Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs

I went to the talk by Helen Rappaport on 8 July at Pushkin House. It was roughly an hour long, including the question & answers and discussion at the end.

The talk was about her latest book, Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, and her journey to write it - plus also the journey of the Romanov family in their final days. Not so much a physical journey, as they were locked away in the Ipatiev House, but a spiritual and emotional journey.

I managed to read most of the book before the talk and it is a very good book. My knowledge of that time in history is very limited. Here was a country crushed by the Germans in the Great War - the Russian Empire suffered 3.3 million dead and almost 5 million wounded. Such was the disaster that Russia pulled out of the war ceding large amounts of its territory to the Central Powers (effectively to Germany).

The Russian Empire was now no more and there was a civil war, which would kill another million soldiers, with around 13 million civilians either killed or injured. This civil war lasted until 1922 - with the ultimate victory of the Bolshevik and the formation of the Soviet Union. However, the book centres around the Romanovs’ final two weeks and their execution on 17 July 1918.

Even if Tsar Nicholas II had not entered the war against the Central Powers, one would imagine that Russia was heading towards revolution and civil war. In any event, the war was probably beyond Nicholas’s control. The family had gradually become unpopular and had lost support amongst even the rural Russian serfs. Therefore, it is interesting to note that the Romanovs have been romanticised in modern Russia. It is also interesting the Tsarina (the German-born Lutheran, Alexandra) best recognised the entrenched adherence of the Russian people towards their Orthodox faith. She realised that not even Bolshevik Sovietise could suppress the religion. In their final days, the Romanovs depended upon their faith for their own solace.

Early Romanov historians blamed the murder of the Romanovs on Soviet Jews. However, whilst the educated Jewry of Russia were disproportionately represented in supporting Bolshevikism, the fact is the only two Jews involved in the Romanovs’ death were Sverdlov and Yurovsky. Yurovsky was Jewish by birth only and was non-practising. In truth it is a cruel twist that anti-Semitism should have tried to distort historic reality.

Under Tsar Nicholas II, there had been widespread pogroms against the Jews in the Russian Empire - and perhaps the legacy of 1920s writers to blame Communism and the murder of the Romanov to the Jews was that it would have influenced the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany (which was radically opposed to Bolsehvikism) and also convinced Hoover in the FBI that letting Jews from 1930s Europe take refuge in the United States would have left America susceptible to Communism.

Ms Rappaport was of the opinion that it was a “great shame” that the Romanovs could not have been rescued. She did not elaborate why. Certainly, it would seem the death at the time caused much upset in Russia amongst the people. Over time, many Russians would visit the site of the Ipatiev House to pay respect. Under Boris Yeltsin’s time as party boss of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) the house was torn down as this pilgrimage caused much embarrassment to the Soviet government. Eventually, under Boris Yeltsin’s Presidency a church was commissioned to be built on the site - the Church on the Blood. The story of the Romanovs’ murder is now coming to an end as in August 2007 remains of two bodies were found near Ekaterinburg and DNA testing results announced in April 2008 has proven the remains belonged to Tsarevich Alexey and his older sister Grand Duchess Marie. The rest of the family had been exhumed in 1991 and interred in St Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998.

Ms Rappaport paraphrased a Russian poet’s who said that Russia has two open tombs and will only be able to move on from the legacy of the Revolution when both those tombs are closed. The two tombs were those of the Romanovs and of Lenin. With the Romanovs now interred in St Petersburg (except Alexey and Marie - who probably will be soon), Ms Rappaport implied that perhaps it was time to close Lenin’s tomb and draw a close to the Revolutionary era of Russia history.

Update (17 July 2008)
Today is the 90th anniversary of this event and as, is now, traditional, many Russians are marking the occasion in Ekaterinburg (often spelt as Yekaterinburg in English-language countries).

Now, almost two decades after the end of the communist state which the Bolsheviks fought to create, the tsar is revered as a saint - a martyr who died for his faith.

Just before the 90th anniversary of his death, Nicholas II pulled into the lead in an online poll to decide on the greatest hero in Russian history.

It is perhaps a sign of the country’s confusion over its own past that he is battling it out for top spot with the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin.

James Rodgers, BBC correspondent

Update (19 July 2008)
Zoe Brennan wrote about the ninetieth anniversary and about Ms Rappaport’s book in the Daily Mail, on Saturday 19 July 2008, in the article Massacre of the Russian royals: Horrific last hours of a dynasty.