Secret Lives of the Tsars (43 page)

Desperate to avert such a massacre, Kerensky quietly arranged to have the family moved to the Siberian town of Tobolsk—“an out-and-out backwater,” as he described it, with “a very small garrison, no industrial proletariat, and a population which was prosperous and contented, not to say old-fashioned.” It was in this remote place, Kerensky believed, that the Romanovs would be safe and “could live with some measure of comfort.” Nicholas readily acceded to the plan. “I have no fear,” he told Kerensky. “We trust you. If you say we must move, it must be. We trust you.”

On August 12, 1917, Nicholas and Alexandra, along with their five children, spent their last day at the place they had
called home over two decades—most of their married life. It was Alexis’s thirteenth birthday, and to celebrate a special service was arranged at the palace with a blessed icon from a nearby church. “The ceremony was poignant, all were in tears,” recalled Count Benckendorff. “The soldiers themselves seemed touched and approached the holy icon to kiss it. [Afterward, the family] followed the procession as far as the balcony, and saw it disappear through the park. It was as if the past were taking leave, never to come back.”

Setting aside the irony of a Russian emperor consigned to Siberia—that forbidding wasteland to which so many of Nicholas’s ancestors had banished their enemies (and from which Rasputin had emerged)—conditions at Tobolsk were tolerable—at least during the early period of the family’s eight-month imprisonment there. The Romanovs were housed in the recently refurbished governor’s mansion, amid a populace fairly well disposed toward them. Gilliard, who still remained with the exiles, recalled that “on the whole, the inhabitants of Tobolsk were still very attached to the Imperial family, and our guards had repeatedly to intervene to prevent them standing under the windows or removing their hats and crossing themselves as they passed the house.”

But that November, terrible news reached Tobolsk. After an abortive second revolution that accompanied Lenin’s return the previous April, the Bolsheviks had now roared back and seized power. And to effect this socialist resurrection, Lenin promised peace with Germany. It came at a staggering price, essentially gutting the empire. Nearly every foot of territory acquired since the days of Peter the Great had to be ceded under the terms of the treaty, including Poland, Finland,
the Baltic States, the Ukraine, the Crimea, and most of the Caucuses. Nicholas was enraged by Lenin’s concessions, which he called “a disgrace” and “suicide for Russia.”

“I then for the first time heard the Tsar regret his abdication,” Gilliard wrote. “It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain and that by his departure in the interests of his country, he had in reality done her an ill turn. The idea was to haunt him more and more.”

Though Lenin’s reemergence assured the destruction of the Romanovs, for now they were still safe in Siberia. That December provided snapshots of the doomed family in their final period of relative calm. There was Anastasia, bored and peering through a window, watching the passersby; Nicholas, huddled with his family around a small fire, reading aloud while his wife and daughters did their needlework, passing the time together on a long winter night. And then there was Alexis—once set to rule over a vast empire—rummaging around the fenced-in yard collecting old nails and pieces of string. “You never know when they will be useful,” he wrote to Anna Vyrubova with a perspective that could only come from a boy eagerly exploring his environment—no matter how limited it was.

“One by one all earthly things slip away,” Alexandra wrote in one of her last letters, “houses and possessions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But God is in all, and nature never changes. I can see all around me churches … and hills, the lovely world.… I feel old, oh, so old, but I am still the mother of this country, and I suffer its pains as my own child’s pains and I love it in spite of all its sins and horrors.”

The family’s circumstances began to rapidly disintegrate as the effects of the Bolshevik triumph in Petrograd began to
seep into Tobolsk. “All the old soldiers (the most friendly) are to leave us,” Gilliard wrote at the beginning of February. “The Tsar seems very depressed at this prospect; the change may have disastrous results for us.” And indeed it did.

Reduced rations often left the family without the most basic staples, although sympathetic townspeople did sometimes make up for the deficit with what Alexandra called “little gifts from Heaven.” And the new guard arrived with a deep reservoir of cruelty. The soldiers took to carving obscenities on the swing set used by the children, and painted pornographic images on the fence. An ice mountain the prisoners had spent weeks constructing together as a joint project was hacked down, simply to deprive the children of the pleasure they found in sliding down it. They are “disconsolate,” Gilliard wrote.

The destruction of the mountain had another, more frightening consequence as well. Without this diversion, Alexis began to seek out other, more risky activities to amuse himself. Sliding down a stairway on a tray one day, he fell and was injured, after which the horrid effects of his ever-lurking disease manifested with monstrous fury. “He is frightfully thin and yellow, reminding me of Spala [five years earlier],” Alexandra wrote to Anna. This time, however, there was no Rasputin to alleviate the agony. Alexis would never walk again.

Though time was quickly evaporating, there was still hope in Tobolsk that a means of escape might be found for the desperate family imprisoned there. “All that is required is the organized and resolute efforts of a few bold spirits outside,” Gilliard wrote on March 17. One such “bold spirit” was none other than Rasputin’s own son-in-law, Boris Soloviev, who managed to centralize all monarchist rescue efforts with himself. The funds poured in but were never used. Instead Soloviev
ran off with the money. Now there was nothing left for Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children but death.

While the family’s fate was being debated in what would become Leningrad, leaders in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg—capital of a region known as the “Red Urals” because of its long history of socialist rebellion—were braying for blood. And after a complicated series of maneuvers and political posturing, they would get just what they wanted.

“The atmosphere around us is electrified,” Alexandra wrote in her final letter to Anna Vyrubova. “We feel that a storm is approaching, but we know that God is merciful and will care for us.… Though we know the storm is coming nearer and nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.”

Nicholas and Alexandra arrived in Ekaterinburg on April 30, 1918,
*
13
and were installed right away at Nicholas Ipatiev’s commandeered residence—ominously renamed “the House of Special Purpose” and retrofitted as an impregnable fortress. More than one hundred guards were posted at strategic locations inside and outside the house, which was surrounded by an imposing stockade, and all the windows were whitewashed, barred, and sealed, rendering the interior a darkened, stifling tomb. The former sovereign and his wife, now more commonly referred to as “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker” and “the German Bitch,” would endure monstrous abuse for most of the month and a half they had remaining.

There was no running water in the house for weeks, and any small request was dismissed by the hard-drinking commandant, Alexander Avadeyev. “Let them go to hell!” he would belch. The commandant liked to invite his Bolshevik comrades to watch the family eat, as he showcased his cruelty. He reached past Nicholas to grab some bread from the table, purposely jabbing him in the face with his elbow, and snatched food out of the former emperor’s hands. “You’ve had enough, you idle rich,” Avadeyev gloated poisonously. “I will take some myself.”

The guards frequently emulated their boss’s behavior in their mistreatment of the prisoners. They taunted Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters with lewd asides and forced them to play revolutionary songs on the piano. When the young women had to use the lavatory—the filthy walls of which were covered with pornographic renderings of their mother having sex with Rasputin—they were always accompanied by a leering soldier who left them no privacy and reminded them to admire the “art.”

On Alexis’s bed, one guard noticed a thin gold chain upon which the boy had strung his collection of religious images. He went to snatch it, but was stopped by Nagorny—the loyal sailor who remained to protect Alexis after the heartless defection of Derevenko at Tsarskoe Selo, and who now carried the boy still immobilized after his fall at Tobolsk. “It was his last service to Alexis,” Massie wrote. Nagorny was arrested for his efforts on the child’s behalf and shot four days later.

The noose was tightening around the Romanovs. At the beginning of July, Avadeyev was replaced as commandant by Jacob Yurovsky. “This specimen we like least of all,” Nicholas wrote in his diary of the man who would very shortly become his executioner. Two days before they were murdered, the
family seemed to have some intimation of what was to come. A priest and deacon came to read them the service, and both noted their exhaustion. When the prayer, “At Rest with the Saints,” was sung, the family fell to their knees in unison. Later, the deacon remarked to the priest, “They are all some other people, truly. Why, no one even sang.”

The Romanovs went to bed on the night of July 16 at ten thirty. An hour and a half later they were roused from their sleep, ordered to get dressed, and told they were being evacuated because Ekaterinburg was in danger of assault by approaching White forces, then engaged in a ferocious civil war with the Bolshevik Red Army. After that, the family and four attendants
*
14
were led down to the basement of the house—Nicholas carrying a sleepy Alexis, his arms draped around his father’s neck, and Anastasia clinging to their pet spaniel, Jemmy. There they were told to wait for the arrival of a car that was going to transport them to a more secure location.

None of the group seemed to sense what was to come. “There were no tears, no sobs, no questions,” Yurovsky later reported. Two chairs were brought in for Alexandra and Nicholas, upon whose lap Alexis rested. The rest stood behind them, against a wall. Yurovsky then stepped before them and announced, “In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing the attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”

“What? What?” Nicholas exclaimed just before Yurovsky’s bullet struck and killed him instantly. He fell forward to the floor on top of his son. Alexandra, too, died immediately, after the rest of the squad began to open fire. As the barrage of bullets
continued over the next several minutes, the four grand duchesses huddled together in a corner, screaming and crying in terror. But they didn’t die. Nor had their brother.

When the firing ceased, groans could be heard emanating from the thick, acrid smoke that filled the room. Then, as it cleared, Alexis could be seen crawling through his parents’ blood, shielding his face in a futile effort to protect himself. Yurovsky shot him twice in the head, while the other soldiers began to attack his surviving sisters with their bayonets. Again and again they stabbed, until finally the screaming young women were silent. Now the only survivor of the massacre was Alexandra’s maid, Anna Demidova, who was chased back and forth against the wall, tripping over corpses, before she, too, was brought down by the squad’s lethal instruments.

The bodies were then wrapped in sheets and dragged outside to a waiting truck. As they were being loaded, however, a low moaning could be heard from beneath the sheets. Then one of the grand duchesses, believed to be dead, suddenly sat up and started to scream. Horrified, the men stabbed her repeatedly but were shocked to find how difficult it was to penetrate the body with their bayonets. Finally, all was still and the truck drove off to an abandoned mine in the forest outside the city. There the bodies were stripped naked and, according to some accounts, sexually violated. It was then revealed why both bullets and bayonets had been so ineffective on some of the victims. Sewn into corsets and other garments were rows upon rows of diamonds and other precious stones, all of which helped deflect the onslaught.

“No one is responsible for their death agonies but themselves,” Yurovsky later stated. “There turned out to be eighteen pounds of such valuables. By the way, their greed turned out to be so great that on Alexandra Feodorovna there was a
simply huge piece of gold wire bent into the shape of a bracelet of around a pound in weight. All these valuables were immediately ripped out so that we wouldn’t have to drag the bloody clothes with us.”

After this plunder, the clothing was burned and the naked bodies unceremoniously tossed into the mine pit. Then several hand grenades were thrown in to destroy any evidence of the crime the Bolshevik government was determined to keep secret. Yet it wasn’t enough. The mine did not collapse and, fearing the corpses would be discovered by the advancing White Army, Yurovsky went back later and had them hauled out with ropes. Once again the bodies were loaded onto a truck for burial elsewhere. But when the vehicle got mired in the mud several miles away, it was decided to dispose of the Romanovs right there. While two of the corpses were burned near the site, a hole was dug and the rest of the remains dumped into it. Before the site was covered with dirt, however, the faces of the victims were smashed with rifle butts and sulfuric acid poured into the grave. This ensured that no one would ever recognize the Romanovs if their unmarked resting place were ever discovered.

“My Lord, save my poor, unlucky Nicky,” the Dowager Empress Marie wrote in her journal on July 17. “Help him in his hard ordeals.” But by then the trials of Nicholas II were over, and buried with him in that marshy Siberian forest was all the splendor, infamy, and madness that was imperial Russia.

*
1
Yussoupov reportedly bragged that once, when dressed as a woman, Britain’s King Edward VII tried to seduce him.