The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Stagnating in the absence of the tsar and tsaritsa, and with it their moral example, St Petersburg society was increasingly dominated by the reactionary grand dukes and their wives who saw themselves – in the face of Nicholas’s incorrigible weakness as monarch – as the ‘true champions of Imperial power’, intent as they were on protecting their own wealth and power by propping up a tottering autocracy implacably opposed to democratic reform.39 St Petersburg society, as the French ambassador’s wife put it, consisted of ‘two or three hundred cliques, all of them social cut-throats’, backed up by a Camorra of court officials, many of them also highly antipathetic to the imperial couple.40 Holding centre stage was Nicholas’s aunt, Maria Pavlovna, whose husband Vladimir (a man of expensive vices who had dissipated thousands of roubles on gambling and women) had died the previous February. Grand Duchess Vladimir, as she was often referred to, was German by birth. Like the tsaritsa she had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, albeit shortly before her husband’s death and with a very determined eye on the dynastic future of her sons. But she had married almost as well as her monarch, coming, like Alexandra, from a fairly minor German dukedom – of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

  At her luxurious Florentine-style mansion on the Palace Embankment by the River Neva, a residence which more than rivalled the Alexander Palace, Grand Duchess Vladimir held court in the absence of Russia’s real monarchs, her fabulous wealth enabling her to throw the most lavish receptions, charity bazaars and costume balls. Her four-day bazaar traditionally opened the Christmas-to-Lent season in St Petersburg and in the weeks that followed, hers were the most sought-after invitations in the capital. The grand duchess’s lofty and forceful manner might be intimidating but her brilliant social connections and her natural energy ensured that she had a finger on the pulse of Russian high society. It also meant that she was at the centre of much intrigue in the capital focused against the increasingly unpopular tsaritsa.

  As a result of her wide-reaching literary interests, Grand Duchess Vladimir had, at the end of 1909, invited a distinguished foreign visitor to come and stay. The best-selling British novelist Elinor Glyn had recently scored a big success in Russia with her romantic novel Three Weeks, and the grand duchess suggested Glyn might like to come to Russia to gather material for a Russian-based story.41 ‘Everyone always writes books about our peasants,’ she had told her, ‘come and write one about how the real people live.’ Few remarks could be more symptomatic of the staggering indifference of her class to the plight of the ordinary Russian population.42 Unfortunately for Glyn, having set off for Russia on the promise that the tsar and tsaritsa were about to emerge from Tsarskoe Selo and take a greater part in St Petersburg social life, she arrived to find the city in mourning for Grand Duke Mikhail. Far worse from a social point of view, she had come with an entirely new wardrobe of clothes from the couturier Lucile, as well as hats from Reboux of Paris, but she had no mourning clothes. The British ambassador’s wife had had to go to her rescue and buy her ‘the regulation headgear … a mourning bonnet of black crepe with a long and flowing veil’.43

  From a window of the British Embassy on the Palace Embankment, on a cold grey day of receding snow and slush, Glyn watched the funeral cortège heading for the Peter and Paul Cathedral across the Neva on Zayachy Island, with the empress ‘crouching back in her carriage’ and Nicholas and the grand dukes walking behind, he pale-faced and like his cousins patently aware of their vulnerability to assassins. Advance warnings of bomb outrages had prompted the authorities to ban all spectators from watching at windows (bar the British Embassy) and soldiers and policemen had been set ‘shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, in a double row facing both ways’ along the entire 3-mile (4.8-km) route.44 As the procession passed, Glyn noticed that the huge crowds stood there ‘mute but unmoved’; there was none of the genuine mourning she had witnessed at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901. ‘The atmosphere was filled, not with grief but with apprehension, not with sorrow but with doom.’45 For Glyn ‘the blind, silent houses, the massed guards, and the hostile people proclaimed to all the world the inevitable passing of this tragic regime’. As she wrote in her journal that evening: ‘Oh! How we should thank God for dear, free, safe, happy England.’46

  The following day Glyn was deeply impressed by the ritual of the magnificent funeral service, the candles and incense and the beautiful but strangely alien singing of the priests. Only Nicholas was present, ‘unnaturally composed, as though he wore a mask’; Alexandra, she was told, had ‘refused’ to come.47 That, no doubt, is how her absence was perceived by the gossips; the reality was that the empress would have been incapable of standing through the four-hour-long ceremony. But inexorably, the drip-drip of negative gossip about her was doing its work, as Glyn noted: ‘I was shocked to find that her unpopularity amounted to hatred, even as early as 1910.’48 She had the distinct impression that St Petersburg society looked upon Grand Duchess Vladimir as the real Empress of Russia, for Alexandra now hardly ever emerged from her retirement at Tsarskoe Selo.49 Indeed, Glyn professed herself to be ‘shocked to witness the atmosphere of unhappiness and dread’ that Alexandra’s morbid personality shed over the Russian court – even in her absence.50 It was the strained but dignified figure of Nicholas leading the mourning that had impressed her. But his presence at the grand duke’s funeral had been considered reckless by those charged with his security, particularly his insistence on walking in the street procession behind the bier, and it had been ‘an anxious day for everybody concerned’.

  ‘Would the tsar and tsaritsa come to the Winter Palace when the court mourning was lifted?’ everyone was asking two months later. ‘That would mean one court ball, at least, which was better than nothing.’51 In diplomatic circles a posting to St Petersburg was considered ‘poisonous’ and one that few enjoyed. Post Wheeler, who was there for six years, encountered a considerable amount of criticism of the restrictions placed on the Romanov daughters, as one society hostess complained to him:

  Poor things!… What a way to bring up imperial children! They might as well be in Peter-Paul [the fortress prison]. It is all right for the little Anastasia and for Marie … But for Tatiana and especially for Olga, who is fifteen, it is ridiculous.52

  The isolation imposed on the girls by their mother was seen by many as cruel and narrow-minded: ‘She wants them to grow up in ignorance of what she calls “the tragedy of the Russian court”’, asserted one lady, alluding to Alexandra’s horror of its immorality.53 All of which makes it all the more extraordinary that the four Romanov sisters seemed so natural and well-rounded. Everyone who met them concurred that they were fine young women, who demonstrated affection, loyalty and a dignified sense of their role: ‘They never let you forget that they are grand duchesses; but they are not forgetful of the feelings of others’, as one lady-in-waiting commented.54 But sightings of the imperial children in the city, especially Alexey, were incredibly rare. One had far more chance of seeing them out at Tsarskoe Selo. Post Wheeler recalled having the good fortune of encountering the tsarevich out with a Cossack minder, when he visited Tsarskoe with Countess Tolstoy one day. The boy was ‘bundled in a long overcoat with a white astrakhan collar and a fur cap at a jaunty tilt’, and ‘talking eagerly, with many gestures, pausing now and then to kick up a cloud of snow’. ‘I was all eyes’, Wheeler admitted. ‘The child was almost a legend, I knew no one who had ever seen him.’ The countess, who knew the imperial family well, felt intensely sorry for Alexey: ‘Poor child! With only his sisters, no boys of his own age to play with! The Empress is doing a great wrong to him, and to the girls too, but no one can make her see it!’55 This widely held view of the imperial children could not of course be countered, although one English visitor granted an audience at Tsarskoe Selo was given the rare privilege of meeting Alexey and the girls.

  He seemed somewhat shy, and stood at one end of the room surrounded by his sisters, handsome young ladies, simply but neatly dressed. They seemed quite at their ease, and their manners
were the frank unaffected manners of ordinary well brought up children. The moment they entered, a smile of motherly pride spread over the features of the Empress, and she advanced towards them placing her arm lovingly round her son’s neck.56

  Alexey was clearly the centre of their mother’s universe, as a result of which the Romanov girls seemed doomed to a bland interchangeability, forever in the shadows of their charismatic brother. Yet behind the scenes shifts in the relationship between the five siblings were beginning to appear. Olga had increasingly been tasked by Alexandra with trying to make the wilful Alexey behave in public during her own frequent periods of indisposition. Once, attending a Boy Scout parade, he had tried to get out of the carriage to join in and when Olga had restrained him had ‘slapped her face as hard as he could’. In response Olga hadn’t so much as winced but had taken his hand and stroked it till Alexey had recovered his equilibrium. It was only when they were safely back at home that she had run to her room and burst into tears. Alexey was duly contrite; for two days he ‘was repentance itself and made Olga accept his portion of dessert at table’. He loved Olga perhaps more than the others, for whenever he was reprimanded by his parents, he would ‘declare that he was Olga’s boy, pick up his toys, and go to her apartment’.57

  By now Olga and Tatiana were becoming noticeably detached from the ‘little pair’, and Maria, the most self-effacing of the four, was beginning to suffer. Jealousy had also crept in for she sensed that perhaps her mother favoured Anastasia more. ‘I have no secrets with Anastasia, I do not like secrets’, Alexandra reassured her in one of her notes, only to send another within days: ‘Sweet child you must promise me never again to think that nobody loves you. How did such an extraordinary idea get into your little head? Get it quickly out again.’ Feeling unwanted by her older sisters, Maria had of late been seeking consolation in the friendship of her cousin Irina, Xenia’s only daughter. But Alexandra told her this would only make things worse: her sisters would ‘imagine then that you do not want to be with them; now that you are getting a big girl it is good that you should be more with them’.58

  Maria clearly was anxious to win the approval and attention of her older siblings, hence perhaps the motive behind a letter on their behalf that she wrote to Alexandra in May 1910:

  My dear Mama! How are you feeling? I wanted to tell you that Olga would very much like to have her own room in Peterhof, because she and Tatiana have too many things and too little room. Mama at what age did you have your own room? Please tell me if it’s possible to arrange. Mama at what age did you start wearing long dresses? Don’t you think Olga would also like to let down her dresses. Mama why don’t you move them both or just Olga. I think they would be comfortable where you slept when Anastasia had diphtheria. I kiss you. Maria. P.S. It was my idea to write to you.59

  In the meantime, Maria’s egocentric younger sibling Anastasia, who inhabited her own little world, was busy thinking along entirely different, idiosyncratic lines, scribbling in her notebook a list of birthday wants that year:

  For my birthday I would like to receive toy hair-combs [for her dolls], a machine on which I can write, an icon of Nikolay the Wonderworker, some kind of outfit, an album for sticking in pictures, then a big bed, like Maria has, for the Crimea, I want a real-life dog, a basket for spoiled paper when I write some book or other … then a book in which to write little plays for children that can be performed.60

  The need for someone to watch over four such different and rapidly developing personalities during the crucial years of puberty was increasing in the absence of their mother, but throughout 1910 problems had been developing with the person on whom most of this had devolved – Sofya Tyutcheva. She hadn’t made many friends and several of the staff disliked her authoritarian manner; according to one diarist she was referred to as a ‘man in skirts’ for her domineering manner and the way in which she still treated the growing sisters like naughty little children.61 Fond as she was of the girls, the highly moral Tyutcheva was worried about the increasing attention – or rather distraction – in their lives of the young officers in the Shtandart and troubled by the propriety of their deepening relationships with them during their Finnish holidays.62

  Although her devotion to the family was undeniable and her intentions well-meant, Sofya’s judgemental manner and her constant laying-down of the law meant she was in danger of crossing the line between her own duties as carer and those of Alexandra as the girls’ mother, with the ultimate responsibility – rather than she – for their moral welfare. Tyutcheva had never got on with the empress and she did not approve of the more relaxed ‘English’ style of the girls’ upbringing. According to Anna Vyrubova, ‘She wished to change the whole system, make it entirely Slav and free from any imported ideas’, and was now openly criticizing the tsaritsa even in front of her charges.63 She had hated Rasputin from the first and was highly critical of the relationship the girls and their mother had with him, which she considered demeaning and inappropriate. The sisters were clearly anxious about the gathering hostility towards Grigory, as Tatiana intimated in a note to her mother in March 1910: ‘I am so afread that S. I. [Sofya Ivanovna] can speak to Maria [Vishnyakova] about our friend some thing bad. I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now.’64

  That January and February of 1910, Alexey had been plagued with pains in his arm and leg and Rasputin had visited the family on ten occasions at Tsarskoe Selo, often staying late and talking at length with them. Having been asked by Alexandra to say no more to the children on the matter of Rasputin’s visits Sofya Tyutcheva pulled back for a while, but then once more began gossiping with Grand Duchess Xenia about his free access to the family, and the children in particular. ‘He’s always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them’, she had told her.* Under instruction from their mother, the children were becoming increasingly secretive; even Elizaveta Naryshkina (who had taken over from the recently deceased Princess Golitsyna as mistress of the robes), felt that such was their mother’s fear of scandal, that the children were being drilled to ‘hide their thoughts and feelings about Rasputin from others’.65 ‘It can hardly be beneficial to accustom the children to such dissimulation’, thought Grand Duke Konstantin.66 Certainly Tyutcheva’s renewed assault in the summer of 1910 was a criticism too far; it further undermined the view of Alexandra within the imperial family, with even her sister Ella and Xenia questioning the wisdom of her continuing patronage of Rasputin.

  Those such as Lili Dehn, who loved Alexandra and respected her trust in Rasputin, put Tyutcheva’s behaviour down to ‘spite and jealousy’; Anna Vyrubova and Iza Buxhoeveden both were convinced that she was the source of much of the unfavourable gossip about the empress and Rasputin circulating in St Petersburg. But the damage had already been done; the rumours were becoming ever more lurid by the day. Dehn herself soon had good reason to be grateful for Rasputin’s help, when her two-year-old son Alexander (known to everyone as Titi) contracted diphtheria. Seeing how desperately ill Titi was, Alexandra and Anna Vyrubova had persuaded her to ask for Grigory’s help. When he arrived, he had sat for a long time on the boy’s bed, looking intently at him. Suddenly Titi woke up, ‘stretched out his little hand, laughed and mouthed the words “uncle, uncle”’. Titi told him that his head ached ‘ever so badly’ but all Rasputin did was ‘take the boy’s hand, ran his finger down the side of his nose, stroked his head and kissed him’. As he left he told Lili that the fever was going; her son would live.67 By the following morning Titi’s symptoms had indeed abated; he recovered a few days later. Lili remained convinced that this was entirely coincidental with Rasputin’s visit, but she was aware that Alexandra’s faith in him was based on her absolute conviction that he was the only person who could help her son. In this regard, any power Rasputin had over the empress was, as far as Lili was concerned, entirely mystical – and never mercenary or political.68

  But on the pages of
the influential daily newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti and elsewhere, the campaign of vilification against the empress and her ‘friend’ was mounting. The satirical magazine Ogonek was publishing interviews with his followers – giving lurid details of their ‘Egyptian nights of initiation’ into Rasputin’s circle.69 With Prime Minister Stolypin renewing his investigation of him, Rasputin once more felt it best to beat a retreat to the safety of Siberia.

  Chapter Nine

  IN ST PETERSBURG WE WORK, BUT AT LIVADIA WE LIVE

  In the summer of 1910, in the face of the continuing dramatic decline in the tsaritsa’s health, Dr Botkin persuaded her to go for a rest cure at Bad Nauheim in Hesse, combining it with a visit to Ernie and other European relatives. ‘It is very important for her to get better, for her own sake and the children’s and mine’, Nicholas told his mother before they left. ‘I am completely run down mentally by worrying over her health.’ His words to Anna Vyrubova were even more candid: ‘“I would do anything,” he said in quiet desperation, “even going to prison, if she could only be well again.”’1