The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  I am already looking forward to those beautiful services – such a longing to pray in church … Nature is beautiful, everything is shining and brilliantly lighted up … We cannot complain, we have got everything, we live well, thanks to the touching kindness of the people, who in secret send us bread, fish, pies, etc.… We too have to understand through it all that God is greater than everything and that He wants to draw us, through our sufferings, closer to Him … But my country – my God – how I love it, with all the power of my being, and her sufferings give me actual physical pain.80

  On 20, 22 and 23 March the household were allowed to attend church for the first time in two months, at which they were able to hear the choir sing ‘our favourite, familiar hymns’.81 It was ‘such a joy and a consolation’, wrote Alexandra. ‘Praying at home is not the same thing at all.’82 But Lent was also, inevitably, a time of sad reflection. Nicholas’s mind went back to his abdication the previous year; his last farewell to his mother at Mogilev; the day he arrived back at Tsarksoe Selo. ‘One remembers this past difficult year unwillingly! But what yet awaits us all? It’s all in God’s hands. All our hopes are in him alone.’83 Having powered his way through most of Leskov, Tolstoy and Lermontov, he was now rereading the Bible from start to finish. Day after day he blanked out his thoughts chopping wood and loading it into the woodshed, the children helping him and revelling in being out in the glorious spring sunshine. But in truth life within the Governor’s House had become deadening beyond belief. The children found captivity ‘irksome’, noted Gilliard. ‘They walk round the courtyard, fenced in by its high paling through which they can see nothing.’84 Lack of exercise was worrying Anastasia: ‘I haven’t quite turned into an elephant yet,’ she told her aunt Xenia, ‘but may do so in the near future. I really don’t know why it’s suddenly happened; maybe it’s from too little exercise, I don’t know.’85

  The children were still bitterly disappointed by the ‘stupid’ action of the guards in wrecking the snow mountain, but tried their best to find consolation in the most prosaic of outdoor tasks. ‘We have found new things to do: we saw, chop and split wood – it’s useful and very jolly work … we’re helping a lot … clearing the paths and the entrance.’ Anastasia was proud of their physical labours: ‘we have turned into real yardmen’; events of the last traumatic year had taught her and her sisters to take pleasure in the smallest of practical achievements.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THEY KNEW IT WAS THE END WHEN I WAS WITH THEM

  After the arrival of the new guards, and with it a distinct hardening in attitude towards the imperial family, everyone in the entourage had become increasingly fearful for their safety. Rowdy and undisciplined elements were making their presence felt in town too. Russia was descending into civil war and the breakdown in law and order had finally reached Tobolsk. ‘How much longer will our unfortunate motherland be tormented and torn apart by internal and external enemies?’ Nicholas wondered in his diary. His despondency increased with news that Lenin’s government had signed the Brest–Litovsk Treaty with Germany; his abdication, for the sake of Russia, had, he felt, been in vain. ‘It sometimes seems as though there’s no strength left to endure, that you don’t even know what to hope for, what to wish for’, he confided in his diary.1

  By mid-March ‘all kinds of rumours and fears’ were stirred up at the Governor’s House by the arrival in Tobolsk from Omsk of a detachment of Bolshevik Red Guards, who promptly began imposing their demands on the local government. They were closely followed by even more militant groups from Tyumen and Ekaterinburg, who roamed the town, terrorizing the inhabitants with threats of hostage-taking (a favourite occupation of Bolshevik hardliners) and agitating to take control of the Romanovs and remove them from Tobolsk.2 In response, Kobylinsky doubled the guard at the Governor’s House and increased the patrols round it. But nothing could dispel the palpable sense of danger, which fed into an already fatalistic attitude among many in the entourage. ‘I have come here knowing quite well that I shall not escape with my life’, Tatishchev told Gleb Botkin. ‘All I ask is to be permitted to die with my Emperor.’3 Nastenka Hendrikova was equally gloomy and had said openly to Iza Buxhoeveden that ‘she had a premonition that all our days were numbered’.4

  For a while, earlier in the year and before the changeover in the guard, escape had seemed a very real possibility to Pierre Gilliard – given the obvious sympathies of Kobylinsky and the more relaxed attitude then of most of his men. Gilliard felt that a rescue could have been effected, with the help of a group of dedicated monarchist officers. But Nicholas and Alexandra had both been adamant that they would not contemplate any ‘rescue’ that involved the family being separated ‘or leaving Russian territory’.5 To do so, as Alexandra explained, would be for them to break their ‘last link with the past, which would then be dead for ever’. ‘The atmosphere around us is fairly electrified. We feel that a storm is approaching,’ she told Anna Vyrubova at the end of March, ‘but we know that God is merciful, and will take care of us.’ She did, however, admit that ‘things are growing very anguishing’.6

  At the end of March the greater part of everyone’s anguish was once more focused on Alexey, who had been confined to bed with a bad cough. The strain of his violent coughing had provoked a haemorrhage in his groin, which soon brought excruciating pain of the kind he had not experienced since 1912. Over at the Kornilov House, Iza Buxhoeveden encountered a deeply despondent Dr Derevenko just back from visiting the boy. ‘He looked very gloomy and said that [Alexey’s] kidneys were affected by the haemorrhage, and in that God-forsaken town none of the remedies he needed could be got. “I fear he will not pull through,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes full of anxiety.’ The terrible shadow of Spala haunted the Governor’s House for many days, as Alexey’s temperature rose and bouts of agonizing pain led him to confess to his mother at one point: ‘I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death.’ Death itself had no hold over him for his fears were elsewhere. ‘I’m so afraid of what they may do to us here.’7

  Alexandra hovered at her son’s bed, as she had always done, trying to soothe him, watching him become ‘thin and yellow’ and ‘with enormous eyes’ – just as at Spala.8 Their footman Alexey Volkov felt that this attack was, if anything, worse than the earlier incident, for this time both Alexey’s legs were affected. ‘He suffered terribly, wept and cried out, calling for his mother all the time.’ Alexandra’s anguish at his suffering and her own impotence was terrible. ‘She grieved … like she had never grieved before … she just could not cope and she wept as she had never wept before.’9 Hour after hour she sat ‘holding his aching legs’ because Alexey could lie only on his back, while Tatiana and Gilliard took it in turns to massage them with the Fohn apparatus they often used to keep his blood circulating.10 But Alexey’s nights were extremely restless, interrupted by bouts of severe pain. It was not until 19 April that Dr Derevenko noted hopeful signs that the ‘resorption’ (of the blood from the swelling into his body) was ‘going well’, although Alexey was still very frail and in a great deal of discomfort.11

  * * *

  During Alexey’s latest crisis an order had come on 12 April that, for security reasons, all those at the Kornilov House – except for the two doctors, Botkin and Derevenko and their families – must move into the Governor’s House. The house was already overcrowded, but by partitioning off some of the rooms with screens and doubling up, everyone managed, without too much grumbling, to squeeze into the ground floor, in order to ‘avoid intruding upon the privacy of the Imperial Family’ upstairs.12 The exception was Sydney Gibbes, who refused point-blank to share with Gilliard, with whom he did not get on. Together with his toothless old maid Anfisa, Gibbes was allowed to lodge in a hastily converted stone outbuilding near the kitchen – in smelling distance of the pig-swill.13 From now on, only the doctors were free to move back and forth; the rest of the entourage were no longer allowed into town and were, effectively, under house arrest.
<
br />   Two weeks later news came that a high-ranking political commissar from Moscow, Vasily Yakovlev, had arrived in Tobolsk to take charge of the family. ‘Everyone is restless and distraught’, wrote Gilliard. ‘The commissar’s arrival is felt to be an evil portent, vague but real.’14 Anticipating an inspection and search of their things, Alexandra immediately set about burning her recent letters, as did the girls; Maria and Anastasia even burned their diaries.15 Yakovlev, it soon turned out, had arrived with 150 new Red Guards and instructions to remove the family to an unspecified location. But when he and his deputy Avdeev arrived at the house it was clear that ‘the yellow-complexioned, haggard boy seemed to be passing away’.16 Alexey was far too unwell to be moved, Kobylinsky argued in alarm; Yakovlev agreed to defer the family’s departure, only to be countermanded by Lenin’s Central Committee, which ordered him to remove the former tsar without delay. Nicholas refused point-blank to travel alone to an undisclosed destination. When Yakovlev conceded that he could bring a travelling companion – either that or be taken by force – Alexandra was faced with the most agonizing of decisions. Aghast at the thought of what might happen to her husband if taken to Moscow (visions of a trial by a French-Revolutionary-style tribunal), she went through hours of mental torment, trying to decide what to do for the best. Her maid Mariya Tutelberg tried to comfort her but Alexandra said:

  Don’t make my pain worse, Tudels. This is a most difficult moment for me. You know what my son means to me. And I now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life – or my death – with my husband.17

  It was clear to the four sisters that their mother could not travel without one of them to support her. Olga’s health was still poor and she was needed to help nurse Alexey. Tatiana must take over the running of the household; even Gibbes asserted that she was ‘now looked upon as the head of the Family in the place of the Grand Duchess Olga’.18 After discussing it among themselves, the girls agreed that Maria should accompany their mother and father, leaving court jester Anastasia to ‘cheer all up’.19 The hope was that in about three weeks’ time, when Alexey was stronger, they would be able to join their parents.

  Nicholas and Alexandra spent most of that afternoon sitting by Alexey’s bed while the most essential items for their journey were packed. Tatiana asked Yakovlev where they would be taken – was her father to be put on trial in Moscow? Yakovlev dismissed the idea, insisting that from Moscow her parents ‘would be taken to Petrograd, and from there out through Finland to Sweden and then Norway’.20 That last evening everyone sat down to dinner, at a properly laid table complete with menu cards, just as they had always done. ‘We spent the evening in grief’, Nicholas confided to his diary, Alexandra and the girls frequently weeping. Alexandra’s stoicism completely gave way as she faced the prospect of leaving the son she had watched over so obsessively for the last thirteen years. Later, when everyone sat down together to take tea before bed, she appeared composed. They all ‘did their best to hide [their] grief and to maintain outward calm’, wrote Gilliard. ‘We felt that for one to give way would cause all to break down.’ ‘It was the most mournful and depressing party I ever attended,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘there was not much talking and no pretence at gaiety. It was solemn and tragic, a fit prelude to an inescapable tragedy.’21 Many years later he insisted, ‘They knew it was the end when I was with them’; that evening, though the words remained resolutely unspoken, everyone had a clear sense of what might lie ahead.22

  Nicholas retained his outward steely calm to the very end, but ‘to leave the rest of the children and Alexey – sick as he was and in such circumstances – was more than difficult’, he admitted in his diary and ‘of course, no one slept that night’.23 At 4 a.m. the following morning, 26 April, Nicholas ‘had a handshake and a word for everyone and we all kissed the Empress’s hand’, recalled Gibbes, before, wrapped in long Persian lamb coats, Alexandra and Maria accompanied him out to the waiting tarantasses.*24

  ‘When they left it was still dark,’ recalled Gibbes, but he ran for his camera, and ‘by a lengthy exposure I succeeded in getting a picture of the Empress’ tarantas – though it was impossible to take one of the departure.’25 The sisters sobbed as they kissed goodbye; but it was the timorous maid Anna Demidova who was travelling with the tsaritsa (along with Dr Botkin, Dolgorukov and servants Terenty Chemodurov and Ivan Sednev), who had been the one finally to voice everyone’s innermost anxiety. ‘I am so frightened of the Bolsheviks, Mr Gibbes. I don’t know what they will do to us.’ Her fright as the mournful row of carriages and their escort of mounted Red Army guards drove away into the cold grey dawn was ‘pitiable to see’.26

  From her window at the Kornilov House, Tatiana Botkina watched them go:

  The carriages passed the house at breakneck speed, swerved round the corner, and disappeared. I cast a glance at the Governor’s residence. Three figures in grey stood on the steps for a long time yet, watching the distant ribbon of the road; then they turned and slowly walked back into the house.27

  * * *

  After the departure – destination unknown – of Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria ‘a sadness like death invaded the house’, as the valet Volkov remembered. ‘Before, there had always been a certain liveliness, but after the departure of the imperial couple, silence and desolation overwhelmed us.’28 ‘The feeling was noticed even in the soldiers’, Kobylinsky noted.29 Olga ‘wept terribly’ when her mother and father left but she and her sisters kept themselves busy and their minds distracted fulfilling an urgent task entrusted them by Alexandra.30 Although many of Alexandra’s large pieces of jewellery had already been smuggled out for safe-keeping at the Abalaksky or Ivanovsky monasteries, from where they were to be used by monarchist sympathizers to raise funds for a possible escape (the money never arrived), the girls had recently been helping Anna Demidova and the maids Mariya Tutelberg and Elizaveta Ersberg ‘dispose of the medicines as agreed’.31 This was Alexandra’s code for the concealment of pearls, diamonds, brooches and necklaces in the family’s clothes, undergarments and hats, with larger stones being disguised under cloth buttons. With their departure perhaps only three weeks away the women frantically worked to complete the task in time, supervised by Tatiana, who despite advice to leave the jewels in safe-keeping in Tobolsk had insisted on following her mother’s instructions to the letter.32 With Alexey still sick there was no thought of lessons. Everyone was too preoccupied with keeping him amused and raising his morale, as he ‘toss[ed] and moan[ed] on his bed of pain, always sighing for his mother, who couldn’t come’.33

  Although word that the family was safe came from one of the drivers who had taken them as far as Tyumen, it was several days before any letters arrived. Because the rivers were still ice-bound the party was having to travel overland and the roads were terrible – ‘horses up to their chests in water crossing rivers. Wheels broken several times’, as Maria later reported.34 On the 29th the first letter arrived, written at their first overnight stopover at Ievlevo. ‘Mother’s heart is hurting very much as a consequence of the awful road to Tyumen – they had to travel over 200 versts [140 miles/225 km] by horses along a horrible road’, Tatiana wrote to a friend.35 The journey improved thereafter, and Alexandra sent a telegram: ‘Travelling in comfort. How is the boy? God be with you.’36 They were now on a train but still did not know where they were headed. ‘Darling, you must know how dreadful it all is’, Olga wrote to Anna Vyrubova as they waited for news.37 But it was not till 3 May – a week since their parents’ departure – that the children finally learned, by telegram, that Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria were now not in Moscow – as they had all imagined – but in Ekaterinburg, a town in the Western Urals, 354 miles (570 km) south-west of Tobolsk. The three girls and their brother now could do nothing but wait out the long anxious days till they could join them there.

  The girls kept themselves busy, taking it in turns to read and play games with Alexey, wh
o was making a very slow recovery. If the weather was fine they took him outside in the wheelchair. In the evenings Olga sat with him when he said his prayers; afterwards the girls joined Nastenka in her room rather than sit upstairs on their own, and then went to bed early. ‘Mama, dear soul, how we miss you! In every, every way. It is so empty’, Olga wrote to Alexandra in a long letter spread over several days. ‘Every now and then I go into your room and then I feel as though you are there and that is so comforting.’ Easter was approaching and they were doing their best to prepare for it, though this was the first time, as a family, that they had ever been separated during this the most important festival in the Russian Orthodox calendar. ‘Today, there was an enormous religious procession with banners, icons, numbers of clergy and a crowd of faithful. It was so beautiful with the glorious sunshine and all the church bells ringing.’38 Zinaida Tolstaya had sent painted Easter eggs, a cake and some jam, and an embroidered napkin for Alexandra. But Good Friday brought wind and rain and a temperature barely above zero. ‘It is terrible not to be together and not to know how you really are, for we are told so many different things’, wrote Olga.39 But together the girls had decorated their field chapel, arranging branches of velvety, scented pine on either side of the iconostasis – its smell reminding them of Christmas – and bringing pots of flowers and plants from the greenhouse (though they were struggling to keep the three dogs out in case of their trying to ‘water’ the pots). ‘We would so like to know how you have celebrated this Feast of Light and what you are doing,’ Olga continued on Easter Sunday, ‘the Midnight Liturgy and Vigil went very well. It was beautiful and intimate. All the side lamps were lit, but not the chandelier, it was light enough.’ That morning they had greeted the staff and handed out Easter eggs and little icons, just as their mother had always done; and they had eaten the traditional kulich and pashka.40