Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (17 page)

During all their years largely closeted from the world at the Alexander Palace, the Romanov sisters had been trapped in a kind of time warp, but the war years and an increasing responsibility for their mother, as well as their sick brother, after Nicholas had left for the Front in August 1915, had brought with them a sudden and cruel awakening into the real world. Now, one of the girls always slept with their mother in her room – Mama was not strong, they could not leave her alone. And then at Mama’s instigation ‘the big pair’, Olga and Tatiana, had undertaken nurses’ training, whilst ‘the little pair’ had been recruited into charitable work and visiting hospitals for the wounded. The war and then the Revolution had finally, to differing degrees, made women of them – courageous, dignified and mutually supportive in the face of adversity. Their uncle, Grand Duke Alexander, had seen Olga and Tatiana that last winter of 1916–17 in their Red Cross uniforms and their nurses’ wimples, looking so plain and serious, their faces drawn.

And now, at the Ipatiev House, the four girls were being forced increasingly to contemplate their own suffering and the family’s uncertain future. They worked hard at concealing their apprehensions from each other and at lifting everyone’s flagging spirits. Their clothes were worn, their famously long glossy hair grown back barely to chin length – their heads had all been shaved in the spring of 1917 when they had been recovering from measles – and they were now far from being the idealised girls in white dresses of the Imperial publicity machine. Olga in particular seemed so much older and troubled, ‘like the sad young heroine of a Turgenev novel with the eyes of a gazelle’. Baroness von Buxhoeveden, who had travelled with her as far as Ekaterinburg in mid-May, had noted even then how the ‘lovely, bright girl of 22’ had become ‘a faded and sad middle-aged woman’. Yet even so, some of the guards were moved by the sisters. Aleksandr Strekotin thought ‘there was something very special about them’, even in their old and tattered clothes, something ‘especially sweet’. He thought that they would not have looked better ‘even if they had been covered in gold and diamonds’.

That last Christmas at Tobolsk in 1917 the girls had put on a brave face for their parents’ sake, but seven months later, in Ekaterinburg, they were still incarcerated, with no sight at all of the outside world and hopes fading of ever seeing their beloved Livadia again. Olga seems to have welcomed with quiet calm what she, in her profound religious faith, believed – that passive acceptance was the only answer. It was what their parents had taught all of them – to turn the other cheek – which perhaps explains why the sisters remained quiet and uncomplaining, watching out for their mother and brother and constantly buoying each other up through the monotony and sometimes despair of their lives with false bonhomie and mutual protectiveness. In the absence of any physical ability to escape their situation, love was the last and only defence the family had. And it did not take much: only a moment of sympathy or commiseration from the guards, one of them later said, for the girls to recover their equilibrium and smile.

But how many times must those four sisters – aged 22, 21, 19 and 17 – have sat and stared at the whited-out windows, wishing they could see the world beyond once more. They had sat for hours on the window ledges at Tobolsk watching people pass by, smiling and waving. But now the Russia they all loved so passionately was out of sight, a distant blank, and their future with it. That evening, 7 July 1918, as a violent storm broke outside and washed the dust of summer from the city’s streets and shook the already yellowing leaves from the trees in the Ipatiev House garden, all the Romanov daughters could do was sit and listen to the rain and wonder, perhaps, as Chekhov’s three sisters did when faced with an
uncertain future in a provincial backwater, ‘Why do we live? Why do we suffer? If only we knew . . . if only.’

In his untidy, smoke-filled office across the hallway, the new commandant of the Ipatiev House, Yakov Yurovsky, knew only too well what the future held for the four Romanov sisters. He had now completed arrangements to replace the friendly but increasingly untrustworthy internal guard of workers from the local factories with men of his own choosing – hand-picked from the Ekaterinburg Cheka. From now on, the younger three girls, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia would even be denied the casual conversations and flirtations that had alleviated the agonising boredom of their lives. A wall of silence was about to descend and the screw to be turned ever tighter on their isolation.

MONDAY 8 JULY 1918

W
hen the Romanovs emerged to use the bathroom and lavatory on the morning of 8 July, they found themselves confronted by a group of strangers. ‘Inside the house new Latvians are standing guard’, Nicholas noted in his diary. The cool of the showery early morning was matched by a new and chilly atmosphere inside. These shadowy new figures would from now on be overseeing the family’s life at the Ipatiev House, along with the three remaining senior internal guards from Avdeev’s original detachment from the Sysert works – Anatoly Yakimov, Konstantin Dobrynin and Ivan Starkov. These three, however, were now designated to guard the hallway area and no longer had the run of the Romanov’s rooms. That was now the province only of Yurovsky’s men.

Yurovsky had requested the new guards be chosen by the local Cheka from the volunteer battalions at the Verkh-Isetsk factory; he had to have men who were dedicated Bolsheviks and who could be relied on to do whatever was asked of them. The new guards therefore had been hired on the understanding that they would be prepared, if necessary, to execute the Tsar, about which they were sworn to secrecy. Nothing at this stage was said about killing the rest of the family. In order to prevent a repetition of the fraternisation that had occurred under Avdeev, Yurovsky had ensured a further emotional distance between the guards and their charges by choosing mainly foreigners, hence Nicholas describing them as ‘Letts’ – a term commonly used in Russia to define someone of European, non-Russian origin. The only Russians among them were Viktor Netrebin, an 18-year-old from the Verkh-Isetsk factory who had already fought against the Whites under Dutov, and the brothers Mikhail and Alexey Kabanov, the latter a former soldier in the Imperial Guards.

Adolf Lepa, the leader of the new guards, was Lithuanian; a man called Jan Tsel’ms (or Tsal’ms; in English sources often transliterated
misleadingly as Soames), who was, according to Yurovsky, probably Latvian, had been recruited from a Latvian communist rifle detachment that had arrived in Ekaterinburg at the end of June. The remaining foreigner, Andras Verhas, was, like Yurovsky’s household servant Rudolf Lacher, an Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war. Verhas and Lacher, like many of their kind, had been forcibly conscripted into the Bolshevik war effort and sent to work in the munitions factories of the Urals; Lacher had been sent from the Verkh-Isetsk factory to the Ipatiev House during Avdeev’s tenure, to assist in various household duties, such as keeping the samovars filled, and had stayed on.

Yurovsky was intent on keeping his new special guards close at hand and under his thumb. He treated them as equals and often spoke to them in German. He moved Avdeev’s old internal guard members, except for Lacher, out of their quarters in the basement of the Ipatiev House and into the Popov House across the street, and the new men took over their billet, eating their meals upstairs in the commandant’s room. Yet, extraordinarily, one afternoon soon afterwards, when out exercising in the garden, Olga recognised one of the new guards – Alexey Kabanov. Had he not been in one of her father’s Guards regiments? Kabanov grudgingly conceded it was so but he did not tell her he was now assigned to man the new Maxim machine gun in the attic.

The arrival of the new guards would have fascinated the ever-curious Alexey, a boy whose inability to run from room to room like other children was compensated for by a capacity to watch and take in everything going on around him in great detail.

The whole focus and dynamic of the Romanov family had shifted dramatically when, at 1.15 p.m. on Friday 30 July 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra’s fifth child had been born. At last the family had been ‘visited by the grace of God’, Nicholas wrote in his diary. He had answered his and his wife’s years of fervent prayers and had sent a son as comfort ‘in time of sore trials’, Russia then being in the midst of a disastrous war with Japan.

In St Petersburg, a 301-gun salute sent the news of the birth of an heir to the throne thundering across the city as the Tsar, his mother and his daughters headed for church and a great Te Deum of thanks. Across Russia, church bells rang out all day long celebrating the news. Eleven days later the baby was taken in a gilded state coach drawn by six plumed white horses to his christening at the palace of Peterhof, his escort a phalanx of Chevaliers-Gardes in white and a detachment of scarlet-coated Cossacks. Lying on a cushion of cloth of silver like some sacred offering, Alexey was ceremoniously carried into the church by the Mistress of the Robes, Princess Maria Golitsyn. The Imperial Court had
assembled in all their finery – the men in full dress uniforms and medals, the women in traditional Russian
kokoshka
headdresses and long gowns of silver and gold brocade encrusted with jewels – for a four-hour ceremony presided over by Metropolitan Anthony of St Petersburg. As an act of gratitude Nicholas had abolished corporal punishment in the army and navy. Far away in Manchuria, where Russia was fighting the Japanese, the entire Russian army was named as the baby’s godfather. The little Tsarevich was given the name Alexey – after Alexey Mikhailovich, the meek and mild tsar who had reigned in the seventeenth century – as a mark of Romanov hopes for reconciliation between tsar and state. But others shook their heads and saw the name as foreboding; it was an unlucky name. According to a seventeenth-century prophecy, the Romanov dynasty would end with an Alexey as heir.

The Tsaritsa had no doubts that she had redeemed herself in the eyes of her husband, her God and her adoptive nation by finally producing a son and heir. Her many prayers to the early nineteenth-century mystic St Serafim of Sarov for a miracle had borne fruit; her years of religious devotion and self-castigation, of pain and sorrow at being vilified by the court – all that was behind her. Now the nation would love her at last. Her son Alexey came into the Romanov family’s lives as a ray of hope, a ‘Sunbeam’ as she called him. He was her ‘Baby’, and forever after, even when he was an adolescent, that would be the pet name she would call him by.

But then, on 8 September, only six weeks after Alexey’s birth, the Romanov family’s world imploded and Alexandra’s delirious joy turned to implacable grief. Her baby started bleeding from the navel. It was the first unmistakable sign of the deadly condition of haemophilia – passed down unwittingly in the female line from Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria to the royal houses of Germany, Spain and Russia. Privately, Nicholas and Alexandra were advised of the truth, but there would be no public pronouncements, not ever. Although the Imperial physicians understood something of the nature of haemophilia, science had yet to explain the realities of the defective gene that transmitted the condition, or its physiology, and it was 1936 before a clotting agent was developed to control the bouts of bleeding. The Tsarevich’s life-threatening condition would therefore be a closely guarded secret, even within the extended Romanov family. A pall of gloom descended over the royal couple and courtiers became afraid to smile in their presence, conducting themselves as though in a house where someone had died. Nicholas and Alexandra thereafter were forced to carry their grief over their son’s condition hidden inside them, for nothing could be said that might undermine his eventual ascent to the throne or indicate that he
was in any way physically unfit to rule. But this also meant that all their hopes of regaining the nation’s sympathy and affection through the public promotion of their beautiful son after the debacle of the war with Japan and the political damage of the 1905 Revolution had to be sacrificed. The Tsarevich was too frail to parade in public and sooner or later people would have noticed that something serious was wrong with him.

It was, for Alexandra, yet another terrible cross to bear; there might briefly have been the suggestion that she try for another son, but she was worn out with childbirth and the strain of another pregnancy might well have killed her. Perversely the slings and arrows life threw at her – even this terrible burden of grief over her only son – gave her something to live for. It was all part of the necessary road towards self-perfection through suffering, and ultimate redemption. And so she enveloped Alexey in a suffocating cocoon of love and the family withdrew to the protective bubble of their palace at Tsarskoe Selo. At Alexandra’s behest, the walls of the Imperial nursery and even baby Alexey’s cradle were festooned with icons and religious images; day by day her increasingly sickly fanaticism about her son’s health grew.

But how could such an enchanting, elfish child be so sick? For those who did not know the truth, Alexey seemed the epitome of the beautiful baby, with a great tumble of golden-brown curls as a toddler that turned auburn as he grew up. Like his father, he had the most expressive eyes, blue-grey, set in a finely chiselled narrow face, and they grew even bigger and more plaintive when overtaken by pain and suffering.

From the moment he was able to crawl and then walk, the Tsarevich’s life was highly circumscribed. Although small cuts could be controlled by tight bandaging and the application of pressure, such was the life-threatening nature of Alexey’s condition that any minor knock to his joints could set in train copious internal bleeding because of the absence in his blood of the essential clotting factor to control it. This was further undermined by a genetic weakness of the veins and arteries that made them rupture easily. Under the surface of the skin the blood would accumulate in the joints, causing inflammation of the vascular membrane surrounding them and creating large swellings that turned the skin purple. The swellings would press on the nerves and cause shooting pains so excruciating that Alexey would not be able to sleep for days on end. Each attack also brought with it irreversible degradation of the tissues and cartilage around the joint, causing lameness for weeks after; his left leg was particularly badly affected. This meant that he would never be able to ride a bicycle, climb trees, play tennis with his sisters and father, or indulge in any of the normal boyish rough games. He might be able to sit on a pony and be led around, but he would never be able to gallop off
at will, and even the simplest of activities like climbing in and out of a rowing boat had to be carefully monitored in case he slipped and banged himself. It meant that such playmates as he had had to be closely vetted and watched in order to ensure their games were not too rough. Even though Klementy Nagorny, from the Imperial Navy, and Andrey Derevenko, a boatman on the royal yacht the
Shtandart
, were assigned as Alexey’s full-time
dyadki
(‘uncles’) when he was five, Alexandra found it hard to trust her son’s safety to anyone. She constantly watched over him. One young princess remembered being invited to the palace and how she was forbidden to play any games where Alexey might fall. Sometimes the Tsar would lift one or other of them on to his back for a ‘horse-ride’ round the room, but the Tsaritsa would always be there, hovering protectively in the doorway, watching, waiting, anticipating disaster.