miraculous resurrection might happen for Russia. “God will not leave it like this,” she wrote to Anna. “He will send wisdom and save Russia I am sure.… The nation is strong and young and soft as wax. Just now it is in bad hands and darkness and anarchy reign. But the King of Glory will come and will save, strengthen, and give wisdom to the people who are now deceived.” Alexandra considered it a sign of this coming transformation that the soldiers changed their rules and allowed her to go frequently to church.
Just at this point, an enemy older than the Bolsheviks rose up to shatter her hopes. Alexis had been well all winter and was filled with energy and high spirits. The destruction of the snow mountain had deprived him of an activity which had absorbed much of his vitality; in its place, he was devising new and reckless games which no one seemed able to inhibit. One of these—riding down the inside stairs on a boat with runners which he had used on the snow mountain—led to calamity. He fell and began to bleed into the groin. The hemorrhage was the worst since Spala five years before. The pain increased rapidly and became excruciating. When it became intolerable, Alexis gasped between his screams, “Mama, I would like to die. I am not afraid of death, but I am so afraid of what they will do to us here.” Alexandra, alone, without Rasputin to come or telegraph or pray, could do nothing. “He is frightfully thin and yellow, reminding me of Spala,” she wrote to Anna. “I sit all day beside him holding his aching legs and I have grown about as thin as he.”
A few days later, in her last letter to Anna Vyrubova, the Empress described Alexis’s progress and mentioned a source of new alarm. “Yesterday for the first time, he smiled and talked with us, even played cards, and slept two hours during the day. He is frightfully thin with enormous eyes, just as Spala. He likes to be read to, eats little.… I am with him the whole day, Tatiana or Mr. Gilliard relieving me at intervals. Mr. Gilliard reads to him tirelessly, or warms his legs with the Fohn apparatus.… A great number of new troops have come from everywhere. A new commissar has arrived from Moscow, a man named Yakovlev and today we shall have to make his acquaintance.… They are always hinting to us that we shall have to travel either very far away or to the center of Siberia.… Just now eleven men have passed on horseback, good faces, mere boys.… They are the guard of the new commissar. Sometimes we see men with the most awful faces.… The atmosphere around us is … electrified. We feel that a storm is approaching, but we know that God is merciful … our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will.”
Alexandra sensed accurately that the political storm was upon them; what she could not know was that her son would never walk again.
The collapse of Kerensky’s government had been even more swift and bloodless than the overthrow of the autocracy. In scarcely more than the passage of a single night, Lenin stood at the helm of the new Soviet state. Nevertheless, his control over the huge territory of Russia was precarious. To consolidate their grip, the Bolsheviks had to have peace—at any price. The price set by the Germans was a terrible one: loss of most of the territory won by Russia since the days of Peter the Great, including Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, the Crimea and most of the Caucasus. Within these four hundred thousand square miles lived sixty million people, more than one third of the population of the empire. Yet Lenin had no choice. “Peace” was the cry which had brought him to power. Russian soldiers, prodded by the Bolsheviks’ own propaganda, were deserting by the millions. A German army was advancing on Petrograd, and the capital was moved to Moscow, but Russian soldiers could not be recalled to arms, least of all by the party which had promised them peace. Therefore, to save the revolution until, as he confidently expected, it spread to Germany itself, Lenin made peace. On March 3, 1918, in the town of Brest- Litovsk, now headquarters of the German Eastern Front, a Bolshevik delegation signed the German treaty. So humiliating were the terms and the German treatment of the Russian delegation that, after observing the ceremony, one Russian general went out and shot himself.
When news of the treaty reached Tobolsk, Nicholas was overwhelmed with grief and shame. It was, as Lenin was well aware, a total rejection of Russian patriotism. Nicholas called it “a disgrace” and “suicide for Russia.” “To think that they called Her Majesty a traitor.” he said bitterly. The Tsar was appalled that the Kaiser, Europe’s most strident spokesman of the monarchical principle, had been willing to deal with the Bolsheviks. “I should never have thought the Emperor William and the German Government could stoop to shake hands with these miserable traitors,” he cried. “But they [the Germans] will get no good from it; it won’t save them from ruin.” Hearing a rumor that the Germans were demanding that the Tsar and his family be handed over to them unharmed, Nicholas called it “either a maneuver to discredit me or an insult.” Defiantly, Alexandra added, “They [the Germans] must never dare to attempt any conversations with Father [Nicholas] or Mother [herself].… After what they have done to the Tsar, I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans.”
Inevitably, once the fighting had ended, both Germans and Russians had more time to think of the Tsar and his family. Nicholas remained a symbol, a human pawn with potential value. To the Kaiser, who was indeed ashamed of his embrace of the Bolsheviks, a pliable Nicholas willing to endorse the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would have had great value. The Bolsheviks, sensing this German interest, immediately understood that in whatever bargaining and maneuvering lay ahead, the Tsar must be kept beyond the Kaiser’s reach. As the soldiers in Tobolsk and their commander, Kobylinsky, were all still holdovers, from the Kerensky regime, the Bolshevik leaders resolved to place the Imperial family under more reliable guard.
There was another factor which was to influence the fate of the Imperial family. Of all the regional Soviets which had sprung up in Russia, none was more fiercely Bolshevik than that which sat in the Ural Mountain city of Ekaterinburg. For years, the Ural miners and workers, toiling underground or before open blast-furnaces, had maintained a tradition of discontent and rebellion which had earned the area the name of the Red Urals. In 1917, well before the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the Ekaterinburg Soviet had nationalized the local mines and factories. For a reason quite different from the central government’s, this group of militant Bolsheviks was anxious to lay hands on the Tsar. Once in Ekaterinburg, the Tsar and his family would become not pawns in a game of international politics, but victims in a grim drama of retribution. In March, the Ural Regional Soviet asked permission from Moscow to bring the Imperial family to Ekaterinburg.
Before Moscow could reply, a Bolshevik detachment from the city of Omsk suddenly arrived in Tobolsk. Omsk was the administrative capital of the province of Western Siberia and a rival of Ekaterinburg for supremacy in the regions east of the Urals. Technically, Tobolsk lay within the sway of Omsk, and this band of soldiers had come not to take away the Tsar, but to dissolve the local government and impose Bolshevism on the town. Pathetically, the Imperial family persisted in hoping that the Omsk soldiers were rescuers. The Empress, looking down from her window as they dashed by in
On April 13, a detachment from Ekaterinburg under a commissar named Zaslavsky finally arrived in Tobolsk. Moscow still had not replied to the request to remove the Tsar from Tobolsk, and without this permission, neither Kobylinsky’s men nor the soldiers from Omsk would allow the family to be taken. Zaslavsky then suggested that they at least be moved to the local prison, where they could be strongly guarded. Kobylinsky refused and Zaslavsky’s men thereupon launched a campaign of propaganda, urging Kobylinsky’s soldiers to ignore the orders of their commandant. It was at this low point that Moscow directly intervened in the form of Commissar Vasily Vaslevich Yakovlev.
From the beginning, an air of mystery attended Yakovlev. The prisoners were aware that someone important was coming from Moscow; there were rumors that it might be Trotsky himself. Instead, on April 22, Yakovlev arrived at the head of 150 horsemen, bringing with him a private telegraph operator through whom he communicated directly with the Kremlin. On his first evening in Tobolsk, he had tea with the Tsar and the Empress, but said nothing about his mission. They noted that he was around thirty-two or thirty-three, tall and muscular with jet-black hair and that, although he was dressed like an ordinary sailor, there was unmistakable evidence of a more cultured background. His language was refined, he addressed Nicholas as “Your Majesty” and greeted Gilliard by saying “
On the second morning, April 24, Yakovlev summoned Kobylinsky and showed him documents signed by Jacob Sverdlov, an intimate of Lenin who occupied the key administrative post of President of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. “The first document was addressed to me,” wrote Kobylinsky,
