The Romanovs became fascinated with Commissar Pankratov and his gentle, firm and knowledgeable management at Freedom House. When their favourite dentist, Kostritski, arrived from Crimea to check their teeth, he came across a copy of Pankratov’s reminiscences about Siberian exile. The very existence of such a book might have widened the gap between Pankratov and the inmates of Freedom House. Instead, as the dentist told Nicholas, the contents revealed a man who bore no grudges. The Romanovs meanwhile learned the details of the killing that had led to Pankratov’s arrest. ‘Why,’ Alexandra asked the dentist, ‘doesn’t he like gendarmes?’ Alexandra could make no sense of his early life. Pankratov seemed so gentle and unobjectionable. The empress could hardly believe that he had ever served time in one of her husband’s prisons. She joined the rest of the family in respecting Kerensky’s commissar.1
As Pankratov himself scrutinized Nicholas, he acquired a deepened understanding of his limitations. The commissar told the emperor to his face that the outbursts of popular wrath throughout his long reign were no accident. Millions of Nicholas’s subjects, Pankratov exclaimed, had been aggrieved about how they were treated. There had been trouble during the Japanese war of 1904–1905. There had been outbreaks of violence in Barnaul and Kuznetsk in summer 1914 when the mobilization papers arrived – Pankratov himself had witnessed this in Siberian exile and seen how people ransacked the vodka stores. He suggested that the disturbances in Petrograd in February and March 1917 had their origins in the same feelings of resentment. Pankratov asked Nicholas to bend his mind as to why Germany and Austria had avoided the same chaos when they had gone to war. He argued that despotisms were always taken by surprise when the people finally decided that enough was enough. This failed to convince Nicholas, who thought for a moment before asking: ‘But why wreck a palace? Why not put a stop to the mob? . . . Why allow robberies and the destruction of treasures?’2
The two men, however, found they could commune about Siberia. Pankratov was becoming an exceptional figure in Nicholas’s life. Until Rasputin, no one who queried the emperor’s basic thinking was allowed into his circle. After Rasputin’s death, in Tsarskoe Selo and Tobolsk, no one was left in the retinue who dared to contradict him. Nicholas lived inside a cocoon of his own making which was even more insulating than those which enveloped rival monarchies abroad. Pankratov set about picking it open. As an ex-prisoner of a Siberian labour colony, he had intimate experience of everyday Siberian conditions; he had exceptional acquaintance with the ethnic groups in the frozen north. Pierre Gilliard overheard a conversation that lasted over an hour in which Pankratov recounted his explorations in the Lena river basin. Nicholas and Pankratov loved to talk together – and Nicholas, forgetting about why Pankratov had found himself in Siberian parts, encouraged his companion to tell his stories. They were united in their confidence about the great future that lay in store for Russia in the depths of tundra and taiga. The ex-emperor and his ex-convict were at one in their patriotic enthusiasm.3
Alexandra did not share her husband’s admiration for Pankratov, and when she had to communicate with him, she preferred to use Dr Botkin as an intermediary. Botkin was happy to oblige. He deeply sympathized with her plight and helped in whatever way she wanted – and he regularly relayed her requests to the authorities.4
Pankratov himself never took to the empress. Her glacial self-control whenever he was in the vicinity was hardly endearing, and she refrained from showing the slightest gratitude for the small indulgences he succeeded in contriving for the family. Despite his personal generosity of spirit, he felt a growing contempt for her demeanour. This was not just because he was a populist revolutionary hostile to the old ruling dynasty. Soon after taking over his duties in Tobolsk on behalf of the Provisional Government, he agreed to head the local commission that collected voluntary contributions for Russia’s war effort against Germany. People soon complained to him about how miserly the Romanovs were. He dealt with this by handing over the contribution request form to Tatishchev and waiting to see what happened. He did not really believe the stories of Romanov stinginess until he found that the imperial family had given only 300 rubles. ‘Was this miserliness or lack of attentiveness?’ he asked. ‘Or was it a sign of vengefulness?’ Pankratov thought it no accident that it had been the Empress who signed the cheque.5
The rest of the family were a different matter, and Pankratov warmed to the way that Nicholas and his daughters were eager to saw timber for the fire and clear snow from the paths. The revolutionary had expected them to behave as the pampered beneficiaries of privilege. Their pleasure in physical work came as a surprise. Even so, Pankratov continued to believe that the entire family had always been artificially isolated from ordinary life in the country they had ruled. In his opinion, moreover, their upbringing had served to stunt their personal development. Nicholas and Alexandra had enclosed their family with rules of etiquette, and power and dynastic pride had given them a narrow and unrealistic outlook on life. Yet Pankratov never ceased to be an optimist. He had seen enough to believe in their constructive potential as fellow citizens and he concluded that it was not too late for them to make a start on changing themselves. (Admittedly, he could hardly believe this possible in the case of the stony-faced empress.)6
He noted Nicholas’s less than successful attempts to secure his offspring’s educational progress. Nicholas took on the teaching of Russian history, going through a book on Peter the Great’s reign with Alexei – this was probably the popular textbook by S. A. Chistyakov, which was later found among the Romanov possessions.7 He boasted by letter to his mother in Kiev: ‘I work with Alexei on Russian history, which I love and – I can say – know about.’8 Pankratov did not share this high opinion and doubted that Nicholas knew much apart from about Russian armies and Russia’s wars – and Nicholas himself made no secret of the fact that the military past was his abiding interest.9
Even so, Nicholas recognized a need to make changes in the teaching staff and turned to Pankratov for advice. Pankratov had a poor opinion of Anastasia Gendrikova and Ekaterina Shneider, who had been tutoring the youngsters. He recommended Klavdia Bitner, a woman with eight years’ experience at a Tsarskoe Selo school. (Pankratov forbore to mention that she was Kobylinski’s lover.) The emperor liked the idea and said he would consult the empress, who readily agreed.10 Bitner had arrived in Tobolsk on the same steamer as Pankratov and Nikolski. While picking up her relationship with Kobylinski, she had aimed to obtain employment at the lycée as a French teacher. The Romanov daughters, according to Dr Botkin, intervened to support the idea of her becoming their tutor. Miss Bitner quickly returned to Tsarskoe Selo to terminate her school contract there before returning to Tobolsk in the company of fellow teacher Sydney Gibbes. She was a woman who knew her own mind, and she informed Pankratov that she wished to discuss her terms of employment alone with the empress. Nicholas and his daughters welcomed her into his office. Nicholas explained simply: ‘My wife is waiting for you.’ In the conversation that followed, Alexandra was so courteous and enthusiastic that Bitner decided to accept the invitation.11
She was pleasantly surprised by how kindly the empress could be in their daily contact. When Alexandra enquired out of sheer human curiosity whether the teacher was remitting money to her mother, Bitner explained that she was short of cash – and Alexandra insisted on giving her some of her own.12 Bitner was equally impressed by Nicholas. With his impeccable manners, he usually made a favourable impact on those who had not already decided against him. Bitner noticed that whenever she had to take time off for illness, he always enquired how she was on her return. She came to want to do something nice for him.13 But she held him and his Alexandra culpable for what she saw as their children’s cultural deprivation. In her estimation, they were shockingly ignorant of Russian literature, history and geography. In poetry they knew little Pushkin and less Lermontov and had not even heard of Nekrasov.14 It was scarcely a surprise that Nekrasov, a revered anti-tsarist writer among revolutionaries but not really a first-class poet, had failed to impinge on their consciousness. Impishly, Pankratov urged Bitner to read some of his poems aloud to her pupils. When she did so, she chose ‘Russian Women’ and ‘Red Nose Frost’. She reported back to Pankratov that the Romanov daughters were delighted. ‘Why weren’t we ever told,’ they had asked, ‘that we had such a wonderful poet?’15
Alexei, meanwhile, was some way short of being a model pupil, and Bitner was disappointed by his preference to have everything read out to him. She accepted that his illness might have made him like this. The empress doted on her son but was less forgiving in this particular instance, comparing him unfavourably with his father, who had read voraciously as a boy.16 In every other respect, in any case, Alexei won Bitner’s heart. The tsarevich was a sweet-natured and brave young lad who hated to ask for help unless he absolutely could not manage without it. Bitner often said to him, ‘Alexei Nikolaevich, your leg is hurting.’ He would typically reply: ‘No, it’s not hurting.’ She would remonstrate: ‘But I can see it for myself.’ But the lad was stubborn: ‘You always see how it’s hurting, but in fact it’s not hurting.’ Both of them knew the truth, and on one memorable occasion he shared his concerns with her: ‘What do you think, will this [illness] ever leave me alone?’17
At the age of thirteen, he was growing into someone with ideas of his own. Waste of any kind annoyed him. Although he did not share all his family’s culinary preferences, he stoically forbore to ask for something different to eat. He also believed that family expenditure ought to be kept to a minimum. He looked after his personal possessions with care.18 Oddly, he preferred Tobolsk to Tsarskoe Selo, stating: ‘It’s better here. They deceived me there. They terribly deceived me,’19 although he apparently never explained what he was complaining about. It was not long before he had his suspicions about life in Freedom House, too, as some of the family’s retainers began to take liberties. One day the tsarevich asked Bitner: ‘Tell me, Klavdia Mikhailovna, why everyone is deceiving us.’ Bitner replied: ‘How are you being deceived? Who is deceiving you?’ Alexei explained that Dr Derevenko had told him to take a bath. The order was given for this and Alexei sat and waited to hear that the water was ready. After a long time he was told that the plumbing system was defective. But next day he learned that Maria Tutelberg, one of the chambermaids, had used the bath instead. Court etiquette was on the slide and the former heir to the throne was quick to sense this for himself.20