The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Since being brought here they had come to cherish the smallest and simplest of pleasures: the sun had shone; Alexey was recovering from his recent bout of illness and the nuns had been allowed to bring him eggs; they had been granted the luxury of an occasional bath. Such are the few passing, mundane details from the Tsaritsa’s diary that have come down to us of the family in their final days and hours. Yet, despite their brevity, they give us a clear and unshakeable image of the family’s state of calm – almost pious acceptance – at this time.

  We have no way of seeing into the true workings of their hearts and minds, of course, but we do know from everything their guards later said that Alexandra in particular had by now resolutely given herself up to God. She was in almost constant pain – her heart, her back, her legs, everything ached – and her faith was her only refuge. She seemed content to retreat into a state of religious meditation, spending most of her time being read to from her favourite spiritual works, usually by Tatiana. One of the girls always sat with her, giving up her precious recreation time when the others were allowed out into the garden. But, as always, none of the four sisters ever complained. They accepted their situation with incredible forbearance. Nicholas, too, struggled on as best he could, buoyed up by his faith and the loving support of his daughters, although Olga – perhaps, of all the family, consumed by a private sense of despair – had become very thin and morose and was more withdrawn than ever. Her brother and sisters, however, all longed for something to relieve their crippling boredom. In the absence of access to the outside world, their only diversions were snatches of conversation with the more sympathetic of their guards, but even these had been severely curtailed by the new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, at the beginning of July.

  By the evening of the 16th we do not even have Nicholas’s few restrained daily comments to go on, for on Sunday, the 13th, he had finally given up keeping his diary. Its closing sentence, coming as it does at the end of a lifetime’s reticence, is an extraordinary and very real cry of despair:

  We have absolutely no news from outside.21

  News of the Russia they loved? News of relatives and friends left behind? Or news of would-be rescue by their ‘loyal officers’? If by then Russia’s last tsar felt abandoned and forgotten, then the family must have sensed it too and shared in his despair. But they did not show it. And so we continue to ask ourselves: did they, in those final moments, when the guards came and woke them at 2.15 a.m. on the morning of the 17th and led them down the dingy stairs to the courtyard and across to the basement, have any inkling that this really was the end?22

  In Moscow, Lenin’s government had in fact been discussing what to do with Nicholas – and indeed the whole family – on and off since early April. It had become increasingly apparent that the civil war now spreading to Siberia would make it impossible to bring the former Tsar back to Moscow for the long-mooted trial, but Lenin had prevaricated on making a decision until counter-revolutionary forces were on the verge of taking Ekaterinburg. In early July, knowing that sooner or later the city, an important strategic point on the Trans-Siberian Railway, would fall to the Whites and Czechs approaching from the east, a decision was taken that when the time came, the Ural Regional Soviet should ‘liquidate’ the Imperial Family rather than have them fall into monarchist hands.23 And they must all perish, in order to ensure, as Lenin insisted, that no ‘living banner’ (that is, the children) survive as a possible rallying point for the monarchists. But the murder of the children, which the Bolsheviks knew would provoke international outrage, must be kept secret for as long as possible.24

  On 14 July the Romanovs had unexpectedly been allowed the special privilege of a service, conducted for them at the Ipatiev House by a local priest, Father Ivan Storozhev. He had been deeply moved by their devotion and the enormous comfort they had clearly taken in being allowed to worship together; but he had also been chilled by an eerie sense of doom that had prevailed throughout the singing of the liturgy. It was almost as though the family had been sharing, knowingly, in their own last rites.25

  Yurovsky had, meanwhile, been planning the family’s murder, though with a surprising lack of efficiency for such a ruthless, dedicated Bolshevik. He chose the site in the forest outside Ekaterinburg where the bodies were to be disposed of, but failed to check how viable it really was as a place of concealment. He selected his team of killers from the guards at the house, but did so without ascertaining whether or not they knew how to handle a gun efficiently; and he investigated the best method of destroying eleven bodies using sulphuric acid or possibly incineration, again without any research into the logistics.

  It was decided that the family would be killed there, in the house, in the basement room where any noise of shooting might be muffled. Early on the evening of 16 July, Yurovsky distributed the assortment of handguns to be used. There was one gun for each guard; one murderer for each of the eleven intended victims: the Romanovs and their four loyal retainers, Dr Evgeniy Botkin, the chambermaid Anna Demidova, the valet Alexey Trupp and the cook Ivan Kharitonov. But then, unexpectedly, several of the guards refused point-blank to kill the girls. Having talked with them on many occasions, they had grown to like them; what harm had they done anyone? The intended murder squad was thus reduced to eight or nine who, when Yurovsky gave the order to open fire, launched into a frenzy of wildly inaccurate shooting, several of them disobeying instructions and shooting Nicholas first. The other victims panicked in terror, necessitating the savage bayoneting of any survivors of the first onslaught. One thing is clear: the Romanov family and their servants met their deaths in the most brutal, bloody and merciless way.

  The corpses were then unceremoniously thrown into a Fiat truck and taken out to the Koptyaki Forest. But the supposed mine shaft that Yurovsky had selected for them to be dumped in turned out to be too shallow; local peasants would easily find the bodies and seek to preserve them as holy relics. And so, within hours, the mutilated corpses of the Romanov family, stripped of their clothes and the Tsaritsa’s jewels, which had been secreted in them, were hastily dug up. Yurovsky and his men then made a botched attempt to incinerate the bodies of Maria and Alexey. Sixty yards away, the rest of the family were hastily reburied in a shallow grave along with their servants.

  People still insist, even today, on referring to what happened to the Romanov family as an ‘execution’. It was not. Nor was it an assassination, for even that word suggests a degree of planning and skill. There was no trial for any of the family, no due process of law, no possibility of a defence or appeal. What happened in the basement of the House of Special Purpose on Voznesensky Prospekt, Ekaterinburg, in the early hours of 17 July 1918, was nothing less than ugly, crazed and botched murder.*

  Despite the grotesque inefficiency with which Yurovsky and his men carried out these killings, and the even greater ineptitude with which they tried to dispose of the bodies, it would be sixty years before these lost graves would be found, in secret, by two local Russians. But it was not till 2007 that the missing remains of Maria and Alexey would finally be discovered.

  But let us return to 17 July 1918 …

  * * *

  British consul Thomas Preston had had surprisingly little intimation, that day in July, of the fulfilment of his worst fears that the Romanov family might be killed, bar the ominous placement of machine guns on Voznesensky Square. In the distance he could hear the boom of the approaching Czech artillery, but from the Ipatiev House itself came only a few audible shots that night. Ever since the family had been brought to Ekaterinburg, Preston had, time and again, made appeals to the Ural Regional Soviet about their welfare, only to be constantly rebuffed and threatened with being shot for his trouble. After the murder of the five children and their parents he was warned that the Bolsheviks were going to come for him; his house was surrounded by a mob shouting, ‘That’s the man who tried to save the Tsar Palach [hangman].’26 It was only the arrival of the Czechs that saved Preston and his family, when they took the city o
n 25 July.

  Fifty-four years later, in an article in The Spectator, Thomas Preston wrote of his private and continuing agony of regret: ‘Ever since then, I have been haunted by the idea that had I been able to argue with the Ural Soviet for a longer period I might have been able to save the Royal family.’27

  The night after the Romanovs were savagely brought to their deaths in Ekaterinburg, over in Alapaevsk the Grand Duchess Ella, her companion Sister Varvara and her fellow prisoners Grand Duke Sergey, the Konstantinovich brothers Ioann, Konstantin and Igor, and Prince Paley were bundled into a truck by the local Cheka and taken out to a place called Verkhnyaya Sinyachikha twelve miles away. Here they were thrown alive down a disused mine shaft; a couple of grenades were tossed in after them and they were left to die of their wounds, thirst and starvation. Unlike their relatives in Ekaterinburg, Ella and her companions were not even granted the mercy of bullets.

  * * *

  At midday on 17 July, the detailed log of Lenin’s official life recorded that he received a telegraph message from Ekaterinburg and wrote on the envelope: ‘Received, Lenin’. The contents confirmed that the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks had carried out the liquidation, acting on Lenin’s and the Central Executive Committee’s preordained decision.28 But their message was ambiguous about the family. Moscow asked for clarification. Two hours later a further telegraph to Lenin and Sverdlov from the Ural Regional Soviet confirmed that ‘Nicholas Romanov was shot on the night of the sixteenth of July by decree of the Presidium of the [Ural] Regional Soviet.’ The URS informed them that it was preparing an announcement to this effect, to which would be added, deliberately misleadingly, that ‘the Romanov family … has been evacuated from the city of Yekaterinburg in the interest of maintaining public security’.29

  That evening, Beloborodov – Chair of the URS – sent Moscow an encrypted postscript to this message: ‘Inform Sverdlov that the entire family suffered the same fate as its head. Officially the family will die during evacuation.’30 The intention had clearly been to allow a degree of public confusion about the whereabouts of Alexandra and the children, after Nicholas’s killing. The URS would only later admit to their perishing during a supposed evacuation to safety. In Moscow, Sverdlov was delegated to make the official announcement, which he did to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (CEC) on 18 July. Later that day, the government released a printed proclamation stating that Nicholas Romanov, ‘the crowned executioner’, had been shot, but his wife and son were ‘in a secure place’; the four daughters did not merit a mention. When the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks drafted an announcement for 20 July, stating that the entire family had been shot, it was thrown back at them with the words ‘Forbidden to publish’ scrawled on it. They were told to stick to the official line of Sverdlov’s press release.31

  It is therefore not surprising that in the days following the Romanov murders intense confusion reigned, not just in Russia, but among their royal relatives in Europe.32 With so little concrete, reliable information to go on, it would seem at first that the only certain fact was that Nicholas was dead. Until they received confirmation to the contrary, it was imperative that the royals of Europe should now do everything in their power to save the Tsaritsa and her children. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks were already busy throwing up a smokescreen of deliberate disinformation. When challenged by a member of the German diplomatic staff in Moscow about the truth of the rumours about the Tsar, Trotsky had replied: ‘I don’t know about this, and I am not in the least interested. I cannot really have any interest in the life of an individual Russian bourgeois.’33

  And so began a hideous, cruel and protracted game of deception; a bizarre diplomatic negotiation over ‘resurrected bodies’ – in the words of Kerensky – in which the Soviets allowed the Romanovs’ relatives and their governments to believe that Alexandra and the children were still alive.34 It was a cynical ploy to buy the Bolsheviks breathing space from the inevitable worldwide condemnation and to keep any monarchist counter-revolution at bay.

  Many of the rumours about the Romanovs that had been in circulation in the West since June had emanated from Stockholm, and from the foreign diplomatic community at Vologda.35 On 16 July in Copenhagen – the eve of the murders – a Danish newspaper, Nationaltidende, had pre-empted that night’s events and reported that Nicholas had been killed. The paper’s editor sent a telegram directly to Lenin asking for confirmation. At 4 p.m. he received a reply from Moscow that ‘Rumour not true ex-czar safe. All rumours are only lies of capitalist press.’ Two days later, 18 July, the CEC issued a formal announcement that Nicholas had been executed, ‘in view of the threat of the advancing Czechs’; but that was all.36

  Back in Petrograd, Little Markov first heard the news on 20 July, when he saw a crowd gathering and newsboys ‘running in all directions’ shouting, ‘Special edition! The ex-Tsar shot at Ekaterinburg. Death of Nikolai Romanoff.’37 The following day the New York Times ran the story on its front page, and the day after, 22 July, The Times published Sverdlov’s official statement. Both articles repeated the Soviet assertion that ‘the wife and son of Romanoff have been sent to a place of security’ and said nothing about the girls. In Russia, the Soviets maintained a stony silence on any further details.38 Had the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks got wind of the Military Academy plot in the days immediately preceding the murders? The local paper, Uraliskiy Rabochii, certainly claimed as much, in a story that appeared on 23 July headlined ‘White Guardists attempted to abduct the ex-Tsar and his family. Their plot was discovered.’ It claimed that the ‘execution’ of the family had taken place in order to prevent this.39

  Reliable news from Ekaterinburg was almost impossible to obtain in the present desperate situation there, and with telegraphic communications so unreliable. At 7.15 p.m. on 23 July, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, as much in the dark as everyone else and unable to get word from Preston in the city, sent a short, stark telegram to his ambassador in Stockholm, which was also copied to Copenhagen:

  URGENT. PERSONAL.

  Have you any definite information as to the death of the Emperor Nicholas?

  Please telegraph at once any reliable news which may reach you.40

  A day later Sir Ralph Paget in Copenhagen responded: ‘Royal Family here after making all possible enquiries are of opinion that there no longer exists any doubt as to death of Czar.’ Sir Esmé Howard in Stockholm replied soon after, regretting that ‘I have no information.’41

  Although the British government was yet to issue any official pronouncements, the King and Queen were privately informed, even though the details were uncertain. Queen Mary noted in her diary on the 24th that ‘The news were [sic] confirmed of poor Nicky of Russia having been shot by those brutes of Bolsheviks last week, on July 16th’. It was, she concluded ‘too horrible & heartless’. While she and the King might perhaps have anticipated a violent end for the former Tsar, the anguish of not knowing what had happened to his family was far worse. Languishing under house arrest in Crimea and cut off from any reliable sources, Nicholas’s distraught mother Dagmar steadfastly refused to believe the news that trickled through. ‘The most gruesome rumours are being spread about my darling Nicky,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Won’t and cannot believe them, but this tension is unbearable … Oh Lord hear my prayer.’42

  While the Foreign Office continued to make every effort to verify Nicholas’s death, British officialdom had, by necessity, swung into action over the matter of how his demise should be formally acknowledged. A clinical debate thus ensued within the Royal Household over the correct protocol to be observed by the King in mourning his cousin. In an internal memorandum of 23 July, Lord Stamfordham discussed the precedents that should be taken into account:

  A. On the death of the Ex-Emperor Napoleon III in 1873 Queen Victoria was represented at the funeral, no member of the Royal Family attended, though the Prince of Wales was present at the lying-in-state at Chiselhurst. There were ten days of court mourning.

/>   B. On the occasion of the assassination of King Carlos of Portugal, King Edward attended a Requiem Mass, which was held in London, and there were four weeks of Court Mourning.

  In A there was no relationship between the Sovereign and the deceased and in B there was a distant family relationship.

  In the present case the King is a first cousin.43

  Nicholas may have been a first cousin, but for all that – and let alone the violent circumstances of his murder – British officialdom was far more concerned about the public response. ‘Any notice on the part of the King of the Emperor’s death might provoke criticism from a small minority that His Majesty was sympathetic towards Czardom, and in favour of Reactionary Government,’ Stamfordham argued. On the other hand, Nicholas had been ‘a faithful Ally and friend of this country’ and ‘any lack of respect to his memory would be resented’. Only that day, Stamfordham had sat next to Lord Burnham at a Lord Mayor’s Luncheon:

  He was most outspoken in deprecating the want of sympathy shown by the Press and by public opinion in this tragedy, and declared most distinctly that in his opinion it would be a great mistake were the King not to observe in the usual manner the Emperor’s death.44

  There would certainly have to be a memorial service, which Konstantin Nabokov, the former tsarist ambassador to London, was now arranging with Grand Duchess George* to take place in a week’s time. Stamfordham presumed that George V would not attend, but ‘would be represented’. Indeed, ‘Would it not be best to postpone it,’ he asked, ‘until such a time as the Government can state officially that the Ex-Emperor is dead?’ He felt that the King should suggest a postponement ‘so that His Majesty can continue to act as if he did not believe the news’.45 Later that day Arthur Balfour contributed his pennyworth in a private letter to Stamfordham. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George was, he said: