The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  The Romanov family arrived at Schloss Friedberg near Nauheim at the end of August. Most of their 140-strong entourage (inflated by the presence of so many security officers) was farmed out to guest houses in town. Welcome though it was to Ernie and his family, the visit was a logistical nightmare, not to mention an enormous expense. During the four weeks of their stay, which was an entirely private visit, Nicholas for once adopted civvies, and made occasional excursions incognito into town. Nevertheless, the security was as tight as at Cowes in 1909, with marksmen and dogs patrolling the grounds of the castle, and Nicholas’s Cossack Escort supplemented by Okhrana agents under the supervision of Spiridovich shadowing the family’s every move.2

  An English visitor, the writer and literary hostess Violet Hunt, recalled the hoo-ha attendant on the Romanovs’ arrival. One evening a notice was posted up in her pension, begging the guests

  not to pursue, persecute, or mob the Tzar of Russia, who was staying at Friedberg, three miles off, and who came in every day with the Tzaritza and her children … He went in danger of his life so obvious and so imminent that the craven and businesslike municipality of Friedberg had insisted on his insuring the public monuments of that place at his own expense!

  Determined efforts were made by Spiridovich to ‘disseminate fallacious announcements’ of the tsar’s movements, in order to deflect the curious from pursuit of the imperial couple. ‘When [Nicholas] was supposed to be going to the baths it was at the Kursaal [public rooms] you would find him; when it was the riding school it was much more likely to be the lake.’3 Violet Hunt caught sight of him there, ‘a disconsolate figure, encouraging his boy to sail his tiny boat or being rowed about in one’. She often saw Alexandra on her way to the baths, ‘in black with pearls … her face a tragic mask … haughty, dejected. She looked a lovely fool; nay hardly lovely now – the morbid shadow of a queen.’4 At a shop in town full of Venetian glass she again encountered Nicholas with Alexey, intently examining some objets d’art:

  I saw his face through the beautiful clear glass; it did not exhibit mere terror, for he was a brave man, but all at once it seemed implicit with a summing up, a résumé of the composite agony of all this race of kings consciously marked down for destruction. His grandfather before him – his uncle – and only the little son with his head below the counter to carry on the monstrous imposthume of Russian Royalty!5

  Well might Nicholas have been worried, for during his stay at Friedberg came news of the coup d’état in Portugal on 5 October against the constitutional monarch Manuel II; it was yet another warning, for Manuel’s father, like Nicholas’s grandfather, had been assassinated (in 1908). A lady witnessed Nicholas’s reaction when the newsboy came to the Kurhaus (the spa house) where they were taking tea. ‘The Czar seemed to turn white and apparently was greatly shocked.’ Pulling out a coin to pay the boy he read the news story from end to end: ‘I could read from his face how it had affected him. In his eyes was fright and occasionally they seemed almost desperate. With some effort he shook off his feelings and realized he was the object of curious persons’ gaze. Assuming an air as if nothing had happened he walked to his waiting automobile.’6

  At Friedberg the two families were joined by several more relatives: Prince Andrew of Greece, his wife Alice and their two daughters Margarita and Theodora; Alexandra’s sister Victoria of Battenberg and her husband Louis and their children Louise, George and Louis. Alexandra’s two other sisters also briefly joined them: Irene, with her husband Prince Henry and their two boys Sigismund and the haemophiliac Waldemar, and the widowed Grand Duchess Ella – who had recently taken the veil and founded a convent in Moscow – wearing the most stylish of grey nun’s habits and wimple, looking like Elizabeth, the pious heroine of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.

  The four Romanov sisters adored the company of their cousins Louise and Louis, better known to them as Dickie. Although only ten at the time, in later life, and by then Lord Mountbatten, Dickie vividly remembered the girls: ‘Oh, they were lovely, and terribly sweet, far more beautiful than their photographs.’ He was totally smitten with the third sister: ‘I was crackers about Marie, and was determined to marry her. She was absolutely lovely.’* Indeed, to his eyes all four girls were blossoming: ‘They seemed to get more and more beautiful every time we saw them.’7

  Cousin Thora had also come over from England with Emily Loch. The morning after their arrival, Olga and Tatiana were eager to go out shopping with Thora in Nauheim, where the jewellers’ shops entranced them, just as had happened in Cowes. They returned the next day and ‘chose heaps to be inspected by the Empress which we took back with us’, recalled Emily, but the crowds that gathered round them had been considerable, and the girls had little opportunity to spend their pocket money, which had been regulated at 15 roubles a month by Alexandra in January of that year.8 At Friedberg and among their cousins, the four sisters seemed happy to play childish games of diablo (a juggling toy) and ‘bumble puppy’ (a game for two with a ball on a string tied to a post). There were plenty of carriage and bicycle rides in the park too, while Alexey had fun playing with Ernie’s two sons Georg Donatus and Louis and was taken out on bike rides by Derevenko, sitting in a specially adapted bicycle seat. They also enjoyed several motor car expeditions with the tsar (who enjoyed driving rather too fast), travelling into the densely wooded countryside for picnics. It was such a rare opportunity for the girls to mix and play with cousins of their own age, with even Nicholas for once letting go. ‘He seemed as happy as a schoolboy in holiday-time.’9 Everyone found the girls polite and solicitous, impressed by how conscientiously ‘they took the greatest pains at table to make conversation for the Gentleman-in Waiting’.10

  After more than a month at Bad Nauheim the family moved on to Wolfsgarten for an additional three weeks with Ernie and his second wife, Onor. Alexandra’s health had improved; Dr Georg Grote, who had attended her at Nauheim, had found no sign of organic heart trouble but confirmed that the state of the empress’s health was so serious that ‘had she not occupied such an exalted position, she should have been sent to a sanatorium with two sisters of mercy to take care of her, not letting her see anyone’. She ‘takes too much on herself’, said Grote, ‘and hides her sufferings from everyone’.11 Nevertheless, Alexandra was transformed by being among close family that summer, as Dickie Mountbatten recalled. ‘Even that crazy lunatic my aunt the Empress was absolutely sweet and charming.’ However, many of her relatives were seriously worried about her mental stability. Dickie overheard his father say to his mother at Nauheim: ‘Alicky is absolutely mad – she’s going to cause a revolution. Can’t you do anything?’12

  The tsaritsa’s constant ill health was often being put down to hypochondria. But Alexandra was adamant that her ailments were not imagined. ‘If people speak to you about my “nerves”,’ she wrote to Mariya Baryatinskaya, ‘please strongly contradict it. They are as strong as ever, it’s the “overtired heart”.’13 She was aware of how her ill health was affecting the children; ‘having a mama who is always ill does not make life bright for you’, she told Maria that December, but it had its positives: ‘I know it’s dull … but it teaches you all to be loving and gentle.’14 She was now having to deal with one of eleven-year-old Maria’s first adolescent crushes, which she had confided in her. Grigory had clearly once more been acting as agony aunt, and had told Maria not to ‘dwell too much on him’, and not to give anything away in the presence of others. ‘Now that you are a big girl, you must always be more careful and not show those feelings’, Alexandra reiterated. ‘One must not let others see what one feels inside.’15 Such studied reticence had encouraged the view people on the outside now held of Alexandra as aloof and unfeeling. ‘It was the usual policy of hush-hush’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden; Alexandra told her that it was ‘not comme il faut for our family to be known to be ill’ – and that included Alexey. The only time the public were to be told something was wrong was ‘when someone is dying’.16

  It was therefor
e left to the foreign press to speculate. ‘The Czarina Slowly Dying of Terror’ ran one headline, relaying a story from the Rome Tribuna claiming that Alexandra had ‘long been the unhappiest royal personage in Europe’ as a result of the high security isolating her and the family from the outside world, for it had made her ‘a victim of melancholia and morbid fears’.17 It was almost impossible, the papers claimed, to recognize in ‘this sad-faced sombre-eyed woman the merry girl who once delighted the hearts of the cottagers at Balmoral’. ‘Her fear of attack by revolutionaries was now all-consuming.’ There was, said one Australian paper, ‘no more pitiful tragedy in the history of any royal house’.18

  * * *

  By November 1910 and back at Tsarskoe, Nicholas was determined that his daughters should enjoy something of the winter season in the capital. In January he and Olga attended a performance of Boris Godunov starring the famous bass Feodor Chaliapin, a great favourite with the family. In February Olga and Tatiana were his companions at Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and later Nicholas took all four girls to see the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Such trips were small consolation for the absence of their mother, but all five children thoroughly enjoyed a concert that winter featuring their favourite army balalaika orchestra.

  Post Wheeler and his wife Hallie were there, surrounded by members of the diplomatic community and the ubiquitous Okhrana men. The imperial party arrived: Maria Feodorovna, Maria Pavlovna, and ‘trooping after her, not only the two older daughters, Olga and Tatiana, but the younger pair, Marie and Anastasia’ – an event remarkable because it was the first time that the Wheelers had seen all four sisters together. ‘The two older ones were in simple white, each with a string of small pearls, and with their heavy dark hair hanging over their shoulders looked very girlish and sweet.’ Olga carried ‘a little bunch of violets’ and Maria and Anastasia had boxes of ‘silver-wrapped chocolates’. Anastasia sat down in the box immediately next to Hallie ‘and gave me a demure little smile as she set her box of chocolates on the railing between us’.19 Then, as Hallie recalled, ‘there was a stir, the whole audience was rising and facing the back’, as the tsar in marshal’s uniform entered with the tsarevich ‘dressed all in white cloth braided with gold’.20

  ‘The house was very still, for it was witnessing what Russia had never seen before. People were completely taken aback’, recalled Hallie. The tsarevich was so little seen in public, that for most Russians ‘he had been only a fable’.21 During the balalaika concert that followed Alexey thrilled to the performance, for he loved the instrument and was learning to play it himself. At the end the entire audience rose to its feet roaring its approval, Alexey by his father’s side, sweet and childishly solemn, ‘stealing cautious glances now and then to right and left’. ‘Mon dieu! Comme il est adorable’, Hallie heard a woman near her remark:

  There was on every face the adoration that through the centuries had been lavished on the person of the ‘Great White Tsar’, and it was more than that, for this little lad, with his boyish beauty, typified the future to which Russia looked … The Tsar stood for the reign that Russia knew and was now coming to distrust, but in the hands of the little future autocrat were the lambent possibilities of which it dreamed.22

  Such adoration of the little heir to the throne served to underline the feelings expressed by Maria Feodorovna back in 1906 that the ‘unfortunate little girls are moved into secondary importance’ with Alexey’s arrival.23 They certainly were in the public’s estimation, for everyone’s eyes were on the tsarevich. Returning to her box after the interval, Hallie noticed that Anastasia and Maria had already taken up their places near her side of the railing. ‘She was not a beautiful child, but there was something frank and winning about her’, she recalled of Anastasia. ‘On the flat railing sat the now depleted box of chocolates and her white gloves were sadly smudged. She shyly held out the box to me, and I took one.’ As the music struck up Anastasia began softly humming the folk tune they were playing. Hallie asked her what it was. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it is an old song about a little girl who had lost her doll.’ The lingering notes of that lovely song hummed by the young grand duchess, and the sight of her chocolate-soiled gloves that evening, would stay with Hallie for many years.24

  * * *

  In the spring of 1911 Alexandra admitted to her sister-in-law Onor that the ‘cure’ at Nauheim had done her no good: ‘Personally I have felt no benefit … and have been so bad again.’25 Olga was despairing of ever seeing her mother well again. ‘Don’t get downhearted, my darling, if she is not getting as strong as you would like her to be,’ her aunt Ella consoled her, ‘it won’t happen quickly, the real effect of the treatment won’t be felt for a month or two, if not after a second course of it.’ Meanwhile Ella advised that Olga invest her best efforts in patient prayer on her mother’s behalf.26 In the spring at least Olga had the excitement of reviewing the new recruits to her Guards corps, but Tatiana was becoming jealous. ‘I would like so much to go to the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn’, she complained to Alexandra, adding that ‘at the second division I will see whom I must see … you know whom…!!!!??!?!’27 Tatiana too was confiding in her mother about her first teenage crushes. More military reviews followed in August, at the big parade ground at Krasnoe Selo, during which Olga and Tatiana, who were both accomplished horsewomen (having learnt to ride in 1903),28 took great pride in riding out side saddle and in uniform to inspect the regiments of which their father had gifted them the honorary command on their 14th name days: the 3rd Elizavetgrad Hussars for Olga and the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans for Tatiana. Maria would have her own regiment too – the 9th Kazan Dragoons in 1913 – but a glum-faced Anastasia was still not old enough. The Shtandart officers had teased her that in view of her lively personality she should be made commander of the St Petersburg fire brigade.29

  During the military reviews that spring the girls had enjoyed a visit from an English cousin, Prince Arthur of Connaught (son of Alexandra’s uncle the Duke of Connaught), a captain in the Royal Scots Greys who had come as an observer. However, the unmarried twenty-seven-year-old prince had, as British ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan noted, other preoccupations: ‘Prince Arthur is coming out next week for the manoeuvres and also (secretly) to look at the Emperor’s daughter.’30 This covert inspection of Olga is no surprise, although we know nothing of her impression of Arthur or his of her.* As the eldest Romanov daughter, she was approaching her sixteenth birthday, a marriageable age, and interest in her in the royal marriage market had long been gathering.* Aware of the need for her two eldest daughters to take their position in society, Alexandra was already planning their official appearance at two family weddings of the children of Grand Duke Konstantin, the first, of his oldest son, Ioannchik, to Princess Helena of Serbia at Peterhof on 21 August.

  ‘They have all grown a lot,’ Alexandra told Onor as she prepared for this, ‘Tatiana is already taller than Olga, whose dresses almost reach the floor now. – Skirt hemlines drop and hair goes up when they reach the age of 16 – how time flies.’ As for herself, she was likely to be absent: ‘I will barely put in an appearance; will have to see how strong I am, and that won’t be much.’31 In the event, Alexandra was not well enough to attend Ioannchik’s wedding but her five good-looking children made an impression, Alexey ‘charming in the uniform of the Imperial family Riflemen’ and the grand duchesses wearing Russian court dresses, ‘white with pink flowers but no trains and pink kokoshniki’. The groom’s brother thought they ‘looked lovely’.32 No doubt Ioannchik did too, for he had been carrying a torch for Olga since seeing her in 1904 at Alexey’s christening. Even in November of 1909 he had still been holding out hope, for despite his having had a succession of short-lived romantic attachments in his search for a bride, Olga had left ‘an indelible mark on him’. Ioannchik had travelled to the Crimea the previous autumn ‘only out of hunger to see Olga’, but having openly admitted his fee
lings to the tsar and tsaritsa there, had finally given up hope. ‘They won’t let me marry Olga Nikolaevna’, he had told his father disconsolately.33 But now, at last, the awkward, gangly Ioannchik, who was extremely unprepossessing as suitors go, had found a suitable royal bride, a fact which alarmed the intensely naïve Tatiana, ‘How funny if they might have children, can they be kissing…? What foul, fie! [sic]’34

  Just three days later Grand Duke Konstantin’s eldest daughter Tatiana was married to Prince Bagration-Mukhransky in a small family ceremony at Pavlovsk, attended by the imperial family. The weddings were closely followed at the end of the month by an important official visit to Kiev. The girls were increasingly deputizing for their mother during her bouts of illness and this trip marked their first major public role in this regard. They were in the Ukrainian city for the inauguration of a new statue to Alexander II, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his liberation of the serfs in 1861, as well as to visit the famous Pechersky Monastery and attend two large military reviews on 1 and 2 September. Although Alexandra attended the unveiling of the statue and managed a long day of official duties on the 1st, she then retreated, exhausted. That evening Olga and Tatiana accompanied Nicholas to the Kiev Municipal Theatre for a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Here numerous local dignitaries and politicians, including Prime Minister Stolypin, joined them.

  During the second interval Stolypin had been standing in the aisle, at the balustrade very near to the imperial box, when a young man rushed towards him with a gun and shot at him twice. ‘Fortunately,’ as Alexandra was relieved to tell Onor in a letter soon afterwards, ‘N., O. and T. were in the foyer when it happened.’35 Sofya Tyutcheva who was there as chaperone remembered Olga suggesting they went outside to get some tea, Nicholas having complained of feeling so hot in their box.36 Out in the foyer they ‘heard two noises, like the sound of an object falling’, Nicholas later wrote to his mother. He thought ‘a pair of binoculars must have fallen on somebody’s head from above’, and ran back into the box to look: