Alexandra (48 page)

An organization had been established, the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk, to raise money and plan and coordinate the deliverance of the Romanovs from their captors. A banker in Petrograd had
collected nearly two hundred thousand roubles from supporters,
and more money had been raised from the sale of Alix’s jewels, which she smuggled past the guards at
Tobolsk, carried by one of her maids. Soloviev had quietly convinced most of the garrison at Tiumen to support the rescue effort – or so he claimed. Communication went on between Alix and
Soloviev, perhaps in code – how much communication will never be known, as the notes were passed in the utmost secrecy and destroyed once they were read. Prearranged signals were worked
out.
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All this activity went on in the deepest secrecy, leaving little or no trace behind. How often messages were smuggled into the house by visitors – Alix’s oculist, her dentist, Dr
Derevenko’s son Kolia, various tradesmen – or delivered in packages of food or clothing (Alexei once smuggled out a small note in a bunch of radishes), or were concealed and carried in
and out by servants, or hidden in gifts, or in the soiled clothes that were sent out to be laundered, can never be known.

Correspondence was thus of two types: the official letters, scrutinized by guards and authorized (and therefore virtually empty of meaningful content), and the private letters and notes, which
came and went by unauthorized channels, many of which can no longer be read.

Of the second type were the messages from Boris Soloviev and others in the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk, and also the letter Alix’s brother Ernie sent via a former cavalry officer,
Serge Vladimirovich Markov. In this letter Ernie offered help to organize a rescue effort, but Nicky and Alix both sent a negative response. The Germans were the enemy, and no help from the enemy
would be accepted.
¹³

The arrival in Tobolsk of a young friend of Olga’s, Marguerita Hitrovo, aroused the guards’ suspicion. They knew, or supposed, that rescue efforts were under way, and were
particularly suspicious of Marguerita, possibly because she had written ‘imprudently worded’ postcards to her family. When she delivered some letters for the Romanovs to Anastasia
Hendrikov, she was arrested and taken to Moscow.
¹⁴
Countess Hendrikov was arrested and questioned, and
kept shut in
her room alone. Eventually Marguerita was released, but the incident marked a turning point in the Romanovs’ captivity; the soldiers redoubled their watchfulness and became more harsh in
their attitude.

Winter closed in like a long pale shroud. The family was used to cold, but this was the cold of Siberia, which froze the river to a great depth and enclosed the town in its icebound grip.
Howling winds arose to blow snow in all directions, cutting the faces of people in the street like needles, and preventing all but the hardiest from going outside for weeks at a time. The
temperature dropped to fifty, sixty, seventy degrees below zero, with the nights even colder. When the dim sun rose in the late morning, it revealed a dull white landscape, trees, roofs, fences
lilac-white with hoar frost, cottages drowned in high-piled white snowdrifts, a white fog hanging low over everything.

Nicky spent his days wrapped in a warm Circassian infantry coat lined with shearling. The temperature in his study was barely 50 degrees, in Alix’s drawing room even lower. Icy draughts
blew in through cracks in the window-frames. There was too little fuel available to operate the heating system in the house, so the only heat came from inadequate wood stoves. The family stayed
near these stoves, doing their best to stuff rags and paper into the cracks in the walls.

‘We shiver in the rooms,’ Alix wrote to Anna Vyrubov shortly before Christmas, ‘and there is always a strong draught from the windows. Your pretty jacket is useful. We all have
chilblains on our fingers.’

She described their daily life. ‘I am writing this while resting before dinner. Little Jimmy [Tatiana’s black and ginger Pekinese] lies near me while his mistress plays the
piano.’ She described their quiet evenings, Nicky reading aloud to the family and staff, her dull days painting ribbons for book markers, making Christmas cards, embroidering with her stiff
cold chilblained fingers.

‘Alexei, Marie and Gelik [Gilliard] acted a little play for us. The others are committing to memory scenes from French plays. Excellent distraction and good for the
memory.’
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‘I have not been
out in the fresh air for four weeks,’ Alix added. ‘I can’t
go out in such bitter weather because of my heart. Nevertheless church draws me almost irresistibly.’

Such was the content of her letter that went by official post. In the same week as this letter was written, she asked Charles Gibbs to write a secret letter to her former governess in England,
Margaret Hardcastle Jackson, describing in detail the floor plan of the governor’s mansion and giving the times they were allowed out in the yard, when they went to church services and how
many guards went with them, and other information vital to any would-be rescuers. The letter, Alix told Gibbs, was intended for George V and his ministers; she was sure that her old governess would
forward it to the British government. What became of it is not recorded.
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‘It is bright sunshine and everything glitters with hoar frost,’ Alix wrote to Anna again in the last days of 1917. ‘There are such moonlight nights, it must be ideal on the
hills.’ The sentiment was poetic, but behind it, no doubt, was a hint to Anna, and through her to Boris Soloviev, that a moonlit night would offer a good opportunity for a small band of
soldiers from the Brotherhood of St John of Tobolsk to find their way to the governor’s house, overwhelm the sleepy guards, and take the family out to safety.

A
mong Alix’s Christmas gifts in 1917, along with dressing gowns, slippers, a silver dish, spoons and several icons, was a homemade diary.
Tatiana had sewn it herself, taking one of her exercise books and making a cover for it of pinkish cloth lined with white silk.

Inside, the diary was inscribed, ‘To my sweet darling Mama dear with my best wishes for a happy new year. May God’s blessings be upon you and guard you for ever. Your own loving
girl, Tatiana.’

Alix began writing in it on New Year’s Day, noting that it was the church feast of the Circumcision of the Lord and that the morning temperature was 39 degrees and that Olga and Tatiana
were in bed with elevated temperatures and symptoms of German measles.
¹
The weather was clear and sunny, and there was no wind; she had lunch
with her two sick daughters and then sat on the balcony in the sunshine for half an hour. In the evening, she noted, both girls’ temperatures had risen. She rested until eight, ‘reading
and writing’, then had dinner with Olga and Tatiana in the room all four of her daughters shared, then played bezique, a card game, with Nicky. The remainder of the evening was spent with the
gathered household, Anastasia Hendrikov (whose isolation from the family following the incident with the letters had been brief), Fräulein Schneider, General Tatishchev, the aide-de-coup Valia
Dolgorukov, the tutors Gilliard and Gibbs, and the doctors Botkin and Derevenko.

Nicky read to them all, from Turgenev’s novel
Nest of the Gentry
, while Alix knitted and the fire popped and crackled in the stove.

Knowing that her diary would be read by the soldiers guarding her, Alix was careful to write nothing in it that would alert them to her hopes and plans, her inmost
thoughts. It was only a bare record of her activities, of the comings and goings of those around her, of the health of her family and of the weather. She also noted the letters she wrote to be sent
by official post.

The diary was as revealing for what it did not record as for what it did; Alix did not note down her variations in mood, or the waxing and waning of her hopes, or her irritations or her moments
of quiet exaltation. She made no record of the secret messages she sent and received, of the whispered conversations – too low for the guards to hear – in which news and rumours were
passed among the family and household. Nor did she write anything of the behaviour of her captors, or of the overriding preoccupation of everyone living in the governor’s mansion and everyone
guarding its occupants: that the rescue effort, and no one doubted that a rescue effort – possibly more than one – would be made, would come with the spring thaw.

The most immediate concern of the captives in January of 1918 was money. There was not enough of it and, with the fall of the Provisional Government, no more was sent from Petrograd. Alexandra
had her jewels, some of which she had sent to Boris Soloviev, and there were still some funds left from what the family had brought from Tsarskoe Selo. But there was not enough cash to pay the
Tobolsk merchants, who stopped advancing credit, nor enough to pay the servants, nor enough to buy food for everyone. Alix, Valia Dolgorukov and Gilliard undertook to make a budget. Some servants
were sent back to Petrograd with small allowances and, while those that remained were willing to work without salaries, Alix could not bring herself to accept their offer; instead she reduced all
the salaries, so that no one would go without.

Keeping the kitchen supplied with food was now difficult, and the staff offered to help pay the cost. The midday meal was reduced to soup, one dish of meat or fish, and stewed fruit. Supper was
light, macaroni or rice or pancakes and a dish of vegetables. No one had more than one helping.
²
There was no butter, and very little sugar
–
three lumps a day for each person. The donations of produce and game that had augmented the family’s diet in September and October came rarely now and, when
they did, Alix rejoiced in them as ‘gifts from heaven’. Once in a while a merchant sent some caviar or fish, but such luxuries were very rare.

The captives did not know it, but Tobolsk was an oasis of plenty in that bleak January. Petrograd starved; peasants in many country villages survived by eating straw and moss and the bark of
trees. The Bolsheviks were blamed for what rapidly became a widespread famine, and crowds of rioters, weak from hunger, murdered food commissars and burned the headquarters of the local soviets.
The violence made no difference; the terrible scarcity continued, and many corpses were buried under the high-piled winter snows.

The family knew little, but heard rumours of overtures being made to Germany for the negotiation of a separate peace, and vaguer reports of Russian regions declaring themselves independent from
the government, a fragmentation of the empire that threatened stability and promised to create further economic disruption. Official news had once again become infrequent and unreliable, and heavy
snowfalls all but cut Tobolsk off from the outside world.
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Travellers came and went in horse-drawn sledges, or followed the riverbanks along
paths hewn through the snowdrifts. After each fresh fall of snow the streets of Tobolsk were impassable for days, blocked by tall mounds of new snow sparkling and glittering in the sunlight.

Alix sat with Anastasia and supervised her history lessons (the fall of the Roman Empire), taught Alexei the meaning of the Filioque Controversy (did the Holy Spirit proceed from God the Father
alone, or from both God and Jesus?) in the history of the eastern and western branches of Christianity, and corrected Tatiana’s German grammar. While the weather worsened (‘snowstorm,
terrible wind,’ she noted on January 21), she read the Gospel of Mark with Alexei, thankful that by the end of the day the temperature had risen slightly and the wind was less severe.

She worried about the weather, for Boris Soloviev was due to reach Tobolsk any day and bad weather was likely to delay his journey.
Fortunately he arrived the day
before the worst snowstorm. Through intermediaries he sent money, letters and goods into the governor’s mansion, and was given many letters Alix had written to take back to Petrograd. The
family glimpsed him from the windows of the house when he walked in the street below.

‘Let me know what you think of our situation,’ Alix wrote in a secret message in the first week of February, probably to Soloviev.
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‘Our common wish is to achieve the possibility of living tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigue. Write frankly, for I will accept
your letter with faith in your sincerity.’

Soloviev replied the following day. ‘Deeply grateful for the feelings and trust expressed,’ he wrote. ‘The situation is on the whole very serious and could become critical, and
I am certain that it will take the help of devoted friends, or a miracle, for everything to turn out all right, and for you to get your wish for a tranquil life.’ He signed the note,
‘Your sincerely devoted Boris.’

Alix sent a response. ‘You’ve confirmed my fears,’ she told Soloviev. ‘Friends are either in uncertain absence or else we simply have none, and I pray tirelessly to the
Lord and place all my hope in Him alone.’ She was discouraged, but still hopeful. ‘You speak of a miracle, but isn’t it already a miracle that the Lord has sent you to us here?
God keep you. Grateful Alexandra.’
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