The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (68 page)

of cloaks and cushions until the beds arrived.2 But the reunion was

soon marred when, when, much to his parents’ intense frustration,

Alexey managed to slip and bang his knee. Nicholas and Alexandra

put him to bed in their room, where he lay for several days in agony; it was 5 June before he was able to join the others outside in the

garden.

Two huge wooden palisades surrounded the Ipatiev House,

ominously designated ‘the house of special purpose’ by their

Bolshevik captors. They were so high that, from inside the house,

the Romanovs could not even see the tops of the trees.3 What little

was visible of the blue sky above had been obliterated in mid-May

when the windows in all the family’s rooms were painted with

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whitewash, creating what seemed like a blanket of fog outside.4

It was dreadfully cramped and stuffy inside the first-floor rooms

that served as the Romanovs’ new accommodation. For this was in

no way a home – but a prison – and it was abundantly clear to

everyone that they would have to endure a rigorous regime here

quite different from those at Tobolsk or the Alexander Palace.5 There were armed guards everywhere: on the street, inside and outside the

palisades surrounding the house, on the roof, in the garden. Guards

also manned machine-gun nests in the basement, the mansard, the

garden and even the belfry of the Voznesensky Sobor across the

road. An announcement in the
Uralskaya zhizn
by Bolshevik War Commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, in overall charge of the family’s

incarceration in the city, had made the hardening of the official

attitude towards the former imperial family, all too plain:

All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest

attempt at counterrevolutionary action in the town will result in

the summary execution of the hostages.6

The days had been monotonous enough in Tobolsk but at

Ekaterinburg the pace of life was slowed to an intolerable tedium.

No papers were delivered and no letters. One solitary parcel, of a

few eggs, coffee and chocolate, had been received from Grand

Duchess Ella on 16 May; but she too was now a prisoner, at Alapaevsk

95 miles (153 km) away to the north.7 With no letters allowed in

or out the girls were deprived of the one thing that had kept them

going all this time – contact with their friends. Visitors, of course, were forbidden. The imperial family was cast adrift; they had ‘no

news of anybody’, as Alexandra noted in her diary.8

Outdoor recreation at Ekaterinburg was restricted to a mournful

little garden with a few stubby trees that was even smaller than the

one at Tobolsk. But as always Nicholas and the girls made the most

of every opportunity to get outside during their two brief daily

exercise periods, and the girls sometimes swung in a couple of

hammocks put up between the trees for them by the guards. Alexey,

when he was well enough, was carried down, often by Maria, and

sat in their mother’s wheelchair. But during recreation periods one

of the sisters always remained indoors with Mama, who with the

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temperature rising into the high 70s F (24–6 degrees C) rarely

ventured out. Yet even these brief snatches of summer were enough,

as Nicholas noted, for them to catch the wonderful scent of flowers

‘from all the gardens in the town’ that was heavy on the air, even

if they could not see them beyond the palisade.9 The unsealing of

one small window in their rooms on 10 June to allow in a refreshing

breeze was a major concession in the otherwise dreary regularity of

their highly constrained lives. It was punctuated by regular acts of

humiliation from the guards, such as searches of their belongings,

confiscation of their money and attempts to remove even Alexandra’s

and the girls’ gold bracelets from their wrists. Tatiana and Maria’s

request that their confiscated cameras be returned to them so that

they could at least amuse themselves with photography was also

refused.10

The month of June brought several family birthdays beginning

with Alexandra’s 46th on the 6th; it passed unnoticed, Nicholas in

bed with painful haemorrhoids and Alexey also indoors for most of

the day, despite the beautiful weather.11 Tatiana’s 21st followed on

11 June but was a very modest day for such an auspicious stage in

her life, the highlight being the surprise treat of fruit compote at

lunch prepared by Kharitonov. There were of course no presents;

Tatiana spent the day reading to her mother: extracts from Alexandra’s favourite book, the
Complete Yearly Cycle of
Brief Homilies for Each
Day of the Year
by an Orthodox priest, Grigory Dyachenko.12 Later she played cards with Alexey and read to him and before bed enjoyed

the prosaic novelty of helping her sisters wash everyone’s pocket-

handkerchiefs.13 Poor Anna Demidova had been struggling single-

handedly with all the family’s personal washing (the bed linen still

being sent out to a laundry) and the sisters had happily volunteered

to help, as they did with darning everyone’s worn-out socks, stock-

ings and underwear.14

Anastasia’s seventeenth birthday – 18 June – was a very hot day

when again there were no celebrations and the girls spent the time

learning another new practical skill – how to knead, roll and bake

bread with Kharitonov.15 Soon they were helping him more and

more in the kitchen in an effort to dissipate their crushing sense of boredom. But it was unbearably airless indoors and even Alexandra

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preferred to be outside when her health allowed. Evenings now were

one interminable game of bezique after another and rereading the

few books left to them. Tatiana seemed always to be doing the lion’s

share of looking after her mother and Alexey; her nursing skills were also called on when Dr Botkin suffered a severe attack of kidney

pain and she gave him an injection from the family’s precious supply

of morphine.16 Olga was now so thin and pale, and had become ever

more withdrawn and morose at Ekaterinburg. One of the guards,

Alexey Kabanov, remembered her visible unhappiness, how she

hardly talked and was ‘uncommunicative with the other members

of her family apart from her father’ – with whom she always walked

arm in arm during recreation in the garden.17 But she did not spend

as much time there as her three other sisters, who all seemed to

him far more cheerful and animated, often breaking into folk songs

when they walked round with the dogs. Maria, so strong and stoical,

seemed still the most rounded and unaffected, ‘the incarnation of

“modesty elevated by suffering”’, as one guard recalled, remembering

a poem by Tyutchev.18 At first – much as at Tobolsk – the younger

sisters had been keen to engage with their captors, asked them about

their lives and their families and showed them their photograph

albums. They were dreadfully bored, they told them: ‘We were

so much happier in Tobolsk.’19 But the arrival of a new and

exacting commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, put paid to any more such

fraternization.

The weather was positively ‘tropical’ according to Nicholas on

Maria’s 19th birthday on 27 June.20 Four days previously the family

had been comforted by ‘the great blessing of a real
Obednitsa
and vespers’ – when a priest and deacon had been allowed in to conduct

the first service for the family in three months.21 But they were two of only a handful of people to see them in these new and very

straitened circumstances. Those on the outside trying to look in

could only guess at what the family was having to endure at the

hands of its intimidating Bolshevik captors.

*

During the final eight weeks of the Romanov family’s captivity many

people – the curious, the covert, the foolhardy – and even royal

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relatives such as the intrepid Princess Helena – made their way up

Voznesensky Prospekt to the Ipatiev House, to try and catch a

glimpse of them. But none was admitted, bar Dr Derevenko, who

was staying in town and had been allowed in to treat Alexey and

put his swollen knee in plaster.

Local children were rather more adventurous. They often came

near and tried to peep through the palisades surrounding the house.

One sunny day soon after the family’s arrival, nine-year-old Anatole

Portnoff came out of the Voznesensky Church opposite after

morning service and ran across the road to take a look. He found

a gap in the paling and peeped through and there, standing directly

in front of him, so he later claimed, he saw Tsar Nicholas ‘taking

a walk about the grounds’. But a sentry soon came rushing up,

‘unceremoniously grabbed him by his coat and told him to be on

his way’.22

Vladimir and Dimitri Storozhev, sons of a priest at the

Ekaterininsky Sobor, were more persistent, for their home was next

door to the Ipatiev House and they managed to communicate ‘by

gestures and talking over the fence with the girls of the imperial

family’.23 Eleven-year-old Vladimir loved flying his kite from the

roof, from which vantage point he could often ‘see the tsar’s children playing in Upatiev’s [
sic
] yard, and the tsar himself would come out once a day and split wood for an hour or so’.24 But the Storozhev

family was fearful of the intimidating Red Guards who watched over

the Romanovs and who often went out summarily searching nearby

houses and arresting people at will. Their father had made the family all sleep in one room, by the door, ‘so if someone comes in and

starts shooting, we will all be together’.25

It was Father Ivan Storozhev who was one of the last people

from the outside to see the imperial family alive, at a service he

conducted in the house at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 14 July. Guards

from the Ipatiev House had banged on his door early that morning.

Father Storozhev thought they had come for him, but no, they

wanted him to go next door to conduct a service for the family. ‘Just stick strictly to what the service is all about’, they warned. ‘We don’t believe in God now, but we remember what the service, the funeral

service, is all about. So, nothing but the service. Don’t try to communicate or anything or else we’ll shoot.’26

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Having climbed the stairs past young guards bristling with

weapons, Storozhev found the family gathered in their sitting room,

a table for the service specially prepared by Alexandra featuring their favourite icon of the Most Holy Mother of God. The girls were

simply dressed in black skirts and white blouses; their hair, he noticed, had grown quite a lot since his previous visit on 2 June, and was

now down to their shoulders.

During the service, the whole family had seemed to Storozhev

to be greatly oppressed in spirit – there was a terrible weariness

about them, quite markedly different from his previous visit, when

they had all been animated and had prayed fervently.27 He came

away shaken to the core by what he had seen. The Romanovs had,

uncharacteristically, all fallen to their knees when his deacon,

Buimirov, had sung rather than recited ‘At Rest with the Saints’ –

the Russian Orthodox prayer for the departed.
*
It seemed to give them great spiritual comfort he noted, though for once they had

not joined in the responses to the liturgy, something they would

normally have done.28 At the end of the service they had all come

forward to kiss the cross and Nicholas and Alexandra had taken the

sacrament. Covertly, as Storozhev passed them to leave, the girls

softly whispered a thank-you. ‘I knew, from the way they conducted

themselves,’ Father Storozhev later recalled, ‘that something fearful and menacing was almost upon the Imperial Family.’’29

The following morning the family appeared to have regained

their equilibrium when four women, sent by the officious-sounding

Union of Professional Housemaids, came to wash the floors. Perhaps

the women’s presence alone – as ordinary people from the world

outside – brightened their mood. They seemed relaxed, gathered

together in the sitting room, and smiled when the women entered.

They were strictly forbidden to speak to them, but by an exchange

of looks and smiles it was clear that the four sisters were only too

happy to help the women move the beds in their room; they would

have helped them wash the floors too if they could. One of the

women, Evdokiya Semenova, remembered their sweet, friendly

* This prayer is normally only sung (rather than recited) at Russian Orthodox funerals.

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manner and how ‘every gentle look was a gift’.30 Although Yurovsky