The Last Tsar (2 page)

The progenitor of the Romanov clan was Andrei Ivanovich Kobyla, a distinguished émigré from the land of Prussia, where, in the fourteenth century, a long and fruitful line that included many of Russia’s most distinguished families began with Kobyla and his brother Feodor. Kobyla’s great-great-granddaughter Anastasia became wife and tsaritsa to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Thus Andrei Kobyla’s descendants allied themselves with the ancient dynasty of Muscovite tsars.

The tsaritsa’s brother, Nikita Romanovich, was particularly close to the cruel tsar. But Ivan the Terrible died, and in his will and testament he appointed Nikita Romanovich guardian and councilor to his son, the new tsar, Feodor.

The struggle for power commenced.

Slandered by the all-powerful Boris Godunov, Tsar Feodor’s brother-in-law, the eldest of Nikita Romanovich’s sons was forced to take monastic vows under the name Filaret.

With the death of Tsar Feodor in 1598 Rurik’s ancient dynasty came to an end, whereupon ensued a period of unprecedented turbulence for old Russia—the Time of Troubles. Selected to be tsar was Boris Godunov, whom the people suspected of having murdered the infant Dmitry, heir to the throne. In the midst of unimaginable famine and death, Godunov died and the Poles invaded Russia, putting a tsar-pretender, the False Dmitry, on the Russian throne. Russia suffered widespread impoverishment, cannibalism, brigandage.

It was then, during the Time of Troubles, that Filaret Romanov was returned from exile and made metropolitan of Rostov.

The Poles were driven from Moscow, and the false tsar perished. And at last, in 1613, the Assembly of the Land put an end to the terrible interregnum.

The son of Metropolitan Filaret, Michael Romanov, who was at that moment at Kostroma’s Ipatiev monastery, was unanimously elected tsar by the Assembly of the Land on February 21, 1613. Thus began the three-hundred-year history of the house of Romanov.

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The mysticism of history: the monastery whence the first Romanov was called upon to rule was the Ipatiev; the house where the last ruling Romanov, Nicholas II, parted with his life was the Ipatiev house, named after the building’s owner, the engineer N. N. Ipatiev.

A Michael was the first tsar from the house of Romanov; a Michael was also the last, in whose favor Nicholas II tried unsuccessfully to abdicate the throne.

I
n the seventh decade of our century, in Moscow, lived a strange old woman: her wrinkled face was plastered with a grotesque layer of theatrical makeup; her bent figure tottered on high heels. She moved almost by feel, but nothing could induce her to don glasses. Oh, no, she had no intention of looking like an old woman!

According to the
Theatrical Encyclopedia
she was then in her tenth decade.

This was Vera Leonidovna Yureneva—a star of the stage from the turn of the century. Once, her student admirers harnessed themselves to her carriage in place of horses to take her home from her performances. Now, yesterday’s femme fatale was living out her life in a communal apartment on a miserable pension. And she had rented one of her two rooms to me, a sorry student at the Historical Archival Institute.

Evenings, when I returned home, I often had long talks with her in the communal kitchen. The suites of Petersburg restaurants, the glamorous Yacht Club with its grand dukes, the palaces on translucent White Nights—this drowned world where she had once lived Vera Leonidovna ironically referred to as Atlantis. She scattered names: “Anya”—just Anya—turned out to be Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s fateful friend; and “Sana”—to the rest of Russia the Empress
Alexandra Feodorovna. Thus began our nightly conversations in a Moscow kitchen, our journey to a drowned Atlantis. I recorded her stories greedily. And now that I have read so many reminiscences by participants in those stormy events, her opinions retain a distinct charm for me, precisely because she was not a participant. Participants are, after all, biased. It reminds me of the expression “He lies like someone who was there.” Vera Leonidovna was merely a contemporary, an interested but disinterested party.

Here is one of Vera Leonidovna’s stories about Atlantis’s demise: “Only after the revolution did Mikhail K. become my husband. [Mikhail Koltsov was a distinguished journalist in Bolshevik Russia.] ‘Yet Another Bolshevik Victory’—that was what the émigré press wrote about our union.

“At that time many prominent Bolsheviks lived in the Metropole Hotel. For relaxation they often invited writers and journalists serving the new authorities. Koltsov, too, was often at the Metropole. Once he met two people there. One had been the head of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks when the tsar’s family was executed. The other had been in charge of the execution itself. And they reminisced about how it all had been. They sipped unsweetened tea through a sugar lump, crunched the cube, and told stories about how
the bullets bounced off the girls and flew about the room
. Gripped with fear, they had been utterly unable to get the boy. He kept crawling across the floor, warding off their shots with his hand. Only later did they learn that the grand duchesses had been wearing corsets sewn solidly with diamonds, which had protected them. Later Misha [Koltsov] used to say that there must be a photograph of that horror somewhere. ‘After all, they were very proud—they had liquidated Nicholas the Bloody. How could they have resisted taking their picture with the slain afterward, especially since the chief assassin had once been a photographer.’ He never did stop searching for that photograph.”

This picture: the tsar’s murderers drinking tea in a room at the Metropole … and the bullets bouncing off the girls and the boy on the floor, and the terrible photograph. I could not put it out of my mind.

Later at the Historical Archives Institute I heard about a secret note written by that same former photographer who had led the execution of the tsar’s family. His name: Yakov Yurovsky. In the note he purportedly told all.

Once I had completed my archival internship, I found myself in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution in Moscow. Immediately I made a naive inquiry about the Yurovsky “note.”

“There is no Yurovsky note,” my colleague replied brusquely, as if to point up the question’s lack of tact.

I was shown the Romanov archive, however. To my surprise, at a time when everything was classified, these documents were not.

First I looked through albums of Romanov photographs. The same colleague with the bloodless (archival) face carried in huge scrapbooks—Moroccan leather, with the tsarist seal and without—and carried them out, one after the other. She refused to leave me alone with those photographs for a second. At first she was cold, indifferent, but then, forgetting herself, she waxed enthusiastic and explained each one to me, as if boasting of this amazing vanished life. The dim pictures in those tsarist photographs were a window out of her destitute, boring life.

“They took pictures of everything,” she explained with a certain pride. “The whole family had cameras: they took photos of the girls, the tsar and the tsaritsa.”

Photographs, photographs. A tall, slender beauty and a sweet young man—the period of their engagement.

Their first child—a little girl on spindly legs.

The four girls sitting on a leather sofa. Then the boy, the long-awaited heir to the throne. The boy and his dog, the boy on a bicycle with an enormous wheel, the amusing bicycle of that era. But most often he is in bed, the empress beside him. She has aged so. She looks into the camera, she looks at us. A bitter crease circles her mouth. The thin nose now hooked—a sad young woman. And here is Nicholas and the future king of England, George. They are looking at each other—astonishingly, ridiculously alike (their mothers were sisters).

A photograph of a hunt: a huge deer with giant antlers lying in the snow. And here is a vacation: Nicholas swimming—he has dived and is swimming underwater, naked—his bare strong body from the back.

Since then I have often recalled those photographs—the dead deer and the naked tsar—when thinking about him lying dead and naked on the warm July ground by the mine shaft into which they later tossed his body.

Then I was given his diary.

In July 1918, the Czechs and Cossacks were advancing on Ekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks would have to surrender the town. Yakov Yurovsky left Ekaterinburg on the last train out. The “secret courier” (as he was officially referred to in the documents) was carrying the
tsar’s leather cases—one of which contained the family archive of the very recently executed Romanovs.

So there he was riding the train, looking through the albums of photographs. The former photographer must have found this very interesting. But the main thing, naturally, was that he read the tsar’s diary. The diary of the man with whom his name would be linked from then on and always. Imagine what he felt as he leafed through it on his long journey, trying to picture this life lived in full view of the entire world.

That is how the diary of Nicholas II, kept in the Romanov archive, came to be in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. The Romanov archive. I call it the Archive of Blood.

Nicholas kept a diary for thirty-six years without interruption. He began it at the age of fourteen, in 1882, in the palace at Gatchina, and ended it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Ekaterinburg.

Fifty notebooks filled from beginning to end with his neat handwriting. But the final, fifty-first notebook is only half filled: his life was cut short, and yawning blank pages remain, conscientiously numbered by the author in advance.

This diary contains no reflections, and opinions are rare. He is terse—this taciturn, retiring man. The diary is a record of the principal events of the day, no more. But his voice lingers on its pages.

The mystical force of genuine speech.

The revolution punished him without trial, not allowing him a final say. The portrait of this puzzling man was created only after his death—by his opponents and his supporters. Now he himself can speak in the words he himself once wrote. I leaf through his diary. One experiences an eternal yet banal sensation in the archive: one feels
other
hands, the touch of hands across a century. He himself will lead us through his life. He is the Author.

The author of the diary was born on May 6, 1868.

An old postcard: an angelic infant in long curls. Here Nicholas is all of a year.

Another photograph: a youth with his hair fashionably parted.

In 1882 Nicholas received a gift from his mother: a gilt-edged “book of souvenirs” bound in precious inlaid wood. This luxurious book became the first notebook of his diary. Nicholas was moved to begin keeping a diary conscientiously by a fateful date in Russian history: March 1, 1881.

On the dank night of February 28, 1881, in a Petersburg apartment, the light stayed on for a long time. All that day, from early morning, certain young people had been going in and out of the apartment. Since eight o’clock in the evening six had remained, four young men and two young women. One of them was Vera Figner, distinguished leader of People’s Will, the revolutionary terrorist organization. Subsequently she would describe that day in her autobiography.