* The plotters remained intimate with the imperial family. Dmitri was in close contact with the tsar and tsarina, who complained about his visits to Misha’s wife Natasha, with whom the young grand duke was in love. As recently as August, Yusupov and his wife Irina had gone for tea with Alexandra, who remarked how ‘nice and natural’ they were, ‘she very brown and he very thin’.
* He was accompanied by the doddery but devoted court minister Count Frederiks, now seventy-nine, the count’s son-in-law the sleek palace commandant General Vladimir Voeikov, the marshal of the court Prince Vasily ‘Valya’ Dolgoruky (son-in-law of the grand marshal of the court Benckendorff and son of the one before him) and of course the African-American Jim Hercules.
* This was compounded by two minor acts of legerdemain chicanery: Nicholas signed the appointments of Lvov as prime minister and Nikolasha as commander-in-chief, both backdated to 2 p.m.
SCENE 7
Afterlife
CAST
NICHOLAS II, ex-emperor, ‘Nicky’
Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Alix of Hesse), ex-empress, ‘Alix’, ‘Sunny’
Olga, their eldest daughter Tatiana, their second daughter
Maria, their third daughter
Anastasia, their youngest daughter
Alexei, their son, ‘Tiny’, ‘Baby’
THE ROMANOVS
Maria Fyodorovna, dowager empress, widow of Alexander III, ‘Minny’
MICHAEL II, ex-emperor, ‘Misha’, ‘Floppy’, married Countess Brassova
Miechen, widow of Uncle Vladimir
Ella, widow of Uncle Sergei, sister of the tsarina, abbess
Uncle Paul, ‘Pitz’, married Princess Paley
Nikolai Nikolaievich, ‘Nikolasha the Terrible’, married Stana of Montenegro
Peter Nikolaievich, his brother, married Militsa of Montenegro,
Nikolai Mikhailovich, ‘Bimbo’
Alexander Mikhailovich, his brother, ‘Sandro’, married the tsar’s sister Xenia
Sergei Mikhailovich, their brother, lover of Little K, formerly inspector-general of artillery
COURTIERS, ministers etc.
Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, marshal of the court, ‘Valya’
Count Ilya Tatishchev, the tsar’s adjutant-general
Anna Vyrubova (née Taneeva), Alexandra’s friend, ‘Lovesick Creature’, ‘Cow’
Countess Elizabeth Kurakina-Naryshkina, mistress of the robes, ‘Zizi’
Anatoly Mordvinov, aide-de-camp to Nicholas II
General Mikhail Alexeev, chief of staff
Prince Georgi Lvov, prime minister
Alexander Kerensky, justice minister then prime minister
REVOLUTIONARIES
Filipp Goloshchekin, military commissar of the Ural Soviet Executive Committee
Vasily Yakovlev, commissar appointed to escort the imperial family
Yakov Yurovsky, member of the Urals Soviet, murderer of the imperial family
Grigory Nikulin, Yurovsky’s deputy, murderer of the imperial family
Peter Ermakov, Chekist, murderer of the imperial family
Peter Voikov, member of Urals Soviet, commissar for supplies, ‘Intellectual’
On 3 March 1917, at Mogilev station, General Alexeev told Nicholas that the dynasty had ended. The ex-tsar was appalled that Misha’s manifesto had contained ‘something about elections. God knows who advised him to sign something so vile.’ He summoned his mother but she arrived with Sandro, whose presence he found ‘unendurable’.
‘Poor Nicky,’ wrote Minny, ‘splendidly calm, collected and magnificent in this awful humiliating position. It was as if I had been hit on the head!’ After dinner, ‘Poor Nicky opened his poor bleeding heart and we wept together.’
When Sandro joined them, he found Minny ‘sobbing aloud’ while Nicky ‘stood motionless looking at his feet and of course smoking’.
Strolling in awkward silence with Mordvinov, the ADC tried to console him with the thought that this was the ‘will of the people’ so let them see if they could manage better.
‘A fine thing the will of the people!’ Nicholas cried ‘suddenly with pain and walked ahead to hide his anguish’. Then he told Mordvinov he would like to retire to Crimea ‘as a private person’ or even to ‘Kostroma, our former fiefdom’ – where it had all started with Michael Romanov.
‘Your Majesty,’ replied Mordvinov, ‘go abroad as fast as possible.’
‘No, never,’ he said. ‘I’d never leave Russia. I love her too much.’
On 7 March, the Provisional Government ordered Nicholas placed under guard and despatched to Tsarskoe so the next morning at 10.30, he addressed his staff in the hall at Stavka. Speaking in ‘curt, soldierly sentences, his modesty made a tremendous impression,’ wrote Sandro. Faced with his ‘heartfelt emotion, two or three fainted, many wept’, recalled a dazed Mordvinov. ‘I don’t remember what he said, I only heard the sound of his voice and the emperor didn’t finish, but upset he left the room and I accompanied him.’ At the Governor’s House, amid ‘total chaos of boxes and rolled-up carpets, I climbed without thinking to the top of the stairs and saw, through the open door of the study . . . the tsar was alone, near the desk, slowly and quietly collecting his things . . .’
At the station, he said goodbye to his mother, covering her face with kisses and then climbed into the train. ‘One of the most awful days in my life,’ wrote Minny, ‘separated from my beloved Nicky!’ At 5 p.m. the train steamed away. Nicky stood in the window smiling with ‘an expression of infinite sadness’ as Minny made the sign of the Cross and prayed, ‘May God hold his hands over him.’ She never saw him again.*
‘My heart was nearly breaking,’ wrote Nicky.1
As Nicky travelled to Tsarskoe, Milyukov, the foreign minister, suggested to the British ambassador Buchanan that ‘the king and British government should offer His Imperial Majesty asylum in this country’, noted George V’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, at Buckingham Palace. The Provisional Government approved ‘the necessity of transporting . . . members of the former imperial family . . . beyond the frontiers of the Russian state.’
Britain was the obvious destination. George V had been aghast at the abdication. ‘I fear Alicky is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak. I am in despair,’ he wrote in his diary on 2 March, sending a telegram to the ex-tsar: ‘My thoughts are constantly with you and I shall always remain your true and devoted friend.’ When Stamfordham reported the plan to David Lloyd George, the prime minister, and his deputy Andrew Bonar Law, ‘It was generally agreed that the proposal . . . could not be refused.’ Next day a general arrived at Tsarskoe with an order of arrest for Nicky and Alix, but he added that they would be sent to Murmansk where a British battleship would take them into exile. Two days later, on 11 March, George V was telling the ex-tsar’s long-exiled cousin Mikhail Mikhailovich about ‘poor Nicky coming to England’. The royal family had already decided that the Romanovs, who would disembark at Scapa Flow, would go directly to Balmoral, the Scottish palace which was empty in winter.
At Tsarskoe, the children still did not know what had happened. Alix summoned Alexei’s Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard. ‘The tsar is coming back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Alexei must be told everything. Will you do it? I’m telling the girls myself.’ The girls sobbed. ‘Mama cried terribly,’ said Tatiana. ‘I cried too but not more than I could help, for Mama’s sake.’
Gilliard told Alexei: ‘Your father doesn’t want to be commander-in-chief any more.’
Alexei was silent.
‘You know your father doesn’t want to be tsar any more.’
‘What!’ said the boy in astonishment. ‘Why?’
‘He’s very tired and has had a lot of trouble.’
‘But won’t Papa be tsar again afterwards?’
Gilliard explained that Misha had abdicated.
‘But who’s going to be tsar then?’
‘Perhaps nobody.’
Gilliard was struck by Alexei’s mode
sty: ‘not a word about himself’, but he was ‘very red and agitated’.
‘But if there isn’t a tsar,’ he asked, ‘who’s going to rule Russia?’ No one knew the answer.
On 9 March, the ex-tsar arrived home.* ‘My God what a difference,’ wrote Colonel Nicholas Romanov, as the guards now called him. ‘I went upstairs and saw darling Alix and the dear children.’ Nicky set off for a walk harassed by six soldiers. ‘After tea,’ he wrote, ‘I unpacked my things.’2
The next day in Tsarskoe Selo park, soldiers dug up and mutilated the body of Rasputin. ‘The face was totally black,’ a witness reported, ‘lumps of frozen earth were embedded in the dark long beard and hair.’ The soldiers took measurements of Rasputin’s penis with a brick and almost certainly cut it off as a trophy. The body was displayed in Tsarskoe town hall.†
Nicky walked and worked in the gardens, the children resumed lessons and now their parents started to tutor them too. Alexandra taught religion and German, Nicky taught history. Nicky and Alexei, still wearing their military uniforms, broke the ice in front of the palace. Groups of soldiers turned up and demanded to look at Alexei. Derevenko, the burly sailor-bodyguard who had for so long carried Alexei during his illnesses, now ‘insolently bawled at the boy’ and made him do menial tasks. Yet his other sailor Nagorny remained touchingly loyal. Nicky read Sherlock Holmes stories aloud in the evenings. Their isolation seemed almost familiar to the ex-tsar: ‘for have I not been a prisoner all my life?’ he asked Benckendorff.
They expected to be leaving soon – for England or Crimea – but on 9 March the Soviet had vetoed the plan to send them abroad. Days later, George V had ‘been thinking much about the government’s proposal’, wrote Lord Stamfordham to Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary. ‘The king has a strong personal friendship for the emperor and would be glad to do anything to help him . . . But His Majesty cannot help doubting, not only on account of the dangers of the voyage, but on general grounds of expediency, whether it is advisable that the imperial family take up residence in this country’. George’s weasel-words did not impress Lloyd George and Balfour. They replied that they did ‘not think unless the position changes that it is now possible to withdraw the invitation and they therefore trust the king will consent to adhere to the original invitation’. But ‘Every day, the king is becoming more concerned,’ receiving as he was many letters, not least from working men, hostile to the proposal. ‘As you know,’ Stamfordham told Balfour, ‘from the first the king has thought the presence of the imperial family (especially the empress) would . . . be awkward for our Royal Family’, and he asked the government to ‘make some other plan’. Later that day, the king requested Balfour to tell the Russians ‘we must be allowed to withdraw’. Four days later, ‘The prime minister admitted that evidently the matter was more serious than he was aware.’
George V has been rightly blamed for this, but his pusillanimity made little difference. The children’s measles had prevented a quick departure; that window was very small. Kerensky, the sole socialist in the government, boasted that the ex-tsar ‘is in my hands’, but he became their protector. On 21 March, he arrived at Tsarskoe, met the tsar and arrested Anna Vyrubova, whom the press had vilified as Rasputin’s mistress. As the summer came, the family planted vegetables and sunbathed. After their measles, the girls’ hair fell out. In July, they shaved their heads and Alexei shaved his in solidarity. They went into the park wearing bandannas and then suddenly removed them and, laughing, took photographs.3
On 10 July, Kerensky, now prime minister, told Nicky that the family would soon be moved away from the ‘uneasy capital’, ironically to protect them. ‘The Bolsheviks are after me,’ Kerensky explained, ‘and then will be after you.’ Nicky realized that ‘this person plays a positive role. The more power he has, the better things will be.’ Kerensky decided on Tobolsk, in Siberia. They packed, hiding a treasure-trove of jewellery in trunks full of letters and diaries and, to protect them, that Romanov talisman, the icon the Fyodorov Mother of God.
On 1 August, Kerensky supervised their departure from the Alexander Palace, bringing Nicky’s brother Misha to say goodbye. Kerensky sat in the corner, put his hands over his ears and said, ‘Talk!’, but the brothers were reticent. ‘Pleasant to meet,’ wrote Nicky, ‘but awkward to talk in front of strangers.’ They were ‘so moved and embarrassed’, noted Benckendorff, ‘they found scarcely anything to say. The grand duke went out in tears.’ Meanwhile hostile crowds delayed their departure. The girls wept; Alexei, now thirteen, perched on a box holding his spaniel Joy; Nicky paced, smoking. ‘They had to wait until six in the morning sitting on their suitcases,’ wrote Zizi Naryshkina. ‘What a trial and humiliation. And they take it with the determination and meekness of saints.’
Kerensky watched Alexandra sobbing in the corner and for the first time saw her ‘simply as a mother, anxious and weeping’. But she wrote to Anna, who had just been released from prison, that the road to Tobolsk was eased by ‘our Friend’ who ‘calls us there’. The ex-empress was ‘glad to be going to the reaches of their Friend’, wrote Naryshkina. ‘Nothing has changed in her mentality.’
At 5.15 a.m., they left.* When they were safely in the train, emblazoned ‘Red Cross Mission’, Kerensky shouted, ‘They can go!’4
After five days’ train ride across the Urals, the family and thirty-nine retainers embarked on a steamer at Tyumen, passing Rasputin’s house at Pokrovskoe. ‘The family gathered on deck to observe the starets’s house.’ The girls still wore lockets with Rasputin’s picture. Arriving at Tobolsk the next evening, they stayed on board while the governor’s two-storey mansion was prepared. When they moved into the renamed Freedom House, the family lived on the first floor, with a corner bedroom shared by the girls, a bedroom, study, salon and bathroom for the parents, and a small room shared by Alexei and Nagorny.
Time passed there with painful slowness. Nicky paced the yard (‘infuriating not to be allowed to walk in the woods in such weather’, he wrote on 22 August, adding that ‘walks in the garden are becoming increasingly tedious’). ‘Are they really afraid that I might run off?’ Nicky, who craved exercise, asked the commissar in charge. ‘I’ll never leave my family.’ They played endless games of bezique and dominoes, and the tutors Gilliard and Gibbes continued their lessons.
In Petrograd, Kerensky ruled from Alexander II’s apartment in the Winter Palace but, undermined by military defeat and political paralysis, his power was leeching away.
Nicky corresponded with his mother and sisters in Crimea. ‘I’m chopping a lot of wood,’ he told his mother. ‘The food here is excellent and plenty of it, so that we’ve all settled down well in Tobolsk and have put on 8–10 pounds.’ Alexandra and Anna started to exchange packages: Anna sent clothes and Alexandra sent food since there was near-famine in Petrograd and plenty in Siberia.
In Petrograd, on 25 October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power. ‘A second revolution,’ wrote Alexandra three days later. As the Germans advanced into Russia, Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, immediately decided to withdraw from the war which outraged Nicky: ‘how could these Bolshevik scoundrels have the effrontery to carry out their hidden dream of proposing peace to the enemy?’ This confirmed his belief in an international Hebraic conspiracy. ‘I started to read aloud Nilus’s book on the Anti-Christ to which have been added the Protocols of the Jews and Masons (Protocols of the Elders of Zion) – very timely reading.’ Nicholas was still blaming the evil Jews for his and Russia’s fall: he was reading this venomous anti-semitic forgery to the family. When he wrote to his sister Xenia on 5 November, he compiled a list of revolutionaries with their real Jewish names, claiming that Lenin was really a Tsederblium, Trotsky a Bronshtein. While he was correct about Trotsky, Lenin was born Ulyanov. ‘It’s worse and more shameful’, thought Nicholas, ‘than the Time of Troubles.’5
‘We haven’t had any significant changes in our life so far,’ Anastasia wrote to a friend. ‘I am terribly sorry my letters turned out to be so stupid and borin
g, but nothing interesting happens here.’ The girls were bored. ‘We often sit at the windows looking at the people passing,’ Anastasia wrote to Anna, ‘and this gives us distraction.’ Gibbes suggested they perform plays. ‘Excellent distraction,’ Alexandra told Anna. ‘God is very near us, we are often amazed we can endure events and separations that might once have killed us.’ She praised Nicholas: ‘He is simply marvellous. Such meekness while all the time suffering intensely for his country. A real marvel.’
When Anna sent some dresses and perfume, the scent took the family back to happy days. ‘Your perfume quite overcame us,’ wrote Alix. ‘I went the round of our teatable and we all saw you clearly before us.’
‘My darling . . . your perfume reminds us so much of you,’ Alexei told Anna while Alexandra reflected: ‘All the past is a dream. One keeps only tears and grateful memories. One by one all earthly things slip away.’
The girls started to become closer to their guards. At Christmas, they decorated one tree for the family and another for the soldiers. ‘The Grand Duchesses with that simplicity that was their charm, loved to talk to these men,’ wrote Gilliard, ‘they questioned them about their families, villages, battles in which they’d taken part.’
Tatiana organized the house, Olga read quietly, while ‘kind-hearted, cheerful and friendly’ Maria was the favourite of the guards. Anastasia’s ‘gay and boisterous temperament . . . could dispel anyone’s gloom’. She starred as the male lead Mister Chugwater in the English farce Packing Up by Harry Grattan. When her petticoats flew up to reveal her legs in Nicky’s Jaeger longjohns, ‘everyone collapsed in uncontrollable laughter’, noted Gibbes, even Alexandra. ‘The last heartily unrestrained laughter the empress ever enjoyed.’6