Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [2]
Here is one of Vera Leonidovna’s stories about Atlantis’s demise: “Only after the revolution did Mikhail K. become my husband. [Mikhail Koltsov was a distinguished journalist in Bolshevik Russia.] ‘Yet Another Bolshevik Victory’—that was what the émigré press wrote about our union.
“At that time many prominent Bolsheviks lived in the Metropole Hotel. For relaxation they often invited writers and journalists serving the new authorities. Koltsov, too, was often at the Metropole. Once he met two people there. One had been the head of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks when the tsar’s family was executed. The other had been in charge of the execution itself. And they reminisced about how it all had been. They sipped unsweetened tea through a sugar lump, crunched the cube, and told stories about how the bullets bounced off the girls and flew about the room. Gripped with fear, they had been utterly unable to get the boy. He kept crawling across the floor, warding off their shots with his hand. Only later did they learn that the grand duchesses had been wearing corsets sewn solidly with diamonds, which had protected them. Later Misha [Koltsov] used to say that there must be a photograph of that horror somewhere. ‘After all, they were very proud—they had liquidated Nicholas the Bloody. How could they have resisted taking their picture with the slain afterward, especially since the chief assassin had once been a photographer.’ He never did stop searching for that photograph.”
This picture: the tsar’s murderers drinking tea in a room at the Metropole … and the bullets bouncing off the girls and the boy on the floor, and the terrible photograph. I could not put it out of my mind.
Later at the Historical Archives Institute I heard about a secret note written by that same former photographer who had led the execution of the tsar’s family. His name: Yakov Yurovsky. In the note he purportedly told all.
Once I had completed my archival internship, I found myself in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution in Moscow. Immediately I made a naive inquiry about the Yurovsky “note.”
“There is no Yurovsky note,” my colleague replied brusquely, as if to point up the question’s lack of tact.
I was shown the Romanov archive, however. To my surprise, at a time when everything was classified, these documents were not.
First I looked through albums of Romanov photographs. The same colleague with the bloodless (archival) face carried in huge scrapbooks—Moroccan leather, with the tsarist seal and without—and carried them out, one after the other. She refused to leave me alone with those photographs for a second. At first she was cold, indifferent, but then, forgetting herself, she waxed enthusiastic and explained each one to me, as if boasting of this amazing vanished life. The dim pictures in those tsarist photographs were a window out of her destitute, boring life.
“They took pictures of everything,” she explained with a certain pride. “The whole family had cameras: they took photos of the girls, the tsar and the tsaritsa.”
Photographs, photographs. A tall, slender beauty and a sweet young man—the period of their engagement.
Their first child—a little girl on spindly legs.
The four girls sitting on a leather sofa. Then the boy, the long-awaited heir to the throne. The boy and his dog, the boy on a bicycle with an enormous wheel, the amusing bicycle of that era. But most often he is in bed, the empress beside him. She has aged so. She looks into the camera, she looks at us. A bitter crease circles her mouth. The thin nose now hooked—a sad young woman. And here is Nicholas and the future king of England, George. They are looking at each other—astonishingly, ridiculously alike (their mothers were sisters).
A photograph of a hunt: a huge deer with giant antlers lying