Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (3 page)

The Urals were equally rich in precious metals. Gold had been discovered here in 1814, platinum five years later. Indeed, there was gold in such abundance that the locals claimed that ‘where it has not been found, it has not been looked for’. By the time revolution came, Ekaterinburg was supplying 90 per cent of the world’s platinum, and a profusion of luxury goods, perfumes and furs of the finest quality – beaver from Kamchatka, sable, ermine, mink, black and grey fox, bearskin rugs – were all to be found in the city, brought in from all over Siberia. But the city’s real wealth lay in iron ore and the pig iron produced from it. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Urals now the biggest iron producer in the world, Ekaterinburg was building the new industrial plants of modernising Russia. But by the end of the century the once dominant ironworks of Ekaterinburg were being outstripped by a powerful new metallurgical industry in the Don basin in the south, powered by vast resources of coal. Industry began to stagnate, only to be rescued by an intensive period of modernisation and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Passing through Ekaterinburg in 1890, Chekhov found it dull and provincial, only being taken by ‘the magnificent, velvety’ sound of its many church bells ringing out in the crisp spring air during Lent. Seeking refuge in the comforts of the Amerikanskaya Hotel, the 30-year-old playwright retreated to his room and kept the blinds down in order not
to have to look out on what seemed to him an alien world. All night long he had heard the distant thud-thud of machine presses. You would need a head of cast iron not to be driven mad by them, he wrote. As for the inhabitants of this semi-Asiatic city, he found them inscrutable, intimidating even. They inspired in him ‘a feeling akin to horror with their prominent cheekbones, large foreheads, tiny eyes and utterly enormous fists’. Stunted by heavy labour, brutalised by the appalling climate, Ekaterinburgers were ‘born in the local iron foundries and brought into the world not by midwives, but mechanics’.

By the 1900s Ekaterinburg had mushroomed from an eighteenth-century settlement of single-storey log houses into a powerful regional city with armies of peasants labouring in its iron-smelting factories, flour and paper mills, soap works and tanneries. Legions of tsarist officials had settled here to run the Ural Mining Industry and Imperial Mint. There was a large foreign contingent too, at the British-owned Hubbard candle works, the Tait mechanical works and the Sysert iron foundry, as well as a strong diplomatic presence, the British Consulate having opened its imposing premises on Voznesensky Prospekt in 1913. French, Swiss, American, German, Swedish and Danish consulates soon were operating nearby. Framed by linden trees, Ekaterinburg’s broad, stone-paved boulevards were grand and airy in the all too brief summer, its parks and ornamental gardens glowing with flowers. The city had its own ‘millionaire’s row’ of fine houses, a museum of natural history, two theatres that were visited by tours from the Moscow Art Theatre, and an imposing opera house where Chaliapin came to sing. It offered several comfortable and grandly named hotels such as the Eldorado and the Palais Royal. Heartily recommended by Baedeker, the Amerikanskaya Hotel was undoubtedly the best in town and comparatively clean by Siberian standards; it also provided good dinners for less than four roubles.

Many travellers arriving here after weary weeks on the road were captivated by the city’s beauty. It was a welcome sight after the sombre, bleak wastes of Siberia – the first ‘really cultivated place’ they had seen since leaving Shanghai. Ekaterinburg had much to offer: stone-built, stuccoed houses of classical architectural beauty, a skyline of golden-domed churches and the cream and turquoise baroque beauty of its Voznesensky and Ekaterininsky cathedrals. Crowning the three-mile-long Voznesensky Prospekt, which intersected the heart of the old city, the Rastorguev-Kharitonov House, a finely proportioned Palladian mansion built by Ekaterinburg’s platinum king, looked down on a regional city flexing its industrial power and basking in its economic prosperity. Ekaterinburg was in the vanguard of a rapidly modernising
Russia: a place with street lighting, telephones, electric trams and a substantial rail depot at the junction of seven railway lines, through which the Trans-Siberian Railway powered its way into the East.

But the October Revolution of 1917 brought seismic changes to the city. In November, the ‘agitators’ arrived and with the support of local railway workers staged a Bolshevik
coup d’état
. This was swiftly followed by industrial and financial crisis as the city fell into debt and bankruptcy. Then followed arrests, shootings, confiscations and fear. Russia’s fifth largest city had become one of its most forbidding strongholds of conflicting political forces and a major hub of Bolshevik activity. Of its population of about 100,000, a large proportion was workers and soldiers, many of them tough young militants notorious for their radical political line.

It was into this menacing hotbed of revolutionary fervour that Public Enemy No. 1, Citizen Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, arrived on 30 April 1918. It seemed poetic justice that he should end up in a city through which so many of those condemned into political exile by the old tsarist system had passed on their own journey into Siberia.

But how had one of the world’s most wealthy, powerful autocrats found himself here, in the notorious ‘Red Urals’? And how had this devout, insistently dull and dogmatic little man, whose primary interest was family life, come to be demonised as the repository of all that was corrupt, reactionary and despotic about the Romanov dynasty?

Tsar Nicholas II was not the first monarch to have kingship unexpectedly thrust upon him, nor was he the first to be emotionally and politically unprepared for its onerous responsibilities. As a man of limited political ability and vision, Nicholas had done what came naturally. He had assiduously maintained the autocratic rule of his father whilst blindly resisting all political innovation and condoning the suppression of the empire’s turbulent minorities. His stubborn belief in his role as God’s anointed representative made him turn a blind eye to increasingly anxious calls for political change. But political and social unrest, fanned by revolutionary activity among the urban workforces of St Petersburg and Moscow, had finally forced Nicholas into token gestures of constitutional reform in 1905. The democratic powers of the newly inaugurated Duma were, however, greatly circumscribed and Nicholas routinely subverted its activities, refusing any real concessions to representative government, and condemning moves to modernise, as he had since the day he ascended the throne, as mere ‘senseless dreams’. He retreated instead into domesticity; playing contentedly with his children, closeted away at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo outside St Petersburg and seeing only a small inner circle of family and friends.

Nicholas’s increasing invisibility from public view and his continuing resistance to reform rapidly set in motion the inexorable collapse of an already moribund political regime, despite a degree of economic recovery and growth in the years between 1907 and 1914. The process of collapse was accelerated after Russia’s enthusiastic entry into the First World War in August 1914. The initial euphoria of national solidarity, which Nicholas could and should have capitalised on politically, rapidly crumbled in the face of catastrophic losses. By September of the following year continuing gross ineptitude in both the conduct of the war and the supply of materiel, coupled with serious territorial losses to the Germans in Galicia, finally dragged Nicholas away from family preoccupations to assume supreme command at the front. But by now, despite the presence of its
batyushka
– ‘little father’ – at the head of the army, Russia was engaged in a war of attrition, fuelling unprecedented desertion rates in its demoralised, ill-equipped and starving peasant army. After centuries of unquestioning loyalty, the long-suffering conscript had begun to ask what he was fighting for. The Tsar, it seemed, only wanted him to plough, and fight, and pay taxes. And so Nicholas’s peasant army began deserting in their thousands.

Back in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in August 1914), Nicholas’s deeply unpopular wife, Alexandra, had been left in effective political control at a time when she was increasingly spellbound by Grigory Rasputin, the charismatic but hugely manipulative ‘holy man’ who had demonstrated an inexplicable ability to control her haemophiliac son Alexey’s attacks of bleeding. Alexandra’s intimacy with Rasputin had thrown her into hysterical conflict with government ministers and fuelled unbridled and increasingly virulent gossip about the true nature of their relationship. Meanwhile, Nicholas ignored the repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from members of his government about the escalating situation in Petrograd. He would not even listen to his devoted uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay, whom he had relieved of supreme command of the army, when the duke begged him to make compromises and save the dynasty from annihilation. The juggernaut of revolutionary change in Russia was now clearly unstoppable; politicians and foreign diplomats had been predicting it for years. Yet Nicholas stubbornly trusted only to his own counsel and that of his wife, a woman determined to protect the Romanovs’ absolute sovereignty, their divine right to rule, and with it the inheritance of their precious only son.

Early in 1917, urban economic chaos in Petrograd finally triggered violent industrial strikes, marches and bread riots, bringing mutinous soldiers out on to the streets. The volatile situation erupted into outright revolution at the end of February. Away at the front, Nicholas believed
he had no option but to abdicate ‘for the good of Russia’, the morale of the army and – most pressingly – the safety of his family. He had already been told by his ailing son’s doctors that Alexey was unlikely to live to the age of 16, so he took the decision simultaneously to abdicate on behalf of his heir.

Six months of house arrest followed for the Romanov family at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, where they tried to carry on domestic life as best they could. Unburdened of affairs of state, Nicholas appeared to thrive, enjoying the outdoors no matter what the weather, sawing wood, vigorously sweeping snow and breaking ice in the park. He was not deterred by the ominous presence of crowds, who made their way out to Tsarskoe Selo, paying the guards a rouble for the privilege of being able to stand at the perimeter fence and gawp, deriding him with the pejorative names of ‘Nikoluchka’ and ‘Nikolashka’.

With an increasingly tense political situation in St Petersburg and the growing threat of a mob descending on the Alexander Palace, by July 1917 Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the provisional government, was coming under pressure to incarcerate the Tsar and Tsaritsa in the Peter Paul Fortress as ordinary prisoners – or worse, to see them transferred to the custody of the radicalised island naval base at Kronstadt. Diplomatic moves to send the family to England had come to nothing, and Kerensky therefore decided to move them to a place of greater safety, not wishing, he said, to become ‘the Marat of the Revolution’. From here the Romanovs could hopefully be evacuated east to Japan or north to Scandinavia. The family were bitterly disappointed not to have been allowed south to the warmth of their much-loved palace at Livadia on the Black Sea, where they would have happily lived out their lives in seclusion as an ordinary family. Instead they found themselves boarding a train for Tyumen in Western Siberia and from there a steamship to what in those unstable times still seemed the politically safe backwater of Tobolsk.

By August 1917, Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children – the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and the Tsarevich Alexey – had been installed in the former Governor’s House, the grandest accommodation Tobolsk could offer. Here they came perversely to enjoy the simple pleasures of rural life as well as a degree of freedom, whilst still retaining a substantial entourage of 39 courtiers and servants. They had also been allowed to bring many of their most treasured possessions with them from the Alexander Palace: cameras and photograph albums – at least 16 of them, made of Moroccan leather – as well as diaries and letters, and even vintage wines from the Imperial Court Cellars.

But three months into their stay in Tobolsk, a second revolution took place, during which the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky’s provisional government and seized power. Lenin’s new government now determined on a campaign of terror and revenge against 300 years of Romanov rule. Whilst the former Tsar and Tsaritsa languished in the Governor’s House, the flamboyant Leon Trotsky planned their dramatic show trial along the lines of the Revolutionary Tribunal that had tried and executed Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette in 1793, with himself, a latter-day Robespierre, as prosecutor.

Meanwhile, the brutalising web of Bolshevism was spreading inexorably beyond the Urals. By April 1918 it had reached Tobolsk, bringing with it a crackdown on the Imperial Family’s remaining privileges. Their very presence in the region was exacerbating the tense situation brewing between Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg and other local factions, who wished to wrest control of the Imperial Family and have a hand in their ultimate fate. In this maelstrom of political tension, very real opportunities to save the Romanovs were dissipated. An ill-assorted cast of aspirants – army officers, monarchists and aristocrats, wealthy merchants, European royals, nuns and clergy – all proved hamstrung by lack of funds and conflicting political agendas, incapable of concerted rescue attempts. Behind embassy doors diplomats and secret service agents strove to come up with viable schemes for the family’s forced abduction. Nevertheless, hopes lived on well into the spring of 1918 in a plethora of abortive, fantastical plans both inside and outside Russia, whilst at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk the Romanovs waited for a miracle.

Any hopes were dashed in April 1918 when Vasily Yakovlev, an Extraordinary Commissar sent by Moscow in response to all the escape rumours, arrived in Tobolsk, ostensibly to escort the Tsar back to Moscow, where he would be put on trial. But the rapidly changing political situation in the Urals soon prevented this. When the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks got wind of Yakovlev’s mission, they demanded the Tsar be brought to their city. After urgent telegraph consultations with the Kremlin, Yakovlev was instructed to take his prisoners to Ekaterinburg, where he was ordered to hand the Romanovs over.