RESCUING THE TSAR AND HIS FAMILY
July 1918 edvard radzinsky
T
he tsar and his family could have been saved.
The first time this could have happened was in Tobolsk.
The imperial family arrived in Tobolsk at the peak of their unpopularity. A weak tsar under the heel of his wife, with the illiterate peasant Rasputin controlling the royal couple - that was the people's portrait of the dynasty on the eve of the revolution. And if they despised the weak tsar, they hated the empress.
Through the whole course of the revolution it is impossible to overstate the impact of Alexandra Federovna. Against the background of the defeat of the Russian army - hundreds of thousands killed and maimed - there were consistent rumours of the treason of the 'German Tsaritsa' and of her lover Rasputin, most probably through the selling of military secrets. One of the leaders of the opposition, Milyukov, said in a widely reported speech to the state Duma 'from province to province creep torrid rumours of betrayal and treachery. These rumours climb high and spare no one ... The name of the Empress is more and more repeated together with those of the adventurists who surround her ... What is this - stupidity or treason?' Denikin wrote in his memoirs, 'Rumours of treason played a fatal role for the attitude of the army to the dynasty.' And one of the leaders of the Duma's monarchist faction, Purishkevich, to enthusiastic applause from the Duma, called the empress 'the evil genius of the Tsar and of Russia, an unalterable German on the Russian throne, alien to the country and its people'.
The dynasty, once it had lost all authority, fell unbelievably fast and easily. Nicholas's attempt to transfer the throne to the Grand Duke Michael would only have ended in bloodshed. Michael hastily refused the dangerous offer.
The country blew away its 300-year-old monarchy like fluff off a sleeve.
After Nicholas's abdication all that was left for the imperial family was to quit Russia and to do so as quickly as possible. To this end the Provisional Government opened contacts with the government of Great Britain. The British throne was occupied by the tsar's relative and friend, George V, who bore a striking resemblance to Nicholas (in the past they had swapped uniforms to fool those around them). After Nicholas's abdication George had sent sympathetic telegrams to his old friend. Nicholas was a true ally of the English to the point where, while the tsar in Russia bore the modest rank of colonel, in England he was an admiral and a field marshal. The tsar, having voluntarily abdicated, saw departure for England as entirely natural.
But the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies gathered in Petro- grad, and, heavily dependent on the forces of the Petrograd garrison, demanded that the tsar be put on trial. The tsar was arrested. The Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government started work. Was it possible for Britain, intending to continue the war in alliance with the new Russia, to accept the family which Russian society had rejected and which stood accused of treason? 'We truly hope that the British Government has no intention of giving asylum to the Tsar and his wife ... that would deeply and rightly offend the feelings of the Russians who have been compelled to make a great revolution because they have been repeatedly betrayed to our current enemy,' wrote the Daily Telegraph. Finally, George was compelled to refuse his hospitality.
The imperial family was now living under arrest in Tsarskoe Selo. The 'Citizen Colonel', as they dubbed yesterday's autocrat, was constantly exposed to the open hostility of the soldiers of the guard. Nor at this time could there even be talk of efforts to escape. During the French Revolution Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been in a similar situation, imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. But then certain foreigners - Marie Antoinette's lover, the Swedish Count Fersen, and the Russian Baroness Korf - had risked organising the escape of the royal family. The attempt of course ended in failure because the whole country was against them. And the honorary president of the Russian Historical Society, Nicholas II, knew the whole story well.
But, three months after the abdication, on 4 July 1917, Zizi Nar- ishkin, former maid of honour to the empress, wrote in her diary 'Princess Palei [wife of the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich] has just left. She secretly told me that a group of young officers has put together a mad project to take them in an automobile by night to one of the ports, where an English ship would be waiting. I felt unbelievable alarm...'
Why such alarm? Because the project was 'mad'? Both Zizi and Palei knew that, given present attitudes to the family, if they didn't get to the port they would be seized and killed on the road. Moreover, there was of course no English ship, nor any plot. There was just the drunken boastfulness of young officers.
At this time influence in the capital was shifting in the direction of radicals demanding the punishment of the tsar and tsarista. The great poet Alexander Blok wrote, 'the tragedy has not yet begun. Either it will never begin or it will be terrible when they [the family] stand face to face with the enraged people.' But Kerensky, now the leader of the Provisional Government, did not want to become the executioner of the unfortunate family who were more and more becoming a dangerous card in the struggle between the Soviet and his weakening Provisional Government. So he tried to rid himself of them.
Such was Kerensky's fear that the Soviet would refuse permission for their departure that it was in circumstances of unusual secrecy, at dawn, under a Japanese flag, that a train with shuttered windows set off from Petrograd to take the family away. Some 330 riflemen under the command of Colonel Kobilinsky accompanied and guarded them.
In order to maintain popular calm the place chosen for exile was Siberia - the same place to which Russian tsars had previously exiled revolutionaries.
The city of Tobolsk lies lost in the vastness of Siberia. In this provincial capital the arrested family lived like Noah in his ark. Here resided the emperor and empress of a vanished empire, the Adjutant General of a vanished suite, and the Head Chamberlain of a vanished court, all addressing each other by vanished titles. But so far, the revolution had not come to Tobolsk. The spiritual leader in the region was Archbishop Hermogen. Once he had been a zealous supporter of Rasputin, and then his avowed enemy. At the initiative of the empress, the Synod had exiled him for this to a distant monastery. Now the Provisional Government had appointed him archbishop in Tobolsk.
But Hermogen had forgotten his oppressions, and was ready to serve the Anointed of God. He saw this service as his foreordained destiny. Indeed, the name 'Hermogen' went back to the very origin of the Romanov dynasty. In the 'time of troubles' in the seventeenth century, a patriarch called Hermogen had launched the call to drive the Poles out of Russia. For this he had suffered a martyr's death. And now, 300 years later, an archbishop with the same name, Hermogen, here in Tobolsk, could help the last Romanov regain his freedom. It was precisely of this that Nicholas's mother, the widowed empress, wrote to him - 'Your Worship ... you bear the name of the Saint Hermogen. This is predestined.' She expected fateful steps from the fateful archbishop.
At this time, in order finally to reconcile the revolutionary committee to the exile of the tsar, Kerensky sent Commissar Pankratov to Tobolsk. Pankratov was a revolutionary who had spent fourteen years as an imprisoned convict in the Shlisselburg Castle on the order of the overthrown tsar. He was thus an outstanding symbol and a guarantee of strict supervision. But Pankratov had forgiven the tsar for the lost years of his life. For him, the tsar was simply the father of a large family subjected to an incomprehensibly awful new life. He presented no real threat of escape. But the soldiers of the guard were suspicious of the good-natured State Commissar. So at this time they took orders only from their commandant, Colonel Kobilinsky.