by Greg King
Empress Alexandra, about 1905.
Nicholas rarely protested his wife’s interference and admonitions. Beyond the realm of politics, the imperial couple at least fully inhabited the roles assigned to them by the fairy tale: they were indeed hopelessly, devotedly in love with each other, their marriage a triumph over familial objections and circumstance. “Even after many years,” recalled one relative, “they were like young lovers.”5 For each, this marriage became their principal comfort in increasingly uncertain times, but the warm and loving empress remained hidden, unknown to Russia. Instead, aristocratic St. Petersburg saw only a woman they deemed a humorless prig, someone who despised the empty social life and lavish balls that filled the long winter days; Alexandra never bothered to conceal her disapproval of this frivolity, and soon she alienated society and even most of her husband’s extended family. Knowing that she was disliked and increasingly unwell, she led her husband into a cloistered world that insulated them from scandalous gossip and unwholesome thoughts but also isolated them from the realities of a changing world.
Alexandra’s mysticism increased after 1904, when she finally gave birth to the long-awaited son and heir, Tsesarevich Alexei. The public rejoiced, but within six weeks his parents learned that he suffered from hemophilia, passed on to him by his mother, who had inherited the defective genes through Queen Victoria. This discovery cast a pall over the lives of Nicholas and Alexandra; rather than admit that their only son was prey to such a devastating illness, they kept Alexei’s hemophilia a state secret. His sisters were told, as were a few servants, courtiers, and intimate family members, but most of Russia knew only that their future emperor was frequently unwell. There was no cure, and almost any bump or fall could result in a potentially fatal internal hemorrhage. Hoping to prevent such incidents, the imperial couple charged two sailors, Andrei Derevenko and Klementy Nagorny, with keeping a constant watch over their fragile son, but the uncertainty took an emotional and physical toll on the parents, particularly Alexandra, who knew that she was unwittingly responsible for Alexei’s suffering. In the absence of scientific hope, Nicholas and Alexandra turned to religion, seeking comfort in the ministrations of a series of questionable seers and holy men, desperate for a miracle. They found their miracle in 1905, when they first met the infamous Siberian peasant Gregory Rasputin.
Anastasia in Russian court dress for the christening of Tsesarevich Alexei, 1904.
The thwarted ambitions, strikes, wars, unrest, assassinations, aristocratic animosity, Alexei’s illness—it all coalesced to drive Nicholas and Alexandra into retreat, to an idyllic world of bourgeois values and familial love carved from a privileged backdrop of imperial palaces. Fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg, cocooned within two dozen modestly decorated rooms in a wing of the yellow and white neoclassical Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the Romanovs lived a confined, isolated existence. Sentries patrolled the perimeters of the imperial park, footmen stood at attention in the palace’s marble halls, and courtiers bowed, yet somehow Nicholas and Alexandra created a life for their children that, in comparison with that of many of their European cousins, was almost stunning in its lack of artifice.
While pompous Russian aristocrats condemned the empress as a bourgeois German hausfrau, domestic cares ensured that her children were brought up in a warm and loving environment. She could be frustratingly obsessive and smothering, but Alexandra also was a tactile mother whose devotion to family life stood in contrast to the deliberate distance maintained by many royal women of the era. She kept her children’s bassinets in her bedroom when they were infants, and bathed, changed, and nursed them herself. But her somewhat anachronistic attitudes, seriousness, and high-minded ambition often made it difficult for Alexandra to indulge her children’s natural spirits, and most people agreed that with the exception of Tatiana, they all favored their father.6 In her teenage letters to Nicholas II, Anastasia was effusive, calling him her “Golden, Good, Darling Papa,” writing, “I want to see you so much,” and signing, “I kiss you 1,000,000 times, your hands and feet.”7 Unfortunately, as one courtier recalled, “In ordinary times, the Tsar did not see much of his children. His work and the demands of court life prevented him from giving them as much time as he would have wished.”8
Instead, with the empress often unwell and the emperor occupied with work, the children were largely brought up by a series of English nurses. For a time, Alexandra’s former nanny Mary Anne Orchard supervised the imperial nurseries and selected the Russian women who served below her.9 At the time of Anastasia’s birth, Margarette Eagar was the principal nanny, but she left the court in 1905, and her position went to her colleague Alexandra Tegleva. Known to the children as “Shura,” Tegleva—along with several Russian girls—saw to their daily needs, nursing them when they were unwell and pampering them with doting attention. Later, as her two eldest daughters matured, Alexandra appointed a young woman named Sophie Tiutcheva as their governess, although she eventually fell out with the empress over Rasputin’s visits to the nurseries.10
Secluded and largely unknown, the four grand duchesses became ciphers, their appearances in public rare and often restricted to a select audience of courtiers and aristocrats. Their father’s subjects saw their faces in formal photographs and souvenir postcards, but very few outside the insular universe of Tsarskoye Selo knew anything of their real lives. Denied friends and social opportunities, they existed in an artificial sanctuary that tended to magnify ordinary clashes and the insecurities of youth as they struggled to win approval and establish a sense of their own identities.
Olga, the eldest of the four daughters, was generally thought to be the most intelligent of Nicholas and Alexandra’s children. A deeply religious, sensitive young woman, Olga possessed a stubborn streak and tendency to depression that occasionally led to clashes with her mother. In temperament and appearance she most resembled her father, whom she adored.11 In contrast, Tatiana, the second of the girls, was closest to her mother, and her siblings nicknamed her “the governess.” Naturally thin and elegant, Tatiana had her mother’s refined features and unquestioning acceptance of their extraordinary privilege. Even so, she was essentially modest by nature, and while she enjoyed what little she was allowed to experience of society, she disliked the ceremonial etiquette that accompanied her rank: she once kicked a lady-in-waiting out of embarrassment for publicly referring to her as “Your Imperial Highness.”12
Being closest in age, Olga and Tatiana formed a natural bond, and within the family they were informally called “the big pair,” while the two youngest grand duchesses became “the little pair.”13 Marie, the third daughter, also was the most beautiful. Her thick golden hair and large blue eyes won her many admirers; her cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg—the future Lord Mountbatten—was so taken with her that until his 1979 assassination by the IRA, he kept a photograph of her beside his bed.14 Unpretentious and simple in her tastes, Marie was content to dream of one day marrying and of raising a large family.15
The youngest of the four daughters and destined by history to become the most famous, Anastasia, said one courtier, was “quite unlike any of her sisters, with a type of her own.”16 Lili Dehn, one of the empress’s closest friends, called Anastasia “pretty” but noted that “hers was more of a clever face.”17 Her hair was dark blond with a slight golden tinge, and her features “were regular and finely cut.”18 Above all else, it was her gray-blue eyes—“of great luminescence,” as Tatiana Botkin, daughter of the imperial family’s chief physician, Eugene Botkin, recalled—that attracted attention, vibrant “wells of intelligence,” according to Dehn, that were constantly moving and glowed with mischief.19
This impression—that with Anastasia mischief was always lurking just beneath the surface—was one that the little girl herself cultivated from an early age. Perhaps, as the youngest of four girls and the least important of five children, she consciously grasped at opportunities—no matter how inappropriate—to assert her individuality, for she
was certainly very different from her sisters in behavior and temperament. There was something altogether irrepressible about her spirited energy, as if she knew no boundaries and feared nothing. Her aunt and godmother Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna nicknamed her “Shvibzik” (Imp), and Anastasia fully lived up to the designation.20 From an early age, said Dr. Botkin’s youngest son, Gleb, Anastasia “undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius.”21
Anastasia in her mother’s boudoir at the Alexander Palace, about 1910.
Anastasia loved to disappear in the vast imperial park, hiding from concerned sentries until worry forced her out of hiding; she climbed trees to dizzying heights, refusing to come down until ordered to do so by her father, and she made faces at the stony-faced guards.22 Visiting cousins feared her: one, Princess Nina Georgievna, declared Anastasia “nasty to the point of being evil,” while her sister Xenia Georgievna called her “wild and rough,” and remembered how she would “often scratch me and pull my hair” if she disliked the outcome of a game.23
It was all distinctly unroyal behavior, but Anastasia usually managed, through charm or through a startling frankness, to get away with such antics. They became an expression of personality within the rarefied and sheltered environment of the Russian court, a subtle rebellion against the regularity and oppressive strictures of life at Tsarskoye Selo. Tradition ruled in the Alexander Palace. Her father may have been the wealthiest sovereign in the world, but as soon as Anastasia outgrew the crib, she shared a bedroom with her sister Marie, an unpretentious chamber made comfortable with overstuffed furniture, chintz fabrics, and walls bedecked with icons, watercolors, and favorite photographs.24 Like her sisters, she slept on a narrow, folding army camp bed, a tradition within the Romanov family dating back to the childhood of Alexander I and meant to instill character and guard against indulgence.25 The same concerns dictated cold baths each morning, although the warm baths permitted at night took place in a solid silver tub engraved with the names of all the imperial children who had used it.26 Anastasia and her sisters helped maids clean their rooms, and in a further effort to prevent them from being spoiled, servants and courtiers referred to them using their Christian names and patronymics—Anastasia Nikolaievna—rather than by their titles or styles.27 Each month came a modest allowance, out of which Anastasia could purchase any gifts or personal items, including her favorite Coty perfume, Violette.28 “In this way,” recalled one courtier, “their mother hoped to make them realize the value of money, a thing that princes find hard to understand. But etiquette prevented their going into any shops but those of the stationers at Tsarskoye Selo and Yalta, and they never had any clear idea of the value and price of things.”29 It was all very simple, especially compared to many other royal households, but it also was very studied, an echo of the simplistic charade enacted by Marie Antoinette in Le Hameau at Versailles before the Terror swept the Bourbons from their throne.
Days passed with a comforting regularity at Tsarskoye Selo. If, beyond the protected confines of the imperial estate, Russia seethed with danger and discontent, here there were only smiling and obsequious faces. Aroused from slumber, the grand duchesses crept down the narrow wooden staircase connecting their rooms to those of their mother to bid Alexandra good morning before returning to their own apartments for breakfast. Nicholas would already be at his desk, and although he might join his children for a walk in the park, sometimes accompanied by the empress, the family often came together for the first time each day at four, when they all gathered for tea in Alexandra’s famous Mauve Boudoir. This, too, was ruled by tradition: the regulations, set down in the reign of Catherine the Great, dictated the number and type of rolls, plates of bread, and pastries placed on the table. Alexandra complained that “other people had much more interesting teas,” but that even as empress she was “unable to change a single detail of the routine of the Russian Court.”30 Alexandra poured, and handed around plates of tiny sandwiches and pastries; for the children there was cocoa and little vanilla-flavored wafers called biblichen. Nicholas smoked and read aloud, the empress and her eldest daughters embroidered, and Anastasia played games with Alexei on the sage-green carpet.31
These quiet scenes of domestic, thoroughly middle-class harmony were often repeated in the evening, usually with the addition of the empress’s great friend Anna Vyrubova, a “sentimental and mystical,” naive young woman whose devotion to Alexandra was rivaled only by her uncritical belief in the infamous Rasputin.32 The family might listen to the gramophone—recordings of Wagnerian operas were a favorite—or to Nicholas as he read from Russian or English novels, the empress inevitably busy with needlework and the girls carefully pasting photographs they had taken with their Kodak box cameras into leather-bound albums.33 On other evenings films would be shown in the palace’s large semicircular hall: newsreels, something for the children, and perhaps an American or European silent comedy or serial. All were carefully screened to ensure that no offending scenes existed, although inevitably the censor missed a passionate kiss or meaningful glance that sent the imperial children into howls of laughter.34
For all of this apparent idyllic domesticity, one thing was missing: Anastasia had no real friends. As a young girl, she pathetically dragged around a well-worn, one-armed, one-eyed, bald-headed doll she had named Vera, and looked to her siblings and the family’s pets for comfort.35 In their isolation, the grand duchesses found comfort and companionship with each other, and with the courtiers and servants around them. Anastasia Hendrikova, a countess who served their mother, was a particular favorite, as was Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, who was appointed a lady-in-waiting to the empress in 1913 at age twenty-eight, but they could not take the place of real confidantes.36 The grand duchesses, noted imperial tutor Pierre Gilliard, “by force of circumstances,” learned “to be self-sufficient” in “a life deprived of outside amusements.”37
The blame lay with the empress. Alexandra, Anna Vyrubova remembered, “dreaded for her daughters the companionship of over-sophisticated young women of the aristocracy whose minds, even in the schoolroom, were fed with the foolish and often vicious gossip of a decadent society.”38 There were, it is true, infrequent visits with the children of Nicholas II’s eldest sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna; with Prince George and Princess Vera, the youngest children of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who lived at Pavlovsk, near Tsarskoye Selo; and with Princesses Nina and Xenia Georgievna, daughters of Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, second cousin to Nicholas II, but such occasions were sporadic and provided only momentary diversions rather than true companionship. Alexandra, said Vyrubova, “discouraged” even these innocent encounters, deeming many of her husband’s relatives “unwholesomely precocious in their outlook on life.”39
Recognizing the isolation of her nieces and their inability to enjoy any meaningful social life, Nicholas II’s youngest sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, tried to step in and provide them with a modicum of diversion. Unhappily married to a homosexual prince, the rather plain and unassuming Olga Alexandrovna shared her goddaughter Anastasia’s intense dislike of the rigidity of imperial life and the crushing etiquette of the Russian court. Her answer was to take the grand duchesses away for days at her palace in St. Petersburg, and to lunches with their grandmother Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Olga also organized small parties, teas, and dances for her nieces, and the grand duchesses looked forward to these Sunday afternoons, when they could mingle with other young men and women invited by their aunt, dance, and play games with carefree abandon.40 They all, Olga Alexandrovna later recalled, “enjoyed every minute of it,” especially Anastasia. “I can still hear her laughter rippling all over the rooms. Dancing, music, games—why, she threw herself wholeheartedly into them all.”41
It was the only apparent flaw in the fairy tale, this lack of friends and influences outside the palace, this isolation imposed by the empress upon her daughters. In a very real way, the grand
duchesses were prisoners in a gilded cage. “More than her sisters,” recalled one courtier, “Anastasia chafed under the narrowness of her environment.”42 Still, little could be done. The same sentries, special details of police, sailors from the Garde Equipage, and members of the Cossack Konvoi Regiment who patrolled the palace grounds to ensure her safety also trapped her in this stifling universe. Such protections were unfortunate but necessary. The Russian throne was an unstable institution, the empire a place where discontent constantly threatened to erupt into violence. It had happened before, with unnerving frequency: Peter the Great had his son and heir Alexei tortured to death; Catherine the Great came to the throne in a conspiracy that resulted in the murder of her husband, Peter III; and Paul I was killed by a group of aristocrats. And it was not just the distant past: in 1881, when the future Nicholas II was just twelve, he had stood at the bedside of his grandfather Tsar Alexander II, watching as he bled to death from a terrorist bomb; less than a quarter century later, Nicholas’s uncle and brother-in-law Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich was literally blown to pieces by revolutionaries. There had already been half a dozen unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Nicholas II by the time Anastasia turned ten. At times, violent strikes and unruly riots left the imperial family confined to their estates; even when they left this protective cocoon and traveled across the vast Russian Empire, they did so in a heavily armored train of royal blue carriages shadowed by a second, identical string of railway cars designed to confuse any would-be revolutionaries.43 This terrible uncertainty became the leitmotif of Anastasia’s fairy tale, an unseen yet very real danger that lurked just beneath the glittering surface of her privileged world.