Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (2 page)

Finally, but most importantly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my agent, Charlie Viney. When he first mooted the idea of a book about the Romanovs to me I groaned, insisting there was nothing left to say. But with his encouragement, I went away and looked at the story again, from different perspectives, and came up with the tight 14-day scenario. Thereafter, Charlie cajoled and praised and guided me to the right way of writing this book, involving as it did a major rethink of how, till then, I had approached history writing. I am profoundly grateful to him for his patience, support and belief in this project and for all his hours of hard work. Without him,
Ekaterinburg
simply would never have happened.

Helen Rappaport

Oxford

September 2008

Section One

 1. Tsar Nicholas II with his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra shortly after their marriage, c. 1895. (Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images)

 2. The four Romanov Grand Duchesses in an official photograph, 1915. Standing from left-right, the Grand Duchesses Maria, Anastasia and Olga and seated Grand Duchess Tatiana (Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images)

 3. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia with his wife, Alexandra and their five children. Alexandra holds the baby Tsarevich, Alexey, surrounded by the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. (Photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 4. Nicholas enjoying a cigarette on board the Imperial yacht, the
Shtandart
(Photo Rex Features)

 5. Empress Alexandra in her wheelchair at Tsarskoe Selo, 1917 (Photo Underwood & Underwood / Library of Congress)

 6. Alexandra seated on Nicholas’s desk, taken during the war years, 1916. (Photo from
The End of the Romanovs
by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

 7. Prince Edward (later briefly King Edward VIII) with Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexey and George, Prince of Wales (later King George V), at Cowes in 1909 (Photo Keystone/Getty Images)

 8. Alexey with his pet cat and his King Charles Spaniel Joy, at Army HQ in 1916 (Photo Roger Violet / Topfoto)

 9. The Tsaritsa with her two oldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, in their nurses’ uniforms, with Maria and Anastasia in civilian dress (Photo David King Collection)

10. Members of the Czech Legion standing by the obelisk outside Ekaterinburg marking the boundary between Europe and Asia (Photo from
The Lost Legion 1939
by Gustav Becvar (Stanley Paul, 1939))

11. Dr Evgeny Botkin, the Romanov family’s physician (Photo from
Thirteen Years at the Russian Court
by Pierre Gilliard (Hutchinson, 1921))

12. Exterior of Ipatiev House showing the first palisade erected just before the Romanovs’ arrival at the end of April 1918. American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia album (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

13. The Commandant’s room on the first floor of the Ipatiev House occupied by Avdeev and after him, Yurovsky. American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia album (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

14. The dining room in the Ipatiev House where the Imperial Family shared their simple meals with their servants (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

15. View of Voznesensky Prospekt c. 1900s showing the Ipatiev House in the bottom left hand corner (Photo Author’s Collection)

16. View of Ekaterinburg showing the bell tower of the Voznesensky Cathedral in distance on right (Photo Prokudin-Gorskii, Sergei Mikhailovich / Library of Congress)

Section Two

17. Filipp Goloshchekin in exile in Turukhansk, Siberia with Yakov Sverdlov, with Joseph Stalin third from left, back row (Photo David King Collection)

18. Lenin in his study in the Kremlin, 1918 (Photo AKG images)

19. Pavel Medvedev, head of the Ipatiev House guard, on the left, with a fellow Bolshevik, Larin (Photo David King Collection)

20. Yurovsky’s family, taken in Ekaterinburg c. 1919. Yurovsky is standing on the back right (Photo from
The Murder of the Romanovs
by Captain Paul Bulygin (Hutchinson, 1935))

21. The Tsar and Tsaritsa’s bedroom on the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt and Voznesensky Lane (Photo from
The End of the Romanovs
by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

22. Main entrance of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent in Ekaterinburg (Photo Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii / Library of Congress)

23. The US journalist Herman Bernstein in Siberia (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

24. Thomas Preston, British Consul in Ekaterinburg in 1918 (Photo Telegraph Group)

25. Lieutenant Colonel Mariya Bochkareva of the 1st women’s Battalion of Death (Photo George Grantham Bain Collection / Library of Congress)

26. President Woodrow Wilson, who reluctantly ordered US intervention forces into Russia in the summer of 1918 (Photo Library of Congress)

27. The coded telegram sent by Aleksandr Beloborodov to Moscow confirming that all the Romanov family had been killed (Photo Topfoto)

28. The Grand Duchesses’ bedroom in the Ipatiev House, showing remains of a fire in which the personal effects of the Romanovs were burned. (Photo from
The End of the Romanovs
by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

29. Petr Ermakov, one of the Romanovs’ killers (Photo David King Collection)

30. One of the complex of churches at Ganina Yama in the Koptyaki Forest outside Ekaterinburg commemorating the Romanov family (Author’s photograph)

31. The opening of the mine-working in the clearing known as the ‘Four Brothers’ in the Koptyaki Forest where the Romanovs were first buried on 17 July (Photo from
The End of the Romanovs
by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

32. The Church on the Blood in Ekaterinburg, built on the site of the Ipatiev House in 2003 (Author’s photograph)

33. A 1900s view of the Voznesensky Cathedral located across the road from the Ipatiev House (Photo Author’s Collection)

34. The Amerikanskaya Hotel on Pokrovsky Prospekt, headquarters of the Ekaterinburg Cheka, c. 1900s. (Photo Author’s Collection)

35. One of many modern day icons celebrating the Romanovs as saints in the Russian Orthodox calendar (Photo Author’s Collection)

36. The Scent of Lilies. The ‘Four Brothers’ burial site today, covered with arum lilies on the anniversary of the murders in July. (Author’s photograph)

Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul—and that’s resignation.

—Joseph Conrad,
Under Western Eyes,
1911

O
n the evening of 29 April 1918, a special train stood in a siding at the remote railway halt of Lyubinskaya on the Trans-Siberian railway line, not far from the city of Omsk. It was abnormally well guarded. Inside its first-class carriage sat Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, former Tsar of All the Russias, and his German-born wife Alexandra.

Stripped of all privileges, a captive awaiting trial or exile, Nicholas was being moved after 13 months under house arrest with his family, first at the Alexander Palace in St Petersburg and latterly at Tobolsk in Western Siberia. If he did not know it already, some of those around him most certainly did: the Tsar was making his final journey. But even those who guessed what might happen to their former monarch could not possibly have imagined the true, appalling horror of what was to come.

Nicholas had been in good spirits till then, but his hopes of a safe refuge were brutally dashed when he and his wife discovered they were not being taken to Moscow, or to exile out of Russia, as they had hoped.

The train they were on was heading for the very last place Nicholas wished to be sent. Ekaterinburg.

‘I would go anywhere at all, only not to the Urals,’ he is reported to have said that night as the train slowed in its approach to the city. Having regularly read the local papers whilst at Tobolsk, he was well aware that the mood among workers in the Urals was ‘harshly against him’. He had good reason to dread being forcibly taken to such a place, among such people – whether as deposed monarch or as a loving family man with a sick wife, four vulnerable daughters, and an ailing, haemophiliac son. Ekaterinburg was violently anti-tsarist and, as the historic hub of Russia’s old penal system, had been a point of transit to places and horrors from which there was no return.

*

Outside Ekaterinburg there once stood a stone obelisk in a lonely forest glade, its plaster facing pitted and worn by the harsh Russian climate. On one side was inscribed the Cyrillic word
EBPOΠA
– Europe – and on the other,
A
– Asia – for this monument marked the symbolic boundary between European and Asian Russia. Straddling the Great Siberian Highway, Ekaterinburg had been Imperial Russia’s gateway to the East since the city’s foundation in the early eighteenth century, and beyond it the original post road stretched 3,000 miles to the Manchurian border.

The natural boundary was formed by the Ural Mountains, a 1,700-mile-long range which split Russia from north to south. To the east lay the arctic wastes of the Siberian plain, stretching like a vast sea and ending, as the writer Anton Chekhov observed, ‘the devil knows where’. But the Great Siberian Highway was no grand thoroughfare. For two centuries or more this ‘brown streak of road running like a thread’ right across Russia was better known as the Trakt. From Ekaterinburg, convoys of exiles and criminals, after being transported by steamboat and barge to Tyumen from the central prisons in Moscow, would tramp along its narrow, meandering gravel path – in columns of dust in the dry summer months and in the arctic snowstorms of winter, their legs in clanking fetters.

During their two-year forced march into imprisonment or exile, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children passed this way during the worst years of Tsarist oppression. Their arrival at the Ekaterinburg obelisk marked a Dantesque point of transition, the portal to a Russian kind of hell beyond which unfortunates abandoned all hope of seeing homes and families again. Stopping briefly here, they would look their last on European Russia before venturing into the pagan wilderness beyond. Many would kiss the obelisk in a final farewell; others scratched their names on the plasterwork. Most would never pass this way again.

Pronounced
Ye-ka-tyer-in-boorg
, the city has an oddly Western-sounding name, but Asia is all around. Nestling on the eastern slopes of the Urals, the low horizon lies open to expanses of swampy
taiga
, the forests of pine, birch and larch extending far to the north and east, where wild bears, elk, wolves and mountain cats roam. The climate here is unforgivingly Siberian, with spring not arriving until mid-May. Even then snow is on the ground, the lakes are still under ice and the earth is muddy from spring floods. Accompanied by swarms of mosquitoes, summer makes a brief appearance in June, bringing with it the brief idyll of the midnight sun, as well as fierce thunder and lightning storms sparked by the rich
mineral deposits in the hills. But late August sees the return of frosts and the cycle tightens its grip once more.

Given its name in 1723 after Peter the Great’s second wife, Ekaterinburg started as a distant outpost of empire – little more than a wooden fortress built to protect the valuable iron-smelting works established there. Despite its remoteness, it was to grow in importance as an economic, scientific and cultural centre, eventually becoming wealthy as a city of mining engineers, merchants and bankers and home to the Russian Imperial Mint. Ekaterinburg’s prosperity was founded on the vast mineral resources of the Urals; the semi-precious stones which decorated Russia’s imperial palaces and cathedrals were mined here, their deep hues seen in exquisite inlay work, in columns of jasper, porphyry and lapis lazuli and the distinctive dark green of the superb urns, vases and tables of malachite that graced the great palaces of the tsars. The mountains here held an abundance of diamonds, amethysts and emeralds, as well as warm, rosy rhodonite and the rare and fascinating alexandrite with its ever-changing hues of red and green. Supplied to the Imperial Lapidary works in Ekaterinburg and St Petersburg, these gemstones provided much of the raw material for the fantastically elaborate jewellery and
objets d’art
created by craftsmen such as Karl Fabergé, the Romanovs’ court jeweller.