Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

by Robert K. Massie

  There were also a number of charred bones, partly destroyed by acid but still bearing the mark of ax and saw; revolver bullets, many of which had been reduced by heat to molten blobs; and a severed human finger belonging to a middle-aged woman. It was slender and manicured like the Empress’s.

  The investigators collected an assortment of nails, tinfoil, copper coins and a small lock which puzzled them until they were shown to Gilliard. He immediately identified them as part of the pocketful of odds and ends always carried by the Tsarevich. Finally, mangled but unburned, the little corpse of the spaniel Jimmy was found at the bottom of the pit. For some reason, the murderers had taken great care to destroy the bodies of the owners, but had ignored the still recognizable body of their pet.

  Later, to confirm this evidence, the Whites added the depositions of captured members of the guard at the House of Special Purpose, who described the execution. Later still, Sokolov’s findings were fully confirmed from the Bolshevik side by P. M. Bykov, Chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet.

  Within a few hours of the murder, a report was telegraphed to Moscow. On July 18, the Presidium of the Central Executive Council approved the action. That night, as the Commissar of Health was reading a draft of a new public-health law to the Council of People’s Commissars, Sverdlov came into the hall and whispered to Lenin, who interrupted the speaker.

  “Comrade Sverdlov wants to make a statement,” said Lenin.

  “I have to say,” declared Sverdlov, “that we have had a communication that at Ekaterinburg, by a decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot. The Presidium has resolved to approve.”

  A hush fell over the room.

  Then Lenin spoke up calmly: “Let us now go on to read the draft [of the health law] clause by clause.”

  Although only Nicholas’s name was publicly mentioned, Lenin and Sverdlov knew that the entire family was dead. In their haste to evacuate Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks left behind the tapes of several telegrams exchanged with the Kremlin after the murder. “Tell Sverdlov,” said one, “that the whole family met the same fate as its head. Officially, the family will perish during the evacuation.” Another message asked how Moscow wished the news to be broken. Apparently the Bolshevik leaders decided that one murder was enough to announce at that time, and on July 20, the official proclamation mentioned only Nicholas. It came in the form of an announcement by the Ural Soviet with an endorsement by the Central Executive Committee:

  DECISION

  of the Presidium of the Divisional Council of Deputies of Workmen, Peasants, and Red Guards of the Urals:

  In view of the fact that Czechoslovakian bands are threatening the Red Capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg; that the crowned executioner may escape from the tribunal of the people (a White Guard Plot to carry off the whole Imperial family has just been discovered) the Presidium of the Divisional Committee in pursuance of the will of the people, has decided that the ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty before the people of innumerable bloody crimes, shall be shot.

  The decision of the Presidium of the Divisional Council was carried into execution on the Night of July 16th–17th.

  Romanov’s family has been transferred from Ekaterinburg to a place of greater safety.

  Moscow’s endorsement was worded:

  DECISION

  of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of all the Russias of July 18th:

  The Central Executive Committee of the Councils of Deputies of Workmen, Peasants, Red Guards and Cossacks, in the person of their president, approve the action of the Presidium of the Council of the Urals.

  The President of the Central Executive Committee

  Sverdlov

  A year later, unable to maintain their fiction, the Bolsheviks admitted that the entire family was dead. They still did not admit their own responsibility for the murders. Instead, they arrested and brought to trial twenty-eight people, all Social Revolutionaries, who, it was charged, had murdered the Tsar in order to discredit the Bolsheviks. Five of the defendants were executed. The hypocrisy of this second crime was later admitted by the Bolsheviks themselves in Bykov’s book.

  The link between the party leaders in Moscow who authorized the murder and the Ural Soviet which determined the time and method of execution was later described by Trotsky. He explained that he had proposed a public trial to be broadcast by radio throughout the country, but before anything could come of it, he had to leave for the front.

  “My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Ekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: ‘Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?’

  “ ‘It’s all over,’ he answered. ‘He has been shot.’

  “ ‘And where is the family?’

  “ ‘And the family along with him.’

  “ ‘All of them?’ I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.

  “ ‘All of them,’ replied Sverdlov. ‘What about it?’ He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.

  “ ‘And who made the decision?’ I asked.

  “ ‘We decided it here. Ilyich believed that we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.’

  “I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.… This Lenin sensed well.”

  The ruthlessness of Lenin’s logic had an effect on many in the world who remained uncertain as to the nature of Bolshevism. Woodrow Wilson, still struggling to keep his idealism about the course of events in Russia, heard the news of the murder while at dinner in the home of his Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane. Rising from the table, the President declared that “a great menace to the world has taken shape.” He added that he was sure everyone present would share his view that “it was not the time for gaiety.” The dinner party broke up immediately.

  The same ruthless logic dictated the murder of every member of the Romanov family on whom the Bolsheviks could lay their hands. Grand Duke Michael, the Tsar’s younger brother, was shot in Perm six days before Nicholas’s death in Ekaterinburg. On July 17, the day after the murder of the Tsar, an Imperial party including the Empress’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, three sons of Grand Duke Constantine and a son of Grand Duke Paul were brutally murdered. Grand Duchess Elizabeth had refused all offers of security and escape. In March 1917, the Provisional Government had asked her to leave her abbey and take refuge in the Kremlin, but she refused. In 1918, the Kaiser tried several times, first through the Swedish Embassy and then through Mirbach, to bring the woman he once had loved to shelter in Germany. Again, Ella refused. Moved by the Bolsheviks to the town of Alapayevsk in the Urals, she and the other victims were taken in peasant carts to the mouth of another abandoned mine shaft. They were thrown down the shaft still living, with heavy timbers and hand grenades thrown after them to complete the work. Not all of the victims were killed immediately, for a peasant who crept up to the pit after the murderers had left heard hymns being sung at the bottom of the shaft. In addition, when the bodies were removed by the Whites, the injured head of one of the boys was found to have been carefully bound with the Grand Duchess’s handkerchief. In January 1919, four more grand dukes, including Paul, the Tsar’s uncle, and Nicholas Mikhailovich, the liberal historian, were executed in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. On the basis of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s historical reputation and his liberalism, Lenin’s friend, the writer Maxim Gorky, pleaded that the life of this Grand Duke be spared. Lenin refused, declaring, “The Revolution does not need historians.”

  Ironically, within a very few yea
rs, the Revolution also did not need either Lenin or Trotsky. Lenin died in 1924 after a series of strokes already had removed him from power. Trotsky, exiled once again in 1927, later wrote that Lenin had been poisoned by Stalin, an accusation about which Lenin’s biographers still argue. There is no question that Trotsky’s own assassination by a pickax in the brain in Mexico City in 1940 was ordered by Stalin. It was Stalin who inherited the revolution and for thirty years ruled Russia more cruelly than any tsar since Ivan the Terrible. In January 1945, near the peak of his power, Stalin received his allies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at Yalta in the Crimea. The American party was housed in the Livadia Palace. Because the President was ill, the other two leaders came to him and the Yalta conference was held around a circular table in the state dining room where, thirty-four years earlier, Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughter Olga had appeared, flushed and fair, at her first ball to dance and celebrate her sixteenth birthday.

  Jacob Sverdlov died within six months of the Ekaterinburg murder. The Bolshevik leaders gave pneumonia as his cause of death, although there were persistent rumors that he had been assassinated by a Moscow workman. In belated acknowledgment that it was Sverdlov who arranged the murder of the Imperial family, the town of Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk. For years, the House of Special Purpose was kept as a Bolshevik museum and visitors were led down into the cellar where the family was shot. In 1959, a group of American correspondents accompanying Vice President Nixon’s tour of Russia quietly visited the house. They found the museum had been closed, but the house, now a repository for the archives of the local Communist Party, was freshly painted in cream and white and brown. The basement room, they were told, was now occupied by dusty bins filled with old documents. In the decades since 1918, Sverdlovsk has grown from a small city to a huge, grimy coal and steel metropolis. It was over Sverdlovsk in May 1960 that the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down.

  The list of members of the Imperial family who escaped the Bolsheviks by leaving Russia was headed by the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Fedorovna. In April 1919, as the Red Army approached the Crimea, the seventy-two-year-old Empress left on board a British battleship, H.M.S. Marlborough. Marie rejected what she called the “rumors” of the Ekaterinburg murders and left Russia reluctantly only at the insistent urging of her sister Queen Alexandra of England and Alexandra’s son, King George V. Returning to her native Denmark, the Empress lived in a wing of the royal palace of her nephew King Christian X. The King and his aunt disliked each other and argued over money. Marie had brought many of her jewels from Russia, and the King suggested that she sell or pawn them to pay her expenses. The Empress adamantly refused and kept the jewels in a box under her bed. In retaliation, King Christian subjected her to numerous petty humiliations. One night in 1920, as she sat with Grand Duchess Olga, one of the King’s footmen entered the room. “His Majesty has sent me over to ask you to switch off all these lights,” he said. “His Majesty said to mention to you that the electricity bill he had to pay recently was excessive.” The Dowager Empress paled and stared at the footman with stony eyes. Then, while the man still stood before her, she rang for her own servant and ordered him to light the palace from cellar to attic. In the end, the Empress’s finances and dignity were saved by King George V, who forwarded a pension of £10,000 ($48,000) a year to his “dear Aunt Minnie.” Marie never accepted the fact that Nicholas and his family were dead, although, contrary to general belief, she never met and interviewed any of the women who claimed to be her granddaughter Anastasia. In October 1928, the gay Danish Princess who had captivated Russia as the consort of the giant Tsar Alexander III died in Copenhagen at the age of eighty-one.

  Marie’s daughters, Grand Duchess Xenia and Grand Duchess Olga, also left Russia on board British warships. Xenia came to London, where her servants, upon first seeing King George V, fell on their knees and kissed the hem of his coat, believing him to be the Tsar miraculously resurrected. She lived her last twenty-five years in a “grace and favor” mansion provided by the British royal family and named—perhaps appropriately—Wilderness House. In 1960, Xenia died at eighty-five. Olga, Nicholas II’s younger sister, lived quietly in Denmark until 1948, when she moved to a small farm outside Toronto, Canada. There, she lived in such peaceful obscurity that her rural neighbors were much surprised in 1959 when she was invited to lunch aboard the royal yacht Britannia with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In 1960, Olga became too ill to live alone and went to live with a Russian couple in an apartment over a barbershop in a poor section of East Toronto. There, in November 1960, seven months after her sister Xenia, she died at seventy-eight.

  Among the Russian grand dukes who got away was the Tsar’s first cousin Cyril. Ironically, although by leading the Garde Equipage to the Duma he was the first Romanov to break his allegiance to Nicholas II, Cyril was still the eldest son of the senior surviving branch of the family, and thereby he became Nicholas’s heir. In 1924, Cyril proclaimed himself “Tsar of all the Russias” and established his “court” in a village in Brittany. In 1930, he visited Paris for a “military review” of two thousand former officers of the Imperial Army in a forest outside the city. At Cyril’s appearance, the officers shouted Cossack battle cries and yelled, “The day of glory is near!” Unfortunately for Cyril’s cause, the Dowager Empress never recognized his title. He died at sixty-two in 1938 in the American Hospital in Paris. Today, Cyril’s forty-nine-year-old son Vladimir, who lives in Madrid, is considered head of the House of Romanov.

  Grand Duke Nicholas remained in the Crimea until 1919, when he left with the Dowager Empress aboard H.M.S. Marlborough. To many Russian émigrés, he seemed a more suitable pretender than Cyril, but the proud Grand Duke would have little to do with these maneuvers. When he died at Antibes in southern France in 1929, his funeral was attended with the elaborate military ceremony due a former commander-in-chief of one of the Allied armies.

  For a while, another claimant to the nonexistent throne was Grand Duke Dmitry, whose life was saved by his banishment to Persia following Rasputin’s murder. In 1926, Dmitry married an American heiress in Biarritz, and for a while in the 1930’s he was a champagne salesman in Palm Beach, Florida. Unlike the other prominent murderers, Yussoupov and Purishkevich, he did not write a book and refused even to talk about his role in the assassination. Dmitry died of tuberculosis in 1941 at the age of fifty in Davos, Switzerland.

  The Bolshevik toll of those who served the Tsar in one role or another was high. Countess Hendrikov and Mlle. Schneider, who shared the long captivity at Tsarskoe Selo and in Tobolsk, were executed in Siberia in September 1918. Prince Dolgoruky and General Tatishchev disappeared at the same time, but two bodies answering to their description were found. Baroness Buxhoeveden and Sidney Gibbs crossed Siberia and reached safety in England.

  Of the Tsarist ministers, the aged Goremykin was caught by a Petrograd mob in 1918 and strangled on the spot. Stürmer and Protopopov were shot by the Bolsheviks. Kokovtsov and Sazonov escaped and went to live in France. Rodzianko, the Duma President, left Russia through the Crimea and died in 1924 in Belgrade, harassed to the end by Russian monarchists who blamed him for the overthrow of the monarchy. Purishkevich fought with the Whites in southern Russia and died there of typhus. Among the ministers of the Provisional Government, Prince Lvov, Miliukov and Guchkov all went to France, where they were active in anti-Bolshevik organizations.

  Only two of Imperial Russia’s leading World War generals left their homeland. These were the two arch-rivals Grand Duke Nicholas and Sukhomlinov. Alexeiev and Kornilov both died leading White armies, while Polivanov and Brusilov sided with the Bolsheviks. Brusilov, at least, saw this new allegiance as Russian patriotism. With the Allies landing troops in the Crimea, at Murmansk and at Vladivostock, with the Poles at the gates of Kiev and Smolensk, Brusilov declared, “The Poles are besieging Russian fortresses with the help of nations whom we rescued from certain defeat at the beg
inning of the war. With every drop of my blood, I wish success to the Red Army, so help me God.” Sukhomlinov had no such patriotic feelings. In a sailboat, he escaped across the Gulf of Finland with his voluptuous wife and went to live in Berlin. Before he died in 1926, he wrote his memoirs, thoughtfully dedicating them to the Kaiser. William was so flattered that he proposed in turn to dedicate his memoirs to Sukhomlinov, but his publishers successfully suppressed this odd gesture. The youthful Mme. Sukhomlinov was not present to assist in her elderly husband’s literary effort. Having seen him safely to Finland, she divorced him and returned to Russia to marry a young Georgian officer. They died together in the Bolshevik terror.

  Buchanan and Paléologue both were transferred from Russia after the revolution to other diplomatic assignments, but for each, the years in the beautiful capital on the Neva remained the crown of his career. Buchanan became Ambassador in Rome, where his last years were troubled by those who alleged that in the spring and summer of 1917 he had not done enough to help Nicholas and his family escape. Paléologue returned to Paris to become a senior official of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was elected to the Académie Française. He died in August 1944, just as his beloved Paris was liberated from the Germans.

  The two dedicated officials of the Imperial court, Count Fredericks and Count Benckendorff, died only a few years after their Imperial master. Benckendorff painstakingly traced all rumors concerning the murder of the Imperial family and the disappearance of his stepson, Prince Dolgoruky. Only when he sincerely believed that all were dead did he attempt to leave Russia. He was held up by visa difficulties on the Estonian frontier and died in a dilapidated border-town hospital in 1921. Count Fredericks lived for a while in Petrograd, which was shortly to become Leningrad. Defiantly, he wore his fading gold court uniform in walks along the Nevsky Prospect. For the last year of his life, he was allowed to return to his native Finland, where he died in 1922 at the age of eighty-four.