Crimea, free from the problems of ice and German submarines, was the easiest southerly exit point by sea and might have seemed the most logical stopover for an evacuation now. It was also, of course, where – since the abdication – Nicholas had hoped the family might be allowed to live, in preference to any departure for England. In fact it was the last place Kerensky would send him; the monarchists had a strong base in Crimea and the surrounding area, where they controlled their own telegraph and telephone communications and were actively circulating propaganda favouring the restoration of the monarchy.49 Several other members of the ‘fallen dynasty’ had by now gathered in Crimea, including Dagmar and Nicholas’s two sisters, and were already creating a security problem for the government, in view of the presence in the peninsula of the highly belligerent sailors of the Black Sea fleet that was based there.
Having rejected the idea of sending the Romanovs to Grand Duke Mikhail’s estate at Brasovo in the southern Russian province of Orel, Kerensky opted for somewhere more out of the way. Still, taking the Romanovs to such a place would not be easy, if the train carrying them had to travel through ‘central provinces with their dense population’ or industrial towns or regions where there had been violent peasant disturbances against the tsarist regime.50 Tobolsk in Western Siberia was therefore chosen; Kerensky had heard tell of it and knew something of its location. It was ‘an out-and-out backwater’ that could be reached at this time of year from the north not by railway but by river, and ‘without crossing any thickly populated districts’; in winter it was totally ice-bound on all sides. It had a ‘very small garrison, no industrial proletariat, and a population which was prosperous and contented, not to say old-fashioned’. It also, fortuitously, had ‘a very passable Governor’s Residence … where the Imperial Family could live with some measure of comfort’.51 The choice of a Siberian location also held symbolic significance that would not go unnoticed by the Russian public, as Kerensky well knew. Sending the former Tsar to the place of transportation and exile to which so many dissidents were condemned under the old regime was an act of poetic social justice that might ‘earn him a dividend’ later, when he needed it.52
Kerensky sent two trusted officials on a secret recce of Tobolsk. When they returned in mid-July confirming its suitability, plans were set in motion for the family’s transfer, without any further discussion with the government and no public announcement. Privately, Kerensky told Count Benckendorff that he hoped, when elections for the Constituent Assembly were held in November and a stable government was installed, that the Romanovs might be allowed to return to Tsarskoe Selo, or leave Russia for a country of their choice via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok and across to Japan.53
On 25 July, Foreign Minister Tereshchenko met Sir George Buchanan to inform him of the family’s imminent transfer. ‘I expressed hope that when he was in Siberia the emperor’s freedom would not be so restricted as at Tsarskoe Selo and that he would be allowed to go out driving,’ Buchanan informed London. ‘In spite of many faults which he had committed and his weak character [the] Emperor was not a criminal and deserved to be treated with as much consideration as possible.’ Tereshchenko confirmed that this would be the case, and that the Tsar would be allowed to choose ‘those whom he wished to accompany him and he would have a very comfortable house with large garden. Whether he would be able to drive out would depend a good deal on [the] state of public feeling in Tobolsk.’54
It was at this late juncture that somebody else stepped forward to plea for the Imperial Family’s release. Till now, his efforts have remained entirely unsung. His name was Petr Botkin and he was the former Imperial Russian ambassador to Portugal. He had very good reason to be anxious about the fate of the family, for he was the brother of Dr Evgeniy Botkin, their devoted physician, who had opted to travel with them to Tobolsk. Full of righteous good intent, Petr Botkin chose to address his appeals to the French government, unaware that it had already made it abundantly clear to the British that it had no interest whatsoever in helping the Romanovs.
On 25 July, Botkin wrote privately, and without the sanction of his government, to a diplomatic colleague, Baron de Berckheim, French Chargé d’Affaires at the Berlin embassy, on the ‘question that at present preoccupies very many Russians: the danger threatening the emperor in captivity’ – which had become more urgent in view of the recent disturbances in July. Botkin might have been a servant of the Provisional Government, but he admitted candidly that despite its best intentions, it simply was not capable of protecting the Imperial Family against danger. Therefore, in view of the ‘feelings of sympathy and loyalty which the government of the French Republic had always shown toward His Majesty the Emperor Nicholas II, a devoted ally of France’, might it not be more effective, he asked, for ‘some kind of collective effort by the great powers, Russia’s allies’ to be made in helping the Provisional Government deal with a problem that was ‘difficult to resolve on its own initiative?’ Perhaps the king of a neutral country such as Denmark could help evacuate them from Russia? A Danish cruiser could be sent to the Gulf of Finland and the family could be boarded from Peterhof. Botkin was putting himself at the disposal of the French government in order to do whatever was necessary to rescue the Emperor and ‘save the history of our times from catastrophe, the consequences of which would be most perilous’.55
No reply came, not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement. Undaunted, on 5 August Botkin wrote again and with an even greater sense of urgency, this time to Jules Cambon, Head of the Political Section of the French Foreign Ministry. With polite insistence he suggested that France, as Russia’s long-standing ally, should ‘take the initiative in the freeing of the emperor from prison’. In somewhat recriminatory tones, Botkin also reminded Cambon that France had recently ‘hurried to greet the Russian revolution, closing her eyes to the past, but that the past had not died and might, one day, rise up before her as a living reproach’. The French had recently sent a socialist delegation to Petrograd to welcome the new revolutionary state, but what had they done ‘to relieve the fate of the unfortunate Monarch to whom France is, all the same, in some way indebted?’
Botkin knew there was no time to be lost. He waited for France to respond and make ‘a beautiful and generous gesture that would go down in history’. Unfortunately, France was not in the business of ‘generous gestures’ any more than Britain was, with regard to the Romanovs right now. Botkin did not receive a reply.56
At Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar himself was still in the dark about the precise location of his family’s future place of exile. He had spent his time, since hearing that they would be moved, calmly sticking photographs in his albums, sorting out his books and, with Alexandra, putting together the things they wanted to take with them. The children were spending more and more time outside, working on the vegetable garden and taking great delight in eating their own home-grown produce for the very first time. But the weather was so hot and they all missed the cool of the Baltic and sailing round the Finnish skerries on the Shtandart, or swimming in the Black Sea at the Livadia Palace in Crimea, where they spent most summers.
It was not till 10 August, in his inscrutable, matter-of-fact style, that Nicholas recorded how that morning after breakfast they had ‘found out from Count Benckendorff that we are not being sent to Crimea but to a distant provincial town, three or four days’ travel east. But where exactly they won’t tell us and even the commandant doesn’t know,’ adding with a sigh, ‘and there we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!’ The family knew that east meant one thing – Siberia. With their characteristic passive air of acceptance, they prepared to travel many hundreds of miles from Tsarskoe into the Russian interior, no doubt privately dreading the unfamiliar location, the cold of winters there and the distance from friends and relatives. The sun of Crimea was in their blood; the snowy wastes of Siberia were entirely alien to them.
Four days later, on 14 August, Sir George Buchanan was able to confirm to King George
that ‘The Emperor and his family attended by small suite left for Tobolsk this morning’ and that Tereshchenko had assured him ‘every care had been taken to provide for their comfort and protection on their journey’, adding that ‘the Emperor, he said, was quite cheerful’. Indeed, Nicholas had been grateful: ‘I have no fear. We trust you,’ he had told Kerensky on hearing the news of their destination. ‘If you say that we must move, it must be so … We trust you.’57
For all those who had had some passing concern for Russia’s Imperial Family, but had faltered when it came to making any serious offer of help, it was a comforting gesture of acceptance on Nicholas’s part. There was no cause for alarm, they all told themselves; the Romanovs would be safe out in the no man’s land of Siberia. As French ambassador Paléologue observed, for now ‘The Great War that persistently kept rolling on in the West was more than enough to satisfy everyone’s curiosity.’58 British officialdom would instead turn its attention to the plight of the Dowager, under house arrest in Crimea. How could the Russian government, Sir George told Tereshchenko, ‘act so harshly towards a lady of her age, who was generally beloved’ (whereas, one supposes, Nicholas and Alexandra were not)? Such ‘unnecessarily harsh treatment of a near relative of the King would make a very bad impression in England.’59 The Queen Mother was alarmed that her sister was being ‘kept like a criminal’; once again she bombarded Buchanan for news. Clearly, when it came to the Russian royals, there was one level of concern for Dagmar and another for Nicholas and Alexandra – not to mention their children.
* * *
On the night of 14 August 1917, Georgiy Lukomsky, recently appointed commissioner in charge of the preservation of the Tsarskoe Selo palaces by Kerensky’s government, found himself one of the very few witnesses to the departure of the Russian Imperial Family from their home of twenty-three years. For days beforehand Lukomsky had been at the palace assessing its contents and how best they could be maintained as a museum after the family’s departure.
Together with Kerensky and Baron Steinheil, the political administrator of the Alexander Palace, Lukomsky watched the family wait patiently that final night. As instructed, their bags were ready for them to leave at midnight on the 13th, but after many hours’ wait, still no convoy of cars had come to take them to the station. Kerensky was in a highly nervous state, recalled Lukomsky, pacing up and down and constantly making telephone calls to try to find out what was going on. Indeed, such was his level of agitation that he seemed unable to control his impatience at the delay. The Romanovs meanwhile stayed calm, the four sisters struggling with their longing to sleep, the Tsarevich dressed in khaki and playing on the parquet floor. At 5 a.m. the cars finally arrived and Lukomsky watched as the Tsar, with a touching expression of calm that he had maintained throughout, supported the Tsaritsa, swathed in a cape of black silk, as they descended the steps.60 As they did so, the soldiers outside unexpectedly formed an impromptu guard of honour and greeted them with the traditional ‘Good morning, little father’. Lukomsky watched the dawn break over the Alexander Park as the convoy of cars drove off; he later wrote that as he watched the Romanovs leave, he could not help thinking of the French Revolution and that fateful night in June 1791 when King Louis XVI and his family had fled from the Tuileries to Varennes to seek support for a counter-revolution.
After the sixteen rooms of the Romanov apartments were vacated, Lukomsky went inside and took photographs of the interiors. He was struck by how much they seemed to embody the spirit of the family, and the former monarch especially. For in this grand palace, designed by the great architect Giacomo Quarenghi for Catherine the Great, the Imperial Family had lived in a modest bourgeois style that was decidedly limited in its aesthetic taste. ‘All the tsar’s personal effects were left in perfect order,’ Lukomsky told a reporter in 1928:
In his study were twenty-six photograph albums cataloguing his reign that he had methodically classified and patiently assembled – an inestimable source for future study. In a symbolic gesture he had left on his desk a newly edited collection of his addresses and speeches; alongside this volume I found a richly encrusted revolver with his imperial insignia, and a watch on a gold chain, which he had cast off shortly before his departure, declaring to Baron Steinhel ‘eto ne moe, eto prinadlezhit narodu’ – ‘It isn’t mine, it belongs to the people.’
In contrast, recalled Lukomsky, the Empress’s apartments were ‘prey to an incredible muddle of jewel boxes that had been emptied and thrown into a pile’.61 Once he had made his inspection, Lukomsky sealed all the rooms: the final symbolic severance of the old tsarist order from the new socialist Russia. He was dismayed that things could not have been different: ‘At that time,’ he said in 1928, ‘had a few resolute men suddenly appeared, nothing could have stood in their way and, I believe, the Imperial Family would have been saved and the world, perhaps, doomed to other destinies.’62
Chapter 7
‘The Smell of a Dumas Novel’
Two days before they left their home at the Alexander Palace, the Romanovs were instructed to pack warm clothes. The cook accompanying them was told to assemble five days’ supply of food. The family did not, of course, depart Tsarskoe Selo alone and unassisted, but with a considerable entourage of thirty-nine servants – chambermaids, cooks and footmen – as well as their physician Dr Evgeniy Botkin, the children’s tutor Pierre Gilliard (with Sydney Gibbes, Baroness Buxhoeveden and Dr Botkin’s children following later with additional servants), the Tsaritsa’s personal ladies-in-waiting, Anastasia Hendrikova and Ekaterina Schneider, and two of Nicholas’s equerries, Count Ilya Tatishchev and Prince Vasily Dolgorukov. Two trains transported them and an escort of around 300 soldiers of the 1st, 3rd and 4th Rifle Brigade, armed with machine guns and headed by Kobylinsky, the palace commandant, now charged with supervising the family’s safe transfer to Tobolsk.
But two of the family’s longest-serving and most devoted courtiers, Elizaveta Naryshkina and Count Pavel Benckendorff, were forced to stay behind due to age and infirmity. It was a great wrench for Benckendorff in particular, but over the months to come he would prove a crucial link with the family. Thanks to his contact with Tobolsk, via letters from his stepson Prince Dolgorukov, he was able to pass on news about the family’s welfare. Benckendorff was also an important source of news about the family for the Dowager in Crimea, to whom he wrote a letter over several days, 2–8 August 1917, telling her that the last hours at Tsarskoe had been ‘horribly painful’. ‘The Emperor is bearing up as well as possible in these awful circumstances,’ he told Dagmar. ‘However he has changed physically and has become nervous. He has been trying to tire himself out as much as possible by doing physical work, which has brought relief to his state of mind.’ The Empress, however, was ‘full of illusions’ about what the future held. Benckendorff’s major concern, though, was for Olga Nikolaevna, the eldest and most impressionable daughter, who in his opinion was ‘in a worryingly melancholic state. She has lost weight and cannot hold back her tears.’1 Of all the Romanov children, Olga had suffered the most, emotionally, since her father’s abdication and seemed to be finding the dramatic change in circumstances painful and difficult to come to terms with. She had in particular been grief-stricken at the violent hatred targeted at her parents when, to her, all they had ever done was love Russia and wish the best for her and her people.
* * *
The three-day train ride to Siberia turned out to be surprisingly comfortable for the Romanovs, who travelled in a first-class carriage of the International Wagons-Lits Company and had morning coffee, lunch, tea and dinner served as punctiliously as though they had been back home at the Alexander Palace. Every day the train stopped so that the family could take an hour’s recreation. The final stage of the journey was completed by steamer up the River Tura from the railway terminal at Tyumen. They arrived in Tobolsk at six in the evening of 19 August to a curious and respectful crowd – the local population being largely sympathetic – who were waiting on the quayside to
catch a glimpse of them, and who later sent them sweets, eggs and other food in short supply.2
In 1917 Tobolsk was a town of 21,000 inhabitants and the commercial centre of a huge province that extended for half a million square miles – an area nearly eight times the size of Great Britain, yet ‘a mere flea-bite in Asiatic-Russia’, in the words of one visitor.3 A large proportion of that land was marshy and very sparsely inhabited; the town itself was ‘a picture of stagnant desolation, even in summer’, at which time it was plagued by swarms of mosquitoes. Much of the city’s trade came in on the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, but the Irtysh was only ice-free for about 200 days of the year. The city itself was built on the high right bank of the river, looking out over the mouth of the River Tobol, and was dominated by a kremlin built by Swedish prisoners of war captured at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
While the Romanovs remained on board the steamer, Nicholas’s equerries Dolgorukov and Tatishchev went in an advance party with Kobylinsky and a representative of the Provisional Government to check out the state of the house, which was located in the centre of town on the main Freedom Street. The sight of it filled them with dismay: ‘a dirty, boarded up, stinking house of 13 rooms, with some furniture and with dreadful toilets and bathrooms,’ wrote Dolgorukov in his first letter to Benckendorff on 27 August.4 In the attic there were five rooms for the servants, but the rest of the entourage – himself, Tatishchev, Hendrikova, Botkin, Schneider, other servants, officers of the guard and the commandant Kobylinsky – were lodged in a rented house across the street. It was fairly spacious but similarly unkempt and had no furniture, which they had to go out and buy for themselves. But at least those housed there, unlike the Imperial Family, had permission to move about fairly freely in the town, making it possible for local monarchists to make contact and, through them, send messages of support to the family, and gifts of money and other necessities.
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 14