Free Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport Page A

a commissar for justice, exhibiting the absolute self-control and cold cynicism so typical of the professional revolutionary. He kept careful control of his burning hatred for the Imperial Family, on the surface appearing polite, even punctilious. He did not suffer conflicts of feelings or a troubled conscience as had his predecessor Avdeev. Nor did his 23-year-old assistant Nikulin, a cold-blooded killer who had already had a hand in secret shootings of counter-revolutionaries and with whom Yurovsky had a very close father–son relationship. Both were fired by implacable class hatred and had come to the Ipatiev House to settle a long-standing score with the Romanovs on behalf of the Revolution.
    On the day of his arrival, Yurovsky instigated ‘a complete disinfection’ of the guard at the Ipatiev House and with it a tightening of discipline, down to the tidying away of rubbish and an insistence on the daily making up of bunks and maintenance of cleanliness. The men from the Sysert and Zlokazov works were removed from the inside guard to the outside. Overall, the Special Detachment would be increased to 86 men, with Yurovsky announcing that in a few days’ time Avdeev’s old internal guard was to be replaced with new men of his own choosing.
     
    Four houses and 300 yards away down Voznesensky Prospekt, in sight of the Ipatiev House, the British consul, Thomas Preston, was encountering considerable problems in obtaining any news of the welfare of the Imperial Family. He had caught a glimpse of Grand Duchess Maria when the convoy bringing the Tsar and Tsaritsa from the railway station had passed his door on 30 April, but had not been allowed to see the family at all, despite their close ties with the British Royal Family. (Alexandra’s mother was King George V’s aunt, and Nicholas and George’s Danish mothers were sisters.) Whilst the Red Flag now flew over the city’s civic buildings, Preston had kept the British Union Jack conspicuously defiant at his own consulate. But for weeks now he had been experiencing great difficulty in getting telegrams out to his Foreign Office back home. The service was intermittent and those telegrams that did get through were often intercepted by the Bolsheviks.
    Preston knew the city well; he had been in the Urals since 1903, as representative of a Leeds-based mining company prospecting there for platinum. He had married a Russian wife and in 1916, thanks to his fluent Russian and detailed local knowledge, had been asked to take on the role of British consul in Ekaterinburg. With the Urals and Western Siberia being completely isolated from the outside world, Preston had rapidlyfound himself left with ‘a kind of enforced carte blanche’ to deal with local affairs, often without instruction from the British government. Much more importantly, he had a specific brief to keep a close watch on the Urals platinum industry on behalf of the British War Office. His deputy, a Cornishman named Arthur Thomas, was also a skilled mining engineer, recruited from a British firm, Holman Brothers Limited, that had been mining platinum in the Urals. For either of them to act assertively now in support of the Romanovs, with a new and volatile Bolshevik government in control, was becoming an increasingly dangerous thing to do.
    During June, several of the Romanov entourage who had accompanied the children from Tobolsk had remained at Ekaterinburg station. Whilst living in a fourth-class railway carriage awaiting safe passage out of the city, they had taken to daily badgering Preston to do something to help the Imperial Family, as too had Prince Dolgorukov, in pencil-written notes smuggled out from his prison cell. The Tsarevich’s two tutors, Sidney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard, and lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie von Buxhoeveden (who had been refused permission to join the family at the Ipatiev House) had been particularly insistent, and had even made personal representations to the Ural Regional Soviet.