The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Whatever Pavel Voronov might have felt in his heart, his tentative relationship with the tsar’s eldest daughter was love held firmly at bay: furtive, affectionate and confidential glances, occasional chats over tea on deck, games of tennis, sticking photographs in albums together. There was even the occasional chance to partner her at small informal dances on the deck of the Shtandart, such as that held to celebrate Olga’s eighteenth birthday, during which, as everyone noticed, she danced a great deal with Voronov. By December 1913, having spent the best part of five months in his company, Olga’s feelings had inevitably intensified and she began confiding them in a special code – something her mother had done during her own youth – using symbols similar to Georgian cursive. Pavel was now ‘her tender darling’, suggesting a degree of reciprocal feeling on his part, and she was happier than she had ever been.41 And then, in September, a worrying note entered her diary entries. Pavel was less in evidence. Olga would go several days without seeing him: ‘It’s so abominable without my S., awful’; even seeing her dear friend AKSH, who was on duty in the Escort at Livadia, didn’t cheer her up.42 Life returned to the same predictable routine of lessons in the morning, sitting with either her sick mama or brother, playing tennis and going on occasional walks or horse rides. From disappointment, to boredom, to petulance and finally pretending she really didn’t care, Olga Nikolaevna ran the gamut of feelings of any teenager in love. Her attention wandered in the days without S and with typical, hormonal fickleness, she turned her thoughts back to AKSH, using a new nickname for him – Shurik – and reminding herself ‘what a sweetheart’ he was and how nice he looked in uniform wearing ‘my favourite dark jacket’.43

  It turned out that during his time off, Pavel had been making visits to the Kleinmikhels, close friends of the Romanov family who had an estate at Koreiz. One day Countess Kleinmikhel was invited to the White Palace to lunch. She arrived, bringing her young niece Olga with her. Suddenly it all became clear; Pavel Voronov and Olga Kleinmikhel were being steered in each other’s direction. When Olga Nikolaevna saw him at a charity ball shortly after in October she already sensed a distancing between them: ‘I saw my S once, during the quadrille, our encounter was strange somehow, a bit sad, I don’t know.’44 Soon after, with characteristic teenage sangfroid she announced: ‘I am used to S. not being here by now’, but oh how it hurt when on 6 November, at a small dance at the White Palace, she noticed that he ‘danced the entire time with Kleinmikhels [sic]’.45 She was miffed and several days later tried to shrug it off: ‘It’s good to see him and not good at the same time. Did not say a word to him and don’t want to.’46 There were always games of hide-and-seek in the palace with Shurik and Rodionov, during which she ‘horsed around a lot’, and a trip to see a film in Yalta. But when she returned home it was the same depressing scenario: Alexey was crying because his leg hurt; Mama was tired, and lying down and her heart was no. 2.47

  By December Olga had become scared of her feelings for S and how they still dominated her thoughts and so it was as well that on the 17th the family left Livadia, although this year, in particular, it was a wrench to go. ‘We all were left with such a longing for the Crimea’, wrote Nicholas in his diary.48 For Olga it was ‘boring without all the friends, the yacht, and S., of course’. And then, on 21 December, she heard the news: ‘I learned that S is to marry Olga Kleinmichael [sic].’ Olga’s response was brief but dignified: ‘May the Lord grant happiness to him, my beloved.’49

  Is it possible that Nicholas and Alexandra had deliberately contrived the engagement of Pavel Voronov to Olga Kleinmikhel, with a view to sparing Olga any further heartache in pursuing a hopeless love match? It was patently clear to everyone – and must have been to them – that she had fallen in love with him, though Pavel’s true feelings for her are unknown. Perhaps he had sensed that his close friendship with the grand duchess was beginning to overstep the permitted mark and that he should therefore fall on his sword and remove himself from the frame. Nicholas and Alex-andra were certainly more than happy to give their warm approval of his engagement to Olga Kleinmikhel, but for Olga Nikolaevna it was hard and her response was to suppress the pain she was feeling, even in her diary. Dealing with a broken heart was one thing, but having to continue seeing Pavel with his fiancée was quite another, as too was having to listen to her sisters excitedly discussing their wedding to come at Tsarskoe Selo.

  In January Aunt Ella arrived at Tsarskoe Selo with Countess Kleinmikhel and Olga and ‘S’; only now S – Olga’s treasure, her happiness – was the other Olga’s, ‘not mine!’ as she exclaimed in her diary. ‘My heart aches, it’s painful, I don’t feel well and only slept for an hour and a half.’50 That year Christmas was a sad one for her. After visiting her grandmother at the Anichkov Palace and presenting gifts to the officers of the Escort it was back to the same quiet routine, as the winter weather closed in on a bitter cold New Year’s Eve at Tsarskoe Selo: ‘At 11 p.m. had tea with Papa and Mama, and welcomed the New Year in the regimental church. I thank God for everything. Snow blizzard. –9 degrees.’51

  All of the Romanov family found Pavel Voronov’s wedding service on 7 February 1914, at the regimental church at Tsarskoe Selo, deeply moving. Olga kept her feelings to herself and did not even unburden them in her diary:

  At about 2:30, the three of us set out with Papa and Mama. We drove to the regimental church for the wedding of P. A. Woronoff and O. K. Kleinmichael at the regimental church. May the Lord grant them happiness. They were both nervous. We made the acquaintance of S’s parents and 2 sisters, sweet girls. We drove to the Kleinmichael’s. There were many people at the reception at the house.52

  Immediately afterwards Pavel Voronov went on leave for two months with his bride, after which he was transferred to the post of commander of the watch on the imperial yacht Aleksandriya. Olga would still see Pavel from time to time at Tsarskoe Selo, and con-tinued to refer to him as ‘S’ in her diary, but her brief experience of real love was over. His wife later recalled that ‘of his four years’ service in the proximity of the imperial family Paul kept a sacred memory’. But Pavel Voronov remained the soul of discretion about his relationship with Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna; it was a memory that he kept to himself until the day he died.53

  Chapter Thirteen

  GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

  The last great winter season of 1913–14 in St Petersburg was a glittering one in the opinion of many who witnessed it – ‘even the dowagers’ could not remember another like it.1 Coming at the end of a successful Tercentary year, the succession of parties laid on by the greatest of Russia’s noble houses would mark the ‘sunset of the dynasty’, as Edith Almedingen recalled – ‘a sunset splendid enough to win a lodgment in the memory’.2 Such unbridled splendour was of course confined to the playgrounds of the super-rich, who spent the season dissipating their crippling ennui in a ‘vortex of worldly gaiety’ during which they ‘scarcely saw the daylight for weeks at a time during the six hours of the winter’s sunshine’.3 Behind the facades of their overheated, luxurious palaces and browsing in the high-class shops along the Nevsky Prospekt filled with Western luxury goods, the Russian aristocracy remained stubbornly oblivious to the visible unrest gathering across the city, fuelled by poverty, deprivation and continuing political oppression.4

  There was a mass of high-society parties, amateur theatricals and masked balls to choose from that year, for those with an ‘in’ to the clique-ridden social scene, all described in detail and lavishly photographed on the pages of the high-society magazine Stolitsa i usadba [Capital and Country Estate], its title reflecting the charmed lives of those privileged to have homes in both locations. After Grand Duchess Vladimir’s four-day Grand Christmas Bazaar had opened the season at the Assembly of Nobles, the hot tickets were for Princess Obolenskaya’s Greek Mythology Ball at her big white palace on the Moika; Countess Kleinmikhel’s fancy-dress ball with costumes designed by Bakst; and two more opulent balls – one in black-and-white and the other featuring
wigs and multicoloured turbans – held by the fabulously wealthy Princess Betsy Shuvalova at her palace on the Fontanka. In addition there were endless, rather more sedate bals blancs for debutantes in white watched over by their chaperones, bals roses for young married women and dances at the various embassies, the two at the British Embassy on the English Embankment being the most sought after. At the Imperial Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre society ladies flocked to see its star performers Mathilde Kschessinska and Anna Pavlova, while gentlemen could indulge in extravagant private dinners and gaming at Grand Duke Dmitri’s favourite haunt, the Imperial Yacht Club.5

  The tsaritsa of course would not dream of allowing her daughters to attend any of these functions; it was their grandmother who gave a special ball – at the Anichkov Palace on 13 February 1914 – to mark Olga’s and Tatiana’s official debut in society and which was the highlight of the social season. Guests were greeted by ‘masters of ceremony in gold-embroidered court dress, black silk breeches and stockings, and buckled, patent leather shoes’, holding ‘thin ivory canes which made them look like rococo shepherds’.6 From here they were herded past ‘two tall black Ethiopian footmen in Oriental costume and high turbans’ into the ballroom, where they awaited the entrance of the emperor and empress, followed by Tatiana and Olga, ‘tall, slim lovely creatures’ who looked at those assembled ‘with a sort of amused curiosity’.7 After the tsar had opened the ball with a ceremonial polonaise, there was a moment of confused embarrassment. ‘Not a single young man made a move to ask the two grand duchesses to dance’, noticed debutante Helene Iswolsky. ‘Were they all too shy to make the plunge? Or was it the sudden realization that the two girls were strangers?’8 After an embarrassing pause a few officers from the Tsar’s Escort who had danced with them before were ‘jockeyed into position’, but it was clear that these young men ‘did not belong to the smart set’; they were ‘completely unknown, rather uncouth, common looking’.9

  Alexandra managed to tolerate the ball for an hour and a half, leaving Nicholas with the girls until a wearying 4.30 in the morning, his daughters having ‘refused to be torn away any earlier’.10 But he had spent the whole evening looking timid and feeling uncomfortable: ‘Je ne connais personne ici’, he confided to one dancing partner.11 Such was the isolation in which he and his family had been living for the last eight years that they were completely out of touch with who was who in fashionable society. This fact did not go unnoticed by Nicholas’s aunt, the forthright Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, who was in St Petersburg for the wedding of Grand Duchess Xenia’s daughter Irina to Prince Felix Yusupov. She did not mince her words when describing the evening in a letter to her daughter Marie, the Crown Princess of Romania. The duchess had very decided views on the high-born company young women such as her great-nieces should keep. But instead,

  they were surrounded by a Chinese wall of Cossack and other third class officers who would not let any of the real good society ones come near them. As the girls know nobody in society, they simply hopped about like provincial demoiselles without anybody being presented to them and they were never made to talk with any of the ladies young or old.12

  The duchess was appalled: ‘Now fancy Grand Duchesses who perhaps will soon marry and perhaps leave the country not being properly introduced into the Petersburg society!’

  If I only think of my young days when before going out I knew all the ladies and the young gentlemen who were presented during a ball. As Alix has allowed her daughters to be engaged by their dancers instead of sending for them like we did (and liked it much better as we got all those we really wanted and not the bores, so that the young ladies even envied us) the whole of the old and good etiquette has been abandoned. The result is that only certain officers danced with them.13

  This mattered not a jot to Olga and Tatiana, who continued to make the most of what precious few social engagements came their way that winter before the austerity of Lent was upon them. A few days later Alexandra allowed Anastasia and Maria to join them for a small thé-dansant at Grand Duchess Vladimir’s palace, given ‘almost in defiance of the cloistered tsarina’ and in which the grand duchess ‘made a great display of luxury and decoration’, as though emphasizing to the sisters the lifestyle they were being deprived of by their anti-social mother. Here Olga and Tatiana ‘danced every dance with wholehearted and intense enjoyment’ and Meriel Buchanan took pleasure in watching them ‘whispering in a corner, fair head and dark head close together, blue eyes and amber eyes alight with merriment’.14 But again, Nicholas, who accompanied them, looked lost, not knowing any of the ladies and gentlemen present.15

  The Duchess of Saxe-Coburg was totally exasperated with Alexandra’s endless retreats and non-appearances that season and her daughters’ total lack of social experience, but she had to admit that she could not help admiring ‘their great devotion to her’. ‘How trying it must be for young gay creatures to have an eternally ailing mother’, she told Marie.16 Nevertheless, by 1914 the eldest two Romanov daughters were finally coming into their own. St Petersburg was full of rumours

  which coupled their names with those of one or two Foreign Princes, with that of a young Grand Duke very popular in Society [i.e. Dmitri Pavlovich]; the story of a too forward suitor who got his cheek severely slapped by the Grand Duchess Olga, the whisper of a romance with one of the officers attached to the Staff which was promptly squashed by those in authority.17

  Was the latter, one wonders, an allusion to Voronov? Certainly, all the royal princes of Europe were once more being thrown into a mix that was being vigorously stirred by the ‘matchmaking busybodies’ of the Continental press.18 A ‘sentimental crisis’ was now approaching in the careers of the tsar’s two eldest daughters according to Current Opinion, which depicted Olga as grave and somewhat melancholy, a reminder of ‘her august origin’. Yet even so, who could miss the exquisiteness of her throat, her slender neck and ‘soft white arms dimpling at the elbow and the long tapering fingers’? But it was Tatiana who intrigued. With her fascinating eyes that ‘alternated from deep grey to violet’ she had ‘all the seductiveness of a sprite’.19 Both sisters were nevertheless noted for their piety, their mother having admitted to a departing French ambassador: ‘My ambition for my girls is that they may become Christian ladies.’20 Their modesty was also reflected in the continuing simplicity of their dress, a fact mourned by the French modistes: ‘The Czarina will not allow her girls to don gold gauze or flaunt in the colours of the Avenue d’Alma.’21 It was clear that the clothes of the young grand duchesses ‘must still be made under the supervizion [sic] of their mother, as they were ten years ago’. Unsophisticated they might be but one thing impressed: the girls’ military ranks were by no means a ‘formality, a mere honour’, for, gasped Current Opinion, ‘the royal ladies can actually put their men through the drill’, a fact which seemed to confirm that not only was Nicholas ensuring his daughters were privy to the mysteries of statecraft but that one or either might if necessary ‘take their father’s place on the throne with the same ease’.22

  In all respects there were, by 1914, no two more wealthy, desirable and marriageable royal princesses than Olga and Tatiana Romanova. According to the Berlin Tageblatt, it was Tatiana who was now being paired off with the Prince of Wales, in anticipation of a projected visit he was to make to St Petersburg in the spring. The rumour soon received short shrift from George V’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham: ‘There is not a vestige of truth in the statement … It is pure invention.’23 Tatiana was also the object of an informal approach by Nikola Pašić, the Serbian prime minister, on behalf of the king, for his son Prince Alexander. The names of Boris of Bulgaria, Peter of Montenegro and Adalbert of Germany were all also once more raised and discussed. Meanwhile rumours persisted that ‘Grand Duchess Olga is willing to become the consort of her second cousin, Grand Duke Demetrius Pavlovich, and that it is on his account that she has rejected the suggestion of other matrimonial alliances’.24 The gossips would not let go of what they
still perceived as the ideal match; but in fact Dmitri, whose disreputable reputation was growing, was suffering from tuberculosis of the throat and spending much of his time abroad for his health. Olga’s diary for December 1913 had made quite clear the rather dim view that she took of him and his louche badinage during a visit to the family: ‘Dmitri was talking nonsense.’25

  Press speculation aside, by early 1914 Nicholas and Alexandra were clearly giving serious consideration to a new royal candidate for their eldest daughter: twenty-year-old Prince Carol of Romania, grandson of the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg. The initiative for the match seems to have been theirs, urged on by Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov, who wished to ensure that the Romanian royal family, who were Hohenzollerns, were in the right political camp – Russia’s and not Germany’s – before the now inevitable war broke out. Such a dynastic union would certainly bring long-term political and economic benefits and Nicholas and Alexandra could see the logic in it.26 Their sole reservation was ‘that the grand duchess’s marriage … should take place only as the result of a much closer acquaintance between the young people and on the absolute condition of their daughter’s voluntary agreement to it’.27 It was the Washington Post that on 1 February broke the story in the West of a possible engagement. ‘Prince Charles [Carol] is a handsome, clever young man’, it reported, and ‘his bride-to-be has great musical talent and is a remarkably accomplished linguist. She is a general favourite in court circles.’28 But in fact the couple had yet even to meet; Carol and his parents were due to visit St Petersburg in March, although everyone was already anticipating that an engagement would take place.