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

Day in, day out they would make their way to the British consulate and spend long hours discussing with Preston all and any possible ways of saving the Imperial Family. But eventually these three had been put on a train back to Tobolsk.
    Nevertheless, other Romanov loyalists, both covertly and overtly, had been congregating in the city, including Princess Helena of Serbia, wife of Prince Ioann Konstantinovich, who was now being held under arrest with the Tsaritsa’s sister at Alapaevsk. Helena had had the temerity to go up to the Ipatiev House and demand of the sentries who confronted her with rifles raised that she see the Tsar. Secretly she had hoped also to be able to pass on letters from their relatives that she had smuggled in with her. Her visit was of course refused by Avdeev, who was taken aback by such boldness, but the princess continued to make a nuisance of herself at the Cheka headquarters at the Amerikanskaya Hotel half a mile down the road from the Ipatiev House, on the corner of Pokrovsky Prospekt and Zlatoustovskaya Street. Finally, tiring of her persistent enquiries, the Cheka took her off to the local prison and two weeks later she was put on a train back to Petrograd.
    Princess Helena’s impetuous behaviour had made Preston’s delicate negotiations on behalf of the Romanovs doubly difficult, but nevertheless, under pressure on all sides, day after day the beleaguered British consul would walk up to the soviet offices at the railway station to makeenquiries on behalf of the entire consular corps. To do so meant running the gauntlet of men bristling with rifles, pistols and grenades. Ekaterinburg railway station was a far from inviting place to visit, he later recalled: ‘the stench was nauseating, the atmosphere charged with the odour of unwashed bodies, dirty boots and the foul-smelling
makhorka
[cheap Russian tobacco] they all smoked’. Outside, the station platforms were crowded with disconsolate, dirty, lice-ridden peasants waiting around with their bundles – hoping for a train, any train, to take them out of the city. Meanwhile, yards away from so much squalor, in the station’s first-class restaurant, newly created soviet officials wined and dined and played cards. It was, said Preston, ‘one of the first mockeries I saw of the so-called egalitarian society’.
    In his office at the station, Preston found Sergey Chutskaev, of the Ural Regional Soviet, a dirty, greasy man in a leather jacket, with baggy
sharovary
(sailor’s trousers) tucked into his top boots, lounging in an anteroom strewn with weapons. He told Chutskaev that he and his American and French colleagues had heard rumours that the Imperial Family were being badly treated and that their governments were becoming increasingly concerned for their welfare. As usual, he got the same unconvincing assurances from Chutskaev that the family were all in good health and in no danger. Preston knew he was being fed a lie – he had been getting the same phoney assurances for weeks – but nevertheless he dutifully telegraphed this news on to his government in the hope that some of his communiqués would get through. The Bolsheviks he knew were becoming increasingly hostile to his enquiries, and Chutskaev had threatened him with arrest for his meddlesome behaviour. In fact, he had even told Preston, in a moment of chilling flippancy, that he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not to shoot him. No wonder Preston was of the view that the members of the city’s new soviet operated like a gang of brigands: ‘a more awe-inspiring and cut-throat crowd would be hard to find’.
    The increasingly unstable situation in Ekaterinburg was plain to see everywhere; it clearly belied Chutskaev’s hollow assertions that the Romanovs were in no danger. From the moment the Bolsheviks, supported by politicised railway workers, had taken control in the Urals and seized the city the previous November, Ekaterinburg had been living under a regime that