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 years, 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 é
migrés, 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 beginning 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.
Anna Vyrubova, after being taken by Kerensky from Tsarskoe Selo, was imprisoned for five months in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, released, then re-imprisoned several times, once in the stoker’s quarters of the former Imperial yacht Polar Star, whose polished decks she had walked with the Empress. For a while, she lived in obscurity in Petrograd and even became friendly with the revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky, who urged her to write her memoirs. Finally, pursued again, she escaped to Finland in 1920. She lived there quietly for forty-four years until her death in 1964 at the age of eighty.
Pierre Gilliard remained in Siberia for three years, assisting in the work of Sokolov’s investigation. With his wife, Alexandra Tegleva, who had been Grand Duchess Anastasia’s nurse, he returned to Switzerland by way of Japan and the United States and there, in his early forties resumed the education interrupted almost twenty years before when he went to Russia. He became a noted Professor of the French language at the University of Lausanne and was awarded the French Legion of Honor. To the end, through his writing and speaking, Gilliard defended the memory of the family he had served. He died in 1962 at eighty-three.
Iliodor, the fiery monk-priest who had been Rasputin’s arch-foe, went back to Russia after the revolution with a quixotic plan to revamp the Orthodox Church to suit the Bolsheviks and make himself the new “Russian Pope.” The Bolsheviks were uninterested, and in 1921, Iliodor came to New York City and became a Baptist. He lived in obscurity, working for a while as a janitor in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Madison Square. In 1952, at the age of seventy-one, he died of heart trouble in Bellevue Hospital.
Maria Rasputin, the starets’s eldest daughter, left Russia with her husband, Boris Soloviev, and became a lion-tamer. In the 1930’s, she toured Europe and the United States, billed as “the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world.” She now lives near the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles.
Now, in the winter of 1967, only a handful of the major characters in this immense historical drama remain alive. Mathilde Kschessinska, whose house was Lenin’s headquarters in Petrograd, left Russia in 1920 and married Grand Duke Andrei at Cannes in 1921. For thirty years, she conducted a ballet studio in Paris, instructing, among many others, Margot Fonteyn. In 1936, at the age of sixty-three, she danced in a jubilee performance at Covent Garden. Today, the young ballerina who rode through the snowy nights in a troika beside Nicholas II still lives in Paris. She is ninety-four.
Prince Felix Yussoupov and his wife, Princess Irina, have lived mostly in Paris, where Yussoupov’s generosity to other Russian émigrés has become legend. Two famous court cases have brought the Yussoupov name back into prominence. The first occurred in 1934, when Princess Irina sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for libel in London over a movie titled Rasputin the Mad Monk. The Yussoupovs won this case and MGM paid them $375,000. In 1965, Prince Yussoupov came to New York City to sue the Columbia Broadcasting System for invasion of privacy over a television play depicting the murder of Rasputin. This time, the Yussoupovs lost. Today, at seventy-nine, Prince Yussoupov lives in the Paris district of Auteuil in a small house converted from a barn.
Alexander Kerensky has lived in London, Paris, Palo Alto, California, and New York City. In the near half-century since leaving Russia, he has written a series of books, most of them an impassioned retelling of the story of the brief, hectic seven months in which he stood at the center of Russian history. Today, still vigorous at eighty-five, he lives in New York City and Palo Alto.
It is impossible to trace exactly the course of one of the overwhelming influences in this drama: the defective gene which Queen Victoria passed to her descendants. Until recently, when plasma and powerful plasma concentrates become available,
hemophilia, like other recessive hereditary diseases, tended to die out of afflicted families by the process of attrition. In Queen Victoria’s enormous clan, this pattern has been followed. Among the fourth generation—the Queen’s great-grandchildren—there were six hemophiliacs. Alexis was one of these. Two of the others were Crown Prince Alfonso and Prince Gonzalo, the sons of Alfonso XIII, the last king of Spain. Both brothers were killed as young men in automobile accidents, Gonzalo in Austria in 1934 and Alfonso in Miami in 1938. In both cases, except for uncontrolled hemorrhaging, their injuries would have been minor. The fifth generation of Victoria’s family, which includes both Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, has been free of hemophilia, as has the sixth. It is possible that the mutant gene may still exist in the carrier state among Queen Victoria’s female descendants and could suddenly appear in a future boy. But with the passing of successive generations, that possibility, already distant, will become exceedingly remote.
There is a durable legend that an immense pile of Romanov gold lies somewhere in a sealed bank vault awaiting the arrival of any member of the Tsar’s immediate family who can positively identify himself or herself. The facts do little to support the legend. Nothing was left of the Imperial family’s wealth inside Russia. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, all the Romanov estates and properties were taken by the Provisional Government. When Nicholas abdicated, his personal capital in Russia amounted to a million roubles, or $500,000; the Empress’s capital was one and a half million roubles, or $750,000. Portions of these sums were withdrawn by Count Benckendorff and used to pay the expenses of the Imperial family at Tobolsk; the rest was seized by the Bolsheviks. The jewelry belonging to the crown became the property of the state. Part of it was broken up and sold by the Soviet government; the residue makes up a dazzling permanent display in the Kremlin. Most of the personal jewelry taken by the Empress and her daughters to Tobolsk was discovered during the destruction of their bodies. The broken fragments later found by Sokolov were preserved as relics and later buried in the Russian cemetery outside Paris. Empress Marie’s personal jewelry, once estimated at a value over $2 million, was sold after her death for a fraction of that sum. A number of pieces found their way into the collection of Queen Mary. Today, Queen Elizabeth II often wears the Empress Marie’s spectacular diamond necklace and diamond tiara.
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 66