The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  When a letter finally came from Maria, briefly describing their new environment at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, it was deeply disconcerting: ‘We miss our quiet and peaceful life in Tobolsk’, she wrote. ‘Here there are unpleasant surprises every day.’41 Their own Easter had been extremely modest: food was brought from the communal canteen in town and many of their belongings were in a terrible state, dusty and dirty from the bumpy journey. There was a poignant postscript for Anastasia from Nicholas: ‘I am lonesome without you, my dear. I miss you pulling funny faces at the table.’42

  The three sisters were intensely relieved when the letters from Ekaterinburg finally began to arrive. Alexandra and Maria wrote daily but many of the twenty-two or so letters that they sent never reached Tobolsk. ‘It was truly dreadful to be without news all that time’, Tatiana wrote on 7 May:

  We see from the window that the Irtych [sic] is calm here. Tomorrow we expect the first steamer from Tioumen [sic]. Our pigs have been sold, but there is still the sow which had six piglets … Yesterday we ate our poor turkey, so now there is only his wife … It is deadly boring in the garden. No sooner are we out there than we are looking at our watches to see when we can go back inside … We suffer a great deal in our souls for you, my darlings; our only hope is in God and our consolation in prayer.43

  Even the resolute Tatiana was finding it hard to keep going: ‘I am so afraid of losing courage,’ she told her father, ‘I pray a lot for you … May the Lord God guard you, save you, protect you from all evil. Your daughter Tatiana who loves you passionately for ever and ever.’44

  With the ice melting, the Irtysh was in full flood and the boats began to sail to Tyumen once more. The girls could hear their sirens in the distance and hopes lifted that they would soon be able to travel.45 At Ekaterinburg Maria was eagerly anticipating their arrival. ‘Who knows, perhaps this letter will reach you just before you leave. God bless your journey and keep you safe from all harm … Tender thoughts and prayers surround you – all that matters is to be together again soon.’46

  Being reunited was the one and only preoccupation of all the letters sent between Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg in those final, intervening days – along with messages of love. ‘How are you surviving and what are you doing?’ asked Olga, in what would be her last letter from Tobolsk. ‘How I would love to be with you. We still do not know when we shall leave … May Our Lord protect you, my dear beloved Mama and all of you. I kiss Papa, you and M. many times over. I clasp you in my arms and love you. Your Olga.’47

  ‘It is difficult to write anything pleasant,’ Maria wrote in a letter to Alexey, ‘for there is little of that kind here.’ Her optimism, however, remained undimmed. ‘But on the other hand God does not abandon us, the sun shines and the birds sing. This morning we heard the dawn chorus.’48 The reality of their new surroundings was, however, grim. They no longer enjoyed any of the small privileges they had been granted at Tobolsk and were under constant, and close, surveillance. Letters now had to be addressed c/o The Chairman, The Regional Executive Committee, Ekaterinburg.49

  Of the three sisters left behind at Tobolsk it was the sixteen-year-old Anastasia who through it all retained an undimmed sense of joy in the shrinking world around them. Writing to Maria about their mundane daily routine, she told her:

  We take turns having breakfast with Alexey and make him eat, although there are days when he eats without needing to be told. You are in our thoughts all the time, dear ones. It is terribly sad and empty; I really don’t know what comes over me. We have the baptismal crosses of course and we received your news. So God helps and will help us. We arranged the iconostasis beautifully for Easter, all with spruce, which is how they do it here, and flowers too. We took pictures, I hope they come out … We swung on the swing, and how I laughed when I fell off, what a landing, honestly!… I have a whole wagonload of things to tell you … We’ve had such weather! I could shout out loud at how good it is. Strange to say, I’ve got more sunburned than the others, a real Arrrab [sic]!…

  We’re sitting together right now, as always, but we miss your presence in the room … I’m sorry this is such a jumbled letter, but you know how my thoughts fly around and I can’t write it all down, so throw in whatever comes into my head. I want to see you so much, it’s terribly sad. I go out and walk, and then come back. It’s boring inside or out. I swung; the sun came out but it was cold, and my hand can hardly write.50

  She and her sisters had done their best to sing the liturgy during the Easter service, Anastasia told Maria, but ‘whenever we sing together it doesn’t come out right because we need that fourth voice. But you’re not here and so we make a joke about it … We constantly think and pray for everyone: Lord help us! Christ be with you, precious ones. I kiss you, my good, fat Mashka. Your Shvybz.’51

  * * *

  On 17 May the most intimidating band of Red Guards yet arrived at the Governor’s House, this time from Ekaterinburg, led by a man named Rodionov. They were ‘the most frightful-looking, dirty, ragged, drunken cut-throats’ Gleb Botkin had ever seen. Rodionov was in fact a Latvian named Yan Svikke and from the first nobody liked him. Kobylinsky thought him cruel, ‘a low bully’.52 Cold and suspicious by nature, Rodionov was constantly on the watch for conspiracy: he ordered a humiliating daily roll-call and the girls had to ask his permission to come downstairs from their room and go out into the yard. They were ordered not to shut the door to their room at night and when the priest and nuns came on 18 May to conduct vespers Rodionov had them searched and posted a sentry right by the altar to watch them during the ceremony.53 Kobylinsky was appalled: ‘This so oppressed everyone, had such an effect on them that Olga Nikolaevna wept and said that if she had known that this would happen she would never have asked for a service.’54

  Alexey was still extremely frail and barely able to sit up for more than an hour or so at a time. Nevertheless, within three days of arriving, Rodionov decided the boy was well enough to travel. For several days now the staff had been preparing for their departure. ‘The rooms are empty, little by little everything’s being packed away. The walls look bare without the pictures’, Alexey wrote to his mother.55 Anything not to be taken was to be ‘disposed of’ in town – if it wasn’t looted by the guards first. Most of the entourage prepared to leave with the children. Dr Botkin’s daughter Tatiana begged for her and her brother to be allowed to go with the sisters but was refused. ‘Why should such a handsome girl as you are want to rot all her life in prison, or even be shot?’ Rodionov sneered. ‘In all probability they will be shot.’ He was equally callous when he told Alexandra Tegleva about what was in store: ‘Life down there is very different.’56 The day before the children left, Gleb Botkin went up to the Governor’s House to try and catch a last glimpse of them. He saw Anastasia at a window; she waved and smiled, upon which Rodionov came rushing out telling him no one was permitted to look at the windows and that the guards would shoot to kill if anyone tried.57

  On their last day in Tobolsk the household gathered together for farewell meals of borshch and hazel hen with rice for lunch and veal with garnish and macaroni for dinner, washed down with the last two bottles of wine that they had managed to keep hidden from the guards.58 At 11.30 the following morning, 20 May 1918, the children were taken to the landing stage and once more boarded the Rus, where, to their great joy, they were greeted by Iza Buxhoeveden. Olga told her that they were ‘lucky to be still alive and able to see their parents once more, whatever the future might bring’.59 But Iza was shocked by the change in her, and in Alexey too – both of whom she had not seen close-to since the previous August:

  He was terribly thin and could not walk, as his knee had got quite stiff from lying with it bent for so long. He was very pale and his large dark eyes seemed still larger in the small narrow face. Olga Nicolaevna had also greatly changed. The suspense and anxiety of her parents’ absence … had changed the lovely, bright girl of twenty-two into a faded and sad middle-aged woman.60

  The
children seemed to think that Iza’s being allowed to rejoin them ‘heralded further small concessions’ from their Bolshevik captors.61 But this was far from the case. Constant intimidation and humiliation followed on the two-day river journey to Tyumen. The guards were rude and boorish and they frightened everyone. Rodionov’s behaviour was callous; he locked Alexey and Nagorny in their cabin at night, despite Nagorny remonstrating that the sick boy needed access to the toilet. Rodionov also insisted that the three sisters and their female companions keep their cabin doors open at all times, even with the guards standing immediately out-side. None of the women undressed at night, during which they had to endure the noise of the rowdy guards drinking and making obscene comments outside their open doors.62

  On arrival at Tyumen the children were transferred to a dirty, third-class carriage on a nearby waiting train, where, much to their distress, they were separated from Gilliard, Gibbes, Buxhoeveden and the others, who were put into a goods wagon with crude wooden benches. Some time after midnight on 23 May, the train finally drew to a halt at a suburban freight station on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg. It was cold and frosty and they were all left there to shiver, chilled to the marrow, till morning. Eventually Rodionov and a couple of commissars came for the children.63 But neither Gibbes, nor Gilliard, nor Iza Buxhoeveden was allowed to go any further. Tatishchev, Nastenka and Trina were also refused, as too were all the other staff except for Nagorny. ‘Tatiana Nicolaevna tried to take the matter lightly’, as Iza kissed her goodbye. ‘What is the use of all these leave-takings?’ she asked. ‘We shall all rejoice in each other’s company in half an hour’s time!’, Tatiana had said reassuringly. But, as Iza later recalled, one of the guards came up to her just then and, with an ominous voice, said, ‘Better say “Good-bye”, citizenness’, and ‘in his sinister face I read that this was a real parting’.64

  Pierre Gilliard watched from the train as the four children were brought out: ‘Nagorny the sailor … passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms; behind him came the Grand Duchesses, loaded with valises and small personal belongings.’ They were surrounded by an escort of commissars in leather jackets and armed militiamen. He tried to get out of the train to say goodbye, but ‘was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry’. He watched in dismay as Tatiana trailed along last in the freezing rain, struggling to carry her heavy suitcase while holding her dog Ortipo under her other arm, as her shoes sank into the mud. Nagorny, who had meanwhile lifted Alexey into one of the waiting one-horse droshkies, turned to offer assistance but the guards pushed him away.65

  A local Ekaterinburg engineer who was at the station that morning, having been tipped off that the children were due to arrive, had stood there in the downpour hoping to see them. Suddenly he caught sight of ‘three young women, dressed in pretty, dark suits with large fabric buttons’.

  They walked unsteadily, or rather unevenly. I decided that this was because each one was carrying a very heavy suitcase and also because the surface of the road had become squelchy from the incessant spring rain. Having to walk, for the first time in their lives, with such heavy luggage was beyond their physical strength … They passed by very close and very slowly. I stared at their lively, young, expressive faces somewhat indiscreetly – and during those two or three minutes I learned something that I will not forget till my dying day. It felt that my eyes met those of the three unfortunate young women just for a moment and that when they did I reached into the depths of their martyred souls, as it were, and I was overwhelmed by pity for them – me, a confirmed revolutionary. Without expecting it, I sensed that we Russian intellectuals, we who claim to be the precursors and the voice of conscience, were responsible for the undignified ridicule to which the Grand Duchesses were subjected … We do not have the right to forget, nor to forgive ourselves for our passivity and failure to do something for them.66

  As the three young women passed him, the engineer was struck by how

  everything was painted on those young, nervous faces: the joy of seeing their parents again, the pride of oppressed young women forced to hide their mental anguish from hostile strangers, and, finally, perhaps, a premonition of imminent death … Olga, with the eyes of a gazelle, reminded me of a sad young girl from a Turgenev novel. Tatiana gave the impression of a haughty patrician with an air of pride in the way she looked at you. Anastasia seemed like a frightened, terrified child, who could, in different circumstances, be charming, light-hearted and affectionate.67

  That engineer was, forever after, haunted by those faces. He felt – indeed he hoped – ‘that the three young girls, momentarily at least, sensed that what was imprinted on my face wasn’t simply a cold curiosity and indifference towards them’. His natural human instincts had made him want to reach out and acknowledge them, but ‘to my great shame, I held back out of weakness of character, thinking of my position, of my family’.68

  From the window of their train Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes had craned their necks to catch a last sight of the girls as they got into the waiting droshkies. ‘As soon as they were all in, an order was given, and the horses moved off at a trot with their escort.’69

  It was the last any of those who had loved, served and lived with the four Romanov sisters since their childhood ever saw of them.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  PRISONERS OF THE URAL REGIONAL SOVIET

  There was still snow on the ground in Ekaterinburg that morning in late May when the children arrived at the Ipatiev House from Tobolsk. Nicholas and Alexandra had only had a few hours’ warning of their arrival and despite their joy at being reunited with them, had only to look at their faces to know that ‘the poor things had had to endure a great deal of moral anguish during their three-day journey’.1

  After four weeks of painful and uncertain separation the four Romanov sisters were intensely happy to be together again. Their campbeds were yet to be sent on from Tobolsk, but they happily slept together on the floor in their new room on an accumulation of cloaks and cushions until the beds arrived.2 But the reunion was soon marred when, when, much to his parents’ intense frustration, Alexey managed to slip and bang his knee. Nicholas and Alexandra put him to bed in their room, where he lay for several days in agony; it was 5 June before he was able to join the others outside in the garden.

  Two huge wooden palisades surrounded the Ipatiev House, ominously designated ‘the house of special purpose’ by their Bolshevik captors. They were so high that, from inside the house, the Romanovs could not even see the tops of the trees.3 What little was visible of the blue sky above had been obliterated in mid-May when the windows in all the family’s rooms were painted with whitewash, creating what seemed like a blanket of fog outside.4

  It was dreadfully cramped and stuffy inside the first-floor rooms that served as the Romanovs’ new accommodation. For this was in no way a home – but a prison – and it was abundantly clear to everyone that they would have to endure a rigorous regime here quite different from those at Tobolsk or the Alexander Palace.5 There were armed guards everywhere: on the street, inside and outside the palisades surrounding the house, on the roof, in the garden. Guards also manned machine-gun nests in the basement, the mansard, the garden and even the belfry of the Voznesensky Sobor across the road. An announcement in the Uralskaya zhizn by Bolshevik War Commissar Filipp Goloshchekin, in overall charge of the family’s incarceration in the city, had made the hardening of the official attitude towards the former imperial family all too plain:

  All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest attempt at counterrevolutionary action in the town will result in the summary execution of the hostages.6

  The days had been monotonous enough in Tobolsk but at Ekaterinburg the pace of life was slowed to an intolerable tedium. No papers were delivered and no letters. One solitary parcel, of a few eggs, coffee and chocolate, had been received from Grand Duchess Ella on 16 May; but she too was now a prisoner, at Alapaevsk 95 miles (153 km) away to the north.7 With no
letters allowed in or out the girls were deprived of the one thing that had kept them going all this time – contact with their friends. Visitors, of course, were forbidden. The imperial family was cast adrift; they had ‘no news of anybody’, as Alexandra noted in her diary.8

  Outdoor recreation at Ekaterinburg was restricted to a mournful little garden with a few stubby trees that was even smaller than the one at Tobolsk. But as always Nicholas and the girls made the most of every opportunity to get outside during their two brief daily exercise periods, and the girls sometimes swung in a couple of hammocks put up between the trees for them by the guards. Alexey, when he was well enough, was carried down, often by Maria, and sat in their mother’s wheelchair. But during recreation periods one of the sisters always remained indoors with Mama, who with the temperature rising into the mid 20s C (high 70s F) rarely ventured out. Yet even these brief snatches of summer were enough, as Nicholas noted, for them to catch the wonderful scent of flowers ‘from all the gardens in the town’ that was heavy on the air, even if they could not see them beyond the palisade.9 The unsealing of one small window in their rooms on 10 June to allow in a refreshing breeze was a major concession in the otherwise dreary regularity of their highly constrained lives. It was punctuated by regular acts of humiliation from the guards, such as searches of their belongings, confiscation of their money and attempts to remove even Alexandra’s and the girls’ gold bracelets from their wrists. Tatiana and Maria’s request that their confiscated cameras be returned to them so that they could at least amuse themselves with photography was also refused.10

  The month of June brought several family birthdays beginning with Alexandra’s 46th on the 6th; it passed unnoticed, Nicholas in bed with painful haemorrhoids and Alexey also indoors for most of the day, despite the beautiful weather.11 Tatiana’s 21st followed on 11 June but was a very modest day for such an auspicious stage in her life, the highlight being the surprise treat of fruit compote at lunch prepared by Kharitonov. There were of course no presents; Tatiana spent the day reading to her mother: extracts from Alex-andra’s favourite book, the Complete Yearly Cycle of Brief Homilies for Each Day of the Year by an Orthodox priest, Grigory Dyachenko.12 Later she played cards with Alexey and read to him and before bed enjoyed the prosaic novelty of helping her sisters wash everyone’s pocket-handkerchiefs.13 Poor Anna Demidova had been struggling single-handedly with all the family’s personal washing (the bed linen still being sent out to a laundry) and the sisters had happily volunteered to help, as they did with darning everyone’s worn-out socks, stockings and underwear.14