Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  From late in the evening the family and staff sat waiting for the cars that would take them to the train. Kerensky had said they would leave at around midnight, but one o’clock came and still the cars had not arrived. Alexei sat on a box, ‘green with fatigue’, Sophie Buxhoeveden thought, holding his spaniel Joy. Nicky chatted with General Tatishchev and Prince Dolgorukov and the doctors. He was allowed a brief, upsetting visit with his brother Michael, who was not permitted to see anyone else in the family.

  Every half-hour or so the cars were announced, but did not arrive, though the chests and boxes and luggage were taken away, one by one. As the hours passed the continual delay was nerveracking. Tired and sad, Alix wrote a sombre farewell note to Sophie. ‘What shall the future bring to my poor children?’ she wrote. ‘My heart breaks thinking of them.’14

  In actuality the delay was an indication of danger. The soldiers had discovered that Kerensky was ordering the transport of the Romanovs to safety in an eastern Russian location, and they immediately called a meeting in the barracks. In keeping with the prevailing climate of decision-making by committee, they debated whether or not the family ought to be permitted to leave the palace. It was a tug-of-war between Kerensky’s authority and the collectivist mentality of the men, and it took all of the prime minister’s persuasiveness to restrain the soldiers from taking matters into their own hands.

  For five hours, until nearly six o’clock in the morning, the arguments went back and forth, with Kerensky’s harangues eventually wearing down the resistance.15 During that time, Sophie thought, Alix ‘had seen her life at Tsarskoe [Selo] passing before her’, and she had given way to tears.

  ‘The Empress’s face was ashy white as she went out of the door of her home for the last time,’ Sophie wrote. ‘Count Benckendorff and I were left alone on the steps to see them drive away.’ Alix wrote to Sophie later that, seeing her two friends standing there on the palace steps, leaning against the wall for support, she felt their desolation, and no doubt it increased her own.

  The sight of the two faithful members of her household, her staunch lady-in-waiting and the frail old marshal who had stood by her so loyally in recent months, moved her to tears. As the car moved forwards, taking her away from the palace, she felt fresh sorrow, knowing that she might never see any of those she was leaving behind, or her home, ever again.

  32

  The train chugged its way through birch forests, past reddish-brown marshlands and across wide meadows where the grain had been harvested and tall haystacks stood pale yellow in the autumn sunshine. Clover and daisies bloomed amid the green flax; ripe apples and pears hung on the branches and in the birch groves; peasants in bright clothes with baskets hung on their arms went in search of mushrooms.

  It was the season of abundance, mellow and rich, but Alix, who in other circumstances would have savoured the view out of the train window, the villages with their blue-domed churches, the country houses and fertile fields, now turned her face away from the lush country scenes and lay all day on her bed, heartsick and worn out.

  On they travelled, eastwards past lakes and hills and across broad rivers, as the countryside unfolded itself in endless amplitude, the wide horizons ever receding. By the third day Petrograd had been left far behind, and the train began to climb into the foothills of the Urals. Yet even here, deep in the rural landscape, the scars of revolution were evident: manor houses burned, fields torched, barns reduced to heaps of blackened timber. Kitchen gardens uprooted and destroyed. And there was evidence too of the war, village cemeteries full of new graves, crude monuments erected in town squares, only young boys and old men in the fields, all the mature men having left long ago for the front.

  All this Alix might have seen, had she managed to lift herself out of her exhaustion.1 On the fourth day the family left the train and boarded a steamer at Tiumen for the journey up river to Tobolsk, their destination. The steamer was much less comfortable than the train, the cabins small and cramped, the toilet facilities inadequate. Alexei and Marie caught cold, boils erupted on the arms and legs of the tutor Pierre Gilliard, who had to suffer in his bunk. Alix roused herself sufficiently to go to the rail when the steamer passed Pokrovsky, Father Gregory’s village, but no one recorded her reaction.

  A mansion, formerly the governor’s residence, had been set aside in Tobolsk for the use of the Romanovs, but no one had cleaned it or prepared it to be lived in. When they arrived in the town and were escorted to the the residence on Freedom Street, they found the house in a shambles. The windows were boarded up, the floors dirty, the rooms dank with mould and the plumbing badly in need of repair. For many months soldiers had camped out there, staining the flooring, ruining the furniture and peeling the wallpaper off the walls. It took a week to restore the mansion to a habitable condition, which for the Romanovs meant another week of living on the cramped steamer, with Alexei, whose arm was bleeding internally, keeping the others awake at night with his crying.2

  At last the house was clean, freshly painted and papered, the dilapidated furnishings augmented with plush upholstered chairs, tables and lamps and the floors covered with Persian carpets brought from the steamer. Pictures from the family rooms at Tsarskoe Selo were hung on the walls, and there were new curtains at the windows. Alix had her own cushioned sofa in the drawing room where she could recline, with a blanket over her feet and legs, while sewing or reading. The family settled in, Alix and Nicky in their own bedroom, Alexei in his, and Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia sharing a bedroom. Besides the drawing room, there was a room for Alexei’s servant Nagorny, a study for Nicky, a sitting room for Alix, and attic rooms for the servants. Across the street, in a smaller mansion, members of the household staff were accommodated.

  It was a setting of bourgeois comfort, a ‘country palace’, complete with potted palms and aspidistras, antimacassars and lace doilies.3 And because the family moved in in the last days of August, when the weather was warm, the house’s major flaw – an unworkable heating system – was not yet apparent.4

  The defects in plumbing, however, were still in evidence. The toilets overflowed, the bath drains overflowed, and the septic pits were full to the brim, with no one willing to clean them. When the commissar from the Provisional Government, Vassily Pankratov, came to inspect the Romanovs’ living conditions, he was ‘quite appalled’, Nicky wrote in his diary.

  The quaint, old-fashioned town of Tobolsk in the autumn of 1917 had not yet been affected by the revolution. Newspapers from Petrograd took six days to reach the town, no trains ran nearby and the river steamers from Tiumen only came during the summer months. The harsh rhetoric of the Bolsheviks had not yet penetrated to this corner of rural Siberia; the townspeople, considering it an honour to have the former tsar and his family living among them, stopped to cross themselves when passing the mansion on Freedom Street, the men taking off their hats as a sign of respect.5 Merchants sent food to the house, farmers sent vegetables, and hunters, fresh game for the larder. The nuns of the nearby Ivanovsky convent made regular gifts of food.

  Alix, sitting out on the balcony in the September sunshine or watching from her window, took some comfort from the acknowledgments made by passers-by, as she took comfort from the sound of the bells of the town’s many churches (one of which was only a short walk away from the house) and from the presence of the miracle-working relics of the saint of Tobolsk, John Maximovich, which lay in the cathedral on the hill.

  Weary and often ill though she was, she had not lost hope. She was well aware that the Provisional Government had moved the family to Tobolsk in order to protect them, that their captivity was a way of keeping them from falling into the hands of the Soviet. And she kept ever in mind what Kerensky had told Count Benckendorff – that in November, only two months away, there would be elections to the Constituent Assembly, following which a new government would liberate them.

  With her faith in the inherent goodness of the Russian people, despite what she saw as their immaturity (they we
re like ‘big children’, she once said, uncultured and wild, but ultimately good-hearted), she believed that eventually the Russians would come to their senses and realize that they had been deceived by those who had led them into revolution.

  ‘Many already recognize that it [the revolution] was all – a utopia, a chimera,’ she wrote to a friend, Madame Syroboyarsky, the mother of a wounded officer she had once nursed. ‘Their ideals are shattered, covered with dirt and shame, they didn’t achieve a single good thing for Russia.’ Before long even more of her husband’s former subjects would ‘awake, the lie will be revealed, all the falsity, for not all the people have been spoiled, they were tempted, led astray.’6

  What had been done politically could be reversed. The revolution did not have to be permanent.

  September gave way to October, and the autumn rains began, turning the small kitchen garden of the house into a muddy bog.7 Alix slept late, and stayed in her room most of the day, occupying herself with reading, embroidery, and her current preoccupation, learning the long, intricate choral chants to be sung in church. She gave German lessons to Tatiana and taught Alexei his catechism. And in the afternoons, she sat at the piano, playing from memory the songs and classical compositions she had learned as a girl.

  Unsettled by what she did not know – for few letters arrived, and reliable sources of information were even fewer – Alix waited for November, for word that the elections had been held. She did know that the Russian army had retreated yet again before the advancing Germans, abandoning Riga and yielding more territory. There was a chance that the Germans would overrun Petrograd, unseat the Provisional Government and install a regime of their own. They might reinstate Nicky as tsar, after forcing him to sign a peace treaty. Even if the German advance could be halted, Kerensky and his cabinet were surely in a more precarious position than ever. And with the coming of winter, with its inevitable hardships and the resulting popular unrest, Petrograd might well go through another violent political upheaval.

  Towards the end of October Alexei’s tutor Charles Gibbs arrived in Tobolsk and was allowed to join the Romanov household staff. He brought news from Petrograd, where the turmoil and conflict between the Provisional Government and its Bolshevik rivals had worsened, though most of the Bolshevik leaders were either in prison or, like Lenin, in exile. So many workers were on strike that virtually all production had stopped, Gibbs said; the railway workers refused to operate the trains, and once again the citizens of the capital faced severe inflation and the prospect of famine. The Congress of Soviets was about to open and Kerensky, still struggling to hold the Provisional Government together, could no longer keep order. Vigilantes patrolled the streets of Petrograd, attacking violent strikers, looters, and bands of drunken soldiers.

  It was ‘the end of everything’, as Alix wrote to Madame Syroboyarsky. Russia was descending into chaos yet, in the midst of the chaos, God stood ready to help. ‘He is all-powerful and can do anything. In the end He will hear the prayers of those who suffer, and will forgive and save.’ She deplored the ‘spineless’ men, ‘devoid of character, devoid of love for their country’ who were letting it happen.8 ‘We must have unshakeable faith.’ She concluded, that in the long run, all would be well.

  But in November 1917, everything got much worse.

  The Bolsheviks, who had grown in number to fifty thousand or more, and were organized around a Military Revolutionary Committee that supplied arms and ammunition, began taking over key Petrograd installations – the post office, the telephone exchange and telegraph office. Having won many of the capital’s soldiers to their cause, they soon took over the Winter Palace where the Provisional Government had its headquarters and arrested most of the ministers. Kerensky fled. Virtually unopposed, the Bolsheviks had seized governing authority; they would rule, they announced, in the name of the soviets, forming a temporary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

  News of the Bolshevik coup reached Tobolsk on November 15, and in the following days the unfolding story became known. Incredulous at first, then in sadness and anger, Alix and Nicky learned what had happened, how the takeover had occurred quietly, with no gunfire, no bloodshed. How no troops loyal to the Provisional Government had been brought into the capital because the Bolsheviks had seized the railway stations. Above all, how the grand regiments of Petrograd – the Preobrazhensky, the Izmailovsky, the Semeonov – did not take part in the transfer of power, but remained neutral.

  The coup itself had been virtually undetectable to the citizens of the capital, but its aftermath scarred them indelibly. A small military force rallied by Kerensky failed in its brief effort to unseat the new government. Lenin, having returned from exile in the days before the takeover, declared all private property abolished, virtually inviting the propertyless of Petrograd to confiscate mansions, shops, warehouses, churches, with everything they contained. Robbery was not robbery, under the new Bolshevik decree, but a patriotic expropriation of goods for the benefit of the people; therefore the expropriation went forward with a vengeance.

  And in order to safeguard the newly constituted Bolshevik state, the killings began. All those opposed to the party in power – members of the rival political parties, some union members, the remnant of monarchists, soldiers and cadets loyal to the Provisional Government – came under suspicion. Many hundreds were murdered in the days following the takeover. And Petrograd, suddenly, was awash in liquor. The vast wine cellars of the Winter Palace were plundered, wine barrels in the vaults and warehouses of merchants were seized, tapped and their contents consumed. Wine flowed everywhere. ‘The air was saturated with vinous vapours,’ a contemporary wrote. ‘The whole population came at a run and . . . gathered into pails the snow saturated with wine, drew with cups the flowing rivulets, or drank lying flat on the ground and pressing their lips to the snow. Everybody was drunk.’9

  As the murders and thefts continued, the ‘wine riots’ went on unchecked, people wandered in a fog of intoxication, brawling, vomiting, lying dead drunk in the snow. Petrograd was the scene of a monumental crime spree and a monumental debauch – the latter a conspicuous symbol, to those critical of the new government, of the depths to which the revolution had sunk.

  So long did the orgy of inebriation last that the Bolshevik officials began to suspect a plot on the part of their political enemies to befuddle the brains of the citizens, making them incapable of coherent thought and reducing them to the level of animals – a plummeting into sordidness that would be blamed on the new regime. Troops were ordered in to destroy the stocks of liquor, but instead of smashing the barrels and breaking the bottles they too became drunk, perpetuating the weeks of inebriation.

  ‘I can imagine what a terrible time you lived through,’ Alix wrote to Madame Syroboyarsky about the events of November and early December. ‘Incredibly painful, sad, offensive, shameful . . . We must bear all these vile, horrible acts and humiliations with meekness (for there is nothing we can do to help). And He will save us . . .’10

  ‘He will save us.’ It was Alix’s litany, her shield and defence against the shocks and sorrows of all that was happening. But in advocating an attitude of meekness, and in reiterating, as she did in her letters to Madame Syroboyarsky and others, that ‘there is nothing we can do to help’, Alix was being disingenuous. For, prayerful though she was, she was far from meek, and she was counting on the success of a rescue effort.

  Boris Soloviev, Father Gregory’s son-in-law, was pledged to free the Romanovs from their captivity.

  Father Gregory was long dead, his corpse disinterred and burned to ashes by revolutionaries and his tomb desecrated. But his spirit lived on, Alix believed. She felt him close to her.11 In the actions of his son-in-law Boris he was still working for the good of the entire family.

  An organization had been established, the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk, to raise money and plan and coordinate the deliverance of the Romanovs from their captors. A banker in Petrograd had collected nearly two hundred thousa
nd roubles from supporters, and more money had been raised from the sale of Alix’s jewels, which she smuggled past the guards at Tobolsk, carried by one of her maids. Soloviev had quietly convinced most of the garrison at Tiumen to support the rescue effort – or so he claimed. Communication went on between Alix and Soloviev, perhaps in code – how much communication will never be known, as the notes were passed in the utmost secrecy and destroyed once they were read. Prearranged signals were worked out.12

  All this activity went on in the deepest secrecy, leaving little or no trace behind. How often messages were smuggled into the house by visitors – Alix’s oculist, her dentist, Dr Derevenko’s son Kolia, various tradesmen – or delivered in packages of food or clothing (Alexei once smuggled out a small note in a bunch of radishes), or were concealed and carried in and out by servants, or hidden in gifts, or in the soiled clothes that were sent out to be laundered, can never be known.

  Correspondence was thus of two types: the official letters, scrutinized by guards and authorized (and therefore virtually empty of meaningful content), and the private letters and notes, which came and went by unauthorized channels, many of which can no longer be read.

  Of the second type were the messages from Boris Soloviev and others in the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk, and also the letter Alix’s brother Ernie sent via a former cavalry officer, Serge Vladimirovich Markov. In this letter Ernie offered help to organize a rescue effort, but Nicky and Alix both sent a negative response. The Germans were the enemy, and no help from the enemy would be accepted.13

  The arrival in Tobolsk of a young friend of Olga’s, Marguerita Hitrovo, aroused the guards’ suspicion. They knew, or supposed, that rescue efforts were under way, and were particularly suspicious of Marguerita, possibly because she had written ‘imprudently worded’ postcards to her family. When she delivered some letters for the Romanovs to Anastasia Hendrikov, she was arrested and taken to Moscow.14 Countess Hendrikov was arrested and questioned, and kept shut in her room alone. Eventually Marguerita was released, but the incident marked a turning point in the Romanovs’ captivity; the soldiers redoubled their watchfulness and became more harsh in their attitude.