In the 90 years since the assassination of the Russian imperial family in the cellar at Ekaterinburg, details have continued to emerge. We know how the tsarina looked around the cellar disdainfully before demanding a chair; we know how the drunken Bolsheviks took a full 20 minutes to complete their bloody task. But among the most poignant testimonies are the humdrum final diary entries of the tsar and tsarina. Three days before his murder, the tsar recorded his joy that his haemophiliac son, Alexis, had managed to have a bath. The tsarina wrote her last entry on the actual night of the killings: "8.00: Played bezique with Nicholas. 10.30: to bed. 15 degrees."
Were the imperial couple heroically stoic or staggeringly unimaginative? Helen Rappaport follows the principal characters over the 13 days leading up to the murders. She skilfully weaves together the grimly repetitive routine of the doomed family with the high drama engulfing the killers as they add the finishing touches to their terrible plan. Though some of the material is familiar, Rappaport's countdown format makes Ekaterinburg freshly compelling.
One of the local Bolshevik leaders makes frantic trips to Moscow in an attempt to get official approval for the killings from Lenin. In the end permission is granted only indirectly; Lenin is too canny to allow himself to be associated directly with the murders. The head of the hit squad, Yakov Yurovsky, meanwhile makes repeated trips to the prospective burial site at the Four Brothers mineshaft. A doctor is ordered to procure 400lb of sulphuric acid to destroy the bodies; the nuns who supply eggs for the imperial family are ordered to bring 50 on the day itself, all of them for the killers.
While the focus of the countdown must of necessity be Ekaterinburg, Rappaport also manages to detail events abroad. Of these, the most powerful concern the tsar's cousin and friend King George V. After the February Revolution, in March 1917, the king had offered asylum in Britain to the beleaguered imperial family. Weeks later, however, he lost his nerve and withdrew the offer. Rappaport depicts King George, three days before the killings, blithely attending a cricket match at Lord's.
The guilty parties of Ekaterinburg are two a penny. Curiously, however, after reading Rappaport's book, I found that the characters with whom I was most exasperated were the tsar and tsarina. Having both contributed in no small part to their country's wretched predicament, they seem to relapse, in these last few days, into a weird torpor. The tsar relieves his anxiety by smoking incessantly, existing in what Rappaport calls a "state of self-induced mental anaesthesia". The otherwise sympathetic guard who accompanies him on the journey to Ekaterinburg is struck by the tsar's preoccupation with family, weather and food. The tsarina, meanwhile, always a prey to morphine and Veronal, appears to embrace her suffering as a sort of redemption. The guards are not impressed, dismissing her as a German hausfrau obsessed with kinder and kirche, without even the küche.
"But the children . . ." as their heartbroken tutor Pierre Gilliard said when he heard about the murders. It is clear, from Rappaport's evidence, that the children - except, perhaps, for the eldest daughter, Olga - had no idea what lay in store for them. The day before the murders, a laundrywoman witnessed 17-year-old Anastasia sticking her tongue out at Yurovsky. As they go to the cellar, the three younger girls are reported by one of the guards to be "smiling and cheerful".
Yet they were to suffer the most: members of the firing squad refused, at the last minute, to shoot them. The children witnessed the murders of their beloved parents and then suffered the full 20 minutes of botched gunfire and bayonet blows before the more brutal Yurovsky and his drunken deputy finished them off.
When all seven members of the imperial family were canonised by the Orthodox Church in 2000, there was some dispute over whether they could be martyrs if they had had no idea they were going to be killed. It seems to me that the tsar and tsarina did recognise - however dimly - that they were on the road to Calvary. Nevertheless, the real martyrs of Ekaterinburg were surely their children, who did not.
