Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Ekaterinburg

THE city of Ekaterinburg lies on a cluster of low hills on the eastern slope of the Urals. Atop the highest of these hills, near the center of town, a successful merchant named N. N. Ipatiev had built himself a handsome, two-story house. Constructed into a slight incline on the side of the hill, the lower story was at: street level on one side of the house and became a semi-basement on the other. At the end of April, as Nicholas and Alexandra were being taken from Tobolsk, Ipatiev was suddenly given twenty-four hours to vacate his house. After he left, a group of workmen arrived and hurriedly erected a high wooden fence shutting off the house and garden from the street. Five rooms on the upper floor were sealed as a prison, with the glass on the windows painted white so that those inside could not see out. The lower floor was hastily converted into guardrooms and offices. When it was ready, the house was given the ominous official designation “The House of Special Purpose.”

As Yakovlev’s train bearing the captives arrived in the city’s main railway station, the mood of Ekaterinburg was all too evident. An angry mob surged around the coaches, shouting, “Show us the Romanovs!” So threatening did the crowd become that even the officials of the local Soviet agreed to let Yakovlev move the train back to an outer station before handing over his prisoners. Nicholas stepped out, wearing an officer’s greatcoat with the epaulets removed, and carried his own luggage to a waiting car. Then, with Alexandra and Marie beside him, followed by only one other car, he was driven quickly through back streets to the Ipatiev house. There at the door stood Isiah Goloshchekin, a member of the Presidium of the Ural Soviet and personal friend of Sverdlov. Goloshchekin greeted the Tsar ironically: “Citizen Romanov, you may enter.”

At once, the captives were ordered to open their hand luggage. Nicholas was willing, but the Empress objected. Seeing his wife upset, Nicholas paced up and down the room, saying bitterly, “So far we have had polite treatment and men who were gentlemen, but now …” The guards cut him short. Roughly, they told him to remember that he was no longer at Tsarskoe Selo, and that if he continued to act provocatively, they would isolate him from his family. A second offense, they warned, would result in hard labor. Frightened for him, Alexandra quickly submitted. Upstairs in their new room, she took a pencil and drew on a window a swastika as a symbol of faith. Beneath, she added the date of their first day in Ekaterinburg, “17/30 Apr. 1918.”

In Tobolsk, meanwhile, the remaining four children waited anxiously to hear what had happened to their parents. On May 3, a telegram to Kobylinsky announced that the Tsar and Empress had been detained at Ekaterinburg. Soon after, a letter from Ekaterinburg, written by the maid Demidova but dictated by the Empress, said non-committally that all were well and advised the Grand Duchesses to “dispose of the medicines as had been agreed.” In the code worked out by the family before separating, “medicines” meant “jewels.” All of the gems brought from Tsarskoe Selo had been left in Tobolsk, as Nicholas and Alexandra, leaving on hours’ notice, had had no time to hide them on their own persons. Now, having been thoroughly and roughly searched, Alexandra was advising her daughters to take the steps agreed on. Accordingly, for several days the girls and trusted servants sewed jewels into their clothing. Diamonds were sewed inside cloth buttons, rubies were hidden inside bodices and corsets. Tatiana, rather than Olga, supervised this work. She was regarded by prisoners and guards alike as head of the family remaining in Tobolsk.

The Bolsheviks had no intention of leaving the family separated. On May 11, Colonel Kobylinsky, who had held his command for twelve difficult months, was relieved, and on May 17, the soldiers of the Tsarskoe Selo regiments acting as guard on the governor’s house were replaced by Red Guards from Ekaterinburg. Kobylinsky’s place was taken by a bullying young commissar named Rodionov, whose orders were to bring the remainder of the party to Ekaterinburg as soon as the Tsarevich could travel. When Rodionov arrived, he went immediately to see Alexis. Finding the boy in bed, Rodionov stepped out of the room, waited a minute and then reentered, thinking to catch him up, using his malady as a pretext for not moving. Determined not to let anyone deceive him, Rodionov instituted daily roll-call of all the prisoners. He refused to allow the young Grand Duchesses to lock their doors at night, explaining that he had to be able to enter at any time to make certain that they were there. One morning, Anastasia came to the window and seeing Dr. Botkin’s son Gleb in the street below, began to wave. Rodionov dashed into the street and pushed Gleb away, shouting, “Nobody is permitted to look at the windows! Comrades,” he cried to the sentries, “shoot everybody who so much as looks in this direction.” Anastasia continued to smile as Gleb bowed to her and walked away.

By May 19, Alexis was well enough to travel, and at noon the following day, Nagorny carried him aboard the steamer Rus, which had brought them to Tobolsk the previous summer. On the river voyage, Rodionov again refused to permit the girls to lock their doors at night. He insisted, nevertheless, on padlocking Alexis and Nagorny into their room. Both Gilliard and Nagorny protested, “The child is ill and the doctor ought to have access to him at any time.” Nagorny was enraged and bellowed at Rodionov, but the commissar merely stared with slitted eyes at the loyal sailor.

At the Tyumen railway station, Gilliard was separated from Alexis and placed in a fourth-class carriage at the rear of the train. They traveled all day and reached Ekaterinburg in the middle of the night. The following morning, looking out his window through a steady drizzle of rain, the tutor had a last glimpse of the Imperial children:

“Several carriages were drawn up alongside our train and I saw four men go towards the children’s carriage. A few minutes passed and then Nagorny the sailor … passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms; behind him came the Grand Duchesses, loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nicolaievna came last, carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commissars.… A few minutes later the carriages drove off with the children.… How little I suspected that I was never to see them again.”

Once the children and Nagorny had disappeared, the guards divided up the rest of the party. General Tatishchev, Countess Hendrikov and Mlle. Schneider were sent to prison to join Prince Dolgoruky, who had been there since arriving with the Tsar. Kharitonov the cook, Trup the footman, and Leonid Sednev the fourteen-year-old kitchen boy were sent to join the Imperial family and Dr. Botkin in the Ipatiev house. When these people had gone, Rodionov entered the coach and announced, to their amazement that everyone else—Dr. Derevenko, Baroness Buxhoeveden, Sidney Gibbs and Gilliard himself—were free. For ten days, they remained in Ekaterinburg, living in the fourth-class railway carriage, until ordered by the Bolsheviks to leave the city. On July 20, in Tyumen, Gilliard and the others were rescued by the advancing White Army.

At the Ipatiev house, the children’s arrival brought a burst of happiness. Marie slept that night on the floor so that Alexis could have her bed. Thereafter, twelve people were crowded into five rooms. Nicholas, Alexandra and Alexis shared a room, the girls had another, and the rest were divided between the male and female retainers.

In Ekaterinburg, Nicholas and his family were truly prisoners. Their guards were divided into two quite separate groups. Outside the fence and at intervals along the street, the guard consisted of ordinary Red soldiers. Inside, the guards were Bolshevik shock troops made up of former workers from the Zlokazovsky and Syseretsky factories in Ekaterinburg. All were old, hard-core revolutionaries, seasoned by years of privation and bitterness. Night and day, three of these men, armed with revolvers, kept watch outside the five rooms occupied by the Imperial family.

The leader of the inner guard was a tall, thin-faced man who habitually referred to the Tsar as “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker.” Alexander Avadeyev had been a commissar at the Zlokazovsky works, where in the autumn of 1917 he personally had arrested the owner and had become head of the factory Soviet. Avadeyev hated the Tsar and dinned into the heads of his subordinates that Nicholas had forced Russia into war in order to spill the blood of larger numbers of workers. Avadeyev drank heavily and encouraged his men to join him. Together, they pilfered the Imperial family’s baggage, which was stored in a downstairs room. Following Avadeyev’s example, the guards went beltless and unbuttoned. They were deliberately rude. If a member of the family asked, for example, that a window be opened on a sweltering day, the guards either ignored the request or transmitted it to Avadeyev, whose customary response was, “Let them go to hell.” Then, pleased with themselves, they would go downstairs and brag that they had just refused this or that to “Nikolasha” and “the German woman.” The family had no privacy. The guards entered the rooms whenever they liked, swearing, telling dirty jokes or singing lewd ditties. When the girls went to the lavatory, the soldiers followed with loud guffaws to “guard” them. Inside the lavatory, they had scrawled obscene pictures depicting the Empress with Rasputin. Before one of the Grand Duchesses entered, the guard would tell her to be sure to notice.

Except for a walk in the garden every afternoon, family activity was limited to what could be done within the walls of their rooms. Nicholas and Alexandra read, the girls knitted and embroidered, and Alexis played in bed with a model of a ship. The Empress and her daughters often sang hymns to drown out the noise of the soldiers singing revolutionary songs around a piano on the floor below. Birthdays passed and were scarcely noticed: on May 19, Nicholas was fifty, and on May 25, Alexandra became forty-six.

Every morning, the family arose at eight and assembled for morning prayers. Breakfast was black bread and tea. The main meal arrived at two p.m., when soup and cutlets, sent from the local Soviet soup kitchen, were rewarmed and served by Kharitonov, the cook. They dined on a bare table lacking linen and silverware, and while they ate, Avadeyev and his men often came to watch. Sometimes, Avadeyev would reach past the Tsar, brushing Nicholas’s face with his elbow, to fetch himself a piece of meat from the pot. “You’ve had enough, you idle rich,” he would say. “There is enough for you, so I will take some myself.”

Nagorny, whose arguments with Rodionov had already marked him, soon ran into more difficulty. The guards insisted that Alexis was to keep only one pair of boots. Nagorny insisted on two pairs, explaining that if one became wet, the Tsarevich needed a second as he was unable to walk without shoes. Soon afterward, one of the guards noticed a thin gold chain hanging from Alexis’s bed on which the boy had strung his collection of Holy Images. The man began to take the chain for himself, and Nagorny, outraged, stopped him. It was his last service to Alexis. He was immediately arrested. As he stepped out of the house surrounded by Red Guards, Gilliard, Dr. Derevenko and Gibbs happened to be walking past in the street. “Nagorny was going to the … carriage,” wrote Gilliard. “He was just setting foot on the step with his hand on the side of the carriage when, raising his head, he saw us all there standing motionless a few yards from him. For a few seconds he looked fixedly at us, then without a single gesture that might have betrayed us, he took his seat. The carriages were driven off … in the direction of the prison.” Nagorny was put in the same cell with Prince George Lvov, the first Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, who had been sent to Ekaterinburg. Their time as cellmates was brief; four days later, Nagorny was taken out and shot.

With Nagorny gone, it became Nicholas’s task to carry Alexis into the garden. There, the Tsar placed his son in a chair and Alexis sat quietly while the others walked back and forth under the eyes of the guards. In time, the sight of Nicholas and his family began to change the impressions of even these seasoned revolutionaries. “I have still an impression of them that will always remain in my soul,” said Anatoly Yakimov, a member of the guard who was captured by the Whites. “The Tsar was no longer young, his beard was getting grey.… [He wore] a soldier’s shirt with an officer’s belt fastened by a buckle around his waist. The buckle was yellow … the shirt was khaki color, the same color as his trousers and his old worn-out boots. His eyes were kind and he had altogether a kind expression. I got the impression that he was a kind, simple, frank and talkative person. Sometimes I felt that he was going to speak to me. He looked as if he would like to talk to us.

“The Tsaritsa was not a bit like him. She was severe looking and she had the appearance and manners of a haughty, grave woman. Sometimes we used to discuss them amongst ourselves and we decided that she was different and looked exactly like a Tsaritsa. She seemed older than the Tsar. Grey hair was plainly visible on her temples and her face was not the face of a young woman.…

“All my evil thoughts about the Tsar disappeared after I had stayed a certain time amongst the guards. After I had seen them several times I began to feel entirely different towards them; I began to pity them. I pitied them as human beings. I am telling you the entire truth. You may or may not believe me, but I kept on saying to myself, ‘Let them escape … do something to let them escape.’ ”

In the few days before Pierre Gilliard was forced to leave Ekaterinburg, he, along with Gibbs and Baroness Buxhoeveden, paid frequent calls on Thomas H. Preston, the British Consul in Ekaterinburg, urging him to do something to help the Imperial family. Preston was pessimistic.

“We spent long hours discussing ways and means of saving the royal family,” said Preston later. “With 10,000 Red soldiers in the town and with Red spies at every corner and in every house, to have attempted anything in the nature of an escape would have been madness and fraught with the greatest danger to the royal family themselves.… There was never any organized attempt at Ekaterinburg to do so.”

Preston’s statement has been disputed by P. M. Bykov, Chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet, who saw a monarchist behind every tree. “From the first days of the Romanovs’ transfer to Ekaterinburg,” he wrote, “there began to flock in monarchists in great numbers, beginning with half-crazy ladies, countesses and baronesses of every calibre and ending with nuns, clergy, and representatives of foreign powers.” According to Bykov, contact between these persons and the Imperial family was maintained through Dr. Derevenko, who was still allowed to enter the Ipatiev house to treat Alexis. In addition, Bykov said, notes were intercepted inside loaves of bread and bottles of milk, containing messages such as: “The hour of liberation is approaching and the days of the usurpers are numbered,” “The Slav armies are coming nearer and nearer Ekaterinburg.… The time has come for action,” “Your friends sleep no longer.”

Preston knew nothing of attempts to rescue the Tsar, and Bykov found plots seething on every corner. Almost certainly, the truth was that there were people anxious to rescue the Imperial family who were never able to put their intentions into a workable plan. Two letters of reasonable authenticity supporting this view are quoted by General M. K. Dieterichs, Chief-of-Staff of Admiral Kolchak’s White Army, who assisted in the subsequent exhaustive White inquiry into the Tsar’s imprisonment and murder. The first letter was a message from an anonymous White officer to the Tsar:

“With God’s help and your prudence we hope to achieve our object without running any risk. It is necessary to unfasten one of your windows, so that you can open it; please let me know exactly which. If the little Tsarevich cannot walk, matters will be very complicated, but we have weighed this up too, and I do not consider it an insurmountable obstacle. Let us know definitely whether you need two men to carry him and whether any of you could undertake this work. Could not the little one be put to sleep for an hour or two with some drug? Let the doctor decide, only you must know the time exactly beforehand. We will supply all that is necessary. Be sure that we shall undertake nothing unless we are absolutely certain of success beforehand. We give you our solemn pledge of this before God, history and our own conscience.” The letter was signed: “Officer.”

The second letter quoted by Dieterichs is Nicholas’s reply:

“The second window from the corner, looking out onto the square, has been kept open for two days already, even at night. The seventh and eight windows near the main entrance … are likewise kept open. The room is occupied by the commandant and his assistants who constitute the inner guard at the present time. They number thirteen, armed with rifles, revolvers and grenades. No room but ours has keys. The commandant and their assistants can enter our quarters whenever they please. The orderly officer makes the round of the house twice an hour at night and we hear his arms clattering under our windows. One machine gun stands on the balcony and one above it, for an emergency. Opposite our windows on the other side of the street is the [outside] guard in a little house. It consists of fifty men.… In any case, inform us when there is a chance and let us know whether we can take our people [servants].… From every post there is a bell to the commandant and a signal to the guard room and other places. If our people stay behind, can we be certain that nothing will happen to them?”

Along with the letters, Nicholas’s diary clearly indicates that something was up. On June 27, he wrote: “We spent an anxious night, and kept up our spirits, fully dressed. All this was because a few days ago we received two letters, one after the other, in which we were told to get ready to be rescued by some devoted people, but days passed and nothing happened and the waiting and the uncertainty were very painful.”

On July 4, uncertainty was replaced by fear. On that day, Avadeyev, whose drunkenness and thieving had become well known, was suddenly replaced along with his factory-worker guards. Their places were taken by a quietly efficient squad of ten “Letts” of the Bolshevik Cheka, or Secret Police, sent from Cheka headquarters in Ekaterinburg’s Hotel America. In fact, the new men were not Letts, as uneducated Russians tended to call any foreigners who spoke in strange Germanic tongues. At least five of them were Magyars, taken as prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army and hired by the Cheka for use in jobs at which they suspected native Russians might balk. Their leader, Jacob Yurovsky, was a Russian who had been a watchmaker in Tomsk and had become a photographic dealer in Ekaterinburg. When the Bolsheviks seized power, he became an active, efficient member of the secret police. Although Yurovsky’s behavior was entirely correct, he was so chillingly cold that Nicholas immediately found him sinister. “This specimen we like least of all,” he wrote in his diary. His apprehension was thoroughly justified. From the moment of Yurovsky’s appearance, the fate of the Imperial family was sealed. The Cheka squad were not guards, but executioners.

Of everything that was to follow, Sverdlov and Moscow had full knowledge. Avadeyev had been replaced not only because of his pilfering, but because members of the Regional Soviet and the Central Executive Committee had sensed the change in the feelings of his men for the prisoners and realized that he was losing control. On July 4, the reassuring news of his replacement was telegraphed to Sverdlov: “Anxiety unnecessary. Useless to worry.… Avadeyev replaced by Yurovsky. Inside guard changed, replaced by others.” The planning of the prisoners’ fate now moved swiftly forward.

The Ural Soviet had never been in any doubt as to what to do with Nicholas. Soon after his arrival in Ekaterinburg, the Soviet decided unanimously in favor of execution. Unwilling to take this responsibility upon themselves, they sent Goloshchekin to Moscow to learn the attitude of the central government. Goloshchekin was not a local Ekaterinburg man. Born in the Baltic provinces, he was a professional revolutionary who had escaped abroad and attached himself to Lenin. He knew Sverdlov well and while in Moscow stayed with him. Goloshchekin learned on his visit that the leaders had not yet decided what to do with the Tsar; they were still toying with Trotsky’s idea of holding a public trial at the end of July with Trotsky himself as prosecutor.

Before this could be arranged, however, there was a sudden dip in Bolshevik fortunes which, ironically, was to have a disastrous effect on the prisoners’ fate. Civil war and foreign intervention had begun to challenge Boshevism’s feeble grip on Russia. Already American marines and British soldiers had landed at Murmansk. In the Ukraine, Generals Alexeiev, Kornilov and Deniken had organized a White Volunteer Army in cooperation with the fiercely independent Don Cossacks. In Siberia, an independent Czech Legion of forty-five thousand men was advancing westward. They had taken Omsk and were moving rapidly toward Tyumen and Ekaterinburg. The Czechs were former prisoners of war taken from the Austro-Hungarian army, reorganized and equipped by Kerensky to fight on the Russian front for the freedom of their homeland. When the Bolsheviks arrived and made peace, Trotsky had agreed that the stranded Czechs be permitted to leave Russia by way of Siberia, Vladivostock and the Pacific to sail around the world to France and there resume the fight. The Czechs were already in Siberia headed eastward in a string of trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad when the German General Staff vigorously objected to their passage and demanded that the Bolsheviks block and disarm them. The Bolsheviks tried, but the Czechs fought back. Already a formidable force in that chaotic arena, the Czechs were strengthened by anti-Bolshevik Russian officers and soldiers. It was the rapidly mounting threat of this advancing army which forced the Bolsheviks to abandon their thoughts of a show trial of the former Tsar and make other plans for Nicholas and his family.

On July 12, Goloshchekin returned from Moscow and appeared before the Ural Soviet to declare that the party leaders were willing to leave the fate of the Romanovs in their hands. The commander of the Red military forces was asked how long Ekaterinburg could hold out against the Whites. He reported that the Czechs already had outflanked the city from the south, and that Ekaterinburg might fall within three days. Upon hearing this, the Ural Soviet decided to shoot the entire family as soon as possible and to destroy all evidence of the act.

Yurovsky was given this order on the 13th, and at once preparations for the massacre began. For the next three days, Yurovsky and Goloshchekin made trips into the woods around the city, looking for a place to hide the remains. Fourteen miles from Ekaterinburg, near the village of Koptyaki, they discovered a suitable site: an abandoned mine shaft close to four lonely pine trees known to the peasants as the “Four Brothers.” At the same time, Voikov, another member of the Ural Soviet, began buying drums containing 150 gallons of gasoline and 400 pounds of sulfuric acid.

The prisoners quickly sensed the change in mood. Yurovsky was not the drunken bully that Avadeyev had been. He did not rant about “Bloody Nicholas” and appeared to have no strong feelings about his captives. He was a professional; they were simply his next assignment. Two women who came to the house to scrub the floors saw Yurovsky sitting and asking the Tsarevich about his health. Earlier that same day, Yurovsky had been at the “Four Brothers” supervising preparations.

The great change in the family’s attitude these last days was noted by an Ekaterinburg priest who had been permitted once before to enter the House of Special Purpose to read the service. On his first visit, at the end of May, he noticed that although the Empress seemed tired and ill, Nicholas and his daughters were in good spirits. Alexis, although unable to walk, had been carried to the service on a cot. He seemed happy, and when Father Storozhov approached with the crucifix, the boy looked up at him with bright, merry eyes. On July 14, when the priest returned, the change was marked. The family appeared extremely anxious and depressed. When the deacon sang the prayer “At Rest with the Saints,” the family knelt and one of the girls sobbed openly. This time, when the crucifix was brought to Alexis, the priest found him pale and thin, lying in a white nightshirt with a blanket covering him up to the waist. His eyes, looking up, were still clear, but sad and distracted.

On July 16, the day of the murder, Yurovsky ordered the kitchen boy sent away from the house. At four in the afternoon, the Tsar and his four daughters went for their usual walk in the garden. At seven p.m., Yurovsky summoned all the Cheka men into his room and ordered them to collect all the revolvers from the outside guards. With twelve heavy military revolvers lying before him on the table, he said, “Tonight, we will shoot the whole family, everybody. Notify the guards outside not to be alarmed if they hear shots.”

The decision was carefully hidden from the family. That night, at 10:30, they went innocently to bed. At midnight, Yurovsky awakened them, telling them to dress quickly and come downstairs. He explained that the Czechs and the White Army were approaching Ekaterinburg and that the Regional Soviet had decided that they must be moved. Still unsuspecting, the family dressed and Nicholas and Alexis put on their military caps. Nicholas came down the stairs first, carrying Alexis. The sleepy boy had his arms tightly around his father’s neck. The others followed, with Anastasia clutching the spaniel Jimmy. On the ground floor, Yurovsky led them to a small semi-basement room, sixteen by eighteen feet, with a heavy iron grill over the window. Here, he asked them to wait until the automobiles arrived.

Nicholas asked for chairs so that his wife and son could sit while they waited. Yurovsky ordered three chairs brought and Alexandra took one. Nicholas took another, using his arm and shoulder to support Alexis, who lay back across the third chair. Behind their mother stood the four girls and Dr. Botkin, the valet Trupp, the cook Kharitonov and Demidova, the Empress’s parlormaid. Demidova carried two pillows, one of which she placed in the chair behind the Empress’s back. The other pillow she clutched tightly. Inside, sewed deep into the feathers, was a box containing a collection of the Imperial jewels.

When all were assembled, Yurovsky reentered the room, followed by his entire Cheka squad carrying revolvers. He stepped forward and declared quickly, “Your relations have tried to save you. They have failed and we must now shoot you.”

Nicholas, his arm still around Alexis, began to rise from his chair to protect his wife and son. He had just time to say “What …?” before Yurovsky pointed his revolver directly at the Tsar’s head and fired. Nicholas died instantly. At this signal, the entire squad of executioners began to shoot. Alexandra had time only to raise her hand and make the sign of the cross before she too was killed by a single bullet. Olga, Tatiana and Marie, standing behind their mother, were hit and died quickly. Botkin, Kharitonov and Trupp also fell in the hail of bullets. Demidova, the maid, survived the first volley, and rather than reload, the executioners took rifles from the next room and pursued her, stabbing with bayonets. Screaming, running back and forth along the wall like a trapped animal, she tried to fend them off with the cushion. At last she fell, pierced by bayonets more than thirty times. Jimmy the spaniel was killed when his head was crushed by a rifle butt.

The room, filled with the smoke and stench of gunpowder, became suddenly quiet. Blood was running in streams from the bodies on the floor. Then there was a movement and a low groan. Alexis, lying on the floor still in the arms of the Tsar, feebly moved his hand to clutch his father’s coat. Savagely, one of the executioners kicked the Tsarevich in the head with his heavy boot. Yurovsky stepped up and fired two shots into the boy’s ear. Just at that moment, Anastasia, who had only fainted, regained consciousness and screamed. With bayonets and rifle butts, the entire band turned on her. In a moment, she too lay still. It was ended.