The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  To the right I saw a group of officers and others dragging someone, a few ladies were screaming, and there right opposite me stood Stolypin. He turned slowly to face me, and made the sign of the cross in the air with his left hand.37

  Olga and Tatiana had tried to restrain their father but as Nicholas instinctively reached towards Stolypin, he noticed that the prime minister had been hit. Stolypin slowly sank into his seat and everyone rushed to his aid, including Dr Botkin. Stolypin muttered a message for the tsar, which the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Freedericksz, brought to him: ‘Your Majesty, Petr Arkadevich has asked me to tell you that he is happy to die for you.’ ‘I hope there is no reason to talk of death’, the tsar replied. ‘I fear there is’, replied Freedericksz – for one of the bullets had entered Stolypin’s liver.38

  Despite his wounds, Stolypin heroically managed, with assistance, to walk out of the theatre and into an ambulance, which rushed him to ‘a first class private clinic’ where he ‘took Holy Communion’ and ‘spoke very lucidly’.39 Meanwhile, his attacker, Dmitri Bogrov, a young lawyer from a prosperous Jewish family in the city (who had been both a revolutionary activist and an informer for the Okhrana), was set upon by members of the audience who would have lynched him if they could. After Bogrov was bundled off by the police the cast of the opera came onto the stage and joined the audience in singing the National Anthem, Nicholas at the front of his box ‘obviously distressed but showing no fear’.40 ‘I left with the girls at eleven’, he later wrote to Maria Feodorovna. ‘You can imagine with what emotions.’ ‘Tatiana came home very tearful and is still a little shaken,’ Alexandra told Onor the following day, ‘whereas Olga put on a brave face throughout.’41 The following morning Sofya Tyutcheva, who had not slept all night from the shock of what she had seen, was surprised to find the girls calmer than she expected after their experience. Noticing how disconcerted she was by this, their nurse Mariya Vishnyakova came up to her and whispered: ‘He’s already there’, meaning Rasputin, who had happened to be in Kiev at the time. ‘Then it all became clear to me’, Tyutcheva later wrote.42

  Hopes remained high that Stolypin would recover from his wounds and the bulletins seemed favourable. ‘They think he is out of danger’, Alexandra told Onor. ‘His liver seems to be only slightly affected. The bullet hit his Vladimir Cross and then bounced off in another direction.’43 Nicholas meanwhile was obliged to continue with his engagements in Kiev and on the 4th attended a major review of troops with the children, followed by visits to museums and to the first school to be founded in Kiev, now celebrating its hundredth anniversary.

  The Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelshtam was an eleven-year-old pupil at that time. She remembered the day vividly and how moved she had been by the sight of ‘the very handsome boy and four sad girls’, one of whom, Maria, was the same age as herself. It prompted her to ponder the difficult lives they led:

  I suddenly understood that I was much happier than these unfortunate girls; after all, I could run around with the dogs on the street, make friends with the boys, not learn my lessons, make mischief, go to bed late, read all kinds of junk and fight with my brothers and anybody else. I and my governesses had a very simple arrangement: we’d leave that house together, purposefully, and then go our separate ways – they to their rendezvous and I to my boys – I didn’t make friends with girls – you can only really fight with boys. But these poor princesses were bound in everything: they were polite, affectionate, friendly, attentive … they weren’t even allowed to fight … poor girls.44

  The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city. The imperial family meanwhile boarded their train and headed for the Black Sea coast and the Shtandart, Nicholas ‘giving very strict instructions to the governor General Feodor Trepov’, as he left, ‘that he would not allow a pogrom against the Jews on any pretext whatsoever’.46

  Bogrov was tried by military court and hanged ten days later in Kiev, despite a plea for clemency from Stolypin’s widow. Having long anticipated his own violent death Stolypin had asked to be buried near the place of his murder and was interred at the Pechersky Monastery in Kiev. Alexandra might have mourned the manner of Stolypin’s death but she did not mourn his loss, for he had always been implacably opposed to Rasputin. When the imperial party later arrived at Sevastopol en route to Livadia, bands and illuminations greeted them on the seafront. One of the ladies-in-waiting thought this inappropriate – as they all did, so soon after Stolypin’s assassination – and said as much to Alexandra, who snapped: ‘He was only a minister, but this is the Russian emperor.’ Sofya Tyutcheva couldn’t fathom her response: she had seen how distraught Alexandra had been and how she had comforted Stolypin’s widow. What had provoked this sudden change of mood? ‘There was only one thing I could put it down to,’ she later concluded, convinced that the entire family was in absolute thrall to Rasputin. ‘It was that same baleful influence which in the end destroyed the unfortunate Alexandra Feodorovna and all her family.’47

  * * *

  After the horror of Stolypin’s murder the family was very glad to escape to the Crimea, where their newly constructed palace was ready for occupation. The Crimea had always been ‘the loveliest gem in the crown of the czar’, a territorial trophy annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 at the end of numerous wars with the Ottoman Empire.48 Gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine atop the rugged southern coast, the palace was surrounded by gardens of vibrant-coloured and sweet-smelling bougainvillea and oleander, trailing vines of glycinia, and all around ‘a veritable riot of roses of every colour and shape’.*49 There was plenty of shade too from exotic palms, olive trees, and pines and cypresses, and below the palace, the family had its own private rocky beach and a sea to bathe in as blue as the Aegean. No wonder Livadia was named after the Greek word for a beautiful meadow or lawn. It literally was a heaven on earth for the Romanov children and they spoke of it always as ‘their real home’. As one of the Romanov sisters later put it: ‘In St Petersburg we work; but at Livadia we live.’50 Livadia was also an important refuge for an increasingly world-weary Nicholas and his invalid wife. For those with money and social status the Crimea was the Russian equivalent of the French Riviera, with Yalta, 2 miles (3 km) from the palace, its most fashionable resort, and the Russian social set all arrived here for the balmy autumn months before the onset of the winter season in St Petersburg. Here, more than anywhere else in Russia, they were most likely to catch a glimpse of their elusive imperial family, for in Livadia the Romanovs were far more relaxed and informal than at Tsarskoe Selo.

  The Livadia Palace was two-storeyed and Italian Renaissance in style, with large windows that let in the light, and faced in local white Inkerman limestone – prompting its popular name as the ‘White Palace’. It had been completed inside sixteen months, including a second house for the imperial entourage, and had all the modern conveniences of central heating, lifts and telephones. Having taken possession on 20 September Nicholas wrote to his mother: ‘We cannot find the words to express our joy and the pleasure of having such a house, built exactly as we wished … The views in all directions are so beautiful, especially of Yalta and the sea. There is so much light in the rooms and you remember how dark it was in the old house.’51 Inside all was simplicity, much in the style moderne that Alexandra favoured. The private apartments on the second floor had the preferred white furniture and chintz fabrics, and as usual there were flowers everywhere.52 The windows and balconies at the back of the palace gave out over the sea: Olga and Tatiana delighted in taking their morning French lessons with Pierre Gilliard out on the balcony. On the northern side of the palace facing inland, the palace looked o
ut onto the rugged Crimean mountains in the distance. A cool and shady inner courtyard featured Italianate marble colonnades and a fountain surrounded by a pretty knot garden. It was a favourite place for the entourage to escape the heat of the day and sit and chat after luncheon.

  An idyllic late summer and autumn at Livadia followed for the Romanov children. There were wonderful days of hiking in the hills with their father, taking drives along the coast to a favourite picnic spot – such as St George’s Monastery perched high on the cliffs at Cape Fiolent – or journeys into the Crimean heartland, past trees heavy with succulent fruit, to the tsar’s own vineyard at Massandra, which produced the finest wines in the Crimea. Day after sunny day was spent riding and playing tennis with Grand Duchess Xenia’s children and other relatives who visited. Swimming was also a great favourite, though after Anastasia nearly drowned one day when an unexpectedly large wave hit them and Nicholas had to rescue her, he had had a swimming pool made of canvas sails attached to wooden posts erected down at the beach for the children’s safety, where they could swim under the watchful eye of Andrey Derevenko.53

  With her pathological dislike of studying and of any kind of constraints on her physical freedom, Anastasia was in clover, as she told their tutor PVP, who was staying in Yalta with Pierre Gilliard:

  Our rooms here are very large and clean and white and we have real fruit and grapes growing here … I am so happy that we don’t have these horrid lessons. In the evening we all sit together, four of us, the gramophone plays, we listen to it and play together … I don’t miss Tsarskoe Selo at all, because I can’t even tell you how bored I am there.54

  Everything about the palace filled the girls with energy and delight. They enjoyed nothing better than going up and running out along the galvanized roof and delighting in the noise their footsteps made. And the nights there were so full of light. Anastasia was entranced by the sky and loved going out on the roof to ‘study the formations of the stars’, for in the Crimea they seemed to shine extra-bright.55

  During their stays at Livadia, as at home in Tsarskoe Selo, the family enjoyed regular film shows on Saturdays in the covered riding school. This was such an important event in their lives that the children would spend the following week talking about it.56 Elizaveta Naryshkina was charged with vetting the films, requiring court photographer Alexander Yagelsky (who had also been designated to shoot official footage of the imperial family at all their public appearances) to edit out any parts she objected to.*57 What the children saw for the most part were newsreels or travelogues from Yagelsky’s own Tsarist Chronicles of the family, or films of educational merit. But they also saw dramas such as The Defence of Sevastopol – about the siege of the naval base during the Crimean War – which, at 100 minutes long, was the first major historical feature film to be made in Russia and which was premiered especially for the imperial family at the Livadia Palace on 26 October 1911.58

  Nicholas also relished the informality of life at Livadia and the family gatherings they had there, for several of their Romanov relatives had summer homes in the vicinity. Grand Duchess George (Nicholas’s cousin, a daughter of the King of Greece) was nearby at Harax; his sister Xenia and her husband Sandro and their seven children were at Ai-Todor; the Montenegrin sisters Militza and Stana had estates at Dulber and Chair, although they now had little contact with Nicholas and Alexandra. Other influential families spent the spring and autumn in the Crimea: the Vorontsovs at Alupka, the Golitsyns at Novyi Svet and the Yusupovs, who had two beautiful homes: one the Moorish palace of Kokoz inland on the road to Sevastopol, and the other at Koreiz on the coast of the Black Sea.

  During the long summer evenings when the Romanovs visited Harax, Grand Duchess George’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de Stoeckl would often find herself looking at the four lovely sisters and wondering ‘what their future might be’. Twenty-three-year-old Prince Christopher of Greece, who had been visiting his sister Grand Duchess George that summer, confessed to Agnes that he ‘greatly admired the Grand Duchess Olga … and he asked me if I thought he had any chance’. They talked it over with his sister and, after giving Christopher ‘a stiff whisky and soda’, Grand Duchess George dispatched him to the Livadia Palace to try his luck. He came back with his tail between his legs; Nicholas had been kind but firm: ‘Olga is too young to think of such a thing as marriage yet’, he had told him.59

  That might be so, but Olga and Tatiana were growing up fast, and Sofya Tyutcheva had already noticed with some alarm their coquettish behaviour with some of the officers in the Shtandart.60 Several of these men joined the family at Livadia for games of tennis, which were Nicholas’s principal distraction from his heavy workload. Tennis matches were a golden opportunity for the eldest girls to see much more of their favourites: Nikolay Sablin, Pavel Voronov and Nikolay Rodionov.61 Like Sofya Tyutcheva, General Mosolov noticed the older girls’ growing interest in the opposite sex and how the sometimes childish games they played with officers ‘changed into a series of flirtations all very innocent’. ‘I do not, of course, use the word “flirtation” quite in the ordinary sense of the term’, he pointed out, for ‘the young officers could better be compared with the pages or squires of dames of the Middle Ages’. They were all intensely loyal to the tsar and his daughters and thus were ‘polished to perfection by one of their superiors, who was regarded as the Empress’s squire of dames’. What disturbed Mosolov, however, was the sisters’ astonishing unworldliness: ‘even when the two eldest had grown up into real young women one might hear them talking like little girls of ten or twelve’.62

  Nevertheless, the physical transformation in Olga between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays had been considerable. Many remarked how the rather plain and serious grand duchess had now blossomed into an elegant beauty. Her tutor Pierre Gilliard had been taken aback, on returning to Russia from a visit to his family in Switzerland, by how Olga had become so slender and graceful. She was now ‘a tall girl (as tall as me) who blushes violently as she looks at me, seeming as uncomfortable with her new self as she is in her longer skirts’.63

  On her sixteenth birthday on 3 November 1911 Olga awoke to gifts from her parents of two necklaces, one of diamonds, one of pearls, and a ring. Alexandra, with typical frugality, had wanted one large pearl to be bought for each of her daughters every time she had a birthday so that by the time they all reached sixteen they would have enough for a necklace; a fact which the head of her private office Prince Obolensky considered a false economy. Alexandra was eventually persuaded, with the tsar’s backing, to buy a five-string necklace that could be broken up into individual pearls, so that the pearls in the necklaces when complete would at least match.64

  That evening, Olga appeared wearing a full-length, high-necked, tulle dress with a lace bodice and a deep sash round her waist pinned with roses, her cheeks flushed with excitement and her shining fair hair dressed on top of her head – an important signifier of her transition from girl to young woman. ‘She was as excited over her debut as any other young girl’, recalled Anna Vyrubova. But the girls were still thought of as two pairs: Tatiana was dressed similarly to Olga with her hair up, while Maria and Anastasia wore shorter matching dresses with their hair loose.65

  The ball was the social event of the Crimean season, and Olga was thrilled to have her favourite officer Nikolay Sablin as her escort for the evening; while Tatiana was partnered by Nikolay Rodionov.66 At a quarter to seven, 140 carefully selected guests assembled in the large upstairs state dining room for dinner. Agnes de Stoeckl recalled how

  Innumerable servants in their gold and scarlet liveries were standing behind each chair – those special ones called ‘l’homme à la plume’ with plumes in their hats. The ladies were in rich coloured gowns, the young girls mostly in white tulle, and the gorgeous uniforms seemed to belong to a feast from the eastern hemisphere.67

  After a candlelit dinner, the dancing began to music from the regimental orchestra, as officers of the Shtandart (which was at anchor nearby at Sev
astopol) and the Alexandrovsk cavalry division invited the ladies to dance. Nicholas proudly conducted his eldest daughter onto the dance floor for her first waltz, as a gaggle of admiring young officers gathered round to watch. It was a magical evening, with a full moon in a cloudless sky. The exotic Crimean location made it even more special, wrote Anna Vyrubova:

  the glass doors to the courtyard thrown open, the music of the unseen orchestra floating in from the rose garden like a breath of its own wondrous fragrance. It was a perfect night, clear and warm, and the gowns and jewels of the women and the brilliant uniforms of the men made a striking spectacle under the blaze of the electric lights.68

  Flushed with the thrill of dancing the mazurka, waltz, contre-danse, danse hongroise and cotillion, and heady with the Crimean champagne they had been allowed to drink for the first time, Olga and Tatiana spent the whole evening in high spirits, ‘fluttering round like butterflies’ as General Spiridovich recalled, and savouring every moment.69 Never one to say much in her diaries, which she had first attempted keeping in 1906 at the age of eleven, Olga made little of the occasion:

  Today for the first time I put on a long white dress. At 9 p.m. was my first ball. Knyazhevich (Major-General of the Suite) and I opened it. I danced the whole time, right up till 1 a.m. and was very happy. There were many officers and ladies. Everyone was having a terribly good time. I am 16 years old.70

  Rather as anticipated, the empress had made her excuses about attending the dinner but had come down afterwards to greet her guests, looking quite beautiful in a gold brocade gown and wearing vivid jewels in her hair and her corsage. By her side was Alexey, ‘his lovely little face flushed with the excitement of the evening’. Alexandra sat down in a large armchair to watch the dancing (looking, as one lady recalled, ‘like an Eastern potentate’). During the cotillion she went down onto the dance floor to place garlands of artificial flowers on the ladies’ heads that she had made herself.71 She tried several times to send Alexey off to bed, where he stubbornly refused to go. Eventually she left the room, upon which Alexey jumped up into her chair. ‘Slowly his little head dropped and he slept’, recalled Agnes de Stoeckl, upon which Nicholas, who had been sitting at a table playing bridge for most of the evening, went over and ‘gently woke him up saying: “You must not sit in mama’s chair” and led him quietly away to bed’.72