ALL THE ROMANOVS
“The death of Nicholas II. and his family did not suffice for the Soviet
plan of “government” with, or without, Germany. Nothing short of
extermination of all the Romanovs could satisfy the enemies of
“Belsatzar.” Whenever the _Tsik_ (Central Executive Committee) and the
_Chrezvychaika_ (inquisition) laid hands on any of the ex-Tsar’s
relatives their fate was sealed. It did not matter where the unfortunate
princes might be, or what local authority happened to be ostensibly
involved--the _Tsik_ and Yankel Sverdlov, Red Jewish Autocrat of All the
Russias, directed the disposal of them.
It is quite useless for the apologists of Soviet rule to insinuate that
local bodies may have committed excesses without the knowledge and
approval of the Centre; in these murders of Grand Dukes and a Grand
Duchess--in all 11 persons of the blood Royal--the hand of the Central
Government is clearly apparent. Moreover, they were all slain in cold
blood, of deliberate purpose; not like the victims of the holocaust at
Perm, because a reign of stark terror had been ordained from Moscow.
It is with mind and hand still atremble after reciting the horrors of
the cellar and the woods of Ekaterinburg that I take up this tale of
woe, all the more pitiful on account of the utter absence of any pretext
for the crime--just sordid murder unrelieved by any shadow of political
expediency or provocation.
First, I take the case of the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich; he
“disappeared” before the others--about a month before the Tsar--and he
was the ostensible heir although he had formally resigned his rights to
the people. I have collected all the materials concerning his last days
in Perm.
The Tsar’s brother had remained at Gachina, his usual residence, during
the early months of Bolshevist rule. There he was arrested in March,
1918, and sent into exile. His secretary, Nicholas Nikolaievich Johnson,
and the former Chief of the Gendarmerie at Gachina, Colonel Znamerovsky,
were arrested at the same time and transported together with him,
guarded by Letts. Perm was their destination, and in that city they
resided for the next two months.
Apart from being under surveillance, the exiles enjoyed comparative
freedom. The Grand Duke took his walks with his secretary. Although
suffering from a chronic complaint (gastric ulcers) which required
constant exercise and a special diet, he had no cause to complain of
his health while in Perm. The fact was many people sent him dainties,
such as sterlets freshly caught out of the Kama, so that his rooms at
the Korolevskie Nomera (King’s Inn) were always full of provisions. He
felt so well that he seldom had recourse to the medicine for stilling
the terrible pains that he suffered during acute attacks of the malady.
Popularity has its drawbacks. The people of Perm did not realise that
their attentions to the exile might arouse suspicion among his Red
enemies. When things came to such a pass that the Tsar’s brother found
himself running the gauntlet of popular ovations, it became necessary to
avoid too frequent appearances in the streets. Znamerovsky warned the
Grand Duke that the Reds at the suburban Motoviliha arsenal were
beginning to grow restive and openly agitating against the liberty
allowed to the exiles. So thereafter the familiar figure of Michael
Alexandrovich in his shabby grey suit and top boots was seen no more,
and he took his exercise under the cover of darkness.
The Grand Duke had left his wife and children at Gachina. Countess
Brasova (his morganatic spouse) came to visit her husband in the middle
of May. Madame Znamerovskaia had also arrived in Perm. It was a rash
step. Countess Brasova had much difficulty in getting away; in fact it
was only managed by a stratagem. The komisars were told that if they
interfered the matter would be referred to Moscow. This frightened them.
Reaching Moscow on the 22nd or 23rd of May Countess Brasova decided to
take a still bolder step to save her husband. Conscious of his complete
aloofness from politics, she imagined that personal intercession with
the Red chieftains would move them to let him go. Of course it was an
illusion excusable only in a distracted wife. I mention it because Lenin
himself intervened in the matter. It was the lofty idealist of Sovietdom
that absolutely refused to permit the departure of Michael, and thereby
assumed responsibility for what happened.
Madame Znamerovskaia did not leave Perm. She was there when her husband
was shot and later shared his fate. But I am anticipating.
Unbeknown to any member of the family or even to N. N. Jackson, Colonel
Znamerovsky had conceived a plan of escape which he intended to put into
practice, fearing that the Motoviliha workmen might be goaded into
violence. I am in possession of the details of this plan, and I can
state most positively--in the light of subsequent events--that it was
not carried out, nor even attempted.
On the 13th June a telegram reached Gachina from Perm, announcing that
“our general favourite and Johnny had been removed by whom and whither
unknown.” This message was supposed to have come from Znamerovsky--it
could have come only from him. The first feeling was one of unmixed
joy; then doubts began to arise, and no small anxiety as to the probable
repression that would at once fall upon the household at Gachina. Surely
enough soon afterwards Countess Brasova was arrested by Uritsky, the
bloodstained Komisar of Petrograd, who himself was assassinated two
months later by another Jew. After innumerable tribulations, she managed
to escape with her children out of Russia.
What had happened in Perm? A despatch from Mr. Alston, the British
Acting High Commissioner, reported from Vladivostok, February 13,
1919:--“Mr. T. has just arrived here.... When at Perm he says he lived
in the same hotel with Grand Duke Michael and Mr. Johnson, his
secretary, who was a Russian. At two a. m. on or about the 16th June he
saw four of the Perm militzia or police take them off, and he is
convinced that they were killed.”
Later, it became possible to obtain the evidence of eye-witnesses, which
corroborated and amplified Mr. Alston’s despatch. The Grand Duke had two
servants with him in Perm, Borunov and Chelyshev. They lived in an
adjoining room. Mr. Johnson lived upstairs. Chelyshev escaped and gave
the following version:--
At about the date above mentioned (12th to 16th June--he was hazy on
this point) he was asleep one night when three men in soldiers’ dress,
fully armed, entered his room, woke him up and roughly ordered him to
lead them to Michael Romanov. In vain he protested that the Grand Duke
was asleep. They threatened him with the Chrezvychaika. He had to
comply. He first woke Mr. Johnson. Then he led the way to the Grand
Duke’s room. He was asleep. Chelyshev roused him and explained the
reason. The Grand Duke looked at the armed men.
One of them said: “We have orders to take you--orders from the Sovdep.”
The Grand Duke replied: “I shall not come unless you show me a paper.”
One of the men then stepped forward and, laying his hand roughly on the
Grand Duke’s shoulder, exclaimed: “Oh! these Romanovs! We are fed up
with you all!”
Realising that resistance was futile, the Grand Duke rose and dressed
himself. Mr. Johnson had also meanwhile made himself ready, and insisted
that the men should take him away as well. After some argument they
agreed. Chelyshev declares that he also asked to be taken, but that the
men refused.
As the soldiers and their prisoners were going out of the room,
Chelyshev remembered about the medicine, and, grasping the bottle,
followed, calling out: “Please your Highness, take it with you.” He knew
that without his medicine the Grand Duke might be subjected to great and
needless suffering. The soldiers roughly pushed him aside and, making
some brutal remark about the Imperial family, led the prisoners away.
From that moment they were lost to view. Many stories of Michael’s
escape and of his having been seen at Omsk, at Semipalatinsk, at Chita,
at Harbin, etc., have been successively disproved.
Against the version of an escape there are the strongest evidences:--The
Grand Duke would never have been a party to any attempt to evade his
gaolers, knowing full well that both the Tsar--for whom his loyalty and
affection were proverbial--and his own family would suffer for him. It
may be objected that he was removed against his will by friends in
disguise; but this theory cannot explain away their refusal to allow him
to take with him a remedy necessary to his health and perhaps to his
life. There had been plots to procure his escape--so I have reason to
believe; but in every case the plans had been betrayed. Colonel
Znamerovsky knew this. He would trust nobody with his plan, but
obviously it miscarried, for he was himself to go with Michael, and we
know that instead of that he was murdered. The shooting of Znamerovsky
followed close upon the Grand Duke’s disappearance.
Chelyshev afterwards professed confidence in his master’s escape, but at
the time he had no such illusion. In fact, he was convinced then that
the Grand Duke had been trapped, for when he had had time to recover
from his surprise, he went to the local Soviet and complained that the
Grand Duke had been kidnapped. He relates that no attention was paid to
him at first but that later some semblance of a search was made and
quickly dropped.
Regarding the ultimate disposal of the two prisoners, stories circulate
just as numerous and varied as the stories of their escape. I need not
cite them. It suffices that the Grand Duke Michael, gentlest of men, to
whom all thought of power and even of ambition was repugnant,
disappeared to be seen no more.
Perm and its vicinity was destined to witness other tragedies full of
horror. Many other members of the Romanov family had been interned there
including (1) the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, sainted sister of the
Empress, venerated by grateful Muscovites while Alexandra was disliked;
(2) the Grand Duke Sergius Mikhailovich former Master of the Ordnance,
and quite remote from politics; (3) Prince Igor; (4) Prince Ioan; (5)
Prince Constantine, all three brilliant young men, the sons of the late
Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich, none of them concerned with
political matters; and (6) Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei son of the
Grand Duke Paul and step-brother of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.
This youth of seventeen had given promise of being one of the world’s
greatest poets.
Prince Ioan was married to Princess Elena of Serbia, who had come to the
Urals to share her husband’s exile. She had been persuaded to go to her
country, the Bolshevists hesitating to incarcerate her, and she was at
Ekaterinburg when, towards the end of June, she heard that Prince Ioan
and the other captives had been put on starvation rations. She decided,
come what might, not to leave him behind. Thereupon the Bolshevists
arrested her. She was in the prison at Ekaterinburg when the Tsar and
his family were murdered. In the same prison were some people who had
followed the Imperial household into captivity; young Countess Anastasia
Hendrykova, Mlle. Schneider, the Emperor’s valet Volkov. (Prince
Dolgoruky and General Tatishchev had “disappeared” earlier.) Of course
none of them knew anything about the awful happenings in Ipatiev’s
house.
When the Jewish murderers and their accomplices, the German-Magyar
“Letts,” had taken wing before the advance of the Whites these prisoners
were sent to Perm for future disposal, while they themselves had hurried
westward, having helped to accomplish the hellish design of the Jew
fiend, Yankel Sverdlov--to exterminate “all the Romanovs.” Orders had
already preceded them to Perm and the design had been fully accomplished
there. The murder of the Romanovs of Perm took place exactly twenty-four
hours after the murder of the family in Ekaterinburg.
Here are the bare facts of this new butchery. The six Romanov prisoners
above-mentioned with the Grand Duchess’s companion, the nun Varvara, and
S. M. Remes, manager for the princes, were interned in the village
school of Alapaevsk, a place in the environs of Perm.
On the night of July 17 (1918) their warders came to tell them the story
that Yurovsky had retailed to the Tsar: that there was danger for them,
that the enemy (_i.e._, the Czecho-Slovaks) were approaching, and that
in the interest of their personal safety they would be removed. It was
even confided to them whither they were going, namely to the Siniachkhin
Works. All unsuspicious, they at once complied. The programme of the
murder was here somewhat different. It was not convenient to carry it
out on the premises. The party took their seats in the native _korobs_
(a small tarantass) and were driven north.
When twelve versts (eight miles) out the caravan halted in a wood which
contained a number of disused iron-ore mines--one sees the similarity of
detail in the murderers’ plan--and here the unfortunates were slain and
their bodies thrown down the shafts.
It was a much cruder performance than that of Ekaterinburg. The actual
murderers here were simply Russian criminals, escaped convicts who
“worked” for the Chrezvychaika, the Red Inquisition. They just
slaughtered the victims and got rid of the bodies without so much as
rifling their pockets.
Meanwhile at the school certain “precautions” were being taken. A
pretended “escape” was staged. The school building and its approaches
were “faked” to show evidence of combat between the Red Guards and
pretended White Guards, and to give verisimilitude to the performance
they took a peasant who happened to be locked up in the local gaol,
murdered him and placed his dead body in the school to represent the
White “bandits.”
Mr. Preston, the Consul, telegraphed from Ekaterinburg, October 28,
1918, that on the retaking of Alapaevsk by the White troops on September
28, the corpses of the Romanov Princes, the Grand Duchess and their
attendants were found sufficiently preserved to be recognised, and that
they were buried in the presence of a great concourse of people.
The discovery had been made, thanks to the resource of a local police
agent, whose name I do not give for special reasons. _Post mortem_
examination showed that the victims had been bludgeoned to death but
must have undergone a prolonged agony before they died. The Grand Duke
Sergius was shot through the head, perhaps to put him out of his misery;
for the murderers were just butchers who did not seek to torture their
victims. There was no refinement of cruelty about them. They were only
Russians. It is not true that they threw their victims down the shaft
before life was extinct. The autopsy has dispelled that legend. The
murderers even exploded hand grenades down the shaft, probably to make
assurance doubly sure.
The investigation has clearly established the authorship of these
murders. The orders came from Moscow through the same channels that had
been used in the murder of the Tsar--namely, from the Jew Sverdlov to
the Jew Goloshchekin, and, as usual, the Russian workman Belodorodov
acted as the dummy president of the Ekaterinburg Soviet board--the
channel through which Moscow acted in the Urals. These orders were
carried out by the leading komisars of Perm, among them being the
Komisar of Justice Soloviev.
As in the case of the murder at Ekaterinburg, the Bolshevists at Perm
followed up their traitorous crime by announcing that there had been a
conspiracy. The world was told that the Princes had been kidnapped by
bands of White Guards. (When the Whites had to evacuate Perm, General
Diterichs arranged to have the bodies of the martyred Princes removed
eastward. They rest in a place of safety--at the Russian Cathedral in
Peking).
More than half a year later a crime equally abominable was perpetrated
at Petrograd. The victims were the Grand Dukes Paul Alexandrovich,
Dmitri Constantinovich, Nicholas Mikhailovich (the historian), and
George Mikhailovich. They had been imprisoned for some time without any
charge being preferred against them. On January 29, 1919, they were
removed to the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, and there on the same day
without any investigation or form of trial they were “killed by Red
Guards with revolvers”--such is the trite information that is available.
But the crime of Ekaterinburg and the slaughter of Alapaevsk give a clue
as to the authorship of this atrocity. The last of the Romanovs within
the power of the Jew-ruled Soviet had passed away. Perhaps, some day, N.
A. Sokolov will be able to investigate the crime of Petrograd.
We now approach the end of this long martyrology. The members of whom I
am about to speak form part of the Red Terror ordained by the Soviet to
avenge the murder of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin, which took place
about a month after the crime of Ekaterinburg.
I referred above to the transfer of certain prisoners from that city to
Perm. Volkov, the Tsar’s valet, has deposed that altogether thirty-six
persons travelled in the prison train. Among them were Countess
Hendrykova, Mlle. Schneider, and Princess Elena. They all found
themselves interned in the same prison in Perm. Here Volkov met
Chelyshev, who had also been locked up, and from him heard the account
of the abduction of the Grand Duke Michael. They saw the Princess leave.
After great difficulty the Siberian Government had managed to rescue
her. She did not, of course, know that her husband had been murdered.
She thought he had escaped, and went away willingly enough this time.
The Terror had been proclaimed on September 1, 1918. The official
_Izvestiya_ declared that the “proletariat (_sic_) will reply ... in a
manner that will make the whole _bourgeoisie_ shudder with horror.” The
_Krasnaia_ (Red) _Gazeta_ announced:--“We will kill our enemies in
scores of hundreds.... Let them drown themselves in their own
blood.”[11]
“On the night of September 3rd”--I am quoting Volkov--“we were led out
of the prison, eight of us. There were Countess Hendrykova, Mlle.
Schneider, and Mme. Znamerovskaia, myself, and four others. We were
surrounded by twenty-two armed guards, part Letts, part Magyars.
“We had been told that we were to be transferred to another prison; we
carried our small possessions. When we saw that they were leading us out
of the town, we realised that our last hour had come. It was terribly
hard on the ladies. They dragged themselves along with difficulty in the
heavy mud. After several miles, we came to a corduroy road with swamps
on either side.” (It was a sewage farm.) “Some of our guards suddenly
began offering to carry our bags. I knew that meant that they were going
to shoot us directly, so each one wanted to secure his booty beforehand.
It was now or never. While they were wrangling over the spoils I made a
dash for it.”
Volkov leapt the ditch and was scuttling across the slimy waste when the
Magyaro-Letts opened fire. He fell just as the first shot rang out and
remained lying. They thought he was dead and moved on. He then made
another dash and finally got away. After wandering about for forty-three
days, he came into the White zone and was saved.
The frightfully mangled remains of Countess Hendrykova and Mlle.
Schneider were discovered by us in the summer of last year and committed
to the grave in Perm, in full view of the prison windows where they had
been fellow captives of Princess Elena.
“Comrade” Petrovsky’s accusations were undeserved in Perm. The Red
Terror ran a full stream of blood in that region. The peasants, being
regarded by Bolshevists as the worst kind of _bourgeoisie_, provided the
bulk of the “scores of hundreds” of victims. For details of these
horrors I would refer the reader to the White Book on Bolshevism issued
in April, 1919.
Respecting Count Tatishchev and Prince Dolgoruky, nothing is known as to
the manner of their death. According to Volkov, who was in prison with
him in Ekaterinburg, Tatishchev was summoned to the office on or about
June 8th, and was there informed that, by order of the Soviet, he was to
be deported to the province of Ufa. He was thereupon taken away from the
prison and seen no more.
Although secret-service investigation among the Reds strengthens the
belief that Michael was murdered, it is a fact that no trace of his dead
body has been discovered; and it is, therefore, conceivable that he
survived. There are many records of wonderful escapes from Red Guard
shooting squads. Volkov is an instance. Chelyshev, the other servant,
was twice led out to execution, yet in the end reappeared. If the Grand
Duke was taken away by Russians, the chances of his escape would be
naturally greater. But even admitting this happy contingency, the
murderous intention of the Soviet rulers remains unaffected.
Prince Dolgoruky remained some time in the Ekaterinburg House of
Detention. He was frequently in communication with the worthy Mr.
Preston, trying to relieve the sufferings of the captives in Ipatiev’s
house. Probably this hastened his end. We know that the British Consul
was threatened with death if he “interfered” any more. Dolgoruky
disappeared like his senior, the Count. Their memories, like the
memories of Hendrykova and Schneider, will live through the ages as of
those who have been “faithful unto death.”