The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Chapter Seventeen

  TERRIBLE THINGS ARE GOING ON IN ST PETERSBURG

  ‘Father Grigory went missing last night. They are looking for him everywhere – it’s absolutely dreadful.’ Such was the state of foreboding at the Alexander Palace on 17 December 1916 that even Anastasia noted Rasputin’s disappearance. The girls and their mother had sat up until midnight, ‘all the time waiting for a telephone call’; it never came. So anxious were they that in the end ‘the four of us slept together. God help us.’1 The following day there was still no news, but word was already out, as Maria wrote in her diary, that ‘they suspect Dmitri and Felix’.2 ‘We are sitting together – can imagine our feelings – thoughts’, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas in her characteristic staccato style, adding that they knew this much: Grigory had been invited to Felix Yusupov’s palace on the evening of the 16th. ‘There had been a ‘big scandal … big meeting, Dmitri, Purishkevitch* etc. all drunk. Police heard shots, Purishkevitch ran out screaming to the Police that our Friend was killed.’ The police were out searching for Grigory now but Alexandra was already utterly distraught: ‘I cannot and won’t believe that he has been killed. God have mercy.’3

  If the story was true, then all the tsaritsa’s hopes for the family’s continuing protection from harm were shipwrecked. Only a month previously she had written to Nicholas reiterating her absolute faith in Grigory’s help and guidance during these difficult years:

  Remember that for your reign, Baby, and us you need the strength prayers and advice of our Friend … Ah Lovy, I pray so hard to God to make you feel and realize, that He is our caring, were He not here, I don’t know what might not have happened. He saves us by His prayers and wise counsils [sic] and is our rock of faith and help.4

  Final confirmation of Rasputin’s death, when it came, could not have been altogether unexpected, even for Alexandra, for gossip in the capital about his rise from messianic faith healer to meddler in affairs of state, and now a morose drunk, had long since reached boiling point. Demoralized by Nicholas’s decision to enter the war, which he had predicted would be disastrous for Russia, Rasputin had allowed his life to fall into disarray. He saw nothing but doom hanging over Russia as the war dragged on and sought refuge in an almost permanent state of alcoholic oblivion.5 Stories of his debauched late-night drinking sessions at Donon’s Restaurant and a string of fashionable hotels – the Astoria, the Rossiya and the Europe – or hanging out with the Massalsky’s Gypsy Chorus at the Samarkand, were legion.6 In his cups, Rasputin had loudly boasted of his influence over the tsaritsa: ‘I can make her do anything’, he was said to have bragged earlier that year. In response Nicholas had summoned Rasputin to Tsarskoe Selo and reprimanded him. Rasputin admitted that he had indeed been ‘sinful’, but it was clear that he was now out of control. The gossip of ‘magic cures and gay carousals’ that had first greeted his arrival in St Petersburg had now turned into a ‘conflagration of rumour’ in which he and the empress were seen as representing ‘Dark Forces’ that were threatening to engulf Russia.7 Alexandra was talked of as being ‘a go-between in traitorous intrigues with the Germans’ and Rasputin accused of being a German spy ‘who had wormed his way into the confidence of the Tsarina for the purpose of obtaining military secrets’.8 Such was the level of seething resentment levelled at the empress by the end of 1916 that members of the imperial family were openly suggesting she be sent to a remote convent for the sake of the country – and her own sanity. But first and foremost Rasputin had to be got rid of.

  As they waited for news at the Alexander Palace, the girls and Alexandra’s two closest friends – Anna Vyrubova and Lili Dehn – gathered round the despairing empress. The following night Tatiana and Olga slept in their mother’s room. And then, on the 19th, they had ‘confirmation that Father Grigory has been murdered, most probably by Dmitri, and thrown from the Krestovsky bridge’, as Olga wrote in her diary. ‘They found him in the water. So awful and can’t bear to write about it. We sat drinking tea with Lili and Anna and the whole time felt Father Grigory among us.’9

  One of the ADCs on duty at the time recalled the impact of the news on the grand duchesses:

  There, upstairs, in one of their modest bedrooms, the four of them sat on the sofa, huddled up closely together. They were cold and visibly terribly upset, but for the whole of that long evening, the name of Rasputin was never uttered in front of me …

  They were in pain, because the man was no longer among the living, but also because they sensed that, with his murder, something terrible and undeserved had started for their mother, their father and themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly towards them.10

  At 6 p.m. on the evening of the 19th Nicholas arrived in haste from Stavka with Alexey, prompted by an urgent telegram he had received from his wife telling him that ‘There is danger that these two boys are organizing something still worse’ – a coup d’état, with the connivance of others in the Romanov family and in tandem with right-wing monarchists in the Duma.11 Rumour had been abroad for some time that Dmitri Pavlovich and his clubbing crony Felix Yusupov were involved. English nurse Dorothy Seymour, at the Anglo-Russian Hospital, had met Dmitri several times socially and remembered him as ‘beautiful to behold, vastly conceited, but superb in glorious youth and dash’. On the evening of 13 December, Dmitri had talked to Dorothy over dinner ‘of many intrigues’ and she had gathered that ‘something was afoot’.*12

  Details soon emerged that Dmitri, Yusupov and fellow conspirator Purishkevich had lured Rasputin to Felix’s palace on the Moika at around midnight on the evening of Friday 16 December. Yusupov had picked Rasputin up from his flat on Gorokhovaya ulitsa and driven him there. In a basement dining room, he had plied Rasputin with booze and cream cakes sprinkled with cyanide. Incredulous that the poison failed to do its work and increasingly frantic that their assassination plot would fail, Yusupov had then shot Rasputin in the back with Dmitri Pavlovich’s Browning revolver. But Rasputin still refused to die; it took two more bullets from Purishkevich (the first missed, the second hit Rasputin in the torso) before a fourth and fatal shot to the forehead finished him off.13 Rasputin’s body was then bundled into a piece of cloth, tied up with rope and taken in Dmitri Pavlovich’s car to Petrovsky Island, where it was consigned to the Malaya Nevka through a gap in the ice.14 At 6 that morning Dorothy Seymour recalled that Dmitri Pavlovich ‘in mad spirits’ had rushed into the Anglo-Russian Hospital with Yusupov to have a wound dressed in Yusupov’s neck.15

  After the frozen, mangled body was hauled out of the river and an autopsy performed it was reclaimed by the Romanovs. It was taken for burial in secret in the Alexander Park, close by the partially constructed northern wall of the new Church of St Serafim, which Anna Vyrubova was funding with the compensation monies from her accident. When Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughters arrived for the funeral at 9 a.m. on the morning of 21 December, Rasputin’s zinc coffin had already been closed and lowered into the grave.†16 After joining the officiating priest in prayers, each of them dropped white flowers on the coffin and then silently departed.17 In Petrograd meanwhile people were rejoicing on the streets. ‘A dog’s death for a dog’, they shouted and – hailing Dmitri Pavlovich as a national hero – lit candles before the icons of St Dimitri in all the churches to give thanks for his gallant act of patriotism. Before Nicholas had even arrived back from Stavka, Alexandra had had Dmitri illegally placed under house arrest; her husband maintained this tough line, rejecting pleas of leniency from his royal relatives. ‘No one has the right to murder’, he responded fiercely to their plea for leniency. ‘I know that many will have this on their conscience, as Dmitri Pavlovich is not the only one involved. I am astonished at your appeal to me.’18 He immediately ordered Dmitri back to the army – at Qazvin on the Persian front.19 Felix Yusupov was exiled to his estate 800 miles (1,300 km) south in the province of Kursk.

  Alexandra’s response to the savage murder of her wise counsellor was plain for all to see. ‘Her agonized featur
es betrayed, in spite of all her efforts, how terribly she was suffering’, remembered Pierre Gilliard. ‘Her grief was inconsolable. Her idol had been shattered. He who alone could save her son had been slain. Now that he was gone, any misfortune, any catastrophe was possible.’20 Anna Vyrubova later described the empress’s state of mind at that time as ‘nearer the insanity they accused her of than she had ever been before’.21 ‘My heart is broken’, Alexandra told Lili Dehn. ‘Veronal* is keeping me up. I’m literally saturated with it.’22

  Rasputin’s death cast its terrible pall over the whole family. Olga was profoundly disturbed by it, as she told Valentina Chebotareva not long afterwards: ‘Maybe it was necessary to kill him, but not in such a terrible way’, a remark that suggests she had by now realized the full extent of his baleful influence over their mother. Olga was appalled that two members of her own close family were involved: ‘one is ashamed to admit they are relatives’, she said. Dmitri’s role must have been particularly wounding for all of them.23 General Spiridovich later claimed that Olga had always ‘instinctively sensed there was something bad in Rasputin’.24 But what troubled her even more was this: ‘why has the feeling in the country changed against my father?’ No one could give her an adequate explanation and she continued to appear ‘filled with a growing anxiety’.25

  Tatiana also took Rasputin’s death very hard but kept her feelings to herself, treasuring the notebook in which she had written down extracts from his letters and telegrams as well as his pronouncements on various religious topics.26 Her mother meanwhile clung to the bloodstained blue satin tunic that her beloved Grigory had been wearing on the night of his ‘martyrdom’, ‘preserving it piously as a relic, a palladium* on which the fate of her dynasty hangs’.27 It was left to Dr Botkin to voice what many privately were thinking: ‘Rasputin dead will be worse than Rasputin alive’, he told his children; adding prophetically that what Dmitri Pavlovich and Yusupov had done was ‘to fire the first shot of the revolution’.28 ‘Lord have mercy and save us this New Year 1917’, was all Olga could think of as that difficult year came to an end.29

  * * *

  January opened on a sombre note for the Romanov family and their entourage. They attended a prayer service together at midnight and exchanged New Year greetings but Pierre Gilliard had no doubt that they had all entered a period of ‘dreadful waiting for the disaster which there was no escaping’.30 A last gasp of imperial ceremonial came during an official visit by Prince Carol of Romania and his parents, their country having finally entered the war on the side of Russia and its allies.31 Alexandra decided to take advantage of a rare state dinner – held in Carol’s honour on the 9th – to present Maria officially to the court. She and Nicholas still viewed their third daughter, albeit affectionately, as chubby and gawky; the previous evening the girls had all been trying on dresses and according to Tatiana, ‘Maria had got so fat that she couldn’t get into any of them’.32 She had long taken her family’s teasing with good heart and this occasion was no exception. ‘She looked extremely pretty in her pale blue dress, wearing the diamonds that her parents gave to each of their daughters on her sixteenth birthday’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden, but unfortunately, ‘Poor Maria slipped in her new high heels and fell when entering the dining hall on the arm of a tall Grand Duke’. ‘On hearing the noise, the Emperor remarked jokingly, “Of course, fat Marie.”’ After her sister had ‘fallen over with a thud with all her might’, as Tatiana recalled, she had sat there on the floor laughing ‘to the point of embarrassment’. Indeed the whole occasion turned out to be quite amusing: ‘After dinner papa slipped on the parquet floor, [and] one of the Romanians knocked over a cup of coffee.’33 But it had all washed over Olga, who, still thinking of Mitya, had noted her former patient’s twenty-fourth birthday in her diary. Valentina Chebotareva thought she had seemed particularly sad of late. ‘Is that the fault of your guests?’ Chebotareva had asked her. ‘Oh, there’s no threat of that now, while there’s a war’, Olga had added, alluding to the unspoken suggestion of a marriage.34 Elizaveta Naryshkina had rather hoped that an engagement between Olga and Carol still might take place, for she found him ‘charming’. But Anna Vyrubova had noticed that Prince Carol’s ‘young man’s fancy [had] rested on Marie’ at that dinner, despite her clumsy behaviour. Before he left for Moscow on 26th January, Carol made a formal proposal for her hand. Nicholas had ‘good-naturedly laughed the Prince’s proposal aside’, saying that his seventeen-year-old daughter ‘was nothing more than a schoolgirl’.35 At Carol’s final lunch with the family Elizaveta Naryshkina noticed how markedly the four sisters kept their distance from him and only Nicholas made any effort at conversation.36 Behind the scenes, however, Carol’s mother, Marie – now Queen of Romania – had had her hopes renewed the day of their departure from Russia, when she and her husband King Ferdinand had received ‘ciphered telegrams from Russia’. ‘It seems they still think about a marriage for Carol with one of Nicky’s daughters,’ she confided to her diary. She was surprised and gratified; ‘one would have thought about it now when our poor little Country hardly exists, now when we have not even a house of our own left.* But on the whole it is flattering and might be taken as a good sign!’ The only problem was Carol himself: ‘I do not at all know if he wants to marry.’37

  Two of the last private visitors to the Alexander Palace were the head of the Anglo-Russian Hospital, Lady Sybil Grey, and Dorothy Seymour. Having been in Petrograd since September 1916, Dorothy had been excited to be sent an official invitation to meet the tsaritsa, telling her mother that ‘It will be too annoying if they start a revolution before I have time to get down to see her’.38 When she and Lady Sybil took the train out to Tsarskoe Selo, Dorothy found the whole experience, despite the difficult times, an ‘amazing fairytale’.39 They were met at the station ‘by gorgeous officials, footmen, horses all white and prancing – Great State – At the palace door two glorious footmen with huge orange and red ostrich plumes on their heads.’40 After being entertained to lunch by Iza Buxhoeveden and Nastenka Hendrikova the two women were taken ‘through miles of palace and a huge banqueting room’ to a door that was opened ‘by a huge negro’ and ushered in to meet Alexandra and Olga. The empress, wearing purple velvet and ‘huge amethysts’, seemed to Dorothy ‘quite lovely’ and ‘wonderfully graceful’. But there was something haunted about her ‘desperately sad eyes’. Olga, in her nurse’s uniform, seemed very plain in comparison. ‘Pretty eyes. Nice little thing, very pleasant and informal’, recalled Dorothy. They sat and talked for almost two hours, at the end of which she came away impressed by Olga’s spirituality and sensitivity. She was ‘evidently a pacifist, and the war and its horrors [were] on her nerves’. Dorothy left with a sense of sadness and the overwhelming feeling that the room they had sat in – and the palace itself – were already ‘heavy with tragedy’.41

  * * *

  The spectre of illness continued to dog the imperial family that winter; Alexandra was still suffering with her heart and legs and Alexey had recurring pain in his arm, and then swollen glands. Shortly after Dorothy Seymour’s visit the still sickly Olga had gone down with a painful ear infection. The two invalids had been sharing the same room when, on 11 February, a couple of young cadets whom Alexey had befriended at Stavka had been brought in to play with him. Olga had remained in the room with them, and Alexandra had noticed that one of the boys was coughing; the following day he went down with measles.42 By 21 February, Olga and Alexey both seemed unwell, but the doctors assured Nicholas that it was not measles, and he began packing for a return to Stavka. He had not wanted to leave Tsarskoe at this time, mindful of the gathering danger since Rasputin’s murder of a possible coup against him. The warnings had been coming thick and fast from his own relatives, including his brother-in-law Sandro, who visited and begged Nicholas to concede to a proper, democratically elected Duma free of imperial interference; ‘with a few words and a stroke of the pen, you could calm everything and give the country what it yearns for’, he ur
ged. To Sandro it was clear that Alexandra’s constant meddling in affairs of state was ‘dragging her husband into an abyss’. Even now she bridled at any talk of capitulation: ‘Nicky is an autocrat. How could he share his divine right with a parliament?’43 And now Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail was warning of imminent mutiny in the army if the tsar did not immediately return to Stavka. Nicholas listened to Sandro passively, as he always did, lighting one cigarette after another. He had no stomach for a fight, either with his relatives, his wife, or his government. His life was in the hands of God and he had long since abandoned all responsibility for it. Reluctant to leave the family, he nevertheless prepared to go. A highly strained atmosphere prevailed over lunch the day he left. Everyone seemed anxious and ‘wanted to think more than talk’.44

  No sooner had a drawn and hollow-cheeked Nicholas said farewell than it became clear not only that Olga and Alexey were coming down with measles, but that Anna Vyrubova too had been infected – and seriously so. On 24 February Tatiana joined them in the darkened sickroom, where their devoted mother wearing her Red Cross uniform nursed her three children.45 All had terrible coughs and were suffering from headaches and earache as their temperatures rocketed.46 Despite the seriousness of their condition Nicholas was already discussing the children’s recuperation with Dr Feoderov at Stavka. He wrote and told Alexandra that the doctor considered it ‘absolutely necessary for the children and Aleksei especially [to have] a change of climate after their complete recovery’. Perhaps, soon after Easter, he told Alexandra, they could take them to the Crimea? ‘We will think it over quietly when I come back.… I won’t be long away – only to put all things as much as possible to rights here and then my duty will be done.’47