44. MURDERS, COVER-UPS, PRETENDERS

The carnage in Ekaterinburg was followed twenty-four hours later by an operation in Alapaevsk where, since May, other Romanovs had been held in the Napolnaya school on the outskirts of town. They had been given freer conditions than those endured by Nicholas and his family, being able to walk around the streets and talk to inhabitants. The Latvians who guarded them were not as strict as those at the Ipatev house and allowed the younger grand dukes to play football and skittles with local lads. The Romanovs busied themselves as best they could. They tended the school gardens; they also read works of Russian literature as well as the Old and New Testament.1 In early July 1918, however, the regime withdrew the right to take strolls in the town, and a barbed-wire fence was erected around the school. A trench was dug to prevent attack or escape. Cheka officials arrived in the little town on 17 July 1918, in the hours when the corpses of the Ipatev house Romanovs were being transported to the wooded place of their ignominious cremation.2

On the night of 17–18 July the Chekists, together with some Alapaevsk Soviet leaders, turned up unannounced at the Napolnaya school in several three-horse carriages and informed the detainees that they were to be transferred to a safer place because an attack by anti-Bolshevik forces was imminent. The grand dukes were told to prepare for departure, taking only light baggage. It was promised that their other possessions would be restored to them in due course. Half an hour later, they were on the move. The secret scheme was to take them to a nearby mineshaft where they would be killed. As the carriages left Alapaevsk, gunshots and exploding grenades were heard. This was a Cheka trick to give the impression that the counter-revolutionaries were already assaulting the school – the authorities wanted to be able to claim that others were to blame for the disappearance of the Romanovs in the crossfire. When the carriages arrived at the mine, the detainees were ordered to alight. In a gruesome manoeuvre they were manhandled and thrown down into the shaft. Stones and earth were hurled into the gaping hole. A shot was fired that hit Sergei Mikhailovich in the head, killing him outright. The rest of them remained alive and, among groans of pain, started to sing hymns.3

It was butchery without cleavers. The armed men at the top of the shafts heard the howls but could not see their victims gasping for air, water and food, and no medical help was provided. The Romanovs died excruciatingly slowly, their bodies broken by their fall. Even the grisly scenario organized by Yurovski in the Ipatev cellar had been less gruesome.

The Urals Bolshevik newspaper on 20 July 1918, published in Ekaterinburg, carried a report that the Romanov detainees had escaped from the Napolnaya school in the course of an attack by ‘bandits’, and their current whereabouts were said to be unknown.4 As the process of evacuation got under way in the city, news about more Romanov deaths had little impact. This time there was no public meeting; no speech by Goloshchëkin or article by Safarov. In any case, the execution of the former emperor was bound to evoke a greater reaction than did the ‘disappearance’ of members of his extended family. The gruesome massacre outside Alapaevsk was hardly even mentioned again in the Soviet press of the Urals. Indeed, little more news – or fabrications – about the Romanovs was to be found in Moscow newspapers, except for the publication on 19 July of the text of Sovnarkom’s decree to confiscate all Romanov property.5 Lenin and Sverdlov were trying to play down the Ekaterinburg events and bury the news of Alapaevsk entirely. No information was distributed about where Nicholas’s wife and children were allegedly being held. They were hoping that the execution of a former emperor was a matter of secondary importance for most Russians at a time when the civil war had reached a high pitch of intensity.

Foreign countries were another matter. Sovnarkom as yet had few official representatives abroad because no Allied government would accept them. Switzerland, Germany and Sweden were the notable exceptions. People’s Commissar Mikhail Pokrovski, who had attended the Sovnarkom session on 18 July, wrote to his wife in the Soviet mission in Berne about the experience. Pokrovski was no sentimental politician, but there was a trace of the shock that he felt in his phrase that the former tsar had been done to death ‘like a dog’.6

Berlin was the international centre of Soviet diplomatic activity. Adolf Ioffe was sent there as head of mission to liaise with the Germans after the signature of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Ioffe had lived in Vienna for years before the Great War, spoke German fluently and was well educated. For some weeks, however, he was discomfited in carrying out his duties by the rumours about the fate of the Romanovs. On 24 June he had written to Lenin warning of dire consequences if Nicholas II were to be executed. When Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, broached the matter, Ioffe had replied that he had no information about the Urals but pointed out that the Czechoslovak offensive, coupled with widespread hostility to the Germans, made an outbreak of popular fury possible in Ekaterinburg. This was his way of saying that workers were after Nicholas’s blood. Ioffe wanted Lenin to ensure that, whatever happened to the Romanovs, nobody would be able to blame the Moscow communist leadership for any violence; he also demanded to be kept up to date with events.7 The Germans meanwhile told Sovnarkom to guarantee the safety of Alexandra and the children, but Ioffe still had no message from Moscow about what had occurred, and he pleaded to be kept in the picture so that he could better do his job.8 He was whistling in the wind. Ioffe was known in leading Bolshevik circles as an upright man, too upright to do what diplomats are said to do: to lie abroad for his country. Lenin took a cynical line. While valuing Ioffe’s handling of German politics, he declined to initiate him into the facts of collective butchery.

The Kaiser, however, expressed a personal interest in the fate of his cousin’s family and asked his own ministers to make enquiries about what had taken place in Ekaterinburg. Empress Alexandra’s brother had the same idea. This only served to make Lenin want to continue to keep Ioffe in the dark when German inquisitiveness was reported to him. In autumn 1918, when Dzierzynski took a break from his Moscow duties and travelled secretly to Berlin on a mission to foment a communist revolution, Lenin told him: ‘Don’t let Ioffe know anything! That way it will be easier for him to tell lies there in Berlin!’9 True to form, Ioffe replied to enquiries with a flat denial that any Romanov other than Nicholas had been executed – it was to be another year before Ioffe, who by then had been expelled from Germany, extracted the truth from Dzierzynski.10

The secret had never been watertight on the Bolshevik side, where there was a swirling mist of rumour, fabrication and accurate testimony. Much of the confusion was deliberately started by the Urals Bolsheviks. Fëdor Lukoyanov, the Cheka city leader in Ekaterinburg, told his sister that only Nicholas had been shot. She did not believe him, reckoning that he was trying to spare pain to their mother, who was listening to them, and soon another Bolshevik told her the truth that the entire family had perished.11 Before the evacuation it was widely known among the Bolsheviks that the emperor’s family had perished with him in Ekaterinburg.12 Beloborodov confirmed this in conversation while continuing to discourage debate about the details.13 And as time passed, Beloborodov saw fit to distance himself from complicity in the decision to kill them, but he could not entirely shrug off responsibility unless he dared to challenge the official line that Ekaterinburg rather than Moscow had been where the essential decision had been taken – and, somewhat lamely, he added that he had been asleep when the executions were taking place.14

The official obfuscations led many people to step forward claiming to be one or other of the Romanov family. In the opinion of the earliest anti-Bolshevik investigators, the Cheka leadership actively encouraged the process with the aim of befuddling discussion, and an easy way to do this was to start some gossip about sightings of the Romanovs. The obvious place for this to happen in the first instance was Perm, the city to where the Urals Bolsheviks retreated after leaving Ekaterinburg, and indeed Perm quickly witnessed the emergence of cranks and ne’er-do-wells purporting to have escaped from the Ipatev house. Before summer ended there were more ‘Romanovs’ than the family had in the last generation. Sovnarkom would have preferred people to stop thinking about what had happened to Nicholas’s closest relatives, and the next-best thing was that people received a plethora of conflicting claims. Some of the surviving Romanov retainers, exhausted and disoriented by their experiences, said things that served to reinforce the untruths about the killings in Ekaterinburg. The valet Chemodurov, who made it over to Tyumen by the second half of August 1918, assured everyone that the emperor and his family were still alive. He declared that it had been Dr Botkin, Nagorny and others in the retinue who were killed in the Ipatev house.15

Sergei Markov, their would-be rescuer, was taken in. After he was released from prison in Tyumen he went on a brief trip to Ekaterinburg to reconnoitre the situation in person, just as he had done in Tobolsk. He returned to Petrograd the day after Mirbach’s murder and was still there when the communiqués were issued about Nicholas’s execution. On 22 July he ran the risk of going to the German consulate, where he pleaded for Berlin to intervene and save the lives of the other Romanovs. He had no inkling about the true body count. His idea was to seek help in getting the empress’s brother and her sister Irena to facilitate an agreement to liberate those in confinement in the Urals.16 Markov was not a man to give up at the first obstacle. In August he set off for Kiev on a mission to persuade the German authorities to help him rescue the surviving Romanovs – it never occurred to him that the entire imperial family had been slaughtered.17