The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Alexandra’s were more explicit: ‘Thanks be to God that all seven of us are alive and well and together,’ she wrote in her diary that same night, ‘and that he has kept us safe all this year as well as all those who are dear to us.’ But a similar message she sent to Iza was far more emphatic: ‘Thank God we are still in Russia and all together.’36

  * * *

  The Siberian winter, in all its merciless fury, finally arrived in Tobolsk in January 1918. Until then the single-digit sub-zero temperature had been generally tolerable and the Romanov family had begun to wonder whether the savage winter foretold them was a myth. But as January passed Alexandra recorded the plummeting temperature. It was –15 degrees C (5 degrees F) on the 17th; five days later it was down to –29 degrees C (–20 degrees F) and with a searing cold wind to boot. In the depths of winter Tobolsk became a ‘city of the dead’, ‘a living tomb’, a ‘listless, lifeless place, whose mournful appearance sinks into the soul’.37 All the children had been ill again – this time with German measles, brought into the house by Alexey’s playmate Kolya Derevenko, but luckily their symptoms lasted only a few days.38

  The severe cold lingered throughout February; it was mid-March before the thermometer struggled above freezing. Even indoors with the tiled stoves stoked with logs it was ‘mortally cold’.39 ‘The logs were damp, so they could not warm up the house at all; they just smoked’, Anastasia told Katya.40 The windows were thick with ice and the wind rattled at the frames and penetrated every aperture. ‘The Grand Duchesses’ bedroom is a real ice-house’, Pierre Gilliard noted in his diary; their fingers were so stiff with cold that they could barely write or sew.41 Being on the corner their room caught the worst of the winter wind and recently the temperature in there had been as low as –44 C (–47.2 F). They wrapped themselves in their thickest long knitted cardigans and even wore their felt boots indoors, but they could still feel the wind whistling down the chimney.42 In desperation, they took to sitting in the corridors, or went and huddled in the kitchen, though that, alas, was full of cockroaches.43

  ‘Lost in the immensity of distant Siberia’, the long dark days of winter passed, for everyone, in a continuing atmosphere of quiet acceptance and ‘family peace’, as both Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes recalled.44 The children remained patient and uncomplaining, always kind-hearted and willing to help and support the others, although it was clear to Gibbes that the elder two sisters ‘realized how serious things were becoming’. Even before leaving Tsarskoe Selo, Olga had told Iza Buxhoeveden that she and her sisters ‘put on brave faces for their parents’ sake’.45 Everyone who spent those last months with the family noticed their quiet fortitude in the face of so much desperate uncertainty. ‘My respect for the Grand Duchesses only grew the longer our exile lasted’, recalled Gleb Botkin.

  The courage and unselfishness they displayed were indeed remarkable. My father marveled at the exhibition of cheerfulness – so often an assumed one – by which they strove to help and cheer their parents.

  ‘Every time the Emperor enters the dining room with a sad expression on his face,’ my father told me, ‘the Grand Duchesses push each other with their elbows and whisper: “Papa is sad today. We must cheer him up.” And so they proceed to do. They begin to laugh, to tell funny stories, and, in a few minutes, His Majesty begins to smile.’46

  The girls’ engaging warmth extended to their friendly relations with the soldiers of the guard, particularly those of the 1st and 4th regiments. ‘The Grand-Duchesses, with that simplicity which was their charm, loved to talk to these men’, observed Gilliard. It was easy to understand why; the soldiers seemed, to the sisters, ‘to be linked with the past in the same way as themselves. They questioned them about their families, their villages, or the battles in which they had taken part in the Great War.’47 Nicholas and Alexey meanwhile had grown so close to the men of the 4th that they often went to the guardhouse in the evening to sit and talk with them and play draughts.

  Klavdiya Bitner, the most recent addition to the entourage, soon came to her own very clear perception of the five children during the last months of their lives. She had no doubt that it was the brisk and efficient Tatiana who was the absolute linchpin at the Governor’s House: ‘if the family had lost Alexandra Feodorovna, then its protector would have been Tatiana Nikolaevna’.

  She had inherited her mother’s nature. She had many of her mother’s features: strength of character, a tendency to keeping life in order, and an awareness of her duty. She took charge of organizing things in the house. She watched over Alexey Nikolaevich. She always walked with the emperor in the yard. She was the closest person to the empress. They were two friends … She loved running the household. Loved doing embroidery and ironing the linen.48

  But there was also a trait in Tatiana’s personality that she shared with her father – and that was her absolute, crippling reticence. Her ability to keep her feelings bottled up and privy to no one became even more marked during the final months of captivity. Nobody ever penetrated that intense reserve; ‘It was impossible to guess her thoughts,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘even if she was more decided in her opinions than her sisters.’49

  Klavdiya Bitner found the gentle and soft-hearted Olga, who in so many ways was Tatiana’s opposite, so much easier to love, for she had inherited her father’s warm, disarming charm. Unlike Tatiana, Olga hated being organized and loathed housework. With her love of books and her preference for solitude, it seemed to Klavdiya that ‘she understood the situation considerably more than the rest of the family and was aware of how dangerous it was’. There was an air of sadness about Olga that suggested to Klavdiya – much as it had done for Valentina Chebotareva – some kind of hidden unhappiness or disappointment. ‘There were times when she smiled when you would sense that the smile was all on the surface, and that deep down inside her soul, she was not smiling, but sad.’50 Olga’s finely tuned nature clearly predisposed her to a sense of impending tragedy, accentuated by her love of poetry and her increasing concentration, in her reading, on religious texts. She withdrew ever more into herself, listening to the many church bells ring across Tobolsk and writing to friends about the beauty of the extraordinarily clear night skies and the astonishing brilliance of the moon and stars.51

  Some time that winter Olga wrote to a family friend, Sergey Bekhteev (the brother of Zinaida Tolstaya), who was himself a budding poet and had published his first collection in 1916. Bekhteev had sent some of his verse to the family in captivity and in response Nicholas had asked Olga to write and thank him. This surviving fragment, more than anything else that has come down to us, sums up both Olga’s mood and that of her father in those final months:

  Father asks me to tell all who have remained loyal to him and those over whom they might have an influence, that they should not avenge him, for he has forgiven everyone and prays for them all; that they should not themselves seek revenge; that they should remember that the evil there now is in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil that will conquer evil – only love.*52

  Bekhteev later took this letter as the inspiration for a composition of his own that echoes these sentiments and which begins, ‘Father asks us to tell everyone, there is no need to weep and murmur / The days of sufferings are sent us all / For our great general sin’.53

  Of all the Romanov sisters, sweet, accommodating Maria remained the most self-effacing, her consistently loving and stoical personality inviting the least amount of comment or criticism. Everyone, including the guards and even Commissar Pankratov, adored her. For Klavdiya Bitner, Maria was the archetypal, wholesome Russian girl: ‘kind hearted, cheerful, with an even temper, and friendly’.54 In contrast, Anastasia, whom she found ‘uncouth’, never seduced Klavdiya. The constant playfulness and challenge to authority in the classroom soon began to grate: ‘She wasn’t serious about anything.’ But worse, in Klavdiya’s opinion, was the way that Anastasia ‘always took advantage of Maria’.55 ‘They were both behind in their l
essons’, she recalled, an opinion that reinforced Pankratov’s view. ‘Neither of them could write essays and [they] had not been trained how to express their thoughts.’ Anastasia was ‘still an absolute child and you had to treat her as you would a child’. Sydney Gibbes tended to agree; the youngest Romanov sister’s social development, in his opinion, had been arrested and he thought her the ‘only ungraceful member of the family’.56

  Others of course saw Anastasia’s irrepressible personality quite differently; she was the family’s ‘cheer-leader’ who kept everyone’s spirits up with her high energy and mimicry.57 She certainly could be very juvenile at times and Dr Botkin had been shocked at her sexually precocious ‘shady anecdotes’ and wondered where she had collected them.58 She had a penchant too for drawing ‘dirty’ pictures and making the occasional outrageous comment. But all in all, at Tobolsk, her ‘gay and boisterous temperament proved of immeasurable value to the rest of the family’, for when she chose to, ‘Anastasia could dispel anybody’s gloom’.59 But now, even she was often overcome with an intense sadness, thinking about their hospital and those who had died: ‘I suppose there’s no one now to visit the graves of our wounded,’ she wrote to Katya, ‘they’ve all left Tsarskoe Selo’; but she kept a postcard of Feodorovsky Gorodok on the writing table because ‘the time we spent at the hospital was so terribly good’. She was pining for news of Katya and her brother Viktor. ‘I have not received letters nos. 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29 – all these letters that you wrote to this address’, she complained plaintively, suggesting Katya address them to Anna Demidova instead as ‘letters to her are of less interest to these people’. ‘It’s awful to think of how long we have not seen you … If God allows, we will see each other some time, and it will be possible to tell you a lot of things, both sad and funny, and in general, how we live.’ But, she added, ‘I will not write about it of course.’60

  Perhaps Anastasia’s madcap behaviour was in fact indicative of a ‘heroic effort’, as Gleb Botkin saw it, a way of helping the family ‘stay cheerful and keep their spirits up’, her relentless offensive being, in its own way, a form of self-protection.61 She was without doubt the star of the show in a series of playlets, in French and English, staged by Gibbes and Gilliard during the final three weeks of January and last two of February. The biggest hit was Packing Up – ‘a very vulgar but also very funny farce by Harry Grattan’ in which Anastasia played the male lead, Mr Chugwater, and Maria his wife.62 During her energetic performance on 4 February the dressing gown Anastasia was wearing flew up, exposing her sturdy legs encased in her father’s Jaeger long johns. Everyone ‘collapsed in uncontrolled laughter’ – even Alexandra, who rarely laughed out loud. It was, remembered Gibbes, ‘the last heartily unrestrained laughter the Empress ever enjoyed’. The play had been so ‘awfully amusing & really well and funnily given’ in Alexandra’s estimation, that a repeat performance was demanded.63

  Despite Anastasia’s attention-grabbing performances, it was Alexey who won Klavdiya Bitner’s heart at Tobolsk. ‘I loved him more than the others,’ she later admitted, though he seemed to her subdued and terribly bored. Although he was very behind in his education and read badly, she found him ‘a good, kind boy … intelligent, observant, receptive, very gentle, cheerful, ebullient’. Like Anastasia, he was by nature ‘very capable but a little lazy’. But he was an extremely quick learner, hated lies and had inherited his father’s simplicity. Klavdiya admired the patience with which Alexey endured his condition. ‘He wanted to be well and hoped this would be so’, and he often asked her, ‘Do you think this will go?’64 At Tobolsk he continued to defy the limitations placed on him and threw himself enthusiastically into vigorous games with Kolya Derevenko using home-made wooden daggers and guns. In early January the boys helped Nicholas and the other men build a snow mountain out in the courtyard. Once the snow was piled up Gilliard and Dolgorukov began carting out bucket after bucket of water to pour over it and make it icily smooth. ‘The children are sledging their hearts out on a snow mountain and taking the most amazing falls’, Alexandra wrote to a friend. ‘It’s a wonder they haven’t broken their necks. They’re all covered with bruises, but even so, this is the only distraction they have, either that or sit at the window.’65 Alexey inevitably banged himself but it was, ironically, Pierre Gilliard who was the snow mountain’s first real casualty; he twisted his ankle badly and was laid up for several days.66 Shortly afterwards Maria, too, took a tumble and ended up with a black eye.

  While most of the entourage tried hard to enjoy the distractions of the snow mountain, and sneak a look over the fence from its summit, anxieties about the deteriorating situation in the country at large frequently bubbled to the surface. ‘Everything they are doing to our poor country is so painful and sad,’ Tatiana wrote to Rita Khitrovo, ‘but there is one hope – that God will not abandon it and will teach these madmen a lesson.’67 Trina Schneider was profoundly depressed. Whenever she received news from outside, she admitted that it reduced her to a state of despair. ‘I don’t read the papers any more, even if they manage to get here,’ she told PVP, ‘it’s become so awful. What kind of times are these – everyone does what they want … If you only knew my frame of mind. No hopes at all – none … I don’t believe in a better future, because I won’t live to see it – it’s too far off.’68 Meanwhile, the only aspiration that Alexandra clung to, as she told a friend, was ‘to achieve the possibility of living tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigue’.69

  On 14 February – the first official day of the changeover to the New Style, Gregorian calendar* – Alexandra noted despondently how ‘many of the nicest soldiers left’.70 Their favourite guards in the Special Detachment, the 4th Rifles – good troop soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted at the outbreak of war – were sent away and replaced by the new breed of revolutionary Red Guards; Pankratov too was removed from his post as commissar responsible for the imperial family. On the 24th, the family clambered onto the top of the snow mountain to get the best view, as three more large groups of the Rifles marched away. Of the 350 men who had accompanied them from Tsarskoe Selo, only around 150 remained.71 The new revolutionary guards were far more threatening: ‘One can never predict how they are going to behave’, remarked Tatiana. These guards had been incensed when the family climbed up and made themselves visible above the level of the fence, in so doing exposing themselves to possible pot shots, for which the guards might be held responsible.72 They promptly voted to remove the snow mountain (by hacking a trench through the middle), though some who took part in its destruction did so, as Gilliard noticed, ‘with a hang-dog look (for they felt it was a mean task)’. The children were, inevitably, utterly ‘disconsolate’.73

  Soon the new guards held another meeting and another vote – that none of them should wear epaulettes, thereby putting everyone on the new, socialist, level playing field. For Nicholas the soldier this was the ultimate dishonour; he refused to comply, opting instead to wear a coat to conceal his own when among the guards outside. But the change in regime brought further unwelcome news. Kobylinsky, who remained in nominal charge of the Governor’s House, received a telegram informing him that Lenin’s new government was no longer prepared to pay the family’s living expenses beyond 600 roubles a month per person, in other words a total for the seven members of the family of 4,200 roubles a month.74 Alexandra spent several days going through all the household accounts with Gilliard. They had for some time been running up considerable credit with the shopkeepers of Tobolsk and could no longer sustain such a large household. There was nothing for it – they would have to let ten servants go. This caused the family considerable distress, as many of those servants had brought their families to join them and, as Gilliard rightly noted, their devotion to the imperial family in following them to Tobolsk would ‘reduce them to beggary’.75 In the end, several insisted on staying, for no pay.

  From 1 March, in addition to the tightening of the budget, everyone was p
ut on rations, just like the rest of the country. Nicholas Romanov, ‘ex-emperor’, of Freedom Street, with six dependants, was issued with ration card no. 54 for flour, butter and sugar.76 Coffee (which Alexandra depended upon) was now virtually unobtainable. But once again, gifts of food began to arrive ‘from various kind people who have heard about our need to economize on our outgoings for food’, wrote Nicholas; he found the generosity of the donors ‘so touching!’77 In response Alexandra painted little icons on paper to send as gifts of thanks. A few days later one of Nicholas’s old staff members at Mogilev arrived in Tobolsk with a gift of 25,000 roubles from monarchist friends in Petrograd, as well as books and tea.78 But it was not just food rationing that hit everyone hard; they could not replace their increasingly threadbare clothes. By March Alexandra was grateful for any parcels of clothing from Anna Vyrubova that reached them: warm jumpers and jackets for the last of the chill weather, blouses and hats for the spring, and a military suit, vest and trousers for Alexey. From Odessa Zinaida Tolstaya sent a wonderful parcel of perfume, sweets, crayons, albums, icons and books, although several others she sent never arrived.79

  Everyone drew further in on themselves as the strictures of Lent approached. Alexandra and the girls were practising their singing of the Orthodox liturgy, for they could not afford to pay the choristers any more. It was hard listening to the sound, outside on the street, of the festivities for Maslenitsa – Butter Week – one of the most joyful festivals in the Russian Orthodox calendar. ‘Everyone is merry. The sledges pass to and fro under our windows; sound of bells, mouth-organs, and singing’, wrote Gilliard. Alexey proudly noted in his diary on the 16th that he had eaten sixteen bliny at lunch before the onset of Lent, when everyone fasted for the first week. They were all looking forward to the church services to come. ‘We hope to do our devotions next week if we are allowed to do so’, Alexandra told Lili Dehn: