The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Before they left Tyumen the next morning Yakovlev again warned Sverdlov that the Ekaterinburgers, with the exception of military commissar Goloshchekin, had only one desire: ‘to finish off the baggage at all costs’; sooner or later the train would be ambushed. Having got Sverdlov to agree to the diversion to Omsk, he now offered an alternative contingency measure: to take the Romanovs on the southern loop out of Omsk back west to Simsky Gorny, a mining district on the River Sim in the province of Chelyabinsk, an area that Yakovlev knew well from his teenage years in Ufa.11 ‘There are good places in the mountains,’ he explained in a telegraph to Sverdlov, ‘that are exactly and purposely suited for this’; from a comment he made to his deputy Avdeev, it would seem he had in mind holing up with his charges somewhere at the vast Ust-Katav tram factory in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.12 In order to underline that there was no intended subterfuge in this proposal – though many have since read it as such – Yakovlev reiterated that his suggestion was as much to prevent the Romanovs being rescued en route by right-wing monarchists as it was to protect them from the murderous Ekaterinburgers. ‘I offer my services as the permanent commissar for guarding the baggage right up to the end,’ he insisted.13

  It did not take long for the Ekaterinburgers in pursuit of Yakovlev’s convoy, and closely monitoring its progress, to notice when his train diverted east to Omsk instead of travelling on the preordained route west to Ekaterinburg. Any train heading to Omsk could pick up the junction there with the Trans-Siberian Railway and head on east, all the way to Vladivostok. Alternatively it could head back west on the southern loop of the Trans-Siberian, bypassing Ekaterinburg, all the way to Moscow.14 When they heard this, the leaders of the Ural Regional Soviet smelled a plot to deny them the promised custody of the Romanovs. But if indeed there was a plot to stymie them, it was not one between Yakovlev and other mythical Romanov rescuers, but was in fact based on secret instructions from Sverdlov. On 28 April, in response to paranoid accusations of subterfuge telegraphed to him by the URS, Sverdlov sent instructions to the Omsk Soviet insisting: ‘Follow only our orders [and] no one else’s. I place full responsibility on you; conspiracy is necessary.’15

  As Yakovlev and his charges headed for Omsk with an escort of 100 men, he insisted to Avdeev that taking the Romanovs there was the only guarantee of complete fulfilment of Sverdlov’s orders. The Romanovs themselves were deeply disturbed when they noticed this change of route: ‘Where will they take us after Omsk,’ Nicholas noted in his diary, ‘to Moscow or Vladivostok?’16 Alexandra overheard the guards saying that the local Soviet in Omsk was now panicking that the train was going to take them out to the coast and on a boat to Japan.17

  Having failed to intercept the convoy on its journey to Tyumen, Yakovlev’s pursuers had now commandeered their own train and were in hot pursuit. Word had reached Yakovlev of plots to blow up his train near a railway bridge at Poklevskaya (now Talitsa). Local Soviets along the route had, apparently, been ordered to use extreme measures to stop the train and to ignore any official documents that Yakovlev was carrying.18 As Yakovlev’s journey with the Romanovs became ever more unpredictable, the chair of the URS was denouncing him to Sverdlov in Moscow: Yakovlev’s behaviour, said Alexander Beloborodov, had been condemned by the URS as an ‘outright betrayal of the revolution’. They were convinced that he was trying to ‘transport the tsar [beyond] the bounds of the revolutionary Urals for reasons unknown’. It was the duty of all ‘revolutionary organizations’ in the area to ‘stop the former tsar’s train’, arrest Yakovlev and his detachment and turn ‘Nicholas Romanov’ over to the regional Soviet in Ekaterinburg.19

  After two days on the train and still with no safe destination in sight, Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria were now in great peril. Sverdlov had to act swiftly in order to bring the URS to heel, or Yakovlev’s prisoners would perish at the hands of this renegade mob. On 29 April Sverdlov telegraphed the URS, reiterating in no uncertain terms: ‘Everything done by Yakovlev … is in direct fulfilment of an order I have given … Undertake absolutely nothing without our agreement. Yakovlev is to be trusted completely. Once again, no interference.’20

  Sverdlov was by now alarmed at the escalating situation. Fearing that Yakovlev’s mission might end in a bloodbath and the deaths of his valuable charges, Sverdlov reluctantly ordered Yakovlev to turn the train round and head back to Tyumen. From there he was to continue his journey, as per the original plans, west to Ekaterinburg. Sverdlov reassured him that he had ‘reached an understanding [with the] Uralites’, who had ‘guaranteed that they will be personally responsible for the actions of the regional men’ and were now guaranteeing Nicholas’s safety. ‘Without question I submit to all orders from the center,’ responded the loyal Bolshevik on the 29th. ‘I will deliver the baggage wherever you say.’21 But he emphasised that the danger was ‘entirely well founded’. Yakovlev still recommended that he take his charges to Simsky Gorny, from where they could then travel on to Moscow rather than the hotbed of Ekaterinburg. ‘The baggage will be in utter danger at all times’ if he headed there, Yakovlev warned, adding that, once delivered, ‘I doubt that you will be able to drag it out of there.’ He was putting this warning on the record one last time, he added, to absolve himself and his deputy Avdeev ‘from any moral responsibility for the future consequences’.22 And with that, Yakovlev headed back north to Tyumen and then west to Ekaterinburg.

  At 8 a.m. on 30 April 1918 Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria, and their small entourage, arrived at Ekaterinburg railway station to be greeted by a hostile crowd, who had been warned of their imminent arrival and were shouting for Nicholas to be brought out. ‘Show us this bloodsucker,’ they screamed. In response, Yakovlev told them he would ‘show them machine guns’ if they did not disperse. He was forced to take the train out to the goods station on the outskirts of the city to unload his prisoners, where they were handed over to Alexander Beloborodov and the members of his Ural Regional Soviet.23 Finally, at 3 in the afternoon, the three prisoners were driven in an open motor car to their new place of incarceration – the Ipatiev House on Voznesensky Prospekt. It was, remarked Yakovlev later, extremely modest in comparison with the Governor’s House at Tobolsk, ‘which could have been a country palace by the size of its rooms and hall’. The new house was much smaller, the view from it blocked by a high wooden palisade, and very heavily guarded. Tobolsk might have been a place of tolerable house arrest, but Ekaterinburg was clearly going be a prison. As they entered the courtyard gates it was the last sight that the former Tsar and Tsaritsa and their daughter Maria would have of the world outside, and it of them.

  How ironic it is that it was neither the British nor the Provisional Government, nor even the Russian monarchists, but a man who appeared to be a punctilious Bolshevik commissar, who had saved three of the Romanov family from being murdered in April. Vasily Yakovlev undoubtedly acted decisively to keep them safe. He risked his own life, certainly not through any love of the former Tsar or any pro-monarchist sentiments, but out of a sense of political honour and duty. While he had never had any intention of spiriting the Romanovs away, one must concede that he had behaved impeccably and had fulfilled his orders to keep the Romanovs alive at all costs.24*

  There is, of course, small comfort in Yakovlev’s delaying of the inevitable. He bought Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria a few more weeks. During that time, until they were joyfully reunited with the rest of the family, only a few precious letters written by Maria and her mother got through to Tobolsk. Tatiana, Olga and Anastasia were intensely relieved when they finally received word from them. The agony of separation is only too painfully apparent: ‘We miss our quiet and peaceful life in Tobolsk,’ Maria told her sisters in a plaintive note of 10 May. They had all been contented with their life there and had made the most of it. But everything about the new house in Ekaterinburg seemed ominous and uncertain; the guards were more oppressive than ever and had searched all their belongings, confiscating what little money they had. ‘It is difficult
to write anything pleasant, for there is little of that kind here,’ Maria wrote five days later. But there were always consolations, she added, trying to be positive: ‘on the other hand, God does not abandon us, the sun shines and the birds sing. This morning we heard the dawn chorus. That was the only pleasant and agreeable event.’ In response, messages of love and support eventually arrived from Tobolsk: ‘May Our Lord protect you, my dear beloved Mama and all of you,’ Olga wrote to Alexandra, ‘I kiss Papa, you and M. many times over. I clasp you in my arms and love you.’25

  * * *

  The Romanovs had been conveniently forgotten for near on nine months when, just as they were being taken away to Ekaterinburg, almost 3,000 miles away in London there was at last a sudden brief spurt of activity on their behalf. It was prompted by the arrival of that important telegram from British consul Arthur Woodhouse – sent from Petrograd on 26 April, but not received till 1 May.

  From the moment my colleague Phil Tomaselli found the short entry in the incoming telegrams ledger and went in search of the actual ‘Woodhouse Telegram’ that appeared to have gone missing from the relevant file, we had been baffled as to why no other Romanov books had mentioned it till now. Phil has many years’ experience working in World War I records at the National Archives and put the telegram’s absence down to the vagaries of their faulty filing and indexing system. No conspiracy here; just plain bureaucratic inefficiency. He finally found the full text of that elusive telegram during one of his ‘periodic trawls through mounds of paperwork’, as he put it, not where it should have been in FO 371/3329/78031, but in FO 371/3938/22804.

  Count Benkendorf lately Grand Court Marshal called yesterday afternoon Thursday begs me to telegraph following: he has received information privately that present condition of the ex-Imperial Family at Tobolsk is pitiful in the extreme. They are being persecuted in every way. He solicits your intercession on their behalf and trusts you will instruct Mr Lockhart to suggest modification of treatment of exiles especially as regards liberty within bounds. The young Prince is again in ill-health.26

  The telegram was, of course, circulated to the King. On 3 May a short private note on headed paper was delivered to the Foreign Office, as follows:

  Lord Cromer* has telephoned to say that The King is much distressed at the news contained in Mr Woodhouse’s telegram No. 142, and hopes that the Foreign Office will telegraph without delay to Mr Lockhart instructing him to take up the matter with M. Trotsky and insist on better treatment.27

  So what happened next? Did the head of the British mission to Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart,† make any representations to Trotsky about the Romanovs? If so, what did he report back to London? Predictably, the record is silent. There is nothing in Lockhart’s memoirs or diaries, or any mention in those of Trotsky, or on the official Foreign Office record. But one can infer a great deal from the scribbled official notes appended to the front cover of file FO 371/3329/78031, added as each official who read it passed it on to the next.

  In tiny, barely readable handwriting, a note on the front of the file observes: ‘I fear intercession for the ex-Imperial Family will not do us much good with the Bolsheviks, and it is very unlikely to do them any good either … If known it is considered necessary to do something Mr Lockhart had better be given discretion as to what form the representations should take.’28‡

  An urgent cipher telegram was therefore sent by Foreign Secretary Balfour to Lockhart in Moscow at 10.30 p.m. that same day, reiterating the King’s concern at the news, but also adding a dampener:

  I entertain grave misgivings whether any representations you will make would not do more harm than good to these unhappy victims. But it is impossible for us here to form any opinion worth having on this point: and I must leave it to your tact and discretion to do what is in your power to diminish the hardships of their confinement.

  In closing, Balfour for once expressed real apprehension about the family:

  … If it were generally believed here that they were the victims of unnecessary cruelty the impression produced would be most painful.29

  After the Lockhart telegram was sent, another observation was added at the very bottom of the file cover:

  In view of the King’s wishes [my italics] I think we must instruct Mr Lockhart to bring the matter before Mr Trotsky. We must be careful not to give away the source of our information.30

  As there appears to be no official follow-up to this suggestion, one must assume that the British government in the end opted to let sleeping dogs lie. In Petrograd, meanwhile, the Danish ambassador Scavenius had taken a much tougher line in response to this news of the treatment of the Romanovs. Soviet ambassador Joffe’s assurances to Berlin that ‘nothing untoward would befall the Imperial Family’ were worthless. Indeed, his statements in response to requests about the Imperial Family – in Tobolsk and in Crimea – had been ‘full of exceptional cynicism’, in Scavenius’s opinion. In Crimea the Dowager and her family were practically starving and at the mercy of their sailor guards, who so far at least had ‘not taken it into their heads to kill her’, he wrote in a despatch to Copenhagen. ‘Mr Joffe knows just as well as I,’ Scavenius reported, ‘that if such an idea had seized the guards, not a single soul could have prevented it happening.’31

  Scavenius then went on to describe the situation being endured by the Imperial Family at Ekaterinburg, in their new and much more cramped conditions, in a residence ‘surrounded by high palisades that completely block both house and windows up to the first floor’:

  The windows that are not blocked by the palisades have been pasted over with newspaper. Their Majesties are thus living in the semi-darkness and without any ventilation, as they are not allowed to open the windows.

  Their access to the outside, and to exercise, was severely curtailed; the food – mainly kasha [buckwheat porridge] and cabbage soup – was barely edible and served in dirty tin dishes; and they were often forced to eat with their guards. ‘It is evident that the goal is to break Their Majesties down both physically and mentally, and this will have a disastrous effect.’32

  This, concluded Scavenius – and one can hear the outrage in his words – ‘is what Mr Joffe calls good and reasonable treatment’. The German government was clearly unaware of the truth of the conditions in which the Romanovs were living. Scavenius now urged that the Danish Foreign Minister ask King Christian to make a direct approach to the Kaiser:

  If there is a desire to save Their Majesties, then it is absolutely necessary to take steps to do so quickly. I have felt compelled to write this report, since I cannot take responsibility for not having informed those persons who are perhaps able to do something about the actual, unvarnished truth of the situation.33

  The Danes might now have been raising serious concerns about the plight of the Romanovs, but what about King George? He had personally expressed his anxiety for his Russian relatives, albeit briefly, once before – after the abdication in March 1917. But how deep was his ‘distress’ now, and what was he prepared to do for them?

  When investigating the possibility of the King having initiated some kind of last-ditch rescue plan in the spring of 1918, Summers and Mangold hit a wall that has continued to firmly bar the way to historians. It is clear from the comments on the cover of TNA 371/3329/78031 that the British government did not wish to be dragged into any overt intercession on behalf of the family, and was reluctant even to ask Lockhart to make representations to the Soviet government.

  Throughout 1917, until the Bolsheviks seized power in October, there had appeared to be no direct threat to the Imperial Family. It was not until 20 May 1918 that the British government received confirmation from Consul Woodhouse in Petrograd – forwarding a telegram of the 10th from Thomas Preston, British consul in Ekaterinburg – that the Tsar had been brought to the town. ‘He is living in a private house a few doors from the Consulate,’ Preston confirmed:

  Many rumours are current as to the reason of his arrival here, one, which is widely circu
lated, being that he is being held for a ransom by the local Bolsheviks against the Central People’s Commissaries, or in order to enable the former to exercise pressure on the latter …

  The report to which most credence can be attached is that the ex-Emperor has been brought here in view of the fact that the Ural district, especially Ekaterinburg, is at the present time the most solid stronghold of Bolshevism in Russia.34

  This report from the horse’s mouth must surely have set alarm bells ringing in Britain about the heightened threat to the safety of the Imperial Family. But in the face of government intransigence, any possible talk of a rescue operation could only have taken place privately between the King and SIS agents, presumably without even the Prime Minister’s knowledge. As Summers and Mangold reported in 1971 – in response to an original TV documentary that they made on the subject – any records of this ‘were unlikely to be found in the sort of archives which became available to the public’.35 It seems highly unlikely that, having officially refused to save the Imperial Family in June 1917, the British government in some way secretly colluded in an underground attempt to ‘recoup the loss’ a year later.36

  The problem with seeking evidence of such a move is that what little we have to go on is linked to bogus claims of one or all of the Romanov family’s miraculous survival. In order to argue their case, denialists and conspiracy theorists have come up with an assortment of scenarios involving eleventh-hour rescue from the Ipatiev House, and mysterious trains with their blinds down heading north-west to Perm, but without any solid evidence to back them up. Nevertheless, might King George have been so conscience-stricken as to act independently and make a private request for something to be done? He knew full well that he could not interfere in another government’s business, but he was, as head of the armed services, in regular contact with the War Office and members of the Secret Service, and it is quite plausible that at some point he might, at the very least, have asked their advice.