Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [155]
“Alexandra Feodorovna, spiteful, constantly suffering from migraine and indigestion, did not deign to look at me. She reclined on the couch, her head bound with a compress.
“I spent all day in the commandant’s room. I was supposed to check on the sentry. During their walk Nicholas paced the road with a soldier’s steps.
“Alexandra Feodorovna refused to go for a walk.”
At the end of Vorobiev’s guard duty, the former tsar asked him to subscribe to the Ural Worker for him. “He had not had any newspapers for more than a week and was suffering greatly as a result.” Vorobiev promised to do so and asked the tsar to send the money.
The Ural Worker would print the first report of his execution.
“1 [14] May. Tuesday. Was gladdened by the receipt of letters from Tobolsk. Got one from Tatiana. We read them to each other all morning.… Today we were told through Botkin that we are allowed to walk only one hour a day. To the question, Why?… ‘So it looks more like a prison routine.’ …
“2 [15] May.… The application of the ‘prison routine’ has continued and expressed itself in the fact that in the morning an old housepainter painted over all the windows in all our rooms with lime. It was like a fog you see out the window….
“5 [18] May.… The light in the rooms is dim. And the tedium is incredible.”
Thus he wrote in his diary on the eve of his fiftieth birthday.
“THAT SPRING CHRIST WAS NOT RISEN”
Inside the house, “Latvians” from the Cheka and the young workers Avdeyev had selected from his old Zlokazov factory were rushing around with revolvers and bombs. “Latvians” was the name given to the Austro-Hungarian prisoners who had joined up with the Russian revolution and the Latvian sharpshooters. The “Latvians” were slow to speak, and when they did talk among themselves the workers could not understand them.
This internal guard lived in the house in the first-floor rooms. Next to that half-cellar room. Part of the guard lived across the way, in the Popov house (named after the former owner).
The outside guard around the house was borne by the Zlokazov workers.
The house had its own automobile. As driver, Avdeyev appointed his sister’s husband—Sergei Lyukhanov. The elder Lyukhanov son had also been taken into the guard. Avdeyev did not forget his Lyukhanov relatives. It was an enviable position to guard the tsar—they paid cash and fed you and you were alive—not like dying in the Civil War.
Avdeyev himself did not stay in the house. In the evening he went back to the Lyukhanov house, where he spent the night. His assistant remained in the house—another Zlokazov worker, Moshnik.
Moshnik was a genial drunkard. As soon as the commandant was across the threshold, Moshnik started to get smashed. From the sentry room the family heard the piano, songs to a harmonica. The merrymaking went on half the night: the sharpshooters were on a binge.
In the morning—once again—Avdeyev appeared at 9. Avdeyev liked his position. The former turner did not forget whom he was now in charge of. This was his hour to shine. When he was given the family’s requests, he answered, “Oh, to hell with them!” and watched triumphantly to see what impression he made on the sharpshooters. Back in the commandant’s room, he specified at length what he had been asked about in the family’s room and what he had refused them.
Commandant Avdeyev, the guard Ukraintsev, a certain “pop-eyed” someone—these were the new names in the tsar’s diary. They replaced Count Witte, Stolypin, and the countless European monarchs.
“This evening chatted at length with Ukraintsev and Botkin” (April 22) [May 5]. Whereas before he had chatted … just whom had he not chatted with!
“My ‘pop-eyed’ enemy was sitting there instead of Ukraintsev” (whereas before his enemy had been Emperor Wilhelm).
As we come to the end of the next to last, fiftieth notebook of his diary, we can draw some conclusions. Everything that truly touched him, truly upset him, all his internal storms—only slip by in individual phrases. No,