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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.82: The House of Special Purpose

Way back in Episode 10.62, I bid a very grateful adieu to Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov, whose incompetent shenanigans finally penetrated the last shred of my composure. You’ll notice we haven’t heard a peep from them since. This is partly yes, because I was sick of talking about them, but there is some historical justification for their absence from the story. After Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, he and his family became remarkably irrelevant. On the international front, the Allied Powers, eager to have new management in charge of the eastern front, exerted no diplomatic pressure on behalf of the Romanovs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the lines, the Central Powers did not add the restoration of the Kaiser’s cousins to their list of war aims. Domestically, the imperial couple had alienated, disappointed, and disillusioned so many people that there was no outraged movement fixated on the overthrown tsar. There were no serious plots to rescue them, certainly none to restore them to power. Even right-wingers who joined the White movement after October 1917 rightly saw Nicholas and Alexandra as fatally discredited, running around saying we fight for Tsar Nicholas was a pretty good way to get no one to volunteer for your volunteer army. Meanwhile, in the post February revolution, political dynamics, the governing coalitions of Octobrists, Kadets, Right SRs, and Mensheviks, were neither driven by a thirst for revolutionary vengeance on the one hand, nor a willingness to just let the ex-imperial family walk free on the other. With far more important things to worry about, the various provisional governments, just let the Romanovs hangout in a state of limbo. And then finally, on the far left, the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and anarchists aimed their post-February passions, polemics, and weapons at the provisional government. The immediate enemy was Kerensky, Kornilov, and the Cossacks, not Nicholas and Alexandra. After the February Revolution, the Romanovs ceased to be the center of anyone’s political calculations, either bore them or against them. It is amazing how quickly, after more than 20 years on the throne, and carrying the historical weight of a 300 year old dynasty, Nicholas and Alexandra became quite simply irrelevant. They had become little more than a loose end to tie up, and today, we are going to tie up that loose end.

Initially, the Romanovs were placed under house arrest at their ancestral residence at Tsarskoye Selo just outside of Petrograd. There, Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia, plus their only son Aleksei, enjoyed a pretty carefree and comfortable life. Through a kind of of passive inertia, the provisional government continued to pay out state subsidies for the ex-imperial family to live on, even though they were now legally private citizens. Nicholas in particular seemed absolutely rejuvenated by the abdication and was as happy as he had ever been. No longer a helplessly deteriorating insomniac with the weight of the world on his shoulders, he relaxed into the responsibility free life he had always wanted. Alexander Kerensky met with the former tsar several times during the first months of their house arrest and said, “All those who watched him in his captivity were unanimous in saying that Nicholas the Second seemed generally to be very good tempered and appeared to enjoy his new manner of life. It seemed as if a heavy burden had fallen from his shoulders and he was greatly relieved.”

So even if there was some huge coordinated effort to restore Nicholas to power, which there absolutely was not, Nicholas himself would have been a very reluctant participant. This initial idyllic phase of their post-abdication house arrest ended in mid August 1917. With the failure of Kerensky’s June offensive, the Russian army dissolving, and the political situation deteriorating rapidly, the family’s life at the old Alexander palace came to an end. Tsarskoye Selo was after all very close to Petrograd, and after the insurrectionary violence during the July Days, Prime Minister Kerensky decided to move the family deeper into the Russian interior. He said it was for the family’s safety, which is almost certainly true, but let’s also not forget that after the failure of June offensive, the Germans were looking at an increasingly clear path to Petrograd. It would not take much for them to capture both the capital and the Romanovs. So in mid August 1917, Kerensky ordered the family moved out to Western Siberia.

On August 13th, 1917, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children departed the Alexander palace for the last time. Their new home would be the remote town of Tobolsk. They traveled first by train to the city of Tyumen, the nearest city with a railroad station. After disembarking, it was another 150 miles by carriage and ferry boat to Tobolsk, which was the point. With no railroad station, it was not an easy place to get in or out of. But remote did not mean primitive. Upon arrival, the Romanovs were put up at the governor’s palace, a well provisioned and pretty nice house. It wasn’t the Alexander Palace of course, but it also wasn’t a straw hut. Here, their life of carefree ease continued. They brought with them a whole cadre of retainers and servants: two valets, six chambermaids, 10 footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a steward, a nurse, a clerk, a barber, and two pet dogs joined them in the house. The family read books and played games, Nicholas and Alexei cut firewood. Far removed from the trouble or danger of responsibility, they lived like affluent country gentry. Obviously they maintained hope that one day friends on the outside would help them escape to someplace truly safe, but it’s not like they were in immediate danger. Or even immediate discomfort.

Their situation did not even change much after the October Revolution came along. The family eventually heard the news, but the October Revolution spread by way of Red Guard detachments fanning out from Petrograd and Moscow by way of the railroad. And as I just said, Tobolsk itself was 150 miles from the nearest railroad station. So it’d takes several months before Red Guards appeared. Besides, to the limited extent the Romanovs received any kind of political news at all in late 1917, they probably would have heard the conventional wisdom of nearly all non-Bolshevik observers: the Bolsheviks are not going to last. After new year’s 1918, with the one-year anniversary of the abdication approaching, the lives of the Romanovs finally took a real turn for the worse. Defying all expectations, the Bolsheviks lasted. After successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly in January. Lenin’s government became more self-confident, and started working through all the responsibilities they had inherited.

There were a million little policy questions they needed to answer, and one of them, which no government had answered since March 1917, is what do we actually do with the Romanovs? The People’s Commissars had no ready answer, but at a minimum, the family would no longer be allowed to live a life of luxury at the people’s expense anymore. At the end of January 1918, the guard to the governor’s mansion put the family under much tighter daily restrictions. Then in mid February, the People’s Commissars announced that the Romanov allowance would be cut to 600 rubles a week. This forced them to give up such luxuries as butter and coffee, and also let go almost their entire household staff, who they could no longer afford to pay.

But that only covered the terms of their confinement, not what was ultimately going to happen to them. Now the most obvious thing would be to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the people. Russian revolutionaries of every stripe were steeped in the history of the French Revolution, and they knew that the great public trial of Louis the 16th was a pretty important plot point. Trotsky in particular seems to have expected a public trial to prove beyond all doubt the guilt of the ex-tsar. Then they would execute him publicly for crimes against his people, demonstrating revolutionary justice that would serve as an inspiration for the workers of the world. Trotsky naturally cast himself as the main character of this theatrical show trial. He would play the part of the brilliant prosecutor, skewering the haplessly feeble — but yet also monstrously terrible — former tsar. Trotsky said he envisioned, “an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign — peasant policy, labor, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc. The proceedings would be broadcast to the nation by radio, in the villages accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily.”

But with everything else going on in the spring of 1918, the People’s Commissars made no specific plans to stage this trial. They did not even know what would happen if they brought Nicholas back to Moscow. It might spark an uncontrollable lynch mob. It might spark an uncontrollable uprising to set him free — now, maybe not. But without any real pressure to come up with a final plan, the People’s Commissars procrastinated, and they set the decision aside for another day.

The pressure to come up with a final plan ultimately started building from local circumstances east of the Ural Mountains. In February, a Congress of Soviets from the Ural region convened in the major industrial city of Yekaterinburg, which elected a Bolshevik dominated executive committee. The Ural Bolsheviks tended to be more hard line and radical than their comrades in Moscow, and they were also more immediately annoyed that Bloody Nicholas and his family were allowed to just hang out in their backyard like nothing had ever had ever happened. They started petitioning Moscow to transfer the Romanovs to Yekaterinburg, where they would be held in the kind of real prison they deserved. This was a matter of some delicacy for the Central Committee back in Moscow, because they were aware many of their comrades in the Urals were itching to answer the question of what to do about the Romanovs with a few well-placed bullets. The Central Committee of the party in Moscow. Wasn’t sure that’s what they wanted to happen, but they also didn’t want to cause any schisms with the Ural Bolsheviks, nor provoke them into doing something they’d all later regret.

Pressure mounted further when Red Guard detachments finally arrived in Tobolsk in late March, the problem being that the Red Guards were not on the same page. One group of about 250 were sent from Yekaterinburg, while another 400 arrived representing the rival city of Omsk. Neither detachment was particularly disciplined, nor were they interested in subordinating themselves to the other’s authority. Meanwhile, the guard units at the governor’s palace were getting awfully restless, because their wages hadn’t been paid for an obnoxiously long time. With reports about all this in hand, Moscow finally appointed a guy called Vassily Yakovlev to go take command of the whole situation. Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk on April 22nd with his own detachment of soldiers, imposed some discipline and paid off the wages of the angry guards. But he was not there to maintain the status quo. There is a lot of mysterious confusion about all decisions surrounding the Ex-Imperial family at this point, but Yakovlev’s mission appears to have been to collect the Romanovs and bring them back to Moscow. The most likely explanation being that at this point, the People’s Commissars still planned to put Nicholas on public trial.

That very night, Nicholas was told to pack his bags. He was not told what his final destination would be, but was told that anybody who wanted to was free to depart with him, Aleksei had recently aggravated his hemophilia and couldn’t be moved, so the whole family traveling together was out of the question. At first, Alexandra was torn between accompanying her husband and staying with her son, but she was convinced by the others to go with Nicholas to support him in whatever may come. Showing how out of touch the couple had become — not that they were ever actually in touch — they believed that the reason Nicholas was being fetched was to force him to sign the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which they both loathed. They appeared quite unaware of the fact that Nicholas’s signature had not been required for anything for quite some time.

Since the rivers were not yet free of ice, they had to travel by carriage over crummy roads for two days, which was miserable, but it did lead them through the hometown of their old friend Rasputin. Alexandra noted in her diary, “Stood before our friend’s house. Saw his family and friends looking out the window at us.”

When they got to Tyumen, they boarded a train that would take them through you, Kettering Borg. But at this point you cough laugh was concerned. Nicholas and Alexandra might not make it out of the city alive.

He informed Moscow. He was going to faint like he was going through Yekaterinburg, but then take a very roundabout path to the capital through Omsk, which meant speeding off a couple hundred miles southeast. When news reached Yekaterinburg that Nicholas and Alexandra were suddenly on an eastbound train, it set off alarm bells for the local Communists, who now suspected Yakovlev was a traitor and planning to spirit the imperial family to Vladivostok, where they could make a getaway via the Pacific Ocean. So Moscow dealt with dueling communiques, each side warning them that the other side had nefarious intentions. One was accused of preparing to shoot the couple on sight, the other accused of playing Russian Scarlet Pimpernel. Moscow finally decided that, at least for the moment, the Romanovs would be transferred to the custody of the Yekaterinburg Soviet, on the promise that nothing would happen to them without direct instructions from Moscow. Yakovlev relented, reversed course again, and headed back northwest. On April 30, an angry mob greeted Nicholas and Alexandra at the Yekaterinburg train station, but they were in fact placed in safe custody and not shot on sight. Their new home had been commandeered the day before from a retired businessman named Nikolai Ipatiev. After the house was requisitioned, it was somewhat menacingly redubbed “the house of special purpose.” Demonstrating either the indecision of the leaders back in Moscow, or that they had maybe already secretly made their decision and just weren’t ready to act yet, Nicholas and Alexandra would not continue on to Moscow. They would remain in the house of special purpose for the time being, and we now know that for the time being meant for the rest of their short lives.

As they sat in the house of special purpose, the world exploded all around them. The Czechoslovak Legions went into revolt at Chelyabinsk on May 14th, which was a pretty big deal locally, as Chelyabinsk was just 130 miles south of Yekaterinburg. But it didn’t immediately change anything. The imperial couple was neither hastily transferred to Moscow, nor sent back to the railroad-less Tobolsk. In fact, on May 23rd, the rest of the children completed their own journey and joined their parents. All the Romanovs, plus their last remaining handful of servants, were now together again under one roof.

Their days of easy house arrest, however, were now over. The house of special purpose operated on prison rules. A large wooden palisade was built around the entire house to prevent anyone from seeing in or out. Then, to prevent any kind of communication, the windows were painted over with whitewash. The family was guarded round the clock by guards both inside the house and outside patrolling the grounds. They could only leave their chambers for meals, and were even followed into the bathroom. Now, despite the constant hostile surliness of the guards, the officers in charge did seem intent preventing any overt abuses, and the diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra both indicate their conditions were stifling and uncomfortable, but not necessarily cruel and abusive. Nicholas finally sat down and read War and Peace for the first time.

By mid June 1918, however, the situation for the Reds in the Ural region grew into a full-on crisis. That SR group down in Samarra had just declared itself the valid government to the Constituent Assembly backed up by the Czechoslovak Legions, who now pretty much controlled the entire Trans-Siberian railway. The Cossacks and volunteer army were on the march in the south, the Communist outposts in the Urals were in danger of being completely cut off. At some point in the midst of all this, Lenin and the other leading Communists shifted away from the idea of staging a great big show and towards the idea of just tying up loose ends the old fashioned way.

The final decision appears to have been made in the first week of July 1918. The most influential leader of the Ural communists had come to Moscow for the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and he was among the more forceful advocates for just doing it and being done with it. Doing it and being done with what, you might ask. Well, you shouldn’t have to ask. Whether the surprise assassination of Count Mirbach and the revolt of the left SRs on July the Sixth played any role in the decision-making isn’t clear, but it is worth noting that a loyal Cheka officer had already taken over command of the house of special purpose on July 4th before all that went down. Then on July 16th, it was communicated from Yekaterinburg back to Moscow that plans were in place, and due to prevailing military circumstances — those circumstances, being that the Czechoslovak Legion was surrounding them and the city would soon fall — that they were prepared to go ahead with you know what as soon as Moscow transmitted a confirmation order.

Now, before we go on, we should note that while the Czechoslovak Legion was advancing and they would capture Yekaterinburg in a week, trains had obviously been going back and forth to Moscow no problem right through the first week of July. So it’s really not the case that, oh, gee whiz evacuating the family is just impossible. Now, maybe it was impossible by July 16th, but if they had wanted to, they could have moved the family at any point before that. If they had wanted to.

So we know from everything that happens next that the requested confirmation order from Moscow came in that very night of July 16. Now there is no documentary evidence for this order. There is no piece of paper hiding in any archive out there proving that the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow gave the order to execute the Romanovs. But, as we’ll discuss here in a second, the conclusion to be drawn is not that they didn’t order the execution, but that they destroyed all evidence that they ordered the execution.

After receiving this confirmation, the Cheka officer commanding the house of special purpose ordered the Romanovs and their last few servant rousted after midnight. They were told there had been some shooting in town and that they were all going to move to the basement for their safety. The family had no reason to doubt this story and complied. So at some point after one in the morning on what was now technically July 17th, 1918, 11 people assembled in the basement of the house. Nicolas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Aleksei, plus their doctor and three remaining servants. The room was not very large, it was like 15 feet by 20 feet, with only a single small window. Still not suspecting anything, they requested two chairs be brought down one for Aleksei and one for Alexandra, a request that was granted. Then suddenly, the Cheka commander entered the small room flanked by 10 men, all armed with revolvers. Without any warning or ceremony, he pulled out a piece of paper and read a death sentence.

Nicolas could only respond, “What? What?” before the Cheka commander shot him point blank in the chest, killing him instantly. Alexandra attempted to cross herself, but was similarly shot point blank and died instantly. Unfortunately, their shockingly quick deaths made them the lucky ones. Each of the executioners had been assigned a different person to kill, but when they entered the room, most of them were not standing directly across from their assigned victim. They weren’t that organized. So they all pulled their guns out and started firing quite wildly. The room filled with smoke and blood and screaming.

After the first round of shooting though, only about half the victims were dead. The rest were in various states of wounded terror. Now, I’m not going to go into all the grizzly details here, but it did require another fifteen minutes of additional pistol shots and repeated bayonet plunges to finally kill all eleven men, women, and children in the room. Once everybody was finally dead, the bodies were loaded into a truck and driven to an abandoned mine shaft that had been earlier identified as the best place to dispose of the remains. There, they were met by a group of about 25 men who had been called in to quickly help bury the bodies, and this group was apparently incensed because they thought they had been called into join the execution, not simply help cover it up and they were very disappointed. There was then a great deal of scuffling between the men and the commanding officers as the bodies were stripped and searched for valuables — and there were valuables, the ladies had secretly sewn diamonds into their corsets. Once this was done, everyone departed, but the next day the commander concluded the mineshaft wasn’t actually deep enough, and so he came back with a party the next day, dug everything back up, and loaded it onto a different truck to take it to a different, deeper mineshaft. But along the way, the truck got stuck in the mud, and so they decided to just dig some holes and bury the corpses, though before they finally dumped the bodies, they poured sulfuric acid all over the faces to prevent identification of the bodies.

Now, the final resting place of the Romanovs was known locally, but it was not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. After sitting around for nearly 75 years, a team dug up the bones in 1992, ran some DNA tests, and successfully identified most of the remains of the Romanov family.

When confirmation of the executions reached Moscow, the People’s Commissars were in the midst of debating national health policy. That discussion was briefly paused for the announcement that the tsar was dead. After a brief silence, Lenin simply said, “We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.” And then they went back to business as if they had just been told a parcel of mail had been delivered. The first official acknowledgement came from the party newspaper on July 19th, which only said that the tsar was dead. The famous British super spy. Bruce Lockhart was in Moscow at the time and reported that when they were told the tsar was dead, “The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”

There was no grief, remorse, or regret. There was no outrage in the streets, nor was there any cheering in the streets. There was just nothing. It was a big nothing. Now the total lack of response may have been because the people were only told that the tsar himself was dead, not that the whole family had been killed. That July 19th announcement straight up lied and said, “The wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place.” This marked the beginning of a whole web of lies about what had happened in the house of special purpose on July 17th. For all his talk about being willing to do the hard and necessary thing bravely and unflinchingly without sentiment or guilt, Lenin very much refused to admit he had ordered the execution not just of the tsar, but also women, children, and some servants. The Soviet government officially maintained that the rest of the family was still alive well into the mid-1920s — like, yes, they are alive and well, but no, you can’t see them or talk to them. Not only did they deny what they had done, the Communist Party also concocted a cover story about who had done it. The official version of events was that the leaders of the Ural regional Soviet Congress had ordered the execution on their own initiative, and it had only been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party after the fact. The official story would be maintained until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the assassination of the tsar and his family were the sole responsibility of the leaders in Yekaterinburg, not Moscow. But that story never fit any other established facts, evidence, witness accounts, or, frankly, common sense. Trotsky, for instance, was off running the civil war at this point, and he wasn’t around Moscow for the final decisions, but later recounted in his diary about how he found out about the executions from the Central Committee Party Secretary Yakov Sverdlov.

> Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: “Oh yes, and where’s the tsar?”

“Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.”

“And where’s the family?”

“The family along with him.”

“All of them?,” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.

“All,” Sverdlov replied. “Why?”

He awaited my reaction. I made no reply.

” And who decided the matter?” I inquired.

“We decided it here. Ilyich thought that we should not leave the White a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances.”

I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.

Now, this was written in 1935, and Trotsky certainly had his own agenda at that point, but this anecdote fits the facts, the circumstances, the record, and the personalities of everyone involved far more than the story of, hey, we were surprised as anybody that the whole family got offed in the middle of the night.

Now, while the Soviet regime kept up the story that Moscow had nothing to do with it right until the bitter end, their story that only Nicholas had been killed was blown up in 1926. After Siberia briefly fell completely out of Soviet control during the civil war, Admiral Kolchak — who we’ll be getting to soon enough — ordered an investigation. A guy called Sokolov spent two years interviewing witnesses, accumulating evidence, and searching for the grave sites to find out who had done what to the Romanovs, where, when, and how. Now, he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 as the civil war turned decisively in favor of the Reds, but he published everything he had accumulated in Paris in 1926, forcing the Soviet government to admit that the Romanovs were dead. All of them. But the years of official denials spread rumors and myths that some of them had gotten away. Most especially, these myths centered around the youngest daughter, Anastasia. But she didn’t live. She was dead the whole time. It was quite a grizzly death too, I might add, if you’re ever inclined to read the details.

So, that’s the end of the Romanovs. They are now dead and buried. Not just metaphorically, but literally. And on the whole, and I think their executions were pointless, unnecessary, and serves no real purpose. Now I’m not going to lose a ton of sleep over the grizzly fate of one family that had sat perched atop a pretty ruthless military and political apparatus that kept them in power by inflicting lots of grizzly fates on lots of different families who we’ve never heard of. But that doesn’t mean that their execution was righteous, necessary, or even useful. Trotsky said that Lenin didn’t want to leave the Whites with a live banner. But what would the Whites have done with that live banner? Probably nothing except be annoyed that they were the ones who now had to figure out what to do with the Romanovs. Indeed, the Romanovs were probably more of a threat to the Communists as dead martyrs than live political actors. When they were dead, they couldn’t keep bungling and screwing everything up. This is why the Communists went to such lengths to deny the murders and bury the bodies under a bunch of sulfuric acid. Now, there may have been some revolutionary utility to the idea of a public execution of Nicholas following a great public prosecution, but by killing them all in the dead of night, the Communists denied themselves even that opportunity. And instead of getting to proudly brag about serving revolutionary justice to a tyrant, they spent the next years and decades covering it up, hiding it. .Mumbling not very convincing lies about what they had done. So it’s not just enemies of the Communists who treated the murders of the Romanovs as a shameful crime. The Communists themselves treated it like it was a shameful crime.

And as for the old revolutionary truism, voiced most famously by Robespierre, that for the Republic to live, the king must die — I mean, lots of successful revolutions have wound up with the ruling monarchs booted off into exile and thereafter posing no future threat to the new regime. Republics have lived and monarchies have died without the monarchs themselves getting killed off in the process. The argument that a political revolution to overthrow a monarchy will only succeed if the specific human currently raining as monarch dies in the process is disproven by plenty of historical revolutions, revolutions we’ve covered on the show — King Charles the 10th of France, Louis Philippe, Napoleon the Third. Meanwhile, plenty of other revolutions have ultimately failed even after the former monarch was executed. Charles the First, say hello to Charles the Second.

The monarch literally living or dying is a variable that just float independently of any causal relationship to the larger cycle of revolutionary events. And besides, the whole operating principle of the monarchy is that the chain of custody never breaks. The king is dead, long live the king. So when you kill one guy who’s currently king, another guy’s just going to claim to be king. There’s right now a claimant to the Romanov dynasty out there, just as there are Stuarts and Bourbons and Orleans and Bonapartists. A monarchy doesn’t end with the death of the last king, but rather when enough people stopped believing in the monarchy. And in July 1918, the Russian people were already there. It didn’t matter whether Nicholas Romanov lived or died, the monarchy was dead. So I think the murders were wrong because they were pointless and unnecessary and, well, murder is wrong. In this case, it was an early signal that the brutal crimes committed in the name of the tsar, the crimes, which may have justified his execution in the mind to the revolutionaries, then and now, were now going to be played out in reverse.

And just as the execution of Louis the 16th was the initial harbinger of the Jacobin Terror, the execution of the Romanovs was a harbinger of the red Terror.