The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (55 page)

Alexandra, for the men of the Escort were to leave that afternoon.

They had all spent a sleepless night pondering their enforced depar-

ture and were intensely gloomy, unable to ‘understand or believe

that the situation was hopeless’.113 Shortly before they left the Escort asked Viktor Zborovsky to pass on their loyal sentiments to the

empress. It was with profound regret, Viktor told her, that they had

no option but to obey the order to leave. Alexandra asked him to

thank all the men on behalf of herself and the children for their

loyal service. ‘I ask you all to refrain from any kind of independent action that might only delay the emperor’s arrival and affect the fate of the children’, she said, adding, ‘Starting with myself, we must all submit to fate.’114

Zborovsky had found it hard to speak when Alexandra handed

him some small icons – her farewell gift to the Escort. She then

took him through to Olga and Tatiana’s room where both were still

ill in bed. It took all Zborovsky’s powers of self-control not to break down in front of the children. Silently, he bowed low to them, and

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then to Alexandra and kissed her hand. ‘I can’t remember how I

left’, he wrote in his diary later, ‘I went without turning round. In my hand I clutched the little icons, my chest felt tight, something

heavy was gathering in my throat that was about to break out into

a groan.’115

After the Escort rode away, all the entrances to the palace were

locked and sealed except for a single exit via the kitchen and the

main entrance for official visitors. ‘We were prisoners’, Pierre

Gilliard recorded starkly in his diary.116 Lili Dehn remembered a

very bright moon that night: ‘the snow lay like a pall on the frost-

bound Park. The cold was intense. The silence of the great Palace

was occasionally broken by snatches of drunken songs and the coarse

laughter of the soldiers’ (of the new palace guard). In the distance, they could all hear the intermittent firing of guns.117

A hundred or more miles (160 km) away to the south, as the

frost of another perishing winter night descended and the wind

gathered, the imperial train carrying Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia and now plain Colonel Romanov, was heading back towards

Tsarskoe Selo.

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N

Nicholas II’s return to Tsarskoe Selo on 9 March 1917 was the most

painful of rude awakenings: ‘sentries on the street and surrounding

the palace and inside the park, and inside the front entrance some

kind of officers’.1 Upstairs he found his wife sitting in a darkened

room with all their children; they were in good spirits, though Maria was very ill. Hugely relieved to be back home he soon discovered

that even his most innocuous daily habits were to be severely

restricted. That afternoon he was refused permission to go for his

usual long walk in the Alexander Park; his domain now comprised

a small recreation area cum garden at the immediate rear entrance

of the palace. Here he took up a spade and cleared the footpath

with his aide Prince Vasily Dolgorukov – the only officer allowed

to return with him from Stavka – their guards looking on with

amusement.2

Lili Dehn was shocked when she saw Nicholas. He was ‘deathly

pale, his face covered with innumerable wrinkles, his hair was quite

grey at the temples, and blue shadows encircled his eyes. He looked

like an old man.’3 To Elizaveta Naryshkina he seemed calm on the

surface and she admired his astonishing self- control and his apparent indifference to being addressed not as tsar but as an army officer,

which effectively was all he now was.4 Although the palace comman-

dant, Pavel Kotzebue, referred to him politely as ‘the ex-Emperor’

most of Nicholas’s captors called him Nikolay Romanov or even

‘little Nikolay’.5 He tried hard not to react to the petty humiliations from some of the more truculent guards: ‘They blew tobacco smoke

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in his face . . . A soldier grabbed him by the arm and pulled one

way, while others clutched him on the other side and pulled him in

an opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed at his anger

and pain’, Anna Vyrubova later recalled.6 But Nicholas did not react:

‘Despite the circumstances in which we now find ourselves,’ he

wrote in his diary on the 10th, ‘the thought that we are all together cheers and comforts us.’7 Maria’s condition, however, was becoming

a serious cause for concern; her temperature was running at over

104 degrees F (40 degrees C). Alexandra and Lili moved her from

her small nickel campbed to a proper double bed, the better to nurse

her. With the exhausted girl drifting in and out of delirium they

spent their time constantly sponging her down, brushing her now

horribly tangled hair and changing her sweat-drenched nightdress

and bedding. To make matters worse, she had developed pneumonia

as well.8

*

Shortly after Nicholas’s return, during the days of uncertainty about where the family might eventually be allowed to live, Elizaveta

Naryshkina had suggested that Nicholas and Alexandra accept any

offer to leave the country; she and Count Benkendorf would look

after the children until they were well enough and then bring them

to them later.9 Thoughts of evacuating the children ahead of

Nicholas’s return had indeed been in Alexandra’s mind, even after

they fell sick, and she had discussed various options with her entou-

rage.10 Perhaps she could get them north into Finland; she asked

Dr Botkin if he thought ‘in their present physical condition’ they

could cope with the journey. Botkin’s response was unequivocal: ‘at

the moment I would be less afraid of measles than of the

revolutionaries.’11However, any thoughts Alexandra might have had

were abandoned when Nicholas countermanded her suggestion and

insisted they wait for his projected return on 1 March. Had he

arrived home then, the family might all have been speedily evacu-

ated, but once he was trapped at Stavka and Alexandra placed under

house arrest the whole situation dramatically changed. The British

ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, had been in an agony of frustra-

tion since the beginning of the year: ‘I shall not be happy till they
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are safely out of Russia’, he had said, but tentative negotiations with the British government for a possible refuge in England had quickly

stalled.12 The offer from George V, made on 9 March (22nd NS)

in response to a request from Russia’s Foreign Minister Pavel

Milyukov, had spoken only of asylum for the duration of the war.

Other options were quickly discussed and dropped: Denmark was

too close to Germany; France would not entertain the idea. Alexandra

had at one point said that she would prefer to go to Norway where

she felt the climate would suit Alexey, although she would certainly

be glad to see England again, should it come to it.13 But wherever

the family went, she and Nicholas both thought in terms only of a

temporary refuge until the situation eased and they could hopefully

be allowed to return and live quietly in Russia – preferably the

Crimea.14

The British government continued to discuss the issue throughout

March, while Alexander Kerensky pondered the family’s evacuation,

perhaps to Port Romanov (Murmansk), from where a British cruiser

could take them through German- patrolled waters to England

under a white flag. But then George V had had a change of heart.

The king was uneasy that the former tsar’s arrival in England would

create problems for his government – which had already acknowl-

edged the revolution – and in so doing threaten the safety of his

own throne. The most important thing was to keep the new revo-

lutionary Russia on side and in the war, and this transcended any

familial loyalty to Nicholas. By the time George’s Foreign Secretary

Arthur Balfour was instructed on 24 March (6 April NS) to suggest

that the Russian government ‘make some other plan for the future

residence of their imperial majesties’, far too much precious time

had been lost.15 A powerful, grassroots opposition to any evacuation

had escalated, particularly among the pro-Bolshevik executive

committees of the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.16 Any attempt to

get the family out by train would have been blocked by the heavily

politicized railwaymen of Petrograd, who, according to
Izvestiya
, the new organ of the Petrograd soviet, had already ‘wired along all

railway lines that every railway organization, each station-master,

every group of railway-workmen, is bound to detain Nicholas II’s

train whenever and wherever it may appear’.17

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Izvestiya
reflected the ugly mood building in the capital. An evacuation of the family could not be permitted, the paper railed,

for the ex-tsar was privy to all state secrets relating to the war and was ‘possessed of colossal wealth’ that he would be able to access

in the comfort of exile.18 Nicholas must be held under the strictest

isolation pending the meting out of a new, Soviet form of justice.

Yet amid so many accusations levelled against them Nicholas and

Alexandra had in fact remained intensely loyal to Russia and all talk of any political betrayal on their part was entirely unfounded; indeed, Nicholas had already been worrying that his abdication might

damage the allied offensive. As far as exile was concerned, neither

he nor Alexandra had any desire for the sybaritic ex-patriot lifestyle of ‘wandering about the Continent, and living at Swiss hotels as

ex-Royalties, snapshotted and paragraphed by representatives of the

picture papers’. They shrank from such ‘cheap publicity’, asserted

Lili Dehn, and considered it their duty to stand by Russia whatever

the cost.19

Arriving in Russia just after Nicholas’s return, the Anglo-Irish

journalist Robert Crozier Long was immediately struck by the ‘unex-

ampled reversal of ranks and conditions which . . . the Revolution

had brought about in the most despotic and class-crystallized country of Europe’. He travelled out to Tsarskoe Selo to report on the tsar’s incarceration and encountered an unnerving atmosphere. The town

was ‘a microcosm of the Revolution’; at the Alexandrovsky Station

he was greeted by ‘crowds of untidy revolutionary soldiers, all with

red badges’, the stationmaster was an army corporal and ‘portraits

of Nicholas II and his father Alexander III lay in tatters in a rubbish heap’. The authorities were finding it hard to keep the lid on

renegade elements in the town that resented any form of indulgence

shown to the prisoners and were keen to exert their own form of

rough justice on the tsar and tsaritsa. The railings of the Alexander Park had now become a public sideshow where people gathered in

order to catch a glimpse of the former tsar and his family whenever

they emerged in the garden.20

The family’s daily routine, having always been mundane, now

became even more predictable. They all got up early except

Alexandra and by 8 a.m. Nicholas was often seen walking outside

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with Dolgorukov, or undertaking some kind of physical work –

breaking the ice on the waterways and clearing the snow. It was all

too painful for Elizaveta Naryshkina to watch: ‘How far has he sunk

who once owned the riches of the earth and a devoted people! How

splendid his reign could have been, if he had only understood the

needs of the era!’21 After a plain lunch at 1 p.m., and as the weather improved and the girls recovered, the family worked outside digging

up the turf and preparing the ground for a vegetable garden to be

planted in the spring. When it was warm enough Alexandra would

join them in her wheelchair, where she sat embroidering or tatting.

In the afternoon the younger children had their lessons, and later,

if the weather continued fine, they returned to the garden until the

light began to fade. Much to their surprise, the guards found them-

selves watching over a family that was ‘quiet, unprovocative, unfail-

ingly polite to one another and to them, and whose occasional

sadness bore the stamp of a dignity their jailers could never emulate and were reluctantly compelled to admire’.22 Some of the sentries

exploited public curiosity by taking money from people wanting a

closer look at the tsar and his children. The family moved out of

sight as best they could when this happened, but even so they were

not immune to insult not just from onlookers but also from their

own guards. ‘When the young Grand Duchesses or the Empress

appeared at a window, the sentries made obscene gestures which

were greeted with shouts of laughter from their comrades.’23A few