WHY THEY WERE ALL DOOMED
A fascinating history of the Romanovs’ last days reveals...
Last Of The Tsars: Nicholas II And The Russian Revolution Robert Service Macmillan €30.99
On July 17 1918, Nicholas II, the former tsar of Russia, his wife Alexandra and their five young children – four girls and a boy – were brutally executed in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg in the Urals. But Nicholas had in fact abdicated as tsar 17 months earlier, after the February Revolution of 1917 that ended the monarchy, and 300 years of Romanov dynastic rule, in Russia.
With regard to the history of that dynasty, readers generally know a little about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and a lot about Nicholas II, his haemophiliac son, the rise and fall of Rasputin, and the slaughter of the entire family.
In this outstanding, subtle book, the historian Robert Service looks at one of the more blurred parts of this seemingly familiar story: Nicholas II’s months of captivity, first in his own palace at Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg, then in the Siberian town of Tobolsk, and finally in the dreaded so-called House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg.
He begins by examining the agonising process of the abdication, showing how Nicholas illegally removed his own son, the teenage haemophiliac Alexei, from the succession.
The British offered Nicholas and his family a sanctuary – until George V, in a shabby move, withdrew the offer, fearing that the Romanovs’ presence could encourage a London revolution. Then we learn how, gradually, Nicholas and Alexandra came to like their new revolutionary master, the Socialist Alexander Kerensky, who was justice, then war minister, then premier. As long as he was in charge, the Romanovs were safe. But in October 1917, the fanatical radical communists known as the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized power.
From then on it was likely Nicholas and Alexandra would be executed but when attempted coups, foreign interventions and civil war threatened the regime, Lenin accepted the idea of executing the children too.
Service’s concern is not so much the domestic experiences of captivity but the political and cultural ones, and in this he has (as always) found new material and a new approach.
He reveals Nicholas II as an enthusiastic reader of The Count Of Monte Cristo, Sherlock Holmes and War And Peace, but also of the viciously anti-semitic forgery The Protocols Of The Elders Of
Zion – Nicholas was always an anti-semitic believer in Christian absolute monarchy.
Service also shows how Nicholas built unexpected friendships with some of the captors, particularly Vasily Pankratov, who was in charge of him in Tobolsk.
And finally, he explains how the murder of the family was the result of a combination of Lenin’s orders in the Kremlin and the radicalism of the Ural Bolsheviks.
As counter-revolutionary White armies threatened the Red rule over Ekaterinburg, the fate of the Romanovs became critical: what mattered to the Bolsheviks was that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands and become a banner against them. Lenin’s role was disguised for the sake of posterity.
As ever, this account of the murders is heartbreaking. This fascinating book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this period of history.
Service gently corrects the naive vision of Nicholas II as a meek gentleman and its opposite view that he was a bloody tyrant, with the sensible argument that he was always both.