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“Little One is better. But still in bed. As soon as he is better we shall join our people. You, dear heart, understand how hard it is. It’s grown lighter. But there is no green yet at all. The Irtysh is running as far as Strastnoi. Summer weather.… God be with you, my dear.”

At Easter the Tobolsk Soviet learned that during the procession Archbishop Hermogen, having pronounced anathema on the Bolsheviks, intended to take his parishioners to the governor’s house and free Alexei.

(Was this another ruse of the Soviet, to obtain grounds for handing the family over sooner to Ekaterinburg? Or had the pastor indeed decided to do as the dowager empress had written? Just as three hundred years before his namesake had dreamed of driving out the Poles, had he conceived a wish to drive the Bolsheviks out of town?)

The Cheka took steps: during the procession, Chekists intermingled with the parishioners. A heat wave had descended on Tobolsk, much in advance of any expected date. The sun beat down mercilessly, and the parishioners—none of them young—gradually abandoned the procession. As the believers drifted off, the Chekists pressed closer and closer to the archbishop.

Finally they surrounded—and arrested—him.

“Then I took him out to the middle of the river and we tied on iron gratings [from stoves]. I pushed him into the river. I myself saw him go to the bottom.” Thus, according to the Chekist Mikhail Medvedev, Pavel Khokhryakov told him what happened.

Finally the day of departure arrived.

They took the endless Romanov suitcases on the steamer Russia—the same one that had carried them to Tobolsk. Now it was carrying them back—to Tyumen, to the train.

A motley crowd boarded the steamer—the suite, the people, and the guard. They were assigned cabins.

Rodionov’s strange whims continued on the Russia. He shut Alexei and his companion Nagorny into his own cabin for the night.

The doors of the former grand duchesses were opened, however. They were strictly, most strictly, forbidden to lock their doors at night. Guards were posted at their doors. Merry sharpshooters by the girls’ open cabin doors.

Tegleva (from her statement to Inspector Sokolov):

“On the steamer Rodionov forbade the duchesses to lock their cabin at night, but Alexei and Nagorny were locked in from the outside. Nagorny even made a scene: ‘What effrontery! A sick boy! He can’t even go out to the washroom.’ All in all he was valiant with Rodionov and predicted his own fate.”

The Russia sailed merrily on, although the revolutionary soldiers’ behavior rather shocked the old soldier Volkov. The Red Guards fired their rifles at passing birds. They also fired machine guns.

Seagulls fell, machine guns chattered: the lads were having a fine time—freedom! Thus, in the second year after the birth of the revolution, to chaotic firing, past quieted banks, sailed this insane, this crazy steamer called the Russia.

From a letter of Alexei Saltykov in Kiev:

“I read your story about Ekaterinburg [one of my articles in Ogonyok]. I read it in two sittings—my heart was so weary from all those horrors.… I want to inform you, true, I do not know whether all this is so, but you can verify it. In our house there lived an old man, a soldier from the Red Guards, Uncle Lyosha Chuvyrin, or Chuvyrev.… He died in 1962, at the latest. He used to say that as a young man he was on the steamer from Tobolsk with the tsar’s children. He was a sentry when they were moved. He said something that I don’t even know whether it’s worth writing. The grand duchesses had to spend the night in open cabins and at night the sharpshooters got the idea of going in to them. He always told the end to this story differently: either someone forbade them, or they passed out drunk first.… Whether he wasn’t telling everything or was simply bragging, I don’t know.”

Oh well, the young sharpshooters liked to brag. The young Red sharpshooters.

Might this be our “spy”?

I keep thinking about him.

——

Four charming girls in captivity. And this man. Quite young. After all the filth, all