Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Read online

  THE LAST DAYS OF THE

  ROMANOVS

  ALSO BY HELEN RAPPAPORT

  No Place for Ladies

  Joseph Stalin

  Queen Victoria

  An Encyclopaedia of Women Social Reformers

  Dark Hearts of Chicago

  (with William Horwood)

  THE LAST DAYS OF

  THE ROMANOVS

  TRAGEDY AT EKATERINBURG

  Helen Rappaport

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMANOVS. Copyright © 2008 by Helen Rappaport. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rappaport, Helen.

  The last days of the Romanovs : tragedy at Ekaterinburg / Helen Rappaport.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37976-6

  ISBN-10: 0-312-37976-5

  1. Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868–1918—Family. 2. Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868–1918—Assassination. 3. Emperors—Russia—Biography. 4. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894–1917.

  DK258 .R35 2009

  947.08'30922—dc22

  [B]

  2008038733

  First published in Great Britain as Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs by Hutchinson, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited

  First U.S. Edition: February 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my daughters, Dani and Lucy

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION: The Red Urals

  1 Behind the Palisade

  2 ‘The Dark Gentleman’

  3 The Man with a Cigarette

  4 The Woman in a Wheelchair

  5 Girls in White Dresses

  6 The Boy in the Sailor Suit

  7 The Good Doctor

  8 ‘Our Poor Russia’

  9 ‘Everything Is the Same’

  10 ‘What Is To Be Done with Nicholas?’

  11 ‘Absolutely No News from Outside’

  12 ‘Something Has Happened to Them in There’

  13 ‘Ordinary People Like Us’

  14 The House of Special Purpose

  15 ‘The Will of the Revolution’

  16 ‘The World Will Never Know What We Did to Them’

  EPILOGUE: The Scent of Lilies

  Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  The Ural Mountains are a very long way from home – or so they seemed to me back in October 2006 when I began this project. I knew that I simply could not write the story of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg without going to the city where it all happened. Despite my apprehensions, it proved to be a most wonderful, memorable experience; the one moment I shall never forget is standing among the thousands of worshippers at the all-night vigil held at the Church on the Blood to commemorate the murder of the Romanovs on the night of 16–17 July. Here at last I got a sense of the power of the story and its continuing impact on Russian history and culture, and realised why Russia, its history and its people have always been and will remain a consuming passion in my life.

  During my stay in Ekaterinburg there were several people without whose kindness and good company it might have been a lonely research trip. First and foremost, Alex Kilin of the History Faculty of the Urals State University proved an irrepressibly good companion and guide through two hot days in July walking the streets of Ekaterinburg from north to south and east to west. I am deeply grateful for his time, his energy and his lively discourse on the city, and for the fact that he spoke no English – it made me work very hard at my Russian.

  Valentina Lapina of the British Council offices at the Belinsky Library was kind and welcoming from my very first day and offered the use of internet and email, as well as providing endless cups of tea with her wonderful home-made jam, and inviting me out to her family dacha near Lake Baltysh. Valery Gafurov gave up time to meet and talk with me and drive me round the city. He also kindly set up my meetings with Professors Alekseev and Plotnikov. Professor Venyamin Alekseev found time in a very busy schedule as Vice-President of the Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences to talk to me about his long-standing research on the Romanov murders. Irina Bedrina of the Ural State Law Academy accompanied me across Ekaterinburg to visit Professor Ivan Plotnikov (about whose outstanding contribution to Romanov studies see Note on Sources). Despite being in frail health, Professor Plotnikov generously gave of his time to talk to me about his many fascinating theories. Konstantin Brylyakov of the Ekaterinburg Guide Centre arranged my trip to Ganina Yama with guide Nadezhda Sokolova, who provided a vivid non-stop Russian commentary on the Romanov story. Princess Svetlana Galitzine of Oxford, while visiting family in Ekaterinburg, kindly met up with me to talk about the city.

  My thanks also must go to the many nameless worshippers I talked to at the Church on the Blood and the Voznesensky Cathedral in Ekaterinburg about the Romanovs and their Orthodox faith. A special word of thanks is due to Irina Chirkova, a volunteer at the Voznesensky Cathedral, who out of the goodness of her very warm Russian heart gave me her own treasured copy of Gleb Panfilov’s film Romanovy – Ventsenosnaya Sem’ya (2000), which I had not been able to locate anywhere. Her gesture was typical of the warmth and kindness I met everywhere in Ekaterinburg, down to the delightful reception staff at the Park Inn who made my stay such a pleasure and were so complimentary about my Russian.

  Back home in England I am hugely grateful to the specialist knowledge and help of Phil Tomaselli, an outstanding expert on British Secret Service and Russian-related Foreign Office and War Office records at Kew for the period. Phil helped me dig out the fascinating reports from Ekaterinburg sent by Sir Thomas Preston, as well as a wealth of other valuable material. Frank Swann, a legal forensics and wounds ballistics expert found time for a very long lunch with me, during which he took me through a fascinating analysis of the likely forensics of the basement murders. Peter Bull at York University was a most entertaining guide through the intriguing body language of the official and unofficial Romanov family photographs. Rosemary Matthew, archivist for the Bible Society Library at Cambridge, located the Belusov letter about conditions in Ekaterinburg in 1918. Marie Takayanagi at the Parliamentary Archives helped me access Sir George Buchanan material in the Lloyd George papers. Gillian Long arranged for my access to the Bernard Pares archive at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London; Annie Kemkaran-Smith did her best to locate the Sidney Gibbes Collection, now part of the Wernher Collection, but sadly in storage, awaiting a new home and unavailable to researchers at present.

  My good friend Michael Holman, former Professor of the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Leeds, put me in touch with Jonathan Sutton, the present incumbent, who provided several useful suggestions and contacts in Ekaterinburg. I owe special thanks, too, to James Harris of Leeds University’s School of History – himself an expert on Urals regional history of the period – for putting me in touch with Alex Kilin in Ekaterinburg. At the Brotherton Library I worked in the incomparable Leeds Russian Archive and am particularly grateful to Richard Davies for his help in making material available and to the Liddle Collection and the Leeds Russian Archive for allowing me permission to quote from it. Roger Taylor alerted me to the wonderful Galloway Stewart photographs at Bradford, and Brian Liddy kindly
made available all 22 volumes for me to see. Nick Mays at News International Archive allowed access to the papers of the Times correspondent Robert Wilton, part of the Geoffrey Dawson papers, and I am grateful to News International Limited for permission to quote from them; Professor John Rohl at the University of Sussex provided some valuable insights on Kaiser Wilhelm and Melanie Ilic at the University of Gloucestershire passed on numerous valuable bibliographic suggestions.

  Elsewhere in England, Princess Olga Romanoff welcomed me into her wonderful home in Kent and shared her photographs and memories of the Romanov ceremonials in St Petersburg in 1998. Sonya Goodman and her husband Philip offered the hospitality of their home in Kensington and Sonya talked vividly about her Kleinmichel ancestors’ connections at the Russian imperial court. Colleagues from the Crimean War Research Society Hugh Small and Bill Curtis offered information on pistols and machine guns. In Oxford, Professor Harry Shukman at St Anthony’s College entertained me to lunch and gave much advice on Russian sources for the period and his full encouragement in the project. I could not, however, end this particular list without mentioning the wonderful facilities of my second home, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and its always helpful and obliging staff.

  It was a joy to discover, during the writing of this book, that I lived but a five-minute walk from the place of worship of the Russian Orthodox community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, founded in 1941 by Father Nicholas, formerly Charles Sidney Gibbes, the Tsarevich’s tutor. Its members gave me a most warm welcome at their services and I would like to take this opportunity to commend their work in the Russian Orthodox community in Britain.

  From the United States, Joshua Wearout at Wichita State University kindly sent photocopies of the material and photographs gathered in Siberia by Paul James Rainey. Ronald M. Bulatoff at the Hoover Institution sent photocopies of the papers of Riza Kuli Mirza (Commander of the Ekaterinburg Garrison 1918–19) from the Vera Cattell collection. John Jenkins at the Spark Museum provided information on telegraphs and telephonograms and David Mould at Ohio University also answered questions about Russian telecommunications. In New York I enjoyed the wonderful facilities of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research on 16th and 5th (now part of the Center for Jewish Studies), where I studied the extensive and greatly undervalued archive of Herman Bernstein (see Note on Sources). At Yivo, Jesse Aaron Cohen helped me locate Bernstein’s Siberian photographs as well as those taken by the US Expeditionary Force in Siberia. Gunnar M. Berg graciously ferried large numbers of files back and forth from the Bernstein collection and photocopied much reference material for me. Finally, my trip to New York would not have been such a joy without the good companionship and support of my friend John Reiner.

  In the wider community of the World Wide Web, I must express my gratitude for the wonderful work in making available material by and about the Romanovs carried out at the Alexander Palace Time Machine website and in particular its enormously interesting, lively and informative discussion list. This list is populated by hundreds of amateur enthusiasts, many of whom have made a lifetime’s study of the Romanov family. Here I drew on a wealth of interested and informed opinion and recommend the list most heartily to anyone wishing to learn more. See www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/.

  During the writing of this book I greatly appreciated the love and support of my family – especially my brothers Christopher and Peter Ware who helped me in the construction of my website and were a continuous source of encouragement, as too was my dear friend Christina Zaba. William Horwood offered insightful comments and constructive criticism on some key passages. At Hutchinson, my commissioning editor, Caroline Gascoigne, offered lively support and enthusiasm for the book, as too did my wonderful publicist Cecília Durães. My thanks too must go to my picture researcher Elaine Willis and my copy editor Jane Selley.

  Finally, but most importantly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my agent, Charlie Viney. When he first mooted the idea of a book about the Romanovs to me I groaned, insisting there was nothing left to say. But with his encouragement, I went away and looked at the story again, from different perspectives, and came up with the tight 14-day scenario. Thereafter, Charlie cajoled and praised and guided me to the right way of writing this book, involving as it did a major rethink of how, till then, I had approached history writing. I am profoundly grateful to him for his patience, support and belief in this project and for all his hours of hard work. Without him, Ekaterinburg simply would never have happened.

  Helen Rappaport

  Oxford

  September 2008

  List of Illustrations

  Section One

  1. Tsar Nicholas II with his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra shortly after their marriage, c. 1895. (Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  2. The four Romanov Grand Duchesses in an official photograph, 1915. Standing from left-right, the Grand Duchesses Maria, Anastasia and Olga and seated Grand Duchess Tatiana (Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  3. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia with his wife, Alexandra and their five children. Alexandra holds the baby Tsarevich, Alexey, surrounded by the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. (Photo Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  4. Nicholas enjoying a cigarette on board the Imperial yacht, the Shtandart (Photo Rex Features)

  5. Empress Alexandra in her wheelchair at Tsarskoe Selo, 1917 (Photo Underwood & Underwood / Library of Congress)

  6. Alexandra seated on Nicholas’s desk, taken during the war years, 1916. (Photo from The End of the Romanovs by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

  7. Prince Edward (later briefly King Edward VIII) with Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexey and George, Prince of Wales (later King George V), at Cowes in 1909 (Photo Keystone/Getty Images)

  8. Alexey with his pet cat and his King Charles Spaniel Joy, at Army HQ in 1916 (Photo Roger Violet / Topfoto)

  9. The Tsaritsa with her two oldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, in their nurses’ uniforms, with Maria and Anastasia in civilian dress (Photo David King Collection)

  10. Members of the Czech Legion standing by the obelisk outside Ekaterinburg marking the boundary between Europe and Asia (Photo from The Lost Legion 1939 by Gustav Becvar (Stanley Paul, 1939))

  11. Dr Evgeny Botkin, the Romanov family’s physician (Photo from Thirteen Years at the Russian Court by Pierre Gilliard (Hutchinson, 1921))

  12. Exterior of Ipatiev House showing the first palisade erected just before the Romanovs’ arrival at the end of April 1918. American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia album (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

  13. The Commandant’s room on the first floor of the Ipatiev House occupied by Avdeev and after him, Yurovsky. American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia album (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

  14. The dining room in the Ipatiev House where the Imperial Family shared their simple meals with their servants (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

  15. View of Voznesensky Prospekt c. 1900s showing the Ipatiev House in the bottom left hand corner (Photo Author’s Collection)

  16. View of Ekaterinburg showing the bell tower of the Voznesensky Cathedral in distance on right (Photo Prokudin-Gorskii, Sergei Mikhailovich / Library of Congress)

  Section Two

  17. Filipp Goloshchekin in exile in Turukhansk, Siberia with Yakov Sverdlov, with Joseph Stalin third from left, back row (Photo David King Collection)

  18. Lenin in his study in the Kremlin, 1918 (Photo AKG images)

  19. Pavel Medvedev, head of the Ipatiev House guard, on the left, with a fellow Bolshevik, Larin (Photo David King Collection)

  20. Yurovsky’s family, taken in Ekaterinburg c. 1919. Yurovsky is standing on the back right (Photo from The Murder of the Romanovs by Captain Paul Bulygin (Hutchinson, 1935))

  21. The Tsar and Tsaritsa’s bedroom on the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt and Voznesensky Lane (Photo from The End of the Romanovs by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sut
cliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

  22. Main entrance of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Convent in Ekaterinburg (Photo Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii / Library of Congress)

  23. The US journalist Herman Bernstein in Siberia (Photo YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

  24. Thomas Preston, British Consul in Ekaterinburg in 1918 (Photo Telegraph Group)

  25. Lieutenant Colonel Mariya Bochkareva of the 1st women’s Battalion of Death (Photo George Grantham Bain Collection / Library of Congress)

  26. President Woodrow Wilson, who reluctantly ordered US intervention forces into Russia in the summer of 1918 (Photo Library of Congress)

  27. The coded telegram sent by Aleksandr Beloborodov to Moscow confirming that all the Romanov family had been killed (Photo Topfoto)

  28. The Grand Duchesses’ bedroom in the Ipatiev House, showing remains of a fire in which the personal effects of the Romanovs were burned. (Photo from The End of the Romanovs by Victor Alexandrov, translated by William Sutcliffe (English translation, Hutchinson, 1966))

  29. Petr Ermakov, one of the Romanovs’ killers (Photo David King Collection)

  30. One of the complex of churches at Ganina Yama in the Koptyaki Forest outside Ekaterinburg commemorating the Romanov family (Author’s photograph)