The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  On 5 March Princess Helena tried to telephone Alexandra at the palace, only to find that the lines had been cut. With no telephones, no trains to Tsarskoe Selo, palace supplies of food and wood dwindling, no electricity or running water, domestic staff defecting and a crowd of curious and increasingly belligerent onlookers gathering outside the palace gates, the situation was becoming very dangerous for Alexandra and the children: ‘A curtain of bayonets separated the Imperial Family from the living world.’95 Lili Dehn noticed that Alexandra was now sometimes smoking cigarettes to ease her stress. It wasn’t until 5 March that Valentina Chebotareva at the annexe finally saw news of the abdication in the papers. ‘At the hospital it is as silent as the grave’, she noted. ‘Everyone is shaken, downcast. Vera Ignatievna [Gedroits] was sobbing like a helpless child. We really were waiting for a constitutional monarchy and suddenly the throne has been handed to the people. In the future – a republic.’96

  Alexandra was now urging all of her entourage that they had the right to leave if they so wished. But even Lili Dehn refused to desert her, insisting she would stay ‘no matter what’.97 She feared she would never see Titi again, nor her husband, who was away on a military mission to England, but she was determined not to desert her empress. Iza Buxhoeveden, Nastenka Hendrikova and Trina Schneider – as well as the ever-present Dr Botkin and Count and Countess Benkendorf – all rallied round as well. Anna Vyrubova was still lying ill in the other wing of the palace, but her moral support at this time was crucial, as too was that of Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had at last managed to get back to Tsarskoe Selo from Petrograd. ‘Oh such emotional turmoil!’ she wrote of their reunion:

  I was with the empress: calm, very sweet, much largesse of spirit. It strikes me that she has not quite grasped that what has happened cannot be put right. She told me: ‘God is stronger than people.’ They have all endured extreme danger and now it is as though order has been reestablished. She does not understand that there are consequences to all mistakes, and especially her own … the condition of the sick children is still serious.98

  It was around 7 March that Alexandra regretfully decided, on the urging of Lili Dehn, to begin the systematic destruction of all her letters and diaries.99 Lili was worried that if they fell into the wrong hands they might easily be misinterpreted, or worse be deemed treasonous and used against her and Nicholas. And so, over the course of the following week, the two women sat together day after day in the girls’ sitting room, taking great piles of letters from a huge oak chest in which Alexandra had stored them and burning them in the fireplace. All of Alexandra’s most treasured letters from her grandmother Queen Victoria, her brother Ernie and many other relatives were ruthlessly consigned to the flames, but the hardest of all to part with were undoubtedly the hundreds of letters she had received from Nicky since the day of their engagement in 1894. Occasionally she stopped to read parts of them and weep before tossing them into the flames. And then too there were her many diaries, satin-covered ones dating from her childhood and the later leather-bound ones, which even now she was still keeping.* Everything remorselessly was turned to ash – with one exception: Nicky’s letters to her from Stavka during the war years, which Alexandra was determined to preserve as proof, should it be needed, of their undying loyalty to Russia.100 But on Thursday the 9th one of Alexandra’s maids came in and ‘begged us to discontinue’ as Lili recalled. The half-charred papers were being carried up the chimney and settling on the ground outside where some of the men were picking them up and reading them.101

  In the sickroom, signs of recovery among the children were slow to come. Although Alexey was improving and his temperature dropping, Olga now was suffering from one of the complications of measles, encephalitis – inflammation of the brain – and Anastasia’s temperature was worryingly high. And then on the evening of the 7th the inevitable happened: Maria began to feel unwell and soon was running a temperature of 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees F). ‘“Oh I did so want to be up when Papa comes,” she kept on repeating, until high fever set in and she lost consciousness.’102

  On Wednesday 8 March Alexandra finally received news of Nicholas from Count Benkendorf – that he was safe and back at Mogilev, and would be returning to the Alexander Palace the following morning. At midday, General Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd military district, arrived in the company of Colonel Evgeny Kobylinsky, newly appointed head of the military garrison at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Kornilov announced that we are shut up … From now [we] are considered pris[oners] … may see nobody fr[om] outside’, Alexandra noted dispassionately.103 As Benkendorf understood it at the time, the imperial couple would only be under arrest until the children had recovered, after which ‘the Emperor’s family would be sent to Murmansk [an ice-free port on Russia’s extreme north-west border] where a British cruiser would await them and take them to England’.104 This was the hoped-for swift resolution to the problem of what to do with the former tsar, announced by the new Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky, in Moscow the previous day, and in response to an initial offer of help from King George V. ‘I will never be the Marat of the Russian Revolution’, Kerensky had grandly declared, but the hopes of a speedy and safe evacuation of the imperial family would soon prove to be a pipe dream.105

  That morning Elizaveta Naryshkina had gone to church, during which the congregation had hissed when prayers were said for the tsar. When she got back to the palace Benkendorf told her:

  We are arrested. We do not have the right either to go out of the palace, or telephone; we are only allowed to write via the Central Committee. We are waiting for the Emperor. The Empress asked to have prayers said for the Emperor’s return trip. Refused!106

  Those in the entourage who wanted to leave, Kornilov told Alexandra that morning, had only forty-eight hours to do so; after that they too would be under house arrest. Many left hurriedly soon after in a ‘veritable orgy of cowardice and stupidity, and a sickening display of shabby, contemptible disloyalty’, recalled Dr Botkin’s son Gleb.107 Dr Ostrogorsky, the children’s paediatrician, sent word that he ‘found the roads too dirty’ to get out to Tsarskoe Selo any more.108 Much to his dismay Sydney Gibbes, who had been in Petrograd for the day on the 10th – his day off – was not allowed back into the palace. Even worse, however, was the news that the men of the Escort and Combined Regiments were to be sent away and replaced by 300 troops of the 1st Rifles, sent by the provisional government.

  Although Maria already knew the truth, it was no longer possible for Alexandra to keep the news of their father’s abdication from the other children. They took it calmly, although Anastasia resented the fact that her mother and Lili had not told them, but ‘as Papa is coming, nothing else matters’.109 Tatiana was still so deaf from the otitis brought on by her measles that Iza Buxhoeveden noticed that ‘she could not follow her mother’s rapid words, her voice rendered husky with emotion. Her sisters had to write down the details before she could understand.’110 It was a bewildered and downcast Alexey, now on the mend, who was full of questions. ‘Shall I never go to G.H.Q. again with Papa?’ he asked his mother. ‘Shan’t I see my regiments and my soldiers?… And the yacht, and all my friends on board – shall we never go yachting any more?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘We shall never see the “Shtandart” … It doesn’t belong to us now.’111 The boy was concerned too about the future of the autocracy. ‘But who’s going to be tsar, then?’ he quizzed Pierre Gilliard. When his tutor responded that probably no one would be, it was only logical that he should then ask: ‘But if there isn’t a Tsar, who’s going to govern Russia?’112

  Wednesday 8 March was an intensely melancholy day for Alexandra, for the men of the Escort were to leave that afternoon. They had all spent a sleepless night pondering their enforced departure and were intensely gloomy, unable to ‘understand or believe that the situation was hopeless’.113 Shortly before they left, the Escort asked Viktor Zborovsky to pass on their loyal sentiments to the empress. It was with profound regret, Vi
ktor told her, that they had no option but to obey the order to leave. Alexandra asked him to thank all the men on behalf of herself and the children for their loyal service. ‘I ask you all to refrain from any kind of independent action that might only delay the emperor’s arrival and affect the fate of the children’, she said, adding, ‘Starting with myself, we must all submit to fate.’114

  Zborovsky had found it hard to speak when Alexandra handed him some small icons – her farewell gift to the Escort. She then took him through to Olga and Tatiana’s room where both were still ill in bed. It took all Zborovsky’s powers of self-control not to break down in front of the children. Silently, he bowed low to them, and then to Alexandra and kissed her hand. ‘I can’t remember how I left’, he wrote in his diary later, ‘I went without turning round. In my hand I clutched the little icons, my chest felt tight, something heavy was gathering in my throat that was about to break out into a groan.’115

  After the Escort rode away, all the entrances to the palace were locked and sealed except for a single exit via the kitchen and the main entrance for official visitors. ‘We were prisoners’, Pierre Gilliard recorded starkly in his diary.116 Lili Dehn remembered a very bright moon that night: ‘the snow lay like a pall on the frost-bound Park. The cold was intense. The silence of the great Palace was occasionally broken by snatches of drunken songs and the coarse laughter of the soldiers’ (of the new palace guard). In the distance, they could all hear the intermittent firing of guns.117

  A hundred or more miles (160 km) away to the south, as the frost of another perishing winter night descended and the wind gathered, the imperial train carrying Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia and now plain Colonel Romanov, was heading back towards Tsarskoe Selo.

  Chapter Eighteen

  GOODBYE. DON’T FORGET ME

  Nicholas II’s return to Tsarskoe Selo on 9 March 1917 was the most painful of rude awakenings: ‘sentries on the street and surrounding the palace and inside the park, and inside the front entrance some kind of officers’.1 Upstairs he found his wife sitting in a darkened room with all their children; they were all in good spirits, though Maria was very ill. Hugely relieved to be back home he soon discovered that even his most innocuous daily habits were to be severely restricted. That afternoon he was refused permission to go for his usual long walk in the Alexander Park; his domain now comprised a small recreation-area-cum-garden at the immediate rear entrance of the palace. Here he took up a spade and cleared the footpath with his aide Prince Vasili Dolgorukov – the only officer allowed to return with him from Stavka – their guards looking on with amusement.2

  Lili Dehn was shocked when she saw Nicholas. He was ‘deathly pale, his face covered with innumerable wrinkles, his hair was quite grey at the temples, and blue shadows encircled his eyes. He looked like an old man.’3 To Elizaveta Naryshkina he seemed calm on the surface; she admired his astonishing self-control and his apparent indifference to being addressed not as tsar but as an army officer, which effectively was all he now was.4 Although the palace commandant, Pavel Kotzebue, referred to him politely as ‘the ex-Emperor’ most of Nicholas’s captors called him Nikolay Romanov or even ‘little Nikolay’.5 He tried hard not to react to the petty humiliations from some of the more truculent guards: ‘They blew tobacco smoke in his face … A soldier grabbed him by the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed at his anger and pain’, Anna Vyrubova later recalled.6 But Nicholas did not react: ‘Despite the circumstances in which we now find ourselves,’ he wrote in his diary on the 10th, ‘the thought that we are all together cheers and comforts us.’7 Maria’s condition, however, was becoming a serious cause for concern; her temperature was running at over 40 degrees C (104 degrees F). Alexandra and Lili moved her from her small nickel campbed to a proper double bed, the better to nurse her. With the exhausted girl drifting in and out of delirium they spent their time constantly sponging her down, brushing her now horribly tangled hair and changing her sweat-drenched nightdress and bedding. To make matters worse, she had developed pneumonia as well.8

  * * *

  Shortly after Nicholas’s return, during the days of uncertainty about where the family might eventually be allowed to live, Elizaveta Naryshkina had suggested that Nicholas and Alexandra accept any offer to leave the country; she and Count Benkendorf would look after the children until they were well enough and then bring them to them later.9 Thoughts of evacuating the children ahead of Nicholas’s return had indeed been in Alexandra’s mind, even after they fell sick, and she had discussed various options with her entourage.10 Perhaps she could get them north into Finland; she asked Dr Botkin if he thought ‘in their present physical condition’ they could cope with the journey. Botkin’s response was unequivocal: ‘at the moment I would be less afraid of measles than of the revolutionaries.’11 However, any thoughts Alexandra might have had were abandoned when Nicholas countermanded her suggestion and insisted they wait for his projected return on 1 March. Had he arrived home then, the family might all have been speedily evacuated, but once he was trapped at Stavka and Alexandra placed under house arrest the whole situation dramatically changed. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, had been in an agony of frustration since the beginning of the year: ‘I shall not be happy till they are safely out of Russia’, he had said, but tentative negotiations with the British government for a possible refuge in England had quickly stalled.12 The offer from George V, made on 9 March (22nd NS) in response to a request from Russia’s Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov, had spoken only of asylum for the duration of the war. Other options were quickly discussed and dropped: Denmark was too close to Germany; France would not entertain the idea. Alexandra had at one point said that she would prefer to go to Norway where she felt the climate would suit Alexey, although she would certainly be glad to see England again, should it come to it.13 But wherever the family went, she and Nicholas both thought in terms only of a temporary refuge until the situation eased and they could hopefully be allowed to return and live quietly in Russia – preferably the Crimea.14

  The British government continued to discuss the issue throughout March, while Alexander Kerensky pondered the family’s evacuation, perhaps to Port Romanov (Murmansk), from where a British cruiser could take them through German-patrolled waters to England under a white flag. But then George V had had a change of heart. The king was uneasy that the former tsar’s arrival in England would create problems for his government – which had already acknowledged the revolution – and in so doing threaten the safety of his own throne. The most important thing was to keep the new revolutionary Russia on side and in the war, and this transcended any familial loyalty to Nicholas. By the time George’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was instructed on 24 March (6 April NS) to suggest that the Russian government ‘make some other plan for the future residence of their imperial majesties’, far too much precious time had been lost.15 A powerful, grassroots opposition to any evacuation had escalated, particularly among the pro-Bolshevik executive committees of the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.16 Any attempt to get the family out by train would have been blocked by the heavily politicized railwaymen of Petrograd, who, according to Izvestiya (the new organ of the Petrograd soviet), had already ‘wired along all railway lines that every railway organization, each station-master, every group of railway-workmen, is bound to detain Nicholas II’s train whenever and wherever it may appear’.17

  Izvestiya reflected the ugly mood building in the capital. An evacuation of the family could not be permitted, the paper railed, for the ex-tsar was privy to all state secrets relating to the war and was ‘possessed of colossal wealth’ that he would be able to access in the comfort of exile.18 Nicholas must be held under the strictest isolation pending the meting out of a new, Soviet form of justice. Yet amid so many accusations levelled against them Nicholas and Alexandra had in fact remained intensely loyal to Russia and all talk of any political betrayal on
their part was entirely unfounded; indeed, Nicholas had already been worrying that his abdication might damage the allied offensive. As far as exile was concerned, neither he nor Alexandra had any desire for the sybaritic expatriate lifestyle of ‘wandering about the Continent, and living at Swiss hotels as ex-Royalties, snapshotted and paragraphed by representatives of the picture papers’. They shrank from such ‘cheap publicity’, asserted Lili Dehn, and considered it their duty to stand by Russia whatever the cost.19