The Romanov Sisters
Page 50
25. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, p. 129.
26. Rasputin, Real Rasputin, p. 103.
27. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 155; W. B., Russian Court Memoirs, p. 159.
28. Ofrosimova, ‘Tsarskaya semya’, p. 146.
29. Ibid.
30. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, p. 75.
31. Kleinmikhel, Shipwrecked World, pp. 216–17, 327; Buchanan, Dissolution of an Empire, p. 125. See also Rowley, ‘Monarchy and the Mundane’.
32. Kleinmikhel, Shipwrecked World, p. 217.
33. Bokhanov, Aleksandra Feodorovna, p. 275.
34. Kleinmikhel, Shipwrecked World, p. 217.
35. SA, p. 251.
36. See SA, pp. 812–13.
37. ASM, p. 22.
38. Ibid., p. 23.
39. See ASM, Anastasia’s letter to Nicholas, 26 August 1916, p. 124. For Maria see e.g. ASM, pp. 44, 49. Alexandra, who seemed to condone her daughter’s crush on Demenkov, called him ‘Marie’s fat fellow’; see WC, p. 335.
40. Vyrubova, Memories, p. 4; LP, p. 407.
41. ASM, p. 34.
42. SA, p. 271.
43. See de Malama, ‘The Romanovs’.
44. ASM, p. 32.
45. Ibid., p. 33; de Malama, ‘The Romanovs’, p. 185.
46. LP, p. 404; ASM, p. 136.
47. Ibid., p. 41.
48. Ibid., p. 5; Vyrubova, however, talks of ‘85 hospitals’ at Tsarskoe Selo, Memories, p. 108.
49. Gibbes, untitled TS memoir, Gibbes Papers, Bodleian, f. 9.
50. Brewster, Anastasia’s Album, p. 46.
Fifteen – We Cannot Drop Our Work in the Hospitals
1. NZ 181, pp. 180–1. Note that the bulk of this entry referring to Rasputin has been redacted in the version of Chebotareva’s diary in SA, p. 295.
2. De Jonge, Life and Times of Rasputin, p. 248.
3. Letter to Evelyn Moore, 26 December 1914 (8 January 1915), in E. Marjorie Moore (ed.), Adventure in the Royal Navy 1847–1934: Life and Letters of Admiral Sir Arthur William Moore (Liverpool: privately printed, 1964), pp. 121–2. The admiral’s sister Evelyn Moore was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, whom Alexandra had known before her marriage.
4. WC, p. 112. See footnote p. 251.
5. LP, pp. 431–2.
6. ASM, pp. 99–100.
7. WC, p. 28.
8. WC, pp. 237–8.
9. WC, pp. 122, 130.
10. Letter to Olga Voronova, 2 June 1915, accessible @: http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/tdiaries.html
11. ASM, p. 111.
12. SA, p. 311.
13. Ibid., p. 315.
14. Popov, Vospominaniya, p. 131.
15. SA, p. 315.
16. Ibid.; Popov, Vospominaniya, 133.
17. Quote accessible @: http://saltkrakan.livejournal.com/658.html. See also Popov, Vospominaniya, p. 133.
18. SA, p. 311.
19. Ibid., pp. 298, 300.
20. ASM, p. 122; WC, p. 181.
21. Anon. [Stopford], Russian Diary, p. 37.
22. WC, p. 261.
23. Anon. [Stopford], Russian Diary, p. 37.
24. See Shavelsky, Vospominaniya poslednego protopresverita russkoi armii i flota, vol. I, pp. 360–2.
25. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, pp. 210, 212.
26. Newton A. McCully, An American Naval Diplomat in Revolutionary Russia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), p. 98.
27. Vyrubova, Memories, p. 143.
28. See Galushkin, Sobstvennyi ego … konvoy, pp. 199–202 for an account of OTMA at Stavka.
29. See e.g. the photographs in Michael of Greece and Maylunas, Nicholas and Alexandra, pp. 215–21 and Grabbe and Grabbe, Private World, pp. 152–8. SA, p. 302; see also WC, p. 279.
30. SA, p. 302; see also WC, p. 279.
31. Vyrubova, Memories, p. 109.
32. WC, p. 279.
33. ASM, p. 145.
34. NZ 181, pp. 206–7.
35. SA, p. 305.
36. NZ 181, p. 206.
37. Nikolay, p. 285.
38. Ibid.
39. Vyrubova, Memories, p. 170.
40. NZ, p. 207.
41. Ibid., p. 208.
42. ASM, p. 151.
Sixteen – The Outside Life
1. Stanislav Kon, The Cost of the War to Russia (London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), p. 33.
2. Reproduced in Argus, Melbourne, 23 February 1916.
3. Logansport Journal-Tribune, 2 January 1916; New York Times, 25 September 1916.
4. For the work of the Tatiana Committee, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 44–7 and Violetta Thurstan, The People Who Run: Being the Tragedy of the Refugees in Russia (London: Putnam, 1916), which has much information on the Petrograd maternity hospital.
5. Atlanta Constitution, Magazine Section, 14 November 1915.
6. Fraser, Russia of To-Day, pp. 24–5.
7. WC, p. 366.
8. Fraser, Russia of To-Day, p. 26.
9. Richard Washburn Child, Potential Russia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916), p. 76.
10. SA, p. 337.
11. WC, p. 361; see also WC, p. 366 re her taking opium.
12. Ibid., p. 381.
13. SA, p. 336.
14. Daily Gleaner, 4 August 1915.
15. NZ 181, pp. 210–11.
16. ASM, p. 157.
17. SA, p. 338.
18. NZ 181, p. 211.
19. ASM, p. 156.
20. Farson, ‘Aux Pieds’, p. 16. Harmer, Forgotten Hospital, pp. 73–5; diary of L. C . Pocock 19 January/1 February 1916, in G. M. and L. C. Pocock Papers, IWM. For photographs see Stolitsa i usadba, no. 54, 15 March 1916, p. 9; also Ogonek, no. 3, 31 January 1916.
21. Farson, ‘Au Pieds’, p. 17.
22. Buchanan, Queen Victoria’s Relations, p. 218.
23. WC, p. 486.
24. Markylie, ‘L’Impératrice en voile blanc’, p. 17.
25. SA, p. 337.
26. WC, p. 404.
27. WC, pp. 369–70; note that this quotation has been wrongly identified by Furhmann as alluding to Olga Alexandrovna, Nicholas’s sister, but that attribution is clearly erroneous, given the context.
28. WC, p. 388.
29. Ibid., p. 356.
30. WC, p. 421. Although he is not mentioned again by Alexandra in WC after March 1916, Malama apparently remained at Tsarskoe Selo till the Revolution, after which he returned to southern Russia. In August 1919 he was in command of a unit of White Army troops fighting the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine when he was captured, and executed soon after by firing squad. Although some sources claim he was killed in battle, according to Peter de Malama, Mitya’s body was recovered and buried with full military honours at Krasnodar. See de Malama, ‘The Romanovs’.
31. SA, p. 339.
32. WC, p. 450.
33. Nikolay, p. 239; ASM, p. 107 and see note on p. 439.
34. ASM, pp. 162–3.
35. Ibid., p. 163.
36. WC, p. 412.
37. Ibid., pp. 432, 413.
38. ASM, p. 178.
39. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 238.
40. ASM, p. 179.
41. Boris Ravtopulo had developed a strong admiration for Tatiana since first seeing her photographs. As a young officer, taking part in the Tercentary celebrations in St Petersburg in 1913, he was at the ball attended by the two sisters before Tatiana fell ill with typhoid and he had breached etiquette and asked her to dance. He took the liberty of asking her a second time, at the risk of being rejected. Afterwards, he took her back to her seat, kissed her hand, and promised, so he later claimed, that he would ‘never again dance a single dance with anyone else from here to the grave’. He kept his promise for sixteen years, before finally marrying in 1929. See web site accessible @: http://saltkrakan.livejournal.com/2520.html
42. See ASM, pp. 179, 181, 182, 186.
43. SA, p. 412.
44. ASM, p. 180.
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45. WC, p. 472.
46. See ASM, pp. 185–6.
47. NZ 181, p. 231.
48. ASM, p. 186.
49. WC, p. 482.
50. Ibid., p. 590.
51. Ibid., p. 500.
52. Letter to Rita Khitrovo from Stavka, July 1916; Hoover Tarsaidze Papers, Box 16, Folder 5. This original transcript has some gaps. The quotation can be found in full in Galushkin, Sobstvennyi ego … konvoy, pp. 241–2.
53. Dassel, Grossfürstin Anastasia Lebt, p. 16. Felix Dassel later became embroiled in the fraudulent claim of Anna Anderson aka Franziska Szankowska that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, miraculously escaped from death at the Ipatiev House. Dassel published his memories of the hospital at Feodorovsky Gorodok five months before he met Anna Anderson in 1927; see King and Wilson, Resurrection, pp. 166–7, 303.
54. Ibid., pp. 19, 22.
55. NZ 181, p. 223.
56. Dassel, Grossfürstin Anastasia Lebt, pp. 20, 25.
57. Geraschinevsky, ‘Ill-Fated Children of the Czar’, p. 159.
58. Ibid., p. 171.
59. Ibid., p. 160.
60. Ibid.
61. WC, p. 556.
62. See ibid. Prior to the war Alexander Funk had worked with the St Petersburg photographer Karl Bulla, but at the time of this photographic session appears to have moved mainly into war photography.
63. Foster Fraser, ‘Side Shows in Armageddon’, pp. 268–9; see also Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 507.
64. Foster Fraser, ‘Side Shows in Armageddon’, pp. 268–9.
65. ASM, p. 217.
66. Ibid., p. 220. Some weeks later she received a telegram from him, from Mozdoka in northern Ossetiya in the Caucasus. She saw him briefly on 22 December 1916 (see ASM, p. 237), but did not mention him again, except for noting his birthday on 9 February 1917. A fellow officer at the annexe heard he was later made commander of a hospital train (see SA, p. 220). Nothing more is known of Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, other than a possible sighting in the autumn of 1920 when the Red Army was on the brink of victory in Zakavkaz, when one of the Ezid resistance groups based in Echmiadzin was commanded by an officer named Shakh-Bagov. This may well have been Dmitri, who, like David Iedigarov, may have been a Georgian Muslim. For photographs and a résumé of what is known of Olga’s Mitya, see web site @: http://saltkrakan.livejournal.com/658.html
67. WC, p. 636.
68. Galushkin, Sobstvennyi ego … konvoy, p. 197.
69. Bokhanov et al., Romanovs, p. 268.
70. Ibid., p. 228.
71. Ibid., p. 233.
72. WC, p. 660.
73. Ibid., p. 681.
74. ASM, p. 233; see also WC, p. 670. Staritsa Mariya died in January 1917, and was later canonized.
75. WC, p. 670.
76. Vyrubova, Memories, p. 148; Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 223.
77. WC, p. 670.
78. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 223.
79. Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, pp. 541, 677.
80. Ibid., p. 676.
81. Almedingen, Empress Alexandra, p. 92.
82. SA, p. 349.
83. Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 731.
84. Ibid., p. 680.
Seventeen – Terrible Things Are Going on in St Petersburg
1. ASM, p. 236. Although Anastasia later destroyed her diaries this appears to be a rare survival, perhaps in a notebook.
2. Ibid.
3. WC, p. 684.
4. Ibid., p. 651.
5. Fuhrmann, Rasputin, ch. 11, p. 112.
6. Ibid., p. 140.
7. Ibid., p. 228. ‘Dark Forces’ became the code name for Rasputin used by British agents.
8. Eugene de Savitsch, In Search of Complications: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), pp. 15 and 16.
9. ASM, p. 236.
10. A. A. Mordvinov, quoted in LP, p. 507.
11. WC, p. 68; Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 740.
12. Dorothy Seymour, MS diary, 26 December (NS) 1916; Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 74. Dorothy Nina Seymour was the well-connected daughter of a lord and granddaughter of an admiral of the fleet. Prior to volunteering as a VAD, she had been a woman of the bedchamber to Queen Victoria’s daughter, Helena – Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein – herself a great patron of women’s wartime nursing. Dorothy left Petrograd on 24 March (NS) 1917 and in December that year married General Sir Henry Cholmondely Jackson. She died in 1953. Her vivid and engaging diary from November 1914 to May 1919 is in the IWM, as are 49 letters written during the same period – though few of these are from Petrograd because of the difficulties in sending mail from Russia during the war and revolution.
13. It is still unclear who fired the fourth bullet into Rasputin’s skull. Recent studies have claimed that Oswald Rayner and Stephen Alley – agents of the British Special Intelligence Mission in Petrograd – played a role in the murder. It has also now been suggested that wounds on Rasputin’s corpse indicate that he was tortured before being killed, in an attempt to ascertain whether he had indeed been a German spy – an act in which the British agents might well have participated. The Special Intelligence Mission was certainly privy to the plot and its members had their own good reasons to back any conspiracy to kill Rasputin or at least remove him from his position of influence over the empress.
14. There is an enormous amount of literature on Rasputin and the circumstances of his murder, much of it contradictory, some of it contentious. The most recent books include: Fuhrman, Rasputin (2012); Moe, Prelude (2011), see ch. IX, ‘Death in a Cellar’; and Margarita Nelipa’s extensive study The Murder of Grigorii Rasputin (2010), which contains detailed police and forensic evidence. For British involvement see Richard Cullen, Rasputin: The Role of the British Secret Service in his Torture and Murder (London: Dialogue, 2010) and Andrew Cook, To Kill Rasputin (Stroud, Glos: History Press, 2006).
15. Dorothy Seymour, MS diary, 30 December 1916.
16. ASM, p. 237.
17. Vyrubova, Memories, pp. 182–3; Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, pp. 122–3. Rasputin did not rest in peace for long. Shortly after the revolution his corpse was dug up and taken into Petrograd and burnt. Recent evidence suggests that it was cremated in the boiler room of the Polytechnic Institute in the northern suburbs of Petrograd and the ashes scattered by the roadside. See Nelipa, Murder of Rasputin, pp. 459–60.
18. Oleg Platonov, Rasputin i ‘deti dyavola’ (Moscow: Algoritm, 2005), p. 351.
19. Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 735; NZ 181, p. 208. Dorothy Seymour, MS diary, 6 January NS/24 December OS, IWM.
20. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, p. 183.
21. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, p. 121.
22. Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, pp. 137–8.
23. NZ 182, p. 207.
24. Spiridovich, Les Dernières années, vol. 2, p. 453.
25. Ibid., p. 452; Buchanan, Queen Victoria’s Relations, p. 220.
26. This 158-page notebook kept between 1905 and 1916 survives in the Russian State Archives, GARF 651 1 110.
27. Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 739.
28. Botkin, Real Romanovs, p. 127.
29. ASM, p. 239
30. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, p. 183.
31. In their later memoirs both Iza Buxhoeveden and Anna Vyrubova said that this visit took place in the autumn of 1916, but it was recorded in Alexandra and Nicholas’s diaries and comments relating to Maria’s mishap clearly date it to 8 January 1917. See Dnevniki I, p. 46.
32. NZ 182, p. 204.
33. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 235; NZ 181, p. 204.
34. NZ 182, p. 205.
35. Naryshkina diary, quoted in Dnevniki I, p. 50; Vyrubova, Memories, p. 86. Note that the manuscript of the Naryshkina diary, an extremely valuable eyewitness account of the imperial family’s last months at Tsarskoe Selo, is held in the state archives in Moscow, at GARF f. 6501.op.1.D.595.
36. Naryshkina diary, quoted in Dnevniki
I p. 96.
37. Queen Marie of Romania diary, 12/26 January 1917. Romanian State Archives. My thanks to Tessa Dunlop for alerting me to this.
38. Letter to her mother and sister, 1 December 1916, IWM.
39. 17 December (4 December OS), letter to mother and sister.
40. Dorothy Seymour, MS diary, 4 February (NS) 1917, IWM.
41. Ibid.
42. See Dnevniki I, pp. 134, 139; Savchenko, Russkaya devushka, p. 43.
43. Alexander, Once a Grand Duke, pp. 282–3.
44. Dnevniki I, p. 166.
45. Ibid., p. 171; ASM, p. 241.
46. See web site @: http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/mdiaries.html
47. WC, p. 691.
48. Zinaida Gippius, Sinyaya kniga: Peterburgskiy dnevnik 1914–1918 (Belgrade: Radenkovicha, 1929), p. 39.
49. Almedingen, Empress Alexandra, p. 190.
50. WC, p. 692; see also Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, pp. 129–30.
51. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 251.
52. WC, pp. 694, 695.
53. Naryshkina, Under Three Tsars, pp. 217, 212.
54. NZ 182, p. 211; see also pp. 210–12, Dnevniki I, p. 193.
55. Dnevniki I, p. 200; Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 267.
56. Zeepvat, ‘Valet’s Story’, p. 329.
57. Dnevniki I, p. 206
58. Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter, p. 146.
59. Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, p. 155.
60. Ibid., p. 152; see also Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 254, re the night of 28 February.
61. NZ 182, p. 213.
62. Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, p. 156.
63. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 255. See also Dnevniki I, p. 223; Galushkin, Sobstevennyi ego … konvoy, p. 262.
64. Ibid., p. 265. For a valuable account of the Tsar’s Escort at the Alexander Palace during the early days of the revolution and the key role of Viktor Zborovsky at that time, see ibid., pp. 262–80.
65. Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, p. 184.
66. Ibid., pp. 151–2.
67. Ibid., pp. 157–8.
68. Ibid., p. 158.
69. Naryshkina diary, quoted in Dnevniki I, p. 232.
70. Buxhoeveden, Life and Tragedy, p. 254; Benkendorf, Last Days, pp. 6–7.
71. Dehn, Real Tsaritsa, p. 160; WC, p. 698.
72. WC, p. 700.
73. Naryshkina diary, quoted in Dnevniki I, p. 253.
74. Dnevniki I, p. 253.