'Joy' the English Cocker Spaniel

 

Joy, the last dog of the Romanovs

King George V of Britain did help some of the Romanovs to escape from Russia but he refused asylum to the Tsar and his family. He thought it could be politically damaging to the House of Windsor if they came to stay in Britain. The Tsar wasn't popular and he was married to a German. He sent HMS Marlborough to evacuate his aunt, Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna, the mother of Tsar Nicholas, from the Crimea in April 1919. She left the Crimea with 17 other Romanovs including her daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia and five of Xenia's sons as well as six dogs and a canary.

What happened in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, must have been terrible for the victims. They say the Tsar died instantly shot in the head. Many of the others were shot and bayonetted. The Bolshevik assassination squad didn't only murder the Tsar and his family, they also killed their domestic servants. The court physician, Eugene Botkin, was killed along with their chambermaid Anna Demidova, their cook, Ivan Kharitonov and their footman, Alexei Trupp. The only thing the Bolsheviks spared, was the family's English Cocker Spaniel, called Joy.

The assassination squad was led by the Jewish Chekist (secret policeman), called Yakov Yurovsky. They say that a revolution devours its own. Yurovsky is said to have died, in great pain, following health problems arising from a duodenal or peptic ulcer. He'd been hospitalised and unexpectedly transferred to the Kremlin Hospital, which was off limits to most Soviet citizens. It has been claimed by the Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky, that Yurovsky was poisoned by the NKVD shortly before his death in August 1938. It has also been alleged that he was denied adequate medical treatment. That same year, Yurovsky's daughter Rimma, was arrested for being a Trotskyist and deported to the gulag. Her arrest also had a severe impact on his health. His death and the arrest of his daughter, occurred during what is called Stalin's Great purge, which also saw many of Yurovsky's Ural comrades being arrested and executed. In 1952, Yurovsky's son, Alexander, who was a Real Admiral in the Soviet Navy was also arrested, but was released a year after Joseph Stalin's death.

The deaths of the Romanov family must have weighed heavily on the conscience of King George V and he must have felt a certain amount of guilt. As cousins they were very close and looked almost like identical twins. The Tsar's mother, Maria Feodorovna, the sister of Queen Alexandra, could never accept that her son and his wife and her grandchildren, had died in the Ipatiev House. It was something that she could never come to terms with. 

Joy, the cocker spaniel, was adopted by Colonel Pavel Rodzianko, who moved to England after the defeat of the White Army. He took the dog with him and went to live in Windsor. The dog died in the 1920s and was buried in his garden. 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."

The site of the grave has now become a parking lot.