Tsar Nicholas II is a controversial figure in twentieth-century history. Admirers defend him as a loving husband and father who did his best for Russia against the tide of malignant revolutionaries who dethroned him in the February 1917 Revolution and murdered him and his family in the following year. Detractors provide a very different account; for them, he was a stubborn, reactionary tyrant whose actions destabilized the country and destroyed opportunities to avoid the catastrophe of later decades. In my opinion, it is wrong to prefer one image to the other. The truth is that he was both things at the same time, a complex, contradictory man and ruler.
I have set out in this book to look at Nicholas in the sixteen months after his fall from power. Throughout that period, he was under detention in Tsarskoe Selo, Tobolsk and finally Ekaterinburg, with little hope of release. He had seldom spoken his mind to ministers and had been notorious for saying one thing and doing another. After his enforced abdication, however, he lost the incentive to give a misleading impression except in so far as he tried to alleviate the worries of his wife and children while they were all under arrest. Parts of this story have been told many times, usually with a justified emphasis on the family’s gruesome execution in a Urals cellar in July 1918 and often with less than justified claims that one or more members escaped the scene of butchery. I have come to think that parts of the English-speaking literary world have an almost sociopathic readiness to believe that a wellarmed and disciplined communist firing squad in a closed cellar was capable of such staggering incompetence. Nevertheless, the evidence, much of which has long been available, ought to be subjected to conscientious examination, and I shall endeavour to do so here.
In 1917 there was much discussion about sending Nicholas to safe exile in the United Kingdom. But even if his cousin George V had not overruled the idea, how realistic would it have been in the light of contemporary political obstacles in Russia? And what of the persisting mysteries of Nicholas’s troubled last journey, from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, in April 1918?
Although the deaths of Nicholas and his family on 17 July 1918 certainly require a fresh look in the light of old and new documentation, the previous months also call for attention. In confinement, Nicholas had the time to reflect on his period of rule since 1894. Even so, it is surprising how seldom his diary and recorded conversations have been employed to shine a light on his thinking. In addition to what he wrote for himself and said to others there is a source that has habitually been overlooked, namely the long list of literary and historical works that Nicholas read as he whiled away the period of enforced inactivity. Throughout his lifetime there was dispute about his political purposes, and his choice of books provides us with a mirror of his private meditations. Taken together, his diary, oral comments and reading material in the sixteen months before his death offer a unique chance to examine whether he had any regrets about his decisions in power. They tell us exactly what kind of ruler he had wanted to be, and they allow us to discover whether, as some have alleged, he was truly a convinced autocrat and rabid anti-Semite who made political concessions only under duress.
They can also illuminate Nicholas’s thoughts on the revolutionary situation in 1917–1918 and on his vision of the prospects for Russia. He was trying to make sense of circumstances that were out of his control and subject to unpredictable change. Outside his entourage, there were three individuals with whom he exchanged ideas. One was Alexander Kerensky, who was responsible for his care on behalf of the Provisional Government that ruled between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. But two other persons had more intimate discussions with the former tsar that have yet to be chronicled. These were Vasili Pankratov and Vasili Yakovlev. Pankratov was a Socialist-Revolutionary, Yakovlev a Bolshevik, and they were successive officials in charge of the detention of the Romanov family in Tobolsk. Did their conversations with the former emperor of all Russia make any dent in the barrel of his assumptions?
The book will also highlight the political, economic and social environment around the Romanovs’ places of detention. This, too, is a topic that has been only lightly treated in the historical literature. The Bolsheviks in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg had their own opinions about how to handle the Romanov question, and relations between them and the Soviet government were subject to strains. Tobolsk was a town that was overrun by Red Guards from other areas who sought to correct what they regarded as Lenin’s failure to hold the family securely; Ekaterinburg had a Bolshevik leadership including several who were willing to kill Nicholas with or without approval by Lenin.
The ultimate decision was to execute not only the former tsar but also all the members of his family in Soviet custody. Russian investigators since the 1990s have immensely expanded the documentary base for an inquiry into who gave the orders and why. I hope to bring these sources together with those I have found in Moscow and California to pinpoint exactly why the murders took place when, where and how they did. The cable traffic between Moscow and Ekaterinburg has often been examined, but it is not enough in itself to explain what happened, and I aim to look at the whole military and security situation in both Ekaterinburg and – just as important – Moscow in the weeks immediately preceding the executions. Moscow’s relations with Berlin are also a factor that needs to be taken into account. Only then, I believe, can the degree of Lenin’s likely involvement be ascertained – the part that he played has been a matter of intense controversy and speculation in Russia in the past three decades. Such are the questions underpinning this book.
The research for it began when I stumbled upon some exceptional documentation concerning the last months of Nicholas II. In summer 2013 I was burrowing in the Hoover Institution Archives, as has been my habit for several years now, when deputy archivist Linda Bernard asked whether I might be interested in the Romanov items in the archives safe. These included the Nicholas II abdication papers. Next year Lora Soroka, who administers the Russian Archives Project, mentioned some recently catalogued papers – the Agnes M. Diterikhs collection – from the anti-Bolshevik inquiry of 1918–1920 into the killing of the Romanovs. At that point I discovered that Hoover also had a box of documents that once were dubbed ‘the file on the Tsar’ – the basis for the long-unchallenged suggestion that one or more of Nicholas’s family escaped from Ekaterinburg, which is the exact opposite of what the documents reveal. While these sources constitute the spine of my researches, I have also uncovered copious fresh material about other Romanov family members.
Nicholas’s thoughts and experiences after the February 1917 Revolution have much to tell us about what happened to Russia in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the last sixteen months of his life, this modest, inadequate, rigid ex-ruler suffered personal tragedy in a country he had played no small part in bringing to catastrophe. He was spared knowledge of the worst stages of the mass terror that followed only because he was executed in the first year of the October Revolution. But for him, what he did know of, even from behind the closed doors of his places of imprisonment, was already quite enough.