فصل 22

Chapter Twenty-two

PRISONERS OF THE URAL REGIONAL SOVIET

There was still snow on the ground in Ekaterinburg that morning in late May when the children arrived at the Ipatiev House from Tobolsk. Nicholas and Alexandra had only had a few hours’ warning of their arrival and despite their joy at being reunited with them, had only to look at their faces to know that ‘the poor things had had to endure a great deal of moral anguish during their three-day journey’.1

After four weeks of painful and uncertain separation the four Romanov sisters were intensely happy to be together again. Their campbeds were yet to be sent on from Tobolsk, but they happily slept together on the floor in their new room on an accumulation of cloaks and cushions until the beds arrived.2 But the reunion was soon marred when, when, much to his parents’ intense frustration, Alexey managed to slip and bang his knee. Nicholas and Alexandra put him to bed in their room, where he lay for several days in agony; it was 5 June before he was able to join the others outside in the garden.

Two huge wooden palisades surrounded the Ipatiev House, ominously designated ‘the house of special purpose’ by their Bolshevik captors. They were so high that, from inside the house, the Romanovs could not even see the tops of the trees.3 What little was visible of the blue sky above had been obliterated in mid-May when the windows in all the family’s rooms were painted with whitewash, creating what seemed like a blanket of fog outside.4

It was dreadfully cramped and stuffy inside the first-floor rooms that served as the Romanovs’ new accommodation. For this was in no way a home – but a prison – and it was abundantly clear to everyone that they would have to endure a rigorous regime here quite different from those at Tobolsk or the Alexander Palace.5 There were armed guards everywhere: on the street, inside and outside the palisades surrounding the house, on the roof, in the garden. Guards also manned machine-gun nests in the basement, the mansard, the garden and even the belfry of the Voznesensky Sobor across the road. An announcement in the Uralskaya zhizn by Bolshevik War Commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, in overall charge of the family’s incarceration in the city, had made the hardening of the official attitude towards the former imperial family all too plain:

All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest attempt at counterrevolutionary action in the town will result in the summary execution of the hostages.6

The days had been monotonous enough in Tobolsk but at Ekaterinburg the pace of life was slowed to an intolerable tedium. No papers were delivered and no letters. One solitary parcel, of a few eggs, coffee and chocolate, had been received from Grand Duchess Ella on 16 May; but she too was now a prisoner, at Alapaevsk 95 miles (153 km) away to the north.7 With no letters allowed in or out the girls were deprived of the one thing that had kept them going all this time – contact with their friends. Visitors, of course, were forbidden. The imperial family was cast adrift; they had ‘no news of anybody’, as Alexandra noted in her diary.8

Outdoor recreation at Ekaterinburg was restricted to a mournful little garden with a few stubby trees that was even smaller than the one at Tobolsk. But as always Nicholas and the girls made the most of every opportunity to get outside during their two brief daily exercise periods, and the girls sometimes swung in a couple of hammocks put up between the trees for them by the guards. Alexey, when he was well enough, was carried down, often by Maria, and sat in their mother’s wheelchair. But during recreation periods one of the sisters always remained indoors with Mama, who with the temperature rising into the mid 20s C (high 70s F) rarely ventured out. Yet even these brief snatches of summer were enough, as Nicholas noted, for them to catch the wonderful scent of flowers ‘from all the gardens in the town’ that was heavy on the air, even if they could not see them beyond the palisade.9 The unsealing of one small window in their rooms on 10 June to allow in a refreshing breeze was a major concession in the otherwise dreary regularity of their highly constrained lives. It was punctuated by regular acts of humiliation from the guards, such as searches of their belongings, confiscation of their money and attempts to remove even Alexandra’s and the girls’ gold bracelets from their wrists. Tatiana and Maria’s request that their confiscated cameras be returned to them so that they could at least amuse themselves with photography was also refused.10

The month of June brought several family birthdays beginning with Alexandra’s 46th on the 6th; it passed unnoticed, Nicholas in bed with painful haemorrhoids and Alexey also indoors for most of the day, despite the beautiful weather.11 Tatiana’s 21st followed on 11 June but was a very modest day for such an auspicious stage in her life, the highlight being the surprise treat of fruit compote at lunch prepared by Kharitonov. There were of course no presents; Tatiana spent the day reading to her mother: extracts from Alex-andra’s favourite book, the Complete Yearly Cycle of Brief Homilies for Each Day of the Year by an Orthodox priest, Grigory Dyachenko.12 Later she played cards with Alexey and read to him and before bed enjoyed the prosaic novelty of helping her sisters wash everyone’s pocket-handkerchiefs.13 Poor Anna Demidova had been struggling single-handedly with all the family’s personal washing (the bed linen still being sent out to a laundry) and the sisters had happily volunteered to help, as they did with darning everyone’s worn-out socks, stockings and underwear.14

Anastasia’s seventeenth birthday – 18 June – was a very hot day when again there were no celebrations and the girls spent the time learning another new practical skill – how to knead, roll and bake bread with Kharitonov.15 Soon they were helping him more and more in the kitchen in an effort to dissipate their crushing sense of boredom. But it was unbearably airless indoors and even Alexandra preferred to be outside when her health allowed. Evenings now were one interminable game of bezique after another and rereading the few books left to them. Tatiana seemed always to be doing the lion’s share of looking after her mother and Alexey; her nursing skills were also called on when Dr Botkin suffered a severe attack of kidney pain and she gave him an injection from the family’s precious supply of morphine.16 Olga was now terribly thin and pale, and at Ekaterinburg had become ever more withdrawn and morose. One of the guards, Alexey Kabanov, remembered her visible unhappiness, how she hardly talked and was ‘uncommunicative with the other members of her family apart from her father’ – with whom she always walked arm in arm during recreation in the garden.17 But she did not spend as much time there as her three other sisters, who all seemed to him far more cheerful and animated, often breaking into folk songs when they walked round with the dogs. Maria, so strong and stoical, seemed still the most rounded and unaffected, ‘the incarnation of “modesty elevated by suffering”’, as one guard recalled, remembering a poem by Tyutchev.18 At first – much as at Tobolsk – the younger sisters had been keen to engage with their captors, asked them about their lives and their families and showed them their photograph albums. They were dreadfully bored, they told them: ‘We were so much happier in Tobolsk.’19 But the arrival of a new and exacting commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, put paid to any more such fraternization.

The weather was positively ‘tropical’ according to Nicholas on Maria’s 19th birthday on 27 June.20 Four days previously the family had been comforted by ‘the great blessing of a real Obednitsa and vespers’ – when a priest and deacon had been allowed in to conduct the first service for the family in three months.21 But they were two of only a handful of people to see them in these new and very straitened circumstances. Those on the outside trying to look in could only guess at what Russia’s former imperial family was having to endure at the hands of its intimidating Bolshevik captors.

During the final eight weeks of the Romanov family’s captivity many people – the curious, the covert, the foolhardy – and even royal relatives such as the intrepid Princess Helena – made their way up Voznesensky Prospekt to the Ipatiev House, to try and catch a glimpse of them. But none was admitted, bar Dr Derevenko, who was staying in town and had been allowed in to treat Alexey and put his swollen knee in plaster.

Local children were rather more adventurous. They often came near and tried to peep through the palisades surrounding the house. One sunny day soon after the family’s arrival, nine-year-old Anatole Portnoff came out of the Voznesensky Sobor opposite after morning service and ran across the road to take a look. He found a gap in the paling and peeped through and there, standing directly in front of him, so he later claimed, he saw Tsar Nicholas ‘taking a walk about the grounds’. But a sentry soon came rushing up, ‘unceremoniously grabbed him by his coat and told him to be on his way’.22

Vladimir and Dimitri Storozhev, sons of a priest at the Ekaterininsky Sobor, were more persistent, for their home was next door to the Ipatiev House and they managed to communicate ‘by gestures and talking over the fence with the girls of the imperial family’.23 Eleven-year-old Vladimir loved flying his kite from their roof, from which vantage point he could often ‘see the tsar’s children playing in Upatiev’s [sic] yard, and the tsar himself would come out once a day and split wood for an hour or so’.24 But the Storozhev family was fearful of the intimidating Red Guards who watched over the Romanovs and who often went out summarily searching nearby houses and arresting people at will. Their father had made the family all sleep in one room, by the door, ‘so if someone comes in and starts shooting, we will all be together’.25

It was Father Ivan Storozhev who was one of the last people from the outside to see the imperial family alive, at a service he conducted in the house at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 14 July. Guards from the Ipatiev House had banged on his door early that morning. Father Storozhev thought they had come for him, but no, they wanted him to go next door to conduct a service for the family. ‘Just stick strictly to what the service is all about’, they warned. ‘We don’t believe in God now, but we remember what the service, the funeral service, is all about. So, nothing but the service. Don’t try to communicate or anything or else we’ll shoot.’26

Having climbed the stairs past young guards bristling with weapons, Storozhev found the family gathered in their sitting room, a table for the service specially prepared by Alexandra featuring their favourite icon of the Most Holy Mother of God. The girls were simply dressed in black skirts and white blouses; their hair, he noticed, had grown quite a lot since his previous visit on 2 June, and was now down to their shoulders.

During the service, the whole family had seemed to Storozhev to be greatly oppressed in spirit – there was a terrible weariness about them, quite markedly different from his previous visit, when they had all been animated and had prayed fervently.27 He came away shaken to the core by what he had seen. The Romanovs had, uncharacteristically, all fallen to their knees when his deacon, Buimirov, had sung rather than recited ‘At Rest with the Saints’ – the Russian Orthodox prayer for the departed.* It seemed to give them great spiritual comfort, he noted, though for once they had not joined in the responses to the liturgy, something they would normally have done.28 At the end of the service they had all come forward to kiss the cross and Nicholas and Alexandra had taken the sacrament. Covertly, as Storozhev passed them to leave, the girls softly whispered a thank-you. ‘I knew, from the way they conducted themselves,’ Father Storozhev later recalled, ‘that something fearful and menacing was almost upon the Imperial Family.’29

The following morning the family appeared to have regained their equilibrium when four women, sent by the officious-sounding Union of Professional Housemaids, came to wash the floors. Perhaps the women’s presence alone – as ordinary people from the world outside – brightened their mood. The Romanovs seemed relaxed, gathered together in the sitting room, and smiled when the women entered. They were strictly forbidden to speak to them, but by an exchange of looks and smiles it was clear that the four sisters were only too happy to help the women move the beds in their room; they would have helped them wash the floors too if they could. One of the women, Evdokiya Semenova, remembered their sweet, friendly manner and how ‘every gentle look was a gift’.30 Although Yurovsky had ordered that the door to their room be kept open the girls managed to chat, sotto voce, with the women as they worked, and when his back was turned, Anastasia with typical irreverence cocked a snook at him. They told the women how much they missed having any physical work, although Olga was suffering with her health and could not do much. But Maria in particular was as vigorous as ever. ‘We would do the most arduous work with the greatest pleasure; washing dishes is not enough for us’, they said.31 The women were greatly moved by the girls’ quiet acceptance of their situation and told them that they hoped they would not have to endure such suffering for much longer. They thanked the women. Yes, they still had hope, they said; there was still a sparkle in their kind eyes.

After the women left at lunchtime the family settled back into their quiet routine, reading, playing cards, walking the same small, dusty circuit in the garden. But in the early hours of the morning of Wednesday 17 July, they were unexpectedly awoken by their captors and ordered to dress. Told that they were being moved downstairs for their safety from unrest and artillery fire in the city, they complied without question. In an orderly line Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children, Dr Botkin and their three loyal servants Demidova, Trupp and Kharitonov, walked quietly down the wooden stairs from their apartments, across the courtyard and into a dingy basement room. As they went, there were ‘no tears, no sobs and no questions’.32

Later that morning, young Vladimir Storozhev recalled, ‘I was on the roof flying my kite, when Father called me down and told me they had been shot. It was July seventeenth, I remember, and very hot.’33

Many weeks later, on 16 August, one of the last affectionate postcards, sent during the first week of Lent by Olga to a friend in Kiev, like so many others written by the four sisters that were never delivered, finally arrived back in Petrograd bearing an official stamp: ‘Returned due to military circumstances.’34