The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (47 page)

Grand Duchess Elizabeth, like her sister, had been born a German princess in Hesse-Darmstadt. A widow and a nun since the 1905 assassination of her husband, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (Nicholas II’s uncle), she almost seemed to be seeking martyrdom. After the tsar’s abdication and even after the Bolshevik assumption of power, Elizabeth turned down all offers of security and escape. In March 1917, the Provisional Government had asked her to leave her convent and take refuge in the Kremlin. She had refused. Early in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had loved her before either he or she was married, had tried several times though diplomatic channels to bring her to safety in Germany. Again, she refused. Transferred by the Bolsheviks to Alapayevsk, east of the Urals, she spent the winter of 1917–18 in a former provincial school called the House by the Fields. The day after her sister’s death, Elizabeth and the other Romanovs interned with her were forced into peasant carts and taken into the country to the opening of an abandoned mine shaft.

Accounts differ as to how they died. Until recently, Nicholas Sokolov’s version was widely accepted: the victims were blindfolded and ordered to walk across a log placed over the top of the sixty-foot pit. All obeyed except Grand Duke Sergei, a former artilleryman, who struggled and was shot immediately. The others, unable to see as they walked out onto the log, inevitably toppled into the pit. To complete the work, hand grenades and heavy timbers were thrown down on top
of them. Not all died immediately, however. A peasant, creeping to the edge of the pit after the assassins departed, reported hearing hymns being sung at the bottom of the shaft. When the Whites found the bodies—this is according to Sokolov’s story—a wound on the head of one of the young men had been bound up with the handkerchief of the grand duchess. Autopsies, Sokolov wrote, revealed that the mouths and stomachs of some of the victims were filled with dirt, indicating that some had actually died of exposure, thirst, and starvation. Now this story is contradicted by other evidence discovered by the investigating officer Vladimir Soloviev. The grand duchess, the grand duke, and the four young men, Soloviev believes, were simply taken to the mouth of the pit, shot in the head, and tumbled into the shaft.

Six months later, on January 28, 1919, four more grand dukes, including the tsar’s uncle Paul (who was the father of Prince Paley killed at Alapayevsk), were executed in Petrograd in the courtyard of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Their bodies were dumped into a mass grave in one of the fortress bastions. (So many prisoners were executed at this time in this place and the bones became so intermingled that no attempt to separate them has been—or is likely to be—attempted.) One of these murdered grand dukes was Nicholas Mikhailovich, a distinguished liberal historian. On the basis of his reputation as a scholar, the writer Maxim Gorky pleaded with Lenin that this grand duke be spared. Lenin refused. “The revolution does not need historians,” he said.

Along with Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, the Bolsheviks massacred seventeen other Romanovs, including eight of sixteen grand dukes living at the time of the revolution, five of seventeen grand duchesses, and four young princes of the blood. After this carnage, there remained the dowager empress, eight grand dukes, and twelve grand duchesses, four of whom were foreigners who received the title on marrying Russian grand dukes.

By 1919, the largest concentration of Romanov survivors was in the Crimea, where a cluster of family summer palaces provided familiar places of refuge. The tsar’s mother, Dowager Empress Marie, was at
the Imperial palace of Livadia, overlooking the Black Sea resort town of Yalta. With Marie was her daughter Grand Duchess Olga, accompanied by Olga’s new husband, Colonel Nicholas Kulikovsky, and their infant son, Tikhon. Nearby, Marie’s older daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia, her husband, Grand Duke Alexander, and six of their seven children were at the palace of Ai-Todor. Also nearby, in his own palace, was Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, commander in chief of the Russian Army at the outbreak of war. Nicholas Nicholaevich’s brother, Grand Duke Peter, was with him, along with their wives, the Montenegrin sisters, Grand Duchesses Anastasia and Militsa. Grand Duke Nicholas had no children, but Grand Duke Peter’s twenty-one-year-old son, Prince Roman, was present.

For eighteen months, while the Russian civil war swayed back and forth, the band of imperial refugees sheltered uneasily in these comfortable but insecure surroundings. Their suspense ended in April 1919, when the British battleship HMS
Marlborough
arrived in Yalta and offered to remove the dowager empress. Marie refused to depart unless the British agreed to embark all the Romanovs, their servants, and a number of others who wanted to go. When the large warship sailed for Malta, her broad decks were crowded with Russians, none of whom would see their country again. From the
Marlborough
, the refugees scattered across Europe and the world. The dowager empress returned to her native Denmark, where her nephew Christian X was king. Eventually, Grand Duchess Xenia, separated from her husband, moved to London, where she lived from 1936 to 1960 in a small mansion provided by the British Crown and named, appropriately, Wilderness House. Grand Duchess Olga and her husband remained in Denmark until after the Second World War, when they moved to Canada. After her husband died, Olga moved in with a Russian couple in an apartment over a barbershop in Toronto. She died there in November 1960, seven months after the death of her sister, Xenia.

Another family of Romanovs survived because the revolution found them at their summer estate in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. This was Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the German-born widow of Nicholas II’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, and her two younger sons, Grand Duke Boris and Grand Duke Andrew. Each of
these men was accompanied by his mistress; Boris by Zinaida Rachevsky and Andrew by Mathilde Kschessinska, the former prima ballerina who, before Nicholas II’s marriage and assumption of the throne, had been the tsar’s first and only mistress. Once out of Russia, both grand dukes married their companions and settled down in Paris and its suburbs.

Their elder brother, Grand Duke Cyril, his English-born wife, Grand Duchess Victoria, and their two young daughters were the only Romanovs who left Russia by a northern route. This was not difficult because they left in June 1917, when the moderate Provisional Government was still in power. They asked permission of Alexander Kerensky, then a leading minister, received their papers, boarded a train in Petrograd, and departed for Finland. Later that summer, while they were still in Finland, their son Vladimir was born. Grand Duke Dimitri, the twenty-six-year-old murderer of Rasputin and a first cousin of both Nicholas II and Grand Duke Cyril, left Russia by an extreme southerly route. He had been exiled to the Caucasus for his role in the assassination, and soon after the tsar abdicated he escaped over the mountains into Persia.

Over the past seventy-five years, the surviving Romanovs have subdivided into five subclans, each named, in Russian fashion, for a patriarch. They are the Mikhailovichi, the Vladimirovichi, the Pavlovichi, the Constantinovichi, and the Nicholaevichi. The Mikhailovichi, descended from Michael, a son of Tsar Nicholas I, are closest by blood to Tsar Nicholas II and also the most numerous. These were and are the children and grandchildren of Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia and her husband, Grand Duke Alexander, a son of the aforementioned Michael. Xenia had seven children, born around the turn of this century Her eldest child was Irina, who married one of Rasputin’s assassins, Prince Yussoupov. The Yussoupovs settled in Paris, where they lived for almost fifty years until they died. They had one child, a daughter, who had a daughter, who has a daughter. It was Yussoupov’s granddaughter Xenia Sfiris who provided a blood sample to Peter Gill which helped him to identify the femur of Nicholas II.

Grand Duchess Xenia also had six sons. These boys and young men grew up in the West, living first with their mother in Denmark and London, then scattering to Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, Chicago, and San Francisco. Germany, the usual source of Romanov brides, was barren for this purpose after the First World War, so these youthful princes married young women from the aristocratic Russian families they knew—Kutuzovs, Galitzines, Sheremetyevs, Vorontsov-Dashkovs—the oldest and most glittering names of the Russian nobility. Xenia’s sons were well spoken, well mannered, well educated, and well tailored, but not ambitious or energetic. “They spoke six languages,” says Rostislav Romanov, whose father, also named Rostislav, was one of the six brothers. “But nobody ever said anything, so they were always referred to as being silent in six languages. I remember taking my father to see his brother Nikita. They said hello to each other and the conversation died. Another day one of Nikita’s sons suggested, ‘Why don’t we drive over and see Uncle Rostislav?’ Nikita said, ‘Why? I already know him.’ ” Grand Duchess Xenia’s youngest son, Prince Vassily, who was born in 1907 and left Russia at twelve, spent most of his adult life in Woodside, California, near San Francisco. He raised award-winning tomatoes and held a number of jobs, including selling (and delivering) champagne and wine. His private joke was to arrive at the back door of the estate of a friend, deliver the cases ordered, then put on his coat and tie, go around to the front door, ring the bell, present his card, which announced Prince Vassily of Russia, and ask whether madame was at home.

Prince Vassily died in 1987, and Xenia’s grandchildren now are men and women in their sixties and seventies. The men, all referred to in society and the press as Prince Romanov, have followed varied careers. Prince Andrew, who served as a Royal Navy seaman on the arctic convoy route during World War II, is a painter who lives in Inverness, California. Prince Michael, whose grandfathers both were grand dukes, has spent most of his life as a film director in France and now lives in Paris and Biarritz. Prince Nikita, a historian with a Ph.D. from Stanford, lives in New York, as does his brother Prince Alexander. The youngest and most active of these princes is Rostislav, who speaks English with a wholly American accent. This is unsurprising,
as he was born and grew up in Chicago, went to an American prep school, and was graduated from Yale. In New Haven, none of his classmates cared that he was a Romanov, and he himself cared mostly about crew. Today, he is a London merchant banker commuting daily from Sussex to Waterloo Station. Although he has worked in England for fourteen years, the British Royal family—like his Yale class—has not noticed his presence. Rostislav does not mind. He is an Anglophile. He does not want to go back to Russia except to visit. “Life in this country suits me,” he says.

After Nicholas II’s sisters, nephews, and nieces, the tsar’s closest surviving relatives were the Vladimirovichi, then comprising his four first cousins, Grand Dukes Cyril, Boris, and Andrew and their sister, Grand Duchess Helen, all children of Nicholas’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir. In normal times, the near-simultaneous deaths of a tsar, his son, and his brother, as happened in 1918, automatically would have promoted the eldest of these cousins, Cyril, who was forty-two in 1918, to the Imperial throne. In 1918, however, there was neither empire nor throne, and, consequently, nothing was automatic. Succession to the Russian throne followed the Salic law, meaning that the crown passed only to males, through males, until there were no more eligible males. When an emperor died and neither a son nor a brother was available, the eldest eligible male from the branch of the family closest to the deceased monarch would succeed. In this case, under the old laws, this was Cyril. After Cyril stood his two brothers, Boris and Andrew, and after them the only surviving male of the Pavlovich line, their first cousin Grand Duke Dimitri, the son of Nicholas II’s youngest uncle, Grand Duke Paul. Nicholas II’s six nephews, the sons of the tsar’s sister Xenia, were closer by blood than Cyril but were ineligible because the succession could not pass through a woman.