The Romanov Family’s Dog Survived Their Grim Fate And Wound Up Thousands Of Miles Away

Members of the imperial family were confirmed animal-lovers and by all accounts owned a veritable menagerie including cats, dogs, horses, and more exotically a pair of elephants. But after the Tsar and his family were sent into exile — effectively imprisoned in their own country — the host of animals was severely reduced. Just three dogs joined the family in the Western Siberian city of Tobolsk. 

The three dogs all belonged to one or other of the Tsar’s and Tsarina’s five children. Jimmy was a Cavalier King Charles spaniel belonging to Anastasia, the youngest of Nicolas’ four daughters. Tsarevich Alexei, Nicolas’ youngest child, only son and heir to the throne, kept his cocker spaniel Joy. Alexei was 12 when his father was forced to abdicate in 1917. 

The final pooch was a French bulldog called Ortipo which belonged to Tatiana, the middle child of the siblings. In her diary, Tatiana showed her evident affection for the miniature bulldog. “The dog is overly cute,” she wrote. Dmitri Malama, a Russian Army officer who met Tatiana while recovering from wounds, gave her the little bulldog in 1914. So the Tsar’s children had managed to hang on to three of their pets during the chaos and bloodshed of the 1917 revolution. 

Alexei’s pet Joy had his origins abroad — he was descended from a dog that had come to Russia from Britain. The Tsarevich suffered from hemophilia, a condition that means even a slight cut can result in death through unstoppable bleeding. As a result the youngster was not allowed to mix with his peers for fear of an accident that could prove fatal. So the company of Joy was all the more important to Alexei.

As well as the three dogs, there were two cats that were especially important to the Romanov children. One of those was a feline called Kot’ka, another pet that belonged to Alexei. The cat played a similar role to Joy’s, substituting for the human friends that Alexei was too delicate to entertain. Kot’ka’s claws were even removed to avoid any possibility it might scratch its master.

Kot’ka was also much-loved by Alexei’s sisters and they asked for another cat to add to the Romanov pet collection. A cat with orange fur duly arrived and it went by the name of Zubrovka. Unfortunately when the time came for the Romanovs to leave their royal palace and travel into exile, they weren’t able to take the cats with them. They played no further part in the Romanov story.

But how had it come to this? How did Nicholas II, the 18th Romanov Tsar, end up being forced from his throne? After all his venerable Romanov ancestors included the likes of Peter and Catherine, ruthless rulers who’d both merited the epithet “the Great.” But Nicholas, and his tsarina Alexandra, managed to make themselves so unpopular that their downfall became inevitable. 

Various events during Nicholas’ reign conspired to make many Russians harbor a hearty dislike for the Tsar and his wife. Nicholas came to power in 1894 on the death of his father Alexander III. His first real test as imperial Russian leader came in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. In military terms, this went disastrously awry for the Tsar and his army. 

The war ended with the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, negotiated under the guidance of the American president, Teddy Roosevelt. The terms of the treaty reflected the fact that Japan had come out on top in what had been a brutal territorial dispute. Russia was obliged to hand over control of the Korean Peninsula and to abandon the Chinese province of Manchuria to the Japanese.

Losing a war is always damaging to a ruler, particularly an absolute monarch like Nicholas II. The year saw more bad news for the Tsar when a workers’ demonstration demanding reform ended in a horrible massacre. As the demonstrators approached the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, troops opened fire on them, killing 130. In the aftermath, violent protests rocked the nation. 

Tsarina Alexandra did little to bolster her husband’s standing with the Russian people. Before she married the Tsar her title had been Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, a province of Germany. It seems her subjects weren’t too keen on her foreign ancestry, and she compounded this by being openly disdainful towards Russian culture. And then there was the scandal that surrounded her association with Rasputin.

Born into a poverty-stricken peasant family in Siberia, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a self-styled holy man of dubious morals. According to website Britannica, “His reputation for licentiousness earned him the surname Rasputin, Russian for ‘debauched one’.” But he became a persistent fixture in the Romanov household because Alexandra believed he had the power to alleviate Alexei’s hemophilia. This close relationship with the disreputable Rasputin further alienated Russians from the Tsarina. 

It was World War I which finally dislodged Nicholas from his throne. The war against Germany was going badly for the Russians and public opinion was turning against him. The Duma, the nearest thing Russia had to a democratic assembly, urged Nicholas to take a path of reform. But the Tsar was convinced that the only option for Russia was his absolute monarchy.

Something had to give and finally did in March 1917 when the Duma, with the support of the Russian Army, forced Nicholas to relinquish his throne. At that point, the deposed Tsar and his family were held in a suburb of St. Petersburg with the intention that they would be spirited away to safety in Britain. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, at the demand of revolutionary workers in St. Petersburg, the Romanovs were taken as captives to Tobolsk, a city in western Siberia. Their stay there was brief, and they were soon moved to what would be their final destination, Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Ironically, this new imprisonment was in a city named after Tsar Peter the Great’s wife, Yekaterina.

The Romanovs were now in the hands of the Bolsheviks who had seized control of Russia in October 1917. This marked a distinct worsening of their treatment. They were lodged in a merchant’s home in Yekaterinburg which was officially called the “House of Special Purpose of the Ural Soviet Committee.” It’s commonly known as the Ipatiev House, named after the man who had formerly owned it. The Romanov party consisted of the Tsar and Tsarina and their five children. 

The Romanovs were accompanied by three servants and the family physician, Dr. Yevgeny Botkin. Most of their days were spent confined in the house, although they were allowed to walk in the property’s gardens. Still with them at Yekaterinburg were those three dogs, the two spaniels Jimmy and Joy, and the French bulldog, Ortipo. They were exercised regularly in the grounds of the Romanov’s new residence. 

However much the human Romanovs might have been dismayed by their new surroundings, it seems that canine Romanovs were entirely happy. A diary entry from Anastasia reads, “Joy, Ortipo, and Jimmy are thriving. The first two had to be shooed away from the yard where they enjoy themselves in the garbage pit eating some rubbish.” The dogs, of course, were oblivious to the precarious position of their owners.

But the truth was that by the summer of 2018 deadly danger for the Romanovs was daily edging closer. Although the Bolsheviks had seized control of much of Russia, the counter-revolutionary forces known as the Whites were fighting back, successfully in some regions. The frontline of this bitter civil war between the Reds and the Whites was edging closer to Yekaterinburg.

Worried by the possibility of the Romanovs falling into the hands of the White Army, the Bolsheviks acted. Initially hostile towards their charges, the guards at the Ipatiev House had actually come to like and even respect the Romanovs. But now they were replaced by men from the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s feared secret police outfit. There would no longer be friendly relations between the Romanovs and their captors.

This secret police detachment was under the command of one Yakov Yurovsky, a Commissar of Justice with the Ural Regional Cheka. The Ural Soviet now wrote to the central authorities in Moscow recommending that the Tsar should be put to death. Moscow’s response was to leave the final decision to the Ural authorities. This was to seal the fate of the Romanovs and the others at the Ipatiev House.

The men on the ground in Ekaterinburg decided that the entire Romanov family and their attendants should be executed. Yurovsky was in charge of the gruesome operation. 

 In an account of events he composed in 1934 Yurovsky chillingly wrote, “I prepared 12 revolvers and designated who would shoot whom.” The scene was set for the massacre of the Romanovs, their three servants and the family doctor. 

The Romanovs and their entourage met their cruel fate in a basement room of the Ipatiev House in the dead of night on July 17, 1918. Two of their beloved dogs, Anastasia's Cavalier King Charles spaniel Jimmy and Tatiana’s French bulldog Ortipo, were also killed in the massacre. But that left Alexei's cocker spaniel, Joy. Somehow he escaped the carnage. 

This Joy was something of a celebrity in Russia. That was because Alexis was seldom separated from his faithful pet partly because, as we’ve seen, his delicate health meant that he was not allowed to play with other children. Because he was rarely apart from the dog, widely publicized photographs of the Tsarevich often showed him with Joy. But how on earth did the dog escape as its master met his grim end?

The exact circumstances of Joy’s miraculous escape from death remain murky. But one eyewitness account quoted on website The Siberian Times confirms that the dog did indeed survive. An Ipatiev House guard remembered that after the massacre, “Only the dog stood in the hallway near the door into the room where the royal family lived and waited to be let in these rooms. I remember thinking at the time: you’re waiting in vain.”

We hear more about what happened next to Joy in a 2004 article by Marion Wynn published in magazine Royalty Digest. “Joy, Alexis' spaniel, hid during the murder and, when the bodies were taken out of the cellar room, he ran out into the streets of Yekaterinburg. Later, Joy was found in the home of an Ipatiev House guard, Michael Letemin,” Wynn wrote.

At this point, the White Army had indeed seized Yekaterinburg as the Bolsheviks had feared. And Letemin, one of those who’d guarded the Romanovs before their execution, was arrested. Colonel Paul Pavlovich Rodzianko, then serving in the British Expeditionary Force in support of the Whites, now took Joy into his custody. By this stage the poor animal was completely blind. Whether this had happened before or after the deaths of the Romanovs is unclear.

Wynn described the moment that Colonel Rodzianko took charge of Alexei’s dog. “The spaniel came, wagging his tail uncertainly, stumbling a little, finally bumping his nose into Rodzianko’s leg,” Wynn wrote. “He was totally blind. He seemed to be always looking for his master, and this had made him so sad and dejected that he would scarcely touch his food even after he was lovingly cared for.”

Wynn’s account of Joy’s fate continues, telling us that the spaniel was taken to the British Military Mission in the city of Omsk, some 500 miles east of Yekaterinburg. At this stage, it’s fair to ask a simple question. How can we be sure that this dog was indeed Alexei’s cocker spaniel Joy? After all, dogs were certainly not chipped back then as many are today, so sure identification was far from straightforward.

But an encounter in Omsk provided strong evidence that this dog was indeed the Tsarevich’s pet. Baroness Buxhoeveden had been a lady-in-waiting to Tsarina Alexandra. She had gone to Yekaterinburg with the Romanovs, but had been released for reasons unknown. That meant the Baroness had often come into contact with Joy. And in Omsk, she was once again to meet Alexei’s dog.

Baroness Buxhoeveden recounted her reunion with Joy at a railroad station in her 1929 book Left Behind: Fourteen Months in Siberia December 1917-February 1919. “I went to see Joy, and he, evidently connecting me in his dog’s brain with his masters, imagined that my coming announced theirs. Never did I see an animal in such ecstasy.” This left the baroness in no doubt that the spaniel was certainly Joy.

Buxhoeveden’s account of her encounter with Joy continued. “When I called him he made one bound out of the carriage and tore down the platform towards me,” she wrote, “leaping in the air and running to me with his forepaws, walking upright like a circus dog. [White Army officer] General Dietrichs said that he had never given such a welcome to anyone before.”

But there’s a puzzle here. How did Joy, now totally blind, recognize the baroness? She had an explanation. “I attributed this solely to the fact that my clothes, which were the same that I had worn at Tobolsk, had still kept a familiar smell, for I had never specially petted him.” Dogs, and spaniels in particular, are well known for being able to “see” as much with their noses as with their eyes. 

Baroness Buxhoeveden speculated on the impact that the horrible events at the Ipatiev House might have had on Joy. “What had little Joy seen on that terrible night?” she wrote. “He had been with the Imperial Family to the last. Had he witnessed the tragedy? His brain had evidently kept the memory of a great shock, and his heart was broken.”

At last, in 1919 the British prime minister David Lloyd George decided it was time to withdraw British soldiers from the bitter Russian civil war. After another two years of cruel conflict, the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant in 1921, lords of all Russia. For Colonel Rodzianko, it was time to travel back to England. He took a passenger with him — Tsarevich Alexei’s cocker spaniel Joy.

Rodzianko published an autobiography in 1939, Tattered Banners. In it he wrote, “With heavy hearts we sailed away from Vladivostok. Joy, the little ill-named spaniel who had seen his master murdered that fateful night, traveled with me. I have never seen Russia again.” The colonel took the dog to his home, Sefton Lawn, which was near Windsor Castle, one of the British royal family's official residences.  

Describing Joy’s last years in England, Wynn wrote, “Joy seemed happy enough in his new home, but staring into his limpid brown eyes, Paul [Rodzianko] often wondered how much the dog could remember. He had been through such a traumatic time in Ekaterinburg, he was such a gentle and faithful friend to his young master. How could he forget such horrors?”

Joy passed away at Sefton Lawn and was buried in the garden there. In his autobiography Rodzianko wrote, “Every time I pass my garden at Windsor I think of the small dog’s tomb in the bushes with the ironical inscription ‘Here lies Joy.’ To me that little stone marks the end of an empire and a way of life.” Sad to tell, it seems the site of the grave is now a car park. 

So Joy was the sole survivor of the hideous massacre of the Romanovs, their attendants and their three dogs on that summer night in 1918. If things had turned out a little differently, the whole party might have escaped to England, as was the initial plan. But it was not to be. It’s perhaps of some comfort that Joy was able to live out his days in peace.