In March 1919, when the Bolsheviks assembled in Moscow for their party congress, there was still no public clarity about what had happened to the Romanovs. The custom was for delegates to pass their queries to the platform on slips of paper. One of them asked Lenin why there was still a delay in bringing Nicholas to Moscow for a big open trial.1 Only a poorly informed Bolshevik could have made such an enquiry. Pravda and other newspapers had announced the execution eight months earlier, and it is hardly surprising that there is no record that Lenin bothered to give an answer. But however stupid the query was, the Soviet leadership had certainly helped to spread confusion, and the official falsehood that only Nicholas had been executed was maintained. Rumours continued to spread and pretenders still sprang up in villages and provincial towns. The tale that Nicholas’s wife and family had been transferred to some unspecified place of safety at a distance from Ekaterinburg gave rise to the obvious question: well, where are they now? The combination of reticence and lies by Soviet authorities opened the ground for other tales to flourish, and White reactionaries put forward a variety of potential dynasts to mount the Romanov throne.2
This in itself did not compel a change to the account given in Moscow; indeed, as earlier, a degree of muddle in some ways suited the communist rulers. But their complacency was destroyed in 1920 when White refugees in Istanbul made the first serious attempt to release documentation about the Ipatev house killings. Whereas the communists could control what was printed in Soviet Russia, they could do nothing about foreign publishing houses. This little book, which was disseminated to émigré communities in Europe and elsewhere, contained documentation that offered a fundamental challenge to Moscow’s account. It summarized what Alexei Namëtkin and Ivan Sergeev had found in summer 1918. In particular, it described some of the discoveries of jewels and other items belonging to the Romanovs. It mentioned the interrogations of Fëdor Gorshkov, Pierre Gilliard and Mikhail Letemin, and it told how the peasants had pointed to the strange happenings at the mineshafts. The book also referred to the telegraph traffic between Moscow and Ekaterinburg. The conclusion was unconditional: the Romanov captives in the Ipatev house had all been shot and none escaped.3
In the same year a blistering attack on the Bolshevik official fiction appeared in the account by Robert Wilton. Through his acquaintance with both Diterikhs and Sokolov, both of whom he admired, he gained access to the inquiry dossiers, and as a journalist he appreciated the importance of producing his book with all possible speed. But he did not do the best of jobs. This was because Wilton marshalled the evidence in an extremely tendentious fashion in order to put the blame for all the killings on a Jewish conspiracy. Allegedly Sverdlov, who was a Jew, was chief of the plotters, whereas the Russian Lenin was a mere ‘dummy’, and the authoritative leaders on the spot were purportedly all Jews by origin. Wilton even claimed that the reason Judge Sergeev had refused to mention the Jewish connection in his report was that he himself was a Jew. This was also the reason Wilton saw fit to denigrate the Istanbul book that was published earlier in the year. With poisonous anti-Semitic fervour, he contended that its authors omitted to mention the Judaic origins of the murderers principally because of their own Jewish origins.4
Wilton did at least accept, though, that all the Ipatev house detainees had perished, and General Diterikhs gave a boost to this case when, on 27 February 1921, he gave an interview to a newspaper in Vladivostok. The Siberian far east had yet to fall into Red hands, mainly because Lenin was wary of annoying the Japanese, and this meant that the White forces who had been driven from the Urals remained in charge of the city. Diterikhs knew that his communiqué would be immediately relayed abroad.5
After explaining how Kolchak had put him in charge of the inquiry, he announced his main findings: ‘The whole imperial family and the grand dukes were killed. The first ones in Ekaterinburg, the second group in Alapaevsk sixty kilometres [sic] from Ekaterinburg. The imperial family was killed by decree of the Urals Regional Soviet in the night of the 16–17 April [sic].’6 Apart from the misdating of the month, this was an announcement that could not easily be ignored at a time when the Soviet leadership was trying to build up commercial and diplomatic ties with foreign countries where the fate of the Romanovs remained controversial. Trade negotiations with the United Kingdom were reaching a climax at the time of Diterikhs’s announcement. The Soviet central authorities knew the truth of his basic contention and could expect difficulty in maintaining the fiction that only Nicholas had been shot; for Diterikhs, resuming control of the anti-Bolshevik inquiry boxes, had delivered twenty-nine of them to the British naval vessel Kent, which transported them to safety in Western Europe.7
Once the lie about the singular killing of Nicholas was exposed, the communist authorities prudently decided to change their story. The alterations were published not in Moscow but in the Urals, when the Ekaterinburg branch of the State Publishing House issued The Workers’ Revolution. There was still no intention of revealing the full details of the Ipatev house killings, but it was clear that the leadership had to acknowledge how many Romanovs had perished.
The Workers’ Revolution opened with a chapter titled ‘The Last Days of the Last Tsar’ by Pavel Bykov, who had belonged to the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee in 1918 and had visited the Ipatev house on its behalf. He knew as much as anyone still working in Ekaterinburg about the fate of the Romanovs. Bykov recounted the transfer of Nicholas and his family from Tsarskoe Selo and then to Tobolsk before their final place of detention in the Ipatev house. He cited the growing danger of a rescue attempt as the reason they were moved to the Urals. Even in Ekaterinburg there were signs of conspiracy. According to Bykov, the Urals Regional Executive Committee alone took the fatal decision to kill the Romanovs living in the territories it controlled. By implication Lenin and Sverdlov had nothing to do with it.8 Bykov dropped all pretence that only one person had perished in the Ipatev house. As he put it, what had occurred on 17 July 1918 was ‘the execution of Nikolai Romanov and all those who were with him’. He bluntly stated that they had all been lined up against a wall and shot. He claimed that the execution squad had contained only four persons.9 The motives behind this last false numerical detail are unclear, but at least it accompanied an admission that all the Ipatev house captives had been liquidated.10
The Last Days of the Last Tsar was the next book on the subject to appear in Russia. Yet again, a provincial publishing house was chosen. Appearing in Tver in 1922, it took the story back to Tobolsk, where there had been ‘a concentration of counter-revolutionary elements and a whole sequence of provocational communications about the flight and seizure of the former Tsar’. The book also pointed to the signs of subsequent plots in Ekaterinburg. The arrival of Major Migic of the Serbian general staff as an emissary of the Queen of Serbia had shown that something was afoot. Responsibility for the decision to kill the Romanovs was ascribed to the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee. ‘Fantasists’ proliferated. Details were revealed for the first time, such as that Nicholas and his family had been taken down to the cellar in the Ipatev house before being shot. Truth was mixed with a new untruth; for it was claimed that the corpses were taken to a wood near the Upper Iset Works and the village of Palkina, where they were cremated. The geography was falsified presumably to stop the mineshafts from becoming a place of monarchist pilgrimage. But it was stressed that all the Romanovs held in Ekaterinburg, Perm and Alapaevsk had been executed.11
At the same time, the Whites were denounced for spreading the false rumour that Nicholas and his family had not been executed but were instead taken away from Ekaterinburg – a ‘rumour’ that Soviet authorities themselves had started in the pages of Pravda. White publications nonetheless began to be used whenever they corroborated Moscow’s new official line, and the recent Vladivostok communiqué by Diterikhs was used in support of the true idea that nobody escaped the Ipatev house cellar alive.12
Diterikhs himself repeated this idea in Murder of the Tsarist Family and Members of the House of Romanov in the Urals, which he rushed into print in 1922 before he left the territory of the former Russian Empire for China. By then Kolchak was dead, having fallen into the hands of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in east Siberia who, in February 1920, handed him over to the Bolsheviks. After a short trial by revolutionary tribunal, he was shot and his body was tossed into the icy waters of the Angara River. After Kolchak’s army had been routed, Diterikhs was at least free from the political need to avoid saying things that might displease governments in America, France and the United Kingdom. One of his first steps was to wave the monarchist flag, which Kolchak had never been able to do if he wanted to maintain Allied support. Indeed, Diterikhs proclaimed Nikolai Nikolaevich – Nicholas II’s cousin – as the new Tsar of All Russia. His own book was a self-aggrandizing account in which he played down the contribution that Namëtkin, Sergeev and Sokolov had made to the inquiry. Diterikhs wore his prejudices on his sleeve. The Bolsheviks to a man and woman, he wrote, were godless fanatics who operated under Jewish leadership.13
Nikolai Sokolov meanwhile continued to refine the work on the inquiry that he had had to suspend in Chita. The urgent need was to find himself a place of refuge in Western Europe. On 19 February 1920 he wrote to Sydney Gibbes (‘Sidnei Ivanovich’) as someone who might offer assistance in enabling him to make the journey. Stranded in Harbin on the Chinese side of the border with Russian Siberia, he worried about the safety of the materials that he had transported from the Urals. There were five large boxes of his own in his luggage, and he worried that Bolshevik agents might make an attempt to seize hold of them as he made his way south across China.14 After reaching Beijing, he headed for Shanghai from where he took a boat to Europe.15 When he disembarked in Dubrovnik, he journeyed to Paris and made contact by letter with the Dowager Empress Maria Fëdorovna. He was mortified by her reaction. Maria Fëdorovna was psychologically unready to accept that her son and his family were dead, and she rejected his requests to talk with her and showed him no cooperation beyond granting him a financial subsidy. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, too, refused to be interviewed. Sokolov ruefully said that if he had known how his painstaking work would be treated, he would have left his inquiry boxes with Russian peasants in Manchuria rather than provide ‘sport for political wire-pullers’.16
It hurt him that he was publicly maligned by those fellow émigré monarchists who wanted to believe that some of the Romanovs had survived the Ekaterinburg massacre. But duty conquered the pain, and Sokolov buried himself in his fourteen volumes of working notes. He paid no heed to his assistants who urged him to cease worrying about details and to publish his book without delay. His ambition was to complete an authoritative account appropriate for a judicial process.17
In private correspondence Sokolov gave vent to several of the attitudes that were to the fore in what Diterikhs had written. As a monarchist loyal to the memory of Nicholas II, he despised the Russian diplomatic corps left behind by the Provisional Government and still in occupation of embassy buildings in Western Europe. It was Sokolov’s crazed belief that men like Ambassador Girs in Rome would soon be working abroad for the Bolsheviks. He blamed the Provisional Government for putting ‘the Sovereign’ under arrest and thereby laying the path that led to his execution. He felt sure that Rasputin’s clique had been linked somehow to the German intelligence network. He noted how many of the individuals who surrounded Rasputin were Jews, and he assumed that such people were bound to lack a sense of patriotism in times of Russian national peril. He saw Germany’s hand in the travails that beset Russia after the February Revolution. With justification he pointed to evidence that Boris Solovëv, self-styled would-be rescuer in Tobolsk in 1918, might in reality have schemed to wreck the chances of a successful escape. But Sokolov also went further than what he could prove when he claimed that it had been German pressure on Sovnarkom that led to Nicholas’s transfer from Tobolsk.18
He put aside most of this speculativeness when writing up his Judicial Inquiry into the Murder of the Russian Imperial Family, which first appeared in a French edition in 1924.19 Its careful analysis and quotations from documents, depositions and interrogations gained international notice. Quickly coming out in a Russian émigré edition as well as in English, it became established as the standard Western account.20 In basic respects its main findings about the killings have been confirmed by later discoveries. Sokolov himself was worn out by his labours and ignored by Russian émigrés; he died in the little town of Salbris in Loir-et-Cher in the same year that his book appeared.
Most of the volumes that were published in the early years after Nicholas’s death focused on the last day of his life. Sokolov gave more information than Wilton or Diterikhs about the previous months, but he generally stuck to the task of inquiring into the killings. Memoirs appeared by the hand of former retainers who had made their way to Europe. The first of these was Pierre Gilliard, who in 1921 had produced an eyewitness account of his experiences with the imperial family.21 The doctor’s daughter Tatyana Botkina and Sophie Buxhoeveden continued in this vein, and General Alexander Syroboyarski published his correspondence with the empress.22 The image that they all conveyed was of a family without blemishes: Nicholas as the kindly patriarch; the imperial couple as devoted spouses even though Alexandra could be domineering towards others, including her retainers; the daughters and son as sweet innocents. Sometimes it was allowed that the welcome they had given to Rasputin had had baleful consequences, but generally the memoirists took it for granted that Nicholas the autocrat had the right to rule autocratically. There was little political analysis of his contribution to his own downfall in the February Revolution – and next to nothing about his reaction to events in 1917–1918.
Other Russian refugees were less generous about the dead tsar but none of them, with the fleeting exception of the Provisional Government’s Alexander Kerensky, had had direct contact with any of the Romanovs after the February Revolution. As they tried to explain the causes of the dynasty’s collapse, they delivered damning verdicts on Nicholas’s long reign in regards to politics, economics and social policy. Most of them had scant interest in the emperor as an individual.
Such attitudes were shared by Western commentators except for the unconditional monarchists. Those who welcomed the October Revolution caricatured the emperor as Nicholas the Bloody and spared no pity on his fate, and most writers who deplored the chaos wrought by the Bolsheviks were eager to blame Nicholas for having reduced Russia to conditions that made possible their advance on power. This had the unintended result of permitting monarchists, Russian or foreign, to dominate the discussion of Nicholas’s personality and ideas as well as his behaviour towards retainers, supporters, guards and political enemies. From the mid-1920s the debates outside Russia were skewed by the question as to whether a particular woman found in a Berlin mental asylum and known as Anna Anderson was really Grand Duchess Anastasia. Judicial proceedings and an inquiry funded by Alexandra’s brother Prince Ernst of Hesse denied the authenticity of her claims, but this only whetted the appetite of newspapers in many countries to sustain her case. The resultant farrago of pseudo-evidence served to concentrate minds on the fateful executions in the Ipatev house.23
Nicholas was turned into a cartoon-like version of himself, quite unlike the historical man and ex-ruler. Ironically, it was a Soviet publication, Vasili Pankratov’s memoirs, that got closest to a credible depiction of him in the months of his detention by writing of his modest habits, ineffectual attempts at teaching Alexei and enthusiasm for knowledge about Siberia. There was also a worthy documentary publication, The Fall of the Tsarist Regime, that appeared in the middle of the 1920s and was the stenographic record of the proceedings of the Provisional Government’s Extraordinary Investigative Commission, including testimonies by many of the political figures who either served Nicholas or worked to bring him down. But otherwise the Moscow authorities preferred to draw a curtain across such matters, and whenever the dead emperor was mentioned, he received no fairer treatment than he himself would have accorded to the communists whom he detested.24