The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Even the Vatican had been drawn into this frantic, concerted campaign to get the Russian Imperial Family to safety. On 11 August, the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano reported that Pope Benedict XV (who, like Alfonso, had been involved in humanitarian work during the war) ‘has offered to defray all costs arising from the move of Nicholas II’s family from Russia to Spain, having asked the Cabinets concerned to act as soon as possible on compassionate grounds’.29 He also offered a refuge to the Dowager and ‘an annuity to enable her to live in accordance with the dignity of her position’.30

  The newspaper announcement was a mercifully short résumé of an excruciatingly obsequious telegram to the German Chancellor, sent by the Pope’s nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, informing him of His Holiness’s desire to ‘help these unfortunate high personages and … do everything possible so that … the pain of those poor ruling figures who have been removed from the glory of the throne to the greatest wretchedness may be alleviated’.31 The Pope’s personal petition reached the Soviets on 19 August and received a positive response from the Council of Soviet Commissars. It was all, of course, a sham. Meanwhile the Vatican had assured the German government that, like the Dowager, the Tsaritsa and her daughters would be given ‘decent accommodation’ and be maintained in the ‘proper style’.32 The Germans were, however, unimpressed by this late papal initiative; it did nothing to help matters. They were now also preoccupied by the fate of the four imprisoned Grand Dukes – George, Dimitri, Nicholas and Paul – and were pressing for them to be released and sent to join their other Romanov relatives in Crimea. The Danish ambassador Scavenius was even attempting to ‘buy them out’ to safety, in return for a bribe to the Soviets of 500,000 rubles.33

  It was now more than a month since the Imperial Family’s murder, but still the Spanish king was caught, unwittingly, in the ugly charade being manipulated by the Soviets. On 22 August, Fernando Gómez Contreras received orders from Madrid to press on with negotiations for the transfer of the family to Spain. At the beginning of September, he travelled to Moscow with the Dutch ambassador, Willem Oudendijk, to see Chicherin at the Foreign Ministry, which was based at the Hotel Metropole. The minister was clearly annoyed, but acted entirely as though the subjects of their conversation were still alive, telling the two diplomats that he ‘could not understand how representatives of countries still ruled by monarchs could intercede for the Imperial Family, which had been responsible for the woes the people had had to endure for centuries’.34 Nevertheless he played along with the Spanish minister, arguing that allowing the family out to Spain was a considerable risk to the Soviets, as it might foster the growth of a counter-revolutionary movement against Russia there. Contreras had remonstrated that there were few places where the family would in fact be further removed from political action than rural Spain. It became apparent to him during their discussion that Chicherin was implying that if neutral Spain finally officially recognised the Soviet government, there might be an advantageous trade-off – the Romanovs. Even in death, the Imperial Family were useful bargaining chips; this demand was one that Alfonso had already anticipated ‘as the price of Soviet acquiescence’ to his proposal.35

  Contreras had been deeply uneasy throughout the meeting with Chicherin, even though he left with the promise that his appeal would be passed on to the CEC. He reported his reservations to Madrid, noting in a telling final statement, ‘I came out of this meeting utterly convinced of the perversity and bad faith of this people, that surpasses everything that could be imagined.’36 He could see no easy resolution in sight, and felt that the Germans had a share of responsibility in trying to save the Tsar’s wife and children. He later filed an official report in which he observed that despite the many entreaties to the Kaiser to ‘stand up for the royal prisoners’, Wilhelm had replied that although he greatly regretted the ‘pitiful situation of the deposed family’, his desire to help had ‘run up against the bitter and absolute impossibility of being able to undertake anything to alleviate their fate’.37

  Contreras was far from convinced of this. Germany, of all the foreign powers, had been in the best position to exert influence over the Bolsheviks. Yet as late as 29 August the Germans still appeared to be hostage to the phoney negotiations being dragged out by the Soviets. At the behest of Karl Radek, liaising on behalf of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, it was now suggested to the German consul, Hauschild, that Alexandra and the children be traded for Leo Jogiches, a Polish Social Democrat and leader of the Spartacists (the German communists now inciting revolution in Germany), who had recently been arrested in Berlin. Soon afterwards Adolph Joffe made the outrageous suggestion of an even bigger trade-off – Karl Liebknecht, founder of the German Communist Party and currently in jail for high treason.38

  At the end of August, just as Hauschild reported to Berlin that Chicherin and Radek were both angling for some kind of political ‘compensation’ in return for releasing Alexandra and the children, news finally began circulating in Britain that the entire family had perished.39 On the 28th a Foreign Office memorandum confirmed the long-awaited news from Archangel. Lord Stamfordham was one of the first to hear it, from Lord Milner at the War Office, on the 31st:

  We have just received a very distressing telegram from the Intelligence Officer serving under General Poole at Murmansk to the effect that there is every probability that the Empress of Russia, her four daughters and the Czarevitch were all murdered at the same time as the late Czar. The information reached the Intelligence Officer from a source which he has no reason to doubt. I am much afraid, therefore, that the news is only too likely to prove true.40

  The King confided a sad little note to his diary that night: ‘It’s too horrible and shows what fiends these Bolshevists are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!’41 He broke the news in person that day to his widowed aunt, Princess Helena, who lived on the Windsor Estate at Cumberland Lodge. It was a Sunday, and the Princess and her daughter Marie Louise were due to have lunch with the King and Queen at the castle, as they often did. But on this occasion they had been kept waiting in the corridor. George and Mary finally emerged half an hour late, looking ‘grave and deeply upset’. Indeed, the King seemed so anguished that Helena thought there must have been a major military defeat on the Western Front. Finally, and in a state of deep shock, George told her he had just received confirmation of what they had all dreaded: ‘Nicky, Alix, and their five children have all been murdered by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg.’42

  On 2 September, Marie Louise took the terrible news in person to Victoria Milford Haven on the Isle of Wight. She had been due there on a visit and had volunteered to take a letter from the King. Victoria was profoundly shocked; ‘we did not talk at great length about it at all, there was so little one could say,’ recalled Marie Louise. ‘The horror of this ghastly tragedy was too overwhelming for mere words, and just the ordinary expressions of condolence seemed utterly out of place.’43

  Victoria herself had, till the last, held out hopes for the four daughters, she wrote to King George the following day: ‘Those dear girls were young enough to have recovered from the horrors they went through and happier days might have come to them, yet also there was the chance, that haunted me, of great wrong being done to them.’44 She was tormented by the fact that she did not know whether Alexandra and her daughters had perished with Nicholas and Alexey or had been killed separately. ‘Though her loss is pain and grief to me,’ Victoria later wrote of her sister Alexandra to a friend, ‘yet I am grateful that I can think of her as being at peace now. She, her dear husband and children removed for ever from further suffering.’45 It was not until 9 November that Victoria finally learned that her other sister Ella had also been killed, her body and those of her companions recovered from the mine shaft on 29 September, when the Whites took Alapaevsk.*

  Lord Stamfordham reacted to confirmation of the murder of the entire family in a letter to a colleague on 1 September: ‘Naturally the King is deeply grie
ved at the ghastly fate which has befallen his relatives,’ he wrote, adding that ‘it is almost incredible that the innocent children should not have been spared’.46 The response of George’s son and heir, David, Prince of Wales, was rather less charitable: ‘How tragic the wretched Czar being shot. What brutes the Bolshevists are … he was a charming man, though of course hopelessly weak’ – said by a man who, eight years later, would expose his own fatal weakness as king.47

  On 12 September, the Daily Express reported that the ‘ex-Czarina and her four daughters’ had been assassinated by the Bolsheviks, the assumption already being that Alexey had been killed with his father. The British Foreign Office was unwilling to confirm the story, which the Express claimed came from ‘a source which is beyond doubt’. It was ‘The Foulest of Crimes’, remarked the Aberdeen Evening Express in its banner headline, and one that would ‘arouse a feeling of horror through the whole civilized world’.48

  Although the British and Spanish royals were by now reluctantly forced to accept that the whole family had died, the Germans were still being led a dance by Chicherin and Radek, who on 13 and 14 September changed their script in order to play for more time. They now claimed that they had received a report from the front that the precise whereabouts of Alexandra and the children, with their Red Guard escort, was unknown, due to the chaotic evacuation of Ekaterinburg when the Czechs had taken the city. But they assured them that ‘news of their present location on this side of the front would shortly be received’.49

  By now the Germans had had enough of Russian stonewalling. In the latest negotiations the Soviets had ‘rejected our approach as interference in Russian affairs,’ remarked a German Foreign Ministry official, ‘unless we equally were to allow Russian intercession on behalf of certain troublesome personalities in Germany [i.e. Jogiches and Liebknecht]’.50 This political trade-off was something the Germans adamantly rejected; and so they decided to defer to King Alfonso, making ever more desperate suggestions: why not send the family to one of the countries of the Entente? Or to Crimea? Joffe brazenly fielded their suggestions by agreeing to them all, finally conceding that, to the best of his knowledge, the family were all still somewhere in Siberia.51 The extent to which Soviet misinformation had infiltrated foreign intelligence on the subject is demonstrated by the fact that it took until 5 October before the news was finally confirmed by Sir Charles Elliott, consul-general for Siberia, in a fifteen-page report to the FO. He had travelled to Ekaterinburg to investigate the intelligence at first hand, but came away with very little evidence; he concluded, misguidedly and based only on tenuous rumour, that ‘the surviving members of the royal family’ had left Ekaterinburg by train to the north or west.52

  And so the uncertainty continued. Indeed, it never really went away. Count Benckendorff observed in his memoirs, published in London in 1927, the continuing and widespread circulation of stories of survival: ‘In spite of the absurdity of the idea that their Majesties, their children, their suite and their servants could have been sent abroad and there hidden without any newspaper mentioning the fact these rumours are credited all over Russia, in all classes.’53

  * * *

  It was not till 5 December 1918 that The Times formally confirmed the ‘Fate of the Tsar’s Family’. News had reached Berlin from its officials in Kiev that they had been ‘All shot together in a cellar’. By this time the first lurid, tabloid account in English had been rushed into print – by a notorious plagiarist whose books bore very little resemblance to the truth. The Secret Life of the Ex-Tsaritza by William Le Queux, published in early November 1918, promised readers a thrill-a-minute account in which the ‘grimmer chapters of this stupendous tragedy are reconstructed in the amazing disclosures … based on the statement of Colonel Vassili Gregorieff, who accompanied the Tsar into exile’.54 Colonel Gregorieff was a fiction; Le Queux’s book marked the beginning of a long, false trail of sensationalist claims about the Romanovs and their murder, given further exposure by a Times story of the 5th, based on a totally unreliable ‘witness’* statement about the last days of the Imperial Family’s imprisonment at the Ipatiev House. The Times story shocked readers with descriptions of the family being ‘locked up in one room, where there was only one bed’, being forced to sleep on the floor and woken and interrogated at all hours and, worse, carried insinuations that the four daughters had been sexually harassed.55

  It would be another eight years before the Soviets finally admitted in print to the deaths of the entire family; forced to do so by the extensive investigative work of Nikolay Sokolov, who published his findings in French as Enquête Judiciaire sur l’assassinat de la famille impériale in Paris in 1924. In 1926, the official, self-justifying Soviet account was released by a member of the Ekaterinburg Soviet, Pavel Bykov. Titled Poslednye dni Romanovykh, [Last Days of the Romanovs] it was published, appropriately enough, in Sverdlovsk – the new name for Ekaterinburg – honouring Yakov Sverdlov, the key architect of the Romanov murders. It was translated into several languages.

  Long before this, in the autumn of 1918, a long saga of accusation and blame had begun to unravel in private letters exchanged within the royal families of Europe. On 1 September, George V, sending a letter of condolence to his cousin Victoria Milford Haven, concluded that ‘The awful part is that they might all have been saved if W had only lifted a finger on their behalf.’56 It is not known how Victoria responded to this, but she made her feelings abundantly clear in a letter of thanks three weeks later to King Alfonso. In it, she painfully admitted that there was ‘nothing to hope for’ and that death had released her sister Alexandra and her children ‘from further suffering’. They had now ‘passed from the cruel hands of man into those of a just and merciful God’ and she wanted to thank the Spanish king for all he had ‘tried to do to save them from their enemies’. In her mind, much like King George’s, it was very clear where the blame lay for the failure to save her family from this hideous end:

  The Sovereign who had most direct influence on the revolutionary government in Russia, the one who had known my sister as a child, who had the same blood as hers flowing in his veins, who formerly never failed to claim her as of his nationality deserted her.*

  Wilhelm: the fellow German, cousin and childhood playmate (from happy family visits to Hesse) of Victoria, Alexandra, Ella and Irene had betrayed the German-born Tsaritsa. Victoria was convinced that he had failed to capitalise on the upper hand that he had had over the Bolshevik government at the Brest-Litovsk talks and insist on the trade-off of the Romanovs being allowed out of Russia to safety. In contrast, King Alfonso, to whom Alexandra and her children ‘were comparative strangers’, had done his utmost to help them. ‘I shall never forget the gratitude I owe you for this,’ she told him.57

  It is said that King Alfonso ever afterwards deeply regretted the ‘lack of solidarity’ from his fellow monarchs in his efforts to rescue the Romanovs. He never recovered from the grief and despair of having failed them. But one thing at least would have greatly consoled him, for word did in fact reach Nicholas of the efforts Alfonso had been making on his behalf. With the help of Baroness Buxhoeveden, a message from the Spanish king to this effect was passed on to Nicholas at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk. The Tsar was deeply moved: ‘that is truly one loyal friend’, he was heard to say to Alexandra. A true friend indeed, for Alfonso and Nicholas had, in fact, never met.58

  As the political and moral consequences of the murders began to unravel in the years that followed, we come to the most ignominious part of this complex story – the deliberate bowdlerisation and redaction of the official record. There were reputations to be protected, and the machinery of government set about ensuring that this happened.

  Chapter 14

  ‘His Majesty Would Much Prefer that Nothing … Be Published’

  The murder of the Romanovs was one of so many tragedies during a world war that saw millions dead, wounded, displaced and dispossessed. Nevertheless, to those most closely associated with the Impe
rial Family, their violent end would be a wound that never healed. Frequent and contradictory stories about the survival of some or all of the family continued to reach their relatives in Western Europe for many decades afterwards. Time and again the revival of discussion about the deaths of the Romanovs brought with it bouts of remorse and recrimination over who was to blame for the failure to save them.

  King George’s grief remained deep, but totally private. ‘He never made any public reference to it,’ recalled his friend the Aga Khan, ‘but more than once in our private talks he had no hesitation in opening his heart to me and telling me of his sorrow.’1 When Colonel Paul Rodzianko, who had entered Ekaterinburg with the British Expeditionary Force soon after the murders, returned to England in 1920, George invited him to lunch, anxious to ‘hear my account of the Siberian Expedition and the murder of his cousins’. Rodzianko had been reluctant to go into details – ‘the episode was so intimate’ – and recalled that it was ‘a somewhat painful conversation’.2 Four years later, the short-lived Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald sought to re-establish links with Russia, now renamed the Soviet Union. The King could not, of course, veto this, but he did refuse to receive any Soviet delegates, and insisted that he should not be made to ‘shake hands with the murderers of his relatives’.3

  All these painful discussions had been revived with the arrival of Dagmar and her daughter Xenia in England on 9 May 1919. It had broken the Dowager Empress’s heart to leave Russia, clinging to the belief that Nicholas and the family had somehow miraculously survived, and still knowing nothing of the fate of her other son, Mikhail. But with the Russian Civil War now spreading to Crimea, her sister the Queen Mother had begged Dagmar to leave while she still could. George V’s sending of a battleship, HMS Marlborough, to evacuate the Dowager, Xenia and other members of the Romanov family and their retainers from Yalta in April 1919 probably saved them from being murdered by the Bolsheviks. But the gregarious Dagmar did not take to the dreary tête-à-têtes with her widowed sister at Marlborough House and Sandringham. She soon decamped to Denmark, where she lived at the expense of her nephew, King Christian, unrepentantly running up mountains of unpaid bills. Even when the rest of the world had given up on her son and his family as ‘irrefutably dead’, Dagmar would not abandon hope. At her window in Copenhagen she kept a small lamp burning, so that ‘Nicky will know I’m still awaiting his return.’ Dagmar’s own lamp went out in 1928.4 In 2006 her body was repatriated to St Petersburg and reburied with her husband’s at the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral.