Gilliard’s conclusion was of course entirely logical; but the reality was far more complex. After the February Revolution, Finland – which had till then been a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire – had gained semi-autonomous status and its own parliament, and might have offered the Romanovs, had they got that far, a degree of protection on their way out of Russia. But any suggested evacuation plans from Petrograd in March or April 1917, after the British offer was initially made, all fall at the first hurdle: the logistics of getting the family out of Tsarskoe Selo. The winter weather, the distance, the sick children, the state of the railways and who controlled them all had a crucial part to play. And this is not to mention the ominous presence of the Petrograd Soviet, which was already policing the Romanovs’ every move.
When asked his opinion by the War Office in March 1917 about an evacuation, the British military attaché in Russia, Brigadier-General Waters, rather glibly observed that if the ‘moderates’ had acted quickly enough – and before the Petrograd Soviet got the upper hand – ‘a fast torpedo boat and a few bags of British sovereigns’ could have got the family out across the Gulf of Finland. But it had to be done ‘within a fortnight’.2 Waters was certainly right about the timing: the only realistic window of opportunity for a successful evacuation of the Imperial Family was in fact even tighter than his rough estimate. It amounted to the six days from the abdication on the 15th to the Provisional Government voting on 20 March that ‘the deposed Emperor and his consort be regarded as deprived of their liberty’ – and certainly before the Petrograd Soviet sent its bully boys to Tsarskoe Selo to ensure that the family did not leave.3
Had Nicholas gone straight back to Tsarskoe Selo after his abdication, instead of diverting to Stavka to see the army and his mother, he could have been back by 16 March – that is, if his train had not been stopped before it even got there.4*
Waters’s suggestion of the Romanovs making a hasty exit via the shores of the Gulf of Finland (their summer dacha at Peterhof could have been the base for this) – and out via the Baltic to England – certainly would have been the quickest route, but they would have needed to avoid their own Russian minefields, laid there against Germans submarines. In March, however, much of the Gulf would have been iced up; and the Baltic beyond was patrolled by murderous German warships and submarines that were deliberately positioned to confine British and Russian vessels to the Gulf.5
It is clear that days before the official British offer, and indeed even before Nicholas had arrived back from Stavka, such was the anxiety of the Provisional Government to get the Romanovs out of Russia that it had already begun exploring the logistics of how it could be done. In their later memoirs, Kerensky and Milyukov emphasised how they were expecting the family’s arrest at Tsarskoe Selo to be merely temporary (a necessary placatory measure to the Petrograd Soviet), pending their departure abroad. So confident were they that they would be able to effect this that in a speech made to the Moscow Soviet on 20 March, Kerensky had publicly committed to personally escorting the family to Murmansk.6 And later that same day, as he reiterated in an article published in 1932, ‘we had firmly settled the Tsar’s departure, and had fixed the itinerary of his journey abroad.’7
When the British offer arrived on 23 March, according to Meriel Buchanan, her father immediately went to see Milyukov to ‘make the necessary arrangements’. ‘It was agreed,’ she wrote, ‘that the Emperor should go to Port Romanoff by the Murmansk railway … and a British cruiser was to meet them and conduct them to England.’8 This much of a tentative plan is confirmed in an undated ‘List of measures to be taken in connection with proposed departure abroad of Nicholas II’, drawn up by a key figure in this story, Count Benckendorff. Its priorities were:
1. Journey abroad via Romanov on the Murman or through Tornio [the Finnish border crossing with Sweden] in view of the desire for a stop in Norway for the treatment of the children.
2. Count Benckendorff to be charged with liaising with a representative of the Provisional Government in discussing issues connected with the journey.
Other points in this document enumerated the protection of the Imperial Family’s personal effects and furniture left behind at the Alexander Palace, the preservation of the contents of Dagmar’s Anichkov Palace in Petrograd and of the other Romanov properties at Peterhof and Livadia. The document also insisted on payment of the pensions of the former Imperial Family’s servants being guaranteed.9 It is clear from the tone that initial hopes were for an orderly evacuation of the family. Any kind of covert, dramatic ‘rescue’ from Tsarskoe Selo in this context is nonsensical.
At this point we must ask the question that has puzzled many: was a British ship actually, specifically sent in March 1917 shortly after the British offer was made? There is not a single document to be found anywhere, in either the Foreign Office or War Office archives or in the logbook of political signals from Petrograd, referring to this. There is, however, a document in the secret archive of the Russian Foreign Minister at AVPRI that confirms the sense of extreme urgency. This aide-memoire of their conversation (rather than an official memorandum), handed by Sir George Buchanan to Milyukov on 24 March, stressed ‘the utmost urgency being given by the king’s government to the safe evacuation to England in the shortest possible time of the former emperor and the members of his family’.10 So any tentative plans by Sir George and Milyukov, if there were some, appear to have been discussed entirely off the record.
There are two possible scenarios with regard to evacuating the Romanovs from Russia at this time: the first is the Murmansk option.11 Indeed, Murmansk as the point of exit has been the repeated mantra of most books on the Romanovs since the 1920s, but without any serious exploration being undertaken of the logistics involved. One wonders whether the viability of a Murmansk evacuation was properly investigated, even in March 1917. How realistic was it in fact to get the Imperial Family to a British destroyer bound for England at that time, given the German submarine war and the volatile political situation in Russia? What possible chance was there that any train carrying them would even get beyond Petrograd? The realities of the Murmansk proposal soon fall apart when one analyses the details. Any train taking the Romanovs out would have had to travel into Petrograd from the station at Tsarskoe Selo, east via Petrozavodsk on the newly constructed Vologda–Petrograd railway line and then north via Zvanka to Romanov-on-the-Murman (renamed Murmansk on 16 April 1917).
The town of Romanov had been created on the Kola Peninsula of the Russian Arctic coast in 1915 as an important wartime supply point into Russia from England, via its nearby ice-free port on the Barents Sea. In early 1917 it was a mere cluster of huts, docks and railway sidings. But it would later become a major base for the Allied Intervention and the White Army during the civil war of 1917–22. The idea of a British submarine or destroyer, with nothing better to do, waiting expectantly for the Romanovs at Murmansk in the spring of 1917 is a fantasy. Although Murmansk was an ice-free port, the sea route to it at that time would have been extremely dangerous, with a great deal of ice in the water. In addition, submarines were not able to submerge for very long distances, having in the main to travel on the surface with a cruiser as escort, and German submarines had already sunk several ships in the area of Murmansk. It was also, at this time of the year, pitch-black for most of the day and night. In early 1917 the only vessels known to have been at Murmansk were an old battleship, a cruiser (which was stationed there regularly) and six armed trawlers. The British Admiralty did send two submarines on war operations to Murmansk from Scapa Flow, but they did not arrive until 27 April.12
Any suggestion of the port at Archangel as another possible evacuation point at this time of year is even less credible. Although it lies nearly 1,000 miles south-east of Murmansk, at the entrance to the White Sea, the ice there was twelve-foot thick in March/ April; the weather was bitter and the port, with its vast expanse of unbroken ice, looked at times like the North Pole, only being ice-free between mid-May
and early November. Even then, as the ice receded it tended to pile up in the narrow neck of the White Sea where it flowed into the Arctic, often impeding navigation in and out of Archangel until well into June.13 However, according to a secret telegram sent to Ambassador Nabokov in London, an evacuation from Archangel was preferred, as soon as the first sailings became possible in mid-May.14
In the winter of 1917 a journey of 846 miles north from Tsarskoe Selo to Murmansk would have been extremely difficult – particularly for five children still weakened by their recent bout of measles – even in the best of circumstances. The railway line was a single-track one, with no proper rail bed (a contingency in wartime to ensure that if there were any accidents, the rails could be pulled up to bypass the site) and it had been laid in a hurry, mainly by prisoners of war, to link the supply route with the capital. A passenger train would have taken up to six days to get there; only munitions trains, which took priority, could do it faster. At any point during the long, arduous journey, a train carrying the Imperial Family could have been stopped dead, simply by belligerent railway workers pulling up the tracks ahead of it or, worse, could have been attacked by Red Guards itching to lay hands on the former Tsar and Tsaritsa and impose their own rough justice on them. The family would have been sitting ducks for the entire duration of the journey.
* * *
However, that is not the end of the Murmansk/Archangel scenario. Murmansk will reappear in our story in early 1918.
* * *
There is, meanwhile, a second, more practical and entirely feasible Scandinavian route out of Russia that could have been explored, and which was suggested in the Benckendorff memo – and that is the route through Tornio. This would have involved taking the Imperial Family by rail through Petrograd and then north across the Karelian Isthmus, to the Finnish border forty-two miles away at the River Sestra. From there, the train would have travelled past the Russian border station at Beloostrov and headed west and then north on the slow single-track line to the British-controlled crossing point with neutral Sweden at Haparanda/ Tornio, a rail journey in all of 744 miles, and 200 miles longer than the shortest direct route. The situation in Finland was less volatile than in Russia and a train might have had a chance of getting through to the Swedish border. From there, with the connivance of the neutral Swedes, the family could have been taken by an undercover British military escort across Sweden to Norway (the two countries, having been in a political union till 1905, must have had cross-country links) to an evacuation point by sea at Bergen.
In Lord Stamfordham’s record of the 22 March meeting that he had with David Lloyd George, the King’s private secretary noted that the Provisional Government ‘wished the Emperor to go to Romanov because he would be in their keeping until he was safe on board an English ship, whereas if he travelled to Bergen he would be free as soon as he crossed the Russian frontier [my italics]’.15 The Bergen option, had it been pursued, might well have been the only viable way of getting the Romanovs from Scandinavia to England in those first crucial days. For in early March, shortly before Nicholas abdicated, the British Admiralty had inaugurated a new, weekly fast steamship service from Bergen across to Aberdeen – a secure port into which only British vessels were allowed – to facilitate the safer and more efficient transport of diplomatic bags and military and diplomatic personnel to and from Russia. This had been prompted by delays experienced in getting crucial Secret Intelligence Service material from Petrograd to England by the normal boats operating out of Norway. It would have offered the perfect route out of Russia for special incognito travellers such as the Romanovs, as the boat itself was armed and the British Consulate at Bergen strictly controlled access to it. The British Military Control officer based in Petrograd, who was in charge of the Bergen operation, was SIS agent Major Stephen Alley (who will reappear later in this story); and the landing point at Aberdeen had its own permanent Port Control Officer – who was a member of MI5, the British Security Service.16
Perhaps it is a coincidence, but another version of a British evacuation plan told to Simon Sebag Montefiore by Prince Michael of Kent was the possibility of bringing the family to the naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and from there to house them temporarily at Balmoral.17 This indeed would have been the route taken by a British cruiser coming from Murmansk – but it seems illogical when Aberdeen is only forty-seven miles away from Balmoral along a straight road. Would this not have made the Bergen–Aberdeen scenario a far better option?
There is no way of knowing whether the Bergen option was ever considered, although it seems too obvious an alternative not to have been, at the very least, entertained. If so, any consideration of it went entirely undocumented or was discussed via a set of back-channels. Uncensored SIS material was certainly getting through to England from Russia, which never appeared in the Foreign Office registers, and the Admiralty had its own telegraphic address and ships’ radios.
* * *
These are the best tentative scenarios for any Romanov evacuation – a plan that was aborted no sooner than it was mooted. The Romanovs’ departure from Tsarskoe Selo in April 1917 ‘proved impossible … for internal reasons’, as Kerensky himself admitted later.18 Put simply, any evacuation – no matter the willingness of the parties involved – was stymied by the distance that would have to be covered, along railway lines largely controlled by hostile Bolshevik revolutionaries. Even the relatively short journey of fifteen miles from Tsarskoe to Petrograd might have proved too dangerous, given that the government was ‘not yet complete master of the administrative machine’, as Kerensky euphemistically put it. The ‘railways, in particular,’ he conceded, ‘were very much at the free disposal of all kinds of Unions and Soviets’. The admission has been there, in print since 1935, for all to see: ‘there would have been a strike the moment the Tsar was entrained for Murmansk [or anywhere else for that matter], and the train would never have left the station’.19
And yet for the last 100 years the vast majority of commentators on the failed Romanov asylum have contented themselves with an oversimplified view of the situation, based on little or no in-depth examination of the circumstances, choosing instead to make King George V the target of their wrath and the repository of all blame. The King may have been a moral coward, but in terms of personally effecting the Romanovs’ physical removal from Russia and their safe journey to England in the spring of 1917, he had absolutely no power. Nor did anyone else. It was Minister of War Alexander Guchkov who best summed it up: ‘the only way to send the Emperor abroad was to do so unexpectedly, and, as far as possible secretly’.20
There was also, of course, the more romantic alternative of rescue by loyal Russian monarchists. In the story of the Romanov captivity there is a great deal of intrigue and mystification on this score, but few published details are to be found other than in the White Russian émigré press of the 1920s and 1930s. Evidence shows, however, that the Tsaritsa’s close friends, Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn, who had been banished from the Alexander Palace by Kerensky on 3 April for being too close to her, over the following months conspired with various nebulous monarchist groups to hatch a rescue plan.21 Thanks to a reasonably sympathetic regime inside the palace under the commandant Evgeniy Kobylinsky, Alexandra had been able to smuggle letters, with the coded names of recipients, out to Vyrubova and Dehn via another former lady-in-waiting, Rita Khitrovo. At that time Khitrovo was working as a volunteer nurse in one of the Tsarskoe Selo hospitals, and Kobylinsky had allowed her to come to the palace regularly to pick up and deliver letters.
In May 1917, German intelligence reported to the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, in Berlin that there were widespread hopes in Russian monarchist circles that Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s uncle and former Commander in Chief of the army, ‘possessed the resolution to place himself at the head of a counter-revolution’; but he had been put under house arrest in Crimea, where he was closely guarded and living under threat of a court martial. Neverthel
ess, such rumours ‘preoccupy and worry the minds of the St Petersburg [sic] government circles, as indeed those of the actual government, if not the “second power”– the Petrograd Soviet’.22 By June, further reports from a ‘most reliable’ source were arriving in Berlin that ‘a strong monarchist conspiracy exists in Moscow’ and even named various ‘pretenders to the crown’, including Rasputin’s murderer, Prince Felix Yusupov, and his father, Count Sumarokov-Elston.23 Many of the potential monarchist conspirators were officers who had served in either the Tsar or Tsaritsa’s own regiments or had been treated as war wounded in the hospital patronised by Alexandra, her daughters and other aristocrats at Tsarskoe Selo.
In around June 1917 various of these monarchist officers, anxious that the Imperial Family had still not been taken out of Russia to safety, began trying to come up with a viable plan for springing them from captivity. Their efforts to keep watch on the situation at the Alexander Palace had begun shortly after the revolution, when Cornet Sergey Markov, an officer in Alexandra’s Crimean Cavalry regiment, had managed to get into the palace to see her, just prior to Nicholas’s return from Pskov. When Lili Dehn was sent to receive him, Alexandra being unwell, Markov announced his undying loyalty: ‘I’ve fought my way through the mob in order to see the Empress, and assure her of my devotion. The assassins wanted to tear off my epaulettes with HER cypher. I told them that the Empress had given them to me, and that it was her right alone to deprive me of them.’24 When Lili Dehn was sent away from Tsarskoe Selo, the devoted Markov (who in sources, for reasons soon apparent, is referred to as Little Markov) visited her. In the meantime she had received a smuggled letter confirming the Tsaritsa’s intransigence with regard to the idea of being ‘saved from this monstrous position’ in which she and her family found themselves, and fleeing abroad. ‘He would be a scoundrel who would leave his country at such a fateful time,’ she had written. ‘They can do what they like with us; they can throw us into the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, but we will not leave Russia in any circumstances.’25 Alexandra’s reluctance to capitulate and leave Russia was perhaps also a reflection of her stubborn determination that she and Nicholas might one day be able to reclaim the throne – not for themselves, but for their beloved son.
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 11