the Tobolsk Soviet proclaimed by the Bolsheviks
formed a commission of inquiry. They blamed Pankratov and demanded that he harshen the regime, and for the first time the call was heard: “To prison with the Romanovs!” The Soviet even went after the priest. But Archbishop Hermogen did not give Father Alexei up for punishment—he sent him to a remote Tobolsk monastery.

How amazingly interlinked everything is in the Romanov history. The name Hermogen stands at the source of the Romanov dynasty. During the Time of Troubles Patriarch Hermogen issued the call to drive the Poles from Russia, for which he was imprisoned and accepted a martyr’s death.

Now, three hundred years later, an archbishop by the same name, here in Tobolsk, was with the last Romanovs. “Master … you bear the name of Saint Hermogen. That is a sign,” the dowager empress wrote him. She was expecting decisive steps from the decisive archbishop.

The empress mother was right. It was a sign. History had come full circle.

At this time the Russian church was acting independently of the tsar. Peter the Great had eliminated the patriarchy in 1703, but in November 1917 a church council again elected a Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias. Early in 1918, Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks and sent the host and his blessing to the deposed tsar through Hermogen. Many pastors, including Hermogen in Tobolsk, behaved in keeping with the head of the church. The majority of them would perish during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the revolution.

At that time, on the threshold of 1918, the power of the Tobolsk pastor was great. When Hermogen refused to recognize Father Alexei as guilty, he challenged the Soviet: “According to the Holy Scriptures … as well as history—former emperors, kings, and tsars are not deprived of their office when they are outside the country’s administration.” He was writing about the office given by God over which the earthly has no power.

Hermogen wanted to help the family escape and could have done so. Siberia meant secret trails, distant monasteries more like fortresses, rivers with hidden boats, parishioners who had not yet come unstuck from God.

Now, when the Bolsheviks had seized power in the capital, how could they not have made an attempt to free them now?

Alix! No, she could not entrust the family’s fate to the holy man’s accursed enemy.

“Every day Hermogen holds a service for Papa and Mama,” she wrote Anya. “Papa and Mama”—that was what Rasputin had called them. While giving Hermogen his due, even praising him, she unconsciously recalled the holy man, who hated him. No, she could not.

Thus, beyond the grave, Rasputin would not allow them to join forces with the only person who could have helped them then. Instead, the holy man sent them a different emissary.

All this time Anya was collecting money for the family. People gave willingly: better to give the money than to take part in dangerous plots themselves. Anyway, they needed to give the money: what if everything suddenly reverted to how it had been? Count Benckendorff and Anya accumulated large sums for the family’s liberation. Then Boris Soloviev leaped from the maelstrom of Petrograd life.

His past spoke for him.

Borya’s father was treasurer of the Holy Synod. His mother had belonged to the circle of the holy man’s most devoted female proselytes.

Later, while compiling his biography, Soloviev would tell about his adventures. At first he had studied in Berlin but had wound up in India. A Theosophist, in India he had been a disciple of the famous Madame Blavatsky.

During the war, in 1914, Soloviev managed to remain in Petrograd, having set himself up in a reserve artillery regiment, and was a frequent guest at the apartment of Grigory Rasputin, where he met Rasputin’s daughters, Varvara and Matryona. After the February Revolution in 1918 Soloviev turned up in the revolutionary Tauride Palace. The ensign had brought his soldiers to swear an oath to the Duma. Now he was a superior officer in the Duma’s War Commission. Rasputin’s disciple had become a revolutionary.

Vyrubova must have chuckled when she heard his tale about his soldiers dragging him to the Duma to swear allegiance—she had no need of justifications. That was precisely what one had to do now to survive. She judged Soloviev’s action and decided to recruit him.

So Boris Soloviev turned up in Tobolsk and easily made contact with the family. His main agent became Father Alexei, who at that
time often held services in Freedom House. Through him Soloviev transmitted letters to the tsaritsa.

And that was where he went wrong. Yes, the tsaritsa respected Father Alexei, but Father Alexei was from Hermogen. From “our Friend’s” enemy. So every proposal Soloviev transmitted through the priest was greeted with supreme caution. She reacted to his plans for organizing their escape without the slightest enthusiasm. Nicholas replied for her (or rather, she suggested he reply): we must avoid the risks that would inevitably arise for the children with any attempt to free us.

As he was leaving Tobolsk for Petrograd, Soloviev evidently got an idea: he advised Father Alexei to proclaim his wishes for a long life for the tsar’s family. Soloviev convinced the priest that such a proclamation would become his great deed, albeit a safe one. For the power of Hermogen would protect him.

As a result of that wish for a long life, what Soloviev had contemplated did indeed happen: the family’s tranquil life ended. The events that inevitably followed pushed them toward escape now and forced them to seek his help.

How many more of them would there be, these clever games with the last tsar! At the base of them all, however, one method would show up with exhausting monotony—provocation.

Soloviev returned to Petrograd and evidently complained to Anya of the tsaritsa’s mistrust and the impossibility of organizing their flight. Then Anya (how well she knew her imperial friend) gave Soloviev a brilliant idea: marry Rasputin’s daughter Matryona. That would be his passport to Alix’s heart. Soloviev did so immediately.

(About Soloviev’s feelings toward his new bride he wrote the following in his diary: “Continuing to live with her, I ought to ask of her at least a pretty body, which, unfortunately, my spouse cannot boast of, so she cannot serve me simply for sexual relations, as there are many better and more useful than her.”)

Soloviev and Matryona returned to Pokrovskoe in Siberia, where Soloviev merged with the image of the holy man. Only after that did he again make contact with Freedom House.

Now a very different reception awaited him. A beloved shadow loomed behind him: now he was “the husband of
his
daughter, who had come to save them,” as Alix wrote. The charger had answered the call. As always, Rasputin’s name transported Alix to a familiar and fantastic world: the powerful host from the Holy Scriptures was bringing Grigory to them from beyond the grave.

She believed in Soloviev with all her heart. Thrifty Alix herself
generously sent him the tsarist jewels to use for the family’s liberation.

In Petrograd Anya sent another officer to assist Soloviev: Sergei Markov. Markov was a “Crimean,” that is, an officer of the Crimean Cavalry Regiment, whose colonel-in-chief was the empress.

On March 12 Alix recorded joyfully in her diary: “I was on the balcony & saw my ex-Crimean Markov walk by, also Stein.”

Who was this Stein that Alix wrote about? This is easy to figure out from the tsar’s diary. Nicholas, as always, recorded
everything
in his diary (including what he should not under any circumstances have written).

“12 (25) March. Vlad[imir] Nik[olaevich] Stein came from Moscow for the second time, bringing along a handsome sum from some good people we know, books, and tea. He was with me in Mogilev as second vice governor. Today we saw him walking down the street.”

So Stein was an emissary from Anya and Benckendorff who had brought a “handsome sum” for their expenses and liberation.

But the main thing was “my ex-Crimean Markov.” Anya had calculated unerringly. Alix was in raptures: they had joined together—the holy man’s emissary and the emissary of valorous Russian officers, loyal to their empress. After the next letter from Soloviev she was already raving to Gilliard about the “Three Hundred Officers” who had gathered in Tyumen and were preparing to free them.

Unlike Soloviev, Sergei Markov was hardly a rogue. He was truly devoted to the “tsar’s abandoned family” (as he would later entitle his bitter book).

Soloviev arranged a meeting with Sergei Markov and another officer who had turned up from Vyrubova—Sedov. He told them about the “officer staging groups” that had already been formed all along the route from Tobolsk to Tyumen. They would pass the tsar’s family down the line during the escape. He informed them that he controlled the telephones of the Soviet itself. His inspired, shameless bravado ended in a convincing introduction: Soloviev presented to them the skipper who was to take the tsar’s family away on his steamer.

Who played the role of skipper remained Soloviev’s secret. For now the money brought by Stein and the tsarist jewels continued to make their way from Freedom House to the scoundrel.

Alix was inflamed with her belief. Even calm Gilliard immersed himself in her world and remained “at the ready in the event of any and every opportunity.”

When in March 1918 the church bells began to ring and armed men rode down Freedom Street in daring “troikas, jingling, whooping, and whistling” (as Nicholas described them), Alix, looking out the window, whispered ecstatically: “What fine Russian faces!” She could see: they had come! The Mighty Host, the three hundred officers the holy man’s emissary had written her so much about.