Read Online Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Helen Rappaport
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groups lurking in Ekaterinburg and plotting, however ineptly, to rescue the family. In addition, reports had been published in Moscow that the Tsar had been murdered, and these had filtered through to the Western press. It had made the Bolshevik government jittery, despite assurances that thereliable local ‘troika’ of Goloshchekin, Beloborodov and his deputy Didkovsky had made regular inspections of the house in May and June as well as bringing groups of officials to observe the Imperial Family during their recreation periods outside. Doubting the trustworthiness of the Ural Regional Soviet and the levels of security at the Ipatiev House, Lenin had ordered Reinhold Berzin, commander of the Northern Ural and Siberian Front, to travel 300 miles from Perm to make a surprise personal inspection. This had been carried out on 22 June, in the company of district military commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, under the guise of the supposed ‘window inspection’, when Nicholas had noted the presence in the house of what he thought were ‘commissars from Petrograd’.
Berzin’s report, which finally reached Moscow on the 28th by a circuitous route, such being the haphazard state of the telegraph lines, had confirmed the rumours about the Tsar’s murder as a malicious provocation. But by now the Ural Regional Soviet was becoming aware of other breakdowns in discipline at the house: unruly behaviour and bouts of drunkenness by the night guard, and worse still, a slide towards fraternisation with the Imperial Family that had been strictly forbidden. At Tobolsk the guards had been disarmed by Nicholas’s natural, friendly manner and the pattern repeated itself at Ekaterinburg. Some of the guards had even smuggled letters out for the family or brought in books. Others privately admitted to a creeping respect and pity for the Romanovs, persisting in referring respectfully to Nicholas as ‘the Tsar’ or ‘the Emperor’.
In such close contact with the family, day in, day out, the inevitable had happened. The Romanovs and their young captors had developed the classic prisoner–jailer bonds so common in such situations. Some of the guards had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the gentle, kindly face of Nicholas and his pretty daughters with the one that Bolshevik propaganda had inculcated in them. The three younger girls by now had become open and friendly to the point of flirtatiousness with some of them. They took any and every opportunity of talking and sharing jokes and cups of tea; given the levels of boredom they were enduring, this is not surprising. Their eldest sister Olga, however, did not mix. Now painfully thin and sickly, she had been withdrawing increasingly into a state of melancholy for months. As for the Tsaritsa, she was another matter altogether. Cold, reserved, bitterly proud and defensive of her privacy, she was hostile towards the guards and unrelentingly argumentative about complying with any of the commandant’s house rules. She refused point blank to ring the bell that the family were supposed to use every time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing, and was always unsmiling andcomplaining. The guards found her personality difficult. But she was clearly a sick woman, as was the boy, for whom they had the greatest, overriding sympathy. So thin, so pale and waxen, Alexey seemed to some of them to be already at death’s door. In the end, many of the Romanovs’ captors, for all their revolutionary talk and Bolshevik persuasions, had succumbed to simple human compassion for what was fundamentally an ordinary, devoted family, blighted by ill health and with no real understanding of their terrible new life in captivity.
Weeks of close confinement and crushing boredom for four hormonal girls aged between 17 and 22, two of them still adolescent and all of them subject to the normal mood swings of menstruating women, must inevitably have brought tensions within
Berzin’s report, which finally reached Moscow on the 28th by a circuitous route, such being the haphazard state of the telegraph lines, had confirmed the rumours about the Tsar’s murder as a malicious provocation. But by now the Ural Regional Soviet was becoming aware of other breakdowns in discipline at the house: unruly behaviour and bouts of drunkenness by the night guard, and worse still, a slide towards fraternisation with the Imperial Family that had been strictly forbidden. At Tobolsk the guards had been disarmed by Nicholas’s natural, friendly manner and the pattern repeated itself at Ekaterinburg. Some of the guards had even smuggled letters out for the family or brought in books. Others privately admitted to a creeping respect and pity for the Romanovs, persisting in referring respectfully to Nicholas as ‘the Tsar’ or ‘the Emperor’.
In such close contact with the family, day in, day out, the inevitable had happened. The Romanovs and their young captors had developed the classic prisoner–jailer bonds so common in such situations. Some of the guards had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the gentle, kindly face of Nicholas and his pretty daughters with the one that Bolshevik propaganda had inculcated in them. The three younger girls by now had become open and friendly to the point of flirtatiousness with some of them. They took any and every opportunity of talking and sharing jokes and cups of tea; given the levels of boredom they were enduring, this is not surprising. Their eldest sister Olga, however, did not mix. Now painfully thin and sickly, she had been withdrawing increasingly into a state of melancholy for months. As for the Tsaritsa, she was another matter altogether. Cold, reserved, bitterly proud and defensive of her privacy, she was hostile towards the guards and unrelentingly argumentative about complying with any of the commandant’s house rules. She refused point blank to ring the bell that the family were supposed to use every time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing, and was always unsmiling andcomplaining. The guards found her personality difficult. But she was clearly a sick woman, as was the boy, for whom they had the greatest, overriding sympathy. So thin, so pale and waxen, Alexey seemed to some of them to be already at death’s door. In the end, many of the Romanovs’ captors, for all their revolutionary talk and Bolshevik persuasions, had succumbed to simple human compassion for what was fundamentally an ordinary, devoted family, blighted by ill health and with no real understanding of their terrible new life in captivity.
Weeks of close confinement and crushing boredom for four hormonal girls aged between 17 and 22, two of them still adolescent and all of them subject to the normal mood swings of menstruating women, must inevitably have brought tensions within
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