The Romanov Sisters
Page 22
Alexey was still suffering a great deal, Ostrogorsky ordered him to lie quietly and avoid all movement since [it] would inevitably bring much harm. So what do you think Alix did, the fool? When Ostrogorsky returned a week later, he found Alexey leaping and running with his sisters. The Empress, responding to the doctor’s look of utter horror, said ‘I wanted to surprise you!’ But Ostrogorsky admitted that, after such surprises, one simply gives up.4
‘Was that not truly idiotic of Alexandra?’ Dmitri asked his sister; but more to the point, it poses the question of whether Alexandra had been sticking to Grigory’s advice to ignore what the doctors said and trust only in him and God for Alexey’s well-being. The fact was that Alexey had not benefited from the discipline of governesses as his sisters had, and was extremely capricious. His mother clearly could not control him, often rebuking Olga for not minding her brother’s manners. But poor Olga could not manage Alexey and his ‘peevish temper’ any more than her mother could.5 The only authority he respected was his father’s: ‘one word was always enough to exact implicit obedience from him’, Sydney Gibbes noted.6
There is no doubt that Alexey was often extremely difficult to handle, yet the lovable and compassionate side of his personality always in the end won through, for ‘it was often only by the glint of his eyes that one could realize the tumult that was passing in his little soul’.7 When he was well he was full of life: bright, intelligent and brave, and everyone in the entourage was happy seeing it. Yet there was always something intensely plaintive about this handsome little boy with the soulful eyes. He seemed so alone, aside from his devoted dyadka Derevenko. The company of other children – mainly Derevenko’s own or Dr Botkin’s – or occasional visits from royal cousins (with whom he did not always get along) were rare. In the main Alexey had only his sisters and his tutors for company.
Until the appointment of Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes, Alexey’s carers had all been Russians, which in itself had isolated him, and as a result his English was much poorer than that of his sisters. However, thanks to Gilliard, who became an important figure in his life, Alexey did end up speaking better French than the girls.* But having so little contact with the outside world, he was often fearful when encountering strangers. Gerald Hamilton, a traveller to Russia that spring, and whose German aunts had known Alexandra in Hesse, had the good fortune to be invited to meet the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo. As he sat taking tea with the tsaritsa, who talked animatedly of her Darmstadt schooldays, the tsarevich suddenly ‘romped into the room’ but immediately shrank back when he saw Hamilton’s unfamiliar face. He seemed so nervous and timid, thought Hamilton, with the ‘most extraordinarily gentle, almost beseeching eyes’.8
For now at least Alexey was in good health and he had for a while been accident-free, so much so that Alexandra had begun to hope that the doctors might be wrong in thinking his condition incurable. Earlier that year, in an attempt to make her sister-in-law Olga understand the extent to which she relied on Grigory, she had finally admitted ‘that the poor little one has that terrible illness’. Olga could see that Alexandra had ‘become ill because of it and w[ould] never fully recover’.9 Her sister-in-law was adamant about how indispensable Grigory was, insisting to Olga Alexandrovna that ‘the boy feels better the moment he is near him, or prays for him’. He had helped him yet again during their recent stay at Livadia when Alexey had had a ‘haemorrhage in the kidneys’, noted Olga’s sister Xenia, who also was now privy to the truth. Grigory, who had followed the imperial family to the Crimea, had been sent for and ‘Everything stopped when he arrived!’10
During the long and exhausting celebrations at Borodino Alexey had been greeted by wildly enthusiastic crowds, ecstatic at seeing their tsarevich close to them. Alexandra had been proud of him for coming through the physical strain of it all so well. But then disaster had once more struck; while out on the river one day not long after their arrival at Białowiea – and ignoring the warnings of Derevenko – Alexey banged the inside of his thigh against one of the oarlocks when hastily jumping into a rowing boat.11 A swelling developed in his left groin soon after, accompanied by pain and raised temperature. But after a week or so it appeared to ease and he seemed fit enough for the family to travel on to their smaller hunting lodge deep in the forest at Spala, though Alexey still had difficulty walking and had to be carried by Derevenko. He remained pale and frail for days but Alexandra refused to call in any additional doctors, entrusting Alexey’s care to Dr Botkin only. He was not allowed to join the girls on mushroom-foraging expeditions in the forest and became restless and disgruntled; to pacify him, on 2 October Alexandra took him out for a carriage drive. The sandy road was very bumpy and uneven and before long Alexey was complaining of a sharp pain in his thigh. Alexandra ordered the driver to turn back, but by the time they reached the lodge he was screaming in agony and was carried into his bedroom in a state of semi-consciousness.12 The juddering of the carriage had caused the still healing haematoma in his upper thigh to rupture and start bleeding again.
Dr Ostrogorsky was immediately sent for from St Petersburg, closely followed by Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Feodorov. But nothing could calm him or alleviate the unremitting agony caused by the swelling, which was now spreading across his groin to his abdomen. On 6 October his fever rose to 102 degrees F (38.9 degrees C) and his heartbeat became irregular; the last strength in Alexey’s body was being drained away by the pain and all the child could do was fretfully draw his left leg up tightly in an attempt to ease it. Dr Feodorov feared that an abscess would develop and blood poisoning might set in, leading to peritonitis. For the next four nights, Alexandra barely left Alexey’s bedside – with Olga and Tatiana both taking turns to sit with him – refusing to rest or eat, forced to listen to him crossing himself and crying out over and over again with each contracting pain ‘Gospodi pomilui’ – ‘O Lord have mercy upon me!’ – as the intensity of his screams faded into a hoarse cry and he slipped in and out of delirium.13 ‘Mama,’ he called out in one of his lucid moments, ‘don’t forget to put a little monument on my tomb when I am dead.’14
In the midst of this crisis Pierre Gilliard watched in horrified fascination as Nicholas, Alexandra and the girls made heroic attempts to act as though nothing was seriously wrong, for they were surrounded by visitors: ‘one shooting party succeeded another, and the guests were more numerous than ever’.15 On one particular evening Maria and Anastasia performed a couple of scenes from Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for a party of visiting Polish nobles. During the performance Alexandra had sat there, smiling and chatting with steely determination, as though nothing was amiss, but the minute the performance ended she rushed upstairs, as Gilliard recalled, with ‘a distracted and terror-stricken look in her face’.16 With guests to entertain out shooting, at luncheon and at dinner she and Nicholas struggled to maintain their composure, while upstairs, out of sight, their son’s cries of pain echoed along the corridors – all, as Gilliard observed, in a last-ditch attempt to maintain the secret of his condition.
By 8 October and unable to do anything at all to help the stricken child, the doctors had given up hope. Feodorov had considered and quickly abandoned the idea of ‘drastic measures’ – surgical intervention to cut open the swelling, drain it and release the agonizing pressure in Alexey’s abdomen – for even the incision would have been enough for him to bleed to death.17 ‘I do not have the strength to convey to you what I am experiencing’, Dr Botkin wrote to his children that day. ‘I am in no condition to do anything but walk around him … in no condition to think about anything except him and his parents … Pray, my children, pray daily and fervently for our precious heir.’18
The tsarevich was dying and the Russian people had to be prepared. Until now Alexandra had been adamant about any bulletins being issued but she finally relented. On the evening of the 9th, Feoderov and Dr Karl Rauchfuss, another leading paediatrician and head of a children’s hospital in the capital who had arrived with him, compo
sed a brief announcement to be published in the St Petersburg evening papers.19 The children’s religious instructor, Father Vasiliev, administered the last rites. Faced with the imminent death of her only son, Alexandra had no options left: she must appeal to Grigory for help. On her instructions, Anna Vyrubova sent a telegram to Rasputin in Pokrovskoe. His daughter Maria remembered it arriving the following morning, upon which Rasputin had prayed for some time in front of an icon of the Virgin of Kazan. Then he had gone to the telegraph office and sent word back to Alexandra: ‘The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.’20 Later a second telegram arrived telling her, ‘God has seen your tears and heard your prayers’; Alexey, Grigory again assured her, would recover.21 A strange calm came over the tsaritsa from that moment; perhaps this transmitted itself to the stricken child and in turn calmed him, for his temperature dropped and he began to settle. At last reassured, Alexandra went down to dinner for the first time since the crisis had begun; ‘she was radiant in her relief from anxiety’, as General Mosolov recalled. The doctors, in contrast, ‘seemed in utter consternation’ at this dramatic turn-around.22
On the 10th Alexey was given Communion again: ‘the poor thin little face with its big suffering eyes, lit up with blessed happiness as the Priest approached him with the Holy Sacrament. It was such a comfort to us all and we too had the same joy’, Alexandra later told Boyd Carpenter. For her, Alexey’s miraculous recovery was down to ‘trust and faith implicite [sic] in God Almighty’.23 He had not deserted her. And now, across the churches of Russia, the people too were praying for the heir’s recovery.
On the afternoon of the 10th Nicholas noted in his diary that Alexey had at last slept soundly. The following day the doctors issued a press bulletin saying that the crisis was over. Dr Botkin was relieved to write and tell his children that ‘our priceless patient’ was ‘undoubtedly significantly better … God heard our fervent prayers.’ But the anguish for everyone had been terrible; it would be a long time before Alexey would be fully well again, and yet even now Botkin found himself wondering ‘how many more occasions like this might there be along the way’.24 In the interim, Dr Feodorov had summoned from St Petersburg his young assistant Dr Vladimir Derevenko, who would now become a permanent fixture in Alexey’s care.
On 20 October Nicholas was able at last to write to his mother ‘with my heart filled with gratitude to the Lord for His Mercy in granting us the beginning of dear Alexei’s recovery’.25 In a bulletin issued by the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Freedericksz, on the 21st a detailed description was finally given to the Russian public of the ‘abdominal haemorrhage and swelling’ that had occurred, the raised temperature and the ‘subsequent exhaustion and severe anaemia’ which would need ‘considerable time to cure completely’ as would the free use of the tsarevich’s left leg as a result of the ‘bent hip muscle’. Signed by doctors Rauchfuss, Feoderov, Ostrogorsky and Botkin, the bulletin made no mention of haemophilia. For the Russian people, the cause of the illness would remain shrouded in mystery. The international press was, however, thick with speculation. ‘Probably the illness of no child in the world is fraught with so much political significance as is that of the eight-year-old czarevitch,’ wrote the Daily News, ‘his death eventually might lead to an upheaval in Russia that would shake the Romanoff dynasty from its throne.’26
But what was really wrong with the tsarevich, everyone asked? Tuberculosis of the bone, a tumour, an abscess, kidney trouble, a fall from his pony, were all mentioned, with the American press even circulating an absurd story that ‘during an unguarded moment’ Alexey had been attacked and stabbed in the grounds of Spala by a ‘nihilist’.27 The St Petersburg correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph reported that the exact nature of the illness was ‘for unexplained reasons into which one is reluctant to pry, kept dark, not merely from the general public, but from the highest state dignitaries, who are reduced to inference and conjecture’. The ‘incomprehensible silence of the Court bulletins’ was causing considerable anxiety among the Russian public, giving, as The Times observed, ‘free scope to the sensation-mongers’.28 On 4 November (22 October OS) it ran a headline, ‘Cause of the Tsarevitch’s illness’, beneath which its St Petersburg correspondent wrote, ‘In medical circles the illness of the Tsarevitch is attributed to a congenital condition of the blood, rendering reabsorption difficult in the case of rupture of the slightest vessel’.29 This in itself was a tacit admission of haemophilia to anyone in the medical profession, and it was the London press that finally broke the story. On 9 November (27 October OS), the British medical journal Hospital announced that the tsarevich had haemophilia, a fact picked up the following day in the New York Times with its headline ‘Czar’s Heir Has Bleeding Disease’, adding that this was ‘long a characteristic of European Royal Families and Still Persists’.30
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When Alexey was finally fit to travel, the most careful preparations were made for his return home to Russia. The sandy road from the hunting lodge at Spala to the railway station was carefully smoothed over, so that there ‘should not be the slightest jolting’ and the imperial train was driven no faster than 15 mph (24 kmh) so that the brakes need not be suddenly applied.31 It was not until 24 November (OS) that Alexey finally was able to take his first bath ‘in more than two months’, Alexandra told Onor. During the daytime he was being ‘wheeled around the upstairs rooms in my bath-chair’ and only later did they finally begin carrying him down to her mauve boudoir.32 Alexey would be lame for a year, during the course of which he was submitted to endless, rigorous treatment: ‘electricity, massage, mud compresses, blue light bath with electric current on arm, & leg bath’; Alexandra hoped he might be able to stand on his leg again by Christmas.33 Professor Roman Wreden, a pioneering orthopaedic surgeon, came from St Petersburg and fitted Alexey with a corrective iron leg caliper. The tsarevich found it extremely uncomfortable and complained to his mother, but Wreden was firm; Alexey must endure the discomfort if he was to be a future emperor. It was a candid remark that hit home, for word was already out that the Russian people had a cripple for an heir. Alexandra did not like having to face this unpalatable truth. And so Nicholas thanked the good professor, made him an honorary court physician, and never called on his services again.34
Alexey’s recovery went hand in hand with his mother’s. Alexandra did not make her first public appearance until 1 December, having been ‘too utterly exhausted’ for the last three months. But she took comfort in her son’s compassion: ‘Sweet angel wants to have my pains,’ she wrote, ‘says I can take his which are much less.’35 But it was clear that this latest crisis had taken an irreversible toll on her: ‘for seven years,’ she told Boyd Carpenter, ‘I suffer from the heart and lead the life of an invalid most of the time.’36
Her precious boy had, however, recovered from almost certain death, a fact that a still baffled Dr Feodorov confirmed was ‘wholly inexplicable, from a medical point of view’.37 But the tsarevich’s survival had come at a high price – the emotional enslavement of his mother to Grigory Rasputin as the only person on God’s earth who could keep her son alive. For after his return to St Petersburg that winter, Grigory had assured her that her son would be safe – all the time that he, Grigory, was alive.
Now more than ever Alexandra’s daughters performed an essential role in the day-to-day care of their mother and brother, in a family life that was increasingly lived in the shadow of the sickroom. ‘They are all 5 touching in their care for me’, Alexandra told Boyd Carpenter; ‘my family life is one blessed ray of sunshine excepting the anxiety for our Boy.’38 But the psychological effect of Alexandra’s chronic sickness was taking its toll: in their crucial formative years the four sisters, now more than ever, needed a mother’s time and attention. But instead of living the carefree life of teenagers exploring the world around them, meeting new people and discovering new places, sickness and suffering had come to dominate their everyday lives, which they were learning
to endure with extraordinary stoicism. ‘My Mama darling,’ wrote Maria, herself in bed suffering with a sore throat, on 14 December 1912:
I thank you so very much for your dear letter. I am so sorry that your heart is still No. 2.* I hope your cold is better. My temperature now is 37.1 [99 degrees F] and my throat acks less than yesterday. Am so sorry not to see you today, but sertenly its better for you to rest. 1000 kisses from your own loving Maria.39
For the four sisters, especially Olga and Tatiana, there was also a major public role to perform in the coming year – 1913 – of the Romanov Tercentary in promoting the popular image of the imperial family in their mother’s frequent absences and in acting, too, as ‘the faithful companions of their beloved father’. ‘It was as if the young, beautiful princesses should protect the ever-threatened czar,’ observed Baroness Souiny, ‘and they did protect him.’40
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Brilliant sunshine in a cloudless sky greeted a St Petersburg in the grip of the winter thaw, when on Thursday 21 February 1913 the streets were set ablaze with the most splendid decorations in red, white and blue in celebration of the Tercentary of the ascent of the Romanov dynasty to the throne of Russia.41 At 8 a.m. that morning a twenty-one-gun salute from the Peter and Paul Fortress had announced the start of the celebrations. Every shopfront and lamp-post along the Nevsky Prospekt was festooned with the tsarist double-headed eagle and portraits of all the Romanov tsars, since Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich had accepted the nomination back in February 1613. Shops were full of commemorative items, special stamps bearing the tsar’s head for the first time (it had previously been considered an insult to depict it), medals and coins were issued and a manifesto by Nicholas published in which he proclaimed his ‘steadfast desire, in unalterable agreement with our beloved people, to continue to lead the Empire along the path of peaceful development of the national life’.42