“Well, here we all are,” Nicholas told Yurovsky, thinking his family was still going to be moved after taking a photograph. “What are you going to do now?” Yurovsky raised his voice to be heard more clearly.
“In view of the fact that your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia,” he said, glaring straight at Nicholas, “the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has sentenced you to be shot.”1043
In a moment of grim realization, Nicholas rose to his feet. His face was blank with shock. He barely had the chance to utter the word what before Yurovsky pulled out a pistol and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. Out of instinct, Alexandra and Olga crossed themselves, trembling with fear. At that moment, a hail of bullets rained down on the unsuspecting family. Alexandra had just enough time to make the sign of the cross again before she was killed by a single bullet. The guards were alarmed when their bullets ricocheted off the wounded grand duchesses. Long before their date with destiny, the girls, at Alexandra’s insistence, had sewn their multi-million-dollar collection of jewels into their corsets. Now, realizing that their shots would be ineffective, the guards used bayonets to murder the four sisters. Miraculously, the one person who survived the horrific attack was Alexei, who, “still in his father’s arms, somehow managed to show signs of life as his hand began to clutch his father’s coat. Yurovsky took his gun and fired into the young boy’s head. The family’s ordeal was ended.” It took twenty minutes to end the life of the last emperor and empress of Russia. Even though they were gone, victims of “one of history’s grisliest political assassinations,” the legacy of Tsarina Alexandra and her family would live on for decades.1044
Eight days later, Ekaterinburg fell to the White Army. Rushing to the Ipatiev House, White soldiers discovered that the occupants had vanished. All that was left were a few pieces of clothes left on the ground, and a bullet-riddled, bloodstained wall in the basement.
22
The Fall of Eagles
(July–November 1918)
With the collapse of the western front and the push of British, American, and Canadian troops into Germany, there was little doubt that the Great War would end in a victory for the Allies. For the first time in nearly four years, Queen Mary felt that she could finally exhale. On Saturday, July 6, 1918, she and George celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The day began with a thanksgiving service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, followed by celebrations at the Guildhall, London’s Gothic-inspired city hall. There, surrounded by hundreds of friends and family, the royal couple received a “humble address” from Parliament expressing their deepest gratitude for the king and queen’s “unfailing devotion to duty in this time of stress.” George and Mary insisted that the traditional gifts of silver be donated to the Red Cross on behalf of the war effort.1045
The celebrations surrounding the silver wedding anniversary were overshadowed by the news that Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family were murdered at Ekaterinburg. On Sunday, July 21, the king and queen were preparing to have lunch with Princess Helena, George’s aunt, and her two daughters, the princesses Marie Louise and Helena Victoria. At around 1:00 p.m., Helena and her daughters were waiting in the corridors at Windsor Castle for the king and queen “who were—for the first time in anyone’s memory—a half-hour late.” When they finally appeared on the landing, both looked grave and deeply upset. The king looked so grief-stricken as he and Mary descended the staircase that Helena assumed it must have been a major German victory on the battlefield.
“Oh, George, is the news very bad?” she asked.
“Yes, but it is not what you think,” he replied. “Nicky, Alix, and their five children have all been murdered by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg.”1046
Mary cancelled lunch with Aunt Helena. She spent the rest of the afternoon in solitude grieving with Nicholas’s aunt Queen Alexandra and the tsarina’s sister the Marchioness of Milford Haven. That night, the queen confirmed in her diary that the sad news had arrived: “The news were confirmed of poor Nicky of Russia having been shot by those brutes of Bolsheviks last week, on July 16th. It is too horrible & heartless … terribly upset by the news.”1047 Some twenty years later, Queen Mary would still be “sorely conscience stricken” over the Romanovs’ fate. Dona’s grandson Fritzi would report that, even in 1936, the queen was “still haunted by the fate which befell the Tsar and his family.”1048
On July 25, the king declared a month of official mourning for the imperial family. Later that day, he and the queen attended a memorial service at the Russian church on Welbeck Street in London. Members of the royal family wore black armbands as a sign of support for the Romanovs. This practice was abruptly stopped when the tsar’s mother Minnie sought refuge in England, since she believed that her son and family were still alive. Early reports claimed only Nicholas had been killed. But for more than a month, information coming out of Russia was scarce. It was not until the end of August that the grisly details emerged that the entire family had in fact been executed as well. “I hear from Russia that there is every probability that Alicky and the four daughters and little boy were murdered at the same time as Nicky,” George wrote. “It is too horrible and shows what fiends those Bolshevists [sic] are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!”1049 From the British public, though, there seemed to be a general lack of sympathy for the tragic fate of the Romanovs. Lord Stamfordham, the king’s private secretary, wrote an indignant letter to the British statesman Lord Esher:
Was there ever a crueler murder and has this country ever before displayed such callous indifference to a tragedy of this magnitude: What does it all mean? I am so thankful that the King and Queen attended the memorial service. I have not yet discovered that the PM … [was] even represented. Where is our national sympathy, gratitude, common decency … Why didn’t the German Emperor make the release of the Czar and his family a condition of the Brest-Litovsk peace?1050
Mary’s son David never forgot the impact the Romanov murders had on his father. Years later, David recalled, “The Russian Revolution of 1917 with the murder of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family had shaken my father’s confidence in the innate decency of mankind.”1051
The murder of the Russian imperial family was met with reactions of horror in every corner of Europe. The tsar’s dramatic downfall had been enough of a shock, but to learn that he and his entire family had been brutally murdered proved too much for many of the continent’s crowned heads. Dona was “haunted” by the massacre.1052 Her Russian antipathy was widely known, but the execution of an anointed monarch and his innocent children overwhelmed the highly sensitive empress. In the words of one historian, “That the once powerful Romanov dynasty should be toppled by the people meant that other thrones were in danger of succumbing to the same fate.”1053 With the eruption of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Charles and Zita’s fates looked increasingly bleak because the overthrow of the imperial family in Russia emboldened the Austrian imperial family’s enemies—the political and nationalist parties within Austria-Hungary—to seek a similar outcome for the emperor and empress.
When the imperial couple left Vienna in May 1918 on an official visit to Bulgaria, their critics accused them of running. The truth was that King Ferdinand of the Bulgarians, Zita’s brother-in-law, insisted they make an appearance in Sofia to rally support for the alliance between their two countries. It also afforded Zita the rare opportunity to visit her nieces and nephews, the children of her sister Maria Louisa and King Ferdinand, who were only a few years younger than the empress.1054 The visit seemed a success. The Bulgarians cheered Charles and Zita, threw parades for them, and lit fireworks off at night. But the enthusiasm of the crowds was misleading. The five days they spent in Bulgaria masked a growing feeling among the Central powers of the war’s futility. It was a similar feeling when they visited Constantinople later that year to shore up relations between Austria-Hungary and the fraying Ottoman Empire.
Over the summer,
Zita and her family slipped away from Vienna for a much-needed respite at their beloved Villa Wartholz. When they returned to Vienna, the empress was overcome with worry and deep sadness over the country’s worsening predicament. Vienna was in the grips of turmoil, prompting Zita to dejectedly ask her husband as they pulled up to Schönbrunn, “Is this all a dream?”1055 In Austria, the emperor’s enemies allied to topple the monarchy. When the Reichsrat convened in July, one of the members of the Czech delegation stood up and shouted out, “We regard Austria as a centuries’ old crime against humanity … It is our highest national duty to betray Austria whenever and wherever we can. We shall hate Austria, we shall fight against her, and God willing, we shall in the end smash her to pieces.”1056 Of all the ethnic groups that comprised the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechs had created the greatest problems for the monarchy. For decades, the Crown had been in constant negotiations with the Czechs over one issue or another. As a Slavic people who comprised the largest portion of the empire’s population—Germans and Hungarians combined only amounted to half the total population—they were determined to receive equality. When that failed, they wanted total independence. This problem was inflamed by the exiled Czech nationalist Thomas Masaryk, who, living mostly in the United States at the time, rallied hundreds of thousands of people to his cause of total Czech independence from Austria-Hungary.
By August 1918, the perfidy of the nationalist parties reached new proportions. The Reichsrat nearly dissolved after the Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, and Slavs all declared their desire for independence. Their mission to dismantle Austria-Hungary was further fueled when the Allied forces, led by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, acknowledged the new nation-state of Czechoslovakia. Declaring itself an independent country, Czechoslovakia forged itself from the eight-hundred-year-old Kingdom of Bohemia, one of the traditional backbones of the Habsburg monarchy. Shortly thereafter, the Allies acknowledged Thomas Masaryk as the head of the Provisional Government of Czechoslovakia—on November 14, he would formally be elected its first president by the National Assembly in Prague.
This latest crisis in Austria-Hungary came as the Allies began their final assault into Central Europe. On August 8, British forces smashed through the German lines at Amiens. Later joined by the French, they conquered six miles of trenches and captured nearly sixteen thousand German and Austrian prisoners of war. Nearly sixty years later, Empress Zita still remembered her husband’s reaction to the news of the Allied advance. “The Emperor Charles had been skeptical all along of the victory boasts which the German supreme command had been making throughout the spring and summer about its offensive in the west,” she said. “So, when the news of the 8 August defeat reached us … his first words to me were simply: ‘Well, so now here we are.’”1057
There was little doubt that the Austrian Empire was facing its greatest crisis, but unlike in Russia and Germany, the imperial family was not universally reviled. Charles, and especially Zita, still enjoyed some measure of popularity. One incident that shows this is a charity ball held at the end of summer 1918. The event was organized to raise money for those who had been wounded in the war. A number of members of the imperial court warned the empress against going for fear that “she would be booed” and the resulting “scandal would be tremendous.” Ever defiant in the face of adversity, Zita declared both she and Charles would attend. When they arrived at Vienna’s newly built Konzerthaus, they were both apprehensive about what they might encounter. When they entered the densely crowded Großer Saal, they were met with dead silence. After a moment of this, the crowds erupted into “frenetic applause.” The rest of the evening passed smoothly. After the performance, the emperor and empress mingled freely with all the guests. The French journalist and historian Jean Sévillia described the sad irony of what took place that night: “In all the provinces of the Empire, in the State, the Church, at the levels of the population, vigorous forces remained faithful to the monarchy. The voice of this silent majority was not heard however: no effort was made to make it speak.”1058
The Konzerthaus ball at the end of August was followed almost immediately by the collapse of the Central powers. It began with the surrender of Bulgaria on September 25, 1918. Bulgaria’s capitulation came as no surprise to Charles and Zita, who received the telegram announcing it at 7:30 p.m. on September 25. According to the empress, King Ferdinand had been “looking for a way out.”1059 King Ferdinand had proved an ineffective wartime leader and had no choice but to capitulate. Defeated and humiliated, Ferdinand departed Bulgaria aboard his train bound for his native Coburg. With Austria’s southern European ally vanquished and the Central powers cut off from Turkey, the tide continued to turn against them. Romania and Serbia, who had been conquered by the Central powers, reentered the war with a vengeance. Once the Balkan front collapsed, Zita knew that it “made it even more urgent to start peace talks with the Western Powers while there was still something to talk about.”1060
By the beginning of October, Austria-Hungary began its descent into near anarchy. The Czechoslovak nationalist party had control of Prague, the Hungarian Magyars were succumbing to Bolshevik propaganda filtering in from Russia, and soldiers from Slovenia and Croatia were in open revolt. Like Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor Charles did not want civil war to erupt, prompting him to acknowledge the different nation-states within the empire. Upon meeting with his Crown Council, Charles’s ministers presented him with a People’s Manifesto, but the emperor made it clear he would not sign an act of abdication. For the better part of a day, his ministers hounded him incessantly to sign the manifesto, following him from one room of Schönbrunn to the next. Fed up, Charles turned to his minister of the interior, who was holding the document, and said, “If you won’t even let me read it, how do you expect me to sign it?” When he finally read the document, Charles handed it to his wife for her opinion. Zita mistook it for an abdication. In one of the rare emotional outbursts of her life, she flew into a frenzy.
“A sovereign can never abdicate,” she said. “He can be deposed and his sovereign rights declared forfeit. All right. That is force. But abdicate—never, never, never! I would rather fall here at your side. Then there would be Otto. And even if all of us here were killed, there would still be other Habsburgs!” The ministers still pressed for a signature.
“The country will be reduced to the utmost misery,” Zita declared. “Who will be concerned for the country if it is no longer led by the one man who is above party interests, and cares only for the future of all?”1061 When one of his ministers told Charles that it was not an abdication—that he was not surrendering his role as emperor—he sat silently for a moment then said, “Madness reigns today and a madhouse is no place for a sovereign.”1062 With that, Emperor Charles I affixed his signature in pencil. His ministers hurriedly grabbed the document and rushed over to the Reichsrat.
The parliamentary delegations decried the manifesto. The Czechs boycotted it, the Slovenians and the other Slavs walked out of the assembly, the Germans refused to accept it, the Ukrainians outright denied its existence, the Poles were in abstention, and the Italians refused to believe it applied to them. Protests broke out in Vienna and the economy “came to a standstill; [there was] no coal, no food, no direction, no control. Prisoners of war returning from Russia brought with them Bolshevik ideas, or at any rate the contempt for ‘authority’ which had inaugurated the Russian Revolution.”1063
Near the end of October, Charles sent Wilhelm II a telegram stating that he intended to ask for peace from the Allies “within twenty-four hours.” Charles declared he was ready “without awaiting the result of the other negotiations, to enter into negotiations upon peace between Austria-Hungary and the states in the opposing group, and for an immediate armistice upon all the Dual Monarchy’s fronts.”1064
A few days later, riots broke out in Hungary. Charles and Zita hurried to Budapest to assess the stability of the monarchy there. “We must show the people, that we are where our duty comman
ds,” Zita said.1065 The Hungarians had shown the couple moving demonstrations of loyalty at their coronation. Now, they hoped that those same people would support the entire empire in its hour of despair. Charles, Zita, and their children arrived by motorcar in Budapest on October 24. They took up residence at Gödöllö Palace, one of the largest royal residences in Central Europe. Built in a double-U shape, Gödöllö boasted eight wings in addition to the residential apartments, as well as a church, theater, riding hall, greenhouse, and orangery. As soon as the children were settled in, Charles and Zita faced the daunting task of consolidating the government. They appointed a new prime minister named Michael Karolyi. Descended from a wealthy aristocratic family, Karolyi believed he was destined to play a part in ruling Hungary. He had been opposed to Austria’s involvement in the war but managed to convince Charles that his appointment as prime minister would strengthen the ties between Hungary and Austria. This proved to be a fatal mistake. When the emperor sounded out Karolyi’s government a few days later for support, he was alarmed to learn that they were abandoning the monarchy in favor of turning the country into a republic. Knowing he had been beaten, Charles released Karolyi and his government from their oaths of loyalty. The death knell of the Habsburg monarchy had been sounded.
Throughout the rest of the empire, the situation completely fell apart. From October 24 to November 3, the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was fought along the Austro-Italian border. The Italian army inflicted demoralizing casualties on the Austro-Hungarian forces—more than four hundred thousand soldiers were captured, wounded, or killed. The defeat marked the collapse of the Italian front and the first dissolutions in the Austro-Hungarian military. This disastrous outcome precipitated the total collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Page 51