After the incident with Yurovsky over the intercepted letters, almost overnight Mother’s hair turned white. She became weak and could hardly walk without leaning on someone’s arm. Even when prayer bolstered her spirit, her hands shook and her voice faded into a whisper. For one month she suffered untold agony, refusing to believe that we had been betrayed. Yet she said, “It is God’s Will.” In these words we could sense her craving for the Holy Communion which brought her the calmness of God’s spirit. Father would look at her and turn his face aside so that his falling tears would not be seen. It was his quiet way of bearing himself that carried along the rest of us. He dropped his head, but not for long. Once more he would hold himself erect, determined to look beyond these cruel conditions to the time when Russia would once more believe in him and repent. For each other’s sake we tried again and went through each day with renewed faith in God and hope for the morrow.

Here we never went out to Church. The priest came to us only twice. Whatever services we had, we held them ourselves. Mother read aloud from the Bible; the rest of us chanted the prayers. We had our own service every day. The comfort of the homemade service lifted us all and gave us satisfaction. Morning, noon and evening we refreshed our faith in God. Religion was our nourishment, especially to Mother. There is no book as precious as the Bible and nothing will ever be able to take its place. It is the Word of God and will never die. Even the hovering guards listened in quiet, their heads bowed. We were astonished.

At last the hard shell of the guards began to crack and out of the cracks oozed a crude shame. In their rough way they tried to atone for their treatment of us. They extended pity when all we wanted was to be left alone. They even gave us some of that by lessening their intrusion into our privacy. Mother called it victory—an answer to our prayers. But when it was discovered that they were becoming lenient, they were, much to our sorrow, promptly removed. The last part of June or the beginning of July they were replaced by the toughest, lowest crew imaginable. These men were beasts. We tried submissiveness, courtesy, but to no avail. When they saw the comfort we derived from our daily services they took away our Bible. But they could not take away our faith. Mother said, “This is another test. Is there not enough of Christ in us to do without the Bible?” But Mother was more shaken than I had ever seen her as she said this. Father looked at the guards and accepted the humiliation.

The men were so unshakeable and cruel. Now we no longer saw or heard them. Their inhuman treatment had built a wall around us, a wall of fear, hard and dark on the outside, soft and mystical inside. We became a world apart, detached from mundane things. Our bodies touched the ground, but our souls were far above in God’s world. Each day of persecution lifted us higher. We were helping Christ to carry His burden. We were marked to suffer, for Russia.

In our last days our privacy was so uncertain we never wholly undressed. The men were there with a repulsive curiosity. Instinctively we drew our skirts aside as one draws away from vermin. The new guards were not Russian at all. We heard every kind of language: Polish, Latvian, Hungarian, German and Yiddish. In the dining room, carelessly thrown on the table, we saw German newspapers which we did not touch. The guards were ready for any trouble, their expressions were filled with accusations.

Yurovsky took a fiendish delight in drawing the family into conversation. The evil in his soul came through, to scar his face. We wanted to hold ourselves aloof but we did not wish to anger him. His mouth was always full of saliva and every time he spoke we feared it would fly out at us. Yurovsky, Sverdlov, Goloshchekin and Medvediev with four Letts and Hungarians searched the entire house. They pulled out all our suitcases, books and pictures and examined every nook and corner, and by the time they were through searching, the house was in complete disorder.

Father read a great deal in order to get his mind off the humiliating surroundings. He wondered if we could memorize such and such a passage, hoping thereby to relieve our nervous tension. He still believed that the fate of our family and Russia was in God’s hands. His belief was a great comfort to us, and helped to carry us through the dark nights. At length our Bible was returned to us.

Yurovsky came into our quarters one day with a cigarette in his mouth. As he stood in front of us, he pulled out a match from his pocket, struck it on the sole of his shoe and lighted the cigarette. It was not hard to recognize it as one of Father’s gold-tipped, Russian double-eagle cigarettes. These cigarettes were made especially for Father by Benson and Hedges with his name on them, but Father had not used many of these during the war. Yurovsky wanted Father to see him smoke this long, slender aristocrat of cigarettes, hoping to hurt his feelings. When he finished smoking he left the gold-tipped butt on the ashtray for us to see. We girls also noticed he wore some of Father’s clothes, probably taken from the trunks in the attic. His appearance was always untidy, no matter what he wore, and his shirt was always open at the neck. From his bushy, black eyebrows he looked out sideways, never straight into one’s eyes.

To our horror we were not allowed to lock our bathroom door, so we went in pairs to wash, one of us always stood near the door for fear that someone might walk in. Near the bathroom there was a stairway leading downstairs, at the head of which there stood a guard, all eyes. One day while Marie and I were crossing the hall, I noticed something shining on the floor and picked it up. It was a key with the inscription, “Made in U.S.A.” We wondered if there were an American in the house, perhaps for the purpose of saving us. Mother thought she had heard some one talking in English, but she was not sure.

Yurovsky was an assumed name. He and many others had changed their names so as to attribute their crimes to the Russian people. There is no doubt that many Russians were involved in crime but when the character of the revolution was revealed and much Russian blood had been spilled, then it was too late for those who supported the revolutionists to repent. The revolution was a foreign importation of Lenin and Trotsky—it destroyed the soul of Russia. They attacked the churches and smeared the altars with human blood, those altars that had stood there since Byzantine times. This beautiful religion, “The Eastern Church”, our forefathers had adopted while persecution of the Christians was still practiced.

Many of those of varying backgrounds who took a leading part in the revolutionary movement in Russia were poisoned by German propaganda. Germany, I have heard, spent many tens of millions of dollars of Russian money to promote the Revolution; this money was made available to them for the care of the Russian prisoners of war. Instead they used the money to overthrow Imperial Russia, while our warriors were starving in dirty barracks.

Father was accused of being instrumental in the Jewish pogrom in the Ukraine. The fact is Father did not know about it at all until one of the Grand Dukes, while on his way to the Crimea, heard of it and telephoned Father. Immediately the Preobrazhensky regiment was dispatched by special train, and other military forces and police were sent from Bendery to quell these riots. Jews were not the only casualties of these disturbances. Other nationalities such as Bulgarians were taken for Jews, and some were killed. The pogrom was touched off by the following incident. A small boy was seized allegedly by Jews. A Jewish sect at that time, in its ritual, believed in sacrificing a Christian and taking his blood. For this purpose they took the boy who was without stain. The veins on the boy’s body were cut in many places from which blood was taken. From this torture he died. When the boy was not found someone reported hearing a scream. A storekeeper placed the boy into a nail barrel and carted it away to a field. There he was found dead with bloody nails imbedded in his body. The barrel was traced to the storekeeper. The discovery of the crime marked the start of the pogrom. This incident was told to us children by our friend Dr. Vatrik, the famous surgeon who came occasionally to the palace to care for Alexei during his illness. According to another account the boy was not seized by Jews, but by one of his relatives.

The Imperial family never hated the Jews. Jews were received in all military hospitals with the same care as any other men during the war. Many Jews fought heroically for Russia and died on the battlefield. But many did everything possible to escape being taken into the army, by crossing the border to the Austrian and German side, where they were placed over Russian prisoners of war and caused them untold suffering. Father did more for the Jews than any Emperor before him. My parents always advocated the principle of freedom of religion.

Count Benckendorff and several others connected closely with my family from the time of Grandfather’s reign were Roman Catholics.

A new commissar arrived from Moscow, and Father was questioned several times in the next few days. The Commissar hinted at the possibility of freedom to leave the country, if Father would consider signing certain documents. Father vehemently rejected having anything to do with Moscow. He made it clear that he had nothing more to say.

Father once asked us, after he returned from one of these talks, if we children would accept freedom in Germany or stay and suffer. We all agreed to stay in our country. He seemed pleased at this mutual feeling. Soon afterwards new guards arrived and our situation became worse, almost unbearable. These heartless men made us understand that their duty was to cause us every kind of humiliation and deprivation.

One afternoon Voykov came and demanded to see our jewels. They searched the house many times. Finally he picked Mother’s engagement ring—a large ruby of a beautiful color, actually a red diamond, probably the only one of its kind in the world. When Father was about eighteen years old, various jewelers in St. Petersburg began to search for rare stones. Bolin, the well-known jeweler, found this diamond and Father purchased it from him to be made into an engagement ring for his future bride. Voykov took this ring as a souvenir, he said, and wore it on his little finger. Father could do nothing but forget the loss. Voykov was still wearing the ring when we saw him again a few days before the tragedy.

On another day, this man again came into our living room without warning and began a long discourse about Ulianov (Lenin) and Pilsudski. He claimed that these two would soon be regarded as the world’s greatest men. Father made no reply but picked up a book and began to read. When Voykov continued his assertions, Father agreed with him saying that no doubt what he said was true.