The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

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  During the imperial family’s time in Livadia many of their favourite officers from the Shtandart were in evidence and as usual the four sisters were ‘allowed to have a little preference for this or that handsome young officer with whom they danced, played tennis, walked, or rode’ – though always in the presence of a chaperone.28 That year Tatiana seemed to be taking a particular shine to Count Alexander Vorontsov-Dashkov – a hussar in the Life Guards from a distinguished Russian family, who was one of Nicholas’s ADCs and a favourite tennis partner. Although Tatiana was not yet sixteen, the matchmakers would soon be busy pairing of her off. Indeed, they were already busily predicting future possible dynastic unions for all four girls. So anxious was the tsar to keep the Balkan states faithful to Russia, it was asserted, that he intended ‘to utilize his four daughters, who are not to marry four Russian Grand Dukes, nor even four unorthodox Princes of Europe’. No, the four grand duchesses of Russia, so the rumour went, were to become ‘Queens of the Balkans’, with Olga a bride for Prince George of Serbia; Tatiana for Prince George of Greece; Maria for Prince Carol of Romania and Anastasia set for Prince Boris of Bulgaria – although other press reports had gone so far as to claim that Boris was in fact about to be betrothed to Olga.29

  When Olga had celebrated her name day the previous July on board the Shtandart, among the gifts and bouquets of flowers presented to her by the officers had been a home-made card, the suggestiveness of which was obvious. ‘What do you think it was?’ Tatiana wrote to Aunt Olga. ‘There was a cardboard frame with a portrait of David cut out from a newspaper.’ Olga had ‘laughed at it long and hard’, but her less worldly sister Tatiana had been offended: ‘Not one of the officers wishes to confess that he had done it. Such swine, aren’t they?’30 It can be no coincidence that eleven days prior to Tatiana’s writing this letter, the formal investiture ceremony for their cousin David, as Prince of Wales, had taken place.

  There is no doubt that ever since the coronation of the new king, George V, in June 1911, talk had been brewing in Britain that ‘the next greatest event to which the people may look forward will be the marriage of Prince Edward of Wales [David], heir apparent to the throne’.31 He was only seventeen but already the royal marriage brokers had drawn up a list of the seven most eligible princesses, with the names of both Olga and Tatiana at the top. The Washington Post was sceptical: ‘A marriage with any Russian princess would certainly not be popular in England’, it averred, citing the example of Maria Alexandrovna, Alexander II’s daughter, who had married the Duke of Edinburgh and was now the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, and who ‘never in the least identified herself with English affairs or ways, but remained always a stranger’. The paper was certain that ‘the same fate would probably attend a Russian queen’.32

  All this foreign press speculation was of course entirely without foundation; for in Russia in 1912 it was assumed that Olga Nikolaevna’s affections were for someone much closer to home. Of all the highborn dukes and princes whose names were being bandied about as possible husbands for the tsar’s eldest daughter, his first cousin, twenty-year-old Grand Duke Dmitri, seemed to be the perfect candidate. Tall and slim – ‘as elegant as a Fabergé statuette’, in the words of his uncle Grand Duke Sergey – Dmitri was naturally sociable and witty; and, most important of all, he was a Russian.33 His debonair manner was extremely disarming and he already had a well-known way with women. ‘Nobody had an easier, a more brilliant debut in life than he’, as his sister Maria recalled:

  He had a large fortune with very few responsibilities attached to it, unusually good looks coupled with charm, and he also had been the recognized favourite of the Tsar. Even before he had finished his studies and joined the Horse Guards, there was no young prince in Europe more socially conspicuous than he was both in his own country and abroad. He walked a golden path, petted and fêted by everyone.34

  Dmitri and Maria were the children of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, who was in turn the youngest of the six sons of Tsar Alexander II. Their mother had died as the result of a boating accident that had triggered Dmitri’s premature birth, and when in 1902 the widowed Pavel provoked scandal by marrying again, to a commoner, Nicholas, who was anxious to stem the incidence of morganatic marriages in the Romanov family, sent him into exile. With Pavel living in the south of France, his brother Grand Duke Sergey and his wife Ella, who had no children of their own, became Dmitri and Maria’s guardians. After Sergey was assassinated in 1905 (his large estate eventually passed on to Dmitri by Ella), Nicholas and Alexandra effectively took over responsibility for his and Maria’s upbringing. In May 1908 the widowed Ella had encouraged eighteen-year-old Maria into a dynastic marriage with Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. With the loss of his only and adored sibling Dmitri gravitated ever more towards the imperial family as surrogates and was now on such intimate terms with Nicholas and Alexandra that he often addressed them as Papa and Mama (even though Nicholas had eventually allowed Dmitri’s own father to return to Russia). In 1909 Dmitri had entered the Officers’ Cavalry School in St Petersburg, the traditional finishing establishment for young men of the Romanov aristocracy, at the end of which he was commissioned as a cornet in the Horse Guards. During those three years he often spent his free time out at Tsarskoe Selo and regularly joined the tsar in military manoeuvres at nearby Krasnoe Selo, often acting as Nicholas’s aide-de-camp; in the spring of 1912 he had joined the family in Livadia for three weeks.

  At some point during 1912, and in the light of the tsarevich’s precarious health, Nicholas and Alexandra must have considered the possibility that, should Alexey die, Dmitri would be the ideal match for Olga as potential heir. Nicholas was intent anyway in creating her co-regent with her mother, should he die before Alexey reached the age of twenty-one.35 Indeed, there was a great deal of logic in such a marriage; it would have been immensely popular in Russia, for Dmitri was one of their own; even better, from Nicholas and Alexandra’s point of view, it would have spared Olga the agony, which she dreaded, of a marriage that might force to her leave Russia. A marriage to Dmitri Pavlovich would give him the title of joint heir presumptive, should Nicholas go even further and change the succession laws in Olga’s favour after Alexey. Becoming tsar was a role that Dmitri coveted; at present he was sixth in line to the throne, but if he married Olga, that might all change.

  Despite the twenty-three-year age difference, Dmitri and Nicholas greatly enjoyed each other’s company; they loved playing billiards together in Nicholas’s study and developed a father–son relationship so close that Dmitri always spoke extremely frankly – if not with a degree of bawdy, even homosexual innuendo – to him, in the manner of fellow officers in the barracks, such as signing off this letter from St Petersburg of October 1911:

  This capital of yours, or, to speak with perfect clarity, MY capital, does not favour us with good weather. It’s so shitty that it’s just frightful – dirty and cold … Well, and now I wrap my illegitimate mother in a firm embrace (the fault is mine – I am an illegitimate son, not she an illegitimate mother). I give the children a big, wet kiss, [and] you I clasp in my arms (but not without the proper respect). I am devoted to you with my whole heart, soul, and body (except, of course my arse hole).36

  Dmitri’s lewd and ambiguous manner often blurred the divide between familial jesting and the dangerously erotic. While this might be par for the course with his cousin the tsar, even a diluted form of it might have been rather too near the knuckle for his unworldly female cousins. As late as 1911 Dmitri still referred to the girls collectively as children, at a time when rumours were gathering in the foreign press of an imminent engagement between himself and Olga. But there is no solid evidence to support any interest in Dmitri on Olga’s part; in fact rather the opposite, she appears to have found his blokeish behaviour with her father – the badinage and endless billiard playing – rather immature. And for someone as sexually experienced as Dmitri, who already was demonstrating an interest in strong-minded, older and often
married women, Olga Nikolaevna would have seemed a total innocent, if not, as has been suggested, ‘a wet blanket’.37

  In 1908 Nicholas had banned Dmitri, so Dmitri told his sister Maria, from going out riding alone with Olga ‘because of what had happened the first time’, probably an allusion to his mischievous behaviour and penchant for telling dirty jokes.38 Yet to all intents and purposes it seemed by 1911 that he was being groomed as a prospective husband for her. Certainly the signs were sufficient for the foreign press to pick up on the gossip in St Petersburg and run away with it. But in fact the possibility of an engagement was already being anticipated much closer to home – within the imperial household itself – as General Spiridovich confirmed in his memoirs. Everyone enjoyed Dmitri’s presence, for he livened up the rather dull atmosphere at court. ‘The grand duke came often without ceremony, after merely announcing his arrival over the phone to the emperor. Such was the emperor’s affection for him that all the entourage already saw in him the future fiancé of one of the grand duchesses.’39

  Although he had not excelled as officer material, at cavalry school Dmitri had proved himself to be an excellent horseman and in early June 1912 he returned to St Petersburg to take up serious training for the Russian equestrian team at the Stockholm Olympics to be held in July. At this point serious rumours began circulating of an engagement, for in her diary for 7 June, General Bogdanov’s wife Alexandra – who held a monarchist political salon in St Petersburg – noted that ‘Yesterday Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna was betrothed to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’.40 The foreign press pounced on the rumours: the Dmitri–Olga ‘romance’ was repeated in the Washington Post in July, under the fanciful headline ‘Cupid by the Thrones’, where it was asserted that Olga had turned down an approach from Prince Adalbert, third son of the Kaiser, because ‘she had given her heart to her cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Paulovitch [sic]’. What is more, the paper said, she and Dmitri had ‘spoken of their affection’ and Olga ‘wore hidden a diamond pendant as a remembrance of these words’.41

  The absence of any official announcement and the lack of clarity even among those in the imperial entourage were compounded by a sphinx-like remark from British ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan, a great friend of Dmitri Pavlovich, in her diary in August, which appears to be a response to the betrothal rumour:

  I heard a rumour yesterday that a certain person is going to marry the Emperor’s eldest daughter. I can’t quite believe it considering all the high and mighty people who are panting to marry her. Of course she may have a coup de foudre for him and insist on having her own way.42

  Whether or not the rumours were true, a possible marriage between Grand Duke Dmitri and Olga soon became problematic. By the autumn of 1912 he had fallen increasingly under the influence of a boyhood friend, Prince Felix Yusupov, and had rapidly been sucked into the racy lifestyle of the St Petersburg fast set that Yusupov patronized. The two men were now spending a riotous time in town, wining and dining, consorting with ballerinas and gypsy girls and driving fast cars. Like any bright young thing in the dying days before the First World War with too much money and not enough to occupy his time, Dmitri was also developing a dangerous gambling habit. He had his own palace by the Anichkov Bridge on St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt – gifted to him by Ella when she retreated to her convent – and conveniently located in sight of all the fashionable clubs. Dmitri began to haunt the Imperial Yacht Club next door to his favourite restaurant at the Astoria Hotel; when he was not running through his fortune playing poker and baccarat there, he would be doing so in Paris, at the Travellers Club on the Champs-Elysées.43

  Sooner or later word of Dmitri’s playboy lifestyle must have got back to Nicholas and Alexandra and also to Olga. It was already rapidly eroding his good looks, the boyish charm mutating into a dark-eyed, saturnine appearance, made worse by the onset of health problems. Olga might have been young but she was strong-willed, deeply religious and principled. By January 1913 she was noting a degree of disdain for Dmitri’s habit of ‘messing about with papa’ that does not square with any romantic interest, although it could perhaps have been a case of teenage sour grapes. That same month Meriel Buchanan was more overt in her own opinion of the situation: ‘He absolutely refuses to look at Olga I believe.’44

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  On 6 August, with the roses of Livadia still filling the gardens with their lovely perfume, the family sadly left the Crimea and returned to Peterhof for army manoeuvres at Krasnoe Selo, followed, on 20 August, by the consecration at Tsarskoe Selo of the family’s newly built church, the Feodorovsky Sobor. This had been built a short walk from the palace and was also for the specific use of Cossacks serving with the Tsar’s Escort. It would become the fam-ily’s favourite place of worship and a significant feature in their spiritual lives, Alexandra in particular creating her own private retreat in a side chapel. Soon afterwards the family left Tsarskoe Selo by special train to Moscow to celebrate the centenary of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in 1812.

  The focal point of the ceremonies was the battlefield of Borodino, 115 miles (185 km) west of Moscow, where, on 7 September 1812, 58,000 Russians had been killed or wounded in what had been a pyrrhic victory for the French. Within two months the exhausted and depleted Grande Armée withdrew from Moscow and into the catastrophe of the long winter retreat from Russia. On 25 August at Borodino Nicholas and Alexey reviewed units whose predecessors had fought in the original battle and were joined by the whole family at a religious ceremony held at Alexander I’s campaign chapel nearby.45 On the following day came more parades on Borodino Field, everyone walking solemnly behind the sacred Smolensk Mother of God icon with which Russian troops had been blessed before the battle, followed by prayers at the Spaso-Borodinsky Monastery and the Borodino monument. The whole family found it an intensely moving experience: ‘A common feeling of deep reverence for our forebears seized us all there,’ Nicholas told his mother, ‘these were moments of such emotional grandeur as can rarely be surpassed in our days!’46 On both occasions, with the emphasis on the tsar and his heir in their military uniforms, the girls looked the epitome of imperial grace in the now iconic ensemble of long white lace dresses and hats draped with large white ostrich feathers – ‘four young girls, whose beauty and charm will gradually be revealed to a respectfully-admiring world, like the blooming of rare and lovely flowers in our hothouses’.47 They were charming, enchanting even; but to ordinary Russians the four Romanov sisters remained as beautiful and inaccessible as storybook princesses.

  After Borodino, the imperial party travelled on to Moscow and further celebrations of the 1812 anniversary at the Kremlin and elsewhere, culminating in a mass at the exquisite fifteenth-century Uspensky Sobor. On the last day of an exhausting programme of religious and public celebration, where the citizens of Moscow took full advantage of a rare glimpse of the entire imperial family together, a huge prayer service was held on Red Square in memory of Alexander I, the conquering tsar who had driven the French from

  Russia. It was a highly emotive conclusion to the anniversary, the square echoing to the voices of a 3,000-strong choir, the booming of cannon firing the salute and the unforgettable sound of church bells ringing out across the heart of old Moscow.48

  Chapter Eleven

  THE LITTLE ONE WILL NOT DIE

  The festivities for Borodino had the inevitable impact on the tsaritsa and in early September 1912, the family headed off for one of Nicholas’s favourite hunting venues, the Białowiea Forest, an imperial estate in eastern Poland (now in Belarus). The territory was part of the Russian Empire at the time, but before it was ceded to Russia during the partitions of the eighteenth century, it had long been the ancient hunting preserve of the kings of Poland. Here, across 30,000 acres (404,686 ha) of dense, virgin forest the tsar could take his pick, hunting for deer, wild boar, moose, wolves – and even the rare European bison, which thrived there. The four sisters, who were all now accomplished horsewomen, went for exhilarating morning rides
with their father, leaving a frustrated Alexey, who was not allowed such dangerous pursuits, to be taken by car in search of the wildlife. Alexandra, meanwhile, stayed at home, ‘lying here all on my own, writing letters and resting my weary heart’.1

  It was hard for Alexey always to be excluded from vigorous family activities, although nothing could restrain him, given half a chance, from indulging in the kind of physical games with other children that so easily could cause him harm. Dr Botkin’s children noticed his penchant for slapstick of the ‘pie-throwing type’ and his inability to ‘stay in any place or at any game for any length of time’.2 There was something always so restless about him. Agnes de Stoeckl recalled with horror seeing how that summer in Livadia he had joined his sisters in whirling round a very high maypole that Grand Duchess George had erected for her children at Harax, ‘insist[ing] on running holding the rope until the impetus lifted him gently into the air’.3 Everyone dreaded the repercussions if he hurt himself, but it had long since proved impossible to contain Alexey’s natural energies and Nicholas had ordered that Alexey be allowed ‘to do everything that other children of his age were wont to do, and not to restrain him unless it was absolutely necessary’. Court paediatrician Dr Sergey Ostrogorsky had told Grand Duke Dmitri that Alexey did not have ‘the full-blown disease’, ‘but it will develop forcefully if it’s allowed to, which is exactly what’s happening’. This was because the empress was too indulgent with him and did not heed his, Ostrogorsky’s, advice, such as recently when