It was also decided to liquidate the remainder of the family, but to announce that they 'had been carried off to an unknown place'.
So the false conspiracy was put together in the Cheka. Half a century later the participants spoke about it. In it, the alleged conspirators were exactly those who might genuinely have conspired - the students of the Nikolaevsky College. Food was brought to the imperial family from the Novotikhvinsky monastery and with the milk in one of those monastery bottles the tsar began to find letters:
'The hour of liberation is approaching and the days of the usurpers are numbered. Whatever happens, the Slovak army is approaching closer and closer to Ekaterinburg. They are a few versts from the town... Do not forget that the Bolsheviks even at the last moment will be ready to commit any crime. The time has come, it is vital to act... An Officer.'
Nicholas enters into correspondence with this 'Officer'. He diligently describes the dispositions around him: how many guards, where the two machine guns are, and so on.
And finally he writes in his diary 'we prepared ourselves to be abducted by certain committed persons'.
Now the diary of the tsar, which the guards read while the prisoners were out walking, contained the words that were necessary. Now the Bolsheviks had proof of a conspiracy.
The imperial family was doomed, all of it.
Indeed, the question of the destruction of the whole imperial family was settled by Lenin, the Jacobin, even before the revolution.
In the journal 30 Days (no. 1, 1934) Bonch-Bruevich recalled some words of the young Lenin. Lenin had been delighted by a successful answer given in Dostoyevsky's The Devils by the revolutionary Nechaev, the main hero, whom Lenin had dubbed 'a revolutionary titan' and 'one of the blazing revolutionaries'.
As recalled by Bonch-Bruevich, the answer of Nechaev that had so pleased the young Lenin was as follows. To the question 'who should be destroyed from the ruling house?' Nechaev gave the crisp reply 'All the Great Ektenia' (the prayer for the ruling family, which lists all its members). 'Yes, the whole Romanov House - so simple that it amounted to genius,' said the delighted Lenin of Nechaev's answer.
And Lenin accomplished Nechaev's dream; the list of Romanov martyrs destroyed by the Bolsheviks was to be long.
But the most brutal massacre was to be the shooting of the imperial family at the Ipatiev house. There, four unwed girls, a sick adolescent, their mother and their father, were all murdered, one with another.
On the eve of the killing of the imperial family a circle of advancing Czechoslovak and Cossack units was tightening around Ekaterinburg - but slowly, as if the attackers were waiting for something. How awful to write this - as if they were waiting while the imperial family was disposed of. Is it possible that the liberation of the former Supreme Commander together with the authoritarian empress could have been deeply uncomfortable for the Whites' current commanders?
As for the students of the college, in the aftermath there would be many stories of secret groups of officers organised to liberate the imperial family - stories put about by the Cheka.
'A certain N attracted 37 student officers but fearing that the Bolsheviks were on their trail they all fled to the advancing Czechoslovaks.' 'A certain Captain Bulyagin sent by the mother of the Tsar was arrested on the road to Ekaterinburg.' And so on.
These are all splendid post facto myths. The gentlemen officers had not forgiven the tsar and tsaritsa their failed war and the collapse of all order. The attitude of most officers towards the tsar is best of all characterised by an entry in the diary of Lt Gen. Baron Alexei Pavlovich von Buler (minister of war in the Russian government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak). He described the requiem mass that took place on 17 July 1919, a year after the murder of the imperial family:
They held a requiem mass for the imperial family in the cathedral. The democratic choir refused to sing. Nuns from a neighbouring monastery were invited, and alone made possible the solemnity of the service. The Archpriest conducted the mass well, including the proclamation oftitles.
Opposite the cathedral was the Archbishop's house where about ten assorted senior clergy live having cast off their pastoral role. Of these, none dared to come and pray for the departed soul of the man who for them was not only Tsar but also the Anointed of God. Senior officials at the requiem included me, Rozanov, Khreshatitsky, and the Urals General Khorotkin. The remainder made an effort to forget
the requiem so as not to compromise their democratic credentials.
After the requiem some elderly fellow looking over those gathered
in the cathedral (a few dozen, mostly old officers) loudly declaimed
'Ha, there aren't many decent people in Omsk.'
Meanwhile the Bolsheviks were right. The tsar could have become a living symbol, and above all a unifying symbol. The White movement had become subject to a law originally formulated by the eighteenth- century aristocrat Artemy Volinsky: 'We Russians don't need bread. We eat one another and thus are satisfied.'
The White leaders, generals, determinedly hated one another; Vrangel, Denikin; Denikin, Vrangel; neither of them liked Yudenich, and none of them Kolchak.
There was just one person who had the right to stand above them: God's anointed tsar. Only he could bind the movement together, damp down the generals' haughtiness, and become that unifying symbol.
Dark semi-literate Russia, where peasants not too long ago were christened on the tsar's passing train, could well have seen a revival of the belief ofwhich Archbishop Hermogen had written in 1918: 'According to the sacred writings, former Emperors, Kings and Tsars who have lost power in their country do not lose their rank. That is granted to them by God . Thus an abandoned church is still a church, an overthrown idol is still God.'
The tsar did a lot of thinking in his captivity and humiliation. He saw with pain that the most important thing in the forthcoming blood and savagery was to be able to forgive it. His daughter wrote in one of her last letters 'the sovereign asks that he not be revenged. He forgives all.'
'Pray gently for your enemies.' This is the last line of a poem left in a book found after their murder in the Ipatiev house. It remained as their testament.
Such a tsar was necessary for a maddened nation washed in the blood of civil war.
But he was not needed by history.
So he was not saved.
FANNY KAPLAN'S ATTEMPT TO KILL LENIN
August 1918
martin sixsmith
the flight of a bullet is among the slimmest. An inch to the left and a man dies; to the right, he lives. And when the target is Vladimir Lenin, an assassin's aim can change the fate of the world.
Few in the West are aware that on 30 August 1918 a volley of bullets, fired at close range, came within inches of ending Lenin's life. Fewer still are aware that the plot may well have been staged by agents of British intelligence.
In 1918 Soviet Russia was in its infancy, fragile and struggling to survive. The Bolshevik regime was beset by enemies within and without. Western troops and White armies were battling to bring it to its knees; Soviet power hung in the balance.
If Lenin had died, depriving the socialist state of his iconic leadership, the whole enterprise could have foundered; the twentieth century would have taken a different course. Conversely, had the assassination attempt never happened, some of the worst excesses of the Red Terror might have been averted - hundreds of thousands of people might not have lost their lives in the horrors of the Gulag.