Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (23 page)

So when, after the morning inspection, three workmen arrived and began installing a heavy iron grating in front of the only open window in the Tsar and Tsaritsa’s corner bedroom, this seemed yet another
indicator of the tightening of the regime at the house under Yurovsky, a man whom Alexandra had taken to calling ‘the ox’ or ‘the bull’. Nicholas was on his guard too: ‘We like this man less and less’, he confided to his diary. The installation of the iron grille had no doubt come about because, despite the high double palisade, Alexandra had been spotted by the external guards standing too close to the open window, trying to catch the attention of people in the large cobbled plaza, Voznesensky Square, opposite. Yurovsky had warned her not to do this, but she had ignored him. The nervousness of the guards at any attempt by the Romanovs to signal to people in the world outside had intensified since the change of regime at the house. The place might seem impregnable, but there was still the threat of attack – or even rescue.

Back in June, Avdeev had been alerted that they might need to evacuate the family due to rumours of a possible attack from anarchist extremists – their intention, though Avdeev did not of course reveal this – to murder the family out of hand. The Romanovs were told to pack and be ready to leave, but a few days later the threat had receded. Then had come the discovery, only a week or so after that, at the end of June, of a smuggled letter concealed inside the large cork stopper of a bottle of cream brought by the nuns. It was Dr Derevenko who had first requested the family be given access to these foodstuffs from the convent, and their daily delivery had inevitably been made clever use of, with messages for the family hidden in loaves of bread or scribbled surreptitiously on the paper in which food was wrapped. Derevenko at some point had been involved as an important go-between in serious plans to try and stage a rescue of the family, but he himself could not have passed notes to the family as he was always very closely watched when he came to the house to treat the Tsarevich.

A certain monarchist officer, Colonel Ivan Sidorov, one of the Tsar’s former adjutants, had however sought out the doctor in Ekaterinburg in mid-June after travelling north from Odessa and through him had made contact with the nuns of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent, getting them to smuggle in notes in this way. It is not known whether Sidorov or some other group of loyalist officers was responsible for the letter in the cream bottle received by the family around 20 June. But Avdeev had spotted it and had handed it over to the Cheka. The letter purported to come from a group of monarchists in the city – no doubt one of several who had taken rooms in the local hotels and rooming houses under false names, where they had hatched their various hare-brained plots, singly and in groups, as they tried to find ways of contacting the Imperial Family. Some had even had the bravado to openly go and stand outside the Ipatiev House, or send in letters and gifts – all of which were confiscated.

If such plots were hare-brained, none could have been more so than that originated by Oliver Locker Lampson of the British Royal Naval Armoured Car Division sent into Russia to assist the Imperial Army in 1916. Lampson had got to know the Tsar at HQ at Mogilev, and after Nicholas’s confinement at Tsarskoe Selo had deemed the opportunities for rescue very easy. Bribing the already careless guards with cigarettes, vodka and British bully beef, Lampson had planned that one of the Tsar’s servants would don a false beard and cloak and take his place, Nicholas meanwhile disguising himself in a British khaki uniform that Lampson had smuggled in, shaving off his beard and walking out of the palace in front of the drunken guards. From there a field ambulance would take him to a military train and north to Archangel and a British ship to the UK. The same ploy, however, could not of course be used with Alexandra and the children; the Tsar had refused point blank to be rescued unless they could be saved too, proving himself, in Lampson’s eyes, ‘a true king and a true man’. The real window of opportunity for escape, had there ever been one, had been in the first two weeks of the Imperial Family’s confinement at Tsarskoe Selo in March 1917. This was the convinced view of British military attaché General Wallscourt Waters, who at the time had told the War Office that ‘if a fast torpedo boat and a few bags of British sovereigns should be promptly dispatched to the Gulf of Finland . . . there was a good prospect of rescue’. But it had to be the entire family; thereafter, even where the opportunities for rescue presented themselves at Tobolsk, any attempt at flight would probably have been vetoed in the end by the Tsar and Tsaritsa because of Alexey’s fragile state of health.

Nevertheless, in Tobolsk, members of the Imperial entourage had had free passage in and out of the Governor’s House, facilitating the passing on of plans and messages and the enlisting of the support of a powerful church leader, Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk, as well as Petrograd supporters of Rasputin’s former circle. The Tsar’s aides, Count Tatishchev and Prince Dolgorukov, had been in communication with an envoy sent to Tobolsk by monarchist leaders of a National Centre group (a secret organisation of anti-Bolsheviks led by right-centre politicians) who had passed on money to assist in their escape. Other loyalists put their trust in a Russian of dubious character named Boris Solovev. Son of the treasurer of the Holy Synod and a follower of the mystic Madame Blavatsky, he had married Rasputin’s daughter Mariya in 1917 in a cynical move designed to curry favour with the monarchists, and had assumed command of a rescue plan based at nearby Tyumen. He had managed to get notes through to the Tsaritsa in Tobolsk and she had approved a rescue plan fronted by Solovev and his supposed 300 officers of the
‘Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk’. Considerable amounts of money were needed, claimed Solovev, to fund the rescue, and these had been raised by means of consignments of the Tsaritsa’s jewels smuggled out of the Governor’s House. But not everyone trusted Solovev or his motives, and when his rescue plan failed to materialise, people started asking questions about where all the money had gone and whose side he was on: the Tsar’s, the Germans’ or the Bolsheviks’? Was his whole rescue plan bogus – an act of simple greed, or the first of several orchestrated attempts at deliberate provocation by the Bolsheviks to unsettle and undermine the Romanov family?

In Simbirsk, in early July, another rescue plot was hatched by a Serbian officer, Lieutenant Kappel, who had held a secret meeting at the Hotel Troitse-Spasskaya with Russian monarchists and former members of the Duma. They had at their disposal, so it is alleged, plans of the Ipatiev House drawn by the Tsar and smuggled out to Dr Derevenko, who, it was claimed, was co-operating with them in a rescue plan set for 15 July. Kappel had dispatched a monarchist captain from the Urals, Stepanov, back to Ekaterinburg to prepare plans to storm the Ipatiev House by night with a commando-style group of local officers, with the assistance of undercover Czech officers from their legion, having first created diversionary disturbances in nearby towns such as Perm. But the Ekaterinburg Cheka, by now only too well aware of monarchist plotting and intrigue in the city, arrested Stepanov as soon as he had stepped off the train. Another highly implausible plot hatched in Kiev by a former member of the Imperial entourage Aleksandr Mosolov, Prince Kochubey and the German Duke, George of Leuchtenberg, had favoured spiriting the Romanovs away to Berlin. A reconnaissance party would go on ahead to set up a base in Ekaterinburg for the family’s rescue. Two officers had been sent into the city as scouts where they were to make contact with German agents already hiding out there, but when word had been passed to the Romanovs about the plan, they had vetoed any thought of rescue by Germany; as the Tsaritsa had insisted, ‘I would rather die in Russia than be rescued by the Germans.’

The same fate as Stepanov’s had befallen a young officer from the Imperial Guard named Captain Paul Bulygin, who had failed in early July 1918 in an ill-conceived mission, based on a false rumour he had heard that the Romanovs were about to be evacuated to Kotelnich near Vyatka. Once the family had arrived there, he and his fellow conspirators in the National Centre planned to seize weapons from the town’s small Bolshevik garrison, storm the house in which they were being held and take them north by river steamer to Archangel in the Arctic. When the Romanovs failed to arrive at Kotelnich and rumours began that the Tsar
had been murdered, Bulygin decided to travel to Ekaterinburg to find out what was going on. But he arrived at the city’s railway station only to be recognised by a former officer who knew him and hauled off to the local jail. Here, living on salted herring and dirty bread and tortured by thirst in a cell shared with several others, he had watched in horror as night after night, one by one, his cellmates were taken away to be shot. He thought his own execution inevitable at any moment when, without explanation, he was taken from the jail and back to the station under escort and put on a train full of wounded Red Army soldiers being evacuated from the Czech Front.

The possibility of a staged rescue from within Ekaterinburg itself was not in fact as unlikely as it seemed, for the Military Academy of the General Staff of the former Imperial Army had been evacuated to the city from Petrograd in April of that year. Of its 300 officials, only a handful professed any Bolshevik sympathies. And among their ranks lurked a secret cabal of five monarchist officers led by 26-year-old Captain Dmitri Malinovsky who discussed the possibilities of rescue. With the Academy located so close to the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent, approaches were made to the nuns to act as possible go-betweens. Dr Derevenko was also asked for a plan of the upper floor of the house – which he had seen and could readily provide. With the rapid approach of the Czechs, Trotsky had ordered the Academy to be transferred to Kazan, but only about half of the staff departed. The rest remained, declaring their ‘neutrality’. Filepp Goloshchekin, however, took no chances and ensured that their activities were closely watched, and the Academy was assigned its own political commissar, a Chekist called Matveev. Nevertheless, Malinovsky and his four friends continued to plot and recruited another seven fellow officers at the Academy into their scheme. But like all the other would-be rescuers they lacked the two things most needed to further their plans: money and weapons. They could not appeal for help locally among the terrorised population and their hopes came to nothing. In the end, although as many as 37 men from the Academy were eventually involved in a rescue plot, all they were able to do was send in gifts of food via the nuns, nothing more. When the Czechs arrived at the end of July, these same 37 defected to their ranks.

We shall never know for sure the identity of the author of the first ‘officer letter’ received by the Romanovs at the Ipatiev House on around 20 June. Either it was genuine and indeed came from Malinovsky’s group and was intercepted by Avdeev and passed on to Goloshchekin, or it was the first of four deliberate fabrications by the Cheka. If it was indeed genuine, then the Cheka were quick to spot its potential as a means of testing the Romanovs’ willingness to intrigue in their own escape – in
Bolshevik eyes good enough grounds for their annihilation. And so the letter was deliberately copied and amended and passed on to the family so that any written response could be intercepted. Coming as it did through the good offices of the nuns of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent, the letter seemed to the Tsar and Tsaritsa trustworthy, even though it was flawed in its failure to use the correct terms of address to a tsar by a supposed loyalist. It was, nevertheless, reassuring: the family’s friends on the outside had not forgotten them after all. It had arrived at a time of great despondency and offered the first tangible hope of rescue after weeks of being deprived of any letters, visits or news of the world outside. The Romanovs’ ‘friends’, as the letter, written in red ink, announced portentously in French, ‘were no longer sleeping’; the ‘hour so long awaited had come’. The Bolsheviks were a clear and present danger to the family, but with the Czechs – the liberating ‘army of Slavic friends’ – now only 50 miles away from Ekaterinburg, Red Army troops in the city would soon capitulate. The family were told to listen out for any movement outside, to ‘wait and hope’ and be ready at any time – day or night – for liberation. They were to smuggle out in the cream bottle a map of the layout of their rooms with as much detail as possible. The note was signed ‘from someone who is ready to die for you, Officer of the Russian Army’.

The family’s cautious response, written in French by Olga in the blank space at the bottom of the letter a day or so later, warned that all their windows were sealed and that Alexey was too sick and unable to walk. They were adamant: ‘No risk whatsoever must be taken without being absolutely certain of the result. We are almost always under close observation.’ Another letter quickly followed on the 25th from the supposed loyal officer, talking of escape from one of the upstairs windows – an impossibility until, by coincidence or design, the Bolsheviks allowed a window to be unsealed and opened a day or so later. Would it be possible beforehand to tranquillise ‘the little one’ in some way so that he could be lowered down without pain? the letter asked. That same day, the 25th, the Romanovs responded with doubt and caution, giving details of the newly opened window, the location of the upstairs guards, the regular inspections, the system of alarm bells, the guards in the house across the street, the motor car always at the commandant’s disposal outside. Now, too, they asked about the welfare of Dr Botkin and their servants: what about them, would they be able to come too? ‘It would be ignoble of us . . . to leave them alone after they have followed us into exile’, the family wrote. If they were to flee and leave them behind, could they be sure that nothing would happen to them? They were worried too about all their personal documents – letters and diaries especially – in storage crates in
the outhouse. Nevertheless, they assured their rescuer officer, ‘you can count on our sangfroid’. A third letter came about a day later, telling the family to prepare for a signal at night, upon which they were to barricade their door with furniture and – somewhat ingenuously – climb out of the open window by means of a rope, where their rescuers would be waiting at the bottom.