The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  In the run-up to the Romanian visit and still in St Petersburg, the busybodying Duchess of Saxe-Coburg was doing her best to lay the ground for a favourable outcome, writing to Marie quashing the persisting rumours about Olga and her cousin: ‘the imperial girls don’t care at all for Dmitri’, she insisted.29 But how she pitied them:

  shut up at Zarskoe, never even allowed to come to the theatre, not one single amusement the whole winter. Of course Alix would not allow them to come to Aunt Miechen’s [Grand Duchess Vladimir’s] ball, they are only granted a Sunday afternoon at Olga’s where they play des petits jeux [little games] with officers: now why this is considered convenable [appropriate] is a real puzzle to us all as Olga is a tomboy without any manners and her surroundings always second rate. She never sees the real society because it bores her to put on better manners.30

  Indeed the duchess talked of how offended Maria Feodorovna was that her granddaughters spent so little time with her when in St Petersburg, preferring to pass their Sundays ‘under the sole chaperonage of that madcap [aunt] Olga … for dinner and romps with the officers’. How ironic that a mother so scrupulous about her daughters’ sense of propriety should allow them the ‘greatest intimacy’ with these young men, unsupervised, and ‘in perfect independence without a lady to look after them’.31 The duchess was anxious to prepare her daughter for what she considered a degree of difficulty when the Romanians arrived: ‘People who think they know all have decided that Carol intends marrying Tatiana, not Olga, as the eldest could not be missed by her parents, being a great help to them and would remain in Russia.’32

  The Crimea would have seemed the far more logical location for a first meeting, being only a short journey across the Black Sea from Romania, but the duchess assured Marie that the Romanovs would not invite them there. In Livadia ‘the acquaintance would have been hopeless as the naval favourites would laugh into ridicule every prince that would come with matrimonial intentions’. The duchess was deeply disapproving of the girls’ familiarity with the officers of the Shtandart, which she considered totally infra dig: ‘Each girl, the big ones like the small ones, have their favourites, qui leur font la cour [who pay court to them] and Alix not only allows it but finds it natural and amusing.’33 This particularly troubled the duchess’s rigid sense of comme il faut. Despite the fact that ‘Olga and Tatiana are very well educated’, as well as being ‘gay, natural and amiable’, she felt they were entirely lacking in the sophisticated social skills of the kind needed by any young woman marrying into a royal court. ‘You must put away all our ideas of imperial young ladies’, she told her daughter. ‘As they have now no governess, no lady, they cannot be taught any manners, they have never paid me a visit and I really don’t know them at all.’ Even their aunts Xenia and Olga had at least been ‘allowed to go out and never had any intimacy with officers’.34

  There was one other important topic that did not pass without comment – haemophilia. The duchess had clearly been checking the lie of the land in this regard ahead of her daughter’s visit: ‘What can I find out about inheriting that sad illness? We all know that it can be propagated, but the children can also escape. I can only quote Uncle Leopold’s two children who never had it but Alice’s boys inherited it.’* It was, as the duchess concluded, ‘a mere chance, but one is never sure. The risk is there always.’35 Such comments beg the question of whether other royal houses had by now considered and rejected the Romanov daughters as prospective brides, for fear of haemophilia being brought into their families. And then there was the prospect of union with a country as politically unstable as Russia. The duchess’s letters to her daughter that January and February are full of foreboding about the future of the country, with a tsar too timid to spend time with anyone beyond his family circle and a tsaritsa stubbornly isolated from society through a combination of perverted choice and physical incapacity, hiding herself away with her only two friends – her ‘false prophet’ and Anna Vyrubova. The duchess sensed a ‘despair and hopelessness’ in St Petersburg so great that ‘people are panting with fear and anxiety of it all’. She was longing to get away – ‘the heavy moral atmosphere simply kills me’.36 Nevertheless she had tried to have a private word with Nicholas and Alexandra about the possible engagement. ‘What shall I say? Do I think it very hopeful? They seem to wish it but Alix is so strange and I have not the slightest idea what she wishes about her daughters.’ The duchess had long since given up on her, and now thought the tsaritsa ‘absolutely mad’.37

  On 15 March 1914 Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, his wife Marie and their son Carol arrived in St Petersburg and were installed in the west wing of the Alexander Palace. That same day, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna officially completed her ten-year period of studies. Her final exams had covered the history of the Orthodox Church; Russian language (dictation, composition and answers on the history of Russian words); general and Russian history; geography and three foreign languages – English, French and German, with dictation and composition in each. (All these subjects had been taught at home; for physics lessons she and her sisters had gone to the Nicholas II Practical Institute in Tsarskoe Selo.)38 In all of them Olga had received top marks, although she had struggled with English composition and German dictation. ‘An average of 5 [out of marks 1 to 5],’ she noted in her diary. ‘Mama was pleased.’39

  During the week of the Romanian visit she acted as escort to her second cousin Karlusha – as she referred to him (a somewhat belittling, Russian diminutive form of Carol’s name). She seemed unimpressed with his shock of blond hair, sticky-out ears and bulbous blue eyes – the latter an unmistakable Hanoverian trait inherited from his English grandfather Alfred. Nevertheless Olga dutifully went everywhere with him: to church, for walks round the park, dinner with Grandmama at the Anichkov and a ball at the exclusive Smolny Girls Institute. She smiled and chatted and went through the motions (in so doing giving the lie to the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg’s insistence that she had no social graces) but revealed nothing. A young secretary at the Romanian legation noted during the first day of the visit: ‘The Imperial Family retired rather early to their chambers, with the daughters casting short and anxious glances at Carol. I found out later that they had not liked him.’40 The gossips still insisted that Olga was not the object of Carol’s interests. An American diplomat heard tell that he was actually ‘trying to get Tatiana, but Olga must go first’.41 In the event the two sets of parents were disappointed at the negative outcome but were not quite ready to give up. They agreed that the Russians would reciprocate with a visit to Constanza in June to enable the young couple to take a second look at each other. The Russian press made no comment on a possible marriage, but in London The Times put it eloquently into perspective: ‘The view propounded in official quarters is that Russia would like to see Rumania as free to choose her friendships as Prince Carol and the Grand Duchess Olga are to follow the inclinations of their hearts.’42

  Three days later, with a sigh of relief, the Romanovs boarded the imperial train for the south and Easter in Livadia. On board the Shtandart that year (and contrary to what the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg had heard) there had been a distinct shift in the attitude of the crew to the now teenage Romanov sisters. Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted in particular how Olga had ‘turned into a real lady’. On the Shtandart, like everywhere else, the officers had begun discussing the future marriages of the sisters and had come to ‘a kind of unspoken agreement … to conduct themselves with these charming Grand Duchesses no longer as juveniles or little girls’.43 Sablin was fully aware that the older two sisters ‘preferred the company of certain officers to that of others’ – no doubt an allusion to the favouritism for Rodionov and the now departed Voronov. But the former relationship the men had had with the sisters was now ‘inadmissable’: ‘We had to remember they were the daughters of the tsar.’ These were not the same little girls they had first encountered seven years previously, and they must all ensure that they behaved punctiliously, as officers and gentleme
n. They did, however, gently tease the sisters, telling them ‘that they would soon be brides and leave us’. In response the girls had laughed and promised that they would ‘never marry foreigners and leave their beloved homeland’.44 Sablin thought this was wishful thinking; for since when, he asked, had royal brides ever had freedom of choice? In this respect, however, he was most certainly wrong.

  The men in the Shtandart were not the only ones to notice how the Romanov sisters were all becoming beautiful young women that last hot summer before the war. Visiting Count Nostitz’s estate near Yalta one day, they were taken by the countess to feed the black swans on the lake: ‘I thought how lovely they looked as they flitted in and out among the flower-beds in their light summer dresses, like so many flowers themselves’, she recalled.45 At a ball at the White Palace shortly afterwards the sisters enjoyed another magical Crimean evening, when ‘a great golden moon hung low over the dark ruffled waters of the Black Sea, gilding the silhouettes of the tall cypress trees’.

  From the ball-room behind us came the dreamy lilt of a Viennese waltz, the light laughter of the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, their merry eyes sparkling with pleasure, as they drifted past the open windows, dancing with Jean Woroniecki and Jack de Lalaing.*46

  It was a perfect picture-book image; but it would be the girls’ last ball in their beloved Crimea.

  With the visit to Constanza imminent, Nicholas walked over to visit Grand Duchess George at Harax one last time before leaving, ‘escaping from the horde of detectives and his bodyguard by taking the mountain paths’. As the duchess’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de Stoeckl stood with him looking out over the sea in the still of the Crimean evening, he turned to her: ‘We are in June now,’ he said, ‘we have had two very happy months, we must repeat them … Let us make a pact we all meet here again on 1 October.’47 And then after a pause he added, ‘more slowly, rather seriously’ – ‘After all, in this life we do not know what lies before us.’48

  Alexandra too was privately expressing her apprehensions about what might be to come. During a discussion she had with Sergey Sazonov on the balcony of the White Palace before they left for Constanza, she spoke of the possible political repercussions of high-profile dynastic matches and the responsibilities her girls would have to take on. ‘I think with terror … that the time draws near when I shall have to part with my daughters’, she told him.

  I could desire nothing better than they should remain in Russia after their marriage. But I have four daughters, and it is, of course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never in the position my daughters occupy … The Emperor will have to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond that.49

  Privately, although Sazonov had been bullish about the desirability of the Romanian match, saying that ‘It’s not every day that an Orthodox Hohenzollern comes along’, Olga was already very clear in her mind, even before they had set sail. ‘I will never leave Russia’, she told her friends in the Shtandart, and she said as much to Pierre Gilliard too.50 She was adamant that she did not want to be a queen or princess in some foreign court. ‘I’m a Russian, and mean to remain a Russian!’

  * * *

  On 1 June the Romanovs sailed from Yalta across the Black Sea to Romania. It was a glorious sunny day, ‘smiling, windless and yet not too hot, a day of rare beauty’, when the Shtandart steamed into view at Constanza escorted by the Polyarnaya Zvezda, like ‘two marvelous Chinese toys of laquer, black and gold’.51 Waiting on the quayside, the Romanian royal family caught sight of Nicholas on deck, ‘a little white figure’ and his wife ‘very tall and dominat[ing] her family as a solitary poplar dominates the garden’. As for the girls, it was the same bland, collective view: ‘four light dresses, four gay summer hats’.52

  As they disembarked, the Romanovs were greeted by a fanfare of guns, flags, hurrahs, military bands and a warm welcome from King Carol and Queen Elizabeth, their son Crown Prince Ferdinand, his wife Marie and their children. Crown Princess Marie later wrote to her mother about their ‘great Russian day’, which had been an intensive fourteen hours of church service at the cathedral, family luncheon in a pavilion, high tea in the Shtandart, a military review, a gala banquet and speeches in the evening. ‘From the first we all had a pleasant surprise, and that was Alix’, Marie told her mother. ‘She took part in everything except the parade and tried to smile and was anyhow very amiable.’53

  Marthe Bibesco, a close friend of the Romanian royal family, saw it rather differently: the empress’s eyes, she recalled, ‘looked as if they had seen all the sorrow of the world and when she smiled … her smile had been one of ineffable sadness, like those smiles which play on the faces of the sick and the dying’.54 As for the four sisters, they were ‘sweet’, and sat patiently through it all, Olga answering all Carol’s questions as politely as she could. But her sisters, as Pierre Gilliard noticed, had ‘found it none too easy to conceal their boredom’ and ‘lost no chances of leaning towards me and indicating their sister with a sly wink’.55

  There was one thing, however, about the tsar’s otherwise charming daughters that alarmed the Romanian party. Having come straight from endless sunny days in Livadia ‘they were baked brown as nuts by the sun and were not looking their best’.56 Sad to say, as Crown Princess Marie told her mother, they ‘were not found very pretty’.57 Marthe Bibesco went so far as to say that their unfashionably sunburnt faces made them as ‘ugly as those of peasant women’.58 The consensus was that the Romanov sisters were ‘much less pretty than their photographs had led us to suppose’.59 Olga’s face ‘was too broad, her cheek-bones too high’, thought Marie, though she liked her ‘open, somewhat brusque way’. Tatiana she found handsome but reserved; Maria was pleasant but plump though with ‘very fine eyes’; and Anastasia’s looks did not register with her at all, though she noticed how ‘watchful’ she was.60 The girls seemed doomed to be unremarkable in the eyes of the Romanian court, although they could not be faulted for their solicitous care of their bored and rather petulant brother, with his face marked by ‘a precocious gravity’. In taking the strain off their mother by entertaining and amusing Alexey throughout the day, the four sisters had remained ‘a clan apart’ from their Romanian cousins, and the presence of Alexey’s shadow Derevenko reminded everyone ‘of the horrible truth about this child’.61

  Although Olga had, for obvious reasons, been ‘the centre of all eyes’, Carol had seemed to his mother to be ‘not particularly attentive’ to any of the girls; later it was said that he was ‘not enamoured of Olga’s broad, plain face and brusque manner’.62 Certainly, neither he nor Olga showed any desire whatsoever in ‘becoming more closely acquainted’.63 Indeed, all four girls had shown far more interest in Carol’s six-month-old baby brother Mircea, whom Olga had dandled on her knee in official photographs taken that day. In the end, the lasting impression left by the imperial family’s visit to Constanza had been not of the girls, but the extraordinary proficiency with which the mischievous tsarevich had, at lunch, sat teaching two of the Romanian children, Prince Nicolas and Princess Ileana, how to spit grape pips into a lemonade bowl in the middle of the dining table.64

  During the Romanians’ earlier visit to St Petersburg Marie and Alexandra had already had a private word and had agreed then that ‘neither of us could make any promises in the name of our children, that they must decide for themselves’.65 Faced with an inconclusive outcome to this second meeting, they parted with a smile; they had done their duty, but the rest ‘was in the hands of Fate’. The two families took a final drive through the streets of Constanza to displays of fireworks and a torchlight procession, but as they waved goodbye at midnight it seemed highly unlikely that the ‘spark of love [would] be lighted between these two’.*66

  It was only after the imperial family had left Constanza that Marthe Bibesco heard that the girls had, all along, had a secret plan to
subvert the entire exercise. They had ‘decided … to make themselves as ugly as they could’ by soaking up the sun, hatless, on the journey from Livadia, ‘so that Carol should not fall in love with any of them’.67

  * * *

  The Romanov family arrived back at Tsarskoe Selo on 5 June, in time for Anastasia’s thirteenth birthday; it was followed by a visit from the First British Battle-Cruiser Squadron commanded by Sir David Beatty, an important mission intended to further bolster the entente cordiale. The squadron arrived at Kronstadt Island on Monday 9 June to a gun salute from Russian destroyers, thousands of pleasure boats with flags flying, and crowds of cheering Russians thronging the quayside opposite. For the British diplomatic community in St Petersburg ‘a week of feverish gaiety’ followed, during which Meriel Buchanan admitted to never getting to bed before 3 a.m.68 The tsar entertained Admiral Beatty and his officers to lunch at Peterhof, and at a garden party at the summer villa of Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich at Tsarskoe Selo the girls all plied the British officers with questions. The inquisitive Anastasia was the most demanding; ‘her childish voice rang out above the hum of conversation’, recalled Meriel. ‘You will take me up into your conning tower,’ she implored, and added mischievously, ‘Couldn’t you let off one of the guns and just pretend it was a mistake?’69

  Among the young officers on board one of the British ships, the New Zealand, was young Prince George of Battenberg, Alexandra’s nephew, whose brother Dickie had taken a shine to Maria during the family’s visit to Nauheim in 1910. Georgie came to stay with his cousins at Tsarskoe Selo during which time the officers of the Shtandart thought he paid a lot of attention to Tatiana, with whom he agreed to exchange letters.70 On the last day of the squadron’s official visit, 14 June, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies, the imperial family returned the admiral’s visit, dining on board HMS Lion, after which the girls were shown round ‘every corner’ of the ship by four eager young midshipmen who had been specially chosen by him. One of them, Harold Tennyson, remembered the thrill and honour: ‘I showed round Princess Olga, who is extraordinarily pretty and most amusing.’ She and her sisters were ‘the most cheery and pretty quartette I have met for some time, and roared with laughter and made jokes the whole time’. ‘If only they were not Princesses,’ he confided rather ruefully in a letter home, ‘I should not mind getting off with one!’*71