The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Korovichenko had been doing his best to defend the right of the girls to send and receive so many letters. ‘They had been hard workers, worked like real sisters of mercy’, he told Valentina. ‘Why should they be deprived in Easter Week of the joy of exchanging greetings with their former wounded and their work colleagues?’ He vetted all their letters and their content was ‘absolutely innocent’. ‘Often Sister Khitrovo and other nurses [send letters] which I have handed on.’ He had, however, ‘a whole box full of letters to the Romanov family’ that he had chosen not to allow through.63 Among the letters being allowed out by Korovichenko were those from Anastasia to Katya Zborovskaya. ‘Truly He is Risen!’ Anastasia exclaimed at the opening of an Eastertide letter, in which she enclosed one of the first snowdrops of spring from the garden and told Katya that she and Tatiana were now going out for walks and helping to break the ice. But, worryingly, Anastasia also confided that ‘After Olga had a sore throat, something happened to her heart, and she has rheumatism now’ – suggesting that Olga’s ‘inflammation of the heart’ was in fact the far more serious post-measles complication of rheumatic fever.64

  By mid-April, with the younger children back at their desks, a new modified timetable of lessons was set up for them and shared among the remaining members of the entourage. Nicholas began teaching Alexey geography and history; Alexandra took on religious doctrine and catechism, as well as giving Tatiana tuition in German; Olga, when recovered, helped teach her siblings English and history. Iza Buxhoeveden gave Alexey and his younger sisters piano lessons, and also taught them all English. Trina Schneider tutored them in maths and Russian grammar; Nastenka Hendrikova taught Anastasia history and gave her art lessons with Tatiana; Dr Botkin took on Russian literature with Alexey and Dr Derevenko volunteered to give him science lessons. Pierre Gilliard continued his French lessons with all five children. Everyone pulled together to try and create as normal an environment as possible in such abnormal circumstances.65 The family appeared to be quietly adjusting to its new, highly circumscribed life; one of the young subaltern guards told Elizaveta Naryshkina how impressed he was: ‘having come down from his pedestal’ even the emperor seemed contented, so long as his routine was not disturbed and he could have ‘his walks and tea at five o’clock’.66

  Increasingly absorbed in thoughts of God, Alexandra seemed to draw especial comfort from her Bible lessons with the children. The girls made a point, as they always did, of remembering her name day on 23 April when all the arestovanniye – ‘those under arrest’ as Nicholas called them – gave her little home-made gifts.67 Olga composed a poem specially:

  You are filled with anguish

  For the suffering of others.

  And no one’s grief

  Has ever passed you by.

  You are relentless

  Only toward yourself,

  Forever cold and pitiless.

  But if only you could look upon

  Your own sadness from a distance,

  Just once with a loving soul –

  Oh, how you would pity yourself.

  How sadly you would weep.68

  On 30 April, Anastasia was delighted to tell Katya, in a letter enclosing several postcards for Viktor and the other officers, that now that the ground had at last begun to thaw ‘we all together started to dig our own kitchen garden … The weather is wonderful today, and it is very warm, so we have worked for a long time.’ The sisters had rearranged their rooms upstairs as they adapted to their changed circumstances: ‘We are all now sitting together and writing in the same Red Room, where we still live, as we do not want to move to our bedroom.’ They had attached a swing to the gymnastic rings in the doorway, where ‘we swing so nicely that the screws probably won’t last long’.69

  May came but the cold weather still lingered. There was snow and a cold wind the day Nicholas turned forty-nine; Alexey was suffering from pains in his arms yet again and was back in bed, and the ever loyal Elizaveta Naryshkina had bronchitis, brought on by the perishing cold in the unheated rooms. Thoughtful as always, Nicholas came and sat with her and Alexandra sent a posy of anemones picked from the garden, but on the 12th Elizaveta had to be sent away to the Catherine Palace Hospital to be nursed. As she said goodbye to Nicholas ‘both of us had a premonition that we would never be together again. We embraced repeatedly, and he kissed my hands incessantly.’70

  Work in the garden remained the only outlet for pent-up energies and May was spent by everyone busily weeding carrots, radishes, onions and lettuce, watering them and watching with pride as the 500 cabbages they had planted began to swell in their neatly ordered rows. When Nicholas, still wearing his khaki soldier’s tunic, had exhausted all possible work in the vegetable garden he began a vigorous and systematic felling of dead trees, sawing them up ready for winter. It was now warm enough to take Alexey out in the rowing boat on the pond near the Children’s Island, or ride bicycles with his daughters. And they had the dogs – Alexey’s Joy, Tatiana’s Ortipo and Anastasia’s Jimmy, as well as two kittens produced by the cat from Stavka that Alexey had given Olga.71

  Nicholas seemed perfectly contented to work up a sweat doing physical labour: ‘Congenial work in the vegetable garden,’ he noted on 6 May, ‘we began to dig beds. After tea vespers, supper, and evening reading – [I am] much more with my sweet family than in normal years.’72 It was hard to ‘be without news of dear Mama,’ he admitted, ‘but I am indifferent toward everything else’.73

  As the Maytime lilac blossom came into full bloom, ‘the aroma of the garden was wonderful when you sat by the window’, observed Nicholas; the girls revelled in it too.74 Anastasia was bright and chirpy in her letters to Katya, telling her on the 20th how much they enjoyed their work in the garden:

  We have already planted a lot; the total number of beds is sixty so far, but we are going to plant more. As now we do not have to work that much, we often just lie and warm ourselves in the sun. We have taken a lot of pictures, and we even processed the film ourselves.

  But it was hard to have to tell Katya, who had now left Tsarskoe Selo with her family and gone south, that their hospitals were to be closed soon ‘and everybody will go away, to my great sorrow’.

  We are thinking of everybody a lot; now while I am writing this letter, my sisters are sitting next to me in the room and are drinking tea, and Maria is sitting on the window sill and writing letters; they all talk a lot, and make writing letters difficult. They kiss you many times. Are you still roller-skating? Do you feel cosy living with your mother in a new place? I’m sending you a sprig of lilac from our garden; let it remind you of northern spring … Well Katya, sweetheart, I have to finish … Huge regards to everybody from us! May the Lord be with you. I kiss you as deeply as I love you. Your A.75

  For all the sisters, thoughts were increasingly turning to the things they missed so much. ‘Today, quite softly, I could hear the sound of the Catherine Palace bells’, Olga told her friend Zinaida Tolstaya. ‘I wish so much that I could sometimes go to Znamenie.’76 Anastasia felt the same: ‘We often hear the bells of the good cathedral and feel so sad,’ she told Katya on 4 July, ‘but it is always nice to remember the good times, right?’ She wondered all the time about Viktor and the other officers and how they were all doing.77 ‘This time last year we were in Mogilev’, she recalled wistfully on the 12th. ‘It was so nice there, as well as the last time we were there in November! We constantly think and talk about you all.’ There were, she said, one or two amusing or interesting things she would have liked to tell Katya, but she could not write about it in her letters: ‘you surely understand this, don’t you?’ By now, as Count Benkendorf recalled, even the accommodating Korovichenko had begun to complain about the ‘enormous correspondence of the young Grand Duchesses, which took up a great deal of his time and prevented him from delivering us our correspondence as quickly as he might’.78

  One of the highlights of family life, aside from receiving letters, was occasional showings of Alexey’s collection of c
inematographs, thanks to the gift of a projector and a large number of films made to him by Pathé during the war. Otherwise, evening entertainment was confined to Nicholas reading aloud. During the five months of their incarceration at the Alexander Palace, he got through a considerable number of popular French and English novels: Alexander Dumas’s Comte de Monte-Cristo and Alphonse Daudet’s adventure stories Tartarin de Tarascon and Tartarin sur les Alpes; Gaston Leroux’s popular Le mystère de la chambre jaune was a great favourite, but un-doubtedly the most popular were Conan Doyle’s stories – The Poison Belt, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear.

  Such diversions into adventure and fantasy served only to distract the family for a short while from the realities of their imprisonment. As the stifling heat of summer gathered – a time when they would have been enjoying the sea breezes at Peterhof or the Crimea – ‘Tsarskoe was a dead place. Its windows were almost hidden by the straggling branches of the unclipped trees,’ recalled Lili Dehn, ‘grass grew between the stones of its silent courtyard.’ Shortly before leaving Petrograd, she had managed to get out there to try and catch sight of the family: ‘I walked to and fro gazing up at the windows, but those within the Palace gave no sign of life. I wanted to call aloud that I was there, but I dared not imperil their safety or my own’.79 Valentina Chebotareva too was complaining of the inertia of the town; it had entirely changed in character and lost all its pride and vigour. Now all you could see were soldiers wandering around aimlessly, chewing sunflower seeds, lounging on the grass. They had taken the fish from the ponds and trampled all the flowerbeds in the public gardens. ‘We hear little of the children now’, she wrote sadly. ‘Over there they live a monotonous life. The children amuse each other, Olga and Maria with history … They dig in the garden, have planted carrots themselves.’ ‘Yesterday,’ as they told her, ‘we went a little way on our bicycles. In the evenings we gather together and Papa reads aloud. Alexey walks with Papa a lot more’ – that was the sum total of their lives. As for their mother – she was ‘think[ing] only of the past’.80 The increasingly religiose tone of Alexandra’s letters was evidence of her determined withdrawal from the real world into a mystical contemplation of death and redemption. The Bible and the scriptures, she said, provided her with the answers to all of life’s questions and she was proud of her children’s responsiveness: ‘they understand many deep things – their souls are growing through suffering.’81 Suffering had become the family’s métier; God, she knew, would crown them for it.

  On her sixteenth birthday on 5 June Anastasia received ‘a pair of earrings, and my ears were pierced’, she told Katya, though ‘this is, so to say, small news’.82 But this was soon spoiled by the loss of all her hair. Ever since their attack of measles, all the girls had found their hair was falling out in great hanks – Maria’s especially – and early in July they had to have their heads shaved. A day later Alexey did likewise, in sympathy. Pierre Gilliard captured their stoical response in his diary and on camera:

  When they go out in the park they wear scarves arranged so as to conceal the fact. Just as I was going to take their photographs, at a sign from Olga Nicolaievna [sic] they all suddenly removed their headdress. I protested, but they insisted, much amused at the idea of seeing themselves photographed like this, and looking forward to seeing the indignant surprise of their parents.

  Gilliard was comforted to see that ‘their good spirits reappear from time to time in spite of everything’. He put it down to the girls’ ‘exuberant youth’. But although they took the loss of their beautiful long hair in good heart their morbidly introspective mother saw it quite differently; Pierre’s photograph, she said, made them look like the condemned.83

  ‘Poor Mama is terribly bored; can’t at all get used to the new life and the circumstances here,’ Olga told her aunt Olga on 21 June, ‘although on the whole we can all be grateful that we will be together and in the Crimea.’84 With a flare-up of conflict in Petrograd, discussion of the family’s evacuation had once again resumed. On 4 July Elizaveta Naryshkina had heard rumours that a ‘group of young monarchists have got up an insane project: to take them away by car at night to one of the ports where an English steamer would be waiting’. But she was fearful ‘of a repetition of Varennes’ – the attempted flight in 1791 of the deposed Louis XVI, his wife and his family that had resulted in the king and queen’s arrest and execution.85

  Faced with a possible Bolshevik coup against the provisional government that summer, and worried about plots to spirit the Romanovs away, Kerensky, (who had now taken over as prime minister), came to the Alexander Palace to see Nicholas. Radical elements in the Petrograd soviet might try to storm the palace and he told him that the family ‘would likely go south, given the proximity of Tsarskoe Selo to the uneasy capital’.86 As Count Benkendorf understood it, Kerensky thought ‘it would be more prudent for His Majesty and his family to … settle in the interior of the country, far from factories and garrisons, in the country house of some landed proprietor’.87 The possibility of Grand Duke Mikhail’s estate at Brasovo, near Orel 660 miles (1060 km) to the south, was discussed; but it was soon discovered that local peasants would be hostile.88 There had even been talk of sending the family to the Ipatiev Monastery at Kostroma. Nicholas and Alexandra still clung to hopes of the Crimea, for his mother and sisters and their families were now living there, but this was out of the question as far as Kerensky was concerned; travelling all that way by train, through the heavily politicized industrial cities of central Russia, would be impossible.89

  ‘We all thought and talked about our forthcoming journey’, Nicholas wrote on 12 July. ‘Strange to think of leaving here after 4 months in seclusion.’90 The following day he began ‘surreptitiously, to gather together my things and books’, still nursing hopes of the Crimea where he ‘could live like a civilized man’.91 It appeared that Kerensky intended moving them some time after Alexey’s birthday, but by now, although the Romanovs did not yet know it, he was considering other, very different options.92

  Out in the palace garden and oblivious to this, the children were able to savour their first home-grown vegetables and were learning to cut hay. It was extremely hot and Alexey had been amusing himself squirting water over the girls from the water pump. They didn’t mind: ‘It’s so good out in the garden’, Tatiana told her friend Zinaida Tolstaya:

  but even better when you go deep into the wood, where it is quite wild and you can go along the little paths and so on … Oh how envious I was to read that you saw the dreadnoughts Alexander III and the Prut. This is what we miss so much – no sea, no boats! We had grown so used to spending practically the whole summer on the water, at the skerries; in my opinion there is nothing better; it was the best and happiest of times – after all, we went sailing for nine years in a row and even before, when we were quite small; and now it’s so strange to have been here for three years without the water, there’s no other such feeling in the summer for me as we only used to live at Tsarskoe Selo in the winter and sometimes in the spring, till we went to the Crimea. Right now the lime trees are in full bloom and it smells so divine.93

  By the middle of the month the family was packing in earnest for the hoped-for journey south. And then, on Friday 28 July, Nicholas noted with dismay:

  After breakfast we found out from Count Benkendorf that they are sending us, not to the Crimea, but to one of the distant provincial towns three or four days’ journey to the east! But where exactly they don’t say – even the commandant doesn’t know. And there we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!94

  For the next two days as everyone hurried to sort out the items they most wished to take with them, there was still no clear indication of where exactly they were going. Hopes were finally dashed when, on the 29th, they were told ‘that we must provide ourselves with warm clothing.’ Pierre Gilliard was dismayed: ‘So we are not to be taken south. A great disappointment.’ They had been told to expect a five-day journey; Nic
holas soon worked it out. Five days on a train meant they were going to Siberia.95

  * * *

  With the family’s departure fixed for 31 July, the members of the entourage had to decide whether they would be prepared to travel with them into a decidedly uncertain future. Pierre Gilliard had no doubts about where his duty lay, as he explained in a letter to his family in Switzerland on the 30th: ‘I have thought about all the possible eventualities and am not frightened by what awaits me. I feel I must go to the very end … with God’s grace. Having benefited from happy days, should I not share with them the bad days?’96 Ladies-in-waiting Trina Schneider and Nastenka Hendrikova also prepared to go with the family, but Iza Buxhoeveden was about to undergo an operation and would have to join them later; Sydney Gibbes, still stuck in Petrograd, hoped to do likewise.97

  On 30 July everyone did their best to celebrate Alexey’s thirteenth birthday. Alexandra asked that the icon of Our Lady of the Sign should be brought from the Znamenie Church for a special Te Deum led by Father Belyaev. It was a very emotional experience and everyone was in tears: ‘Somehow it was especially comforting to pray to her holy image together with all our people’, wrote Nicholas, in the knowledge that it would probably be for the last time.98 Later, the household went outside in the garden to take farewell photographs of each other and out of habit Nicholas sawed some wood, telling Benkendorf (who, too old and with an ailing wife, was remaining at Tsarskoe) to distribute the vegetables and wood among those servants who had remained loyal during their captivity. Valentina Chebotareva had sent Tatiana a note that day congratulating them on Alexey’s birthday: ‘As for you, my dear child, allow this old V[alentina] I[vanovna] who loves you so much to mentally make the sign of the cross over you and kiss you warmly.’99