The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia
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FINAL SECRETS
On a warm afternoon in July 2007, Sergei Plotnikov was searching Koptyaki Forest not far from the Romanovs’ grave site when he stumbled on a small hollow covered with nettles. Using a large, corkscrew-like instrument, Plotnikov—an amateur historian who often spent his weekends searching for the missing imperial children—poked deep beneath the soil’s surface. There was a crunching sound. Plotnikov started to dig. Soon he uncovered a pile of bone fragments. DNA tests run on them proved they were the remains of Alexei and one of his sisters. “My heart leaped with joy,” Plotnikov said of his discovery. “I knew the Romanov children would finally be reunited with their family.”
But as of this writing, the remains of the last two Romanovs have yet to be buried. Instead, they lie in a cardboard box in Moscow’s State Archive of the Russian Federation, waiting for the day when all seven Romanovs will once again be together; as Nicholas called them, “a small family circle.”
Standing on a balcony of the Winter Palace the day he declared war in 1914, Nicholas bows his head emotionally as the crowd below bursts into the national anthem.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Russian troops stand in a trench on the Eastern Front, 1915. Since tsarist generals scorned trench warfare, they never learned the technological art of properly constructing them. Nothing more than holes in the ground, Russian trenches constantly filled with water while unsupported dirt walls crumbled under artillery bombardment. The primitive nature of these trenches was a major cause of Russia’s huge loss of life.
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Raising his cross in blessing, a priest walks among the wounded in a Russian field hospital, 1915. While officers recuperated in mansions that had been converted into hospitals, ordinary soldiers were not so lucky. Recalled one war observer, “I went around several wards, rooms in vacated houses where the sick and wounded lay on the floor, on straw, dressed, unwashed and covered in blood.” Because of this, diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery decimated Russian troops even further.
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Russian dead. The number of the country’s casualties was staggering—more than three million by 1917.
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A peasant woman mourns the death of her soldier son, 1916.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Olga (left) and Tatiana in their nurses’ uniforms, ministering to wounded officers.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Marie (left) and Anastasia pose with a group of recovering officers in their hospital, c. 1915.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Alexei (in uniform) presides over a military luncheon at Stavka in 1916. Third from the left sits Nicholas. Between him and Alexei is the deposed, but still consulted Nicholasha.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Rasputin at his full powers, looking both commanding and controlling, c. 1915.
LOUISE BRYANT PAPERS (MS 1840). MANUSCRIPT AND ARCHIVES, YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
This snapshot of an imperious Alexandra was taken in 1916 when the reins of government were firmly in her hands.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
This 1916 cartoon depicts Rasputin as an evil puppet master, pulling both Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s strings.
THE STATE ARCHIVES OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
Prince Felix Yusupov, the mastermind behind Rasputin’s murder, c. 1915.
ROMANOV COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
A photograph of Rasputin’s battered corpse after being pulled from the Neva River three days after the murder.
CENTRAL STATE ARCHIVE OF CINEMATIC, PHOTOGRAPHIC AND PHONOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTS, ST. PETERSBURG
Somber, hungry Petrograd citizens line up outside a bakery for bread, c. 1915.
CENTRAL ARCHIVE OF CINEMATIC, PHOTOGRAPHIC AND PHONOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTS, ST. PETERSBURG
Carrying a red banner reading “Long Live the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies,” a group of mostly women and children, along with former tsarist soldiers, marches through the streets of St. Petersburg in February 1917.
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Alexander Kerensky in 1917. Just thirty-six years old, he took on the hard task of maintaining a link between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet.
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The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soliders’ Deputies meets in the Tauride Palace, February 1917.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
After Nicholas’s abdication, citizens jubilantly dismantled tsarist symbols in and around cities. Here children gaze at the giant bronze head of Alexander III—Nicholas’s father—after crowds pulled it off the statue.
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Nicholas poses for a photograph aboard the imperial train, site of his eventual abdication.
THE STATE ARCHIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
Enthusiastic crowds welcome Lenin back to Petrograd, April 1917.
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Nicholas under guard at Tsarskoe Selo, 1917.
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Alexandra sits in her wheelchair while watching her family (not pictured) working in the garden at Tsarskoe Selo, 1917.
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From left to right: Olga, Alexei, Anastasia (holding Jemmy in her lap), and Tatiana resting after gardening in May 1917.
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Alexei, just hours before the family’s removal from Tsarskoe Selo, takes one last swim in the estate’s lake, August 1917.
THE STATE ARCHIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW
Forces of the Provisional Government fire on Bolshevik rioters, necessitating their lying down in the street to avoid being shot, July 1917.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
The Governor’s Mansion in Tobolsk, where the Romanovs were imprisoned. This picture was taken before the tall wooden fence was built, although guards can be seen patrolling the street. From the balcony, the family could sit and wave to the passersby below.
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Perched on the platform that Nicholas built on the roof of the greenhouse in Tobolsk are (from left to right): Olga, Anastasia, Nicholas, Alexei, and Tatiana. Marie is standing.
CORBIS
This retouched photograph shows a column of Bolshevik soldiers seizing the Winter Palace after the Provisional Government’s surrender.
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The House of Special Purpose surrounded by its fence, which would later be extended to the house’s eaves.
SOKOLOV ARCHIVE, VOL. 3, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
White Army troops move through the forests of Siberia in January 1918.
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The man who planned and carried out the murder of the Romanovs, Yakov Yurovsky, c. 1920.
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Captured by White Troops, a soldier of the Red Army is tied to a stake after confessing that he is a Communist. He would later be shot.
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A photograph of the cellar room, taken after the family was killed, shows bullet holes and bayonet scars in the walls and floor.
CORBIS
Investigators in Koptyaki Forest search at the mine site. Sheets were laid out to receive bodies that were never found.
SOKOLOV ARCHIVE, VOL. 3, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Skeletons of the Romanovs (Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of the girls) being examined by a forensic scientist in Ekaterinburg, 1992.
RIA NOVOSTI/SCIENCE SOURCE
In 2000, the Orthodox Church in Russia declared Nicholas II and his family saints. This holy icon shows them together and haloed.
Alexei himse
lf holds the icon of Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most revered icons in Russian history.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In Russian it’s spasibo. In English, it’s thank you. In either language, I am immensely grateful to the peerless Anne Schwartz for her inspiration and encouragement (not to mention her patience and persistence), as well as to the talented Rachael Cole for her extraordinary book design. Thanks also to everyone at Random House who helped this project come together: Lee Wade, Stephanie Pitts, Adrienne Waintraub, and Colleen Fellingham.
I am also indebted to fellow writer Eugene Yelchin for taking precious time away from his own manuscript to read and comment on mine. He grew up in the former Soviet Union, and his suggestions were not only insightful, but also invaluable.
Special thanks to Sarah Miller (author, librarian, and fellow Romanov geek) for “saving my bacon” in so many ways, and to Laura Mabee for coming to my rescue with that elusive 1903 menu.
Hooray to Holly Pribble for once again aiding me with her artistic skills; cheers to my writing friends Penny Blubaugh, Stephanie Hemphill, and Karen Blumenthal for listening, advising, and occasionally consoling; and hugs to Eric Rohmann, my first, most trusted reader.
Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their help in obtaining images, documents, and other important resources: Agata Rukowska, picture library assistant at the Royal Collection Trust; Beth Remak-Honnef, head of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz; Anne Marie Menta, library service assistant for Romanov materials at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University; Stephanie Stewart, assistant archivist at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University; Susan Halpert, reference librarian at the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the reference librarians at the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.
Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Mark D. Steinberg, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who not only meticulously vetted the manuscript, but also answered my endless questions with patience and enthusiasm, provided invaluable insight into revolutionary Russia, and challenged my conventional images of Nicholas and Alexandra by pointing me in the direction of additional historical documents. Spasibo!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Three years ago, I set out to discover the true story of what happened to Russia’s last imperial family. I was aware of the facts surrounding their murder. I knew about their bodies’ discovery and the results of DNA testing. But the facts did not tell the whole tale. I suspected there was more. After some reading and research, I came to realize, more than anything, that I needed to find the answers to the question that kept nagging me: How did this happen? How did this rich, splendidly privileged, and, yes, beautiful family related by blood or marriage to almost every royal house in Europe end up in that Siberian cellar? Something had gone terribly wrong. But what? What forces were at work? What personalities? And was there really nothing Nicholas or Alexandra could have done to change their fate?
These were the questions I set out to answer. But doing so, I realized, would require a wider lens. I would need to look beyond the Romanovs and their fairy-tale existence and examine the lives of lower-class Russians—peasants and workers, revolutionaries and soldiers. The result? A book that is essentially three stories in one. The first is an intimate look at the Romanovs themselves. The second follows the sweep of revolution from the workers’ strikes of 1905 to Lenin’s rise to power in November 1917. And the third—conveyed in their own words—is the personal stories of the men and women whose struggle for a better life directly affected the course of the Romanovs’ lives.
The following bibliography and quote sources reflect just a small portion of the material used to inform my understanding of those three stories. I have bombarded Russian scholars with endless questions; looked at thousands of photographs; scoured dozens of newspapers on microfilm, in bound volumes, and online; and read more Karl Marx than I ever thought possible. With the help of the archivists at both the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and Harvard’s Houghton Library, I’ve had access to original sources. And in August 2012, I traveled to Russia, where I followed in the Romanovs’ footsteps, wandering the shady paths of Tsarskoe Selo and traipsing through the hallways of the Alexander Palace; visiting Rasputin’s last apartment; exploring workers’ neighborhoods, Lenin’s headquarters, and the dark, dank jail cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. All this and more has significantly contributed to the work you’ve just read.
PRIMARY SOURCES
The heart of all research is the firsthand accounts and eyewitness testimonies of those who lived through an historical event. For almost seventy-five years, the only primary material we had about the imperial family came from the memoirs of the Russian nobility who had fled the country after Lenin’s rise to power. Many of these reminiscences were sympathetic, painting an overly rosy picture of the imperial family. But in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all that changed. Diaries, letters, and other documents believed to have been destroyed began emerging from archives and museums. Now we can read Alexei’s last diary entries for ourselves, delve into Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s letters, discover Olga’s poetry. More surprising, we can hear directly from ordinary Russians who encountered the family in their final months—Yurovsky’s chilling account of the murders; statements from guards; depositions from priests and cleaning women. Certainly, some accounts, especially those of the family’s jailers, contradict one another. And because most were originally written in Russian or French, they vary by translator. For this reason, more than one version of the same source is occasionally listed. I have chosen to use the more accessible quote, or the pithier, more poignant translation. It should also be noted that the Romanovs themselves used English when writing to each other. Thus their colorful, sometimes awkward prose is not a creative translation, but exactly how they wrote. Additionally, in citations of letters or diary entries, you will notice two dates. The first is the “old-style” Julian calendar date cited by its creator. The second is the “new-style” Georgian calendar date coinciding with this book’s text.
Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia. Once a Grand Duke. Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1932.
Alexandra, Empress of Russia. The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–16. London: Duckworth, 1923.
Botkin, Gleb. The Real Romanovs. New York: Revell, 1931.
Buchanan, Meriel. The Dissolution of an Empire. London: John Murray, 1932.
Buchanan, Sir George. My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories. 2 volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1923.
Bulygin, Paul, and Alexander Kerensky. The Murder of the Romanovs. London: Hutchinson, 1935.
Buxhoeveden, Baroness Sophie. Left Behind: Fourteen Months in Siberia During the Revolution. London: Longmans, Green, 1929.
——. The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia. London: Longmans, Green, 1928.
Bykov, P. M. The Last Days of Tsardom. London: Martin Lawrence, 1934.
“Czar Has Another Daughter.” The New York Times, 18 June 1901.
Dehn, Lili. The Real Tsaritsa. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922.
de Stoeckl, Agnes. Not All Vanity. London: John Murray, 1951.
Elchaninov, Major-General Andrei. The Tsar and His People. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914.
Gautier, Théophile. “A Ball at the Winter Palace” in Romantic Castles and Palaces as Seen and Described by Famous Writers. Edited and translated by Esther Singleton. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901.
Gilliard, Pierre. Thirteen Years at the Russian Court. Translated by F. Appleby Holt. New York: Doran, 1921.
Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923.
Gorky, Maxim. Autobiography of Maxim Gorky. Trans
lated by Isidor Schneider. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001.
Gudvan, A. M. “Essays on the History of the Movement of Sales-Clerical Workers in Russia” (1925) in The Russian Worker: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime. Edited by Victoria E. Bonnell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Halliburton, Richard. Seven League Boots. Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1942.
(Ilidor) Trufanoff, Sergei. The Mad Monk of Russia. New York: Century, 1918.
Kanatchikov, Semën Ivanovich. A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov. Edited and translated by Reginald E. Zelnik. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Kerensky, Alexander. The Crucifixion of Liberty. New York: Day, 1934.
Khrustalev, Vladimir M., and Vladimir A. Kozlov. The Last Diary of Tsarista Alexandra. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Knox, Alfred. With the Russian Army, 1914–1917. 2 volumes. London: Hutchinson & Company, 1921.
Kokovtsov, Count Vladimir N. Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov. Edited by H. H. Fisher. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935.
Korolenko, Vladimir. “Kishineff: The Medieval Outbreak Against the Jew.” www.fighthatred.com/historical-events/pogroms-razzias/1034-the-kishinev-pogrom-of-1093-chaim-nachman-bialik.
Lockhard, R. H. Bruce. Memoirs of a British Agent. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933.
Marie, Queen of Romania. Ordeal: The Story of My Life. 2 volumes. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1934.