The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Reverting to her former morose state of mind, Olga went through the motions of fulfilling her duties at the annexe – measuring and handing out the medicines, sorting the bed linen, arranging flowers and phlegmatically noting in her brief diary entries: ‘Did the same as always. It’s boring without Mitya.’48 Day after day was much like any other, and she ‘didn’t do anything special’: maybe a walk or drive in the afternoon, sewing pillowcases at the hospital in the evening, or board games with the wounded, playing the piano and then home to bed. But as Olga wilted like a fading flower Tatiana had lost none of her vigour nor her application to duty. Nicholas, who often referred to her as his secretary, was now entrusting her, rather than Olga, with regular requests to send items such as writing paper or cigarettes out to him at Stavka. On Tatiana’s nineteenth birthday he had telegraphed Alexandra congratulating her: ‘God bless dear Tatiana and may she always remain the good, loving and patient girl she is now and a consolation in our old days.’49 Alexandra agreed; by September and once again full of aches and pains, she openly admitted to her husband ‘I do so want to get quicker well again, have more work to do and all lies upon Tatiana’s shoulders.’50

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  Whenever any of their favourite officers were wounded the family made special efforts to take care of their welfare. A case in point was Lieutenant Viktor Zborovsky, their old friend from the Tsar’s Escort, who was seriously wounded at the end of May 1916. Nicholas himself sent special instructions from Stavka for Zborovsky to be brought back from Novoselitsky in the Caucasus to Tsarskoe Selo. Much to Anastasia’s great joy, Vitya, as she affectionately called him, was brought to the officers’ ward of the Feodorovsky Gorodok. His arrival raised everyone’s spirits – despite the severity of his wounds. He looked ‘brown and all right,’ Alexandra told Nicky, ‘pretends he has no pains, but one sees his face twitch. He is wounded through the chest, but feels the arm.’51

  His Majesty’s Own Cossack Escort, to give it its full title, was comprised of four squadrons, two of Kuban Cossacks and two of Tereks, who were distinguished wherever they went by their red Cossack parade uniforms and black Persian lamb hats. Under the command of Count Grabbe since January 1914, the Escort largely performed a ceremonial role, but for the Romanov family it was the heart and soul of the Russian army.* In July, when the four sisters visited Nicholas and Alexey at Stavka with their mother, they made a surprise visit to the Escort’s summer camp. The soldiers sang old Cossack songs for them and performed their traditional dance – the lezginka. Tatiana recalled one particular thrilling exploit of theirs in a letter to Rita Khitrovo, a friend and fellow nurse at the annexe:

  Yesterday we went up on the banks of the Dnieper again. The squadron of our Escort came along singing, hurrying to catch up with us. They sang songs, and played games and we just lay on the grass and enjoyed it. When they left, Papa said to them that they should go along the same bank of the river, and that we’d stay here for a bit longer, then drive in a fast moving car lower down along the river. We caught up with the squadron which had been going at a march playing the zurna* and singing. When we came alongside they put their horses into a full gallop behind us and flew along. Further on there was a steep ravine and a bend in the river. They had to cross it in a single stride as the earth was soft. They had already fallen behind us, but as soon as they came out of this ravine, then they began to catch us at a full gallop. It was terribly exciting. They were like real Caucasian horsemen at that pace. You can’t imagine just how marvellous it was. They rode with a whoop and a shout. If they go into an attack like that, especially whole regiments of them, I think the Germans will run away out of fear and wonder at what’s coming at them.52

  Having such affection for the Escort, it is not surprising that Maria and Anastasia delighted in having Viktor Zborovsky as a patient at Feodorovsky Gorodok when the new officers’ ward was opened there in June; they reported on his progress regularly in their letters to Nicholas. They were now visiting daily, although evenings were still mainly spent at the annexe hospital with Olga and Tatiana. At their own hospital the warm presence of the two younger sisters greatly enhanced the sense of homeliness that the place already exuded. In the autumn of 1916, Felix Dassel, an officer from Maria’s regiment, the 5th Kazan Dragoons, was brought in, severely wounded in the leg. He found the hospital cosy and welcoming with a wood fire crackling in the grate – ‘nothing like how you would imagine a military hospital to be’. His small ward was calm and intimate, the bed made up with snow-white linen. Shortly after he arrived the grand duchesses came for their regular visit and he remembered them vividly: ‘Maria, my patron, stocky, with a round open face, good clear eyes, somewhat timid’, stopped to ask whether he was in very much pain. ‘Anastasia, the smaller of the two, with elfish, lusty eyes’, greeted him in the same concerned, though rather inattentive, way, ‘leaning on the end of the bed, observing me sharply, examining me, swinging a foot, rolling her handkerchief’.53

  Not long afterwards Dassel fell into a delirium and was operated on; he woke up to find roses on the table by his bed from the grand duchesses, who had telephoned regularly to enquire on his progress. During his time at the hospital the girls visited Dassel once or twice a week; Maria always remaining ‘a little self-conscious’, while the forthright Anastasia was ‘freer, impish, with a very dry humour’, and, as he noticed, adept too at cheating at board games with her sister. She also liked to ‘tease in a childish way’ which brought reproachful, warning glances from Maria.54 (The two sisters certainly still squabbled, as Tatiana told Valentina Chebotareva: they often had cat fights when ‘Nastasya gets mad and pulls [Maria’s] hair and tears out clumps of it’.)55 Once Dassel started feeling better the girls celebrated his recovery by posing for photographs with him. He noticed how ‘terribly proud of her hospital’ Anastasia was: ‘she feels like she’s half grown up, on an equal footing with her older sisters’. Maria too talked with concern about the war, about the hunger in the towns and of people not knowing if their fathers or brothers at the front were still alive.56

  Captain Mikhail Geraschinevsky of the Keksholm Imperial Guard had similar warm memories of Feodorovsky Gorodok where he was a patient for thirteen months. He noticed that ‘the girls came every day except when they did not behave’; this, it would seem, was their mother’s most effective punishment.57 He remembered their care over one wounded soldier in particular who had a bullet lodged in his skull and had lost his memory, and how they had patiently sat with him, asking him questions in an attempt to help bring back his memory.58 When he was home from Stavka on visits, Alexey sometimes visited too – he chatted and played dice with the soldiers, demanding they tell him all about the war. Like the patients at the annexe, the wounded here all loved the imperial children for their open and friendly manner: ‘we could not tell them apart from ordinary children’, recalled Geraschinevsky. He noticed how Alexey and his sisters always talked very fast with them in Russian, thinking that perhaps this was because ‘they were so rarely in contact with strangers that they were always in a hurry to tell them all they knew before they would be called away’.59 Whenever Anastasia and Maria sat at soldiers’ bedsides, playing board and card games with them, there was always one thing in particular they wanted to know. ‘They would ask us to tell them stories of the people from outside life. They would call “outside life” anything that was not in the castle [sic] and would listen intently not to miss one word.’60

  While the Romanov sisters might still have little experience of ‘outside life’ – the world outside definitely wanted to see more of them. On 11 August Alexandra informed Nicholas that their daughters had spent all day posing for a new set of official photographs ‘for giving away to their committees’.61 As it turned out these would be the last official pictures ever taken of the four sisters – by photographer Alexander Funk.62 Released from their usual all-purpose plain skirts and blouses the girls dressed in their best satin tea dresses with embroidered panels of roses, wearing their pearl neck
laces and gold bracelets. Anastasia not having passed the socially liberating age of sixteen still had her long hair loose, but her three older sisters all had theirs specially marcel-waved and dressed in chignons, most probably by Alexandra’s hairdresser Delacroix. The girls and their brother were now also being regularly captured on newsreel foot-age, most of it during official appearances, which was released for public consumption. Watching such films was one of the few forms of entertainment they enjoyed during the war years, although they were occasionally allowed the comic antics of Max Linder and André Deed, and morale-raisers such as Vasilii Ryabov, a documentary film about a war hero shot by the Japanese in 1904. John Foster Fraser recalled how when he was in Petrograd in the summer of 1916, Nicholas had had a cinematograph operator put together some film of the imperial family ‘in unimperial circumstances’.63 Fraser had applied for a copy of the film to use in lectures when he went back to the UK and had had it run for him by Pathé Frères in their dark room in Moscow:

  There was the Emperor on a see-saw with his son, the Czare-vitch. There was a tug-of-war between the daughters, the grand duchesses, and their imperial father; the emperor lost, and was hilariously dragged along the ground. There was a snow-fight in which the Emperor was routed by his girls. There were picnic scenes. There was dancing on the royal yacht Standart.64

  In all, 3,000 feet (914 m) of film showed the Romanovs at their most happy and informal. Nicholas had no objection to Fraser using the film but Alexandra, conscious of public image-making and in particular the future dynastic role of the heir, most certainly did and insisted that those parts ‘which were not imperial’ should be cut before the film could be shown in London.

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  With Olga continuing to pine for the absent Mitya, Tatiana resisted the temptation of being sucked into the same kind of visible emotional turmoil when Volodya Kiknadze was wounded again – this time in the spine – and returned to the annexe in September 1916. In fact Tatiana only recorded his departure for recuperation in the Crimea a month later; she was sad but said nothing more. Olga, however, seemed happy to grasp at any small reminders of her precious Mitya, whose mother she met in September, a fact that made her feel ‘terribly happy to have a little piece of him’.65 She saw Mitya again briefly in October when he was passing through and appeared unexpectedly at the hospital. He looked well and suntanned and she was pleased to note that he had changed his hair parting, but she was reticent about saying more, even in her diary. ‘We stood in the corridor and then sat. Darned socks.’66 The strain of having to internalize so many of her feelings left her frustrated, which she dissipated back at home by indulging in childish play with her younger sisters, chasing them round indoors on bicycles, while her more composed sister sat reading a book quietly in a corner. Olga was approaching her twenty-first birthday, but life and love had, it seemed, passed her by. It was ‘Quite a venerable age!’ as Alexandra observed in a letter to Nicholas, but if only their girls might one day find ‘the intense love and happiness you, my Angel, have given me these 22 years. It’s such a rare thing nowadays, alas!’67

  Perhaps Olga was able to take some consolation in a gift from Alexey at Stavka – a cat that he had taken pity on, notorious as he was for rescuing stray cats and dogs there.68 He seemed to be doing famously over at Mogilev with Nicholas, proud to inform his mother that he had recently been given an award by the Serbs of ‘a gold medal with the inscription “For Bravery”’. ‘I deserved it in my battles with the tutors’, he told her.69 He found himself obliged to write to Alexandra in November to remind her that his pocket money was overdue:

  My darling dear, sweet beloved mummy. It’s warm. Tomorrow I shall be up. The salary! I beg you!!!!! Nothing to stuff myself with!!! In ‘Nain Jaune’* also bad luck! Let it be! Soon I shall be selling my dress, books, and, at last, shall die of starvation.70

  After the final words Alexey added a drawing of a coffin. His cry of anguish must have crossed with a letter from his mother in which she enclosed ten roubles and wrote apologetically, ‘To my dear Alexei. To my dear corporal. I am sending you your salary. I am sorry I forgot to enclose it.… Kiss you fondly your own Mama. Alexey was ecstatic – ‘Rich!! Drink barley coffee.’71

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  During these last two years of war and her husband’s frequent absences at Stavka, Alexandra had seen her daughters grow up considerably. It pleased her to tell Nicholas that Grigory approved:

  Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy ‘courses’ for their age and their souls have much developed – they are really great dears … They have shared all our emotions and it has taught them to see people with open eyes, so that it will be a great help to them later in life.72

  The experience of war had, in Alexandra’s view, ‘ripened’ their girls, though ‘They are happily at times great babies – but have the insight and feelings of the soul of much wiser beings’.73 With this in mind, on 11 December 1916, she took all four daughters south on the imperial train to visit the ancient Russian city of Novgorod, for centuries a focal point of Orthodoxy and Russian spirituality. Upon arriving they attended a two-hour mass at the Cathedral of St Sophia, then visited a nearby hospital, a museum of church treasures, and in the afternoon a provincial hospital and a shelter for refugee children. The final stop on their brief visit was the Desyatinny Convent – where Alexandra particularly wished to meet a renowned and much venerated seer, the staritsa Mariya Mikhailovna. Olga later described to Nicholas how they entered the old nun’s cell:

  it was very narrow and dark and only one small candle was burning, which immediately went out, so they lit some kind of kerosene lamp without a shade and a nun, her eyes watering, held it. The old woman was lying behind a kind of piece of patchwork that was full of holes on a wooden bed. She had huge iron fetters on her and her hands were so thin and dark, just like religious relics. It seems she is 107 years old. Hair very very thin, dishevelled and her face covered in wrinkles. Eyes bright and clear. She gave each of us a little icon and some communion bread and blessed us. She said something to mama, that it would all soon be over and everything would be all right.74

  Alexandra too was very taken by the sweetness of the old woman: ‘always works, goes about, sews for the convicts and soldiers with-out spectacles – never washes. And of course no smell, or feeling of dirt.’ More importantly, the staritsa had addressed her personally, telling her – exactly as Olga recalled – that the war would be over soon: ‘And you beautiful one, she had said several times, “don’t fear the heavy cross”’ – as though in prophecy of a personal test of faith to come.75 Others later told a different tale: Anna Vyrubova was sure that ‘as the tsarina approached, the old woman cried out: “Behold, the martyred Empress Alexandra Feodorovna!”’ Iza Buxhoeveden remembered much the same, adding that ‘Her Majesty seemed not to hear’.76 After receiving the staritsa’s blessing and the gift of an apple for Nicholas and Alexey (which they later dutifully ate, on Alexandra’s instructions, at Stavka) the tsaritsa left Novgorod feeling ‘cheered and comforted’, telling Nicholas that the visit to Novgorod had reinforced her faith in the simple people of Russia. ‘Such love and warmth everywhere, feeling of God and your people, unity and purity of feelings – did me no end of good.’77 Those in the entourage who had accompanied her returned with very different feelings. Having heard what the staritsa had said they ‘came back depressed and apprehensive for they felt the reception was an omen’.78

  Alexandra’s devoutly Orthodox belief and the continuing wise counsel and prayers of Grigory undoubtedly sustained her at a time when her perilous state of health would have felled a far stronger woman. ‘She believes in Rasputin; she regards him as a just man, a saint, persecuted by the calumnies of the Pharisees, like the victim of Calvary’, observed the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue: ‘she has made him her spiritual guide and refuge; her mediator with Christ, her witness and intercessor before God.’79 But when the tsaritsa returned to Tsarskoe Selo in December 1
916 it was in a state of total denial about the rapidly changing atmosphere in the capital 19 miles (30.5 km) away. Edith Almedingen recalled ‘the feverish texture of the last weeks of 1916’, of a city ‘brooding over a darkly uncertain future’. With prophecies of disaster for Nicholas’s command as the army continued to suffer catastrophic casualties, another harsh winter approached, ‘under the most sinister auspices’.80 Cold, war weariness, hunger, the grim reality of food shortages leading to profiteering and rumour of famine, were all fermenting discontent, soon made manifest in strikes and food riots. ‘The streets were just queues full of ceaseless whimpering chatter’, wrote Almedingen.81

  But the loudest chatter of all around the city came in public discussion of the empress’s continuing close relationship with Rasputin. At the annexe Valentina Chebotareva worried about how the unrelenting vilification of the tsaritsa was impacting on her daughters and possibly imperilling them. ‘Olga is holding out with difficulty,’ she wrote, ‘[she] is either more light hearted or has better control over herself. How difficult it is to see them after all I’ve heard. Is it really true that they are threatened by imminent danger?’ Valentina had heard that ‘the young people, the social revolutionaries are resolved to remove them all – and her!’82 ‘If the Emperor appeared on Red Square today,’ predicted Ambassador Paléologue in his diary on 16 December 1916, ‘he would be booed. The Empress would be torn to pieces.’83 Elizaveta Naryshkina agreed with him: ‘What a multitude of things are coming to an end, Ambassador! And such a bad end.’84 To the superstitious Russian people the imperial family seemed increasingly shackled to the mystical chains of fate. It was a uniquely Russian view and one that had long dictated that everything about to be unleashed in Russia was a manifestation of God’s inexorable will.