Nicholas and Alexandra learned the truth about Alexei’s condition early on, but they were determined to keep it secret from their subjects. They didn’t want any hint that Alexei might not be able to rule, or that he might not live long enough to take the throne. As Alexei grew up, many Russians must have known that something was wrong, especially when Alexei was seen being carried, even at ceremonial occasions. But such public appearances were limited. Alexandra already wanted to protect her children from what she perceived as decadent Russian society; Alexei’s illness made her withdraw her children from public view and from social interaction all the more.
Alexei’s condition also made Nicholas and Alexandra dependent on the one man who seemed to be able to help Alexei: Grigori Rasputin, who was, depending on your viewpoint, either a mystic healer and a holy man, or a religious fake. Some speculate that Rasputin had such a hypnotic effect on Alexei that, even in the midst of a serious bleed, Alexei would calm down enough that the bleeding would stop. But the Russian nobility blamed Rasputin for many of the country’s problems, and a group of them ended up assassinating him in 1916. (Contributing to the notion that Rasputin did have special powers, he supposedly survived being knifed, poisoned, shot, and beaten before his assassins finally succeeded in drowning him.)
If you look at the pictures of the Romanov children growing up—and there are lots and lots of those pictures, because the whole family loved cameras—it’s easy to forget that they lived in turbulent times, and that more and more people outside the palace walls were coming to believe that the rule of the tsars had to end. For the five Romanov kids, their lives were an odd mix of being very privileged, very sheltered, and in some ways very restricted. Their family owned seven palaces, and the girls each received a diamond and a pearl every year on their birthdays, with the idea that they would have enough for a full necklace of each by the time they were sixteen. But both of their parents preferred a simpler lifestyle than many people would have chosen given their incredible wealth and power. Even when their father was still in power, the children grew up taking cold baths and sleeping on simple camp-style cots with no pillows.
Strangely, the way the Romanov kids were raised turned out to be fairly good preparation for their last months of imprisonment. Theirs was a close-knit family, and as children they had mostly played only with one another. So being trapped with just their parents and siblings and a few servants probably didn’t seem as devastating to them as it might have for kids who were used to being around a lot of friends.
Still, for most of their lives, the Romanov children were protected from the unrest outside their palace walls. A great deal changed with the start of World War I in 1914. In early 1915, the tsar left Tsarskoe Selo, the family’s eight-hundred-acre palace compound near St. Petersburg, to take command of the military forces at headquarters near the front hundreds of miles away. To Alexei’s great delight, he was allowed to go live with his father at headquarters later that same year. The eleven-year-old boy, who had always been so protected and babied, was delighted to get the chance to live more roughly and be around soldiers and learn everything he could about the military. However, this glorious freedom ended for him about a year later, after a massive nosebleed and other hemophilia-related problems forced him to return home.
Meanwhile, the tsarina and her four daughters considered it their patriotic duty to help wounded soldiers. Alexandra, Olga, and Tatiana all went through nursing programs. Maria and Anastasia were not old enough to be trained as nurses, but they visited the military hospitals as well. All of the Romanov females were exposed to grisly sights, and the tsarina made it clear that she and her daughters would pitch in and help no matter how much filth and blood and gore they encountered.
Russia entered World War I with plenty of fervor and nationalistic pride, but it quickly became clear that the country’s military was woefully unprepared. After a series of humiliating losses and a mounting death count, the mood of the country began to turn. The grief and resentment of families who’d lost sons and husbands fed into the calls for revolution. A February 1917 demonstration calling for “bread and peace” turned into violent riots in St. Petersburg, with thousands of soldiers turning against the government as well. The capital was in chaos. Even the tsar himself came to believe that the only way to end the unrest was for him to step down.
Ultimately, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne on March 15, 1917. Not wanting to endanger his sickly son, the tsar indicated that his brother Michael—not Alexei—should take the throne in his place. But just trading one tsar for another was not enough for the revolutionaries. Michael never actually took over, and he ended up being murdered a month before his brother.
At first the royal rule was replaced by a provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky, who had been a parliamentary leader during Nicholas II’s reign. But the more extreme Bolsheviks overthrew this government and took over in October 1917.
At the time of the tsar’s abdication, all five of his children had the measles—so badly that they had to have their heads shaved. Anastasia and Tatiana also had burst eardrums because of the measles and so were temporarily deaf. Their mother couldn’t even tell them what had happened—she had to write it down for them.
If the five Romanov offspring had been well enough to travel, and if their parents had chosen to act immediately, they probably could have left the country right away and moved to England, where a cousin, George V, was on the throne. The British government made a formal offer of asylum on March 22. But then the British backed away from that offer. Among other issues, the British leaders worried about Alexandra’s German connections, since Britain was still in the midst of fighting Germany in World War I.
The British also may not have fully understood that the Romanovs’ lives were in danger.
At first the family was simply kept under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo. Then in August 1917 they were sent to western Siberia, to a place called Tobolsk. After the Bolsheviks took over, they were moved again. When they were taken from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, in the heart of revolutionary territory, they had to have known it was a bad sign.
Alexei was once again very ill, and so Nicholas, Alexandra, and Maria went to Ekaterinburg first, and were joined by the others about a month later.
In Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs moved into a house that had been taken away from a retired engineer named Nikolai Ipatiev. The Bolsheviks referred to it rather chillingly as the House of Special Purpose—the “special purpose” never actually being spelled out. Ipatiev’s house was large and well-furnished, but the seven Romanovs, their four servants, and the doctor were crowded into five rooms. And the double fences, armed guards, and blocked windows were constant reminders that the Romanovs were imprisoned there. At one point Anastasia tried to peek out a window, and a guard immediately began firing toward her. (Most versions of this story I encountered said this happened to either Anastasia or “one of the sisters”; one version claimed it was the tsar himself who was fired upon. Anastasia seems the likeliest person to show such curiosity and risk-taking; regardless, the guards made it clear that that wasn’t allowed.)
Surprisingly, the Romanovs were allowed to keep some of their valuables, such as imperial bed linens and tableware. And the original commander and guards at Ekaterinburg didn’t treat the family too badly. When Yakov Yurovsky took over as commander in early July and brought in new guards, they took a more hardcore approach.
The Romanovs’ captors were afraid that some of the family’s loyal friends would try to free them. A few notes were smuggled in with food deliveries—hidden in loaves of bread or, in one case, wrapped around the cork stopper of a bottle of cream—asking about the family’s condition and the possibilities for escape and/or rescue. The family responded to the notes with caution, apparently because they couldn’t be sure if the notes were real and not fakes set up to catch them plotting against the government.
Either way, nothing came of the notes in the end. According to writings t
he Romanovs left behind and the descriptions of their captors, the family mostly seemed to accept their imprisonment with unusual calm, taking refuge in their religious beliefs and a regular routine of family meals, morning and afternoon walks, and evening card-playing and reading.
Meanwhile, with fighting in the mountains near Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs’ captors knew the city was about to be retaken from the revolutionaries, and they feared the Romanovs might be freed that way. It’s unclear how much of the decision to kill the Romanovs was made by local officials and how much was dictated by the national leadership. The local officials did send a telegram to Moscow on July 16 saying they couldn’t wait, but they didn’t send it until late in the day. And because of disruptions in the telegraph lines, the message didn’t arrive until hours after that. There’s no official record of a reply, but Yurovsky later claimed that he had received an order from Moscow.
Regardless, Yurovsky’s plans went just as they’re described in this book (at least just as they’re described apart from the time travelers’ changes). Yurovsky did send away the kitchen boy, Leonid Sednev, on July 16, since he didn’t want to kill the boy with everyone else. However, his excuse about the boy visiting his uncle was a lie, since the uncle had already been murdered by the Bolsheviks. In reality, Leonid spent the night across the street in a house where the external guards slept—and where he undoubtedly could hear the shots fired at the Romanovs. He became the only Ipatiev House servant to survive that night.
It was about one thirty a.m. when Yurovsky woke Dr. Botkin to tell him that the fighting was getting too close and the family had to be moved. The family did take about forty-five minutes to get ready, probably because they were debating about what they should take with them and what they would need to leave behind. The seven Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, and the three remaining servants did rather cluelessly follow the guards down to the cellar.
Yurovsky kept the whole group waiting in the cellar for another half an hour, while he made sure that the truck arrived and everything was prepared. Alexandra really did demand chairs for her and Alexei, and the guards provided them.
According to Yurovsky, the family seemed stunned when he read off the charges against the former tsar. Accounts vary about exactly what Yurovsky said: Did he talk about the nearby fighting and efforts to rescue the Romanovs? Or the fact that their relatives in Europe fought against Russia? Or did he focus more on what one account called the former tsar’s “countless bloody crimes” against the Russian people? (I included all three issues in the charges I depicted Yurovsky reading in Risked.) Yurovsky claims he himself took the first shot at the tsar, and then a team of assassins all began shooting at once. Reportedly, none of the guards actually wanted to kill the girls, but theirs became particularly horrific deaths, probably because of the jewels sewn into their clothing and the assassins’ disorganization and poor planning. When the four girls—and the maid, the doctor, and even Alexei—were still alive even after the extreme barrage of bullets, the assassins resorted to shooting them point-blank in the head and/or using bayonets to stab them to death.
Just as the killings were botched, so were the attempts to hide the bodies afterward. Yurovsky had planned to dump all the bodies down a deserted mine shaft in an uninhabited area outside the city. But the truck broke down and got stuck in mud, and Yurovsky’s men were forced to move the bodies part of the way in carts. They encountered peasants preparing to mow hay, and Yurovsky had to send men into a nearby village to tell people to stay out of the area—so much for the idea of secrecy. Then when the men dropped the bodies into the mine shaft, the water at the bottom proved to be too shallow to cover them. The men threw grenades down into the shaft, hoping to collapse the walls onto the bodies, but this failed too.
With the sun already up by then, Yurovsky realized he’d just need to leave guards near the mine shaft and come back later to move the bodies again.
More car and truck problems and a series of injuries complicated Yurovsky’s second night of trying to hide the bodies elsewhere. He resorted to doing his best to disguise the bodies so that even if they were found they wouldn’t be recognized. His men threw sulfuric acid into a collective grave they dug, and this ate away at the corpses. Also, Yurovsky later wrote, he had his men separate two of the bodies from the rest so the men could burn them and bury them elsewhere. He reasoned that anyone finding just nine bodies would not automatically know that it was the Romanovs and their servants.
The official story about the killings that went out on July 20—just five days before Ekaterinburg did indeed fall to the army that would have rescued the Romanovs—was that only the former tsar had been killed; the rest of the family was said to be alive and well and in a hidden location.
That original lie fed rumors later on that at least one of the Romanovs had somehow escaped. As the years passed, a variety of pretenders cropped up claiming to be Romanovs. The most attention went to a woman named Anna Anderson, who turned up in Germany in 1920 and managed to convince many people—including some Romanov relatives—that she really was Anastasia. Multiple authors wrote books that advanced or discredited her story; a TV movie based on her life billed her as “the great romantic enigma of the twentieth century.”
When Anna Anderson died in 1984, it seemed that she had carried her secrets to the grave. However, DNA tests done ten years later proved conclusively that Anna Anderson could not have been Anastasia.
The actual whereabouts of the Romanovs’ bodies remained secret—at least publicly—during most of the history of the Soviet Union. An amateur historian and a filmmaker found some of the bodies in the 1970s, but they didn’t feel it was safe to reveal their discovery for another decade. In 1991 the skeletal remains were finally dug up and studied and analyzed, and scientists determined that they belonged to Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters, along with the three servants and Dr. Botkin.
Alexei’s body was missing, and so was one sister’s, although scientists disagreed about whether it was Anastasia or Maria.
For a while, the two missing bodies fueled even more speculation. But then, sixteen years later, remains of two more bodies were found nearby. These remains were broken and burned, fitting with the claim that Yurovsky and his men had unsuccessfully tried to cremate two of the bodies before burying them.
According to scientists, the DNA tests on those remains were conclusive: They belonged to the missing Romanov children. In real history, there was never any hope for any of the Romanovs from the moment they stepped into that cellar in the middle of the night on July 17, 1918.
But what does it say about human nature that so many people wanted to believe, so desperately, for so many years, that at least one of the children had lived?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Volumes have been written about the Romanovs and their horrific deaths. I am grateful to all the researchers, scientists, writers, and translators who have worked to ferret out the truth and share it with the rest of the world. Given what is known now, I found it a little amusing that so many of the books published before 2007 claimed to “prove” implausible scenarios to account for the missing bodies. But many of those older books were useful for background information and eyewitness accounts. I greatly appreciated the 2008 book The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinaburg by Helen Rappaport, because it provided newer information and focused so precisely on the Romanovs’ time at the Ipatiev House. For a broader overview of the Romanovs’ lives (and for its many, many pictures), I also appreciated Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra by Peter Kirth.
Useful resources I found online included http://www.romanov-memorial.com/, which has detailed blueprints and pictures of the Ipatiev House. It was also helpful (though unsettling) to read the eyewitness accounts from Yurovsky and some of the other assassins online at http://www.kingandwilson.com/FOTRresources/.
In addition to the books and online resources I used for research, I am also very grateful to Rob Alexander, executive director of th
e Central Ohio chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation, for answering my questions about what Gavin’s experiences with hemophilia would be like in the modern world.
MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX
is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middle-grade novels, including the Shadow Children series. A graduate of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for the Indianapolis News. She also taught at Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.
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ALSO BY MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX
THE MISSING SERIES
Found
Sent
Sabotaged
Torn
Caught
THE SHADOW CHILDREN SERIES
Among the Hidden
Among the Impostors
Among the Betrayed
Among the Barons
Among the Brave
Among the Enemy
Among the Free
The Girl with 500 Middle Names
Because of Anya
Say What?
Dexter the Tough
Running Out of Time
Game Changer
The Always War
Claim to Fame
Palace of Mirrors
Uprising
Double Identity
The House on the Gulf
Escape from Memory
Takeoffs and Landings
Turnabout
Just Ella
Leaving Fishers