ON 15 JULY 1891, the thirteen-year-old Yakov Yurovsky was part of the crowd lining the main street of Tomsk, one of the oldest settlements in Siberia, to welcome the visiting twenty-three-year-old Prince Nicholas, oldest son of the House of Romanov, Russia’s royal family. ‘I remember how handsome he was, with his neat brown beard; as he drew level he nodded and waved back at me,’ Yurovsky recalled. In 1918, Yurovsky would be responsible for murdering Nicholas and his family.
By 1897, Yurovsky was a dedicated Communist revolutionary and the hardline agitator who organized Tomsk’s first general labour strike, a short-lived fiasco for which he was banished from the city. Casting his lot to fate, Yurovsky closed his eyes and stuck a pin in a map to choose his new home, landing on Yekaterinburg, a city in the eastern Urals. By coincidence, this would also be the city in which the revolutionary Russian Red Army would soon be holding Tsar Nicholas and the Romanov family captive in the Ipatiev House, a deserted mansion they grimly code-named the ‘House of Special Purpose’.
At about the same time as Yurovsky was being appointed Yekaterinburg’s local commissar in 1917, Vladimir Lenin was being returned to Russia by the Germans to take control of the Red Revolution. The pro-Romanov White Army was still a viable force and, in the summer of 1918, was advancing on Yekaterinburg. The prospect of the Whites releasing the Romanovs to serve as figureheads for a counter-revolution was unthinkable; they had to die. Knowing this day would come sooner or later, Lenin had already identified Yurovsky as the perfect assassin; not only was he Red through and through but the troops under his command were Hungarian mercenaries and thus far less likely than any Russian contingent to turn squeamish over gunning down the Russian royal family. Besides, Lenin reasoned, if there was a domestic or international uproar over the killings he could always blame it on a bunch of foreigners over whom he had no control.
Taking charge of the Ipatiev House, Yurovsky told the Romanovs they were to be moved further from the fighting and that they should make ready but, when they presented themselves for transport on the night of 16–17 July 1918, they were met by a hail of gunfire. Yurovsky’s unsettlingly detailed report makes for grim reading, especially the account of the deaths of the princesses who, despite being shot several times, seemed unscathed. It transpired they had so much gold wire wound about their bodies and so many jewels sewn into their dresses that they were virtually bulletproof, and eventually bayonets had to be rammed through their eye sockets. But why did it have to come to that? Why did George V refuse his cousin and family sanctuary in the United Kingdom?
Before the Bolsheviks and the Red Army had secured total power, quite a few countries had been approached as possible refuges but only Britain, initially, agreed. Although Labour Prime Minister David Lloyd George openly applauded the upheaval in Russia he assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that his king, George V, as cousin and close friend of the Tsar, would be happy for the family to be offered sanctuary. But George, or rather his Queen Consort, Mary, put her foot down. Gore Vidal, a close friend of both Princess Margaret and the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated Edward VIII, recalled in his memoirs a conversation he had with the latter in 1952 at the Capri villa of the Countess Mona von Bismarck. Vidal was informed by the Duke that when breakfasting with his parents the morning after Lloyd George had, off his own bat, offered to send a British warship to collect the Romanovs, an aide interrupted them with a note asking royal approval for the venture. George read it before passing it to Mary who uttered a most emphatic ‘No.’ This was repeated by George as he handed the note back to the aide for him to take the reply to the Prime Minister.
Mary’s reasons for her blunt refusal of sanctuary focused on the fact that the Easter Rising in Ireland was still fresh in everybody’s minds and that socialism, with its star on the rise in Britain, might be further stirred up by the Crown giving house room to the last of the autocrats and his family, who were proving such a thorn in the side of the great socialist uprising in Russia. Could this not trigger revolution in the UK? But there may have been other, more petty reasons, at the heart of Mary’s decision to reject the Romanovs. Of lower station than others in the British and international royal elite and disliked by the British people for her German accent, Mary of Teck had long carried a chip on her shoulder, especially for Alexandra, Empress of Russia, who, rightly or wrongly, she felt sure took delight in slighting and demeaning her. To be fair, at the time of Mary’s high-handed rejection of her own prime minister’s proposed rescue venture, the Romanovs were simply confined to the palace at Tsarskoe Selo by the interim Kerensky government. The Bolsheviks were not yet in power so none could have then imagined what was to befall them – but Mary’s spite, if indeed that’s what it was, certainly nudged the Romanovs a lot closer to Lenin’s House of Special Purpose.
THE ROMANOVS
Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov were the authors of their own downfall. Neither were terribly bright, and the calamitous ineptitude of their rule was little improved by their addictions to barbiturates, opium and cocaine, nor by their obsession with the occult, which brought them under the malevolent control of Rasputin, a man seen by many as a religious charlatan with dangerous influence over the Tsar and his family. During the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II assumed control of the Russian Army, a move welcomed only by the Germans, relieved that command had not been delegated to generals who actually knew what they were doing. His absence left his wife Alexandra to run the country into the ground; when the people rioted in starvation she unleashed brigades of Cossack cavalry, which did nothing to improve her standing with the people. The Cossacks, however, mutinied to join those they were meant to attack, heralding the end of the Romanov dynasty as other military units followed the Cossack lead to fuel the Russian Revolution. In March 1917, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, bringing three centuries of Romanov rule to an end.
Shortly after, George seems to have changed his mind and asked Lloyd George to reinstate his offer to extract the Romanovs, but by that time the Prime Minister had himself executed a volte-face on the matter. He was by then openly praising the Russian revolutionaries in parliament and trying to cement close relationships with the new Russian leaders; it no longer seemed sensible to offer refuge to the Romanovs. Once branded a ‘dangerous revolutionary socialist’ by Edward VII, Lloyd George’s initial enthusiasm to bring the Romanovs to Britain seems to have darkly mirrored the initial stance of George and Mary in that he too thought their presence might bring about a socialist revolution in the UK which, unlike the royal couple, he would have gleefully welcomed. Besides, he argued, with the Bolsheviks by then in undisputed power, the sending of a British warship into their territorial waters was out of the question. So, the Romanovs were abandoned to their fate.