Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (9 page)

But there was no real reason for anyone to go hungry. Out in the villages there were in fact no food shortages, and so, weekly, people trudged there from the city – often as far as 15 miles – to barter whatever they had – old clothes, boots – for flour, bread and potatoes, for the peasants did not trust the new Bolshevik paper money and wouldn’t take it. Having secured a few precious supplies, people returned to the city only to be stopped and searched at the entry points and stripped of their purchases. The public square on market day was now a forlorn sight. The dogs and crows and pigeons had deserted it. There was simply nothing left to scavenge.

Yet still people continued to stand in line for hours in the heat, periodically drenched by the rainstorms that regularly swept the Urals in summer. The desperate, the idle and the destitute, as well as bands of deserters from the Front, could be seen on every street corner, listless and broken, drinking and smoking when they could, and spitting the husks of sunflower seeds on the pavements. As the summer heat wore on, there was only one thing you could be sure to get in Ekaterinburg – typhus. With the water supply spasmodic, the disease spread like wildfire in a city of lousy, unwashed bodies, infecting over 40 per cent of the population and overstretching the limited medical resources and overcrowded city hospitals. And then came cholera too.

In Ekaterinburg, as in many other Russian cities, the sharp and unavoidable disparity between Bolshevik rhetoric and Bolshevik practice was now becoming only too painfully clear. Hunger did little but breed political indifference in the population; among the peasantry, the requisitioning by the Bolsheviks of their precious grain and livestock provoked outright hostility, to which the response was brutal. Under the Tsar, people said, there were at least judges who sent you to Siberia. Now you just got taken out and shot without trial. In June, 250 local peasants who had protested the confiscation of their grain and livestock had been thrown into Ekaterinburg’s prison no. 2. Night after night, for weeks, they were taken out in twos and threes and shot; only 35 were left alive by the time the Czechs took the city.

People were now being arrested indiscriminately, on the slightest suspicion of counter-revolution. When the prisons were full, hotels and factories were taken over as places of internment. Bolshevik venom was in particular directed at the clergy – 45 members of the Ekaterinburg Orthodox diocese were murdered that summer – shot, drowned, bayoneted, their eyes gouged out, tongues and ears hacked off and their mangled bodies thrown in the river. And it got much worse after news
came of the taking of Omsk by the Czech legions on 7 June. The Czechs’ rapid advance on Ekaterinburg triggered a terrifying catalogue of executions, with the Bolsheviks vowing that for every Communist killed they would shoot 100 hostages. They began to draw up lists of citizens who would be the first to pay the penalty. At the top of that list were the names of the Romanovs already being held at Ekaterinburg and Alapaevsk. But in reality, the first act in the systematic annihilation of the Romanovs had already taken place, in Perm on the night of 12/13 June, when the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, had been taken from his prison cell and shot in the woods by the Cheka. It is likely that this murder was the Bolsheviks’ way of testing the water of public opinion for further Romanov murders to come.

At four in the morning of 29 June, the latest and most chilling act of vicious murder had been perpetrated by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg. Nineteen prominent citizens – priests, doctors, lawyers, merchants, including personal acquaintances of Consul Preston, such as mining engineer Fadeev, Makronosoev, the Russian manager of the English-owned Sysert works, the merchant Stepanov, the grocer Torupechev – were taken to the local sewage dump half a mile outside the city. Here they were lined up and shot in front of a freshly dug grave and then frenziedly bayoneted after they had fallen. One of them miraculously survived to tell the tale. When Preston and the other foreign consuls protested to the Bolsheviks about these killings, they were told they were in revenge for the murder of Bolshevik Commissar Ivan Malyshev, captured and shot by the Czechs at the Kusvinsky works on 23 June. On 30 June the Ekaterinburg edition of
Izvestiya
published the list of names of those killed and an announcement ‘From the Ural Provincial Extraordinary Committee for Combating Counter-Terrorism’, explaining that this was a response to an act of terror against a representative of the labouring class and that any similar acts would be repressed tenfold.

At home, in the bucolic safety of a cool English summer, Preston’s monarch, and the Tsar’s first cousin, seemed oblivious to it all, for no doubt the consul’s communiqués on the escalating situation in Ekaterinburg had failed to reach the Foreign Office. Back in April, King George had appeared to wash his hands of his troublesome Romanov relatives, though he had subsequently expressed his ‘distress’ about reports reaching him regarding the family’s treatment at Tobolsk. This was about as far as his sympathies stretched, for George had other preoccupations, not the least of which was the war on the Western Front, which was now entering its final stages.

On the afternoon of 4 July, in fact, the British king and his new American allies in the war were making their own small but significant mark in history. In an act of solidarity to mark Independence Day, King George and Queen Mary were among a crowd of 50,000 spectators at a baseball match between the United States navy and army at Chelsea football ground, the first such game to be held on English soil. The British royals, bemused by all the brashness and American razzamatazz, watched the game in a polite state of mystification. Baseball it seemed had none of the dignity of cricket, nor the tremulous tumult of football. What, asked someone in the crowd, would the Kaiser make of such a public display of nationalistic fervour and back-slapping in the midst of war?

Former prime minister of the Russian provisional government Aleksandr Kerensky, in exile in Paris, had been busy that day too, meeting with French Socialists and urging intervention by the Allies as the only thing that now could save Russia from the abyss. Even as he spoke, and the bands at Stamford Bridge played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a joint intervention force of British and French soldiers backed by a few American marines had been on the move, after landing at Murmansk in northern Russia. Such an act of provocation would make Bolshevik cooperation with any of the Allies over the future of the Romanovs even less likely. It all seemed hopeless. The Imperial Family were too well guarded. Any attempt at rescue would only end in a bloodbath. Consul Preston’s view was that the last hope left to the Romanovs was via diplomatic channels.

In Moscow, German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, newly appointed in April to build relations with the Bolsheviks and report back on the situation in Russia, was doing precisely that – exercising his diplomatic muscle with his Russian ‘allies’ and voicing his concerns about rumours that the Romanovs had been harmed during unrest in Ekaterinburg. He had gone to the Kremlin demanding an explanation from foreign minister Georgy Chicherin about rumours in the press that Nicholas had already been assassinated. Even the
Washington Post
had picked up on the story via reports circulating from Copenhagen. The Bolshevik government was embarrassed. Mirbach, who had been at the centre of vigorous German efforts on behalf of the Romanovs all summer, was reassured that there was no truth in the rumour. Maintaining an outward air of inscrutable control over the situation, in order to pacify Mirbach and other foreign ambassadors, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party held an urgent meeting. It was attended by Lenin, Sverdlov and Cheka head Feliks Dzerzhinsky, its object to discuss the Romanovs’ fate. It wasn’t just the ambassadors who
were becoming a thorn in their side; challenges had been coming in by telegram from an assortment of revolutionary factions demanding the immediate execution of the Tsar. Lenin and the CEC were now conducting a delicate balancing act whilst they contemplated the best course of action, knowing also that independently of them the Bolsheviks of the Urals Regional Soviet were already having their own discussions on the subject. All the time the Romanovs were alive they were valuable bargaining chips with the Kaiser, and the German injection of millions of gold marks into Bolshevik funds each month would continue. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had brought peace with Germany in March and Russia’s exit from the war. An ignominious act in the view of Nicholas and Alexandra, for Russia had been forced to cede those territories already occupied by the Germans: the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine (where the Germans had set up a puppet government) and regions in Belorussia and the Caucasus – losing at a stroke one third of its population and many of its most valuable industrial areas, including coal mines. But the treaty had bought the Bolsheviks precious time in which to consolidate their hold on the country. Meanwhile Lenin privately was gambling that a social revolution was imminent in Germany too, and that it would oust the Kaiser from power just like his cousin Nicky, bringing an end to the war and sparking a European socialist upheaval that would keep the Bolsheviks in power. But right now Lenin was facing increasing challenges on all sides: from anarchists, Mensheviks and Constitutionalist and Socialist Revolutionaries opposed to the treaty, who saw it as a sham. He had no doubts about how the Bolshevik government should respond to such threats. On 26 June he had announced: ‘We must encourage and promote mass terror against the counter-revolutionists, especially in St Petersburg, to make a decisive example.’

Sensing the weakness of the new Soviet state, the Germans meanwhile were gathering in the south and west of Russia, in anticipation of what seemed to them its imminent demise. For the Germans too had a master plan and their own political gamble at stake: that Russia would collapse and be dismembered, her vast black earth regions in Ukraine to be exploited as an enormous granary by Germany, which would make of the occupied Russian territories virtual German colonies.

With so much at stake in the great power play of international politics, the value to the Bolsheviks of Nicholas was now rapidly receding. It was certainly increasingly unlikely in the current volatile internal situation that he could be brought back to Moscow for Trotsky’s great show trial. A trial would, by its very nature, have been a public acknowledgement of Nicholas’s innocence till proven guilty, something the Bolsheviks had no wish to invite. It is more likely that talk of a trial was yet another part
of deliberate Bolshevik policy to stall Western protests and lend an air of legitimacy to their handling of the Tsar’s fate. A few cosmetic preparations for this had been put in motion as a palliative to public opinion, but it is unlikely there was ever any serious intention to go ahead with it. If a trial were now to take place it would have to be in Ekaterinburg. Goloshchekin, in Moscow for consultations with Lenin and Sverdlov, was told to prepare for this eventuality and also, if events overtook them, for the execution of the Tsar, should the situation in the Urals become untenable. Late in the afternoon of 4 July, he received a telegram from his colleague Beloborodov in Ekaterinburg. It confirmed Avdeev’s dismissal and the change of regime at the Ipatiev House. Moscow’s misgivings that Ekaterinburg had lost control of the situation were ‘unfounded’.

Be that as it may, the military situation in the Urals was reaching crisis point. The anti-Bolshevik White forces under Admiral Kolchak had established their own rival provisional government in Omsk in Eastern Siberia and were now fighting their way west with the Czech legion. Well disciplined and well armed, the legions were a serious military challenge to the still badly organised Red Army. They had now also seized the Bolshevik strongholds of Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk and Tomsk. It was clear they were turning the tide against the Bolsheviks in Siberia and were bent on capturing Ekaterinburg, the last major obstacle in their path. But they were not in any hurry. Slowly, slowly the Czechs were approaching the city from the south-west, squeezing it inexorably into submission; and they would strike in their own good time.

Ekaterinburg was now under martial law and the sense of panic was palpable. The Ural Regional Soviet had already suppressed an anti-Soviet rebellion on 12 June when a group of anarchists had attempted to seize the Verkh-Isetsk factory, and the wave of searches and summary arrests was provoking further rallies and protests. Meanwhile ordinary citizens were asking themselves where the Red Army forces to protect the city were. Rumour was rife that the leaders of the local soviet were preparing to decamp by special train before the arrival of the Czechs. People talked nervously on the streets. Hadn’t they heard about the trainloads of gold and platinum and precious stones already being evacuated from the Ekaterinburg mint by train to Perm? Of the money being raided from the safes of the city’s business magnates, shops and factories? Of the icons and other church treasures being confiscated and shipped out? The government archives had already been taken away to safety. It was a sure sign the city was to be abandoned to its fate.

The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks did their best to counter the rumours, issuing proclamations assuring the population they would not abandon
them and exhorting them: ‘All to the front! To the defence of the Red Urals. In defiance of all the bourgeois, we are lighting the universal conflagration! Be ready, workers!’ But even at the closely guarded Ipatiev House, the guards were beginning to get nervous. Two possible monarchist plots to rescue the family had already been foiled in June. And then had come threats of an ‘anarchist’ attack on the house: Avdeev had been warned that the family might need to be evacuated and for days the Romanovs had lived in a state of transit, their bags packed and ready to leave. But the burning question now, with the fall of Ekaterinburg increasingly likely, was would the Czechs, when they got there, attempt to liberate the Tsar? The release of the Imperial Family might have seemed to some a romantic possibility, but the approaching anti-Bolshevik forces had far greater concerns; the Whites certainly had no desire to put Nicholas back on the throne. Privately the Czechs were more concerned with their own stand for Czech nationhood. They had appealed to the US government in Washington on 2 July for support in their campaign, and demands were increasing for the American administration to send in intervention forces to work with British and Japanese troops already landed in the north and the Far East in their great new crusade – the war against Bolshevik class tyranny and despotism. As far as the Allies were concerned, rescuing the Tsar was low on their list of priorities.