by Greg King
That autumn Dr. Botkin’s two children, nineteen-year-old Tatiana and seventeen-year-old Gleb, arrived in Tobolsk, sharing his lodgings in the Kornilov House. When they asked for permission to visit the grand duchesses and the tsesarevich, though, authorities refused, apparently on the pretext that they were not intimates and had never been invited to the palace.55 From the windows of the Kornilov House, Tatiana and Gleb could catch only occasional glimpses of the prisoners, but Botkin’s son found a novel way to amuse the youngest Romanovs. A talented artist, Gleb created an allegorical story about a group of aristocratic animals living through a revolution, illustrated with charming drawings. These he gave to his father, who smuggled them to Anastasia and Alexei for review; they would make suggestions about the stories, which Dr. Botkin conveyed back to his son.56
The winter passed. Anastasia, as her mother wrote, had now grown “very fat,” and even at sixteen she stood just a little over five feet tall.57 Kobylinsky called her “over-developed for her age . . . stout and short, too stout for her height,” while Gibbes deemed her “ungraceful” and said, rather unkindly, that “if she had grown and lost weight she might have been the prettiest of the family.”58
Monotony set in. To relieve the boredom, Gilliard and Gibbes organized small plays, acted and staged by Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei for the amusement of their parents and members of the household sharing their exile. One night, it was an English farce called Packing Up, in which Anastasia took the principal male role. As always, she relished the attention, and was doing a splendid job of it until the end, when she turned so quickly that her dressing gown flew up, exposing “her sturdy legs and bottom encased in the Emperor’s Jaeger underwear,” as Gibbes recalled. The audience collapsed in laughter as Anastasia, with no idea of what had happened, stood on the makeshift stage with a confused look on her face.59
Laughter was much needed in Tobolsk as life became more uncertain. The Bolshevik coup in November that replaced the Provisional Government marked the end of the rather indulgent treatment the Romanovs had thus far received. Over the months that followed, restrictions and personal freedoms tightened: new, coarse guards replaced the old, friendly soldiers who had been charged with security, and attendance at church services was denied. Money became tight: when Kerensky’s regime ceased, so did government stipends for the prisoners’ upkeep and pay for the men guarding them.60 In the spring of 1918 the Romanovs were placed on ordinary soldiers’ rations, and eggs, butter, and coffee disappeared from their diet, although occasionally sympathetic citizens in the town dispatched baskets of provisions.61 Dinner now, Gilliard reported, without a hint of irony, “consisted of two courses, and this situation was difficult to bear for those who had been accustomed since birth to an entirely different manner of life.”62 Although the Romanovs possessed a fortune in jewelry that they had smuggled into exile with them—enough to bribe entire regiments of soldiers and escape—lack of imagination; a critical failure to recognize the mounting forces aligned against them; and, above all, a fatalistic approach to life all coalesced into a stunning sense of resignation. As winter turned to spring, the prisoners whispered of possible rescue plots, dreaming of a world of freedom that lay beyond the still-frozen Siberian plains.
The late April arrival of Vassili Yakovlev, a new commandant from Moscow, brought with it new worries. Relieving Kobylinsky of duty, he explained that he had come to immediately transfer the Romanovs from Tobolsk, although he refused to reveal their intended destination. Tsesarevich Alexei’s precarious health, though, threatened the urgency of Yakovlev’s mission: he found the thirteen-year-old in bed, suffering from a severe internal hemorrhage and unable to travel. When the commissar insisted on taking Nicholas II as planned, Alexandra was forced to choose between her husband and her sick son; after a terrible night that found the whole family in tears, the emperor and empress, together with Marie and a handful of servants, agreed to travel with Yakovlev; the others would follow when Alexei had recovered. Just before dawn on the morning of April 26, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia stood on the steps of the Governor’s House, “three figures in gray suits,” as Tatiana Botkin saw them from her window, who “gazed for a long time into the distance” as the carts holding their parents and sister disappeared into the darkness.63
4
“How Little I Suspected That I Was Never to See Them Again”
Fearful and alone, not knowing the reason why the mysterious Yakovlev had taken their parents and sister away nor where they had gone, the three grand duchesses and their brother remained in Tobolsk, uncertain and awaiting any news. “The sadness of death,” recalled Alexei Volkov, elderly groom of the chamber to Empress Alexandra, “descended on the Governor’s House.”1 There were suspicions that the mission involved a journey to Moscow; everyone in Tobolsk was therefore surprised and alarmed on learning that Yakovlev’s train had been diverted to the city of Ekaterinburg, an industrial center and Bolshevik stronghold in the Ural Mountains.2 There, the emperor, empress, their daughter, and servants had been imprisoned in a house commandeered from a wealthy local. “We were so terribly glad to receive news,” Anastasia wrote to her sister Marie in Ekaterinburg, “we kept on sharing our impressions! Forgive me for writing so crookedly, I’m just being stupid. . . . I am always with you dears in my thoughts. It’s so terribly sad and lonely. I just don’t know what to do. The Lord helps and will help. . . . We played on the swing, that was when I roared with laughter, the fall was so wonderful! Indeed! I told the sisters about it so many times yesterday that they got quite fed up, but I could go on telling it masses of times, only there’s no one left. In fact I already have loads of things to tell you. . . . I’m sorry of course for such a clumsy letter, you will understand that my thoughts keep racing ahead and I can’t write everything down, I just grasp at whatever enters my noodle.”3
There was another letter, this one dictated by Alexandra but written by her maid Anna Demidova, who had followed her to Ekaterinburg. Although she could say little about their new situation, the empress warned her daughters that on arrival all of their belongings had been searched, even their “medicines.”4 This was a code word meant to indicate that the grand duchesses should conceal their jewelry. Aided by Alexandra Tegleva, the young women spent several days quietly sewing diamonds, ropes of pearls, and other gems under the lining of undergarments, into the bands of hats and belts of dresses, and behind buttons covered with cotton wadding to escape the attention of the Bolsheviks.5
Worried that some monarchist group would manage to rescue the Romanovs remaining in Tobolsk, the Ural Regional Soviet in Ekaterinburg dispatched a contingent of reliable Bolshevik soldiers to surround the prisoners in the Governor’s House.6 With them came a new Bolshevik commissar named Nicholas Rodionov, a dour man who delighted in inflicting petty humiliations on the prisoners, including a daily roll call at which the three grand duchesses had to appear and answer to their names, “like so many inanimate objects,” Tegleva recalled.7 One day, he pulled Alexei Volkov aside and, “armed to the teeth,” announced, “Tell the young ladies that they may not close the door to their bedchamber at night.” Volkov attempted to argue with the commissar, but to no avail as Bolshevik soldiers wandered freely through the house.8
The day before the prisoners were to leave, Tatiana Botkin sought out Rodionov. Her father had accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra to Ekaterinburg and shared their confinement, and she asked if she and her brother Gleb could join him. Rodionov first tried to dissuade her from this, saying it would be better if they remained in Tobolsk; when Tatiana pressed, the commissar warned her that, once transferred to Ekaterinburg, all of the Romanovs would either be imprisoned or, more ominously, “be shot.” Although Tatiana quickly dismissed this threat, she and Gleb decided to stay in Tobolsk. That night, Gleb took to the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of the prisoners; he spied Anastasia smiling from a window, took off his cap, and gave a low bow, only to be chased from the street by armed soldiers.9
On May 20, Anastas
ia and her siblings left Tobolsk aboard the Rus, the same river steamer that had brought them into exile nine months earlier; in Tyumen they transferred to a train and, at two on the morning of May 23, finally arrived in Ekaterinburg, where a contingent of heavily armed soldiers mounted a guard outside their railway carriage.10 The following morning, as rain poured from the gray Siberian sky, an angry mob gathered at the siding, demanding to see the “bloodsuckers” as the grand duchesses nervously peered from the windows of their compartment. Soldiers struggled to hold the crowd back as it screamed, “Hang them!” The anger reached a crescendo when soldiers began to unload the baggage; the mob surged forward, tearing into the trunks and suitcases, ripping up clothing, and shouting, “Off with their heads!”11 In those few tense moments, the petty humiliations and uncertainties endured by Anastasia and her siblings in the year since their father’s abdication must have been replaced by the first very real fears for their lives.
Not until nine that morning did a string of carriages pull up alongside the train. Although twenty-seven courtiers and servants had followed the tsesarevich and grand duchesses from Tobolsk, authorities in Ekaterinburg arrested most of the group. Some were later executed, while others, such as Gilliard, Gibbes, Tegleva, and Buxhoeveden, were set free.12 Armed guards hustled the prisoners off the train as the crowd screamed and jeered. First came Alexei, still unable to walk and carried by his sailor Klementy Nagorny, followed by Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia; holding their suitcases and their three dogs, they slipped and struggled in the thick morass of mud before reaching the waiting vehicles. From the windows of his railway carriage, Pierre Gilliard watched Anastasia and her siblings disappear into the incessant rain. “How little I suspected,” he later wrote, “that I was never to see them again.”13
Surrounded by wide, shallow lakes and deep birch forests, the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg stands on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, just fifty miles from the border dividing Europe and Asia. Named for Catherine the Great, by the twentieth century it had developed into a substantial industrial center, where miners grew wealthy from rich mineral deposits and workers toiled in a string of grim suburban factories. A tinderbox for revolution, the conflict between rich and poor, between prosperity and despair, erupted with the rest of Russia in 1917, and Ekaterinburg quickly acquired a proud reputation as a fiery Bolshevik stronghold, the “Center of the Red Urals.” Here, in an increasingly uncertain and hostile environment, the Romanovs began the final months of their captivity.
On Voznesensky Prospekt, near the city center and sprawled along the edge of a steep hillside, stood an ornate, whitewashed mansion owned by engineer Nicholas Ipatiev. In April, the local ruling Ural Regional Soviet had evicted Ipatiev and commandeered the property; they ringed the structure with a stockade fence dotted with sentry boxes, and positioned machine guns on the balcony and in the attic. Windows were whitewashed and sealed, interior doors nailed shut, and workers drawn from local factories were given rifles and posted around the perimeter. Ominously, the Ural Regional Soviet rechristened the building “the House of Special Purpose.”14 This was the new prison Anastasia and her siblings entered on the morning of May 23, 1918. “What an enormous joy to see them again and to embrace them after the four week separation and uncertainty,” Nicholas II wrote in his diary. “The poor things had endured a lot of personal, spiritual suffering both in Tobolsk and during the three day trip.”15
View of Ekaterinburg from Cathedral Square; the Ipatiev House is the building at the extreme left.
The House of Special Purpose was not as large as the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, and the Romanovs were given only eight rooms to use; these they shared with the handful of retainers remaining with them. Aside from Dr. Botkin, this included maid Anna Demidova; valets Alexei Trupp and Terenty Chemodurov; Klementy Nagorny; cook Ivan Kharitonov; footman Ivan Sednev; and Sednev’s fourteen-year-old nephew Leonid, who helped in the kitchen. Increasingly ill and senile, Chemodurov left the house the day after Anastasia arrived, while the Bolsheviks arrested both Nagorny and Ivan Sednev on May 27 and, unknown to the Romanovs, executed them.16 These servants slept on sofas or cots in the hallways, kitchen, and drawing room, while the imperial family took three rooms at the southern end of the house. Alexei had one bedroom (he later shared his parents’ bedroom) and Nicholas and Alexandra another; the four grand duchesses slept on their camp beds in a former dressing room between the two chambers, its walls hung with pink, red, and green floral paper and the ceiling adorned with a bronze Italian chandelier with colored glass shades.17
The Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were imprisoned and executed by the Ural Regional Soviet.
Behind these heavily guarded walls a new myth was born, one that replaced the former fairy-tale existence of the imperial family and that would last throughout the twentieth century. History, relying on reports of the White Army and on the memoirs of those who had known the Romanovs, would record the seventy-eight days spent by the imperial family in the Ipatiev House as a time of unrelenting brutality. British journalist Robert Wilton, who in 1920 produced the first published account of the Ekaterinburg period, thus asserted, “Before their death, the captives were subjected to ill-treatment, amounting to horrible torture, mental if not physical.”18 He described their guards as “coarse, drunken, criminal types,” with “leering eyes,” “loathsome familiarities,” and “evil smelling bodies.”19
This set the pattern for what followed, a chronicle of distortions depicting the Romanovs’ time in Ekaterinburg as a long string of deliberate humiliations that culminated in their execution.20 There was a clear political and religious value in such tales. The White Army, monarchists, and Russian émigrés scattered by the Revolution not only attained sympathetic martyrs in the imperial family but also gained in their deaths a piece of stunning anti-Soviet propaganda. An atheistic regime that maltreated and executed the sick tsesarevich and his four sisters offered a stark moral contrast to the vanished empire carried in the hearts and minds of Russian exiles; this position spoke less of reality than of attempts to ignore the factors that had led to the Revolution, to portray the imperial past in a golden light against the dark and forbidding Soviet government. The truth of what actually happened behind the walls of the Ipatiev House was thus, in many ways, less important than the emotional mythology that wrapped the Romanovs in a mantle of suffering.
That these tales were so easily believed owed something to the complete veil of secrecy drawn by the Soviet government over the fate of the Romanovs. In the absence of definitive information, a narrative was pieced together that, however erroneous in detail, firmly cemented itself in legend. This began with Alexander Avdayev, the first commandant of the House of Special Purpose, a man condemned by Pierre Gilliard as an “inveterate drunkard” who “showed great ingenuity in daily inflicting fresh humiliations on those in his charge.”21 Avdayev, so it was said, was “often drunk, and sometimes came into the room where the Imperial Family was without his tunic.” He always dined with the prisoners, said the senile Chemodurov, and “often behaved towards the Emperor in an indecent and insulting manner.”22
Hand in hand with Avdayev as chief villains were the guards, whose “mere presence,” wrote Wilton, “was an offense.” They “entered the prisoners’ rooms whenever they thought fit, at all hours,” taunting and tormenting the captives.23 When not devising new ways to humiliate the Romanovs, the soldiers lustily sang revolutionary anthems such as “Let’s Forget the Old Regime” and “You Fell as a Victim in the Struggle,” while forcing the grand duchesses to accompany them on the drawing room piano.24 Whenever one of the young women had to use the lavatory, the soldiers followed them on the pretext of ensuring that they did not try to escape.25
Even meals, ran the narrative that emerged at the beginning of the 1920s, were conceived to denigrate the imperial family. Avdayev forced the Romanovs and their retainers to dine together, at a table covered with “a greasy oil-cloth.” The prisoners lacked plat
es and silver and were forced to dine “with wooden spoons out of one common dish,” Wilton reported.26 The food was “very bad,” brought in “from a cheap lunch room,” and “always” served late, if at all.27 Soldiers crowded around the table, helping themselves to the sparse food with their “dirty hands” as they spat on the floor, their “greasy elbows” thrust into the faces of the imperial family.28
Two generations would pass before these horror stories were revealed as clumsy and inaccurate fabrications, repeated and recycled by a stream of voices that embellished and amended them in misguided attempts to enhance the aura of the Romanovs as martyrs. Avdayev never brutalized or humiliated the prisoners; the guards never entered the rooms where the imperial family lived and never ate with them; they never forced the grand duchesses to sing, and never escorted them to the bathroom; the Romanovs had plentiful china and silver during their meals, which were only rarely served late, and they certainly never endured the humiliation of lewd soldiers spitting and sharing their table.29 There were, to be sure, unpleasant moments and uncomfortable situations, and for the Romanovs life within the Ipatiev House was a stark change from their indulgent confinement in the Alexander Palace and even their months of fairly comfortable captivity at Tobolsk. Food, it was true, was sometimes less than appetizing; a few soldiers scrawled obscene verses and pornographic drawings of the empress and Rasputin in places where the prisoners could not help but see them; and exercise was confined to a daily turn in the small, enclosed garden under the watchful eyes of armed sentries.30 More than anything, though, it was not humiliation or discomfort that marked the lives of the prisoners but rather a terrible uncertainty as soldiers in the Red and White armies waged Russia’s Civil War and the fighting edged ever closer to a nervous Ekaterinburg.