Above the town, on the highest hill, rose the Church of the Ascension. Next to the church a few houses formed Ascension Square.
One of these houses stood directly opposite the church—low-slung, white, with thick walls and a stone carving all the way across the facade, which was turned toward the boulevard and the church. One of the house’s thick sides dropped down a slope along blind Ascension Lane. Here the windows of the first half-cellar barely peeked out from below ground level.
One of these half-cellar windows was between two trees. This was the window of that very room to which we will find ourselves returning.
Driving up to the house, however, they saw none of this. The house was masked nearly to the roof by a very high fence. Only a bit of the uppermost part of the second-floor windows looked out.
Around the house stood the guard.
This house belonged to the engineer Ipatiev, an unlucky man. An influential member of the Soviet and also a graduate of the University of Geneva, Peter Voikov was the son of a mining engineer. He knew Ipatiev and had been in this house with the thick walls that was so conveniently situated (from the standpoint of guarding it).
That is why at the very end of April the engineer was called in to the Soviet of Deputies and ordered to clear out of his house in twenty-four hours. They promised “to return the house soon” (engineer Ipatiev did not understand the portent in this statement). He was ordered to leave all his furniture where it was and put his personal possessions into storage.
The cement storeroom was located on the first floor, next to a half-cellar room—the execution room.
Both cars drove along the fence to the plank gates.
The gates opened and the cars were allowed in. Neither Nicholas nor Alix nor their daughter would ever leave those gates alive.
They were led across the paved courtyard to the house. In the entry, a carved wooden staircase ascended to the second floor.
Standing by the stairs, Beloborodov made a formal announcement: “By decision of the Central Executive Committee, the former tsar Nicholas Romanov and his family are transferred to the conduct of the Ural Soviet and shall henceforth be located in Ekaterinburg with the status of prisoners. Until their trial. Comrade Avdeyev has been appointed house commandant, and all requests and complaints shall be made to the Ural Executive Committee through the commandant.”
After which both Ural leaders, Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, went off in a car and the family was invited to tour their new quarters in the company of the commandant and Ditkovsky.
Nicholas’s diary:
“Little by little our people arrived, as well as our things, but they would not let Valya in.”
Yes, their things arrived, and along with them Botkin and their people.
But not Dolgorukov. Poor Valya was taken away somewhere directly from the station. Somewhere….
Subsequently a rumor spread that two guns and many thousands in cash had been found on Prince Dolgorukov. This was reported in Tobolsk by the returning riflemen of the old guard. Why would Dolgorukov have had two guns? One way or another, Nicholas would not see Valya again; the prince had disappeared for good.
M. Medvedev (the son of a Chekist who participated in the execution of the tsar’s family) told the story to me:
“Dolgorukov was shot by the young Chekist Grigory Nikulin. Nikulin said so himself. I don’t remember the details anymore, I remember he took Dolgorukov out with his suitcases into a field.”
“You mean this was immediately after the train? If there were suitcases?”
“I just don’t remember. I only remember there was snow, and after the execution Nikulin himself had to carry Dolgorukov’s suitcases across a snowy field. The snow was deep and he cursed all the way.”
Thus perished this charmer, the gallant cavalier at the brilliant Winter Palace balls.
Nicholas’s diary:
“The house is fine, clean. We have been assigned 4 rooms: a corner bedroom, a lavatory, next door a dining room with windows onto a little garden and a view of a low-lying part of town, and finally, a spacious hall with arches in place of doors.
“We arranged ourselves in the following manner: Alix, Marie, and I together in the bedroom. A shared lavatory. Demidova in the dining room, and in the hall—Botkin, Chemodurov, and Sednev. In order to get to the washroom and water closet one must go past the sentry. A very high wooden fence has been built around the house 2 sazhens [14 feet] from the windows: a chain of sentries has been posted there and in the little garden too.”
Here the drama’s last act would unfold. The dynasty’s finale.
THE FINALE SET
The tsar and tsaritsa would be staying in the spacious corner room with four windows. Two windows looked out on Ascension Avenue, but the high fence two sazhens from the windows closed off the view. Only the cross over the bell tower was visible from the rooms. The two other windows looked out onto Ascension Lane, which was a dead end. The room was very light, with pale yellow wallpaper covered by a free-form frieze of faded flowers.
A rug on the floor, a baize-covered table, a bronze lamp with a handmade lamp shade, a small card table, a bookcase between the windows where she would put her books. Two beds (Alexei would sleep on one of them when he was brought from Tobolsk), and a couch.
Her vanity and mirror with two electric lamps on the sides, on the table a jar of cold cream with the inscription “Court Pharmacy to His Excellency.”
How strange that inscription sounded already.
A washbasin on a cracked marble counter and an armoire, which now held all the clothing of the former tsar and tsaritsa.
Next to their room, with windows on Ascension Lane, was a large empty room. In it were a table, chairs, and a large pier glass. The four daughters would live in this room. They would come, in May, and until their camp beds were brought they would sleep on mattresses right on the floor.
Both these rooms were directly above that half-cellar room.
Next to the daughters’ room, in the dining room “with the view on the garden,” slept Anna Demidova. In the large hall (the drawing room) slept Botkin, Chemodurov, and Sednev.
There was one more as yet sealed room—designated for Alexei.
Catercorner from the former grand duchesses was the commandant’s room—date palm wallpaper, gold baguette molding, and the head of a dead deer. And one more—next to the commandant’s—set aside for the watch.
Completing the suite was the lavatory. The porcelain vessel left over from engineer Ipatiev would be fouled by the commandant and the guards, and amid the shameless drawings on the lavatory walls depicting the tsaritsa and Rasputin, amid the obscene utterances of the guard and reflections such as “I don’t know why I wrote either, but you strangers read it,” was a note nailed to the wall: “You are implored to leave the seat as clean as you found it.”
This was the joint creation of the former tsar and his personal physician Botkin.
Entering the bedroom, Alix walked over to the right-hand window and on the jamb penciled her favorite symbol, the swastika, and the date of their arrival: 17 (30).
She drew another swastika as an incantation directly on the wallpaper over the bed where Alexei was to sleep.
17 (30). Thus she innocently signaled the start of the last game with the last tsar.
It began right away.
THE LAST GAME
When their belongings arrived they were taken out into the hall and, in the presence of the former military academy student and present member of the Ural Executive Committee Ditkovsky and the former turner and present commandant Avdeyev, the inspection began.
The captors opened the suitcases and looked through them carefully. They examined Alix’s hand luggage. They confiscated the camera she had brought from Tsarskoe Selo and also, as Commandant Avdeyev would write in his memoirs, “a detailed map of Ekaterinburg.” How could that have turned up in her bag if they had assumed they were going to Moscow? Even if it couldn’t have, though, it did. Like the two guns allegedly found on Dolgorukov.
They even opened the medicine bottles—they dug through her entire traveling pharmacy.
Nicholas’s diary:
“17 [30] April [continued].… The search of our things was like at customs: just as strict, right up to the last vial in Alix’s pharmacy. That exasperated me and I expressed my opinion sharply to the commissar.”
Alix did not understand the reason for the search. She was nervous and indignant: “This is an insult!” Her accent made the searchers smile; the impotent anger of the former empress was funny. But she continued her irate monologue; she even mentioned “Mr. Kerensky.” She cited the example of the revolutionary who was nevertheless a gentleman. The word gentleman amused the former turner Avdeyev. Finally, Nicholas blew up. He declared: “Up until now we have dealt with decent people!” This was the ultimate manifestation of anger for this most well-bred of monarchs.
Why did they make this search?
To demonstrate the conditions of their new life in the capital of the Red Urals? In part. But only in part.
They were looking for the jewels. The legendary tsarist jewels. The “spy” had not been napping. Evidently in Tobolsk he found out that Alix used the word “medicine” when talking in the presence of outsiders about the jewels (that was how she would refer to them in her letters to her daughters from Ekaterinburg). That was why they examined the vials of medicine so thoroughly and vainly, though they did not find anything.
They realized the jewels had been left in Tobolsk.
There was a third reason for the harsh examination. Since the day of the family’s arrival in Ekaterinburg they had begun to gather evidence of a “monarchist plot.” That was why they took the camera away—as evidence. That was apparently why they discovered the map of Ekaterinburg—more evidence (plus the rumor about the two guns confiscated from unlucky Valya—another link in the evidence).
This terrible game with the tsar began at the Ekaterinburg station. We shall call it the monarchist plot game. The plot that would serve as grounds for their execution. The “just punishment” had been decided upon from the very start.
Nicholas’s diary:
“21 April [4 May].… All morning wrote letters to the girls from Alix and Marie. And drew a plan of this house.”
He wanted those in Tobolsk to be able to picture their new quarters. He was preparing them for their encounter with the crowded house. But—
“24 April [7 May].… Avdeyev, the commandant, removed the plan of the house I had done for the children on a letter the day before yesterday and took it away, saying I could not send it.”
In his memoirs Avdeyev would describe this incident quite differently:
“Once while reviewing the letters my attention was drawn to one letter addressed to Nicholas Nikolaevich [!]. Upon examination of the envelope lining, I discovered a thin sheet of paper on which was drawn a plan of the house.”
Avdeyev further described how he called Nicholas into the commandant’s room and how the tsar lied, refused to admit it, and begged for the commandant’s forgiveness. This was not simply a fabrication. The plan of the house, allegedly concealed under the envelope lining, was one more “irrefutable proof.” As was the “frightened and exposed Nicholas.” They were making their case. And waiting.
Waiting for the children to arrive from Tobolsk. And the jewels.
“I BREATHED THE AIR THROUGH AN OPEN PANE”
“17 [30] April.… The sentry has been put in the two rooms by the dining room, so that to go to the washroom and water closet one must pass by the guard and sentry by the doors,” Nicholas wrote in his diary.
On May 3, however, the sentry was moved to quarters downstairs, where that half-cellar room was, and they who had so recently owned the most magnificent palaces in Europe were happy at this new convenience and opened up space.
On the first day of their stay in the Ipatiev house, their “false titles were rescinded” by resolution of the Ural Soviet. Avdeyev made certain the servant did not address Nicholas as “Your Excellency.” He was now to be called Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov.
“18 April [1 May]. On the occasion of the first of May we heard music from some parade. We were not allowed to go out in the garden today. Felt like washing in an excellent bath, but the water was not running. This is tiresome, since my sense of hygiene has suffered. Marvelous weather, the sun shone brightly, I breathed the air through an open pane.”
A year before, at Tsarskoe Selo, the arrested former emperor had written the following angry words on this day:
“18 April, 1917. Abroad today is May 1, so our blockheads have decided to celebrate this day with parades through the streets with choruses, music, and red flags.”
By now he had learned not to get annoyed. He realized that “breathing the air through an open pane” was itself happiness, and “washing in an excellent bath” could be an unrealized dream.
Gradually things improved. Their captors started letting them out for a walk. For two whole hours. He still believed that Dolgorukov would return and kept worrying about his loyal friend.
“20 April [3 May]. From the vague hints of those around us we are given to understand that poor Valya is not at liberty, and that an inquiry will be carried out against him after which he will be freed: there is no possibility of entering into any contact with him, no matter how Botkin has tried.”
Their daily life at that time was recounted by a certain V. Vorobiev, editor of the Ural Worker. He described it, naturally retaining the revolutionary’s “class” point of view:
“Besides the commandant, for the first while in the Ipatiev mansion members of the Regional Executive Committee took turns standing guard. Among others, it fell on me as well to perform this type of sentry duty.… The prisoners had only just gotten up and greeted us, as they say, unwashed. Nicholas looked at me dully and nodded silently.… Maria Nikolaevna on the contrary looked at me with curiosity, wanted to ask me something, but evidently embarrassed by her morning toilette, became flustered and turned away toward the window….
“Alexandra Feodorovna, spiteful, constantly suffering from migraine and indigestion, did not deign to look at me. She reclined on the couch, her head bound with a compress.
“I spent all day in the commandant’s room. I was supposed to check on the sentry. During their walk Nicholas paced the road with a soldier’s steps.
“Alexandra Feodorovna refused to go for a walk.”
At the end of Vorobiev’s guard duty, the former tsar asked him to subscribe to the Ural Worker for him. “He had not had any newspapers for more than a week and was suffering greatly as a result.” Vorobiev promised to do so and asked the tsar to send the money.
The Ural Worker would print the first report of his execution.
“1 [14] May. Tuesday. Was gladdened by the receipt of letters from Tobolsk. Got one from Tatiana. We read them to each other all morning.… Today we were told through Botkin that we are allowed to walk only one hour a day. To the question, Why?… ‘So it looks more like a prison routine.’ …
“2 [15] May.… The application of the ‘prison routine’ has continued and expressed itself in the fact that in the morning an old housepainter painted over all the windows in all our rooms with lime. It was like a fog you see out the window….
“5 [18] May.… The light in the rooms is dim. And the tedium is incredible.”
Thus he wrote in his diary on the eve of his fiftieth birthday.
“THAT SPRING CHRIST WAS NOT RISEN”
Inside the house, “Latvians” from the Cheka and the young workers Avdeyev had selected from his old Zlokazov factory were rushing around with revolvers and bombs. “Latvians” was the name given to the Austro-Hungarian prisoners who had joined up with the Russian revolution and the Latvian sharpshooters. The “Latvians” were slow to speak, and when they did talk among themselves the workers could not understand them.
This internal guard lived in the house in the first-floor rooms. Next to that half-cellar room. Part of the guard lived across the way, in the Popov house (named after the former owner).
The outside guard around the house was borne by the Zlokazov workers.
The house had its own automobile. As driver, Avdeyev appointed his sister’s husband—Sergei Lyukhanov. The elder Lyukhanov son had also been taken into the guard. Avdeyev did not forget his Lyukhanov relatives. It was an enviable position to guard the tsar—they paid cash and fed you and you were alive—not like dying in the Civil War.
Avdeyev himself did not stay in the house. In the evening he went back to the Lyukhanov house, where he spent the night. His assistant remained in the house—another Zlokazov worker, Moshnik.
Moshnik was a genial drunkard. As soon as the commandant was across the threshold, Moshnik started to get smashed. From the sentry room the family heard the piano, songs to a harmonica. The merrymaking went on half the night: the sharpshooters were on a binge.
In the morning—once again—Avdeyev appeared at 9. Avdeyev liked his position. The former turner did not forget whom he was now in charge of. This was his hour to shine. When he was given the family’s requests, he answered, “Oh, to hell with them!” and watched triumphantly to see what impression he made on the sharpshooters. Back in the commandant’s room, he specified at length what he had been asked about in the family’s room and what he had refused them.
Commandant Avdeyev, the guard Ukraintsev, a certain “pop-eyed” someone—these were the new names in the tsar’s diary. They replaced Count Witte, Stolypin, and the countless European monarchs.
“This evening chatted at length with Ukraintsev and Botkin” (April 22) [May 5]. Whereas before he had chatted … just whom had he not chatted with!
“My ‘pop-eyed’ enemy was sitting there instead of Ukraintsev” (whereas before his enemy had been Emperor Wilhelm).
As we come to the end of the next to last, fiftieth notebook of his diary, we can draw some conclusions. Everything that truly touched him, truly upset him, all his internal storms—only slip by in individual phrases. No, he wrote beautifully. Suffice it to recall his letters to his mother, or his Manifesto of Abdication.
That was simply the style of his diary.
He was secretive and reticent. He wrote about conversations with Avdeyev and Ukraintsev, about the painted-over windows. And just as briefly, in passing, mentioned: “this morning and evening, as on all days here, read the proper in the Holy Gospels aloud.”
That was the main thing.
——
Their forced arrival in Ekaterinburg coincided with Holy Week.
The bloody Easter of 1918 was approaching. The country was drenched in blood—“Russia washed in blood.”
During these great days of the Lord’s Passion, as the hour of His Crucifixion was approaching—they entered the Ipatiev house. For the mystical Nicholas, the family’s arrival in the Ipatiev house at that particular time was replete with meaning. He had to have felt a flutter of foreboding.
On the third day of Easter, Alix’s sister Ella was sent out of Moscow. At first the new authorities had not touched Ella or her Cloister of Martha and Mary. She wrote in one of her last letters: “Obviously we are not yet worthy of the martyr’s crown.” Her favorite thought: “Humiliation and suffering, drawing us closer to God.”
So her path to that crown had begun. At Eastertime, the arrested Ella was brought to Ekaterinburg, where she stayed in the same Novotikhvinsky monastery that would soon be bringing food to the tsar’s family. But by the end of May Ella would be sent even farther, 140 versts (93 miles) away, to the small town of Alapaevsk, where the Romanovs sent from Petrograd were gathered: Sergei Mikhailovich, the companion of Nicky’s childhood games; Grand Duke Konstantin’s three sons; and Grand Duke Paul’s son by his second marriage, the seventeen-year-old poet Prince Oleg Paley.
On Easter the tsar and his family received gifts from Ella.
The martyr’s crown was Ella’s main theme. During those days she must have written to them about this. Ioann of Kronstadt, whom Nicholas respected, as had his father, had said in his sermons: “The Christian enduring misfortunes or sufferings must not doubt in God’s goodness and wisdom and must guess how much of God’s will is manifested in them.… May every man bring his own Isaac to God’s sacrifice.”
“Guess how much of God’s will is manifested in their sufferings”—that is what he had to be contemplating during those days.
A notable event linked with these thoughts then:
“6 [19] May.… I have lived to 50; even to me it is strange.”
Romanovs did not live to fifty very often. The tsars of this dynasty had lived little, and here the Lord had given him this age. Why had He given it to someone whom his own country had rejected?
A martyr’s crown? A reward of suffering?
The land was burning, towns were in flames, brother had gone against brother, and the people God had entrusted to him were creating evil. He himself had been at the beginning of the evil. He had assisted at its birth.
A redeeming sacrifice? Perhaps his whole life had been for this? “Guess how much of God’s will….”
The days dragged on slowly, identically, as did the “bull’s” slow, persistent contemplation … or was he a lamb?
Alix spent her days in the pale yellow bedroom between her four lime-washed windows—in that white fog—in her wheelchair, her head bandaged (a migraine). The former tsaritsa went out for walks only rarely. She daydreamed, read her holy books, embroidered, or drew. Her small watercolors were scattered around the house. How she disdained those little men who dared guard them, God’s anointed. But the guards respected her, feared her even. “The tsar, he was a simple man … not much like a tsar. But Alexandra Feodorovna was a severe lady and an absolutely pure tsaritsa!” (as their guards would later say).
As before she awaited her liberation. The holy man would protect them; it was no accident that his village had appeared on their journey. Indeed, legions of deliverers were already approaching. She knew that all Russia was in flames. In the north, the south, the east, and the west there was civil war. And in her correspondence with her daughters, in her semi-encoded letters to the Tobolsk house, she wrote about the “medicines … that are extremely important for you to bring along to Ekaterinburg.” Although her Tobolsk friends implored them to leave the jewels in reliable hands in Tobolsk rather than take them to the terrible capital of the Red Urals, she was implacable. She believed her liberation was drawing nigh, and they must have their jewels with them.
In Tobolsk, under the guidance of Tatiana (the “governor”), the nurse Sasha Tegleva and her helper Liza Ersberg began to prepare the jewels for the trip. They concealed them by sewing them into the girls’ bodices: two bodices were placed on top of one another and the stones sewn in between.
They hid the diamonds and pearls in buttons and sewed them into the fur linings of hats.
THE EXODUS FROM TOBOLSK
What about Feodor Lukoyanov, the “spy”? He, of course, was in Tobolsk, for that was where the jewels were. Now he was their sentry. So that they would be returned “to the working people of the Red Urals, whose sweat and blood had won those jewels.”
Leaving Tobolsk, Nicholas had embraced Alexander Volkov and instructed him: “Protect the children.” It was not easy for the devoted old servant to fulfill his tsar’s instruction. Now the remaining family was in the charge of the Soviet and its chairman, the former stoker from the steamer Alexander III who was now master of Tobolsk, Pavel Khokhryakov. He was readying the departure of the tsar’s children, the remaining suite, and the people from Freedom House. They were going to the capital of the Red Urals. For many, this would be their last journey.
Inside the house Commissar Rodionov and his detachment were in charge. Subsequently Sasha Tegleva would tell White Guard investigator Sokolov: “I have nothing bad to say about Khokhryakov, but Rodionov—there was a malicious snake.”
Baroness Buxhoeveden identified Rodionov. Sofia Karlovna asserted that she had once seen him at Verzhbolovo, a station on the German border. A policeman, who was as like Rodionov as two drops of water, had checked their passports.
Kobylinsky spoke about Rodionov: “You immediately felt the policeman in him.… A bloodthirsty, cruel police detective.”
It turned out, though, that they were both partially wrong.
From a letter of Yakov Verigin in Tver:
“At one time, in my youth, in the fifties, I lived in Riga in the apartment of a university professor, the old Latvian Bolshevik Yan Svikke.… He had an amazing biography. He had been a professional revolutionary and carried out important party orders; he even managed to infiltrate the tsarist secret police.… In 1918, Commissar Yan Svikke, under the name of Rodionov, was sent to Tobolsk, where he led the detachment transferring the tsar’s children.… He died in 1976, in Riga, at the age of ninety-one—in complete senility and isolation. He walked around town wearing all sorts of pins—he thought they were medals.”
In 1918 the revolutionary-policeman was young and zealous.
During services, Rodionov-Svikke placed a Latvian rifleman near the altar, explaining: “He’s watching the priest.” He searched the priest, and the nuns as well. He was suspiciously fond of undressing them during the search. He also introduced a strange innovation: the girls were not allowed to lock their doors at night. The tsar’s daughters did not even have the right to close their doors.
“So that I can walk in at any moment and see what is going on.”
Volkov tried to object: “How can you … they are young girls, after all.”
They had grown up before his very eyes, and he had always looked forward to seeing them marry. He had always tried to guess which king they would wed. And here—the former grand duchesses were now to sleep with their doors open at night.
“If my order is not carried out, I have the authority to shoot them on the spot.” The policeman-revolutionary was enjoying himself.
His time would come. The spirit of the timeless Russian institution would triumph.
Meanwhile the rivers opened up and Alexei began to recuperate.
Olga reported in one of her last letters from Tobolsk:
“Little One is better. But still in bed. As soon as he is better we shall join our people. You, dear heart, understand how hard it is. It’s grown lighter. But there is no green yet at all. The Irtysh is running as far as Strastnoi. Summer weather.… God be with you, my dear.”
At Easter the Tobolsk Soviet learned that during the procession Archbishop Hermogen, having pronounced anathema on the Bolsheviks, intended to take his parishioners to the governor’s house and free Alexei.
(Was this another ruse of the Soviet, to obtain grounds for handing the family over sooner to Ekaterinburg? Or had the pastor indeed decided to do as the dowager empress had written? Just as three hundred years before his namesake had dreamed of driving out the Poles, had he conceived a wish to drive the Bolsheviks out of town?)
The Cheka took steps: during the procession, Chekists intermingled with the parishioners. A heat wave had descended on Tobolsk, much in advance of any expected date. The sun beat down mercilessly, and the parishioners—none of them young—gradually abandoned the procession. As the believers drifted off, the Chekists pressed closer and closer to the archbishop.
Finally they surrounded—and arrested—him.
“Then I took him out to the middle of the river and we tied on iron gratings [from stoves]. I pushed him into the river. I myself saw him go to the bottom.” Thus, according to the Chekist Mikhail Medvedev, Pavel Khokhryakov told him what happened.
Finally the day of departure arrived.
They took the endless Romanov suitcases on the steamer Russia—the same one that had carried them to Tobolsk. Now it was carrying them back—to Tyumen, to the train.
A motley crowd boarded the steamer—the suite, the people, and the guard. They were assigned cabins.
Rodionov’s strange whims continued on the Russia. He shut Alexei and his companion Nagorny into his own cabin for the night.
The doors of the former grand duchesses were opened, however. They were strictly, most strictly, forbidden to lock their doors at night. Guards were posted at their doors. Merry sharpshooters by the girls’ open cabin doors.
Tegleva (from her statement to Inspector Sokolov):
“On the steamer Rodionov forbade the duchesses to lock their cabin at night, but Alexei and Nagorny were locked in from the outside. Nagorny even made a scene: ‘What effrontery! A sick boy! He can’t even go out to the washroom.’ All in all he was valiant with Rodionov and predicted his own fate.”
The Russia sailed merrily on, although the revolutionary soldiers’ behavior rather shocked the old soldier Volkov. The Red Guards fired their rifles at passing birds. They also fired machine guns.
Seagulls fell, machine guns chattered: the lads were having a fine time—freedom! Thus, in the second year after the birth of the revolution, to chaotic firing, past quieted banks, sailed this insane, this crazy steamer called the Russia.
From a letter of Alexei Saltykov in Kiev:
“I read your story about Ekaterinburg [one of my articles in Ogonyok]. I read it in two sittings—my heart was so weary from all those horrors.… I want to inform you, true, I do not know whether all this is so, but you can verify it. In our house there lived an old man, a soldier from the Red Guards, Uncle Lyosha Chuvyrin, or Chuvyrev.… He died in 1962, at the latest. He used to say that as a young man he was on the steamer from Tobolsk with the tsar’s children. He was a sentry when they were moved. He said something that I don’t even know whether it’s worth writing. The grand duchesses had to spend the night in open cabins and at night the sharpshooters got the idea of going in to them. He always told the end to this story differently: either someone forbade them, or they passed out drunk first.… Whether he wasn’t telling everything or was simply bragging, I don’t know.”
Oh well, the young sharpshooters liked to brag. The young Red sharpshooters.
Might this be our “spy”?
I keep thinking about him.
——
Four charming girls in captivity. And this man. Quite young. After all the filth, all the reprisals against the peasants, the cellars of the Cheka, these pure, enchanting young girls. The coquettish Anastasia. She must certainly have liked him. And Lukoyanov? Just as the iron revolutionary-comrade Maratov would be expected—Tatiana, of course, who hated the revolution. The proudest and most beautiful. He tried to run into her in the hall. And her majestic, contemptuous look.
The story developed. They were good, ordinary young girls living in an ordinary girlish world. The strange young carpenter with his student coat and intellectual face, of course he could not have been missed among the jolly, fat-faced sharpshooters. Anastasia, “good, marvelous Tiutka,” teased her older sister for being sympathetic to the “horrible revolutionary.”
He made a board for Alexei (planing it neatly), which was put on the sick boy’s bed. Alexei ate, read, and wrote at this board, using it as a table.
They would take this board to Ekaterinburg, and it would remain standing in the room when the boy was gone.
The “spy.” No, no, he had carried out his mission. He had not let himself go. For him they remained “the tyrant’s daughters.” He conquered himself!
They sailed away from Tobolsk on this insane steamer with the Red Guards firing at birds, with the bleeding heir. With the suite, which was already awaited at the Ekaterinburg Cheka. Oh, our bitter, bitter revolution. On the ship Lukoyanov overheard the sharpshooters from the detachment agreeing to make mischief with the tsar’s daughters. What did he care about a tyrant’s daughters when thousands of soldiers, torn away once from hearth and home, were being drained of their male strength and daily committing terrible excesses? Nonetheless, at the last moment he could not resist: he ordered Rodionov to forbid the sharpshooters. He closed the cabin door for the night.
THE END OF THE TSAR’S SUITE
In Tyumen a special train awaited them. The girls, Alexei, his companion Nagorny, former Adjutant General Tatishchev, the old court reader Schneider, and the lady-in-waiting Countess Gendrikova, were put in a second-class car.
All the rest—the tutors Gilliard and Gibbes; the tsar’s lackey Trupp; the parlormaid Tutelberg; Countess Buxhoeveden; the nurse Tegleva and her helper Ersberg; the cook Kharitonov; the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev, Alexei’s friend; and others—in a fourth-class car. The train arrived in Ekaterinburg on the night of May 21–22.
The train immediately moved onto a siding. It was drizzling, and the lamps barely shone.
Nicholas’s diary:
“9 [22] May. We still do not know where the children are or when they shall arrive? Tiresome uncertainty….
“10 [23] May. This morning for an hour they announced first that the children were a few hours from town, then that they had arrived at the station, and finally, that they had arrived at the house, although their train had been here since 2 in the morning.”
In the morning droshkies were brought up to the train. Those sitting in fourth class were forbidden to get out. Gilliard and Volkov watched out the window.
The grand duchesses themselves dragged their suitcases through the drizzling rain, their feet swallowed up by the mud. Tatiana brought up the rear, making sure no one dropped behind. She truly felt like the eldest, dragging her two suitcases and her little dog.
Then Nagorny quickly bore the heir past the train car to the droshky. He wanted to go help the duchesses carry their suitcases, but he was pushed back: they must carry them themselves! Nagorny could not restrain himself and said something. Another mistake for the former sailor: the new authority did not brook insult. The authority was nervous. And touchy. The only payment recognized now was a life, which is what people paid for an incautious word, too. It may have been Upper Isetsk Commissar Peter Ermakov himself whom he replied to. In any event, within a few days poor Nagorny would be taken away.
In the 1930s, by a Pioneer campfire, the former commissar, Comrade Peter Ermakov, would tell the young Pioneers how in the Cheka he had shot “a tsarist lackey—the former heir’s companion.”
Nicholas’s diary:
“10 [23] May [continued].… Great joy to see them again and embrace them after four weeks of separation and uncertainty. No end to the mutual questions and answers, the poor things endured much moral suffering in Tobolsk and during their three-day journey.”
While Nicholas was greeting his children, his people and suite were led out of the train cars—Tatishchev, Countess Gendrikova, Volkov, Sednev, Kharitonov, the lady-in-waiting, the nurses, and so on—and put into droshkies.
Volkov later recounted:
“Rodionov walked up to the car: ‘Get out. We’re going now.’
“I got out, grabbing a large tin of jam, but they told me to leave the tin behind. I never did get that tin.” He survived so much—and forgot it all! But he did not forget that tin of jam.
The droshkies set out. In the first sat the head of the Red Urals himself, Alexander Beloborodov.
The droshkies drove through Ekaterinburg.
But what about Volkov?
The old servant outlived his masters: shortly afterward he was moved from one prison to another. When the Whites took Ekaterinburg, he was already in a prison in Perm.
One day he was called into the prison office with his things. There he saw his old acquaintances from Tsarskoe Selo—the young Countess Gendrikova and the old lady Schneider. They made up a group of eleven people—all “formers”—and they were led away from that prison and told they were being taken to a transfer prison and then to Moscow.
Oh that “to Moscow.” We shall see more than once what that meant.
They walked for a long time, and old Schneider could barely move her feet. She was carrying a handbasket, which Volkov took from her. In it were two wooden spoons and some bits of bread—the entire worldly goods of the teacher of two empresses.
They passed through the town and came out onto a highway. Their escorts became very polite and offered to help carry suitcases. It was already nighttime, and obviously they had already been thinking ahead—they did not want to be splitting up the loot in the darkness. That was when Volkov understood. He made a leap into the darkness and ran. Lazy shots rang out in pursuit, but he ran and ran … and got away, the old soldier Volkov.
His acquaintances from Tsarskoe Selo—young Countess Gendrikova and the old court reader Ekaterina Schneider—were destroyed. The Whites later found their corpses. The enchanting Nastenka had a crushed skull—she had been struck with a rifle butt. They had not wanted to waste a bullet.
Nicholas’s diary:
“10 [23] May [continued].… Of all those who arrived they only let the cook Kharitonov and Sednev go. We waited until night for them to bring the beds and necessary things from the station.… The girls had to sleep on the floor. Alexei spent the night on Marie’s cot, in the evening he had bruised his knee, as if on purpose, and suffered terribly all night.”
Thus on his first day in the Ipatiev house the boy was taken to his bed. He would not get up until his very last.
Meanwhile, Gilliard, Gibbes, Baroness Buxhoeveden, and Liza Ersberg spent the night in the train car on a siding. Thousands of homeless gathered here in heated cargo vans. Why were they spared? Some were saved by their German surnames. After all, there was the Treaty of Brest with the Germans. Others—Gilliard and Gibbes—were also foreign born.
But why did they spare Tegleva?
She was on fond terms with the Swiss Gilliard, and evidently whoever spared her knew that. Yes, I think this is again our “spy.” Naturally, knowing French, he must have made friends in Tobolsk with the talkative Swiss. So he decided not to break up the couple. But enough of conjectures.
In a heated cargo van, amid thousands of sacks, in a mass of humanity, were these remnants of the court.
The strange Gilliard, loyal to the Russian tsar, kept trying to obtain permission to return to the family. But they repeated: “Your services are no longer needed.” Gilliard appealed to the English consul, who explained that for the good of all those arrested it was better not to attempt anything. The favorite explanation of foreigners when they are afraid to intervene in Russian affairs.
At night a locomotive was coupled to their van, and the car with the court remnants was pulled out of Ekaterinburg to Tyumen. The Ekaterinburg Cheka was toying with them. After the Whites freed him, Gilliard would return to Switzerland, where he would marry Tegleva.
THE DARK GENTLEMAN
Nicholas’s diary:
“12 [25] May.… The children sorted out some of their things after an incredibly lengthy inspection in the commandant’s room.”
So the family had arrived. As had the “medicines.”
The jewels were in cases. They were also on the hands, ears, and necks of the Romanov women. Jewels “created by the people’s labor, sweat, and blood.” Now they had only to be taken away and put back into the hands of the people. From that moment events began to speed up.
Nicholas’s diary:
“13 [26] May. We slept well, except Alexei, whose pains continued.… Like every day of late. V. Derevenko came to examine Alexei. Today he was accompanied by a dark gentleman, whom we identified as a doctor.”
The “dark gentleman” who appeared that day in the family’s room and whom they “identified as a doctor” was the Chekist Comrade Yakov Yurovsky.
“Let us drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand”—this was a slogan at the Solovetsky labor camp.
Subsequently, in attempting to explain the inhuman event in the half-cellar of the Ipatiev house, some would brand Yurovsky and his comrades murderers and sadists. Others would see in the execution of the family the Jews’ blood revenge against the Orthodox tsar (to the revenge of Goloshchekin and Yurovsky they would add that of other purely Russian names). Indeed, it was easier to explain what went on that way. Revenge for the brutal pogroms and daily humiliation!
Had it had been like that then, as horrible as it is to write, there would at least have been something in it that the human mind could understand.
But it was not.
“Our family suffered less from the constant hunger than from my father’s religious fanaticism.
“… On holidays and regular days the children were forced to pray, and it is not surprising that my first active protest was against religious and nationalistic traditions. I came to hate God and prayer as I hated poverty and the bosses.” This is what Yurovsky would write in his last letter, as he lay dying in the Kremlin hospital.
Yes, he came to hate the religion of his fathers and their God.
Yurovsky and Goloshchekin rejected their Jewishness at an early age, and they served a completely different people. This people also lived all over the world. They were called the worldwide proletariat. The people of Yurovsky, Nikulin, Goloshchekin, Beloborodov, the Latvian Berzin.… “The world must live without a Russia, without a Latvia, as one human community,” their poet Vladimir Mayakovsky proudly wrote.
The party to which they belonged promised to confirm the mastery of this people all over the land. Then mankind’s long-awaited happiness would come to pass.
This could happen, however, only through harsh struggle. They called blood and violence the “midwife of history.”
Once the nineteenth-century revolutionaries Nechaev and Tkachev had discussed how many people from the old society would have to be destroyed to create a happy future. They came to the conclusion that they should be thinking about how many to “leave.”
“The method of sorting out Communist humanity from the material of the capitalist era” (Bolshevik leader Bukharin). So they took up this work of sorting. Out of human material.
Trotsky: “We must put an end once and for all to the Papish-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.”
They did. Inexorable class hatred took possession of their souls.
“In your investigation do not look for material or proof that the accused acted in word and deed against Soviet power. The first question is … Which class does he belong to? … Herein lie the idea and essence of Red terror” (M. Latsis, Cheka board member, in the November 1, 1918, issue of Red Terror).
The murder of the Romanovs, who symbolized the overthrown classes, was to become a private declaration of the Red terror. Of worldwide class war.
“At least a hundred Romanovs must have their heads chopped off in order to unlearn their descendants of crimes” (Lenin). That is why the tsar and his family were doomed the moment they arrived at the Ekaterinburg station.
Yakov Yurovsky in 1918: a high-cheekboned face on a short neck; important, unhurried speech; a black leather jacket, black beard, black hair—he really was the “dark gentleman.” He evidently had already learned from the “spy” that Nicholas was keeping a diary in the old style. That was why he came to the door on the thirteenth “old style.” He knew that the mystic tsar noted omens. He appeared before him, the “dark gentleman” did, on that unlucky day like an ominous augury. Like advancing vengeance. He went to see him in the guise of a physician. As a medic, it was easy for him to play that role. Even Derevenko, a doctor, believed it and would later say how professionally he had examined the heir’s leg. In fact, this was more of the same revolutionary symbolism. They were healing this world with revolvers. Carrying out the great mission bequeathed to them in the name of the future by their teacher Marx: “Hasten the agony of the outlived classes.” In the name of this bright future, the tsar’s family had to die.
They began to prepare the Romanovs for the end.
“14 [27] May.… The guard under our window shot at our house when he thought someone was moving by the window after 10 at night. In my opinion he was just fooling around with his rifle the way guards always do.”
I am leafing through a big black notebook in the archive. This is the watch journal: “June 5 at post no. 9 guard Dobrynin fired accidentally, having left off the safety. The bullet went through the ceiling and stuck without causing any damage.
“8 June. Due to the incaution of the guard on duty a bomb exploded. No victims or injuries.”
The comrades handled their weapons artlessly and freely. So the tsar was correct in his entry.
But the guard’s “fooling around” immediately turned into a story about the tsar’s daughters giving someone signals from the windows and a vigilant rifleman immediately shooting at the window. That was how Avdeyev described the incident in his memoirs.
They were making their case.
The valiant Nagorny and the servant Sednev were taken from the house.
“14 [27] May [continued]. After tea Sednev and Nagorny were called in for questioning to the District Soviet.”
At that time, hanging around the Ipatiev house, Gilliard saw Red Army soldiers putting the arrested Nagorny and Sednev into droshkies. They silently exchanged looks but did nothing to betray the Swiss’s presence.
They never came back.
“16 [29] May. Supper at 8 in daylight. Alix went to bed earlier because of migraine. No word about Sednev or Nagorny.”
The Cheka was already at work, combing and weeding out, cutting back the doomed company around the family. To minimize confusion on the decisive night. It was approaching—that night!
They lived their usual life. And kept their diaries.
He: “20 May [2 June]. At 11 o’clock we had vespers. Alexei attended, lying in bed. The weather was magnificent, hot.… It was unbearable to sit that way, locked up, and not be in a position to go out into the garden when you wanted and spend a fine evening outside. The prison regime!”
She: “May 23 (June 5). Wednesday. Get up at 6.30, now at 8.30 by the watch. [That day they changed the clock to the new time.] Glorious morning. Baby did not sleep well. Leg ached probably more because Vlad[imir] Nik[olaevich, Dr. Derevenko] carried him out before the house and put him in my wheeling chair. I sat out with him in the sun … he went to bed as leg ached much for dressing and carrying about. Lunch only brought at 3 o’clock, are putting yet higher planks before all our windows so that not even the top of trees can be seen.”
So, they were “putting yet higher planks before all our windows.” The house was already being readied for something, but what?
At that point Nicholas took to his bed. From the constant sitting in the rooms. He loved his walks, not only because he liked walking. He had hereditary hemorrhoids. They got worse.
He: “24 May [6 June]. All day suffered from the pain of hem[orrhoids], therefore went to bed, since it is more convenient to apply compresses. Alix and Alexei spent half an hour in the fresh air, and we spent an hour after them. The weather was marvelous.”
She: “May 25 [June 7]. Friday. Beautiful weather. Nicholas] stayed in bed all day since he slept poorly last night due to the pains. P—a [these two Latin letters conceal the Russian word for “bottom,” which she modestly shortened to insert in her English text] is better when he lies quietly….
“… Vladimir Nikolaevich did not come today either.”
Dr. Derevenko was no longer allowed to see Alexei.
He: “27 May [9 June]. Finally got up and quit my bed, it was a summer’s day, walked twice. The green is very fine and lush, a pleasant smell.”
Again Nicholas felt something was going on. Something was about to happen.
“28 May [10 June].… Outward relations … have changed lately. Our jailers are trying not to talk to us, as if they did not feel right, and one senses alarm and worry in them! Incomprehensible!”
But beyond the limits of the Ipatiev house, everything was quite comprehensible. In the middle of May there was an uprising against the Bolsheviks by former tsarist war prisoners—the Czech Legion, who were joined by Cossack units. Chelyabinsk fell. Now they were advancing on the capital of the Red Urals.
The town was expecting them. On June 10 there were sinister riots. The night before, June 8–9, a certain Ensign Ardatov and his detachment had gone over to the Whites. Now the chief support of the Ural Soviet in the town was the detachment of Upper Isetsk workers led by Commissar Peter Ermakov. A huge, shouting crowd gathered on Ascension Square. Ermakov and his Isetsk detachment, Yurovsky and his Chekists, and Commissar Goloshchekin had a hard time dispersing the mutinous crowd. They just did not have enough loyal soldiers. Meanwhile, how many Red Guards were guarding the “tyrant and his family.”
He: “31 May [13 June]. This afternoon we were let out into the garden for some reason. Avdeyev came and talked for a long time with E. S. [Botkin], According to him, he and the Regional Soviet are worried about anarchist acts and therefore we may be facing a hasty departure, probably to Moscow. He asked us to prepare for departure. We immediately began to pack, but quietly, so as not to attract attention from the sentry officers, at Avdeyev’s special request. At about 11 at night he returned and said that we would remain another few days. Therefore on the 1st [14th] of June we stayed bivouacked, not unpacking anything. Finally after dinner Avdeyev, slightly tipsy, told Botkin that the anarchists had been captured, the danger had passed, and our departure had been postponed. After all the preparations it was rather tiresome.”
The former tsaritsa wrote obscurely that day:
“May 31 [June 13]. Pray morning. Sunshine.
“12.30 Avd[eyev]no walk.… said to pack up as any moment….
“At night Av[deyev] again … said not before several days.”
——
What a strange story. Not long before, the Ural Soviet had done battle with Moscow, explaining how dangerous it was to transport the Romanovs by rail. Now, frightened by anarchists, the Urals themselves wanted to take the tsar and his family to Moscow. Now—when the Czechs were advancing on the town. When there was an uprising in the town itself, when the land around Ekaterinburg was burning! And all this out of concern for the bloody tyrant?
No, something is not right here. It is hard to believe in this sudden concern on the part of the Uralites. This was a very strange trip for Moscow being planned.
Let us recall a conversation between Commissar Yakovlev and the commander of the Ekaterinburg detachment—Busyatsky—en route to Tobolsk, when the latter suggested to Yakovlev: “During the Romanovs’ trip, en route, stage an attack and kill them.”
Kill them on a trip?
MISHA’S LAST JOURNEY
If only Nicholas had known, when he heard the “concerned” Uralites’ proposal to travel to Moscow, what had happened the previous night. If only he had known the “trip” that had already been taken. He never would, though, not even on the day he died.
On the night of June 12–13, three strangers appeared at a Perm hotel owned by a merchant named Korolev and presented an order from the Cheka to take away Nicholas’s brother Michael and his secretary, Brian Johnson.
When he was sent away from Gatchina, Michael had gone to live in a hotel in Perm, where, as Moscow confirmed several times in letters to the Perm Soviet, he enjoyed “all the rights of a citizen of the republic.”
With him in the hotel were his secretary, the Englishman Brian Johnson, his valet, and his driver (the grand duke was a passionate motorist—witness his daring trip through the Alps with his bride-to-be). But that day he had a very different trip ahead of him. The three strangers went up to the grand duke’s room and when they went back down beside them walked the tall grand duke and his short, fat secretary, who looked like Mr. Pickwick.
The grand duke, the secretary, and their three escorts got into two droshkies and drove away.
All that transpired in the hotel room was recounted to Alexander Volkov by the grand duke’s valet, Chelyshev, when the two were in prison together.
The visitors woke Michael, who did not want to go with them and demanded an important Bolshevik: “I know him, not you.” The one in charge swore and grabbed the former grand duke by the shoulder.
“Oh, you Romanovs! We’re sick and tired of it all!”
After which Michael dressed silently. His valet said: “Your Highness, do not forget to take your medicine.” The visitors swore again and took them away without the medicine.
In the morning the Cheka announced that they had issued no orders and that Michael had been abducted. A telegram went to Petrograd. “Tonight, unidentified men dressed as soldiers abducted Michael Romanov and his secretary Johnson. Searches have yet to yield results. The most energetic measures are being taken.”
Soon after, however, rumors spread that the role of the “unidentified men” had been filled by some very well known people: Myasnikov, who was chairman of the Motovilikha Soviet, and his comrades. They took Michael and his secretary away—and shot them. Their action was proclaimed an act of proletarian vengeance. The rumors were confirmed. The Perm Cheka and local authorities called it “an anarchistic lynching” and firmly distanced themselves from it.
THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE GRAND DUKE’S MURDER
In 1965, in Moscow, in his declining years, a deserving man died, a holder of the Red Banner of Labor: Andrei Vasilievich Markov.
A year before his death, he met with the head of the Perm Party Archives, N. Alikina, who had compiled the biographies of the Perm Bolsheviks, to make known the most glorious deed of his life. Before telling his story the old man showed her an unusually shaped silver watch, resembling a segment of a cut hard-boiled egg. Markov said that the watch had run without repair for nearly fifty years, and then he told her the whole story. Until recently these statements of Markov were kept in classified storage in the Perm Party Archives.
Markov told how the principal organizer of Michael’s murder, Myasnikov, had chosen for his assistants Chief of Police Ivanchenko and him, Markov. But three armed men seemed too few, so they brought in two more, Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov, both workers.
“At about seven in the evening, in two closed phaetons,” recalled Markov, “we set out for Perm. The horses had been furnished us in the Cheka courtyard, so we initiated the chairman of the provincial Cheka, P. Malkov, into the affair. That was where the plan for abducting Michael Romanov was worked out in full.… Malkov stayed at the Cheka, Myasnikov left on foot for the Royal Rooms hotel, and we four—Ivanchenko and Zhuzhgov on the first horse and Kolpashchikov and I on the second—approached the front door of the Royal Rooms at about eleven. Zhuzhgov and Kolpashchikov went into the hotel, and Ivanchenko and I stayed outside in reserve.”
Everything went just as the grand duke’s valet had told Volkov: Michael refused to go with the men, demanding that Cheka Chairman Malkov (the “important Bolshevik”) be telephoned and citing “the decree on my free choice of residence.”
While Michael was defending his rights, the men waiting outside were growing exasperated.
“Armed with a revolver and a bomb, I entered the room, having first cut the telephone line in the hall,” Markov continued. “Michael Romanov was still being stubborn, citing illness, and demanding a doctor and Malkov. Then I ordered him taken as he was. They threw whatever came to hand on him and started to take him away, after which he began to get ready and asked whether he needed to take any things with him. I told him someone else would collect his things. Then he asked to take along at least his personal secretary, Brian Johnson. Since that was in our plans, we consented. Michael Romanov threw on a raincoat. N. V. Zhuzhgov grabbed him by the collar and told him to go outside, which he did. Johnson followed voluntarily. Michael Romanov was put in a phaeton. N. V. Zhuzhgov sat behind the coachman, and V. A. Ivanchenko next to Michael Romanov.”
They bravely grabbed the grand duke by the collar (not the shoulder as the valet had testified, concealing the gentleman’s humiliation)—five armed against three unarmed men. To his death—by the collar!
“We rode as far as the kerosene storehouses,” Markov recounted, “which is 5 versts [3.5 miles] from the village of Motovilikha. We went another verst from the storehouses and turned right into the forest.… We met no one on the road [it was night]. When we had gone 100–120 sazhens [750 feet], Zhuzhgov shouted: ‘Get out.’ I jumped out quickly and demanded that my rider Johnson get out, too. As soon as he got up to get out of the phaeton I shot him in the temple; he swayed and fell. Kolpashchikov fired at Johnson, too, but his bullet stuck in his pistol. Zhuzhgov was doing the same thing, but he only wounded Michael Romanov. Romanov ran toward me with his arms spread open begging to say goodbye to his secretary. Zhuzhgov’s drum got stuck in his revolver [his bullets were homemade]. I had to make the second shot at a rather close distance (about a sazhen) from Michael Romanov’s head and felled him on the spot.
“… We couldn’t bury the corpses since it was growing light quickly and it was so close to the road. We just dragged them together to one side, heaped them with twigs, and returned to Motovilikha. Zhuzhgov and a very reliable policeman went back that night to do the burying.”
Tall, thin Michael, after taking a bullet, his arms spread wide, runs, begging to say goodbye, and in reply—another bullet!
After the murder Markov took the watch off the murdered Johnson, “a souvenir,” as he explained to Alikina. We will have cause to recall this tradition of murderers: taking watches off the slain.
Alikina recorded a most interesting detail at the end of the conversation. “Andrei Vasilievich Markov said at the end that after the execution of Michael Romanov he went to Moscow. With the help of Sverdlov he was received by Lenin, whom he told about the event.”
Such was the “lynching” in which the leaders of the local Cheka, the police, and the head of one of the Soviets participated. And about which they went with pride to tell the head of state.
WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED?
As they put an end to Michael, the unsuspecting family was feverishly preparing for the trip to Moscow.
We now know how Michael’s individual trip went. We can also imagine how the group trip of Nicholas and his family proceeded.
——
A month later, according to the scenario worked out in Ekaterinburg, a group trip for some other Romanovs would be carried out. Alix’s sister Ella, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, the sons of Grand Duke Konstantin—Ioann, Igor, and Konstantin—young Prince Oleg Paley, and their servants had all been held since May on the outskirts of Alapaevsk.
On July 18 a local cook would see them all get into wagons very calmly with the Red Guards: they too had been told they were going on a trip—to a place of safety.
The wagons would stop by a nameless mine shaft not far from Alapaevsk, and the Red Guards would start beating the captives with their rifle butts. The old grand duchess, too. Nicky’s childhood playmate and Kschessinska’s admirer, Sergei Mikhailovich, naturally would resist. For which he would get a bullet, the old dandy. He alone would be thrown into the mine dead; the others would still be alive. Grenades would be tossed in, brush and fallen branches heaped on, and all of it set afire. For a long time local residents—this is not a pretty legend—would hear the singing of prayers from underground. Ella would be dying in agony but would have strength for more than prayer. In the dark of the mine, gasping from the smoke, the crippled grand duchess crawled to the dying Ioann and bandaged his smashed head. To the end she fulfilled the vows of the Convent of Martha and Mary.
When the Whites would take Alapaevsk later that summer, they would find these bodies in the strewn mine. An examination of the corpses would reveal the trip’s denouement. As in Michael’s case, the Cheka in Alapaevsk staged the slain Romanovs’ escape.
A telegram dated July 19, 1918, to the Sovnarkom, Moscow, from Alapaevsk: “Reporting that in Alapaevsk I have learned of an assault on the quarters where the former Romanov princes were being kept and the removal of such. My brief inquiry and examination at the scene has shown that … the attackers broke into the building, freed all the Romanovs and servants, and took them away.… Examination of the building has shown the Romanovs’ things had been packed and stowed.… I assume that the attack and flight had been previously planned. Political Representative Kobelyanko.”
This is what awaited the family on their trip.
The same scenario lay at the base of all the Romanov murders, and all of them contained an element of provocation.
Yes, Russia’s revolutionaries had grown up with the secret police’s provocations, and when they conquered they adopted the familiar methods. The immortal, all-Russian institution—the secret police—was resurrected then and there, like a phoenix from the ashes. Now it was called the Cheka. It would become more powerful than its creators. And it would kill them. In 1917 the revolutionaries destroyed the secret police, and in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the secret police would destroy the revolutionaries.
So, the general action was planned for June 13–14: the night of the long knives, the destruction of both tsarist brothers and the annihilation of the tsar’s entire family at one fell swoop.
But only Michael’s murder was accomplished.
In the heat of preparations, Avdeyev suddenly arrived and the family’s trip was postponed.
What had happened?
Most likely carrying out the executions had been a local decision made by the ferocious Ural Bolsheviks. When they conceived of destroying the Romanovs, they were on their own. To them Moscow was a distant myth.
The decision, naturally, had been made by the head of the Ural government—Beloborodov. Subsequently Chekists captured by White Guards would corroborate this fact, stating that the Romanovs in Alapaevsk had been destroyed in response to a telegram from Ekaterinburg over the signatures of Beloborodov and his assistant Safarov. But there was one more person without whom Beloborodov could not have acted: the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, the military commissar of the Urals, Comrade Filipp Goloshchekin.
Beloborodov was hot-headed, young, and fierce. Goloshchekin was much older and more circumspect. As military commissar he was directly involved in fighting the White Army. When the Bolsheviks had conceived of their proletarian vengeance—the annihilation of the Romanovs—the military situation did not yet threaten irrevocable catastrophe. Now Commissar Goloshchekin knew for certain that Ekaterinburg would fall to the White forces. Soon they would have to flee, and the only place for them to go was Moscow. If yesterday they had treated the capital with mocking disdain, today it was their only island of salvation. No, without Moscow, without the permission of Lenin and his old friend Sverdlov, nothing important could be contemplated. The elimination of the tsar’s family—it was too dangerous to undertake something like that now.
At the last moment, Goloshchekin evidently rescinded his decision to proceed with the murders. He decided first to obtain Moscow’s consent.
Meanwhile he let go a trial balloon: to see how Moscow would react to Michael’s destruction.
The organizer of Michael’s murder, Myasnikov, did not want to be a guinea pig. That was why he disappeared the moment they brought Michael out of the hotel. According to Markov’s statements, Myasnikov was not involved in the actual murder at all. A shrewd man, Myasnikov. During the first postrevolutionary years he took part in the workers’ opposition and did battle with Lenin himself. When the persecutions of the workers’ opposition began in 1921–22, he managed to flee abroad and lived happily in Paris, where he forgot all about our bitter revolution. In vain. Just as he had once taken Michael away by force, so he too would be abducted by Stalin’s bold Chekists, who brought the poor forgetful man back to his homeland. And just as Michael had once been shot without trial, like a dog, so too would Myasnikov.
Or else it had all been conceived in Moscow—how to destroy both pretenders to the Russian throne—and now, when the days of Bolshevik power seemed numbered, the Central Committee panicked and decided to limit themselves to Michael and see how the world would react. They could leave the family for now, a trump card in possible negotiations with the Allied powers.
One way or another, the plan to kill the family was postponed. For now the Ural leaders decided to take the tried and true path.
Once again the days dragged on.
Nicholas’s diary:
“3 [16] June.… All week have been reading and today finished The History of Emperor Paul the First by Schiller [Schilder]—very interesting.”
What was he thinking about as he read the history of his unlucky ancestor? About his mother’s prophecy back in 1916, when he became commander-in-chief, that he would repeat Paul Is story? Or was he simply reading a book about a past life that had vanished so very quickly? As if there had always been this pitiful house and these long, boring, maddeningly hot days.
“5 [18] June. Dear Anastasia has turned 17. The heat outside and inside was terrific.… The girls are learning how to cook from Kharitonov and in the evenings they knead flour and in the morning bake the bread. Not bad!”