The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  My precious Papa! I congratulate you on the victory. Yesterday we visited Alexey’s hospital train. We saw many wounded. Three died on the journey – two of them officers … Pretty serious wounds, so much so that within the next two days one soldier may die; they were groaning. Then we went to the big Court Hospital: Mama and our sisters were dressing wounds, and Maria and I went round all the wounded, chatted to them all, one of them showed me a very big piece of shrapnel that they had taken out of his leg along with a large piece [of flesh]. They all said that they want to go back and get their revenge on the enemy.37

  The girls wrote many loving letters to their father at army HQ, filling them with kisses and drawing signs of the cross to protect him. With all four of them and their mother writing with devoted regularity, Nicholas was receiving several letters a day. Much of what the girls said only reiterated in rather laconic form what Alexandra herself told her husband in her own long, rambling missives. But the girls clearly missed their father terribly: ‘You absolutely must take me with you next time,’ Maria told him on 21 September, ‘or I’ll jump onto the train myself, because I miss you.’ ‘I don’t want to go to bed, bah! I want to be there with you, wherever you are, as I don’t know where it is’, added Anastasia two days later.38 Olga and Tatiana’s letters suffered as a result of their heavy workload and were often quite cursory; but the quirky individuality of Anastasia’s usually made up for it. Her breezy personality, signing off letters as ‘your devoted slave, the 13-year-old Nastasya (Shvybzig)’, constantly flitted from one point of interest to the next and must have been welcome entertainment for Nicholas during the long weeks away from his family. Anastasia took great delight in her letters of making fun of Maria’s developing affection for Nikolay (Kolya) Demenkov, an officer in the Guards Equipage, and teased her about his chubbiness, calling him ‘fat Demenkov’. Maria herself happily confided her affection for ‘my dear Demenkov’ to her father, for Kolya was already a firm favourite with the family.39

  Alexandra had once observed in conversation with Anna Vyrubova that ‘Most Russian girls seem to have nothing in their heads but thoughts of officers’, but she appears not to have taken seriously what was now going on right under her very nose.40 In 1914 she was still infantilizing her daughters as ‘my little girlies’ in letters to her husband, when they were all fast growing into young women with an interest in the opposite sex. What she saw as harmless affection was, for her oldest daughters, developing into afternoon trysts, sitting chatting on the beds of nashikh (‘ours’). Olga’s first favourites were Nikolay Karangozov, an Armenian cornet in the Cuirassier Life Guards, and the ‘terribly dishy, dark’ David Iedigarov, a Muslim from Tiflis and captain in the 17th Nizhegorod Dragoons who arrived in mid-October and created a strong impression on her (he was, however, married).41 Iedigarov and Karangozov were the first of several swarthy, swashbuckling officers from the Caucasus – many of whom sported splendid moustaches – to arrive at the annexe during the war.

  Tatiana meanwhile had fallen for the boyish charm of the clean-shaven Staff Captain Dmitri Malama, a Kuban Cossack from her own regiment of Uhlans who already was something of a legend for his gallantry in rescuing a fellow officer under fire. All of the sisters liked Malama and found him incredibly sweet and good-natured. Fellow patient Ivan Stepanov vividly remembered the ‘fair haired and ruddy cheeked’ young officer, so modest and with such dedication to his regiment, who was tormented by the fact that he was lying in hospital ‘enjoying his life’ while others were out there fighting.42 Tatiana first dressed his wounds on 26 September; she was incredibly proud of her Uhlans and within days was sitting on Malama’s bed at every opportunity, chatting and looking at photograph albums, much as her sister was doing with Karangozov, for the two men shared the same ward. Often in the evenings they would sing, with Olga playing the piano for them, making their ward, according to Stepanov, the noisiest and liveliest at the annexe.43 Such evenings became the highlight of Olga and Tatiana’s day, but like Maria and Anastasia they were always delighted to catch up with other old army friends who arrived on tours of duty. Men such as Olga’s old favourite AKSH, now posted with the 1st squadron of the Tsar’s Escort, who seemed as ‘sweet’ as ever, and his fellow officer, Staff Captain Viktor Zborovsky, the tsar’s favourite tennis partner, for whom Anastasia was showing clear signs of devoted puppy love.

  With their daily routine becoming increasingly mundane and largely restricted to Tsarskoe Selo, bad news from the front made all the girls, particularly Olga, fearful for their father, but they always felt themselves to be in safe hands with the officers of the Escort. In Aunt Olga’s absence nursing in Rovno, Anna Vyrubova had taken to inviting the four sisters to tea with these officers at her house near the Alexander Palace. ‘At 4 we had tea at Anna’s with Zborovsky and Sh[vedov] – the darling’, noted Olga on 12 October. ‘So glad at last to see each other and chatted happily.’ Tatiana was particularly pleased that same day to be able to talk on the phone to Dmitri Malama, who had enlisted Anna to buy Tatiana a special gift from him – ‘a little French bulldog … it’s unbelievably sweet. I’m so happy.’44 She named the dog Ortipo – after Malama’s cavalry horse.45 In advance of Ortipo’s arrival, she wrote one of her typical apologetic notes to her mother:

  Mama darling mine,

  Forgive me about the little dog. To say the truth, when he asked should I like to have it if he gave it me, I at once said yes. You remember, I always wanted to have one, and only afterwards when we came home I thought that suddenly you might not like me having one … Please, darling angel, forgive me … 1000 kisses from your devoted daughter … Say, darling, you are not angry.

  Ortipo was soon running riot at the palace; she was mischievous and disruptive (and before long pregnant), but she arrived at a fortuitous time, for Alexey’s own dog Shot died not long after and she was a companion for Anastasia’s dog Shvybzik. Ortipo’s puppies, however, proved to be ‘small and ugly’ and the family did not keep them.46 Sadly for Tatiana, Dmitri Malama recovered all too quickly from his wounds. He was discharged from the annexe on 23 October; ‘Poor me, it’s so awful’, was as much as she could bring herself to write in her diary.47

  On 4 November the Sisters Romanova took their final exams in surgery and two days later, along with forty-two other sisters, were issued with their nursing certificates at Red Cross headquarters in Tsarskoe Selo. By this time Alexandra had already set up around seventy hospitals across the town and its environs.48 Work in the military hospitals had, by the beginning of 1915, recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘become the centre of their life and their engrossing occupation’, for all four Romanov sisters. To some extent, as was inevitable, the education of the younger two suffered ‘but the experience was so vitalizing that the sacrifice was certainly worth the making’.49 As Anastasia wrote with enthusiasm to her teacher PVP at the time: ‘This afternoon we all went for a ride, went to church and to the hospital, and that’s it! And now we have to go eat dinner and then to the hospital again, and this is our life, yes!’50 War had, ironically, opened up new horizons for all of them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WE CANNOT DROP OUR WORK IN THE HOSPITALS

  In January 1915 an additional burden of concern was placed on the shoulders of the Romanov sisters when Anna Vyrubova was very seriously injured in a railway accident on the line between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo. She was brought to the annexe in a desperate state with a dislocated shoulder, double fracture of her left leg, lacerations to the right one and head and spine injuries. She was not expected to live. Her elderly parents arrived; Tatiana met them in tears, and gently escorted them down the corridor. Valentina Chebotareva remembered that night vividly:

  They sent for Grigory. I thought this was terrible, but I could not sit in judgment on another. The woman is dying, she believes in Grigory, in his saintliness, in [his] prayers. He arrived in a state of fright, his dishevelled beard shaking, his mouselike eyes flitting back and forth. He grasped Vera Ignateva [Dr Gedroits] by the
hand: ‘She’ll live, she’ll live’. But as she herself later told me: ‘I decided to play the priest at his own game, thought for a moment and then said solemnly: ‘Thank you, but I will save her.’

  Gedroits’s response did not go unnoticed by Nicholas who was home from Stavka at the time: ‘Each to his own’, he said, giving Gedroits a wry smile.1 He spoke with the doctor for some time that evening, as Valentina recalled. It seemed clear to both women that the tsar ‘without doubt did not believe in either Grigory’s saintliness or his powers, but put up with him, like a sick person when exhausted by suffering clutches at straws’. But Grigory himself had been visibly drained by the experience of willing Anna’s recovery. He always later claimed that he had ‘raised Annushka from the dead’, for against the odds she did indeed recover.2

  After six weeks’ dedicated care Anna was able to return home but her recuperation was a long one and she was disabled by her injuries for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, early that year, having driven herself relentlessly since day one of the war in the face of her already unstable health, Alexandra broke down completely. Dr Botkin ordered her to bed for six weeks. ‘The nursing in the hospital and assisting at operations, tending and binding up the most hideous wounds,’ Alexandra explained to a friend, ‘is all less tiring than for hours visiting hospitals and talking with the poor wounded.’ She struggled to carry on with some of her work at the annexe, ‘Coming as privately and unexpectedly as possible, but it does not often succeed … One’s greatest comfort is being with the dear wounded and I miss my hospitals awfully.’3 When her energies failed her, Alexandra read and composed reports from her sickbed, meanwhile taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heartdrops.’4

  For the next few weeks, in addition to their nursing duties at the hospital, Olga and Tatiana would spend their days visiting Anna and often sitting with their mother or Alexey, who was suffering recurring pain in his arms from overdoing it when playing. Moments of private pleasure were increasingly rare, but when she could Tatiana would escape in the afternoons on her own to go riding. In the evenings, while her other sisters often sat playing board games or the gramophone, or Anastasia fussed round the two dogs – clearing up after their numerous accidents – Tatiana would sit quietly and read poetry. She found her mother’s latest indisposition hard to take and constantly tormented herself that she was not doing enough to support her: ‘Mama, sweet, I am so awfully sad. I see so little of you … It doesn’t matter if sisters go earlier to bed – I’ll remain. For me it is better to sleep less and see more of you, my beloved one.’ ‘In such moments,’ she told Alexandra, ‘I am sorry I’m not a man.’5 She was now having to draw on all her strength of character to deal with the many duties required of her, as she told Nicholas in May:

  Today I was in the hospital dressing the wounds of this poor unfortunate soldier with amputations of his tongue and ears. He’s young and has a lovely face, from the Orenburg district and cannot speak at all, so wrote down how it all had happened to him, which Mama asked me to send on to you … and he was very happy. Princess Gedroits hopes that he will in time be able to speak, as only half his tongue had to be amputated. He is in a lot of pain. He has lost the top of his right ear, and the bottom of his left one. I am so sorry for the poor man. After lunch Mama and I went into Petrograd to the Supreme Council. We sat for an hour and a half – it was dreadfully boring … then Mama and I went all round the supply depot. And we’ve only just got back now at 5.30.6

  Alexandra was convinced that their committee work was ‘so good for the girls’; it would teach them to become independent and would ‘develop them much more having to think and speak for themselves without my constant aid’.7 It seems strange that, believing this, she had not allowed her daughters a greater role in society sooner; had she done so they would not still be grappling with the intense self-consciousness they suffered chairing committee meetings. Tatiana said these meetings made her want ‘to dive under the table from fright’. As for Olga, in addition to her mother’s interminable meetings at the Supreme Council, she had to sit and take donations every week, which Alexandra thought equally good for her: ‘she will get accustomed to see people and hear what is going [on]’, she told Nicholas, though she sometimes despaired of her: ‘She is a clever child but does not use her brains enough.’8

  With the arrival of spring in 1915, the family could not but ruefully cast their minds back on how life had been before the war. It was still snowing at Tsarskoe Selo in mid-April but one of their friends in Livadia had sent them gifts of Crimean flowers – glycinia, golden rain, purple irises, anemones and peonies. ‘To see them in one’s vases makes me quite melancholy’, Alix told Nicky, ‘Does it not seem strange, hatred and bloodshed and all the horrors of war – and there simply Paradise, sunshine and flowers and peace … Dear me, how much has happened since the peaceful, homely life in the fjords!’9 They all longed for their usual visit to the Crimea. But duty was paramount, as Tatiana told Pavel Voronov’s wife Olga in June: ‘It’s the first summer that we are not going to live in Peterhof. We cannot drop our work in the hospitals. It would be distressing to live there and to think that there will be no yacht and no skerries. It’s a pity there is no sea here.’10

  The girls had from time to time still seen Pavel and Olga when they had visited Tsarskoe Selo, but the sad summer of 1913 and all the heartache attached to it had now faded for Olga, whose thoughts since the end of May had been increasingly revolving around a new arrival at the annexe: Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, a Georgian adjutant in the Life Grenadiers of the Erevan Regiment. This was one of the oldest and most prestigious regiments in the Russian army and the dearest to the imperial family after the Escort. But Dmitri’s stay was short: ‘After supper spoke on the phone to Shakh-Bagov and said goodbye as he is going back to his regiment tomorrow’, Olga wrote in her diary on 22 June. ‘I’m so sorry for him the darling, it’s terrible, he is so sweet.’11 Tatiana also had a favourite patient from the same regiment – an ensign from Azerbaijan called Sergey Melik-Adamov. He had the archetypal swarthy looks and large moustache of his predecessors, but his fellow patients found his pockmarked face unattractive and his loud jokes something of an embarrassment.12

  Dmitri Shakh-Bagov’s departure had a marked and immediate effect: ‘Dear Olga Nikolaevna became sad,’ recalled another patient, Ivan Belyaev, ‘her cheeks lost their usual ruddiness, and her eyes darkened with tears.’13 Soon afterwards, Dmitri’s commanding officer Konstantin Popov was brought in wounded and joined Melik-Adamov in the ‘Erevan’ Ward. ‘The Grand Duchesses greeted me like an old friend’, he recalled, and began asking questions about how the regiment was, about the officers they knew and so on.

  What sweet simple people, I instinctively thought, and with every day I became more and more convinced of this. I was a witness of their daily work and was struck by their patience, persistence, their great skill for difficult work and their tenderness and kindness to everyone around them.14

  Barely five weeks later, much to Olga’s joy, and despite the unfortunate circumstances, Dmitri Shakh-Bagov was brought back to the hospital, having been seriously wounded on a reconnaissance mis-sion near Zagrody in eastern Poland. He arrived on 2 August on a stretcher with a shattered leg and a hand wound, much thinner and looking very pale, and was immediately taken back to his former bed in the Erevan Ward.15 He was operated on and his leg put in plaster but although he was supposed to be confined to bed he was soon up and hobbling round after Olga like a devoted puppy. ‘It soon became noticeable how her previous mood returned … and her sweet eyes shone once more’, noted Ivan Belyaev.16 Olga’s Dmitri now began appearing regularly in her diary in the affectionate form of Mitya. She spent every precious moment she could in his company – sitting with him in the corridor, on the balcony and in the ward, as well as during the evenings when she sterilized the instruments and made up the cotton-wool swabs. She had every reason to feel deeply for him, for everyone loved Mitya. Konstantin Popov was fulsome in his praise of him as ‘a
distinguished and brave officer, a rare friend and wonderfully good-natured person. If one were to add to this his handsome appearance and his great ability to wear his uniform and deport himself with distinction then you would have an example of the young Erevan officer in whom in truth our regiment prides itself.’17 Mitya was ‘very sweet and shy, like a girl’, remembered Ivan Belyaev, and what is more, ‘it was evident that he was completely in love with his nursing sister. His cheeks became brightly flushed whenever he looked at Olga Nikolaevna.’18

  While Olga’s head might have been turned, there was no diminution in the compassion and care that she, like Tatiana, continued to offer to all their patients. Valentina Chebotareva remembered a particularly traumatic operation at which both sisters had assisted and how bitterly they had wept when the patient had died. ‘How poetic Tatiana Nikolaevna’s caresses are! How warmly she speaks when she calls on the telephone and reads the telegrams about her wounded’, Valentina wrote in her diary. ‘What a good, pure and deep feeling girl she is.’19 That summer, the highly reserved Tatiana, who had until now only shown passing interest in Dmitri Malama, appeared to have fallen for Vladimir Kiknadze – or Volodya as she was soon calling him – another Georgian and a 2nd lieutenant in the 3rd Guards Rifles Regiment. The two sisters began enjoying trysts as a foursome in the garden playing croquet with Kiknadze and Shakh-Bagov, and falling into a routine of shared smiles and confidences, sitting on their beds and looking at albums and taking each other’s photograph. The war, for a while, did not seem quite so grim.