Nikolai’s Story Yekaterinburg, Russia, July. 1918
Four minutes before the massacre of his family and closest friends, Nikolai felt a surge of relief. As he walked towards the staircase, a guard pushed his shoulder.
‘Hurry, citizen!’
Months earlier, such disrespect would have been unthinkable. Now, it was unremarkable. He was carrying his son, Alexei Nikolaevich, in his weary arms and stumbled slightly, but regained his balance and began trudging down the twenty-three steps of the mansion his captors called ‘the House of Special Purpose’.
He was that special purpose. Or, rather, his imprisonment, and that of his wife and children, was held to be. Special enough to warrant three hundred armed soldiers standing guard over a man in his fifties, his ailing wife, sickly son and four young daughters. Never let it be said that the Bolsheviks did anything by halves. Security, as with murder and hypocrisy, was something they committed to on a grand scale.
The shoes worn by Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov, the last Tzar and Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland and Grand Duke of Finland, had gradually become, like the rest of his clothes, badly worn. Holes in their soles meant his feet could feel the cold, dusty stone steps as he padded down them and into the semi-basement.
The chamber was half above ground level, half below. Rectangular and completely devoid of furniture, its small, single window was predictably barred.
And here, in this dimly lit room no bigger than the boot cupboard of his previous home, the Winter Palace, he saw four of his friends and fellow prisoners, huddled by the far wall with his wife, Alexandra, and their daughters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who held her tiny King Charles spaniel close to her chest. The relief Nikolai felt was overwhelming. When he’d been woken up and ordered downstairs, he’d feared that Lenin, or Trotsky, or the prison-house’s commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, or any one of his countless enemies, had decided his death would be convenient.
But no. His wife was here. His girls were here. This gathering could not be for a massacre. He’d once joked that the Bolsheviks chose a red flag so the bloodstains wouldn’t show, but Nikolai reasoned that even the most fervent revolutionary must realise that ‘ordinary’ Russian folk would baulk at the idea of slaughtering unarmed women and children. The word Bolsheviks meant ‘the majority’ and surely the vast majority of his people still retained an iota of humanity?
He asked for a seat for Alexei and although his request was granted, the commandant’s assistant sneered, ‘So, the heir wants to die in a chair?’
Nikolai assumed the rhetorical question was just another barb intended to unsettle him.
Yakov Yurovsky leant against the back wall and called for his prisoners to straighten themselves up and line up. He told them they were going to be photographed to provide proof that they were alive and well.
Nikolai nodded. It struck him as a reasonable request. A reassuring one, as well, suggesting their welfare remained a consideration. He helped organise two smart rows. His wife sat in a seat near the corner, their daughters were arranged behind her, and their friends, including their cook and long-standing doctor, positioned themselves a pace behind Nikolai, who stood by his son’s armchair in the middle of the front row.
He leant forward slightly to inspect the line-up. Yes, that should—
A clatter of footsteps down the stairs interrupted his thoughts. Everyone in the two rows looked towards the steps as about a dozen men poured into the room. Some were drunk. Some were absurdly young and looked expectant, like fresh-faced kids about to set off on a school trip. All were heavily armed.
As they lined up to face the Romanovs, Yurovsky shouldered his way to the front of the divide between the soldiers and civilians. He read out the order for the Romanovs’ execution.
The deposed emperor spluttered, ‘What? What?’ and the fatal words were recited once more. A little faster this time. Yurovsky wanted to crack on.
The gunfire was deafening. Alexandra tried to make the sign of the cross, but Yurovsky’s right-hand man, Peter Ermakov, although hopelessly drunk, delivered a killshot to her head so quickly that the blessing was unfinished as she fell. Her husband didn’t witness her murder. Yurovsky, in his zeal, had shot him thrice in the chest with his Colt pistol, and a little over three centuries after Michael I became the first Romanov Tzar of Russia, that nation’s final official emperor lay dead at his son’s feet.
But Nikolai’s children were not so easy to kill.