The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Instructed to be ready to leave at midnight on Monday 31 July, the family assembled in the semicircular hall, downstairs by the rear entrance. The elegant marble reception room looked like ‘a customs hall’, as chambermaid Anna Demidova noted. She was horrified at the mountains of luggage that two hours later had yet to be carried out to the waiting trucks; by 3 o’clock the men loading it all had hardly made a dent in the pile and everyone was getting anxious about the delay to their departure, which had been scheduled for 1 a.m.100 Finally everything was loaded, but now rumours were flying that their train had not even left Petrograd.101 They all sat there, dog tired, and waited with sinking hearts as the night wore on. The girls wept a great deal and Alexandra was extremely agitated. Dr Botkin spent the night going from one to the next with valerian drops to calm them down. Alexey kept trying to lie down and sleep but in the end gave up. Wan with fatigue, he sat ‘perched on a box, and holding his favourite spaniel “Joy” by a leash’ as his father paced up and down, endlessly lighting cigarettes.102 They were all grateful for the offer of tea when it finally came at 5 a.m.

  Behind the scenes, Kerensky’s evacuation plans had been on the brink of failure. During the night, workers at Petrograd’s Nikolaevsky Station, who had been preparing the train had begun to hesitate about whether they would allow it to leave. ‘All night long there had been difficulties, doubts and vacillations. The railwaymen delayed the shunting and coupling, put through mysterious phone calls, made inquiries somewhere.’103 Dawn was already breaking when the train – comprised of wagons-lits and a restaurant car of the Chinese Eastern Railway – finally arrived at Tsarskoe Selo’s Alexandrovsky Station more than five hours late and was parked down the tracks, away from the main entrance.104 The station itself ‘was surrounded by soldiers, and troops with loaded rifles’ who had ‘marched out and lined both sides of the road from the palace to the station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds of ammunition’.105

  Word by now had got out in Tsarskoe Selo that something was afoot and as the sun rose on 1 August a triple cordon of guards in front of the palace was having to hold back an ‘immense crowd of people hooting and shouting menacingly’, keen to get one last look at Nikolashka-durachok* as he was taken away.106 At about 5.15, four motor cars finally arrived. It was clearly going to be impossible to take the family out past the crowds at the main gate; they would have to cross the Alexander Park to reach the station at its western end. The entourage tried to steel themselves and remain cheerful during this final farewell, refusing to say the usual Do svidaniya but repeating the more emphatic Do skorogo svidaniya, ‘till we see each other soon’.107 Much to her despair the tsaritsa had not been allowed to say farewell to all of her most faithful retainers, particularly her elderly mistress of the robes, Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had served three tsaritsas. But she sent her a note: ‘Farewell, darling motherly friend, my heart is too full to write any more.’108 It was only now, as Alexandra left the palace, that Kerensky, who on their previous encounters had found her ‘proud and unbending, fully conscious of her right to rule’ saw for the first time ‘the former Empress simply as a mother, anxious and weeping’.109

  When the family arrived at the station – their cars surrounded by a mounted escort of Dragoons – they had to walk down the heavy moist sand of the railway embankment to get to their train, which had been mocked up with flags and placards proclaiming it was part of a ‘Red Cross Mission’.*110 Alexandra could barely manage the walk, nor could she climb up onto the footboard and had to be ‘pulled up with great difficulty and at once fell forward on her hands and knees’. A military escort, headed by Evgeny Kobylinsky, was to travel with them and their immediate entourage on this train; a second train was waiting nearby for the remainder of the servants and the guards.111

  When everyone in the Romanov entourage had taken their places, Kerensky ran up and shouted, ‘They can go!’ and ‘The whole train immediately shuddered off in the direction of the imperial branch line’. As it did so the quiet and watchful crowd that had gathered as one ‘suddenly stirred themselves, and waved their hands, their scarves and caps’, in an eerily silent farewell.112 The sunrise was beautiful, noted Nicholas, as the train headed north in the direction of Petrograd before swinging south-east in the direction of the Urals; his attitude to departure as an ordinary civilian from his home of twenty-two years was as phlegmatic as it had been to his abdication.

  ‘I will describe to you how we travelled’, Anastasia later wrote of their journey, in an essay for Sydney Gibbes, in which as usual she struggled with her English spelling:

  We started in the morning and when we got into the train I went to sleap, so did all of us. We were very tierd because we did not sleap the whole night. The first day was hot and very dusty. At the stations we had to shut our window curtanse that nobody should see us. Once in the evening I was looking out we stoped near a little house, but there was no station so we could look out. A little boy came to my window and asked: ‘Uncle, please give me, if you have got, a newspaper.’ I said: ‘I am not an uncle but an aunty and have no newspaper.’ At the first moment I could not understand why did he call me ‘Uncle’ but then I remembered that my hear is cut and I and the soldiers (which were standing next to me) laugh very much. On the way many funy things had hapend, and if I shall have time I shall write to you our travel farther on. Goodbye. Don’t forget me. Many kisses from us all to you my darling. Your A.113

  It was only now, on the train, that the family was finally informed of their destination.114 ‘And so ended this act of the tragedy, the final episode of the Tsarskoe Selo period’, wrote Valentina Chebotareva in her diary after they had gone. ‘What’, she wondered, ‘awaits them in Tobolsk?’115

  Chapter Nineteen

  ON FREEDOM STREET

  ‘Why are there so many soldiers on this train?’ asked one of the grand duchesses, as it pulled out of the Alexandrovsky Station. They were all of course used to being escorted by the military, ‘but the great number on this occasion excited her surprise’.1 In all, 330 men and 6 officers of the 1st, 2nd and 4th Rifles accompanied the Romanovs on their journey to Siberia, the 1st occupying the com-partments on either side of the family. Whenever the train passed through a station the blinds were kept tightly drawn and the doors locked and it stopped only in sidings at rural halts where there were few, if any, of the curious to ask questions.

  Back in Petrograd, when the news got out that the imperial family had been sent away, there was considerable confusion about where it was heading for. Talk of the Crimea abounded; others heard that the train was going west to Mogilev, and out of Russia. ‘This caused a panic in the Narva suburb of Petrograd’, recalled Robert Crozier Long:

  A crowd of Bolshevik working-men proclaimed that the counter-revolutionary Government of Kerensky had treacherously sent the Tsar for safety to Germany, and that the result would be an immediate invasion with the aim of Restoration.2

  Elsewhere rumour was rife that the train was heading all the way out to Harbin in Manchuria – a destination already becoming a refuge for White Russians fleeing the revolution.3 Perhaps Kerensky had this in mind as an ultimate destination, but for now the objective was to get the Romanovs beyond the tentacles of Petrograd’s militants.*

  Despite the close proximity of so many guards, chambermaid Anna Demidova did not find the journey unpleasant. That first day on the train, as she noted in her diary, it was unbearably hot, but their compartments were very clean and comfortable and the food laid on in the restaurant car was surprisingly good, prepared by Chinese and Armenian cooks of the railway line.4 Alexey and his mother, who were both exhausted, did not join them, but dined together in her compartment. Finally at 7.30 in the evening, the heat still oppressive, they were all allowed off the train to stretch their legs and Anna and the girls even stopped to pick bilberries and cowberries. But they were all apprehensive about where they were headed:

  It’s hard thinking about where they are taking us. While you’re on th
e way there you think less of what lies ahead, but your heart is heavy when you start to think about how far you are from your family and if and when you might see them again. I haven’t seen my sister once in five months.5

  But she slept well that night, relieved after two weeks of terrible uncertainty and very little sleep that she now at least knew their destination, although the thought of Tobolsk made her heart sink. Later that day when the train pulled up at a rural halt, she heard questions being asked of one of the guards by a railway official:

  ‘Who’s on the train?

  ‘An American Red Cross Mission.’

  ‘Then why does no one show themselves and come out of the wagons?’

  ‘It’s because they are all very sick, barely alive.’6

  Resting in her compartment, Alexandra sat scrupulously noting down the stations as they passed: Tikhvin – Cherepovets – Shavra – Katen – Chaikovsky – Perm – Kamyshevo – Poklevskaya: aside from Perm, all obscure way stations in a vast empire that she and Nicholas had never got to know and from which they were now to be for ever separated.

  Later on, near the River Slyva at Kama, they were allowed off the train once more for an hour’s walk; they stopped to admire the view of the beautiful valley of Kungur and the girls picked flowers. Now more at ease, that evening Anna Demidova played whist with Dr Botkin, Ilya Tatishchev and Vasili Dolgorukov.7 Another long hot day followed as they crossed the endless Russian steppe with its vast fields of ripening grain stretching far into the distance. The train finally crossed the Urals into western Siberia on the 4th and rattled on through the big railway junction at Ekaterinburg. Nicholas noticed a distinct chill in the air by the time they pulled up in sight of the landing stage at Tyumen at 11.15 that evening.8

  There was no railway line to Tobolsk and it was accessible by boat only for the brief four months of summer, so the family now boarded the American-built steamer the Rus for the remainder of their journey. They were given no special privileges on board, just plain hard beds like everyone else; much to the disgust of Anna Demidova there were no carafes of water in any of the cabins, and the most primitive washing facilities. She came to the conclusion that the boat was designed for people who didn’t wash very much. It took all night to load all the baggage and the escort onto two additional steamers, the Kormilets and the Tyumen, and it was not till 6 a.m. on 5 August that the Rus finally set off on the 189-mile (304-km) river journey to Tobolsk.9

  The low-lying river banks on either side were thinly populated and had little to distinguish them. Dr Botkin’s son Gleb later recalled ‘the same brown fields, the same groves of sickly looking birches. Not a hill, not the slightest elevation of any sort to break the monotony of the landscape.’10 Thirty-six hours later and now on the wider waters of the Tobol River, the boat entered the Irtysh – ‘a little sluggish stream that drains, or partially drains one of the great marshes of eastern Siberia’ – which brought them into Tobolsk.11 Having heard of the former tsar’s imminent arrival, many gathered to catch sight of him. ‘Literally the entire town, I am not exaggerating, spilled out on to the shore’, recalled Commissar Makarov of the guard.12 The church bells were ringing for the Feast of the Transfiguration and as the Rus drew up at the landing stage at 6.30 on the evening of 6 August, Nicholas recalled that the family’s first sight was ‘the view of the cathedral and the houses on the hill’.13 Below, on the banks of the Irtysh, Tobolsk itself was a jumble of low wooden houses and dirt roads built on treeless marshland. It was significant for two things: as a former place of exile – Feodor Dostoevsky had spent ten days in a cell here in transit to Omsk in 1850 – and as the haunt of mosquitoes ‘said to be of a size and a ferocity unequalled elsewhere’.14 Malaria haunted the miasmas of the marshy forests that stretched for miles around the town.

  A small, eighteenth-century kremlin of white stone – the only one of its kind in Siberia – dominated the view from the top of a steep bluff inland, and was pretty much all that Tobolsk had to offer the adventurous tourist. Its major attraction was the former bishop’s palace – now a courthouse – the St Sophia Cathedral, and a museum containing ‘large collections of old instruments of torture: branding tools, used to stamp the foreheads and cheeks of prisoners, instruments for pulling out the center bone of the nose [a favourite of torturers during the reign of Boris Godunov], painful shackles, and other horrible devices’.15 Churches dominated the town: twenty had been built to serve a population of around 23,000 people. Kerensky knew Tobolsk, having visited it in 1910, and had chosen it for the Romanovs, not as a lesson in the iniquities of tsarism, but because it had no industrial proletariat, no railway depots or factories seething with political activists, and because for eight months of the year it was ‘shut off from the world … as remote from human association as the moon’.16 The Siberian winter was a better policeman than any prison; as Olga was soon to discover: ‘Tobolsk is a forgotten corner when the river freezes.’17

  While the family waited on board the Rus, Kobylinsky, Dolgorukov, Tatishchev and Makarov went ahead to inspect the family’s accommodation. The former Governor’s House – hastily rechristened Freedom House – was located on the also appropriately revolutionary Freedom Street. It was one of the two best buildings that the town had to offer, and had the advantage of surrounding boardwalks to spare the pedestrian from the quagmire of the intractable autumn mud. But two hours later the three men came back with grim faces: the ‘dirty, boarded-up, smelly house’ had ‘terrible bathrooms and toilets’ and in its present state, was totally uninhabitable.18 Until three days previously it had been used as a barracks by deputies of the local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet, who had left it filthy and practically stripped of furniture. There were no chairs, tables, washstands, or even carpets. The double winter windows were grimy and had not been removed and there was rubbish everywhere. Forced to remain on board the Rus and in order to pass the time while waiting for the house to be got ready, the Romanov family took some excursions on the river and made the most of any opportunity to get off and walk.

  Anna Demidova had meanwhile gone on ahead to help prepare the house and had been deeply depressed at the sight of its derelict interior. Soon she was trudging round town with Nastenka Hendrikova and Vasili Dolgorukov in search of household supplies: jugs and ewers for the washstands, buckets, tins of paint, flat-irons, inkpots, candles, writing paper, wool and thread for darning, as well as a much needed laundress to handle all the family’s washing. She stopped to admire the fur coats and warm valenki on sale in the market – all at horribly inflated prices, deliberately raised in the knowledge of the imperial entourage’s arrival in town. But otherwise ‘everything here is very primitive’ she noted in her diary.19 Makarov meanwhile had been hunting for a piano for Alexandra and the grand duchesses as well as additional furniture, while a team of upholsterers, carpenters, painters and electricians was gathered together – some of them German prisoners of war – to refurbish the house at speed.20 Most urgent were repairs to the inadequate plumbing, but there was also considerable concern about where exactly the authorities would put all the staff who could not be accommodated in the Governor’s House.

  ‘The family is bearing everything with great sangfroid and courage’, wrote Dolgorukov. ‘They apparently adapt to circumstances easily, or at least pretend to, and do not complain after all their previous luxury.’21 Finally, on Sunday 13 August the house was ready. Only one carriage was laid on to take Alexandra from the ship to the house, accompanied by Tatiana; the rest of the family, servants and entourage walked the mile (1½ km) into town. When they entered, the whole of the ground floor was a mass of luggage and packing cases; nevertheless they were allowed an impromptu Sunday service conducted by the local priest, who went round blessing the rooms with holy water.22

  Although their packing had been hurried, Alexandra had ensured that they had brought with them not just their personal clothing and possessions but also many of their favourite pictures, silver tableware, monogrammed china, tabl
e linen, a phonograph and records, their cameras and photographic equipment, favourite books, a trunkful of photograph albums, and another containing all Nicholas’s letters and diaries (which he had not destroyed). The girls had left behind all their beautiful court dresses and their large picture hats, bringing only simple linen suits, white summer dresses, skirts, blouses, sunhats and, as instructed, plenty of warm cardigans, scarves and hats, fur jackets and thick felt coats.

  The family was accommodated on the first floor of the two-storey house, with the girls sharing a corner bedroom facing the street. Alexey had another with his dyadka Nagorny in a small room next to it.*23 There was a bedroom for Nicholas and Alexandra, as well as a study for him and a private drawing room for her, a bathroom and toilet. A large upstairs ballroom opposite Nicholas’s study would be used for church services, furnished with the field chapel that the family had brought with them from Tsarskoe Selo and with Alexandra’s lace bedspread serving as an altar cloth. Services would be conducted by the priest and deacon from the nearby Blagoveshchensky Church, assisted by four nuns from the Ivanovsky Convent outside town, who came to sing the liturgy (and also brought welcome gifts of eggs and milk).24

  With a typical lack of complaint the four sisters immediately set about making the most of their new surroundings by ensuring that the room they shared was as congenial as possible. It had a traditional, tall white-tiled stove in the corner, a small sofa scattered with cushions, a table which was soon stacked with books, pens and writing paper. Simple white bentwood chairs stood at the foot of each of the girls’ four modest campbeds, brought from the Alexander Palace and surrounded with screens covered with colourful throws and shawls, which the girls also draped on the bare and draughty white walls to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. On their tiny bedside tables the sisters crammed their favourite knick-knacks, icons and photographs. Each girl also fixed many pictures on the wall above her own bedhead: the younger two opting for fond reminders of the Tsar’s Escort in their Cossack uniforms at Mogilev and other friends, relatives, pets and much-loved wounded officers, while their older sisters’ more sober tastes focused on religious images and a large photograph of their parents on board the Shtandart.25