Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  Winter closed in like a long pale shroud. The family was used to cold, but this was the cold of Siberia, which froze the river to a great depth and enclosed the town in its icebound grip. Howling winds arose to blow snow in all directions, cutting the faces of people in the street like needles, and preventing all but the hardiest from going outside for weeks at a time. The temperature dropped to fifty, sixty, seventy degrees below zero, with the nights even colder. When the dim sun rose in the late morning, it revealed a dull white landscape, trees, roofs, fences lilac-white with hoar frost, cottages drowned in high-piled white snowdrifts, a white fog hanging low over everything.

  Nicky spent his days wrapped in a warm Circassian infantry coat lined with shearling. The temperature in his study was barely 50 degrees, in Alix’s drawing room even lower. Icy draughts blew in through cracks in the window-frames. There was too little fuel available to operate the heating system in the house, so the only heat came from inadequate wood stoves. The family stayed near these stoves, doing their best to stuff rags and paper into the cracks in the walls.

  ‘We shiver in the rooms,’ Alix wrote to Anna Vyrubov shortly before Christmas, ‘and there is always a strong draught from the windows. Your pretty jacket is useful. We all have chilblains on our fingers.’

  She described their daily life. ‘I am writing this while resting before dinner. Little Jimmy [Tatiana’s black and ginger Pekinese] lies near me while his mistress plays the piano.’ She described their quiet evenings, Nicky reading aloud to the family and staff, her dull days painting ribbons for book markers, making Christmas cards, embroidering with her stiff cold chilblained fingers.

  ‘Alexei, Marie and Gelik [Gilliard] acted a little play for us. The others are committing to memory scenes from French plays. Excellent distraction and good for the memory.’15 ‘I have not been out in the fresh air for four weeks,’ Alix added. ‘I can’t go out in such bitter weather because of my heart. Nevertheless church draws me almost irresistibly.’

  Such was the content of her letter that went by official post. In the same week as this letter was written, she asked Charles Gibbs to write a secret letter to her former governess in England, Margaret Hardcastle Jackson, describing in detail the floor plan of the governor’s mansion and giving the times they were allowed out in the yard, when they went to church services and how many guards went with them, and other information vital to any would-be rescuers. The letter, Alix told Gibbs, was intended for George V and his ministers; she was sure that her old governess would forward it to the British government. What became of it is not recorded.16

  ‘It is bright sunshine and everything glitters with hoar frost,’ Alix wrote to Anna again in the last days of 1917. ‘There are such moonlight nights, it must be ideal on the hills.’ The sentiment was poetic, but behind it, no doubt, was a hint to Anna, and through her to Boris Soloviev, that a moonlit night would offer a good opportunity for a small band of soldiers from the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk to find their way to the governor’s house, overwhelm the sleepy guards, and take the family out to safety.

  33

  Among Alix’s Christmas gifts in 1917, along with dressing gowns, slippers, a silver dish, spoons and several icons, was a homemade diary. Tatiana had sewn it herself, taking one of her exercise books and making a cover for it of pinkish cloth lined with white silk.

  Inside, the diary was inscribed, ‘To my sweet darling Mama dear with my best wishes for a happy new year. May God’s blessings be upon you and guard you for ever. Your own loving girl, Tatiana.’

  Alix began writing in it on New Year’s Day, noting that it was the church feast of the Circumcision of the Lord and that the morning temperature was 39 degrees and that Olga and Tatiana were in bed with elevated temperatures and symptoms of German measles.1 The weather was clear and sunny, and there was no wind; she had lunch with her two sick daughters and then sat on the balcony in the sunshine for half an hour. In the evening, she noted, both girls’ temperatures had risen. She rested until eight, ‘reading and writing’, then had dinner with Olga and Tatiana in the room all four of her daughters shared, then played bezique, a card game, with Nicky. The remainder of the evening was spent with the gathered household, Anastasia Hendrikov (whose isolation from the family following the incident with the letters had been brief), Fräulein Schneider, General Tatishchev, the aide-de-coup Valia Dolgorukov, the tutors Gilliard and Gibbs, and the doctors Botkin and Derevenko.

  Nicky read to them all, from Turgenev’s novel Nest of the Gentry, while Alix knitted and the fire popped and crackled in the stove.

  Knowing that her diary would be read by the soldiers guarding her, Alix was careful to write nothing in it that would alert them to her hopes and plans, her inmost thoughts. It was only a bare record of her activities, of the comings and goings of those around her, of the health of her family and of the weather. She also noted the letters she wrote to be sent by official post.

  The diary was as revealing for what it did not record as for what it did; Alix did not note down her variations in mood, or the waxing and waning of her hopes, or her irritations or her moments of quiet exaltation. She made no record of the secret messages she sent and received, of the whispered conversations – too low for the guards to hear – in which news and rumours were passed among the family and household. Nor did she write anything of the behaviour of her captors, or of the overriding preoccupation of everyone living in the governor’s mansion and everyone guarding its occupants: that the rescue effort, and no one doubted that a rescue effort – possibly more than one – would be made, would come with the spring thaw.

  The most immediate concern of the captives in January of 1918 was money. There was not enough of it and, with the fall of the Provisional Government, no more was sent from Petrograd. Alexandra had her jewels, some of which she had sent to Boris Soloviev, and there were still some funds left from what the family had brought from Tsarskoe Selo. But there was not enough cash to pay the Tobolsk merchants, who stopped advancing credit, nor enough to pay the servants, nor enough to buy food for everyone. Alix, Valia Dolgorukov and Gilliard undertook to make a budget. Some servants were sent back to Petrograd with small allowances and, while those that remained were willing to work without salaries, Alix could not bring herself to accept their offer; instead she reduced all the salaries, so that no one would go without.

  Keeping the kitchen supplied with food was now difficult, and the staff offered to help pay the cost. The midday meal was reduced to soup, one dish of meat or fish, and stewed fruit. Supper was light, macaroni or rice or pancakes and a dish of vegetables. No one had more than one helping.2 There was no butter, and very little sugar – three lumps a day for each person. The donations of produce and game that had augmented the family’s diet in September and October came rarely now and, when they did, Alix rejoiced in them as ‘gifts from heaven’. Once in a while a merchant sent some caviar or fish, but such luxuries were very rare.

  The captives did not know it, but Tobolsk was an oasis of plenty in that bleak January. Petrograd starved; peasants in many country villages survived by eating straw and moss and the bark of trees. The Bolsheviks were blamed for what rapidly became a widespread famine, and crowds of rioters, weak from hunger, murdered food commissars and burned the headquarters of the local soviets. The violence made no difference; the terrible scarcity continued, and many corpses were buried under the high-piled winter snows.

  The family knew little, but heard rumours of overtures being made to Germany for the negotiation of a separate peace, and vaguer reports of Russian regions declaring themselves independent from the government, a fragmentation of the empire that threatened stability and promised to create further economic disruption. Official news had once again become infrequent and unreliable, and heavy snowfalls all but cut Tobolsk off from the outside world.3 Travellers came and went in horse-drawn sledges, or followed the riverbanks along paths hewn through the snowdrifts. After each fresh fall of snow the streets of Tobolsk were impassab
le for days, blocked by tall mounds of new snow sparkling and glittering in the sunlight.

  Alix sat with Anastasia and supervised her history lessons (the fall of the Roman Empire), taught Alexei the meaning of the Filioque Controversy (did the Holy Spirit proceed from God the Father alone, or from both God and Jesus?) in the history of the eastern and western branches of Christianity, and corrected Tatiana’s German grammar. While the weather worsened (‘snowstorm, terrible wind,’ she noted on January 21), she read the Gospel of Mark with Alexei, thankful that by the end of the day the temperature had risen slightly and the wind was less severe.

  She worried about the weather, for Boris Soloviev was due to reach Tobolsk any day and bad weather was likely to delay his journey. Fortunately he arrived the day before the worst snowstorm. Through intermediaries he sent money, letters and goods into the governor’s mansion, and was given many letters Alix had written to take back to Petrograd. The family glimpsed him from the windows of the house when he walked in the street below.

  ‘Let me know what you think of our situation,’ Alix wrote in a secret message in the first week of February, probably to Soloviev.4 ‘Our common wish is to achieve the possibility of living tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigue. Write frankly, for I will accept your letter with faith in your sincerity.’

  Soloviev replied the following day. ‘Deeply grateful for the feelings and trust expressed,’ he wrote. ‘The situation is on the whole very serious and could become critical, and I am certain that it will take the help of devoted friends, or a miracle, for everything to turn out all right, and for you to get your wish for a tranquil life.’ He signed the note, ‘Your sincerely devoted Boris.’

  Alix sent a response. ‘You’ve confirmed my fears,’ she told Soloviev. ‘Friends are either in uncertain absence or else we simply have none, and I pray tirelessly to the Lord and place all my hope in Him alone.’ She was discouraged, but still hopeful. ‘You speak of a miracle, but isn’t it already a miracle that the Lord has sent you to us here? God keep you. Grateful Alexandra.’5

  In February, on orders from Moscow, a soviet was elected in Tobolsk, and the town was brought within the Bolshevik orbit. New soldiers from Tsarskoe Selo arrived to guard the Romanovs, ‘blackguardly-looking young men’, Gilliard thought, and a new commander was appointed.6 The soviet imposed rationing, and the Tobolsk City Food Committee issued ration card number fifty-four to ‘Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, Ex-Emperor, residing on Freedom Street, with six dependents’. It entitled him to receive, when presented in the cooperative shop called ‘Self-Conscience,’ 190 pounds of flour, seven pounds of butter, and half a pound of sugar – when these things were available. With the reduction in food came a reduction in the monthly stipend allotted to each of the captives, and Alix had to dismiss ten more servants.

  Tobolsk was no longer a safe enclave, an obscure corner of the old Russia. It had become a battleground of sorts, where the Bolshevik government was seeking to impose new ways of thinking and living on a conservative population. There was resistance to these new ways in the town – and in Siberia generally, where political opposition to the government was strong. Special paramilitary groups called Red Guards were being formed to crush the counter-revolutionary forces. An armed clash was likely and, when it came, the Romanovs would be at risk.

  ‘Their Majesties still cherish hope that among their loyal friends some may be found to attempt their release,’ Gilliard wrote in mid-March.7 The new guards were insolent and hostile, but their commander, Colonel Kobylinsky, was, Gilliard thought, ‘on our side’. The arrogant guards were strict in their rules, but often careless; it would be relatively easy for a few resolute men, well organized and with a sound plan, to contrive an escape.

  It was carnival season, and Tobolsk was full of revelry. Bells pealed, people sang and played mouth-organs and balalaikas, there were jugglers and clowns, mimes and comics. Disguised by their costumes and masks, the ordinarily staid citizens of the town plunged into merriment, drinking and flirting without inhibition. Sleighs decorated with ribbons and banners flew along the snowy streets, bells jangling. Work was forgotten, business set aside, politics ignored. The only imperative was enjoyment and, to heighten the enjoyment, there were plates of blinis and gingerbread and nuts and candy, washed down with glass after glass of pepper vodka, lemon vodka, black-currant vodka, vodka in seemingly infinite variety.

  ‘Never was the situation more favourable for escape,’ Gilliard thought. Not only was the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk active, but another monarchist organization was at work, and at the beginning of Lent, this group sent 250,000 roubles to the family.8 Couriers brought letters from friends pledging assistance, and Alix managed to smuggle out more of her valuables to be sold to raise funds.9

  Unknown to the Romanovs, the British Foreign Office was attempting a rescue plan of its own. A Norwegian steamship operator, Jonas Lied, was recruited to coordinate the rescue and to provide a boat. Once the ice broke on the Irtysh River, it would be possible to take the family up river via the Irtysh and the Ob and then overland to the Kara Sea, where a torpedo boat from the British Navy would be waiting. King George was in favour of this effort, which reached the office of the director of British naval intelligence.10 But it was abandoned – possibly because by the time the rivers were free of ice, the Romanovs were no longer in Tobolsk.

  The merriment of carnival came to an abrupt end, and Lent began, the season of deprivation, purgation, cleansing. Stories swept through Tobolsk of bands of renegade sailors who were roaming at will through Tiumen, terrorizing the populace, stealing and shooting. Late in March some Red Guards from Omsk arrived in Tobolsk and installed themselves in a makeshift barracks in the town. No one knew whether they had been sent by some provincial authority or whether they had come on their own, to steal and kill and cause disruption.

  Soon another group of Red Guards came, this time from Ekaterinburg, a leftist stronghold. This group, made up largely of workmen turned soldier, most of them Latvian, put up posters in the streets announcing that all gold and silver and valuables must be turned over to them on pain of death.11 They went from house to house, seizing money, jewellery, and other goods, arresting the wealthy merchants and holding them for ransom.

  Conflict between the Omsk and Ekaterinburg gangs – they were little more than that – erupted, and the soldiers guarding the Governor’s House were caught in the middle. Their obligation was to protect the Romanovs, but the prime imperative was not to let the family fall into other hands. ‘The guard announced,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote, ‘that if anyone tried to take their prisoners, they would kill the entire imperial family themselves before they gave them up.’12

  Confusion escalated. Groups of renegades came and went, skirmishing among themselves, fighting for turf. At any moment they might begin to fight over the Governor’s Mansion, with its valuable hostages. And the defenders of the mansion, not knowing what else to do amid the chaos, were sworn to eliminate their captives.

  Amid this extremely tense situation, Alexei, who had caught whooping cough from his playmate Kolia Derevenko, began to haemorrhage.

  ‘Bright sunshine,’ Alix wrote in her diary for April 12. ‘Baby [Alexei] stays in bed as from coughing so hard has a slight haemorrhage in the abdomen.’ Later in the day she added ‘Dined with Baby. Pains strong.’13

  The haemorrhage grew worse; the pain spread to Alexei’s groin and legs. Hour by hour the swelling increased and the pain became greater. ‘Baby slept badly from pain and was four times sick,’ Alix wrote on the following day. ‘A little better for two hours in the evening and then worse again.’14

  It soon became evident that this was a severe attack, the most severe Alexei had undergone in years. His fever rose and he moaned and screamed in pain, his body grotesquely swollen, his skin stretched tight. He ate nothing, and the pain kept him from sleeping. With his fever rising and the risk of a fatal internal infection high, Dr Derevenko cautioned A
lix and Nicky that Alexei was close to death.

  Icons hung around Alexei’s bed, some of them gifts from Father Gregory, and Alix must have invoked Father Gregory’s healing powers many times as hour by hour she watched by her son’s bedside. This was what she had been dreading ever since the starets’s death sixteen months earlier: that one day Alexei would become dangerously ill, and that Father Gregory would not be available to heal him.

  ‘Sat whole day with him,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘every half-hour very strong cramp-like pains for three minutes. Towards the evening better.’15

  Suddenly, after several days of agony, he was better. Unable to find any medicines in Tobolsk, Dr Derevenko ‘tried a new remedy’, according to Sophie Buxhoeveden. Whatever the new remedy was, it brought relief. The bleeding ceased, though Alexei’s fever was still high and he remained very weak.16 By April 19 Alix was able to write in a letter to Anna Vyrubov that, though Alexei still had pains in his back and leg, he was eating a little and his fever was no longer consistently high, though he was still ‘terribly pale and thin’ and the doctor was concerned that he might start to bleed again.

  Throughout the days and nights of Alexei’s illness, Alix had watched by his bedside as she always did, relieved for an hour or two by Tatiana so that she could rest. She had become ‘like his shadow’, she told Anna in a letter, sitting there with him, holding his leg, talking to him, watching him in his fitful sleep. She was as thin, as pale as a shadow, her grey hair drawn back carelessly off her lined face, her frayed, patched gown loose at waist and wrists.