The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (27 page)

First, he handpicked the men who would accompany the family and act as guards once they reached their destination—loyal men who would follow Kerensky’s orders to the letter. “
Behave like gentlemen, not like cads,” he advised them. “Remember, [Nicholas] is a former Emperor and neither he nor his family must suffer any hardships.”

Next he made the travel arrangements. Knowing he could not transport the family in their easily recognizable blue imperial train, he had an ordinary one fitted out with Japanese flags and placards that read “Japanese Red Cross Mission.” Kerensky hoped this disguise would reduce the chances of the family being recognized and captured.

How does one choose among the belongings of a lifetime? In his study, Nicholas sorted through his papers. Some he destroyed. Others he locked in a file cabinet, taking the key into exile with him. And still others—all fifty of his diaries as well as the over six hundred letters Alexandra had written to him since their courtship—went into two crates marked
A.F
. (for Alexandra Feodorovna) and
N.A
. (Nicholas Alexandrovich).

In her dressing room, Alexandra emptied the contents of her closets onto the floor. Then she picked through the huge mound of
clothing, making two piles. Into the smallest one went the items she was taking along; the other, much larger pile would be donated to war victims. Afterward, she packed her family photographs, prayer books, and icon collection. Unlike Nicholas, she had no diaries or letters to pack. She had burned these during the tense days just before Nicholas’s abdication.

Overhead, the children bustled about. Along with their clothes, the girls packed books, art supplies, photograph albums, and their Brownie box cameras. Alexei added his tin soldiers, a chessboard, and his toy gun. Even the army cots with their thin mattresses and satin comforters would be folded up and taken along.

August 13, 1917, was their last day at Tsarskoe Selo. While Alexandra did some last-minute packing, the children drifted through the palace for the final time. Already, the rooms felt empty, the dustcloth-covered furniture looking like forlorn ghosts. They rowed across the pond to visit Children’s Island one last time, and walked between the furrows of the now lush vegetable garden. “
What shall the future bring for my poor children?” Alexandra wondered that day. “My heart breaks thinking of them.”

As ordered, at five o’clock that evening, the family gathered in the semicircular hall to wait for word that the train arranged for by Kerensky had arrived at the station. Around them, fifty soldiers grunted and cursed as they moved the family’s mountain of luggage. Besides clothing, toys, and personal papers, there were crates of books, rolled-up Turkish rugs, reams of bed linen marked with the imperial crest, silverware, fine porcelain dinner plates, clocks, fragile vases, silver pencils, and velvet cushions. Anything to preserve the appearance of their former luxurious lives. Other necessary items included the tsar’s portable chin-up bar, Alexandra’s nursing kit, and the electroshock machine Dr. Botkin used on Alexei’s weak leg muscles. There were vials of holy water; boxes of smelling salts; laxatives, morphine, and even a year’s supply of bath oil and cologne.

But more than luggage accompanied the family. In addition to several courtiers who had chosen to share their exile, the Romanovs went with two valets, six chambermaids, ten footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a clerk, a nurse, a doctor, a barber, a butler, a wine steward, two pet spaniels, and a bulldog.

Now the Romanovs sat among the detritus of their lives, and waited. But as the hours passed with no word of the train, the family grew more and more nervous. Finally, at eleven p.m., Kerensky arrived to take the situation in hand. He found the grand duchesses huddled together “
weeping copiously” while the tsar stood at one of the windows stonily smoking cigarette after cigarette. Even the usually stoic Alexandra was affected by the nerve-racking delay. Sitting in her wheelchair, “
she wept and worried like any ordinary woman,” recalled Kerensky.

As the hours continued to pass, Kerensky also grew pale and tense. The train ordered for one a.m. did not arrive. It did not come at two a.m. either. When three a.m. came and went, Kerensky picked up the phone. The problem, he learned, was the rail workers. On strike, they refused to couple the cars together. Kerensky desperately tried to work out a deal with them, but two anxious hours passed before the group finally heard cars pull into the driveway. Their train was ready, Kerensky told them. It was time to head to the station.

Alexandra, her face ashy white, took Nicholas’s arm and walked out the door. Behind them came the children, all five of them in tears. Overhead, the sky was a rosy pink, the first rays of sunlight bathing the palace and the park in a golden haze. As the cars pulled away, the family turned and watched until their beloved Tsarskoe Selo faded into the distance.

They would never see it again.

The journey to Tobolsk took a week, the train clacking over a ribbon of rails that stretched across the empty Siberian grasslands before crossing the Ural Mountains and chugging into the river town of Tyumen. Here the family transferred to a steamer for the last leg of their trip down the Tura River. It took forty hours to cover the last two hundred miles. Nicholas and the children spent most of their waking hours on the steamer’s upper deck, playing with the dogs, basking in the sunshine, and gazing out across the barren landscape. It was all so different from the ornate palaces and manicured parks they knew. The countryside seemed to stretch forever, broken only by an occasional village of mud roads and simple log huts. Just before sunset on the first day, the steamer passed the village of Pokrovskoe, where Rasputin had lived. Years earlier, the
starets
had predicted they would see it for themselves. Now, standing at the boat’s railing, the entire family watched as his village glided past. Alexandra was especially moved. Crossing herself, she took the sight as a sign of her destiny.

Finally, Tobolsk came into view. As the boat slipped into the wharf, the passengers saw a town of dirt roads and whitewashed churches, log huts and wooden plank sidewalks. It was a far cry from cosmopolitan Petrograd some two thousand miles away.

The Romanovs’ new home was a two-story mansion that had once belonged to the governor of the province. The family and their servants quickly decorated it with the furniture, rugs, and
other items they had brought with them. It was “
arranged all quite cozily,” said Olga.

Even though the mansion had fourteen rooms, it could not house everyone who’d accompanied the Romanovs. The imperial family took up the entire first floor, the grand duchesses sharing a corner room next door to their parents while Alexei lived opposite, and Pierre Gilliard settled into the study on the ground floor. Most of the servants had to live across the street in a sprawling pink house that had been commandeered from a wealthy merchant.

Both houses sat on a dusty avenue that the townspeople of Tobolsk had renamed Freedom Street after the revolution. Sometimes they even called the Governor’s Mansion the Freedom House. But without a doubt, the place was now a prison. Armed guards stood at all the entrances, and not long after the family moved in, a tall wooden wall was built. Extending all the way around the house, the wall also enclosed the greenhouse and a little-used side street meant as a sort of courtyard for exercise. The Romanovs were used to living behind fences. But always before they’d been erected to keep people
out
. This was the first one built specifically to keep the family
in
.

Still, life was far from uncomfortable. Just as Kerensky had said, the townspeople remained respectful of the tsar. Whenever they walked past the house, they removed their hats and crossed themselves. Just a glimpse of Nicholas sent them to their knees. Spotting Alexandra in her second-story window, they bowed. And whenever the grand duchesses stepped out onto the second-floor balcony, so many people gathered below on the sidewalk that the guards were forced to wave their rifles to shoo them away. Recalled one resident, “
We were all amazed at the girls.”

So attached to the imperial family were some of the shopkeepers that they regularly sent gifts of bread and meat. Peasant farmers
arrived with fresh butter and eggs. And to dessert-loving Anastasia’s joy, nuns from the local convent brought sugar and cakes. While much of the country starved, the youngest grand duchess grew “
very fat … round and fat to the waist,” remarked her mother.

Perhaps Anastasia overate because she was bored. The family tried everything it could think of to keep busy. They sawed and chopped wood. They snapped photographs of each other, played card games, knit or did needlework, and listened as Nicholas read aloud from
The Three Musketeers
or
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. He even built a small wooden platform on top of the greenhouse roof, where he and the children could sit, secluded and above it all. There in the sunlight, they could close their eyes and conjure up images of Tsarskoe Selo’s shaded footpaths and sweet-smelling lilacs. They could dream about home and freedom.

Still, time dragged. “
The whole day was just like yesterday,” Alexei complained time and again in his diary. “
Everything is the same!” “
Boring!!!” “
It’s still boring.”

What a relief it was when the children’s English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, arrived.

Gibbes had been away when the Romanovs were placed under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. Returning to the Alexander Palace, he discovered he’d been locked out. Dismayed, he repeatedly petitioned the Provisional Government for permission to rejoin the family. Seven months later, in October 1917, he finally received it. Taking the first available train to Siberia, the tutor arrived in Tobolsk just before winter did.

The tsar, who had been lunching with the children when Gibbes
turned up at the Governor’s Mansion, hurried forward to grip the tutor’s hand. “
He absolutely pounced on me,” recalled Gibbes, so eager was he to hear the most recent war news. (Nicholas received newspapers weeks, sometimes even months, late.) Were the Germans being held back? How many troops had the Americans, who’d entered the conflict in April 1917, sent to Europe? As Gibbes spoke, he couldn’t help but notice how “
extremely … cheerful” the tsar looked. He still depended on Alexandra for even the most trivial decisions. “I will ask my wife; her wishes are mine,” he said whenever he was asked for an opinion. But months of working outdoors had left him looking fit and healthy.