Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [108]
They yielded to the Soviet. It was decided to take Mstislavsky into the inner rooms; he would stand at the intersection of two corridors, and Nicholas would walk past.
In the inner corridors the same three-hundred-year-old life continued: Abyssinians in gold-embroidered crimson jackets and turbans, footmen in tricorner hats, lackeys in frock coats. And among them Mstislavsky, the new world, with his dirty sheepskin coat and his automatic pistol. The door bolt clicked and Nicholas appeared wearing the uniform of the Life Guard Hussar Regiment. He pulled at his mustache (as always when he was nervous), walked past, and looked indifferently at Mstislavsky. But the next moment Mstislavsky saw Nicholas’s eyes ablaze with fury. The man who had ruled Russia for twenty-two years had yet to learn humility.
FAREWELL TO TSARSKOE SELO
Newspapers, those reliable scandalmongers, were spreading rumors about their escape. In fact, all these months of their confinement so near to Petrograd, there was not one authentic plot, not a single attempt to liberate them! There were boasting, drunken conversations of young officers—but that was all.
On July 4, E. A. Naryshkina, the empress’s lady-in-waiting (Madame Zizi, as Alix called her), wrote in her diary: “Princess Paley [Grand Duke Paul’s wife] just left. She told me in confidence that a group of young officers has devised an insane plan to take them away at night by motor to one of the ports, where an English ship would be waiting. I am unspeakably worried.”
Why worried? Why was the plan insane? Because both Zizi and Paley knew that feelings about the family were such that they would never make it to any port—they would be captured and killed en route. Fortunately, these were all cock-and-bull stories. There was no English ship, nor would there be one.
During this period Alexander Blok wrote in his Notebook: “The tragedy has yet to occur, it will either not happen at all or it will be horrible, and they shall stand face to face with the enraged people.”
What were their royal relatives doing at the time?
For instance, the English Georgie, King George to the rest of the world, Nicholas’s ally in war who looked so like Nicky.
It all began quite reasonably. Immediately after the tsar’s arrest the British ambassador warned the Provisional Government that every measure must be taken to ensure the family’s safety. The Provisional Government readily entered into talks with George’s government about their departure for England. Agreement was reached in a few days. After the arrest, they informed the British ambassador on March 23. Ambassador George Buchanan wrote that “the representative of His Highness and the King will be pleased to receive,” etc.
That was in March, and it was already July—and they were still at Tsarskoe Selo. Why?
Subsequently British Prime Minister Lloyd George would blame the Provisional Government for being unable to overcome the resistance of the Petrograd Soviet. But there is another point of view: “Prime Minister Lloyd George himself advised King George to decline the Romanovs’ arrival in order to buy popularity among leftist England at the price of his own relatives’ lives.” For from the very beginning of the revolution Russian society had pronounced an implicit sentence on the tsar’s family. That is why the Special Commission, which investigated the accusations against the tsar and tsaritsa of betraying the homeland and their allies’ interests, was created. How could George provide a haven for those whom his own country was getting ready to accuse of being traitors in their common struggle? How could Kerensky release this family, which embodied “treason” and the “damned old regime”? So all these talks were just a game—a game of good intentions for the purpose of salving consciences.
“We sincerely hope that the English government does not have any intention