This latest service had come in response to a written request made on the 11 July by Dr Botkin that a priest be allowed to celebrate obednitsa (liturgy without communion) with the family. At the last liturgy held for them, on Trinity Sunday, the service had been conducted by Father Anatoly Meledin of the Ekaterininsky Cathedral, assisted by deacon Vasily Buimirov. Storozhev, who had given up a career as local public prosecutor to study for holy orders, himself had previously conducted a service – on 19 May – Father Meledin having officiated at the two subsequent services, on 2 and 23 June. On arriving at the Ipatiev House on the first occasion, Storozhev had been greatly disconcerted by the number of scruffy, heavily armed young men with hand grenades hanging from their belts who had been on duty both inside and outside the house. Commandant Avdeev’s room had been a mess, a couple of slovenly men lounging around – one sleeping, the other smoking, their weapons thrown carelessly across the piano. One of the men, in soldier’s tunic and breeches with a wide belt round his waist from which protruded a large revolver, Storozhev had taken to be the commandant, but no greetings or introductions had been made, the only exchange between them being the strict instruction that Storozhev should not engage in conversation of any kind with the family. In later years Storozhev regretted that he had been able only to be a passive observer of the Romanovs’ situation, but he tried hard to remember every detail. The commandant himself had opened the double doors into the sitting room where the service was to take place. Here, near the connecting archway between the two halves of the room, the Romanovs had prepared a table covered with a silk cloth and icons – some old, some new, some plain, others in heavily bejewelled silver cladding, all of them arranged in meticulous order and precedence for the purpose. The Tsaritsa’s most precious icon of all, the Fedorovsky Mother of God in its simple gold frame, took pride of place.
At that time, mid-May, Storozhev had been shocked at how pale, transparent even, Alexey had appeared, so tall and thin and too sick to stand, but lying on his camp bed covered with a blanket. But there was light and life still in his darting eyes, which followed Storozhev’s every move with childish curiosity. Alexandra, despite appearing sickly and needing to frequently sit and rest in a chair, nevertheless looked ‘majestic’ – Storozhev could not deny it. She was dressed very simply, with no jewellery, but the Tsaritsa in her was still very apparent and she had taken an active part in the service. The Tsar, who had appeared calm and in good spirits, had been wearing military dress with the cross of St George pinned to his tunic. Storozhev had noticed that the four girls all had short hair. All the way through the service, Commandant Avdeev had stood in the corner by the far window keeping watch on them. The profound respect with which the family had bowed and acknowledged Storozhev as priest during the service had greatly impressed him, as too had the Tsar’s deep bass voice ringing out the responses behind him and the quiet fervency with which they had all recited the prayers.
Today, from the moment of his arrival, Storozhev had again been closely watched, but he had managed to make a mental note of two things that were different about the house this time: the first was the number of ‘electric wires’ coming out through the window of the commandant’s office (all part of the increased security at the house, the updating of its electrics and system of bells that had been going on since Yurovsky’s arrival, as well as improved telecommunications). The second thing was that there was a motor car parked right up outside the front door. The commandant’s room was just as dirty, dusty and disorganised as before – if not more so. Yurovsky had been sitting at his desk drinking tea and eating bread and butter. Another man – his assistant Nikulin, who practically lived in Yurovsky’s room – was stretched out fast asleep and fully clothed on the truckle bed. When Storozhev asked which service they required, Yurovsky had asked him to perform the obednitsa (liturgy without communion) as opposed to the obednya, the full, and much longer, service with communion, the obednitsa being the truncated version often given for troops in the field when there wasn’t time for more. Storozhev had been greatly disheartened by this: the Imperial Family had, to his mind, been denied the all-important ‘sacrament of the Eucharist’ that was their right as Christians. As he and his deacon donned their vestments for the service, Yurovsky sat there in a dark shirt and jacket, drinking his tea and watching them. Sotto voce, Buimirov began to insist to Storozhev that the family be given the obednya; the suggestion clearly irritated Yurovsky, who threw dirty looks at the deacon. This was what the Romanovs had asked for, he insisted; Dr Botkin himself had written it down. Perhaps the request for the shorter version of the service took into account the continuing poor health of the Tsaritsa and Tsarevich; perhaps Yurovsky, a man now in a hurry, was not prepared to allow them more.
On the surface, he behaved perfectly pleasantly towards Storozhev. Noticing the priest was rubbing his hands, which were sensitive to the cold (it was, for July, a cold day), he enquired why and was told that Storozhev had recently had an attack of pleurisy. Yurovsky became solicitous, offering his own suggestions for combating the condition and informing Storozhev that he himself had had an operation on his lungs (for tuberculosis). Throughout his and Buimirov’s preparations for the service, Storozhev could not fault Yurovsky’s punctilious manner. When the priest entered the sitting room, he noticed that Alexey this time was sitting in the Tsaritsa’s wheelchair, and though still pale he seemed more animated than the previous time. His mother was next to him in an armchair; she seemed well enough, but was in fact exhausted, having been up all night with excruciating sciatic pain. She wore the same clothes she had worn at his previous service; the girls once more were dressed in simple dark skirts and white blouses, but their hair had grown and was now down to their shoulders. They and their father this time seemed weary and subdued. Dr Botkin and the servants, including the kitchen boy Sednev, as before joined them for the service, the tall and very proper Trupp wearing his silver-buttoned butler’s jacket, carrying the censer. The table too had been precisely arranged with icons, as before. In the far corner, Yurovsky never took his eyes off them.
On the surface, Yurovsky might have imagined the service to have gone without incident, but there had in fact been profound and telling differences this time around, the significance of which Storozhev quickly noticed. The Imperial Family had not participated in the responses in the sung liturgy, as all Russians normally did. More disturbing still had been the fact that when, as part of the service, Deacon Buimirov had come to recite the traditional prayer for the dead – ‘With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of your servant where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor suffering but life everlasting’ – instinct had prompted him to sing it instead, upon which the Romanovs had all silently fallen to their knees. Storozhev had sensed, in that moment, the great spiritual comfort it had given them to share in that particular prayer together. The same profound religious unity of the family was manifested again at the end of the service when Storozhev came to recite the prayer to the Mother of God, in which suffering man begs her to support him in the midst of sorrow and give him the strength with dignity to carry the cross of suffering sent down from heaven by God. At the end of the service Yurovsky allowed the Tsar and Tsaritsa to be given the sacramental bread from Storozhev as they and their servants all came forward to kiss the cross. As he turned to leave, the Romanov girls took the opportunity of their close proximity to whisper a covert thank-you to Storozhev. He noticed that there were tears in their eyes.
As he went into the commandant’s office to change out of his vestments, Storozhev let out a deep sigh; overhearing him, Yurovsky laughed and asked him why. The priest made some trivial excuse about feeling unwell, to which Yurovsky jokingly responded that he should keep his windows closed so he didn’t get a chill. Then his voice dropped and his tone suddenly changed: ‘Well, they’ve said their prayers and unburdened themselves’, such unexpected words, said, so it seemed to Storozhev, in utter seriousness. Thrown by the commandant’s remark, he responde
d that he who believed in God’s will always found his faith fortified through prayer. ‘I have never discounted the power of religion’, responded Yurovsky tartly, looking the priest straight in the eye, ‘and say this to you in all honesty.’ It was an extraordinary remark to come from the mouth of such a man; Storozhev responded by telling Yurovsky how grateful he was that the family had been allowed this opportunity to pray. ‘But why should we prevent them?’ Yurovsky said cuttingly. It was of course a specious remark; the Ekaterinburg authorities had not stopped the family praying together but certainly had severely curtailed their access to the offices of a priest. Yurovsky knew only too well that what had just taken place was effectively the Romanovs’ last rites, their panikhida. Perhaps somewhere deep inside the mind of this hardened Bolshevik and Jewish apostate the power of his own religious roots had stirred in him, reminding him of long-forgotten moments of family prayer around the Friday night table and the profound significance to his own Jewish race of the mourners’ Kaddish – the prayers for the dead.
When he left the Ipatiev House, Father Storozhev did so with a heavy heart. There had been about the family an intangible but overwhelming sense of doom; they were now greatly changed. The Tsar had seemed so thin, so haggard, he later recalled to a British officer in Ekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks had stripped him of his officer’s epaulettes back at Tobolsk and wouldn’t allow him to wear his St George’s Cross any more – the one honour of which Nicholas was deeply proud and which he had always worn. Alexandra had cut his hair for him and his beard was much shorter than it had been in 20 years.
Storozhev’s deacon Buimirov had sensed a profound change in the family too. The two men walked back together along Glavny Prospekt to the cathedral in silence, and then, outside the Art School building, Buimirov suddenly stopped and turned to Storozhev. ‘You know, Father, something has happened to them in there.’ The deacon had taken the words out of Father Storozhev’s own mouth. What made him think so? The family had all seemed different somehow, Buimirov told him; the fact that none of them had sung the responses had greatly affected him. And he should know, for Buimirov, as deacon, had assisted at all five of the services held at the Ipatiev House for the Romanovs. No one from the outside world, other than Dr Derevenko, had had more access to them than he.
There are many possible explanations for this change in mood among the Romanovs, and 90 years of speculation have still not resolved it entirely. Storozhev’s testimony provides one of the most valuable eyewitness accounts by an independent civilian in the final days. Bearing in mind the infrequency of the services allowed them, the uncertainty of when they might hear the liturgy again clearly had been uppermost in the Romanov family’s minds, thus prompting a profound response in them. This may well have been in part coloured by the contents of the final letter they had recently received from the supposedly loyal officers eager to rescue them. It had clearly intimated that the military endgame in Ekaterinburg was imminent. ‘The hour of deliberation is approaching’, it had intoned in the same cod-biblical style as the previous letters, ‘the Slavic armies are advancing toward Ekaterinburg . . . The moment is becoming critical, and now bloodshed must not be feared.’ The family could not fail to have been alarmed by the ominous but emphatic comment that followed: ‘Do not forget that the Bolsheviks will, in the end, be ready to commit any crime.’ Even without newspapers they could sense the escalating military crisis in the city; they could hear it all around them. If a last-minute rescue came now, they clearly knew and dreaded the risks. If it did not materialise, they must equally have known that if the Bolsheviks did not remove them to somewhere safe in time, their lives would be in great peril. The Czechs might come and rescue them; on the other hand, the Bolsheviks might kill them first. The thought must have crossed their minds for they had had a very long time in confinement to consider the final possible outcome of it all. So today, they had, at last, grasped the precious opportunity of a final reconciliation with God, and with their possible approaching deaths – no matter that such thoughts remained unspoken, locked up within their individual minds.
This final sense of foreboding and need for reconciliation and acceptance had not suddenly come upon them. It was a necessary part of the Romanovs’ Christian faith to be prepared at all times for the life of the soul in the world hereafter. There is a popular saying, coined in the 1940s: ‘the family that prays together stays together’. Retrospectively, nothing could have been more truly said of the Romanovs. Religion was the glue that had bound them tightly together through all the years of anguish, over first the Tsaritsa’s collapsing health and then Alexey’s near-fatal attacks of haemophilia, and now through 16 months of imprisonment, uncertainty and isolation. Toward the end of his life, the Tsarevich’s tutor Sidney Gibbes recalled that if there was one thing that had impressed him more than anything else about the family, it was their religious harmony, the extent to which they were all strengthened by their Orthodox faith.
A British military observer in Russia, Lieutenant Patterson of the Armoured Car Brigade, put his finger on the power and evangelism of Russian Orthodoxy and the extent to which it was an intimate part of the nation’s everyday life:
To every Ruski [sic] religion was not just a convention or a fad, but the fabric of his life. Old and young, rich and poor, good and bad. It was a daily revelation and solace. I don’t mean just bobbing to Ikons and signing the cross and sniffing up incense. I mean that in their hearts a lamp was lit and kept trim and holy . . . they reached a depth of emotions which we westerners hardly skim.
But while Nicholas now had slipped into a negative, almost sickly state of acceptance, resigned to disaster and ready for the sacrifice that had been inevitable since the day of his birth, Alexandra had reached a new plane of calm that was more actively engaged with the preparation of the soul for heaven and the path to Christian redemption she now felt sure she was travelling. Back in March 1918, writing from Tobolsk, she had observed the overwhelming sense of reconciliation growing within the family: ‘we live here on earth but we are already half gone to the next world’, she had said. She had long cultivated her own mystic resignation to suffering with an all-embracing Russianness that belied her German origins and her strict Lutheran upbringing. Orthodoxy in its traditional, mystical and ritualistic sixteenth-century form instantly appealed to Alexandra’s compulsive religiosity, as it had to her equally pious sister Ella when she married a Romanov in 1884. Maurice Paléologue was fascinated by the totality of Alexandra’s ‘moral and religious nationalisation’. She seemed a throwback to one of those old tsaritsas from the Byzantine and archaic Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible. In her propensity for profound religious exaltation, her belief in miracles and her extreme superstition, Alexandra had, by ‘a process of mental contagion’, absorbed the most ancient characteristics of the Russian soul, ‘all of those obscure, emotional and visionary elements which find their highest expression in religious mysticism’. It had, since the moment of her conversion, been her self-designated mission to save Holy Orthodox Russia. But that was all now lost. In confinement, denied the ritual of church services, all Alexandra could do was pause and cross herself whenever they rang the church bells at the Voznesensky Cathedral opposite, their sound announcing the sacred moments for prayer during the day.
Had she been able to read it, Article 13 of the new Soviet constitution would have horrified the Tsaritsa, for it now laid down that church and state were to be separated, as too school from church, supposedly in a drive to secure for the workers ‘real freedom of conscience’. From now on, every Soviet citizen had the right to take part in anti-religious propaganda, down to scrawling slogans on church walls and joining in the wholesale looting and despoliation of churches, tearing icons from their precious frames and burning them, driving priests from their congregations and overseeing the conversion of Russia’s ancient churches to secular use. It was the beginning of a new state policy of militant atheism. But Lenin’s government, as too the increasingly repressive Stalinist
regime that followed, failed absolutely in its underestimation of the great visceral power of religion in Russia. In the end, overthrowing the old tsarist empire proved easier than eradicating the intangible power of faith. This, at least, was one thing both Nicholas and Alexandra understood, for all their lack of empathy for other races and religions within the empire, and hidebound as they both were by the implacable, endemic anti-Semitism that tainted Russia. For them and for the multitude of observant Russians, pravoslavie’ – Orthodoxy – was and would forever remain the repository of the last vestiges of national spiritual feeling. It was a mystical gift passed down from God to the Tsar – this ‘invisible spiritual bond’ Nicholas shared with the people. British agent Sydney Reilly, currently in Russia to conduct covert negotiations with the Russian Orthodox Church for its support over the Allied intervention, had no doubt that Orthodoxy was ‘the one fundamental moral factor in Russian life which can be temporarily obscured, but which neither Bolshevism nor the German can destroy’. Bolshevik oppression in the first years after the Revolution brought with it for a while a backlash – a frenzy of religious observance, with people desperate for Bibles and other religious literature – but all too rapidly Russia’s old religious idealism was translated into a perverted form of messianic Socialist idealism. Where once in church people called out to their ‘Lord God’, the mob now subverted this to cries to ‘President God of the heavenly republic’. Many felt that only a Christian revival could save Russia from the dark days to come.
Meanwhile, all the Romanovs could do in confinement was submit meekly to their fate and forgive their enemies. Writing to a friend from Tobolsk earlier that year, Grand Duchess Olga had best expressed the family’s sentiments:
Father asks to have it passed on to all who have remained loyal to him and to those on whom they might have influence, that they not avenge him; he has forgiven and prays for everyone; and not to avenge themselves, but to remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 24