The family’s circumstances began to rapidly disintegrate as the effects of the Bolshevik triumph in Petrograd began to seep into Tobolsk. “All the old soldiers (the most friendly) are to leave us,” Gilliard wrote at the beginning of February. “The Tsar seems very depressed at this prospect; the change may have disastrous results for us.” And indeed it did.
Reduced rations often left the family without the most basic staples, although sympathetic townspeople did sometimes make up for the deficit with what Alexandra called “little gifts from Heaven.” And the new guard arrived with a deep reservoir of cruelty. The soldiers took to carving obscenities on the swing set used by the children, and painted pornographic images on the fence. An ice mountain the prisoners had spent weeks constructing together as a joint project was hacked down, simply to deprive the children of the pleasure they found in sliding down it. They are “disconsolate,” Gilliard wrote.
The destruction of the mountain had another, more frightening consequence as well. Without this diversion, Alexis began to seek out other, more risky activities to amuse himself. Sliding down a stairway on a tray one day, he fell and was injured, after which the horrid effects of his ever-lurking disease manifested with monstrous fury. “He is frightfully thin and yellow, reminding me of Spala [five years earlier],” Alexandra wrote to Anna. This time, however, there was no Rasputin to alleviate the agony. Alexis would never walk again.
Though time was quickly evaporating, there was still hope in Tobolsk that a means of escape might be found for the desperate family imprisoned there. “All that is required is the organized and resolute efforts of a few bold spirits outside,” Gilliard wrote on March 17. One such “bold spirit” was none other than Rasputin’s own son-in-law, Boris Soloviev, who managed to centralize all monarchist rescue efforts with himself. The funds poured in but were never used. Instead Soloviev ran off with the money. Now there was nothing left for Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children but death.
While the family’s fate was being debated in what would become Leningrad, leaders in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg—capital of a region known as the “Red Urals” because of its long history of socialist rebellion—were braying for blood. And after a complicated series of maneuvers and political posturing, they would get just what they wanted.
“The atmosphere around us is electrified,” Alexandra wrote in her final letter to Anna Vyrubova. “We feel that a storm is approaching, but we know that God is merciful and will care for us.… Though we know the storm is coming nearer and nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.”
Nicholas and Alexandra arrived in Ekaterinburg on April 30, 1918,*13 and were installed right away at Nicholas Ipatiev’s commandeered residence—ominously renamed “the House of Special Purpose” and retrofitted as an impregnable fortress. More than one hundred guards were posted at strategic locations inside and outside the house, which was surrounded by an imposing stockade, and all the windows were whitewashed, barred, and sealed, rendering the interior a darkened, stifling tomb. The former sovereign and his wife, now more commonly referred to as “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker” and “the German Bitch,” would endure monstrous abuse for most of the month and a half they had remaining.
There was no running water in the house for weeks, and any small request was dismissed by the hard-drinking commandant, Alexander Avadeyev. “Let them go to hell!” he would belch. The commandant liked to invite his Bolshevik comrades to watch the family eat, as he showcased his cruelty. He reached past Nicholas to grab some bread from the table, purposely jabbing him in the face with his elbow, and snatched food out of the former emperor’s hands. “You’ve had enough, you idle rich,” Avadeyev gloated poisonously. “I will take some myself.”
The guards frequently emulated their boss’s behavior in their mistreatment of the prisoners. They taunted Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters with lewd asides and forced them to play revolutionary songs on the piano. When the young women had to use the lavatory—the filthy walls of which were covered with pornographic renderings of their mother having sex with Rasputin—they were always accompanied by a leering soldier who left them no privacy and reminded them to admire the “art.”
On Alexis’s bed, one guard noticed a thin gold chain upon which the boy had strung his collection of religious images. He went to snatch it, but was stopped by Nagorny—the loyal sailor who remained to protect Alexis after the heartless defection of Derevenko at Tsarskoe Selo, and who now carried the boy still immobilized after his fall at Tobolsk. “It was his last service to Alexis,” Massie wrote. Nagorny was arrested for his efforts on the child’s behalf and shot four days later.
The noose was tightening around the Romanovs. At the beginning of July, Avadeyev was replaced as commandant by Jacob Yurovsky. “This specimen we like least of all,” Nicholas wrote in his diary of the man who would very shortly become his executioner. Two days before they were murdered, the family seemed to have some intimation of what was to come. A priest and deacon came to read them the service, and both noted their exhaustion. When the prayer, “At Rest with the Saints,” was sung, the family fell to their knees in unison. Later, the deacon remarked to the priest, “They are all some other people, truly. Why, no one even sang.”
The Romanovs went to bed on the night of July 16 at ten thirty. An hour and a half later they were roused from their sleep, ordered to get dressed, and told they were being evacuated because Ekaterinburg was in danger of assault by approaching White forces, then engaged in a ferocious civil war with the Bolshevik Red Army. After that, the family and four attendants*14 were led down to the basement of the house—Nicholas carrying a sleepy Alexis, his arms draped around his father’s neck, and Anastasia clinging to their pet spaniel, Jemmy. There they were told to wait for the arrival of a car that was going to transport them to a more secure location.
None of the group seemed to sense what was to come. “There were no tears, no sobs, no questions,” Yurovsky later reported. Two chairs were brought in for Alexandra and Nicholas, upon whose lap Alexis rested. The rest stood behind them, against a wall. Yurovsky then stepped before them and announced, “In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing the attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”
“What? What?” Nicholas exclaimed just before Yurovsky’s bullet struck and killed him instantly. He fell forward to the floor on top of his son. Alexandra, too, died immediately, after the rest of the squad began to open fire. As the barrage of bullets continued over the next several minutes, the four grand duchesses huddled together in a corner, screaming and crying in terror. But they didn’t die. Nor had their brother.
When the firing ceased, groans could be heard emanating from the thick, acrid smoke that filled the room. Then, as it cleared, Alexis could be seen crawling through his parents’ blood, shielding his face in a futile effort to protect himself. Yurovsky shot him twice in the head, while the other soldiers began to attack his surviving sisters with their bayonets. Again and again they stabbed, until finally the screaming young women were silent. Now the only survivor of the massacre was Alexandra’s maid, Anna Demidova, who was chased back and forth against the wall, tripping over corpses, before she, too, was brought down by the squad’s lethal instruments.
The bodies were then wrapped in sheets and dragged outside to a waiting truck. As they were being loaded, however, a low moaning could be heard from beneath the sheets. Then one of the grand duchesses, believed to be dead, suddenly sat up and started to scream. Horrified, the men stabbed her repeatedly but were shocked to find how difficult it was to penetrate the body with their bayonets. Finally, all was still and the truck drove off to an abandoned mine in the forest outside the city. There the bodies were stripped naked and, according to some accounts, sexually violated. It was then revealed why both bullets and bayonets had been so ineffective on some of the victims. Sewn into corsets and other garments were rows upon rows of diamonds and other precious
stones, all of which helped deflect the onslaught.
“No one is responsible for their death agonies but themselves,” Yurovsky later stated. “There turned out to be eighteen pounds of such valuables. By the way, their greed turned out to be so great that on Alexandra Feodorovna there was a simply huge piece of gold wire bent into the shape of a bracelet of around a pound in weight. All these valuables were immediately ripped out so that we wouldn’t have to drag the bloody clothes with us.”
After this plunder, the clothing was burned and the naked bodies unceremoniously tossed into the mine pit. Then several hand grenades were thrown in to destroy any evidence of the crime the Bolshevik government was determined to keep secret. Yet it wasn’t enough. The mine did not collapse and, fearing the corpses would be discovered by the advancing White Army, Yurovsky went back later and had them hauled out with ropes. Once again the bodies were loaded onto a truck for burial elsewhere. But when the vehicle got mired in the mud several miles away, it was decided to dispose of the Romanovs right there. While two of the corpses were burned near the site, a hole was dug and the rest of the remains dumped into it. Before the site was covered with dirt, however, the faces of the victims were smashed with rifle butts and sulfuric acid poured into the grave. This ensured that no one would ever recognize the Romanovs if their unmarked resting place were ever discovered.
“My Lord, save my poor, unlucky Nicky,” the Dowager Empress Marie wrote in her journal on July 17. “Help him in his hard ordeals.” But by then the trials of Nicholas II were over, and buried with him in that marshy Siberian forest was all the splendor, infamy, and madness that was imperial Russia.
* * *
*1 Yussoupov reportedly bragged that once, when dressed as a woman, Britain’s King Edward VII tried to seduce him.
*2 Grand Duke Paul, uncle of Nicholas II, had been exiled because he married a commoner without the emperor’s approval.
*3 It should be noted that the murder was not universally celebrated. “For the peasants Rasputin has become a martyr,” one noble, recently returned from the countryside, related to Paléologue. “He was from the people, he made the voice of the people known to the tsar; he defended the people against the court, and so courtiers killed him! That’s what is being said in all the izbas [traditional countryside dwellings, usually constructed of logs].”
*4 In reaction to the ferocious anti-German agitation among the Russians during the war, Nicholas II changed the name of the capital from St. Petersburg to the more Slavic Petrograd. For similar reasons in Britain, King George V replaced the royal family surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha with the thoroughly English “Windsor.”
*5 In the midst of rising antimonarchical sentiment, Michael almost immediately renounced the throne as well. “He was frail and gentle,” Shulgin wrote of the grand duke, “not born for such difficult times, but he was sincere and humane. He wore no masks. It occurred to me: ‘What a good constitutional monarch he would have been.’ ” Michael was murdered by the Bolsheviks just a few weeks before his brother.
*6 “As God is in heaven,” generations of Russians had been taught, “so great is our Tsar on earth.”
*7 Dowager Empress Marie, once so beloved by the Russian people, would endure a degrading captivity by the Bolsheviks in the Crimea, along with her daughters and other members of the extended family. “Here, we are looked at as if we were real criminals and very dangerous people,” she wrote. “It is difficult to believe in this.”
*8 On March 20, the Provisional Government resolved “to deprive the deposed emperor and his consort of their liberty.” The following day, both Nicholas and Alexandra were under arrest.
*9 See previous chapter, this page.
*10 Kerensky also formed a favorable impression of Nicholas, whose violent overthrow he had once advocated. The socialist leader of the Provisional Government later acknowledged that he had been affected by his “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm, which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful.… It cannot be said that my talks with the Tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former Emperor never once lost his equilibrium, never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.”
*11 Lili Dehn was quickly released after her arrest, but Anna Vyrubova remained imprisoned for five months at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where, due to widespread speculation about a sexual relationship with Rasputin, she underwent a mortifying gynecological exam that finally proved she was actually a virgin.
*12 The British government had actually arranged sanctuary for the Russian royal family, until the king, cousin “Georgie,” stepped in to revoke it. With his own throne imperiled by a rising tide of republicanism in wartime Britain, George V feared the impression it might make if he were to give shelter to a fallen autocrat. Still, he was saddened by his cousin’s fate the following year. “It was a foul murder,” the king wrote in his diary. “I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.”
*13 They would be joined three weeks later by their five children, and the remnants of their retinue—most of whom were then either shot or dismissed. It was at this time that the loyal Gilliard was separated from the family forever.
*14 The four loyal companions murdered along with the imperial family were Dr. Eugene Botkin; Alexandra’s maid, Anna Demidova; the valet, Alexis Trupp; and their cook, Ivan Kharitonov.
Aftermath
As the Romanovs either lay moldering in unmarked graves or scattered into exile, relics of the imperial past remained. Crowns, orbs, and scepters were unceremoniously stashed away, but the Bolsheviks never saw fit to destroy all the grand monuments erected to the glory of long-dead monarchs. Thus the massive figure of Peter the Great could still be seen proudly mounted on his horse, while Catherine the Great stood imperiously overlooking what had become Leningrad—semideities, frozen in bronze, lingering in what now was an officially godless state. Their splendid palaces were preserved, but entirely devoid of the passion and intrigue that made them uniquely Romanov—merely elaborate shells, occupied only by ghosts.
Dowager Empress Marie, who had once enchanted Russia as the vivacious wife of Alexander III, barely managed to escape the Bolsheviks with her life. And, while she endured in exile, clashing with her cheap nephew King Christian X of Demark over such trivia as electricity bills, she stoutly refused to accept that her son and his family had been slaughtered. Indeed, upon arriving in England after leaving Russia, she tore off a black armband that the future King Edward VIII was wearing in honor of his fallen kinsmen. “It was clear,” recalled Marie’s loyal bodyguard Timofei Yaschik, “the Empress wanted to underline the fact that she did not believe and did not want to believe the news about the murder of the Imperial family.”
Marie was far from alone in this, for almost as soon as the bodies of Nicholas II and his family had been dumped in their makeshift grave did reports emerge of the miraculous escape of at least some of them. Romantic legends were born, particularly about the impish Anastasia, youngest of the four grand duchesses. One of the most enduring revolved around a woman, known to the world as Anna Anderson, who in 1920 emerged dazed and confused from a Berlin canal she had fallen into and gradually began to reveal herself as Russia’s lost tsarevna. Hers was a riveting tale of escape, and her resemblance to Anastasia was uncanny enough to convince some Romanov associates that she was indeed Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughter.
The woman’s amazing story of survival captured the imagination of millions; Ingrid Bergman played her in the Hollywood movie. Even after many decades, when Anna Anderson was just an eccentric cat lady living a decidedly unregal existence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the legend persisted. It was only DNA that ultimately destroyed it: After her death in 1984, a preserved tissue sample from the claimant was compared to a blood sample taken from one of th
e real Anastasia’s royal relatives, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip. Anna Anderson was a fraud.
“I think it’s a shame,” her biographer Peter Kurth told author Robert K. Massie, “that a great legend, a wonderful adventure, an astonishing story that inspired so many people, including myself, should suddenly be reduced to a little glass dish.”
Yet almost as soon as the myth of Anastasia’s astonishing escape imploded, a Romanov revival of sorts began with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, a collection of skeletal remains—discovered and reburied outside Ekaterinburg in 1978—were once again unearthed and forensically examined by several sets of scientists. All came to the conclusion that the bones were indeed the remains of Nicholas II, his family, and four servants. The murderers’ attempt to destroy the identities of their victims had failed in the face of science. But the evidence of their brutal efforts still remained apparent more than eight decades later. Dr. Ludmilla Koryakova, a professor of archeology at the Ural State University, had examined many skeletons over the course of her career. “But never,” she told the Sunday Times, “so many that were so badly damaged—so violated. I was ill.”
On July 17, 1998, the remains of Nicholas and Alexandra, along with three of their five children, were at last ceremoniously laid to rest at St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the imperial mausoleum since the interment there of Peter the Great in 1725. Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, paid tribute to the massacred family with a stirring apology:
“All these years, we were silent about this horrible crime. Those who perpetuated this crime and those who for decades have been finding excuses for it are guilty. All of us are guilty. One cannot lie to oneself and explain away wanton cruelty as political necessity.… We are all responsible to the historic memory of the nation. That’s why I should come here as a person and as president. I bow my head before the victims of a senseless murder.”
Secret Lives of the Tsars Page 31