The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (36 page)
Read The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia Online
Authors: Candace Fleming
The man who planned and carried out the murder of the Romanovs, Yakov Yurovsky, c. 1920.
C
OURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Captured by White Troops, a soldier of the Red Army is tied to a stake after confessing that he is a Communist. He would later be shot.
C
OURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
A photograph of the cellar room, taken after the family was killed, shows bullet holes and bayonet scars in the walls and floor.
C
ORBIS
Investigators in Koptyaki Forest search at the mine site. Sheets were laid out to receive bodies that were never found.
S
OKOLOV
A
RCHIVE, VOL. 3
, H
OUGHTON
L
IBRARY
, H
ARVARD
U
NIVERSITY
Skeletons of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of the girls) being examined by a forensic scientist in Ekaterinburg, 1992.
RIA N
OVOSTI
/S
CIENCE
S
OURCE
In 2000, the Orthodox Church in Russia declared Nicholas II and his family saints. This holy icon shows them together and haloed.
Alexei himself holds the icon of Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most revered icons in Russian history.
C
OURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
In Russian it’s
spasibo
. In English, it’s thank you. In either language, I am immensely grateful to the peerless Anne Schwartz for her inspiration and encouragement (not to mention her patience and persistence), as well as to the talented Rachael Cole for her extraordinary book design. Thanks also to everyone at Random House who helped this project come together: Lee Wade, Stephanie Pitts, Adrienne Waintraub, and Colleen Fellingham.
I am also indebted to fellow writer Eugene Yelchin for taking precious time away from his own manuscript to read and comment on mine. He grew up in the former Soviet Union, and his suggestions were not only insightful, but also invaluable.
Special thanks to Sarah Miller (author, librarian, and fellow Romanov geek) for “saving my bacon” in so many ways, and to Laura Mabee for coming to my rescue with that elusive 1903 menu.
Hooray to Holly Pribble for once again aiding me with her artistic skills; cheers to my writing friends Penny Blubaugh, Stephanie Hemphill, and Karen Blumenthal for listening, advising, and occasionally consoling; and hugs to Eric Rohmann, my first, most trusted reader.
Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their help in obtaining images, documents, and other important resources: Agata Rukowska, picture library assistant at the Royal Collection Trust; Beth Remak-Honnef, head of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz; Anne Marie Menta, library service assistant for Romanov materials at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University; Stephanie Stewart, assistant archivist at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University; Susan Halpert, reference librarian at the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the reference librarians at the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.
Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Mark D. Steinberg, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who not only meticulously vetted the manuscript, but also answered my endless questions with patience and enthusiasm, provided invaluable insight into revolutionary Russia, and challenged my conventional images of Nicholas and Alexandra by pointing me in the direction of additional historical documents.
Spasibo!
IBLIOGRAPHY
Q
UESTIONS
AND
A
NSWERS
Three years ago, I set out to discover the true story of what happened to Russia’s last imperial family. I was aware of the facts surrounding their murder. I knew about their bodies’ discovery and the results of DNA testing. But the facts did not tell the whole tale. I suspected there was more. After some reading and research, I came to realize, more than anything, that I needed to find the answers to the question that kept nagging me:
How did this happen?
How did this rich, splendidly privileged, and, yes, beautiful family related by blood or marriage to almost every royal house in Europe end up in that Siberian cellar? Something had gone terribly wrong. But what? What forces were at work? What personalities? And was there really nothing Nicholas or Alexandra could have done to change their fate?
These were the questions I set out to answer. But doing so, I realized, would require a wider lens. I would need to look beyond the Romanovs and their fairy-tale existence and examine the lives of lower-class Russians—peasants and workers, revolutionaries and soldiers. The result? A book that is essentially three stories in one. The first is an intimate look at the Romanovs themselves. The second follows the sweep of revolution from the workers’ strikes of 1905 to Lenin’s rise to power in November 1917. And the third—conveyed in their own words—is the personal stories of the men and women whose struggle for a better life directly affected the course of the Romanovs’ lives.
The following bibliography and quote sources reflect just a small portion of the material used to inform my understanding of those three stories. I have bombarded Russian scholars with endless
questions; looked at thousands of photographs; scoured dozens of newspapers on microfilm, in bound volumes, and online; and read more Karl Marx than I ever thought possible. With the help of the archivists at both the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and Harvard’s Houghton Library, I’ve had access to original sources. And in August 2012, I traveled to Russia, where I followed in the Romanovs’ footsteps, wandering the shady paths of Tsarskoe Selo and traipsing through the hallways of the Alexander Palace; visiting Rasputin’s last apartment; exploring workers’ neighborhoods, Lenin’s headquarters, and the dark, dank jail cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. All this and more has significantly contributed to the work you’ve just read.
RIMARY
S
OURCES
The heart of all research is the firsthand accounts and eyewitness testimonies of those who lived through an historical event. For almost seventy-five years, the only primary material we had about the imperial family came from the memoirs of the Russian nobility who had fled the country after Lenin’s rise to power. Many of these reminiscences were sympathetic, painting an overly rosy picture of the imperial family. But in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all that changed. Diaries, letters, and other documents believed to have been destroyed began emerging from archives and museums. Now we can read Alexei’s last diary entries for ourselves, delve into Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s letters, discover Olga’s poetry. More surprising, we can hear directly from ordinary Russians who encountered the family in their final months—Yurovsky’s chilling account of the murders; statements from guards; depositions from priests and cleaning women. Certainly, some accounts, especially those of the family’s jailers, contradict one another. And because
most were originally written in Russian or French, they vary by translator. For this reason, more than one version of the same source is occasionally listed. I have chosen to use the more accessible quote, or the pithier, more poignant translation. It should also be noted that the Romanovs themselves used English when writing to each other. Thus their colorful, sometimes awkward prose is not a creative translation, but exactly how they wrote. Additionally, in citations of letters or diary entries, you will notice two dates. The first is the “old-style” Julian calendar date cited by its creator. The second is the “new-style” Georgian calendar date coinciding with this book’s text.
Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia.
Once a Grand Duke
. Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1932.
Alexandra, Empress of Russia.
The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–16
. London: Duckworth, 1923.
Botkin, Gleb.
The Real Romanovs
. New York: Revell, 1931.
Buchanan, Meriel.
The Dissolution of an Empire
. London: John Murray, 1932.
Buchanan, Sir George.
My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories
. 2 volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1923.
Bulygin, Paul, and Alexander Kerensky.
The Murder of the Romanovs
. London: Hutchinson, 1935.
Buxhoeveden, Baroness Sophie.
Left Behind: Fourteen Months in Siberia During the Revolution
. London: Longmans, Green, 1929.
——.
The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia
. London: Longmans, Green, 1928.
Bykov, P. M.
The Last Days of Tsardom
. London: Martin Lawrence, 1934.
“Czar Has Another Daughter.”
The New York Times
, 18 June 1901.
Dehn, Lili.
The Real Tsaritsa
. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922.
de Stoeckl, Agnes.
Not All Vanity
. London: John Murray, 1951.
Elchaninov, Major-General Andrei.
The Tsar and His People
. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914.
Gautier, Théophile. “A Ball at the Winter Palace” in
Romantic Castles and Palaces as Seen and Described by Famous Writers
. Edited and translated by Esther Singleton. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901.
Gilliard, Pierre.
Thirteen Years at the Russian Court
. Translated by F. Appleby Holt. New York: Doran, 1921.
Goldman, Emma.
My Disillusionment in Russia
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923.
Gorky, Maxim.
Autobiography of Maxim Gorky
. Translated by Isidor Schneider. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001.
Gudvan, A. M. “Essays on the History of the Movement of Sales-Clerical Workers in Russia” (1925) in
The Russian Worker: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime
. Edited by Victoria E. Bonnell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Halliburton, Richard.
Seven League Boots
. Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1942.
(Ilidor) Trufanoff, Sergei.
The Mad Monk of Russia
. New York: Century, 1918.
Kanatchikov, Semën Ivanovich.
A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov
. Edited and translated by Reginald E. Zelnik. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Kerensky, Alexander.
The Crucifixion of Liberty
. New York: Day, 1934.
Khrustalev, Vladimir M., and Vladimir A. Kozlov.
The Last Diary of Tsarista Alexandra
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Knox, Alfred.
With the Russian Army, 1914–1917
. 2 volumes. London: Hutchinson & Company, 1921.
Kokovtsov, Count Vladimir N.
Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov
. Edited by H. H. Fisher. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935.
Korolenko, Vladimir. “Kishineff: The Medieval Outbreak Against the Jew.”
www.fighthatred.com/historical-events/pogroms-razzias/1034-the-kishinev-pogrom-of-1093-chaim-nachman-bialik
.
Lockhard, R. H. Bruce.
Memoirs of a British Agent
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933.
Marie, Queen of Romania.
Ordeal: The Story of My Life
. 2 volumes. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
Maylunas, Andrei, and Sergei Mironenko.
A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas & Alexandra: Their Own Story
. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Mosolov, A. A.
At the Court of the Last Tsar
. London: Methuen, 1935.
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia.
Journal Intime
. Translated by A. Pierre. Paris: Payot, 1925.
——.
The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa, 1914–1916
. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929.
——and Dowager Empress of Russia Marie Feodorovna.
The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar: The Confidential Correspondence Between Nicholas II and His Mother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna
. Edited by Edward J. Bing. New York: Longmans, Green, 1938.
Paléologue, Maurice.
An Ambassador’s Memoirs
. 3 volumes. Translated by F. Appleby Holt. New York: Doran, 1925.
Palmer, Svetlana, and Sarah Wallis, editors.
Intimate Voices from the First World War
. New York: William Morrow, 2003.
Paustovsky, Konstantin.
The Story of a Life
. Translated by Joseph Barnes. New York: Pantheon, 1964.
Poole, Ernest.
The Village: Russian Impressions
. New York: Macmillan, 1918.
Purishkevich, Vladimir.
The Murder of Rasputin
. Translated by Bella Costello. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985.
Rasputin, Maria.
My Father
. London: Cassell, 1934.
Rasputin, Maria, and Patte Barham.
Rasputin: The Man Behind the Myth
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
Reed, John.
Ten Days That Shook the World
. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
Rodzianko, M. V.
The Reign of Rasputin
. London: Philpot, 1927.
Shulgin, V. V.
Days of the Russian Revolution: Memoirs from the Right, 1905–1917
. Translation of
Dni
by Bruce F. Adams. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1990.
Skipworth, Sofka [Princess Sophy Dolgorouky].
Sofka: The Autobiography of a Princess
. London: Hart-Davis, 1968.
Spiridovitch, Alexander. “Murder of Prime Minister Stolypin in Kiev, 1911” in
Les Dernières Années de la Cour de Tzarskoe-Selo
. Paris: Payot, 1928.
alexanderpalace.org/palace/stolypin-murder-1911-kiev.html
(Translated by Robert Moshein), accessed 6/15/11.
Strekotin, Alexander. “Alexander Strekotin: Statement, 1934.”
www.kingandwilson.com/FOTRResources/strekotin.htm
.
Tian-Shanskaia, Olga Semyonova.
Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
. Edited and translated by David L. Ransel with Michael Levine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Trotsky, Leon.
Diary in Exile, 1935
. Translated by Elena Zarudnaya. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
——.
The History of the Russian Revolution
. 3 volumes. Translated by Max Eastman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932.
Volkov, Alexei.
Souvenirs d’Alexis Volkov, Valet de Chambre de la Tsarine Alexandra Feodorovna 1910–1918
. Paris: Payot, 1928.
www.alexanderpalace.org/volkov/
(Translated by Robert Moshein, 2004), accessed 8/1/11.
Vorres, Ian.
Last Grand Duchess: The Memoirs of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna
. London: Hutchinson, 1964.
Vyrubova, Anna.
Memories of the Russian Court
. London: Macmillan, 1923.
Williams, Albert Rhys.
Through the Russian Revolution
. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921.
Wilton, Robert.
The Last Days of the Romanovs (including Depositions of Colonel Kobylinksy, Pierre Gilliard, Sydney Gibbes, Anatoly Yakimov, Pavel Medvedev, Philip Proskuriakov)
. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920.
Witte, Count Sergei.
The Memoirs of Count Witte
. Translated by Abraham Yarmolinksy. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921.
(Yusupov) Youssoupoff, Prince Felix.
Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin
. Translated by Anne Green and Nicholas Katkoff. London: Cape, 1953.
