The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Having witnessed her son’s recovery at first hand the tsaritsa wanted desperately to believe in this holy man’s unexplained gifts, for here at last was a lifeline when all conventional medicine had failed. Rasputin made no inflated claims to her about his healing powers and why they were effective; nor was he paid for his services (he once complained to Lili Dehn that he ‘was never even given his cab-fares’; though often lavish gifts from Nicholas and Alexandra, including tunics hand-embroidered by her, were from time to time sent to him).22 For Rasputin, healing was a simple matter of unquestioning faith and the power of prayer. And those two great weapons in the Christian armoury – faith and prayer – were fundamental to Alexandra’s credo. She called him Grigory – ‘Our Friend’ – seeing in him not just the saviour of her son, but something bigger – a holy man and seer. She responded warmly to his Christian wisdom and the simplicity of his message: ‘Man must live to praise God … asking for nothing, giving all.’23 Here was an ordinary man of the people, a true muzhik, a valuable conduit between herself and Nicholas – as batyushka and matyushka (little father and little mother) – and the Russian people.24 At a time when they saw danger all around, Nicholas and Alexandra at last felt they had met someone they could truly trust.

  They had no illusions, however, about Rasputin’s libidinous personality. Unbridled gossip about him was raging in the city and investing their hopes in him might provoke scandal. With this in mind Alexandra enlisted Nikolay Sablin, one of her and Nicholas’s most trusted friends, and one who was particularly close to the children, to visit Rasputin in St Petersburg to find out more. Sablin knew nothing of Rasputin but went to see him, having been told by the empress that he was ‘very pious and wise, a true Russian peasant’.25 He was repelled by Rasputin’s appearance and found his manner unnerving. But he spoke very animatedly to Sablin about the imperial family, religion and God and like everyone else Sablin admitted there was something compelling about Rasputin’s pale, deep-set eyes. He sensed that Rasputin was eager to ingratiate him-self with the imperial family – for he had certainly already been bragging about his illustrious connections. Sablin suggested that he should never request audiences with the tsar, in response to which Rasputin had grumbled: ‘When they need me to pray for the tsarevich they call me, and when they don’t – they don’t!’26

  After several meetings with him Sablin had no option but to admit to the tsaritsa that he had come away with a negative impression. Alexandra refused to accept his view: ‘You cannot understand him because you are so far removed from such people,’ she had replied stubbornly, ‘but even if your opinion was correct, then it is God’s will that it is such.’27 As far as she was concerned, God had willed that they should meet Grigory, just as God had willed it that everyone else should despise and revile him. This was the cross that Grigory had to bear; just as Alexey’s affliction was her own for having transmitted haemophilia to him. In befriending Grigory the outcast she truly believed that in his godliness he would rise above the slander; and, more importantly, he would keep her precious boy alive.

  Sydney Gibbes later recorded his impressions of Rasputin. Not long after taking up his post with the imperial family, he had been invited to go and meet Rasputin in St Petersburg. The children heard of this and the next day came bursting into the schoolroom. ‘What did you think of our friend?’ they asked. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Gibbes noticed Rasputin was always on his best behaviour with the tsar and tsaritsa and that ‘his table-manners, which were much complained of by his critics, were those of a decent peasant’. He was never aware of Rasputin exerting any influence at court, though conceded that he had an instinctive ‘naïve cunning’. But there was no doubting Rasputin’s ‘extraordinary powers over the little boy’s bleeding attacks’; Rasputin could always cure them, he recalled, and once did so ‘by speaking to the boy over the telephone’.28

  In March 1908 Alexey had another fall, this time hitting his forehead. The swelling was so bad that he could hardly open his eyes. But on this occasion Rasputin was not called in, for he was back at his home in Pokrovskoe in western Siberia (where he had a wife, Praskovya, and three children), under investigation by the Church. His enemies had accused him of spreading false doctrine as the leader of a dissident and disreputable sect known as the Khlysty, notorious for the use of self-flagellation in religious rites.29

  It was three weeks before Nicholas was relieved to write and tell his mother that Alexey was recovering and that ‘the swelling and bruising have disappeared without trace. He is well and happy, just like his sisters.’30 Whether this was in any way the result of intervention, by telegram or over the telephone, by Rasputin is unknown. Two months later Alexey was still unwell when members of the wider imperial family gathered at Tsarskoe Selo for the wedding of the girls’ childhood playmate, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. After the day’s ceremonials, which she steeled herself to sit through despite her anxieties for her son, and looking beautiful but extremely strained, Alexandra went up to Alexey’s bedroom. The nurse told her his temperature had finally fallen at 8 p.m. There was a telegram waiting for her – from Grigory in Pokrovskoe – which, when she opened it, assured her that all would be well and that ‘he would say a special prayer at eight that very evening’.31 Coincidence or not, such manifestations of the power of Grigory’s prayers for her boy were for the tsaritsa incontrovertible proof that he alone could save him from death – even at a distance. How could she not but invest all her desperate hopes in him? Wouldn’t any other mother have done the same?

  Many of Nicholas and Alexandra’s European relatives who came to Russia for the wedding, and knew nothing of Alexey’s haemophilia, commented on how isolated the family had become by 1908 – ‘shut away from the rest of the world’, as Crown Princess Marie of Romania observed. The ‘happy family life’ that Nicholas and Alexandra clearly fostered was all very laudable in her view, but ‘their exclusiveness was little conducive towards that fine, loyal unity which had always been traditional in the Russian Imperial Family during the two former reigns and which had constituted its great power’.32 Marie felt the two of them were ‘too self-centered, too exclusively interested in their own children’; in so doing they neglected their European relatives, and this had led to their alienation from them. Brief state visits with the children in the Shtandart in the summers of 1907 and 1908 to Reval* in the Baltic – for a meeting between Nicholas, Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm – and to the King and Queen of Sweden at Stockholm had done nothing to change the general consensus. In the meantime, rumours continued to circulate about the tsarevich’s ill health, with whisperings that he suffered from ‘convulsions’, and from a ‘certain form of infantile tuberculosis which gives rise to acute alarm’; another source suggested ‘one of the layers of his skin was missing’, which predisposed him to constant haemorrhage.33 But nobody as yet had publicly uttered the dreaded word – haemophilia.

  Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Alexey’s condition little record survives of the various attacks he suffered over the next four years or how often Rasputin visited Tsarskoe Selo or treated him from a distance, but just before Christmas 1908, in Rasputin’s continuing absence at Pokrovskoe, Dr Feodorov was summoned urgently from Moscow to attend the child.34 Anxiety within the family was further compounded that winter when Alexandra’s own health took a turn for the worst and she was laid up for eight weeks. ‘It is too sad and painful to see [Alix] always ailing and incapable of taking part in anything’, Maria Feodorovna wrote to Nicholas. ‘You have enough worries in life as it is – without having the ordeal added to it of seeing the person you love most in the world suffer.’35

  Alexandra’s daughters too were increasingly feeling the separation from their mother through her constant illness and had taken to sending her plaintive little notes. ‘So sorry that never see you alone Mama dear’, wrote Olga on 4 December,

  can not talk so should trie to write to you what could course better say, but what is to be do
ne if there is no time, and neighter can I hear the dear words which sweet Mama could tell me. Good-bye. God bless you. Kisses from your very own devoted daughter.†36

  Tatiana took it particularly hard: ‘I hope you wont be today very tied’, she wrote on 17 January 1909,

  and that you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfuy sorry when you are tied and when you cant get up.… Perhaps I have lots of folts but please forgive me … I try to listen what Mary [Mariya Vishnyakova] says now as much as I kan.… Sleep well and I hope that you wont be tied. Your loving daughter Tatiana. I will pray for you in church.37

  Alexandra responded from her sickroom with motherly exhortations: ‘Try to be as good as you can and not cause me worries, then I will be content,’ she told Tatiana, ‘I really can’t come upstairs and check how things are with lessons, how you are behaving and speaking.’38

  In most cases, though, the onus was on Olga to set an example. ‘Remember above all to always be a good example to the little ones,’ Alexandra told her in the new year, ‘then our Friend will be contented with you.’39 Alexandra’s advice that Olga be kind and considerate extended to the servants as well, especially Mariya Vishnyakova, who of late had been getting cross with her: ‘Listen to her, be obedient and always kind … you must always be good with her and also S. I. [Sofya Ivanovna Tyutcheva]. You are big enough to understand what I mean.’40 It was advice that Olga responded to gratefully: ‘Mama dear it helps me very much when you write to me what to do, and then I try to do it is better as I can.’ The motherly exhortations followed thick and fast: ‘Try to have a serious word with Tatiana and Maria about how they should conduct themselves towards God.’ ‘Did you read my letter of the 1st? It will help when you speak to them. You must have a positive influence over them.’41 It is clear that Olga felt frustrated that she and her mother never had ‘time to talk things over properly’. ‘We will soon,’ Alexandra reassured her, ‘but right now I’m just too tired.’42 She was, however, concerned that Olga found it hard to contain her patience with her younger siblings: ‘I know that this is especially difficult for you because you feel things very deeply and you have a hot temper,’ Alexandra told her, ‘but you must learn to control your tongue.’43

  By now, the children had come to enjoy visits from their ‘friend’ Grigory as a welcome diversion from their mother’s sickbed. He played with them and let them ride round the room on his back; he told them Russian folk tales and talked to them about God in a way that seemed entirely natural. He was clearly playing a key role as the girls’ moral guardian and kept in regular touch with them, sending telegrams such as one received in February in which he thanked them for remembering him, ‘for your sweet words, for your pure heart and your love for the people of God. Love the whole of God’s nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth.’44 On 29 March 1909 he arrived unexpectedly on a visit, which delighted all the children. ‘I’m glad you had him so long to yourselves’, Alexandra told Olga from her sickbed.45 In June, at Peterhof, young Olga sent a note to her father, who was away on a visit to the King of Sweden: ‘My dear kind Papa. Today the weather is lovely, it’s very warm. The little ones [Anastasia and Alexey] are running around barefoot. Grigoriy is coming to see us this evening. We are all so very happy that we will see him again.’46

  Despite her misgivings about the man himself, Olga Alexandrovna always refuted any suggestion of impropriety by Rasputin towards her nieces: ‘I know what their upbringing was down to the tiniest detail. The least sign of what is known as “freshness” on Rasputin’s part would have dumbfounded them! None of it ever happened. The girls were always glad to see him because they knew how greatly he helped their little brother.’47 Nevertheless, Alexandra continued to worry about the derogatory gossip in circulation about Rasputin. Although the charge of heresy had been abandoned as unproven, other accusations had followed and Stolypin (unmoved by Rasputin’s bedside manner in 1906) now had him under police investigation.48 St Petersburg was rife with talk of Rasputin’s disreputable drunken behaviour, his sexual exploits and the dubious company he kept. Even the faith of his erstwhile supporters Militza and Stana had waned, particularly now that Anna Vyrubova – whom they despised – had gained privileged access to him, supplanting them as the link between Rasputin and the throne. The Montenegrin sisters began actively trying to dissuade Nicholas and Alexandra from having any further dealings with Rasputin, whom they now looked upon as a ‘devil’. As a result, the close relationship they had until now enjoyed with the imperial family disintegrated. The imperial couple refused to be influenced by the gossip and doggedly clung to their own perception of Grigory as a true friend, despite his obvious faults – to which they were far from oblivious. The true reason for their friendship and their increasing dependency – Alexey’s haemophilia – ‘was kept a strict secret and it bound the participants still closer to one another, separating them still further from the rest of the world’.49

  By the end of 1909 Alexandra was seeking regular spiritual advice from Grigory and meeting him at Anna Vyrubova’s house. Such was her trust in him that she was making unguarded and potentially compromising remarks in letters to him such as ‘I wish only one thing: to fall asleep, fall asleep for ages on your shoulders, in your embrace’, a comment which would later be seized on by her enemies and used against her.50 The girls too were writing regular notes, thanking Grigory for his help, eager to see him again and asking his advice. Now at a highly impressionable age, Olga, in her isolation from other more suitable mentors, looked upon her friend almost as a father confessor. She wrote in November 1909 saying how much she had missed seeing him, for she had been confiding in him about a teenage crush and was finding it hard to control her feelings as Grigory had advised her. She wrote again in December once more asking what she should do:

  My precious friend! We often remember you, how you visited us and talked to us about God. It’s hard without you: I have no one to turn to about my worries, and there are so very many of them. Here is my torment. Nikolay is driving me crazy. I only have to go to the Sophia Cathedral* and I see him and could climb the wall, my whole body shakes … I love him … I want to fling myself at him. You advised me to be cautious. But how can I be when I cannot control myself … We often go to Anna’s. Every time I wonder whether I might meet you there, my precious friend; oh if only I could see you there again soon and ask your advice about Nikolay. Pray for me and bless me. I kiss your hands. Your loving Olga.51

  Olga’s three sisters were all writing to Grigory in an equally trusting manner. Tatiana had sent a letter in March that year, asking him how long it would be before he returned from Pokrovskoe and wishing that they could all visit him there. ‘When will that time come?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Without you it is boring, so boring.’ Tatiana’s words were echoed by Maria, who told him she was pining in his absence and finding life so dull without his visits and his kind words: ‘As soon as I wake up in the morning I take the Gospel you gave me from under my pillow and kiss it … then I feel as though I am kissing you.’ Even the normally subversive Anastasia was demanding when she would see Grigory again:

  I love it when you talk to us about God … I often dream about you. Do you dream about me? When are you coming?… Come soon, and then I will try to be good, like you have told me. If you were always around us then I would be good all the time.52

  Such was the solitary existence of the four Romanov sisters that, by 1909, apart from each other’s company and occasional contact with other royal cousins, they were largely reliant on the friendship of adults: their Aunt Olga, a few close officers, servants and ladies-in-waiting – and a forty-year-old reprobate and religious maverick whose continuing influence over their family life was already sowing the seeds of their ultimate destruction.

  Chapter Eight

  ROYAL COUSINS

  In the late summer of 1909 the Romanov sisters at last found themselves with something exciting to look forward to – a visit to their royal cousins in England. It
would be their first proper official trip abroad, apart from private family visits to Uncle Ernie at Darmstadt and Wolfsgarten. Crossing the North Sea, the Shtandart encountered strong winds from the south and the water was very choppy. All the children were seasick, and many of the entourage too.1 The crew made up an area of plaids and pillows for the children to sleep on where the rocking of the ship was less intense. But Tatiana still suffered terribly; she had never been a good sailor and had sometimes been seasick even when the yacht was at anchor. ‘A whole trunkful of special remedies from America’ had been sent for but nothing worked.2 En route to England, the family had stopped briefly at Kiel to visit Alexandra’s sister Irene and her family, and then they had made a three-day visit to President Fallières of France at Cherbourg, where they were greeted with the usual pageantry of gun salutes, crowds, bunting and massed bands playing the Marseillaise. After three days of diplomatic meetings, formal dinners and a review of the French fleet – at which the girls had been thrilled to be allowed to take photos of French submarines with their Box Brownies – the Shtandart finally set sail for England.3

  Having met at Reval for three days the previous year, both Nicholas and his cousin Edward VII had been keen to rehabilitate Russia in the eyes of the world after the terrible events of 1905, at a time when talk of war with Germany was increasing. But it was also an opportunity for a much-wanted family reunion. There was, however, a problem: the impending visit of the tsar caused considerable disquiet in Parliament and the British press, far more so than the 1896 visit. After the events of 1905 British radical groups had damned Nicholas as a brutal despot, the architect of Russian imperial oppression. In the run-up to the visit he was further vilified in socialist rallies at Trafalgar Square and elsewhere, with the evidence of Stolypin’s repressive measures against political activists stacked up against him. In short, Nicholas II was seen as the repository of all evil: ‘The Czar of the “Bloody Sunday”, the Czar of Stolypins and the Czar of Pogroms and Black Hundreds’.4 The impending visit divided public opinion in Britain, although Lord Hardinge, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, put much of the protest down to scaremongering and dismissed the Trafalgar Square ‘demonstrators’ as a motley collection of ‘five hundred Frenchmen, six hundred German waiters, a few Russian Jews and Italian ice-vendors’.5 One of the most strident opponents of Nicholas’s visit was the Labour leader Keir Hardie, who inspired 130 resolutions from socialist groups, schools, evangelical societies, trade unions, pacifist groups and branches of the Labour Party and the Women’s Labour League that were sent to the Home Secretary condemning the visit.6 At some radical meetings there were open calls for Nicholas’s assassination, should he step onto English soil.