Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  Everywhere she went Bochkareva created a furore: she stopped the traffic marching down Fifth Avenue in her military garb; people were mesmerised by her vivid accounts of her harsh childhood, her terrifying experiences in the front lines, of how she had commanded the last loyal unit to defend Kerensky’s provisional government at the Winter Palace when the Bolsheviks had seized power, and, more darkly, of the later Bolshevik atrocities she had witnessed. She was, she said, tired of the ‘river of words’ about Russia fuelling the Western press and wanted to see active, practical help for her country, now racked by profound moral and social internal disorder. Bochkareva had already met with former president Theodore Roosevelt, who thought her a ‘remarkable woman’ ‘abounding in natural wisdom and determination’. On 25 June she had requested a meeting with the President, seeing him, as many did in Russia, as the embodiment of its hope and salvation. Ahead of her meeting, she had sent him a gift – a small icon of St Anne which she herself had worn at the Front; Wilson had been touched and had written a warm response.

  Bochkareva’s reputation as a magnetic personality and born actress, despite having to use an interpreter, went before her. Ushered into Wilson’s presence at 4.30 that afternoon, she did not stand on ceremony. She was a Russian and Russians speak without inhibition, from the heart. She was highly articulate, and once she got started in her inimitable husky-voiced way she couldn’t be stopped. Nor could her hapless interpreter keep pace with the torrent of words that gushed forth as Bochkareva’s tongue ‘went like a runaway horse’, hitting the highs of passion one minute and the lows of abject despair the next, in a wild semaphore of flamboyant gestures that left the President and his aides transfixed. So impassioned were her pleas that she threw herself on the floor in floods of tears, clasping her arms tight around Wilson’s knees, begging him to help poor Russia, to send food, and troops to intervene against the Bolsheviks. Her demands were extravagant – she wanted to see a combined US, French, British and Japanese force of 100,000 sent in to serve as the nucleus of a Russian fighting army of a million ‘free sons of Russia’ that she believed would rise up against Germany without reference to party or politics. An Allied army would, Bochkareva asserted, be met with joy by the Russian peasants and soldiers. If the Allies failed to help then she would be forced to return to Russia and tell her people that she had begged in vain and that the Allies were no better friends to Russia than the Germans.

  Woodrow Wilson, a man known for his restraint and austerity, had not been able to resist this emotional tirade from Bochkareva. He sat there with tears streaming down his cheeks and did his best to assure her of his sympathy and support. A week later Bochkareva left Washington for London and an audience with King George V, leaving behind two ‘legacies’, as she called them, with her American friends: the story of her life, which she had dictated to the American journalist Isaac Don Levine, who translated and published it in 1919; and, somewhat alarmingly, her 15-year-old sister Nadya, for her patrons ‘to keep until Russia is safe for her’. Bochkareva did not want the innocent Nadya to be exposed to the ideas of free love ‘and all the other horrible things that the Bolsheviks teach’. A year later a homesick Nadya went back to Russia. Bochkareva herself clearly made an indelible impression on American sentiment, for in August 1918 Theodore Roosevelt gave $1,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to her ‘as a token of my respect for those Russians who have refused to follow the Bolsheviki in their betrayal to Germany of Russia, of the Allies, and of the cause of liberty throughout the world’.

  In all her speeches across America, Mariya Bochkareva made no reference to the fate of the Tsar who had allowed her to fight like a man. But Nicholas and Alexandra, so far away in Ekaterinburg, would have been proud of her moral fibre, her virulent anti-German sentiments and her spirited defence of Mother Russia at the White House that day. For like her, they loved Russia with a passion and still prayed daily to God to save the country from the brink of destruction. Alexandra had adopted all that was Russian with the fierce, visceral passion of a mother protecting her young: ‘How I love my country, with all its faults. It grows dearer and dearer to me, and I thank God daily that He allowed us to remain here and did not send us farther away.’ She constantly urged her husband and friends to keep faith in the people: ‘The nation is strong, and young, and as soft as wax’, she asserted. There was hope for Russia yet ‘in spite of all its sins and horrors’.

  But the Russia that Alexandra thought she knew was far more complex and conflicted than she ever could have imagined; her ‘Russia’ was a chimera, a product of her own imagination, created in isolation at Tsarskoe Selo and in exile. The idealised Russia of loyal, God-fearing ordinary people whom she and Nicholas had convinced themselves were devoted to them had never really existed; it was an abstraction. Yet when Nicholas had abdicated in March 1917 it had been in the firm belief that his sacrifice ‘for the sake of the true well-being and salvation of our Mother Russia’ would save the country from the violence and anarchy into which it had been descending since the February Revolution. Since childhood he had been taught to believe in the mystical relationship between tsar and people and his divine right to be master of the fate of a country that was his own personal patrimony handed down by God. He had made a solemn undertaking on the day of his coronation to act as ‘little father’ to his people and had entered into a sacred trust to toil unceasingly in their service, no matter that his disposition was entirely unsuited to the role.

  But the hope that the God-centred Russian narod (nation) would respond positively, in the spirit of traditional ‘Holy Russia’, to his sacrifice had been smashed. The problem of Russia had been far too big for Nicholas to resolve, and the war, instead of uniting tsar and people, had only intensified the many difficulties Nicholas faced. His long-term vision of his role – like that being carved out for President Wilson – as an apostle of world peace in the coming post-war years crumbled with it.

  The Russian nation – exhausted, hungry, war-weary, and perverted by centuries of cruelty, absolutism and deceit – had failed to respond to the Tsar’s last-ditch gestures in 1905, in 1914 and again in 1917, just as it did in the main to the rhetoric of Bolshevism later. Despair, poverty and the dislocations of war gave birth to idleness, criminality and indifference after the first flush of hunger had goaded the masses into revolutionary action. Martial law, the suppression of a free press and courts of law and now, in the summer of 1918, the introduction of mass conscription had seen many of the new hoped-for liberties stripped away. Autocracy had been replaced by a new and insidious ‘commissarocracy’, as Herman Bernstein observed.

  But Holy Russia – that mythical fusion of tsar, faith and people – had, under Nicholas, once enjoyed an all too brief resurgence, first during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913, when Nicholas and Alexandra had made a rare appearance en famille, the Tsar seeming, to British observer Bruce Lockhart, ‘a small figure in the centre of the procession . . . more like a sacred ikon to be kept hidden with Oriental exclusiveness by the High Priests and to be shown to the public on feast days’. That same sense of reverence at the visible presence of a monarch who for so much of the time had remained hidden from his public came again during the heady days of mobilisation for war in July 1914. During a great sombre ceremonial on the 20th of that month, it had seemed, for one brief day, as though tsar and people were truly united in a single objective: the repulsion of the German invader. Flags had flown from every window and balcony in Russia’s two great cities, St Petersburg and Moscow. Processions of the faithful had carried the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s portraits through the streets, had pressed round the couple during public appearances, reaching out and kissing their clothes, their hands. Vast congregations had gathered in Russia’s churches to pray, light candles and kiss the icons in a euphoria of national solidarity that had not been seen since Napoleon’s Grand Armée was driven from Russia in 1812. Here at last the spirit of a great and invincible Russia depicted in Tolstoy’s War and Peace was briefly r
eincarnated.

  Having proclaimed his intention relentlessly to prosecute the war until the German invader was driven from the soil of the Russian motherland, Nicholas rode in a coach along the banks of the River Neva in St Petersburg to tumultuous cheers from the crowds. Later, he appeared with Alexandra on a balcony at the Winter Palace to publicly declare war on Germany and acknowledge the packed Alexander Square below. A tiny figure, dwarfed by the grandeur of the great columns of the Winter Palace on all sides, he had nevertheless inspired the swelling crowd of tens of thousands below to spontaneously kneel down and join in singing the Russian national anthem ‘Bozhe, Tsarya Khrani’:

  God save the noble Tsar!

  Long may he live, in pow’r,

  In happiness,

  In peace to reign!

  Dread of his enemies,

  Faith’s sure defender,

  God save the Tsar!

  Composed in 1833, the melody had become an integral part of Russian national identity after it was incorporated by Tchaikovsky into his 1812 Overture in 1882. Uplifted by this profound moment of communion with his people, Nicholas had stood and wept. Russia loved him; the nation needed its batyushka-tsar; the people would never desert their monarch and Russia once more would be a great nation led by a great tsar. Alexandra had reiterated it time and again: the reign of their son would inaugurate a great and golden new era for the country.

  A similar moment of epiphany had followed in Moscow, on 23 August, where Nicholas had attended a long and solemn service thick with the smell of incense and candles at the historic Uspensky Cathedral to pray for victory. He did so with ‘a holy fervour which gave his pale face a movingly mystical expression’, according to French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, who noted how Alexandra seemed physically intoxicated by the experience, her gaze ‘magnetic and inspired’. Afterwards the couple joined the crowds outside to hear the cathedral’s great bells pealing out a Russian message of defiance across the ancient Kremlin walls. Later that day, Nicholas acknowledged another vast, hushed crowd from the steps of the Kremlin’s Red Porch, decorated with its stone lions – the place where Russia’s rulers at momentous times in history had appeared before their people – recreating an almost medieval scene from an idealised Little Mother Moscow, the holy city of old, amid the glittering onion domes and spires of Moscow’s ancient churches.

  And so, comforted by this false image of national unity, the concerted pattern of denial continued, with Nicholas and Alexandra remaining stubbornly blind to the dramatic changes going on within the nation. Only a few months later this upsurge of xenophobia and national unity was dissipated by the devastating losses on the Eastern Front. The Russian people, whom both Nicholas and Alexandra had believed had boundless love for their tsar as the being ‘from whom all charity and fortune derive’, turned their backs on him, their devotion fatally undermined by the political and economic strains that, having reached a high point in 1905, had bubbled on through the Rasputin scandal and now into a disastrous war. The monarchy which Nicholas had believed was the only viable form of government for Russia’s huge cross-section of races, classes and religions thereafter rapidly lost the support of the two most powerful elements that had always, traditionally, shored it up: the peasantry, called on to make the economic sacrifices to provide food and men for the Front; and the army, called on to continue fighting a war in Europe whilst revolution raged at home.

  Nicholas and Alexandra, and their children too, never ceased to agonise over the fate of their ‘poor Russia’. The anguish stayed with them even during their final months in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. If anything, it increased, for they were now completely isolated from the Russia they thought they knew. Alexandra’s blind faith in miracles had never let her accept the finality of the Revolution and the Romanov removal from power. It was all a terrible mistake, a nightmare that surely would pass. All that was needed was to pray more and more fervently for God’s intervention. Even when asylum for the family had been discussed in the early days after the abdication, it had been done in terms only of a temporary arrangement – until the war was over, after which the family made clear their wish to return and live in retirement in the Crimea. To be forced to leave Russia for ever would for them be a spiritual death, which other Russians – notably creative artists and writers – have also rejected. It would break their ‘last link with the past, which would then be dead for ever’. The Tsar and Tsaritsa had made it clear that they would rather die in Russia than be forced to live permanently in exile, and their children shared their sentiments.

  But today, 10 July, a very new and irrevocably changed Soviet Russia was about to be inaugurated at the 2,000-seater Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow, where the main auditorium was packed for the ratification of the newly composed Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. After more than six months of preparation under Sverdlov, Lenin’s government was ready to unveil a constitution that it believed would be the first in the world ‘to give expression . . . to the hopes of the workers, the peasants and the oppressed and to abolish political and economic inequality once and for all’. This constitution, combined with the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People, approved in January 1918, set out to destroy the old bourgeois regime and the exploitation of man by man, by disenfranchising those who had so rapaciously exploited Russia – capitalists, the clergy and the aristocracy – depriving them of their civil rights, and creating a form of government where the wealth produced by the country’s workers would be shared by them. Divested of ‘every form of force, coercion, and oppression’, the new state would set an example for the whole world and oppressed peoples everywhere.

  The reality, however, was already somewhat different: the erosion of the power of the recently formed regional soviets and with it the destruction of independent political parties in Russia had begun in June with the outlawing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists and Mensheviks and the domination over them of the Bolsheviks in local government. The creation of the Cheka further fuelled the suppression of any independent political action in the regions. Since the assassination of Mirbach on 6 July, arrests and executions of political opponents had escalated across Russia’s regional soviets such as Kursk, Tambov, Kaluga, Tula, Vladimir and Nizhni-Novgorod. One by one, Left SR committees in these cities were dissolved, and their representatives – and with them representation in the main of the Russian peasantry – removed. Left SRs in positions of responsibility were being driven from their posts as well as excluded from delegations to central government, and many rank-and-file party members were being arrested and interrogated. The process was further accelerated on the 10th: a telegram sent out by People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Grigory Petrovsky (who worked hand-in-glove with the Cheka) ordered provincial soviets ‘immediately to take all measures [to] apprehend and detain’ anyone who had taken part in the recent Left SR uprising, hand them over to military-revolutionary courts and shoot anyone who resisted.

  For a brief while, the messianism of revolution and popular anger at an age-old class system based on privilege had driven the motor of change in Russia, but by the summer of 1918 it mattered little to Russia’s hungry and dispossessed who now was in power. And the fate of their former tsar, now vanished from view, mattered even less. The promise of political equality laid down by the new constitution was something the hungry could not comprehend, any more than the concept of their collective responsibility to the state. It was all so new and baffling to a peasantry with no real sense of a national consciousness. Yes, a constitution and a republic were all very fine and good, they observed, provided always that there was a wise tsar too, someone to whom they could doff their caps, as they had always done. In the old days they had been taught to answer only to the tsar and to God; the idea now of answering to their newly constituted country when all most of them knew was their immediate village was beyond their comprehension. The vast majority of Russia’s ordinary peasants (85 per cent of the population) wer
e confused about the nature of this new democracy and highly resistant to the forced requisitioning of their grain which they thought the Revolution had brought them the right to keep. This was all part, they were told, of the necessary Socialist transformation of the village. But all the peasants wanted was peace and quiet, independence and the right to farm the ‘three acres per soul’ that the Duma had long since promised them. For a while they had been persuaded to place their faith in Lenin’s 1917 promise of ‘peace, bread and land’ that would come once the bourgeoisie had been disarmed of its own land and property in the name of the state. But now, suddenly, the labouring masses found themselves facing the imposition of enforced labour on all, under the constitution’s ominous watchword, ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ It soon became clear that the land was not to be divided out equally among the peasantry but collectively worked for the nation as a whole, its produce benefiting the local communes. A new kind of official ideology, summarised in the constitution, was about to ensure that the state rather than the tsar was all, and the individual, once again, as he had been under the old feudal system, was enchained by economic slavery in a system where he counted for nothing.