Still, the focus of popular hatred was always the Tsar and his family at Tsarskoe Selo. From the moment of abdication, rumors spread through Petrograd that “Citizen Romanov” and his wife, “Alexandra the German,” were working secretly to betray the country to the Germans and with their help restore the autocracy. The press, freed of censorship and restraint, rushed into print with lurid tales of Rasputin and the Empress which hitherto had been passed only by word of mouth. The “private lives” of the Tsar’s four daughters were written by their “lovers.” A Rabelaisian palace dinner menu, described as “typical,” was published so that the hungry people of Petrograd could read how “Nikolasha” and his family were gorging themselves: “Caviar, lobster soup, mushroom patties, macaroni, pudding, roast goose, chicken pie, veal cutlets, orange jelly, pork chops, rice pudding, herrings with cucumber, omelet, rissoles in cream, fresh pineapple, sturgeon.” Cartoons depicted Nicholas clapping his hands with joy while he watched the hanging of a political prisoner, and Alexandra bathing in a tub filled with blood and saying, “If Nicky killed a few more of these revolutionaries, I could have such a bath more often.”
It was at this point, with public opinion thoroughly aroused and the Soviet demanding that Nicholas be thrown into the Fortress, that the Provisional Government placed responsibility for the safety of the Imperial family entirely on Kerensky’s shoulders. On April 3, the new warden decided to take a personal look at his prisoners.
He arrived early in the afternoon in one of the Tsar’s automobiles driven by a chauffeur from the Imperial Garage. Alighting at the kitchen door, he assembled the soldiers of the guard and the palace servants in a passageway and delivered an impassioned revolutionary speech. The servants, he announced, were now the servants of the people, who paid their salaries, and who expected them to keep a close eye and report everything suspicious that happened in the palace. Next, in the Tsar’s waiting room, Kerensky met Benckendorff. “He was dressed in a blue shirt buttoned to the neck, with no cuffs or collar, big boots, and he affected the air of a workman in his Sunday clothes,” recalled the Count. “… He introduced himself and said, ‘I have come here to see how you live, to inspect your Palace and to talk to Nicholas Alexandrovich.’” According to Kerensky, “the old dignitary [Benckendorff] with a monocle in his eye replied that he would put the matter before His Majesty.” In the meantime, Benckendorff, knowing that Nicholas and Alexandra were still at lunch with the children, distracted Kerensky by proposing a tour of the palace. Kerensky agreed. “His manner was abrupt and nervous,” Benckendorff recalled. “He did not walk but ran through the rooms, talking very loudly…. He had the Emperor’s private rooms opened; and all the doors, drawers and cupboards searched, and told those who accompanied him to look in every corner and under the furniture.” Without saying a word to them, Kerensky went through the rooms of the ladies-in-waiting, who stood and watched him. Eventually, he came to the door of Anna Vyrubova.
Nearly recovered from measles, Anna had been up having lunch with Lili Dehn when the noise and confusion in the palace signaled Kerensky’s arrival. In terror, she grabbed a pile of her private papers and threw them into her fire, then jumped into bed and pulled the covers up to her head. As the commotion outside grew louder, Anna, “with an icy hand” upon her heart, whispered to Lili, “They are coming.” A moment later, Kerensky entered, noting the fireplace filled with the glowing ash of burning paper. “The room seemed to fill up with men,” Anna wrote, “and walking arrogantly before them I beheld a small, clean-shaven, theatrical person whose essentially weak face was disguised in a Napoleonic frown. Standing over me … right hand thrust into the bosom of his jacket, the man boomed out, ‘I am the Minister of Justice. You are to dress and go at once to Petrograd.’ I answered not a word but lay still on my pillows. … This seemed to disconcert him somewhat for he turned … and said nervously ‘Ask the doctors if she is fit to go.’” Botkin and Derevenko were questioned and both declared that, from a medical viewpoint, it would not harm her to leave. Later, Anna bitterly attributed the doctors’ decision to “craven fear.”
Leaving Anna, Kerensky passed Gilliard’s room. Assuming that the Swiss—being a citizen of a republic—was a friend, Kerensky nodded pleasantly and said, “Everything is going well.”
By then, Nicholas and Alexandra were ready. Kerensky was conducted to the children’s schoolroom, where Benckendorff left him standing before a closed door while he stepped in to announce the new Minister. Then, swinging wide open the double door, the Count announced grandly, “His Majesty bids you welcome.” “Kerensky,” Benckendorff recalled, “was in a state of feverish agitation; he could not stand still, touched all the objects which were on the table and seemed like a madman. He spoke incoherently.”
Kerensky admitted his extreme nervousness: “To be frank I was anything but calm before this first meeting with Nicholas II. Too many hard, terrible things had been connected in the past with his name…. All the way along the endless chain of official apartments I was struggling for control over my emotions…. [Entering the room] my feelings underwent a lightning change…. The Imperial family … were standing … near the window, around a small table, in a huddled, perplexed little group. From this cluster of frightened humanity, there stepped out somewhat hesitantly, a man of medium height in military kit, who walked forward to meet me with a slight peculiar smile. It was the Emperor … he stopped in confusion. He did not know what to do, he did not know how I would act, what attitude I would adopt. Should he walk forward to meet me as a host, or ought he to wait for me to speak first? Should he hold out his hand?
“In a flash, instinctively, I knew the exact position: the family’s confusion, its fear at finding itself alone with a revolutionary whose objects in bursting in upon it were unknown…. With an answering smile, I hurriedly walked over to the Emperor, shook hands and sharply said, ‘Kerensky’—as I always do, by way of introduction. … Nicholas II gave my hand a firm grasp, immediately recovering from his confusion, and smiling once again, led me to his family.
“His daughters and the Heir Apparent were obviously burning with curiosity and their eyes were simply glued to me. But Alexandra Fedorovna stood tense and erect—proud, domineering, irreconcilable; she held out her hand to me slowly and unwillingly…. When the hand-shaking was over, I inquired after their health [and] told them that their relatives abroad were taking a keen interest in their welfare…. [I] told them not to be frightened … but to have complete confidence in the Provisional Government. After that the Emperor and I went into the next room where I again assured him that they were safe…. He had fully recovered his impressive calm. He asked me about the military situation and wished us success in our difficult new task.”
In recalling the events of this day, Kerensky makes no mention of the arrest of Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn. Before leaving, both women briefly said goodbye to the Empress. “The last thing I remember,” wrote Anna, “was the white hand of the Empress pointing upward and her voice, ‘There we are always together.’” Alexandra’s last words to Lili were similar: “With a tremendous effort of will, she [Alexandra] forced herself to smile; then, in a voice whose every accent bespoke intense love and deep religious conviction, she said: ‘Lili, by suffering, we are purified for Heaven. This goodbye matters little. We shall meet in another world.’” Leaving her pet spaniel Jimmy behind, Anna stumbled on her crutches to the waiting car and climbed in beside Lili. “The car shot forward, and I left the palace at Tsarskoe Selo forever,” Anna later wrote. “Both Lili and I pressed our faces to the glass in a last effort to see those beloved we were leaving behind, and through the mist and rain we could just discern a group of white-clad figures crowded close to the nursery windows to see us go. In a moment of time the picture was blotted out and we saw only the wet landscape, the storm-bent trees, the rapidly creeping twilight.” In Petrograd, Lili was released the following day, but Anna was sent to spend five chilling months in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.
Six d
ays later, on April 9, Kerensky returned to the palace to begin an investigation of the Empress’s “treasonable, pro-German” activities. While the interrogation was under way, he ordered the Empress separated from her husband and children. At once, he ran into a storm of protest from both doctors and ladies-in-waiting, who declared that it was inhuman to separate a mother from her sick children. Kerensky relented and named Nicholas as the parent who would have to live apart. The couple were permitted to meet at prayers and meals, providing an officer was always present and only Russian was spoken.
Although the separation lasted for eighteen days, the investigation was casual and Kerensky learned nothing. His questioning of Alexandra was confined to a single session lasting one hour. As Benckendorff later described it, Kerensky began politely and mildly by asking about “the part the Empress had played in politics, [and] her influence on the Emperor in the choice of ministers whom she often had received in the absence of the Emperor. Her Majesty answered that the Emperor and herself were the most united of couples, whose whole joy and pleasure was in their family life, and that they had no secrets from each other; that they discussed everything, and that it was not astonishing that in the last years which had been so troubled, they had often discussed politics…. It was true that they had discussed the different appointments of ministers, but this could not be otherwise in a marriage such as theirs.” Benckendorff learned afterward that Alexandra had been impressed by Kerensky’s politeness and that Kerensky had been “struck by the clarity, the energy and the frankness of her words.” When the Minister came out, he said to the Tsar, who was waiting outside, “Your wife does not lie.” Quietly, Nicholas observed that this was scarcely news to him.
Questioning Nicholas, Kerensky learned even less. He asked why the Tsar had changed ministers so frequently, why he had appointed Stürmer and Protopopov and dismissed Sazonov, but Nicholas avoided answering directly and Kerensky quickly let the conversation drop. There was no further discussion of “treason” and Kerensky himself declared to his colleagues in the Provisional Government that the Empress Alexandra had been loyal to Russia.
As time passed and Kerensky continued to visit the palace, the relationship between the socialist minister and the deposed sovereign and his wife markedly improved. “Kerensky’s attitude toward the Tsar is no longer what it was at the beginning…. [He] has requested the papers to put an end to their campaign against the Tsar and more especially the Empress,” Gilliard wrote in his diary on April 25. Kerensky admitted that, during these weeks, he was affected by Nicholas’s “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful…. It cannot be said that my talks with the Tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former Emperor never once lost his equilibrium, never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.” On Nicholas’s part, Benckendorff noted that “the confidence which the Emperor felt in Kerensky increased still more … and the Empress shared this confidence.” Nicholas himself declared of Kerensky, “He is not a bad sort. He’s a good fellow. One can talk to him.” Later, Nicholas was to add, “He [Kerensky] is a man who loves Russia, and I wish I could have known him earlier because he could have been useful to me.”
Spring melted the snow, and in the afternoons the family began to go out together into the park. At first, they had to wait in the semicircular entry hall for an officer to come with the key, then file out, the Empress being pushed in her wheelchair, through a gauntlet of gaping, loitering soldiers, many of whom gibed and snickered as they passed. Sometimes, the men did more than mock: when Nicholas got his bicycle and started to pedal along a path, a soldier thrust his bayonet between the spokes. The Tsar fell and the soldiers guffawed. Yet Nicholas was unfailingly friendly even to those who insulted him. He always said “Good morning” and held out his hand. “Not for anything in the world,” declared one soldier, turning his back on the outstretched hand. “But, my dear fellow, why? What have you got against me?” asked Nicholas, genuinely astonished.
The news that the former Tsar and his family were walking under guard in the park attracted crowds who lined the iron fence to watch, whistle and jeer. At one point, an officer of the guard went up to Nicholas and asked him to move to avoid provoking the crowd any further. Nicholas, surprised, replied that he was not afraid and said that “the good people were not annoying him in any way.”
The line of guards with fixed bayonets, the restriction of movement to a corner of the park and, especially, the humilation of his father were hard for Alexis to understand and to bear. He had seen his father treated only with respect and reverence, and he blushed with shame whenever an incident occurred. Alexandra, too, flushed deeply when her husband was insulted, but she learned to keep silent. When the weather was fine, she sat near the pond on a rug spread beneath a tree. Usually, she was surrounded by a ring of curious soldiers. Once when Baroness Buxhoeveden, who had been sitting next to the Empress, got up, one of the men dropped with a belligerent grunt onto the rug beside Alexandra. “The Empress edged a little bit away,” wrote the Baroness, “making a sign to me to be silent, for she was afraid that the whole family would be taken home and the children robbed of an hour’s fresh air. The man seemed to her not to have a bad face, and she was soon engaged in conversation with him. At first he cross-questioned her, accusing her of ‘despising’ the people, of showing by not travelling about that she did not want to know Russia. Alexandra Fedorovna quietly explained to him that, as in her young days she had had five children and nursed them all herself, she had not had time to go about the country and that, afterwards, her health had prevented her. He seemed to be struck by this reasoning and, little by little, he grew more friendly. He asked the Empress about her life, about her children, her attitude towards Germany, etc. She answered in simple words that she had been a German in her youth, but that that was long past. Her husband and her children were Russians and she was a Russian, too, now, with all her heart. When I came back with the officer … to whom I had risked appealing, fearing that the soldier might annoy the Empress, I found them peacefully discussing questions of religion. The soldier got up on our approach, and took the Empress’s hand, saying, ‘Do you know, Alexandra Fedorovna, I had quite a different idea of you. I was mistaken about you.”
In May, a new officer assumed command of the Tsarskoe Selo garrison. Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky was a thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the Petrograd Life Guards who had twice been wounded at the front and then reassigned to one of the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Kobylinsky was not a revolutionary, simply an officer doing the duty assigned him by General Kornilov. Although in name he was their jailer, in fact Kobylinsky was deeply loyal to the Imperial family and, during the twelve months that he was with them, did much to buffer them from shocks. Nicholas well understood Kobylinsky’s situation, and from Siberia he wrote to his mother that Kobylinsky was “my last friend.”
There were limits, however, to what any officer could do with the obstreperous soldiery, and unpleasant incidents continued to happen. In June, Alexis was playing outside with the toy rifle which he had played with in the garden at Stavka. Suddenly, the soldiers spotted the gun and began to shout to each other, “They are armed.” Alexis, hearing the hubbub, went to this mother, who was sitting on the grass. A minute later, the soldiers arrived and demanded “the weapon.” Gilliard tried to intervene and explain that the gun was a toy, but the soldiers insisted and walked off with the gun. Alexis, in tears, looked from the Empress to the tutor; both were helpless. The gun was turned over to Colonel Kobylinsky, who was furious that his men had bothered the child. Carefully, he took the gun apart and, carrying it under his coat, returned it piece by piece to the Tsarevich. Thereafter, Alexis played with his rifle only behind the door of his room.
Despite harassment and humiliation, the family continued to go out every d
ay, happy for the chance to spend time in the fresh air. In the middle of May, they began digging up part of the park lawn to plant a vegetable garden. Together, they carried the grassy sod away, turned the soil, planted the seeds and brought water in tubs from the kitchen. Many of the servants helped; so did some of the soldiers, who discovered more pleasure in working beside the Tsar than in mocking him. In June, once the seeds were in, Nicholas turned to sawing up the dead trees in the park for firewood. Soon, piles of wood, neatly stacked, began to appear all over the park.
At night, tired from this exercise, the family sat quietly together before going to bed. One stifling evening in July, he was reading to the Empress and his daughters when an officer and two soldiers burst into the room shouting excitedly that a sentry in the park had seen someone signaling from the open window by flashing red and green lights. The men searched the room and found nothing. Despite the heat, the officer ordered the heavy curtains to be pulled shut—and at this moment the mystery was unraveled. Anastasia had been sitting in a window ledge doing needlework as she listened to her father. As she moved, bending to pick things up from a table, she had covered and uncovered two lamps, one with a red and the other with a green shade.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 57