Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918

by Croft, Christina

  George, however, was about to deal them a terrible blow. Initially the British King acquiesced to the Provisional Government’s request but hardly had he consent to the invitation than he began to have serious doubts. Reflecting on the strong anti-German sentiments and the hatred with which he supposed the British public would view the ‘tyrannical’ Tsar, he dared not risk his own position.

  Despite the desperate pleading of Alix’s sister, Victoria Battenberg, George refused to receive them. Even when his government urged him to adhere to his original invitation, he remained intransigent and sent word that the Ambassador, should ask the Russians ‘to make some other plans for [their] future residences.’

  With tears in his eyes Buchanan broke the news to Kerensky who, by August 1917, feared that he could no longer guarantee the safety of his Imperial prisoners in Petrograd. The radical revolutionary Lenin had returned to Russia from a prolonged exile in Switzerland and he and his extreme Bolsheviks had no intention of permitting the Tsar to escape to a foreign haven. For their own protection, Kerensky arranged for Alix, Nicholas and their family to be taken to the safety of Tobolsk in Siberia.

  Ironically, while their trusted friend and cousin, George V, refused the Russians asylum in Britain, ‘horrid’ Cousin Willy was more than ready to welcome his relatives to Germany. Assuring them of a friendly reception in Berlin, he ordered his brother, Henry, Commander of the Baltic Fleet, to allow any ships bearing the Tsar’s standard to pass unimpeded. His well-intentioned offers were not so well received. Neither Alix nor Nicholas could contemplate accepting such a gesture from their enemy in wartime.

  Even if the Tsar and Tsarina refused his invitation, the Kaiser had not lost hope of rescuing another German princess. Never having quite fallen out of love with Cousin Ella, the Kaiser repeatedly sent messages via Daisy Connaught and the Swedish Embassy to the House of Martha and Mary, pleading with the Abbess to leave Russia while there was still time. Ella, unwilling to abandon her work among the poor, thanked them but refused. She would not even consider leaving her convent to take refuge in the relative safety of the Kremlin.

  “Twelve years ago I left the Kremlin,” she said, “and I do not wish to return there.”[180]

  Ultimately, she would pay with her life for that decision.

  Barely had the Tsar signed his abdication manifesto than a second sovereign, Tino of Greece, was temporarily removed from his throne. In the summer of 1917, the dismissed Prime Minister, Venizelos, declared war on the Central Powers. When Tino refused to accept the declaration, the French imposed a blockade around Athens with the intention of starving him into submission. In December, as Queen Sophie busied herself in soup kitchens and hospitals, the Allies bombarded the city, aiming their shells towards the palace and driving the Queen and her children into hiding.

  Like Nicholas before him, Tino watched his country escalate towards civil war and saw that his only means of avoiding the catastrophe was to abdicate in favour of his son, Alexander, for the duration of the hostilities. The Allies rejoiced but the loyal citizens of Athens were loath to see their king leave and surrounded the front gates of the palace, forcing the Royal Family to sneak quietly away through the back, to the peaceful haven of Switzerland.

  As other monarchies foundered and kings feared for their thrones, the war elevated Missy of Roumania to the pinnacle of popularity. With all the ebullience of her charismatic personality, she threw herself into the Allied campaign, inspiring her soldiers with a conviction of the righteousness of their cause.

  Her efforts were not without great personal cost. Less than two months after her country entered the war, her youngest son, Mircea, died of typhoid. Though devastated by grief, Missy refused to allow personal sorrow to impede her efforts on behalf of the troops. Within days of the little boy’s death, she was touring hospitals, offering her ungloved hand to the wounded and doling out cigarettes and signed photographs of herself to the adoring soldiers.

  Missy not only concerned herself with the immediate needs of the soldiers, but also made use of her family connections to urge both George V and the Tsar (prior to his abdication) to support her husband’s ill-equipped army. Nicholas did his utmost to assist but help was slow in coming and the disorderly Russian troops, thrown into disarray by events in Petrograd, became increasingly reluctant to sacrifice their lives in defence of a monarchist regime. As German planes bombed Bucharest, enemy armies steadily marched across the country forcing Ferdinand, Missy and their children to escape from the capital to Jassy on the Russian border.

  On 6th December 1916, the Kaiser’s soldiers took possession of Bucharest, seizing the Roumanians’ provisions and leaving the people to starve. Typhoid and smallpox swept the country and Marie’s visits to the unsanitary hospitals became even more frequent and distasteful.

  “‘The retreat from Wallachia,’ her Majesty said, ‘the sorrow and depression of a vanquished Army is a story filled with tragic grief; the winter was one of darkest horror, thousands of our soldiers died of sheer want. We could neither feed, clothe, warm, nor house them. Disease in its worst form fell upon us; and being cut off from all aid, we struggled against odds we had no means of overcoming. Row upon row of graves and uncounted numbers of rough wooden crosses throughout the land stand as mute witness of a tale too sad to relate. Thousands of little children, left without father or mother, died before help could reach them, and I, the Queen, heard each cry of anguish, shared each terror, and divided each fear.’”[181]

  The fall of the Tsar was a disaster for Roumania in general, and for Missy in particular. Not only had she lost a powerful ally whom, she was sure, could be prevailed upon to send troops to her support, but also she felt very deeply for Nicholas’ humiliation, and feared for the safety of her sister, Ducky.

  Despite Kyril’s ungallant desertion of the Tsarina and his declaration of allegiance to the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were determined to root out and destroy every Romanov on Russian soil. Only three months after hoisting the red flag above his palace, Kyril and his pregnant wife were forced to flee to Finland, where at the age of forty-one Ducky gave birth to a son, Vladimir. Even in Finland, as the Bolshevik armies approached, they could not feel safe. Food was in such short supply that Ducky was dependent on her cousin, Daisy, Crown Princess of Sweden (who herself had recently given birth to her youngest child Carl Johann) to send her provisions for the baby. With Daisy’s help, the Swedish Embassy was desperately trying to help the family to escape to England.

  In the early months of 1917, the Roumanians and their allies clung to the hope that the new Russian regime would honour the Tsar’s promise to fight on until victory. For seven months after Nicholas’ abdication, the increasingly disheartened Russian troops continued the war but, in November 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power with a promise of taking Russia out of the conflict. Officers who refused to abandon their positions were ignored or even murdered by their mutinous subordinates whose sole desire was to return home and reap the rewards of revolution.

  In January 1918, Roumania, too, was in danger of falling prey to revolutionaries when the Bolsheviks declared war on the country, ransacked the royal palaces and removed the Crown Jewels to Russia. It was, in part, the Queen’s personal popularity that prevented the Roumanian throne from toppling alongside that of Cousin Nicholas.

  The departure of their Russian allies left the Roumanians outnumbered and by March 1918 King Ferdinand was bound to admit defeat. Helpless and frustrated, Missy could only gape in horror at her husband’s willingness to surrender, declaring to her cousin, George V of Britain, that she would have preferred to die with the army than see the country surrender.

  In response, King George offered her asylum but, like her Russian cousins, she was too devoted to her people to abandon them in their hour of need. Besides, even when the outcome seemed inevitable, she was determined to expend all her energies in persuading Ferdinand to reject the Kaiser’s terms, advising him to abdicate rather than accept such humili
ation.

  For all her pleading and cajoling, King Ferdinand agreed to the German demands in their entirety. On hearing what he had done, Missy exploded with rage and even entertained the idea of leading the troops into Russia in the hope of finding refuge in the Crimea and inspiring the Russians to restore the Tsar, but this time even the headstrong Queen was powerless. Ferdinand had signed the treaty and there was nothing she could do about it. Nevertheless, heroic and theatrical to the end, Missy insisted that she had not accepted the treaty and refused to acknowledge defeat.

  For now she was forced to live ‘under the yoke’ but she never doubted that, in spite of present hardships, the Entente would eventually win the war and she waited optimistically for future glory.

  Chapter 35 – I Would Rather Die In Russia

  Captive in Siberia, the former Tsar and Tsarina kept abreast of world events through the newspapers and faithfully followed the course of the war. Still praying for a Russian victory and optimistic about the possibility of a restoration of the monarchy or at least a comfortable exile in a friendly country, the Tsarina and her daughters prepared for the future. The guards had confiscated most of their belongings but Alix and the girls sewed many of their precious jewels into their undergarments so that when freedom eventually came, they would have some means of supporting themselves. Keeping up their spirits with such hopes, Alix and Nicholas read and prayed and continued the children’s lessons, finding comfort in their faith in God’s goodness and a fatalistic resignation to his will.

  Were it not for the shame of abdication and incarceration and his fears for the future of his people, Nicholas would probably have been happier in Tobolsk than at any time since his marriage. Walking in the grounds with his daughters, chopping wood as he had done when a child, it was almost a relief to be free from the burden of office. But the respite was short-lived.

  The first blow came in March 1918 when Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk taking Russia out of the war.

  “And they call me a traitor!” Nicholas gasped in horror on reading of the humiliating terms.

  When it was rumoured that Cousin Willy had included a secret clause in the treaty, guaranteeing the safety of the Imperial Family, Alix was still more disgusted, declaring: “I would rather die in Russia than be saved by Germans.”

  A depressed Nicholas agreed and prophetically sighed that no good could come to the Kaiser and his ministers who had stooped to shake hands with the Bolshevik traitors.

  Even if Nicholas and Alix had been prepared to accept the Kaiser’s offers of asylum, the Bolsheviks (Reds) had no intention of allowing their former rulers to escape from their grasp. Lenin resolved to destroy every trace of the Romanovs and all they had stood for, while his comrade, Trotsky favoured a show trial in Moscow followed by Nicholas’ execution. As long as the Tsar was alive, they argued, he would provide the focus for counter-revolution. The Mensheviks’ White Army might settle for a constitutional monarchy, while Tsarist supporters, backed, it was said, by Nicholas’ foreign cousins, were planning to return the Tsar to his throne. Fearing a successful rescue attempt, the Bolsheviks felt it was imperative to move the prisoners to a more secure location.

  On 23rd April 1918, Commissar Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk from Moscow and ordered Nicholas to prepare to leave for an unknown destination. There were no specific orders concerning Alix or the children but, if they wished to travel with him, they would be permitted to do so. The news brought further heartache to Alix. The young Tsarevich had fallen some days earlier and, suffering another haemorrhage, was too ill to travel. His mother hardly dared leave his side and yet the thought of abandoning Nicholas to face an uncertain future alone was more than she could bear. Both she and Nicholas believed that he would be taken to Moscow and forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Convinced that had she been with him, Nicholas would never have signed the abdication manifesto, Alix could not allow him to be manipulated a second time. After much soul-searching and weeping, she decided to travel with her husband. Their third daughter, Maria, accompanied them, leaving Alexei in the care of his sisters, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia, until he was well enough to follow.

  The arduous journey was torture for the ailing Tsarina. Having been hurled about in a cart over the icy tracks and flooded roads, it came as a relief to board a train bound for Moscow. Yurovsky, intending to deliver his ‘baggage’ safely, arranged for the train to avoid the fiercely anti-Romanov Urals but an ambush thwarted his plans. As they neared Ekaterinburg, armed members of the local soviet stopped the train and insisted at gunpoint that the family be taken into the town, where a house had been requisitioned from a merchant named Ipatiev and ominously renamed ‘The House of Special Purpose.’

  The hostility of the crowds who gathered to jeer and hiss was as nothing compared to the humiliations that the family endured once they reached the house. Unlike the guards in Tobolsk, the Red Guards had no sympathy whatsoever with their former rulers and went out of their way to debase them. When Alexei and his sisters were eventually able to join the rest of the family, the soldiers ensured that they suffered every possible indignity, even loitering outside the one toilet and refusing to allow the young Grand Duchesses to close the door. On the bathroom walls they had scrawled lewd verses about Nicholas and drawn obscene pictures of Alix and Rasputin. Yet the family remained as devout and devoted to one another as ever and found consolation in each other’s company and their prayers; and, while accepting the possibility of imminent death, Alix still dreamed of a future in the Crimea or in England.

  Freed from the constraints of war, Lenin turned his attention to his own position in Russia. Now that the Imperial Family were safely in the Reds’ custody, he was able to tighten his grip on the new regime by rounding up all the rest of the Romanovs who had remained in Russia. Nicholas’ brother, Misha, was placed under house arrest in Perm. His uncle, Pavel, and several other Grand Dukes were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd, while Nicholas’ cousin, Prince Vladimir Paley, and a further four Grand Dukes were transported east to Siberia.

  At Easter, soldiers arrived at the House of Martha and Mary and ordered the Abbess to prepare to leave at once. Ella, anticipating her fate, requested two hours to say goodbye to her sisters but was curtly told she had half an hour. Accompanied by two nuns she was placed on a train and informed that she was needed to assist in a hospital in Siberia.

  The train eventually reached Ekaterinburg where Ella, granted a limited amount of freedom, was housed in a convent and permitted to join her cousins, the Grand Dukes, for church services. When she heard that her sister was also captive in the town, she pleaded to be allowed to visit her but permission was refused and she had to content herself with sending a letter containing gifts of chocolates and coffee for the inmates of the Ipatiev house.

  In early June, Ella and the Grand Dukes were moved again. Fearing that such a concentration of Romanovs would make the town a target for counter-revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks ordered the prisoners to be taken seventy-five miles north to Alapaevsk, where they were accommodated in a disused school. The place was filthy when they arrived but Ella and the two nuns who had travelled with her, set about clearing the rooms and planting vegetables in the gardens.

  A cook came daily to prepare meals and later gave evidence that Ella spent her time drawing and praying. Local people, recalling the Ella’s previous pilgrimages to their town, were saddened by the news of her arrest and secretly passed gifts and messages of support through the fence. The Mensheviks, they said, were gaining ground and it was only a matter of time before the Imperial prisoners would be liberated.

  By mid-summer the White Army was rapidly nearing Ekaterinburg and the echo of their guns could be heard through the shuttered windows of the Ipatiev House. Realising that if they delayed any longer the Imperial prisoners could be snatched away to freedom, the Bolsheviks decided to act. One night in June two soldiers arrived at the hotel in Perm where Nicholas’ brother, Misha, and his se
cretary, Brian Johnson, were under house arrest. Forcing them at gun point into a car, the Bolsheviks drove to a remote spot in the woods and there, out of the hearing of the townspeople, shot them dead and hastily buried the bodies in the unknown location. Their remains have never been found.

  Until then, the guards in Alapaevsk had been on relatively friendly terms with their prisoners but, following Misha’s disappearance, their attitude changed dramatically. No longer would they permit the Grand Dukes to wander in the gardens, and the two nuns who had accompanied Ella from Moscow were ordered to leave the town. Convinced that this could only mean that their beloved Abbess was about to be killed, they begged to be allowed to stay but, despite their tears when all three ‘cried like little children,’ they were forced into a truck and driven away. They reached Ekaterinburg where they earnestly pleaded with the leader of local Soviet to permit them to return. Their petition was greeted with contempt; soldiers mocked their loyalty and warned them that if they returned they would share the same fate as the Grand Duchess: torture and execution. Undeterred, they continued to plead until the soviet agreed that one of them could return. Barbara Yakovleva, a thirty-two year old nun who had been with Ella since the foundation of her Order, had virtually signed her own death warrant. The other nun, Catherine Yanisheva, was never heard of again.