After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Final Days of the Romanovs (Part 1)

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

(1/2) As the Russia collapses, the Romanovs find themselves trapped by delusions and failed ideals; by revolution and Russian geography. Helen Rappaport joins Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney for part 1 of the Final Days of the Romanovs.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Acas powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris.

Three decades later, French investigators finally identified a suspect in the case. A Lebanese Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life on the outskirts of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Diab guilty? Can you introduce yourself? Or is he a scapegoat? Hassan Diab. From Canada land, this is the Copernic Affair. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com Over 1,000 miles east of St. Petersburg and Moscow, just a little north of the town of Ekaterinburg, Russia, silver birch trees rustle together in a ravine. Besides the trains that occasionally pass by on the railway track, this stretch of wood is usually desolate. In August 2007, however, a team of amateur historians are scouring the ground. This is the site from which the remains of the Tsar, Tsarina, and three of their four daughters and four of their staff were exhumed

a few decades before in 1991. The team are looking for the final missing members of the family, another daughter and the Tsar's only son. 46-year-old Sergey Platnikov, a construction worker by trade, is advancing through the trees, poking at the ground with finding tools, when suddenly he hears a familiar sound. A scraping. Now this usually means he has made contact with one of two things, coal or bone.

Plotnikov calls one of his friends over to examine his findings. Soon the site will be taken over by trained archaeologists. Plotnikov had indeed found human remains. A girl between the ages of 18 and 23, and a boy aged between 10 and 13. These were the final Romanov children to be found. But the damage to their bodies, the brutality of their deaths, in comparison to their titles and the luxury suggested

by a fragment of the fine fabric found with their remains, begs the question, what could possibly have prompted such a dramatic, murderous fall from grace? Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And today we are getting into one of the most requested, I think it's fair to say, episodes. And you know what? We do say that a lot. We get a lot of requests, but this one really, really, really has been requested an awful lot. We're going to be talking about the royal Russian family, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and their children. Joining us on this journey today to explain this history is Helen Rappaport. She is an expert amongst other things in the Russian Revolution and its context. So Helen, we're so excited to have you on After Dark. Welcome.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. We've been talking off air about this moment of the discovery of some of the Romanov remains. And am I right in thinking that you were on the ground in that moment? Well, I wasn't actually in the forest, but weirdly, I had gone to Eketonburg on a research trip in the summer, July of 2007, and I was actually in the city doing my research when they were out searching in the Kaptiaki forest when they found the remains. Unfortunately, I had literally almost got back inside my flat door having flown home. I got an email pinged in from one of my Russian contacts in Kazhniberg saying very excitedly, they found them, they found the remains. So everyone was incredibly thrilled. And I later, of course, I worked closely with one of the investigators

who looked at the remains forensically. It's so exciting to be able to get that proximity to history. And especially, you know, we often think about archaeology uncovering the bodies of people from the distant past. In this case, it's something so recent really in terms of human history, but so exciting to be able to have that proximity to it and to see it from that perspective. Before we get into the context of the fall of the Roman's Helen, because there's so much political, military, social, economic context here. Can you just tell us who the family were? Who is in this family? Because I think what I want to hold onto throughout this conversation is the humanity of these

people. They were human beings who lived and died in an incredible moment in history. So who were they? Well, the Romanov family were the last great ruling dynasty of Russia and they had been holding sway in Russia since 1613. They just, not long before the war, celebrated a very glorious tercentenary. And the focal point of the Romanov story was that final last family, the Russian Imperial family, who were Nicholas II, his German-born wife Alexandra of Hesse by Rhine, and their five children. And of course, the great aspect of the story, which most people know, is that they had the tragedy of waiting for a son to be born. Poor Alexandra had four daughters in succession. Finally, a son was born to the couple in 1904 who turned out to be a hemophiliac. And in a way, it's Alex's hemophilia that really was the turning point for the tragedy of the family, and in a way, their downfall. So they were kind of doomed from the moment

poor Alexei was born with hemophilia, because in Russia, the daughters would not have been allowed to succeed to the throne. It's funny that you say there's this idea of doom, Helen, because doom is in the air slightly, if I'm not mistaken, because the context of what's happening in Russia. So we've talked about briefly what's happening within the family there, within the Romanovs themselves. But let's move out a little bit now and talk about what's happening in Russia. And there's a lot of trouble and unrest in Russia at this time, too, isn't there?

Well, Russia, as we all know, if you've read Dostoyevsky and you know a bit about Lenin and the Revolution, it was a very turbulent country, increasingly so from the 1880s, after the assassination of Nicholas II's grandfather, Alexander II. There were huge protests and a growing revolutionary movement against the autocracy, the despotism of the Russian Tsars. And during the 1880s, it reared its head time and time again through violent political assassinations, attacks on government officials and dignitaries, to the point where it was a security nightmare for the Romanovs to protect the family from assassination. What happened after Alexander II was killed by a terrorist bomb in 1881 is that his son, Alexander III,

reacted by introducing an extraordinarily repressive authoritarian regime that in a way only fueled the flames of resentment and revolt even further. So by the time Nicholas unexpectedly became Tsar, his father died young of kidney disease, when he unexpectedly became Tsar in 1894, Russia was pretty much a boiling point. There was a huge growing revolutionary movement, there was considerable oppression, deportation, executions, incarceration of revolutionaries. Sooner or later, it was going to blow. I suppose as well, a thing to remember about Russia is that it is this vast place and that it operated certainly at the beginning of

the 20th century in this very strictly hierarchical system. There was a huge divide, I think it's fair to say, between the wealthy and the impoverished. Then the economic system in Russia, you've got the food growth and you start to see, I suppose, the fragility of that system. I'm thinking about famines that happened at the end of the 19th century that kill I think hundreds of thousands of people. You've got racial and religious unrest with the pogroms against the Jews. Then of course, in the beginning of the 20th century, you have the First World War, adding to this as well. How does war in Europe affect the Romanov's position in their already tense country? Because presumably that does

have a huge knock- on effect in Russia itself. Well, war is an interesting thing, isn't it? It always begins with these great displays of patriotism and king and country rallies of the population waving flags and saying, isn't it wonderful? And it was a bit like that in Russia, though I have to say, first of all, that Nicholas was extremely reluctant to go to war. He really could see it was going to be a disastrous involvement for Russia, but he felt duty-bound as a Russian Orthodox slave to go to the defense of the Serbians, who were fellow Orthodox. So when he announced that Russia was

going to go to war, initially of course with Serbia, in August 1914 there was an enormous outpouring of patriotic acclaim and love and volunteering and people thought Russia was going to go out and beat the lot of them. But it rapidly degenerated. The Russian war effort was spread along a huge eastern front and there were enormous problems very quickly with supplying the troops. They were poorly equipped. Morale was low. They were poorly led. And then kind of the worst thing he could possibly have done was Nicholas decided to take over command of the army. And he replaced his uncle Grand Duke Nicolai as commander, which fatally, as it will turn out, as you will see, took him out of Petrograd. And once he was, Petersburg became Petrograd during the war because they wanted to lose the German name. Once Nicholas was removed from St. Petersburg and out at Army HQ in Belorussia,

he wasn't really very well informed about what was going on in Petrograd. Had he known how serious the situation was becoming, I'm sure he would have returned. But people deliberately kept the truth from him, and his own wife downplayed the discontent at home. So that was a very serious error of Nicholas's, to leave the country and go to the war front. You speak about this discontent, Helen, and we've touched on it in the conversation so far. And it's impossible to talk about this period in Russian history without speaking about discontent. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us about

the living conditions of people who are potentially living a very poor life, a very simple life in Russia, because Russia at this time is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and there's very high levels of unemployment. Could you give us an idea of what life would have been like for those people? There was an enormous divide between urban and rural Russia. Russia was so vast, a country of many nationalities and religions and cultures. The peasants on the estates of Imperial Russia, pre-revolutionary Russia, knew very little, next to nothing, about what was going on in the big cities, in government. They toiled, they tilled the land, they produced the food that was sent to the big cities.

It was the big cities where the suffering became very serious and extreme, prompting mass protests and marches. And this is because there were huge areas of workers' tenement blocks in and around, say Petrograd particularly, working very long hours for poor wages, unable to feed their families properly, now the war effort was siphoning off a lot of the food from the people in the urban areas. So there was massive discontent, very poor living conditions in these horrible seedy tenements, the kind that you get in Dostoevsky actually only at a slightly earlier period.

So that was really the flashpoint. The living conditions, the poor wages, the discontent of the industrial factory workers. In terms of the peasantry, well, they had had generations, decades, centuries of serfdom before they were freed in 1861. And after that, not a lot changed. They were given land as such, but their lives were a hard grind. But the peasantry in Russia didn't really rise up until after the revolution happened and news spread to them, because at first they knew very little of what was going on in the cities. So when the news of revolution spread, then you get in some regions peasants rising up and burning and pillaging the estates of the people

they work for. So Helen, on the one hand, we have this growing discontent amongst the lower classes. As you say, there's poverty, there's food shortages, and resentment against the ruling class is building. Tell me about how the Romanovs view their own position, though, because they believe in the divine right of kings, don't they? They feel that they are God-appointed. Do you think that's a mentality that shielded them from the reality of what was going on in Russia under them? NM Yes, they had a very... Nicholas and Alexandra had this really semi-mystical concept of themselves as the little mother and the little father of Russia, i.e. you know, the protective wings around the nation in a very religious sort of way.

They had very little awareness of how the poor suffered. Occasionally, I think they saw signs of it when they went out during the war years. The girls are interesting. In the war years, when they went out to Belorussia to the front at Magyarov and visited the troops, they sometimes saw an indication of the poverty in the more rural parts of the empire and they were compassionate. They always were compassionate when they saw suffering the children even though they were very much living in a bubble, cut off from it all. But Alexandra in particular had a very sort of stubborn authoritarian belief, very stubborn belief that the peasants all loved them and looked up to them and all this nonsense and protests and stuff going on in the big city would all fade away once the weather turned cold and

they didn't want to go out of doors. So Nicholas, I think, had a conscience, but he was so overburdened just by the sheer task of being Tsar, of ruler of such an enormous nation that he tended to shut himself away with Alexandra out at Zaskoys-Sylos where they lived in the Alexander Palace and I wouldn't say they deliberately turned a blind eye to things but they lived in a bubble to protect Alexei and also because of the constant risk of assassination and attack. It was a huge security nightmare protecting that family. And so they tended to spend most of their time out at Zaskoyskyi Sylo, come out for the odd occasion for high days and holidays. But really, the last time the Russian people really saw the Roman office as a family together was during the Tersentenary celebrations in 1913. And after that, the family all sort

of put their shoulder to the wheel of the war effort. So the girls did nursing with their mother and Nicholas went to the front. It's really interesting, isn't it, that distance that is built up and built into the system of Russian royalty, that they are, as you say, Helen, elevated and mystical in terms of how they appear to everyone else and certainly in terms of how they understand their own role. Tell me about the Tsarina a little bit more though, because we know that she has this relationship with her son, who famously has very bad health. We know we've covered on this podcast before her relationship or not, there's a question mark over that, with Rasputin. But she is incredibly

unpopular by the time of the revolution, isn't she? So is that something that's been bubbling up for a long time or does it happen in a relatively short period that the way that she's portrayed to people is flipped on its head and she's suddenly an enemy of the people? Well I think poor Alexandra didn't stand a chance to be honest. People referred to her as the German woman. She was always seen as an outsider, as hostile, as difficult and she didn't as an outsider, as hostile, as difficult, and she didn't make an effort to make people like her. I think it all stems from the fact that, as I said earlier, Nicholas very unexpectedly became Tsar in, I think it was November of 1894. They were engaged, but they weren't due to marry for at least a year. But once he became Tsar, the whole thing was rushed forward.

They were married inside a fortnight. And right from day one, there was this, as Anthony said, this sense of doom and foreboding, because Pete the Peasants, who were very, very superstitious in Russia, referred to her as the funeral Tsarina, because she basically became Tsarina her as the funeral tsarina because she basically became tsarina behind the corpse of Alexander III, not long after his funeral. So in that kind of very superstitious Russian way, she was sort of doomed because she came to the throne on the back of the death of the previous Tsar as it were. You've got to imagine she came from very provincial Hesse by right, which was a little, I wouldn't say tin pot German Dutchie, but it wasn't that influential or wealthy or even well known. And here she is suddenly extracted from a very quiet court life at Hesse to the Imperial Russia and the Grand Winter Palace and all the ceremony and bling and pageantry.

She hated it. She was inherently extremely reserved, mistrustful of people. And she just shrunk back at the prospect of having all the hand kissing and processions. And so she hated all that. And what you find with Alexandra is very quickly, because she had very several quite serious health issues, she retreated.

She used her health as an excuse to retreat from her duties. And of course, as her daughters grew up, they took her place. They went out with daddy to openings and fates and church ceremonies and a wonderful picture of them representing their mother at the Borodino centenary, which Alexandra didn't go to. So she, from day one, only ever had a very small circle of close trusted friends. She wanted just to be with Nikki and live a happy life playing happy families, almost forgetting that they were rulers of this enormous empire. So that, you know, there's this terrible dichotomy. She was Tsarina of all this, and yet she really just wanted to be mommy at home with her children and she never endeared herself to the Russian people they couldn't

understand her she wasn't people friendly at all and that was the real difficulty with Alexandra but everything she did was colored by her obsession with her boy keeping her boy alive. If that meant living in retreats at Zaskia Syilot, then so be it. podcast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris. Three decades later, French investigators finally identified a suspect in the case, a Lebanese-Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life on the outskirts of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Diab guilty?

Can you introduce yourself? Or is he a scapegoat? Hassan Diab. From Canada land, this is the Kopernik Affair. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. All of this foreboding, not just with the Zarina, but in general, all of this foreboding that you're talking about, Helen, all of this doom. This comes to a head. Can you take us to February 1917 and give us a hint of the unrest that starts to unfold in a very specific way that

leads to what we now call the Russian Revolution? Basically, by 1917, Russia had been in the war for three years. It had been a catastrophe for Imperial Russia. The army was demoralized, revolutionary, a sort of subversive material was finding its way out to the army. There was massive disaffection in the army. Some of the men had no guns, no boots, they were poorly equipped, they weren't properly fed, and what food there was was being diverted to the army. So you can imagine in the big cities, in the heart of a bitter, bitter Russian winter, you have got all these workers crowded into freezing cold tenement blocks without enough fuel,

without enough food. And what triggered it is very interesting because it's a bit like the march on Versailles with the French Revolution. It was the mothers, it was the women who went out on the streets on Women's Day, which is March the 8th, our time, so it's 11 days back from that, International Women's Day, they marched down the main drag, the Nürsky Prospekt in Pedrograd, banners demanding bread. So the initial protests were about food. The women were shouting, we can't feed our children, give us food. And that snowballed because of course all these many, many various revolutionary groups, I mean not just the Bolsheviks, anarchists, socialists, revolutionaries,

you name it, there were lots of splinter groups, all came in on the coattails of the women marching and protesting. So these marches got bigger and louder and more violent and then it turned really ugly because of course the government called in the troops and then there was that classic moment where the troops, particularly the Cossacks, the notorious Cossacks who charged the protesters in 1905 on Bloody Sunday, turned. They turned against the government and went to the side of the people and that was this seminal moment where the army started taking the side of the people. And of course in the midst of all this chaos Alexandra is out at Zaskoys Szilá with all her children very ill with measles. The Tsar is right over with the army in Magyarlyov really not getting

up-to-date information about the unrest in the streets. When Alexandra did write to him, she said, ''Oh, don't worry, they're just still having a bit of a protest, so we'll go home soon. It'll all die down. It's a storm in a teacup.'' So his own wife misinformed him. His officials in the Capitol misinformed him

deliberately of the seriousness of the situation. And so Nicholas didn't immediately get on a train and come back. He might possibly have been able to defuse things if he'd really come back and taken command, real serious authoritarian command of the situation. But of course it just spiraled further and further out of control. But of course, it just spiraled further and further out of control. It's fascinating that it's that family dynamic and the marriage dynamic between the Tsar and Tsarina that actually, I mean, of course, there are other considerations here, but it's her almost lying to him, playing down this concern and him taking her counsel on that, that is the big sort of disastrous decision.

But we know that the Tsar isn't going to maintain the position that he's in. So what does happen next, Helen? Helen Well, I should say that Alexandra bombarded Nicholas with letters. There is a volume about, I'd say, two inches thick, the wartime correspondence, which luckily survived being destroyed because Nicholas kept all her letters, which is all these letters she was bombarding him with, and telegrams, day in, day out, do this, do that, sack this person, you know, a point that, and she was kind of running the show and giving him bad advice. He had had better, more responsible people in government, people like the sadly assassinated Stalipin

and one or two others, but most of the good people in the government being pushed out because Alexandra didn't get on with them. So she constantly was sending her advice out to Nicholas about what to do and what not to do. And he always trusted her judgment implicitly. And that is his failing. And so he didn't come back and he should have done. I'd love to know what the link between the Zarina's judgment and Nicholas's abdication is, Helen, because that comes essentially next, doesn't it? So where do they both stand on that? Are they in agreement that that's what he should do?

And what prompts it? The abdication in a way is a kind of minor tragedy in this story because there's Alexandra at the Alexander Palace. And one of the reasons she couldn't get out if they got their act together really fast and got her on the train with the children was because they were all very sick with measles. So she's stuck there. Nicholas over at Army HQ is visited by two members of the Dumas who pressurise him into the abdication. Now, it's a massively contentious moment in Russian history, but what happened was, there's Nicholas isolated from his family and from good advisors really, and he's pressurized into thinking for the good of the country, because the army was demoralized, because the level of desertion was horrendous from the army, that if he abdicated, it was for the sake of Russia to pull Russia together to keep Russia in the war effort

because he was very, very loyal to his wartime allies, Britain and France. So under pressure, Nicholas agreed to abdicate at Magliyov and signed the order. He also, at the same time, having already taken private advice about Alexei because he knew initially they wanted him to abdicate in favour of Alexei, which would have needed a regency because Alexei was too young. Nicholas made the decision because of Alexei's haemophilia and because because he knew hemophiliacs then were unlikely

to survive beyond their teenage years. He abdicated for his son Alexei as well. And now the awful thing was, Alexandra knew nothing of this until the news finally, I'd know a day or two later, comes back to her that he has abdicated and she was devastated and now I've always said and I still stick to it if Alexandra had been in the room with Nicholas at the time she would never have allowed him to abdicate she would have said over my dead body because the one thing she clung to through, absolute thick and thin, was the autocracy, the imperial line must be preserved for her darling boy Alexei. Her one great ambition was to ensure Alexei would one day be Tsar. She would never have allowed Nicholas to abdicate.

So there again, that's one of those big what-ifs in history. It's an astonishing moment, isn't it Helen, for not only the family, this moment of abdication, but for Russia as well. And that the power structure, the way the country will now be managed has completely shifted. But you know, there's an interesting thing that was said by the peasants. They're so used to the system, this great entrenched system of serfdom, which they never really got freed from. When they heard Nicholas had abdicated, peasants were had to say, well, who's going to be Tsar then? There had to be someone in charge, someone up there, a kind of superhuman being in charge. They couldn't comprehend Russia becoming a republic. And so that created enormous, enormous problems

and then all the infighting and conflict that followed. I suppose one of the most remarkable things in the moment of the abdication though is that the abdication itself is not enough, that the family are then arrested. It's not enough simply to remove the Tsar from the throne. So tell me about the moment of that arrest because that feels like another line being crossed. This is something that Russia cannot go back from. So what happens? There was a terrible turbulent period where people frantically tried to find a way of saving them. Because after the revolution, Nicholas abdicated. He is eventually, within a couple of days, put on a train back to Petrograd because he said he wanted to be reunited with his family. That's all he cared about. Once he'd given

up the throne, he was free. He actually felt relieved. All he cared about, absolute tunnel vision, was to get back to his children and his wife. So he's on the train coming back. Now there was a tiny window of opportunity. Alexandra and the children were all under house arrest at Zarskoe Szylo. The children were only just beginning to recover from measles. If the new provisional government, which was totally chaotic anyway and disorganised, if they got their act together and got Alexander and the children on a train, they might have got them north to Mamansk, because I think the Brits would have sent a ship,

if they'd done it within days. But they didn't, they couldn't get them out. The geography and the situation was just too difficult. And similarly, Nicholas was advised when he abdicated to not go back, don't go back, get out of, go west, get out, get away, because pretty much, it was pretty obvious if he went back, he too would be arrested. So, by choosing to go back to his family, he sealed his own fate. And so there they were, all incarcerated in the Alexander Palace. What the hell could the Provisional Government do with them? They were in disarray. The Bolsheviks were controlling the railway lines. It would have been impossible within days to get the Romanovs out of Russia on a train, and they certainly couldn't take them west because

that's a war zone. That's the front. The only way to get them out really would have been north to Mamanetsk and on to a British destroyer. The south of Russia, central southern Russia down to Crimea where they might have got a boat was in chaos. The peasants were rising up and burning the estates. The only other option, a train ride right across Siberia to Vladivostok. You see, the difficulty was astronomical. There was really no way of getting them out unless they literally left Russia within like a day or two of the abdication. So they are stuck, they are trapped, and then this terrible tragedy begins to unfold. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris. Three decades later, French investigators finally identified a suspect in the case.

A Lebanese-Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life on the outskirts of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Diab guilty? Can you introduce yourself? Or is he a scapegoat? Hassan Diab. From Canada Land, this is the Copernic Affair. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and Petrograd Soviet released the following statement. In view of information received that the Provisional Government has decided to permit Nicholas

Romanov to depart for England, and that he is at present on his way to Petrograd, the Executive Committee has resolved to take extraordinary steps immediately for his detention and arrest. Nicholas II disembarks the Imperial train at the Imperial Railway Pavilion at 11am. He is dressed in a fur cap and a soldier's greatcoat. Here he will be collected by motorcar and taken to the palace that he and his family call home, Alexander Palace. As he steps from the train, tired but composed, there is a commotion behind him. Members of his staff are jumping back from the train, fleeing down the platform, not looking back.

The former Tsar continues on his journey towards the palace, and his beloved family who await him there. On arrival, he is met at the gate by a sentry, and admitted on the orders of a commandant. Nicholas Romanov is no longer the master of his own fate. Now, before we get into the next questions, I cut a bit from that narrative because the Russian pronunciation was a little bit too much for me.

So the name of that royal pavilion, Helen, can you help us with it? That was their own railway station at Tsarskoye Selo. Fantastic. It's an education having Helen on because she's also a fluent Russian speaker, which is incredibly useful for what we're doing today. You may have guessed, I am not. Anthony, you shock me. So Helen, we have this moment now where the Tsar is entering what is essentially going to be house arrest, albeit house arrest in a palace. What is that like? Can you paint us a picture of how restrictive that would have been for the Tsar? Of course, this is a palace he spent time in,

he's familiar with it, but this is in very different circumstances now, isn't it? Well, remember they're all living on wartime rations, which are pretty thin by 1917, and now there's a revolution. There are even more shortages. So there are levels of privation. The place is cold, it's not probably heated. They're only restricted to certain rooms. So they're not swanning around in their glorious robes still and being very regal. They had since the outbreak of war, voluntarily lived very pared down lives, all the family because they felt,

and this is to Alexandra's credit, that the family should live as the ordinary people should live during war and not go around looking ostentatious. And there was an interesting comment made that during the war, the girls all wore plain skirts and blouses and woolly hats and look very ordinary. And the people complained.

They actually complained they didn't look royal anymore. So they lived very modestly at the Alexander Palace. They grew vegetables and they planted vegetables in the gardens to keep themselves busy, but also to support themselves with food. They chopped wood, they found things to do because, you know, they were kept incarcerated there right through until August. So they lived very simple lives. But for them, the one thing that mattered more than anything was still to be able to practice their religious faith. They weren't able to go out of the palace and across to the

wonderful little church, the Fyodorovsky Garadok, so they had their own icon screen installed in a room in the palace. They were still able to worship, but everything was very pared down. Ben Wattenberg So Helen, while they're there, they're under guard, who is guarding them and how were they treated during that time? Helen Boucher Well, there are some sort of conflicting stories about that. Some of the guards that earned the actual commander were fairly decent and respectful insofar as they were revolutionaries or employed by the provisional government. But some of the ordinary soldiers in the grounds, more generally guarding the family when they were outside, could be quite unpleasant and pass nasty remarks. They had to run the

gauntlet a bit because some of the guards were very sympathetic and kind to them and others were not. They were aggressive. I suppose that's sort of representative of the confusion that Russia was in in that moment. You mentioned earlier, Helen, all those sort of splinter groups of different aggravators and protesters and revolutionaries and that why would that not be represented in terms of the guards as well. Do you think there's a world in which the Tsar himself feels some kind of contentment in this moment? You've spoken about how he felt enormous pressure from his role as the Tsar and that he wasn't always that adept at the craftsmanship of running a state, of being

the head of that state. Now he's been sort of paired back to this simple life and he's there with his family, albeit under very trying conditions. Do you think there's a part of him that is relieved not to be the Tsar anymore in this moment, or are they simply living under tremendous threat and fear every day? Oh, he was enormously relieved. It was a massive burden being so. And one thing I should have mentioned, the time he was happiest, I think, in his marriage to Alexandra, were the war years out at Army HQ when he took Alexei with him for a while. They absolutely loved being with the army. He was a soldier through and through.

Nicholas was an army man. That was the only thing he really knew. He was happiest always wearing his tunic and breeches. In fact, all the way through incarceration, he still kept his army tunic on, except they, much to his dismay and Alexandra's fury, they removed his epaulettes, they stripped him. So he was in a way happy and glad to be with his family because the fundamental of life for the Romanov family, apart from being together with each other, was to worship together, to practice their faith together, to be supportive of each other. They were a very, very devoted and united family. And I always say to people when they ask me about Nicholas, they may have been a far from perfect Tsar, but he was the most

exemplary, hands-on father. And throughout that entire time, he was the most loving and caring and devoted father and that was as I say why you know he didn't run in the opposite direction when the revolution broke. So yes he enjoyed chopping wood he was very physical this is why the later treatment in Ekaterinburg when they were literally shut in and couldn't hardly go outside at all he couldn't bear not being physically active. So at Zarska, he was clearing ice from the canals, he was digging the garden and planting vegetables. He was out in the fresh air, being vigorous and active. And he was perfectly content with that. And with reading books to his family in the evenings together in Alexander's Lilac

Boudoir, he was contented with very little. And yet there must have been this idea of some form of life beyond this kind of house arrest, let's say, where they're under guard and revolution is unfolding. They must have had a hope, Helen. What was that hope? How did they see that resolution coming about for them as a family, not necessarily for Russia? Helen Boucher-Gibson This is the interesting thing. When the revolution first broke, they very naively hoped. Their very first thought was, oh, they'll let us go and live quietly in our palace down at

Livadia, the palace in Crimea, which they absolutely loved. They thought, we'll be no trouble, we'll go there. And they would have done, this is the awful thing. If they had been allowed to retreat there and just live quietly, modestly in Crimea, they would be more than happy to do so. But that was a complete no-no. They weren't allowed to do that. So the next best thing was, of course, Nicholas thought, well, and it was suggested to him when there was this initial hope that they'd get them out to a ship, a British ship would come for them, was that he'd go to England. But it was always made clear, and this is where people get it wrong, right from the

opening sort of appeals to King George's government to take them in, it was always a given that it would only be temporary for the war years to evacuate them for the duration of the war. But as we know, George got very, very frightened and worried. There was a massive political opposition to Nicholas and Alexandra Cumming, not just George getting cold feet, but his entire government knew it was a dreadful political hot potato to bring a German Tsaritsa to England in the middle of the war. So there were lots and lots of contributing factors to the whole issue of asylum. Well, in Britain it wasn't really asylum ever, it would have been temporary refuge. So they very quickly discovered they were not going to be allowed to

leave. And that meant, okay, for now they were at Zarskoye until things got very ugly by the high summer of 1917. There was an attempted Bolshevik coup in July and that was the writing on the wall because Kerensky's provisional government knew that sooner or later the mob are going to rampage out of Petrograd and storm the palace and basically lynch Nicholas and Alexandra. So that Kerensky knew he had to move them further inland. Best place of course, Siberia, the traditional home of captives under the Russian system. Well, Helen, you have set that up perfectly for us

because this is part one of a two-parter on the final days of the Romanovs. So to find out what happens next, tune in next week after we have spoken to Helen again. But if you can't wait that long, we already have an episode on Rasputin available to listen to right now. Thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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