The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

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  In the grip of deep snow and remorseless sub-zero temperatures, Petrograd that winter of 1916–17 was a desperate place. The transport system was in disarray due to fuel shortages; a lack of labour, horses and implements was further affecting the production and transportation of food. There was no flour, and long queues could be seen everywhere for what little bread was baked; virtually no meat was to be had and sugar and butter could only be got on the black market. There was no wood for fuel and the streets were piled high with garbage. Talk of revolution was on everyone’s lips. Petrograd was doomed, a Chertograd – ‘Devil’s town’, as poet Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary:

  The most frightening and crude rumours are disturbing the masses. It is a charged, neurotic atmosphere. You can almost hear the laments of the refugees in the air. Each day is drenched in catastrophes. What is going to happen? It is intolerable. ‘Things cannot go on like this’ an old cab-driver says.48

  The ‘first claps of thunder’ were heard with riots and protests in the workers’ districts of the Vyborg Side and Vasilievsky Island.49 Soon hungry crowds were marching along the Nevsky prospekt as bakeries and food shops came under attack. By 25 February, and with a lift in the temperature, street disturbances were becoming widespread and violent, with acts of arson, looting and the lynching of policemen. The capital was seething with strikers. At the Alexandra Palace the tsaritsa remained convinced that none of this posed a serious threat. Bread rationing was all that was needed to bring the situation under control. ‘It’s a hooligan movement,’ she wrote to Nicholas, ‘young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread; only to excite … if it were very cold they would probably stay indoors. But this will all pass and quieten down, if the Duma would only behave itself.’50 Meanwhile she was proud to tell him that his two youngest daughters ‘call themselves the sick-nurses – sidelki – chatter without end and telephone right and left. They are most useful.’ The lift at the palace had stopped working and Alexandra was increasingly relying on Maria to do the running around that she could not manage, affectionately calling her ‘my legs’.51 But she was expecting both her younger daughters inevitably to succumb to the measles. Alexey was now covered in one great ugly rash, ‘like a leopard – Olga has flat spots, Ania too all over, all their eyes and [their] throats ache’.52

  By the 27th, a day of ‘street brawls, bombs, shootings and numerous wounded and dead’, shouts of ‘Bread, victory!’ and ‘Down with the War!’ could be heard everywhere on the streets of Petrograd.53 Nicholas could not leave Stavka and meanwhile his children’s temperatures had reached 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees F) or more.54 With measles spreading at the Alexander Palace and unrest raging in the city, Alexandra struggled to maintain her equilibrium, still convinced that the disturbances, like the sickness, would pass; but the strain of it was ageing her and her hair was turning grey. ‘Terrible things are going on in St Petersburg’, she confided in her diary, shocked to hear that regiments she had always thought loyal to the throne – the Preobrazhensk and the Pavlovsk Guards – were even now mutinying.55 She was therefore greatly cheered by the arrival of Lili Dehn, who had bravely come out to Tsarskoe Selo to offer moral support, leaving her son behind in the city with her maid. But by 10 p.m. that evening a message came from Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko advising that Alexandra and the children be evacuated from the Alexander Palace immediately. ‘When the house is burning,’ he had told Count Benkendorf, Minister of the Court, ‘you take the children to safety, even if they are ill.’56 Benkendorf immediately telephoned Mogilev and informed Nich-olas. But the tsar was adamant: his family should stay put and wait until he could get back, which he hoped would be on the morning of 1 March.57

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  Many years later, Meriel Buchanan recalled the ‘deathlike stillness of Petrograd’ on the eve of revolution. ‘There were the same wide streets we knew so well, the same palaces, the same golden spires and domes rising out of the pearl-coloured mists, and yet they all seemed unreal and strange as if I had never seen them before. And everywhere emptiness: no long lines of carts, no crowded trams, no isvostchiks,* no private carriages, no policemen.’58 The following morning, 28 February, as rioting continued across the city, out at an Alexander Park deep in snow and in temperatures of -37.2 C (-35 F) the sound of intermittent firing and shouting could be heard, coming from the Tsarskoe Selo barracks. What had started as a group of renegade drunken soldiers firing in the air soon developed into a mutiny by most of the garrison and reserve battalions. Soon rifle fire was joined by the sound of military bands playing the Marseillaise to cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ The imperial family meanwhile had little protection beyond a few remaining loyal troops camped outside in the park in the bitter cold.

  Seeing how desperate the situation was becoming, Lili offered to stay with Alexandra, having asked Nikolay Sablin and his wife, who lived in the same block of flats in the city, to take care of her son.59 The sick children ‘looked almost like corpses’, she recalled. From their beds they could clearly hear the firing in town and asked her what the shooting was about. Lili pretended not to know; such noises always sound louder in the frost, she told them. ‘But are you sure that’s what it is?’ Olga asked. ‘You can see how even Mama is nervous, we are so worried about her sick heart. She is overtaxing herself too much. You absolutely must tell her to rest.’60 It was hard maintaining an air of calm but Alexandra was adamant that she did not want the children to know anything until it was ‘impossible to keep the truth from them’. That day she telephoned Bibi at the annexe, warning her of the dangerous situation now prevailing: ‘It’s all finished, everyone has gone over to their [the revolutionaries’] side. Pray for us, we need nothing more. As a last resort we are prepared to take the children away, even the sick ones … All three are in the same room in complete darkness, they are suffering greatly, only the little ones know everything.’ Hearing this from Bibi, Valentina Chebotareva discussed the situation with her wounded patients. They all believed that Nicholas would ‘uphold Rodzianko’s government’ when he returned. ‘Salvation is possible,’ Valentina wrote in her diary that night, ‘but I am full of doubt.’61

  At 10 p.m. on the evening of the 28th, anxious to thank the loyal troops still guarding them in the bitter cold outside, Alexandra emerged from the Alexander Palace holding Maria’s hand and walked out to speak to them, the only light coming from the glow of fire on the horizon. Lili Dehn watched Alexandra from a window, ‘wrapped in furs, walking from one man to another, utterly fearless of her safety’.62 All was strangely silent in the park except for gunfire in the distance and the sound of boots crunching on snow as she and Maria ‘passed like dark shadows from line to line’, acknowledging the soldiers with a smile.63 Many called out greetings and Alexandra stopped to talk to them, particularly the officers of the Tsar’s Escort, who formed a protective circle round her as she returned to the palace. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said before leaving them, insisting that they go inside and warm themselves, ‘I ask all of you not to let any blood be shed on our account!’64

  That night, Alexandra decided that Maria should sleep in her bed. In fact, one of the girls had slept in her room with her ever since Nicholas had left for Stavka, as they were all fearful of leaving their mother alone.65 A bed was made up for Lili on the sofa in the girls’ drawing room which connected directly into their bedrooms, where she also could be on hand if needed. Anastasia got the room ready, thoughtfully putting a nightgown for Lili on the bed, setting an icon on the bedside table and even a photo of Lili’s son Titi from their own collection.66 ‘Don’t take off your corset’, Alexandra said, instructing both Lili and Iza Buxhoeveden to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. ‘You don’t know what might happen. The emperor will arrive tomorrow between 5 and 7 and we must be ready to meet him.’67 That night, Lili and Anastasia found it hard to sleep; they got up to look out of the window and saw that a large gun had been positioned in the courtyard. ‘How astonished Papa will be!
’ Anastasia had remarked, open-mouthed.68

  Many of the palace servants fled that night, but in Petrograd, Duma chairman Mikhail Rodzianko was still managing to maintain order and the situation in the city seemed to have eased. ‘They say that they’ve gone to Tsarskoe Selo to inform the empress of a change of government’, wrote Elizaveta Naryshkina, who was currently trapped in the city. ‘Full revolution has taken place peacefully.’69 But this was not entirely so: revolutionary groups even now were heading for the Alexander Palace, intent on seizing Alexandra. Count Benkendorf surveyed the remaining troops he could count on: one battalion of the Guards Equipage, two battalions of the Combined Regiment of Imperial Guards; two squadrons of the Tsar’s Escort, one company of the Railway Regiment and one battery of field artillery brought over from Pavlovsk.70

  Early in the morning of 1 March everyone was awake and anxiously expecting the tsar’s arrival at any moment. But he didn’t come. At Malaya-Vishera, a hundred miles (160 km) south in Novgorod province, insurgents on the line had turned his train back; the route to Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo beyond was closed. The imperial train was instead diverted to Pskov. Here, unexpectedly, Nicholas was met by a deputation from the Duma who had come out by special train with one thought in mind: to force him to abdicate.

  At Tsarskoe Selo a frantic Alexandra was firing off letters and telegrams to no avail; no reply came. And now Anastasia had gone down with measles too. Alexandra was intensely grateful for the support of Lili Dehn – ‘an angel’, who was ‘inseparable’ from her. Lili did her best to comfort Anastasia, who ‘could not reconcile herself to the idea of being ill and kept crying and saying “Please don’t keep me in bed”’.71 ‘God for sure sent it, for the good somehow,’ Alix wrote to Nicky of their children’s suffering. Later that same day she scrawled another letter: ‘Your little family is worthy of you, so brave and quiet.’72

  For seventy-two hours the household at Tsarskoe Selo waited. ‘No news of the Emperor; we don’t know where he is’, wrote Elizaveta Naryshkina.73 Meanwhile, over in a railway siding at Pskov, 183 miles (294.5 km) to the south-west, Nicholas had on 2 March abdicated the throne, not just for himself but his son also. His decision, it later emerged, was based on a candid conversation he had had with Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Feodorov, about the nature of his son’s condition. Feodorov had told him that although Alexey might live for some time, his condition was incurable. Nicholas knew that if his son became tsar under the required regency of his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, he and Alexandra, as former monarchs, would not be allowed to remain in Russia and would be sent into exile. Neither of them could contemplate separation from their son and so he abdicated for both of them.* But he also did so in the genuine hope that his abdication was the best thing both for Russia and the honour of the army – and that it might defuse the volatile political situation.74 At Mogilev Nicholas had been joined by his mother Maria Feodorovna, who had travelled up from Kiev where she was now living. With the millstone of duty lifted from him, Nicholas sat quietly and dined with his mama, went for a walk, packed his things and after dinner played a game of bezique with her. He signed the declaration of abdication at 3 o’clock that afternoon and finally left Pskov at 1 a.m. ‘with the heavy sense of what I had lived through’, heading back to Mogilev to bid farewell to his military staff. All around him he saw nothing but ‘betrayal, cowardice and deception’; there was only one place he wanted to be and that was with his family.75 ‘Now that I am about to be freed of my responsibilities to the nation,’ Nicholas had remarked to the commander of the Tsar’s Escort, Count Grabbe, ‘perhaps I can fulfill my life’s desire – to have a farm, somewhere in England.’76

  Back at the Alexander Palace the tsaritsa was still fervently praying for news of her husband. Meanwhile the first rumours began to reach the capital that Nicholas had abdicated. Shortly afterwards, the Guards Equipage, on the orders of their commander Grand Duke Kirill, were ordered to leave the palace, for Kirill had thrown in his lot with the new provisional government. The tsaritsa watched as the naval colours – so familiar from the family’s many trips on the Shtandart – were marched away. But as the Guards left, others such as Rita Khitrovo, one of Olga and Tatiana’s fellow nurses from the annexe, were arriving to offer help. Even some servants who had been stranded in the city had managed to make their way back to Tsarskoe Selo on foot. Outside their windows the children were greatly comforted to see their ‘dear Cossacks … with their horses, standing around their officers and singing their songs in low voices’, as Maria told her father.77 But it was a terrible time for her and her mother as they watched over the sickroom: Olga and Tatiana were very much worse, with abscesses in their ears. Tatiana had gone temporarily deaf, and her head was swathed in bandages. Olga had been coughing so much that she had completely lost her voice.78

  Prime Minister Rodzianko continued to urge that the children be got away to safety but Alexandra was adamant: ‘We’re not going anywhere. Let them do what they will, but I won’t leave and will not destroy the children [by doing so].’79 Instead, she asked Father Belyaev of the Feodorovsky Sobor to bring the icon of Our Lady of the Sign from the Znamenie Church and hold prayers upstairs for the children: ‘We put the Icon on the table that had been pre-pared for it. The room was so dark that I could hardly see those present in it. The empress, dressed as a nurse was standing beside the bed of the heir … a few thin candles were lit before the icon’, the priest recalled.80 In the afternoon, Ioannchik’s wife, Princess Helena, bravely made her way over to see Alexandra. She was shocked at how the last two weeks had dramatically aged her. There was no doubting her courage and she found her ‘extremely dignified’:

  Even though she had gloomy forebodings about the fate of her imperial spouse and fear for her children, the empress impressed us with her sangfroid. This composure may have been a characteristic of the English blood that flowed in her veins. During these tragic hours she did not once show any sign of weakness, and like any wife and mother she lived through those minutes as a mother and woman would.81

  ‘Oh my, our 4 invalids go on suffering,’ Alexandra wrote to Nicholas that day, not knowing if her letter would reach him, ‘only Marie is up and about – calm and my helper growing thin as [she] shows nothing of how she feels.’ There is no doubt, however, that recent events had finally cowed Alexandra’s combativeness. A new note of meekness was to be discerned, as she assured Nicholas that ‘Sunny blesses, prays, bears up by faith and her martyr’s [Grigory’s] sake … she assists into nothing … She is now only a mother with ill children.’82

  On the afternoon of 3 March it was Grand Duke Pavel (still resident at his home at Tsarskoe Selo) who arrived finally bringing news of Nicholas. ‘I heard that N[icky] has abdicated, and also for Baby’, Alexandra noted curtly in her diary.83 She was shocked but remained outwardly calm; in private she wept bitterly. Sitting with the grand duke over supper, she talked of a new and different future. ‘I may no longer be Empress, but I still remain a Sister of Mercy’, she told him. ‘I shall look after the children, the hospital, and we will go to the Crimea.’84 In the midst of this crushing news Maria remained the only one of the five children still not affected by sickness, but even she was convinced, as she told Iza Buxhoeveden, that she was ‘in for it’.85 It was hard for her to keep her mother going on her own and protect her from harm, as all four sisters had done so conscientiously all their adult lives.

  That afternoon Alexandra received Viktor Zborovsky, one of the most trusted officers of the Escort guarding the palace. She thanked him for his continuing loyalty and reiterated that no blood should be shed in protecting the family. As Zborovsky was leaving Maria stopped him and they ended up chatting for an hour. He was deeply moved by the great change in her during recent days. ‘Nothing remained of the former young girl’, he told his colleagues later; in front of him stood ‘a serious sensible woman, who was responding in a deep and thoughtful way to what was going on.’86 But the strain of it all was telling on her. That evening L
ili heard the sound of weeping and went to look: ‘In one corner of the room crouched the Grand Duchess Marie. She was as pale as her mother. She knew all!… She was so young, so helpless, so hurt.’87 ‘Mama cried terribly’, Maria told Anna Vyrubova, when she visited her sickbed to talk about her father’s abdication. ‘I cried too, but not more than I could help, for poor Mama’s sake’; but Maria was terrified that they would come and take her mother away.88 Such ‘proud fortitude’ was but one instance of what Anna later recalled was ‘shown all through those days of wreck and disaster by the Empress and her children’.89

  Cornet S. V. Markov was another loyal officer allowed in to see Alexandra that day. He entered via the basement, which he remembered was full of soldiers of the Combined Regiments taking a break from the cold, and was taken upstairs through many rooms still full of the lingering fragrance of flowers. In the children’s apartments he came to a door on which was fixed a piece of paper on which was written ‘No entry without the permission of Olga and Tatiana’.90 A big table in the middle of the room was covered with French and English magazines, scissors and water-colours, where Alexey had been cutting out and pasting pictures before his illness. Alexandra came in and surprised him by saying, ‘Hello dear little Markov.’ She was dressed in her nurse’s white, ‘her sunken eyes very tired from sleepless nights and fear, expressive of unbearable suffering’. During their conversation she asked Markov to remove his imperial insignia – rather than have some drunken soldier on the street tear them from his jacket – and to tell his fellow officers to do likewise. She thanked them all for their loyalty and made the sign of the cross over him as he left.91

  Alexandra was right to be fearful for the loyal troops still guarding her since they did so at increasing risk to themselves. They all took the news of the emperor’s abdication very hard. None more so than Viktor Zborovsky: ‘Something incomprehensible, savage, unreal had happened that was impossible to take in’, he wrote in his diary on 4 March. ‘The ground fell away from under one’s feet … It had happened … and there was nothing! Empty, dark … It was as though the soul had taken flight from a still living body.’92 For the last couple of days, in an attempt to demoralize those out at Tsarskoe Selo, a false rumour had been put about in Petrograd that the men of the Escort had defected. But this was far from the truth. When Alexandra at last made contact with Nicholas on the 4th one of the first to hear the news from her was Viktor Zborovsky. She wanted to reassure him that despite the pernicious rumours, she was in no doubt of the Escort’s loyalty and that she and Nicholas ‘were right to look upon the Cossacks as our true friends’. She also asked him, as she had Markov, to tell the officers of the Escort to remove their imperial insignia. ‘Do this for me,’ she urged, ‘or I will once more be blamed for everything, and the children might suffer as a result.’93 The men of the Escort took this instruction hard when Zborovsky brought it: for them it was a deeply dishonourable act and some of them wept and refused to comply: ‘What kind of Russia is it without the tsar?’ they asked.94 Honour, for the Escort, died hard and they were prepared to defend theirs to the death.