The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  For this Nicholas did not like him.

  Nor did the suite—Dolgorukov and Tatishchev—to Pankratov’s astonishment, understand anything either. They never stopped demanding that the tsar be allowed to take walks, citing Kerensky’s promise. Meanwhile, their own walks around town had already begun to provoke grumbling. The soldiers on the street warned the commissar with a chuckle: “If the prince [Dolgorukov] doesn’t stop roaming around town, we’re going to beat him up for starters.” Russia was on the rampage.

  The good Pankratov put up with Nicholas’s dislike. He had long since forgiven him for the fortress and fourteen years of his life. Now he simply saw Nicholas as the father of a large family who had absolutely no understanding of this terrible new life. Pankratov became attached to Nicholas’s children and gave the duchesses a book he had written about his sufferings and wanderings through Siberia. The girls read it aloud and liked it. He volunteered to be Alexei’s geography teacher. Nonetheless, Nicholas did not like him.

  In Dr. Botkin’s papers I found a poem that evidently enjoyed great success at that time in Freedom House, a poem written in an elegant hand similar to the empress’s:

  Whispering mirrors.

  Mirrors in the sad quiet

  Of the Winter Palace,

  Reflect the brazen glance

  Of a shaven face.

  In every hall, indifferent,

  In every corner,

  Someone in a jacket

  Gazes upon his greatness.

  Once yielding to the dazzle,

  The country’s hero imagines,

  That all must fall before him

  In humble worship.

  That the road to splendid glory

  Lies before him.

  Barely audible, though, in reply,

  The mirrors whisper:

  “What care we for empty speeches,

  Impertinent newcomer,

  The triumph of centuries past

  Guards this palace.

  Power glorious, imperial,

  Shadows incorporeal.

  No momentary guest shall drive away

  The guests of ages past….

  … Stop! Never forget too long

  Of the crown of the tsar,

  He will rise up soon, rise up terribly,

  Yellow dawn,

  … So, witnesses of the past,

  Just as the gloom appears—

  The mirrors whisper the word.

  The coming truth.”

  TOBOLSK 1917

  To Nicholas, Pankratov was also a typical civilian with the audacity to lead soldiers. Like a true Romanov, Nicholas did not look favorably upon men who lacked military bearing.

  That was why Pankratov remained the “little man.”

  The soldiers of the guard too, following Nicholas’s lead, despised the good commissar and obeyed only Colonel Kobylinsky, who had been appointed commandant at Tsarskoe Selo by General Kornilov, having recommended himself as a devoted supporter of the February Revolution and the Duma.

  But the colonel had changed greatly since then. He did try to do his duty, but … Nicholas’s strange charm … his gentleness and delicacy, and those charming little girls, and the empress, so helpless in her arrogance. That was the colonel’s portrait of the family, and more and more he was beginning to feel responsible for their fate.

  “I have given you what is most precious, Your Excellency, my honor.” He had every right to say that to Nicholas.

  The colonel began to feel close to Nicholas and his family. Thus, in that quiet town, where the sole military force were those 330 riflemen guarding the family, their commander was heart and soul on the side of the tsar—a strange puzzle.

  The head of the guard was for the tsar. The riflemen received endless gifts from the family. Dr. Botkin’s daughter wrote very specifically: “During those months [from August to the October Revolution], the family could have escaped. The guard most definitely would have helped them.”

  Quiet Tobolsk, the influence of the mighty Archbishop Hermogen—everything ought to have facilitated an escape.

  Clearly Kerensky had sent them to Tobolsk with the secret intention of creating the conditions for their liberation (as if their flight would have simplified his life). That was why he chose the quiet and very good-hearted Pankratov to watch over the family.

  Nonetheless, they did not flee. Why?

  THE TSARIST CACHE

  Kobylinsky’s deputy in the guard was a certain Captain Aksyuta, who ran the affairs of the entire detachment—quite a noteworthy individual. Two years later, in the heat of the Civil War, in the bloody year 1919, a White officer, Count Mstislav Gudovich, was traveling through the unimportant town of Eisk, where he saw a familiar face, that of Captain Aksyuta, whom the count had known during his service at Tsarskoe Selo.

  Aksyuta invited him to spend the night in his home and all night he told the count stories about life with the tsar’s family in Tobolsk. Aksyuta described in detail the whole story of the tsar’s family’s departure from Tobolsk as well, and how before their departure they gave things to Captain Aksyuta: the tsaritsa a pearl necklace and diamonds; the sovereign his saber. Aksyuta hid these things on the outskirts of Tobolsk. Only two people knew about the cache: he himself and General Denikin, whom he had told at the inquiry. (Aksyuta was arrested upon his return from Tobolsk and accused of bolshevism, but he was released when they did not find him guilty of anything.)

  By the way, we can verify these nighttime stories of Aksyuta’s through the tsar’s diary.

  Like Prince Dolgorukov and Pierre Gilliard, the tsar, of course, would have taken along the pride of any soldier—his saber. In April 1918, shortly before the tsar’s departure from Tobolsk, the house was searched, and the tsar recorded the results of that search in his diary:

  “This morning the commandant, a commission of officers, and two riflemen walked around a part of our quarters, the result of this ‘search’ being the confiscation of sabers from Valya and Gilliard and a dagger from me.”

  So they did not take his saber away. Evidently someone had warned him of the search beforehand and he had given it to that someone—evidently Captain Aksyuta—for safekeeping.

  But the little southern town of Eisk was hopelessly distant from Tobolsk, lost in the expanses of Siberia, and in the bloody jumble of the Civil War neither of the two initiated was likely to have been able to reach the hiding place. So in all likelihood the tsar’s saber and the tsaritsa’s jewels are still buried there somewhere.

  We can trust Aksyuta’s testimony. That is why his answer to the very important question Gudovich asked him is so interesting: “Why didn’t you give the sovereign a chance to escape?”

  Aksyuta answered that he and Colonel Kobylinsky did have a plan to free the sovereign, but the tsar told him that in this difficult time for Russia, no Russian should abandon the country. He had no intention of running away and would await his fate right there, he said. We find a reflection of those thoughts in Pankratov’s memoirs, where he relates his conversation with one of the grand duchesses:

  “ ‘Papa was reading in the papers yesterday that they are sending us abroad as soon as they can convene a Constituent Assembly. Is that true?’

  “ ‘There’s no telling what they write in our papers!’” ‘No, no. Papa says we ought to stay in Russia. Let them send us deeper into Siberia.’”

  PATCHED TROUSERS

  Time dragged on and on. Everything was an event: the long-awaited wine brought from Tsarskoe Selo was poured out on the wharf. Gray coats, having heard about the wine, had converged on the wharf like flies on sugar. Fearing their “visit” to Freedom House, Pankratov had ordered the wine destroyed.

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “They decided to pour all the wine out into the Irtysh.… The departure of the cart carrying the bottles of wine on which the commissar’s assistant sat with an axe in his hands … we saw from our windows before tea.”

  General Lavr Kornilov had unsuccessfully deman
ded dictatorial powers to deal with the Soviets and the Bolsheviks and bring order to the rear and the front.

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “5 September.… Clearly in Petrograd there is great confusion.… Evidently nothing ever came of General Kornilov’s undertakings.”

  In his confinement, all events were equal, although his disappointment over the loss of the wine may have been greater.

  September 17 (again 17!). Shortly before the October overthrow of the Provisional Government Nicholas finished the fiftieth notebook of his diary, the last he was to complete. He began a new one, which he would fill only halfway.

  “51,” the tsar numbered it. “Begun in Tobolsk.”

  “18 September. Monday. 1917. Fall this year is remarkable here. Today 15 degrees in the shade and the air utterly southern and warm. In the afternoon Valya and I played gorodki, which I haven’t done for many years.… Olga’s ill health has passed, and she sat on the balcony for a long time with Alix.… Mama wrote a letter through the censor Pankratov.”

  This entry began his fateful final notebook.

  A monotonous life.

  A letter from Alix to Anya:

  “I cant guess what lies ahead.… God knows—& will work in His own way.… I put all in His hands.… am knitting socks for Little One, he asked for a pair: his are full of holes, but mine are thick & warm.… We used to knit in winter, remember? Now I do everything for my people: Papa’s trousers are all patched … the girls’ nightgowns are full of holes, Mama has masses of grey hair, & Anastasia is very fat, like Marie used to be—big, thick-waisted, then tiny feet—I hope she grows more. Olga is thin & so is Tatiana—their hair is growing marvelously, so in winter they can go without shawls.” (In February the grand duchesses’ hair had been shaved when they had the measles.)

  They entertained themselves with amateur shows. Gilliard and the daughters and the tsar himself were the actors. “We rehearsed the play,” “we did a small play very amicably … much laughter.”

  Nicholas appeared in the leading role in Chekhov’s The Bear, playing the “not very old landowner” who comes to collect a debt from the “little widow with the dimples in her cheeks” and falls in love with her.

  Nicholas’s diary:

  “18 February.… We performed our play [The Bear], in which Olga, Marie again, and I acted. At the beginning of the performance there was a great deal of nervousness, but it seems to have come off well.”

  He stood on his knees before Olga, who played the widow. “I love you as I have never loved before: I have left twelve women, and nine have left me, but I never loved one of them as I love you.”

  How they all laughed when Nicholas said this. Even Alix. Rarely did she laugh anymore.

  Their voices, there in the darkness, in a vanished house, a vanished time.

  “IT MAKES ME SICK TO READ WHAT HAPPENED”

  October had come.

  Snow-draped Tobolsk dozed, and no one knew about the events in Petrograd. The newspapers had suddenly stopped arriving. Nicholas was reading 1793.

  He did not read this book aloud, but Alix could not have helped but see it—and remembered: Versailles, the Revolution, the execution of the royal couple.

  “11 November. No papers or even telegrams from Petrograd for a long time. In such a trying time this is awful.”

  On November 17 (again 17!) he learned of the Bolshevik seizure of power.

  “17 November.… It makes me sick to read in the papers what happened two weeks ago in Petrograd and Moscow! Much worse and more shameful than events in the Time of Troubles.”

  During that time Commissar Pankratov recorded:

  “He was quite depressed, but depressed most of all by the looting of the wine cellars in the Winter Palace! ‘Couldn’t Mr. Kerensky have put a stop to that license?’

  “ ‘Obviously not. A mob, Nicholas Alexandrovich, is always a mob.’

  “ ‘How can that be?’ the tsar asked with sudden bile. ‘Alexander Feodorovich was put in by the people. A real favorite of the soldiers.… Regardless of what happened—why tear apart a palace, why allow the plunder and destruction of riches?’”

  The old revolutionary and the former tsar did not understand one another. The tsar was not talking about cellars, he was talking about “plunder,” about the “senseless and merciless Russian insurrection.”

  Gilliard recalled how during the first days of captivity the tsar had been strangely pleased. But as soon as he learned of Kornilov’s rout, and then the fall of the Provisional Government, Nicholas regretted his abdication more and more. It was a Time of Troubles.

  Their last New Year’s had come. The cold was so fierce the boy went to bed wrapped up in all his blankets, the grand duchesses’ room turned into an icebox, and they all sat in Alix’s room—where a small fire burned—until late into the night. “It is boring! Today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today. God help us! God have mercy on us!” Alexei wrote in his diary.

  “Today was grey and not too cold.… Today our boredom is green!” his father wrote on January 2.

  They put the New Year’s tree right on the table. A Siberian spruce—but no toys. Their severe tree of 1918. Their last tree. For Christmas they made each other small gifts. Tatiana gave her mother a homemade notebook for a diary: a pathetic quadrille note pad inside a cloth cover she had sewn herself—in her mother’s favorite color, lilac (from a scrap of the empress’s scarf).

  On the cover she embroidered a swastika, her mother’s favorite symbol.

  I am opening the lilac cover. On the back of the cover Tatiana wrote in English: “To my sweet darling Mama dear with my best wishes for a happy new year. May God’s blessings be upon you and guard you for ever. Yr own loving girl Tatiana.”

  Now Alix began a diary that she too would be fated not to finish.

  On New Year’s Eve she wrote in this diary: “Thank God we are saved & together & He has protected us & all who are dear to us this year.”

  If the legends are to be believed, this was supposed to be a fateful year for them.

  In the Tobolsk house the tsar was reading a book by Sergei Nilus. (He wrote about this in his diary on March 27, 1918.) The wife of Nilus was known to the empress. When the Niluses were wed, Alix had given them an icon and a samovar with her own initials in blessing.

  All this is to the point because the Niluses had entrée to the imperial court and knew a great deal. In the book Nicholas was reading, On the Banks of God’s River, Nilus recorded a legend told to him by the empress’s lady-in-waiting Mrs. Geringer.

  A small chest was kept at Gatchina Palace, locked and sealed. Inside was something put there by the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul I, Maria Feodorovna, who had instructed that the chest be opened by the emperor who ruled Russia one hundred years after her husband’s murder. That day came in 1901. The tsar and tsaritsa—at the time still very young people—prepared for their journey to retrieve the chest as if it were an amusing outing. But they returned, according to the lady-in-waiting, “extremely thoughtful and sad.… After that, I heard that the sovereign had mentioned 1918 as a fateful year for him and the dynasty.”

  This may be merely an ingenious legend. Nevertheless: the cold house, the empty tree on the large table. There was something fateful in the gathering of this, their last year—1918.

  A GAME FROM THE GRAVE

  Indeed, by then it had already begun.

  This happened on New Year’s Eve:

  In the Church of the Protective Veil of the Virgin, where the family went on the first day of Christmas of the first revolutionary year, under convoy, the holiday service was coming to an end in the overfilled church when suddenly some very familiar, not yet forgotten words were heard. The deacon solemnly proclaimed: “Their Excellencies the Sovereign Emperor and the Sovereign Empress,” followed by the names of their children and all their old titles. At the end the deacon’s bass uttered powerfully: “A long life!” Thus in the Tobolsk church, for the first time since the Februar
y Revolution, the ancient “wish for a long life” for the tsar’s family was proclaimed.

  The church responded with a rumble. The senior officer of the convoy and Commissar Pankratov waited till the end of the service and called for the deacon, who cited the instructions of his superior, Father Alexei. “Drag him out of the church by his braids!” the convoy’s rifleman raged.

  The next day the Tobolsk Soviet proclaimed by the Bolsheviks formed a commission of inquiry. They blamed Pankratov and demanded that he harshen the regime, and for the first time the call was heard: “To prison with the Romanovs!” The Soviet even went after the priest. But Archbishop Hermogen did not give Father Alexei up for punishment—he sent him to a remote Tobolsk monastery.

  How amazingly interlinked everything is in the Romanov history. The name Hermogen stands at the source of the Romanov dynasty. During the Time of Troubles Patriarch Hermogen issued the call to drive the Poles from Russia, for which he was imprisoned and accepted a martyr’s death.

  Now, three hundred years later, an archbishop by the same name, here in Tobolsk, was with the last Romanovs. “Master … you bear the name of Saint Hermogen. That is a sign,” the dowager empress wrote him. She was expecting decisive steps from the decisive archbishop.

  The empress mother was right. It was a sign. History had come full circle.

  At this time the Russian church was acting independently of the tsar. Peter the Great had eliminated the patriarchy in 1703, but in November 1917 a church council again elected a Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias. Early in 1918, Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks and sent the host and his blessing to the deposed tsar through Hermogen. Many pastors, including Hermogen in Tobolsk, behaved in keeping with the head of the church. The majority of them would perish during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the revolution.