And I lay there, listening for that elusive whistle and praying, Please, please come tonight. Please come and carry us away this very eve…
By morning it seemed but a dream – or rather a nightmare that passed like the midnight storm – for nothing had changed. I woke cool and calm. First the Empress herself checked on me, feeling again my forehead, and then the doctor did likewise. I was pronounced healthy, surprisingly healthy. Meanwhile, it was noted that Aleksei had come down with a slight cold – caught from me, they speculated – and it was hoped he would recover just as quickly.
This was the sixteenth, of course. July 16. The day thereof. Yet as far as I could tell there were no suspicions, no thoughts or fears of what was to come. At least not by any of them, the family. This I knew because I studied them all day long, trying to figure out who had found this stupid note. I could learn nothing, however, and the time just progressed into another boring day. I suppose it was infinitely better that way, better they didn’t suspect, better they couldn’t conceive of anything as terrible as that which would transpire that very night.
That morning eggs, milk, and thread were again brought from the monastery. Sister Antonina and Novice Marina came early, but I did not see them. Rather, they left the foodstuffs with the guards at the front door. And while a good many eggs they did in fact bring, we received only ten. The evidence of the other eggs – all forty of them – I was to see only later.
Otherwise, for the rest of the day the Empress and Olga, her eldest, madly continued “arranging medicines.” It was late that afternoon too that they completed the long and difficult task of individually wrapping every diamond in cotton wadding and then densely packing and stitching those little bundles between two corsets for the girls to wear. And just in time too. That night, when Yurovsky woke them, the grand duchesses would slip on their corsets, each of which was packed with no less than 10,000 carats. They would get dressed, sure that three hundred officers were charging to their rescue, and Aleksandra would think herself so smart, so clever.
And yet a horrific cloud of doubt must have hovered in the Tsaritsa’s mind…
While Nikolai was a slave to fate, Aleksandra believed in the duality of the prophecies, that what was written in the Bible of ancient times applied as well to her, a fallen queen. In the afternoon while Nikolai was pacing outside in the garden for his thirty minutes, Aleksandra and her second daughter, Tatyana, remained inside reading of the prophets’ gloom, including: “Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.”
As for me, I became less worried as the day wore on. As far as I could see, no one in our suite had found the note, nor had Yurovsky or any of the guards apparently discovered it, for there was no recrimination, no horrible scene. Little did I know, however, that the note had in fact been found by the Reds and that the entire day telegrams were flying to and from Moscow demanding that Nikolai be “immediately destroyed.”
16
Lenin denied it all.
During those tumultuous days, those violent days, when the outside world couldn’t tell what happened to Nikolai and Aleksandra, Lenin claimed that the ex-Tsar was safe, that the rumors of their murders were only a provocation and “lie of capitalist press.” But Lenin knew. Of course he did, for on that day, Tuesday July 16, 1918, he authorized not only the execution of Nikolai, but the entire family, including all the girls and the boy. That was what kind of man he was, a cold-blooded murderer. I spit on the bastard’s body, which to this day lies like a pickle in a glass coffin on Moscow’s Red Square. A shrine to a mass murderer, that’s what it is.
I never learned who discovered the envelope I hid in the bathroom, but it soon fell into Komendant Yurovksy’s hands, who in turn sounded the bloodthirsty alarm. And the discovery of that note from the Tsar to his would-be rescuers, his “Officers,” caused a terrible fright among the kommunisty. Expecting imminent defeat and seeing monarchist spies in every shadow and around every corner, some of the Reds fled into the forest and hills. Others slipped out of town and secretly crossed over enemy lines, where the double-crossing bastards swore allegiance to the Whites. Yet others, a core group of Reds, gathered at the American Hotel, a fine brick building down by the train station. It was there, in room number three, that these bloodthirsty Bolsheviki celebrated, for at last here it was, their excuse, and to Moscow they issued an urgent request:
… to destroy him and the family and relatives of the former Tsar… In case of refusal… we have decided to carry out this decree using our own forces.
Gospodi. Dear Lord. It was my fault that the note was found, that the plot to rescue them was exposed, and that the Tsar and his family were executed before they could be rescued. When I question myself, when I begin to doubt or even perhaps forgive myself, I take out my dossier. And I read these documents, and in each line I see the truth:
The Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government is at the telegraph apparatus:
In view of the enemy’s proximity to Yekaterinburg and the exposure by the Cheka of a serious White Guard plot with the goal of abducting the former Tsar and his family… For this reason: In light of the approach of the counterrevolutionary bands toward the Red capital of the Urals and the possibility of the crowned executioner escaping trial by the people (a plot among White Guards to try to abduct him and his family was exposed and the compromising documents have been found and will be published), the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the revolution, resolved to shoot the former Tsar, Nikolai Romanov, who is guilty of countless bloody, violent acts against the Russian people…
We ask for your sanction… The documents concerning the plot are being expedited by courier to the Sovnarkom and the TsIK. We are waiting by the apparatus for advice. We urgently request an answer; we are waiting by the apparatus.
Facts cannot lie, and in them I see that the stupidity of a young boy hastened the murder of the Imperial Family of Mother Russia and their four loyal attendants. Eleven people in total. But my guilt is even greater, for the Romanovs were more than simply people. Nikolai, Aleksandra, and their five children were the ultimate symbols, both good and bad, of all that was Russia, and their brutal murders unleashed such chaos and darkness. Yes, regicide opened the door to fratricide, matricide, and patricide of unimaginable proportion. Some twenty, thirty, forty million souls perished under the Reds, helped along in part by me, Leonka Sednyov, the kitchen boy, for if the plot to save the Tsar had succeeded, what corner might history have turned? Might Nikolai have rallied his troops in the depths of Siberia and gone on to defeat the Bolsheviki? Would that gentle, misdirected Tsar have finally found the good direction he had searched for all along, and would he then have been able to lead his people and country back to sanity? I burn with the thoughts of what needn’t have been and what might have been. And yet in a corner of my tired heart I still believe in the Russian people, that given the light, the life, and the opportunity a great future awaits them.
Meanwhile, of course, Yurovsky and the others were greatly dedicated to the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the creation of a workers’ paradise, and yet… while they were most eager to murder the family to cement their cause, there was great hesitation on their part to take any definitive action. After all, Yurovsky, unlike many of those beneath him, was a professional revolutionary, and orders had to be issued and obeyed, the chain of command had to be followed. Consequently, many urgent communications were sent to the Red tsars in Moscow.