Alexandra (51 page)

From then on, the family’s routine changed. They continued to observe the schedule the guards imposed, but they added to it a regimen of their own, in which one of their number stayed
awake each night from two to three and all of them were prepared to dress rapidly and pack simply and in haste when the signal for rescue was given.

A second letter came soon after the first, giving more explicit instructions.
¹³
The signal would be a whistle. When they heard it, they were
to barricade the doorway to their rooms with furniture, then go out of the window, down a rope. Their friends would be waiting below.

‘The means for getting away are not lacking and the escape is surer than ever,’ the writer said. Nicky and Alix must come down the rope first, then Alexei, then Olga, Tatiana, Marie
and Anastasia, and finally Dr Botkin. They were to make the rope themselves, quickly. Then they were to wait for the whistle in the middle of the night.

June 27, Marie’s nineteenth birthday, was a day of sweltering heat. The guards had relented and allowed a single window to be opened, which let in a light breeze and the scent of flowers
from the town gardens. But still there was no real ventilation, the air did not circulate freely, and Alix wrote in her diary, ‘Heat intense.’

The rescue signal was expected, and each of the family members had surreptitiously laid out his or her clothes and belongings, ready to leave, to go out of the window, as soon as the signal was
heard. It was hardly necessary to delegate someone to stay awake after midnight, they would all be awake, listening. There would be the usual shouts and gunshots and sounds of marching in the
street, but there would also, or so they had been assured, be the whistle. Then they would swiftly get up and move the furniture in front of the doorways – hoping that the guards would not
succeed in blocking their efforts – and move to the open window.

‘Escape is surer than ever,’ the last secret letter had said, but the family must have worried nonetheless. How would the rescuers
disarm the sentries,
overwhelm the guards, seize the machine-guns on the roof and on the first floor, and hold off the rest of the soldiers, those who were off duty, who would be roused from their sleep at the first
sign of a disturbance? How could they prevent Avdeev or one of his assistants from calling for reinforcements? Or would they cut the telephone line from the house in time to prevent any call being
made?

As they went about their daily activities, their minds must have been full of questions, hopes, prayers for divine protection. Alix spent the day ‘arranging things’, doing
needlework, and visiting Dr Botkin, who had been bedridden with severe kidney pains. Olga sat with her in the sweltering afternoon; together they watched while two officials from the soviet
inspected their rooms, and refused to open another window to provide relief from the heat.

‘The waiting and the uncertainty were torture,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. The day must have seemed endless.

After supper they went to bed, and lay awake, ‘fully dressed’, listening for a whistle in the street. It was hot even at night, and they lay in the dark, sweating in their clothes,
no doubt worrying that the guards might decide to make an unannounced inspection and become suspicious on seeing them clothed for flight.
¹⁴

Hours passed. Between two and three o’clock in the morning, they must have listened with greater focus, straining to pick up every sound, annoyed when the sentries under the windows called
to each other, or when carriages passed in the street. No doubt they longed to be able to look outside, to watch for a party of armed men, hundreds of them, marching down Voznesensky Avenue,
terrifying all opposition, coming their way.

Three o’clock came and went, and then four o’clock, and there was no whistle. The sky began to lighten. The opportunity for rescue had passed.

‘Nothing happened,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. But the waiting, the terribly uncertainty, had been ‘almost impossible to bear!’

The next night the sentries received orders to increase their vigilance.

M
id-July came, and the family still waited for rescue, amid increasing signs that Ekaterinburg was becoming a war zone. Artillery rolled up and
down Voznesensky Avenue; troops of infantry marched and at times cavalry as well. It was easy for the Romanovs to identify the troops, they only had to listen to the anthems the bands played. They
were able to surmise that Austrians, former prisoners of war, had been drafted into the Red Guard to fight the Czech Legion. Ambulances passed the house, bringing the wounded to the town. Each day
the ambulances passed more frequently, indicating that more wounded were in need of aid, and that the fighting was intensifying.

At night, the booming of artillery and the crackle of pistol fire troubled their sleep, as did the urgency of their ongoing vigil, their awareness that, at any time, they might be called upon to
flee quickly, should their liberators arrive. The nearness of the fighting exhilarated and frightened them: would help come? Would the White Army seize the house and release them? Or would they be
moved again, to Moscow this time, and put into harsher captivity there?

Surely something would happen soon. One of the secret letters had said that the White Army was only eighty kilometres from Ekaterinburg. It was coming closer by the day; they could tell that
without a newspaper or an informant.

On July 5 another secret message had arrived, buoying their hopes. But the former tsar had sent a message back cautioning their deliverers not to expect them to climb down a rope out of the
window. They needed a ladder. ‘Give up the idea of carrying us off,’ he wrote. ‘If
you are guarding over us, you may always come and save us in the case
of imminent and real danger . . . Above all, in the name of God, avoid bloodshed.’
¹
The somewhat enigmatic message was sent – and
received by the Cheka at their headquarters in the Hotel America in Ekaterinburg, where it was filed away as further evidence of the ex-tsar’s treasonous activity.

The Cheka had taken over guardianship of the prisoners, sending Avdeev and his men away. A new Cheka commander, Jacob Yurovsky, was in charge.

‘[The commandant] made us show all our jewels we had on, and the young one [Yurovsky’s assistant] wrote them all down in detail and then they were taken from us (where to, for how
long, why?? don’t know),’ Alix wrote in her diary. ‘Only left me my two bracelets of U[ncle] Leo’s which I can’t take off, and the children one bracelet each which we
gave and can’t be removed, neither Nicholas’s engagement [ring?] could he get off.’
²
The inventory was superfluous, as the
Romanovs’ most valuable jewels had been concealed while they were at Tobolsk, put in small boxes sewn into pillows, individual gems hidden in covered buttons, belt linings, hat linings,
stiff-boned corsets.
³
Alix, her daughters and her maids had quietly undertaken the work of concealment, making it look, to their guards, as
though they were darning and mending.

It had been necessary to hide the jewels, for the guards had stolen many of the family’s possessions, looting their boxes and trunks and making off with their gold watches and silver pins
and necklaces, the gold and silver on the former tsar’s military decorations, even the gold chains from which their icons hung, along with their china, linen, and stored clothing. Anything
saleable.

Yurovsky put an end to the thievery. He sealed up the few pieces of jewellery he had inventoried and left them with the family.

Yurovsky was scrupulous, and very correct. But he was chillingly detached. Avdeev had been spiteful, his soldiers mean – but all had been human. Yurovsky played his role on a plane outside
the human, a plane of high-minded dedication to his superiors in Moscow and to the Cheka. All considerations of humanity, it seemed, were put aside.

He went about his task with efficiency and rigour. He ordered the nuns from the convent to deliver only milk from now on, nothing more – nothing in which a
message could be concealed. He increased the number of guard posts, and ordered a second machine-gun placed in the attic of the house and an additional sentry positioned in the back yard. He
ordered iron bars installed in front of the window that had been opened for ventilation, an ominous change, since the Romanovs had been expecting to leave the house by that window.
⁴

With the change in commander came a change in the atmosphere at the Ipatiev house. A priest and a deacon who came to say mass on July 14 observed it, though they could not define its nature.

Father Storozhev had come to the house before, six weeks earlier, and had taken note then of Alexei’s extreme pallor and Alix’s taut face and evident struggle for composure. Now, in
mid-July, Alexei seemed healthier and Alix too appeared to be in a better state.

‘Do you know,’ the deacon remarked after the mass, ‘something has happened to them in there.’ The family appeared ‘somehow different’. For one thing, they
hadn’t joined in the liturgical singing, as they had before.

Whatever the difference was, and it was indefinable, something had changed. Yurovsky had changed it and, just possibly, the chaotic situation in Ekaterinburg, and the exhilaration and fear to
which it gave rise, were a factor too. All might go badly for the family yet, this they knew. But perhaps, just perhaps, they were on the threshold of liberation at last. No matter that there were
now bars on the open window. There were thousands of monarchist troops fighting the Red Guards, beating them back (for there was no other explanation of the increasingly loud battle sounds), coming
to save the tsar and his family.

On the morning after Father Storozhev’s visit, four women came to the house to clean the floors. The Romanovs were playing cards when the women arrived, and Yurovsky was courteously asking
Alexei how he was feeling – he was developing a cold. Yurovsky ‘didn’t allow us to talk with the imperial family’, the women said later, ‘who were all in a good mood;
the duchesses [Olga, Tatiana,
Marie and Anastasia] were laughing, and there was no sadness about them.’
⁵

Alix had spent that morning lying down, while Tatiana read to her from a devotional book,
Spiritual Readings
. She was doing her best to observe the fast of Saints Peter and Paul, and to
examine her conscience as was the practice during fasts. Her daughters were taking turns reading to her from a book of homilies. But once again her physical complaints were distracting her. Her
eyes ached. She was dosing herself with arsenic in hope of alleviating what she noted in her diary as ‘very strong’ pains in her back and legs, pains that had continued for at least a
week and were making it hard for her to rest.
⁶

She was still endeavouring to be a better woman, to conquer her impatience. But from time to time she lost her temper at the cook, the maid, probably even her family. She could not help feeling
the effect of all the nervous strain. One of the guards described her as ‘severe-looking’, with ‘the appearance and ways of a haughty, grave woman’.
⁷
He thought that, with her grey hair and very thin frame, she looked much older than Nicky, though he had turned fifty in May and she was only forty-six.

Despite her long hours of enforced rest, Alix still endeavoured to be usefully occupied when possible. On July 16 she noted in her diary that she and Olga continued secretly to sew gems into
their corsets, corsets that they intended to be wearing when they were freed.

She continued to do all she could, but she had put her fate in God’s hands. Some months earlier she had written, in a letter to Anna Vyrubov, ‘Though we know that the storm is coming
nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.’
⁸
The storm had come, and was reaching the climax of its
force.

The White Army, with two Czech divisions at its core, was encircling Ekaterinburg and would soon have the city under siege. The Red Guard, dismayed and overcome, had begun falling back,
retreating in disarray. It was impossible to keep order among the men. Anything could happen, including mass desertions of Bolshevik soldiers to the other side. Loyalties broke down when men
panicked.
It was not entirely inconceivable that Yurovsky’s men, fearing the wrath of the Czechs, might try to save themselves by freeing the former tsar and turning
him over to the Whites.

The Soviet leadership, meeting on July 14 in the Hotel America, had to consider all these things when deciding, as artillery blasts shook the walls, what to do about the Romanovs. The city could
not hold out for more than a few days. British, French, even Japanese reinforcements might come to strengthen the White Army and seize the former tsar. Much was at stake in the decision the local
leaders had to make, not merely the future of Ekaterinburg – that was certain, the city could not hold out – but the future of Russia.

On no account could the former tsar, or his heir, or any conceivable future heirs, be allowed to return to power. That must be made impossible. Such was the view of the authorities in Moscow,
carried back to Ekaterinburg by Chaya Goloshchokin, regional commissar for war. The former tsar must be eliminated, along with his family, and with haste. The Ekaterinburg leaders decided to
implement Moscow’s order.