Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER THIRTY

Citizen Romanov

IN the afternoon, the Tsar reappeared, walking alone through the hushed rooms of the palace. In the red drawing room, he met Lili Dehn. Taking her hands in his, he said simply, “Thank you, Lili, for all you have done for us.” She was shocked to see how much he had changed. “The Emperor was deathly pale,” she observed. “His face was covered with innumerable wrinkles, his hair was quite grey at the temples, and blue shadows encircled his eyes. He looked like an old man.” Nicholas smiled sadly at Lili’s expression. “I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said. “Walking always does me good.”

Before going out, Nicholas spoke to Count Benckendorff, who explained the arrangements made with General Kornilov. At first, Kornilov had wished to keep the Imperial family locked inside the palace, but Benckendorff, knowing the Tsar’s intense need for outdoor exercise, had arranged for a small section of the park to be used. Nevertheless, it was required that every excursion be arranged in advance so that sentries could be posted. On this first afternoon, none of these arrangements had been made, and Nicholas was forced to wait for twenty minutes before an officer appeared with a key. When at last he did go outside, the Empress, Lili and Anna Vyrubova were watching from an upstairs window.

They saw Nicholas marching briskly across the park when a soldier stepped up and blocked his path. Surprised, the Tsar made a nervous gesture with his hand and started in a different direction. Another sentinel appeared and ordered him back. A moment later, Nicholas was surrounded by six soldiers armed with rifles. Anna was horrified: “With their fists and with the butts of their guns they pushed the Emperor this way and that as though he were some wretched vagrant they were baiting on a country road. ‘You can’t go there, Gospodin Polkovnik (Mr. Colonel).’ ‘We don’t permit you to walk in that direction, Gospodin Polkovnik.’ ‘Stand back when you are commanded, Gospodin Polkovnik’ The Emperor, apparently unmoved, looked from one of these coarse brutes to another and with great dignity turned and walked back to the palace.” In the window above, Alexandra said nothing, but reached out and tightly clutched Lili’s hand. “I do not think that until this moment we had realized the crushing grip of the Revolution,” said Lili. “But it was brought home to us most forcibly, when we saw the passage of the Lord of all the Russias, the Emperor whose domains extended over millions of miles, now restricted to a few yards in his own park.”

Still, the long, tumultuous day was not over. At dusk, three armored cars packed with revolutionary soldiers from Petrograd burst through the palace gates. Leaping from the steel turrets, the soldiers demanded that Nicholas be given to them. The Soviet had unanimously resolved that the former Tsar be removed to a cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul; this detachment had come to seize him. The palace guard, surly and disorganized, made no move to resist, but their officers hurriedly mustered to defend the entryway. Rebuffed, the invaders backed away and agreed not to take the Tsar if they were allowed to see him. Benckendorff reluctantly agreed to arrange an “inspection.” “I found the Emperor with his sick children,” recalled the Count, “informed him of what had happened, and begged him to come down and walk slowly along the long corridor.… He did this a quarter of an hour later. In the meantime, the Commandant, all the officers of the Guard … and myself, stationed ourselves at the end of the corridor so as to be between the Emperor and … [the invading band].… The corridor was lit up brightly, the Emperor walked slowly from one door to the other, and … [the leader of the intruders] declared himself satisfied. He could, he said, reassure those who sent him.”

Even when the armored cars had rumbled off into the night, Fate was to add a lurid epilogue to this extraordinary day. Sometime after midnight, another band of soldiers broke into the tiny chapel in the Imperial Park which had become Rasputin’s tomb and exhumed the coffin. They took it to a clearing in the forest, pried off the lid and, using sticks to avoid touching the putrefying corpse, lifted what remained of Rasputin onto a pile of pine logs. The body and logs were drenched with gasoline and set on fire. For more than six hours, the body burned while an icy wind howled through the clearing and clouds of pungent smoke rose from the pyre. Along with the soldiers, a group of peasants gathered, silent and afraid, to watch through the night as the final scene of this baleful drama was played. It had happened as Rasputin once predicted: he would be killed and his body not left in peace, but burned, with his ashes scattered to the winds.

The small group which had ignored the offer to leave and remained with the family in the palace seemed, in Anna Vyrubova’s words, “like the survivors of a shipwreck.” It included, besides Anna herself and Lili Dehn, Count Benckendorff and his wife; Prince Dolgoruky; two ladies-in-waiting, Baroness Buxhoeveden and Countess Hendrikov; the tutors Pierre Gilliard and Mlle. Schneider; and Doctors Botkin and Derevenko. The two doctors were coping as best they could with Marie, who had developed pneumonia on top of measles. Dr. Ostrogorsky, the Petrograd children’s specialist who for many years had made regular visits, had declined to return, informing the Empress that he “found the roads too dirty” to make further calls at the palace.

Inside the palace, the little band of captives was entirely isolated. All letters passing in and out were left unsealed so that the commander of the guard could read them. All telephone lines were cut except one connected to a single telephone in the guardroom. It could be used only if both an officer and a private soldier were present and the conversation was entirely in Russian. Every parcel entering the palace was minutely examined: tubes of toothpaste were ripped open, jars of yogurt stirred by dirty fingers, and pieces of chocolate bitten apart. When Dr. Botkin visited the ill Grand Duchesses, he was accompanied by soldiers who wanted to come right into the sickroom and hear everything that was said. With difficulty, Botkin persuaded the soldiers to wait at the open doorway while he examined his patients.

The attitude and appearance of the guards grated on Nicholas’s precise military sensibilities. Their hair was shaggy and uncombed, they went unshaven, their blouses were unbuttoned and their boots were filthy. To others, such as Baroness Buxhoeveden, this crumbling discipline offered moments of comic relief. “One day,” she remembered, “the Grand Duchess Tatiana and I saw from the window that one of the guards on duty in front of the palace, struck evidently with the injustice of having to stand at his post, had brought a gilt armchair from the hall and had comfortably ensconced himself therein, leaning back, enjoying the view, with his rifle across his knee. I remarked that the man only wanted cushions to complete the picture. There was evidently telepathy in my eye, for when we looked out again, he had actually got some sofa cushions out of one of the rooms, and with a footstool under his feet, was reading the papers, his discarded rifle lying on the ground.” In time, even Nicholas saw the humor in this behavior: “When I got up,” he told Alexandra one morning, “I put on my dressing gown and looked through the window.… The sentinel who was usually stationed there was now sitting on the steps—his rifle had slipped out of his hand—he was dozing! I called my valet, and showed him the unusual sight, and I couldn’t help laughing—it was really absurd. At the sound of my laughter the soldier awoke … he scowled at us and we withdrew.”

Off duty, the soldiers wandered freely through the palace. Baroness Buxhoeveden awoke one night to find a soldier in her bedroom, busily pocketing a number of small gold and silver trinkets from her table. Alexis attracted the most attention. Groups of soldiers kept tramping into the nursery, asking, “Where is Alexis?” Gilliard once came on ten of them standing uncertainly in a passage outside the boy’s room.

“We want to see the Heir,” they said.

“He is in bed and can’t be seen,” replied the tutor.

“And the others?”

“They are also unwell.”

“And where is the Tsar?”

“I don’t know; but come, don’t hang about here,” said the determined Swiss, at last losing patience. “There must be no noise because of the invalids.” Nodding, the men tiptoed away, whispering to each other.

Gilliard became even closer to the Tsarevich at this time because Alexis had just been abruptly and cruelly deserted by another of the key figures in his small, intimate world. Derevenko, the sailor-attendant who for ten years had lived at the boy’s side, catching him before he fell, devotedly massaging his injured legs when he could not walk, now saw his chance to escape this life which apparently he had hated. He did not leave without an act of petty but heartless vengeance. The scene was witnessed by Anna Vyrubova: “I passed the open door of Alexis’s room and … I saw lying sprawled in a chair … the sailor Derevenko.… Insolently, he bawled at the boy whom he had formerly loved and cherished, to bring him this or that, to perform any menial service.… Dazed and apparently only half conscious of what he was being forced to do, the child moved about trying to obey.” Derevenko immediately left the palace. Nagorny, the Tsarevich’s other sailor-attendant, was outraged by the betrayal and remained.

In the long imprisonment that followed, Alexis found happy distraction in a movie projector and a number of films given him before the revolution by the Pathé film company. Using the equipment, he gave a number of “performances,” inviting everyone to come to his room, where with grave delight he played the role of host. Count Benckendorff, a guest at these soirees, found himself thinking, “He is very intelligent, has a great deal of character and an excellent heart. If his disease could be mastered, and should God grant him life, he should one day play a part in the restoration of our poor country. He is the representative of the legitimate principle; his character has been formed by the misfortunes of his parents and of his childhood. May God protect him and save him and all his family from the claws of the fanatics in which they are at present.”

Once all the children were well enough, the parents decided to resume their lessons, dividing their subjects among the people available. Nicholas himself became an instructor in history and geography, Baroness Buxhoeveden gave lessons in English and piano, Mlle. Schneider taught arithmetic, Countess Hendrikov taught art, and the Empress, religion. Gilliard, besides teaching French, became informal headmaster. After Nicholas had given his first lesson, the Tsar greeted Gilliard, “Good morning, dear colleague.”

The tranquillity of Nicholas’s behavior during his imprisonment, beginning with the five months he and his family were held at Tsarskoe Selo, has attracted both contemptuous scorn and glowing praise. In general, the scorn has come from those who, distant in place or time, have wondered how a man could fall from the pinnacle of earthly power without lapsing into bitter, impotent fury. Yet those who were closest to Nicholas during these months and saw him as a man; who had been with him during the years of supreme power and knew what a burden, however conscientiously carried, that power had been—these witnesses regarded his calm as evidence of courage and nobility of spirit. It was not a secret inside the palace that the Tsar’s immense shield of reserve and self-control had broken when he returned to the palace; everyone knew that Nicholas had wept, and for a moment, for everyone, the anchor was gone. Then, he recovered and his bearing became once again the anchor which held everything and everyone else. “The Tsar accepted all these restraints with extraordinary serenity and moral grandeur,” said Pierre Gilliard. “No word of reproach ever passed his lips. The fact was that his whole being was dominated by one passion, which was more powerful even than the bonds between himself and his family—his love of country. We felt that he was ready to forgive everything to those who were inflicting such humiliations upon him so long as they were capable of saving Russia.”

Through the Russian newspapers and French and English magazines he was allowed to have, Nicholas followed military and political events with keen interest. At his request, the priest in church prayed for the success of the Russian and Allied armies, and when the priest offered a prayer for the Provisional Government, Nicholas fervently crossed himself. Above all, he was anxious that the army be kept disciplined and strong and that the country remain faithful to its allies. Having seen with his own eyes the collapse of discipline at the palace, he worried about the decay taking place at the front. Hearing that General Ruzsky had resigned, Nicholas said indignantly, “He [Ruzsky] asked that an offensive be undertaken. The Soldiers’ Committee refused. What humilation! We are going to let our allies be crushed and then it will be our turn.” The following day, he mellowed and consoled himself. “What gives me a little hope,” he said, “is our love of exaggeration. I can’t believe that our army at the front is as bad as they say.”

Purely in a physical sense, the abdication and imprisonment at Tsarskoe Selo were a blessing for the fearfully weary man whom Nicholas had become. For the first time in twenty-three years, there were no reports to read, no ministers to see, no supreme decisions to make. Nicholas was free to spend his days reading and smoking cigarettes, playing with his children, shoveling snow and walking in the garden. He read the Bible from the beginning. At night, sitting with his wife and daughters, he read aloud to them from the Russian classics. Gently, by example, he tried to make easier for Alexandra the painful transition from empress to prisoner. After the long midnight service on Easter Eve, Nicholas quietly asked the two officers of the guard on duty to join his family for the traditional Easter meal in the library. There, he embraced them, not as prisoner and jailor, but as Russian and Russian, Christian and Christian.

Alexandra, unlike Nicholas, faced the overthrow of the monarchy and the beginning of captivity with deep bitterness. Proud and silent, thinner than ever before, her hair now predominantly gray, she remained most of the day on the sofa in the girls’ room. In the evening, she traveled by wheelchair to visit Anna, with Nicholas himself usually pushing the chair. Everything spoke to her of humiliation. Used to filling her rooms with violets, lilies of the valley and hyacinths from the park greenhouses or brought fresh from the Crimea, she was now forbidden these as “luxuries unnecessary for prisoners.” Occasionally when a maid or footman brought her a single branch of lilac, the Empress wept in gratitude.

For weeks, Alexandra remained convinced that, despite what had happened in Petrograd, the real Russia—the millions of peasants and the army—remained faithful. Only gradually, with a kind of bitter humor, did she begin to accept reality. Nicholas showed her the way. “He would sometimes laugh at the idea of being what he called ‘an Ex,’ ” said Lili Dehn. Alexandra picked up the expression. “Don’t call me an Empress any more—I’m only an Ex,” she would say. One day at lunch when an especially unpalatable ham appeared on the table, Nicholas made everyone laugh by shrugging and saying, “Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it’s nothing but an ex-ham.”

In Petrograd during the weeks after the abdication, feelings mounted against all Romanovs. On March 24, Grand Duke Nicholas, reappointed by the Provisional Government to his old post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armies, arrived to take up his duties at Mogilev only to find a letter from Prince Lvov awaiting him. In the letter, the new Premier asked the Grand Duke to resign, explaining apologetically that “the national feeling is decidedly and insistently against the employment of any members of the House of Romanov in any official position.” Rigidly loyal, the Grand Duke immediately acquiesced, handing the command to Alexeiev with the grandiloquent declaration, “I am happy once more to be able to prove my love for my country which so far Russia has not doubted.” Then the old soldier retired from the army and retreated to his estate in the Crimea.

Still, the focus of popular hatred was always the Tsar and his family at Tsarskoe Selo. From the moment of abdication, rumors spread through Petrograd that “Citizen Romanov” and his wife, “Alexandra the German,” were working secretly to betray the country to the Germans and with their help restore the autocracy. The press, freed of censorship and restraint, rushed into print with lurid tales of Rasputin and the Empress which hitherto had been passed only by word of mouth. The “private lives” of the Tsar’s four daughters were written by their “lovers.” A Rabelaisian palace dinner menu, described as “typical,” was published so that the hungry people of Petrograd could read how “Nikolasha” and his family were gorging themselves: “Caviar, lobster soup, mushroom patties, macaroni, pudding, roast goose, chicken pie, veal cutlets, orange jelly, pork chops, rice pudding, herrings with cucumber, omelet, rissoles in cream, fresh pineapple, sturgeon.” Cartoons depicted Nicholas clapping his hands with joy while he watched the hanging of a political prisoner, and Alexandra bathing in a tub filled with blood and saying, “If Nicky killed a few more of these revolutionaries, I could have such a bath more often.”

It was at this point, with public opinion thoroughly aroused and the Soviet demanding that Nicholas be thrown into the Fortress, that the Provisional Government placed responsibility for the safety of the Imperial family entirely on Kerensky’s shoulders. On April 3, the new warden decided to take a personal look at his prisoners.

He arrived early in the afternoon in one of the Tsar’s automobiles driven by a chauffeur from the Imperial Garage. Alighting at the kitchen door, he assembled the soldiers of the guard and the palace servants in a passageway and delivered an impassioned revolutionary speech. The servants, he announced, were now the servants of the people, who paid their salaries, and who expected them to keep a close eye and report everything suspicious that happened in the palace. Next, in the Tsar’s waiting room, Kerensky met Benckendorff. “He was dressed in a blue shirt buttoned to the neck, with no cuffs or collar, big boots, and he affected the air of a workman in his Sunday clothes,” recalled the Count. “… He introduced himself and said, ‘I have come here to see how you live, to inspect your Palace and to talk to Nicholas Alexandrovich.’ ” According to Kerensky, “the old dignitary [Benckendorff] with a monocle in his eye replied that he would put the matter before His Majesty.” In the meantime, Benckendorff, knowing that Nicholas and Alexandra were still at lunch with the children, distracted Kerensky by proposing a tour of the palace. Kerensky agreed. “His manner was abrupt and nervous,” Benckendorff recalled. “He did not walk but ran through the rooms, talking very loudly.… He had the Emperor’s private rooms opened; and all the doors, drawers and cupboards searched, and told those who accompanied him to look in every corner and under the furniture.” Without saying a word to them, Kerensky went through the rooms of the ladies-in-waiting, who stood and watched him. Eventually, he came to the door of Anna Vyrubova.

Nearly recovered from measles, Anna had been up having lunch with Lili Dehn when the noise and confusion in the palace signaled Kerensky’s arrival. In terror, she grabbed a pile of her private papers and threw them into her fire, then jumped into bed and pulled the covers up to her head. As the commotion outside grew louder, Anna, “with an icy hand” upon her heart, whispered to Lili, “They are coming.” A moment later, Kerensky entered, noting the fireplace filled with the glowing ash of burning paper. “The room seemed to fill up with men,” Anna wrote, “and walking arrogantly before them I beheld a small, clean-shaven, theatrical person whose essentially weak face was disguised in a Napoleonic frown. Standing over me … right hand thrust into the bosom of his jacket, the man boomed out, ‘I am the Minister of Justice. You are to dress and go at once to Petrograd.’ I answered not a word but lay still on my pillows.… This seemed to disconcert him somewhat for he turned … and said nervously ‘Ask the doctors if she is fit to go.’ ” Botkin and Derevenko were questioned and both declared that, from a medical viewpoint, it would not harm her to leave. Later, Anna bitterly attributed the doctors’ decision to “craven fear.”

Leaving Anna, Kerensky passed Gilliard’s room. Assuming that the Swiss—being a citizen of a republic—was a friend, Kerensky nodded pleasantly and said, “Everything is going well.”

By then, Nicholas and Alexandra were ready. Kerensky was conducted to the children’s schoolroom, where Benckendorff left him standing before a closed door while he stepped in to announce the new Minister. Then, swinging wide open the double door, the Count announced grandly, “His Majesty bids you welcome.” “Kerensky,” Benckendorff recalled, “was in a state of feverish agitation; he could not stand still, touched all the objects which were on the table and seemed like a madman. He spoke incoherently.”

Kerensky admitted his extreme nervousness: “To be frank I was anything but calm before this first meeting with Nicholas II. Too many hard, terrible things had been connected in the past with his name.… All the way along the endless chain of official apartments I was struggling for control over my emotions.… [Entering the room] my feelings underwent a lightning change.… The Imperial family … were standing … near the window, around a small table, in a huddled, perplexed little group. From this cluster of frightened humanity, there stepped out somewhat hesitantly, a man of medium height in military kit, who walked forward to meet me with a slight peculiar smile. It was the Emperor … he stopped in confusion. He did not know what to do, he did not know how I would act, what attitude I would adopt. Should he walk forward to meet me as a host, or ought he to wait for me to speak first? Should he hold out his hand?

“In a flash, instinctively, I knew the exact position: the family’s confusion, its fear at finding itself alone with a revolutionary whose objects in bursting in upon it were unknown.… With an answering smile, I hurriedly walked over to the Emperor, shook hands and sharply said, ‘Kerensky’—as I always do, by way of introduction.… Nicholas II gave my hand a firm grasp, immediately recovering from his confusion, and smiling once again, led me to his family.

“His daughters and the Heir Apparent were obviously burning with curiosity and their eyes were simply glued to me. But Alexandra Fedorovna stood tense and erect—proud, domineering, irreconcilable; she held out her hand to me slowly and unwillingly.… When the hand-shaking was over, I inquired after their health [and] told them that their relatives abroad were taking a keen interest in their welfare.… [I] told them not to be frightened … but to have complete confidence in the Provisional Government. After that the Emperor and I went into the next room where I again assured him that they were safe.… He had fully recovered his impressive calm. He asked me about the military situation and wished us success in our difficult new task.”

In recalling the events of this day, Kerensky makes no mention of the arrest of Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn. Before leaving, both women briefly said goodbye to the Empress. “The last thing I remember,” wrote Anna, “was the white hand of the Empress pointing upward and her voice, ‘There we are always together.’ ” Alexandra’s last words to Lili were similar: “With a tremendous effort of will, she [Alexandra] forced herself to smile; then, in a voice whose every accent bespoke intense love and deep religious conviction, she said: ‘Lili, by suffering, we are purified for Heaven. This goodbye matters little. We shall meet in another world.’ ” Leaving her pet spaniel Jimmy behind, Anna stumbled on her crutches to the waiting car and climbed in beside Lili. “The car shot forward, and I left the palace at Tsarskoe Selo forever,” Anna later wrote. “Both Lili and I pressed our faces to the glass in a last effort to see those beloved we were leaving behind, and through the mist and rain we could just discern a group of white-clad figures crowded close to the nursery windows to see us go. In a moment of time the picture was blotted out and we saw only the wet landscape, the storm-bent trees, the rapidly creeping twilight.” In Petrograd, Lili was released the following day, but Anna was sent to spend five chilling months in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.

Six days later, on April 9, Kerensky returned to the palace to begin an investigation of the Empress’s “treasonable, pro-German” activities. While the interrogation was under way, he ordered the Empress separated from her husband and children. At once, he ran into a storm of protest from both doctors and ladies-in-waiting, who declared that it was inhuman to separate a mother from her sick children. Kerensky relented and named Nicholas as the parent who would have to live apart. The couple were permitted to meet at prayers and meals, providing an officer was always present and only Russian was spoken.

Although the separation lasted for eighteen days, the investigation was casual and Kerensky learned nothing. His questioning of Alexandra was confined to a single session lasting one hour. As Benckendorff later described it, Kerensky began politely and mildly by asking about “the part the Empress had played in politics, [and] her influence on the Emperor in the choice of ministers whom she often had received in the absence of the Emperor. Her Majesty answered that the Emperor and herself were the most united of couples, whose whole joy and pleasure was in their family life, and that they had no secrets from each other; that they discussed everything, and that it was not astonishing that in the last years which had been so troubled, they had often discussed politics.… It was true that they had discussed the different appointments of ministers, but this could not be otherwise in a marriage such as theirs.” Benckendorff learned afterward that Alexandra had been impressed by Kerensky’s politeness and that Kerensky had been “struck by the clarity, the energy and the frankness of her words.” When the Minister came out, he said to the Tsar, who was waiting outside, “Your wife does not lie.” Quietly, Nicholas observed that this was scarcely news to him.

Questioning Nicholas, Kerensky learned even less. He asked why the Tsar had changed ministers so frequently, why he had appointed Stürmer and Protopopov and dismissed Sazonov, but Nicholas avoided answering directly and Kerensky quickly let the conversation drop. There was no further discussion of “treason” and Kerensky himself declared to his colleagues in the Provisional Government that the Empress Alexandra had been loyal to Russia.

As time passed and Kerensky continued to visit the palace, the relationship between the socialist minister and the deposed sovereign and his wife markedly improved. “Kerensky’s attitude toward the Tsar is no longer what it was at the beginning.… [He] has requested the papers to put an end to their campaign against the Tsar and more especially the Empress,” Gilliard wrote in his diary on April 25. Kerensky admitted that, during these weeks, he was affected by Nicholas’s “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful.… It cannot be said that my talks with the Tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former Emperor never once lost his equilibrium, never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.” On Nicholas’s part, Benckendorff noted that “the confidence which the Emperor felt in Kerensky increased still more … and the Empress shared this confidence.” Nicholas himself declared of Kerensky, “He is not a bad sort. He’s a good fellow. One can talk to him.” Later, Nicholas was to add, “He [Kerensky] is a man who loves Russia, and I wish I could have known him earlier because he could have been useful to me.”

Spring melted the snow, and in the afternoons the family began to go out together into the park. At first, they had to wait in the semicircular entry hall for an officer to come with the key, then file out, the Empress being pushed in her wheelchair, through a gauntlet of gaping, loitering soldiers, many of whom gibed and snickered as they passed. Sometimes, the men did more than mock: when Nicholas got his bicycle and started to pedal along a path, a soldier thrust his bayonet between the spokes. The Tsar fell and the soldiers guffawed. Yet Nicholas was unfailingly friendly even to those who insulted him. He always said “Good morning” and held out his hand. “Not for anything in the world,” declared one soldier, turning his back on the outstretched hand. “But, my dear fellow, why? What have you got against me?” asked Nicholas, genuinely astonished.

The news that the former Tsar and his family were walking under guard in the park attracted crowds who lined the iron fence to watch, whistle and jeer. At one point, an officer of the guard went up to Nicholas and asked him to move to avoid provoking the crowd any further. Nicholas, surprised, replied that he was not afraid and said that “the good people were not annoying him in any way.”

The line of guards with fixed bayonets, the restriction of movement to a corner of the park and, especially, the humilation of his father were hard for Alexis to understand and to bear. He had seen his father treated only with respect and reverence, and he blushed with shame whenever an incident occurred. Alexandra, too, flushed deeply when her husband was insulted, but she learned to keep silent. When the weather was fine, she sat near the pond on a rug spread beneath a tree. Usually, she was surrounded by a ring of curious soldiers. Once when Baroness Buxhoeveden, who had been sitting next to the Empress, got up, one of the men dropped with a belligerent grunt onto the rug beside Alexandra. “The Empress edged a little bit away,” wrote the Baroness, “making a sign to me to be silent, for she was afraid that the whole family would be taken home and the children robbed of an hour’s fresh air. The man seemed to her not to have a bad face, and she was soon engaged in conversation with him. At first he cross-questioned her, accusing her of ‘despising’ the people, of showing by not travelling about that she did not want to know Russia. Alexandra Fedorovna quietly explained to him that, as in her young days she had had five children and nursed them all herself, she had not had time to go about the country and that, afterwards, her health had prevented her. He seemed to be struck by this reasoning and, little by little, he grew more friendly. He asked the Empress about her life, about her children, her attitude towards Germany, etc She answered in simple words that she had been a German in her youth, but that that was long past. Her husband and her children were Russians and she was a Russian, too, now, with all her heart. When I came back with the officer … to whom I had risked appealing, fearing that the soldier might annoy the Empress, I found them peacefully discussing questions of religion. The soldier got up on our approach, and took the Empress’s hand, saying, ‘Do you know, Alexandra Fedorovna, I had quite a different idea of you. I was mistaken about you.”

In May, a new officer assumed command of the Tsarskoe Selo garrison. Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky was a thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the Petrograd Life Guards who had twice been wounded at the front and then reassigned to one of the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Kobylinsky was not a revolutionary, simply an officer doing the duty assigned him by General Kornilov. Although in name he was their jailer, in fact Kobylinsky was deeply loyal to the Imperial family and, during the twelve months that he was with them, did much to buffer them from shocks. Nicholas well understood Kobylinsky’s situation, and from Siberia he wrote to his mother that Kobylinsky was “my last friend.”

There were limits, however, to what any officer could do with the obstreperous soldiery, and unpleasant incidents continued to happen. In June, Alexis was playing outside with the toy rifle which he had played with in the garden at Stavka. Suddenly, the soldiers spotted the gun and began to shout to each other, “They are armed.” Alexis, hearing the hubbub, went to this mother, who was sitting on the grass. A minute later, the soldiers arrived and demanded “the weapon.” Gilliard tried to intervene and explain that the gun was a toy, but the soldiers insisted and walked off with the gun. Alexis, in tears, looked from the Empress to the tutor; both were helpless. The gun was turned over to Colonel Kobylinsky, who was furious that his men had bothered the child. Carefully, he took the gun apart and, carrying it under his coat, returned it piece by piece to the Tsarevich. Thereafter, Alexis played with his rifle only behind the door of his room.

Despite harassment and humiliation, the family continued to go out every day, happy for the chance to spend time in the fresh air. In the middle of May, they began digging up part of the park lawn to plant a vegetable garden. Together, they carried the grassy sod away, turned the soil, planted the seeds and brought water in tubs from the kitchen. Many of the servants helped; so did some of the soldiers, who discovered more pleasure in working beside the Tsar than in mocking him. In June, once the seeds were in, Nicholas turned to sawing up the dead trees in the park for firewood. Soon, piles of wood, neatly stacked, began to appear all over the park.

At night, tired from this exercise, the family sat quietly together before going to bed. One stifling evening in July, he was reading to the Empress and his daughters when an officer and two soldiers burst into the room shouting excitedly that a sentry in the park had seen someone signaling from the open window by flashing red and green lights. The men searched the room and found nothing. Despite the heat, the officer ordered the heavy curtains to be pulled shut—and at this moment the mystery was unraveled. Anastasia had been sitting in a window ledge doing needlework as she listened to her father. As she moved, bending to pick things up from a table, she had covered and uncovered two lamps, one with a red and the other with a green shade.

Harmless in themselves, these incidents revealed the underlying tension which prevailed at Tsarskoe Selo. Day and night, the sentries paced their rounds, believing that at any moment a rescue attempt might be made, for which, if successful, they would be held responsible. The prisoners waited inside the palace, living from day to day, uncertain as to who and where were friends, wondering whether the following morning would find them released or flung into a Soviet dungeon.

From the beginning, they most expected to be sent abroad. This was what every representative of the Provisional Government—Guchkov, Kornilov and Kerensky—had promised; that they would be powerless to keep this promise, no one could know. “Our captivity at Tsarskoe Selo did not seem likely to last long,” said Gilliard, “and there was talk about our imminent transfer to England. Yet the days passed and our departure was always being postponed.… We were only a few hours by railway from the Finnish frontier, and the necessity of passing through Petrograd was the only serious obstacle. It would thus appear that if the authorities had acted resolutely and secretly it would not have been difficult to get the Imperial family to one of the Finnish ports and thus to some foreign country. But they were afraid of responsibilities, and no one dared compromise himself.”