While it is their parents’ story that will set the scene in the opening chapters of this book, and we shall see how they were in many respects the masters of their own violent destiny, it is the children who inspire a continuing sense of regret and of longing for a different outcome.
As rulers of the most powerful empire in the world, Nicholas and Alexandra had been desperate for a son and heir. The birth of four daughters – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – in quick succession between 1895 and 1901 had brought considerable public anguish, but also much private joy. The arrival, finally, in 1904 of a son and heir to the Romanov throne, Alexey, turned the family’s life upside down. Its whole focus shifted onto the sickly Tsarevich and the unending battle to keep at bay the crippling attacks of haemophilia, passed on to him unknowingly by his mother, which could at any time have killed ‘The Hope of Russia’.
With so much attention directed onto Alexey, less and less note was taken of his four sisters, who increasingly slipped into the background, an anonymous collective of pretty girls who seemed charming, uncontroversial – and dull. But despite living perpetually in the shadow of filial duty to their brother and loyalty to their controlling, invalid mother, the Romanov sisters by no means lost their striking individuality. Olga, kind and sensitive, who loved poetry but who tended to introspection and mood swings, felt the weight of responsibility, as the eldest, to set an example. Tatiana, in contrast, never betrayed her feelings, was brisk and capable and extremely good at getting things done. She had the same cautious personality and reserve as her mother, to whom she was devoted. Maria was sweet, gentle and loving, a natural care-giver who loved children. But as the middle child she was vulnerable to being bullied by the others, particularly the fourth sister, Anastasia. Much has been written about the youngest Romanov sister – perhaps at the expense of the others – but she was an extraordinary individualist, a wild spirit, flamboyant and extrovert, good at entertaining people and keeping up morale. And finally there was Alexey, a bright, inquisitive child who suffered from being spoilt by an overprotective mother – which encouraged bouts of bad behaviour – but who demonstrated great intelligence and intuition as he grew older, and a compassion for those, like him, who experienced ill health.
The intimate, highly protected domestic world created by their mama and papa, which these five children inhabited so contentedly till the outbreak of war in 1914, was very different from the public one occupied by Nicholas and Alexandra themselves. By 1917, the autocratic Tsar and Tsaritsa – once so beloved as the ‘little father’ and ‘little mother’ of the nation – were widely reviled in a rapidly changing revolutionary Russia. The country was worn down by the abuses of the old repressive tsarist regime and a growing voice of dissent demanded their overthrow and the establishment of a democratic constitutional government.
During the war years of 1914–18 the Romanov children had begun to see and experience at first hand the ugly truth of the widespread antipathy directed towards their parents. They had had to grow up fast – the eldest two sisters, Olga and Tatiana, training as nurses to work in the hospital set up by their mother at Tsarskoe Selo, and all of them, including Alexey, supporting Red Cross charities, hospital-visiting and other war work. But then war descended into revolution and chaos; in March 1917 the metaphorical cage that had protected the Romanov children till now became a very real and frightening one. The old tsarist government – the State Duma – fell, and Nicholas was prevailed upon to abdicate. Now prisoners of the new Russian Provisional Government, the Romanov family were held under house arrest, first at the Alexander Palace from March to July 1917, then transferred to Tobolsk from August to April 1918, and finally sent to the House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg.
It was here, in this centre of the Urals mining industry in Western Siberia, during the last ninety-eight days of their lives, that the Romanovs finally began to sense an ominous change in the atmosphere. Until then they had endured the monotony of their captivity with a combination of intense boredom and calm resignation. But, for the Bolshevik Revolution, the endgame was in sight; and that meant one thing: a brutal and vindictive act of retribution would be carried out against the entire Imperial Family. Nicholas and Alexandra must have sensed that sooner or later the revolution might take its revenge on them. But the children too?
The violent deaths of these seven royal victims, along with their doctor and three loyal servants, although horrific to us now, were soon forgotten at the time. They were rapidly swallowed up in a much more hideous catalogue of savage fighting and murder that saw eleven million Russians die during the years of upheaval and civil war of 1917–22.
Yet despite this, for some people the Romanov family will always represent, historically, the symbolic first victims of the new, Soviet regime and a system that would go on to kill even more millions in the decades of Stalinist repression that followed. There is also another element that keeps this story in the public consciousness: a persisting sense – often not fully understood – that regicide, the killing of a king or tsar, is the killing of God’s anointed; that regicide is an act that crosses a line, after which any evil is possible.
But, ultimately, it is the murder of innocent children that horrifies us the most.
I had felt a strong sense of attachment to the Romanov family right from the very start – when walking the streets of Ekaterinburg in the summer of 2007, after flying there to research my book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs. In the humid July heat and late into the eerie White Nights that lit up the city, I walked its streets from north to south, east to west, reimagining the Romanovs’ last days at the Ipatiev House on Voznesensky Prospekt. I travelled out to the Koptyaki Forest nine miles away and stood with the pilgrims mourning the Romanovs in rapt silence at the place where the family’s bodies, and those of their loyal retainers, had been thrown in chaotic haste that first night. I found my way to the modest wooden cross with plastic flowers in a woodland glade not far away, where they all – bar Maria and Alexey – had been tossed into a shallow grave forty-eight hours later. I pondered why exactly this story had gained such a hold over my imagination. I could understand the powerful, all-pervading sense of grief about the Romanov murders that was still nursed by devout Orthodox Russians; and, like everyone else, I had been sucked into its elements of high drama and tragedy. But my fundamental attraction to it was as a historian and a writer. I wanted answers to questions that had long been troubling me, and which I felt no one till now had really tried to answer. I wanted to try and get at the truth of what really happened in 1917–18.
The canonisation of the murdered Romanov family in the 1980s, followed by the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church after the collapse of communism in 1991, has fostered a level of veneration that has today turned Ekaterinburg into a major pilgrimage centre. As a result, a great deal of evidence has come to light in the last twenty-five years in post-Soviet Russia about the circumstances of the family’s time in captivity, from their house arrest at the Alexander Palace to the final haunting, foreboding days in Ekaterinburg. Russian historians have, since the 1990s, published valuable evidence that had long been languishing in the Soviet archives, and have written extensively on the circumstances of the murders and the identity of their perpetrators. The continuing controversy over the DNA testing of the remains – first carried out in the 1990s and repeated more recently at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church – has meant that the story regularly resurfaces in the press. Every time it does, the inevitable tedious conspiracy theories and claims of miraculous survival follow in its wake; even now, they still refuse to go away.
July 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Romanov murders. Now is undoubtedly the opportune and most fitting time to at last put the metaphorical lid on the coffin and bring closure to this story. For me as a historian, there remain several burning, unanswered questions that nobody has yet tackled – except piecemeal, here and there, and often based on conjecture rather than original, evidence
-based research. And they are these:
Why was nobody able to save the Romanovs?
Why did the Imperial Family’s many royal cousins in Europe collectively fail them? Why did all the Allied governments with which Russia had so doggedly been fighting a war for three and a half years let them down? Why did the Russian Provisional Government prove impotent in effecting a prompt and safe evacuation out of Russia, after Nicholas abdicated? Why did Germany not take advantage of its upper hand at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and insist that the Romanovs be released? And why was everyone so easily taken in by the duplicitous game played by Lenin’s Soviet government about the true circumstances of the Imperial Family’s brutal murder?
Having spoken about the Romanovs on the literary-festival circuit for many years, I always get two predictable questions from audiences at the end of every talk. One is: ‘Did Anastasia get away?’; and the other: ‘Why did King George V betray his Romanov cousins and not grant them asylum in England?’
Ah, so it was all King George’s fault? The British king had failed to come galloping to the rescue of his Romanov cousins. If only it were that simple. The story that I unravel here is much more complicated: it is a tale of intriguing personal family relationships; internal and international political rivalries and prejudices; the vagaries of geography and the weather, and the logistical difficulties created by them; and – at its most basic level – a story of plain bad timing.
To make sense of it all, I wanted to begin by getting to grips with the attitudes and relationships of the royal cousins who found themselves at war – or clinging perilously to a neutral stance – in August 1914. This meant that I needed to go back to the close, incestuous world of European royalty of the 1890s.
Chapter 1
Happy Families
In April 1894 the last of a succession of royal dynastic marriages engineered by Queen Victoria as ‘Grandmama of Europe’ took place in Coburg, the capital of the German Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine. The bride and groom were two of her grandchildren: Ernst, the reigning Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and Princess Victoria Melita, a daughter of Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. It was a union that epitomised the close intermarriage of first and second cousins that had been a regular feature of Queen Victoria’s family since the 1850s. By the time she died in 1901, her royal descendants in Europe had been drawn into a network of complex and often antagonistic dynastic ties and loyalties that would continue to be made right up to the eve of war in 1914.
This latest family marriage at Coburg, between first cousins Ernst (better known as Ernie) and Victoria Melita, was, however, almost upstaged by the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the ten-year-long on–off romance between Nicholas Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian throne, and Ernie’s sister, Princess Alix (as she was then known). Everyone thought Alix a great beauty and a desirable match, as a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Nicholas had carried the torch for her for several years, but she had stubbornly resisted his entreaties to marry her. The seemingly insurmountable stumbling block was that, despite being deeply in love with Nicholas, the pious Alix steadfastly refused to give up her Lutheran faith and convert to Russian Orthodoxy. But at the Coburg wedding, and somewhat unexpectedly, the match was given the impetus it required by the intervention of one of the couple’s least-likely relatives – the difficult and often antagonistic Wilhelm, Kaiser of Germany. Here, as German emperor on a par with his grandmother Victoria, who was Empress of India, Wilhelm revelled in presiding over this ‘august reunion of the oldest dynasties in Europe’.1 He had worked hard to persuade Alix to agree to convert, in order to cement further royal dynastic expansion in Europe, and on 21 April she had finally relented. Nicholas recorded in his diary that this was the ‘most wonderful, unforgettable day of my life – the day of my betrothal to my dear beloved Alix’.2 For ever after, Wilhelm would congratulate himself that he had acted as the deus ex machina behind the engagement of his Russian and German cousins. They owed their good fortune to him, and this unshakeable belief in his own magisterial powers would remain an integral part of the ‘mythomania’ of Wilhelm’s eccentric world.3
Queen Victoria, however, had very serious apprehensions about what the future might hold for her beloved granddaughter Alix if she married into Russian royalty. ‘My blood runs cold when I think of her so young most likely placed on that very unsafe throne,’ she wrote to Alix’s sister Victoria, for ‘her dear life and above all her husband’s’ would be ‘constantly threatened’.4 As in many things, history would prove Queen Victoria right.
In earlier years, Wilhelm had himself held aspirations to marry one of the four beautiful Hesse sisters: Alix, Ella, Victoria and Irene. He had visited them frequently from his home in Berlin when they were growing up in Hesse and had always looked on Alix’s older sister Ella as his ‘special pet’.5 By the time he was nineteen, Wilhelm hoped to make her his wife. She was a first cousin, a match that, despite the genetic risks of consanguinity, Queen Victoria might nevertheless have encouraged. But Wilhelm’s mother, Crown Princess Victoria, had other thoughts. She favoured a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who was less closely related.
Wilhelm never liked being thwarted, especially by his mother, and persisted in visiting the Hesse sisters at Darmstadt. But just as Ella began to relent, the notoriously unpredictable Kaiser-in-waiting switched his affections to his mother’s preferred candidate, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, with what his own father described as ‘outrageous rapidity’.6 Yet Wilhelm never forgot his early love for Ella and developed an obsessive hatred for the man she went on to marry in 1884 – Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich. Ella might have married a Russian, but in Wilhelm’s eyes she was, and would remain, a German.
Privately it was clear that Crown Princess Victoria had feared that haemophilia – the ‘Hesse disease’ – might be passed by Ella into the German royal family. For Ella’s mother, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse and the Crown Princess’s sister, had been a carrier of the potentially fatal gene, passed on to her unknowingly by their mother, Queen Victoria. The closeness of the blood ties that bound the European royal families was thus, by the end of the century, increasingly being called into question. Still, at the wedding at Coburg in 1894 everyone tried to shut out these fears. It was such a happy time: ‘No one seemed to remember all those horrid things which were said about cousins marrying,’ Alix had reassured a friend about her engagement to Nicholas, ‘look, half our cousins have married each other’. And besides, ‘who else is there to marry?’7
The marriage in November 1894 of Nicholas and Alix (who now took the Russian names of Alexandra Feodorovna) forged new Russian–German–British family alliances. These would ensure that the Russian Imperial Family made regular family visits, with their five children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – to their relatives in Europe over the coming fifteen years. The favourite venue was Alexandra’s home state of Hesse and by Rhine – usually the Neues Palais in the city of Darmstadt, where she had been born a princess of the ruling house in 1872. So regular were Romanov family visits that in the late 1890s Nicholas paid for a Russian Orthodox chapel to be specially built for Alexandra’s use there, for she had become as devout in her Russian Orthodoxy as she had been in her Lutheranism. But the place in Hesse that the Romanov family loved most was Ernie’s summer retreat, the hunting lodge known as Schloss Wolfsgarten, to which his and Alexandra’s father, Grand Duke Louis, frequently retreated after the untimely death of their mother, Princess Alice, in 1878. Situated not far from the capital, the house was brick-built and modest, but it was set in beautiful, dense beech woods, with a sweet-smelling rose garden, ornamental fountain and orchards. Here the Romanovs enjoyed reunions with Alexandra’s sisters Irene, married to Prince Henry of Prussia, and Victoria, married to Prince Louis of Battenberg and now resident in England. Ella joined them from Russia when she was able. These relaxed family holidays often went on for several weeks, with ma
ny happy hours of riding, games of tennis and picnics, much music and singing. They were in marked contrast to the tense atmosphere that prevailed when Wilhelm was present at family gatherings.
Like most of their European royal cousins, the Hesse and Romanov families always found Wilhelm abrasive and systematically cold-shouldered him; many held him in utter contempt. He had – as Count Mosolov, head of the Russian Imperial Court Chancellery, noted – ‘a special gift of upsetting everybody who came near him’. Nicholas could not bear Wilhelm’s overbearing manner and held him always at arm’s length, as his father Alexander III had done before him. Alexandra too had always had ‘an innate aversion’ to her cousin and often contrived a ‘bad head’ when a lunch or dinner with Wilhelm loomed. She was scathing in her view of her cousin: ‘He’s an actor, an outstanding comic turn, a false person,’ she told a member of her entourage.8
Wilhelm’s English cousin, George – who had become Prince of Wales after the old queen’s death in 1901 – and his wife, the half-German Mary, got on with the Kaiser rather better. Although privately Mary thought Wilhelm’s erratic behaviour at times ‘made royalty ridiculous’, she and her husband showed a greater natural tolerance of his eccentricities. This was partly out of loyalty to the strong ties with Prussia that had been promoted by George’s grandfather, Prince Albert, during his lifetime, when his and Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Vicky had married Wilhelm’s father, the future Prussian emperor.9 For a time an inherent sense of a ‘deep dynastic commitment’ to all things German, based on a century or more of Hanoverians on the throne of Britain prior to Victoria, had existed between the two royal houses.10 This was confirmed by a relative, Princess Marie of Battenberg (a daughter of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine), who remarked that she had ‘never felt more German’ than with Queen Victoria. During the Queen’s lifetime, ‘it was taken as a matter of course that German was widely and fluently spoken in the family’.11 But after Victoria’s death it was a struggle for Wilhelm to gain the approval of his uncle Bertie, now King Edward VII; Wilhelm’s hectoring and bellicose manner did nothing to promote the alliance with Britain that his mother and father had long cherished. His aggressive colonial expansionism further antagonised the British and, by the end of the century, a chill political and diplomatic air between the two countries prevailed. During the reign of King Edward VII ‘there was always a feeling of thunder in the air’ whenever he was obliged to meet with his nephew the Kaiser.12
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 2