The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Setting aside the impossibility of any attempted airborne rescue of the Romanovs from Tsarskoe Selo in 1917 – when Gordon-Smith was with the RFC in southern Russia (though the myth persists that the RFC were in some way involved in such a plan) – his rescue mission only makes sense if we look at it in terms not of 1917, but of the spring of 1918 when he was sent back to Russia. This chimes with the fact that Robert Bruce Lockhart, with whom he travelled there, was till January 1918 back in England before he returned to Russia as head of an unofficial British mission to the new Bolshevik government in Moscow. Was it a coincidence that Victor Warrender, who travelled with them, was also returning to Russia to rejoin the staff of the British Supply Mission? And how do we explain the award to Warrender of the Military Cross, gazetted on 3 June 1918 at the age of just eighteen? This was presented to him personally by King George V in a Birthday Honours Ceremony at Windsor, ‘for distinguished services rendered in connection with Military Operations in Russia’ – yet his Medal Card at the National Archives bears no mention of his Russia service.57*

  From his base at Archangel, Gordon-Smith could have been called on to travel across to the Gulf of Ob to take part in a rescue mission based on the Lied plan. But the distance was considerable: 1,400 miles or so. By sledge it would have taken weeks, and no British aircraft – if there were any based at Archangel at that time – was capable of flying that far without numerous stops. Be that as it may, from the Gulf of Ob the Romanovs would presumably have been boarded onto a British torpedo boat (perhaps one of those operating in the North Sea Patrol Flotillas in the Kara Sea area) sent specially for them. Unless, of course, Vickers had been persuaded to offer one of their own boats after all. These boats operated at a top speed of twenty-six knots and were the next fastest to the bigger destroyers, but far more manoeuvrable, so they were ideal for a rescue at speed. Alternatively, Gordon-Smith might have been designated to lead a reception party sent to look after the Romanovs, once installed at the safe house at Murmansk. The mention of supplies and transport, and the bribing of household staff by his grandson, might well make sense in this context.

  The fact remains that Rusplycom, to which Gordon-Smith was seconded in 1918, and which was overseen in London by Mitchell-Thompson (whom Lied had been taken to meet in March), was by now increasingly involved in secret work. This involved preventing British military, industrial and food supplies already stockpiled in the northern Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk from falling into the hands of the advancing Germans (or the Bolsheviks, who by February were beginning to gain a foothold in the area). By this time, Rusplycom probably had the biggest viable group of British personnel based in or near Russia, with the exception of the Royal Navy’s submarine flotilla and its Armoured Car Division. With British relations with the unpredictable and devious Bolsheviks becoming strained, the work of Rusplycom’s personnel in Russia became increasingly clandestine (some of them eventually joining the SIS).58

  Nevertheless, in the spring of 1918, much as we would like it to be otherwise, British officialdom was not preoccupied with a Romanov rescue. It was far more concerned with the bigger commercial, financial and industrial objectives of opening up the Russian markets after the Bolshevik takeover. And their efforts were intensified when, on 3 March 1918 – the very day that Jonas Lied arrived in London for his series of meetings – after three and a half months of diplomatic wrangling at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky signed a peace treaty with Germany. In so doing he pulled Russia out of the war and ceded great swathes of Russian territory in the Baltic, Ukraine and Caucasus to the Germans. The very real prospect of German dominance over a still-fractured Russia, further weakened by the spread of civil war, brought a new and serious turn to the situation. If Russian troops were pulled from the Eastern Front, the Germans could redirect their own army there to the war on the Western Front.

  On 10 March the Bolshevik government moved the capital back to Moscow. Most foreign diplomats decamped soon afterwards for the safety of Vologda, leaving the British embassy in Petrograd with only a skeleton staff. With an ailing Sir George Buchanan sent home to England at the beginning of January (and not replaced as ambassador), who was there left in Russia to speak for the Romanovs via official British channels? Robert Wilton’s warning of the previous December became even more telling: ‘It is evident from the overtures made on their behalf by the Germans at Brest-Litovsk that the enemy intend to make use of [the former Imperial Family].’ Many of the Russian monarchists were pro-German and fiercely anti-Bolshevik and would have supported German intervention in Russia and the restoration of a puppet monarchy.59 But what exactly were the motives behind these German ‘overtures’ now being made on behalf of the Romanovs?

  Chapter 9

  ‘I Would Rather Die in Russia than Be Saved by the Germans’

  When writing about his time in Russia, in retirement in the 1930s, the former French ambassador to Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, never had any doubts as to who had been best placed to effect the safe evacuation of the Romanovs from Russia at the beginning of 1918. In his study of the two deposed emperors, Guillaume II et Nicolas II, published in Paris in 1935, he asserted that:

  One solitary person was capable of saving the tsar, the tsarina and their children: and that was Wilhelm. He had the means and, more than any other sovereign, he had the duty, as no other sovereign was as closely linked to the house of Romanov by such direct and intimate ties. Was he not the godfather of Alexey the Tsarevich?1

  In support of his argument Paléologue cited a long-overlooked open letter written to Wilhelm by General Maxim Leontiev, commander of the Vyborg regiment – of which Wilhelm was honorary Commander in Chief – that had been published in Paris in 1918. Leontiev had been present during the Kaiser’s meeting with the Romanovs on board the Shtandart at the Baltic harbour of Paldiski in Estonia in 1912, where Wilhelm had played the benevolent uncle, showering the Romanov children with gifts. In his letter Leontiev reminded Wilhelm of the affection he had shown at that time to his godson Alexey:

  Do you remember how on that very first day of your arrival, when you were sitting at table on the Shtandart next to the Empress, a playful and vivacious little boy rushed into the dining room, and on seeing such a large gathering of unfamiliar people shyly clutched onto his mother. You beckoned him to you, sat him on your knee, joked with him and stroked his head.2

  And how attentive the Tsar’s four young daughters had all been towards Wilhelm; and how all five children had hung on his every word. ‘Were they not right,’ Leontiev asked, ‘to see in you a guest and a friend, not only of Russia, as you then tried to present yourself, but also a true friend of their own family?’ Leontiev proceeded to berate Wilhelm about his many failings as a professed friend of Russia, but what concerned him most of all was this question: ‘What did you do to protect this family? … Why did you not come to their aid? One word from your ambassador, Mirbach, to put pressure on the Bolshevik government would have been sufficient. You could have saved them and you didn’t!”3

  It has long been claimed that there was a special, secret clause in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which the Romanovs would be set free by the Bolsheviks and allowed to leave Russia. To date no evidence has emerged, however, to support this, or Robert Wilton’s claim that the Germans made any ‘overtures’ on their behalf during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The German historian Kurt Jagow fiercely rebutted Paléologue’s assertion that Germany could have included such a clause. They would hardly have risked intervening on behalf of the sovereign of an enemy state who had just been deposed, he argued, ‘while simultaneously negotiating for a peace with his deposers’. ‘The monarchist question was like a red rag for the Bolshevists’; why would Germany risk such a move, when Nicholas’s own allies had failed to help him?4 Certainly hopes were raised, after the failure of the British to act in the spring of 1917, that Russia’s peace with Germany would ensure that the Romanovs were brought to safety. By the spring of 1918 the Russian monarchists had certainl
y come to the conclusion that the only hope for saving the family lay in making an appeal to the Kaiser. Indeed, many of them had been, and remained, pro-German before and during the war.

  For Lenin, the decision finally to capitulate to the Kaiser had been a grudgingly pragmatic one: the Russian fight on the Eastern Front had collapsed and the Germans were advancing on Russia with frightening ease. Without a peace deal his government would be finished.5 Wilhelm was equally pragmatic: he had no affection for the Bolsheviks, whom he despised as ‘robber chieftains’, and found dealing with them extremely distasteful. They were all ‘swine’ and ‘Jew boys’ in his eyes and he made no attempt to conceal his utter, rabid contempt.6 But he had to work with them in order to achieve the German domination of Russia that he aspired to and his dream of the eventual division of the old empire into ‘four “Tsardoms”: the Ukraine, eastern Caucasus, Siberia and Rump Russia’, all of which would serve German industrial and economic interests.7 Supporting the Bolsheviks, and in so doing enabling the spread of German influence south through the oil-rich Caucasus and Russia’s vast grain-growing areas, was infinitely preferable to helping the Whites in a restoration of the monarchy.8 Yet how different things might have been if in the spring of 1918 the Germans had pursued Supreme Commander General Ludendorff’s plan to go all-out for an overthrow of the Bolsheviks and enlist the support of the Cossacks and other White and monarchist groups in introducing, as Robert Wilton wrote, a ‘more agreeable form of government’.9 Instead, Lenin’s Soviet government was allowed a valuable breathing space in which to consolidate its control, a fact that eventually sealed the fate of the Romanovs.

  Nicholas and Alexandra would have been horrified, had they known of the hopes raised in Russia that the Germans would save them. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was, for them, a wicked betrayal of their beloved country, which would reduce it to a client state of the German Empire. ‘To think that they called Her Majesty a traitress!’ Nicholas exclaimed. ‘Who is the real traitor?’10 Well might Nicholas mourn, for the treaty initiated a brutal dismemberment of the Russia over which he and his Romanov forefathers had ruled for 300 years. In many respects Russia had been ‘almost reduced to the old frontiers of Muscovy under Ivan III’.11 For a soldier of honour such as he, this triumph for Prussian militarism was a shameful abandonment of his wartime allies. It was a ‘disgrace for Russia’ amounting to suicide, tutor Gilliard heard him say, ‘and it would not save the Bolsheviks from ruin’.12

  Alexandra felt exactly the same. In captivity she had never ceased to rail against her cousin Wilhelm and his ‘petty nature’, with the utmost venom.13 ‘I never thought he could sink down as far as coming to terms with the Bolsheviks,’ she exclaimed. ‘What a disgrace!’14 All thought of being offered protection by the Germans was abhorrent to her. When Prince Dolgorukov read out a newspaper article alleging that the treaty had this secret clause guaranteeing the safety of the family, Alexandra was heard to say in French (so that their captors would not understand), ‘I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans!’15

  Many years later Pierre Gilliard recalled that ‘The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been a blow from which the Emperor had never recovered.’ Russia, for Nicholas, represented ‘above all the muzhik [the Russian peasant] and the army … Before and after his abdication he had had one solitary preoccupation: the future of his country; one solitary hope: the victory of Russia’s armies.’ For the first time Gilliard heard Nicholas expressing regret that he had allowed himself to be persuaded to abdicate:

  Brest-Litovsk had so profoundly affected and depressed him that his health was greatly undermined by it. He aged considerably after this. We all noticed it at Tobolsk: his complexion became pallid, there were large bags under his eyes and his beard went very grey.16

  During his darkest days in captivity Nicholas had continued to hold out hope for Russia. But now all seemed lost. Brest-Litovsk marked the point at which he fell into a deep depression and a fatalistic acceptance of whatever life threw at him thereafter. This was accompanied by a stronger resistance – if not dread – in both him and Alexandra to the idea of leaving Russia at all: ‘more than anything they feared being sent away somewhere abroad’ (i.e. Germany), recalled Klavdiya Bitner, the girls’ tutor at Tobolsk.17 In conversation with Commandant Pankratov earlier that year, one of the Romanov sisters had commented that there was talk in the papers that the new Constituent Assembly, when established, would ‘send us all abroad’. She had been disturbed by this suggestion: ‘It would be better if they sent us someplace else in Siberia but not abroad,’ she said. Pankratov was surprised: ‘You don’t want to leave Russia?’ ‘It’s best if we stay in Russia,’ Tatiana had replied. ‘Let them send us deeper into Siberia.’18

  After Brest-Litovsk there was a significant shift regarding the diplomatic efforts being undertaken to protect the Romanovs or get them out of Russia, as well as a change of internal Russian policy in relation to their future. The struggle between the government in Moscow and some of the militant regional Soviets deepened, as the latter began trying to dictate how the Romanovs should be dealt with. On 4 March, ‘In response to concern that Nicholas would become the puppet of the Germans’, the regional committee of the Soviet of the Kolomensk district of the Moscow region was the first of numerous hardline groups to send in demands for official state retribution to be carried out against the Imperial Family. In their telegram they ‘unanimously’ demanded the ‘prompt annihilation of the entire family and relatives of the former tsar’ in order to pre-empt any attempt by ‘the German and Russian bourgeoisie’ to re-establish a tsarist regime.19

  In this heightened atmosphere, concerns for the family were once more being raised abroad. On 12 March, King Christian of Denmark received such alarming reports from Harald Scavenius, his ambassador in Petrograd, that he felt he must renew his appeals to Wilhelm to ‘intercede in the fate of the deposed monarch and his family’. Their safety was seriously threatened, he telegraphed, as well as that of Nicholas’s Danish mother and her daughters Olga and Xenia and son-in-law Sandro in Crimea, who were now suffering considerable ‘want and hardship’ as well as being ‘completely at the mercy of the capriciousness of swarming gangs of sailors’.20 The Germans were the only power with any influence over the Soviets, and Christian urged the Kaiser to do something.

  We have no access to Scavenius’s private reports to King Christian, as the Danish Royal Archives are off-limits, but the fact that intelligence had reached Scavenius in Petrograd on the plight of the Romanovs in Tobolsk and Crimea is confirmed by a letter written by Scavenius’s secretary, Esther Aksel-Hansen, to her family:

  The Imperial Family is suffering a great deal. It looks like they are close to starving and are being molested in all sorts of ways without any sort of protection. If would be amazing if they were to come out of it all alive.21

  There was good reason for this heightened sense of alarm: Nicholas’s brother Mikhail, who had been planning his escape out of Russia via Finland, had recently been arrested at Gatchina and sent to Perm, 600 miles west of Tobolsk. At the Governor’s House in Tobolsk the guards were ‘in a very vicious mood’. No one could ‘predict the fate that may befall the Tsar and Tsarina, as well as the children’. ‘I am turning to you,’ King Christian told Wilhelm, ‘in case it might be possible for you to do something for the improvement and safety of the possible fate of persons who are so close to me.’22

  In response to Christian’s telegram, on 15 March Wilhelm assured him that his message had ‘made a profound impression’ on him:

  I completely understand that the future fate of the Imperial Family that is so close to you fills you with the greatest anxiety. Despite all the affronts and great harm that my fatherland and I have suffered from this once friendly quarter, I cannot withhold my purely humanitarian concern for the Imperial Family, and were it in my power, I would willingly do my part to ensure that the Imperial Family is granted a secure and dignified lot.23

  But like his cousin Geo
rge, the British king, Wilhelm could not be prompted to act purely out of family feeling. ‘Immediate assistance,’ he said was ‘impossible in the present circumstances’. Why? For precisely the same reasons that had influenced the change in the British position: undemocratic political interference in the government of another country. Any direct intervention made by Wilhelm would ‘be misconstrued by the Russian government’ and ‘could possibly be interpreted as meaning our intention was to bring about the reinstatement of the Czar’. Wilhelm was sorry, but ‘for that reason, I can unfortunately see no possibility of offering assistance’. The best option, he concluded, would be for the ‘Nordic kingdoms collectively to approach the Russian government. As neutral powers, it would be much more likely for them to be believed to be solely acting from humanitarian motives rather than pursuing any political interests.’24