Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

by Helen Rappaport

  As for the Ipatiev House itself, after the Bolsheviks recaptured Ekaterinburg in 1919 it was used as a Red Army officers’ mess, a notice over the door proclaiming the triumph of Soviet enlightenment over the dark hegemony of the tsars. In 1927 it was converted to a Museum of the Revolution, then in the early thirties it became an agricultural school. In 1938 it was deemed an appropriate venue for an Antireligious Museum, to which apparatchiks came in coachloads, posing for their photographs in front of the bullet-damaged wall in the cellar where the Romanovs were shot and stabbed to death. And then suddenly, in 1938, Stalin issued a clampdown on all discussion of the Romanov murders. In 1946 the Sverdlovsk party archives took the house over and finally, in 1974, it was listed as a Historical Revolutionary Monument.

  By now, stories had been getting back to Moscow about the increasing numbers of pilgrims arriving in Ekaterinburg to pay homage at the Ipatiev House to the murdered Imperial Family. In 1975, with the sixtieth anniversary of the Romanov murders due in 1978, Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo decided to take action. A closed session agreed that the Ipatiev House was not of ‘sufficient historical significance’ and ordered its destruction. A secret directive was passed down the line to the local party chair, Boris Eltsin. Finally, in September 1977, the house was demolished and its site covered with asphalt. In his memoirs, published in 1990, Eltsin admitted that ‘sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism’. Even so, the pilgrims kept coming, albeit surreptitiously, conducting their own private moments of remembrance on the mournful, barren site.

  In 1979 the Koptyaki Forest finally began to yield up its secrets, when in May an Ekaterinburg-born amateur sleuth, Aleksandr Avdonin, after years of covert evidence-gathering and a study of the primary evidence, located the shallow grave under the rotting railway ties with the help of film-maker Geli Ryabov. Together they had secretly made a topographical survey of the Koptyaki Forest in order to define where precisely the grave was located; a secret dig took place on 31 May at which they discovered three skulls and a selection of bones, which they yanked at random from the ground without keeping any kind of documentary or archaeological record. They later reburied the skulls, having taken plaster casts of them, but were forced to sit on their story for 10 years until the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev brought with it the era of perestroika, when Ryabov told his story to the Moscow News. The remains of the Romanovs and their servants were disinterred in a hasty ‘official exhumation’ that further trashed the site, destroying precious evidence. Then began the long, tortuous process of identification, at a time when DNA testing was in its infancy, as scientific experts in Britain and America began to squabble among themselves and the Anastasia camp continued, still, to talk of miraculous escapes.

  Meanwhile, in Ekaterinburg after the collapse of Communism in 1991, a simple wooden cross was erected to mark the site of the Ipatiev House until funds could be raised to build a huge new cathedral there. By the time the Church on the Blood had its official opening in 2003, the Romanovs had been officially canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church and a monastery commemorating them had been founded out at the Four Brothers, now better known as Ganina Yama. On 17 July 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the murders, the remaining, scattered descendants of the dynasty gathered in St Petersburg for the solemn reburial of the remains of all but two of those murdered at the Ipatiev House. The bodies of Alexey and Maria had yet to be found, and still the controversy raged over whether the skeletal remains identified and interred in St Petersburg as Anastasia’s were really hers or in fact Maria’s.

  It took another amateur group of local enthusiasts – members of Ekaterinburg’s Military Historical Club – to finally achieve, in the summer of 2007, what previous official investigators and a whole host of weekend amateur diggers had failed to do for 90 years – locate the lost remains of Alexey and Maria. The team based their search on a close study of the statements made by Yurovsky about the location of the final graves, under the aegis of Ekaterinburg’s Institute of History & Archaeology. On 29 July, a few shards of bone, nails, bullets and fragments of ceramic vessels (the jars that had contained the sulphuric acid) were located in two small bonfire sites not far from the main grave site on the Koptyaki Road.

  Ekaterinburg today is becoming hostage to big business as it rushes headlong towards a market economy. More and more of its neglected historic buildings are being torn down to make way for offices and expensive apartment blocks. Gift shops, fast food and the most fashionable of Western clothes are now available at shopping malls such as Vainer Street, where the ear is assaulted by tinny and obtrusive disco music. Here the foreign businessman can get an excellent three-course ‘biznes lanch’ for as little as 350 roubles (about £7). The Amerikanskaya Hotel is still there; dusty, tatty and disconsolate. But it’s not a hotel any more. Western travellers seeking the creature comforts they expect now head for the newly built Park Inn on Malysheva.

  Out at Ganina Yama, where Yurovsky oversaw the hasty consignment of the bodies to the mineshaft that first night, the air in July is heavy with the rich, cloying smell of lilies. On the 17th, the anniversary of the murders at the Ipatiev House, the site is covered with huge ranks of these tall white flowers that sway gently in the humid air. In the traditional Russian iconography of mourning, they have been planted here to symbolise the restored innocence of the soul at death. This once lonely site is now the Monastery of the Holy Tsarist Passion Bearers. The actual grave site – a couple of miles away in the forest glade where Ryabov and Avdonin found the remains in 1979 – was until recently marked only by a simple wooden cross and some plastic flowers. Some 60 metres beyond it lie the two small pits where the last pathetically few burnt remains of Maria and Alexey were found.

  Standing in front of the bank of lilies at Ganina Yama – a quiet, atmospheric spot where the pilgrims tread softly and unobtrusively – one gets an overwhelming sense of the emotional dynamic of a story that, for the faithful, has now been set in stone as a national tragedy encapsulating everything that Russia has lost. Elsewhere on the site there is a strangely unreal quality about the fairytale architectural ensemble of seven picturesque churches built Russian-style of pine wood without a single nail. With their dainty curves and arches, their malachite green roofs and delicate golden cupolas and spires, each church is the personal shrine for a member of the Romanov family. But their beauty seems somehow too contrived, too new, too perfect, making the overall effect uncannily that of a Disney-style Russian theme park.

  The politics behind the creation of this – the Russian Orthodox Church’s official commemoration of the Romanovs – are complex. Its construction is also in fundamental conflict with considerable ongoing dissent within the Church itself about whether or not the bones actually discovered in the forest are those of the Romanovs at all, for which reason, when they were interred in St Petersburg in 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as being of ‘Christian victims of the Revolution’ rather than the Imperial Family. Perhaps now with the final discovery of the remains of Maria and Alexey (at the time of writing, still pending the results of DNA tests) that omission will be rectified. Be that as it may, the Russian Orthodox Church now has an overriding control over Ganina Yama’s burgeoning tourist industry, its influx of pilgrims, its gift shop full of garish icons, and its official tour guides, just as it does at that other major place of Romanov pilgrimage, Ekaterinburg’s Church on the Blood. In the summer of 2007 the All-Russia Conference of Tourism laid down plans for the inception of an official ‘Romanovs Royal Tourist Route’, taking in the cities of Tobolsk, Tyumen, Ekaterinburg, St Petersburg and Kazan. The inevitable commercialisation of the Imperial Family as a valuable asset in Russia’s burgeoning market economy is now at hand. And with it the possibility of defending the truth of their story from an onslaught of inaccuracy, sentiment and hagiography rapidly recedes. As the Romanov gifts and souvenirs proliferate, so too the unstoppable and growing interest in the Romanov legend at home and in the
West becomes ever more covered in a coat of saccharine. The mushrooming of the Romanov tourist industry has done little to throw new light on the events of July 1918, merely adding further obscuring layers, like varnish, over time, to an old icon.

  It is only in the dappled shadows of the still rough opening in the ground where the scent of the lilies overwhelms the senses that something intangible on the heavy summer air brings with it a moment of epiphany. In breathing in the sickly aroma, one catches the sense of an enduring romantic tragedy that transcends – if not defies – all the logic of political and historical argument. Here there is an eerie silence, broken only by the occasional softly spoken prayer of the faithful, who stand and look, and sometimes weep. With the sunlight gently filtering down through the birch trees and catching the gold of their great long stamens, the lilies stand like dozens of living white headstones, memorials to innocent young lives cut short.

  Back in 1998, travel writer Colin Thubron noted on a visit to a far less commercial Ekaterinburg that the whole Romanov story was already drowned in a ‘mist of holiness’. That mist has now become an inundation. As time goes on, it is the sanitised commercial image of the Romanovs as saints and ‘Holy Passion Bearers’ that will increasingly prevail, no matter what historians may argue, or the archives yield up to us. Ganina Yama is the obligatory place of pilgrimage for any Russian believer, and the high point for any foreign tourist visiting what Russian tour websites now call ‘The Romanov Golgotha’. The legend has simply become irresistible; too powerful, too emotive, forever perpetuated in the hearts and minds of the many thousands of sincere believers who find their way here. Indeed, their numbers are increasing so rapidly that soon the very basic infrastructure at Ganina Yama, as well as the overstretched facilities at the Church on the Blood, will not be able to cope, inundated by an influx of pilgrims and seekers after God – the needy, the hopeful, the despairing – who now see in their reverence for the martyred Imperial Family a way of atoning for the past, for the depredations of 73 years of Communism, for the loss of Russian national and spiritual identity. For them it is a way of building hopes for the restoration of faith, and with it a better life.

  Attempting, as one inevitably does on contemplating the lilies of Ganina Yama, to imagine the true events of that violent and chaotic night in July 1918, it is those inescapably romantic, evocative images of the Imperial Family that inevitably twist and turn into view. No matter how hard one tries to resist, they nag at one’s consciousness . . . a boy in a sailor suit . . . girls in white dresses . . . untainted, murdered children . . . a devoted family destroyed . . . all of them now forever young, forever innocent and, as they all so fervently wished for in their many prayers, ‘At Rest with the Saints’.

  Note on Sources

  This book is a synthesis and retelling of a large number of Russian and English sources, many of the former published in Ekaterinburg (and Sverdlovsk, under its Soviet name) and difficult to access in the West. It is not a political history, nor does it set out to evaluate the reign of Nicholas II or his vices and virtues as a monarch. It seeks to tell the story of the Romanov family within the dynamic of those extraordinary last 14 days. For this reason, with the predominance of material coming from difficult-to-locate Russian-language sources, and also by virtue of the nature of the story’s telling, it was decided to write this book without the intrusion of footnotes. The priority was to create a strong historical narrative that did not enter into academic digression or interrupt the story with debate about contentious issues. There are, of course, many controversial points of interpretation in the story of the Romanov murders, but in the end this book, as much as any other on a real, historical topic, is a subjective one, based on my own evaluation of the material available to me. At all times I have stayed with historical truth in so far as it has been possible to substantiate the facts in the face of much contradictory material, but there have, inevitably, been moments when I have had to take my own leaps of faith as a historian and come to my own conclusions.

  There is a vast wealth of material, both written and visual, on the Romanov family, but one has to treat much of the written record with caution. Many contemporary memoirs by members of the Imperial Court are little more than unbridled hagiography based on extremely personal, subjective views of the family; similarly, in the years since the Romanovs were canonised, a welter of sentimental literature – both in Russia and among the now huge Russian Orthodox émigré community – has sought to detach the family as real people from the context of their story and their very violent times, and present them as plaster saints, above criticism. And whilst much revisionist literature on the political career of Nicholas II now concentrates on pointing the finger at his treatment of the Jews and the endemic tsarist anti-Semitism in which he was brought up, there is, at the polar opposite of this, a strong anti-Semitic strain to many books about the murder of the Romanovs from the 1920s onwards (notably those of the early investigators Melgunov, Diterikhs, Wilton and Sokolov). Some of these seek, in an often extremely distasteful manner, to emphasise the Jewishness of many of the leading Bolsheviks of the day (not just those involved in the murders) and take this as a stepping-off point for blaming all of Russia’s woes, from the Revolution to the murders in Ekaterinburg, on a darkly seditious Jewish cabal. The simple fact is that with the strong traditional value placed on knowledge and learning within the Jewish faith, education has always been a priority; hence the large numbers of Russian Jews who by default were drawn into the intellectual elite of the Russian revolutionary movement.

  It is thus something of a minefield steering one’s way through the two opposing camps of the sycophantically pro-tsarist and violently anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik sources relating to the Romanov story. It prompted me, as much as possible, to stick as closely as I could to those sources written nearest to the time of the events themselves by people who were there, in Russia. This related in particular to early accounts of Lenin and the Soviet leadership before they were tainted by Stalin’s post-1924 cult of the personality that created a Leninist hagiography that even today has barely been dented. This was very much the line taken by Professor Ivan Plotnikov, who urged me when I met him in July 2007 to go back to the earliest accounts I could find, in particular those of Yakov Yurovsky, and stay as much as I could with them.

  At the beginning of this project I made the decision not to spend precious research time, on a very limited budget, going over the extensive Russian archival sources on the subject; these have been very well picked over by a host of other scholars and are now largely available. Practically all the seminal material relating to the regime at the Ipatiev House, members of the execution squad and eyewitnesses to the murders and burials in the forest has now been republished in a range of Russian collections – sources such as Alekseev (1993), Aksyuchits (1998), Buranov & Khrustalev (1992), Ross (1987), a valuable collection of very rare testimony, Nikulin & Belokurov (1999), Lykova (2007), as well as the Tsar’s diaries for the period (Zakharov, 2007). In English, King & Wilson (2003) have done much ground-breaking work, as too Steinberg & Khrustalev (1995) in making primary sources available. Instead, I decided to take a lateral approach to the story, exploring new and unseen eyewitness accounts of the situation in Siberia in 1918 and in Ekaterinburg itself, written by American and British observers who were there at the time or soon after – either as diplomats, or independent journalists, or with the Allied Intervention Forces (see list of Archival Sources). In particular the eyewitness accounts of the British consul in Ekaterinburg, Thomas Preston (he did not inherit his baronetcy of Beeston St Lawrence, as Sir Thomas, until after the events in this story), had, I felt, been seriously underrated and underused. His full typescript memoirs in the Leeds Russian Archive contain much valuable detail not included in the published version Before the Curtain, as too do his extensive official memoranda and reports in the Public Record Office at Kew and the article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary in 1968. Other
hunches turned up unexpectedly interesting material: the Belusov letter from the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society at Cambridge came after I discovered that Ekaterinburg had been home to a major depository for the Society’s onward dissemination of religious literature across Siberia. The archive of the outstanding Russianist and historian Sir Bernard Pares, who was in Siberia after the Romanov murders, also threw up some valuable nuggets of information. Similarly, a search in the much underrated Tyrkova-Williams collection of revolutionary and civil war pamphlets printed in Russia – many of them so extraordinarily rare that the surviving copies are unique to this collection – threw up Debogory-Mokrievich’s fascinating account of the Bolsheviks in Perm and Ekaterinburg 1917–18.

  Pride of place, however, must go to the now forgotten Herman Bernstein – a Russian-born Jew and US Russia correspondent for the New York Herald and the Washington Post. I flew to New York to conduct an entirely speculative search of his archive and I was not disappointed. It is an absolute treasure trove of material – letters, photographs, articles and newspapers cuttings charting Bernstein’s passionate love–hate relationship with Russia during his numerous trips there, his contact with many distinguished Russians and several variant accounts of his visit to Ekaterinburg and his interview with Judge Sergeev and other eyewitnesses. The archive charts Bernstein’s own personal journey from violently anti-tsarist, as a leading critic of the Jewish pogroms in Russia, through ecstatic welcome of the Revolution as the big New Idea, to bitter disillusion and anger at the Bolshevik abuse of human and civil rights during the civil war. Bernstein’s invaluable archive, whilst being somewhat haphazard in its organisation and often in a very poor state (crumbling newspaper cuttings, often undated and unattributed), deserves much wider recognition and study.