The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (28 page)

Not so Alexandra. In his diary, the tutor expressed shock at how much she had aged. Stooped and thin, she looked achingly tired and there was an expression of pain and anguish in her eyes.

Gibbes found the children changed, too. Olga, who would celebrate her twenty-second birthday in Tobolsk, had “
got[ten] much thinner,” he recalled, and was “easily irritated.”

As for twenty-year-old Tatiana, “
you could hardly find anyone so thin. Haughty and reserved … it was [now] impossible to guess her thoughts.”

Eighteen-year-old Marie, however, was as earnest and open as ever. “
She liked Tobolsk,” he wrote, “and told me she could have made herself quite happy there.”

Anastasia, at sixteen, was “
short and stout, the only ungraceful member of the family,” claimed Gibbes. Even in captivity she had retained her sense of humor. “She had a comedienne’s talent, and she made everyone laugh.”

And Alexei? He now let his emotions rule and “
rarely did what he was told,” noted Gibbes. Additionally, “he had [developed] some odd fancies.” One of them was a constant and obsessive search for old nails, pieces of tin, bits of string. “This may be useful,” Alexei
would say, tucking them into his already full pockets. Whatever unpleasant thoughts were in his head, Gibbes said, the boy “bore them silently.”

Even though the Provisional Government had put down the July uprising, its problems were far from over. The bloody war still ground on. And the economy was in shambles. In Petrograd, jobs were hard to find, and bread even harder. “
Week by week food became scarcer,” wrote American journalist John Reed. “The daily allowance of bread fell from … a pound, then [to] three-quarters, then half, and a quarter pound. Toward the end there were weeks without any bread at all.” As for sugar, milk, and meat, they were rarely seen.

Many people blamed the Provisional Government. They believed it had intentionally kept back the promises of the revolution—food, land for the peasants, and an end to the war. For this, they said, the government must be considered an enemy of the people, and overthrown.

The Petrograd Soviet agreed. In the months since Lenin’s return to Russia, more and more members had come around to his beliefs. Now Bolsheviks held the majority in the soviet. “
History will not forgive us if we do not take power [soon],” urged Lenin.

Two weeks later, on November 6, 1917, a few thousand Bolshevik-leaning soldiers under soviet orders seized control of the electric power station and the main post office as well as the main bridges and railroad stations. The majority of Petrograd’s citizens didn’t even notice. The streetcars continued to run; restaurants and shops were open for business; people even attended the opera and theater.
Hardly anyone realized the Bolsheviks were overthrowing the Provisional Government.

Inside the Winter Palace, ministers of the Provisional Government huddled around a table, smoking nervously and waiting for word from Kerensky, who had gone east to the front in hopes of raising an army to stop the mobs. They had known the insurrection was coming. Bolsheviks had been openly discussing it for days. In fact, just twenty-four hours earlier, the ministers had issued several orders: shut down Bolshevik newspapers, arrest Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries, and cut phone service to the Smolny Institute (a former girls’ school now being used by the soviet). Problem was, there was nobody to carry out these orders. The only soldiers the government had on hand were a single unit of female troops and a few untrained military cadets. That was all that stood between them and the rebels.

At nine p.m., the
Aurora
, a ship operated by Bolshevik sailors, slipped down the Neva River. It fired just one blank shell at the Winter Palace. But it was enough to terrify the ministers’ measly troops into instantly surrendering. A few hours later, the Bolsheviks seized the Peter and Paul Fortress and fired twice more at the palace. Again, no damage was done, but it was enough to scare the still-waiting ministers. At two a.m. on November 8, 1917, they surrendered.

The event, which became known as the October Revolution (according to the old-style Julian calendar, it took place on October 25), was dramatically different from the one that had occurred the previous March. The March Revolution had happened spontaneously, without any planning whatsoever. But the October Revolution was a well-organized and quiet coup. In later years, the Soviet Union would mythologize the October Revolution, inventing stories of fierce battles and daring exploits. But in truth, there
was little drama. That night, the Provisional Government vanished with barely a whimper. All power had indeed passed to the soviets.

Word of the October Revolution arrived in a bundle of old newspapers delivered to the Governor’s Mansion several weeks later. Nicholas read the accounts with despair. “
I had never seen the Emperor so shaken,” recalled Sydney Gibbes. “For a moment he was
completely incapable of saying or doing anything.” When he finally did speak, he expressed for the first time regret over giving up his throne. He had done so, he told Pierre Gilliard, “
in the hope that those who wished to get rid of [me] would be capable of making a success of the war and saving Russia.” But now he believed he had done Russia “an ill turn” by making way for the Bolsheviks. “This idea,” added Gilliard, “haunt[ed] him.”

Lenin had promised workers and peasants that, under Bolshevik rule, he would replace the unjust social order with a system of equality. So almost immediately after assuming power, he declared “
a war to the death against the rich, the idlers and the parasites.” Between November 1917 and March 1918, he decreed dozens of new policies that transferred much of the country’s public and private wealth into the government’s hands. There were so many, claimed one Moscow citizen, that the streets “
smelled of printer’s ink.… Day by day, these sharp, ruthless decrees were cutting away whole layers of a way of life, throwing them away, and laying the basis for a new life.” Among them was the Decree on Land, making private ownership of land illegal. Within weeks, 75 percent of all estates had been confiscated. The new government did not compensate the noblemen for their losses. Instead, the land passed directly to peasant committees whose job it was to divide it. When divvying up these estates, committees often left the former owner enough acreage to live on. Believing, as they did, that the land belonged to those who plowed it, peasants now provided a way for the nobleman to earn a living. Many took the peasant committees up on their offers. In the mid-1920s, there were still some ten thousand former landowners laboring beside the peasants.

Additionally, Lenin decreed that private homes be seized. Bolshevik officials now arrived at upper-class homes waving warrants that allowed them to seize anything—furniture, books, carpets, silverware. Said one looter as he meticulously plucked every jewel-tipped pin from Countess Sheremetev’s pincushion, “
This is how we take everything.” Across the country, palaces, mansions, and town houses were turned into government offices, or living space for workers. Taking the best rooms, workers typically forced the previous owners into one small room in the servants’ quarters (as sanctioned by another of Lenin’s laws). To most workers, this seemed fair. “
I’ve spent all my life in the stables while they live in their beautiful flats and lie on soft couches playing with their poodles,” said one ex-servant. “No more of that, I say! It’s my turn to play with poodles now.”

Around the same time, Lenin issued more than thirty other decrees nationalizing private industry and manufacturing. Factories were wrested from their owners. Shipping and foreign trade were declared a state monopoly. And the banks were nationalized. On December 27, 1917, government soldiers occupied twenty-three private banks and arrested their directors. After cleaning out the vaults, they ordered anyone with a safe-deposit box to report with their key. When the boxes were opened, they confiscated everything inside—jewels, money, property deeds. They even took personal items like marriage certificates and lockets of baby hair. Additionally, the government formed a State Treasury for Storage of Valuables, charged with collecting everything from art, antiques, and precious stones to rare books and expensive wines. Lenin was determined that no personal wealth would remain in anyone’s hands—not even the Church’s.

In January 1918, he issued the Decree on the Separation of Church and State, allowing for the seizure of all property belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. Gold was stripped from altar
walls. Jewels were pried from holy icons. And cathedrals and monasteries were converted into hospitals, schools, and orphanages.

All these policies were directed at those who had once been socially privileged. Now Lenin gave them a new title—“
former people.” And he ordered the mandatory registration of all “
former landowners, capitalists and persons who held positions of authority in either the tsarist or the provisional government.” These “former people” were forced to work, and any who refused, starved. By Lenin’s decree, every month “former people” had to show proof of having performed community jobs (other Russians did not have to do this). And they were purposely given the most degrading tasks—cleaning public toilets, digging graves, cleaning trash off the streets. As they struggled with their brooms and shovels, groups of bystanders mocked them. “
For centuries, our fathers and grandfathers have been cleaning up the dirt and filth of the ruling class,” said one Bolshevik official, “but now we will make them clean up our dirt.”

This miserable existence forced many “former people” to pack up and abandon their homeland. They moved to Western Europe or America. Some moved to southern cities in Russia, where Bolshevik authority did not yet reach. Many were jailed. Others were killed. So effective was Lenin’s attack on the former elite that the communist newspaper
Pravda
would soon write: “
Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances … all the corrupt ‘golden life’? All swept away.”

At first, the new Bolshevik-controlled government had little effect on the Romanovs, and their days went on as before—meals, books,
card games … boredom! Then winter roared in, bringing both snow and a break in the monotony.

For ten whole days in January 1918, everyone except Alexandra worked to build a mountain of snow in the little yard. Gibbes and Gilliard joined in the fun, along with a handful of servants and even a couple of the guards. Together, they shoveled snow and piled it high. Then they carried gallons of water to pour and freeze over the mound. With the temperature dipping below zero, they had to sprint from the kitchen tap, trying to reach the mountain before the water froze in their buckets. When they finished, the mountain stood almost as tall as the wooden fence—an icy and fast sled run. Soon everyone (except Alexandra) could be seen wrestling, sliding, tumbling, and racing up and down the hill. “
We often take very funny falls,” reported Tatiana. “Once Monsieur [Gilliard] ended up sitting on my head.… It was terribly silly and funny.… Another time I was going down the hill backwards and banged the back of my head really hard across the ice. I thought nothing would be left of the hill, but it turned out that neither it nor my head burst.… I’ve got a hard head, don’t I? Eh?”