Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  At Tobolsk, the family had enjoyed regular access to the open compound surrounding the Governor’s House. Here they had been able to sun themselves on the greenhouse roof, soaking up the view of the free world beyond. Passers-by would often stop to reverentially acknowledge them. Despite the obvious boredom and monotony – especially felt by young Alexey, whose life was already tragically circumscribed by illness – the Romanovs had lived a peaceful life for eight months at Tobolsk, enduring the bitter winter in the poorly heated Governor’s House without complaint. The simple rural life paradoxically suited this cosily bourgeois family, and for a while it had lulled them into a false sense of security. Indeed Maria had confided to tutor Sidney Gibbes that she could happily live at Tobolsk for ever if only their guards would allow them to ‘walk out a little’. Beyond their own self-absorbed world, the family maintained few aspirations or interests. Even at Tsarskoe Selo outside St Petersburg they had lived relatively modestly, preferring the smaller Alexander Palace to the formal rococo splendour of the Catherine Palace next door. Imprisonment at Tobolsk had almost been a positive in their lives, a release into ordinariness and anonymity. There they had both sent and received letters. English, French and Russian newspapers had been provided, while the children enjoyed daily lessons from their German, Swiss and English tutors. Life in Siberia had opened their eyes to a different world, a world free of the hidebound court rituals and official functions that they all hated.

  But here in Ekaterinburg, Maria wrote to a friend that ‘every day brings unpleasant surprises’. They were not allowed visitors. They could not enjoy the pleasures of working in the kitchen garden as they had done when confined at the Alexander Palace, or even the large exercise yard at Tobolsk, where the Tsar had vigorously sawn wood in winter. The receipt and sending of letters had soon been curtailed and in early June the Tsar no longer received his daily newspapers – the one remaining pleasure left to him. Here they were strictly forbidden to speak any language other than Russian, something which particularly irked the Tsaritsa, who always spoke English with the children. Occasional gifts from relatives had now stopped, chocolate and coffee from the Tsaritsa’s sister Ella being the last to arrive. (Unknown to Alexandra, after being held initially in Ekaterinburg, her sister had now been incarcerated along with the Grand Princes at Alapaevsk, 93 miles away.) At the Ipatiev House there would be no more Sunday evening theatricals punctuated by the mischievous laughter of Anastasia, the family entertainer. No excursions to mass at the nearby church were permitted, and a priest had only been allowed in twice since their arrival to conduct services. Yet still the Imperial Family hoped for God’s deliverance. In her dreams the Tsaritsa had visions of monarchist knights on horseback riding to their rescue. But Nicholas was more pragmatic, increasingly recognising the impossibility of rescue or flight from this grim Bolshevik stronghold.

  Daily life had become a matter of endurance. Beyond devotion to each other and to God there remained one consuming obsession in their daily lives – Alexey’s fragile state of health. Since the middle of April, the Tsarevich had been suffering from a recurring haemorrhage in a damaged knee, causing agonising pain that wrecked his sleep and crippled his leg so that he could not walk. Thin, wasting away and with no appetite, the boy no longer had the support of his tutors, the devoted Pierre Gilliard from Switzerland and the sober Cambridge graduate Sidney Gibbes, who had taken it in turns to read and talk with him during his painful attacks. The Tsaritsa and her daughters were exhausted from all-night sessions sitting by Alexey’s bed, listening to his moans of pain. The sailor Klementy Nagorny, who for years had protectively shadowed Alexey, sitting with him at nights and carrying him when too weak to walk, had been taken away on the evening of 27 May (along with the Grand Duchesses’ servant Ivan Sednev), never to return. By July even the visits of the Tsarevich’s physician Dr Vladimir Derevenko, who had been allowed to remain on call in Ekaterinburg and on whom the family relied so heavily, had been curtailed. He continued to come to the house but was refused admittance by Avdeev on the grounds that the Tsarevich was ‘well enough’ and did not need him. It was more than eight days after his arrival that the weak and sickly Alexey, his injured knee at last taken from its splint, went outside into the garden for the first time, carried by Dr Botkin. But he was never able to walk or play outside again with the others.

  By early July the daily ritual of life at the Ipatiev House was rapidly taking on a numbing predictability. The family rose at eight in the morning, washed, dressed and said their prayers together. Tea and black bread were provided by Avdeev at nine, when he made his obligatory roll call to ensure the family were all there. Cocoa was occasionally on offer, but with the Romanovs on rations like all other Soviet citizens, coffee and butter were luxuries beyond their reach; ‘they were no longer permitted to live like tsars’, Avdeev informed them. At around one in the afternoon a simple lunch of cutlets or soup with meat was delivered to the gates, sent in from a canteen run by the Ekaterinburg Soviet in the Commercial Assembly House, a short distance away on the corner of Glavny Prospket. Supper was delivered to the house around 8 p.m. From mid-June the family’s own cook, Kharitonov, had been allowed to prepare some of the family’s modest meals on a small oil stove in the upstairs kitchen, where he tried to coax the Tsaritsa’s always difficult and now rapidly fading appetite (she was a vegetarian) with the simple, bland dishes of vermicelli she preferred. In mid-June, Dr Derevenko had voiced concerns about the family’s poor diet to Commandant Avdeev and, with his consent, had gone to the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent in the city suburbs to ask the sisters to bring the family eggs, milk, cream and bread on a daily basis from their farm. Other foods were brought as well: meat, sausage, vegetables and tasty Russian pies, but much was siphoned off on arrival by Avdeev for his and the guard’s use.

  During the morning there was little to do but read, which the Tsar did at length, in an increasingly desperate attempt to counter the physical frustration of his incarceration. He voraciously consumed the collected works of the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin that he had discovered on the bookshelves in the house, followed by Shilder’s biography of the Emperor Paul I. During Easter he also daily read out loud from the Gospels and other edifying spiritual works while the women sat endlessly mending their increasingly threadbare clothes, knitting or sewing. True, they had brought plenty of clothes and shoes with them, but most of these were in storage in the outbuilding to which they were persistently denied access, even when Nicholas’s boots were clearly falling apart and in need of replacement. In the beginning they had filled up their time writing letters daily to friends, but few reached their destination and even fewer were passed on when they arrived. Now, all there was were endless games of cards – patience and the French game bezique, which was a great family favourite – while Alexey played with his model ship and tin soldiers. Sometimes the women sang sacred songs together, a favourite being the ‘Cherubim’s Song’, the song of the angels from the Orthodox liturgy. Mundane new diversions were created for the girls when the Ural Regional Soviet refused to have the family’s large quantities of laundry sent out any more. Even in exile the Romanovs changed their underwear and bed linen with excessive regularity, and the Grand Duchesses now found themselves learning to be laundresses, helping Demidova the maid. They were also taught by Kharitonov to cook and make bread. With the Tsaritsa and Tsarevich frequently sick or resting, the girls created their own amusements until afternoon tea between four and five. A final modest supper was served at eight, after which the remainder of the evening was filled with further prayers and Bible reading, more games of bezique, more embroidery and sewing until bedtime.

  The only break in the monotony of it all was the recreation allowed twice daily in the garden, once in the late morning around eleven, and again in the afternoon before tea. Until mid-May Avdeev had tended to be lax applying the rules, sometimes allowing the Imperial Family as much as 90 minutes when the weather was fine. But this had now been reduced to half an hour mor
ning and afternoon, in order, the family were told, that their life at the Ipatiev House more closely resembled ‘a prison regime’. The Romanovs had been under strict instructions not to engage in conversation with their guards, a rule which Nicholas had broken in an effort to establish relationships, particularly after he and Alexandra had recognised one of the guards, a former soldier named Konstantin Ukraintsev, as a beater who had worked for Romanov shooting parties in the Caucasus. But here there was to be none of the camaraderie of Tobolsk, where Nicholas had often gone to the guards’ room to smoke and play draughts with his captors. The hapless Ukraintsev was soon dismissed for his sympathetic response to the family, and sent to the Eastern Front.

  Grateful for the chance to walk in the sun and breathe the summer air, the three younger Grand Duchesses had also smiled and been friendly with the guards outside, their elder sister keeping herself to herself. The scent of Ekaterinburg’s parks and gardens wafted tantalisingly close, and on these brief occasions the sound of laughter could be heard as the sisters chased their dogs Ortipo, Joy and Jimmy round in the hot sunshine or enjoyed the double swing that some of the guards had hung for them in the garden.

  But this last remaining luxury was rarely indulged in by Alexandra. Plagued by migraines, heart palpitations and sciatica and intolerant of the heat, she rarely ventured outside. When she did, she donned jacket and hat while her daughters ran around bare-headed. She frequently gave in to her physical frailties, keeping one of her daughters indoors to read aloud as she lay with her head swathed in cold compresses. Her heart palpitations were now so bad that she could hardly walk; at night she was frequently tormented by insomnia. When she did, very occasionally, emerge into the garden, she was too exhausted to do anything but sit in the shade of the porch.

  From here she would watch Alexey, when he was not bedridden, sit playing at toy soldiers with the kitchen boy Sednev, who, when Alexey was too frail, would push him around the garden in his mother’s wheelchair. Nicholas and the girls meanwhile would take the 40 paces walk that measured the length of the small overgrown garden, going back and forth relentlessly in the sun – as though anxious not to waste a single precious moment of recreation – amidst a few poplars, birches and limes and bushes of yellow acacia and lilac. The man who had once ruled eight and a half million square miles of empire was now master of a single room of his own and a small, scrappy garden. Free of the responsibilities of state, Nicholas seemed unengaged with the unreality of it all, but he sorely missed physical exercise and was bitterly disappointed that his requests to Avdeev to be given something active to do – clearing the garden or chopping wood – had been curtly refused, as had his request to put up a hammock for the children. Dr Botkin’s written appeal to the local soviet that the family be allowed two hours’ recreation outside daily for the sake of their health fell on deaf ears as well. During June the weather had become increasingly hot and thundery, making life inside their prison even more intolerable. The sealed, airless rooms trapped the smells of cooking and cigarette smoke, human sweat and the lavatory. They also spread germs and that most tenacious of parasites, head lice, forcing Nicholas to trim his beard and the girls to keep their hair short. ‘It’s unbearable to be locked up like this, and not to be able to go into the garden when we want to, or spend a pleasant evening in the air’, wrote Nicholas in his diary, as the humidity and sudden storms of a changeable Urals summer gathered pace.

  Had Nicholas been able to see beyond his prison, he would have discovered that, from the day of his arrival in Ekaterinburg, people had been venturing up to the ‘Tsar’s House’, as the Ipatiev House rapidly became known (none of the locals using the official name), in hopes of seeing him – despite the severe warnings not to do so. The guards, rifles in hand, had pushed them away: ‘Walk on, Citizens, walk on. There’s nothing to see here’, they would say, to which came the often argumentative response: ‘If there’s nothing to see, then why can’t we just stand here if we want to?’ People tried to get the guards to take in presents and letters for the family and were all turned away, though one or two guards occasionally relented and allowed the curious to take a quick look inside the palisade. Others anxious to see the Imperial Family approached the house from a different direction – congregating at the bottom of Voznesensky Lane, near the Iset Pond. Here, in the centre of town, you could just make out the balcony overlooking the garden at the back of the Ipatiev House. A man in uniform was often seen standing there. Word got round that it was the Tsar. Some thought they had caught a glimpse of him. But the rumours were false; the man on the balcony was only one of the guards. Yet still people came. One of the reasons for the construction of the second, higher palisade had been the discovery that when the Tsar took a turn on the swing in the garden, his booted legs flew up over the palisade and could be seen by the curious outside. That did not stop two young schoolboys, the Telezhnikov brothers, who were caught by the guards outside the Ipatiev House trying to take photographs and hauled off to the offices of the Cheka for a severe warning.

  Although the lack of physical exercise was hugely stressful to him personally, Nicholas and his family had by now become long inured to isolation – an isolation that had for many years been largely self-imposed. They had always preferred their own company to anybody else’s, including that of most of their Romanov relatives. The life of a prisoner was, as it turned out, nothing new to Nicholas, for he had already observed to Chief Marshal of the Imperial Court Count Benckendorff, during his confinement at the Alexander Palace, that he was hardly less free now than formerly, adding, as he reached for the cigarette that was the ready prop in moments of stress: ‘For have I not been a prisoner all my life?’

  Whilst he might still be in denial about the true nature of his imprisonment and his ultimate fate, on the morning of 4 July, the former Tsar of Russia would begin, finally, to discover what captivity in the Urals really entailed.

  2

  ‘The Dark Gentleman’

  THURSDAY 4 JULY 1918

  ‘Today there was a change of commandant’, Nicholas noted with surprise in his diary on 4 July. That afternoon the Romanovs had had an unexpected visitor: Aleksandr Beloborodov, chair of the Ural Regional Soviet, had arrived when they were taking their modest lunch. Commandant Avdeev, he announced, had been dismissed and would not be returning. Nor, as they soon discovered, would his vulgar, drunken assistant Moshkin. Whilst they would not miss Moshkin, who had taken pleasure in humiliating them in the evenings after Avdeev had gone home off duty, the Romanovs felt a pang of regret at the loss of the disorderly Avdeev. For all his drinking, his swaggering in front of his subordinates and his occasionally crass behaviour, he had been fundamentally considerate, even kind. He’d made sure they had their own samovar so that the guards didn’t take all the hot water for tea; he’d stretched the rules on their time allowed outside in the garden. The Romanovs had grown used to him and at times Nicholas had even found him endearing. The family had sensed his conflicted feelings towards them, and a certain reluctant compassion. They knew what to expect.

  The Tsar’s response was sympathetic: ‘I am sorry for Avdeev, but it was his own fault as he did nothing to keep his men from stealing things out of our trunks in the shed.’ Naively, Nicholas thought the shake-up was down to the constant pilfering by the guards from the family’s goods in the outhouse that Avdeev had turned a blind eye to, if not colluded in. But there were other, far more sinister reasons for the changeover of which Nicholas could not be aware.

  In recent weeks the Ural Regional Soviet had been thrown into a state of increasing paranoia by evidence of monarchist and other groups lurking in Ekaterinburg and plotting, however ineptly, to rescue the family. In addition, reports had been published in Moscow that the Tsar had been murdered, and these had filtered through to the Western press. It had made the Bolshevik government jittery, despite assurances that the reliable local ‘troika’ of Goloshchekin, Beloborodov and his deputy Didkovsky had made regular inspections of the house in Ma
y and June as well as bringing groups of officials to observe the Imperial Family during their recreation periods outside. Doubting the trustworthiness of the Ural Regional Soviet and the levels of security at the Ipatiev House, Lenin had ordered Reinhold Berzin, commander of the Northern Ural and Siberian Front, to travel 300 miles from Perm to make a surprise personal inspection. This had been carried out on 22 June, in the company of district military commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, under the guise of the supposed ‘window inspection’, when Nicholas had noted the presence in the house of what he thought were ‘commissars from Petrograd’.

  Berzin’s report, which finally reached Moscow on the 28th by a circuitous route, such being the haphazard state of the telegraph lines, had confirmed the rumours about the Tsar’s murder as a malicious provocation. But by now the Ural Regional Soviet was becoming aware of other breakdowns in discipline at the house: unruly behaviour and bouts of drunkenness by the night guard, and worse still, a slide towards fraternisation with the Imperial Family that had been strictly forbidden. At Tobolsk the guards had been disarmed by Nicholas’s natural, friendly manner and the pattern repeated itself at Ekaterinburg. Some of the guards had even smuggled letters out for the family or brought in books. Others privately admitted to a creeping respect and pity for the Romanovs, persisting in referring respectfully to Nicholas as ‘the Tsar’ or ‘the Emperor’.