The Romanov Sisters
Page 40
‘We keep doing the same things every day’, became the regular complaint of all the family, as Anastasia told Katya on 8 October. One thing that lightened the girls’ day was the visits of a cleaning woman who brought her little boy Tolya with her. The sisters loved playing with him for he reminded them of a little boy at Stavka called Lenka whom they had taken under their wing. ‘Ask your brother; he met him’, Anastasia told Katya. Mention of Lenka once again prompted the remembrance of happier times with the Tsar’s Escort at Mogilev: ‘What are you doing? I want to see you all awfully badly!… When I look at the street through the window, I see everything covered with snow and feel so sad, because it is winter already, and I love summer and warmth.’60 ‘Till now we’ve had no reason to complain about the weather, as it’s been warm,’ Olga told Xenia that same day, ‘but now we are freezing.’ She envied her living in the Crimea with her mother and sister. ‘No doubt it’s wonderful where you are. The sea so bluish-green … We are all well and our life is the same, so there is nothing interesting that I can write about.’61
For ten days in the second half of October came a less than pleasant change to the daily routine when the former imperial dentist, Sergey Kostritsky, travelled all the way from the Crimea to check the family’s teeth and perform some urgent dental work on Nicholas and Alexandra, who both suffered endless problems. Kostritsky arrived with letters and gifts from Maria Feodorovna, Xenia and Olga and was accommodated in Pankratov’s lodgings. Inevitably, the two men discussed the family and agreed that even here in Tobolsk, they were still ‘suffocating in the same stilted formal atmosphere’ that had prevailed at court. It had created a real ‘spiritual hunger’ in them and a ‘thirst to meet with people from a different milieu’. Hidebound tradition ‘dragged them down like a dead weight and made them the slaves of etiquette’.62 Pankratov might have wished more time had been given to the girls’ broader education, instead of to the niceties of ‘how to stand, how to sit and what to say, and so on’, but despite that he was impressed with how willingly they chopped wood and cleared the snow – ‘their simple life gave them much pleasure’.63 With most of the winter wood now cut the girls were helping their father to pile it up in the wood store and clear the snow in the yard, as well as from the steps and roofs of the outbuildings. Pankratov caught Maria one day struggling to do this with a broken spade. Why hadn’t she asked for a replacement, he enquired, adding that he had not thought she would wish to do such things. ‘But I love this kind of work’, she had replied.64 So long as the weather was fine and they could work outside in the fresh air the girls were happy. ‘Bright sun … makes my mood immediately better’, Olga wrote to PVP, with the weather continuing ‘divine’ well into November. ‘So don’t think that it is always bad. Not at all. As you know, we don’t get dejected easily.’65
But dejection must have descended at the end of the month when the family heard of the October Revolution in Petrograd. ‘A second revolution’, Alexandra wrote in her diary on the 28th, when the news finally reached Tobolsk. ‘Provisional government replaced. The Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky have occupied the Smolny. Winter Palace badly damaged.’66 Only the day before Nicholas had written a cheerful letter to his mother: ‘I’m chopping a lot of wood, usually with Tatishchev … The food here is excellent and plenty of it, a big difference with Tsarskoe Selo, so that we have all settled down well in Tobolsk and have put on 8–10 pounds [3.5–4.5 kg] in weight.’67 Petrograd and their former lives were now so much past history for Nicholas that the Bolshevik coup did not particularly register with him and he didn’t even mention it in his diary; the weather was excellent, he had walked a lot and chopped wood, that was the sum total of his world now.68 For a long time he made no comment about the October Revolution: ‘Nicholas II suffered silently and never talked to me about it’, Pankratov recalled. Eventually he merely expressed outrage at the sacking of the Winter Palace. It was mid-November before Nicholas finally received the newspaper accounts and deemed this second revolution ‘Far worse and more shameful than the events of the Time of Troubles’. The turbulent years of the interregnum in the sixteenth century seemed to have far more resonance for him now than the recent past.69
Chapter Twenty
THANK GOD WE ARE STILL IN RUSSIA AND ALL TOGETHER
A heavy fall of snow greeted Olga’s birthday on 3 November, for which she received modest presents of three pots of cyclamen and some strong-smelling geraniums. ‘Dear Olga has turned 22,’ Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘it’s a pity that the poor thing has to spend her birthday in this present environment.’1 For a mournful and introspective Alexandra, Olga’s birthday was, this sad difficult year of 1917, a talismanic day – a day of remembrance rather than celebration. Thirty-nine years previously to the day, her little sister May had died of diphtheria; and on this same day fourteen years ago Ernie’s daughter Elisabeth had died suddenly when staying with them at Skierniewice. Against this comment in her diary Alexandra added the left-facing sauwastika symbol of which she was so fond, her use of it denoting the cycle of life and death.
For Olga herself – twenty-two, unmarried, and a prisoner in snowbound Siberia – it must have been a particularly bleak birthday. She had remained very thin since her illness and had become increasingly withdrawn and anxious, so much so that Sydney Gibbes had found her rather short-tempered at times. But her innate love and kindness still illuminated her letters to friends and family. On 9 November she wrote with affection to her aunt Xenia saying they were all well and cheerful. She had rescued a half-dead potted lemon tree from the conservatory and brought it back to life with careful watering. She was sorry that she had nothing interesting to tell her and that Xenia could not come and visit them, ‘as we’ve arranged things very nicely and feel completely at home here’.2
‘We live here as though on a ship at sea, and the days all resemble one another’, Nicholas wrote to Xenia with the same sense of quiet resignation.3 But the lack of news depressed him: ‘No papers at all, or even telegrams, have come from Petrograd for a long while. This is awful in such trying times.’4 When newspapers finally did arrive they said little. Denied access to The Times, ‘we were reduced to a nasty local rag printed on packing paper,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, ‘which only gave telegrams several days old and generally distorted and cut down’.5 Nevertheless Nicholas was grateful for any news; Sydney Gibbes noticed how he ‘would read through a newspaper from beginning to end, and when he had finished, would start again’.6 He was rereading his old diaries too, which he found ‘a pleasant occupation’ and a distraction from his interminable routine.7
‘We have not had any significant changes in our life so far’, Anastasia told Katya on 14 November. Apart from propelling themselves back and forth on the swing outside and from there dropping down into a heap of snow, or pulling Alexey around on his sledge, there was only the endless piling up of logs. ‘This work kept us busy. That is the way we live here, not very exciting, is it?’ Anastasia found herself endlessly apologizing to Katya: ‘I am terribly sorry that my letter turned out to be so stupid and boring, but nothing interesting happens here.’8 Her sense of frustration and irritation grew in her next letter: ‘I am starting to write this letter to you for the third time, because it either turns out messy, or very stupid!… Of course we have not played tennis for a long time. We swing, walk, and saw logs. Inside the house we read and study.’9
‘The children are getting very bored without their walks’, Anna Demidova wrote to a friend at the end of the month. Indeed,
there is a terrible boredom among the entourage. Frost, thaw, sunshine – darkness. The days fly by. Reading out loud in the evenings, needlework or bezique. We’re making Christmas presents. On the 21st they suddenly once more would not allow us out to church and wouldn’t even let us have a service at home – everything hangs on the whim of others. And it is at such difficult times that we particularly long for church … It’s hard to write letters when others read them, but I’m grateful all the same to h
ave them.10
The unreliability of the postal system was a major frustration for everyone. All of the girls’ and Alexandra’s correspondence testifies to many letters and parcels never reaching them in Tobolsk, or the people they sent them to. ‘Every time I went over to the house,’ recalled Pankratov, ‘one or other of the Grand Duchesses would meet me with the question – are there any letters?’11 Their own were full of endless questions about old friends, former patients, where they were and what they were doing – though hopes of their ever knowing the answer were rapidly receding. ‘Forgive me for so many questions,’ Maria apologized to her friend Vera Kapralova, ‘but I so want to know what you are doing and how everyone is.’12 ‘Do you have news of any of ours?’ echoed her sister Olga. ‘As always, my postcards are uninteresting and full of questions.’13 And again, the same day, to Valentina Chebotareva: ‘Did you receive my letter of 12/10? I’m very sad not to have had news of you for such a long time.’14 Tatiana, more restrained, seemed for her part almost to enjoy the isolation: ‘everything is quiet in our distant little town. It’s good to be so far from the railway and large towns, where there are no cars and only horses.’15 But she admitted to Valentina Chebotareva, ‘we feel as though we are living on some kind of faraway island where we receive news from another world … I play the piano a lot. The time goes quickly and the days pass completely unnoticed.’16
By early December the temperature was dropping well below zero; on the 7th and 8th it hit –23 degrees C (–9.4 degrees F). ‘We shiver in the rooms,’ Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova, ‘and there is always a strong draught from the windows.’17 It was so cold indoors that even the hardy Nicholas sat in his Cossack cherkeska. The girls huddled together to try and keep warm; ‘the dogs are running around and begging to get in our laps’, Tatiana told Zinaida Tolstaya, all of them glad of the warmth of a friendly animal. ‘We do not have enough space for everybody,’ Anastasia wrote to Katya, ‘so one of us is writing while sitting on the sofa and holding the paper on her lap. It is pretty chilly in the room, so our hands do not write properly.’18 Spirits were beginning to sag until Sydney Gibbes came up with a new way of passing the cold, dark winter days. He suggested that the children perform some one-act plays; he had brought a selection with him. They started rehearsing after their afternoon recreation, and created an improvised theatre in the ballroom upstairs. On the evening of 6 December Maria, Alexey and Gilliard performed a twenty-minute playlet, Le fluide de John by Maurice Hennequin.19
At last, on 10 December, the family was allowed out to mass again. ‘We are always so happy when they let us go to church’, Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia:
although you can’t compare this church with our cathedral,* but all the same it’s better than indoors … I often remember Tsarskoe Selo and the lovely concerts we had at the hospital; do you remember how amusing it was when our wounded did the lezginka dance; I also remember our walks at Pavlovsk and your little carriage, and the morning jaunts past your house. How long ago that all seems, doesn’t it? Well, I must stop now.20
Although they were all getting chilblains from the intense cold, the girls had at last had things to do in the run-up to Christmas, helping their mother make presents for the entourage and even the guards as well. Alexandra knitted woollen waistcoats and painted cards and bookmarks. She and the girls were using up every last precious scrap of material and knitting wool to ensure that everyone had something to open on Christmas Eve. ‘They were all expert needlewomen’, remembered Iza Buxhoeveden, ‘and managed to make the prettiest things out of the coarse, hand woven, country linen, on which they drew their own designs.’21 ‘I am knitting stockings for the small one’, Alexandra told Anna on the 15th.
He asked for a pair as all his are in holes. Mine are warm and thick like the ones I gave the wounded, do you remember? I make everything now. Father’s trousers are torn and darned, the girls’ under-linen in rags. Dreadful, is it not? I have grown quite gray. Anastasia is now very fat, as Marie was, round and fat to the waist, with short legs. I do hope she will grow. Olga and Tatiana are both thin, but their hair grows beautifully so that they can go without scarves.22
With food supplies considerably better in Tobolsk than Petrograd, she had sent Anna precious gifts of flour, sugar, macaroni and sausage, as well as a hand-knitted scarf and stockings. In return Anna had sent a parcel with perfume, a blue silk jacket for Alexandra and pastilles for the children.23 Alexandra regretted that unlike her husband she had no old diaries and letters to read through. ‘I have not a line of yours’, she told Anna. She had ‘burnt everything’:
All the past is a dream. One keeps only tears and grateful memories. One by one all earthly things slip away, houses and possessions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But God is in all and nature never changes. I can see all around me churches (long to go to them) and hills, the lovely world.24
Her heart lifted when, on 19 December, Iza Buxhoeveden finally arrived in Tobolsk, with her Scottish travelling companion Miss Mather. Disappointingly, however, militants in the 2nd Regiment of the guard refused to allow her into the Governor’s House and she had to put up at the Kornilov House and content herself with catching only glimpses of the family.25 When the girls first saw her ‘they began to gesticulate wildly … in a moment all four Grand Duchesses were at the window waving their hands, while the youngest jumped up and down in her excitement’.26 They were all terribly disappointed that Iza was not allowed to join them, even for Christmas; three weeks later she was told to move into lodgings in town.
‘Christmas is coming,’ Trina Schneider wrote to her colleague PVP in Petrograd, ‘but this year it will be an especially sad one – far from our friends and families.’ Olga too, in response to a comment from her aunt Xenia about recent misfortunes, was trying hard not to feel melancholy:
They always say that nothing good or happy endures for long, or rather doesn’t last; but I also think that even awful things must come to an end some time. Isn’t that so? Things are as quiet with us as they can be, thank God. We are all well and cheerful and are not losing heart.
I dreamed about grandmother today. I’ve just put on an orange scarf and for some reason it reminded me of your sitting room in Petrograd. My thoughts are jumping from one thing to another, which is why this letter seems so incoherent, for which I ask your forgiveness. Well, what else is there to write?27
Having made their many Christmas gifts the girls did their best to decorate the tree. ‘We have a Christmas tree standing in the corner and it gives off such a wonderful smell, not at all like the ones at Tsarskoe’, Olga told Rita Khitrovo.
It’s a special kind and is called a ‘balsamic fir’. It smells strongly of orange and mandarin, and resin trickles down its trunk all the time. We don’t have any decorations; only some silver rain and wax candles, church ones of course, as there aren’t any other kind here.28
The tree ‘smelled divine’, Tatiana wrote to PVP, ‘I don’t remember such a strong scent anywhere else.’29 Its presence inevitably inspired thoughts of absent friends: ‘At Christmas we will be especially think-ing of the past’, Anastasia wrote to Katya. ‘How much fun we had … I would like to write and tell you a lot, but it is so sad that everything is being read!’30
At midday on Christmas Eve everyone gathered for liturgy in the upstairs hall and after lunch they arranged the tree and presents. The family also decorated a tree for the twenty men of the guard, and at half past four took them their gifts, as well as special things to eat. Alexandra presented each soldier with a gospel and a hand-painted bookmark. Nor did she forget Iza, sending gifts to the Kornilov House of ‘a tiny Christmas tree and some tablecloths and pillows embroidered by herself and her daughters, to which the Emperor added a little vase with his cipher on it’.31
‘After supper on Christmas Eve,’ Olga wrote to Rita,
we handed out the presents to everyone, the majority being various items of our own needlework. As we were sorting them out and deciding who
to give what to, it reminded us so much of our charity bazaars at Yalta. You remember how much there always was to get ready? We had vespers at around 10 last night and the tree was lit. It was lovely and cosy. The choir was large and sang well, only too much like a concert, which I don’t like.32
Surrounded by those who had remained faithful to them through these last difficult nine months, the Romanov family sang with great heart – and hope. Pierre Gilliard felt a special sense of ‘peaceful intimacy’ that Christmas, as though they all, truly, were like ‘one big family’.33
Early on Christmas Day the family walked to church in the snow for the early morning service, conducted in front of the icon of the Mother of God brought specially from the Abalatsky Monastery 17 miles (27 km) from Tobolsk. During the service, when Father Alexey Vasiliev intoned the mnogoletie – the prayer for the long life of the family – he failed to omit their imperial titles. Militants in the guard who heard this loudly complained to Pankratov. The result was a total ban on the family’s attending any more services in church.34 It was a disheartening end to Christmas, and to the year. After a glass of tea in the early evening of 31 December, ‘we went our separate ways – without waiting for the New Year’, Nicholas noted in his diary. His final thoughts that year’s end were elsewhere: ‘Lord God, save Russia.’35