Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (10 page)

As they retired to bed that night, the Tsar and Tsaritsa could have had no inkling of the seething political conflicts going on around them, the perilous way of life now being endured by the citizens of Ekaterinburg, nor the machinations of the Moscow and Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks as to their ultimate fate. Their world now was far too small; all that was left to them was the meticulous daily habit of writing their diaries. But what was there to say about Thursday 4 July 1918? Only the narrow certainties of eleven lives lived within five increasingly claustrophobic rooms: the ritual of meals, rest, books, what the weather was like and the temperature outside. Writing their daily entries was, for Nicholas and Alexandra, a last faint attempt to retain a sense of order and familiarity in a world gone mad, from which they were now totally divorced.

Nevertheless, the ever-circumspect Nicholas recorded the arrival of Yurovsky and his satisfaction with the new commandant’s meticulous inspection of the family’s jewellery. For Alexandra, that day’s events were reduced to a few bald, scribbled sentences. Hers could hardly be called a diary. She no longer dared keep such a record of intimate thoughts and feelings, having destroyed her own extensive ones before leaving the Alexander Palace, along with some of her most precious letters, from her
father and from her grandmother, Queen Victoria. But old habits die hard and she still felt compelled to keep some kind of aide-memoire of the day’s events. Only now it was one in which physical pain and exhaustion were the constants in an increasingly circumscribed existence.

‘Very hot, went early to bed as awfully tired & heart ached more’ was how she summarised that day. But there is one thing strangely absent from her diary as well as that of her husband. The one thing each and every member of that close-knit family must have held in their hearts but kept resolutely locked away in their minds. It had for months gnawed away at them but it was too awful to utter. Now, as the weary days of captivity continued, and with them came increasing uncertainty, fear must have been in all their minds. In the first months of house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo Alexandra had talked of how ‘each buries the anguish inside’. The family had long since learned stoicism in sickness and adversity; throughout those July days fear was to be the family’s constant companion – its presence forever unspoken.

FRIDAY 5 JULY 1918

O
n Friday 5 July the editorial offices of London’s newspapers were buzzing with the latest news from the Exchange Telegraph in Copenhagen. Tsar Nicholas II – whose assassination had already been falsely reported on several occasions in late June – had, on the good authority of the Swedish Communist newspaper
Politiken
, now definitely been murdered by the Bolsheviks. Word no doubt filtered back to King George, but like most of his royal relatives he was by now in denial about the real dangers his cousins in Russia faced, with so much unsubstantiated rumour and counter-rumour flying around.

Throughout the Western press an assortment of lurid and highly fanciful tales about the Romanov family’s life in custody – ranging from the derisive and dismissive to the more compassionate – had been fuelling newspaper stories since the turn of the year. A communiqué from the Pacific on 28 January by an American academic, Professor Edward A. Ross, had reported in all seriousness, after five months’ supposed observation of the Bolshevik cause in Russia, that such was the power of the new government’s pacifist Socialist message that the Tsar’s eldest daughters Tatiana and Olga were said to have espoused the Bolshevik cause and had attended radical meetings in Tobolsk. Another paper countered this claim, alleging that Tatiana was in fact now living in the USA, having fled there from Tobolsk with ‘$350,000 worth’ of the Tsaritsa’s jewels, and that she planned to give lectures on Russia and open a school in the United States.

Erstwhile friends, ministers and retainers of the Romanovs, many of them fleeing into exile abroad, all seemed anxious to report their own observations on the Imperial Family. An unnamed former guard at Tobolsk told of the Tsar’s ‘melancholy’ life there – of the outward calm and dignity that crumpled when he thought no one was observing him. At such times the former monarch would walk with bowed head, his face filled with painful dejection. When his children went outside to play he
would stand and watch them at a window, his eyes full of tears. In April the
Washington Post
had published the first of a long serialisation that would go on till August – ‘The Confessions of the Former Czarina of Russia’ – regaling its readers for weeks with the fictionalised and highly salacious ‘amazing personal history of Alexandra Fedorovna . . . compiled by Count Paul Vassili, who predicted the fall of the Romanoff Dynasty almost four years ago’ and who delighted in telling readers that Alexandra was a product of the ‘hereditary madness’ of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt. Twenty-two members of the family had been confined to lunatic asylums over the last 100 years. Count Paul, it turns out, was none other than the prolific émigrée adventuress Princess Catherine Radziwill, a woman who had turned Romanov-baiting into a personal cottage industry.

Despite the repeated denials from Moscow of this scandal-mongering by the ‘capitalist press’, rumours in the West about the Tsar’s execution or even escape from Russia persisted. The patent unreliability of witnesses who spread the rumours – first of execution, then of escape – clearly played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as part of a general softening-up process of public opinion to the idea of the Romanovs’ eventual deaths. As early as January the
Washington Post
had reported that Nicholas and the children had escaped from Tobolsk, abandoning the now hopelessly insane Alexandra to a mental asylum in the city. Again, in late June the papers were full of stories from Russia that Nicholas had been shot during a vehement dispute with his guards on a special train taking him to Moscow. The former Tsar, reported Russia correspondent Herman Bernstein to
Washington Post
readers, was soon to face trial for despotism and violation of the people’s rights, followed by public execution to appease the starving and exhausted Russian masses. There was rumour too that the Tsarevich had died not long after his removal from Tobolsk. And now the latest rumour was that Nicholas along with his wife Alexandra and one of their children, the Grand Duchess Tatiana, had been murdered, this latest piece of fantasy coming from a priest at Tsarskoe Selo, who had already sung prayers for the dead to a weeping congregation. One New York paper even went so far as to bring out a premature obituary, which reflected the general lack of sympathy for the Tsar in the West, where a war still raged, now in its fourth devastating year, and he had already been virtually forgotten. The Tsar’s assassination, it claimed, had ‘long seemed a matter of course’. Nicholas had been ‘virtually a helpless figurehead born into outworn institutions with the shaping of which he had nothing to do and for the reform of which he was totally incapable’. Russia’s former ruler, it would seem, was already an irrelevance.

In Ekaterinburg, of course, the Tsar and his family were still very much alive. Indeed their lives could not have been more uneventful. The Romanovs had ‘spent the day as usual’, as the Tsaritsa noted in an unusually short entry in her diary, recording that the only event had been the now daily inspection of their valuables by Yurovsky. A jolly good thing as far as Nicholas was concerned; it meant that Yurovsky and his subordinate Nikulin had begun to understand what kind of people had been ‘surrounding and protecting’ the family whilst simultaneously stealing from them. In the ever narrowing routine of his daily life, Nicholas found a welcome displacement activity in worry about his few remaining possessions.

He had now turned 50, having noted in his diary with an air of tired surprise the arrival of his half-century on 19 May. It had never been an auspicious day, for he had been born on the feast day of St Job, the silent, patient sufferer. ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born’ was the lament that echoed through this biblical tale of sorrow, and many Russians, with their propensity for reading signs and symbols into everything, saw this as ominous. Not the least among them was Nicholas himself. Sooner or later, as he accepted, God would put him to the test, and like Job he would be called upon to endure calamities without reproach, trusting only to Divine Providence. Conforming to Job’s biblical archetype of unquestioning self-sacrifice, Nicholas had seemed, without any resistance to fate, to grow into the same qualities as obedient son, pious tsar and dutiful husband. Such profound mysticism was, from the beginning, the hallmark of his sense of himself as tsar, of his relationship with his people, and of his duty – to them, to his country, and to God. He grew up in the sincere belief that he could redeem the sins of Russia through his own humiliation and suffering, on his personal road to Golgotha. A greater power was controlling his destiny and resistance was futile. It was this knowledge that had enabled him so easily to give up the throne and to endure the monotony of his life in captivity. Soon there would be an end to it all, as he so often told himself,
kak Gospodu ugodno budet
– according to God’s will.

The physical and spiritual weariness that overwhelmed him now at the age of 50 had finally divested the Tsar of his one great quality. For virtually everyone who ever met Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov said that he had the finest, kindest, most velvety blue eyes they had ever seen. It was an inheritance from his mother’s Danish side of the family. But behind those gently smiling, sensitive eyes, which every now and then drooped as he spoke, as though to block out the intimate gaze of others, lay a whole hidden world – a lifetime’s thoughts and anxieties forever deeply repressed. For all his obvious, superficial charm and modesty,
there was no guessing at the true nature of the Tsar’s reticent personality. It was perhaps only his wife who ever saw what lay beyond – an inner, profoundly melancholic loneliness. But even she found it hard at times to overcome her husband’s pathological reticence. And beautiful though they were, Nicholas’s eyes also had a strange, blank impassiveness about them. They reflected nothing back of the inner man, and now they were greatly changed. Even at Tsarskoe Selo the previous year, as a famous photograph of Nicholas in captivity had testified, the bags underneath them were very pronounced, the shadows darker too. Those who saw the Tsar before he was taken away to Tobolsk said that his eyes seemed sunken. The soft, clear light remarked on by so many so often had now departed, leaving the whites tinged with yellow.

Nicholas’s spiritual and mental decline had begun with Russia’s ill-judged and catastrophic war against Japan in 1904, a year that would be his
annus horribilis
, for it also marked the terrible discovery that his new-born and much longed-for son and heir had the incurable condition of haemophilia. The strain of knowing that Alexey could at any time have a fatal attack, coupled with the 1905 revolution and the war years after 1914, had worn him out. When the moment came, he had been glad to abdicate. Shortly before, he had suffered a painful coronary occlusion whilst standing during a service in church, the first sign of the stress that was wearing his body down. But then, ironically, during the nine months at Tobolsk, when he had worked hard outdoors chopping wood and clearing snow with an indefatigable energy that everyone marvelled at, Nicholas had briefly become healthier and fitter than in a long time.

But that was all gone now and with it any hopes of a quiet life in exile. His face bore the indelible signs of fatigue and listlessness, broken only by his enduringly sad, wistful smile. Nicholas now had a large bald patch; his hair was receding and going grey at the temples. His distinctive reddish-brown beard was going grey too. His teeth were rotten and long neglected and must have caused him pain, their decay, combined with his heavy smoking, bringing severe halitosis too. Nicholas looked prematurely aged, with hollow cheeks, his face weathered and wrinkled, coarsened to a dark reddish brown from so much exposure to the sun. His clothes too were worn and patched. He might no longer be tsar or head of the army but he persisted in wearing his
gimnasterka
– a khaki soldier’s shirt and officer’s belt fastened by a buckle round his waist. But his boots were worn and down at heel. After two months of close confinement at Ekaterinburg he was spent – both physically and mentally.

For months now he had calmly and knowingly been on the edge of the abyss. But he never complained, even in his diary. His own fate and
that of his family was in the hands of God. Several observers have remarked that Nicholas at this time demonstrated a puzzling lack of interest in what was going on around him. Commissar Yakovlev had noted during the journey from Tobolsk that there were only three things that preoccupied the Tsar: ‘his family, the weather, and food’. The rest of the world – power, politics, affairs of state – was past history and excised from his brain.

Such necessary and onerous preoccupations had, for Nicholas, been imposed as an accident of birth, and in that lay his tragedy. He had never wanted to be tsar and had been in a state of perpetual denial at the prospect until the moment the role was thrust upon him. As a boy he had had a conventional, authoritarian upbringing at home with tutors, growing up in awe of his great bear of a father, Alexander III, and his charming but controlling mother, Maria Fedorovna. Alexander was disappointed in Nicholas’s smallness of stature – he was only 5′ 7″ and had narrow shoulders and short, stocky legs. He derided his son’s weakness, his feminine laugh and handwriting, referring to him as a
devchonka
– ‘a bit of a girl’ – capable of nothing other than ‘infantile judgements’ with regard to affairs of state and not one to be entrusted with them.

Nicholas met his father’s criticisms, and both parents’ patent disappointment in him as heir to the throne, with what would become his familiar passiveness and diffidence. His natural timidity grew in the face of Alexander’s charisma and his mother’s smothering indulgence. Knuckling down to his studies of mathematics, history, geography and chemistry, he displayed a natural flair for languages, becoming fluent in English, French and German. He certainly was not without intellectual gifts and the ability to read – fast – and absorb facts and issues very quickly, but he lacked any natural curiosity about most of the subjects he was obliged to tackle. His youthful diary demonstrates limited powers of self-expression and empathy and a chilling lack of interest in anything other than the most bourgeois, personal and domestic trifles. Political or cultural observations are almost entirely absent. But his photographic memory for names, faces, facts, dates was something that put him in good stead for the mountains of official documents with which he would have to deal as tsar, and it enabled him to read and digest endless volumes of the classic works of Russian fiction and history, including his favourite historians Karamzin and Solovev. For years, the Imperial Librarian had provided the Tsar monthly with 20 of the best books from all countries, military history being a particular favourite.