The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

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  Throughout 1915 Nicholas had managed to make regular trips back home to Tsarskoe Selo but in August he made a momentous decision that would take him away from the family for even longer periods. A succession of Russian defeats on the Eastern Front, resulting in a massive retreat from Galicia, had already seen 1.4 million Russians killed and wounded and 1 million captured. Morale in a poorly equipped imperial army was haemorrhaging away. In response he dismissed his uncle Grand Duke Nikolay as Commander-in-Chief of the army and took over command himself, moving Stavka to Mogilev, 490 miles (790 km) due south of Petrograd. This decision, like every other the tsar made during the war, was guided by his deeply held belief that the people trusted in him as their spiritual leader and that the fate of himself, his family and Russia lay in God’s hands. At 10 p.m. on 22 August the children went to the station with him. ‘My precious papa!’ Olga wrote as soon as he had left. ‘How sad it is that you are leaving but this time it is with a special feeling of joy that we see you off, because we all fervently believe that your arrival there will more than ever raise the strong spirit of our mighty, national Army.’ ‘Here I am with this new heavy responsibility on my shoulders!’ Nicholas told Alexandra upon his arrival. ‘But God’s will be fulfilled – I feel so calm.’20 Two months later he made another important decision: at the end of a visit home he took Alexey back with him to Stavka, partly for company, as he missed the family so terribly, but also because he and Alexandra both believed that the tsarevich’s presence would be a huge boost to army morale. Alexey, now aged eleven, was ecstatic; much as he loved his mother he was desperate to escape her suffocating presence and no doubt also the over-protectiveness of his sisters. As he would later complain: ‘I hate going back to Tsarskoe to be the only man amongst all those women.’21

  Since the outbreak of war Alexey had been playing soldiers at home, proudly strutting around in his soldier’s greatcoat – ‘quite like a little military man’, as Alix told Nicky – standing guard, digging trenches and fortifications in the palace gardens with his dyadki and in the process sometimes provoking attacks of pain in his arms.22 But aside from this he was in better health than he had been for years, and for some time now had had no serious attacks. It was hard for Alexandra to let her boy go, but she agreed on condition that Alexey’s studies should not be interrupted. He was by now, however, woefully behind in his lessons and although he was followed to Stavka by both PVP and Pierre Gilliard, he rarely knuckled down to a full day’s lessons, preferring the distractions of board games, playing his balalaika and enjoying the company of his new dog, a cocker spaniel named Joy.23 At Stavka Alexey was in his element, sharing the same Spartan living conditions with his father, sleeping on campbeds, going on trips to army camps, inspecting the troops with him and enjoying the camaraderie of the soldiers, and taking particular pleasure in swimming with his father in the River Dnieper. Back at Tsarskoe everyone in the entourage felt the absence of father and son: ‘life at the Imperial Palace became, if possible, even quieter’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden. ‘The whole place seemed dead. There was no movement in the great courtyard. We ladies-in-waiting went to the Empress through a series of empty halls.’24 Whenever Nicholas and Alexey returned on visits, ‘the palace sprang to life’.

  At Stavka the young heir made a strong impression on all who met him. True, he could still be brattish – particularly at table, where he had a penchant for throwing pellets of bread at his father’s ADCs.25 But his extraordinary energy lit up a room. ‘It was the first time I had seen the Tsarevich when the door of our box flung open and he came like a gale of wind,’ recalled US naval attaché Newton McCully:

  Full of life, healthy looking, and one of the handsomest youngsters I have ever seen, I was particularly glad to see him so closely because I had heard so many rumors about his being paralyzed – maimed for life – and so on. One could not wish to see a handsomer child. Undoubtedly he has been ill, but there are no signs of illness about him now – if anything perhaps a too exuberant vitality, perhaps an organism over-nervous.26

  In mid-October, Alexandra, Anna Vyrubova and the girls visited Mogilev, in time to see Alexey awarded the Medal of St George 4th class. They were all delighted to see the continuing improvement in his health and strength. ‘He was developing marvelously through the summer both in bodily vigor and gaiety of spirits’, recalled Anna Vyrubova. ‘With his tutors, M. Gilliard and Petrov, he romped and played as though illness were a thing to him unknown.’27 The visit was a welcome break for the girls from their virtually monastic life at Tsarskoe. At Stavka they had more freedom to move around; they spent time playing with the children of railway workers and local peasants (whom Tatiana photographed for her album, scrupulously noting down all their names), though once more there were whisperings that the imperial sisters should not stoop so low in their friendships and that they looked scruffy and ‘unroyal’.28

  The Governor’s House at Mogilev that served as HQ was too cramped to accommodate all the family, so Alexandra and the girls stayed on the imperial train, where Nicholas and Alexey dined with them in the evenings. The train was parked in the midst of wooded countryside and the girls were able to go walking unobserved and often unrecognized. Out in the woods they made bonfires and roasted potatoes with members of the Tsar’s Escort, much as they had done on their Finnish holidays; they slept in the sunshine on the new-mown hay and even enjoyed the occasional cigarette given to them by Nicholas. For the rest of the time it was boat rides on the River Dnieper and games of hide-and-seek on the imperial train, and even occasional visits to the local cinematograph in Mogilev.29 But in many of the photographs taken that October, Olga looked withdrawn and pensive, often sitting apart from the others. She came back from Stavka with a bad cough and Valentina Chebotareva immediately became concerned, not just about her melancholy frame of mind, but also her visibly declining health:

  Her nerves are completely shot to pieces, she’s got thinner and paler. She hasn’t been able to do the bandaging lately, can’t bear to look at wounds and in the operating theatre is distressed, becomes irritable, tries to do things and can’t control herself – feels dizzy. It’s awful to see the child, how sad and overwrought she is. They say it’s exhaustion.30

  In her later memoirs Anna Vyrubova claimed that although Tatiana from the outset demonstrated ‘extraordinary ability’ as a nurse, ‘Olga within two months [of her training] was almost too exhausted and too unnerved to continue’.31 It was clear that the long hours were taking their toll on her, that she was less resilient emotionally and physically than Tatiana, and also far less focused. She could not cope with the trauma of some of the operations she witnessed, nor could she knuckle down to regular routine as easily as her sister. And now she was distracted yet again by her feelings – this time for Mitya Shakh-Bagov. The exhaustion she was suffering was compounded by severe anaemia and, like her mother, she was put on a course of daily arsenic injections. ‘Olga’s condition still not famous’, Alexandra telegraphed Nicholas on 31 October, adding in a letter that their daughter had ‘only got up for a drive & now after tea she remains on the sopha and we shall dine upstairs – this is my treatment – she must lie more, as goes about so pale and wearily – the Arsenic injections will act quicker like that, you see’.*32

  A few days later they were all celebrating Olga’s twentieth birthday, but of late she had hardly been to the annexe and when she did go, as she told her father, she ‘didn’t do anything, just sat with them. But they still make me lie down a lot.’ She didn’t like the daily arsenic injections from Dr Botkin: ‘I reek of garlic a bit, which is not nice.’†33 Whatever her private thoughts might have been at this time, Olga, like her sisters, retained a stoical acceptance of her lot. Fellow nurse Bibi happened to be visiting at the palace one evening when Olga and Tatiana were getting changed for dinner and choosing jewellery. ‘The only shame is that no one can enjoy seeing me like this,’ quipped Olga, ‘only papa!’ The remark was made, as Bibi told Valentina, total
ly without affectation. ‘One, two and her hair’s done (though no hairdo as such), and she didn’t even glance in the mirror.’ It was typical of Olga to take little interest in her looks or bother about how she appeared to others. During her hours lying at home feeling unwell the chambermaid Nyuta had brought Olga a gramophone record – ‘Goodbye Lou-Lou’. ‘Echoes, no doubt, of things seen in the hospital’, wrote Valentina in her diary, perhaps alluding to songs sung by Olga’s officer friends there. ‘It’s sad for the poor children to have to live in this gilded cage.’34

  When she was finally able, Olga returned to the annexe, but on a much reduced workload, mainly taking temperatures, writing prescriptions and machining bed linen. The lion’s share of changing the dressings every morning was now done by Tatiana, who also did the injections and assisted Gedroits in surgery. Valentina and Tatiana had recently had to deal with a particularly unpleasant gangrenous wound that had required an urgent amputation. While Valentina rushed to prepare the Novocain, Tatiana, without need for instruction, had gathered together all the instruments, prepared the operating table and the linen. During the operation a good deal of hideous pus was drained away from the wound, and for once even Valentina had felt nauseous. ‘But Tatiana Nikolaevna wasn’t affected by it, only twitched at the groans and moans of the patient, and blushed scarlet.’ She returned to the hospital at nine that evening to sterilize the instruments with Olga and went in to see the patient at ten, just before leaving. Sadly he took a turn for the worse in the night and died.35

  It was this kind of traumatic situation with which Olga was no longer able to cope, although she visited for a short while most days, especially while Mitya was still there. And now Tatiana was cheered by the return of Volodya Kiknadze, who had been wounded again. The cosy foursomes they had enjoyed earlier in the summer were once more resumed as the girls spun out the evenings sterilizing instruments and preparing swabs. ‘Who’s to know the drama Olga Nikolaevna has been living through’, wrote Valentina. ‘Why is she wasting away, become so thin, so pale: is she in love with Shakh-Bagov?’ Valentina was concerned at the amount of time the sisters were spending with their two favourites: ‘As soon as she finishes the dressings, Tatiana Nikolaevna goes to do the injections, and then she sits down in a twosome with K[iknadze] … he sits down at the piano, playing something with one finger, and chats animatedly with our dear girl for a long time.’ Bibi worried too; what if Elizaveta Naryshkina were to walk in on ‘this little scene’? She would die of shock.

  Shakh Bagov has a fever and is in bed. Olga Nikolaevna spends the whole time sitting by his bed. The other pair joined them there yesterday and sat side by side on the bed looking through the album. K[iknadze] cosies up to her. Tatiana Nikolaevna’s sweet childlike face can’t hide a thing and is flushed and animated. But isn’t all this close proximity, all this touching dangerous? I’ve become anxious about it. The others are getting jealous, and annoyed and I imagine they gossip and spread it around in town, and maybe even beyond.36

  Dr Gedroits shared Valentina’s concern; they both felt that Volodya Kiknadze was a ladykiller and was leading the impres-sionable Tatiana astray. Gedroits decided to send him away to the Crimea for recuperation, or rather – as she and Valentina both saw it – ‘out of harm’s way’. Even Mitya, Olga’s ‘precious one’, was not beyond reproach; Gedroits had discovered that once, when drunk, he had shown private letters Olga had written to him to another patient. ‘That is positively the last straw! The poor children!’37

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  Over at Stavka on 3 December 1915, Nicholas noted in his diary that ‘Alexey started developing a cold yesterday’; he began sneezing and a nosebleed ensued.38 Unable to stem the bleeding, Dr Feodorov advised that Alexey be taken back to Tsarskoe Selo. When they arrived on the 6th, Anna Vyrubova was shocked at

  the waxen, grave-like pallor of the little pointed face as the boy with infinite care was borne into the palace and laid on his little white bed. Above the blood-soaked bandages his large blue eyes gazed at us with pathos unspeakable, and it seemed to all around the bed that the last hour of the unhappy child was at hand.

  Grigory had, of course, been sent for and arrived soon after. Much as before, he stood for a while by Alexey’s bed and made the sign of the cross over him. Then he turned to Alexandra and said, ‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen’; then he left.39 She nevertheless sat up with her son all night and did not go to bed until 8 a.m. the following morning; ‘half an hour later she got up and went to church’, Tatiana told Valentina.40 The following day a specialist named Dr Polyakov was called in and managed to cauterize the bleeding. Alexey remained in bed until 18 December but was still very frail. A disconsolate Nicholas had returned to Stavka alone on the 12th.

  As Christmas 1915 approached Olga and Tatiana were feeling gloomy: Mitya and Volodya were soon to be discharged from the hospital. The girls begged their mother to intercede so they could at least stay for the holiday. On the 26th the girls ‘arranged to come just for an hour to do the dressings’ at the annexe, although not without ‘secret thoughts’ of chatting with Mitya and Volodya, as Valentina well knew. She was anxious to see the back of Kiknadze, whom she heard had been bragging of his conquest. ‘People are gossiping, they see how he is constantly taking her to one side in the ward, away from the others … always whispering things quietly, secretively in a low voice.’ Dr Gedroits was ‘in a rage’ about his inappropriate behaviour.41

  On 30 December 1915 Olga noted wistfully in her diary that ‘Mitya was at the commission, then came back and we sat nearly the whole time together, playing at draughts and it was so simple. He is good, God knows.’ In the evening she spoke to him on the phone and heard the news she had dreaded: ‘He has suddenly received orders from his regiment to go to the Caucasus in two days’ time.’42

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE OUTSIDE LIFE

  By the spring of 1916 the refugee crisis in the Russian Empire had become enormous, with something like 3.3 million people, many of them Jews displaced from the Pale of Settlement, by fighting on the Eastern Front.1 With the urgent need for more refuges, orphanages and soup kitchens, Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna published a heartfelt appeal in aid of her committee in the Russian press. ‘The war has ruined and scattered millions of our peaceful citizens’, she wrote:

  Homeless and breadless, the unfortunate refugees are seeking shelter throughout the land … I appeal to you, all you kind-hearted people, to help the refugee physically and morally. At the very least give him the comfort of knowing that you understand and feel for him in his boundless misery. Remember the words of our Lord: ‘I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ [Matthew, xxv: 35]2

  The Tatiana Committee not only sought to provide for refugees but also to register them and reunite families separated by the fighting. In particular it worked to ensure the welfare of children – many arriving from the war zone in a pitiful state, weak from hunger and lice-ridden – by setting up orphanages and schools for them. Early in 1916 a seventh home for refugee children and their mothers was opened in Petrograd under the auspices of the committee. It was funded by Americans in the city, led by the ambassador’s wife, Mrs George Marye; later that year the Americans donated fifteen field ambulances.3 The British also collaborated, sending out a team of female nurses and doctors to staff the British Women’s Maternity Hospital in Petrograd which the Tatiana Committee was supporting to the tune of 1,000 roubles a month.4

  After more than a year of war, word had spread into the foreign press of the exemplary work of the empress and her two eldest daughters. Olga and Tatiana were projected as virtuous heroines, ‘The Beautiful “White Sisters” of the War’, heading an army of ‘ministering women carrying the snow-white sign of peace and the red cross of redemption’.5 British journalist John Foster Fraser recalled how a ‘3-day Flag Day for collection for the refugees was begun with a big service in front of Kazan Cathedral’:

&
nbsp; The idea of helping the distant war-sufferers came from the Grand Duchess Tatiana, aged seventeen … She is tall and dark and beautiful and mischievous, and the Russians adore her … When she started her fund to find bread and clothing for the people of Poland it was like the waving of a fairy wand … The appeal by their pretty princess was irresistible … It would have been difficult to find a shop window in Petrograd where there was not a large photograph of the young lady, with a softly twinkling side-glance as much as to inquire: ‘well, how much have you given?’6

  Alexandra was delighted to tell Nicholas on 13 January that Tatiana’s name day ‘was celebrated in town with great fanfare. There was a concert and presentations in the theatre … Tatiana’s portrait with autograph was sold along with the programme.’7 Money raised from the sale of postcards and portraits of Tatiana was going into the fund for her committee. ‘I’ve seen elderly gentlemen sauntering along the Nevski with as long a row of little photographs of the princess across their rotund chests as the stretch of medals worn by a Petrograd policeman,’ reported John Foster Fraser, ‘and that is wonderful.’8 For others, however, the imperial family was ‘surrounded by wall after wall of isolation from the people’, wrote American Richard Washburn Child, ‘the Czarina and the four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, take some interest in charities, but otherwise are real to the Russian people only through their photographs’.9

  Tatiana’s public profile nevertheless had been considerably raised by the crucial work of her committee, in comparison to Olga’s less visible role on the Supreme Council, although this undoubtedly had much to do with Olga’s continuing ill health. Their mother too had been absent from meetings in Petrograd as well as the annexe hospital since before Christmas. She spent most of January and February suffering from a recurrence of excruciating neuralgia and toothache, as well as problems with her ‘enlarged’ heart, which left her ‘constantly in tears’ from the pain.10 Dr Botkin gave her electrotherapy treatment for the neuralgia and her dentist visited numerous times, while Alexandra continued to dose herself on a wide range of proprietary medicines, including opium and ‘Adonis and other drops to quieten the heartbeating’.11 Anastasia had bronchitis and Alexey was also unwell, with pain in his arms from going out sledging. ‘Both arms are bandaged & the right ached rather yesterday’, Alexandra told Nicholas. Grigory had, since Anna’s accident the previous year, been constantly on hand to pray and offer sage advice and told her Alexey’s pain would ‘pass in two days’.12 Rasputin’s increased influence over the empress in her husband’s absence, and his now constant whisperings on matters military and political in Alexandra’s ear, had been fanning the flames of gossip even more of late. ‘The hatred grows not by the day but by the hour,’ recorded an anxious Valentina Chebotareva, ‘and transmits itself to our poor unfortunate girls. People think them of the same mind as their mother.’13