The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  As the last days of summer faded into autumn, the streets of Petrograd were transformed, with many buildings now serving as hospitals and flying the flag of the Red Cross alongside the Russian tricolour. Far fewer fine carriages and fashionable motor cars were to be seen processing up and down the Nevsky; instead the wide boulevard was witness to a never-ending cavalcade of ambulances ferrying the wounded to one or other hospital and a crush of wagons bearing supplies. Tsarskoe Selo too became a town of hospitals, its quiet leafy streets the thoroughfare now – morning, noon and night – for slow-moving Red Cross ambulances carrying the pale-faced wounded, as well as numerous private vehicles, many of them made available for this purpose from the imperial fleet of motor cars. Here as in Petrograd every available large building was commandeered for the care of the wounded. The great gilded reception rooms of the Catherine Palace were converted into hospital wards and depots and more than thirty of the private summer villas of the rich were given over for use as wartime hospitals. Such was the desperate need for beds as the wounded poured in, that soon much smaller private homes would be taking them in as well; in September Dr Botkin set up an improvised ward at his own home for seven patients.

  All of the military hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo came under the supervision of Dr Vera Gedroits, a Lithuanian aristocrat who was the senior physician at the Court Hospital, and one of the first women to qualify as a doctor in Russia.8 The Court Hospital was located in an extended and revamped 1850s mansion on Gospitalnaya ulitsa, and throughout the war it continued to serve the needs of the local community, with an upper floor of the main building set aside for an operating theatre for the war wounded and a ward for 200 lower ranks.9 A single-storey annexe built shortly before the war in the courtyard garden of the hospital for the isolation of infectious patients was converted into a fully functioning hospital in its own right, with an operating theatre and six small wards accommodating a total of thirty beds. One of the wards was for all ranks brought down from the Catherine Palace Hospital for operations conducted by Gedroits; the remainder was for wounded officers. The annexe – or ‘the little house’ or ‘the barrack’ as the girls sometimes referred to it – became the hub of Olga and Tatiana’s daily lives as Red Cross nurses.*

  During their training at the annexe under the exacting standards set by Dr Gedroits, Olga and Tatiana came under the watchful care of Valentina Chebotareva, the daughter of a military doctor, who had been a nurse during the Russo-Japanese War. ‘How distant they were at first’, she recalled of the tsaritsa and her daughters’ first days at the annexe. ‘We kissed their hand, exchanged greetings … and that’s as far as it went.’10 But Alexandra soon told the staff that they were not to pay them any special attention and things quickly changed. During their training the three women were to observe Gedroits in the operating theatre and then graduate on to assisting during operations, but their primary duty in the first days at the annexe was to learn how to dress wounds. The days were particularly long for Tatiana, as she was still completing her education and often had an early morning lesson. Immediately afterwards, and before they started work at the annexe, the tsaritsa and the girls would stop to pray before the miracle-working icon of the Mother of God at the little Znamenie Church located near the Catherine Palace, before arriving at the annexe at around 10 a.m. to change into their uniforms and begin work.

  Every morning Olga and Tatiana were tasked with changing the dressings of three or four patients each (though this increased as the war went on and the numbers of wounded went up) as well as undertaking the many menial tasks required of them – rolling bandages, preparing swabs, boiling the silk thread for stitching, and machining bed linen. At one o’clock they would return home for lunch and in the afternoon if the weather was fine they would sometimes go out for a brief walk, a bike ride, or a drive with their mother, but most often they returned to the hospital to spend time with the wounded, chatting, playing board games or ping-pong with them and in the summer months croquet in the garden with those who could walk. Often they simply sat knitting or sewing items for refugees and war orphans while the soldiers chatted to them; sometimes they went off and sneaked a cigarette in their rest room. Always, inevitably, the cameras would be taken out at every opportunity and photographs taken of themselves with their wounded officers and friends. Some of these were later reproduced as postcards sold to raise funds for war relief. Others the girls carefully pasted into albums and shared with the wounded later.11

  It took a while for Tatiana and Olga to get used to being around strangers and Tatiana in particular, just like her mother, suffered from a sometimes crippling reserve. Valentina Chebotareva recalled how, one day when they went upstairs in the Court Hospital together, they had had to walk past a group of sisters. Tatiana grabbed her hand: ‘It’s awful how self-conscious and scared I feel … I don’t know who to say hello to and who not.’12 This lack of social experience tipped over into simple things like going into shops. Once while waiting for the motor car to pick them up and take them back to the palace, Olga and Tatiana decided to pop into the Gostinny dvor – a parade of shops near the hospital. They were not in uniform so no one recognized them but they soon realized that they had no money on them, nor did they know how to go about buying anything.13

  Until they completed their training at the end of October the girls and their mother also had a lesson in medical theory with Dr Gedroits at home every evening at 6 p.m., after which Olga and Tatiana would often go back to the hospital to help sterilize and prepare the instruments for the next day’s operations with another nurse Bibi (Varvara Vilchkovskaya), with whom they became close friends. Whenever the girls took a break in the corridor outside the wards those patients able to walk would venture out to sit and chat with them and tell them stories. The girls would always have sweets in their pockets to share and often brought fruit and bunches of flowers from the Alexander Palace greenhouses. In the evenings some of the men gathered round the piano in the common room and sang – which Olga and Tatiana particularly enjoyed – but the best days were festivals or holidays, when they would be joined by Maria and Anastasia, and sometimes even Alexey. On evenings when they went back home earlier the girls would often end up telephoning the hospital for one last chat with their favourites.14

  * * *

  The Romanov sisters and their mother were not spared any of the shock of their first confrontation with the suffering of the wounded and the terrible damage done to their bodies by bombs, sabres and bullets. Joined by Anna Vyrubova in their training, they were thrown in at the deep end, dealing with men who arrived ‘dirty, bloodstained and suffering’, as Anna recalled. ‘Our hands scrubbed in antiseptic solutions we began the work of washing, cleaning, and bandaging maimed bodies, mangled faces, blinded eyes, all the indescribable mutilations of what is called civilized warfare.’15 Sometimes Anastasia and Maria were allowed to come and watch them dressing the wounds, and from 16 August the older girls began observing operations, at first civilian ones for appendixes and hernias, and the lancing of swellings. But soon they were watching bullets being taken out and on 8 September a trepanning for removal of shrapnel; five days later they witnessed their first leg amputation.16 Once qualified they would be assisting – Alexandra usually handing the surgical instruments to Gedroits and taking away amputated limbs, the girls threading surgical needles and passing cotton-wool swabs. On 25 November they saw their first wounded man die on the operating table; Alexandra told Nicholas that their ‘girlies’ had been very brave.17

  In addition to their nursing training Olga and Tatiana were assigned important public roles in the war effort by their mother, although being among strangers in the capital chairing committees was something they both dreaded and never enjoyed. On 11 August an imperial ukaz was issued, establishing the Supreme Council for the Care of Soldiers’ Families and of Families of the Wounded and Dead. It was headed by Alexandra, who nominated Olga as vice-president with responsibility for its Special Petrograd Committee – one of numerou
s subsidiary committees set up in cities across Russia to raise funds for the central Supreme Council.18 A month later, Tatiana was given a similar role with the establishment of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna’s Committee for the Temporary Relief of Those Suffering Deprivation in War-time. Under its chief administrator, Alexey Neidgardt, the Tatiana Committee, as everyone came to call it, dealt specifically with the growing refugee problem in Russia’s western provinces – where civilian Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts and Ruthenians had now become caught up in the fighting.

  From its inception the Tatiana Committee proved to be a great success, in no small part thanks to Tatiana’s high public profile as an imperial daughter and her active involvement with its work in setting up shelters, soup kitchens, maternity homes and refuges for orphaned children. The tedious bureaucracy of her Wednesday afternoon meetings in Petrograd was, however, a different matter, and she found Neidgardt a pompous bore. She also disliked the formalities, as one official recalled when he addressed her at a committee: ‘If you should so please your imperial highness…’ Tatiana was visibly embarrassed: ‘she looked at me in astonishment and when I sat down next to her again, she gave me a sharp nudge under the table and whispered: “Are you off your head or what, to address me in that way?”’19 She and Olga both hated such formalities. ‘It’s only at our hospital that we feel comfortable and at ease’, admitted Olga to one of her patients.20 Nevertheless, they both got on with their public duties conscientiously and without complaint, Tatiana often having to tackle committee paperwork after long days in the hospital. Alexandra helped her with this, for the welfare of refugees became an increasingly urgent issue as the war went on. The committee’s budget was huge and rose to several million roubles – so much so that private donation soon was not enough to sustain it and the government had to step in.21

  With Nicholas away for much of the time at Stavka – army HQ located at a railway junction near Baranovichi (in today’s Belorussia) – Alexandra sent him regular updates on their daughters’ progress. On 20 September she told him what a comfort it was ‘to see the girls working alone & that they will be known more and learn to be useful’.22 They seemed to adapt quickly to the new demands made on them, and, as Pierre Gilliard observed, ‘with their usual natural simplicity and good humour … accepted the increasing austerity of life at Court’. Gilliard was especially impressed with their thoughtful attitude to their work and the fact that they had no problem with covering their beautiful hair in the nunlike nurse’s wimple and spending most of their time in uniform. They weren’t playing at being nurses – which from time to time Gilliard observed in other aristocratic ladies – but were true sisters of mercy.23 Wartime volunteer Svetlana Ofrosimova who had lived at Tsarskoe Selo for several years noticed it too. ‘I was struck by the change in them. Most of all I was moved by the deep expression of concentration on their faces, which were thinner and paler. There was a new kind of expression in their eyes.’24 Maria Rasputin concurred: ‘I found them grown taller, more serious, conscious of the responsibilities of the imperial family, bent on doing their duty with all their strength.’25 This applied equally to the younger sisters; although their days were still taken up mainly with lessons they had to adjust to the long absences of their older siblings and all of them, with their father now away for much of the time, had to share the burden of their brother’s and mother’s frequent bouts of sickness.26

  Until the war, with so much talk about Olga’s marriage prospects, as well as her possible future role as heir to the throne after Alexey, much of the attention had inevitably been centred on her. She had always been the most outgoing and talkative of the two older sisters but during the war years it was Tatiana who would shine through. Prior to the war she had seemed to have all the makings of a coquette for, unlike Olga, she was very self-conscious about her appearance, had the figure of a mannequin and longed to have the fine clothes and beautiful jewels of fashionable St Petersburg ladies. ‘Any frock, no matter how old, looked well on her’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden: ‘She knew how to put on her clothes, was admired and liked admiration.’27 ‘She was a Grand Duchess from head to toe, so aristocratic and regal was she’, recalled Svetlana Ofrosimova.28 From the first, as a trainee nurse, there was something special about Tatiana that was quite different from heart-on-sleeve Olga, and that set her apart from her sisters. It was as though she had inside her her own completely private, distinctive world.29 But it was one that Tatiana never allowed to intrude on her practical skills as a nurse and her devotion to duty.

  Precise and even bossy at times, Tatiana could, for some, seem too serious and – unlike Olga – lacking in spontaneity. But she was always ready to help others and her ability to apply herself in tandem with her altruistic personality made her admirably suited for nursing work. Whenever Alexey had been ill she had helped nurse him and followed the doctors’ instructions with regard to medicines, as well as sitting with him. She was also unquestioningly tolerant of the demands of her mother; she ‘knew how to surround her with un-wearying attentions and she never gave way to her own capricious impulses’, as Gilliard recalled, which was something that Olga was increasingly becoming prey to.30 Indeed, in everything she did Tatiana Nikolaevna would soon prove that she had perseverance of the kind her more emotionally volatile older sister lacked. Many of the nurses and doctors who observed her – as well as the patients themselves – later spoke of her as being born to nurse.

  The outbreak of war so soon after the celebrations of the Tercentary had inevitably brought a complete turn-around in the popular perception of the Romanov sisters as lofty princesses. With their mother calling a wartime moratorium on the purchase of any new clothes for the family, official photographs of the svelte young women in court dress were replaced by images of the older sisters in uniform and of their younger siblings in rather plain, ordinary clothes that belied their imperial status. Alexandra felt that the sight of herself and her daughters in uniform helped to bridge the gap between them and the population at large in time of war. Some saw this as a terrible miscalculation: the vast majority of ordinary Russians, especially the peasantry, still looked upon the imperial family as almost divine beings and expected their public image to project that. As Countess Kleinmikhel observed, ‘When a soldier saw his Empress dressed in a nurse’s uniform, just like any other nurse, he was disappointed. Looking at the Tsarina, whom he had pictured as a princess in a fairy tale, he thought: “And that is a Tsarina? But there is no difference between us.”’31

  Similar expressions of distaste circulated among the society ladies of Petrograd who noted with a sneer how ‘common’ the grand duchesses’ clothes were, ‘which even a provincial girl would not dare to wear’.32 They disliked this demystification of imperial women – and worse, their association with unclean wounds, mutilation and men’s bodies. They were horrified to learn that the empress even cut patients’ fingernails for them. Alexandra’s neglect of protocol – her acting as a common nurse – was seen as a ‘beau geste’, ‘a cheap method of seeking popularity’.33 Even ordinary soldiers were disappointed to see the tsaritsa and her daughters performing the same duties as other nurses or sitting on the beds of the wounded, rather than maintaining their exalted difference. ‘The intimacy which sprang up between the Empress, her young daughters and the wounded officers destroyed their prestige,’ said Countess Kleinmikhel, ‘for it has been truly said: “Il n’y a pas de grand homme pour son valet de chambre”.’*34

  Be that as it may, many wounded soldiers came to be grateful for the care they received from Alexandra and her daughters during the war. In August 1914 Ivan Stepanov, a nineteen-year-old wounded soldier of the Semenovsk Regiment, arrived at the annexe at Tsarskoe Selo with his dressings unchanged for over a week. Conscious of his dirty appearance he felt discomforted at the prospect of being helped by the nurses who surrounded him in the treatment room – one of them, a tall gracious sister who smiled kindly as she bent over him, and opposite her two younger nur
ses who watched with interest as his filthy bandages were unwrapped. They seemed familiar, where had he seen these faces? Then suddenly he realized. ‘Really, was it them … the empress and her two daughters?’35 The tsaritsa seemed a different woman – smiling, younger-looking than her years. During his time in the hospital Stepanov witnessed many such instances of her spontaneous warmth and kindness, and that of her daughters.

  Maria and Anastasia inevitably envied their older sisters’ new and challenging role. But they soon had a small hospital of their own in which to do their bit for the war effort. On 28 August the Hospital for Wounded Soldiers No. 17 of Their Imperial Highnesses, the Grand Duchesses Maria Nikolaevna and Anastasia Nikolaevna was opened just a stone’s throw from the Alexander Palace in what was known as the Feodorovsky Gorodok (village).36 Built between 1913 and 1917 as an adjunct to the Feodorovsky Sobor nearby and in the same ancient Russian Novgorod style, it was comprised of five buildings contained within a small Kremlin-like fortress wall with towers.* Two of the buildings were designated as a hospital for lower ranks and another one for officers was added in 1916. The two younger sisters would visit daily after lessons to sit and chat with the wounded, play board games, and even help the semi-literate patients to read and write letters. On a more serious note, they were already becoming used to sitting by the bedsides of wounded men, and sometimes had to deal with the trauma of their subsequent deaths. Like Olga and Tatiana they took endless photographs of themselves with their patients, nor did their visiting activities stop here. They supported fund-raising charity concerts for their hospital and often went to the bigger Catherine Palace Hospital and even some of those in Petrograd with their mother, as well as inspecting the hospital trains named after various members of the family. They might be too young to nurse but they were far from immune to the sufferings of the wounded, as Anastasia wrote and told Nicholas on 21 September: