The Race to Save the Romanovs
Page 15
On leaving Tsarskoe Selo, Kobylinsky had been instructed by Kerensky: ‘Don’t forget that this is the former emperor. Neither he nor his family should experience any deprivation’. And certainly the commandant did his best to ensure that the Romanovs had a degree of comfort and freedom of movement within the large fenced-in yard attached to the house, as well as occasional walks beyond to attend church.5 Their guards too were a great deal more friendly and courteous than those at Tsarskoe and, from their rooms on the first floor, and the small balcony on which they were allowed to sit, the family could see the ordinary people of Tobolsk passing by on the street outside, who often stopped and waved and even crossed themselves.
For loyal monarchists gathering in the Tobolsk area and keeping watch on the Governor’s House, the period from August to November 1917 was undoubtedly the opportune time to try and spring the captives from their prison. Siberia then was still relatively ‘quiet’ politically and, with his removal there, Citizen Romanov (as the papers now referred to him) and his family had receded even further from the public consciousness. Kobylinsky was sympathetic, and would not have resisted a forced abduction of the family; security was lax and the exercise yard where the Romanovs spent a great deal of time was relatively easy for a group of determined monarchists to storm. Indeed, some of the family’s own guards, from the former 4th Imperial Rifles, even suggested to Nicholas that the best time for an escape would be when they were on duty.6
Logically speaking, the best exit route for any group hoping to rescue the Romanovs from Tobolsk would have been the one Kerensky had hoped to follow through on later – taking them out of Russia from Tyumen on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok on the east coast, and from there putting them on a boat for Japan and eventually the USA. But such plans were vastly outside the scope of local monarchists in Tobolsk, for whom the only viable option that seems to have been discussed was to hide the Romanovs within Russia, in the hope of at least protecting them from harm until the political situation changed.
By the autumn of 1917 there was no shortage of willing, idealistic officer-rescuers from the former Imperial Russian Army eager to wear the badge of honour for mounting a rescue. Unfortunately, most of what has been written about their plots to save the Romanovs is the stuff of insubstantial and largely speculative myth, a mixed bag of often confused and inconsistent accounts by those who supposedly took part, often recalled many years later in exile. Few of these accounts concur and many contradict each other; the majority, infuriatingly, refer to people involved by their initial only. In the main they serve merely to confuse any historian trying to make sense of them. Sadly, however, these plans were all doomed to failure: what the monarchists shared in enthusiasm was outweighed by internal rivalries and an inability to keep their schemes to themselves. As World War I expert Phil Tomaselli put it to me in one of our many conversations:
Any plot with a single Russian involved will leak; one with two Russians will leak shortly; one with more than two Russians has already leaked. One with 70 Russians is handicapped from day one.
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For now, let us return to Little Markov, who in Petrograd in August 1917, under instructions from Markov II, was busy making contact with monarchist cells. He reckoned that by this time there were around fifty such groups, some of them holed up in the Astoria Hotel, where they had clandestine meetings with Lili Dehn, formerly of Alexandra’s entourage. Markov II meanwhile held secret meetings with others, in the offices of a commercial company on the Nevsky Prospekt. They were all ‘inspired by the same sentiments’, noted Little Markov, but got themselves in an ‘incredible muddle’ and seemed incapable of coming together into one well-organised direction. The problem, as he noted, was that they were all deeply suspicious of each other and had no organisational skills. Nor, at this stage, did they have the one crucial essential: sufficient money to fund their various plans. ‘The young officers were enthusiastic about all the mystery-mongering, the passwords, signs, and other paraphernalia of conspiracy,’ he recalled, ‘but had no idea of the technical side of such activities.’7 In the meantime, Lili Dehn had become aware that she was being watched by the authorities and decided to move to her mother’s home in southern Russia to keep a lower profile. Little Markov travelled with her to Beletskovka in southern Ukraine. During their journey they discovered that ‘the whole of the south was honeycombed with monarchist groups’.8 There was much talk of counter-revolution among them, but as yet no one to marshal any of these groups into a cohesive force.
A typical example of ‘an enthusiastic display of loyalty without sense’, in the words of Alexander Kerensky, came in August 1917 when one of the Imperial Family’s closest friends, twenty-two-year-old Rita Khitrovo, took it upon herself to travel to Tobolsk.9 Acting entirely independently and without consultation with other Romanov supporters, she arrived there with a pillow stuffed with gifts and a bundle of fifteen or so letters for the Imperial Family.10 Such had been her thoughtlessness and lack of discretion about the trip that word had soon reached Kerensky. Alerted to her departure and paranoid that she was involved in a plot to free the Romanovs, he had her arrested and searched by Kobylinsky as soon as she arrived in Tobolsk.
Khitrovo’s motive for travelling to see the Imperial Family had been one of foolish devotion rather than anything counter-revolutionary, but it put the authorities on their guard for other plots. She was immediately put on a train back to Moscow, where she was interrogated and eventually released. Khitrovo was, however, able to pass on valuable details of the family’s greatly straitened living conditions at the Governor’s House – prompting a frenzy of fund-raising on their behalf back in Petrograd and Moscow. But in Tobolsk her ‘thoughtless visit’ did nothing to help the Romanovs, instead having ‘the effect of a heavy stone falling upon the still surface of the prisoners’ lives’.11 Thankfully, Kobylinsky deemed the letters she had brought harmless and they were at least passed on to the family. But as a direct result of this incident a new Socialist Revolutionary commissar, Vasily Pankratov, and his assistant Alexander Nikolsky were sent from Moscow to take charge of the captives, with Kobylinsky being sidelined to command the 337 troops guarding them.
Unlike the more sympathetic Kobylinsky, Pankratov was a hardened and trusted revolutionary who had spent fourteen years incarcerated in the notorious Shlisselburg Fortress for the murder of a policeman, and then another twenty-seven years in internal Siberian exile. Arriving on 14 September, he had been extremely reluctant to take up his appointment, but as a dedicated servant of the revolution he carried out his instructions to the letter and with a strong sense of moral rectitude.12 Nevertheless, though he might have seemed ‘a fanatic imbued with humanitarian principles’ to tutor Pierre Gilliard, as revolutionaries went, Pankratov was a decent and fair man; he wished no harm to the Imperial Family and was vigilant about their security. He was polite and got on well with the Tsar and his children and earned their respect.13 Indeed, such was his even-handedness that some of the more militant guards in the detachment at the Governor’s House formed their own Soldiers’ Committee and began insisting that Pankratov, and Kobylinsky as well, take a much tougher line with their charges.
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At the beginning of November 1917, the Bolshevik takeover of power from the Provisional Government in Petrograd brought with it growing anxieties about how the new draconian socialist regime would impact on the Romanovs in Tobolsk. Nicholas was distraught at the news when it finally reached him two weeks later. He had abdicated for the sake of Russia, but his country had not been united by his act of sacrifice; instead it was now riven with even greater violence and discord. Alexandra, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly impatient and anxious, sending word to Dehn and Vyrubova asking, ‘what was Markov II doing, and how far had the work for the liberation of Their Majesties really advanced?’14 By now Little Markov and Dehn had returned to Petrograd to find their group was still trying to collect money to fund sending officers to Tobolsk to mount a rescue. M
arkov II had recruited 150 people, so he claimed, with everyone becoming increasingly concerned that ‘the position of the Emperor and Empress seemed to … be dangerous, even critical.’15
Another important figure had meanwhile also entered the frame: Archbishop Germogen. This well-known spiritual leader and monarchist, who had been influential in Rasputin’s rise to a position of influence over the Romanov family, was now based in Tobolsk. Although he had, in the end, turned against Rasputin, Hermogen had remained loyal to the Imperial Family and was lobbying locally for support and funds. He was also in secret communication with the Dowager in Crimea and with monarchists in Petrograd and elsewhere who were organising for a counter-revolution. More importantly, Hermogen had control of a network of monasteries in Western Siberia that might have provided ideal hiding places for the family, once liberated.16 Acting as a conduit for letters being passed to the family in the Governor’s House, Hermogen had, however, aroused much suspicion among the local Soviets. It was under his auspices, and with the assistance of Father Alexey Vasiliev – the priest he had appointed to the church where the Romanovs were occasionally allowed to attend services – that one of the most mysterious plotters now emerged.
Lieutenant Boris Solovev, formerly of the mounted Artillery Brigade, was a leader of the ‘Rasputin circle’ of Petrograd-based monarchists. Aged twenty-seven, he was ‘tall and fair, with a toothbrush moustache’ and penetrating grey-green eyes.17 The son of the treasurer of the Holy Synod, after studying in Berlin he had briefly flirted with theosophy and spent time at Madame Blavatsky’s commune in India. In 1915 his interest in the occult drew him to Anna Vyrubova’s circle of Rasputin admirers, where he had met Rasputin’s daughter Maria, in whose direction Rasputin himself deliberately steered him. Solovev proposed to her several times, but Maria rejected him, until finally agreeing in September 1917 to marry him.18 Solovev’s motives in this are questionable. Many would later allege that he married Maria as an act of cynical self-advancement in order to gain the Empress’s confidence as an associate of the two people (family aside) who had been closest to her – Rasputin and Vyrubova.19 From such an advantageous position he was able, so it seemed, to convince Alexandra that, guided by Rasputin’s all-powerful spirit, he was there to ensure not just the Imperial Family’s financial support and safety, but also its ultimate liberation.
In October, Solovev had heard that the family were having a difficult time in captivity and were running out of money. Alexandra had been sending messages to Anna Vyrubova, pleading for financial help and other basic commodities. When the family had left for Tobolsk, Count Benckendorff, as Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court, had entrusted Kobylinsky with a large sum of money to cover the family’s household expenses, food, servants’ salaries and doctors’ fees. But these funds had also had to be drawn on by Kobylinsky, to pay the men guarding the family; by November, Prince Dolgorukov was writing to his stepfather in alarm that the money had run out and the Romanovs were piling up debts.20 Economies had to be made and several servants were let go; many members of the entourage were already covering their own subsistence costs, but even so the Romanovs were living in severely straitened circumstances. Benckendorff had been soliciting donations far and wide – in Moscow and even abroad – on their behalf.21 The French and British ambassadors, Noulens and Buchanan, had been approached by another group for financial support and had politely declined, but in France the Marquis de la Guiche and other monarchists were also collecting money.22 As too was Boris Solovev, who had found a major donor in Kiev-based banker and sugar manufacturer Karol Yaroshinsky, for whom Solovev had in the past worked as an assistant. Yaroshinsky had stocks and shares in numerous banks and railroad companies, as well as agricultural investments in Ukraine, and was well known to the Romanov family, having been a benefactor of the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo set up under the patronage of Nicholas and Alexandra’s younger daughters Anastasia and Maria. Accounts vary, but he is said to have stumped up around 175,000 gold rubles (worth more than $3 million/£2,175,000 today), which Anna Vyrubova passed on to Solovev to deliver to the family in Tobolsk, in his guise as a ‘fully accredited representative of various monarchist organisations, which trusted him because of Vyrubova’s recommendation’.23
In Tobolsk in November 1917, Solovev handed over the money, as well as letters for the family, to Father Vasiliev. Some of these gifts were smuggled into the Governor’s House by two maids, Anna Romanova (no relation) and Anna Utkina; others went astray. The two women had travelled to Tobolsk separately from the Imperial Family and were able to do this, as they lived independently.24 In response, Alexandra expressed her gratitude for Yaroshinsky’s financial support in a coded letter to Vyrubova: ‘Really it is touching that even now we are not forgotten … God bless him.’25 By now she had also received word about ‘300’ monarchist rescuers gathering in the area, supposedly under Solovev’s auspices, which he referred to as the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk. As an expression of their loyalty to the Tsaritsa, they had adopted as their calling card the Buddhist sign of the left-facing sauwastika, which had long been Alexandra’s favourite good-luck symbol.26 Ever watchful for signs from above, Alexandra put her trust in Solovev and his gallant knights: ‘I pray tirelessly to the Lord and put my hopes in Him alone,’ she wrote to him. ‘You talk of a miracle, but it isn’t a miracle that the Lord has sent you here to us.’27
Investing all her hopes in this promised rescue, Alexandra was also providing another valuable source of funding: her hidden cache of jewels, objets d’art and other precious family items – ornamental swords, gold- and jewel-encrusted medals and orders, and so on – that she had brought with her from Tsarskoe Selo. The difficulty was turning such items into hard cash. Some of these jewels were smuggled out by the maids Utkina and Romanova to Bishop Hermogen and Father Vasiliev; others were passed on to Solovev to be converted into money and were never seen again. A large collection of gold and diamond jewellery was taken to the Mother Superior of the nearby Ivanovsky convent by the Tsar’s valet Chemodurov and was hidden there for many years.* Other jewels and valuable items were dispersed for safe-keeping among members of the entourage, as the only insurance policy for the Romanovs’ future lives in exile, should they escape Russia.
By the beginning of 1918, however, the situation in Tobolsk began to change dramatically. For a while the local government had resisted the slow encroachment of Soviet power in their district, but after news of the second revolution in November filtered through to the guards of the detachment at the Governor’s House, some of the more militant among them had become increasingly hostile towards the Romanov family. Kobylinsky was having difficulty keeping them under control: they were more and more disruptive, complaining that the Romanovs had better food and more comfortable beds than they did and demanding an increase in wages. When a consignment of six crates of wine arrived for the family from Tsarskoe Selo, in a rage they demanded it be poured into the River Irtysh. Their own Soldiers’ Committee continued to insist on a much stricter regime at the Governor’s House. In so doing they effectively usurped power from Kobylinsky, and even the more authoritarian commandant Pankratov.
Pankratov had hoped that elections to a new Constituent Assembly promised in December might restore order to the political situation, but his hopes were in vain. The proceedings to elect the assembly had no sooner begun than Lenin closed them down on 19 January, when the Bolsheviks failed to gain sufficient seats. With his position undermined, friction between the commandant and the ever more militant Soldiers’ Committee forced Pankratov’s resignation at the end of January.28 From now on, the regime around the family tightened, as the attitude of the more politicised guards became ever more belligerent and intimidating. They demanded that all guards and officers no longer wear epaulettes, a rule extended to Nicholas and Alexey, who still took pride in wearing their army tunics and who were upset at having to kowtow to it. Kobylinsky noted with alarm how those men who had served under him, when completing their term of dut
y, were replaced by much more aggressive new recruits from Petrograd; these guards were ‘a pack of blackguardly-looking young men’, in the view of Pierre Gilliard.29
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In the meantime, on 20 January 1918, Boris Solovev had set off for Siberia once more, with another 10,000 rubles ($173,000/£125,000 equivalent today) from Yaroshinsky and a suitcase full of chocolate, perfume, underclothing and winter clothes for the Imperial Family from their friends in the capital, and three packets of letters passed on by Vyrubova. At Tobolsk the gifts were again smuggled into the Governor’s House by the maids. Alexandra, believing that Solovev had been sent by the ghost of Rasputin, in response smuggled out an icon as a gift for him.30 Shortly afterwards Solovev established a base for his rescue ‘conspiracy’ at Tyumen. Here, jealous of rival groups arriving from Petrograd and Moscow who might try to exploit the funds raised for the Imperial Family, Solovev ‘established a kind of toll-gate for all persons trying to visit Tobolsk with the object of seeing the Romanovs’.31 He insisted that ‘our people’ were primed and ready for a rescue – with plants at the local telegraph office, in the Tobolsk militia and the police.32 There were, he told his supporters, eight former revolutionary regiments that had come over to the cause, and who ‘had occupied every approach to Tobolsk, so that it was complete encircled’. He even had, he claimed, ‘several trusted men within the house of detention itself’ and ‘mines had been laid under every bridge within reach of the town, so that it could be isolated at a moment’s notice’. When the moment to strike came, this loyal chain of men would pass the Romanovs safely from one group to another. Solovev announced there was no need for further supporters to be sent from Moscow and Petrograd, ‘because every new face increased the risk of arousing suspicions’. ‘Money was all he asked for’ and, needless to say, ‘the money was forthcoming’.33 All they needed now was the right weather and the right opportunity to storm the house.