especially the Empress,” Gilliard wrote in his diary on April 25. Kerensky admitted that, during these weeks, he was affected by Nicholas’s “unassuming manner and complete absence of pose. Perhaps it was this natural, quite artless simplicity that gave the Emperor that peculiar fascination, that charm which was further increased by his wonderful eyes, deep and sorrowful.… It cannot be said that my talks with the Tsar were due to a special desire on his part; he was obliged to see me … yet the former Emperor never once lost his equilibrium, never failed to act as a courteous man of the world.” On Nicholas’s part, Benckendorff noted that “the confidence which the Emperor felt in Kerensky increased still more … and the Empress shared this confidence.” Nicholas himself declared of Kerensky, “He is not a bad sort. He’s a good fellow. One can talk to him.” Later, Nicholas was to add, “He [Kerensky] is a man who loves Russia, and I wish I could have known him earlier because he could have been useful to me.”
Spring melted the snow, and in the afternoons the family began to go out together into the park. At first, they had to wait in the semicircular entry hall for an officer to come with the key, then file out, the Empress being pushed in her wheelchair, through a gauntlet of gaping, loitering soldiers, many of whom gibed and snickered as they passed. Sometimes, the men did more than mock: when Nicholas got his bicycle and started to pedal along a path, a soldier thrust his bayonet between the spokes. The Tsar fell and the soldiers guffawed. Yet Nicholas was unfailingly friendly even to those who insulted him. He always said “Good morning” and held out his hand. “Not for anything in the world,” declared one soldier, turning his back on the outstretched hand. “But, my dear fellow, why? What have you got against me?” asked Nicholas, genuinely astonished.
The news that the former Tsar and his family were walking under guard in the park attracted crowds who lined the iron fence to watch, whistle and jeer. At one point, an officer of the guard went up to Nicholas and asked him to move to avoid provoking the crowd any further. Nicholas, surprised, replied that he was not afraid and said that “the good people were not annoying him in any way.”
The line of guards with fixed bayonets, the restriction of movement to a corner of the park and, especially, the humilation of his father were hard for Alexis to understand and to bear. He had seen his father treated only with respect and reverence, and he blushed with shame whenever an incident occurred. Alexandra, too, flushed deeply when her husband was insulted, but she learned to keep silent. When the weather was fine, she sat near the pond on a rug spread beneath a tree. Usually, she was surrounded by a ring of curious soldiers. Once when Baroness Buxhoeveden, who had been sitting next to the Empress, got up, one of the men dropped with a belligerent grunt onto the rug beside Alexandra. “The Empress edged a little bit away,” wrote the Baroness, “making a sign to me to be silent, for she was afraid that the whole family would be taken home and the children robbed of an hour’s fresh air. The man seemed to her not to have a bad face, and she was soon engaged in conversation with him. At first he cross-questioned her, accusing her of ‘despising’ the people, of showing by not travelling about that she did not want to know Russia. Alexandra Fedorovna quietly explained to him that, as in her young days she had had five children and nursed them all herself, she had not had time to go about the country and that, afterwards, her health had prevented her. He seemed to be struck by this reasoning and, little by little, he grew more friendly. He asked the Empress about her life, about her children, her attitude towards Germany, etc She answered in simple words that she had been a German in her youth, but that that was long past. Her husband and her children were Russians and she was a Russian, too, now, with all her heart. When I came back with the officer … to whom I had risked appealing, fearing that the soldier might annoy the Empress, I found them peacefully discussing questions of religion. The soldier got up on our approach, and took the Empress’s hand, saying, ‘Do you know, Alexandra Fedorovna, I had quite a different idea of you. I was mistaken about you.”
In May, a new officer assumed command of the Tsarskoe Selo garrison. Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky was a thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the Petrograd Life Guards who had twice been wounded at the front and then reassigned to one of the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Kobylinsky was not a revolutionary, simply an officer doing the duty assigned him by General Kornilov. Although in name he was their jailer, in fact Kobylinsky was deeply loyal to the Imperial family and, during the twelve months that he was with them, did much to buffer them from shocks. Nicholas well understood Kobylinsky’s situation, and from Siberia he wrote to his mother that Kobylinsky was “my last friend.”
There were limits, however, to what any officer could do with the obstreperous soldiery, and unpleasant incidents continued to happen. In June, Alexis was playing outside with the toy rifle which he had played with in the garden at
Despite harassment and humiliation, the family continued to go out every day, happy for the chance to spend time in the fresh air. In the middle of May, they began digging up part of the park lawn to plant a vegetable garden. Together, they carried the grassy sod away, turned the soil, planted the seeds and brought water in tubs from the kitchen. Many of the servants helped; so did some of the soldiers, who discovered more pleasure in working beside the Tsar than in mocking him. In June, once the seeds were in, Nicholas turned to sawing up the dead trees in the park for firewood. Soon, piles of wood, neatly stacked, began to appear all over the park.
At night, tired from this exercise, the family sat quietly together before going to bed. One stifling evening in July, he was reading to the Empress and his daughters when an officer and two soldiers burst into the room shouting excitedly that a sentry in the park had seen someone signaling from the open window by flashing red and green lights. The men searched the room and found nothing. Despite the heat, the officer ordered the heavy curtains to be pulled shut—and at this moment the mystery was unraveled. Anastasia had been sitting in a window ledge doing needlework as she listened to her father. As she moved, bending to pick things up from a table, she had covered and uncovered two lamps, one with a red and the other with a green shade.
Harmless in themselves, these incidents revealed the underlying tension which prevailed at Tsarskoe Selo. Day and night, the sentries paced their rounds, believing that at any moment a rescue attempt might be made, for which, if successful, they would be held responsible. The prisoners waited inside the palace, living from day to day, uncertain as to who and where were friends, wondering whether the following morning would find them released or flung into a Soviet dungeon.
From the beginning, they most expected to be sent abroad. This was what every representative of the Provisional Government—Guchkov, Kornilov and Kerensky—had promised; that they would be powerless to keep this promise, no one could know. “Our captivity at Tsarskoe Selo did not seem likely to last long,” said Gilliard, “and there was talk about our imminent transfer to England. Yet the days passed and our departure was always being postponed.… We were only a few hours by railway from the Finnish frontier, and the necessity of passing through Petrograd was the only serious obstacle. It would thus appear that if the authorities had acted resolutely and secretly it would not have been difficult to get the Imperial family to one of the Finnish ports and thus to some foreign country. But they were afraid of responsibilities, and no one dared compromise himself.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
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GILLIARD could not have known it, but, from the earliest days of the revolution, an overriding preoccupation of the Provisional Government had been to get the Tsar and his family to safety. “The former Emperor and the Imperial family were no longer political enemies but simply human beings who had come under our protection. We regarded any display of revengefulness as unworthy of Free Russia,” said Kerensky. In keeping with this spirit, the new government had immediately abolished capital punishment in Russia. As Minister of Justice, Kerensky initiated this law, partly because he knew it would help forestall demands for the Tsar’s execution. Stubbornly, Nicholas objected to the law. “It’s a mistake. The abolition of the death penalty will ruin the discipline of the army,” said the Tsar. “If he [Kerensky] is abolishing it to save me from danger, tell him that I am ready to give my life for the good of my country.” Nevertheless, Kerensky held to his view. On March 20, he appeared in Moscow before the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and listened to an angry cacophony of cries for the Tsar’s execution. Boldly, Kerensky
