At midnight on Tuesday, July 16, the family was awakened by Yurovsky and told that because of the immediate military threat they were to be evacuated at once. Having dressed, they went quietly downstairs and were told to wait in a basement room while their transport was arranged. Yurovsky brought in three chairs, for Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexis; the four girls stood in a row behind them. That done, Yurovsky re-entered the room with his Cheka death squad, and the firing began. It was pitiless slaughter, finished off with bayonet and rifle butt, and so horrific that when the truth came out it would revolt the world.11
The following day Grand Duchess Ella and the five male Romanovs at Alapaevsk were to face an even more terrible and deliberately cruel end. Taken in peasant carts to a disused mineshaft, they were then all buried alive, save for Grand Duke Serge who was shot after he tried to resist. Their killers shovelled earth and rubble on top of them, but later admitted under interrogation by the Whites who captured them shortly afterwards that they had heard hymn singing coming from the shaft for some time afterwards.12
As in Michael’s case the Alapaevsk Romanovs were said to have been abducted by Whites and to have escaped. Apart from admitting the death of Nicholas, the rest of the family were said to have been evacuated to safety. The Bolsheviks also cynically continued in negotiations with the Germans for the release of Alexandra and the children, using the dead family as a bargaining tool.13
They did not bother to say more about Nicholas. The announcement of his death had no more effect on public opinion than the false story of him being killed by a Red Guard five weeks earlier. In Moscow the British diplomat Bruce Lockhart noted that ‘I am bound to admit that the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference’,14 though that might not have been the case if they had known that five innocent children had also been murdered. When that did become known, revulsion at the massacre in Ekaterinburg — as well as the burying alive at Alapaevsk — would leave a stain on the Bolsheviks and their Soviet Union that would never wash away.
NOT knowing the truth, the Germans brushed aside the killing of Nicholas and persisted in their efforts to win over the invisible Michael. No one doubted that he was alive and in Omsk, 1,000 miles to the east of Perm, yet no one seemed to wonder why there were no reports or photographs of him actually in action — holding meetings, visiting troops, handing out medals, or sending telegrams to London, his ally in arms.
The first report of an actual ‘sighting’ of Michael was not until August 26, some ten weeks after his ‘escape’, when a British agent in Stockholm identified only as ST12 told London that ‘a Swede arrived from Omsk reports that Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich is living in the Governor’s House in Omsk with the Imperial Russian flag flying, with guards and procedures as in old regime days’.15
By then, however, the German armies in France were on the retreat. On August 8, 1918, a British counter-offensive had smashed their lines in what the German commander General Erich von Ludendorff would call ‘a black day for the German army’. They would never recover. However, the hope in Berlin that they could at least secure an armistice which would allow them to carve out a new Russian empire was not yet entirely dashed, and in Russia itself the Germans would continue to think that it was still possible, persisting even unto the end in their aim of securing Michael’s support and thus of his ‘army’ for the German cause.
Desperate to bring good news, on August 23, the German Ukraine Delegation in Kiev sent a positive cable to Berlin to say that Michael ‘is by no means as pro-Entente as he is said to be…’16 That seemed to confirm an earlier report that ‘attention should be paid to news which has repeatedly come in recently that certain differences of opinion exist between Grand Duke Michael and the Omsk government about the Entente, as the Omsk government is pursuing solely Russian objectives, and in any case wishes to avoid a war with Germany’.17
By then the Germans in Russia had added reason for winning over Michael. An Allied Expeditionary Force had been sent to Murmansk on the White Sea, and although small, it had captured Archangel on August 2, 1918. The first aim of the British and French — joined later by Americans — had been to secure the stockpile of armaments sent in to supply Russia before their peace treaty in March and so that they did not fall into the hands of either the Bolsheviks or the Germans. The second aim was to re-open the war against Germany in Russia, for which they needed the support of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s advancing White Army in eastern Russia.
That was reason enough for the Germans to hope that somehow Michael could be persuaded to switch sides, and in their eagerness to win him over the Germans saw a new opportunity to earn his favour. After all, the Kaiser had already made sure that his precious son George had passed safely into family care in Denmark. Now the bait would be Natasha. They would save his beloved wife from the Bolsheviks, and the execution squad which surely otherwise awaited her in the next few weeks. Michael would then be further in their debt and that must surely bring him to accept that imperial Germany was his friend, not his foe.
NATASHA, who was then staying with her friend Maggie Abakanovich at her house on the Moika, had been told that Michael had disappeared within hours of his being taken from the hotel. Colonel Znamerovsky had cabled her that ‘Our friend and Johnny have vanished without trace’.18 Seeking explanation she and Maggie had gone at once to the offices of Cheka boss Uritsky, who promptly arrested them both, sending them to the women’s prison on the fourth floor of his headquarters at 2 Gorokhovyana Street.19
One of the last men to see her at the house on the Moika before her arrest was the German diplomat Armin von Reyer, a key figure in the secret negotiations between the German legation and the monarchist organisations in Petrograd. The fact that von Reyer knew where she was staying says much about German interest in Natasha. Afterwards he reported their conversation to Prince Henry in Berlin, emphasising Michael’s popularity and recounting her story of the scenes at Easter when the people of Perm had overwhelmed them with flowers and gifts.20
Von Reyer was never in any doubt that Michael was alive, for there were too many reports to think otherwise. One of the first on his desk was that Michael had been ‘brought by ship to Rybinsk’, a river port on the Upper Volga, 200 miles north-east of Moscow and about 1,000 miles westwards by river from Perm. The fact that this proved wholly wrong when more credible reports placed him some 1,600 miles to the east in Omsk, and behind friendly lines, did nothing to disturb the main point — that he had escaped his captors in Perm.21
In Petrograd, the question for the Germans was how Natasha would escape her captors. Her friend Maggie had been released, since even Uritsky could not think up any charge against her, except that she was Natasha’s friend. That done, the threat for Natasha was that she would be shortly transferred to a proper prison in Moscow to stand trial for conspiracy.
German intervention was discreet, as it had to be if it was to be effective. In consequence, ten weeks later Natasha was still confined on the fourth-floor at Cheka headquarters. The reason was that she was said to be too ill to be moved to prison in Moscow; she was suffering from tuberculosis — or so claimed a doctor who examined her.22 Shortly afterwards, at the insistence of the doctor, she was removed to a nursing home, under guard. It was just in time. For on August 30 Lenin was shot and seriously wounded at a factory in Moscow by a Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, and coincidentally Uritsky was assassinated in Petrograd by a Jewish military cadet, Leonid Kanegisser, in revenge for the execution of a friend.