Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  The redemptive power of acceptance and suffering had long been inculcated in the Romanov children by their parents. Alexandra knew that the family’s suffering in this world was a preparation for the next and impressed it upon her children. It is as though, in her final months, she was inviting martyrdom, her husband already long since reconciled to it. Together as a family the Romanovs now sought to transcend the forces of irreligion that were destroying Russia. God was visiting his wrath on a sinful nation and was punishing his children. Perhaps the Romanovs felt in these final days that their sacrifice was a necessary part of it all. Perhaps, too, the Tsar, in his 16 months of passive Christian acceptance of his fate, had in some way redeemed the sins of his own deeply flawed monarchy.

  Consoled and reassured by Father Storozhev’s service, and confident of the resurrection to come, Alexandra spent the rest of the day lying on her bed making lace and having the scriptures read to her when the others went out for their walk. Her choice of extracts from the 12 books of the Minor Prophets offered appropriate parables for the present state of Russia. Olga and Tatiana had read to her from Hosea – a book of dark and melancholy prophecy about the sins of Israel that had brought the country great national disasters. The apocalyptic tones of chapter four seemed to mirror what was now happening in their own country – a place where there was ‘no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God’. In Russia, just as in Israel, ‘blood toucheth blood’ as the country descended into internecine strife. Russia was a land in mourning where the people had rejected ‘knowledge’ – i.e. religion – and were now suffering for it. Further gloom and despondency followed in the readings from Joel, which prophesied a cataclysm over a land of Israel faced with desolation, plague and famine as punishment for its sins. God soon would swoop down in vengeance and sweep it all away: ‘Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand.’

  What vestiges of ordinary life remained in the city of Ekaterinburg seemed to be taking no account of the Day of Judgement soon to come. You could still stroll down to the summer gardens by Iset Pond and catch a performance of Ostrovsky’s play The Forest, or go to the trotting races that afternoon at the local hippodrome at 2 p.m. or a football match at 6 p.m. But the grim reality was that the Ekaterinburg Soviet was now announcing the mobilisation of all loyal Communists in the city: two thirds of the membership of the local Urals Communist Party had joined up and were heading for the Front against the Czechs and Whites. Practically all the workers from the major factories and plants at Sysert and nearby Nizhe-Tagil and Alapaevsk were also leaving their jobs to fight.

  Yurovsky, having overseen the Romanovs’ obednitsa that morning, now had more important things on his mind: finalising where to dump their bodies after they had been killed and how to destroy as much of the evidence as possible at the same time. He had, over the last few days, been frequently in consultation with Petr Ermakov, who was in charge of the disposal squad, about finalising the location in the forest for the purpose, the mine-workings at Four Brothers seeming to be the best bet. They had to decide on the location today, it could not be left any longer, but he had to be sure that the mine was sufficiently remote and would not be discovered. As a local man Ermakov claimed to know every inch of the outlying countryside and Yurovsky had placed his trust in him.

  Today Petr Voikov had accompanied Yurovsky to double-check the two clearings they had chosen where the bodies would be destroyed on a huge funeral pyre – so they anticipated – their ashes then thrown down one of the mine shafts. Voikov had been busy of late trying to get the sulphuric acid and gasoline needed for the task from the city’s central supplies, Dr Arkhipov no doubt having proved unable to obtain sufficiently large quantities of sulphuric acid for his old friend Yurovsky through his own connections.

  Other local Bolshevik bigwigs, including Goloshchekin, Beloborodov and Safarov, had also been out in the forest that day – having a picnic. They had even taken their women with them. According to evidence given by a local mining inspector, M. Talashmanov, they had been overheard loudly joking about what was to be done with the former Tsar and his family. Goloshchekin had been quite vocal, so it was noted, in his insistence that they had to kill all of them. But not all the others had agreed with him; there was no need to kill the Tsar, they said, he was a waste of time. But the Tsaritsa, yes, she was the guilty one. It was all her fault.

  Back in the city, as the much-maligned Alexandra was stepping into a hot bath that evening at ten, the lights in room no. 3 on the first floor of the Amerikanskaya Hotel were burning bright and would do so late into the night. Once again the Ekaterinburg Cheka and the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet were locked in urgent consultation, with Commandant Yurovsky in the chair. A report had arrived from the commanders at the Front confirming that they could not hold out much longer against the Czechs approaching from the south. Ekaterinburg had another few days at best. Yurovsky meanwhile was beginning to have serious doubts about the reliability of some of the guards from the Zlokazov works. They were not trustworthy and he was worried they might talk. Once the family were out of the way they would have to kill some of them too, to ensure secrecy. Beloborodov had immediately protested; it was a crazy suggestion, it would cause a riot in the town.

  In Moscow, knowing that the situation was well under the control of the highly vigilant Sverdlov, Lenin left the city by chauffeur-driven car with his wife and sister to enjoy 24 hours of rest and relaxation at his official dacha 15 miles away at Kuntsevo. Why else would the Bolshevik leader, a man who liked to be in total control at all times, leave town at this critical moment if the Romanovs’ fate had not now finally been decided at the centre?

  13

  ‘Ordinary People Like Us’

  MONDAY 15 JULY 1918

  Arriving at the Ipatiev House at 7 a.m. on 15 July with their daily delivery of milk, the nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent had received a special request from Commandant Yurovsky. The next morning he wanted them to be sure to bring plenty of eggs – 50 at least, in a basket – and a quart of milk. Oh yes, and there was a written request from one of the Grand Duchesses too – for some sewing thread. As he thrust the note at them, Yurovsky hurried on. The eggs would be food for hungry men out in the forest, if all went according to plan.

  Yakov Yurovsky was a busy man with murder on his mind; early that morning he had been out yet again to the Koptyaki Forest with Petr Ermakov, to discuss plans for the destruction and burial of the Romanovs’ bodies after they had killed them; there would be another meeting that night at the Amerikanskaya to finalise arrangements. Petr Ermakov might look the archetypal handsome revolutionary, with his shoulder-length black hair, his aquiline nose and his sensual mouth, but he had a track record of criminality and violence as a classic Bolshevik hooligan. As a young activist, thug and thief on behalf of the party, he had been arrested and imprisoned three times by the tsarist police and was sent into Siberian exile when he offended a fourth time. He was filled with a seething hatred for autocracy which regularly boiled over into violent rages. The tsars had kept him in prison for nine of his 34 years and he wanted his revenge. Ermakov saw himself as a hard man: he’d seen a lot of people killed and killed a lot himself, he later recalled, including that summer when, as an agent for the local Cheka, he’d been involved in rounding up counter-revolutionaries in the Ekaterinburg area. He was a ruthless killer who went by the nickname of ‘Comrade Mauser’, but nevertheless he regarded himself as a ‘softie’ compared to Yurovsky.

  Ermakov had seen the Tsar the day he had arrived at Ekaterinburg station: ‘there wasn’t a thing royal about him’, he said; he could have taken him and wrung his neck then and there. The Tsaritsa, in his opinion, had looked like a ‘sharp-tongued German housewife’ who immediately, even at the Ipatiev House, had tried to run everything. ‘But we soon fixed her’, Ermakov later recalled with glee. He had relished the thought of the haughty forme
r empress made to eat rations like everybody else. She had been the only one to kick up a fuss about their imprisonment. The Tsar, he said, kept quiet and smoked cigarettes all day.

  The weather had started grey that morning, later turning to torrential rain, making a quagmire of the country roads around Ekaterinburg as the two men rode back to the Ipatiev House. Inside, the Romanovs had gone about their usual routine, Alexandra being read to by one or other of the girls when the others went outside, despite the rain. But there had at least been the diversion at 10.30 that morning of the unexpected arrival of four local women, sent by the Union of Professional Housemaids, to wash the floors at the Ipatiev House. It was all part and parcel of the subtle game Yurovsky was now playing with his victims, an obvious psychological ploy designed to create a sense of normality, of routine continuing uninterrupted (it wasn’t the first time women had come to wash the floors), so that the doomed family should not think things were in any way different.

  Mariya Starodumova, Evdokiya Semenova, Varvara Dryagina and the other, unnamed woman would be the last Ekaterinburg civilians to see the family alive. Early that morning they had washed the floors over at the Popov House where the external guard was billeted, noting that it was dirty and untidy, with sunflower seed shells strewn all over the floors. It was hard work, Evdokiya Semenova later related; the guards had ‘turned their quarters into a stable with their muddy boots’ and the women had had to ‘scrape and scrub’ to get it clean. The commander of the guard, Pavel Medvedev, had then escorted them over to the Ipatiev House. They noticed that some of the guards were foreigners – not Russians; they had to wash the floors in the basement of the house first where these men had their beds, but there were some women in the rooms with them, so they didn’t do all of them.

  When the cleaning women were taken up to the first floor, the Imperial Family had all been sitting in the dining room ‘as though they were having a meeting’ – in fact playing one of their endless games of bezique at the table, the Tsarevich sitting in the wheelchair. The family had all greeted them with smiles, the women responding with silent deep bows. They could only nod and smile, having been forbidden, like the priests the day before, to speak to the family. Yurovsky – that ‘weasel’ of a man, as Semenova called him – had paced up and down by the open door, watching all the time. The Grand Duchesses, she and Starodumova both remembered, had all seemed very bright and cheerful and had helped the women move the beds in their room in order to get at the floors. Evdokiya Semenova, known by her pet name of ‘Avdotyushka’ to her friend Starodumova, had been very excited by this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of seeing the Imperial Family close to. A simple peasant woman with an honest heart, already sick with TB (she died not long after), she had been one of many local people still devoted to the Tsar who had sent in cakes and gifts for the Imperial Family at Easter, fearing however that the guards would keep them for themselves. She had long nursed her own naïve, romantic dreams about the family and especially the Tsar’s four beautiful daughters: one would marry the King of England, another the King of France, a third the King of Germany. Like most of the ordinary Russian population she had been beguiled by those romantic publicity images of girls in white dresses. But here in the Ipatiev House, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia did not look like princesses from fairy stories as she had imagined them; they were dressed in simple black skirts and white silk blouses – the same few clothes now left to them that they had worn the previous day. Nevertheless, Semenova had been struck by their happiness, their eyes bright, their short hair ‘tumbled and disorderly’, their cheeks ‘rosy like apples’. In the girls’ bedroom the women ventured to exchange a few comments with the Romanov daughters in low voices. When Yurovsky momentarily left the room, the irrepressible Anastasia, true to form, stuck out her tongue and cocked a snook at his back. It was a most precious experience for Semenova; every look the girls gave them was ‘a gift’, as she later remarked. Despite all the humiliation they were now enduring, the Grand Duchesses had seemed so vivacious, so natural. They ‘breathed a love of life’ and had even got down on their knees to help the women scrub the floor of their room. They had in truth welcomed this brief opportunity for physical exertion, so they whispered to them, adding that their father was ‘suffering the most’ for lack of it. ‘We used to enjoy work of the hardest kind with the greatest of pleasure’, they told the women. They had loved sawing wood with their father at Tobolsk and piling up the logs – ‘Washing up dishes is not enough for us.’ But although Olga was now thin and sick, Maria was still capable of hard work and was as strong as a man, they claimed. In an atmosphere of light-heartedness and camaraderie, the four girls took great pleasure in sharing a few covert jokes with these ordinary women from the outside world.

  Before completing their task, Semenova managed to whisper to one of the eldest girls, ‘Please God you will not have to suffer under the yoke of these monsters for much longer.’ ‘Thank you my dear for your kind words’, the Grand Duchess had responded. ‘We also hold out great hope . . .’ Their faith gave them hope even now, but the strain of constantly lifting each other’s flagging morale as well as that of their brother and parents was clearly taking its toll. That morning, in the face of so much desperate uncertainty, the four Grand Duchesses had demonstrated the simple good nature and profound loyalty towards each other that was their great abiding virtue and one inculcated by their parents. It had enabled them to contain their own deep fears and make of a mundane event a moment’s diversion – even joy.

  Semenova was, however, bitterly disappointed when she saw the Tsar and Tsaritsa: ‘all my dreams evaporated in an instant’, she remarked. She had grown up with an entirely rosy view of the Imperial couple, picturing them in her mind in vestments of gold, with music playing in the background and coloured drapes fluttering in the breeze, as flower petals floated down on them from above and great church bells chimed. The Tsar had been ‘a figure of divinity’ for her, a giant among men; the Tsaritsa too she imagined as a rosy-faced Russian beauty with a voice ‘like a flute from paradise’. Now suddenly, Evdokiya Semenova discovered that her former monarchs had feet of clay. The Tsar was not the Godlike being she had imagined: what she saw that morning was ‘a small and drab man, much smaller than his wife, and much simpler [in manner] than she’. He behaved like a man of the people; he was just like them and far from being a paragon of physical perfection, his hair was thinning – he had a large bald patch – and his legs were too short for his body. Alexandra, for all her paleness and physical frailty, was however still very much the proud Tsaritsa, but her eyes told Semenova how much she was suffering. As the women had moved from room to room to wash the floors, Nicholas had gently lifted and carried Alexey from bed to wheelchair to bed again. The sight of the frail and sickly Tsarevich had given Semenova profound pause for thought: here before her was the boy whom the Romanov publicity machine had led her to believe was the hope of Russia, a ‘strong and flourishing cherub’ as she put it, but instead what she saw was a thin, delicate child with great dark circles under his eyes, his face waxen. And even though he frequently smiled, his eyes seemed full of sadness.

  Starodumova and Semenova both remembered quite clearly that at one point Yurovsky had sat down next to the Tsarevich and enquired of his health, asking the opinion too of Dr Botkin. It had seemed a most solicitous gesture to them, as it might have done to any other observer. It was of course all part of the softening-up process, but coming from a man who had trained as a medical orderly, in the knowledge of what was to come it seems particularly cruel. Did Yurovsky take pleasure or power, one wonders, from such an act – knowing that he alone was in control of the sick boy’s last hours on earth? Ignorant of this fact, Semenova went away an hour and a half later convinced of one thing: the boy, in comparison to his vibrant sisters, ‘was no longer of this world’. The experience had greatly moved her; she left with a love for the Imperial Family so profound, she said, that it would not leave her till the day she died. They were not
the divine beings she had always supposed them to be; ‘they were not gods, they were actually ordinary people like us, simple mortals’.

  The women who came to the Ipatiev House that morning were never paid for their work; four days later, when they went to see Medvedev at the Popov House to collect their money, there was no one there except a few Red Army guards who were packing up to go to the Front. Then a very drunk Medvedev drove up in a troika. There was nobody at the Ipatiev House, they were told, the house was shut up. They had all ‘gone to Perm’.

  14

  The House of Special Purpose

  TUESDAY 16 JULY 1918

  It was another quiet, uneventful day, the Romanov family’s seventy-eighth day in the Ipatiev House. ‘Baby’ had a slight cold and was still weak but went out with the others in the garden in the morning. And after a week of no supplies from the nuns, there came a wonderful gift of eggs for Alexey – the boy’s last supper, had he known it. The remainder of Yurovsky’s requisition of 50 would be gorged later by the family’s murderers out in the forest, leaving the scattered eggshells as proof to later investigators.

  At around nine, while the family sat taking the same dreary tea and black bread for breakfast that every other Soviet citizen was reduced to, Beloborodov arrived at the Ipatiev House in an official car belonging to the Ekaterinburg Cheka. Soon afterwards he left with Yurovsky to attend yet another meeting of the Central Committee of the Ural Regional Soviet, followed by consultations with the Cheka at the Amerikanskaya Hotel. Yurovsky was now getting very nervous, and seemed even more so when he returned at eleven, when he went through the daily ritual of checking that the box containing the Romanovs’ valuables had not been tampered with. Soon afterwards, in the privacy of his office next door, he informed his assistant Nikulin that the ‘liquidation’ was to take place tonight. There could be no more delays and it was paramount that they ensure that the family did not suspect anything in advance.