The Romanov Sisters
Page 58
Nicholas’s wartime visits
nursery staff
Olga’s first birthday
preparations for departure
Rasputin’s visits
Revolution
security
soldiers at
troop numbers
troops mutiny
Tutelberg, Mariya (Tudels/Toodles)
Tyutchev, Feodor
Tyutcheva, Sofya (Savanna)
background
chaperone
character
dismissal
Gibbes’ appointment
gossiping about Rasputin
moral concerns
relationship with Alexandra
relationship with Olga
role
Stolypin’s assassination
view of Rasputin
Uspensky Sobor (Cathedral)
Vasilchikova, Mariya
Vasiliev, Father Alexander
Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven
Victoria, Queen
Alexandra’s marriage prospects
children’s marriages
choice of nanny
concern for Alexandra’s health
Crimean War
death
dolls for Romanov girls
funeral
godmother to Olga
granddaughters
haemophilia among descendants
letters from granddaughters
letters to Alexandra
Maria’s birth
marriage
motherhood
news of Olga’s second birthday
Olga’s birth
relationship with Alexandra
Romanov family’s visit to Balmoral
Tatiana’s birth
view of Olga
wedding day
widowhood
Victoria and Albert (royal yacht)
Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg (Ducky), Princess
Victoria of Battenberg, Princess
Vilchikovskaya, Varvara (Bibi)
Virolahti
Vishnyakova, Mariya (Mary)
Vladimir, Grand Duchess (Maria Pavlovna)
ambition for sons
background
ball
Elinor Glyn’s visit
Grand Christmas Bazaar
name
position in St Petersburg society
thé-dansant
Vladimir Alexandrovich, Grand Duke
Volkov, Alexey
Vonlyarlyarsky, General
Voronov, Pavel
Vorontsov family
Vorontsov-Dashkov, Alexander
Vyrubova, Anna
appearance
character
gifts from Alexandra
gifts to Romanov family
imprisonment and release
injury in rail accident
interrogation
letters from Alexandra
life after 1918
measles
memories of Alexey
memories of Nicholas
memories of Olga
memories of Prince Carol
memories of public response to imperial couple
memories of Shtandart accident
memories of staritsa’s prophecy
memories of Tatiana
Mogilev visit
nursing training
Rasputin’s death
relationship with Alexandra
relationship with Rasputin
removed from Tsarskoe Selo
suspicions of
tea parties
view of Tyutcheva
view of Vishnyakova
Waldemar of Prussia, Prince
Wheeler, Hallie (Hallie Rives)
Wheeler, Post
White Flower Day
White Palace, see Livadia Palace
Wilhelm, Kaiser
Wilhelm of Sweden, Prince
Winter Palace, St Petersburg
apartments
Blessing of the Waters
Bloody Sunday
First World War declaration
marriage of Nicholas and Alexandra
Nicholas and Alexandra quit
October Revolution
Romanov Tercentenary
Tatiana’s illness
war work
wartime supply depot
Woroniecki, Prince Jean
Wreden, Professor Roman
Wulfert, Natalya
Xenia Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess
children
correspondence
Crimean home
First World War outbreak
knowledge of Alexey’s haemophilia
letters from Anastasia
letters from Nicholas
letters from Olga
letters from Tatiana
nanny
Tyutcheva’s gossip about Rasputin
upbringing
view of Alexandra’s pregnancy
view of Alexey
view of Anastasia’s birth
view of haemophilia
view of Olga’s birth
view of Philippe
view of Rasputin
view of Tatiana
Yagelsky, Alexander
Yakovlev, Vasily
Yalta
Yanyshev, Father Ioann
Yaroslavl
Yeltsin, Boris
Yurovsky, Yakov
Yusupov, Prince Felix
children
exile
friendship with Dmitri Pavlovich
lifestyle
marriage
murder of Rasputin
Yusupov family
Zanotti, Madeleine (Magdalina)
Zborovskaya, Ekaterina (Katya)
death
departure from Tsarskoe Selo
father’s career
friendship with Anastasia
letters from Anastasia
life after 1917
war service
Zborovsky, Viktor (Vitya)
Anastasia’s feelings towards
departure from Tsarskoe Selo
favourite of Romanov sisters
in hospital at Tsarskoe Selo
life after 1918
meeting with Maria
received by Alexandra
removal of imperial insignia
response to abdication
visited by Anastasia and Maria
wounded
THE ROMANOV SISTERS. Copyright © 2014 by Helen Rappaport. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First published in Great Britain under the title Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
First U.S. Edition: June 2014
eISBN 9781250020215
First eBook edition: April 2014
* The former Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, a daughter of Alexander II, who had married Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. She took the title Duchess of Edinburgh until Alfred inherited the throne of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1893, his older brother Bertie having relinquished his right of succession to it.
* A year later when the twins had their first birthday Alix sent gifts of Russian gold and enamelled cutlery, serviette rings and salt cellars bearing the imperial coat of arms and the babies’ initials, as well as two matching pink and blue petticoats that she herself made specially for the occasion. Further presents followed from Russia in 1910 when the twins were confirmed and again in 1915 when they reached twenty-one.
* All events taking place in Russia prior to February 1918 are given according to the Old Style, Julian calendar then in use there. Where confusion might a
rise, New Style dates are added in brackets.
* Alexandra’s spelling was extremely idiosyncratic and her erratic grammar simply the result of writing in haste. All instances of misspelling and bad grammar in quotations from her letters and diaries are therefore sic.
* The Russian equivalent of Obstetrician-in-Ordinary.
* Although Nicholas took advantage of the visit to hold several important wide-ranging political conversations with the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury.
* Maria (or Marie) Pavlovna was often referred to as ‘the younger’ in order to differentiate her from Maria Pavlovna ‘the elder’, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir. In order to avoid confusion, the older Maria Pavlovna will be referred to throughout as Grand Duchess Vladimir.
* Over 260 such letters survive in RGIA, the State Historic Archive in St Petersburg.
† Such fanciful suggestions continued to be taken seriously in Russia well into the twentieth century; in his autobiography of 1990 the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin described how he was advised to ‘place an axe and a man’s peaked cap under the pillow to ensure that his wife had a boy’.
* ‘She looks like someone at a funeral.’
* The future parents of the Duke of Edinburgh.
* Even in the early twentieth century haemophilia was little understood and was thought to be caused by a weakness in the blood vessels. It was not until the 1930s that scientists concluded that the fatal defect lay in the lack of proteins in the blood platelets which prevented the blood clotting in those with the condition.
* ‘I love mama, who promises and gives so many kisses to her child, and so gently forgives her every time she is naughty.’ Tatiana has clearly copied this from somewhere else as, grammatically if referring to herself, it should be ‘qu’elle est méchante’.
* The capital of Estonia, now known as Tallinn.
† The idiosyncratic spelling and grammatical errors of the Romanov sisters when writing in English, as here, are reproduced as given throughout.
* Olga is referring to the Ascension Cathedral at Sophia – a suburb of Tsarskoe Selo, where the imperial entourage often worshipped before their own private church, the Feodorovsky Sobor, near the Alexander Palace was built.
* In her book My Father, p. 56, Maria Rasputin denied this allegation vehemently: ‘My father was never received in Their Majesties’ bedchamber, nor in those of the Grand Duchesses, but only in that of Alexis Nicolaievitch [sic], or in one of the drawing rooms, and once or twice in the schoolroom.’
* In Hough’s 1985 biography, Mountbatten misremembers this meeting as being at Heiligenberg in 1913, but the family did not travel out of Russia that year. The last time they visited Germany en famille was this particular summer of 1910. Dickie did not see Maria again but he never forgot her. In later life, he kept her photograph on the mantelpiece in his bedroom until his death.
* Prince Arthur finally found himself a bride in 1913 when he married Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife.
* During the Crimean War of 1854–6 British soldiers had written home describing the exquisite flowers growing wild all over the peninsula. Many of them dug up Crimean crocus and snowdrop bulbs to take back to England with them.
* Yagelsky worked for the firm of K. E. von Gann, based at Tsarskoe Selo.
* Rasputin later claimed that Iliodor had stolen the letters from him.
* According to Dr Botkin’s son Gleb, Schneider was ‘extremely priggish’, so much so that she ‘forbade the Grand Duchesses to stage a play because the dialogue contained the highly improper word “stockings”’. Botkin, Real Romanovs, p. 79.
* Tatiana once declared to Anna Vyrubova ‘that she never would be able to carry on a conversation in French’; but all of the children spoke English fluently, ‘from their cradles’. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, p. 123.
* Alexandra created her own private code for the levels of intensity of her heart pain, ranging from 1 to 3, used in notes to her daughters.
* In her letters Alexandra described it as ‘typhus’, much as she had Nicholas’s attack in 1900 and Olga’s in 1901, the names for the two quite different diseases often being used interchangeably at the time. Typhus is, however, lice-borne and caught in dirty, overcrowded conditions, which is clearly unlikely in either daughter’s case. Tatiana is thought to have contracted typhoid fever from an infected drink of lemonade taken at the Winter Palace.
* A long Circassian collarless coat.
* The house in which the Romanovs were held captive in 1918 in Ekaterinbug ironically had the same name, the Ipatiev House, after its owner, an engineer on the Trans-Siberian Railway named Nikolai Ipatiev.
* Queen Victoria’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany, who died after an attack of haemophilia brought on by a fall at the age of thirty-one, had a son and a daughter: his son Charles was not a haemophiliac but his daughter Alice was a carrier and passed it on to her sons, Maurice who died in infancy and Rupert who died of haemorrhaging after an accident when he was twenty.
* Foreign Office official Prince Jean Woroniecki, and Comte Jacques de Lalaing, a secretary at the Belgian legation, were house guests of the Nostitz family at their estate at Yalta.
* Evidence suggests that after the failure of the Olga–Carol match, and in the light of his brother Mikhail’s morganatic marriage in 1912, Nicholas began to seriously consider lifting the restrictions on marriages in the imperial family, having been forewarned of the problems that might be faced when and if the tsarevich came of age that ‘there would not be a single suitable [royal] bride in the world’. See Royalty Digest 15, no. 7, January 2005, p. 220.
* Harold Tennyson was a grandson of the British poet laureate. He was drowned in January 1916 when his ship HMS Viking hit a mine in the English Channel.
* Rasputin was in hospital in Tyumen, western Siberia, recovering from a knife attack made on him by a mentally unstable woman that summer.
* Edith Almedingen acted as Lady Buchanan’s Russian interpreter. The British Colony Hospital was also known as the King George V Hospital.
* In order to avoid confusion with the Court Hospital and the Catherine Palace Hospital, it was formally named Their Imperial Highnesses’ No. 3 Hospital. For clarity, it will be referred to hereafter as ‘the annexe’.
* Kleinmikhel is quoting the famous aphorism by Madame Cornuel: ‘No man is a hero to his valet’ – although the original French was ‘Il n’y avoit point de héros pour son valet de chambre’.
* Badly damaged in the Second World War, it is now being restored for use by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
* Arsenic was a popular remedy for such ailments at the time. For example, diplomat’s wife Dorothy Bosanquet spent time in Tsarskoe Selo in April 1916 when recovering from pleurisy, where she went every afternoon to the Palace Hospital to have an arsenic injection at 50 kopeks a time.
† If heated, arsenic oxidizes and produces arsenic trioxide, the smell of which resembles garlic. Plain arsenic also smells like garlic when it evaporates.
* Had circumstances been different one wonders whether at war’s end Nicholas and Alexandra would have conceded that the only way to see their daughters happily married, in Russia, would have been to allow morganatic marriages for them to high-ranking officers.
* The Escort had been formed in 1811 as a special security guard for Alexander I during the Napoleonic Wars, although the job of protecting the imperial family’s security had long since been taken over by the Okhrana and Spiridovich’s men. During the war, one squadron remained at Tsarskoe Selo with the empress, another served at Stavka with Nicholas, a third was based in Petrograd and a fourth, in rotation with the other three, was fighting at the front.
* An Azeri or Turkish wind instrument popular in the Caucasus.
* This was a favourite board game with Alexey and his sisters. The board has five sections, each representing a playing card, and the game is played with dice, chips and slips of paper. The objective is to dispose of the cards in your
hand, playing them in simple numerical sequence from 1 (Ace) to King, picking up bonuses along the way.
* Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich was a reactionary and monarchist, a member of an extremist group known as the Black Hundreds that sought to save the autocracy from ruination, as they saw it, by Rasputin.
* The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue noted at the time that several of the grand dukes, including Grand Duchess Vladimir’s three sons and Grand Duke Nikolay (whom Nicholas had deposed as Commander-in-Chief) were ‘talking of nothing less than saving tsarism by a change of sovereign’. The plan as he heard it was that Nicholas would be forced to abdicate in favour of Alexey with Nikolay Nikolaevich as regent. And Alexandra would be ‘shut up in a nunnery’.
† Alexey was confined to bed at the time with stomach pains and did not attend.
* A popular and widely available barbiturate, used for insomnia.
* A source of protection.
* The Romanian royal family had been forced by the German invasion to leave the capital, Bucharest, in December 1916 for Iasi in the north-east.
* An izvozchik is a driver of a horse-drawn cab, familiar all over Russian cities at the time.