Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  Page 5 of the paper further endorsed the sense of a country about to implode. There was an ominous silence in the capital, Moscow, an atmosphere of muted feelings, the faces of passers-by so often now ingrained with a look of deep, rankling hatred. The once great neoclassical city of St Petersburg, under its new name Petrograd, was swarming with refugees. It was, according to British diplomat William Gerhardie, a ‘wild, depressed, anarchic city’. Herman Bernstein noted the same desperate situation wherever he went. There was no joy on the streets of Russia any more. An anonymous report from an English nurse recently returned to England after serving for more than three years with the Russian Red Cross at the Front talked in much the same terms, of a beaten, quiescent population, ‘so passive, so indifferent to famine and the fratricidal warfare around them’. ‘A kind of stupor’ lay on the population of Russia, she observed, the people ‘bowed the head and submitted’, whilst daily the Soviet powers issued endless decrees ‘commanding, demanding, threatening’, all of which ‘were read through meekly’. Everywhere there was an outspoken contempt for human rights. With the two elemental forces of hunger and hatred at work across Russia, the people were at breaking point. Landowners had been driven from their estates, country houses pillaged and burned – not just by the Bolsheviks but by the starving and land-hungry local peasantry, now acting according to the Bolshevik diktat of ‘rob that which was robbed’. The long-dormant volcano of the agrarian question had finally erupted. The old noble families of Russia were fleeing for their lives and seeking refuge in the towns, where they were forced to sweep the streets, or sell newspapers or their last possessions on corners for the price of a loaf of bread. In Moscow, Trotsky was now driving around in Nicholas II’s favourite motor car, while all over Russia railway stations and even churches were filling with homeless refugees with dim, haggard eyes who had been drifting aimlessly for weeks in search of food and refuge and would remain camped out indefinitely, whole families herded together in filthy and foul-smelling conditions that spread typhus.

  The Bolshevists meanwhile had announced that the hour had come to ‘starve the bourgeoisie’ and with them their children. Whilst workers received a healthy pound of bread a day, the ration for those people deemed to be class enemies was four ounces. With such utter despair engulfing them, Russia’s former nobility and intelligentsia were openly referring to the German invasion as their only chance of salvation from the systematic victimisation they were suffering under the Bolsheviks. The Germans might at least deliver them from their own rapacious army, who even now were accosting ordinary travellers at railway stations and stealing their luggage and eatables, or ransacking homes and confiscating everything they could find, only to sell it later on Moscow’s streets. ‘At a wave of the hand a soldier could sell you a herring, one rouble, a pair of galoshes, 30 roubles, and a Maxim gun, 75 roubles.’ Herman Bernstein concurred: there was nothing one could not get ‘by bribing a commissary, from a passport to a battleship’. With industry disrupted, only the presses turning out virtually worthless Soviet paper money were still working. People asked themselves why the Allies didn’t come to help the Russians in their hour of need. ‘How can England look on so calmly when the existence of our country is at stake?’

  How too could the English king look on knowing that his cousin Nicholas was incarcerated in Siberia awaiting an uncertain future? With the British press largely indifferent to the fate of the Romanovs, back in May of 1918, on the occasion of Nicholas’s fiftieth birthday, the Washington Post had been the only Western paper to comment on the Tsar’s desperate situation, ‘neglected by his allies, his life in peril’, and that it must be a source of ‘great regret and compunction to Great Britain and the other powers associated with her, that no provision should have been made for his personal safety and for that of the other members of his more immediate family’. ‘Today’, concluded the Post’s correspondent, ‘it is too late to save his family from without.’ Too late certainly for Nicholas, and too late even for the children. Nicholas’s cousin, King George V, his mind preoccupied with the Western Front, was taken up with daily gestures of solidarity with the nation, such as today attending a cricket match at Lord’s in aid of the King George’s Fund for Sailors, and, in the evening, accompanying Queen Mary to a special service for Woolwich munitions workers at St Paul’s Cathedral. The question of the Romanov family and, more specifically, the German-born Tsaritsa, had been a political hot potato he had not wanted to handle.

  Since the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914, King George had been treading on eggshells with regard to the German blood in his own line from his grandfather Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, as well as the German descent of his wife Mary, let alone his close family ties to his first cousin the Kaiser. Because of this, he had appeared to demonstrate a distinct loss of nerve in relation to the plight of his Russian cousin ‘Nicky’ and his German-born wife, despite thinking Nicholas a ‘thorough gentleman who loved his country and his people’. After the Tsar’s abdication the previous March, George had promised to remain his faithful and devoted friend ‘as you know I always have been’ in a personal telegram to Nicholas sent to Army HQ at Mogilev but (Nicholas having already returned to Tsarskoe Selo) forwarded to the provisional government. This telegram, the sole expression of solidarity from a close royal relative, was never passed on to the Tsar (nor was a telegram congratulating him on his fiftieth birthday sent by the Scots Greys, of which he was honorary Colonel-in-Chief – the British censor had intercepted it and the Foreign Office had deemed it ‘impolitic’ to let it get through).

  George’s immediate and natural impulse after the abdication had been to offer the Romanovs asylum, through the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan, no doubt influenced in part by Buchanan’s urgent dispatches to the Foreign Office from the Russian capital. Since January 1917, Buchanan, a thin, dignified man with a fine moustache who performed his duties in the style of an old-school Victorian diplomatist, had been strongly urging the Tsar, with whom he was on very close terms, to liberalise his policies before it was too late. In telegram after telegram Buchanan warned London of his repeated attempts to ‘bring home to the Emperor the gravity of the situation’. The dynasty would, Buchanan told the Tsar quite candidly, be exposed to danger if the present political tension was allowed to continue. Russia was, he predicted on 7 January, ‘on the verge of revolution’. While Nicholas blindly dug in his heels in his fatalistic way and refused to respond to these warnings, nobody in London took note of the danger to the Imperial Family, even though diplomats were reporting open conversations by Russians in responsible positions about the possible assassination of both the Tsar and Tsaritsa.

  Buchanan meanwhile had entered into urgent consultation with Pavel Milyukov, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Kerensky’s provisional government. Milyukov had assured him that special measures were being taken for the protection of the Imperial Family at Tsarskoe Selo; he himself was anxious for the Tsar to leave Russia as soon as possible. Buchanan reported as much on 21 March; the provisional government would be ‘most glad if our King and Government would invite the Czar to take refuge with them’, so long as he remained in England for the duration of the war. The British government concurred, insisting that, publicly, the asylum proposal must be seen to be coming from the Russian government, rather than from King George. With the tenure of the provisional government increasingly precarious by the day, Milyukov and his colleagues were seriously worried about how much longer they could protect Nicholas against extremists threatening to attack Tsarskoe Selo. They wanted to be rid of the Tsar even though these groups had been pressurising them not to give him his freedom. Buchanan cabled London urgently, pressing to be given authorisation by the government to offer the Tsar asylum in England, vowing he would not be happy till the Romanovs were safely out of Russia. On 22 March, after the issue was discussed by the British War Cabinet, Buchanan received telegram confirmation that the King would be happy to receive his cousin in England. Privately George would
nevertheless have preferred someone else to grasp this political nettle – such as the neutral government of Switzerland. Denmark was also suggested, but considered to be too close to Germany for comfort.

  Plans meanwhile were put in motion to transport the Romanovs by special train to Port Romanov (soon to be known as Murmansk), an ice-free supply port in the Russian Arctic set up by the Allies in 1915. From here the plan was that a British warship flying the Imperial flag would take the family out under a guarantee of safe conduct through German-occupied waters, with an escort of torpedo boats. The tragedy is that such an evacuation might well have been effected quickly and before King George had had time to change his mind had not all the children been recovering from the measles, Maria having succumbed also to near-fatal pneumonia. By the time she had recovered, the provisional government, which now had put various bureaucratic delays in the way of a speedy departure, no longer had the military muscle to get the family out – either north via the Arctic or south to the Crimea. Buchanan repeatedly warned that the net around the Imperial Family was being drawn ever tighter at Tsarskoe Selo, but by now King George was having serious doubts.

  The problem was Alexandra: King George disliked her and had no qualms in stating that he held her ‘largely responsible for the present state of chaos that exists in Russia’. Her interference in government and her association with Rasputin had brought the Russian monarchy into such disrepute that even Buchanan was openly of the opinion that she had been ‘the Emperor’s evil genius ever since they married’. With King George vacillating, even the British ambassador began to doubt the wisdom of bringing the Romanovs to England. Brigadier General Waters, a former military attaché in Russia, observed at the time that the moderates in the provisional government might be ‘tottering to their fall’, but if bribed sufficiently might yet get the Romanovs out of Russia; unless it was done immediately, however, ‘their lives were surely forfeit’.

  From the moment he had abdicated, the Tsar had certainly expected to go into exile – albeit temporarily. Although he and Alexandra had both been extremely reluctant to leave, they had certainly been prepared to go England for the duration of the war, for King George V and Nicholas were on very affectionate terms. Indeed, they bore a close physical resemblance and were often referred to as ‘the handsome twins’. They had been staunch friends since George had attended Nicholas and Alexandra’s wedding in St Petersburg in 1894; becoming monarchs in 1894 and 1910, they had shared the same unimaginative sense of duty, were determined defenders of hereditary monarchy and equally hardworking and meticulous in dealing with government business. Disliking the formalities of royal ceremonial, both were quiet, unadventurous family men who enjoyed being at home with their children or out hunting and shooting. Assuming he would be coming to England, where he hoped to perhaps fulfil his ‘life’s desire and run a farm’, Nicholas had looked forward to sharing in such rural pursuits with his cousin. He had busily set about sorting his books and getting his private papers in order, burning anything that might prove politically compromising, and noting in his diary on 23 March that he had been ‘putting aside everything that I want to take with me if we have to leave for England’. He had also sent a request to the provisional government soon after his abdication to be allowed free passage to Murmansk as soon as the children were all recovered from their bout of measles.

  George, however, although having professed himself to be ‘in despair’ when Nicholas had abdicated, within the space of a week had become greatly exercised by the moral and political dilemma of offering asylum to the Romanovs. He was fearful for his own rocky position as monarch, with a number of republican articles having recently appeared in the British press. With news leaking out about the offer of asylum, he was also receiving considerable amounts of hate mail about the prospect of the Tsaritsa, with her assumed pro-German sympathies, being given refuge in Britain. He was advised however that it might now prove difficult to withdraw the invitation made to the Russian provisional government, even though additional questions had been raised about who was going to pay for the family’s upkeep in Britain and where they would live. On 6 April, the King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, communicated the monarch’s apprehensions to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, that working men and Labour Members of Parliament were ‘expressing adverse opinions to the proposal’. The fact was that the social and political climate of wartime Britain was a good deal harsher than the republican disaffection that Queen Victoria had had to face out during the 1870s, and the influence of the monarchy over politics had dwindled even further since then. With the proletariat on the march, the aristocracy in retreat, and troubles continuing in Ireland, George was convinced that the Crown was less secure than it had been in the reign of his grandmother. A series of labour disputes and strikes in the early days of his reign had convinced him and Queen Mary of a ‘socialist menace to come’. Over the years, royal disquiet had grown as labour demands and strikes escalated and the living conditions of the poor deteriorated. As the war progressed, the royal couple had greatly increased their public and charitable work among the nation’s poor in an attempt to counter the low public morale brought on by the continuing stalemate on the Western Front. The onset of the Russian Revolution in 1917 had for King George been a salutary warning of the dark days of social dislocation that might yet be visited on Britain; monarchies across Europe were now under threat: Portugal, Greece, Austro-Hungary, even Germany. George feared that Nicky’s fall marked the imminent collapse of the whole European dynastic system. There was already much talk of a possible Labour landslide in Britain after the war and with it the advent of a Socialist administration that would ‘raise the republican banner’.

  Fiercely protective of his monarch, Lord Stamfordham took the bull by the horns and assumed command of the crisis, feeding the King alarming reports on the situation in Russia (deliberately inflated by Special Branch head Basil Thomson to help force the King’s hand and centralise Thomson’s own control of domestic intelligence); the King’s anxiety levels rocketed about his promise of asylum to the Imperial Family. Stamfordham continued to crank up the tension with a succession of memoranda to the Foreign Office and Downing Street claiming that public opinion would be turned against the King. The British government meanwhile became increasingly preoccupied with how to get itself out of a delicate political situation – withdrawing its offer to the provisional government whilst simultaneously maintaining its amicable links with a valuable military ally.

  And so, on 10 April, at the King’s insistence, a telegram had arrived at the British embassy in Petrograd from Lloyd George’s government, advising that it was no longer deemed wise for the Imperial Family to come to England. ‘The British Government does not insist on its former offer’, it said; indeed, it was most anxious to withdraw it, suggesting France be encouraged to offer asylum instead. (Maurice Paléologue, French ambassador in Petrograd, had in his copious and gossipy diary entries recorded little more than passing observations on the ‘present sad state of the Tsar’ and the ‘dreadful prospects for his near future’, but expressed no aspirations as to French intervention on his behalf.) Meanwhile, a variety of excuses were offered by the British to Buchanan, the most pressing being the threat of labour unrest in crucial British industries – mining, shipping, munitions – in protest at the asylum offer. There was, so Buchanan was informed, ‘revolutionary talk’ at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and a good deal of hostility to the Tsaritsa, as there was too in France, from where the British ambassador asserted that Alexandra would not be welcome, being a ‘Boche not only by birth but in sentiment’. Even The Times was uncompromising in its hostility towards her, asking in a leader article, ‘How can we tolerate this friend of Germany in our midst?’ According to one Labour MP, so Buchanan’s daughter Meriel later observed, the attitude in Britain was that if the Tsar was not good enough for Russia, ‘he is not good enough for us’.

  By 16 April, such was the King’s heightened state of anxiety th
at Stamfordham was obliged to send a second letter to Balfour, categorically stating that the arrival of Nicholas and Alexandra in Britain ‘would be strongly resented by the public and would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen’. Lloyd George was obliged to concede. His sympathies as a Liberal on the left of the party had all along been with the Revolution but nevertheless he would have supported the offer of asylum to the Romanovs had the King insisted. Yet for years afterwards both Lloyd George and Ambassador Buchanan would be vilified for their supposed failure to effect the Romanov family’s rescue. Buchanan was made to fall on his sword in his memoirs and cover up the truth of the British government’s failure to act, on pain of losing his pension. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, he could not reveal the truth of diplomatic moves at the time but had to go along with the official line that a handful of left-wing extremists in government, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, had pressurised the King into relenting. Meriel Buchanan never had any doubt that it was all Lloyd George’s fault. In shifting the blame from her father to the Prime Minister, along with most other subsequent commentators she made Lloyd George the big bogeyman of the story. It was he who had imposed his leftist sympathies on a hapless king who, as a constitutional monarch, had had to kowtow to his Prime Minister’s wishes. Official records, however, do not back up the accusations that Lloyd George was directly instrumental in preventing the Romanovs from coming to England. Indeed, he too came under pressure when writing his War Memoirs in 1934 to cover up the King’s ignominious abandonment of the Tsar, by scrapping an entire chapter on the discussions over the asylum offer, substituting a brief comment to the effect that it was the provisional government that had scuppered the Romanovs’ chances of leaving Russia by placing obstacles in the way of effecting this. In the event, for reasons of diplomatic protocol the British offer was never officially withdrawn; it was simply allowed to wither on the branch and was not pressed home by either the government or the King, in the knowledge that Kerensky’s provisional government was in any event rapidly becoming incapable of effecting the family’s evacuation in the face of the opposition of militant soldier and peasant deputies in the Petrograd Soviet.