This did not deter Little Markov from recruiting a dozen or so loyal officers at his base at Novogeorgievsk, in Kherson province, southern Russia, to plan a rescue mission, complete with ‘special secret code, covering addresses, false names, and words with secret meanings’.26 It was at this point that he met another Markov, Nikolay Evgenevich (known as Markov II, for the sake of clarity), to whom he was loosely related. A former Duma deputy and an influential figure in monarchist circles, Markov II was a leading member of a right-wing organisation known as the ‘Union of the Russian People’ – founded in 1905 and sanctioned by Nicholas for its defence of ‘Tsar, Faith and Motherland’ – which was plotting an uprising and had ‘made it its mission to protect and free the imprisoned Imperial Family’. Despite the organisation being hounded since the revolution, with some of its members arrested and killed, Markov II had managed to lie low, establishing underground links with groups of officers in the south and elsewhere who would eventually rally counter-revolutionary forces against the Bolsheviks. The Union had even infiltrated Bolshevik ranks with their own people, in the hope of gleaning information on the government’s plans for the Imperial Family.27 With this in mind, Markov II and other monarchists were already in touch with Lili Dehn, holding secret meetings in the relative safety of a dacha at Kellomäki (Komarova) across the border in Finland. As a result of these meetings, Dehn had passed on a secret message to Alexandra that the monarchists were utterly devoted to the cause and could be counted on to offer effective help.28
Both Markovs agreed that the situation the family were facing at Tsarskoe Selo was becoming increasingly dangerous: the Palace Guard was volatile and untrustworthy, the town ‘packed with demoralized soldiers’ who might march on the palace at any time. They concluded that the Tsar and Tsaritsa should be ‘removed, if necessary by force, for their own safety’.29 They discussed forming ‘a group of thirty officers, prepared to dare all’, to include the twelve loyal officers that Little Markov had already recruited in the south. Little Markov had it all worked out: the group would disguise themselves in civilian clothes and carry false papers for themselves and the seven members of the Imperial Family. Armed with guns and grenades, and after secretly informing the Imperial Family in advance of the exact day and time, they would launch a ‘sham attack’ on the Palace. Markov thought it would be easy enough to pick off the external guards ‘with the help of air-guns with poisoned darts’, before ‘forcing their way into the palace’. All Nicholas need do was don civilian clothes and shave off his beard, ‘to make it certain that no one would recognize him’.30 The liberators would then create a large diversionary explosion using grenades, giving them time to spirit the family out to several waiting cars, ‘with trustworthy drivers’ gunning their engines in the side streets. Having installed the fugitive Romanovs in a prearranged safe house, they would then arrange their exit through Finland and Sweden. If the Romanovs refused to leave Russia, they would hide them – separately – ‘in the remote villages of North Russia, where one could be certain that no spy would track them down, and where they could tranquilly await the future course of events’.31
Such is the stuff of Boy’s Own Paper fantasy, so disarming in its naïveté; Markov II quickly dismissed Little Markov’s idea as ‘quite impossible’; they had ‘no right to expose Their Majesties to such a risk’. He was in the process of planning things ‘quite differently’, he said enigmatically, but failed to elaborate. Under the unlikely cover name of ‘Aunt Ivetta’, he had, through Lili Dehn, made contact with Nicholas via a concealed note in a box of cigarettes, in which he had solicited the Tsar’s permission to serve him and his family’s interests in any way he could. Would the Tsar give his group his blessing by sending an icon, he asked? In response, Nicholas had smuggled out an icon of St Nicholas the Wonderworker to Lili Dehn, bearing his own and Alexandra’s initials.32
Little Markov’s hare-brained scheme does, however, have some interesting parallels with an equally audacious, though more credible, rescue plot conjured up around the same time by a British officer then in Russia: Oliver Locker-Lampson. In command of the Royal Naval Armoured Car Squadron that had been sent to assist its Russian allies on the Eastern Front, Lampson had met Nicholas at Army HQ at Mogilev and had been in Petrograd when the revolution broke in March. He had noted how often the Tsar was to be seen outside in the Alexander Park digging the vegetable garden, cutting wood or chatting with his guards: ‘It appeared to be so easy to rescue him that I decided it should be done.’33 He planned to use an insider at the Alexander Palace, one of the servants whom he had recruited – code name Vladimir – who had learned to cut hair and shave in order to be instated as the Tsar’s barber. Lampson bribed key members of the guards inside the palace with vodka, cigarettes and tins of British bully beef. While they were otherwise drunk or distracted, the plan was that Vladimir would smuggle in Lampson’s orderly, Tovell (who was the same size as the Tsar), have the Tsar shave off his beard and then dress him in the British khaki uniform that Tovell had on under his own clothes. He’d then walk out under the noses of the guards, leaving Vladimir wearing a false beard and cloak to take the Tsar’s place. Outside, Locker Lampson – pretending to be an orderly – would meet Nicholas, who would then be taken away in a field ambulance. From there he would be sent by military train to Archangel and smuggled out to Britain by sea. In the event, when word of the plan reached Nicholas, he ‘absolutely refused to be rescued unless his wife and family could be saved also’. It confirms that at no stage would the Tsar ever have agreed to be separated from his family in order to save his own skin. If nothing else, it proved him to be, in Lampson’s eyes, ‘a true king and a true man’.34
Although Markov II was adamant that there should be no attempt at a forced rescue while the family were at Tsarskoe Selo, which would clearly be against the Tsar’s will, by the autumn he and Little Markov would be bound up in another ongoing plot to rescue the Imperial Family. But in May 1917, as the former Mistress of the Robes, Elizaveta Naryshkina, noted in her diary, ‘a monarchist response is impossible right now: there are neither leaders, nor organization; torrents of blood would flow in vain. Later – yes.’35
Chapter 6
‘I Shall Not Be Happy till They Are Safely out of Russia’
When King George expressed his grave anxieties in early April 1917 about welcoming his Russian cousins to England, the best anyone could hope for was that the political situation would ease; the Romanov evacuation would then be rearranged when ‘a more favourable psychological moment could be chosen’. The British government was determined to maintain radio silence on the matter, although its dogged ambassador Sir George Buchanan continued to lobby unofficially for the family, as a matter of personal honour. An atmosphere of stealth now crept into any official correspondence about the Romanovs; they had rapidly become a problem that everyone in the British Cabinet hoped would quietly go away, and instructions were sent round ‘to keep an eye on anything that may be put into the War Cabinet minutes likely to hurt the King’s feelings’.1
While the French had made it clear to Lord Hardinge that the ‘Ex emperor and family [are] not welcome in France’, King Alfonso of Spain had continued to ask for news, fearful that the Imperial Family might be murdered.2 The British ambassador to Madrid, Sir Arthur Hardinge (who clearly had not been disabused of the fact), had been reassured that the Romanovs would ‘find refuge in England’. All British diplomats other than Buchanan seem to have been kept carefully out of the loop concerning what was actually going on, while an increasingly frustrated Buchanan repeatedly insisted to his wife and daughter, ‘I shall not be happy till they are safely out of Russia.’3
Although the British War Cabinet did discuss the possibility of Spain as an alternative destination, the threat there from left-wing activists made them fearful that ‘there might be constant plots’ against the Imperial Family. Nevertheless, it might still have been considered a better option than Britain, but ‘only in the event of Spain joining the
Allies’.4 Spain might have been neutral in the war, but Madrid at this time was a hotbed of international espionage and the Germans there were monitoring the situation closely. Their ambassador, Prince Maximilian von Ratibor, had reported on Alfonso’s intercession, informing Berlin that the Provisional Government’s response had been that ‘great difficulties are to be expected from the soldiers and peasant committees’. The question of the Romanovs, Ratibor also noted, ‘is being viewed with considerable pessimism in Britain’.5
* * *
By the end of April it would have taken considerable effort to find out anything at all about the well-being, let alone the state of mind, of the captives at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘The confinement of our unhappy sovereigns has become so rigorous,’ wrote Nicholas’s uncle, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, still resident at his home at Tsarskoe Selo not far from the Alexander Palace, that even he had to admit, ‘we know practically nothing of what they are thinking and doing’.6 Kerensky observed that the ordinary ‘man on the street’ in Russia had ceased to show any interest in the Romanovs. Nor could any foreign journalists in the city get a fix on what was happening to the former monarch, as American Bessie Beatty recalled: ‘I discovered with surprise that the Tsar’s name was seldom mentioned. He ceased to count for anything. A month after the first revolutionary attack, he was as completely forgotten as if he had never lived.’7 ‘No news from Russia of our dear ones,’ wrote Prince Louis of Battenberg disconsolately in England in May. ‘It is terrible and really all A[un]t Alix’s fault.’8
With the Romanovs settling into an acceptance of the limitations placed on their lives as prisoners, things on the diplomatic front seemed to have gone very quiet. However, the issue of what to do with the Romanovs had never been absent from the Provisional Government’s agenda. Lacking the power to facilitate an exit, Justice Minister Kerensky was still hedging his bets. When asked once more by the Tsar about the family being able to go to Livadia, in order for the children to recover their health, Kerensky had said it was ‘quite impossible for the moment’ but, according to Pierre Gilliard, he seemed to agree that Crimea was now a better option. Once more the family were given false hope.9 For the time being, Kerensky seemed to have won the confidence of the Tsar and even of the Tsaritsa, as Count Benckendorff noticed, particularly after he withdrew the ban on them associating, which he had been forced to impose a month previously.10 Not having been officially informed of the British change of heart, the government still patiently awaited news of the arrival of a mythical destroyer to take the Imperial Family to safety and hoped that the problem would soon be off their hands.
Then, in early May, the issue resurfaced when the highly sympathetic Foreign Minister, Milyukov, was forced to resign over his discussions with the Allies on Russian territorial annexations to be made after the war was over (the widespread demand in post-revolutionary Russia being for ‘peace without annexations’). Just days before, Milyukov – who had hoped for the eventual establishment of a constitutional monarchy, with Alexey as Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail as regent when the war was over – once more asked the question of Buchanan: was a British cruiser coming to take the Romanovs to safety pro tem? Sir George replied ‘with some embarrassment’, Milyukov recalled in his later memoirs, ‘that his government “no longer insists” on its invitation’.11 Milyukov was very clear about this: ‘I reproduce the term “insist” deliberately. It does not signify that the initiative in this question had come from the English government. The initiative was ours, the Provisional Government’s. The term “insist” was used in the sense given it in diplomatic language.’12
* * *
The key phrase ‘His Majesty’s Government does not insist’ – albeit in several variant forms – has been widely quoted as signalling the final British rejection of providing asylum for the Romanovs. Many sources repeat Kerensky’s claim that it came in a ‘semi-official Foreign Office statement’ of 10 April that was published in the newspapers.13 But despite an extensive search, I was unable to locate such a document anywhere in Foreign Office or Cabinet records. Nor did I find it, as Kerensky states, in the British press at the time, with either that or even variant wording. It is in fact highly unlikely that the British government would have made any such definitive public statement with regard to an issue as politically sensitive as this, and one about which it was clearly determined to maintain a low profile. Indeed, Sir George Buchanan had been specifically instructed to ‘say nothing further’ on the subject, which underlines as erroneous the suggestion that the British government made such a public pronouncement. It didn’t; but the myth that it did has been endlessly repeated, unchallenged.14
* * *
Despite Sir George having admitted to Milyukov privately that his government was not pursuing (rather than actively withdrawing) its original offer, in the middle of May Milyukov’s successor at the Russian Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Tereshchenko, ‘revived negotiations with the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan on the subject of the transfer of the Imperial Family to England’. And so the charade continued, as once more the options of an exit via Murmansk, or perhaps via Finland, Sweden and Norway, and from there across the North Sea to England, were discussed, although Tereshchenko warned that his government could not guarantee the family would get out ‘safe and sound’.15
Oblivious to the unravelling controversies about their future, the Romanov family were making the most of the spring weather, using their two daily periods of recreation within a fenced-in area of the park to plant and maintain a vegetable garden, watched by a sickly Alexandra, who spent most of her time in a rolling chair, sewing or knitting. Nicholas, always desperate for vigorous exercise and missing the freedom to go for long walks, had thrown his pent-up energies into shovelling the lingering snow, breaking the ice on the canals and, when the spring came, cutting down dead trees and chopping logs with the help of his children. Evenings were cheered up when he read aloud to the family from favourite detective and adventure stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was, he noted in his diary, ‘much more with my dear family than in normal years’, and for him that was all that mattered.
He recorded all this daily trivia punctiliously in his diary, showing little or no reaction to the regular and petty humiliations to which the family were subjected by guards brandishing fixed bayonets.16 He tried hard to be polite and friendly with them, though such efforts largely received a hostile response. According to a report on the family in the press, Nicholas had ‘recognized the hopelessness of his situation and submitted to his fate’; the only thing he found difficult was ‘having no news of dear Mama’, but he was ‘indifferent as to the rest’.17 ‘He does not yet realize that he will not be allowed to go as he had hoped to Livadia, but the loss of his Throne does not seem to have depressed him,’ Buchanan reported to London. His wife, however, ‘feels the humiliation of her present position deeply’.18 Alexandra had made no attempt to disguise her bitterness at the loss of power; unable to reconcile herself to their changed situation, she still believed that Russia ‘could not exist without a tsar’. Elizaveta Naryshkina noted in her diary how steadfastly the Tsaritsa clung to hopes of a counter-revolution.19
At last recovered from the measles, the children had resumed their lessons, with their tutors, parents and members of the entourage rallying round to create a regular timetable and share in their tuition. It was important to Nicholas and Alexandra to restore a degree of normality to their children’s imprisonment.20 When May brought a bursting into bloom of the wonderful lilac bushes in the park, they all breathed in the glorious aroma with delight, and took pleasure in the first fruits of their kitchen garden. The warmth of summer soothed anxieties for a while, but days were frequently marred by aggressive and often abusive comments from their guards, and an awareness of crowds of the curious trying to grab sight of them through the palace fence. These, however, were as nothing – had they known it – compared to the calls being made by extremist elements for more
draconian punishments to be meted out on Nicholas and Alexandra, such as this one:
In view of the incongruity of the conditions under which the former Tsar and former Tsarinas [i.e. Alexandra and Dagmar] are living and the weight of their guilt before the people, and in view of the obvious danger of their further remaining under such conditions, which afford them an opportunity for contact with sympathizing circles, the Congress of the Delegates from the Front resolved … to present the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with an unequivocal demand to transfer the former Tsar and both formers Tsarinas to the Peter and Paul Fortress.21
By the end of May, as American photojournalist Donald Thompson confirmed, demands for retribution against the Romanovs were mounting:
The clamor for putting the Ex-Czar in the Peter and Paul Fortress is growing daily. Where formerly only a few of the soldiers and anarchists wanted it, now it is being heard everywhere. Lenine [sic] demands that the ex-Czar should be transferred to Kronstadt or sent to the Siberian mines. The sailors stationed at Helsingfors have demanded that Nicholas be given to them; they say they will take him to Petrograd and keep him until he is placed on trial, and that if their demand is rejected, they will bring warships and force it. They say this must be Russia’s last revolution and that the only way to make it the last is to imprison the ex-Czar. Thousands of handbills are being thrown broadcast from automobiles in Petrograd saying, ‘Try him at once, Nicholas II’.22
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 12