The Race to Save the Romanovs
Page 42
No Place for Ladies
Joseph Stalin
An Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers
Queen Victoria
The Last Days of the Romanovs
Conspirator
Beautiful for Ever
A Magnificent Obsession
The Romanov Sisters
The Victoria Letters
Caught in the Revolution
WITH WILLIAM HORWOOD
Dark Hearts of Chicago
WITH ROGER WATSON
Capturing the Light
About the Author
Helen Rappaport studied Russian at Leeds University and is a specialist in Russian and Victorian history. Her books include Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge, A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy and The Last Days of the Romanovs. She lives in West Dorset. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
List of Illustrations
Tsarskoe Selo to Ekaterinburg: The Romanovs’ Places of Captivity, 1917–18
The Romanovs and their European Royal Relatives
Glossary of Names
By Way of a Beginning
1. Happy Families
2. ‘Some Catastrophe Lurking in the Dark’
3. ‘Alicky Is the Cause of It All and Nicky Has Been Weak’
4. ‘Every Day the King Is Becoming More Concerned’
5. ‘Port Romanoff by the Murmansk Railway’
6. ‘I Shall Not Be Happy till They Are Safely out of Russia’
7. ‘The Smell of a Dumas Novel’
8. ‘Please Don’t Mention My Name!’
9. ‘I Would Rather Die in Russia than Be Saved by the Germans’
10. ‘The Baggage Will Be in Utter Danger at All Times’
11. ‘Await the Whistle around Midnight’
12. ‘It Is Too Horrible and Heartless’
13. ‘Those Poor Innocent Children’
14. ‘His Majesty Would Much Prefer that Nothing … Be Published’
Postscript: ‘Nobody’s Fault’?
Photographs
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Also by Helen Rappaport
About the Author
Copyright
THE RACE TO SAVE THE ROMANOVS. Copyright © 2018 by Helen Rappaport.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press,
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-15121-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-20200-0 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability)
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First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of Cornerstone, a Penguin Random House company
First U.S. Edition: June 2018
* For a description of the 1909 Cowes visit, see chapter 8, ‘Royal Cousins’, of my book Four Sisters.
* Other royal brides had also been vulnerable to nationalistic rabble-rousing during war or times of crisis. During the French Revolution the mob referred to Marie Antoinette as the ‘Austrian woman’; and in World War I, Queen Sophie of Greece, who was Alexandra’s cousin and the Kaiser’s sister, was also referred to as ‘the German woman’. Rumours even circulated that she kept a secret transmitter at the Tatoi Palace, on which she sent messages to the Germans.
* Note that all dates throughout are given according to the Gregorian calendar in use in Western Europe (New Style: NS), and to avoid confusion with the Julian calendar, which was in use in Russia until 13 February 1918 (Old Style: OS).
* German Foreign Ministry documents contain an intelligence report from Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, German ambassador to Denmark, suggesting that Nicholas was threatened harm might come to his family if he did not sign the abdication. Certainly he was extremely anxious about his wife and sick children, and his only thought was to get back to them as soon as possible.
* Kudashev had been appointed shortly before the revolution and was removed soon afterwards, replaced by Anatoly Neklyudov.
* There is no doubt that this and other insinuations about the royal family’s possible pro-German sympathies, made even by eminent writers such as H. G. Wells, prompted the change of the family’s name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor on 17 July 1917, in order to help defuse such accusations.
* Dagmar, who suffered from stomach trouble, had been living in Kiev since May 1916, where she had been undertaking Red Cross and other wartime hospital work. This almost certainly saved her from arrest and incarceration at Tsarskoe Selo with the rest of the Imperial Family, had she still been resident in Petrograd.
† Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich, or Miche-Miche as he was known in the family, had been banished from Russia by Alexander III for contracting a morganatic marriage to Countess Sophie von Merenberg in 1891. He had settled in England in 1900, where he later leased Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath.
* One has to conclude that Meriel Buchanan’s recall is faulty, writing many years after the event; a few lines down on the same page she misdates another important document in this story. Kerensky also appears to muddle or conflate dates in this sequence.
* So desperate were members of the entourage Count Benckendorff and Elizaveta Naryshkina, the former Mistress of the Robes, to see the Tsar and Tsaritsa escape possible Bolshevik reprisals that they urged them to flee Russia immediately, offering to take care of the sick children and to escort them abroad later to join their parents.
* After a long diplomatic career, including service as secretary of the Russian embassy in Paris in 1908–11, de Basily joined the Imperial Chancellery and in 1916 was appointed its director. Based with the Tsar at Imperial Army HQ at Mogilev, he drafted Nicholas’s abdication manifesto.
* The original was probably lost when Sir George destroyed all his personal papers and diaries after writing his memoirs in 1921, perhaps aware of their potentially damning content on the discreditable British role in the Romanov asylum.
* In 1933, this hidden collection of Romanov jewels weighing eight kilograms was finally discovered by the Soviets and listed as 154 individual items, appraised at 3,270,793 rubles then – a modern-day equivalent of many millions. And this was only a portion of the jewels that Alexandra had taken with her from Tsarskoe Selo.
* Viktor Sokolov is not to be confused with the better-known Nikolay Sokolov, a lawyer who in 1919 was appointed by the White commander Alexander Kolchak to investigate the Romanov murders. The Greek brothers Kirill and Methodius were famous Russian theologians and missionaries, venerated in the Orthodox Church as apostles.
* Romanov historian Victor Alexandrov suggested that ‘a convoy protected by a hundred resolute cavalrymen stood a reasonable chance of reaching northern Turkestan, a region of Moslem tribes hostile to the Revolution’.
* An article published in a Sov
iet journal in 1956 also mentioned the schooner, naming it as the Svyataya Mariya, and said it was reported to have been British in origin.
* The Armitsteads were English immigrants to Latvia who had arrived from Yorkshire in 1812 and built their wealth on the flax trade there. Henry was related through his grandfather to George Armitstead, Mayor of Riga 1901–12, who had built the city up into ‘the Paris of the North’ and entertained Nicholas II on his three-day visit there in 1910.
* There were serious economic reasons for the Lied flax- and hemp-purchasing mission in this regard. Pre-war Russia had provided 80 per cent of British supplies of flax, and stocks were running seriously low in 1918.
* Possibly the ski manufacturer L. H. Hagen, who had supplied skis to Lied’s friend Fridtjof Nansen for his expeditions.
* A reference to the two-part BBC2 documentary Russia’s Lost Princesses, based on my book Four Sisters and first transmitted in 2015.
* Lockhart, who until the autumn of 1917 had been consul-general in Moscow, travelled back to Russia on an Admiralty boat on 12 January 1918 via Stockholm and Tornio. If Warrender and Gordon-Smith did indeed travel out together, there is curiously no record of passports being issued to either of them for Russia, although there is one for Lockhart.
* It is a matter of considerable regret that it has proved impossible to uncover any kind of paper trail on the role of Warrender, aka Lord Bruntisfield, in this story, despite Patricia Eykyn’s conviction that he was indeed involved.
* Yakovlev’s subsequent behaviour suggests, however, a growing ambivalence in his loyalties and a creeping disenchantment with the Bolsheviks. After serving as a commander on the Ural–Orenburg front in the Russian civil war, in the autumn of 1918 Yakovlev defected to anti-Bolshevik forces. He did so, he later claimed, because as a populist he was sickened by the savagery of the Bolshevik oppression of the peasantry, its raids on their lands and the famine that followed. In early 1919 he fled across the border to Manchuria, where he resumed his revolutionary work. Repenting his political sins in 1928 and denying that he was a counter-revolutionary, he made the grave error of returning from Harbin to Stalinist Russia; after spending five years in the Gulag, he was eventually rearrested and shot in 1928.
* Roland Thomas Baring, 2nd Lord Cromer, was George V’s assistant private secretary, subordinate to Stamfordham, 1916–20.
† Lockhart’s position after his return to Russia in January 1918 was unofficial, as the first British envoy to the Bolsheviks. The ambassadorial position remained vacant until 1924; from 1917 to that date Britain had no ambassador in place.
‡ The comment is initialled ‘EHC’ and was almost certainly made by Edward Hallett Carr, who was then a fairly low-ranking FO official, having joined the service straight from Cambridge in 1916. He went on to become a distinguished historian and specialist on Russia, writing three volumes on The Bolshevik Revolution.
* Meinertzhagen may well have met Fellowes in the Middle East, when the latter was posted to the Royal Flying Corps Command there in 1920. He may well have spun a yarn from information on the RFC gleaned retrospectively from him.
* Francis Lindley, formerly a counsellor at the Petrograd embassy, who was now based at the Archangel consulate, reported that by the beginning of August the Bolsheviks had shipped out 36,000 pounds of gold and 7,200 pounds of platinum. In all, four billion rubles-worth of platinum, gold, stores and money was taken away during the Bolshevik tenure.
* When he was seriously ill with typhoid in 1901 Nicholas had instructed ministers to see whether it would be possible for his eldest daughter Olga to join the Regency Council for Alexey, if he, Nicholas, should die and Alexey come to the throne. The implication here is that Victoria sensed that Olga was therefore of more political significance than her sisters and thus would not be released by the Russian government.
* Sadly, not a shred of information has come to light about Giné or any efforts he may have made on behalf of the Romanovs.
* Helena languished in jail in Perm for five months before Norwegian diplomats located her and arranged for her transfer to the Kremlin in Moscow. She was eventually allowed to leave Russia for Sweden and join her mother and children there.
* This was in fact not Levine’s only Romanov scoop. A year later the Soviets again gave him unique access to their archives to publish Letters from the Kaiser to the Czar, in a further PR drive to discredit both former monarchs.
† It is important to emphasise that the Romanovs, although on rations, were far better fed than the vast majority of the population of Ekaterinburg. No evidence has come to light to substantiate allegations in some émigré memoirs that they were badly treated and starved in the Ipatiev House, or that Avdeev was deliberately cruel to them.
* Malinovsky and other officers from the Academy initiated the very first investigations into the murder of the Romanovs in August 1918.
* For full, forensic details of the murder of the Romanovs and their burial in the Koptyaki Forest, see my book Ekaterinburg.
* Grand Duchess George was the daughter of King George I of Greece (d. 1913), a niece to the Queen Mother and first cousin to Nicholas. She had been in Harrogate during World War I, running hospitals for the wounded. Her husband, along with the Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich, Dmitri Konstantinovich and Paul Alexandrovich, was shot by the Bolsheviks at the Peter & Paul Fortress in Petrograd on 30 January 1919, despite heroic efforts by Harald Scavenius to help them.
* Ella and her companions’ remains were taken to Irkutsk for safety, but when it became clear that the Whites would lose control of that area, the coffins were sent to Peking to protect them from desecration. In January 1921 Ella’s body and that of Sister Varvara were sent to Jerusalem and, in honour of Ella’s own long-held wishes, buried at the Russian Orthodox Convent on the Mount of Olives.
* Sensationalist accounts based on the bogus testimony of this witness, named ‘Parfen Domnin’, were syndicated in the USA. He would appear in fact to have been the Tsar’s former valet, Terenty Chemodurov, who went to Ekaterinburg with the family but, when he fell ill in May, was removed from the Ipatiev House to the local hospital. Confused and possibly senile, he was freed from Ekaterinburg jail by the Whites and spoke to some Western reporters about his experiences.
* For many years sources have interpreted these comments as an allusion to King George, but this cannot be right, given the context in which it was written. King George’s comments in his own recent letter to Victoria Milford Haven quoted above, plus the very specific allusions to their shared German roots, all clearly indicate that she had Kaiser Wilhelm, and not King George, in mind.
* In 1922, after an insurrection against the Greek throne, the British government sent a warship to rescue King George’s cousin, Prince Andrew (the Duke of Edinburgh’s father), who was being held under arrest. A British ship also safely evacuated the deposed Emperor Charles I of Austria–Hungary across the Black Sea in November 1921.
* See chapter 9, page 166–7.
* The Danish diplomat Harald Scavenius is without doubt one of the unsung heroes in this story. If only more information on his diplomatic efforts on behalf of all the Romanovs trapped in Russia were available to us. Unfortunately, aside from official correspondence, they probably languish in the Royal Danish Archives, which are closed to researchers.
* Note that the archival dating of the file is rather misleading. The notes in the Kaiser’s hand are not dated. The date of 1931 and another of 1934 in the file both relate to letters sent to the Kaiser about the Romanovs, on which he had scribbled his responses.
* Note that Bethmann resigned in July 1917.
* An interesting point of comparison can be found in the plight of the late Shah of Iran, who until his fall from power in 1979 had many friends and supporters in the West and the USA. After the Iranian Revolution, however, these supposed allies tu
rned their backs on Mohammad Reza Shah. Already dying of cancer, he managed to escape to the West, where he was shuttled back and forth like an unwanted package, in search of medical treatment and asylum. Only Anwar Sadat (the Alfonso of this story) stood by him and offered a refuge.
* Gilliard, who was not allowed to join the family at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, remained in Siberia, where he gave valuable testimony to the Sokolov enquiry. In 1919 he married the childen’s former Russian nanny, Alexandra Tegleva, and in 1920 the couple settled in Gilliard’s home town of Lausanne, where he taught at the university.