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This may be merely an ingenious legend. Nevertheless: the cold house, the empty tree on the large table. There was something fateful in the gathering of this, their last year—1918.

A GAME FROM THE GRAVE

Indeed, by then it had already begun.

This happened on New Year’s Eve:

In the Church of the Protective Veil of the Virgin, where the family went on the first day of Christmas of the first revolutionary year, under convoy, the holiday service was coming to an end in the overfilled church when suddenly some very familiar, not yet forgotten words were heard. The deacon solemnly proclaimed: “Their Excellencies the Sovereign Emperor and the Sovereign Empress,” followed by the names of their children and all their old titles. At the end the deacon’s bass uttered powerfully: “A long life!” Thus in the Tobolsk church, for the first time since the February Revolution, the ancient “wish for a long life” for the tsar’s family was proclaimed.

The church responded with a rumble. The senior officer of the convoy and Commissar Pankratov waited till the end of the service and called for the deacon, who cited the instructions of his superior, Father Alexei. “Drag him out of the church by his braids!” the convoy’s rifleman raged.

The next day the Tobolsk Soviet proclaimed by the Bolsheviks formed a commission of inquiry. They blamed Pankratov and demanded that he harshen the regime, and for the first time the call was heard: “To prison with the Romanovs!” The Soviet even went after the priest. But Archbishop Hermogen did not give Father Alexei up for punishment—he sent him to a remote Tobolsk monastery.

How amazingly interlinked everything is in the Romanov history. The name Hermogen stands at the source of the Romanov dynasty. During the Time of Troubles Patriarch Hermogen issued the call to drive the Poles from Russia, for which he was imprisoned and accepted a martyr’s death.

Now, three hundred years later, an archbishop by the same name, here in Tobolsk, was with the last Romanovs. “Master … you bear the name of Saint Hermogen. That is a sign,” the dowager empress wrote him. She was expecting decisive steps from the decisive archbishop.

The empress mother was right. It was a sign. History had come full circle.

At this time the Russian church was acting independently of the tsar. Peter the Great had eliminated the patriarchy in 1703, but in November 1917 a church council again elected a Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias. Early in 1918, Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks and sent the host and his blessing to the deposed tsar through Hermogen. Many pastors, including Hermogen in Tobolsk, behaved in keeping with the head of the church. The majority of them would perish during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the revolution.

At that time, on the threshold of 1918, the power of the Tobolsk pastor was great. When Hermogen refused to recognize Father Alexei as guilty, he challenged the Soviet: “According to the Holy Scriptures … as well as history—former emperors, kings, and tsars are not deprived of their office when they are outside the country’s administration.” He was writing about the office given by God over which the earthly has no power.

Hermogen wanted to help the family escape and could have done so. Siberia meant secret trails, distant monasteries more like fortresses, rivers with hidden boats, parishioners who had not yet come unstuck from God.

Now, when the Bolsheviks had seized power in the capital, how could they not have made an attempt to free them now?

Alix! No, she could not entrust the family’s fate to the holy man’s accursed enemy.

“Every day Hermogen holds a service for Papa and Mama,” she wrote Anya. “Papa and Mama”—that was what Rasputin had called them. While giving Hermogen his due, even praising him, she unconsciously recalled the holy man, who hated him. No, she could not.

Thus, beyond the grave, Rasputin would not allow them to join forces with the only person who could have helped them then. Instead,