Alexandra

by Carolly Erickson

  ‘Be ready all the time, day and night,’ the letter instructed them. ‘Make a sketch of your two rooms, the places of the furniture, of the beds. Write exactly when you all go to bed. One of you should not sleep between two and three o’clock all the following nights.’ The letter was signed simply, ‘One who is ready to die for you – An Officer of the Russian Army.’

  From then on, the family’s routine changed. They continued to observe the schedule the guards imposed, but they added to it a regimen of their own, in which one of their number stayed awake each night from two to three and all of them were prepared to dress rapidly and pack simply and in haste when the signal for rescue was given.

  A second letter came soon after the first, giving more explicit instructions.13 The signal would be a whistle. When they heard it, they were to barricade the doorway to their rooms with furniture, then go out of the window, down a rope. Their friends would be waiting below.

  ‘The means for getting away are not lacking and the escape is surer than ever,’ the writer said. Nicky and Alix must come down the rope first, then Alexei, then Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, and finally Dr Botkin. They were to make the rope themselves, quickly. Then they were to wait for the whistle in the middle of the night.

  June 27, Marie’s nineteenth birthday, was a day of sweltering heat. The guards had relented and allowed a single window to be opened, which let in a light breeze and the scent of flowers from the town gardens. But still there was no real ventilation, the air did not circulate freely, and Alix wrote in her diary, ‘Heat intense.’

  The rescue signal was expected, and each of the family members had surreptitiously laid out his or her clothes and belongings, ready to leave, to go out of the window, as soon as the signal was heard. It was hardly necessary to delegate someone to stay awake after midnight, they would all be awake, listening. There would be the usual shouts and gunshots and sounds of marching in the street, but there would also, or so they had been assured, be the whistle. Then they would swiftly get up and move the furniture in front of the doorways – hoping that the guards would not succeed in blocking their efforts – and move to the open window.

  ‘Escape is surer than ever,’ the last secret letter had said, but the family must have worried nonetheless. How would the rescuers disarm the sentries, overwhelm the guards, seize the machine-guns on the roof and on the first floor, and hold off the rest of the soldiers, those who were off duty, who would be roused from their sleep at the first sign of a disturbance? How could they prevent Avdeev or one of his assistants from calling for reinforcements? Or would they cut the telephone line from the house in time to prevent any call being made?

  As they went about their daily activities, their minds must have been full of questions, hopes, prayers for divine protection. Alix spent the day ‘arranging things’, doing needlework, and visiting Dr Botkin, who had been bedridden with severe kidney pains. Olga sat with her in the sweltering afternoon; together they watched while two officials from the soviet inspected their rooms, and refused to open another window to provide relief from the heat.

  ‘The waiting and the uncertainty were torture,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. The day must have seemed endless.

  After supper they went to bed, and lay awake, ‘fully dressed’, listening for a whistle in the street. It was hot even at night, and they lay in the dark, sweating in their clothes, no doubt worrying that the guards might decide to make an unannounced inspection and become suspicious on seeing them clothed for flight.14

  Hours passed. Between two and three o’clock in the morning, they must have listened with greater focus, straining to pick up every sound, annoyed when the sentries under the windows called to each other, or when carriages passed in the street. No doubt they longed to be able to look outside, to watch for a party of armed men, hundreds of them, marching down Voznesensky Avenue, terrifying all opposition, coming their way.

  Three o’clock came and went, and then four o’clock, and there was no whistle. The sky began to lighten. The opportunity for rescue had passed.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. But the waiting, the terribly uncertainty, had been ‘almost impossible to bear!’

  The next night the sentries received orders to increase their vigilance.

  35

  Mid-July came, and the family still waited for rescue, amid increasing signs that Ekaterinburg was becoming a war zone. Artillery rolled up and down Voznesensky Avenue; troops of infantry marched and at times cavalry as well. It was easy for the Romanovs to identify the troops, they only had to listen to the anthems the bands played. They were able to surmise that Austrians, former prisoners of war, had been drafted into the Red Guard to fight the Czech Legion. Ambulances passed the house, bringing the wounded to the town. Each day the ambulances passed more frequently, indicating that more wounded were in need of aid, and that the fighting was intensifying.

  At night, the booming of artillery and the crackle of pistol fire troubled their sleep, as did the urgency of their ongoing vigil, their awareness that, at any time, they might be called upon to flee quickly, should their liberators arrive. The nearness of the fighting exhilarated and frightened them: would help come? Would the White Army seize the house and release them? Or would they be moved again, to Moscow this time, and put into harsher captivity there?

  Surely something would happen soon. One of the secret letters had said that the White Army was only eighty kilometres from Ekaterinburg. It was coming closer by the day; they could tell that without a newspaper or an informant.

  On July 5 another secret message had arrived, buoying their hopes. But the former tsar had sent a message back cautioning their deliverers not to expect them to climb down a rope out of the window. They needed a ladder. ‘Give up the idea of carrying us off,’ he wrote. ‘If you are guarding over us, you may always come and save us in the case of imminent and real danger . . . Above all, in the name of God, avoid bloodshed.’1 The somewhat enigmatic message was sent – and received by the Cheka at their headquarters in the Hotel America in Ekaterinburg, where it was filed away as further evidence of the ex-tsar’s treasonous activity.

  The Cheka had taken over guardianship of the prisoners, sending Avdeev and his men away. A new Cheka commander, Jacob Yurovsky, was in charge.

  ‘[The commandant] made us show all our jewels we had on, and the young one [Yurovsky’s assistant] wrote them all down in detail and then they were taken from us (where to, for how long, why?? don’t know),’ Alix wrote in her diary. ‘Only left me my two bracelets of U[ncle] Leo’s which I can’t take off, and the children one bracelet each which we gave and can’t be removed, neither Nicholas’s engagement [ring?] could he get off.’2 The inventory was superfluous, as the Romanovs’ most valuable jewels had been concealed while they were at Tobolsk, put in small boxes sewn into pillows, individual gems hidden in covered buttons, belt linings, hat linings, stiff-boned corsets.3 Alix, her daughters and her maids had quietly undertaken the work of concealment, making it look, to their guards, as though they were darning and mending.

  It had been necessary to hide the jewels, for the guards had stolen many of the family’s possessions, looting their boxes and trunks and making off with their gold watches and silver pins and necklaces, the gold and silver on the former tsar’s military decorations, even the gold chains from which their icons hung, along with their china, linen, and stored clothing. Anything saleable.

  Yurovsky put an end to the thievery. He sealed up the few pieces of jewellery he had inventoried and left them with the family.

  Yurovsky was scrupulous, and very correct. But he was chillingly detached. Avdeev had been spiteful, his soldiers mean – but all had been human. Yurovsky played his role on a plane outside the human, a plane of high-minded dedication to his superiors in Moscow and to the Cheka. All considerations of humanity, it seemed, were put aside.

  He went about his task with efficiency and rigour. He ordered the nuns from the convent to deliver only milk from n
ow on, nothing more – nothing in which a message could be concealed. He increased the number of guard posts, and ordered a second machine-gun placed in the attic of the house and an additional sentry positioned in the back yard. He ordered iron bars installed in front of the window that had been opened for ventilation, an ominous change, since the Romanovs had been expecting to leave the house by that window.4

  With the change in commander came a change in the atmosphere at the Ipatiev house. A priest and a deacon who came to say mass on July 14 observed it, though they could not define its nature.

  Father Storozhev had come to the house before, six weeks earlier, and had taken note then of Alexei’s extreme pallor and Alix’s taut face and evident struggle for composure. Now, in mid-July, Alexei seemed healthier and Alix too appeared to be in a better state.

  ‘Do you know,’ the deacon remarked after the mass, ‘something has happened to them in there.’ The family appeared ‘somehow different’. For one thing, they hadn’t joined in the liturgical singing, as they had before.

  Whatever the difference was, and it was indefinable, something had changed. Yurovsky had changed it and, just possibly, the chaotic situation in Ekaterinburg, and the exhilaration and fear to which it gave rise, were a factor too. All might go badly for the family yet, this they knew. But perhaps, just perhaps, they were on the threshold of liberation at last. No matter that there were now bars on the open window. There were thousands of monarchist troops fighting the Red Guards, beating them back (for there was no other explanation of the increasingly loud battle sounds), coming to save the tsar and his family.

  On the morning after Father Storozhev’s visit, four women came to the house to clean the floors. The Romanovs were playing cards when the women arrived, and Yurovsky was courteously asking Alexei how he was feeling – he was developing a cold. Yurovsky ‘didn’t allow us to talk with the imperial family’, the women said later, ‘who were all in a good mood; the duchesses [Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia] were laughing, and there was no sadness about them.’5

  Alix had spent that morning lying down, while Tatiana read to her from a devotional book, Spiritual Readings. She was doing her best to observe the fast of Saints Peter and Paul, and to examine her conscience as was the practice during fasts. Her daughters were taking turns reading to her from a book of homilies. But once again her physical complaints were distracting her. Her eyes ached. She was dosing herself with arsenic in hope of alleviating what she noted in her diary as ‘very strong’ pains in her back and legs, pains that had continued for at least a week and were making it hard for her to rest.6

  She was still endeavouring to be a better woman, to conquer her impatience. But from time to time she lost her temper at the cook, the maid, probably even her family. She could not help feeling the effect of all the nervous strain. One of the guards described her as ‘severe-looking’, with ‘the appearance and ways of a haughty, grave woman’.7 He thought that, with her grey hair and very thin frame, she looked much older than Nicky, though he had turned fifty in May and she was only forty-six.

  Despite her long hours of enforced rest, Alix still endeavoured to be usefully occupied when possible. On July 16 she noted in her diary that she and Olga continued secretly to sew gems into their corsets, corsets that they intended to be wearing when they were freed.

  She continued to do all she could, but she had put her fate in God’s hands. Some months earlier she had written, in a letter to Anna Vyrubov, ‘Though we know that the storm is coming nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.’8 The storm had come, and was reaching the climax of its force.

  The White Army, with two Czech divisions at its core, was encircling Ekaterinburg and would soon have the city under siege. The Red Guard, dismayed and overcome, had begun falling back, retreating in disarray. It was impossible to keep order among the men. Anything could happen, including mass desertions of Bolshevik soldiers to the other side. Loyalties broke down when men panicked. It was not entirely inconceivable that Yurovsky’s men, fearing the wrath of the Czechs, might try to save themselves by freeing the former tsar and turning him over to the Whites.

  The Soviet leadership, meeting on July 14 in the Hotel America, had to consider all these things when deciding, as artillery blasts shook the walls, what to do about the Romanovs. The city could not hold out for more than a few days. British, French, even Japanese reinforcements might come to strengthen the White Army and seize the former tsar. Much was at stake in the decision the local leaders had to make, not merely the future of Ekaterinburg – that was certain, the city could not hold out – but the future of Russia.

  On no account could the former tsar, or his heir, or any conceivable future heirs, be allowed to return to power. That must be made impossible. Such was the view of the authorities in Moscow, carried back to Ekaterinburg by Chaya Goloshchokin, regional commissar for war. The former tsar must be eliminated, along with his family, and with haste. The Ekaterinburg leaders decided to implement Moscow’s order.

  On the following day, July 15, Yurovsky had his instructions. He was to carry out the decision. He was to execute the entire Romanov family, and the others who were living with them.

  Yurovsky made his preparations methodically, choosing trusted men, bringing them together and addressing them as a group, telling them what had to be done, then replacing two of them when they indicated a reluctance to shoot the captives in cold blood.9 Once he was assured that his soldiers were resolute, and would do as they were told, he began to plan how and where the task would be carried out, and what would be done with the bodies afterwards.

  He went on with his planning the next day, the sixteenth, aware that time was growing short. A dozen revolvers were cleaned and loaded and handed out to the men, together with specific instructions as to which soldier would shoot which victim.10 Then, apparently, he thought better of his original plan and decided that there would be only eleven victims, not twelve. The fourteen-year-old kitchen boy Leonid Sednev was sent out of the house, with the excuse that he was to see his uncle. He would be spared. The others would die that evening.

  Neither Yurovsky nor any of his men betrayed, by their demeanour, what they intended to do. As a result the Romanovs, on their final day, were in no greater state of stress than they usually were, Nicky and the children walking in the garden for exercise, Alix reading from the Old Testament with Tatiana, the books of the prophets Amos and Obadiah (‘And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day: And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation . . . and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.’). Later, Alix and Olga sewed their corsets, and Alix was relieved to find out that Yurovsky had once again ordered the nuns from the convent to bring eggs for Alexei, along with milk.

  So intense was the fighting on July 16 that an early curfew was ordered, and apart from the calling of the sentries and the rattle of rifle fire and the ever-present blasting of the heavy guns, no sounds came from the street. Traffic had been halted.

  After supper Alix and Nicky played bezique, as they customarily did, until ten-thirty when they went to bed, half-alert, as they always were, for the whistle that would tell them their friends had come at last to save them.

  But it was not a whistle that awakened them after midnight, it was Dr Botkin, who had been alerted to the state of danger in the town and instructed to wake the others.11 The entire town was in turmoil, he was told. The family and household members had to be moved to the lower floor for their safety.

  Alix woke, put on her heavy corset with its weight of hidden jewels, and made certain her daughters put on theirs. What was happening was without precedent. Never before had they been roused from sleep to go to a safer part of the house. Perhaps they were to be taken out of the city entirely. Or possibly rescue was at hand, and the guards knew it, and were attempting
to thwart the rescue effort.

  It made sense: the early curfew, the incessant firing and shouting, the activity of the guards. It might be the liberators, come at last.

  Yurovsky came to escort the group of captives as one by one they made their way to the lower floor of the house, first Nicky carrying Alexei, then Alix, then their four daughters, Tatiana carrying her Pekinese dog, then Dr Botkin, Nicky’s valet Alexei Trupp, Alix’s maid Anna Demidov and the cook Ivan Kharitonov.12

  Alix followed her husband, wincing from the pain in her leg, taking note, when they went out into the courtyard, that the sky was bright with flares and rockets. They were led into a small empty room on one corner of the house, with a single high barred window.

  ‘Aren’t there even any chairs?’ Alix asked. ‘Can we not sit down?’

  Two chairs were brought. Nicky put Alexei down on one, and Alix sat on the other. Then Yurovsky did something puzzling. He asked the nine who were still standing to arrange themselves in line behind the chairs. He needed a photograph, he said. To prove that they had not been kidnapped by the Whites.

  Alix sat up in her chair, assuming the regal posture she invariably presented to the camera. But there was no camera. Instead, Yurovsky gave an order and a group of soldiers came in, staying by the door, facing the captives. Yurovsky was saying something. That ‘in view of the fact that their relatives in Europe were continuing to attack Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee had ordered them to be shot.’

  The startling words hung in the air, there was an instant of bewilderment. Nicky turned to look at the children, then addressed Yurovsky. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’