Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  3

  The Man with a Cigarette

  FRIDAY 5 JULY 1918

  On Friday 5 July the editorial offices of London’s newspapers were buzzing with the latest news from the Exchange Telegraph in Copenhagen. Tsar Nicholas II – whose assassination had already been falsely reported on several occasions in late June – had, on the good authority of the Swedish Communist newspaper Politiken, now definitely been murdered by the Bolsheviks. Word no doubt filtered back to King George, but like most of his royal relatives he was by now in denial about the real dangers his cousins in Russia faced, with so much unsubstantiated rumour and counter-rumour flying around.

  Throughout the Western press an assortment of lurid and highly fanciful tales about the Romanov family’s life in custody – ranging from the derisive and dismissive to the more compassionate – had been fuelling newspaper stories since the turn of the year. A communiqué from the Pacific on 28 January by an American academic, Professor Edward A. Ross, had reported in all seriousness, after five months’ supposed observation of the Bolshevik cause in Russia, that such was the power of the new government’s pacifist Socialist message that the Tsar’s eldest daughters Tatiana and Olga were said to have espoused the Bolshevik cause and had attended radical meetings in Tobolsk. Another paper countered this claim, alleging that Tatiana was in fact now living in the USA, having fled there from Tobolsk with ‘$350,000 worth’ of the Tsaritsa’s jewels, and that she planned to give lectures on Russia and open a school in the United States.

  Erstwhile friends, ministers and retainers of the Romanovs, many of them fleeing into exile abroad, all seemed anxious to report their own observations on the Imperial Family. An unnamed former guard at Tobolsk told of the Tsar’s ‘melancholy’ life there – of the outward calm and dignity that crumpled when he thought no one was observing him. At such times the former monarch would walk with bowed head, his face filled with painful dejection. When his children went outside to play he would stand and watch them at a window, his eyes full of tears. In April the Washington Post had published the first of a long serialisation that would go on till August – ‘The Confessions of the Former Czarina of Russia’ – regaling its readers for weeks with the fictionalised and highly salacious ‘amazing personal history of Alexandra Fedorovna . . . compiled by Count Paul Vassili, who predicted the fall of the Romanoff Dynasty almost four years ago’ and who delighted in telling readers that Alexandra was a product of the ‘hereditary madness’ of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt. Twenty-two members of the family had been confined to lunatic asylums over the last 100 years. Count Paul, it turns out, was none other than the prolific émigrée adventuress Princess Catherine Radziwill, a woman who had turned Romanov-baiting into a personal cottage industry.

  Despite the repeated denials from Moscow of this scandal-mongering by the ‘capitalist press’, rumours in the West about the Tsar’s execution or even escape from Russia persisted. The patent unreliability of witnesses who spread the rumours – first of execution, then of escape – clearly played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as part of a general softening-up process of public opinion to the idea of the Romanovs’ eventual deaths. As early as January the Washington Post had reported that Nicholas and the children had escaped from Tobolsk, abandoning the now hopelessly insane Alexandra to a mental asylum in the city. Again, in late June the papers were full of stories from Russia that Nicholas had been shot during a vehement dispute with his guards on a special train taking him to Moscow. The former Tsar, reported Russia correspondent Herman Bernstein to Washington Post readers, was soon to face trial for despotism and violation of the people’s rights, followed by public execution to appease the starving and exhausted Russian masses. There was rumour too that the Tsarevich had died not long after his removal from Tobolsk. And now the latest rumour was that Nicholas along with his wife Alexandra and one of their children, the Grand Duchess Tatiana, had been murdered, this latest piece of fantasy coming from a priest at Tsarskoe Selo, who had already sung prayers for the dead to a weeping congregation. One New York paper even went so far as to bring out a premature obituary, which reflected the general lack of sympathy for the Tsar in the West, where a war still raged, now in its fourth devastating year, and he had already been virtually forgotten. The Tsar’s assassination, it claimed, had ‘long seemed a matter of course’. Nicholas had been ‘virtually a helpless figurehead born into outworn institutions with the shaping of which he had nothing to do and for the reform of which he was totally incapable’. Russia’s former ruler, it would seem, was already an irrelevance.

  In Ekaterinburg, of course, the Tsar and his family were still very much alive. Indeed their lives could not have been more uneventful. The Romanovs had ‘spent the day as usual’, as the Tsaritsa noted in an unusually short entry in her diary, recording that the only event had been the now daily inspection of their valuables by Yurovsky. A jolly good thing as far as Nicholas was concerned; it meant that Yurovsky and his subordinate Nikulin had begun to understand what kind of people had been ‘surrounding and protecting’ the family whilst simultaneously stealing from them. In the ever narrowing routine of his daily life, Nicholas found a welcome displacement activity in worry about his few remaining possessions.

  He had now turned 50, having noted in his diary with an air of tired surprise the arrival of his half-century on 19 May. It had never been an auspicious day, for he had been born on the feast day of St Job, the silent, patient sufferer. ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born’ was the lament that echoed through this biblical tale of sorrow, and many Russians, with their propensity for reading signs and symbols into everything, saw this as ominous. Not the least among them was Nicholas himself. Sooner or later, as he accepted, God would put him to the test, and like Job he would be called upon to endure calamities without reproach, trusting only to Divine Providence. Conforming to Job’s biblical archetype of unquestioning self-sacrifice, Nicholas had seemed, without any resistance to fate, to grow into the same qualities as obedient son, pious tsar and dutiful husband. Such profound mysticism was, from the beginning, the hallmark of his sense of himself as tsar, of his relationship with his people, and of his duty – to them, to his country, and to God. He grew up in the sincere belief that he could redeem the sins of Russia through his own humiliation and suffering, on his personal road to Golgotha. A greater power was controlling his destiny and resistance was futile. It was this knowledge that had enabled him so easily to give up the throne and to endure the monotony of his life in captivity. Soon there would be an end to it all, as he so often told himself, kak Gospodu ugodno budet – according to God’s will.

  The physical and spiritual weariness that overwhelmed him now at the age of 50 had finally divested the Tsar of his one great quality. For virtually everyone who ever met Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov said that he had the finest, kindest, most velvety blue eyes they had ever seen. It was an inheritance from his mother’s Danish side of the family. But behind those gently smiling, sensitive eyes, which every now and then drooped as he spoke, as though to block out the intimate gaze of others, lay a whole hidden world – a lifetime’s thoughts and anxieties forever deeply repressed. For all his obvious, superficial charm and modesty, there was no guessing at the true nature of the Tsar’s reticent personality. It was perhaps only his wife who ever saw what lay beyond – an inner, profoundly melancholic loneliness. But even she found it hard at times to overcome her husband’s pathological reticence. And beautiful though they were, Nicholas’s eyes also had a strange, blank impassiveness about them. They reflected nothing back of the inner man, and now they were greatly changed. Even at Tsarskoe Selo the previous year, as a famous photograph of Nicholas in captivity had testified, the bags underneath them were very pronounced, the shadows darker too. Those who saw the Tsar before he was taken away to Tobolsk said that his eyes seemed sunken. The soft, clear light remarked on by so many so often had now departed, leaving the whites tinged with yellow.

  Nicholas’s spiritual and mental decl
ine had begun with Russia’s ill-judged and catastrophic war against Japan in 1904, a year that would be his annus horribilis, for it also marked the terrible discovery that his new-born and much longed-for son and heir had the incurable condition of haemophilia. The strain of knowing that Alexey could at any time have a fatal attack, coupled with the 1905 revolution and the war years after 1914, had worn him out. When the moment came, he had been glad to abdicate. Shortly before, he had suffered a painful coronary occlusion whilst standing during a service in church, the first sign of the stress that was wearing his body down. But then, ironically, during the nine months at Tobolsk, when he had worked hard outdoors chopping wood and clearing snow with an indefatigable energy that everyone marvelled at, Nicholas had briefly become healthier and fitter than in a long time.

  But that was all gone now and with it any hopes of a quiet life in exile. His face bore the indelible signs of fatigue and listlessness, broken only by his enduringly sad, wistful smile. Nicholas now had a large bald patch; his hair was receding and going grey at the temples. His distinctive reddish-brown beard was going grey too. His teeth were rotten and long neglected and must have caused him pain, their decay, combined with his heavy smoking, bringing severe halitosis too. Nicholas looked prematurely aged, with hollow cheeks, his face weathered and wrinkled, coarsened to a dark reddish brown from so much exposure to the sun. His clothes too were worn and patched. He might no longer be tsar or head of the army but he persisted in wearing his gimnasterka – a khaki soldier’s shirt and officer’s belt fastened by a buckle round his waist. But his boots were worn and down at heel. After two months of close confinement at Ekaterinburg he was spent – both physically and mentally.

  For months now he had calmly and knowingly been on the edge of the abyss. But he never complained, even in his diary. His own fate and that of his family was in the hands of God. Several observers have remarked that Nicholas at this time demonstrated a puzzling lack of interest in what was going on around him. Commissar Yakovlev had noted during the journey from Tobolsk that there were only three things that preoccupied the Tsar: ‘his family, the weather, and food’. The rest of the world – power, politics, affairs of state – was past history and excised from his brain.

  Such necessary and onerous preoccupations had, for Nicholas, been imposed as an accident of birth, and in that lay his tragedy. He had never wanted to be tsar and had been in a state of perpetual denial at the prospect until the moment the role was thrust upon him. As a boy he had had a conventional, authoritarian upbringing at home with tutors, growing up in awe of his great bear of a father, Alexander III, and his charming but controlling mother, Maria Fedorovna. Alexander was disappointed in Nicholas’s smallness of stature – he was only 5′ 7″ and had narrow shoulders and short, stocky legs. He derided his son’s weakness, his feminine laugh and handwriting, referring to him as a devchonka – ‘a bit of a girl’ – capable of nothing other than ‘infantile judgements’ with regard to affairs of state and not one to be entrusted with them.

  Nicholas met his father’s criticisms, and both parents’ patent disappointment in him as heir to the throne, with what would become his familiar passiveness and diffidence. His natural timidity grew in the face of Alexander’s charisma and his mother’s smothering indulgence. Knuckling down to his studies of mathematics, history, geography and chemistry, he displayed a natural flair for languages, becoming fluent in English, French and German. He certainly was not without intellectual gifts and the ability to read – fast – and absorb facts and issues very quickly, but he lacked any natural curiosity about most of the subjects he was obliged to tackle. His youthful diary demonstrates limited powers of self-expression and empathy and a chilling lack of interest in anything other than the most bourgeois, personal and domestic trifles. Political or cultural observations are almost entirely absent. But his photographic memory for names, faces, facts, dates was something that put him in good stead for the mountains of official documents with which he would have to deal as tsar, and it enabled him to read and digest endless volumes of the classic works of Russian fiction and history, including his favourite historians Karamzin and Solovev. For years, the Imperial Librarian had provided the Tsar monthly with 20 of the best books from all countries, military history being a particular favourite.

  Nevertheless, educated as he was in seclusion without the luxury of the free exchange and exploration of ideas with others, Nicholas’s world view remained narrow and unchallenged. Worse, he lacked any real friends of his own. His thoughts and opinions about issues in which he remained untutored were not solicited or broadened, leaving him often surprisingly ingenuous. A selection of professors and generals were later recruited to teach him the complexities of military science, political economy and international law. But amidst the circle of servile bureaucrats, army men and aristocrats who made up his entourage, none were capable of teaching him the true qualities of statesmanship. Nicholas’s natural intelligence was dissipated in the dull and stultifying curriculum imposed upon him, and in response he was a dull and dutiful student. One man among them, however, exerted a considerable influence in shaping the young Tsarevich’s mind: the coldly ascetic Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod and an arch-conservative, anti-Semite and adherent of autocratic monarchy. Pobedonostsev ‘put the final seal on an already closed mind’, convincing Nicholas that parliamentary institutions were corrupt and decadent and instilling in him an unshakeable belief in the high ideal of his role as batyushka-tsar and God’s chosen protector of an Orthodox-observant nation. Nicholas was, as his brother-in-law Aleksandr observed, a man ‘vividly of the old system’, who trusted ever after to his vision of a plain, honest, God-bearing people (as Dostoevsky saw them) loyal to their tsar – even when all the signs were there that he had long since lost their respect.

  Nicholas’s life at home in the great gloomy 900-room palace at Gatchina was spartan, like that of a military cadet, despite his vast retinue of servants. He became a creature of simple habits: he slept on a camp bed with a single hard pillow and a very thin mattress in a room with few home comforts, taking cold baths daily, eating the plainest of Russian food and allowing himself only a single glass of Madeira at dinner. He remained ever after a man of simple habits and simple tastes, modest in his style of dress (he always wore the belted tunic and tall boots of a soldier, and only donned civilian clothes on visits abroad) and utterly unworldly with regard to the value of things; after his marriage, his and Alexandra’s lifestyle at Tsarskoe Selo was simple to the point of parsimony, and he never carried money. Lots of fresh air was de rigueur and he quickly turned it to his advantage, making it an outlet for his repressed emotions. Exercise became an absolute fundamental in his daily life, with Nicholas enjoying the country pursuits of hunting, shooting, fishing, swimming, playing tennis, rowing and, most particularly, long, vigorous walks.

  But within the confines of his narrow, proscribed existence as heir to the throne, nothing had given him greater pleasure than joining the Preobrazhensky Guards when he was 19. Now, at last, he was released from the dreariness of studies and initiated into the macho world of fine uniforms, military exercises and the officers’ club. Like any young initiate, Nicholas had thrown himself into army life with gusto. He stayed up late drinking, dining and playing billiards. He joined fellow officers on visits to the gypsies. Night after night he could be seen living up to the classic royal playboy image – going to balls, the theatre and opera. And soon he entered into a discreet affair, after falling for the Imperial Ballet’s prima ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinska. His love of the army and all its associated pageantry never left him, and even in 1916 he would privately confide that his most agreeable duty was going to the Front and being among soldiers; it also provided welcome opportunities for avoidance, even in 1917: ‘My brain feels rested here – no ministers and no fidgety questions to think over.’

  When the time came, Nicholas, as heir to the throne, dutifully set off on the necessary rites-of-passage
world tour, a 10-month journey to India and the Far East in 1890. On a stopover in Japan he was attacked with a sabre by a mentally disturbed man and wounded in the head, as a result of which he suffered for the rest of his life from severe headaches. But his preparation for the onerous duties of state, daily dealings with ministers and ambassadors, speech-making, and the complexities of official policy had barely begun when his father died prematurely, of kidney disease, in 1894. Nicholas found himself tsar at the age of 26 – too young and guileless, ill prepared by a father who had constantly stalled about giving him responsibilities. His sister Olga was very clear on the matter: it was all their father’s fault – ‘He would not even have Nicky sit in the Council of State until 1893.’ A year later the bewildered Tsarevich found himself at the head of what had seemed to him till then one vast ancestral family estate of which he was now the unexpected, benign landowner. He was terrified at the responsibilities to come. He did not yet know his people and they certainly did not know him. ‘What is going to happen to Russia?’ he asked his uncle Grand Duke Alexander. ‘I am not ready to be a tsar. I cannot rule the Empire. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’

  There was only one way in which Nicholas could cope with the huge and unending burden of official papers, many of them tedious and utterly trivial, that rapidly piled on to his desk. He adopted a rigorous routine to which he strictly adhered. Everything about his daily life was tidy, systematic, down to the rows of neatly ranked pens and pencils on his desk, the pedantic orderliness with which he carefully stuck thousands of photographs in his albums, the laborious way in which he composed letters. He was extremely hardworking and thorough in an unimaginative way, perversely refusing the help of a private secretary let alone a secretariat, and often sitting up late over a vast range of documents that would have taxed the mental energy of several men. His coping strategy for the onerous responsibilities before him came from an extraordinary self-control – developed from a very early age with the help of his English tutor Charles Heath as a deliberate counter to an inborn hot temper. Whilst such calmness was repeatedly misinterpreted as indifference, if not a total absence of feeling, Nicholas’s personal rigour ensured an exceptional tolerance of the tedium of official work and endless audiences and state functions. But diligence could not make up for the absence of monarchical gravitas, or for the fact that whenever he found himself in a difficult or confrontational situation he was incapable of dealing harshly with people face to face. Such were the contradictions in a man who sought the opinions of others and courteously listened as they expressed them, but who was then incapable of making independent judgements. In the end he frequently resorted to accepting the advice of the last person he spoke to. He rarely acted on anyone else’s advice other than his wife’s, but when things went wrong he blamed his political misfortunes on his ministers, and rather than come into conflict with them simply dismissed them out of hand.