Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  In Alexandra, Nicholas undoubtedly found a surrogate for his own lack of will and forcefulness, as well as a consuming maternal protectiveness he had never had from his own mother. Behind the scenes, his impressionability and his malleable personality were rapidly moulded by Alexandra’s powerful and assertive character. In public she might have appeared awkward and self-conscious, but in private she was vocal, emotional and highly strung. With her domineering, masculine mind she articulated her personal opinions in long and hectoring letters to her husband in which she exhorted him to be everything he inherently was not – firm, decisive, intractable and at all times asserting the dignity of his position. Convinced of her own infallibility, Alexandra would brook no criticism from even the most well-meaning and concerned of friends and relatives. Blindly obstinate in her determination to hang on to power, she relentlessly belaboured the hapless Nicholas with her paranoid suspicions about ‘rotten’ ministers and her reactionary opinions on domestic policy. That she truly believed she was right there is no doubt; so much so that she worked herself up into a frenzy in her attempts to inject her own willpower into her husband’s flaccid spirit: ‘I am fighting for your reign and Baby’s future’, she would repeatedly remind him. In order to defend that inheritance she reeled off endless admonitions: ‘a Sovereign needs to show his will more often’ . . . ‘let others feel you know what you wish’ . . . ‘If you could only be severe my love’ . . . ‘They must learn to tremble before you’ . . . ‘be more autocratic’ . . . ‘show everybody that you are master’ . . . ‘let them feel your fist at times’. Alexandra would not let go; when Nicholas’s command of the army finally took him away from her in late August 1915, in scribbled page after page, several letters a day, she bombarded him with her increasingly hysterical ramblings.

  Even at her most cloyingly devoted, kissing Nicholas’s cushion and wishing she could hold him tightly in her arms and mop his fevered brow, in the next breath she would be unrelentingly manipulative, exhorting him, ‘Forgive me, but I don’t like the choice of Minister of War.’ Nor did she like anybody who uttered a word of criticism against their ‘friend’ Rasputin. The Holy Man’s critics were all misguided bigots. She knew best – for the country and for her husband: ‘sweetheart needs pushing always and to be reminded that he is emperor’. This included being turned against his devoted uncle Grand Duke Nikolay, of whose popularity as a military leader Alexandra was consumingly jealous. Sound reason to oust him came, in her view, when the Duke openly expressed his grave anxieties about Rasputin’s malign influence over her. In response, Alexandra, like a female Iago, proceeded to sow the seeds of doubt and suspicion in her husband’s mind, as she did about anyone of whom she disapproved, wheedling and insinuating until Nicholas capitulated and removed his uncle from his command of the Eastern Front.

  But Nicholas did not always succumb to his wife’s perpetual moral blackmail or her stated longing to ‘poke [her] nose into everything’. ‘Silly old Wifey’ might have thought she wore the trousers, but at other times ‘sweetheart’ refused to be pushed. He turned a deaf ear, as he did to all advice to which he did not wish to respond, lit another cigarette and moved on to the next dispatch on his desk. For all his devotion to his controlling wife, there were times when the Tsar relished the opportunity of escaping to the all-male world of military HQ at Mogilev, where he could distance himself from the relentless diet of Alexandra’s overweening sentiment and tedious shrewishness. The Tsar was a ‘saint and an angel’ in the opinion of his German brother-in-law Ernst, but he did not know how to deal with his wife – and that was his problem.

  As she grew older, somewhere deep inside Alexandra there developed an earnest and sincere impulse to set herself free, to control her irritability and temper and open-heartedly warm to others, to comfort them and win their affection. But such were her high standards of what was right, moral and proper and her implacable opposition to anyone who disagreed with her that she found few people around her attractive. It was only those who were weak and suffering passively – the sick and the wounded – who were by default unchallenging and grateful for her ministrations, in whom she could find a channel for her undoubted virtues. During the war, Alexandra’s practical skills came to the fore. Despite her physical limitations, she threw herself into charity work, taking on responsibility for organising St Petersburg’s hospital system, a project encompassing 85 hospitals; she set up new ones as well as rehabilitation centres for the wounded, and involved herself in women’s nursing training and the supply of medicines and linen. Mindful too of the need for spiritual comfort in the field, she also concerned herself with the distribution of thousands of Bibles and psalters to the troops. In so doing she demonstrated the same deep levels of compassion for the sick and wounded that her own mother had shown before her during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. Nursing provided an absorbing outlet, if not a positive therapy; it consoled Alexandra’s ‘aching heart’. For in it she could subsume all her frustrations and suspicious meanderings by doing something practical. From their infancy she had devotedly nursed all her children when sick and had shown the same loving vigilance at Nicholas’s bedside through a serious bout of typhoid in 1900. Early in 1917 she exhausted herself nursing the children at Tsarskoe Selo when one by one they were laid low with measles. Dressed in her Red Cross uniform, dignified and courageous, whilst living in a state of continual anxiety about the safety of the children and the Tsar, who was away at the Front, Alexandra wore herself to total physical collapse in attending them as well as Anna Vyrubova, who also caught the disease. She did so again at Tobolsk during the winter of 1917–18 when all of the children except Anastasia went down with German measles. It was and remains her great redeeming quality. Count Benckendorff, who had found much of the Tsaritsa’s behaviour irrational and impossible to deal with till then, was forced grudgingly to concede: ‘She is great, great . . . But I had always said that she was one of those people who rise to sublime heights in the midst of misfortune.’

  Somewhere between the two polarised perceptions of Alexandra – the virago and the saint – lay the real woman. But her true qualities and the depth to which she embraced her country’s suffering during the war years remained hidden from the world at large. The criticism and hostility were relentless, and became increasingly vitriolic by 1916, so much so that various members of the Romanov family and the aristocracy discussed the possibility of removing her from power and putting her in a convent; even assassination was suggested. When ultimately she did lose power she did not relinquish it with her husband’s effortless grace. She balked at the loss of authority, at the withdrawal of titles and acknowledgement of status. She fought tooth and nail against the daily little humiliations of being a former tsaritsa. But as time and her collapsing health wore on, Alexandra’s profound Christian acceptance of her fate dulled her sense of outrage, and by the beginning of 1918 she had become increasingly reconciled to, if not preoccupied about the life to come. Her preparation for her own fate had begun back in January, in a prayer written on a postcard she sent from Tobolsk:

  O Lord, send us patience

  During these dark, tumultuous days

  To stand the people’s persecution

  And the tortures of our executioners.

  She took it all very seriously, with a strange kind of exhausted calm, assuring friends by letter that she and her family were ‘readying ourselves in our thoughts for admission to the Kingdom of Heaven’.

  As Nicholas and Alexandra in Ekaterinburg wearily reconciled themselves to their fate – whatever that might be – in Moscow, Count Mirbach was closely monitoring the breakdown in order and the tenuousness of Bolshevik rule. Russia, he was convinced, was ‘headed for a still greater catastrophe than the one inflicted on her by the [Bolshevik] coup’ of October 1917. ‘We are unquestionably standing by the bedside of a dangerously ill man, who might show apparent improvement from time to time, but who is lost in the long run’, he remarked. Even the coldly confident Lenin had been
forced to admit to Mirbach that he was surrounded on all sides by enemies and that it was only their lack of organisation that prevented them from being a serious threat to his government. Mirbach advised the German government to consider switching support to rival political groupings in support of the restoration of a monarchy under the Tsar’s younger brother Mikhail. Such however had been the success of Bolshevik deception that nobody yet knew that Mikhail had already been murdered. The cause of the Tsar himself was now hopeless, as the indifferent reaction in Russia and abroad to his frequently misreported death had shown. If the Germans chose now to throw in their lot with opposition groups, they would have to renegotiate the terms of the unpopular treaty of Brest-Litovsk and make territorial concessions. The alternative was to bolster the Bolshevik regime with large injections of money – three million marks a month by Mirbach’s estimates – in order to keep them in power. It would not have taken much during the chaos in June, should Germany have so chosen, to move in and seize Petrograd and Moscow and set up a puppet government, but in the end the Kaiser had vetoed the idea.

  Meanwhile, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had raised the levels of invective against the Bolsheviks’ German allies to fever pitch at the 5th Congress of Soviets. The atmosphere at the Bolshoi on 6 July had been heated, the weather outside sultry. The Left SRs, who made up about one third of the delegates, had once again been trying desperately to stir up protests against the government during debates over Russia’s future domestic and foreign policy. Led by Mariya Spiridonova, they had been extremely vocal in their condemnation of Russia’s humiliating reduction to Germany’s vassal under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and denounced Lenin’s government for having betrayed the Revolution to German militarism.

  On the afternoon of the 6th, in an attempt to provoke the Germans into breaking the treaty or the Russians into breaking off diplomatic relations with them, the Socialist Revolutionaries struck in a plot masterminded by Spiridonova. Two of their members, Yakov Blyumkin and Nikolay Andreev, with the faked credentials of Cheka agents and secretly armed with revolvers and grenades, went to the German Embassy and asked to see Ambassador Mirbach. When Mirbach appeared, they pulled revolvers from their briefcases and in a shambolic assassination scene, after their gunshots failed to kill him, threw a grenade at him as he tried to run from the room. He died of his wounds shortly afterwards. By evening, around 1,000 Left SRs and their supporters were out on the streets in a spontaneous mass demonstration – one could hardly call it an insurrection – at a time when most of the crack Latvian Rifle Brigade guarding the Moscow garrison was on a day’s leave. Had they so wished, the Left SRs could have stormed the Kremlin and taken control of the government. But these were not organised revolutionaries, and though they had ground support from the peasantry thanks to their strong agricultural policy, they lacked the structure of the Bolsheviks. They were, rather, a band of dedicated and fanatical idealists and revolutionary romantics who wished to stir the Russian masses into further action – its precise nature and objectives unclear – against Bolshevik despotism and German imperialism.

  Beyond Moscow, a group of disaffected Socialist Revolutionary officers led by a former adventurer, Boris Savinkov, had organised themselves loosely into a ‘Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Freedom’ and sparked further insurrection in defence of the suffering nation. The Council of People’s Commissars had brought ruin to Russia, they proclaimed, ‘Instead of bread and peace it has brought famine and war.’ Unrest broke out in a number of central Russian cities, the most serious being in Yaroslavl, 150 miles north-east of Moscow on the Volga, as well as in Murom and Samara. The local militia and Bolshevik commissars in Yaroslavl had been taken unawares by a group of army officers aided by local workers and peasants, as they were at Murom, but the success of the insurgents was short-lived. Bolshevik reinforcements soon regained Murom and Samara, and Savinkov’s men were only able to hold out for two weeks in Yaroslavl before the Bolsheviks retook the city and initiated mass arrests. Three hundred and fifty ‘former officers, counter-revolutionists, and White Guards’ were singled out and shot in reprisal.

  During the confused few hours that followed the assassination of Mirbach, in which the Left SRs dissipated their political chances, the Latvian Rifles were summoned and regrouped. Early in the morning of 7 July, they launched a counterattack against Left SR strongholds that resulted in four days of street fighting before the Bolsheviks finally crushed them. In its official statement, Lenin’s government blamed the assassination of Mirbach on ‘agents of Russian-Anglo-French Imperialism’ and other counter-revolutionists. The Germans for their part were now demanding the right to send a battalion of infantry to Moscow to protect their embassy and their foreign nationals in Russia. Inside the Kremlin, Lenin and his colleagues resorted to frantic damage limitation, fearing German reprisals and possibly even an invasion. They also initiated a swift and brutal response to the Left SR rising. Within days, Left SRs in regional soviets all over Russia were removed from their positions; 13 of the ringleaders of the uprising in Moscow were shot without trial. Spiridonova was arrested and sent to jail. The Bolshevik government, as Lenin later admitted in a telegram to Stalin, ‘had been within a hair’s breadth of war’. Having mercilessly put down this opposition, Lenin resolved to tighten central political control. From now on the CEC would ‘carry the burden of the Revolution alone’, which meant closing ranks and imposing Communist control over all government institutions, especially the army. They now turned their attention to the threat from the Whites and the Czechs in Siberia, and to resolving how to deal once and for all with their various Romanov captives.

  For now a new threat from outside was about to further exacerbate the precarious political situation in Russia. That afternoon, 5,390 miles away, at the White House in Washington, President Woodrow Wilson had finally capitulated under pressure from his British and French allies to demonstrate concrete support for the Czech legions in Russia as well as send a relief mission to the Russian people. An Allied War Council in Versailles on 2 July had called for US intervention to extend to rebuilding the failing Eastern Front and bringing the Russians back into the war against ‘the Hun’. But this was a political step too far for the democratic idealist Wilson, who was reluctant to intervene in this way. Back in March he had agreed to a small, symbolic American presence at Murmansk to help protect the billion-dollar investment of American guns and equipment along the Trans-Siberian Railway sent to assist Russia in its fight against Germany. But now, with Russia out of the war on the Eastern Front, and in light of the Bolshevik government’s continuing trade-off with the Germans and the unexpected military success of the Czech legions as they pressed westward, Wilson reluctantly rubber-stamped the sending of 5,000 US troops to Archangel in the north of Russia and 8,000 to Vladivostok in the Far East. He liked to think that his action was largely in support of the Czechs’ romantic struggle for nationhood, but he later amended his view, hoping that the legions could become the spearhead of a powerful force for political regeneration in Russia and the inception of a new, democratic government there. American troops now on their way to Siberia would offer peaceful economic aid in support of the Russian people’s right to determination in the face of the Bolshevik dictatorship. News of the advance parties that had landed in Murmansk in May and June and of a possible Allied invasion in July had had some influence in the recent Left SR revolt. In response, fearful of a major Allied intervention in Russia, the Bolsheviks now intensified their campaign of terror by means of the Cheka.

  Several showers during the course of 6 July had brought a welcome coolness to the stuffy rooms on the first floor of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. The punctilious Yurovsky had that day returned a watch in a leather case belonging to Nicholas that had been found in one of the service rooms downstairs, purloined by one of the guards. A silver spoon with the Imperial crest, found in the garden where it no doubt had been hidden after being stolen, was also dutifully returned. That day’s crushin
g boredom for the Romanovs had seen the minor diversion of two women sent by the local soviet to wash the floors of their living quarters. Nicholas was now racing through volume seven of the complete works of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin; Alexandra was allowed the now rare luxury of a bath. All was in order. Life was as uneventful as ever.

  But Yakov Yurovsky had other plans. For all his apparent deference to the welfare of the Romanovs, he had made an important decision. That day he replaced the old Colt machine gun at guard post no. 9 in the attic with a much faster and more efficient Maxim gun, a weapon perfected by the British during the Second Boer War that could fire 500 rounds a minute. A necessary security measure no doubt, in view of the approach of the Czechs and the still circulating rumours of rescue attempts, but a mark also of a hardening of Bolshevik resolve to keep control of a situation from which there would be no possible hope of a Romanov escape.