THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS
I asked Mme. Virubova to tell me what happened at the palace during the
revolution and how the royal family received the news of its overthrow.
“I can tell you only what I personally know,” she replied, “and I was
very ill in bed when it happened. All the children had measles and,
helping the empress nurse them, I was stricken too. The Empress was
an angel. She went from one room to another caring for us, waiting on
us, while all the time anxiety must have been tearing cruelly at her
heartstrings. Once or twice she said something to me about trouble in
Petrograd, food riots.
“The scarcity of food had preyed on the Empress’s mind for many months,
and one of the last conversations she ever had with Rasputin was on
that subject. The winter of 1916 set in early, and the snows were so
deep that transportation of all kinds of things, food included, was
greatly impeded. I remember that the Empress said to Rasputin that
nature itself seemed to be conspiring against poor Russia that year.
“The rioting in Petrograd increased, and even in my bed I could hear
echoes of it around the palace. Shots I heard and horrid yells. I
tried to get out of bed, but the Empress soothed me. ‘It is bad, of
course,’ she said, ‘but it will quiet soon. The poor people are mad
with hunger. They will be given food and then all this will be over.’
Soon the palace guards, the regiments on duty in Tsarskoe Selo, began
to show signs of demoralization. They were afraid for their own lives,
and you cannot wonder that they were. The Empress used to go out in
the cold and snow in the dead of night and talk to the men, reassure
them, comfort them. ‘Nothing will happen,’ she told them. But for her I
believe the last man would have thrown away his gun and fled. Her will
and her resolution alone kept them at their posts.”
“Do you think that the Empress really believed that it was a riot and
not a revolution?” I asked. It was history this woman was telling me,
history that will live in libraries a thousand years after we two, and
all of us, are dust. I wanted to know the exact truth.
“I am sure she did,” said Mme. Virubova. “If she had dreamed that it
was a revolution she would have sent earlier for the Emperor, who, you
know, was at the front with his army. She was alone and she faced the
trouble alone, but if she had known the full extent of the trouble
she would have wanted the Emperor where he would be safer than out
there among that murderous gang. She did not know that Russia was in
revolution, nor would she believe it at first when she was told that
the army had gone over to the revolutionists. The officers of the guard
told her, but she simply shook her head. Finally, Grand Duke Paul came
tearing out to Tsarskoe in his highest power motor car. He convinced
her that it was true. Even then her steel nerves endured. ‘Send for
the Emperor,’ she said calmly and sternly. ‘I am going back to my sick
children.’ And she went.”
The iron nerve displayed by the Empress of Russia when she learned that
supreme disaster had befallen the house of Romanoff was in contrast
to the emotion which overcame the deposed Emperor on his return to
Tsarskoe Selo. At the time of his abdication, near the army front,
he had behaved with dignity and self-command. He scornfully refused
the whispered suggestion of one general that he escape in one of the
high-power motor cars which always accompanied the imperial train. If
the people wanted him to abdicate, he was ready to do so, and ready
also to place himself at their disposal. Nicholas also showed himself
to be a good Russian and no tool of the pro-German party, if reports
are correct. When the news came that the army had gone over to the
revolution some one near the Emperor, it is said, told him that there
was one desperate way to avert the catastrophe. He could open up the
Dvinsk front, let the enemy in, and thus by the sacrifice of his
country save his dynasty. Nicholas refused even to consider such a
crime. He committed many sins of cruelty in his time, and many more
sins of stupidity. But in the end he showed himself no traitor. His
return to Tsarskoe Selo was intended by Kerensky and the other members
of the provisional government to be in accordance with his former rank,
and orders were given to treat him with all respect and consideration.
These orders, if Mme. Virubova is to be believed, were disregarded by
the soldiers on guard at the Alexander palace, the home of the royal
family.
In my last talk with Mme. Virubova she spoke with deep feeling of
the rowdy reception given the returning Nicholas. “They blew tobacco
smoke in his face, the brutes!” she said. “A soldier grabbed him by
the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other
side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and
laughed at his anger and pain. When he was finally alone with his
family and intimate friends he could not contain his grief but wept
unrestrainedly. We all wept, for that matter: we who loved him.”
It is to the credit of Kerensky and the ministers that they never would
consent to any suggestion that Nicholas be thrown into a dungeon or
otherwise harshly treated. As long as the family remained at Tsarskoe
Selo, which was until the 1st of August, Russian style, and August
13 in the western calendar, it lived in its accustomed manner. The
servants, most of them, remained at their posts, and while no member
of the family was allowed to leave the palace grounds on any pretext,
nor the palace itself except when accompanied by armed guards, they
had the freedom of their home and the society of a few friends. They
were not allowed to telephone, and all letters reaching them had first
to be read by the officer in command of the guards. Mme. Virubova told
me that in spite of Kerensky’s good intentions, the deposed royalties
were subjected to a number of petty annoyances which must have caused
them all the resentment and humiliation their tormentors intended.
The electric lights were sometimes turned off early in the evening,
leaving the palace in darkness. There were days when the water was
turned off and the family was deprived of bathing facilities. The
soldiers on guard were not infrequently rude and churlish and openly
exultant in the presence of their prisoners.
Kerensky cannot be held responsible for these things, but he was
responsible for depriving the former Empress of the society of her
most intimate friend, Mme. Virubova. I have already told how she was
arrested while still suffering from the effects of measles and thrown
into a cell in Peter and Paul. The cell was damp and insanitary, and
the sick woman suffered extreme misery all the time she was there.
Surrounded constantly by soldiers, who watched her night and day, she
was never alone even long enough to dress or to bathe. She is lame, as
I have stated, and once she fell on the slippery floor of her cell and
was unable for a long time to rise. The soldiers on guard refused to
help her, but simply stood and laughed at her efforts to reach her bed.
“Twice during the months of my confinement they let my mother visit
me,” she told me. “But I was allowed to talk to her only in presence of
the guard and across a wide table in the governor’s room.”
A friend of Mme. Virubova told me a still worse story concerning her
imprisonment. Several times her father was visited by soldiers from
Peter and Paul and made to pay large sums of money in order to insure
his daughter from the most horrible indignities at the hands of the men
who guarded her. He paid this blackmail. He had to. There was no power
in Russia to appeal to, and Kerensky himself could not have prevented
the murder or outrage of that lame and helpless woman in the fortress
of Peter and Paul. She escaped the last insult men are capable of
offering to women, and the government, after vainly trying to fasten
the crime of treason on her, set Anna Virubova free under military
surveillance. But they would not grant the Empress’s plea to send her
friend back to Tsarskoe Selo.
The first shock of dumbfounded amazement over, the royal family, which
had never believed that it could be overthrown, regained its composure
and accepted its destiny with quiet resignation. The Emperor became his
adored son’s tutor, and the Empress her daughters’ constant companion.
When spring came the whole family went out and made a garden. The
hundreds of soldiers in Tsarskoe and thousands of people from Petrograd
made pilgrimages to the palace grounds and watched through the high
iron fence the former Czar spading up the ground and the former heir
and his sisters planting and hoeing potatoes. The former Empress, in
a wheeled chair or low pony carriage, for she was in feeble health,
usually looked on smilingly.
Of course, the Tavarishi, or at least the extremists in the Council
of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates, resented the respectful and
considerate treatment accorded the captive royalties. They kept up a
constant clamor for the removal of the Emperor and Empress to some
dungeon in Kronstadt or Peter and Paul. Every once in a while the
newspapers published a resolution to that effect passed by a committee
of the council in Petrograd or Tsarskoe, or in a city more remote. A
dispatch from Helsingfors said that the crews of three warships lying
near there had passed fiery resolutions demanding that the Czar be
turned over to the tender mercies of the ruffians at Kronstadt. The
crew of the cruiser _Gangoute_ went on record as saying: “This is the
third time that we have expressed our will in this matter, and we have
not been trifling. This is our last resolution. Next we shall employ
force.”
The government, however, disregarded all these resolutions and muttered
threats. It may very well be, though, that the final decision to send
Nicholas and his wife into Siberian exile came as a result of pressure
on the part of the soviets. Kerensky may have feared a bloody tragedy
at Tsarskoe Selo, and perhaps he had reason to fear it. At all events,
the provisional government decided, some time in July, to transfer the
family to one of the remotest spots in the empire, Tobolsk, in Eastern
Siberia. The government kept this decision an absolute secret, as far
as the deposed Emperor as well as the general public were concerned.
A few days before the transfer was made one of the soviets, I think
at Tsarskoe, held a stormy meeting at which great indignation was
expressed over the ease and comfort in which the once royal family
lived. “We eat black bread, they eat white,” complained one impassioned
orator. “We drink cold water and Nicholas drinks wine. My wife walks
while his rides in a carriage. Where’s the justice in that?”
Doesn’t it sound like a deliberate plagiarism of one of the speeches
made against allowing the sixteenth Louis to remain in the Tuileries? A
lot of things have changed since the French revolution, but some human
nature is just as small and mean as ever.
It was not until the Romanoff family was well on its way to Siberia
that the transfer was mentioned in the newspapers. Many people knew of
it, of course, and the news was passed from excited lip to lip in the
capital a few hours after the special train left Tsarskoe Selo. In the
newspapers of August 3 (16, old style) the carefully censored story
of the departure was published. The full story, as far as I know it,
reveals that for three weeks beforehand the garrison at Tsarskoe knew,
or suspected, that something was about to happen to the captives. Two
days before the event Kerensky went in person to the garrison and asked
the soldiers to choose from their ranks a squadron of the most reliable
and trustworthy men. They were needed, he explained, for a mission of
great importance. Three hundred and eighty-four men were chosen, eight
from forty-eight regimental groups. On the 31st of July (August 12)
at midnight Kerensky appeared at the barrack, called the picked men
together and told them that their mission was to escort the man who had
been their emperor and autocrat into exile in far Siberia.
The royal family knew its fate before that time, but just when they
were told has not been revealed. Kerensky told them, and I feel
sure that he did it gently and courteously. But he refused them all
information as to where they were going. On July 30 (August 11) the
confessor of the family held a service for those about to go on a long
journey. Then they went to work to pack trunks and to choose among
clothes, trinkets, furs, personal belongings, books, ikons, rugs and
other essential things that would lighten exile and keep them in memory
of other days. It is said that neither Nicholas nor Alexandra slept on
the night before their departure, but wandered from room to room, hand
in hand, mutely and sorrowfully bidding their beloved home good-by.
Many others in Tsarskoe Selo refrained from sleep on that night. The
garrison was wildly excited, and the streets of the picturesque little
town were full of people. At 3 o’clock in the morning motor vans
were driven into the palace grounds, and those near enough the gates
could see that the vans were being loaded with trunks and boxes. At 6
o’clock a long train slowly backed into the station of Tsarskoe Selo,
the station was surrounded by soldiers, and troops with loaded rifles
marched out and lined both sides of the road from the palace to the
station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds of cartridges.
Those who saw the departure differ in minor details, of course, because
no two people ever see the same event exactly alike. Especially an
important event on which we would like to have all the details. But all
the observers agree that Nicholas walked out of the palace and entered
the waiting motor car with the calm manner of a man about to take a
pleasure drive. Alexandra did the same. She walked without assistance,
having apparently recovered her shattered health. The former
Czarevitch, in a sailor suit and cap, danced ahead of his parents, in
pleased anticipation of a journey, and the young grand duchesses also
appeared in high spirits. They are extremely handsome girls, all of
them, and people rather sympathetically observed that during their
illness in February they had all had their luxuriant hair cut short.
Some of the observers say that the former Czar drove to the station
alone, others say Kerensky followed him into the car and still others
say that the family went together. Some say that Nicholas wore the
uniform of a Russian army officer, others particularly noticed his gray
suit. To some he looked dejected and tearful, and to others careless
and cold. Some saw tears in his eyes when he entered the train, others
marveled at the calmness with which he shook hands with members of the
provisional government who were on the platform. To this day we do not
know whether Louis XVI. laid his head on the block quietly or fought
the headsman all over the place, although several thousand Frenchmen
witnessed the execution.
It is said that the Emperor left Tsarskoe under the impression that he
was being taken to Livadia, the beautiful Crimean estate toward which
he yearned at the time of his abdication. He must have been profoundly
shocked when he learned that instead he was speeding toward one of
the bleakest and dreariest spots in Siberia. Before the train left
the Emperor is said to have asked Kerensky, who accompanied him to
the last, if the family would ever be allowed to return to Tsarskoe
Selo. If he did, Kerensky’s reply must have been evasive, for Nicholas
told one of his suite, or is said to have done so, that he expected to
return after the war.
The Empress, when told that the family was on its way to Tobolsk,
is reputed to have smiled coldly and said: “I am glad we shall see
Tobolsk. It is a place that has dear associations.” Tobolsk, or its
near neighborhood, it will be remembered, was the early home of
Rasputin. Women of the French aristocracy mounted the guillotine with
exactly such speeches on their lips, a last defiance of the mob.
“Why are there so many soldiers on this train?” asked one of the young
grand duchesses. She was used to being escorted by soldiers, but the
great number on this occasion excited her surprise. The children
all knew that they were going into exile, and had been given their
choice of remaining with relatives or going with their parents. Mme.
Virubova’s claim that the family bond is strong was borne out by their
unanimous decision to go wherever their father and mother went.
Mme. Narychkine, one of the empress’s faithful ladies in waiting, went
with her, since the provisional government would not let her have Mme.
Virubova or even allow the two friends to bid each other farewell.
Prince Dolgorouki was permitted to go with the Emperor. The children
retained a governess and the boy a tutor. Twelve servants accompanied
the family.
According to the depths of his nature and understanding, one feels a
certain pity for the former autocrat of all the Russias, or rejoices
wildly at his present plight. He had to be exiled, and perhaps Siberia
was the best place to send him. But Siberia has a large variety of
climates and places to choose among, and it seems to many people that
the provisional government might have been a little more humane in
their choice of a residence for Nicholas and his family. Whatever his
shortcomings, however just his punishment, his five children never
harmed anybody, and they deserve no punishment. According to accounts,
every hour they spend at Tobolsk will be a punishment, and their time
there will be short, because all of them will probably die owing to the
frightful surroundings.
Tobolsk is a town of about 25,000 inhabitants, situated on the Irtish
river, a little sluggish stream that drains, or partially drains one
of the great marshes of eastern Siberia. The town is built on a marsh,
and the mosquitoes which breed there are said to be of a size and a
ferocity unequaled elsewhere. Malaria haunts the miasmas of the marshy
forests that stretch for miles around the town and line the river
banks. The nearest railroad is 300 versts distant. In winter, which
endures eight months of the year, the place is shut off from the world.
It is as remote from human association as the moon. The provisional
government apologizes for Tobolsk as a choice on the ground of the
necessity for remoteness.