The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (59 page)

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Botkin spent the night going from one to the next with valerian

drops to calm them down. Alexey kept trying to lie down and sleep

but in the end gave up. Wan with fatigue, he sat ‘perched on a box,

and holding his favourite spaniel “Joy” by a leash’ as his father paced up and down, endlessly lighting cigarettes.102 They were all grateful for the offer of tea when it finally came at 5 a.m.

Behind the scenes, Kerensky’s evacuation plans had been on the

brink of failure. During the night, workers at Petrograd’s Nikolaevsky Station, who had been preparing the train had begun to hesitate

about whether they would allow it to leave. ‘All night long there

had been difficulties, doubts and vacillations. The railwaymen

delayed the shunting and coupling, put through mysterious phone

calls, made inquiries somewhere.’103 Dawn was already breaking

when the train – comprised of
wagons-lits
and a restaurant car of the Chinese Eastern Railway – finally arrived at Tsarskoe Selo’s

Alexandrovsky Station more than five hours late and was parked

down the tracks, away from the main entrance.104 The station itself

‘was surrounded by soldiers, and troops with loaded rifles’ who had

‘marched out and lined both sides of the road from the palace to

the station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds of

cartridges’.105

Word by now had got out in Tsarskoe Selo that something was

afoot and as the sun rose on 1 August a triple cordon of guards in

front of the palace was having to hold back an ‘immense crowd of

people hooting and shouting menacingly’, keen to get one last look

at
Nikolashka-durachok
*
as he was taken away.106 At about 5.15, four motor cars finally arrived. It was clearly going to be impossible to

take the family out past the crowds at the main gate; they would

have to cross the Alexander Park to reach the station at its western

end. The entourage tried to steel themselves and remain cheerful

during this final farewell, refusing to say the usual
Do svidaniya
but repeating the more emphatic
Do skorogo svidaniya
, ‘till we see each other soon’.107 Much to her despair the tsaritsa had not been allowed to say farewell to all of her most faithful retainers, particularly her elderly mistress of the robes, Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had served

* ‘Little Nicholas the fool’.

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three tsaritsas. But she sent her a note: ‘Farewell, darling motherly friend, my heart is too full to write any more.’108 It was only now,

as Alexandra left the palace, that Kerensky, who on their previous

encounters had found her ‘proud and unbending, fully conscious of

her right to rule’ saw for the first time ‘the former Empress simply

as a mother, anxious and weeping’.109

When the family arrived at the station – their cars surrounded

by a mounted escort of Dragoons – they had to walk down the

heavy moist sand of the railway embankment to get to their train,

which had been mocked up with flags and placards proclaiming it

was part of a ‘Red Cross Mission’.110
*
Alexandra could barely manage the walk, nor could she climb up onto the footboard and had to be

‘pulled up with great difficulty and at once fell forward on her hands and knees’. A military escort, headed by Evgeny Kobylinsky, was to

travel with them and their immediate entourage on this train; a

second train was waiting nearby for the remainder of the servants

and the guards.111

When everyone in the Romanov entourage had taken their places,

Kerensky ran up and shouted, ‘They can go!’ and ‘The whole train

immediately shuddered off in the direction of the imperial branch

line’.112 As it did so the quiet and watchful crowd that had gathered as one ‘suddenly stirred themselves, and waved their hands, their

scarves and caps’, in an eerily silent farewell. The sunrise was beautiful, noted Nicholas, as the train headed north in the direction of

Petrograd before swinging south-east in the direction of the Urals;

his attitude to departure as an ordinary civilian from his home of

twenty-two years was as phlegmatic as it had been to his abdication.

‘I will describe to you how we travelled’, Anastasia later wrote

of their journey, in an essay for Sydney Gibbes, in which as usual

she struggled with her English spelling:

* Sources vary on precisely which national flag the train was travelling under.

Some say Japanese, others, including Anna Demidova in her diary, say American.

She clearly talks of Chinese cooks working in the restaurant car and a railway worker eyewitness confirms that the cars were provided by the Chinese-Eastern Railway – a line that operated effectively as an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway into Manchuria, via Harbin, and out to the Pacific coast at Vladivostok.

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We started in the morning and when we got into the train I

went to sleap, so did all of us. We were very tierd because we

did not sleap the whole night. The first day was hot and very

dusty. At the stations we had to shut our window curtanse that

nobody should see us. Once in the evening I was looking out

we stoped near a little house, but there was no station so we

could look out. A little boy came to my window and asked:

‘Uncle, please give me, if you have got, a newspaper.’ I said: ‘I

am not an uncle but an aunty and have no newspaper.’ At the

first moment I could not understand why did he call me ‘Uncle’

but then I remembered that my hear is cut and I and the soldiers

(which were standing next to me) laugh very much. On the way

many funy things had hapend, and if I shall have time I shall

write to you our travel farther on. Goodbye. Don’t forget me.

Many kisses from us all to you my darling. Your A.113

It was only now, on the train, that the family was finally informed

of the destination.114 ‘And so ended this act of the tragedy, the final episode of the Tsarskoe Selo period’, wrote Valentina Chebotareva

in her diary after they had gone. ‘What’, she wondered, ‘awaits them

in Tobolsk?’115

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‘Why are there so many soldiers on this train?’ asked one of the

grand duchesses, as it pulled out of the Alexandrovsky Station. They

were all of course used to being escorted by the military, ‘but the

great number on this occasion excited her surprise’.1 In all, 330 men and 6 officers of the 1st, 2nd and 4th Rifles accompanied the

Romanovs on their journey to Siberia, the 1st occupying the

compartments on either side of the family. Whenever the train

passed through a station the blinds were kept tightly drawn and the

doors locked and it stopped only in sidings at rural halts where there were few, if any, of the curious to ask questions.

Back in Petrograd, when the news got out that the imperial family

had been sent away, there was considerable confusion about where

it was heading for. Talk of the Crimea abounded; others heard that

the train was going west to Mogilev, and out of Russia. ‘This caused

a panic in the Narva suburb of Petrograd’, recalled Robert Crozier

Long:

A crowd of Bolshevik working-men proclaimed that the counter-

revolutionary Government of Kerensky had treacherously sent

the Tsar for safety to Germany, and that the result would be an

immediate invasion with the aim of Restoration.2

Elsewhere rumour was rife that the train was heading all the way

out to Harbin in Manchuria – a destination already becoming a

refuge for White Russians fleeing the revolution.3 Perhaps Kerensky

had this in mind as an ultimate destination, but for now the

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objective was to get the Romanovs beyond the tentacles of Petrograd’s militants.
*

Despite the close proximity of so many guards, chambermaid

Anna Demidova did not find the journey unpleasant. That first day

on the train, as she noted in her diary, it was unbearably hot, but

their compartments were very clean and comfortable and the food

laid on in the restaurant car was surprisingly good, prepared by

Chinese and Armenian cooks of the railway line.4 Alexey and his

mother, who were both exhausted, did not join them, but dined

together in her compartment. Finally at 7.30 in the evening, the

heat still oppressive, they were all allowed off the train to stretch their legs and Anna and the girls even stopped to pick bilberries

and cowberries. But they were all apprehensive about where they

were headed:

It’s hard thinking about where they are taking us. While you’re

on the way there you think less of what lies ahead, but your

heart is heavy when you start to think about how far you are

from your family and if and when you might see them again. I

haven’t seen my sister once in five months.5

But she slept well that night, relieved after two weeks of terrible

uncertainty and very little sleep that she now at least knew their

destination, although the thought of Tobolsk made her heart sink.

Later that day when the train pulled up at a rural halt, she heard

questions being asked of one of the guards by a railway official:

‘Who’s on the train?

‘An American Red Cross Mission.’

‘Then why does no one show themselves and come out of the

wagons?’

‘It’s because they are all very sick, barely alive.’6

Resting in her compartment, Alexandra sat scrupulously noting

down the stations as they passed: Tikhvin – Cherepovets – Shavra

* It has been suggested that Kerensky had considered Tobolsk as a stopgap and that from there he did indeed hope to evacuate the family out to the safety of Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railway via Manchuria.

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– Katen – Chaikovsky – Perm – Kamyshevo – Poklevskaya: aside

from Perm, all obscure way stations in a vast empire that she and

Nicholas had never got to know and from which they were now to

be for ever separated.

Later on, near the River Slyva at Kama, they were allowed off

the train once more for an hour’s walk; they stopped to admire the

view of the beautiful valley of Kungur and the girls picked flowers.

Now more at ease, that evening Anna Demidova played whist with

Dr Botkin, Ilya Tatishchev and Vasily Dolgorukov.7 Another long

hot day followed as they crossed the endless Russian steppe with its

vast fields of ripening grain stretching far into the distance. The

train finally crossed the Urals into western Siberia on the 4th and

rattled on through the big railway junction at Ekaterinburg. Nicholas noticed a distinct chill in the air by the time they pulled up in sight of the landing stage at Tyumen at 11.15 that evening.8

There was no railway line to Tobolsk and it was accessible by

boat only for the brief four months of summer, so the family now

boarded the American-built steamer the
Rus
for the remainder of their journey. They were given no special privileges on board, just

plain hard beds like everyone else; much to the disgust of Anna

Demidova there were no carafes of water in any of the cabins, and

the most primitive washing facilities. She came to the conclusion

that the boat was designed for people who didn’t wash very much.

It took all night to load all the baggage and the escort onto two

additional steamers, the
Kormilets
and the
Tyumen
, and it was not till 6 a.m. on 5 August that the
Rus
finally
set off on the 189-mile (304-km) river journey to Tobolsk.9

The low-lying river banks on either side were thinly populated

and had little to distinguish them. Dr Botkin’s son Gleb later recalled

‘the same brown fields, the same groves of sickly looking birches.

Not a hill, not the slightest elevation of any sort to break the

monotony of the landscape.’10 Thirty-six hours later and now on

the wider waters of the Tobol River, the boat entered the Irtysh – ‘a little sluggish stream that drains, or partially drains one of the great marshes of eastern Siberia’ – which brought them into Tobolsk.11

Having heard of the former tsar’s imminent arrival, many gathered

to catch sight of him. ‘Literally the entire town, I am not

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exaggerating, spilled out on to the shore’, recalled Commissar

Makarov of the guard.12 The church bells were ringing for the Feast

of the Transfiguration and as the
Rus
drew up at the landing stage at 6.30 on the evening of 6 August, Nicholas recalled that the

family’s first sight was ‘the view of the cathedral and the houses on the hill’.13 Below, on the banks of the Irtysh, Tobolsk itself was a

jumble of low wooden houses and dirt roads built on treeless marsh-

land. It was significant for two things: as a former place of exile –

Fedor Dostoevsky had spent ten days in a cell here in transit to