Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  After the Revolution and their journey into exile, for seven months at Tobolsk Alexey had been well again. But then in a typical act of daredevil defiance of the illness that had haunted his life, he had provoked another serious attack by hurtling down a staircase in the Governor’s House on his sled, falling and injuring his groin. Before his mother departed for Ekaterinburg, forced to leave the sick Alexey in the care of his sisters, he told her in one of his moments of pain: ‘I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death, but I’m so afraid of what they might do to us here.’ When finally he was able to travel with the others to join his parents in mid-May, he was still extremely frail. His carer Nagorny had carried him from the train at Ekaterinburg station that day, so pale and delicate, his collar bones sticking out and his thin hand clutched tight round Nagorny’s thick bronzed neck. Those who saw him arrive were moved by the protective loyalty of Nagorny and had little doubt about the look of mortal resignation in the Tsarevich’s huge sad eyes. He had the look of a martyr to suffering, and one not long for this world either. It was a sight that shocked the hardest of hearts, not least the guards at the Ipatiev House. Alexey’s spectral, jaundiced appearance reminded his mother of Spala, and she was filled with dread.

  Approaching his fourteenth birthday, Alexey had spent a lifetime being watched by a retinue of family and carers, and now he was doubly watched in an even closer place of confinement at the Ipatiev House. It was hard for him, very hard and he seemed to have a sense of foreboding that he and his family were doomed. For the first three weeks after his arrival he was in a lot of pain with a swollen knee, and Dr Derevenko was allowed in to put on a plaster of Paris splint. Later, as the leg recovered, Dr Botkin applied electrotherapy to his wasted leg muscles with the Fohn apparatus they had brought with them. His only playmate now was the young kitchen boy Leonid Sednev, his carer Nagorny having been taken away in May. Nicholas, or sometimes Maria or Dr Botkin, carried Alexey downstairs on the rare occasions he went out into the garden, but he could rarely walk let alone run in the sunshine. If he went out at all, he mainly sat with his mother under the balcony. Lately, however, both invalids increasingly remained in their bedroom, taking their frugal meals there together.

  Alexey coped with his intense boredom by playing childish games with his tin soldiers and paper boats and filling his pockets with the random detritus boys like to collect: coins, nails, stones and buttons, bits of string and scraps of paper. There were also games of draughts, bezique and chess with his parents in the evenings. There still were occasional flashes of the naughty boy: one day he caused a stir by letting off some fireworks that Avdeev had given him in the garden with Leonid Sednev – much to Yurovsky’s fury. Avdeev had allowed him to play bows and arrows too, sometimes even firing them out of the upstairs window and nearly hitting passers-by. But that all changed with the arrival of Yurovsky. He would allow the boy no such indulgences.

  Slowly, the condition of Alexey’s leg began to improve as a result of being so closely confined, but he was still dreadfully weak and the visits of Dr Derevenko became increasingly infrequent; on 8 July Alexandra noted in her diary that yet again the doctor had not been permitted to come in response to their frequent requests to see him. The absence of Dr Derevenko was one of many subtle changes to life in the Ipatiev House under Yurovsky. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra seemed to read any significance into it. In his diary that day Nicholas observed that ‘our life has not changed one bit with Yu.[rovsky]’ – except for the continuing morning checks on their valuables and further tightening of the security of their possessions in the storehouse outside. Alexandra recorded that ‘nothing particular happened’; even the guard duty book noted that 8 July was ‘without change’. But there were changes afoot, deliberate and sinister ones. That day Yurovsky, as well as bringing in his own new, internal guards, had added two more guard posts at the Ipatiev House – no. 11 in the garden at the back and no. 12 in the dormer window at the top of the house. For most of the day men had been at the house ‘fixing’ the electricity – as both the Tsar and Tsaritsa noted, thinking perhaps it was for their benefit, since the supply had been intermittent. In fact the purpose had been to install a new and more reliable warning system of bells between guard posts to replace the existing defective one.

  Yurovsky was in fact turning the Ipatiev House into an impregnable fortress as the unstable situation in Russia at large escalated. The threat of the recent Left SR insurrection, which had spread to some of the regions, had brought the Bolshevik government to the brink of collapse. Instructions had been sent to regional soviets to clamp down on all possible counter-revolutionary activity. In response Aleksandr Beloborodov and Grigory Safarov of the Ural Regional Soviet had posted a proclamation to the Ekaterinburg population exhorting them: ‘Increase your vigilance, mercilessly eradicate insurrection against Soviet power no matter from where it emanates.’ Meanwhile, all that day the Ekaterinburg Cheka had been busy rounding up any possible suspects who might be involved in an attempted Romanov rescue.

  Beyond Ekaterinburg, to the immediate south and south-east, a combined force of four Czech detachments of about 10,000 men, with artillery and two aeroplanes as support, was closing in on the city from its base at Chelyabinsk. Further Czech forces were now stretched out along the Trans-Siberian Railway from Samara in the west to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal in the east, with another large contingent of about 14,000 out at Vladivostok. As men from Czech armoured trains routed the Bolsheviks from town after town along the railway line, they were hailed as deliverers to the sound of church bells. The Czechs now held the longest front in the war – 3,000 miles across Siberia. From this consolidated military position they were bolstered by news of the resolution made in Versailles by the Allies to shorten the war, attempting to reconstitute the Russian Front against the Germans by sending in an intervention force in support of the Czechs. Informed of this, the Czech commanders decided to press on with their march westwards to the Volga, in the vanguard of the Allied intervention.

  Meanwhile, the central Czech forces under the overall command of White general Sergey Voitsekhovsky were now assigned to take Ekaterinburg and were approaching from their base at Chelyabinsk along the densely forested railway line to the south. Soon they would be at the Sysert works outside the city. The vice was tightening around Ekaterinburg; every man with a gun and who knew how to shoot it was leaving for the Front, piling on to every available train at Ekaterinburg station. With 300 valuable men now assigned to the roster of guards at the Ipatiev House, revolutionary necessity and the defence of the October Revolution increasingly demanded they be released for military duty.

  Knowing the game would soon be up, and intent on looking after his own, Beloborodov asked a colleague, Gabriel Myasnikov of the Perm Cheka, who was now busy evacuating the government reserves of gold and platinum out via Perm, to escort his wife and three children to safety by rail (a week later they drowned when a crowded ferry they had boarded to cross the River Vytchegda capsized). Ekaterinburg now was effectively unprotected, except for a rabble of Red Army soldiers and Cheka men from the Verkh-Isetsk factory, under the command of Petr Ermakov, a Bolshevik commissar. The moment for evacuating the Tsar and his family north to safety or back to Moscow for a trial, which had been feasible all the time the Czechs were approaching from the south, had passed. It is doubtful that it had ever been a realistic Bolshevik intention, but rather a ploy to keep everyone guessing about what the leadership’s plans for the Imperial Family really were. Sooner or later, Yurovsky knew, he would have to take a stand on the ‘question of liquidating the Romanovs’. Which was why his colleague Filipp Goloshchekin was in Moscow right now, consulting with Lenin and Sverdlov.

  7

  The Good Doctor

  TUESDAY 9 JULY 1918

  Dr Evgeny Sergeevich Botkin was feeling his age – and his own mortality. He was 63, and like everybody in the Ipatiev House he was becoming increasingly tired and disconsolate. His kidney problem had flared up at the end of Ju
ne, laying him low for days. The pain had been so bad that Tatiana had given him an injection of the family’s precious supply of morphine. He had had to stay in bed for several days and had not been able to venture out into the garden again till only two days ago. Time in the Ipatiev House was dragging terribly, and the pain in his back nagged at him; he had tried to distract himself from gloomy thoughts by reading the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin – the same set of his collected works that the Tsar had also been enjoying – but he couldn’t concentrate. His mind had constantly been wandering and he was increasingly haunted by gloomy thoughts and visions of his children, especially of his dead son Yuri, killed on the Eastern Front during the war.

  And so, after the arrival of Yurovsky at the house and sensing the tightening of the screws, Botkin had now judged that the time had finally come to put pen to paper. Some time in early July the doctor had begun, intermittently, to write a letter – his last letter, a letter he knew would never be sent and never received. It was a testament of sorts – a statement of resignation and also expectation of what was to come. Addressed to his brother Sasha (Alexander), with whom he had studied at medical school, it began starkly with all the pragmatism of the medical man

  I am making a final attempt at writing a real letter – from here at least – although that proviso to my mind is utterly superfluous. I don’t think I was fated to write again from anywhere – my voluntary confinement here is not so much limited by time as it is limited by my earthly existence. In essence, I am already dead, dead for my children, for my friends, for my work . . .

  Facing reality with such clear-eyed calm typified the doctor in him. Botkin knew that he could not share his musings with those around him, so he quietly acceded to the general atmosphere of denial, or rather exhausted acceptance, that now pervaded the upstairs rooms of the Ipatiev House and kept his real thoughts to himself.

  Botkin was an old-school medical man and prided himself on being so: upright, hard-working, incorruptible, a man who always put duty before self. Tall and stout, he had a neat beard, gold-rimmed spectacles with thick pebble lenses, and even in confinement dressed formally in a stiff shirt and tie; Nicholas’s valet Chemodurov noted before he left the house sick on 24 May that the doctor even slept with his tie on. It all gave him an air of solidity, dependability. Medicine ran in the family; his own father, Dr Sergey Botkin, had been a highly respected scientist and medical pioneer before being appointed court physician, serving both Alexander II and Alexander III. Three of Sergey’s sons in a family of 13 children had followed him into the medical profession. Evgeny had studied in St Petersburg and in Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Army-Medical Academy. He had served during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, overseeing Red Cross care of the wounded on a hospital train. Decorated for his efforts, he was invited to the Russian court by Alexandra, who had been greatly impressed by his war service, as a physician-in-ordinary in 1905. In 1908 he was appointed Honorary Physician of the Imperial Court. But the honour was an onerous one, for the stresses and strains of the Tsaritsa and Tsarevich’s various medical crises meant he was often on call for long and exhausting periods of time, and this in addition to continuing his teaching and his private practice. It made great demands on Botkin, not least the battle with the Tsaritsa’s own very stubborn views on what she thought was wrong with her – which was often at odds with the pronouncements of the medical men. He was forced to capitulate time and again rather than provoke a hysterical response in his patient by telling the truth. He therefore obligingly doled out the Veronal and other opiates that were the Tsaritsa’s lifeline, kept his distance from Rasputin and passed no opinion on him, and remained silently loyal, never indulging in gossip about the Imperial Family. Although he accompanied the Tsar sometimes to Army HQ at Mogilev, Botkin spent most of his time at Tsarskoe Selo attending the Tsaritsa and her children. As a result, his own family saw very little of him. His marriage broke down; his wife had an affair and in 1911 they were divorced.

  Having once undertaken to serve, Dr Botkin was unswervingly devoted to his monarch and the principles he upheld, and increasingly shared the same conservative attitudes on politics, religion and morals as the Tsar and Tsaritsa. He also, during the final years, had grown to share their religious fatalism. When the Tsar abdicated and the Imperial Family were confined to the Alexander Palace, Botkin had no hesitation in asking Kerensky’s government to allow him to join them. A few days later he accompanied the Imperial Family into exile at Tobolsk. It had not been a difficult decision: his sense of duty demanded it, as Botkin told Count Tatishchev at Tobolsk: ‘I have come here knowing quite well that I shall not escape with my life. All I ask is to be permitted to die with my Emperor.’ Even his jailer Yurovsky, for whom Botkin with his endless requests on behalf of the family became a thorn in the side, remarked that the doctor was a ‘true friend to the family’.

  Which is why the doctor had not hesitated again – when he was asked to make the final sacrifice of leaving behind at Tobolsk his son Gleb and daughter Tatyana, who had followed him into exile – to accompany the Tsar and Tsaritsa to Ekaterinburg. At the Ipatiev House he became an essential intermediary between the Romanovs and the commandant, sent to negotiate over any day-to-day matters, and sometimes more serious ones. At every opportunity he defended the family’s physical and spiritual welfare, asking Avdeev to allow them more time out of doors for recreation, appealing for a priest to be allowed to come and conduct services and repeatedly requesting visits from Dr Derevenko. Derevenko had been appointed in 1912 after Alexey’s near fatal attack of haemophilia; he had followed the Imperial Family to Ekaterinburg but had been excluded from the Ipatiev House, remaining in lodgings in the city. Avdeev had allowed him in fairly regularly, but the family had now not seen him for five days and Yurovsky was becoming irritated by Botkin’s persistent requests and his continuing insistence that the Tsarevich needed to be in a hospital as his own supply of medicines and bandages was running out. Such had been Botkin’s intense frustration that back in May he had written a very strong letter to the Ural Regional Soviet Executive Committee describing Alexey’s very poor state of health, and asking that Pierre Gilliard and Sidney Gibbes be allowed into the house to share the load of keeping him amused and distracted from the ‘indescribable pain’ that he endured, day and night, so that he, Botkin, and the family, who were all drained from sitting up with him, could get some rest. Botkin was only too aware of the psychological importance of Derevenko and his tutors for the Tsarevich, as well as for his mother. Gibbes and Gilliard were, he asserted, ‘irreplaceable’, and he begged the URS to allow them to continue in their selfless service to the Tsarevich. The request was denied, Avdeev explaining that Alexey already had enough grown-ups, including his sisters, to attend him.

  As he sat writing his last letter, Botkin’s mind turned back to his and Sasha’s graduation year – 1889. As a young, idealistic medical student he had had no religious concerns and had been decidedly liberal in his thinking, looking on religion from a detached, aesthetic point of view. One did not need religious faith in order to work as a doctor, or so they all thought then. But the death of his firstborn son, Sergey, had changed all that, and his subsequent years of medical experience had taught him to be increasingly concerned for the patient’s ‘soul’ – their mental well-being. It was why, he said now in his letter to Sasha, he had unhesitatingly ‘orphaned’ his own children in order to carry out his physician’s duty ‘to the end, as Abraham did not hesitate at God’s demand to sacrifice his only son’. At Tobolsk, buoyed by the fine weather and the presence with him in the merchant Kornilov’s house of his children (he was not resident in the Governor’s House), he had expended all his remaining energies in offering medical assistance to anyone in the town who needed his help. Conditions in the house were very cramped, but between 3 and 5 p.m. every day he had held a surgery for local residents. As word got out, peasants began arriving from outlying villages as far as 50 miles away seeking his medical help
– distance being meaningless to Siberians. Botkin had been greatly moved by their simple, unswerving trust in him and their gratitude for the way in which he treated them, not just as equals, but as sick people who had every right to his care and attention as a doctor. They tried to pay him but he never took their money. When Botkin could, he went out and visited those peasants too sick to travel; when he refused their money, they tried to pay his driver.

  The same kind of unquestioning loyalty to the Imperial Family had also been demonstrated by the servants and kitchen boy who had voluntarily gone with the family to Ekaterinburg and now, in July, were still with them. It was as though by travelling with the family they felt they could in some way protect them from harm. Four of the original seven now remained: the Lithuanian Catholic Alexey Trupp – a 61-year-old ex-army officer who was the Tsaritsa’s footman; the Tsaritsa’s 40-year-old parlour maid Anna Demidova; the 48-year-old cook Ivan Kharitonov and the little kitchen boy Leonid Sednev – a nephew of Ivan Sednev, the Grand Duchesses’ valet. Leonid was two years younger than Alexey, and the Tsarevich had grown to greatly rely on him as a playmate. Demidova, a tall blonde whom the family called Nyuta and the guards with playful obsequiousness ‘Freylina’, was dutiful but rather timid and probably the most overworked, with all the bed linen and family laundry to deal with. But there was no ceremony to the very simple meals prepared from Soviet rations in the tiny, stuffy kitchen by Kharitonov – who had left behind a wife and daughter in Tobolsk – and eaten communally at the dining room table; and the family hardly needed a footman such as Trupp to serve them.