The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  During the winter months of 1913 at the Alexander Palace, Nicholas’s diary is a testament to his hands-on parenting of his four daughters in lieu of his perpetually sick wife. No matter the amount of paperwork on his desk, the number of meetings with ministers, public audiences and military reviews that filled his day, at this time of year when they were home at Tsarskoe Selo he always found time for his children. History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers. The months of January and February were a special time for him and his daughters, during which he treated them all to trips to see the ballets The Little Humpbacked Horse, Don Quixote and The Pharoah’s Daughter – in which last they were thrilled to see Pavlova dance. As the eldest, Olga (and Tatiana, until illness prevented her) enjoyed the added bonus of seeing the operas Madame Butterfly, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Wagner’s Lohengrin, which latter Olga found particularly beautiful and moving.13 But in the main, time with Papa was spent out in the park, whatever the weather, sharing invigorating walks, riding bicycles, helping him break the ice on the canals, skiing, sliding down the ice hill, and joined – when he was well enough – by Alexey wearing his specially made boot with a caliper. The girls so enjoyed having their father to themselves; he was a fast, unrelenting walker and they had all learned to keep up or be left behind, Olga in particular always walking closest to him on one side, Tatiana on the other, with Maria and Anastasia running back and forth in front of them, sliding on the ice and throwing snowballs. It was clear to anyone who encountered the tsar and his daughters in the Alexander Park how much pride he had in his girls. ‘He was happy that people admired them. It was as though his kind blue eyes were saying to them: “Look what wonderful daughters I have.”’14

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  On the evening of 15 May the family boarded the imperial train for Moscow and began a two-week trip in the steamship Mezhen up the Volga from Moscow in celebration of the Tercentary. It was an arduous tour during which they stopped off at the major religious sites of the Golden Ring, a route taken by the first Romanov tsar from his birthplace to Moscow in 1613.15 It had been a major pilgrimage route for centuries and was one that Alexandra had long expressed a wish to see; Nicholas himself had not visited the area since 1881. From a succession of holy sites at Vladimir, Bogolyubovo and Suzdal the family travelled to Nizhniy Novgorod for a service at its beautiful Cathedral of the Transfiguration; then back along the Volga by steamer, arriving at Kostroma on 19 May. At each stop there was a traditional welcome of bread and salt from local dignitaries and clergy. Church bells rang out and military bands played, as huge crowds of peasants gathered along the river banks – some wading deep into the water – to catch a glimpse of the imperial family as they arrived (a fact which alarmed Alexandra who feared a catastrophe like the stampede at Khodynka Fields). But she enjoyed meeting the devoted old peasant babushki and would stop and talk to them on the river bank, giving them money and religious images.16 Kostroma was the most important stop on their itinerary for it was here, at the Ipatiev Monastery,* that the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov had taken refuge during a time of political upheaval in Russia, and where he was invited by a delegation of boyars from Moscow to take the throne. The monastery had its own Romanov Museum that the family visited after attending services in the cathedral, before going on to unveil a monument marking the Tercentary. This was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip with huge crowds voicing their enthusiasm for the imperial family as they processed through streets decorated with flags and Romanov insignia, the peasantry demonstrating their traditional loyalty to the ‘little father’ by falling on their knees when the national anthem was played.17 Such devotion served to stiffen Alexandra’s conviction that the ordinary people loved them: ‘What cowards those State Ministers are’, she told Elizaveta Naryshkina. ‘They are constantly frightening the Emperor with threats and forebodings of a revolution, and here you see it yourself – we only need to show ourselves, and at once their hearts are ours.’18

  Olga was thrilled when they arrived at Yaroslavl to see her dear AKSH in the honour guard that greeted them. After yet another crowded reception and a visit to an orphanage built to commemorate the Tercentary, the girls and Nicholas left Alexandra behind and headed for an exhibition of local manufacturing, a prayer service followed by dinner and musical entertainment, before they all finally boarded the train at midnight for Rostov. ‘A ton of presents, got very tired, very long and boring, also very hot’, Olga noted in her diary of that day. But ‘nice, sweet AKSH was there. I was terribly happy to see him.’ ‘Poor Mama’ was, however, very tired. ‘Heart no. 3, hurts. Lord save her.’19 The whole of the following day Alexandra remained in bed. During their time on the Volga Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin saw the strain Nicholas was under coping with the demands of the schedule and a tetchy wife constantly prostrated by fatigue and eating virtually nothing; he noticed that she often went all day on just a couple of boiled eggs.20

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  The family arrived back in Moscow on 24 May for the climax of their tour; ‘dear AKSH was once more smiling from across the crowd’ among officers of the Tsar’s Escort standing guard when they stepped from the carriages.21 If the celebrations in St Petersburg had been muted, officialdom had ensured that those in the heart of ancient Muscovy were triumphal, mimicking the entry into Moscow of Tsar Alexander I in the early days of the 1812 war with France. However, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, who was there for the celebrations, thought the crowds seemed subdued:

  The Emperor made restrained greetings to the right and the left without changing expression; it was impossible to detect any enthusiasm from either side. The muzhiks mostly stood there staring, a few made the sign of the cross or fell to their knees for the head of the church. It was more awe and curiosity than spontaneous warmth, more dutiful obedience than trust. Subjects kept down rather than free citizens. It was unpleasant, remote and as unlike how things are at home [in Sweden] as possible. The unbridgeable gap between the ruler and the people was more notable than ever.22

  The ceremonials once more revealed Alexey’s frailty, particularly on 25 May during the procession made by the family down the famous Red Staircase in the Kremlin, when people were shocked to see the tsarevich carried by one of the Cossacks from the Tsar’s Escort. ‘How sad to see the heir to the Romanov throne so weak, sickly, and helpless’, wrote Prime Minister Kokovtsov, who noted also the gasps of sympathy that this sight evoked in the crowd.23 The empress’s discomfort was also clearly visible, an ugly red flush appearing on her face during the ceremony. In contrast, the four Romanov daughters seemed relaxed if somewhat inattentive at the end of what had been a gruelling two weeks. At the Kremlin, one of the guards noticed how they ‘looked around, they were bored, they ate grapes and sweets’, though they always ‘behaved in a very natural and unpretentious manner’.24

  Just before their return to Tsarskoe Selo, Olga and Tatiana attended a ball at Moscow’s Assembly of Nobles. Alexandra was unable to endure more than an hour, but the two sisters happily opened the ball and took centre stage, dancing with many of the officers from the Erevan Regiment. And Olga’s head was once more turned during the quadrille by the sight of ‘AKSH’s sweet smiling face from afar’.25 En route to the railway station the following morning she thought she caught sight of him ‘in a red cap on one of the balconies far away’ and she saw him again soon at Aunt Olga’s on 2 and 6 June. As usual, after tea, dinner and a cosy chat on the sofa, the Romanov sisters indulged in a succession of noisy and childish catch-me-if-you-can games in the garden with their regular group of officers including AKSH and another great favourite, Viktor Zborovsky from the Tsar’s Escort. On the 6th, however, it all got wildly out of hand during a game of hide-and-seek upstairs when they ‘horsed around terribly, turned everything upside down, especially one big wardrobe. 10 people got inside it, and also on top of it, broke the doors, laughed and had a lot of fun.’26 A necessary dissipatio
n of pent-up energies perhaps, but – for the older two sisters at least – there must have been an underlying sexual tension. But then, inevitably, the motor car came for them at 7 p.m. and took them all back to Tsarskoe Selo. Olga went back with a heavy heart, sad to have learned that day that AKSH was ‘leaving for [the] Caucasus on Saturday. God save him.’

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  Throughout the 1913 Tercentary the tsarist publicity machine had promoted a paternalistic Romanov monarchy headed by a loving, devoted and virtuous family, an image perpetuated in the thousands of official photographs sold as postcards across Russia that year. But many of the Russian peasantry were bewildered by the official images, for they did not project an authoritarian all-powerful tsar, remote on his throne, as many of them certainly perceived him, but instead an ordinary, bourgeois man at the heart of a domestic unit dominated by women that called into question his manliness and with it his ability to rule.27 The role of the four Romanov sisters as an adjunct to their brother meanwhile underlined their widespread depiction as uncontroversial, dutiful daughters, nowhere more so than in an official hagiography, made available in English translation as The Tsar and His People. Written for the Tercentary by a member of the imperial entourage, Major-General Andrey Elchaninov, it found time briefly to summarize the sisters as

  brought up in the rules of the Holy Orthodox Church and trained to be good and careful housewives … [They] are remarkable for their power of observation, kindness, and sympathy, and their manners are simple and gracious. They are very active in helping the poor, especially poor children, their presents taking the form not of money, but of useful objects which they have made or knitted themselves.28

  Such a description set in stone the representation of the four girls as interchangeable and unremarkable, and it was one that they themselves compounded by often referring to themselves collectively as OTMA. The official view continued to be entirely bland with an emphasis on domestic pleasures over and above worldly ones: ‘They seldom visit the theatre except during their holidays. Only at Christmas or on other feast-days are they taken to the opera by their parents.’ Ironically, this was true enough; with hindsight one might say that in being denied contact with young men and women of their own social standing and the life experiences that went with it, the sisters were trapped in a stultifying, artificial world in which they were perpetually infantilized. ‘Why were they never seen,’ asked Meriel Buchanan, ‘except at Te Deums, or Reviews, or on some State occasion?’29 The one breath of fresh air in their lives remained their beloved Aunt Olga, but tea parties with her in St Petersburg were curtailed when, after returning from Moscow, the family headed straight off to Finland for four weeks’ holiday in the Shtandart.30

  They were all very tired after their Volga tour and the holiday was a rather subdued one for most of the family. But for Olga it was full of new interest for, in the absence of AKSH, she turned her attention to another handsome moustachioed officer on the Shtandart, who in her diary she referred to as ‘Pav. Al.’. The newly promoted Lieutenant Pavel Alexeevich Voronov was twenty-seven and had joined the Shtandart in April. From the moment she stepped on board on 10 June, Olga rapidly developed an attachment to him. Sometimes she sat with him in the front control room when he was on duty, or came there to dictate the day’s log to him. Soon they had a favourite trysting place, between the telegraph room and one of the ship’s funnels, where they often sat chatting with Tatiana and her favourite, Nikolay Rodionov. During the day Pavel sometimes joined the girls and their father on land, playing hot and vigorous games of tennis (he was Nicholas’s favourite partner at the game) or going for walks or swimming. Back on board they watched film shows and played card games together. It all seemed so innocent and above-board, but under the surface Olga’s emotions were in turmoil.

  Everyone liked the easy-going Pavel Voronov, especially Alexey, whom Voronov often carried when he was unwell. By the end of June Olga was writing that ‘he is so affectionate’, and was snatching what small moments of intimacy she could, often simply sitting gazing at him as he kept watch on the bridge.31 Any activity from which Pavel was absent or excluded was ‘boring’; when he was there ‘it was cosy and insanely nice to be with him’. By 6 July her feelings had deepened: ‘I dictated the log journal to him. After that we sat on the couch until after 5.00. I love him, dear, so much.’32 On 12 July on their last day in the Shtandart en route back to Peterhof she sat with Pavel in the control room all the way. ‘It was awfully sad. The whole time while the gangway was extended, I stood with him. Left the yacht around 4.00. So terribly hard to part with the beloved Shtandart, officers and sweetie pie … Lord save him.’33

  In the intervening weeks at Peterhof she received occasional telephone calls from Pavel and also the dependable Nikolay Sablin whom she so looked up to. It helped temper the sad litany of her mother’s almost daily indispositions. Mama’s heart hurt, her face hurt, her legs hurt; she was tired; she had a bad headache. Alexey was unwell too, his arm sore ‘from waving his arms about too much when playing’, so much so that in mid-July Grigory was called in to see him. He came at seven one evening, sat with Alexandra and Alexey and then talked for a short while with Nicholas and the girls, before leaving. ‘Soon after his departure,’ Nicholas noted in his diary, ‘the pain in Alexey’s arm began to go, he calmed down and began to fall asleep.34 Olga sat with her brother and her mother often when they were unwell, offering comfort – as too did Tatiana – in between the occasional horse ride or game of tennis. Her former crush, AKSH, reappeared from time to time in the Escort and she was happy to see him but her thoughts remained primarily with the Shtandart which was now sailing to the Mediterranean.

  At the beginning of August the two older sisters began preparing in earnest for their first official appearance at army manoeuvres, to be held on the 5th at Krasnoe Selo. They practised their riding for several days beforehand for the auspicious day when they would review their regiments in uniform on horseback for the first time – Olga in the blue and red with gold trim of the 3rd Elizavetgrad Hussars on her horse Regent and Tatiana in the navy and blue of the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans on Robino. They were now the youngest female colonels in the world – and on the day proved how accomplished they were. ‘Both Grand Duchesses led a pass in front of the Emperor at a gallop’, escorted by Grand Duke Nikolay, Commander-in-Chief of the army.35 ‘It was a hot day and they were very nervous, but they were delightful and did their utmost. I believe the Emperor was very proud as he watched his daughters for the first – and alas! – for the last time in a military line-up’, recalled Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich. But it was yet another milestone in their lives that their mother had been too ill to witness, shut away in her boudoir suffering from another bout of neuralgia.

  Two days later, the family headed south to Livadia in the 40-degree C (104-degree F) heat of high summer. Alexey was still unwell, and grumbled about the mud-bath treatments he had to endure twice a week, which he hated. But he now had his own, official governor. Nicholas and Alexandra had originally considered appointing someone from their military or naval entourage, but eventually decided to offer the post to Pierre Gilliard. Not every-one approved; Gilliard was an impeccable pedagogue, very proper and punctilious but very un-Russian, as Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted.36 Some said appointing a republican Swiss to look after the tsarevich was inappropriate. Gilliard accepted the appointment with considerable apprehension at what it entailed, having only just been privately informed by Dr Derevenko that Alexey had haemophilia. ‘Will I ever get used to the terrible responsibility that I am taking on?’ he asked his brother Frederick in a letter home.37 He found Alexey very undisciplined; in his view the boy’s nervousness and restless behaviour was exacerbated by the constant supervision of Derevenko. At the end of November his charge had yet another accident, falling off a chair he had climbed up on in the schoolroom and banging his leg. The subsequent swelling quickly spread from below the knee to his ankle. Another sailor from the Shtandart, Klimenty Nagorny,
had recently been charged with sharing the task of looking after Alexey with Derevenko and proved to be ‘touchingly kind’, sitting up at night with him during this latest attack, while his sisters opened the door every now and then and tiptoed in to kiss him.38 Yet again, the prayers of Grigory, who was in Yalta at the time, seemed to be the only thing that saved him; but, with the same alarming regularity, as after every injury, the frail tsarevich needed months of convalescence.

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  On 9 August when she had boarded the Shtandart in Sevastopol for the journey to Livadia, and saw Pavel Voronov once more, Olga began referring to him in her diary as ‘S’. This was an abbreviation for the Russian words sokrovishche – treasure, solntse – sunshine and schaste – happiness, which were her frequently used epithets for those she cared about most. Her whole world for the rest of that year was bound up in Pavel Voronov. Day after day she refers to him: ‘it’s so boring without my S, ghastly’; ‘it’s empty without him’; ‘didn’t see S and was miserable’.39 Pavel was perfection: sweet, kind, gentle, precious. At all times, no matter how briefly, she was always ‘so happy, so terribly happy’ to see him. Indeed, Olga was desolate when even a day passed without her spending time with the object of her affection and she snatched at the slightest sight or word of him like the lovesick teenager that she was. This experience went beyond the usual light flirting and coquetry that she and Tatiana had been indulging in for the last couple of years with the officers in the entourage. It was first love and it was painful. But it also had no future whatsoever. None of the well-drilled officers in the Shtandart ever breached the strict, unwritten code of honour that they adhered to in their relations with the daughters of the tsar. Voronov was clearly attracted to Olga, touched by her attention and certainly flattered; when the family left the ship for the White Palace, his fellow officers noticed how he often pointed his binoculars in its direction in hopes of catching a glimpse of her white dress on the balcony. Olga did likewise from her own vantage point – perhaps they had a private agreement to do so?40