The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  The dining room was located downstairs, as was a room occupied by Pierre Gilliard where he also gave the children lessons. Later on, shared rooms downstairs were allocated to the maids Alexandra Tegleva and Elizaveta Ersberg who looked after the children, Mariya Tutelberg who attended Alexandra, and other staff includ-ing Nicholas’s valet Terenty Chemodurov. For now the rest of the entourage and servants were housed in the even more ill-prepared and uncongenial Kornilov House opposite: Nastenka Hendrikova and her maid Paulina Mezhants, Dr Botkin (who in mid-September was joined by his two children, Gleb and Tatiana), Dr Derevenko and his family, Tatishchev and Dolgorukov. Here, occupying crudely partitioned cubicles in a large draughty hall, and with very little concession to privacy, the women were later joined by Trina Schneider and her two maids Katya and Masha and another tutor, Klavdiya Bitner.26 Although the family remained under house arrest with only the yard outside to move about in and occasional excursions to the nearby church, the entourage and servants were, for the time being, allowed to go about freely in town.

  * * *

  The weather remained hot and sunny in Tobolsk well into September, but the family had been deeply disconsolate to see that the ‘so-called garden’ was a ‘nasty little vegetable patch’ that would only grow a few cabbages and swedes at best.27 In addition, at the back of the house were a lean-to greenhouse, woodshed and barn, and a few spindly birch trees. There were no flowers or shrubs at all. The only concession for the children was a couple of swings. Nicholas was bitterly disappointed that the garden offered no scope for the physical labour and recreation that he craved, though within days he had chopped down a dry pine tree and was allowed to put up his horizontal bar on which he did his daily chin-ups. To the side of the house the authorities had hastily created a square dusty courtyard for recreation – twice a day, between 11 and 12 and after lunch until dusk – in a fenced-off part of the unpaved road.

  The uncertainties of the family’s new environment were very quickly compounded by the increasingly erratic arrival of letters. ‘My dear Katya,’ Anastasia wrote within days of their arrival, ‘I am writing this letter to you being certain that you will never get it … It is so sad to be unable to hear from you. We often, often think and talk of you … Have you received my letter of 31 July and the card that I wrote long ago?’ She was now numbering her letters in hopes of keeping track of them. But her thoughts were already turning to happier times: ‘Ask Victor whether he still remembers last autumn. I am now remembering a lot … everything good, of course!’ Enclosing a red petal from a poppy in the garden she apologized for having so little to say: ‘I cannot write anything interesting … we spend our time monotonously.’28

  The monotony was, however, broken soon after by unexpected news: Olga’s friend Rita Khitrovo had arrived in Tobolsk anxious to see the family and pass on to them some fifteen or so letters (which she had hidden in a travelling pillow), as well as gifts of chocolate, perfume, sweets and biscuits, and icons sent by various friends.29 The highly-strung and excitable twenty-two-year-old, whose ingenuousness and devotion to Olga – to the point of hero-worship – were equalled only by her fearlessness, had taken it upon herself to make the journey without any thought of the possible repercussions. Refused admittance to the Governor’s House, Rita went to the Kornilov House opposite to see Nastenka Hendrikova, from where she waved and blew kisses to the four sisters who had come out on the balcony to try and catch a glimpse of her.

  But her arrival alarmed the authorities. During her journey she had sent postcards home that had been intercepted and interpreted as suspicious. It was thought she might be colluding with Anna Vyrubova and other monarchist friends in a conspiracy to rescue the family, rumours of a nebulous plot by ‘Cossack officers’ having already been circulating in Tobolsk. Soon afterwards, on the orders of Kerensky, men came to inspect all the things Rita had brought for the family. The letters were checked and deemed harmless, but she was put under arrest and sent back to Moscow for questioning. Hearing the story later, Valentina Chebotareva thought a ‘mountain had been made out of a molehill’, for Rita insisted that her journey had been undertaken entirely out of a personal desire to see the family. But she had, unwittingly, caused them harm: ‘an obliging fool is more dangerous than an enemy’, as Valentina observed.30 Commissar Makarov was recalled by the Provisional Government and replaced by a new man, Vasily Pankratov.

  Pankratov was an archetypal, old-school revolutionary. The son of peasants, he had been active in the extremist Narodnaya Volya [People’s Will] movement of the 1880s and in 1884 had been sentenced to death for killing a gendarme in Kiev. It was only his youth that had saved him from the gallows; instead he served fourteen years incarcerated in the notorious Shlisselburg Fortress and from there was sent into exile in Yakutiya before being freed in the political amnesty of 1905. His revolutionary career might have been a textbook one but to Nicholas, Pankratov would be ‘the little man’.31 But adjust to him he did, for Pankratov, who did his best by the family within the constraints placed upon him, would be their only link with the outside world. During the weeks that followed, the family and Pankratov would learn much about each other and develop a polite, respectful relationship.

  The first thing that had struck the new commissar was seeing the family at prayer. He noted how devotedly Alexandra came and arranged the temporary altar, covered it with her embroidery, the candles and icons before the arrival of the priest and nuns for the service. There was a punctiliousness to every aspect of the family’s religious observance: after the entire suite and servants had all assembled, in their designated places according to rank, the family entered through the side doors and everyone bowed to them. During the service Pankratov noticed how frequently – and fervently – the Romanovs crossed themselves. He could not but be impressed that ‘the whole family of the former tsar had given themselves up to a truly religious state of mind and feeling’ – even if it was one that was beyond his comprehension.32

  With their lives so grounded in religious acceptance it took no time at all for the family to slip back into the same kind of quiet, uneventful routine that they had followed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace. Having always been so physically active, Nicholas was intensely frustrated by the lack of exercise and took to walking up and down the yard forty or fifty times in an hour, though soon he was able to busy himself sawing wood for the winter. Alexey’s only outside interest, until the arrival of a playmate in the shape of Dr Derevenko’s son Kolya later that month, was in the dogs. Much of the girls’ time was spent, when not helping their father saw logs, in chasing Joy and Ortipo away from the refuse tip at the back of the yard, where they persisted in rootling around for food.33 The heat was too much for Alexandra, who would sometimes sit on the balcony under a parasol sewing, before retiring indoors. She was rarely up and out of her room before lunchtime and often remained alone in the house when the others were outside – painting and sewing, or playing the piano. Much of her time was spent in religious contemplation and reading the gospels, her thoughts on which she continued to pour into long homiletic letters to her friends, particularly Anna Vyrubova.

  The food at the Governor’s House was surprisingly good and plentiful in comparison with the desperate shortages now being endured in Petrograd. Many of the locals looked favourably on the former tsar and his family, and gifts of food began to arrive. Some doffed their caps when passing by on the street; others occasionally even kneeled down and crossed themselves. Old habits died hard, even here, and Alexandra still wrote out menu cards for each day’s modest meals. The atmosphere was less stressful too. Evenings were spent playing the usual games of bezique and dominoes, or bumble puppy and nain jaune, and Nicholas as always read aloud – his first choice on arrival in Tobolsk being The Scarlet Pimpernel. He then set about revisiting the classics of Russian literature. ‘I have decided to re-read all our best writers from beginning to end (I’m reading English and French books too)’, he told his mother.34 Having just worked his way
through Gogol, he moved on to Turgenev. But, as Pankratov noted with amusement, the members of the entourage often seemed to get bored with having to sit in silence as he read and would begin to whisper among themselves or even nodded off to the monotonous sound of his voice.35 Nevertheless, reading was undoubtedly a boon for all the family. Sydney Gibbes soon arrived with more favourite books for the children: English adventure stories such as Alexey’s great favourite Cast Up by the Sea by Sir Samuel Baker, the novels of Walter Scott (Tatiana and Anastasia loved Ivanhoe), Thackeray, Dickens and H. Rider Haggard. Such indeed was the hunger for reading material that Trina Schneider wrote to PVP in Petrograd asking him to send more books – the stories of Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Karamzin, which the children didn’t have, as well as books on Russian grammar and literature.36 Tatiana wrote too, asking him to send out her set of Alexey Tolstoy’s novels that she had unfortunately not brought with her.

  But even the best of books could not for long fend off the crippling boredom that was infecting the entire entourage and which was so clearly reflected in everyone’s diaries and letters. Alexey’s perfunctory diary contained nothing but repetitious complaints: ‘Today passed just as yesterday … It is boring.’37 Even Alexandra could write nothing but ‘I spent the day, as usual’… ‘Everything was the same as yesterday’. And Nicholas echoed her: ‘The day passed as always’… ‘The day passed as usual’.38 By 25 August he was already noting that ‘Walks in the garden are becoming incredibly tedious; here the sense of sitting locked up is much stronger than it ever was at Tsarskoe Selo.’39 To keep himself occupied he dug out a pond in the garden, helped by Alexey, for the ducks and geese that had been brought in, and he also built a wooden platform on the roof of the greenhouse where he and the children could sit soaking up the sunshine and watch the world go by below. The locals were fascinated when they saw them there, or on the balcony, especially when they saw the girls: ‘Their hair was shorn like little boys’… We thought that was the fashion in Petrograd,’ recalled one local, ‘later, people said they had been sick … still they were very pretty, very clean.’40

  At midday on Friday 8 September – the Nativity of the Virgin – the family was allowed out for the first time to attend service at the nearby Blagoveshchensky Church. They went on foot, pushing Alexandra in her wheelchair through the public garden where there was no one around, but were greatly disconcerted to see a crowd waiting for them outside the church. ‘The emperor was still the emperor in Tobolsk’, it appeared.41 ‘It was very unpleasant’, Alexandra wrote, but she was ‘grateful that I had been in a real church for the first time in six months’.42

  Pankratov noticed how much pleasure this small concession had evoked:

  As Nicholas II and the children walked through the public garden, they looked this way and that, talking in French* about the weather, the garden, as though they had never seen it before, although the gardens were located directly opposite their balcony, from where they could clearly see them every day. But it is one thing to see something from a distance, from behind bars as it were, and quite another to see it when almost at liberty. Every tree, every twig and bush and bench acquired its own unique charm … From the expression on their faces and the way they moved one could tell they had all undergone some particular personal trial.43

  On their way through the gardens Anastasia fell over while craning her neck to look at things and her sisters and father laughed at her clumsiness. Alexandra did not react. ‘She sat there majestically in her wheelchair and said nothing.’ She hadn’t been sleeping at night – tormented by another bout of neuralgia and toothache. Once again, what most evoked public curiosity as the family passed was the girls’ heads: ‘Why was their hair cut short like boys?’ people asked.44 By the end of September, however, their hair was getting quite long again, though Anastasia told Katya that it had been ‘such a pleasure to have short hair’.45

  On 14 September when they attended church a second time the family went at 8 a.m. to avoid the crowds: ‘You can just imagine how great our joy was,’ Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia, ‘as you will remember how inconvenient our field chapel at Tsarskoe Selo was.’46 But a chill autumnal rain the previous day had brought a transformation in the surrounding streets, and they were now a sea of mud: ‘If they hadn’t laid wooden boards on the road it would be impossible to get through’, said Anna Demidova.47 Nicholas was now spending as much time as he could outside sawing wood. Pankratov was astonished at his prodigious energy. From time to time Alexey, Tatishchev, Dolgorukov, and even an uncomfortable-looking Pierre Gilliard (inappropriately dressed in trilby and wing collar) were enlisted to help, but Nicholas wore them all out. Pankratov sent word to the local authorities that the ex-tsar enjoyed sawing wood so much that in response they sent in great piles of birch trunks for him to cut up.48 The whole family was counting its luck at the continuing fine weather. ‘It’s so good that we sit in the garden a lot or in the courtyard in front of the house’, Tatiana told her aunt Xenia:

  It’s terribly nice that we have a balcony, which the sun warms from morning to evening. It’s good to sit there and watch people coming and going on the street. It is our only entertainment … We’ve managed to play skittles in front of the house and we play a kind of tennis, though of course without a net, for the sake of practice. Then we walk up and down, so we don’t forget how to walk – 120 paces in all, which is considerably shorter than the deck [of the Shtandart].49

  Tatiana calculated that you could walk round the entire kitchen garden in three minutes flat, but at least there was the livestock to look after, which now included five pigs housed in the former stables – all no doubt destined to provide food during the winter to come.50

  The beginning of October brought the long-awaited arrival from Tsarskoe Selo of carpets, curtains and window blinds in time for the approaching winter, but the wine brought from the imperial cellars was confiscated by the guards and poured into the Irtysh.51 Far more welcome, however, was Sydney Gibbes, who on 5 October arrived on the boat from Tyumen – one of the last before the ice made the river impassable – along with a new tutor for the children, Klavdiya Bitner. Gibbes brought cards and gifts from Anna Vyrubova, now out of prison, including her favourite perfume which Maria said reminded them all of her. How they missed her, she wrote to Anna: ‘It’s terribly sad that we don’t see each other, but God grant that we shall meet again and what joy that will be.’52

  It was not long before Sydney Gibbes found himself once more having to contend with Anastasia’s quirky and inattentive behaviour in class. On one occasion, having lost his temper, he told her to ‘shut up’; the next time she handed in her homework she had added a new nameplate to her exercise book – ‘A. Romanova (Shut up!)’.53 Klavdiya Bitner found Anastasia a trial too – lazy in lessons and often ill-mannered.54 She had been a teacher at the Mariinsky girls’ school at Tsarskoe Selo and during the war had volunteered as a nurse at one of the hospitals where she had looked after Kobylinsky who had been wounded at the front. A romance had developed between them and when he was sent with the family to Tobolsk, Kobylinsky had wangled a job for Klavdiya teaching Maria, Anastasia and Alexey Russian language, literature and maths. Both she and Pankratov remained distinctly unimpressed with the standard of the children’s education, particularly Alexey’s, unaware perhaps that it had been constantly interrupted through illness. Pankratov was shocked at how little they, and their father for that matter, knew of Siberia, its geography and peoples.55 As winter set in, one of the grand duchesses had been amazed at the sight of people on the streets wearing ‘strange white and grey costumes trimmed with fur’. Pankratov realized she was referring to the reindeer-skin traditional dress worn by Yakuts, Khanty and Samoyedic peoples living in the region. Had the sisters never seen pictures of these inhabitants of their father’s vast Russian Empire in their geography books, he wondered? Such strangers from the ‘outside life’ were, for the girls, precisely the kind of people they had so longed to learn about, but had never had a chan
ce to discover. Pankratov found them at times extremely naïve: you only had to talk to them about the most mundane things in the world outside and it was ‘as if they had never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything’, a highly biased view but one that was clearly ignorant of the breadth of the education the girls had in fact been receiving until the revolution had disrupted it.56

  Lessons, for all their limitations in such highly constrained circumstances, were, in Sydney Gibbes’s estimation, an important distraction that helped the younger children get through the monotony of the day. Indeed, he felt that the only one of the grand duchesses who seemed ‘dull’ was Olga, who didn’t have any formal lessons, although she did continue with her own independent study, wrote poetry and practised her French by reading stories to Alexandra. It seemed painfully clear to Gibbes, though, that the family’s ‘greatest hardship’, especially Nicholas’s, was the lack of free exercise, ‘the yard being a poor substitute for their Alexander Park’.57 On one occasion Maria had said to him that they were all, otherwise, quite contented and that she ‘could live at Tobolsk for ever if only they would be able to walk out a little’.58 But Nicholas’s repeated requests to Pankratov to be allowed into town were refused. ‘Are they really afraid that I might run off?’ he asked. ‘I will never leave my family.’59 He seemed to have no comprehension of the security problems that this would pose. The local government of Tobolsk was still holding on but not far away, in Tomsk, the workers’ soviet there was already demanding that the Romanovs be taken to prison.