Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family

by Robert K. Massie

  Before long, however, Soloviev’s behavior began showing odd twists. He left Pokrovskoe and settled not in Tobolsk, where the prisoners were, but in Tyumen, where he could keep watch on the railroad and monitor all contact between Tobolsk and the outside world. In time, his careful scrutiny of every north-bound traveler became unnecessary; those who were involved in anything to do with the Imperial family came straight to him, handed over the money they had brought and asked for instructions. Soloviev operated with ruthless efficiency. He insisted that all agents and funds be channeled through him. When other conservative monarchist groups attempted to operate outside his control, he announced that any additional attempts to contact the Imperial family would jeopardize the efforts which were already going forward. Occasionally, when necessary, Soloviev went so far as to declare that the Empress herself believed that the work of groups other than his was endangering their chance of escape.

  In time, of course, the other groups began to ask for evidence of Soloviev’s rescue plans. He replied that he had converted eight regiments of Red soldiers in the area to monarchism. To prove it, he took skeptics to watch the cavalry of the Tyumen garrison at drill. There, just as Soloviev had promised, the officer at the head of the squadron made a prearranged hand signal, indicating his adherence to the plot. When skeptics proved unusually stubborn, Soloviev sent them to Tobolsk to stand in the street near the governor’s house. As arranged through Romanova, a member of the Imperial family would step onto the balcony and make a carefully prescribed gesture.

  Despite these persuasive indications, there remained four stubbornly suspicious officers who still did not trust Soloviev. Why, they asked, was he passing his messages through a parlormaid when Dr. Botkin—more intelligent, more devoted and more trusted by the Imperial family—was available? Why, because a single officer responded at drill to Soloviev’s presence, did it follow that eight regiments stood ready to fight for the Tsar? Why did Soloviev continually assure Petrograd and Moscow that no more men should be sent but that they should show their support by advancing more money? The officers put these questions to Soloviev in January after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Tyumen. Immediately, three of the four officers were handed over to the Bolsheviks and shot; the fourth escaped.

  Needless to say, no rescue attempts occurred under Soloviev’s command. A few months later, when the Imperial family was moved from Tobolsk, Soloviev was conveniently arrested by the Bolsheviks, held for a few days and then released, thus providing him with a suitable alibi for doing nothing to prevent the transfer. During the civil war, he wandered with his wife through Siberia in the rear of the White armies, eventually reaching Vladivostock. From there, he made his way to Berlin, where he was hailed by unknowing Russians as the man who had tried to save the Imperial family; some of these grateful folk made him the manager of a restaurant.

  Subsequently, a number of isolated facts relating to Soloviev came to light. The cavalry officer who supplied hand signals at his squadron’s drill admitted that, of all his men, he alone had had anything to do with Soloviev. A Petrograd banker declared that he had raised 175,000 roubles and given them to Anna Vyrubova for transmission to the Imperial family. Of this sum, Soloviev had delivered only 35,000 roubles. As soon as the Imperial family left Tobolsk, Soloviev hurried there to talk to the maid Romanova; later, Romanova was to marry a Bolshevik commissar. In Vladivostock, Soloviev was arrested by the Whites and found to be in possession of documents indicating that he might be a German agent. However, his reputation as the gallant—if unsuccessful—“savior” of the Imperial family was strong, and he was released.

  Soloviev’s motives during his adventure in Tyumen have remained cloudy. He may have been only greedy. Having established an enormously profitable enterprise—in effect, a tollgate at Tyumen for everyone concerned with helping the Imperial family—he may have wished to extract what he could before he was forced to flee. But many believe that his intrigue was far more sinister. Kerensky later wrote, “In the Tobolsk region … the royalists were captained by the traitor Soloviev … who was sent there … to save and protect the family, but who was actually betraying to the Bolsheviks the royalist officers who came to Tobolsk.”

  It is possible that Soloviev was working for both the Bolsheviks and the Germans. It may be that his eager acceptance by Rasputin’s devotees, his introduction and marriage to Maria and his mission to Siberia were all arranged by the same shadowy people who lurked around Rasputin before his death. Unquestionably, this marriage was the surest way to gain the Empress’s confidence and persuade her not to seek other avenues of escape. With the Empress convinced that a strong, secret “Brotherhood” operating in the name of Rasputin stood ready to help, she naturally assisted Soloviev in discouraging other monarchists from making conflicting plans. In the end, whatever Soloviev’s motives, the effect was the same. When the moment came for the laboriously constructed, lavishly financed escape machinery to swing into action, it did not do so because it did not exist.

  In March, spring brought hope with the first warming rays of the sun. Sitting on her balcony in the sunshine, Alexandra closed her eyes and dreamed of English gardens. As Easter approached, she began to hope that some miraculous resurrection might happen for Russia. “God will not leave it like this,” she wrote to Anna. “He will send wisdom and save Russia I am sure…. The nation is strong and young and soft as wax. Just now it is in bad hands and darkness and anarchy reign. But the King of Glory will come and will save, strengthen, and give wisdom to the people who are now deceived.” Alexandra considered it a sign of this coming transformation that the soldiers changed their rules and allowed her to go frequently to church.

  Just at this point, an enemy older than the Bolsheviks rose up to shatter her hopes. Alexis had been well all winter and was filled with energy and high spirits. The destruction of the snow mountain had deprived him of an activity which had absorbed much of his vitality; in its place, he was devising new and reckless games which no one seemed able to inhibit. One of these—riding down the inside stairs on a boat with runners which he had used on the snow mountain—led to calamity. He fell and began to bleed into the groin. The hemorrhage was the worst since Spala five years before. The pain increased rapidly and became excruciating. When it became intolerable, Alexis gasped between his screams, “Mama, I would like to die. I am not afraid of death, but I am so afraid of what they will do to us here.” Alexandra, alone, without Rasputin to come or telegraph or pray, could do nothing. “He is frightfully thin and yellow, reminding me of Spala,” she wrote to Anna. “I sit all day beside him holding his aching legs and I have grown about as thin as he.”

  A few days later, in her last letter to Anna Vyrubova, the Empress described Alexis’s progress and mentioned a source of new alarm. “Yesterday for the first time, he smiled and talked with us, even played cards, and slept two hours during the day. He is frightfully thin with enormous eyes, just as Spala. He likes to be read to, eats little…. I am with him the whole day, Tatiana or Mr. Gilliard relieving me at intervals. Mr. Gilliard reads to him tirelessly, or warms his legs with the Fohn apparatus…. A great number of new troops have come from everywhere. A new commissar has arrived from Moscow, a man named Yakovlev and today we shall have to make his acquaintance. … They are always hinting to us that we shall have to travel either very far away or to the center of Siberia…. Just now eleven men have passed on horseback, good faces, mere boys…. They are the guard of the new commissar. Sometimes we see men with the most awful faces…. The atmosphere around us is … electrified. We feel that a storm is approaching, but we know that God is merciful … our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.”

  Alexandra sensed accurately that the political storm was upon them; what she could not know was that her son would never walk again.

  The collapse of Kerensky’s government had been even more swift and bloodless than the overthrow of the autocracy. In scarcely more than the passage of a single night, Leni
n stood at the helm of the new Soviet state. Nevertheless, his control over the huge territory of Russia was precarious. To consolidate their grip, the Bolsheviks had to have peace—at any price. The price set by the Germans was a terrible one: loss of most of the territory won by Russia since the days of Peter the Great, including Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, the Crimea and most of the Caucasus. Within these four hundred thousand square miles lived sixty million people, more than one third of the population of the empire. Yet Lenin had no choice. “Peace” was the cry which had brought him to power. Russian soldiers, prodded by the Bolsheviks’ own propaganda, were deserting by the millions. A German army was advancing on Petrograd, and the capital was moved to Moscow, but Russian soldiers could not be recalled to arms, least of all by the party which had promised them peace. Therefore, to save the revolution until, as he confidently expected, it spread to Germany itself, Lenin made peace. On March 3, 1918, in the town of Brest-Litovsk, now headquarters of the German Eastern Front, a Bolshevik delegation signed the German treaty. So humiliating were the terms and the German treatment of the Russian delegation that, after observing the ceremony, one Russian general went out and shot himself.

  When news of the treaty reached Tobolsk, Nicholas was overwhelmed with grief and shame. It was, as Lenin was well aware, a total rejection of Russian patriotism. Nicholas called it “a disgrace” and “suicide for Russia.” “To think that they called Her Majesty a traitor.” he said bitterly. The Tsar was appalled that the Kaiser, Europe’s most strident spokesman of the monarchical principle, had been willing to deal with the Bolsheviks. “I should never have thought the Emperor William and the German Government could stoop to shake hands with these miserable traitors,” he cried. “But they [the Germans] will get no good from it; it won’t save them from ruin.” Hearing a rumor that the Germans were demanding that the Tsar and his family be handed over to them unharmed, Nicholas called it “either a maneuver to discredit me or an insult.” Defiantly, Alexandra added, “They [the Germans] must never dare to attempt any conversations with Father [Nicholas] or Mother [herself]…. After what they have done to the Tsar, I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans.”

  Inevitably, once the fighting had ended, both Germans and Russians had more time to think of the Tsar and his family. Nicholas remained a symbol, a human pawn with potential value. To the Kaiser, who was indeed ashamed of his embrace of the Bolsheviks, a pliable Nicholas willing to endorse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would have had great value. The Bolsheviks, sensing this German interest, immediately understood that in whatever bargaining and maneuvering lay ahead, the Tsar must be kept beyond the Kaiser’s reach. As the soldiers in Tobolsk and their commander, Kobylinsky, were all still holdovers, from the Kerensky regime, the Bolshevik leaders resolved to place the Imperial family under more reliable guard.

  There was another factor which was to influence the fate of the Imperial family. Of all the regional Soviets which had sprung up in Russia, none was more fiercely Bolshevik than that which sat in the Ural Mountain city of Ekaterinburg. For years, the Ural miners and workers, toiling underground or before open blast-furnaces, had maintained a tradition of discontent and rebellion which had earned the area the name of the Red Urals. In 1917, well before the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the Ekaterinburg Soviet had nationalized the local mines and factories. For a reason quite different from the central government’s, this group of militant Bolsheviks was anxious to lay hands on the Tsar. Once in Ekaterinburg, the Tsar and his family would become not pawns in a game of international politics, but victims in a grim drama of retribution. In March, the Ural Regional Soviet asked permission from Moscow to bring the Imperial family to Ekaterinburg.

  Before Moscow could reply, a Bolshevik detachment from the city of Omsk suddenly arrived in Tobolsk. Omsk was the administrative capital of the province of Western Siberia and a rival of Ekaterinburg for supremacy in the regions east of the Urals. Technically, Tobolsk lay within the sway of Omsk, and this band of soldiers had come not to take away the Tsar, but to dissolve the local government and impose Bolshevism on the town. Pathetically, the Imperial family persisted in hoping that the Omsk soldiers were rescuers. The Empress, looking down from her window as they dashed by in troikas festooned with tinkling bells, happily waved and called her daughters to come and look out at “the good Russian men.” Nicholas also was hopeful. “His Majesty tells me he has reason to believe that there are among these men many officers who have enlisted in the ranks,” said Gilliard, who did not share this optimism. “He also asserts, without telling me definitely the source of his information, that there are three hundred officers at Tyumen.”

  On April 13, a detachment from Ekaterinburg under a commissar named Zaslavsky finally arrived in Tobolsk. Moscow still had not replied to the request to remove the Tsar from Tobolsk, and without this permission, neither Kobylinsky’s men nor the soldiers from Omsk would allow the family to be taken. Zaslavsky then suggested that they at least be moved to the local prison, where they could be strongly guarded. Kobylinsky refused and Zaslavsky’s men thereupon launched a campaign of propaganda, urging Kobylinsky’s soldiers to ignore the orders of their commandant. It was at this low point that Moscow directly intervened in the form of Commissar Vasily Vaslevich Yakovlev.

  From the beginning, an air of mystery attended Yakovlev. The prisoners were aware that someone important was coming from Moscow; there were rumors that it might be Trotsky himself. Instead, on April 22, Yakovlev arrived at the head of 150 horsemen, bringing with him a private telegraph operator through whom he communicated directly with the Kremlin. On his first evening in Tobolsk, he had tea with the Tsar and the Empress, but said nothing about his mission. They noted that he was around thirty-two or thirty-three, tall and muscular with jet-black hair and that, although he was dressed like an ordinary sailor, there was unmistakable evidence of a more cultured background. His language was refined, he addressed Nicholas as “Your Majesty” and greeted Gilliard by saying “Bonjour, Monsieur.” His hands were clean and his fingers long and thin. Despite these observations, the prisoners were not necessarily reassured. “Everyone is restless and distraught,” Gilliard wrote in his diary that night. “The commissar’s arrival is felt to be an evil portent, vague but real.”

  On the second morning, April 24, Yakovlev summoned Kobylinsky and showed him documents signed by Jacob Sverdlov, an intimate of Lenin who occupied the key administrative post of President of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. “The first document was addressed to me,” wrote Kobylinsky, “and ordered me to comply without delay with all requests of the Special Commissar Tovarich Yakovlev who had been assigned a mission of great importance. My refusal to execute these orders would result in my being instantly killed. The second document was addressed to the soldiers of our detachment…. It also carried a threat of the same penalty—i.e. courtmartial by a revolutionary tribunal and instant death.”

  Kobylinsky did not argue and, at Yakovlev’s request, took him to see Nicholas and Alexis. The Tsarevich was lying in bed, his leg still badly flexed from the recent hemorrhage. The commissar was disturbed by this sight. Later in the day, he returned with an army doctor, who examined Alexis and assured Yakovlev that the boy was seriously ill.

  Observing these movements, Gilliard became thoroughly alarmed. “We feel we are forgotten by everyone, abandoned to our own resources and at the mercy of this man. Is it possible that no one will raise a finger to save the Imperial family? Where are those who have remained loyal to the Tsar? Why do they delay?”

  On the morning of the 25th, Yakovlev finally revealed his mission to Kobylinsky. He explained that originally he had been assigned by the Central Executive Committee to take the entire Imperial family from Tobolsk. On arriving, his discovery that the Tsarevich was seriously ill had forced a reconsideration. By telegraph, he had been communicating steadily with Moscow. Now, he concluded, “I have received an order to leave the fami
ly in Tobolsk and only to take the Emperor away.” He asked to see the Tsar as soon as possible.

  “After lunch, at two o’clock,” said Kobylinsky, “Yakovlev and I entered the hall. The Emperor and Empress stood in the middle of the hall, and Yakovlev stopped a little distance away from them and bowed. Then he said, ‘I must tell you that I am the Special Representative of the Moscow Central Executive Committee and my mission is to take all your family away from Tobolsk, but, as your son is ill, I have received a second order which says that you alone must leave.’ The Emperor replied: ‘I refuse to go.’ Upon hearing this Yakovlev said: ‘I beg you not to refuse. I am compelled to execute the order. In case of your refusal I must take you by force or I must resign my position. In the latter case the Committee would probably send a far less scrupulous man to replace me. Be calm, I am responsible with my life for your safety. If you do not want to go alone, you can take with you any people you wish. Be ready, we are leaving tomorrow [morning] at four o’clock.”

  Yakovlev bowed again, first to the Tsar, then to the Empress, and left. As soon as he was gone, Nicholas summoned Kobylinsky and asked where he thought Yakovlev intended to take him. Kobylinsky did not know, but Yakovlev had mentioned that the journey would take four or five days; therefore, he assumed the destination was Moscow. Nicholas nodded and, turning to Alexandra, said bitterly, “They want to force me to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But I would rather cut off my right hand than sign such a treaty.” The Empress agreed and, harking back to the abdication, declared emotionally, “I shall also go. If I am not there, they will force him to do something in exactly the same way they did before.”