THE ROMANOFF TRAGEDY

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28104, 20 October 1956, Page 3

THE ROMANOFF TRAGEDY

STORY OF A BRITISH RESCUE MISSION

Close of a Dynasty. By Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Pridham, K.8.E., C.B. Wingate. 176 pp.

After the Czar of Russia, the Czarina and their five children had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, at the close of the 1914-18 war, the battleship H.M.S. Marlborough was sent to Crimea to rescue surviving members of the Romanoff family: the Czar’s mother (the Empress Marie Feodorovna, who was Queen Alexandra’s sister), the Czar’s sister (the Grand Duchess Xenia who, incidentally, writes with an aged pen a brief yet gracious and poignant foreword to this book), and a number of Grand Dukes, Duchesses, Princes and Princesses together with their children governesses, servants and luggage. As the ship's first lieutenant, the author of this book was personally responsible for the billetting arrangements and the comfort of these pathetic few who had managed to escape from the advancing Red Army, and as the ship made its way back to Malta he came to know each of the passengers intimately. At the time he kept a diary, and now after 37 years he has published this revealing and intensely moving story—one eminently worth publishing and one which throws light on the character of many members of the Romanoff family.

Early in the book the author outlines the eruption and course of the Russian Revolution and so enables the reader to link the main narratives with the circumstances leading up to it. Then follows his personal account of the. journey to Yalta and of the mission of mercy to rescue those who were to leave Russia for the last time in such tragic circumstances. At Yalta he describes how he watched the shackled corpses of the murdered officers of the Imperial Russian Navy bob grimly to the surface of the sea about his ship. Nearby lay the mutinous vessels of the French Fleet, their crews clamouring to return to France. The account of the last occasion on which the Russian Imperial Anthem was rendered to a member of the Imperial family within Russian territory is graphic.

Shortly before the evacuation from Yalta was completed, a British sloop embarked about 400 of the Imperial Guard, mostly officers, who had collected at Yalta.’ for transport to Sevastopol. On sailing, the sloop steamed slowly round the Marlborough to allow those on board to salute the Empress Marie and obtain a last sight of her. Gathered on our quarter-deck were a number of our distinguished passengers, including the Empress and the Grand Duke Nicholas. The Empress, a little lone figure, stood sadly and apart from the others near the ensign staff, flying of course the White Ensign, while the voices of the Imperial Guard singing the Russian Imperial Anthem. drifted across the water to her in last salute. None other than that beautiful old tune, rendered in such a manner, could have so poignantly reflected the sadness of that moment. The memory of those deep Russian voices, unaccompanied but in perfect harmony, has surely never faded from the minds of those who were privileged to witness this touching scene. Until long after the sloop had passed there was silence. No-one approached the Empress, while she remained standing, gazing sadly after those who. leaving her to pass into exile, were bound for what seemed likely to be a forlorn mission. Few indeed survived the next period of fighting outside Sevastopol.

Two days after the refugees had left the ship at Malta, H.M.S. Marlborough was on her way back via Constantinople to Sevastopol. Here despite lack of help from the French, the ship was able to give a little assistance to the White Army in opposing the Bolshevik advance, and the concluding chapters of the book, include a concise account of the last phases of the civil war during 1919. A complete chapter is devoted to details of the captivity and massacre of the Imperial family and their servants, and authentic pictures are given of such leaders as Lenin, Zinoviev, Kerensky, Radek and Krylenko. Under Lenin the actual person responsible for the extermination of the Romanoffs was Yankel (Jacob) Sverdlov, “the Red Czar,” a Jew who had returned to Russia from Switzerland with Lenin in 1917. Says the author:

It is worth noting that the representative of the Soviet Navy present at Her Majesty's Coronation Naval Review at Spithead in July, 1953, was the cruiser Sverdlov, a ship -named after the infamous assassin; but one does not credit the Kremlin of these days with any understanding of good manners. Sverdlov died in Moscow early in 1919 as the result of being beaten up by workmen of the Morosov Mills during a revolt against the Soviet Government. He was avenged by the Cheka (secret police), who slaughtered hundreds of innocent persons in memory of Jacob Sverdlov.

A few months before H.M.S. Marlborough was ordered to the Black Sea, Francis Pridham had witnessed from the foretop the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet. In the introduction to this book he describes unforgettably the stirring spectacle of 14 German capital ships, seven cruisers and 50 destroyers appearing out of the grey North Sea mist and being led into captivity by one small British cruiser, H.M.S. Cardiff, to surrender to Sir David Beatty, aboard H.M.S. Revenge. On this occasion Sir David Beatty made an astonishing speech to the ship's companies of the First Battle Squadron into whose hands was commended the custody of the German Navy. In spite of the Admiral's orders that no notes were to be taken. Pridham came by the text of that remarkable oration and this he reproduces in full. Its blood-thirsty tone may shock some, but German atrocities had outraged the feeling of the British seamen and the speech was made after long years of terrible casualties and grim anxiety. Says Francis Pridham:

Nevertheless, the present generation with bitter experiences in World War 11, the fiercest sea-war in history, may be excused for raising an eyebrow on reading that Sir David described the Germans’ methods of conducting sea warfare as a “nightmare.” Twenty-one years later we were to learn that the methods of the 1914-18 War were chivalrous by comparison with those employed by the same enemy in the Second World War. The reader of this book is assisted with two useful maps and several photographs. The story of the protracted agony of Russia's early tribulations under the Bolsheviks has been more impartially and more fully told in Prince Felix Youssoupoff's "Lost Splendour,” in Robert Wilton's “The Last Days of the Romanoffs,” W. H. Chamberlain’s “The Russian Revolution” and in Winston Churchill’s “The World Crisis.” Nevertheless the matter contained in this interesting book, especially in the nine authoritative appendices, is extremely valuable. Apart from the human interest of its main theme, this is a valuable footnote to history.