Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [159]
The story developed. They were good, ordinary young girls living in an ordinary girlish world. The strange young carpenter with his student coat and intellectual face, of course he could not have been missed among the jolly, fat-faced sharpshooters. Anastasia, “good, marvelous Tiutka,” teased her older sister for being sympathetic to the “horrible revolutionary.”
He made a board for Alexei (planing it neatly), which was put on the sick boy’s bed. Alexei ate, read, and wrote at this board, using it as a table.
They would take this board to Ekaterinburg, and it would remain standing in the room when the boy was gone.
The “spy.” No, no, he had carried out his mission. He had not let himself go. For him they remained “the tyrant’s daughters.” He conquered himself!
They sailed away from Tobolsk on this insane steamer with the Red Guards firing at birds, with the bleeding heir. With the suite, which was already awaited at the Ekaterinburg Cheka. Oh, our bitter, bitter revolution. On the ship Lukoyanov overheard the sharpshooters from the detachment agreeing to make mischief with the tsar’s daughters. What did he care about a tyrant’s daughters when thousands of soldiers, torn away once from hearth and home, were being drained of their male strength and daily committing terrible excesses? Nonetheless, at the last moment he could not resist: he ordered Rodionov to forbid the sharpshooters. He closed the cabin door for the night.
THE END OF THE TSAR’S SUITE
In Tyumen a special train awaited them. The girls, Alexei, his companion Nagorny, former Adjutant General Tatishchev, the old court reader Schneider, and the lady-in-waiting Countess Gendrikova, were put in a second-class car.
All the rest—the tutors Gilliard and Gibbes; the tsar’s lackey Trupp; the parlormaid Tutelberg; Countess Buxhoeveden; the nurse Tegleva and her helper Ersberg; the cook Kharitonov; the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev, Alexei’s friend; and others—in a fourth-class car. The train arrived in Ekaterinburg on the night of May 21–22.
The train immediately moved onto a siding. It was drizzling, and the lamps barely shone.
Nicholas’s diary:
“9 [22] May. We still do not know where the children are or when they shall arrive? Tiresome uncertainty….
“10 [23] May. This morning for an hour they announced first that the children were a few hours from town, then that they had arrived at the station, and finally, that they had arrived at the house, although their train had been here since 2 in the morning.”
In the morning droshkies were brought up to the train. Those sitting in fourth class were forbidden to get out. Gilliard and Volkov watched out the window.
The grand duchesses themselves dragged their suitcases through the drizzling rain, their feet swallowed up by the mud. Tatiana brought up the rear, making sure no one dropped behind. She truly felt like the eldest, dragging her two suitcases and her little dog.
Then Nagorny quickly bore the heir past the train car to the droshky. He wanted to go help the duchesses carry their suitcases, but he was pushed back: they must carry them themselves! Nagorny could not restrain himself and said something. Another mistake for the former sailor: the new authority did not brook insult. The authority was nervous. And touchy. The only payment recognized now was a life, which is what people paid for an incautious word, too. It may have been Upper Isetsk Commissar Peter Ermakov himself whom he replied to. In any event, within a few days poor Nagorny would be taken away.
In the 1930s, by a Pioneer campfire, the former commissar, Comrade Peter Ermakov, would tell the young Pioneers how in the Cheka he had shot “a tsarist lackey—the former