Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Tragedies and Legacy of the Royal Romanovs with Helen Rappaport

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, writer and historian Helen Rappaport joins Sharon to talk about a topic our listeners are fascinated by: the last royal family of Russia. The Romanov murder and legacy has long persisted in popular culture. Learn more about their lineage and the parts that often get overlooked. Often, the truth is more interesting than the myth. Special thanks to our guest, Helen Rappaport. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Helen Rappaport Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So excited that you're here. Today we are talking with somebody who is one of the world's experts on the Romanov family. People are enduringly fascinated by the last royal family of Russia, talking about Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, the mythology of Anastasia. And of course, they're related to all kinds of other European royalty. Their murder has been the stuff of legend. So let's dive into my conversation with author and historian Helen Rappaport. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with you because I have been fascinated by Russian history for most of my adolescence and adult life.

I'm sure you hear that from people all the time. And I bet you share the same fascination. Otherwise, you would not have made such an extensive career of writing about the Romanov family. Yes, I was caught up with Russia and the Russian language and the literature and the music at that very kind of mid-teen period when one is very impressionable and hungry for knowledge and discovery. And really, I fell in love with the Russians when I was about 15. That was long before I discovered the Romanals, I have to say, because my initial passion was for Anton Chekhov, the short story writer. And when I watched all those old Russian films they used to show on the TV, and I then studied Russian. I was very lucky because I went to a girls' grammar school in England where I had the chance to learn Russian.

And then I went on to do Russian at university. But I came to the Romanovs very late in my life as such. Did you? What about them is so fascinating to you and to audiences? Because there is undoubtedly an enduring fascination with them. What about it is so interesting? Well, it's funny you should say that. I think as a historian, I actually avoided them because I felt that there was too much bling and chintz and sentiment and the whole story become inflated with a lot of mythology you know it had been dominated for so many decades by the spurious anastasia claim and then there's all

the endless demonization of rasputin and all the the nonsense written about him and i felt that the subject had been infected with a lot of mythology and misinformation. And quite honestly, I didn't want to go near it. So when I first started writing, I hadn't thought particularly of doing the Romanos. And it came from an agent I was with at the time, a literary agent. And I'd just done a book on women in the Crimean War. And we were sitting in his office sort of mulling over what I should write next. And he said, well, look, why don't you do the Romanovs? You're a Russianist.

You're a Russian speaker. And I went, and I can remember my reaction. It was, oh, no, all those palaces and bling and sentimental stuff and Anastasia. I really didn't fancy it. I really was kind of put off by all the schmaltz associated with the story. But he was insistent. He said, look, go away and take a look at them. And I said, well, I don't want to do a big biography of, say,

Nicholas or Alexander. I wasn't want to do a big biography of, say, Nicholas or Alexander. I wasn't interested in that because as a historian, what really fascinates me are aspects of the story that are less well known, you know, going into the footnotes, looking behind the scenes. So he gave me the key and I shall always be grateful to this agent. He said to me, think of a timeline. You don't have to do a whole life. And this is a principle I've kept to with many other books. He said, go away and look at a part of the story. So what I did, in fact, was looked at the last two weeks of their lives in the build up to their horrific murders at the Apartheid house in Yekaterinburg. And I suddenly realised very,

very quickly, and maybe it comes from having once been an actress a long, long time ago, but when I looked at the last two weeks of their lives, I could see a scenario. I could see a story developing and how you could build the tension. These people trapped in this awful house, unable to get away. Everyone wants to kill them. Other people want to rescue them. And in the end, I wrote Last Days of the Romanovs, as it was known in America, about the last two weeks of their lives, it building up to that horrible murder. And after I'd done that, I thought, well, that's fine. I've written a story. I've satisfied myself that I'd given the Romanovs a go

and something kept niggling at me I kept thinking about those four girls and how really when you look at any book written about the Romanovs they're always the set dressing they're always in the background the pretty girls in white frocks who all look interchangeable and rather demure and sweet. And so there was nothing going on between their ears, you know, and I thought there's got to be more. And so I decided to research the story of the four sisters, how little known they were and what a wonderful support they were to the family and how in many ways without them their mother and father would not have been able to keep going in captivity and so what what began as one book that I thought I'd be done with in 2007 when I wrote it carried on and carried on

and carried on and I'm still at the tail end of Romance even now, my 17th book for my sins. And I wasn't expecting to go back to them, but I say that every time and I do. But this really has got to be the last one. This is it. I know there's somebody listening to this who was like, who, what now? What are we talking about? Who were they?

Okay, so let's first of all, just set the stage very simply. Who exactly are the Romanovs and why were they murdered? Well, the Romanov family was Tsars of Russia. They were the ruling house of Russia and had been since the early 17th century. In 1913, they celebrated their tercentenary. And they had been on the throne of Russia at the time the revolution broke out in 1917. And so my interest has always been in the last imperial family of Russia, who were all murdered in July 1918 in Siberia. It was a very turbulent story because the reason so many people take an interest in the last imperial family of Russia is because so much of their story revolves around the tragedy

of the only son and heir who was born to the family in 1904, turning out to be a haemophiliac with very short life expectancy. And the trauma that his mother, Alexandra the Tsaritsa, had gone through between her marriage in 1894 and producing Alexei in 1904, the trauma she had gone through trying to produce a son and heir because it had to go by the male line in Russia. And in order to get to Alexei, she produced four daughters in a row. Alexei, she produced four daughters in a row. And the enormous pressures on her caused a lot of controversy and drama in Russia because without a son-in-law, the throne would have passed sideways to one of the other grand dukes. Okay, so this is the last sort of royal ruling family of Russia. People have probably heard of, you know, Tsar Nicholas II. They probably heard of Nicholas and Alexandra. And they have probably heard of

the mythology, the legend, the lore surrounding their daughter, Anastasia. There's even been like animated movies made about it. Don't talk to me about that. I have to say, I do get a bit hot under the collar when people go on at me, but not you, but when people generally get all aerated about Anastasia, because the woman who claimed to be Anastasia was a total fraud. The whole story got ridiculously inflated thanks to that Hollywood film with Ingrid Bergman. And unfortunately, it dragged on and on and on for decades because Anna Anderson, the claimant who ended up in America, she dragged through the German law courts pursuing her claim for decades, trying to prove she was Anastasia and ultimately failing. But all the time this claim was going on, there were those who wanted to believe it because no one wanted to believe that the Bolsheviks would have been the Russians.

Russian government led by Lenin, would have been so cruel as to murder all those children, all five children, that somehow if one of them had got away, there would be some comfort in that. Here's another thing that a lot of people don't realize if they're new to studying this time period in this geographical region in history is they perhaps don't understand how related many of the rulers of Europe were, how related they were to each other. Let me just think my way through this because it's very easy to confuse them all. Nicholas II's mother, Maria Fyodorovna, that was her Russian name, but she was Princess Dagmar of Denmark. So she was Danish. Her sister, Alexandra, was the wife of Bertie, the heir to Queen Victoria, who was the mother of the next king. So, you know, the relationships

are very, very close. The Russian royals were sort of effectively cousins or fairly close cousins. Nicholas spoke perfect English when he was courting Alexandra and then they married, you know, in that period just before their marriage. He came to Windsor. He met Granny, Queen Victoria, and charmed the pants off her. He spoke impeccable English. He had English manners. He was an Anglophile. So in many ways, King George V, who succeeded his father in 1910, had very, very close relationship with Nicholas and Alexandra because Alexandra was his cousin as well. So, you know, there's all this intertwining. And one of Alexandra's sisters, because they were from Germany, also married one of the Russian

Grand Dukes. Okay. I have a lot of questions that were sent in by people who are in my community. They have things they want to know. This is a big one. I got asked a lot about why couldn't they have been rescued? And I know you've written a whole book on this, The Race to Save the Romanovs, could the king have done more? Walk us through exactly what was undertaken to rescue them and why it was unsuccessful. Because once the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution, they were intent on sort of purging Russia from this idea of like a royal family. And they were imprisoned in a house in Siberia, as you mentioned. And so there was this like time period during their imprisonment

where people persist in believing that they could have and should have been rescued by somebody. Well, this is a very, very big question. You'll appreciate I could spend two hours explaining. You could write a whole book on it. I basically will beg your listeners to please read my book, but I will try my very best to simplify it. If I have to give you one word answer why they couldn't get them out, it's simple, geography. People have no conception of the difficulty of distance,

thousands of miles from Western Europe. They're in the middle of nowhere. You haven't got aeroplanes that could fly in and out that kind of distance. In order to mount a rescue, you would need an enormously sophisticated and well-planned operation. And the other thing people must remember, Alexandra and Nicholas had many royal relatives in Europe. You know, there was a degree of collective responsibility to help them, but everyone passed the buck. It was too much of a hot potato and then you get the this additional ramification of well if we take them in who's going to pay for them who's going to support them where are they

going to live are they going to be a drain on our finances are they going to be a security risk because i promise you if nicholas and alex Alexander had come here people would have been trying to pop a shot at them so the government various governments of Europe behind the scenes were all saying the same thing it's too much of a liability to take them in so what you've got to understand with the failure to get them out it's a combination of many many factors and not just simply king george saying oh i've changed my mind that wouldn't have made any difference one way or the other king george could have been jumping up and down sitting on a you know in a boat in northern russia saying come on come and get on the boat if they couldn't have got them on a train out of petrograd

or got them out of siia, any attempt at rescue would have been futile. It was thousands of miles north to get them onto a boat. I think people underestimate the sheer geographical complexity. Siberia is so vast. Yeah the weather the weather is so bad the other thing too is that when people say well they should have flown in a plane there was no such thing as an enclosed cockpit they weren't passenger planes and they were not enclosed cockpits so you could not safely even fly at all no it would have been impossible to fly all the way to St. Tabor. It was bonkers.

It's absolutely bonkers. There's no possible way to fly them out that the technology did not exist. No, it didn't. It didn't exist. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. I'm Jenna Fisher.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments.

So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Here's another question that a lot of people are curious about i bet you get asked about this all of the time people want to know about Rasputin they want to know about his relationship with the Tsarina they want to know about his influence on the Russian royal family first First of all, who was he? I'm going to start by saying what he wasn't.

He was not a mad monk, as he is so often labeled. He was neither mad nor a monk. He was a kind of itinerant holy man, come preacher, come healer, of the kind that's unique to Russia. You can't really find an equivalent, a sort of wise man, guru, who traveled Russia. And when he came to Petersburg, he set himself up and gathered around him a group of followers, mainly women, because he had this talent, some kind of talent for autosuggestive talents, for calming, healing. I won't say he was a miracle worker because he wasn't, but people thought he was. The problem with Rasputin is in a way similar to Anastasia in that layers and layers of hype, misinformation, hype, misinformation, gossip, utter silliness, Hollywoodization, you name it, have totally warped the story and misrepresented him. He was an extraordinary, powerful presence whom the

Romanos, Nicholas and Alexander gravitated to because of Alexei's attacks of haemophilia and uncontrollable bleeding. He had some kind of auto-suggestive power. Now, anyone who lives in America might know about horse whispering, where he was like a human whisperer. That's the best equivalent I can find. He had an ability to calm and reassure. And by calming the mother, who got very hysterical when Alexei had these attacks, he calmed the child. And it's actually a skill that peasants in Russia had. He'd been a horse dealer. He knew how to deal with animals. Back in Siberia, his father had dealt with horses. He'd learned this skill where they call, which they call in Russian, talking the blood, which is talking to an animal when it's injured itself and calming it. And he applied those kind of skills to humans. But no one's ever been able to explain Rasputin's gift skills, whatever you want to call them.

He was not a fraud. And so he's been very demonized, unfortunately, through a lot of really bad TV and film dramas who always make him out to be this insane, crazy, satanic sexual figure. Yes, he had a bad reputation for being a bit of a drinker and a womanizer. There was a negative side to him, certainly. But when you look into the story, he actually cared very deeply about the imperial family, and especially the children. And the children liked him and they respected him, because he would be like this old prophet. He would tell them Bible stories, and they were quite enthralled by him. So, there are many dimensions to Rasputin. Unfortunately, they've all been ironed out,

and instead, there's this superficial imposition of this satanic kind of lurid personality that isn't really the truth of him at all. Okay, here's another question people want to know because there's a lot of rumor, conjecture, mythology surrounding the murder of the Romanovs themselves, including one that I can remember very vividly learning about as a teenager, and I would love to know if it's true or not, which is that they hid their jewels beneath their clothing. And then as they were being shot, the jewels caused the bullets to ricochet around this room. I have to restrain myself.

I take it that didn't really happen. When the Ramanaths were taken into captivity, all they had as insurance for the future, should they ever miraculously sprung from jail or be allowed to go into exile, were Alexandra's jewellery, of which she had a considerable collection. Many, many long ropes of pearls, which she particularly liked, but diamonds and you name it. So what happened in the winter of 1917, when they were in Tobolsk, which was their first

Siberian place of captivity, where the regime was a lot looser and not as frightening and oppressive, she and her daughter spent that winter, because they knew sooner or later these things would be found and taken away from them, sewing Alexandra's jewellery into the girls' camisoles. They disguised individual diamonds and bigger jewels as buttons, covered them over, put them on caps, inside cap linings. everywhere they could think of. They dispersed Alexandra's jewellery because that was their only money. That was their only currency. So what happened when they were then moved on to Ekaterinburg and when they were taken down into the cellar that night to be murdered, there is no way that bullets bounced off the clothing they were wearing. Because I had a very, very long discussion, five-hour discussion with an expert

witness, forensics, forensic ballistic expert, who explained to me that there was no way on God's earth that bullets would have bounced off. The reason they had such a job killing them was the killers were incompetent. Some of the guns didn't work or misfired. There was mass panic in the room. People were screaming and falling over all over the place. It was mainly down to the competence of the killers

that, you know, the bullets didn't hit the target. And what was so interesting that this forensics expert said to me, he said, you wouldn't believe how easy it is in a situation like that, where there's, remember, a room with one light bulb, loads of smoke and fumes and chaos and screaming. He said, it's unbelievably easy to miss, but the bouncing bullet myth needs to be buried. Okay. Speaking of being buried, there's a lot of speculation that where they were buried was an open secret, that everybody knew about it or they didn't? What actually happened to their bodies after they were murdered? This, again, is another shining example of Bolshevik inefficiency. The commandant of the Apartheid house and his henchmen had gone out into the Koptyaki forest about nine miles out of Ekaterinburg to find a suitable spot to dump the bodies.

They wanted to find a proper mine shaft, but that was too far away. But in the end, they decided on a mine working. Now, it's very important because, again, mythology says they threw the bodies down the mine shaft. It wasn't a mine shaft. It was a fairly shallow mine working in the forest. And they were all exhausted. They'd been up all night. They wanted to get rid of the bodies.

So they stripped them of their clothes. And as they did so, they found all the jewels sewn, you know, in the clothes. And they threw the bodies into this fairly shallow pit at a place called Four Brothers and hastily poured acid over the bodies to try and destroy them. That was dreadfully inefficiently done and threw earth in over them and went home. And of course, not long after they went back, the Commandant Uroski realised that the local peasants would find that grave in five minutes. And what would happen, there would be a mass rush to get holy martyr relics from the grave of all the murdered Ravnos. So he now took his exhausted henchmen, who hadn't been to bed for more than 24 hours, back to the forest the next day, dug them all out again, they put them back in the truck and they were going to try

and go to a proper mine shaft some miles away. I think it was a copper mine some miles further north. But halfway coming out of the Kopciakki Forest, which was muddy and only a rough track, their rubbishy little citron lorries sunk into the mud and they couldn't move it. So that's when, in a panic, Jourovski said, oh, let's just dig a hole and dump them here. So they then dug a hole and dumped the bodies there. But at the time they did that, now that was Nicholas, Alexandra, three of the daughters, but the two smaller children, Alexei and Maria, were taken aside and they tried to burn their

bodies. So they were not thrown into that pit, along with the Romanov family and their doctor and three of their very loyal servants, of course, had all been horribly murdered with them in the cellar. So this is how the myth of Anastasia starts, really, because they dumped the bodies that second night in the second grave at Parasyonkov Lug, which is called Pig's Meadow. In the late 70s, a couple of local amateur archaeologists started going out to the forest, searching for the second grave. And they had read and examined all the accounts by Jorowski, who made two or three statements about some of his henchmen who later were interviewed about where they dumped them on

the night of the murders. And they figured out where they thought the second grave was. and they figured out where they thought the second grave was. And in secret, these two guys dug and they found that second grave. And in fact, they pulled out several of Romanov's skulls, including Nicholas's, took them home, put them under the bed. But, you know, this is the Soviet era. They could not say anything.

And in the end, they kind of got a bit nervous about it, took them back and reburied them. So nothing was said or done until after the collapse of communism in 1991. The grave was opened and the bodies of the family and their servants, minus the two children, remember, whose bodies were taken off, were found. They were exhumed, identified. Meanwhile, this is now 1998, they still haven't found the missing two children. And because one daughter and Alexei were missing, there was this big argument that raged. Was the missing daughter Anastasia? And others said, no, it was Maria.

There was still this element of doubt that made people carry on claiming, oh, no, Anastasia got away because they hadn't found the two children who were missing. And then an extraordinary thing happened. I went to Katrinberg in 2007 to research my first book about the murder of the Romanovs. And just as I flew home, I got an email from a Katrinberg from one of my contacts saying they'd been digging in the forest and they think they found the two missing children. So I was mortified that I missed it.

Yeah. But that's when they found the two missing children and did a lot more tests and conclusively they all died please let's put the lid on it one of the things i wanted to ask you about is about the sort of this canonization of the Romanov family. I want to say it was 2000 or thereabouts. It was about then. They were canonized as holy Russian passion bearers, as Orthodox saints in the calendar, as was the Tsaritsa's murdered sister, Ella, who she, with some of the grand dukes and a couple of prince, were murdered not far away the night after the Romanos were killed. Yes, they are

saints in the Orthodox calendar. And the extraordinary thing is the absolute explosion of resurgence of Orthodoxy after the collapse of communism. And the thing I noticed very profoundly when I went to Russia to research that book on the murders was everywhere you went in Russia, every church had enormous icons of the imperial family. They have, in a way, been at the centre of this massive resurgence of orthodox faith. And of course, in Ekaterinburg, every July, on the anniversary of the murders, there are the Tsarskoye Dni, the Tsar's Days, when pilgrims come from all over Russia to commemorate that.

And on the 100th anniversary in 2018, there was an enormous influx, I don't know, about 20,000 people in Ekaterinburg for that all-night vigil. And I've stood there. I've stood there during the all-night vigil in July of that very, very long church service, and it's incredibly moving. Last question, which is, if you could share one interesting fact or dispel one persistent myth you wish everyone knew about the Romanov family, what would that be? Well, I think it's a very simple thing, actually. When it actually comes down to it, they were a very ordinary, loving family who were very devoted to each other, loving family who were very devoted to each other who were devoutly religious and whose religious faith in many ways kept them going through captivity and when you look at their private lives as a domestic unit they couldn't look less like a blingtastic royal family. They were very unpretentious as a royal family. They really were.

Fascinating. Yeah, that's not the impression you get as a Western observer at all. No. And when you look at the girls during the war, during the war, it was very interesting. Alexandra says, well, first of all, they trained as nurses and did voluntary work in the hospitals but Alexandra said to her daughters no new clothes we will patch and mend we will not have luxuries we will try and put up with things as the rest of the population is and you look at the photographs of the girls during the warriors and they're in just ordinary blouses and cardigans and bubble hats. And they dressed incredibly modestly, wore very little jewelry. Helen, thank you for being here today. This was incredibly interesting.

And I know that people who find this topic fascinating are going to find a treasure trove of information in your books. a treasure trove of information in your books. I mean, we have not even scratched one tenth of 1% of the surface of the research you have conducted and the stories you have written about the Russian royal family. So thank you for being here.

Well, thank you. I just hope people can just find the time to try and get to the real story and forget about the Disneyfication of it all. Agreed. Oh my goodness. Helen is a prolific researcher and writer. Her books are truly fascinating.

The race to save the Romanovs goes deeply into what it was like to try to get the Romanovs out of their imprisonment before they were murdered. And also the book, The Romanov Sisters, I found very fascinating. This is scholarship that almost nobody else is engaged in. What were the family members themselves like? So check out Helen Rappaport's books if you want to know more. I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin. Edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.