“THANK GOD WE ARE SAVED AND TOGETHER”
The two trains, their windows gleaming in the rising sun, inexorably linked, were heading toward Siberia.
Nicholas’s diary:
“1 August. The whole family got settled in a fine sleeping car.… Quite stifling and dusty—26 degrees [79°F] in the car. Took a walk in the afternoon with our riflemen—gathered flowers and berries….
“2 August.… At all stations have had to draw the curtains, at the commandant’s request—stupid and boring….
“4 August. Crossed the Urals and felt a substantial cooling. Passed Ekaterinburg early morning. All these days the second echelon with the riflemen has frequently overtaken us—we meet like old Friends.”
The children and Alix slept, but he did not. Behind the curtained windows was a station. There had been so many stations in his life, but this was destined to be his last.
“4 August. Dragged along incredibly slowly to arrive at Tyumen late—at 11.30. There the train pulled in almost to the platform, so that we only had to go down to the steamer. Ours is called the Russia. The loading of our things began and went on all night.… Poor Alexei again went to bed God knows when!”
They were met in Tyumen.
From Matveyev’s Notes:
“I was watching and the doors of the Romanovs’ car opened. Nicholas appeared before them all. I turned toward the gathered military authorities and saw that Romanov was still only thinking about leaving the car and they were all standing, strung out in a line, maintaining a salute.… How many people there are who have absolutely not been permeated by the revolutionary spirit!”
At six in the morning they left Tyumen on the Russia. Two steamers sailed behind the Russia—the Kormilets and the Tyumen, which carried the servants and baggage. The caravan of vessels sailed down the river Tur.
On August 6 they entered the river Tobol.
“The river is broader and the banks higher. The morning was fresher, and in the afternoon it got quite warm when the sun showed itself.… Forgot to mention that yesterday before dinner we went past the village of Pokrovskoe—Grigory’s home.”
At the very beginning of their journey toward death, they were near him again, the immortal holy man.
Volkov heard Alix say with feeling: “Here lived Grigory Efimovich. In this river he caught the fish he brought to us in Tsarskoe Selo.” There were tears in her eyes.
They were approaching Tobolsk.
A quarter of a century before, so young and happy, he too had sailed on a steamer. Nicholas’s diary:
“6 August [continued].… Many people were standing on shore, so they knew of our arrival. I remembered the view of the cathedral and houses on the hill.”
From Matveyev’s Notes:
“Literally the entire town, I am not exaggerating, spilled out onto the shore.”
The crowd gazed at the short man wearing a khaki shirt with regimental stripes, a forage cap with a cross-shaped cockade, his shirt belted by an ordinary soldier’s belt with a gleaming brass buckle, on his chest the silver Cross of St. George, wide trousers with a crimson stripe, and folded-over boots. Next to him was a boy dressed in a soldier’s greatcoat with epaulets, a lance corporal’s stripes, and a soldier’s forage cap. And she—in a black coat—and the four girls in navy traveling costumes.
Bells were ringing in all the churches. The commissars of the Provisional Government took fright that a monarchist demonstration had begun in the town, but it was the Feast of the Divine Transfiguration.
Nicholas’s diary:
“6 August [conclusion].… As soon as the steamer landed they began unloading our baggage. Valya [Dolgorukov], the commissar, and the commandant [as he called the guard commander, Kobylinsky] went off to inspect the houses designated for us and the suite. Upon his return Valya told us the lodgings were empty, unfurnished, dirty, and unfit to move into. So we remained on the steamer and began to wait for them to bring back the necessary baggage for us to retire. We had supper, joked about people’s astonishing inability to arrange even for lodgings, and went to bed early.”
So they remained on the steamer. But they were happy at this liberty and this new, unfamiliar place.
Only on August 6, after their commissar reported that the family had arrived in Tobolsk, was the official announcement about their departure published: “Due to considerations of state necessity, the government has resolved to move the former emperor and empress, now under guard, to a new location. Designated as such is the town of Tobolsk, where the former emperor and empress have been sent in accordance with all measures pertaining to their protection. Along with the former emperor and empress under the same conditions their children and individuals close to them have at their own wish gone to Tobolsk.”
The governor’s house, where they were to live, was called Freedom House after the February Revolution, which brought the Provisional Government to power, and the street where this house was located was called Freedom Street. The word freedom was very popular then.
Freedom House became the first home of their Siberian captivity. (The Dno station, the Russia steamer, Freedom House, the Ipatiev house—was all this history’s irony?) Freedom House had two floors; the family lived on the second, and on the first were the dining room and rooms for the servants. There was also a half-cellar, ground floor, where their possessions were taken.
The entire downstairs was stacked with the family’s traveling bags, trunks, and suitcases. Special belongings were kept in two small wardrobes, and there was a trunk filled with albums of yellowed photographs. There was also a dark leather suitcase that contained the former tsar’s diaries and letters. This was all that remained of their vanished life.
While their people were preparing the house, hanging portieres, arranging the furniture they had brought, and cleaning the furniture bought in town, the family remained on the steamer. They even took rides on it, as they once had on their yacht.
“8 August. Went up the Irtysh and after about 10 versts [6 miles] landed on the right bank and went for a walk. Passed bushes and crossed a stream, then climbed a high bank which had a very beautiful view.” Happy days.
On August 13 they moved into Freedom House. Tatiana and the empress rode in a carriage; the rest walked.
“We examined everything in the house from the bottom to the attic. Occupied the second floor.… Many rooms … have an unattractive view. Then we went into the so-called garden—nasty! Everything has an old, neglected look. Unpacked our things in the study and in the washroom, which is half mine and half Alexei’s.”
Freedom House reminded them of Noah’s ark: the emperor and empress of a nonexistent empire, the aide-de-camp to a nonexistent emperor, the marshal of a nonexistent imperial court, and the ladies-in-waiting of a nonexistent empress gathered in the large dining room in the evening and called each other nonexistent titles: “Your Highness … Your Excellency.”
The servants were well matched to their masters. These accomplished liveried people passed silently from one generation to the next. The menu was written on cards with the tsar’s seal: it did not matter that modest dishes were inscribed. As in the Alexander Palace, the gentlemen of the suite were invited to the tsar’s table.
A dance of shadows, a fantastic masquerade, unfolded in this Siberian house. The last outpost of a three-hundred-year-old empire.
“14 August.… Spent all day sorting through photographs from the cruises of 1890, 1891.”
He was still trying to live in a vanished world—in that round-the-world trip when he saw Tobolsk for the first time. And here he was again in Tobolsk. Full circle.
Life in the Tobolsk house proceeded peacefully.
“9 August. In the morning we sat in the garden for an hour, and in the afternoon for 2 hours. Set up the trapeze there for myself.”
This was the same trapeze that would go with him all the way to Ekaterinburg. In the morning he swung on it, in the afternoon he played gorodki, a game similar to skittles, or sawed wood.
“After all, is this any worse than the Time of Troubles?” Nicholas said to Valya, chuckling, over his sawing.
“A lot worse, Your Highness. A prince is sawing wood.”
Tatishchev and Dolgorukov took turns joining in the tsar’s sawing: when one got tired the other took over. Nicholas was indefatigable. How he loved movement and thirsted for his beloved walks.
“22 August. What a marvelous day. One gets frustrated at not being able to take walks along the riverbank or in the woods in weather like this. We read on the balcony.”
They had a favorite spot.
“16 August. Now every morning we have tea with all the children.… We spend a great part of the day on the balcony, which is warmed by the sun all day.”
Freedom Street opened out from the balcony. And from Freedom Street there was a good view of the family seated on the balcony: an average-size man in a military tunic, girls in white dresses, and a majestic lady, also in white, holding a lace parasol.
The appearance of the family on the balcony was a favorite spectacle and the principal theater in quiet Tobolsk.
From a letter I received from Andrei Anuchin in Magnitogorsk after my article about the execution of the tsar’s family was printed in Ogonyok:
“They would come out on the balcony. Especially, I remember, we were all amazed at the girls. Their hair was shorn like little boys. We thought that was the fashion in Petrograd. True, later people said they had been sick, but I don’t know for sure. Still, they were very pretty, very clean.… The empress was an imposing lady, but not young—my father kept wondering, What, he said, did Grigory see in that old woman? My father had worked with Rasputin in the rooms in the Tobolsk hotel. And Rasputin had been our guest.”
So went this monotonous life, where everything was an event.
“24 August. Vladimir Nikolaevich Derevenko arrived with his family. This made the event of the day.”
Dr. Derevenko was Alexei’s physician, but at this time the boy was healthy—a rare period in his life when he had been in good health for quite a while. The doctor brought his son Kolya along—he was allowed to come on Sundays to play with Alexei.
A quiet, quiet life, but….
“25 August. Walks in the garden are becoming incredibly tedious, here the sense of sitting locked up is much stronger than at Tsarskoe Selo.”
What about her?
Upstairs and down the hall, the first and largest room was Alix’s.
She spent the greater part of the day there, or on the balcony. Rarely did she go downstairs, even before dinner. She had her favorite books. She read her Bible—in its brown binding and with its many bookmarks—and her “good books,” the multitude of spiritual books she had brought along.
They would later be found in the cesspool of the Ekaterinburg house.
The usual scene: a fire in the fireplace, although it was still warm outside, the little dog resting on its knees. The sounds of the piano: Tatiana playing in the drawing room.
Alix was writing another letter to Anya.
“Often I scarcely sleep.… My body pains me, my heart is better since I live so tranquilly. I am terribly thin.… My hair is graying quickly too.”
(She paid a high price for this “I live so tranquilly.” That year her hair turned gray and she wasted away.)
“We have settled far from everyone, we live quietly & read about all the horrors—but let us not talk about that. You are living in all that horror, that is enough.”
The “horrors.” Anya wrote to her about them in detail. The tension was mounting around the unhappy Romanov family. Misha had been arrested. Savinkov, the former terrorist and one of the organizers of Sergei Alexandrovich’s murder, was now running the War Ministry. It was on his demand that both Misha and his wife—“that woman,” the smug Countess Brasova (now Alix had forgiven her, now Alix only pitied her)—were arrested. And poor Paul Alexandrovich (she had forgiven him as well for all the nasty things he had written in the papers immediately following this horrible revolution).
History had come full circle: yesterday they were locking these bomb throwers up; today the bomb throwers were locking them up. It was a new world. Although Kerensky did free Misha and Paul soon after, they were both eventually killed by the Bolsheviks, Misha in 1918 and Paul in 1919.
In this time of “horrors,” the tsaritsa began to dream of moving to the Ivanov monastery. Their dynasty had begun in a monastery, and it ought to end in one as well.
Late in 1904, while Russia was being defeated in its war with Japan, Nicholas had had an amazing idea. The question had arisen in the Holy Synod about restoring the ancient Orthodox patriarchy in Russia. After long reflection and conversations with the empress, Nicholas decided to abdicate the throne, take monastic vows—and become patriarch! As once, during the Time of Troubles, his ancestor Filaret had been patriarch. The Synod, however, had taken a dim view of this idea.
Now in 1918, during the triumph of the new Time of Troubles—how he wished he could live in a monastery.
The spiritual master in Tobolsk was Archbishop Hermogen. Once he had been a jealous admirer of Rasputin, but when he became Rasputin’s sworn enemy he had been persecuted and sent into exile. For all those oppressions, the new authorities had appointed him archbishop of Tobolsk, and he had become the family’s hope and support: the Lord’s slave Hermogen had forgotten his oppressions and was prepared to serve God’s anointed.
Hermogen greeted their idea with enthusiasm.
Volkov was sent to the mother superior. A new building was under construction at the monastery, and the mother superior joyfully prepared to receive the family. But this idyllic change of fate was not destined to be.
RISKY AFFAIRS
In September Vasily Pankratov, a commissar of the Provisional Government, arrived, and the idea was buried then and there.
“1 September. A new commissar arrived from the Provisional Government, Pankratov. He settled in the suite’s house with his assistant, some disheveled ensign who looks like a worker or a poor teacher. He will be censor of our correspondence.”
The “suite’s house”—that was the pretty name he gave to the merchant Kornilov’s home. There, opposite Freedom House, lived the suite—Tatishchev, Dolgorukov, Dr. Botkin, and Botkin’s daughter, who would later describe all that had gone on.
Commissar Pankratov had been sent to Tobolsk in the evolution of that same striking game that Kerensky had dreamed up: Pankratov had served fourteen years—the greater part of Nicholas’s reign—in the infamous Schlusselburg Fortress. So Kerensky sent him to guard Nicholas himself.
In all this Alix saw one and the same thing: the world had been stood on its head—a convict was guarding God’s anointed. She did not favor the strange man in the big fur cap with so much as a glance. He saw the contemptuous disdain on her face when he stopped in to return letters, the letters that she had written to Anya and that this revolutionary had now read (dared read!).
This correspondence was her life.
——
In Petrograd Anya, who had been released from the Fortress of Peter and Paul, was feverishly beginning to gather funds to free the family. It is ridiculous, but in this whole enormous empire, Anya was probably the only true conspirator trying to free the tsar’s family. Back in August Anya had sent one of the empress’s young ladies-in-waiting, Rita Khitrovo—a friend of Nastya Gendrikova and Grand Duchess Olga—to Tobolsk with some letters. Anya was furiously energetic, as ever, but she was an inexperienced conspirator. She explained to Rita the importance of the letters. Young Rita caught fire: the romantic aureole of the conspirator turned her head. Her imagination started working, and soon utterly trusting Rita was telling her friend about a certain organization. They were going to save the family! But then Rita’s friend told.… And then….
Nicholas’s diary:
“18 August.… In the morning Rita Khitrovo appeared on the street, having come from Petrograd, and spent some time with Nastenka Gendrikova. This was enough that in the evening they conducted a search of her room. The Devil knows what this is!…
“19 August.… Nastenka has lost the right to walk in the street for several days, and poor Rita Khitrovo has to go back with the evening steamer.”
She did not simply “go back.” She was taken to Petrograd for interrogation. The charges were the gravest; they were looking for a “Cossack organization.” Naturally, they did not find one, but Rita did not betray Anya.
Anya would manage to quit perilous Petrograd: Vyrubova was deported. She took the train from Petrograd to Finland. Soldiers and sailors surrounded the train at Helsingfors, Finland. Someone had spread a rumor that there were grand dukes on the train.
“Give us the grand dukes!”
“Give us the Romanovs!” the furious crowd raged.
What hatred! Yes, Blok was right: the future of the tsar’s family could have been read then, during the period of the Provisional Government.
The Helsingfors Soviet arrested Anya and sent her to the Polar Star, which had been seized by revolutionary sailors. She was put into the hold, which was teeming with parasites. She was led along the spat-upon, butt-strewn deck to be questioned in the same drawing room where once she had played four hands on the piano with the tsaritsa. In Petrograd her mother went to see Trotsky, the leader of the powerful Petrograd Soviet, who alone could influence the Baltic sailors—“the pride and glory of the Russian revolution.” Trotsky honored her request, and the “pride and glory” released Anya. Once again she was in Petrograd, and once again she corresponded with the tsaritsa.
Alix’s diary:
“Sept. 7th.… I heard that Ania was taken with the others on her way to Sweden, seized at Helsingfors and ended up on the Polar Star.”
Alix’s elegiac letters to Anya:
“My dear.… Yes, the past is over, I thank God for all I had & was given—& will live in my memories, which no one can take away. My youth is over.… My near and dear are all far far away.… & am surrounded by their photographs and possessions … a robe, slippers, a saucer, an ikon.… I would love to send you something, but fear it would be lost….
“You know I am with you in my heart & soul, I share all your sufferings & pray for you fervently.… The weather is changeable: frost & sun, then it melts & dims.… Terribly boring for those who like long walks & cant have them.… How time flies.… Soon will be 9 months since I said goodbye to so many … & you are alone in your suffering & loneliness.… All are generally healthy excepting for slight colds & my knee & wrist swell, tho’ thank God, without any great suffering. My heart has hurt me lately. I read much & live in the past, so full of rich & precious memories.… Dont lose heart, I wish I could send you something tasty.
“… I left all the albums in a trunk & am sad without them, but its better that way because it would be painful to look & remember.… I drive things away, they destroy me, all too fresh in my memory….
“I remember Novgorod & the terrible 17th.… Russia too suffers for this, all must suffer for this, what they have done, but no one understands.”
(The “17th”—the day of Rasputin’s murder. She was certain that “no one understands”: the country had had a revolution in punishment for the “17th.”)
After writing about her murdered spiritual pastor, she told Anya about the country’s captive pastor—the tsar, who was devoted: “He is absolutely stunning, such fortitude of spirit, tho’ he suffers endlessly for his country.… How old I am, but I feel like the country’s mother & suffer as if for my own child and love my Homeland despite all the horrors & sins.… Despite its black ingratitude to the sovereign which tears at my heart.… Lord have mercy on Russia and save her.”
——
Anya’s indomitable energy. The lesson of Trotsky’s might did not pass unappreciated. She continued to improve her ties with the new world, this time with the famous “stormy petrel of the revolution”—the writer Maxim Gorky.
Poor Alix with her firm principles could not understand Anya’s new acquaintances, and she branded Gorky in her letters. But Anya knew: new times, new names. And those new names could come in handy in her risky affairs.
Anya did not for one second abandon the “tsar’s family, abandoned by all”; she acted. She waited impatiently for news from a certain Boris Soloviev, whom she had sent to Tobolsk immediately after the family.
THE LITTLE MAN
At Freedom House it was the era of Commissar Pankratov. “The little man,” as Nicholas mockingly referred to him.
“You yourself have experienced much. You have the ability to fulfill your mission with dignity and nobility, as befits a revolutionary. You and the guard entrusted to you will be guarding and protecting the former tsar and his family until the Constituent Assembly decides his fate.” These were Kerensky’s parting words to Pankratov the revolutionary, who had spent fourteen years in solitary confinement, and then had been sent from Siberian prison to another. And here he was—overseeing the tsar!
Unlike the empress, delicate Nicholas was gracious with the commissar, but their conversations gradually came to focus on Nicholas’s request (or rather, dream):
“Why won’t you let us walk in town? You can’t actually be afraid that I shall run away?”
The little man did sense the concealed ridicule, and he responded gravely. “I don’t have the slightest doubt of it, Nicholas Alexandrovich, Generally speaking, an attempt to escape would only make matters worse—for you and your family.” (Just in case, he warned him.)
“So what is the matter, kind sir? I was in Tobolsk in my youth, I remember it is a very beautiful town, and I would like to see it—along with my family.”
But the commissar rejected the notion of a walk.
Nicholas’s diary:
“Recently P. S. Botkin received a paper from Kerensky from which we learned that we are allowed walks outside town.… Pankratov, the rascal, has replied that there can be no question of that now due to some incomprehensible fear for our safety.”
Good-natured Pankratov did not want to disappoint him so he did not explain his “incomprehensible fear”: the chancellery had been inundated with letters and telegrams from all ends of Russia full of threats and obscenities. People were sending nasty depictions of the tsaritsa and Rasputin. What particularly alarmed the commissar was that many of the letters came from Tobolsk. Soldiers back from the front were hanging around town, poor and hardened men “who had spilled a little blood because of the tsar.” No, he could not let the family out into town.
For this Nicholas did not like him.
Nor did the suite—Dolgorukov and Tatishchev—to Pankratov’s astonishment, understand anything either. They never stopped demanding that the tsar be allowed to take walks, citing Kerensky’s promise. Meanwhile, their own walks around town had already begun to provoke grumbling. The soldiers on the street warned the commissar with a chuckle: “If the prince [Dolgorukov] doesn’t stop roaming around town, we’re going to beat him up for starters.” Russia was on the rampage.
The good Pankratov put up with Nicholas’s dislike. He had long since forgiven him for the fortress and fourteen years of his life. Now he simply saw Nicholas as the father of a large family who had absolutely no understanding of this terrible new life. Pankratov became attached to Nicholas’s children and gave the duchesses a book he had written about his sufferings and wanderings through Siberia. The girls read it aloud and liked it. He volunteered to be Alexei’s geography teacher. Nonetheless, Nicholas did not like him.
In Dr. Botkin’s papers I found a poem that evidently enjoyed great success at that time in Freedom House, a poem written in an elegant hand similar to the empress’s:
Whispering mirrors.
Mirrors in the sad quiet
Of the Winter Palace,
Reflect the brazen glance
Of a shaven face.
In every hall, indifferent,
In every corner,
Someone in a jacket
Gazes upon his greatness.
Once yielding to the dazzle,
The country’s hero imagines,
That all must fall before him
In humble worship.
That the road to splendid glory
Lies before him.
Barely audible, though, in reply,
The mirrors whisper:
“What care we for empty speeches,
Impertinent newcomer,
The triumph of centuries past
Guards this palace.
Power glorious, imperial,
Shadows incorporeal.
No momentary guest shall drive away
The guests of ages past….
… Stop! Never forget too long
Of the crown of the tsar,
He will rise up soon, rise up terribly,
Yellow dawn,
… So, witnesses of the past,
Just as the gloom appears—
The mirrors whisper the word.
The coming truth.”
TOBOLSK 1917
To Nicholas, Pankratov was also a typical civilian with the audacity to lead soldiers. Like a true Romanov, Nicholas did not look favorably upon men who lacked military bearing.
That was why Pankratov remained the “little man.”
The soldiers of the guard too, following Nicholas’s lead, despised the good commissar and obeyed only Colonel Kobylinsky, who had been appointed commandant at Tsarskoe Selo by General Kornilov, having recommended himself as a devoted supporter of the February Revolution and the Duma.
But the colonel had changed greatly since then. He did try to do his duty, but … Nicholas’s strange charm … his gentleness and delicacy, and those charming little girls, and the empress, so helpless in her arrogance. That was the colonel’s portrait of the family, and more and more he was beginning to feel responsible for their fate.
“I have given you what is most precious, Your Excellency, my honor.” He had every right to say that to Nicholas.
The colonel began to feel close to Nicholas and his family. Thus, in that quiet town, where the sole military force were those 330 riflemen guarding the family, their commander was heart and soul on the side of the tsar—a strange puzzle.
The head of the guard was for the tsar. The riflemen received endless gifts from the family. Dr. Botkin’s daughter wrote very specifically: “During those months [from August to the October Revolution], the family could have escaped. The guard most definitely would have helped them.”
Quiet Tobolsk, the influence of the mighty Archbishop Hermogen—everything ought to have facilitated an escape.
Clearly Kerensky had sent them to Tobolsk with the secret intention of creating the conditions for their liberation (as if their flight would have simplified his life). That was why he chose the quiet and very good-hearted Pankratov to watch over the family.
Nonetheless, they did not flee. Why?
THE TSARIST CACHE
Kobylinsky’s deputy in the guard was a certain Captain Aksyuta, who ran the affairs of the entire detachment—quite a noteworthy individual. Two years later, in the heat of the Civil War, in the bloody year 1919, a White officer, Count Mstislav Gudovich, was traveling through the unimportant town of Eisk, where he saw a familiar face, that of Captain Aksyuta, whom the count had known during his service at Tsarskoe Selo.
Aksyuta invited him to spend the night in his home and all night he told the count stories about life with the tsar’s family in Tobolsk. Aksyuta described in detail the whole story of the tsar’s family’s departure from Tobolsk as well, and how before their departure they gave things to Captain Aksyuta: the tsaritsa a pearl necklace and diamonds; the sovereign his saber. Aksyuta hid these things on the outskirts of Tobolsk. Only two people knew about the cache: he himself and General Denikin, whom he had told at the inquiry. (Aksyuta was arrested upon his return from Tobolsk and accused of bolshevism, but he was released when they did not find him guilty of anything.)
By the way, we can verify these nighttime stories of Aksyuta’s through the tsar’s diary.
Like Prince Dolgorukov and Pierre Gilliard, the tsar, of course, would have taken along the pride of any soldier—his saber. In April 1918, shortly before the tsar’s departure from Tobolsk, the house was searched, and the tsar recorded the results of that search in his diary:
“This morning the commandant, a commission of officers, and two riflemen walked around a part of our quarters, the result of this ‘search’ being the confiscation of sabers from Valya and Gilliard and a dagger from me.”
So they did not take his saber away. Evidently someone had warned him of the search beforehand and he had given it to that someone—evidently Captain Aksyuta—for safekeeping.
But the little southern town of Eisk was hopelessly distant from Tobolsk, lost in the expanses of Siberia, and in the bloody jumble of the Civil War neither of the two initiated was likely to have been able to reach the hiding place. So in all likelihood the tsar’s saber and the tsaritsa’s jewels are still buried there somewhere.
We can trust Aksyuta’s testimony. That is why his answer to the very important question Gudovich asked him is so interesting: “Why didn’t you give the sovereign a chance to escape?”
Aksyuta answered that he and Colonel Kobylinsky did have a plan to free the sovereign, but the tsar told him that in this difficult time for Russia, no Russian should abandon the country. He had no intention of running away and would await his fate right there, he said. We find a reflection of those thoughts in Pankratov’s memoirs, where he relates his conversation with one of the grand duchesses:
“ ‘Papa was reading in the papers yesterday that they are sending us abroad as soon as they can convene a Constituent Assembly. Is that true?’
“ ‘There’s no telling what they write in our papers!’” ‘No, no. Papa says we ought to stay in Russia. Let them send us deeper into Siberia.’”
PATCHED TROUSERS
Time dragged on and on. Everything was an event: the long-awaited wine brought from Tsarskoe Selo was poured out on the wharf. Gray coats, having heard about the wine, had converged on the wharf like flies on sugar. Fearing their “visit” to Freedom House, Pankratov had ordered the wine destroyed.
Nicholas’s diary:
“They decided to pour all the wine out into the Irtysh.… The departure of the cart carrying the bottles of wine on which the commissar’s assistant sat with an axe in his hands … we saw from our windows before tea.”
General Lavr Kornilov had unsuccessfully demanded dictatorial powers to deal with the Soviets and the Bolsheviks and bring order to the rear and the front.
Nicholas’s diary:
“5 September.… Clearly in Petrograd there is great confusion.… Evidently nothing ever came of General Kornilov’s undertakings.”
In his confinement, all events were equal, although his disappointment over the loss of the wine may have been greater.
September 17 (again 17!). Shortly before the October overthrow of the Provisional Government Nicholas finished the fiftieth notebook of his diary, the last he was to complete. He began a new one, which he would fill only halfway.
“51,” the tsar numbered it. “Begun in Tobolsk.”
“18 September. Monday. 1917. Fall this year is remarkable here. Today 15 degrees in the shade and the air utterly southern and warm. In the afternoon Valya and I played gorodki, which I haven’t done for many years.… Olga’s ill health has passed, and she sat on the balcony for a long time with Alix.… Mama wrote a letter through the censor Pankratov.”
This entry began his fateful final notebook.
A monotonous life.
A letter from Alix to Anya:
“I cant guess what lies ahead.… God knows—& will work in His own way.… I put all in His hands.… am knitting socks for Little One, he asked for a pair: his are full of holes, but mine are thick & warm.… We used to knit in winter, remember? Now I do everything for my people: Papa’s trousers are all patched … the girls’ nightgowns are full of holes, Mama has masses of grey hair, & Anastasia is very fat, like Marie used to be—big, thick-waisted, then tiny feet—I hope she grows more. Olga is thin & so is Tatiana—their hair is growing marvelously, so in winter they can go without shawls.” (In February the grand duchesses’ hair had been shaved when they had the measles.)
They entertained themselves with amateur shows. Gilliard and the daughters and the tsar himself were the actors. “We rehearsed the play,” “we did a small play very amicably … much laughter.”
Nicholas appeared in the leading role in Chekhov’s The Bear, playing the “not very old landowner” who comes to collect a debt from the “little widow with the dimples in her cheeks” and falls in love with her.
Nicholas’s diary:
“18 February.… We performed our play [The Bear], in which Olga, Marie again, and I acted. At the beginning of the performance there was a great deal of nervousness, but it seems to have come off well.”
He stood on his knees before Olga, who played the widow. “I love you as I have never loved before: I have left twelve women, and nine have left me, but I never loved one of them as I love you.”
How they all laughed when Nicholas said this. Even Alix. Rarely did she laugh anymore.
Their voices, there in the darkness, in a vanished house, a vanished time.
“IT MAKES ME SICK TO READ WHAT HAPPENED”
October had come.
Snow-draped Tobolsk dozed, and no one knew about the events in Petrograd. The newspapers had suddenly stopped arriving. Nicholas was reading 1793.
He did not read this book aloud, but Alix could not have helped but see it—and remembered: Versailles, the Revolution, the execution of the royal couple.
“11 November. No papers or even telegrams from Petrograd for a long time. In such a trying time this is awful.”
On November 17 (again 17!) he learned of the Bolshevik seizure of power.
“17 November.… It makes me sick to read in the papers what happened two weeks ago in Petrograd and Moscow! Much worse and more shameful than events in the Time of Troubles.”
During that time Commissar Pankratov recorded:
“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.
A GAME FROM THE GRAVE
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.
In fact, that day it was daring Red Guards riding into town from Omsk to establish Bolshevik power in Tobolsk. And on that day the idyllic period of their captivity came to an end. The post-October world invaded quiet Tobolsk, jingling, whooping, and whistling.
After his death Rasputin managed to ruin the family yet again.
“There were no officer groups to liberate the tsar’s family! There was only talk,” Tatiana Botkina, the daughter of the doctor Evgeny Sergeyevich would exclaim in her memoirs.
Already after the tsar had been forced to leave Tobolsk, she asked one of the Tobolsk “plotters”—monarchists: “Why didn’t your organization undertake anything?”
“We organized to rescue Alexei Nikolaevich.”
When the time came for Alexei and the grand duchesses to leave Tobolsk, however, once again she posed the same question.
“Have pity, after all, we could be discovered and the Red Army could catch us all.”
“There were many organizers like that,” Botkin’s daughter concluded sadly. She considered Soloviev nothing more than a provocateur—as did many in Freedom House.
But who would have dared come out against Rasputin’s son-in-law?
Was Soloviev actually a Bolshevik agent?
Hardly. More likely they simply found each other convenient, the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret service, and Soloviev: two games played with the participation of the unsuspecting family.
There was the plot game organized by Boris Soloviev, who simply robbed the family. And there was one other performance, which took advantage of Soloviev’s idea by declaring his false plot genuine—to prove the necessity of the immediate transfer of the tsar’s family from quiet Tobolsk.
This second game had been born in the Red capital of the revolutionary Urals, in the town of Ekaterinburg.
Let us try to picture the cast, the game’s chief players.