#eugene botkin

[roses-of-the-romanovs]

"I remember the disappointment of my eldest brother, Dimitry, after his first ball in his new capacity as Chamber Page. He had hoped so much to dance with the Grand Duchesses, but they had given no indication that they wanted to dance with him and he had not dared to invite them. And on the following morning Grand Duchess Olga said to my father:

"'I was waiting for Dimitry to invite me for a dance, but he didn’t; and he dances so well.'"

(Gleb Botkin, The Woman Who Rose Again)

[thestarik]

Maria and Tatiana with Dr. Botkin and Pavel Voronov on the Standart, 1910.

[otmaaromanovas]

hi! So I was just rewatching the movie Romanovs an Imperial Family and I noticed that at Tobolsk they (the guards) took pictures of the family (front and side profiles) and I was also just watching Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and I noticed that they also took pictures at Tobolsk. Did this happen in real life or is it just a myth? (If it’s a myth you can put it on the list for your series :)

Thank you!

Hi! Thank you so much for your question lovely! It made me dig a lot deeper into whether this was actually true and I am pleased to say that it isn't a myth, but something that actually happened. Here are some details!

Pierre Gilliard's diary mentions the family having to have identification photos taken. On 17 September 1917 he wrote that "ID cards with numbers, equipped with photographs" were taken of the family. According to Paul Gilbert, who runs the Nicholas II website and has a great article about this, Alix also wrote about this in her diary.

Pierre Gilliard also wrote about this in his memoir Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, Page 286:

In September Commissary Pankratof arrived at Tobolsk, having been sent by Kerensky. He was accompanied by his deputy, Nikolsky—like himself, an old political exile. Pankratof was quite a well-informed man, of gentle character, the typical enlightened fanatic. He made a good impression on the Czar and subsequently became attached to the children. But Nikolsky was a low type, whose conduct was most brutal. Narrow and stubborn, he applied his whole mind to the daily invention of fresh annoyances. Immediately after his arrival he demanded of Colonel Kobylinsky that we should be forced to have our photographs taken. When the latter objected that this was superfluous, since all the soldiers knew us—they were the same as had guarded us at Tsarskoie-Selo—he replied: " It was forced on us in the old days, now it's their turn." It had to be done, and henceforward we had to carry our identity cards with a photograph and identity number."

It's worth mentioning that all the staff that worked at the palace before the Revolution did indeed have to carry ID passes with photographs.

We have a brilliant example of what one of these passes in Tobolsk might have looked like in the form of passes for Botkin and Demidova, which are now Museum of the Family of Emperor Nicholas II in Tobolsk. I sadly couldn't find Demidova's, so have just attached Botkin's.

Captioned: 'Identity card (pass) E. S. Botkin for the right to enter the house number 1 (“Freedom House”) dated November 6, 1917.'

Which brings me on to a lady named Maria Mikhailovna Ussakovskaya. For clarification, I don't know if she was the person who took the photos for definite, but she was a prominent photographer in the area and could have been hired to take the photos. She did 100% have some connection to the Romanov family, as I'll explain later.

Maria was a photographer in Tobolsk, in fact she was the first woman photographer from the region that operated professionally, and she had her own salon. She even photographed Rasputin - you can see her surname embossed on the cabinet card here, reading Уссаковская

She photographed the family's entourage, too, as the staff were able to move freely about Tobolsk. Shown here are (left-right): Catherine 'Trina' Schneider, Count Ilya Tatishchev, Pierre Gilliard, Countess Anastasia 'Nastenka' Hendrikova, and Prince Vasily Dolgorukov. Note Maria's surname embossed again onto the card, showing it was taken and produced at her salon.

Invoices for the family show that the Romanovs had several payments sent to Ussakovskaya for postcards and "correcting negatives", so we know that there definitely was a relationship between the two parties. She took photos of the exterior of the house in Tobolsk, and postcards were sent by the Grand Duchesses showing the house, so they might have used her photos.

Letter sent from Maria to Nikolai Demenkov, her 'crush'

Which then begs the question of what happened to these ID photos...

Apparently, Maria Ussakovskaya's daughter Nina owned some photographic plates of the Romanov family. It's not explained whether these were casual photos taken of the family, or ID photos, but according to Paul Gilbert "in 1938... fearing arrest, [Nina] destroyed all the photographic plates".

Owning any Romanov or Tsarist related items, including photographs and postcards, was an arrestable offence. The rise of the gulags in the 1930s with the Stalinist regime probably prompted Nina to destroy what she owned.

Personally, I don't have much hope that any of the photos of the family will ever turn up. But there is always a small chance, I suppose :)

To conclude: yes, this happened, photos were definitely taken of the family for identification passes. Pierre Gilliard is a trustworthy source and the fact that it was written in his diary and also Alix's diary is pretty much concrete evidence. The existence of Maria Ussakovskaya and her association with the family also points towards this, alongside the bills and invoices sent to the family at Freedom House.

Maria with her husband, Ivan.

SOURCES:

The woman who photographed the Imperial Family in Tobolsk by Paul Gilbert

Thirteen Years at the Russian Court by Pierre Gilliard

[imperial-russia]

The Romanov martyrs (including doctor Botkin and nun Varvara) as depicted in one of the Orthodox churches

[tiny-librarian]

Yurovsky, in 1922, wrote “after checking again to see that all were dead, I ordered the men to start moving them.” The entire executions had taken fewer than ten minutes.

His finger caught the trigger, and, with a flash of smoke and a deafening noise, the first bullet smashed into Nicholas’s chest. “He reeled suddenly,” remembered Andrei Strekotin. In an instant his khaki tunic exploded in blood, as “all ten people firing” took direct aim at their former emperor. “I shot Nicholas,” Yurovsky later wrote, “and everyone else also shot him.” Kudrin, who opened fire the same instant as Yurovsky, squeezed off five rounds in rapid succession, each ripping into Nicholas, who, Strekotin remembered, “stood quivering as shot after shot pierced his body.” Three of these wounds, to the left side of his chest, were, in and of themselves, fatal, tearing through Nicholas’s rib cage, into the pericardial cavity, into his heart, and exiting out his back. With “wide, vacant eyes,” Alexei Kabanov recalled, “Nicholas lurched forward and toppled to the floor.”

***********

With the first shot, Trupp turned from the execution squad toward the northeastern corner of the room; two bullets, fired in rapid sucession, struck his left thigh, shattering his femur and breaking his leg. Unable to stand, Trupp crumpled to his knees; seeing him beneath the thick layer of smoke, one of the executioners in the first row took aim, firing a bullet into the right side of his head. Smashing through his skull, it killed him instantly.

***********

Kharitonov, standing against the northern wall, was hit with several bullets at once, the force so powerful, Yurovsky recalled, that he “sat down and died.”

***********

Drunk and consumed with his own lust for blood, Ermakoy turned from Nicholas to Alexandra, who, he recalled, stood “only six feet away.” He raised his Mauser as she turned her head away and began to cross herself; but before she could finish, as Andrei Strekotin recalled, he pulled the trigger. A bullet slammed into the left side of her skull, a spray of blood and brain tissue exploding from her right ear as the force drove her violently back, knocking her onto the floor.

***********

When Yurovsky entered the room, he saw Botkin, covered in blood, leaning on his right arm as he tried to raise himself from the floor. He stepped across the pile of blood spreading from the emperor’s body, held his Mauser close to Botkin’s head, and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through the doctor’s head, exiting out the lower right side of his skull, its force slamming his body against the floor in a shower of gore.

***********

Yurovsky fired the last bullets from his Mauser directly into the tsesarevich, who slowly slipped from his chair and crumpled to the floor. Paul Medvedev, who had staggered back into the room, saw Alexei on the floor, “moaning and alive.” Out of bullets, Yurovsky yelled to Ermakov, who turned back to the center of the room, pulling and eight-inch triangular bayonet from his belt as he stumbled over the growing pile of arms and legs. Crouched on the floor, he raised the knife; over and over, the glint of steel flashed in the dim electric light as he stabbed the supine boy, blood flying from the blade with each arc and seeping across the once-yellow floorboards. Yurovsky watched in horror as Alexei struggled against the powerful, wild Ermakov: “nothing seemed to work,” Yurovsky wrote. “Though injured, he continued to live.” None of the assassins knew that, beneath his tunic, the tsesarevich wore a shirt wrapped with jewels, which shielded his torso from both bullets and Ermakov’s bayonet. Finally, “unable to stand by,” Yurovsky pulled his second gun, a colt, from his belt, pushed Ermakov aside, and first two shots into the boy.

***********

Yurovsky, standing behind Tatiana, aimed his Colt and fired. The bullet tore into the rear of her head; it ripped through her skull instantly, blowing out the right side of her face in “a shower of blood and brains” that covered her screaming sister.

***********

In an instant, Ermakov, “wild-eyed and face splattered with blood,” moved forward. As Olga tried to rise, he violently kicked her back, sending her spinning toward the floor; at the same time he squeezed the trigger of his Nagant revolver. With a flash of smoke, the bullet caught her as she fell, just beneath her chin, breaking her jaw as it seared through her skull, lacerating her brain before smashing through the top of her forehead. In a second, she toppled across her sister, dead.

***********

Hearing their terrified screams, Ermakov turned from the lifeless body of their eldest sister, rounding on them with his blood-stained bayonet. Kabanov watched as he grabbed Marie, “stabbing her in the chest over and over again.” Yurovsky looked on in horror as Ermakov attacked her, but “the bayonet would not pierce her bodice.” She was, Yurovsky wrote, “finished off” with a shot to the head.

***********

Anastasia had backed into the corner next to the storeroom door. Ermakov turned on her, slashing frenziedly “through the air” as he approached. Drunk and crazed, he struck the pier, his bayonet slicing deeply into the plaster, before drawing back the blade and plunging it into Anastasia’s chest as she struggled to fend him off. In an increasing spiral of savagery, he swung his knife repeatedly, unable to penetrate her bodice. “Screaming and fighting,” Yurovsky wrote, she fell only after Ermakov put his gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

***********

Yurovsky and Ermakov had reached the open door to the corridor when, as Kudrin recalled, “something white moved in the corner.” It was Anna Demidova, who had fallen in a faint after being shot in the leg. ‘Thank God!“ she screamed. "God has saved me!” She tried to get to her feet, but Ermakov, bayonet held high, reached her, swinging out in delirium. “She grabbed it with her hands,” Kabanov remembered, “screaming and crying.” With her hands sliced to ribbons and unable to defend herself, finally she, too, fell still.

The Fate of the Romanovs - Greg King and Penny Wilson

[thestarik]

Tatiana and Olga with Pavel Voronov and Eugene Botkin on the Standart, 1910.

[roses-of-the-romanovs]

“I am making the last attempt to write a real letter,—at least from here,—although this caveat is completely redundant; I do not think that it is in the cards for me to ever write from anywhere else again,—my voluntary imprisonment here is limited to my existence on this earth. In actuality, I have died—dead to my children, my friends, my work. ... I have died, but have not been buried yet, or rather was buried alive … I left my children completely orphaned, in order to do my physician's duty to the end, like Abraham did not hesitate to sacrifice his only son to God on His demand. I strongly believe that the same way God saved Isaac, He will save my children too and be a father to them. … Job did bear more, and my late Misha always reminded me about him, when he was afraid that I, bereft of my dear little children, would not be able to bear it. No, apparently, I can bear it all, whatever God wills to burden me with.” —letter to his brother Alexander, written in Ekaterinburg, on 26 June (9 July), 1918. [Source: Maria Romanov: Third Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1908–1918]

[thestarik]

Olga and Tatiana sightseeing and shopping on the Isle of Wight. 1909