Chapter 11
‘Await the Whistle around Midnight’
On 23 May 1918 – the very day that Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Alexey were finally brought from Tobolsk to join their parents and sister at the Ipatiev House – their aunt Victoria wrote an impassioned letter to British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. As Alexandra and Ella’s sister, and one who knew the Romanov family intimately, Victoria Milford Haven made perhaps the most logical suggestion yet. Writing from her home at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, as any mother would, she prioritised the welfare of the innocent Romanov children. What is telling, though, is the manner in which she opened her letter: ‘I must apologize for troubling you with my private anxieties and wishes at a time when you are so heavily burdened with work,’ she wrote in her large and emphatic hand, ‘but I know of no one else to turn to.’1
‘No one else to turn to’? What about her cousin, King George? Does this despairing comment in itself speak volumes about the King’s utter impotence – both practical and political – in effecting any kind of assistance to his beleaguered Romanov relatives at this desperate time?
Victoria went on to explain her concern at the lack of news about her sisters and her other relatives in Russia. What little she knew came from the papers, and that was ‘of a nature to cause me grave anxiety’. At this stage all she had ascertained was that Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria had been taken to Ekaterinburg, and the other children seemingly abandoned in Tobolsk. ‘As long as the family were all together and sharing the same fate I felt this is what they would wish,’ she continued, with an insight few others in the family shared. But now she ‘dread[ed] to think of the grief their separation must have been to them all’, particularly Alexandra. It seemed as though her sister’s children were now ‘left without a single relation to take care of them’.2 Victoria had clearly thought through the ramifications of the appeal she was now making; ‘the boy’, she conceded, ‘is a political asset which no party in Russia will allow to be taken out of its hands or to leave the country’.
But the girls (except perhaps the eldest)* can be of no value and importance as hostages to a Russian government nor be an embarrassment to any other government in whose country they might reside. I desire greatly, if it be possible to try and have these girls, the youngest of whom are 19 and 17 years old only, put under my charge.3
What harm could there be, Victoria asked, in the three other sisters being allowed a refuge in this ‘out-of-the way little Isle of Wight’, where they could live ‘a simple private life with me who am myself politically quite unimportant’. She and her husband would undertake to keep them there ‘in quiet obscurity, out of touch with all Russians’. Might arrangements not be possible for the girls to be sent out of Russia into her care? It was, she emphasised, ‘the only thing I can do which might be a small comfort to their poor mother, my sister, under present circumstances’.4 Victoria went on to suggest that her proposal could be mediated by Germany; she was sure that her sister Irene (Princess Henry of Prussia) was equally concerned about ‘the fate of these young girls’. Could the British government make an approach now, ‘without loss of time’?5
Balfour took Victoria Milford Haven’s plea seriously enough to note on 25 May that he would ‘like the question considered officially’.6 There is no record of the Cabinet discussion, but five days later he drafted his response:
I regret that from all the enquiries I have made privately from those best acquainted with present conditions in Russia, the difficulties in the way of such a proposal seem to me at this moment almost insuperable.7
Once again, the handwritten notes added on the front cover of the file containing this correspondence underline British officialdom’s rigid adherence to a political line adopted more than a year previously. The decision, which appears to have been minuted on 28 May, did not take note of the recent move to Ekaterinburg:
I fear that, even were there no objection on general grounds, we could not get the Imperial children away. Trotsky might conceivably be prevailed on to give his secret consent, but, even so, that would only be the first difficulty surmounted. To entrust them to a Bolshevist escort would be unsafe and we should accordingly have to send British officers to fetch them at Tobolsk and take them to Vladivostok. The mission would immediately become known and we should be suspected of some Czarist conspiracy – when local antagonism would probably endanger the lives of everybody concerned.8
If this indeed was the British government’s position, then its tone makes it all the more likely that the Stephen Alley rescue plan was completely off the record and unofficial. Thoughts of a ‘Czarist conspiracy’ seemed to be a British obsession, but right now, in the final weeks, some kind of improbable but gallant last-ditch monarchist rescue was in fact all that was left to the Romanovs.
* * *
Sometimes material turns up in the most unexpected of places. One such discovery I made during research for this book was a till-now-unknown and uncatalogued typescript memoir by British consul Thomas Preston, entitled ‘The Vigil’. I found it in the archive of American journalist Isaac Don Levine, held at Emory University, Atlanta. How Levine came to have this copy, which is not among Preston’s papers at Leeds University, I have no idea, but he must have met Preston at some point, possibly during his visit to Russia in 1919, and discussed their mutual interest in the Romanovs. ‘The Vigil’ is a valuable and powerful account of what the terrible days of June and July 1918 were like for the inhabitants of Ekaterinburg.
* * *
By the summer of 1918, with the spread of the civil war into Siberia and an increase in counter-revolutionary activity in the area, Ekaterinburg was enduring a reign of Bolshevik terror during which thousands were being brutally murdered. In this ‘maelstrom of lawlessness’, Preston recorded the frequent vengeful acts of cold-blooded murder being wreaked by bands of fanatical Red Guards. There were something like 10,000 soldiers roaming the town, looking for trouble, their numbers recently boosted by the arrival of 500 vicious Kronstadt sailors, who immediately proceeded to terrorise the population.9 Preston later recalled the fear under which everyone was living:
Lorries containing terrorist police and firing squads made nightly house to house visits, taking their victims from their beds. They then drove them to the outskirts of town, and, having forced them to dig their own graves, they either machine-gunned them or bayoneted them to death, according to the caprice of the drunken firing squad whose duty it was to put an end to them. The only crime of the victims was that as ‘bourgeoisie’ they were ‘enemies of the people’.10
Preston recalled that during that summer of 1918 he was able, from time to time, to send ciphered reports about the Russian Imperial Family via undercover messengers of the Anglo-American expeditionary force that was now based at Archangel. He used an English–Russian dictionary to create his rather crude cipher, which mercifully the Bolsheviks who intercepted his messages never figured out – ‘Perhaps they didn’t approve of bourgeois dictionaries.’11
The Romanovs themselves could only guess at what might be going on in the city, but outside on Voznesensky Prospekt – the main road to the railway station – they could hear the gunshots, the shouts and the rattle of artillery and lorries and troops constantly passing by and must have had a strong sense of gathering danger. They were, of course, unaware that on 20 May, Alexandra’s sister Ella, who had been briefly held, separately from the family, in Ekaterinburg, had been sent on to Alapaevsk ninety-three miles away and incarcerated there with Grand Duke Sergey Mikhailovich, the three brothers (Princes Ioann, Konstantin and Igor Konstantinovich) and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley. The Ural Regional Soviet (URS) had no doubt concluded that keeping so many members of the Romanov family conveniently together in one city, Ekaterinburg, was too much of a liability, inviting rescue plots and counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Two weeks later, Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, and his personal secretary Brian Johnson, who had been held in Perm since March, were taken away
from their hotel and disappeared. On 13 June, they were driven out to the forest nearby and murdered in secret by the local Cheka.
Such was the dangerous situation for all civilians in Ekaterinburg by the summer of 1918 that even the Allied consuls were not immune to the threat of summary execution. The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks regarded them as enemies, and it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Thomas Preston to continue his determined and almost daily representations to the URS about the welfare of the Romanovs. As Dean of the city’s Consular Corps, he had been most vigorous in his appeals, as too, so he said, had been the French consul, Commandant Giné.* At the beginning of June, word reached Preston that large forces of Czechs and Cossacks were approaching Ekaterinburg and ‘were marching to liberate us from our persecutors’; a message came through from the Czechs telling all foreign residents ‘to keep our national flags flying on our houses so that they might avoid hitting us with their artillery fire’.12
Help was at hand for the besieged city – but would it arrive in time to save the Romanovs? It would seem that, once again, what remaining hopes there were fell back on the Russian monarchists to mount some kind of daring rescue. It was noticed that ‘from the first days of the Romanovs’ transfer to Ekaterinburg there began to flock in monarchists in great number, beginning with half-crazy ladies, countesses and baronesses of every caliber and ending with nuns, clergy and representatives of foreign Powers’.13 One resident recalled how people would make their way up to the Ipatiev House every day, despite severe warnings that they should not do so. ‘They gathered in small huddles, whispering, gazing anxiously at the high fence and sighing until they were dispersed by shots from a hefty Red Guard with a rifle in his hands.’ Commandant of the Ipatiev House, Avdeev, remarked that some of them even brought cameras and tried to take photographs.14
Thomas Preston found some of these do-gooders a decided nuisance: they were ‘a tiny clique’, but constantly pestered him for news. They seemed intent, one way or another, on engineering hair-brained plots to liberate the family, turning up at the Ipatiev House with messages and letters for the family or trying to make direct contact with them.15 It seems likely that Alexey’s personal physician, Dr Vladimir Derevenko – who was living in town and was occasionally allowed into the house to treat the sick boy, as a special concession – may have tried to smuggle in letters, but his visits were closely monitored, making handover extremely difficult; ‘the commissar never leaves my side,’ he said.16 Nevertheless, Derevenko is claimed to have liaised with a man named Ivan Sidorov (formerly one of Nicholas’s ADCs) who was sent to Ekaterinburg in May by a friend of the Romanov family to offer gifts of food.17 According to a contemporary account, notes from well-wishers were variously passed on to the family ‘in loaves of bread, on parcels and wrapping paper’. One monarchist officer later claimed to investigator Sokolov that Derevenko had provided him with a sketch plan of the family’s rooms. At the very least, whether or not he was able to transmit correspondence, the doctor would have been the one person capable of providing important updates on the conditions in which the Romanovs were living and the state of their morale.18
A lone royal visitor to Ekaterinburg at this dangerous time was Princess Helena of Serbia, who came in June on her way back to Petrograd, having been forced to leave Alapaevsk where her husband Prince Ioann Konstantinovich was imprisoned with Ella and the other princes. Helena had gone straight to the URS, demanding permission to see her relative Nicholas. She also appealed to Thomas Preston, but he had long since concluded that direct appeals to the URS only antagonised and could make matters much worse.19 Nevertheless, Helena made her way up to the Ipatiev House in early July, to be confronted by ‘machine guns, trucks and armed men, all Red Guards’ posted outside. ‘My heart was sick,’ she recalled, but nevertheless she had the courage to ask to see the commandant and demand that she be allowed to visit the family. ‘Moscow does not permit them any visitors,’ Avdeev told her. He promised he would pass on a message. Later that evening a commissar arrived at her hotel to inform Helena that ‘The ex-Emperor and ex-Empress thank you for your visit and your interest in [them]. They are in want of nothing.’20 The following morning, 9 July, Helena was arrested and a couple of weeks later sent by train to prison in Perm.*
The Bolsheviks guarding the Romanovs were now highly suspicious of anyone showing concern for their captives, paranoid that conspiracies to liberate them were afoot all over the city. When Prince Dolgorukov had arrived on the train with Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria at the beginning of May, he had been summarily arrested and searched and was found to be carrying weapons, as well as maps of Siberia, indicating the route of a planned river escape – perhaps the same plans described by Ievreinov that the Tobolsk monarchists had been entertaining.21 Around the same time, Commandant Avdeev had also confiscated a rough diagram of their rooms on the upper storey that Nicholas had tried to smuggle out. He had hidden it inside the lining of the envelope of a letter that Maria had been allowed to send to her siblings still in Tobolsk.22
Having been responsible for running the household at Tobolsk, Dolgorukov was also found to have on him a large amount of money – 80,000 rubles – which was, of course, confiscated.23 These were no doubt funds smuggled to him by the monarchists in contact with his stepfather, Benckendorff, in Petrograd.24 Already in poor health, Dolgorukov was hauled off to Ekaterinburg jail, from where he sent a plaintive letter to Benckendorff:
I sit here not knowing why I have been arrested. I’ve written an appeal to the Regional Soviet, begging them to release me and allow me to go home to my sick mother in Petrograd. I hope with my whole heart that I will see you again soon and embrace you. Don’t frighten poor mama about my arrest, she is old and you must take care of her. Tell her only that, God willing, I will see her again soon.25
Not long afterwards Dolgorukov was joined in jail by Nicholas’s ADC, Count Ilya Tatishchev, who was refused entry to the Ipatiev House when he arrived with the other children at the end of May, perhaps also suspected of trying to contact the monarchists. From prison, Dolgorukov managed to send out ‘several pencil-written notes’ to Thomas Preston, ‘imploring [him] to intervene on behalf of the royal family’, but to which Preston did not respond, for fear of further compromising Dolgorukov.26 He and Tatishchev were never heard of again; it was not until the 1990s that it was confirmed that they had been shot by the Cheka – on 10 July.27
Had they known it, revolutionary sentiment in Ekaterinburg was mounting against the Imperial Family. The local papers were full of strident letters demanding Nicholas’s execution. It was frequently talked of in workers’ meetings; other revolutionary groups, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, accused the URS of inconsistency in their ‘preservation’ of the Romanovs ‘in the service of imperialism’.28 The Anarchists went further and, according to Avdeev, tried to push through a resolution that the ‘former tsar be immediately executed and that within 24 hours all the others under arrest be liquidated’.29 There was talk that the Anarchists might attack the Ipatiev House, and Avdeev warned the Romanovs that they might be moved at short notice – probably to Moscow.30 When the Moscow newspapers ran a story that Nicholas had ‘already been killed at some railway stop outside Yekaterinburg’, on 12 June Reingold Berzin, the commander of the Northern Ural-Siberian Front, was sent to check the security arrangements at the Ipatiev House.
Official rebuttals of the various murder rumours were published in Izvestiya on 25 and 28 June, at around the time that Nicholas and Alexandra had been receiving a series of secret messages from would-be monarchist rescuers hiding out in the city.31
Or so they seemed to be …
* * *
In December 1919 the American journalist Isaac Don Levine pulled off a sensational scoop in the Chicago Daily News when, on arriving back from a visit to Soviet Russia, he published four letters, written in French, that had supposedly been smuggled into the Imperial Family at the Ipatiev House in June/July 1918, outlining plans by monarchists hiding i
n the city to rescue them.* Published under the heading ‘Last Efforts to Save Czar and His Family’, the letters (which had first been published in the newspaper Vechernye izvestiya in Moscow in April), to which Levine was given exclusive access in the Soviet Archives, caused a considerable international stir. But in the century since publication their authenticity has been much disputed. Were they indeed bona-fide proof of a desperate last-minute attempt to save the Romanovs or – as historians have now concluded – a cruel deception? Were ‘The Officer Letters’, as they came to be called, in fact a cynical act, spun out to raise the family’s hopes and win their confidence, which could ultimately be used as proof of the need to prevent their escape by killing them?
* * *
The first letter, written in French and undated, was probably smuggled into the Ipatiev House around 19 or 20 June, inside the cork of a wide-necked bottle of cream brought to the house for the family. Deliveries of milk, cream, eggs and other foodstuffs by nuns from the nearby Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent were a new and most welcome concession, to which Avdeev had agreed on 18 June.†
Whenever the nuns took gifts to the Ipatiev House they were obliged to hand them over in a basket at the door; they were never allowed in to present them personally and thus protect these smuggled messages from interception. Avdeev and his guards often helped themselves to much of the food when it arrived, and he clearly checked the contents of the basket before passing it on. Although something of a boor, he was on the alert for subterfuge and, having found the letter hidden in the cork, ‘turned it over to Comrade Goloshchekin’.32
It is certainly the case that both the nuns of the convent and the officers of the academy were being very carefully watched by the Cheka, and reports were being sent back to Sverdlov in Moscow. Indeed, at the end of May, Sverdlov had sent specific instructions to Goloshchekin: ‘Increase guard at Ekaterinburg … Take particular note of the Academy.’33 With these instructions in mind, Goloshchekin may well have decided to play the ‘officer letter’, when it was intercepted, to the government’s own advantage. It was decided to copy it out and pass the copy on to the Romanovs. A series of further notes were also fashioned, in French and in the same hand, in order to flush out the family’s response to a rescue bid.34 These letters were composed by Petr Voikov (a Urals commissar who had studied at Geneva University and spoke French), with input from Goloshchekin and Beloborodov. But Voikov had terrible handwriting, and so Isay Rodzinsky, one of the more literate guards, copied them out in red ink.35
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 24