A year later, unable to maintain their fiction, the Bolsheviks admitted that the entire family was dead. They still did not admit their own responsibility for the murders. Instead, they arrested and brought to trial twenty-eight people, all Social Revolutionaries, who, it was charged, had murdered the Tsar in order to discredit the Bolsheviks. Five of the defendants were executed. The hypocrisy of this second crime was later admitted by the Bolsheviks themselves in Bykov’s book.
The link between the party leaders in Moscow who authorized the murder and the Ural Soviet which determined the time and method of execution was later described by Trotsky. He explained that he had proposed a public trial to be broadcast by radio throughout the country, but before anything could come of it, he had to leave for the front.
“My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Ekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: ‘Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?’
“ ‘It’s all over,’ he answered. ‘He has been shot.’
“ ‘And where is the family?’
“ ‘And the family along with him.’
“ ‘All of them?’ I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
“ ‘All of them,’ replied Sverdlov. ‘What about it?’ He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.
“ ‘And who made the decision?’ I asked.
“ ‘We decided it here. Ilyich believed that we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances.’
“I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.… This Lenin sensed well.”
The ruthlessness of Lenin’s logic had an effect on many in the world who remained uncertain as to the nature of Bolshevism. Woodrow Wilson, still struggling to keep his idealism about the course of events in Russia, heard the news of the murder while at dinner in the home of his Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane. Rising from the table, the President declared that “a great menace to the world has taken shape.” He added that he was sure everyone present would share his view that “it was not the time for gaiety.” The dinner party broke up immediately.
The same ruthless logic dictated the murder of every member of the Romanov family on whom the Bolsheviks could lay their hands. Grand Duke Michael, the Tsar’s younger brother, was shot in Perm six days before Nicholas’s death in Ekaterinburg. On July 17, the day after the murder of the Tsar, an Imperial party including the Empress’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, three sons of Grand Duke Constantine and a son of Grand Duke Paul were brutally murdered. Grand Duchess Elizabeth had refused all offers of security and escape. In March 1917, the Provisional Government had asked her to leave her abbey and take refuge in the Kremlin, but she refused. In 1918, the Kaiser tried several times, first through the Swedish Embassy and then through Mirbach, to bring the woman he once had loved to shelter in Germany. Again, Ella refused. Moved by the Bolsheviks to the town of Alapayevsk in the Urals, she and the other victims were taken in peasant carts to the mouth of another abandoned mine shaft. They were thrown down the shaft still living, with heavy timbers and hand grenades thrown after them to complete the work. Not all of the victims were killed immediately, for a peasant who crept up to the pit after the murderers had left heard hymns being sung at the bottom of the shaft. In addition, when the bodies were removed by the Whites, the injured head of one of the boys was found to have been carefully bound with the Grand Duchess’s handkerchief. In January 1919, four more grand dukes, including Paul, the Tsar’s uncle, and Nicholas Mikhailovich, the liberal historian, were executed in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. On the basis of Nicholas Mikhailovich’s historical reputation and his liberalism, Lenin’s friend, the writer Maxim Gorky, pleaded that the life of this Grand Duke be spared. Lenin refused, declaring, “The Revolution does not need historians.”
Ironically, within a very few years, the Revolution also did not need either Lenin or Trotsky. Lenin died in 1924 after a series of strokes already had removed him from power. Trotsky, exiled once again in 1927, later wrote that Lenin had been poisoned by Stalin, an accusation about which Lenin’s biographers still argue. There is no question that Trotsky’s own assassination by a pickax in the brain in Mexico City in 1940 was ordered by Stalin. It was Stalin who inherited the revolution and for thirty years ruled Russia more cruelly than any tsar since Ivan the Terrible. In January 1945, near the peak of his power, Stalin received his allies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at Yalta in the Crimea. The American party was housed in the Livadia Palace. Because the President was ill, the other two leaders came to him and the Yalta conference was held around a circular table in the state dining room where, thirty-four years earlier, Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughter Olga had appeared, flushed and fair, at her first ball to dance and celebrate her sixteenth birthday.
Jacob Sverdlov died within six months of the Ekaterinburg murder. The Bolshevik leaders gave pneumonia as his cause of death, although there were persistent rumors that he had been assassinated by a Moscow workman. In belated acknowledgment that it was Sverdlov who arranged the murder of the Imperial family, the town of Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk. For years, the House of Special Purpose was kept as a Bolshevik museum and visitors were led down into the cellar where the family was shot. In 1959, a group of American correspondents accompanying Vice President Nixon’s tour of Russia quietly visited the house. They found the museum had been closed, but the house, now a repository for the archives of the local Communist Party, was freshly painted in cream and white and brown. The basement room, they were told, was now occupied by dusty bins filled with old documents. In the decades since 1918, Sverdlovsk has grown from a small city to a huge, grimy coal and steel metropolis. It was over Sverdlovsk in May 1960 that the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down.
The list of members of the Imperial family who escaped the Bolsheviks by leaving Russia was headed by the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Fedorovna. In April 1919, as the Red Army approached the Crimea, the seventy-two-year-old Empress left on board a British battleship, H.M.S.
Marie’s daughters, Grand Duchess Xenia and Grand Duchess Olga, also left Russia on board British warships. Xenia came to London, where her servants, upon first seeing King George V, fell on their knees and kissed the hem of his coat, believing him to be the Tsar miraculously resurrected. She lived her last twenty-five years in a “grace and favor” mansion provided by the British royal family and named—perhaps appropriately—Wilderness House. In 1960, Xenia died at eighty-five. Olga, Nicholas II’s younger sister, lived quietly in Denmark until 1948, when she moved to a small farm outside Toronto, Canada. There, she lived in such peaceful obscurity that her rural neighbors were much surprised in 1959 when she was invited to lunch aboard the royal yacht
Among the Russian grand dukes who got away was the Tsar’s first cousin Cyril. Ironically, although by leading the
