The Romanov Sisters

by Helen Rappaport

  Anastasia’s seventeenth birthday – 18 June – was a very hot day when again there were no celebrations and the girls spent the time learning another new practical skill – how to knead, roll and bake bread with Kharitonov.15 Soon they were helping him more and more in the kitchen in an effort to dissipate their crushing sense of boredom. But it was unbearably airless indoors and even Alexandra preferred to be outside when her health allowed. Evenings now were one interminable game of bezique after another and rereading the few books left to them. Tatiana seemed always to be doing the lion’s share of looking after her mother and Alexey; her nursing skills were also called on when Dr Botkin suffered a severe attack of kidney pain and she gave him an injection from the family’s precious supply of morphine.16 Olga was now terribly thin and pale, and at Ekaterinburg had become ever more withdrawn and morose. One of the guards, Alexey Kabanov, remembered her visible unhappiness, how she hardly talked and was ‘uncommunicative with the other members of her family apart from her father’ – with whom she always walked arm in arm during recreation in the garden.17 But she did not spend as much time there as her three other sisters, who all seemed to him far more cheerful and animated, often breaking into folk songs when they walked round with the dogs. Maria, so strong and stoical, seemed still the most rounded and unaffected, ‘the incarnation of “modesty elevated by suffering”’, as one guard recalled, remembering a poem by Tyutchev.18 At first – much as at Tobolsk – the younger sisters had been keen to engage with their captors, asked them about their lives and their families and showed them their photograph albums. They were dreadfully bored, they told them: ‘We were so much happier in Tobolsk.’19 But the arrival of a new and exacting commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, put paid to any more such fraternization.

  The weather was positively ‘tropical’ according to Nicholas on Maria’s 19th birthday on 27 June.20 Four days previously the family had been comforted by ‘the great blessing of a real Obednitsa and vespers’ – when a priest and deacon had been allowed in to conduct the first service for the family in three months.21 But they were two of only a handful of people to see them in these new and very straitened circumstances. Those on the outside trying to look in could only guess at what Russia’s former imperial family was having to endure at the hands of its intimidating Bolshevik captors.

  * * *

  During the final eight weeks of the Romanov family’s captivity many people – the curious, the covert, the foolhardy – and even royal relatives such as the intrepid Princess Helena – made their way up Voznesensky Prospekt to the Ipatiev House, to try and catch a glimpse of them. But none was admitted, bar Dr Derevenko, who was staying in town and had been allowed in to treat Alexey and put his swollen knee in plaster.

  Local children were rather more adventurous. They often came near and tried to peep through the palisades surrounding the house. One sunny day soon after the family’s arrival, nine-year-old Anatole Portnoff came out of the Voznesensky Sobor opposite after morning service and ran across the road to take a look. He found a gap in the paling and peeped through and there, standing directly in front of him, so he later claimed, he saw Tsar Nicholas ‘taking a walk about the grounds’. But a sentry soon came rushing up, ‘unceremoniously grabbed him by his coat and told him to be on his way’.22

  Vladimir and Dimitri Storozhev, sons of a priest at the Ekaterininsky Sobor, were more persistent, for their home was next door to the Ipatiev House and they managed to communicate ‘by gestures and talking over the fence with the girls of the imperial family’.23 Eleven-year-old Vladimir loved flying his kite from their roof, from which vantage point he could often ‘see the tsar’s children playing in Upatiev’s [sic] yard, and the tsar himself would come out once a day and split wood for an hour or so’.24 But the Storozhev family was fearful of the intimidating Red Guards who watched over the Romanovs and who often went out summarily searching nearby houses and arresting people at will. Their father had made the family all sleep in one room, by the door, ‘so if someone comes in and starts shooting, we will all be together’.25

  It was Father Ivan Storozhev who was one of the last people from the outside to see the imperial family alive, at a service he conducted in the house at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 14 July. Guards from the Ipatiev House had banged on his door early that morning. Father Storozhev thought they had come for him, but no, they wanted him to go next door to conduct a service for the family. ‘Just stick strictly to what the service is all about’, they warned. ‘We don’t believe in God now, but we remember what the service, the funeral service, is all about. So, nothing but the service. Don’t try to communicate or anything or else we’ll shoot.’26

  Having climbed the stairs past young guards bristling with weapons, Storozhev found the family gathered in their sitting room, a table for the service specially prepared by Alexandra featuring their favourite icon of the Most Holy Mother of God. The girls were simply dressed in black skirts and white blouses; their hair, he noticed, had grown quite a lot since his previous visit on 2 June, and was now down to their shoulders.

  During the service, the whole family had seemed to Storozhev to be greatly oppressed in spirit – there was a terrible weariness about them, quite markedly different from his previous visit, when they had all been animated and had prayed fervently.27 He came away shaken to the core by what he had seen. The Romanovs had, uncharacteristically, all fallen to their knees when his deacon, Buimirov, had sung rather than recited ‘At Rest with the Saints’ – the Russian Orthodox prayer for the departed.* It seemed to give them great spiritual comfort, he noted, though for once they had not joined in the responses to the liturgy, something they would normally have done.28 At the end of the service they had all come forward to kiss the cross and Nicholas and Alexandra had taken the sacrament. Covertly, as Storozhev passed them to leave, the girls softly whispered a thank-you. ‘I knew, from the way they conducted themselves,’ Father Storozhev later recalled, ‘that something fearful and menacing was almost upon the Imperial Family.’29

  The following morning the family appeared to have regained their equilibrium when four women, sent by the officious-sounding Union of Professional Housemaids, came to wash the floors. Perhaps the women’s presence alone – as ordinary people from the world outside – brightened their mood. The Romanovs seemed relaxed, gathered together in the sitting room, and smiled when the women entered. They were strictly forbidden to speak to them, but by an exchange of looks and smiles it was clear that the four sisters were only too happy to help the women move the beds in their room; they would have helped them wash the floors too if they could. One of the women, Evdokiya Semenova, remembered their sweet, friendly manner and how ‘every gentle look was a gift’.30 Although Yurovsky had ordered that the door to their room be kept open the girls managed to chat, sotto voce, with the women as they worked, and when his back was turned, Anastasia with typical irreverence cocked a snook at him. They told the women how much they missed having any physical work, although Olga was suffering with her health and could not do much. But Maria in particular was as vigorous as ever. ‘We would do the most arduous work with the greatest pleasure; washing dishes is not enough for us’, they said.31 The women were greatly moved by the girls’ quiet acceptance of their situation and told them that they hoped they would not have to endure such suffering for much longer. They thanked the women. Yes, they still had hope, they said; there was still a sparkle in their kind eyes.

  After the women left at lunchtime the family settled back into their quiet routine, reading, playing cards, walking the same small, dusty circuit in the garden. But in the early hours of the morning of Wednesday 17 July, they were unexpectedly awoken by their captors and ordered to dress. Told that they were being moved downstairs for their safety from unrest and artillery fire in the city, they complied without question. In an orderly line Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children, Dr Botkin and their three loyal servants Demidova, Trupp and Kharitonov, walked quietly down the wooden stairs from their apartme
nts, across the courtyard and into a dingy basement room. As they went, there were ‘no tears, no sobs and no questions’.32

  Later that morning, young Vladimir Storozhev recalled, ‘I was on the roof flying my kite, when Father called me down and told me they had been shot. It was July seventeenth, I remember, and very hot.’33

  Many weeks later, on 16 August, one of the last affectionate postcards, sent during the first week of Lent by Olga to a friend in Kiev, like so many others written by the four sisters that were never delivered, finally arrived back in Petrograd bearing an official stamp: ‘Returned due to military circumstances.’34

  Epilogue

  VICTIMS OF REPRESSIONS

  On the day of their arrival in Ekaterinburg, the seventeen remaining members of the entourage who had accompanied the children were left to sit for several hours on their train while it was shunted back and forth before finally coming to a halt. Later, Gibbes and Gilliard saw the footman Volkov, Kharitonov the cook, Trupp the valet and the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev taken off and put in droshkies which took them to join the family at the Ipatiev House. Ilya Tatishchev, Nastenka Hendrikova and Trina Schneider were taken away next; Tatishchev to the Ipatiev House, but Trina and Nastenka were transported to Perm with the footman Volkov. Here they languished in prison until, on 4 September, the Cheka came for them and they were taken out with a group of hostages, and shot. Their bodies, at least, were soon recovered, by the Whites, the following May.1

  Ilya Tatishchev and Vasili Dolgorukov were removed from the Ipatiev House not long after their arrival there and taken to prison where they too were shot, on 10 July 1918; their bodies were never found. En route to a similar death in Perm in September Volkov, by a miracle, managed to escape being shot with Trina and Nastenka; he survived to tell his story and died in exile in Estonia in 1929.2 Before leaving the Alexander Palace, Anna Demidova had sent her things home to Cherepovets in anticipation of returning there after seeing the imperial family safely off to exile somewhere. During the Stalinist years, her family was forced, out of fear, to destroy most of the valuable photographs and documents she entrusted to them. But her diary, discovered in the Ipatiev House, survives in GARF, the State Archives in Moscow.3 The rest of the servants who had loyally volunteered to go with the family to the Ipatiev House, like Anna, shared their violent fate, their bodies dumped in the same mass grave in the Koptyaki Forest outside Ekaterinburg. The little kitchen boy Leonid Sednev escaped the carnage, having been taken from the house the day before. He was sent back to his family in Kaluga. But the tentacles of Stalinist repression finally caught up with him and he was arrested and shot by the NKVD in 1941 or 1942.

  On 23 May Sydney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard had been left sitting on the train at Ekaterinburg with Iza Buxhoeveden and Alexandra Tegleva and some of the other former servants in a state of growing apprehension until Rodionov finally reappeared at 5 p.m. and told them they were free. The train would, however, be their home for the best part of the next month, for they were obliged to live on it while waiting for permits to leave the city. During that time Gibbes and Gilliard walked past the Ipatiev House on numerous occasions and made repeated visits to the English consul Thomas Preston, who lived nearby, to find out what was being done to help the imperial family; but Preston’s requests to be granted access to them were also consistently refused. On one occasion, when approaching the house, Gilliard and Gibbes happened to catch sight of the valet Ivan Sednev (Leonid’s uncle) and Alexey’s dyadka Nagorny being brought out of the front door. Soon afterwards, the Ekaterinburg Cheka shot both of them.

  On 26 May the group on the train was finally ordered back to Tobolsk but en route was stranded at Tyumen – now under martial law and besieged by a huge wave of refugees fleeing the fighting along the Trans-Siberian Railway.4 It was here, their money running out and short of food, that they finally had news in July of the murder of the tsar, though at the time nothing was said about the fate of Alexandra and the children. When Ekaterinburg fell to the Whites on 25 July, Gibbes and Gilliard returned to the city and made their way back to the Ipatiev House. The interior had been stripped of its furnishings, though a great deal of small personal belongings of the family had been left strewn around the rooms and Gibbes rescued a few things, including the Italian glass chandelier from the grand duchesses’ bedroom. They saw the dim and grimy basement room where the family had been killed and found it ‘sinister beyond expression’.5

  Finally, in February 1919, Gilliard, Gibbes, Tegleva and Buxhoeveden made their way east to Omsk, where Gilliard joined the French Military Mission. He, Tegleva and Gibbes subsequently gave evidence to the Sokolov Commission set up by Alexander Kolchak, leader of the White forces, at the end of July 1918 to investigate the murder of the family, as too did Klavdiya Bitner, Kobylinsky, Pankratov and many others. Gilliard and Tegleva eventually travelled on to Switzerland via Japan and the USA and were married in Geneva in 1922. Gilliard went back to teaching French, as a professor at Lausanne University. In 1923 he published an account of his time in Russia: Thirteen Years at the Russian Court. He died in 1962.

  In Omsk in 1919 Sydney Gibbes joined the British Military Mission, and later left Russia for Harbin, where he worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs for many years. In April 1934, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was ordained as a priest. On his return to England in 1937 he settled in Oxford, where he founded his own religious community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker. After his death in 1963 the community went into decline, but it is now thriving, and has its own church in Headington, Oxford.

  From Omsk, Iza Buxhoeveden travelled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Manchuria and on to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, from where she took a boat to the USA and eventually made her way to Europe. She lived for a while in Denmark and then in Germany before accepting a post in England as lady-in-waiting to Alexandra’s sister Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven. She lived in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court till her death in 1956, and wrote three memoirs of her time with the Imperial Family.6

  Elizaveta Naryshkina, who was seventy-nine when the Romanovs left Tsarskoe Selo, eventually told her story to the Austrian writer René Fülöp-Miller, in Moscow some time in the 1920s. Published in 1931, Under Three Tsars is, however, a heavily edited version of her wonderful and extremely valuable diaries for the last year at Tsarskoe Selo. These survive in GARF and are extensively quoted in Nicholas and Alexandra’s diaries for 1917–18 that were published in Russia in 2008. Naryshkina eventually emigrated to Paris, dying in the Russian Emigrants’ Home in Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois in 1928.

  Klavdiya Bitner later married Evgeny Kobylinsky and they settled in Rybinsk in central Russia, where they had a son, Innokenty. Here in 1927 Kobylinsky was arrested for supposed ‘counter-revolutionary activities’; he was held in the much-feared Butyrki Prison near Moscow, where he was probably tortured before being shot that December. Klavdiya did not escape; in September 1937 she too was arrested. Two weeks later she was taken to the Butovo Poligon, a favourite killing ground of the NKVD during the Great Terror, located in woodland 15 miles (24 km) outside Moscow. Here she was shot and her body thrown into a mass grave – just one of 21,000 victims of the purges who were dumped there during 1937–8. The Kobylinskys’ orphaned son was abandoned; his fate is unknown.

  During the terrible anarchy that raged in Ekaterinburg after the murder of the Romanovs, and under threat of being taken hostage by the Cheka, Father Ivan Storozhev fled the city. He and others dug a hole in the cellar of a convent and walled themselves in with a supply of food until the Czech Legion and the Whites liberated the city.7 From there he joined the White Army as a chaplain and with his family fled to Harbin in China. Storozhev served as a respected priest at St Nicholas’s Russian Orthodox Church in Harbin and taught religion in the town’s commercial school, becoming a leading member of the émigré community by the time of his death in 1927.8

  Of the Romanov sisters’ closest friends from the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo,
Rita Khitrovo managed to get her precious papers, including her letters from Olga and Tatiana, to safe-keeping in Paris. She emigrated to Yugoslavia and then to the USA, dying in New York in 1952; her papers have recently been donated to GARF. Dr Vera Gedroits settled in Kiev where she continued to work and teach, becoming chair of the faculty of surgery at the Kiev Medical Institute. She died of cancer in 1932. After the annexe hospital was closed in late 1917, Valentina Chebotareva continued to work as a nurse in military hospitals. She died of typhus in Novocherkassk in south-western Russia on 6 May 1919. Her son Gregory emigrated to the USA, ensuring the survival of his mother’s diary and letters, which form a key testimony of the Romanov sisters during the war years at Tsarskoe Selo.

  After the revolution, Anastasia’s friend and confidante Katya Zborovskaya had gone south, back to the family’s original home in the Kuban, where she worked as a nurse in a TB hospital. Her brother Viktor fought on with former members of the Tsar’s Escort on the side of the Whites in southern Russia, before he was wounded again in 1920. He was evacuated to Lemnos with his family and settled in Yugoslavia. Katya had been sick and unable to travel with the family at the time they left, but she had had the foresight to entrust to them her precious letters and postcards from Anastasia and other mementoes of the Romanovs, which the family took with them into exile. Viktor died in 1944, but his widow and her daughter eventually settled in California where they have since placed Anastasia’s letters to Katya in safe-keeping with the Hoover Institution Archives.