Sovnarkom held one of its rare discussions of the Romanov question on 29 January 1918.1 It entirely omitted, though, to add to its recent instructions about Tobolsk. Pankratov’s unilateral decision to resign had no impact on the central authorities, who felt they had already done enough by prescribing a stricter regime at Freedom House and handing oversight to the West Siberian Regional Soviet Executive Committee in Omsk. This still left Sovnarkom with the problem of deciding what to do in the longer term. The agreed preference was to bring Nicholas to the capital and put him on public trial. Sovnarkom’s idea was to use the judicial proceedings as a way of exposing the abuses of power and privilege under the tsarist order. Nicholas had been the fount of all political authority. The Constituent Assembly elections had shown that a majority of men and women in Russia and its borderlands rejected Bolshevism. Sovnarkom obviously had to popularize its purposes to greater effect, and Nicholas’s trial was intended as a means to this end. Lenin and his fellow people’s commissars badly needed to publicize the rationale for their seizure of power and rally support for the socialist order that they intended to extend all over Russia and then on to Europe.
Despite projecting subversion and revolutionary war in Germany, however, Sovnarkom had to comply with the terms of their negotiations with the Central Powers. Once the armistice had come into force on the Eastern Front, the next stage was to exchange diplomatic representatives between Petrograd and Berlin. Both sides found this distasteful. The Soviet authorities despised the German elite as imperialists; Germany’s ministers and commanders regarded Bolsheviks as the revolutionary scum of the earth. But Lenin glimpsed a chance to propagate the Marxist cause by sending a mission to Berlin, and Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s de facto military leader, sought to ensure that Russia fell under his control while he tackled the Allied armies on the Western Front. Diplomatic missions from Germany and Austria-Hungary reached Petrograd in the night of 28–29 December 1917 and stayed at three of the city’s finest hotels. Their fellow residents included the British, French and American officials who were attached to their own countries’ diplomatic missions.2 While the Germans strove to browbeat the Soviet government into signing a separate peace on the Eastern Front, Allied emissaries were arguing that Russia’s interests lay in resuming operations against the German armies. With the outcome of the Great War at stake, the belligerent powers allowed the Romanov question to fall off their agenda for action.
Sovnarkom meanwhile recognized that their Romanov plan might go awry. Though few people in spring 1917 had lamented the monarchy’s overthrow, Lenin and others knew that this could easily change. Rural households in particular might object to Nicholas being subjected to cross-examination, and it was quite possible that there would be a surge of sympathy for the ex-emperor. Sovnarkom also saw the possibility of controversy about whatever sentence might be imposed. If millions of peasants were capable of feeling sorry for Nicholas, caution had to be exercised about his future treatment. Was he to be executed or imprisoned? And if imprisoned, for how long? Only Sovnarkom could take these decisions, but Lenin saw no necessity for swift action. This was a time when the governing coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was debating whether or not to sign a separate peace with Germany in the Great War. Lenin was in favour of signature but he was in the minority both in Sovnarkom and in the Bolshevik Central Committee. The question of war or peace predictably took priority over the Romanov question. Sovnarkom resolved only to make a start by getting Nikolai Alexeev, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary who served as Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture, to provide it with the resolutions that had been passed about the imperial family at the recent All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies. Sovnarkom wanted to take soundings of rural opinion.3
Alexeev reported back on 20 February 1918 when the Romanov question was top of the agenda and he was accompanied by Moisei Uritski, who headed the Petrograd branch of the new political police known as the Cheka. After further discussion, Sovnarkom resolved to require the People’s Commissariat of Justice and two representatives from the Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies to prepare investigative material on Nicholas. The timing of Nicholas’s transfer from Tobolsk was still postponed until such time as Sovnarkom reviewed the entire question, but the process was at last picking up speed and urgency in the central Soviet leadership.4
For the time being, nothing much ensued except for a budgetary order by People’s Commissar for State Property and Left Socialist-Revolutionary Vladimir Karelin, who telegrammed on 23 February 1918 to the effect that Sovnarkom could no longer afford to keep the Romanovs in their current comfort. From then onwards the state subsidy would be fixed at a monthly rate of 600 rubles per person. No allowance would be made for the retinue. Nicholas had to choose between firing some of his retainers and drawing on his own funds to continue to pay them, and he asked Tatishchev, Dolgorukov and Gilliard to work out how to deal with the situation. After a painful discussion they concluded that there was no alternative to a numerical reduction of the retinue. The emperor gave his consent, and it was decided that those who lacked private means or could not be kept on his payroll would have to leave the house.5 The change was planned to start on 1 March.6 Gilliard would never forget the time when butter and coffee became household luxuries.7 The emperor got rid of twelve of his staff; he also reduced the pay of all those who remained.8
The dismissed individuals reacted with a bout of heavy drinking – there was still plenty of alcohol at Freedom House. Some of the servants got so drunk that they crawled on all fours past the imperial family’s quarters to get to their own rooms, where they collapsed in a stupor.9 It was yet another stage in the degradation of morale. Until then the retinue had stuck to traditional standards of behaviour, but if their services were no longer required, they saw no obligation to defer to such expectations.
Alexandra hoped to ease the problems of unemployment for departing servants by paying them for a further three months. When she looked at the accounts, however, it was clear that she lacked the funds for this. Her solution was to reduce the salaries of the retained staff by a third over the same period and to use what was left over to pay the individuals who were being fired, and at the same time she aimed to make further economies to compensate for the losses suffered by those who remained with the family.10 As she and Gilliard examined the books, they discovered that the holes in the budget were deeper than she had imagined.11 She implored Gilliard to explain the situation to the other retainers. Inevitably, he met with a storm of discontent. The staff were furious about the cutting of their salaries, even though they were still being well fed and still had a roof over their heads in a comfortable residence.12 Loyalty to the imperial family was being eroded. Tatyana Botkina noted that several people in the retinue began to submit improbable expense claims and take their pick from food parcels intended for the Romanovs.13
Supporters outside Freedom House secretly helped to prop up Nicholas’s budget. Vladimir Shtein, the former vice-governor of Mogilëv, had been out to Tobolsk in January 1918 and returned to Moscow telling monarchists about Nicholas’s financial distress. Shtein collected 250,000 rubles before going back to Tobolsk and handing over the money to Tatishchev and Dolgorukov.14 Nicholas caught a glimpse of him on the street outside. He wrote gratefully in his diary on 26 March 1918 about ‘a decent sum from the good people of our acquaintance’. Shtein also brought tea and books for use by the Romanovs.15
The family had no information about what was being planned for them in the longer term. They did, though, know about one discussion in the capital that would affect everybody. On 23 February 1918 the Bolshevik Central Committee at last assented to Lenin’s argument that a separate peace was the only practical way to save the October Revolution.16 Since December, Lenin had led a minority of its members in advocating acceptance of German terms for Russian withdrawal from the war. He met with resistance from the majority. For these, there was no point in being Bolsheviks if it meant signing a deal with Europe’s most rapacious military and economic power. Many of them could see plainly enough that Russia was on the brink of inevitable defeat on the Eastern Front. Indeed, the old Russian Army had voted with its feet and left the trenches. There was no real front any longer, and the Germans could rampage on Petrograd whenever they wanted. Such was the danger that it had been decided to transfer the capital to Moscow, and arrangements were made for trains to transport the Soviet government and most of its leaders as a matter of urgency.
The treaty was signed on 3 March at Brest-Litovsk, near to the Eastern Front. Lenin secured a ‘breathing space’ for Sovnarkom, but it came at the price of driving the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries out of the governing coalition and splitting the Bolsheviks in two. Under the treaty’s terms, Sovnarkom gave up all claims of sovereignty over the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. The Germans surged into Ukraine and beyond, occupying Crimea, the Don province and the North Caucasus. They marched even into Rostov in southern Russia.
The Romanovs were not taken by surprise, despite the fact that Pravda was not one of the newspapers that they read. When Lenin had seemed enveloped in a hopeless struggle against the odds to persuade the Bolsheviks about the benefits of a separate peace, Alexandra felt instinctively that he would eventually get his way. She wrote: ‘The Germans are at Pskov. Peace will be concluded on the most terrible, shameful, ruinous terms for Russia.’17 She had never been good at political prediction. This time, for once, she was proved absolutely right. Nicholas recalled that Alexandra had often been accused of conspiring against the country’s interests. Now he himself asked: ‘Who exactly is it who’s the traitor?’ The Brest-Litovsk treaty appeared to him a disgrace for Russia and a betrayal of the Western Allies. After dinner on 19 March he exclaimed: ‘It’s such a shame on Russia and the equivalent of suicide! I would never have believed that Kaiser Wilhelm and the German government could stretch out their hands to these wretches who have betrayed their country!’
Nicholas’s distress was obvious to everyone. Gilliard later recalled: ‘The Brest-Litovsk treaty deeply affected him and so depressed him that it had an effect on his physical well-being. From that moment onwards he aged a great deal. All of us observed in Tobolsk how he had a fearful pallor and big pockets below his eyes and his beard turned sharply grey.’18
Alexandra felt the same about Brest-Litovsk; she felt that only divine intervention could remedy the situation. On 19 March 1918 she wrote to Madame Syroboyarskaya:
What times are these? What lies ahead? It’s a shameful peace. It’s a total horror what has been reached in a single year. Their sole achievement is to have destroyed everything. The army is being annihilated at full tilt, so how to resist the enemy? A humiliating peace. But God is higher than everything and perhaps He will do something about it where people are simply incapable. Something will happen to save things. Being under the yoke of the Germans is worse than [under] the Tartar yoke. No, the Lord won’t permit such injustice and will put everything to rights.19
Alexandra was focusing on the future for Russia. It did not yet occur to her or Nicholas that the treaty might have consequences for the entire Romanov family. Sovnarkom’s relations with Germany were in fact about to affect every aspect of Russian public affairs. When Bolshevik leaders came back to what to do about the Romanovs, the German factor was always going to be to the fore in their considerations. And, very quietly, the danger was increasing.