Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  She was worried about Alexei. He had been so robust over the winter, flinging himself down the ice mountain Nicky and Gilliard had erected in the yard (and the soldiers had torn down), piling up the wood his father cut with such vigour that he tore his gloves, playing energetically with Kolia. She had hoped that his robustness was a good sign. Now that hope had proved illusory.

  She still clung to her other hope – the hope of rescue – but worried that that too might prove illusory. Early in April she learned that Boris Soloviev had been arrested. In prison, under torture, he might reveal the names of the others who were working for the family’s relief. She trusted that there were many others still actively making plans and arrangements on their behalf, but so far none had done more than send money and encouraging messages. She had been told that, among the soldiers from Omsk, and others from Tiumen, there were hundreds of former officers, devoted monarchists, who had enlisted in the ranks in order to be in a position to come to the family’s aid when the right moment came.17 Surely, now that spring was on its way, all the plans that had been made over the winter would come to fruition.

  Meanwhile she devoted herself to watching Alexei’s gradual recovery, worn out by her vigil and her anxiety.

  ‘I worry so much. My God! How Russia suffers,’ she wrote to Anna. ‘You know that I love it even more than you do, miserable country, demolished from within, and by the Germans from without.’ Russia was ‘disintegrating into bits’, she wrote. ‘I cannot think calmly about it. Such hideous pain in heart and soul.’18

  The burden of the hideous pain made her irascible. She snapped at the servants. (‘My greatest sin is my irritability . . . You know how hot-tempered I am.’) She could endure the cold, the privation, the humiliations of captivity and the dread of harm, even the terrible apprehension that Alexei might die. But the small, everyday strains provoked her to angry outbursts – when a maid lied, or ‘sermonized like a preacher.’

  ‘I want to be a better woman, and I try,’ she wrote. ‘For long periods I am really patient, and then breaks out again my bad temper.’ She knew that she had grown cold towards the servants and staff, and she felt guilty about it.19

  Alix’s accustomed self-scrutiny and scrupulosity of conscience were intact, as was her faith. ‘We live here on earth but we are already half gone to the next world,’ she wrote. ‘We see with different eyes.’ She looked around her, and saw not the chaos of armed bands clashing in confused struggle, not her tense, anxious husband and children and the apprehensive staff, not nervous guards ready, if need be, to kill them all, but the benign, protective presence of the divine.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she told Anna Vyurubov after Boris Soloviev’s arrest. ‘Don’t worry. The Lord is everywhere and will work a miracle.’

  34

  Long before dawn on the morning of April 26, 1918, four wooden carts stood in Freedom Street, in front of the Governor’s Mansion. A cold wind was blowing, and there was snow on the ground. The door of the house opened, and a cluster of people began to file out, wrapped tightly in layers of garments against the morning chill.

  The commissar from Moscow, Vassily Yakovlev, stood to attention as the former tsar came out, wearing his Circassian coat, and the sentry presented arms. Yakovlev remarked to Nicky that he ought to take an extra coat.

  Eight others followed: Alix and Marie, Valia Dolgorukov, Dr Botkin, an officer of the Tobolsk guard, Matveev, and three servants, Alix’s maid Anna Demidov, Nicky’s valet Chemodurov and the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev.

  Alix was lifted into one of the carts, the only one with a hood covering it. Dr Botkin saw that there were no seats, only the bare wooden floor, and protested to Yakovlev. His patient, he said, was not well enough to travel in such a crude conveyance; she would injure herself.

  There was a delay while straw was found in a pigsty, and sprinkled over the wooden planks. A mattress, rugs and blankets were spread over the straw, and then Alix, wearing a thin coat of Persian lamb, was lifted in. Marie climbed in beside her.

  Alix had few possessions with her, but one of them was her diary, in which she wrote, later that day, that she was suffering from pain in her chest. She was miserable. She hadn’t slept the night before, worried over the decision she had been forced to make, whether to accompany Nicky on this journey or to stay in Tobolsk with her children.

  It had been a terrible decision, the most terrible she had ever faced, as she confided to her maid Maria Toutelberg.1 When told that she had to make up her mind, she paced up and down for hours, unable to choose.

  ‘It is the hardest moment of my life,’ she told her maid. ‘You know what my son is to me, and I must choose between him and my husband.’

  Her daughters helped her to decide. They assured her that, if she left, Olga would run the household, Tatiana would nurse Alexei, and Marie would go with her, to comfort her. Anastasia too would do what she could to help.

  At last she came to a decision. ‘I must be firm,’ she told Toutelberg. ‘I must leave my child and share my husband’s life or death.’

  She was leaving, not knowing whether she would ever see her children again. She and Nicky had said their formal goodbyes to the servants and staff, embracing each one in turn as they stood in the large hall of the Governor’s Mansion, nearly all of them in tears. That had been difficult enough. But saying goodbye to Alexei and her daughters was a starker anguish.

  That she had Marie with her now helped a little, for Marie, at nearly nineteen, was the sturdiest of her daughters and the one from whom she could draw the most strength. And Yakovlev had given his word that the others would join Alix and Nicky at their new destination in about three weeks – assuming Alexei was well enough to travel.

  The convoy set out, escorted by eight sentries and ten Red Guards. The carts bumped and creaked, pitching and tossing like ships in a gale when their wheels sank into deep ruts or struck hard lumps of ice. The travellers’ hands and faces soon were red with cold, stung by the relentless wind. The cold dawn came with grey skies, the sharp wind continuing. They came to the edge of the frozen river Irtysh, where the ice, groaning and straining in the first throes of the spring thaw, was too unstable to hold the weight of the laden carts.

  They got out, and Nicky, taking Alix in his arms, carried her across, walking on broad planks laid down across the heaving ice veined with black cracks. Near the bank the ice had melted, and he was obliged to wade knee-deep in the near-freezing river water for the last few yards.

  In the course of the long day they stopped often, to change horses and to repair the harnesses and the carts, which, jolted severely as they were, lost wheels and linchpins. At each stop they ate from a store of provisions they brought, first rubbing their numbed fingers until the circulation returned.

  ‘Road perfectly atrocious,’ Alix wrote, ‘frozen ground[,] wind, snow, water up to the horses’ stomachs, fearfully shaken, pain all over.’2 She wrote a note to the children, which one of the drivers promised to deliver for her.

  Finally at eight o’clock at night they came to the town of Ievlevo where they were allowed to spend the night in a small unheated house, formerly the village shop. The men slept on the floor, Alix on her mattress and blankets from the cart. ‘Got to bed at ten, dead tired and ached all over.’

  They surmised that they were going to Tiumen, but where they were to be taken after that was a mystery. They thought it would be Moscow, which the Bolsheviks had made the new capital of Russia – and where, most likely, Nicky would be tried and imprisoned.

  The following morning they were again awakened long before dawn, and set off in the carts at five. Again they crossed the river on planks, Nicky carrying Alix, and at another point took a ferry. The weather had turned warm, and the road was somewhat easier, though there were still many deep ruts and long stretches of muddy track where the carts bogged down. Towards evening the moon rose, and the carts ‘tore along at a wild rate’ by moonlight. Approaching Tiumen, they were met by a group of horsemen who escorted th
em to the train station through the dark town. At midnight they boarded a train, exhausted, and fell into bed in their dusty clothes.3

  Though the Romanovs did not know it, they had become the subject of intense debate. The governing soviets of the two principal Siberian cities, Omsk and Ekaterinburg, were vying to possess the most celebrated prisoner in Russia, the former tsar. Yakovlev had been sent by Moscow to forestall this rivalry and bring the prisoner and his family to the capital. Out of consideration for Alexei’s weak condition, he had decided to bring only the ex-tsar and his wife and daughter, with the others to follow later.

  Yakovlev’s orders were clear, and his plans logical – but planning and logic were rapidly being subverted by events. On the journey to Tiumen Alix noted that Yakovlev, who appeared nervous, was ‘fidgety, running about, telegraphing’.4 He had heard that the Ural Regional Soviet Executive Committee in Ekaterinburg might try to kidnap Nicky en route to Moscow, and was sending telegrams to two members of the committee, warning them against making any such attempt or there would be bloodshed.

  The train set off for Omsk but, when it arrived, representatives of the Omsk Soviet were waiting, and refused to let the prisoners continue on, fearing that Yakovlev, who had been branded a ‘traitor to the revolution,’ would not take them on to Moscow but further east, to Japanese-held Vladivostok, from which they could get safely out of Russia.

  Yakovlev contacted Moscow, and was ordered to turn back, towards Ekaterinburg, despite the threat of Nicky’s capture. On Tuesday, April 30, their fifth day of travel, the Romanovs approached Ekaterinburg. A band of soldiers surrounded the train. ‘Yakovlev had to give us over to the Ural Region Soviet,’ Alix wrote in her diary. ‘Their chief took us three in an open motor, a truck with soldiers armed to their [sic] teeth followed us. Drove through by-streets till reached a small house, around which high wooden palings have been placed.’5

  The ‘small house’ was in fact a large two-storey residence, not as grand as the Governor’s House in Tobolsk but impressive nonetheless. It belonged to an engineer named Ipatiev, who had been ordered to leave, with his family, a few days before the Romanovs’ arrival. The new occupants were given three rooms, a bedroom for Alix, Nicky and Marie, a sitting room where Dr Botkin and the male servants slept, and a small dressing room for Anna Demidov. There was no view from the windows; only the boards of the high fence that ringed the house could be seen, and later, a gold cross surmounting a church. As at the Tobolsk house, the plumbing was at first inoperative; chamber pots were provided.

  From the first the guards were rough and insolent. Nicky’s valet Chemodurov recalled later that as soon as the family arrived at the house they were made to undergo a ‘thorough and humiliating search’. One of the soldiers snatched Alix’s grey suede handbag out of her hand and turned out its contents – which consisted of her supply of Veronal, a handkerchief, and smelling salts. Nicky protested. ‘Until now I have been dealing with decent and honest people,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Do not forget that you are under investigation and arrest,’ was the reply from the commissar Didkovsky, equally sharp. ‘We are the masters now! We will do as we please.’6 Alix had to restrain Nicky from lunging at the man, his anger flared so explosively.

  But he mastered his anger, and indeed, according to Chemodurov, both he and Alix bore the harsh treatment they received and the guards’ ceaseless humiliations and insults ‘with apparent calm’. For the most part, they ‘appeared not to notice either the people around them or what they were doing’.

  For Alix to maintain her self-control, given her tendency towards irritability, was a challenge, and she did not always meet the challenge successfully. When Avdeev ordered that the Romanovs be addressed, not by their titles, but merely as ‘Nicholas Alexandrovich’, ‘Alexandra Feodorovna’ and ‘Maria Nicolaevna’, Alix bristled.

  ‘And why has no one dispensed with addressing one by title before this?’ she demanded of the commander. He retorted that now, at Ekaterinburg, they were in the hands of genuine revolutionaries.7

  Petty humiliations made her indignant, but they also wore her down, there were so many of them: the lack of cleanliness and privacy, the coarse food (Alix could barely eat it, and subsisted on vermicelli which Leonid the kitchen boy prepared for her), the ‘roll call’ at eight each morning, reminiscent of prison life, the soldiers who entered the family’s doorless rooms without warning, at all times of the day and night, the necessity of asking permission before using the toilet, once it was made workable, and the presence of a sentry at the opening where once there had been a lavatory door, the constant vulgar, offensive remarks.

  These assaults on her sensibilities, combined with her worry over Alexei and her daughters, gave Alix headaches and heart pains, and during the first three weeks of the family’s captivity in Ekaterinburg she often lay on her bed, her aching eyes shut, too dizzy and ill to sit up, read, or write letters. She slept badly many nights, kept awake by the pacing of the guards and their loud voices, the commander’s inebriated loutishness, and her own restless musings. Marie and the maid Anna did what they could for her, Anna washing her long hair and Marie brushing it and dressing it. Anna sewed and mended, and perhaps washed the clothes as well – with much inconvenience, as in the first month at least there was no running water in the house.

  Strict though the family’s captivity was in the Ipatiev house, Alix continued to hope for rescue, and to write letters to their would-be rescuers. She drew a detailed plan of the house, and sent it out, presumably with Dr Derevenko when he came to see Alix, or with one of the nuns from the Novotikhvinsky Convent who came to deliver fresh eggs and milk. But the commander managed to discover the drawing, and took it to Nicky and showed it to him. According to Avdeev, he stammered out a lie about not realizing that it was forbidden to send sketches out of the house.

  On May 23 Alix recorded in her diary that ‘towards eleven the girls suddenly turned up with Alexei – thank God – such joy to have them again.’8 Their arrival soothed her worries temporarily, but that same night Alexei, who had been unwell and was alarmingly thin, slipped and hurt his knee getting into bed, and woke up every hour complaining of pain.9 In the following days he ‘suffered very much’ with strong pains, was unable to sleep and continued to lose weight and colour until he looked, according to a priest who came to say mass at the house, ‘transparent’.10

  For Alix, her son’s renewed attack of illness meant still more nights of lost sleep, more anxiety, added to the mounting anxiety of the family’s imprisonment. Twin emotions peaked and ebbed within her, the hope of rescue and the fear of her husband’s execution, followed by an unknown but terrible fate for herself and her children.

  That something extraordinary was happening in Ekaterinburg was clear. Even though very little news reached the family (sometimes they were allowed to read newspapers, often out of date, sometimes they were denied any newspapers for days at a time), they could tell, from the increased nervousness of their guards, from the shouting in the streets around the house and the frequent tramping of boots – a sound they associated with movements of large groups of soldiers – from the flashes of fire or light in the sky, and the loud reports of distant gunfire, that more turmoil had broken out.

  In actuality, in the first week of June the authorities in Ekaterinburg faced the most serious threat they had yet encountered, and were attempting to crush uprisings in the city by making mass arrests.

  Opposition to the Bolshevik government had been growing rapidly until, by May, the country was in a state of civil war. In particular, Siberia was under threat of anarchy as anti-Bolshevik forces gathered strength. Political moderates opposed to the rulers in Moscow set up a Siberian Regional Council at Omsk. Armies of patriots and monarchists (‘Whites’ in contrast to the Bolshevik ‘Reds’) were gaining strength, and one of these armies, the Czech Legion, with some forty thousand trained troops, had seized the city of Samara on the Volga and was threatening to link up with the Omsk rebels and wit
h other discontented groups – ethnic minorities, anarchists, peasant insurgents – to conquer the Urals. Already the telephone lines between Ekaterinburg and Moscow were cut, the Trans-Siberian Railway was in the hands of the Whites and boats on the Volga were being captured.

  The Bolshevik nightmare, Lenin’s nightmare, was that all of Siberia would soon be under monarchist control, the Red Army would be driven out and the former tsar, from his captivity in Ekaterinburg, would be proclaimed head of a re-established empire. The revolution would be reversed.

  The guards at the Ipatiev House were alarmed and frightened. They avoided talking with their prisoners, and confined their communication to announcing that they could not walk in the yard, or that there would be no supper. On June 13 Avdeev appeared and ordered the family to pack; an uprising by anarchists was feared, and the Romanovs might have to be taken to Moscow on very short notice. They packed, and waited for further word. Then at eleven o’clock at night Avdeev came again to say that they would stay in the house for another few days. The leader of the anarchists had been arrested, and the threat of an uprising had diminished.11

  The immediate threat had diminished, but the nightly noise and disturbances continued, as more Red Guard soldiers assembled in Ekaterinburg and men and equipment were moved into position to withstand the expected assault from the Whites.

  For the Whites were surely coming – and, for Alix and the others, the Whites meant rescue.

  A letter was brought to them by a soldier in the last ten days of June. ‘The friends sleep no longer,’ it began cryptically, ‘and hope the hour so long awaited has arrived. The revolt of the Czechoslovaks menaces the Bolsheviks more and more seriously. Samara, Cheliabinsk and the whole of Siberia, eastern and western, are under the control of the provincial national government [the White government]. The army of the Slavic friends is eighty kilometres from Ekaterinburg.’12

  With what mingled joy and apprehension this secret message was received can only be imagined. Naturally, Alix wrote nothing of it in her diary. But Avdeev and the guards, shrewdly watchful, no doubt saw fleeting smiles on the faces of their captives in the days following receipt of the message.