Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (12 page)

For it was in captivity that his great powers of self-control and restraint – till then seen as negative characteristics in a monarch – ironically became his strengths during the increasingly uncertain days of July. They impressed even the guards at the Ipatiev House, one of whom observed that the Tsar’s self-mastery was almost ‘supernatural’. The quiet inner force of the man was not like that of other mortals; it belied his appearance and the outward manner he had of an ordinary little colonel of the guards. Other more intriguing rumours had reached the ears of British ambassador Sir George Buchanan in Petrograd, from both Prince Felix Yusupov and also Grand Duke Nikolay: that Nicholas’s almost childlike indifference to the loss of his throne had been the result of his smoking narcotics – probably a blend of henbane and hashish –
administered by a Tibetan doctor, P. A. Badmaev, recommended by Rasputin to counter stress and insomnia. Some courtiers in the know about this claimed that the habit had ‘seriously affected his mental powers’ and had produced in the Tsar ‘a state of callousness and complete insensibility to anything that befell him’. This seems unlikely, but the drug may well have had a sufficiently anaesthetic effect for Nicholas to endure the abdication crisis with such uncanny calm. Now, however, there were no palliatives left. They might take away his cigarettes, but in the end Nicholas had one last refuge, the most powerful narcotic of all – prayer.

As for his diary, he had nothing useful left to say in it, despite writing it being a lifelong habit. His thoughts and feelings were becoming increasingly internalised as the ‘intolerable boredom’ of having no physical work became an ever greater strain. Over the years his wife’s catalogue of ailments had become, as he had admitted to his cousin Konstantin, tiresome and depressing; it had taken all his superhuman tolerance and tact to remain loving and supportive but it was wearing him down and forcing him further in on himself. Commandant Avdeev at the Ipatiev House was of the opinion that Nicholas ‘feared his wife more than the devil himself’. The Tsaritsa openly berated him in English in front of people, both inside the house and outdoors, taking him to task for being friendly and talkative with the guards whilst she persisted with her ingrained autocratic manner. But it was all water off a duck’s back; Nicholas had for so long now learned how to inhabit his own profound loneliness and had developed such a blankness of mind that during these final July days he was merely riding the tide towards his inexorable fate. For the Orthodox faithful, such calmness is perceived as a mark of the Tsar’s Christlike resignation and meekness; for the more cynical Bolsheviks it seemed a kind of ‘idiotic indifference’ that ran counter to his natural intelligence. Such behaviour was incomprehensible in the ruthless logic of his captors. Each day now inside the Ipatiev House came and went for Nicholas in a state of self-induced mental anaesthesia; hiding his thoughts behind the books he read and re-read all morning and pacing relentlessly up and down the garden twice a day. Alone with his daughters on the frequent occasions that Alexandra did not go out into the garden, he was able to occasionally relax, to laugh with them and sit on the swing. But the nights were now increasingly welcome, ‘the best part of the day’, a time briefly to forget, as he himself had observed in Tobolsk in January.

Something different was now in the air at the Ipatiev House; even Nicholas had, since June, noticed a change in the guards and their reluctance to talk when the family were outside. He had taken this as an
affront, uncomprehending of the true significance of this distancing. But that Friday, as Nicholas worried about the safety of his possessions, the net around the Romanovs, and the threat to his very existence, was tightening.

For in Moscow, Lenin was now facing a major crisis, with armed insurrection brewing among the Bolsheviks’ political rivals the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (several of whose leaders had taken important roles in the provisional government and who had broken away from the party in December 1917). At the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets which had opened the previous day as a showcase for Lenin’s new Bolshevik government at a Bolshoy Theatre packed with 1,164 delegates, there had been a violent quarrel between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs (as they were known) about the peace treaty with Germany. Workers and soviet deputies had crowded the gangways and stood on their seats amidst the chandeliers, plush and gilding of the Bolshoy’s opulent Imperial interior, gesticulating at the Grand Duke’s box occupied by Ambassador Mirbach and other representatives of the German government and hurling abusive shouts of ‘Down with the Germans’ and ‘Down with Mirbach’. This fine building, that had once echoed to the voice of the great bass singer Chaliapin singing
Boris Godunov
and where the newly nationalised Imperial Ballet provided a final dying vestige of Imperial culture, now resounded with angry shouts of condemnation of the Bolsheviks for their perceived sell-out of Russia to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk.

The most vociferous critic that afternoon was the 32-year-old Left SR Mariya Spiridonova, now back in Russia after 11 years of exile in one of the harshest prisons in Siberia for murdering a brutal tsarist official. Small, sober-faced, dressed in black with a stiff puritanical white collar, she was the archetypal fanatical female revolutionary, her big grey eyes full of anger behind her pince-nez as she took to the stage. From here she virulently condemned Lenin and the new regime for using the ‘toiling peasantry’ to their own ends and allowing the martyred Ukraine to be occupied and despoiled by the Germans. It made her ‘burn with shame’ that the Bolsheviks, with whom she had fought ‘behind the same barricade’, had now betrayed the Revolution. The auditorium was quickly in uproar; Chairman Sverdlov’s attempts at tinkling the bell on his table to call the meeting to order failed dismally.

Holed up in the backwater of Vologda – a railway junction halfway between Moscow and the northern port of Murmansk, where the foreign diplomatic corps had been evacuated to safety from Petrograd after the Revolution – US ambassador to Russia Richard Francis seized news of the conflict at the Congress of Soviets as a welcome justification for his
continuing arguments to President Wilson for American intervention in a Russia that he felt was about to collapse in turmoil. Germany he sensed was ready to step in for the kill, and this must be prevented at all costs.

That morning, the calendar on the wall in Nicholas and Alexandra’s bedroom had been changed, with its usual regularity. The ‘amazing’ aroma of Ekaterinburg’s summer gardens was one of the few lingering pleasures left to the Tsar during his now increasingly brief periods of recreation, an evocative memory perhaps of hot summers at his palace in Livadia in the Crimea. The smell of blossom, the summer sun overhead and the warmth on his face, exercise in the outdoors: these were the things he most valued, next to his family. Everything else had long since been exorcised from his shuttered mind. But now even the consolations of the weather were not enough. After Friday 5 July, time in the Ipatiev House stood still. The calendar would not be changed again.

SATURDAY 6 JULY 1918

I
f Queen Victoria had had her way, her granddaughter Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse and by Rhine would one day have been Queen of England and Empress of India. Alix (as she was known in the family, rather than by her official name, Alexandra) was not a particularly eminent candidate, coming as she did from a relatively minor German principality. Nevertheless, the Queen, in her insatiable drive to keep control of the dynastic marriages of her vast extended family, earmarked her as a suitable bride for one or other of her two grandsons, Eddy or George, the next two in line to the British throne after their father the Prince of Wales.

But the wilful Alix would have none of it. Much to the Queen’s disgust, she turned down the proposal of Edward, Duke of Clarence, who seemed genuinely infatuated with her. Acknowledging her granddaughter’s strength of character – not without much surprise and a little offence – the Queen observed that ‘she refuses the greatest position there is’. George, the next in line, never even made it into the frame, for Alix by then had fallen for the handsome young Russian Tsarevich Nicholas. The unimaginative George settled instead for a rather poor second best after Eddy died unexpectedly in 1892. He married his dead brother’s fiancée, Princess May of Teck, yet another minor German princess.

And now, today, Saturday 6 July, King George and Queen Mary (her official name) were celebrating 25 years of what had turned out to be a surprisingly successful marriage. That morning, after a carriage procession from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral and a service of thanksgiving, the royal couple had gone on to London’s Guildhall for their silver wedding celebrations, where they had been the recipients of a ‘humble address’ by parliament expressing warm appreciation of their Majesties’ ‘unfailing devotion to duty in this time of stress’. During his reign, George and his wife had, said the
Times
, ‘strengthened the bonds of affection binding them to the people’. At the King’s insistence, gifts of
silver to celebrate the occasion would be donated to the Red Cross for the war effort.

George and Mary were now at the height of their popularity as wartime figureheads. Such, too, ought to have been the role of their royal cousins, Nicholas and Alexandra. Still a year short of her own twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, how Alexandra must have wished her own bonds of affection with the Russian people could have been appreciated rather than so sorely misunderstood all these years. She was consumed by bitterness and anger at the ruination into which Russia was now being led. It was a wicked war and her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm was responsible. It was, she was sure, God’s punishment for the country’s sins, and she prayed fervently for his mercy and Russia’s redemption. She was tormented too by the invective that had been so unjustly hurled at herself and the Tsar – her husband’s sufferings she viewed as nothing less than Christlike, and such ‘black ingratitude’ at his self-sacrifice broke her heart. Her attitude to Russia was that of an indulgent but wise parent of a sick child, and she doggedly refused to abandon her loyalty to her adoptive country, in the naïve hope that one day it would recover its health – and its senses. God would save Russia, of that she remained certain. Discipline, order, faith – these were what was needed to put the country back on track; for they were, after all, the tenets to which she had long adhered in her own life.

For months now the Tsaritsa had been living increasingly in the past and ‘in the hope of better days’. The earthly things of her former life had slipped away and the present had become a matter of endurance and giving thanks for each day as it came. But she felt so bitterly misunderstood. All she and Nicholas had ever wanted to do was to ‘live tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigues’. Ironically, in captivity after the abdication, they had achieved precisely that. Alexandra had spent her time knitting socks, sewing and patching the family’s clothes and linen. But her eyesight was troubling her, as too were her many other long-term physical ailments. Her mental collapse in 1904 on discovering that her only son had the incurable disease of haemophilia – unknowingly passed down to Alix and on to him by Queen Victoria – had surrendered her finally and irrevocably to her accumulating neuroses. Thirteen years of living in false hope of Alexey’s miraculous recovery had utterly destroyed her. Her body was a wreck: five pregnancies in quick succession – all of them producing large babies and difficult births – plus a miscarriage and a phantom pregnancy would be enough to debilitate many women. But add to it heart pain and shortness of breath brought on by nervous anxiety, sciatica so bad that she often could hardly walk, facial neuralgia, cyanosis (blue lips), acute earache, swollen legs and severe
headaches and it meant that she had for years spent hours if not days in bed, reclining on a couch, or sitting in a wheelchair.

The Tsaritsa was now hopelessly addicted to a whole range of narcotics and sedatives, prescribed by Dr Botkin to control her various neuroses, her chronic headaches and insomnia. She had long since admitted that she was holding out physically thanks only to Veronal (a barbiturate-based proprietary drug), so much so that she was ‘saturated with it’. She also took morphine and cocaine for menstrual pain and a whole range of other complaints, and occasionally smoked French cigarettes – all in an attempt to dull her anxieties. But the compensations were few and the side effects only added to her overwhelming sense of physical exhaustion.

At a time when Freud’s methodology was in its infancy, Alexandra demonstrated all the classic psychosomatic symptoms of the recently described condition of ‘hystero-neurasthenia’. Its inexorable progress, through increasing levels of irritability, restlessness, fatigue, a lack of pleasure in ordinary things, a fear of impending calamity and a marked preoccupation with her mental and physical condition, had begun in Alexandra’s youth with a succession of family bereavements and had escalated ever after. A detailed report on his wife’s mental and physical condition had been presented to the Tsar in 1910 by a German specialist, Dr Fischer. What the eminent doctor had to say was, however, deemed too close for comfort and he had not been invited back to the palace again. Instead the biddable Dr Botkin had been appointed and told the Tsaritsa what she wanted to hear, she having come to the unshakeable conclusion that she had a serious heart condition. The discomforting truths of the 1910 report may well explain the Tsar’s saintlike tolerance of his wife’s increasing sickliness and paranoid behaviour over the last few years. Seeing her so physically and mentally vulnerable, he was desperate to protect her. But by then he himself was, as he admitted to his mother, ‘completely run down mentally by worrying over her health’.

Unlike her husband, who clung to the few paltry pleasures and diversions allowed them in the garden at the Ipatiev House, Alexandra spent most of her time indoors, lying on her bed or the couch, lost in sober thoughts of Christian resignation and the afterlife. An unrelenting diet of biblical and scriptural texts read to her by one or other of her daughters filled the blank pages of her days. For she always kept one of the girls with her when the others were allowed their daily recreation, no matter how fine the weather. She was achingly tired and had aged terribly since the abdication. Her hair was grey and she was painfully thin. There was a perpetual look of strain and anguish in her eyes. Yet even though broken in health, she remained an indomitable woman, convinced that
her necessary suffering and that of her family was but one trial on the path to Christian self-perfection.