This article titled “The Last of the Tsars by Robert Service review – dispelling the myths” was written by Sheila Fitzpatrick, for The Guardian on Wednesday 15th February 2017 15.00 UTCThe killing of the tsar and his family bothered the American writer Mary McCarthy, even in her quasi-Stalinist phase, when she was impressed against her better judgment by communist apparatchiks. Whenever she got a bit drunk, she wrote in “My Confession” in 1953, she would bring up the killing of the tsar’s children and look hopefully, but in vain, for “a trace of scruple or compassion”. The next morning, for some reason, she would feel “bitterly ashamed”. I found this confession bewildering when I first read it many years ago. Why the shame? But then, on the other hand, why such a strong reaction to the killing of the tsar’s family in the first place, when death came to so many bystanders as well as participants in the course of Russia’s revolution and civil war?
Many others have shared McCarthy’s reaction, but not Robert Service, whose unsentimental account of the last 16 months of Nicholas’s life seems to have been motivated largely by a desire to dispel the myths that have gathered around the killings, and to get the facts of the matter established once and for all. It is a non-partisan account, which gives Nicholas good marks for stoicism and lack of pretension in adversity, but bad marks for conservative rigidity as a ruler. Service reproaches him for not rethinking his conservatism once he had leisure to do so, which is a lot to ask under the circumstances. What struck me most on the basis of Service’s account was the contrast between the tsar’s strong sense of sense of duty while he was in the job, and the ease with which he resigned it and his subsequent lack of regret.
It is hard to imagine a ruler with less apparent interest in power than Nicholas. He was a patriot, attached particularly to Russia’s military tradition, to Orthodoxy, and to what he imagined as the goodness and devotion of Russia’s simple people, as opposed to its elites, who had lost touch with Russia’s traditional values. During the first world war, he spent a lot of time out at army headquarters in Mogilev, hoping to encourage the war effort by his presence. Back in Saint Petersburg, then called Petrograd, his wife Alexandra and elder daughters did their bit by nursing the wounded. Nicholas was in Mogilev in March 1917 when emissaries from the Duma – the parliament he had unwillingly set up after the 1905 revolution – came to report alarming signs of elite disaffection and popular unrest and suggest that abdication was the answer. To their great surprise, Nicholas put up no resistance. Perhaps, as Alexandra always thought, it would have been a different matter if she had been around to strengthen his backbone. As it was, his only stipulation was that he would not abdicate in favour of his young son Alexei, the legal heir, because the boy’s haemophilia and delicate health meant that he should not be separated from his family. So he abdicated in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, which was in fact unconstitutional, and likely to cause no end of trouble. But Mikhail immediately declined the throne, thus paving the way for a provisional government without a monarch, set up, initially, by the Duma leaders and their associates.
The provisional government, trying to rule in tandem with a much more radical Petrograd Soviet, which had strong support in the urban working class and the army, was concerned to keep Nicholas out of the limelight and also out of harm’s way. At first he and the family were confined under house arrest to his palace in Tsarskoe Selo outside Petrograd; then, in August, they were moved for their own safety to the relatively quiet and non-radical Tobolsk in western Siberia, where they remained for some months after the Bolshevik takeover (the “October Revolution”) in November. In April 1918, when Tobolsk became unsecure, they were moved to Ekaterinburg in the Urals. Nicholas, a man of ascetic tastes who liked outdoor work and was comfortable in old clothes when not in uniform, proved remarkably polite, reasonable, friendly and amenable as a quasi-prisoner. He came to like Alexander Kerensky, the socialist who took over leadership of the provisional government from the liberals in the middle of 1917, remarking to a confidant: “That’s a person who could have been useful to me; it’s a pity that I didn’t know him earlier.” He and his household were looked after by Kerensky’s appointees, and he had many interesting conversations with one of them, a working-class socialist who had served time in tsarist prisons. Nicholas even got on reasonably well with the overseer appointed by the Bolsheviks, Vasily Yakovlev, a revolutionary known for his participation in bank expropriations before the revolution. Alexandra, on the other hand, treated all their overseers and guardians with resentful hauteur and was widely disliked by them.
A man more given than Nicholas to grievance might have found much to begrudge in his situation after the February revolution. In the first place, his and Alexandra’s royal relatives in the British and German monarchies proved strikingly indifferent to their fate, despite occasionally making noises of concern. In the second place, Russia’s monarchists, whose presumed plots to rescue the Tsar were a continuing concern for the ruling revolutionaries of February and October, never managed to mount anything like a serious rescue attempt. For the leaders of the White Armies – the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the civil war that broke out in the spring of 1918 – restoration of the monarchy was not a rallying cry. Even Nicholas himself seemed not to be a partisan of absolute monarchy, though Alexandra remained one. Musing on what might have happened had Alexei assumed the throne, Nicholas suggested that he might well have accepted limitations to autocracy, since he would have been free of the constraints of Nicholas’s own coronation oath to “guard intact the form of government that I received from my father and to hand it on as such to my successor”.
One of Service’s contributions to the extensive literature on the last Russian tsar is the information he has dug up on Nicholas’s reading after his abdication. Evidently not much of a reader before – since Tolstoy’s War and Peace was new to him – Nicholas now made up for lost time and devoured an eclectic range of Russian and foreign literature and historical works, including Dmitri Merezhkovski’s Silver Age novels and even the work of satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, as well as Chekhov and Conan Doyle, whose stories he read aloud to his family in the evenings. Alexandra did not share his new taste for literature, preferring a diet of ultra-conservative devotional works. As for the children, four daughters ranging in age from 16 to 21 at the time of Nicholas’s abdication, and the 12-year-old tsarevitch, they receive little attention from Service. They all caught measles in the winter of 1917, resulting apparently in their heads being shaved. The girls still had short hair when they died.
Nicholas’s hopes of being ultimately allowed to live quietly in Russia as a private citizen were never realistic, but the circumstances became immeasurably worse after their move to Ekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks in charge there were wild men, more militantly inclined towards the former royal family than the party leaders in Moscow, and the military situation had sharply deteriorated. The Czech legion’s prisoners of war were supposed to be evacuated across Russia to Vladivostok to sail round the world to fight with the allies back in Europe, but they started taking over stations on the Trans-Siberian railway in June 1918 and joining forces with Russian anti-Bolsheviks. The transfer to Ekaterinburg was itself perilous, with Nicholas and his party unable to be unloaded at the main station because of a hostile crowd gathered there. The original intention of the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow had been to hold a show trial of Nicholas in that city, but the idea had to be abandoned as it became clear that Ekaterinburg was likely to be occupied by anti-Bolshevik forces. The decision to dispose of the Romanovs was batted back and forth through telegraph exchanges with Moscow that took three days to get through, but there was little real doubt about the outcome. On 17 July 1918, the former tsar and his whole family, plus retainers and the family doctor, were shot in the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg, where they had been held under house arrest. The bodies were then taken into the forest, burned, and dropped down a mine shaft. A week later, the city fell to the Czechs.
Whether Moscow authorised or ordered the killing in advance, or simply accepted a fait accompli, has been a point of controversy. Service dismisses as whitewashing suggestions that it was purely an initiative of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks. The motivation for the killings is easy to see, since it would have constituted a major threat to Bolshevik security had Nicholas or any of his children fallen into White hands. The Bolsheviks announced Nicholas’s execution, but remained silent about the fate of the rest of the family, leaving popular rumours about the miraculous survival of at least one offspring to multiply. It was a trivial issue, according to Trotsky at his most studiedly callous, responding to the inquiries of a German diplomat: “This is of completely no interest to me. I cannot take interest in the life of an individual Russian citizen.”
Discovery in the Urals of what were alleged to be Romanov remains and disputes about their authenticity caused great excitement in early post-Soviet Russia; in 2000, the Moscow patriarch declared the whole family to be “passion bearers” (a lower category of suffering than that of martyrs, earlier bestowed by the Russian Church in emigration). Now, with the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the issue may become contentious again. Putin’s government, along with Russian public opinion, is still conflicted in its evaluation of the revolution, and by implication the execution of the Romanov family. Once a communist by conviction, by his own account, and still an admirer of many aspects of socialism and the Soviet system, Putin himself has problems with it. He told a conference in Stavropol last year that “the elimination and shooting of the tsar’s family, including the children”, was a (or perhaps “the” – Russian is ambiguous on this) “most outrageous example” of the repressions that characterised Soviet rule from the very beginning. Unlike McCarthy, Putin could see there might be reasonable grounds for revolutionaries to kill the family, since “one had to root out, so to speak, possible heirs”. But why did they kill Dr Botkin? Why did they kill the servants, people in general of proletarian origin – for what? His answer – implying a foundational sin at the basis of the Soviet regime that Putin in other respects still cherishes – was “in order to hide a crime”.
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