Studies have shown that the Kaiser was fully aware of the plan to return Lenin to Russia and even joked about it.41 To win the war, his generals needed Russia to fall to the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and the Kaiser did not think too closely about the price that might be paid – not just by his Russian cousins but by future generations.
In that turbulent summer of 1917 a second of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters would lose her throne: Queen Sophie of Greece and her husband, Constantine of Greece.
Like her cousins, Queen Maud of Norway and Queen Ena of Spain, Sophie had supported her husband’s neutrality during the war – but neutrality proved to be no easy option. Spain and Norway suffered from trade wars, leading to such hardships that there were food riots in Spain. Nowhere were the dangers of neutrality greater than in Greece, where Queen Sophie was a sister of the Kaiser, and like her cousin, Alix, was suspected of being a spy. From the very outset the German emperor did indeed threaten Sophie and Constantine that Greece would be treated ‘as the enemy’ unless they joined the Central Powers.42 But the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, backed Britain and her allies. When the Greek king and queen refused to support the Gallipoli campaign in the eastern Mediterranean in 1915, the Entente launched a vicious campaign against them.
The hatred inspired by French and British propaganda was so intense it almost cost Sophie and Constantine their lives. There was an oppressive heat on 14 July 1916 when a column of smoke was spotted rising over their summer palace at Tatoi near Athens. They took the car to investigate but in moments it was trapped. They had driven into a forest blaze, the sparks jumping twenty feet and creating a fiery wall in seconds. There was no time to turn the car around; Sophie grabbed her youngest daughter and fled back to the palace while Constantine tried unsuccessfully to reach others in their party. Seventeen members of the royal household lost their lives that day. Police soon found a pile of used petrol containers near the palace. Arsonists had tried to kill the royal family.43
To pressure the Greeks to turn against their neutral king and queen, the Entente bombed Athens and blockaded the country. By Christmas 1916 Sophie was driven to despair and finally turned to her brother for help. The Allies were ‘trying to rouse the people against us’, she explained on 26 December. ‘A decisive and prompt attack [on your] part . . . would mean for us the deliverance from the horrible situation in which we are.’44 She encouraged the German emperor to launch an attack in Macedonia. All will be ‘lost’, she telegrammed again on 2 January 1917, ‘if the attack does not take place immediately’. Her message to her brother one week later expressed her feelings against the French and British. ‘May the infamous pigs receive the punishment they deserve! I embrace you affectionately. Your isolated and afflicted sister, who hopes for better times. Sophie.’45
A crisis was reached in June 1917 when the Entente presented the Greek prime minister with an ultimatum. The Greek king and queen must go into exile. If they failed to obey, Greece would be occupied and Athens bombarded again. Constantine and Sophie bowed to the pressures. Hurried enquiries were made as to which country would have them. Once again the British press was hostile and George V objected to a request for them to settle on the Isle of Wight. In this once honorary ‘club of monarchs’ for a second time the British king found good reason not to help a cousin.
On 11 June Constantine and Sophie drove to the coast where their yacht was moored. An anxious crowd had gathered and as the king and queen set out, people waded into the sea after them, calling for them to return. Sophie and Constantine made their way into ignominious exile in Switzerland, the cries of the people fading into the night as the Greek coast gradually slipped from view.
‘Flaming Russia’ appeared to Queen Marie of Romania ‘a close and terrifying reality’ during the summer of 1917, where ‘anything could happen’ as Bolshevik ideas spread across the country. Romania relied on its Russian ally, but discipline collapsed among the Russian soldiers. Their regiments in Romania turned against their officers and there was an air of menace among the men. ‘Our hour of disaster seems to be coming nearer and nearer,’ Marie wrote, feeling ‘waves of anxiety which almost amount to panic’. The prospect of fleeing Romania was unthinkable: ‘My grief over the situation is so great that I am like one great wound.’46 Marie was even more stunned by a long letter from her sister, Victoria-Melita, in Russia, a ‘soul torturing letter . . . full of the blackest despair, and deepest most hopeless agony’. It was as though everything familiar and good in their lives was being swallowed up. Victoria-Melita felt there was nothing left, ‘neither pride, nor hope, nor money, nor future and the dear past blotted out by the frightful present’.47
Although George V had declined to help his cousins Nicholas and Alexandra in Russia or Sophie in Greece, he did offer asylum to Marie. Romania had been a loyal ally. Possibly he still remembered those carefree Malta days and the princess he had once hoped to marry. Marie declined his help. Even though the Romania she knew was disappearing before her eyes, nothing would induce her to leave. The advance of the Central Powers was rapid. The German emperor was ‘triumphantly promenading about the invaded part of our country’, she wrote. For Marie, her Cousin Wilhelm now represented ‘a brutal, a merciless tyranny’.48
In Britain, too, a virulent hatred of anything German was sweeping the country. As German ‘Gotha’ planes bombed British cities in the spring of 1917, the German roots of the royal family were called into question. The many German royal marriages in Queen Victoria’s era now prompted awkward questions. During a stormy debate in the House of Commons the chancellor was asked whether he could ‘state the names of all Royal or titled persons of German birth receiving pensions from the British taxpayer – some of whom were even living in Germany!’ Was any ‘redistribution of this money contemplated in view of the hardships endured by families of soldiers killed at the front?’49 Such anti-German sentiment towards the royal family was growing. Even Lloyd George referred to the king as ‘my little German friend’.50
George V had already distanced himself from his Russian and Greek cousins. Now he was urged to obscure his German origins. The British royal family name was ‘Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’, passed down the line from his German grandfather, Prince Albert. For Queen Victoria the ties to Coburg were sacrosanct and the many illustrious connections to Germany resounded through family names such as Battenberg, Hanover, Teck and Saxony. But such German ties ‘have become utterly offensive to all true Britons’, observed one press report.51 The connections had to go. It was not just, as Victoria-Melita had written, ‘the dear past blotted out’. Aspects of King George’s very identity had to be effaced. His private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, alighted on the perfect solution: ‘Windsor’, a name resonant with all things British, conjuring up the solid security of the ancient castle that towered over the Home Counties and reached back through centuries of British history to medieval times. A royal proclamation on 17 July 1917 confirmed that all German names and honours would go. Battenberg became Mountbatten and the ‘House of Windsor’ was born.52
Over the summer of 1917 the former tsar and tsarina began to feel the consequences of George V’s decision not to grant them asylum. Russia’s Provisional Government lost its authority following heavy military losses, while Lenin’s Bolsheviks held out the promise of ‘Peace! Bread! Land!’ The mood in Petrograd was ugly with half a million demonstrators on 16 July roaming the streets and mingling with the thousands of deserters. The royal family were secretly moved during August from Petrograd to Siberia and imprisoned in the remote town of Tobolsk, lost in a subarctic wilderness. ‘We live as in a ship at sea,’ Nicholas wrote to his sister, Xenia, confined in a small space, the days ‘all very much alike’.53
Assisted by German funds, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party gained supporters in the large industrial cities, and on 7 November he and his party overthrew the Provisional Government. To strengthen his hold on power Lenin advocated violence ‘in the interests of the people’ to establish his Commun
ist Party. ‘Terror reigns everywhere,’ wrote Marie of Romania on hearing of the collapse of law and order in Russia. ‘It is the old story, the French revolution over again, probably worse. It fills me with horror.’54 Lenin wanted to secure peace with Germany, but the Kaiser’s armies progressed deep into Russian heartlands, almost to Petrograd, before a settlement was agreed. In March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk peace was signed between the Bolsheviks and the Kaiser and his generals. Lenin had surrendered some 400,000 square miles to the Germans, including Poland, Finland, the Ukraine and the Crimea.
Nicholas was devastated. For him, the ‘Bolshevik scoundrels’ had committed Russia to ‘suicide’.55 Lenin was no more than a German-funded ‘traitor’. The part played by the German emperor added to Nicholas’s grief. For Alix the idea of her own cousin triumphing over their abject defeat, celebrating his ‘victor’s peace’, and gloating over a map of Russia as regions were dismembered between German allies, was too much to bear. The appalling terms of the peace deal made her family’s suffering meaningless. ‘All things for us are in the past,’ she wrote despairingly to a friend.56 When she heard that the Kaiser was asking for the Russian royal family to be sent to Germany, she was resolute: ‘I would rather die.’57
The Kaiser also tried repeatedly to reach Ella through the Swedish Embassy. He had loved her once and now he did not forget her ‘on the eve of terrible happenings’, observed Yusupov in his memoirs. Ella, too, declined. She would not abandon her sister, or her new sisters who shared her life in the Order of Saints Martha and Mary. She sent word that ‘she would never leave her convent, or Russia, of her own free will’.58
In late April 1918 a commissar travelled from Moscow to Tobolsk, his very arrival ushering in a renewed air of threat for Alix and Nicholas. Civil war had erupted across Russia between the Red Army that supported Lenin and the White Army that represented, amongst others, monarchists and foreign armies. Lenin had hoped to bring the former tsar to trial in Moscow, but recognising the complications he liaised instead with the Ural Soviet, one of the most virulently Bolshevik of all the Soviets. The train carrying the prisoners was intercepted by troops who moved them to their final destination: the mining town of Ekaterinburg in the Urals. They were confined within Ipatiev House, now redesignated ‘House of Special Purpose’.
Yakov Yurovsky, who headed the Bolshevik guard watching over the Romanov family, received his final orders on 13 July 1918. There would be no trial. The Ural Soviet had decided the fate of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ and his family. The weight of evidence indicates that Lenin approved the orders but took steps to ensure there were no official documents revealing his involvement.
At 1.30 a.m. on 17 July the imperial family was woken and told there was unrest in the town. They had to be moved to a different location. While supposedly awaiting transport, they were taken across the dark courtyard to the cellar – an empty room, the window barred with a grille like a prison. Alexandra asked for chairs. Two were brought in, one for Alexandra, while Nicholas placed Alexei beside her in the other. The young grand duchesses duly lined up behind them as though they were about to have their photograph taken; beside them stood their loyal doctor, valet, cook and maid.
There was silence. No reassuring sound of their escort arriving. No familiar faces.
Yurovsky returned, followed by his band of executioners. They piled into the room after him through the small doorway. As their numbers kept increasing, twelve in all, it was apparent these were not their guards for a journey. The men lined up opposite the frightened family like a firing squad.
‘In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia,’ said Yurovsky, ‘the Ural Executive committee has given orders to shoot you.’
For a split second, Nicholas moved instinctively forward to protect his wife and son.
‘What? What . . .’ he began.
Yurovsky and his men fired at him at point-blank range.59
The former tsar fell to the floor.
Nicholas was spared the horror of seeing the fate of his daughters and son, an execution so grim that it has gone down in the annals of history as a symbol of the brutality of the new Soviet regime. The soldiers fired a volley of shots, enough to mow them down. There was utter confusion. Unaccountably, the girls refused to die. The bullets ricocheted off them. Even those that fell did not appear to be dead, clinging to their youthful lives amongst the growing wreckage of their family.
The killing became frenzied, the young princesses trapped in the small room fighting for their lives. It was incomprehensible, as though they were not made of mortal flesh. The maid also was strangely invulnerable, running against the back wall, trying to avoid the bullets by holding out a cushion. Plaster began to fall off the wall behind the prisoners, obscuring the soldiers’ view with clouds of dust. The floor became slippery, covered in blood. The slaughter continued in the reduced visibility created by firing so many bullets.
‘We set about finishing them off,’ recorded Yurovsky later. The maid was stabbed, her hands sliced to shreds as she tried to protect herself from the bayonets. The girls’ final cries were haunting even for the most committed of revolutionaries. Still, the carnage was not over. Groans were heard from Alexei, who had been protected by his father’s body. The squad turned on him with kicks and blows until Yurovsky shot him in the head. Anastasia was the last to die, bludgeoned and finally shot in the head. At last silence presided over the mutilated bodies of individuals, who, only a short time before, had been enveloped in the certainty that they were the resplendent, the only true rulers created by God of the mightiest empire in the world.
For the efficient Yurovsky this was just one more order, successfully carried out. Now it was time to clear up the mess. The bodies were loaded onto the waiting vehicle and taken to a site in the Koptyaki Forest a few miles away. As the bodies were stripped, precious stones fell from the duchesses’ clothing. Their bodices were almost entirely lined with prized gems that had protected them from the bullets, prolonging their agonising death. The bodies were doused with sulphuric acid and thrown in a disused pit. But daylight was approaching and the killers were desperate to conceal the evidence. Over the following two nights Yurovsky struggled to conceal their bodies despite ordering gallons of sulphuric acid and gasoline. The mighty Romanovs ended in a shallow grave by a roadside, their faces disfigured with blows to the head and acid burns. Alexei and Maria were dismembered, burnt and buried in a separate pit nearby.
As evidence of these murders was being hidden in the woods near Ekaterinburg on 17 July, the Ural Soviet determined the fate of Alix’s older sister, Ella. She had been taken from the Martha and Mary Convent in late April and was now imprisoned in a disused school in Alapayevsk in the Urals along with several younger members of the Romanov family.
Ella and her relatives were woken in the night. Blindfolded, hands bound, they were driven into the surrounding forest. The carts stopped in a clearing and Ella was led first to the edge of a mine shaft some sixty feet deep. She was stunned with a blow from a rifle butt before being flung, still alive, into the shaft. But there was water below and one of the executioners, Vassili Ryabov, later claimed that they listened to her struggles ‘for some time’. They threw in her companion, Sister Varvara, only to hear more splashing ‘and then the two women’s voices’. One by one the men followed. According to Ryabov’s account – no doubt much embellished in the retelling – voices could still be heard and so he threw down a grenade. When sounds continued to rise from below, ‘I threw another grenade and what do you think? From beneath the ground I heard singing. I was seized with horror. They were singing the prayer, Lord Save your People.’ The executioners gathered wood and lit a fire in the mine shaft. Even this did not silence the hymns, which ‘rose up through the thick smoke for some time yet’. Eventually the singing stopped. No sound came from the shaft.60
Eighteen members of the Romanov family were murdered by the Bolsheviks and the rest fled, bringing a horrific end to on
e of the world’s most legendary dynasties. The Romanovs had forged the rise of the Russian Empire over 300 years and unintentionally had taken a leading role in its demise.
‘The blood of the unhappy tsar is not at my door; not on my hands,’ the German emperor declared when he heard the news.61 Profoundly shaken, he seemed unable to grasp, or perhaps refused to grasp, any part he had played in the downfall of the last tsar and his family. But within a couple of weeks the Kaiser, too, had to face the reckoning.
It had taken over a year for the Americans to train and transport an army across the Atlantic, but at last, in the summer of 1918, the Americans were ready. To the overwhelming gratitude of the exhausted British and French troops on the western front, young men from America began to arrive in France at a rate of 10,000 a day. Shaking, nervous, Kaiser Wilhelm was stunned on 8 August 1918 when he learned of a new Allied offensive led by the British at Amiens, Germany’s ‘black day’.62 The German war machine appeared to be at breaking point.
German troops continued to be beaten back and many surrendered. Ahead was humiliation, past glories stripped away. In early September the Kaiser retreated to his bed in a state of nervous collapse.63 When he surfaced he found it hard to grasp the fast-changing situation. His surroundings on the imperial train bore potent reminders of his proud heritage: a photograph of him taking tea with Queen Victoria in the grounds of Osborne; a world apart, so safe and secure, from the closing years of the previous century. He could not accept that all this had gone.
Rallying on 10 September 1918 the Kaiser told Krupp workers in Essen that they must labour with renewed vigour, ‘to you with your hammer . . . to me upon my throne’. With fanatical zeal he announced to the crews at Kiel that traitors would be shot.64 But soon he learned that Bulgaria and Turkey could no longer fight. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was close to collapse. Germany could not continue alone. Confusion reigned in the German high command.
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