Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  When the Romanovs had arrived at Ekaterinburg the Bolsheviks had ordered that the servants from now on address them not by their titles but by their names and patronymics, something the servants had found difficult to adjust to. The Tsaritsa had complained bitterly and often about the reduction in their retinue, but one wonders quite how any more servants could have been accommodated in such an already overcrowded space – five rooms compared to the 18 the Imperial entourage had occupied at the house in Tobolsk – or what they could have occupied themselves with all day. Alexandra remained in denial about her reduced status, constantly complaining, and asking repeatedly for the return of Nagorny to help Dr Botkin watch over Alexey at night when he was sick and carry him from room to room.

  Not knowing what had happened to Sednev, Nagorny, Dolgorukov and Chemodurov, who had all now been taken from them, as well as Tatishchev who had been arrested on 23 May after arriving in Ekaterinburg with the rest of the children, worried the family, for they had no way of knowing whether they had been sent away to safety or had suffered some terrible fate. They were fobbed off with lies by Avdeev, and Yurovsky after him, but lack of information about what was going on in the world outside and how long they were to remain in Ekaterinburg was beginning to wear everybody down. Bouts of boredom were interrupted by moments of irritation and periods of acute stress; meanwhile, Alexey and Alexandra’s health continued to decline. Today the Tsaritsa’s eyes were hurting so much that she couldn’t read for more than five minutes at a time. Her teeth were troubling her too, and she noted in her diary that she had taken arsenic – often used in dentistry as a painkiller. Olga stayed in with her all day when the others went out to the garden. Otherwise, it was the same routine: Alexandra sitting playing patience with Alexey and Dr Botkin, or ‘tatting’ – making knotted lace – whilst the servants hovered aimlessly, their roles largely redundant but their familiar presence reassuring.

  For Nicholas, the physical constraints had become increasingly intolerable since he had been forbidden even to exchange pleasantries with the guards. The arrival of Yurovsky had curtailed what free association there had been to help lighten the monotony, but for the sake of his family, of whom he was fiercely protective, Nicholas had kept his frustration bottled up. When the distraction of cards and reading failed him, he would pace incessantly back and forth across the sitting room humming military tunes and army songs, anything to keep the black dog of despair at bay. After which he would often sit listlessly in a chair, leafing through the book in the collection at the Ipatiev House that most interested him: a copy of The House of the Romanovs published to celebrate the tercentenary in 1913. Fond memories of happier days and illustrious ancestors.

  Meanwhile, in London, another European monarch, Albert, the beleaguered King of the Belgians, and his wife were continuing their visit for the royal silver wedding, during which they had been garnering further support for the ‘long-drawn sufferings of the high-souled people of Belgium’, who since the German invasion in August 1914 were still living under the ‘heel of the enemy’. King Albert, a popular, democratic monarch, seemed a paean of incorruptibility. He had refused to sacrifice the honour of his country for the price that Germany offered, insisting that ‘Belgium is a nation, not a road’, had kept Belgium neutral throughout the war despite the invasion of German troops, and had stalled for time to allow Allied preparations for the crucial assault against Germany at the Marne that was now taking place. He had earned British respect as a man who had remained ‘unbowed by the misfortunes of his kingship’. The obvious comparisons with Nicholas of Russia, who to outside observers had buckled and abdicated all too easily, abandoning his country to German domination, were unspoken but palpable. The ‘indomitable’ King of Belgium was soldiering on whilst Nicholas was now languishing, a forgotten man, out of sight, out of mind.

  Early in the morning of 9 July, while it was still dark, the small Red Army garrison under the command of Ensign Ardatov charged with protecting Ekaterinburg had realised the time had come to abandon their posts. They could hear the distant boom of artillery approaching from the south, and decided to flee, defecting to the Czechs. Later that morning, across the road from the Ipatiev House, an angry mob gathered in the square outside the Voznesensky Cathedral, fearful for the security of their homes, their lives and the city itself. All over Ekaterinburg, hidden eyes were watching and assessing the crumbling political situation. Czech agents had already arrived undercover and were warning foreign consulates to ensure that they haul up their flags so that the Czech relief forces, when they came, would avoid hitting them with artillery fire. Other spies lurked in the city. One, from France, was holed up at the British consulate down the road from the Ipatiev House on Voznesensky Prospekt, sent to check on the rumours that the Tsar and some if not all of the family had already been killed. He managed to get a telegraph out confirming that the ‘rumours about the Romanovs are false’. Thomas Preston knew there had been British agents in the city too, observing the goings-on at the Ipatiev House; but such had been the situation for months. These shadowy figures – spies, monarchists, would-be rescuers – all came and went, but nothing changed for the Romanovs.

  It took men of an entirely different calibre, of icy calculating calm and implacable political intent, to plan not a Romanov rescue, but the annihilation of a dynasty. And the person who now had this most firmly in mind was Lenin’s close associate Yakov Sverdlov. He was small and lean, with dark, exotic Jewish looks, a huge mop of black hair, flashing eyes and a neat goatee beard. He liked to dress in a long leather coat, the favoured dress code of the Cheka, often sporting a floppy Bohemian black cravat. He might have seemed rather fey, but he had a thunderous voice, and behind the pince-nez there lurked a fierce and calculating intelligence and a photographic memory. He carried a huge amount of information in his head about the names and faces of core party activists and collaborators, as he built up a network of party officials across Russia. Whilst Lenin might have been the mastermind and theoretician of the Revolution, and Trotsky its outstanding orator, in Yakov Sverdlov it had found a brilliant organiser who oversaw the apparatus of government.

  Practical organisational skills were Lenin’s one great failing, and Sverdlov was quick to capitalise on this deficiency. He was ‘like a diamond’, as fellow commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky described him, that had been ‘chosen for its absolute hardness to be the axis of some delicate, perpetually revolving piece of mechanism’. Sverdlov shared the same crystalline political nature as his good friend Lenin – a ruthlessly rational and unsentimental line of thought. They had not met till 1917 but had immediately established a very close rapport. According to Sverdlov’s widow, ‘It took only a word or two for them to understand each other’; her husband instantly grasped and accepted without question Lenin’s every idea and every instruction because, she insisted, ‘they had identical views’. Like all good revolutionaries, Sverdlov was not showy and had the ability of the chameleon to blend effortlessly into the background. To Lenin he was, quite simply, indispensable, which was why Lenin had installed him in place of the more lenient Lev Kamenev as chair of the Central Executive Committee, effectively making him Soviet Russia’s first president and the CEC the de facto power centre of the government. Sverdlov increasingly used the CEC to circumvent open meetings of the party and thus squeeze out opposition from the Left SRs and Mensheviks, in the process strengthening his own hand. In the current increasingly tense situation over the fate of the Romanovs he was playing a key role. He was well connected with the Bolsheviks of Ekaterinburg – he’d served his apprenticeship as an underground worker in and around the Urals during 1905–6, when he had established strong links with local Bolshevik leaders. The prison camps of Siberian exile were only too familiar to him as well: he had spent three years there in 1906–9; had escaped a second term in 1910, and then had been sent to Narym, where he spent time with Stalin, before a further four years in exile in Turukhansk, where he had become firm friends with fellow exile Filipp Golos
hchekin.

  Sverdlov had an innate gift for judging people with extraordinary accuracy, and right now he knew who could be relied on to carry out Lenin’s wishes when the final decision over the Romanovs was made. Goloshchekin was his man, and they were now in close and regular contact. It was Goloshchekin who had warned him of the weakening of security at Tobolsk; thereafter Sverdlov had given him personal responsibility for ensuring the Tsar’s safety until a decision was made about his fate. From now on, control of the Imperial Family’s life in Ekaterinburg, whilst seeming to emanate from the Ural Regional Soviet, was in fact closely monitored by Sverdlov and Lenin, hand in hand with Goloshchekin. And now Goloshchekin was once more in Moscow for further and final consultations with them, staying with Sverdlov in his spacious four-bedroom apartment in the Kremlin.

  Over in the sitting room of the House of Special Purpose, as he added a few more lines to his letter to Sasha, Dr Botkin had no doubts about the fate in store for himself and the other occupants of the Ipatiev House:

  I am dead but not yet buried or buried alive – whichever: the consequences are almost identical . . . My children may hold out hope that we will see each other again in this life . . . but I personally do not indulge in that hope . . . and I look the unadulterated reality in the eye.

  That day in Ekaterinburg another fellow medical professional had been busy, though his mission was not an altruistic one. Dr Kensorin Arkhipov, a local physician of good repute, whose house had been considered by the Ural Regional Soviet as a possible alternative venue for the Imperial Family, had been instructed, as British consul Thomas Preston had heard, to procure 400lb of sulphuric acid. Dr Arkhipov, so it seemed, had served as a medical orderly at the Ekaterinburg Military Hospital in 1916; he had not actually completed his medical studies, but this fact was ignored and a diploma issued to him anyway because of the pressing needs of the war. His fellow doctors had been wary of him – they found him wild, full of crazy ideas, unbalanced even. Nevertheless, Arkhipov did manage to make one good friend among their ranks – Yakov Yurovsky – and they had remained thick as thieves ever since.

  8

  ‘Our Poor Russia’

  WEDNESDAY 10 JULY 1918

  In the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, President Woodrow Wilson was grappling with a problem. What was right and feasible to do in Russia? How to provide relief to its starving masses and support for the Czech legions, whilst refraining from interfering in the country’s internal affairs? Only two days earlier, Wilson had confided to his adviser Colonel Edward House that he had been ‘sweating blood’ over the question for many weeks now, but every time he thought he had found a solution ‘it goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch’. Meanwhile the whole contentious issue of Russia had snowballed in the world’s press, and was now dominating US foreign policy, with everyone second-guessing what the President would do next. Halfway round the world and ignorant of the forces contemplating intervention in their country, the Romanovs remained impotent in the face of what they already sensed was going on outside – a situation of escalating violence. All they could do was pray that God would intervene over their beloved Russia’s fate.

  Public opinion on Russia in America had been galvanised since the end of June by a series of excoriating articles by US journalist Herman Bernstein, special correspondent of the New York Herald and the Washington Post (many of whose Russian dispatches were syndicated across the US and European press). Bernstein, himself a Russo-Jewish émigré who had left Russia in 1893, had recently arrived back after six months studying conditions in Russia. Prior to the Revolution he had been violently anti-tsarist and had campaigned vigorously against the persecution of Russia’s Jews. In 1913 he had written an open letter to the Tsar condemning the recent wave of pogroms. Every aspiration for liberty and justice in Russia had, Bernstein wrote, ‘withered in the bud’. The tsarist government had nothing but contempt for the ignorant masses who to them were so much ‘human dust’.

  Bernstein had therefore welcomed the Revolution as a release from the ‘dark spirits of despotism and intolerance’ that ruled in Russia, spending four months there in 1917. The Revolution had uprooted the ‘medieval evil’ of the Romanov dynasty and was Russia’s great hope for the future. The ‘sun of Freedom’ had risen over darkest Russia at last, particularly for its oppressed Jews. But Bernstein’s return to his former country a year later, to get to the truth of what was going on there, as he put it, had appalled him, and he soon went from being a friend and supporter of the ‘new idea’ in Russia to one of its sternest critics in the West. He had not been afraid to tell the truth about the Tsar and now asserted that he was ‘not afraid to tell the truth about the tyranny of Lenine and Trotzky [sic]’. Lenin was using Russia as his laboratory, Bernstein alleged bitterly, and its people as guinea pigs for his great social experiment. He now urged American intervention: ‘Russia is broken down, wretched, demoralized, and starving, and waiting for someone stronger than herself to come and pick her up.’ What was needed above all was a return to a ‘sane’ form of government. The Russian people had lost confidence in themselves and in their desperation were even looking to Germany for a restoration of order. ‘Nine-tenths of the Russian people’, he was confident, ‘would welcome the advent of the Allies with open arms.’

  Throughout June, the high-minded President had been besieged day in, day out by a stream of influential visitors with a plethora of moral arguments and the same ultimate thought in mind – American intervention in Russia. British and French diplomats had been in constant attendance, as too had Tomas Masaryk, the respected exiled leader of the Czech independence movement; Lady Muriel Paget arrived fresh from her humanitarian work at the British Hospital in Petrograd, in her wake an assortment of Russian émigrés, former tsarist ministers and members of Kerensky’s ill-fated provisional government – all of them fiercely lobbying for US support and urgent economic aid to Russia. Even Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable former suffragette rebel and now staunch conservative, was in town, angling to give the President her pennyworth on the Russian situation. America, it seemed, was Russia’s only hope of salvation. Wilson was a good and patient listener and gave everyone his ear. Bolshevism in Russia was now facing its darkest hour, he was assured; the Soviet government was politically isolated, confronted by nationwide famine and anarchy, with an inadequate Red Army to face off the German Imperial forces on its doorstep and the gathering White advance across Siberia. Many were predicting the new Soviet state’s imminent demise: ‘it has been a corpse for four or five weeks’, US ambassador to Russia David Francis reported back to Washington, ‘but no one has had the courage to bury it’. At an impromptu party he had thrown for the American, British, French and Italian diplomatic corps at Vologda – a railway junction halfway between Moscow and the northern port of Murmansk – Francis had issued a statement promising that America would ‘never stand idly by and see the Germans exploit the Russian people and appropriate to Germany’s selfish ends the immense resources of Russia’. Since 7 July he had been urging Washington that the projected US landings in northern Russia and Siberia be brought forward. All that was needed, so it seemed, was to raise the Allied flags in Russia, and the people would rally to the cause and overthrow the Soviet government.

  Wilson meanwhile was finding it hard to stick to his guns and his decision announced on the 6th to send in a limited American relief mission only, to augment work already being done in the USA by the Red Cross and the American YMCA. As a believer in the self-determination of nations and the moral force of America in helping support such aspirations, he wanted to do the right thing. Archangel was now in British and French hands; the Czechs were holding sway along the Trans-Siberian Railway and a small intervention force of Japanese troops had landed at Vladivostok and was in control of Eastern Siberia beyond Irkutsk. All of this facilitated the arrival in Russia of the projected US mission, but Wilson was adamant that any American action should not involve force, even though the progress
of the Czech legions across Siberia had now materially altered the situation by ‘introducing a sentimental element’ into the question of American duty towards the Slav peoples.

  As a devout Presbyterian, a man of conscience and probity, Wilson was driven by his desire to offer American solidarity with the Russian and Czech people. It was all part of the ambitious peace plan he had initiated in January when he had unveiled his Fourteen Points for a new world order of peace and the establishment of a peace-making organisation to promote it: the League of Nations. It was his sincere hope that the US and Czech presence in Russia would provoke a spontaneous democratic response on the part of the people of Siberia, the vast majority of whom were anti-Communist, that would spread across Russia.

  Today, 10 July, the beleaguered President could expect to be further assaulted by even more persuasive pleas for help in Russia, for after a meeting with his war cabinet, he was due to meet Russia’s most unlikely and most impassioned envoy: Lieutenant Colonel Mariya Bochkareva, the 30-year-old former commander of the volunteer 1st Women’s Battalion of Death, that had served on the Eastern Front. Small, dumpy and large-bosomed, with a round Russian face framed by close-cropped dark hair, Bochkareva was an intimidating sight in her male army tunic, jodhpurs and high boots along with a chest full of medals. In the West she was looked upon as Russia’s very own Joan of Arc, a parallel observed by Mrs Pankhurst, who called her ‘the greatest woman of the century’. Semi-literate and of stoical peasant stock, Bochkareva had been born into poverty and a large family before marrying at the age of 15 and becoming the victim of an abusive husband. She had had a tough life but remained a passionate patriot who cut to the simple truths of life, and whilst having no quarrel with the theories and social aspirations of Bolshevism, she had become appalled by what it had mutated into: a rule of terror and the mob. Back in 1914 Bochkareva had shared in the popular belief that the outbreak of war would pull Russia back from the brink of political disaster by drawing its disparate peoples together in a great tide of national unity. Determined to do her part and shame those men who were reticent about volunteering for the Front, she had in November that year sent a telegram to Nicholas II, telling him of her moral purpose and her desire to defend Russia and asking his permission to be allowed to join up. The Tsar had agreed to her request and she had initially joined the 25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion. With the permission of Kerensky’s provisional government, she later organised and commanded the Women’s Battalion in action in June 1917, as a response to the breakdown of morale and discipline in the Russian Army. She and all her female troops had carried vials of potassium cyanide in case of capture and rape. Leading from the front, Bochkareva herself was gassed, suffered shell shock and was wounded three times – plagued ever after with pain caused by a piece of shrapnel lodged in her side. The Russian government later awarded her the St George’s cross and several other honours for her bravery under fire. After being beaten up and mocked by male Russian soldiers, and narrowly missing execution by the Bolsheviks, in 1918 she had got out of Russia via Vladivostok, thanks to 500 roubles from the British consul in Moscow, intending to rally support in London for Russia’s suffering masses through her contacts established with Mrs Pankhurst. Sailing across the Pacific, Bochkareva had arrived in San Francisco in June and made public appearances in New York before travelling to Washington DC, where she was sponsored by the wealthy socialite and civic dignitary Florence Harriman, a close friend of the President.