Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  Lenin had no love for the tsar – his own brother had been executed by Nicholas’s father. Soon after Brest-Litovsk the German ambassador to Moscow was assassinated and Lenin was terrified that the Germans might use the episode as an excuse to attack again. Civil war was breaking out in several parts of the country where White Russians loyal to the tsar were fighting the Bolsheviks. Lenin ordered the family to be moved again, this time to Ekaterinburg, later known as Sverdlovsk,1 in the Urals, where he felt confident of the loyalty of the local Soviet. At his accession the twenty-yearold Nicholas had wept, ‘What am I going to do? What is going to happen to me? . . . I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one.’ As a middle-aged man he had brought his country into the war to honour a treaty with Serbia, he had mobilized one and half million men in a week and seen half of that first draft killed or wounded. He had perhaps saved the West in 1914 but he had destroyed his own country in the years that followed. Now he was a prisoner, alone with the family he loved, except for a few loyal servants including his personal physician Dr Botkin and a cheerful sailor, Nogorny, who carried the haemophiliac child around in his arms. Once again Alexis had a bleeding episode and he and his sisters made a delayed entrance into their new prison, three weeks after their parents, on 24 May. At Ekaterinburg, the royal family was guarded by a Soviet commissar called Alexander Avadeyev, who drank heavily, stole from the family, invaded their privacy and drew obscene pictures of the tsarina and Rasputin on the lavatory wall, where the grand duchesses and the tsarevitch would see them. Nogorny, the loyal sailor, was murdered and the tsar now had to carry his son about the house himself.

  It is at this point that hard historical facts begin to fray into tattered threads of gossip and political propaganda. It was rumoured the Brest-Litovsk Treaty contained a secret clause whereby the Communists guaranteed the safety of the imperial family. The kaiser seems to have been genuinely solicitous of his cousin’s welfare and he would have benefited politically by being the saviour of the tsar. The tsarina, however, claimed ‘she would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans’. The kaiser’s daughter-in-law recalled, much later, that the tsar said he would not be saved ‘at any price. His attitude’, she went on, ‘much disturbed the German Emperor, who spent sleepless nights in mourning over the Romanovs’ fate.’

  Russia was vast, communications poor and the country was racked by civil war. To the west the war was entering a critical phase and each side knew that the renewal of war on the eastern front could well decide the outcome in the west. The Germans felt that they might gain the support of the monarchists if they aided them against the Bolsheviks. Many a Russian wanted to join the British and French and renew the war against Germany. Each side tried to keep its options open. Nicholas II had abdicated in favour of his brother Grand Duke Michail Alexandrovitch. The grand duke abdicated in turn but after the death of Nicholas the grand duke could still have been a centre of resistance. The Bolsheviks claimed that Michail had been assassinated in Perm on the night of 12–13 June 1918, a few weeks before Nicholas was murdered, but German diplomats in Russia continued to telegraph Berlin that the grand duke was still alive, claiming from St Petersburg on August 24, ‘Completely reliable and exact news that his Imperial Highness Grand Duke Michail is healthy and has been found in safety’. To this day no corpse and no unequivocal account of his death have been found.

  The last Tsar of all the Russias was killed in the early hours of 17 July 1918. That much has never been in dispute, and two days later Lenin interrupted the session of the Council of the People’s Commissars on public health legislation in St Petersburg with a dramatic message, ‘at Ekaterinburg, by a decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot’. The Council, none of whom knew any of the details, fell silent until Lenin said drolly, ‘Let us now go on and read the draft, clause by clause’. The official press communiqué added to the report of the tsar’s death: ‘The wife and son of Nicholas have been sent to a safe place.’ In spite of these comforting words it is clear that most or all of the rest of the family were also murdered. How the rest of the family died and what happened to the corpses has remained one of the greatest historical mysteries of the twentieth century.

  The tsar died in a house on Ascension Avenue in Ekaterinburg, belonging to an engineer called Ipatiev. A White Russian army was at the outskirts of the town and would capture it from the Bolsheviks a few days later. Before they died, on 12 July, the tsar and tsarina ‘constantly’ heard the cannon along the battlefront.

  Eight days later, the White Russians captured Ekaterinburg and later set up an inquiry into the fate of the royal family, chaired by Sokolov, a lawyer. Seven years later Nikolai Sokolov published a book, called Judicial Enquiry into the Assassination of the Russian Imperial Family (until the recent revelations this book was the basis for all later accounts). According to Sokolov, as the White Russians advanced on Ekaterinburg the family and their few remaining servants were shot in a basement room of their prison,2 their bodies were burnt and treated with 358 lb of sulphuric acid and any remains thrown down a flooded mine shaft 30 ft deep. Certainly there were bullet-holes and blood in the house where the Romanovs had been held, but there were no reliable first-hand witnesses and human bodies are difficult to destroy completely. Even though the mine-shaft was drained and explored during the White Russian occupation of Ekaterinburg, only one human finger, a few other bone fragments (never proved to be human), and some false teeth were recovered. None of the royal family had false teeth but their personal physician Dr Botkin wore them.

  Regicide, inevitably, is the stuff of drama. Those who ordered the execution and those who carried it out were perfectly aware of the historical significance of what they were doing, yet for a series of understandable reasons, the details became blurred, confused, hidden and filled with false leads.

  The authorities running the Urals Soviet responsible for Ekaterinburg, the party bosses in Moscow and the Cheka (the secret police predecessor of the KGB) all played a role in controlling the execution, but each wanted the story told in a different way. The soldiers were zealous to shoot the tsar but reluctant to kill the daughters. The family was killed in a basement by a crowd of soldiers, firing partially blind, into a room rapidly filling with smoke. Several of the soldiers were drunk, almost to the point of incapacity. The women were wearing the equivalent of flak jackets, the like of which the world has never seen before and will never see again.

  In the years that followed, tens of millions of Russians were to be shot, starved or beaten to death (including all but one of those who gave the order to execute the tsar). Under Stalin historical facts were subservient to propaganda needs. The key documents, particularly the diaries of the royal couple and several written statements by eyewitnesses were unread, apparently even by the bureaucrats who looked after them, and even physical evidence of the deaths was poorly analysed and went unpublished. It took the light of glasnost to unravel most – but perhaps still not all – of what had happened in the Ipatiev house in the hot summer of 1918.

  Edvard Radzinsky is a major contemporary Russian playwright, who trained as an historian and who has recently had access to the Central State Archives to the October Revolution. To his astonishment he was shown all the diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra. The tsar had filled fifty notebooks on his day-to-day life, beginning shortly after the assassination of his grandfather Alexander II in May 1868, until a few hours before his own assassination. In the late 1970s a colleague who knew of Radzinsky’s interest had copied a critical document from the Museum of the Revolution, although at the time she called it ‘abstract knowledge’ and was certain he would not be able ‘to talk about all this any time in the next hundred years’. Slowly, however, material was declassified and in 1989 Radzinsky published the first eyewitness account of the tsar’s death. It opened a floodgate of information from around what was still the Soviet Union. There was even a Russian version of ‘Deep Throat’ who telephoned and visited anonymously with key items
of information. Radzinsky’s book Zhisn i smert Nikolaia II was published in English as The Last Tsar in 1992.

  From the Bolshevik perspective Nicholas was a danger, in the sense that if a White Russian army recaptured him he would become the focus of anti-Communist opposition. The military commissar for the Urals, Filipp Goloshchekin wanted ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ or the ‘Crowned Hangman’, as they called him, dead, but was afraid to move without Moscow’s approval. Moscow wanted to be rid of the Romanovs, but was afraid of international criticism.

  A trap was laid by the Cheka. Friends of the royal family were given permission to send food to the Ipatiev house. The Cheka wrote notes, hidden in milk bottles and written in bad student-French suggesting rescue. The tsar wrote in his diary for 16 June: ‘Spent an uneasy night and kept vigil fully dressed. All this because a few days ago we received two letters, one after the other, telling us to prepare to be abducted by some loyal people! The days have passed, though, and nothing has happened, and the waiting and uncertainty have been very trying.’

  Cleverly, the windows of the family’s living quarters had been whitewashed and sealed so the family looked forward to their brief walks in the garden behind the high fence, away from the stifling conditions indoors. While they were in the garden the diary was read. Goloshchekin had his ‘evidence’; he went to Moscow, saw Lenin and the execution was agreed. It was characteristic of the tsarina to insist that the notes in the milk bottles were genuine, but why did Nicholas record the plot in his diary? Was it plain stupidity, or did he believe, as Radzinsky suggests, that by sacrificing himself his family might escape, just as he believed that by abdicating he could still preserve the throne for his brother?

  For the Communists the military situation was deteriorating. On 12 June the Ural Soviet agreed unanimously to the execution of the royal family. Goloshchekin didn’t tell them that Moscow had already agreed. The Commander-in-Chief on the Ural front told him to proceed. Now he had authority from three different sources, but even so he sent one final telegram to make assurance doubly sure: ‘To Moscow, the Kremlin, Sverdlov,3 copy to Lenin. From Ekaterinburg transmit the following directly: inform Moscow that the trial agreed upon with Filipp due to military circumstances cannot bear delay, we cannot wait. If our opinion is contrary inform immediately. Goloshchekin, Safarov.’

  The royal family had no way of knowing their assassination plans were so advanced but they were having a difficult time: Alex had migraines and sat for long hours with cold compresses on her head. Nicholas had painful haemorrhoids and couldn’t sit and the young tsarevitch had another episode of bleeding and couldn’t walk. A new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, from the secret police, was appointed at the Ipatiev house. He ingratiated himself by examining Alexei’s leg, and listed all the family’s valuables under the pretext that the garrison might steal things. There was a lot to steal and the soldiers suspected it. The tsarina loved secrets and for years had used special codes in letters to her husband. In letters to the family in Tobolsk she called jewellery ‘medicines’ and said it was ‘extremely important’ to bring them to Ekaterinburg. Tatiana had double bodices sewn for herself and her sisters, concealing diamonds and pearls between the two layers. Yurovsky suspected, but could not prove, that other fabulous wealth existed in addition to his formal lists of family valuables. The men of the guard had all been replaced.

  On the evening of 16 July the tsar and tsarina read the Bible, played bezique and went to bed early. Goloshchekin did not receive Lenin’s confirmation of his telegram until about midnight. A lorry to collect the corpses arrived at the house at 1.30 a.m., and Yurovsky issued revolvers to twelve men. The royal family and their few retainers were woken and told that because of increased fighting around Ekaterinburg it would be safer if they moved to the basement. It took 40 minutes for them to dress; no doubt it took time for the four daughters to climb into their jewel-laden bodices.

  Yurovsky shepherded his victims, the tsar, as he so often did, carrying his haemophiliac son, to the half-cellar, selected because it would muffle the gun-shots and the bullets would not ricochet off the plaster walls. Yurovsky seems to have allayed the group’s fears by saying there were malicious rumours that the family were dead, so he was going to photograph them. Chairs were brought for Alix and her son and everyone else arranged themselves in two neat, convenient lines against the wall opposite the door. Instead of a camera, the twelve soldiers with their pistols were called to the doorway. Yurovsky now read from a scrap of paper: ‘In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive has decided to execute you.’ ‘What, what?’ asked the tsar. Yurovsky repeated the statement. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do’, breathed Nicholas. Alix and Olga began making the sign of the cross, but the bullets began to fly before they could finish.

  Killing people can be curiously difficult. In the middle of the night, after a bout of heavy drinking, twelve soldiers were crowded into a narrow doorway, to shoot a family they had been brought up to believe was almost divine. They held their pistols in outstretched arms and they were so close together that those at the front got powder burns on their hair and necks from the guns of those behind.

  The tsar and tsarina fell quickly, but the rest of the group began running round the room, now becoming opaque with smoke. For the rest of their lives, the soldiers would argue over who had the honour of actually pulling the trigger on the tsar, but only a few minutes earlier, Yurovsky had to replace two of the soldiers because they ‘refused to shoot the girls’. Something amazing was happening. In Yurovsky’s written account he says ‘the bullets from the revolvers bounded off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping around the room like hail’ – the bodices had turned into diamond-studded flak jackets! Even the haemophiliac Alexei survived the first hysterical shooting, as did two of the daughters, the lady-in-waiting and Dr Botkin. If this seems improbable it should be recalled that the present King Hussein of Jordan owes his life to the fact that a bullet ricocheted off the medals on his chest when his father, King Abdullah of Jordan, was assassinated in 1951.

  The ‘Crowned Hangman’ had been executed, but it was more difficult to murder the women. The commandant tried to reassert his control: firing from the doorway was stopped. Yurovsky emptied a clip of bullets into the survivors. Then he ordered the victims bayoneted. The lady-in-waiting ‘grabbed the bayonet in both hands and began screaming’, wrote the commander: ‘Later they got her with their rifle butts’.

  An effort was made to disentangle the bodies and feel for pulses. It was 20 minutes since the royal family had been brought into the room. The bodies were carried on sheets and loaded into the lorry. The soldiers began to loot watches and other valuables. Another eyewitness (Alexander Strekotin) takes up the story: ‘When they laid one of the daughters on the stretcher she cried out and covered her face with her arm. The other [daughters] also turned out to be alive. . . . Ermakov took my bayonet from me and started stabbing everyone dead who turned out to be alive.’

  But Peter Zakharovitch Ermakov was even more drunk than most of his comrades. Yurovsky also witnessed this resurrection, adding, ‘When they tried to stab one of the girls with a bayonet, the point would not go through her corset’. Ermakov had been delegated the job of disposing of the bodies, but he seemed so incapable that Yurovsky decided to stay with the lorry. In later years Ermakov claimed he fired the first bullets that night and also wrote down his recollections, although they were inaccurate, his memory being blurred with alcohol. He began: ‘The good fortune befell me to carry out the ultimate proletarian Soviet justice against the human tyrant, the crowned autocrat. . . . I was honoured to fulfil my obligation before my people and country and took place in the execution of the tsar’s entire family.’

  But Ermakov was also commissar of a nearby region and, privately, he had promised his companions to bring out the duchesses alive – ‘We’re not shooting womenfolk! Just the men!’ he told them. It was the middle of the night, alcoh
ol and adrenaline were circulating in his veins, Ermakov wanted the girls alive, the bayonet would not go through the corset of the girl who cried out: how long did she live on the lorry?

  Ermakov had selected an abandoned mine about 11 miles from Ekaterinburg to dispose of the dead. When the lorry arrived near the place at about dawn, about twenty-five of Ermakov’s rowdy friends were waiting: ‘Why didn’t you bring them to us alive?’, they called, remembering the promised sexual pleasures. In the hope of finding something to loot, the local men pretended they could not find the mine-shaft. Eventually, Yurovsky ordered the corpses laid on the ground and stripped naked. He noted later, ‘When they began undressing the girls, they saw a corset torn in places by bullets and through the opening they saw diamonds’. Eventually, 18 pounds of diamonds were recovered.4 The clothes were burnt and the bodies thrown down a shallow shaft with water at the bottom: a hand grenade was thrown in. This may account for the finger later found in the mine.

  Twenty-five drunken men, extras to a climactic moment in history, do not keep quiet. Within a few hours Yurovsky realized that everyone knew about the previous night’s events. He spent the day looking for another hiding place and twenty-four hours after he had begun the execution he used a small party of men to recover the corpses from their wet grave. Botkin’s teeth and the finger were evidently left behind.

  What happened next is described in conflicting terms by three eyewitnesses. Yurovsky claims that the corpses were carried a long way. Two (Alexei and the lady-in-waiting) were burnt and disfigured with sulphuric acid and the rest were buried in a 6-foot deep grave. A lorry was finally run backwards and forwards over the site. Ermakov bombastically claims that he recovered the bodies himself and then, near the first grave, all the corpses were cremated: ‘The bodies burned to ash, which was buried.’ Lyukhanov, who drove the lorry carrying the corpses on both journeys, was exceedingly secretive and never wrote down his memories. His wife, a party idealist, left him shortly after the killings but ‘forgave her husband’ before she died. Forgave what?