Helen Rappaport - Romanov's Last Days

Helen Rappaport thanks very much for talking to Artie now you focus on the last 13 days of the Romanovs lives in Yekaterinburg why did you choose that period well when I looked at the stories of the end of the dynasty I suddenly realized that we although he knew the broad span of Nicholas's reign and the overall story no one had looked at any great detail in those final few days it particularly in Yekaterinburg and the main reason for that was because until the collapse of communism there was no access to some of the important I witness testimonies by the guards and Yakov furoshiki who was in charge of the appositive house so we didn't have enough evidence to look at that really closely and when I did start looking at it closely I found it absolutely fascinating and gripping and it was a story I wanted to tell the city was in a terrible state of panic the Bolsheviks were basically taking everything they could out of the Ekaterinburg that was worth anything because it was the center of the mining industry so there's gold semi and precious minerals and they wanted to get that all out before the city fell so in terms of taking the imperial family there what do you think the Tsar for example must have felt when he knew they were going to Yekaterinburg Yekaterinburg had a large factory and industrial population a very heavily politicized workers who were very loyal Bolsheviks and the Tsar's heart sank when he was told that he was going to be taken there he said I would go anywhere butter Yekaterinburg because the people there are so against me once the family arrived in Yekaterinburg they lived in increasingly horrible circumstances they were actually told the minute they arrived you are now are entering a prison regime and there was a big difference between how things were in Tobolsk where they had a relative degree of freedom to move about to go to church to go outside to see people in the outside world the awful thing that happened when they arrived at Yekaterinburg they were immediately greeted by a place surrounded by an enormous stockade a wooden stockade was built right around the house the windows were painted white so the family once they're inside that house could not see the outside world they were denied newspapers they were denied letters and parcels no visitors so they were effectively cut off and what kind of family were they at that stage well they were incredibly close-knit family very devoted to each other and I think the thing that one of the fundamental things that held them so closely together was they had this very deep very profound Orthodox faith and they did take a rather fatalistic attitude to God's will and what would happen happen to to them also the girls in many ways were very immature for their age very unworldly they'd lived such a cocooned life at the Alexander Palace in outside San Petersburg once Alexei was born found to be haemophiliac everyone closed in to protect him to protect the family so in that way they managed to survive better I think than other families would because they were so so used to being only in each other's company but it wasn't just the family who were in the Apache of house was it they were also accompanied by some of their old retainers well the retainers were intensely loyal they volunteered to go with the ROM nos2 Yekaterinburg and it was very uncertain what was going to happen to them they might must have had some sense that it might all end horribly so they're intensely loyal particularly dr. Botkin who I think of all of them had a sense that this might end in something dreadful he was very pragmatic very realistic and one of the last letters he wrote from the house an unfinished letter said basically I don't expect to get out of here alive but what was interesting was that when the Romanovs first arrived as obviously an intensely hostile attitude to them from the guards mainly very young local factory workers who'd volunteered what they considered was an honor to guard in his bloodthirsty czar and his family and as time went on a strange thing happened some of these young guards began to develop a sympathy for the family especially the girls and especially Alexei who was very very sick but interestingly although they could empathize the children especially and came to like the girls actually and even thought the Tsar was a perfectly decent chap they never liked that Tsaritsa they always found her very arrogant and stuck-up and still demanding that people bow and scrape to her even in that situation but as time went on the guards began to fraternize a bit too much became a bit too friendly with the girls especially and that was when there was a massive clamp down and yuckle furoshiki was brought in and the whole thing changed and talked to me a bit more about yeah Komarovsky he is often portrayed as a sort of maniac all murderer but in fact you sort of bring out it a slightly more complex side to his personality well he was an absolutely ruthless cold-blooded pragmatic dedicated Bolshevik he was also a local checker man Shekhar was the precursor of what became the KGB the the Russian political secret service so he was there for a purpose he was sent in to enforce clamp down on the fraternization to really make the regime there a very strict prison regime and effectively to prepare for what was now an increasing venture ality was that they might have to kill the family because the white and the counter revolutionary forces were working their way east from bloody Vostok right in far the Far West of Russia working their way back to walk along the trans-siberian railway towards Ekaterinburg which was an a focal point on the railway line amongst the guards was there any feeling that they weren't going to go through with it yes absolutely and just before they came to kill the family Yurovsky was issuing orders about who was supposed to kill whom they were all given an individual target and some of the guards immediately said we will not kill the girls and the number of killers in the end was reduced because of that and in fact the ultimate solution was putting all in a room and and killing them all together but that turned into a bloodbath didn't it and you've spoken to a forensic expert tell me what you what his opinion of what happened was well what concerned me was the terrible inefficiency with which they murdered them I mean some some people think they were just lined up in a row bang bang bang you're dead it was not like that it was a dreadful ill-conceived ill executed murder you can't say it was an execution it was brutal because you know euros he didn't plan it he didn't check out whether these guys were good shots they didn't check the guns they had a mixture of some efficient guns Browning's and Colts and also old army-issue noggins which probably didn't work they didn't account the fact they were killing 11 people in a small dark basement room which rapidly became full of acrid smoke noise panic hysteria people screaming and running around it was an absolute catastrophe because they then had to brutally finish them off the only one of them the family really who had a quick death was actually Nikolas because the minute the the order came to fire they all want to take pop pot shot at the Tsar of course so they could say well I shot Nikolas so he died immediately but the others suffered horribly particularly the children and then the burial also were total total mismanaged from the son worst of it was that the man in charge of the detail to take the bodies out into the forest in a truck a very rattly old fiat truck arrived dead drunk and late with one shovel one shovel to bury heaven people it was it was just silly and the other thing was they hadn't properly checked out the site they chosen which was a mine working in the forest and when they got there they discovered first of all it was too shallow and secondly it was full of water and let's get thro 11 bodies down there they'd almost immediately be found by the local peasants so they had to go back the next morning all the bodies out and go and dump them somewhere else it was just dreadful now the the murder of third among a family is often attributed to a sort of Maverick branch of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks but you believe that the order can be traced directly to Lenin well Lenin was very careful to always cover his tracks and he he never ever took responsibility for anything as controversial as the murder of the Romanovs but he said categorically we must not have a living banner we must not have anyone surviving from the family around whom a counter-revolution could could gather and gain a you know gain gain power so the decision was made in Moscow during meetings with Dulles sha Qian a man from the Ekaterinburg Soviet he went back and forth quite a few times to Moscow now goddess sha Qian was very good friends with yuckles feel off who was Lenin's right-hand man said lava had worked as a Bolshevik agitator in Yekaterinburg he knew the city he knew the Bolsheviks there and I think fundamentally a tacit agreement was given by Lenin that when the time came and the judgment of when that time came was left to the cutter in BO Bolsheviks when they knew that the game was up and the city was going to fall to go in and kill them all and moving forward to the present day what would you say is the abiding legacy of the Ramona family to me the most interesting thing I found when I went to Russia when I went to patron burgesses incredible devoutness this sense of identification of the Romano's with orthodoxy and particularly with everything of Mother Russia of nationhood of a united country that everything that Russia lost under the depredations of 70 years of communism this is terrible nostalgia for the ramanatham of course Nicholas wasn't a good Tsar he was a terrible terribly incompetent in many respects but the de biding thing is this terrible sense of the murder of innocence and the Romanovs represent for ordinary Russians for believers a sense of nationhood an orthodoxy that they feel they've lost

Channel: Tsarevich Alexei

Views: 48,453

Rating: 4.8863635 out of 5

Keywords: romanov, helen, rappaport, last, days, interview

Id: jOGZp0VvFfQ

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2010