The last sixteen months of Nicholas II’s life are a lasting object of fascination. Outside Russia, he has characteristically been depicted as a loving husband and father and a butchered ex-ruler. Books have dwelt on his noble qualities during a captivity that grew ever harsher in Tsarskoe Selo, Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. The stereotype culminated in Robert and Suzanne Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, which became a global best-seller in 1967. The Massies highlighted the ghastly scene of collective execution in the Ipatev house.1 They touched a nerve with millions of readers who were open to the idea that communism in Russia had been a bloodbath in the first year after the October Revolution – and the imperial couple were represented as entirely innocent of thoughts and actions that might have led to their deposition from power in 1917. A less sentimental portrait of the events leading to the February Revolution was offered in the British Hammer film Rasputin the Mad Monk, starring Christopher Lee and accentuating the dark forces that operated behind Nicholas’s throne. (The screenplay strangely omitted Nicholas from the cast of characters.) The common thread was that Russia, at the point when the Romanovs lost power, took a disastrous lurch on to a path that exaggerated all the exotic and grotesque tendencies that until then it had been steadily eliminating.2
Soviet writers ignored all such trends. From Lenin and Stalin onwards, the official line was always that monarchs made little difference to public affairs but rather were the puppets of robust economic forces. Nicholas was thrust into this analytical mould. The question for official debate was about whether the last tsar devoted himself to defending the interests of the ancestral landowning elite or aligned his administration with the demands of new industrial and financial forces. It was also asked whether the Russian Empire under Nicholas was truly an independent great power or the plaything of foreign imperial states, particularly the United Kingdom and France. No full-scale account of his rulership was approved for publication in the USSR either before or after the Second World War. The grim story of the last days in Ekaterinburg was kept under wraps.
Behind the veil of secrecy, an effort was made in Moscow to gather documents and testimony about the Romanovs in 1917–1918. Nikita Khrushchëv, Stalin’s successor as party general secretary, called for the illumination of hidden corners of the Soviet past. His principal objective was to find damning data about Stalin. Khrushchëv’s other imperative was to discover uplifting sources for the career of Lenin, who became the single unifying focus for Marxism–Leninism in the USSR. Assiduous efforts were made to excavate each and every item of Leniniana. As regards the killing of Nicholas, those members of the Ipatev killing squad who remained alive were interviewed and those interviews were recorded on tape. One of the official purposes was to prove that Lenin had nothing to do with the order to execute the Romanov family. The interviewees duly complied with what was required of them. But a trace of embarrassment persisted about the Ipatev house butchery, and the sound recordings were consigned to the archives. What is more, there was no serious attempt to produce a focused account of Nicholas’s long period as emperor or his fate as captive of the Provisional Government and Sovnarkom. In order to prevent any resurgence of monarchist feelings under Khrushchëv’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, it was decided even to demolish the museum that had once been the Ipatev house in Ekaterinburg.
Western historical writers reacted patchily to Soviet claims, accentuating the theme of escape, and gullibility about successful Romanov refugees from Ekaterinburg was not confined to the case made by ‘Anastasia’. In 1976 BBC investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold produced a book, File on the Tsar, which claimed to disprove the entire story of the murder of Nicholas and his family. Summers and Mangold argued that one or more members of the family escaped to sanctuary in Perm.3 The evidence was slim and their attempts at annotation were pitiful. I have worked on the same ‘file’ (which consists chiefly of the extant set of correspondence received and sent by Nikander I. Mirolyubov, Procurator of the Kazan Palace of Justice) in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and note that Summers and Mangold omitted to look at statements in the very same letters that blew a hole in their contention about the reliability of witnesses such as Natalya Mutnykh. The book nonetheless remains in print. Moreover, its basic hypothesis about a collective relocation of Romanovs to Perm or its surroundings has continued to grip the imagination of several writers. Although the British seem to have cornered the market in outlandish narratives about the Romanovs, American authors have started to compete with them. Perhaps the widespread prurience about private lives in the House of Windsor has spawned a credulousness about all reigning dynasties past and present.
Interest in Nicholas II has waned among professional historians, who have been more attracted by earlier Russian emperors such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. An exception was the measured biography by Dominic Lieven in 1993, which set the last tsar firmly in the political frame of his times, and Richard Wortman has recently highlighted the symbols and ceremonies developed by Nicholas to disseminate his idea of the kind of Russia he wanted to create.4 Geoffrey Hosking examined the tense relationship between the tsar and his outstanding conservative prime minister Pëtr Stolypin.5 Heinz-Dietrich Löwe explored the connections between Nicholas and anti-Semitic organizations and doctrines before 1917.6 Simon Sebag Montefiore examined his failures as a ruler while showing that the marriage of Nicholas and Alexandra was a coupling of mutual passion and support.7 Helen Rappaport investigated the local peculiarities of the situation in Ekaterinburg.8 Such accounts have healthily moved away from the saccharine treatments that once were the standard offering. They have also highlighted why Nicholas is a subject deserving of historical attention.
Nicholas has gained in public respect in Russia since 1991, when the USSR disintegrated and communism was swept from the scene. When President Yeltsin designated the decades since the October Revolution as ‘a totalitarian nightmare’, the Romanov dynasty began to be seen in a brighter light than had been permitted under communist rule. Even so, Nicholas remained a dark reactionary figure in many accounts and Genrikh Ioffe stuck resolutely to the line that it was the men of Ekaterinburg alone rather than of Moscow who took the ultimate decision to kill the Romanovs.9 But the stronger trend portrayed Nicholas in a sympathetic fashion and as Lenin’s fatal victim. Indeed, the romantic image of the tsar and his family became a staple of popular histories. Prominent in promoting such a portraiture was the playwright Edvard Radzinski.10
A host of investigative scholars – V. V. Alexeev, A. N. Avdonin, Vladimir Khrustalëv (together with American historian Mark Steinberg), L. A. Lykova, I. F. Plotnikov and Yuri Zhuk – have meanwhile dug up fresh sources about the Romanovs in captivity through to their deaths. They have sensibly avoided the Western controversies about Anastasia or other so-called Ekaterinburg escapees.11 They have concentrated on the sources in Russia without being able to give equal attention to complementary material in Western holdings, and have tended to limit themselves to questions about Lenin’s culpability and the circumstances of the confinement and execution in the Urals. Some of them also have monarchist sympathies.
The rehabilitation of the Romanovs was furthered by Yeltsin’s decision to rebury their remains in St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Cathedral on 17 July 1998, eighty years to the day after their murder. Forensic archaeology was undertaken in and around disused mineshafts outside Ekaterinburg, and the excavated bones were subjected to DNA testing and proved to have a Romanov lineage. Yeltsin himself had been the Communist Party chief who in 1973 had carried out Brezhnev’s orders to demolish the former Ipatev house, an action he had come to regret. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, withheld its complete approval because remains of not all the Romanov detainees were found among the fragments of bones and clothing. Predictably, this gave renewed stimulus to those seeking to convince the world that one or more of the family had avoided execution. President Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin in 2000, encouraged continued public respect for the murdered Romanovs. Despite reservations about the recent scientific inquiry, Patriarch Alexi was loyal to the memory of the Romanovs and canonized them as ‘passion-bearers’ who sought to live by the principles of the Gospels.
Nicholas and his family met a gruesome end in the Ipatev house. The former emperor’s dignity in the circumstances of captivity was impressive. He was indeed a devoted husband and father who vacated the throne in the February Revolution mainly because he could not bear the thought of being separated from his haemophiliac son Alexei. What shattered his confidence as monarch was the military high command’s withdrawal of support. His competence to oversee the governance of Russia had never been better than average, and his autocratic wilfulness wrecked any chances of a gradual transition to a more balanced constitution. The widespread image of him as a blameless monarch is unconvincing. In power and out of it, he was a nationalist extremist, a deluded nostalgist and a virulent anti-Semite. When held in confinement in Tsarskoe Selo, Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg, he strove to make sense of his experience by reading historical literature on the travails of his dynastic forebears. He also introduced himself to books that told him about those social classes in his empire with which he had negligible acquaintance. The imperial couple continued to cherish an idealized and misleading vision of the Russians as a people. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra gave adequate thought to the causes of their fall from power, and in so far as Nicholas tried to understand what had happened, he blamed alien forces that had deceived and manipulated his former subjects.
The anti-Bolshevik inquiry of 1918–1919 was focused on the period of detention and execution. It deserves commendation for getting most things right in a difficult environment for investigators. The original interrogation records lie at the foundations of this book. Of course, we now can examine documents and memoirs that were unavailable to Nikolai Sokolov. It is at last possible, as we have seen, to clear up several long-standing controversies: about Yakovlev’s choices of route to transfer the Romanovs from Tobolsk; about the Urals leadership’s political management in early 1918; about Lenin’s part in the setting of policy in the summer; and about the relationship between Moscow and Ekaterinburg.
My own broader purpose has been to look at the tsar after his abdication through to his death from combined political and personal angles and to ascertain how much his attitudes underwent change about Russia, politics, rulership, war and international relations as well as about himself after his abdication. His diaries, recorded conversations and reading habits are revelatory about his thinking when he was no longer at the helm of public affairs. His ultimate purposes before 1917 have given rise to decades of debate, and there is a question about whether he was truly as mentally rigid as his enemies claimed. The evidence suggests that those enemies had a point. In captivity he had the time to recognize any of his mistakes and rectify his basic analysis. In fact he did nothing of the kind. Although he belatedly allowed that if his son, Alexei, had been able to succeed him, a constitutional monarchy of some sort could have been attempted, he never expressed regret that he himself had set his face against any such outcome while he held power.
Nicholas was nonetheless a more complicated person than anyone could easily know because he kept so many of his thoughts secret from ministers, revolutionaries and even retainers. His best chance to commune with others came when he got to know Plenipotentiary Pankratov and Commissar Yakovlev. For Alexandra, the same opportunity occurred through conversations with her children’s teacher Bitner. Nicholas was more willing than Alexandra to pay mind to some of the notions of people with whom he disagreed. Even so, he barely altered a single one of his underlying assumptions. At a psychological level this is hardly surprising. In 1913 he had celebrated the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. Four years later he lost power when workers and soldiers joined in political demonstrations against Nicholas the Bloody. Naturally, he was reluctant to accept that he had brought much of the turmoil on his own head and made little effort to comprehend either the February Revolution or the October Revolution of 1917.
After abdicating, he was living in seclusion in a Russia that underwent ceaseless transformation. The Provisional Government altered fundamental features of official policy before being overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who implemented an even more radical set of revolutionary objectives.
The communist leaderships in Moscow and Ekaterinburg hated and despised Nicholas too much to try to understand him and his point of view. Lenin and the Bolshevik Committee, as is clear, were regularly consulted by the Urals regional comrades about what was happening in Ekaterinburg in the weeks before the killing took place in the Ipatev house. Lenin and Sverdlov were deft in the way they erased the traces of responsibility for the order of execution, and they and their comrades wasted no time in expressing pity for the former emperor and his family. For Bolsheviks, it was crystal-clear that the future lay definitively and forever with the revolutionary cause. Until 1991, the official slogan was: ‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!’ Exhumed from the dank depths of a disused Urals mine, Nicholas has enjoyed a tenacious afterlife. As with Lenin, moreover, myths about the last tsar compete fiercely against the demonstrable historical record. This is how it has been since the bloody Urals events of 1918 and how it is likely to continue.