The Russian Revolution полностью

The family settled into a monotonous routine. They rose at nine o’clock, took tea at ten. Lunch was served at one, dinner between four and five, tea at seven, supper at nine. They went to sleep at eleven o’clock.⁴⁵ Except for the meals, the prisoners were confined to their rooms. Life grew so dull that Nicholas began to skip entries in his journal. Much time was spent reading aloud from the Bible and from Russian classics, sometimes by candlelight because of the frequent power failures: Nicholas had his first opportunity to read War and Peace. The family prayed a great deal. They were allowed short walks in the garden, fifteen minutes at most, but no physical exercise, which was very hard on Nicholas. In good weather, Nicholas carried his disabled son into the yard. They played bezique and Russian backgammon, called tricktrack. They were not allowed to attend church, but on Sundays and holidays a priest would hold services in an improvised chapel in the salon, under the watchful eye of the guards.

97. Alexis and Olga on board the ship Rus on their last journey from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg: May 1918.

There exist many lurid stories about the abuse of the Imperial family at the hands of the guards. It is said that the latter entered the rooms occupied by the princesses any time of day or night, helped themselves to the food which the family, at Nicholas’s insistence, shared with their servants at a common table, and even jostled the ex-Tsar. These stories, while not baseless, tend to be exaggerated: the behavior of the commandant and his guards was undoubtedly rude, but no evidence exists of actual maltreatment. Even so, the conditions which the Imperial family endured were exceedingly painful. The guards posted on the second floor amused themselves by accompanying the princesses to the lavatory, demanding to know why they were going there and standing outside until they came out.⁴⁶ It was not uncommon for obscene drawings and inscriptions to be found in the lavatory and bathroom. A proletarian lad named Faika Safonov amused friends with renditions of obscene ditties under the windows of the Imperial prisoners.

The Romanovs bore their confinement, discomforts, and indignities with remarkable serenity. Avdeev thought that Nicholas did not behave like a prisoner at all, displaying “natural gaiety.” Bykov, the Communist historian of these events, speaks with irritation of Nicholas’s “idiotic indifference to the events occurring around him.”⁴⁷ The behavior of the ex-Tsar and his family, however, was due not to indifference but to a sense of decorum and a fatalism rooted in religious faith. We shall, of course, never know what went on in the minds of the prisoners, behind the façade of Nicholas’s “natural gaiety,” Alexandra’s hauteur, and the children’s irrepressible spirits, for they confided in no one: Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s diaries for the period are logs rather than intimate journals. But an unexpected insight into their inner feelings is provided by the discovery among their belongings of a poem called “Prayer.” It was written by S. S. Bekhteev, a brother of Zinaida Tolstoy, a close friend of Alexandra’s, in October 1917 and sent to Tobolsk with a dedication to Olga and Tatiana. In the papers of the Imperial family, two copies of this poem were found, one in the hand of Alexandra, the other in that of Olga. It read:

Give patience, Lord, to us Thy children

In these dark, stormy days to bear

The persecution of our people,

The tortures falling to our share.

Give strength, Just God, to us who need it,

The persecutors to forgive,

Our heavy, painful cross to carry

And Thy great meekness to achieve.

When we are plundered and insulted,

In days of mutinous unrest,

We turn for help to Thee, Christ-Savior,

That we may stand the bitter test.

Lord of the world, God of Creation,

    Give us Thy blessing through our prayer,

    Give peace of heart to us, O Master,

    This hour of deadly dread to bear.

And on the threshold of the grave

Breathe power divine into our clay

That we, Thy children, may find strength

In meekness for our foes to pray.⁴⁸

In the spring of 1918, when they had confined Nicholas and his family in Ekaterinburg and the rest of the Romanov clan in other towns of Perm province, the Bolsheviks were placing them in what appeared to be a safe area: far away from the German front and the White Army, in the midst of a Bolshevik stronghold. But the situation in this territory changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Czech rebellion. By the middle of June, the Czechs controlled Omsk, Cheliabinsk, and Samara. Their military operations endangered the province of Perm, located directly north of these cities, and placed the Romanovs close to a battlefront where the Bolsheviks were in retreat.

What was to be done with them? In June, Trotsky still favored a spectacular trial: