At the Ipatiev house, the children’s arrival brought a burst of happiness. Marie slept that night on the floor so that Alexis could have her bed. Thereafter, twelve people were crowded into five rooms. Nicholas, Alexandra and Alexis shared a room, the girls had another, and the rest were divided between the male and female retainers.
In Ekaterinburg, Nicholas and his family were truly prisoners. Their guards were divided into two quite separate groups. Outside the fence and at intervals along the street, the guard consisted of ordinary Red soldiers. Inside, the guards were Bolshevik shock troops made up of former workers from the Zlokazovsky and Syseretsky factories in Ekaterinburg. All were old, hard-core revolutionaries, seasoned by years of privation and bitterness. Night and day, three of these men, armed with revolvers, kept watch outside the five rooms occupied by the Imperial family.
The leader of the inner guard was a tall, thin-faced man who habitually referred to the Tsar as “Nicholas the Blood-Drinker.” Alexander Avadeyev had been a commissar at the Zlokazovsky works, where in the autumn of 1917 he personally had arrested the owner and had become head of the factory Soviet. Avadeyev hated the Tsar and dinned into the heads of his subordinates that Nicholas had forced Russia into war in order to spill the blood of larger numbers of workers. Avadeyev drank heavily and encouraged his men to join him. Together, they pilfered the Imperial family’s baggage, which was stored in a downstairs room. Following Avadeyev’s example, the guards went beltless and unbuttoned. They were deliberately rude. If a member of the family asked, for example, that a window be opened on a sweltering day, the guards either ignored the request or transmitted it to Avadeyev, whose customary response was, “Let them go to hell.” Then, pleased with themselves, they would go downstairs and brag that they had just refused this or that to “Nikolasha” and “the German woman.” The family had no privacy. The guards entered the rooms whenever they liked, swearing, telling dirty jokes or singing lewd ditties. When the girls went to the lavatory, the soldiers followed with loud guffaws to “guard” them. Inside the lavatory, they had scrawled obscene pictures depicting the Empress with Rasputin. Before one of the Grand Duchesses entered, the guard would tell her to be sure to notice.
Except for a walk in the garden every afternoon, family activity was limited to what could be done within the walls of their rooms. Nicholas and Alexandra read, the girls knitted and embroidered, and Alexis played in bed with a model of a ship. The Empress and her daughters often sang hymns to drown out the noise of the soldiers singing revolutionary songs around a piano on the floor below. Birthdays passed and were scarcely noticed: on May 19, Nicholas was fifty, and on May 25, Alexandra became forty-six.
Every morning, the family arose at eight and assembled for morning prayers. Breakfast was black bread and tea. The main meal arrived at two p.m., when soup and cutlets, sent from the local Soviet soup kitchen, were rewarmed and served by Kharitonov, the cook. They dined on a bare table lacking linen and silverware, and while they ate, Avadeyev and his men often came to watch. Sometimes, Avadeyev would reach past the Tsar, brushing Nicholas’s face with his elbow, to fetch himself a piece of meat from the pot. “You’ve had enough, you idle rich,” he would say. “There is enough for you, so I will take some myself.”
Nagorny, whose arguments with Rodionov had already marked him, soon ran into more difficulty. The guards insisted that Alexis was to keep only one pair of boots. Nagorny insisted on two pairs, explaining that if one became wet, the Tsarevich needed a second as he was unable to walk without shoes. Soon afterward, one of the guards noticed a thin gold chain hanging from Alexis’s bed on which the boy had strung his collection of Holy Images. The man began to take the chain for himself, and Nagorny, outraged, stopped him. It was his last service to Alexis. He was immediately arrested. As he stepped out of the house surrounded by Red Guards, Gilliard, Dr. Derevenko and Gibbs happened to be walking past in the street. “Nagorny was going to the … carriage,” wrote Gilliard. “He was just setting foot on the step with his hand on the side of the carriage when, raising his head, he saw us all there standing motionless a few yards from him. For a few seconds he looked fixedly at us, then without a single gesture that might have betrayed us, he took his seat. The carriages were driven off … in the direction of the prison.” Nagorny was put in the same cell with Prince George Lvov, the first Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, who had been sent to Ekaterinburg. Their time as cellmates was brief; four days later, Nagorny was taken out and shot.
With Nagorny gone, it became Nicholas’s task to carry Alexis into the garden. There, the Tsar placed his son in a chair and Alexis sat quietly while the others walked back and forth under the eyes of the guards. In time, the sight of Nicholas and his family began to change the impressions of even these seasoned revolutionaries. “I have still an impression of them that will always remain in my soul,” said Anatoly Yakimov, a member of the guard who was captured by the Whites. “The Tsar was no longer young, his beard was getting grey.… [He wore] a soldier’s shirt with an officer’s belt fastened by a buckle around his waist. The buckle was yellow … the shirt was khaki color, the same color as his trousers and his old worn-out boots. His eyes were kind and he had altogether a kind expression. I got the impression that he was a kind, simple, frank and talkative person. Sometimes I felt that he was going to speak to me. He looked as if he would like to talk to us.
“The Tsaritsa was not a bit like him. She was severe looking and she had the appearance and manners of a haughty, grave woman. Sometimes we used to discuss them amongst ourselves and we decided that she was different and looked exactly like a Tsaritsa. She seemed older than the Tsar. Grey hair was plainly visible on her temples and her face was not the face of a young woman.…
“All my evil thoughts about the Tsar disappeared after I had stayed a certain time amongst the guards. After I had seen them several times I began to feel entirely different towards them; I began to pity them. I pitied them as human beings. I am telling you the entire truth. You may or may not believe me, but I kept on saying to myself, ‘Let them escape … do something to let them escape.’ ”
In the few days before Pierre Gilliard was forced to leave Ekaterinburg, he, along with Gibbs and Baroness Buxhoeveden, paid frequent calls on Thomas H. Preston, the British Consul in Ekaterinburg, urging him to do something to help the Imperial family. Preston was pessimistic.
“We spent long hours discussing ways and means of saving the royal family,” said Preston later. “With 10,000 Red soldiers in the town and with Red spies at every corner and in every house, to have attempted anything in the nature of an escape would have been madness and fraught with the greatest danger to the royal family themselves.… There was never any organized attempt at Ekaterinburg to do so.”
Preston’s statement has been disputed by P. M. Bykov, Chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet, who saw a monarchist behind every tree. “From the first days of the Romanovs’ transfer to Ekaterinburg,” he wrote, “there began to flock in monarchists in great numbers, beginning with half-crazy ladies, countesses and baronesses of every calibre and ending with nuns, clergy, and representatives of foreign powers.” According to Bykov, contact between these persons and the Imperial family was maintained through Dr. Derevenko, who was still allowed to enter the Ipatiev house to treat Alexis. In addition, Bykov said, notes were intercepted inside loaves of bread and bottles of milk, containing messages such as: “The hour of liberation is approaching and the days of the usurpers are numbered,” “The Slav armies are coming nearer and nearer Ekaterinburg.… The time has come for action,” “Your friends sleep no longer.”
Preston knew nothing of attempts to rescue the Tsar, and Bykov found plots seething on every corner. Almost certainly, the truth was that there were people anxious to rescue the Imperial family who were never able to put their intentions into a workable plan. Two letters of reasonable authenticity supporting this view are quoted by General M. K. Dieterichs, Chief-of-Staff of Admiral Kolchak’s White Army, who assisted in the subsequent exhaustive White inquiry into the Tsar’s imprisonment and murder. The first letter was a message from an anonymous White officer to the Tsar:
“With God’s help and your prudence we hope to achieve our object without running any risk. It is necessary to unfasten one of your windows, so that you can open it; please let me know exactly which. If the little Tsarevich cannot walk, matters will be very complicated, but we have weighed this up too, and I do not consider it an insurmountable obstacle. Let us know definitely whether you need two men to carry him and whether any of you could undertake this work. Could not the little one be put to sleep for an hour or two with some drug? Let the doctor decide, only you must know the time exactly beforehand. We will supply all that is necessary. Be sure that we shall undertake nothing unless we are absolutely certain of success beforehand. We give you our solemn pledge of this before God, history and our own conscience.” The letter was signed: “Officer.”
The second letter quoted by Dieterichs is Nicholas’s reply:
“The second window from the corner, looking out onto the square, has been kept open for two days already, even at night. The seventh and eight windows near the main entrance … are likewise kept open. The room is occupied by the commandant and his assistants who constitute the inner guard at the present time. They number thirteen, armed with rifles, revolvers and grenades. No room but ours has keys. The commandant and their
