Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been held prisoner by the revolutionaries since his abdication in March 1917. The Provisional Government had offered to send them to London, but Nicholas’s cousin, George V refused1, fearing their presence might foment revolution in an already strife-ridden Britain. After the Bolsheviks came to power, the royal family were held in a confiscated merchant’s house in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg.
For the new regime, the Romanovs, alive, were a burden and an embarrassment. Something had to be done.
At midnight on 16 July 1918, the royals were woken by loud knocking on their bedroom doors. Two Yekaterinburg secret policemen told them they were being taken to the cellar, ‘where they would be safer2’. The tsar and empress were allowed to wash and dress, eventually emerging from their rooms at 1 a.m. A local party member, the teenaged Pavel Medvedev, was among their guards and seems to have established cordial relations with some of the family. Certainly, his account of the events of the early hours of 17 July 1918 betrays elements of sympathy:
The tsar was carrying his young son3 Alexei in his arms … They were dressed in soldiers’ shirts and wore caps. The empress, her daughters and the others followed the tsar and the secret policemen led them down to the cellar. During my presence none of the tsar’s family asked any questions. They did not weep or cry … It seemed as if all of them guessed their fate, but not one of them uttered a single sound …
Yakov Yurovsky, a Yekaterinburg Bolshevik, was the secret policeman in charge of the operation. His official report on the events that followed is matter-of-fact:
Nicholas had put Alexei on a chair4 and stood as if to shield him. I said to Nicholas that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies had resolved to shoot them. He said, ‘What? What?’ and turned towards Alexei. But I shot him and killed him outright. Then the firing started … Bullets began to ricochet off the walls. The firing intensified as the victims’ shouts rose. When it stopped, the daughters, the empress and Alexei were still alive. Alexei remained sitting, petrified. I killed him. The others shot the daughters but did not kill them. They resorted to a bayonet, but that didn’t work either. Finally they killed them by shooting them in the head.
The spot in Yekaterinburg where the last Tsar of Russia met his fate is now occupied by a recently built cathedral, the Shrine of Redemption through Blood. The old merchant’s house where the murders took place was torn down (ironically, by Boris Yeltsin when he was the local Communist Party boss in the 1970s) to stop it becoming a place of pro-monarchist pilgrimage. But times change, and in 1981 Nicholas was canonised by the Orthodox Church. The new cathedral is surrounded by billboards showing life-sized images of the dead Romanovs and asking for prayers to ‘the holy martyrs’.
After the shootings, the corpses were thrown onto the back of a lorry and dumped in a disused mineshaft outside the city. According to Yurovsky, rumours began to circulate about the location of the bodies. He was ordered to retrieve the remains and take them elsewhere for reburial. On the way to the new site his lorry broke down, so he and his men decided to bury them where they were in the forest. As a result, the resting place of the last tsar and his murdered family remained unknown for over 70 years. When the grave was finally discovered in 1991 by local amateurs, the royal bodies were identified by DNA from their relatives in the British royal family, including Prince Michael of Kent. Also buried with them was the royal physician, Botkin, who had voluntarily stayed with the tsar’s family, as well as a maid and two servants.
A well-signposted Orthodox monastery has now sprung up on the spot, 12 miles from the city, with photo displays, shrines and cafeterias to cater to the many pilgrims who come here to pay homage. In hushed reverence, some with tears in their eyes, men and women offer up their love and respect to the tsar who was once so widely reviled.
There has been debate about exactly who ordered the executions, but recent research suggests the decision was taken personally by Lenin. At first the Bolsheviks gloried in the murders. The anniversary was declared a public holiday and Soviet officials came to Yekaterinburg to have their photograph taken in the bloodstained cellar with its bullet-scarred walls. But in later years the official version became almost apologetic. Now it was claimed that the murders were the panicked reaction of low-level functionaries as the escalating civil war closed in on Yekaterinburg, with the dangerous possibility that the tsar might be rescued by the monarchist Whites.
Civil war had been raging for several months before the killings took place. The October Revolution had divided the country. Former officers of the Imperial Army, furious at the capitulation to the Germans in the First World War, were leading the armed opposition. They were joined by a host of other groups, including dispossessed landowners, anarchists, national minorities – Cossacks, Finns, Ukrainians and others – as well as the Bolsheviks’ former comrades, now enemies, from the other revolutionary factions. The conflict between Bolshevik Reds and anti-Bolshevik Whites was immensely bloody, the atrocities committed by both sides appalling. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband fought with the Whites but later became a Red agent, evoked a war that pitted Russian against Russian:
The field sways5, a chant of ‘Rus!’
rises over it.
Help me, I’m unsteady on my feet.
This blood-red is making my eyes foggy …
They all lie in a row,
no line between them,
I recognise that each one was a soldier,
But which is mine? Which one is another’s?
This man was White now he’s become Red.
Blood has reddened him.
This one was Red now he’s become White.
Death has whitened him …
And so from right and left
behind ahead
together. White and Red, one cry of
– ‘Mother!’
The anti-Bolshevik campaign – or, rather, series of campaigns – began well. Lenin’s newly named Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) controlled Petrograd, Moscow and most of the big cities, but its opponents controlled vast areas of the country. The south was in the hands of Cossack governments; the Ukrainian nationalists were growing in strength; and White volunteer armies, led by the tsarist generals Kornilov and Denikin were beginning a menacing march northwards. Admiral Kolchak’s forces held Omsk in the east; and from their base in Estonia, General Yudenich’s troops were threatening Petrograd itself. The Bolsheviks were surrounded.
The Western powers – the British, French, Americans and Czechs – were helping the Whites with supplies and men. Tens of thousands of foreign soldiers were pouring in to fight the menace of socialism, sparking Lenin’s fury in a series of passionate speeches:
Comrade soldiers of the Red Army!6 The capitalists of England, America and France are waging war against Russia. They are taking revenge on the Soviet Peasants and Workers’ Republic because she overthrew the power of the landlords and capitalists and set an example for the peoples of the rest of the world to follow. With money and munitions, the capitalists of England, France and America are helping the Russian landlords lead their armies from Siberia, the Don and the Caucasus against the Soviets, seeking to restore the power of the tsar, of the landlords, of the capitalists!
In the crackly recording that has come down to us, you can hear the anger in Lenin’s voice as he demands global class struggle. You can understand how he became the prototype for the twentieth-century demagogue. But, despite the rhetoric, Lenin privately feared the Bolshevik state might not survive the civil war. The Bolshevik propaganda effort was focused on demonising the Whites and the foreign interventionists, particularly the English. Songs with anti-British words suddenly became widely performed and improbably popular.
Our former masters7 begged the foreigners
To save their land and their banks …
So the crafty old English sent in troops and tanks!
But to the bourgeois devils our people say:
We’ll take death over slavery any day.
The 40,000 British troops were war weary and keen to get home. One division sent to8 the Russian far north had all been declared unfit for service in France, but they successfully blockaded the ports of Archangelsk and Murmansk to prevent supplies getting through to the Communist government. The men hated the harsh climate and were revolted by the brutality of the civil war, as a British seaman, Tom Spurgeon, recorded in his diary in March 1918:
While I was there I met9 a Russian officer who could speak better English than I could. One day, we were walking together, talking away as we always did about the Western way of life. Without noticing too much, we strolled into a park where there were a number of soldiers and dissidents, including women and children. When the soldiers saw us approach the civilians were all lined up. Then, as calm as anything, the officer I had been talking to walked down the line and shot every one of them through the back. He then went back down the line and if any of them were breathing he shot them through the head. To him it was like having breakfast. There were women and small children but it didn’t seem to worry him at all. I remember clearly some of the bodies quivering on the ground. I can never forget. I am haunted by it even now.
Other British troops spent10 weeks or months waiting for action. Those sent to Baku in Azerbaijan learned to barter in the local markets, referring to it as ‘skolko-ing’ (skolko – ‘how much?’ – was the only Russian word many of them learned), but to a man they hated the ‘fish jam’ (actually, caviar) that they were given as rations. When they eventually fought, the British acquitted themselves well, earning the respect of those who fought with them and against them.
Trotsky wrote later in his memoirs that Lenin had felt intimidated by the British forces, which were armed with guns and equipment far more modern and efficient than those of the Red Army. In October 1919, as army commander, Trotsky issued an order of the day designed to fan the flames of hatred against the foreign interlopers:
Red warriors! On all11 the fronts you meet the hostile plots of the English. The counter-revolutionary troops shoot you with English guns. On the southern and western fronts, you find supplies of English manufacture. The prisoners you have captured are dressed in uniforms made in England. The women and children of Archangel and Astrakhan are maimed and killed by English airmen with the aid of English explosives. English ships bomb our shores …
French troops showed less enthusiasm than the British. Many mutinied in the Black Sea ports, demanding to go home. But the 70,000 Czechs fought fiercely. As the Bolsheviks had feared, they did indeed seize Yekaterinburg, just nine days after the tsar was murdered there. Within a few months they had helped capture a string of Siberian cities and advanced all the way to Vladivostok. The Allies supplied12 General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak with a million rifles, 15,000 machine guns and 8 million rounds of ammunition. The Whites were in the ascendancy. Their forces came to within 100 miles of Moscow and even closer to Petrograd.
In October 1919, the White general Nikolai Yudenich arrived in the town of Gatchina with 20,000 troops. Gatchina had been a traditional monarchist stronghold, with its magnificent royal palace and loyal tsarist history dating back to Catherine the Great. Now it was the perfect launching pad for a White assault on Red Petrograd just 30 miles away. Bolshevik power was tottering; if the regime could not retake Gatchina, the new state would be staring annihilation in the face.
But the Red Army was led by a military genius. Leon Trotsky had worked tirelessly to transform the raggle-taggle Red Guards into a proper fighting force. He reversed the disastrous ‘democratisation’ of the army, which had allowed soldiers to debate military orders and countermand their officers. He imposed political commissars in every battalion to maintain discipline. He introduced conscription, and shot those who refused. By early 191913, the Red Army had doubled in size to 1.6 million men; by the end of the year it had doubled again.
Now, in the face of the threat from Yudenich, Trotsky raised new fighting units from the revolutionary suburbs of Petrograd and rushed in many more by rail from Moscow. The defence of Petrograd made Trotsky an iconic, terrifying figure, dashing from battle to battle in his own armoured train, haranguing and inspiring the troops, meting out summary execution to cowards and deserters. He ordered the construction of barricades and trenches to halt the British tanks fighting with the Whites and marshalled thousands of foot soldiers to advance towards Gatchina. After three days of fierce fighting, the Whites retreated; Petrograd was saved. Trotsky’s reward was the Order of the Red Banner and the renaming of Gatchina in his honour: it would be called Trotsk until he fell from grace in 1929.fn1
Gatchina and the defence of Petrograd was a turning point in the civil war. Now Lenin’s speeches sounded an optimistic note:
The Red Army has united14, it has risen up, it is chasing the landlords’ armies and the White Guards officers out of the Volga region; it has taken back Riga and nearly all of Ukraine; it is getting close to Odessa and Rostov. Just a little more effort; just a few more months of struggle and victory will be ours. The strength of the Red Army is that it consciously and unitedly goes into battle – for the land of the peasants, for the power of the peasants and the workers, for Soviet power!
Germany’s defeat in the First World War allowed the Bolsheviks to recoup much of the territory they had ceded under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 (see here). Finland and the Baltic states were gone, but much of Ukraine, Belorussia and the southern territories were back in the Soviet fold.
Poland was another matter. Seizing on the chaos caused by the Russian civil war, the Poles, under the command of the charismatic Jozef Pilsudski, launched an invasion of Soviet Ukraine. Their aim was to reclaim those lands that had historically belonged to Poland, and in collusion with anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists they advanced remarkably quickly, capturing Kiev itself. The writer Isaak Babel, who himself served in the Soviet cavalry, wrote of the callous cruelty of the Russo–Polish War (1919–21):
On that day, 22 July 192015, the Poles tore into our rear in a series of lightning manoeuvres. They swooped down on the Eleventh Division and took many prisoners … Numb with despair, I stumbled into the fighting around Khotyn … My horse was killed … the universe was rent with wails and screams … In the darkness I stopped to relieve myself … and when I finished I saw I’d spattered the corpse of a dead Pole with my urine. It was trickling from his mouth and empty eye sockets …
Babel’s Red Cavalry stories of the 1920s are harsh portraits by a battlefield reporter. This was a ferocious, nationalistic struggle for territory that the two nations had fought over since the sixteenth century. Startled by the Polish successes, the Bolsheviks ditched the rhetoric of class conflict and international revolution, and returned instead to Russian nationalism. They no longer urged the workers of all nations to wage war against capitalism; they urged Russians to wage war against Poles.
The 100,000 volunteers who responded were enough to halt the Polish advance and send Soviet forces marching to within a few miles of Warsaw. The communiqués of the Red Army’s commander, General Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were euphoric. He declared his intention to march onwards and bring Communism to the streets of London and Paris ‘over the corpse of White Poland16 on the road to worldwide conflagration’. But in a battle that became known as the Cud nad Wisłą (Miracle of the Vistula) Poland won an unlikely victory over the encircling Russian forces. Warsaw was saved and so, for the time being, were the streets of London and Paris. With the Soviets forced out of Polish territory, the two sides agreed an armistice that split the disputed areas in Ukraine and Belorussia between them. For Moscow, the war imposed a tacit acceptance that the export of Communism would, at least temporarily, have to be abandoned. For the moment, the Soviets needed to concentrate on ensuring the triumph of revolution at home.
Peace with Poland and the departure from Russia of the Western intervention forces meant Trotsky could turn his attention to the remaining White Army of General Pyotr Wrangel, now bottled up in the Crimea. In November 1920, with the Red Army advancing and horrific tales of torture and executions proliferating, the White soldiers and their families scrambled for a place on the British and American ships that would take them to exile in Turkey. In scenes foreshadowing the US evacuation of Saigon, the Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky described the desperation and panic of those determined not to be left behind as the last vessels departed the port of Odessa:
Gaping mouths, torn open17 by cries for help, eyes bulging from their sockets, faces livid and deeply etched by fear of death, of people who could see nothing but the one, blinding, terrible sight: rickety ships’ gang-planks with handrails snapping under the weight of human bodies, soldiers’ rifle-butts crashing down overhead, mothers stretching up their arms to lift their children above the demented human herd … People were senselessly destroying each other, preventing even those who reached the gangway from saving themselves. The moment anyone gained a hold on the plank or the rail, hands grabbed and clutched at him, clusters of bodies hung on him … Ships listed under the weight of people clinging to the deck rails … ships sailed away without stowing the gangplanks, which slid into the sea, with people still clinging to them. It was impossible to listen to the cries, curses and wails of those left on the quayside, parted from their families.
Fifty thousand men, women and children left behind were summarily executed by the incoming Bolsheviks. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Flight (1928), two White officers fall into conversation on board a ship fleeing the port of Sevastopol. They discuss the destruction of the old Russia, and the failure to save her from the Bolshevik yoke:
What do you see out there18? Ship after ship steaming away, the decks filled with defeated men … It’s over; it’s the end of the road … Everything, everybody smashed to pieces for once and for all … And you know what the problem’s been? We’ve all been play-acting. Everybody except the Bolsheviks: because they knew exactly what they wanted all along …
fn1 Trotsky’s own memoirs of the defence of Petrograd suggest it was a close run thing: ‘For the one and only time during the entire war I had to play the role of a regimental commander. When I saw our men were retreating … I mounted the first horse I could lay my hands on and turned them back. For the first few minutes, there was nothing but confusion. Not all of them understood what was happening, and some of them continued to retreat. But I chased one soldier after another, on horseback, and made them all turn back. My orderly, a Muscovite peasant, and an old soldier himself, was racing at my heels. Brandishing a revolver, he ran wildly along the line, repeating my appeals and yelling for all he was worth: “Courage, boys, Comrade Trotsky is leading you!” The men were now advancing at the pace at which they had been retreating before. Young workers and peasants, military students from Moscow and Petrograd, were utterly reckless with their lives. They advanced against machine-gun fire and attacked tanks with revolvers in their hands. The general staff of the Whites wrote of the “heroic frenzy” of the Reds …’