by Greg King
Anastasia on the balcony at the Alexander Palace.
These visits, “all too short” for the grand duchesses, said Gilliard, relieved some of the boredom of “their monotonous and austere lives.”17 Inevitably, though, military matters demanded Nicholas’s attention, and forced the family back to Tsarskoye Selo, back—for Anastasia—to lessons, to the wards of her hospital, to the trivial events that filled the ebb and flow of her days. And those days, so relentless in their unceasing regularity, were about to veer into violent uncertainty.
Influenced by their mother, the grand duchesses had completely accepted the infamous Rasputin as a genuine religious figure whose prayers kept their brother alive. “All the children seemed to like him,” Olga Alexandrovna remembered. “They were completely at ease with him.”18 Very early on, they learned from Alexandra to avoid mentions of the peasant and even to conceal his visits from curious servants, as their aunt Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna noted. “He’s always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them,” she complained of Rasputin in 1910, deeming the situation “quite unbelievable and beyond understanding.”19 This bit of dissembling, like the secrecy imposed over Alexei’s illness, led people to believe the worst. One nurse employed at the palace accused Rasputin of raping her and spread her story across St. Petersburg; it was taken up and carried into the ether of escalating rumor when governess Sophie Tiutcheva lost her position at court over the peasant’s presence and complained of his malignant influence at Tsarskoye Selo.20
The four Grand Duchesses, seated in the Corner Salon of the Alexander Palace, about 1915. From left: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia.
“Our Friend,” Alexandra wrote of Rasputin to Nicholas, “is so contented with our Girlies, says they have gone through heavy ‘courses’ for their age and their souls have much developed.”21 Just ten days after this letter, on the night of December 29, 1916, Rasputin accepted an invitation to visit Prince Felix Yusupov at his Petrograd palace. Yusupov, the immensely wealthy, decadent, and debauched husband of Anastasia’s first cousin Princess Irina Alexandrovna, gathered a group of conspirators, including Nicholas II’s first cousin Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, and poisoned, shot, and stabbed Rasputin in a highly melodramatic and mythologized murder before dumping his body into a frozen tributary of the Neva. Discovery of the crime, and of Rasputin’s body, shocked the imperial family. Anatole Mordvinov, one of Nicholas II’s adjutants, recalled how he had found the grand duchesses on a sofa on hearing the news, “huddled up closely together. They were cold and visibly, terribly upset, but for the whole of that long evening the name of Rasputin was never uttered in front of me. They were in pain, because the man was no longer among the living, but also because they had evidently sensed that, with his murder, something terrible and undeserved had started for their mother, their father, and themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly toward them.”22
In killing Rasputin, Yusupov and the other conspirators had hoped to prevail upon Nicholas II to radically change his reactionary policies; with Rasputin gone, it was thought, an aggrieved empress would withdraw from political affairs altogether. But the murder of the peasant merely strengthened the imperial couple in their resolve to stand firm against any hint of concessions, any admission that public opinion mattered, any acknowledgment that the autocracy had ceased to exist when Nicholas II had granted the Duma in 1905. By March 1917, when Nicholas had returned to Mogilev, the country stood poised on the edge of an abyss, and strikes and bread riots in the capital quickly swelled into revolution.
As chaos erupted on the streets of Petrograd, Empress Alexandra remained isolated at Tsarskoye Selo. Not only was her husband away at headquarters, but also Olga, Tatiana, and Alexei had suddenly come down with serious cases of the measles, confined to their beds and nursed around the clock by Dr. Botkin and by their increasingly anxious mother.23 Rumors about the disorders in the capital replaced fact, and no one knew quite what to believe as the empress anxiously awaited the return of her husband. Alexandra’s friend Lili Dehn, who had come to Tsarskoye Selo, spent the evening of Tuesday, March 13, putting jigsaw puzzles together with Anastasia, an ordinary slice of life that played out in a palace isolated from the churning storm gathering beyond its walls. After sending her youngest daughter to bed, Alexandra turned to her friend, saying, “I don’t want the girls to know anything until it is impossible to keep the truth from them, but people are drinking to excess, and there is indiscriminate shooting in the streets. Oh, Lili, what a blessing that we have here the most devoted troops. There is the Garde Equipage, they are all our personal friends.”24
These guards became crucial the next day when a mutinous mob of soldiers decided to storm the Alexander Palace and take the empress and her son back to the capital under arrest. The emperor was expected back early the following morning, but that night his family prepared for an attack. Some fifteen hundred loyal men surrounded the building and huddled in the snowy palace courtyard around open fires awaiting the expected mob; the guards were armed with rifles and a massive field gun pointing out into the black night.25 Warning her sick children that maneuvers were under way and that soldiers might be firing their guns close to the palace, Alexandra went out to the courtyard, accompanied by Marie, to speak to the remaining guards and thank them for their loyalty.26 Looking down on this scene with Lili, Anastasia naively remarked, “How astonished Papa will be!”27
Marie remained with her mother through the nervous hours, and Lili Dehn took the grand duchess’s camp bed in the room she usually shared with Anastasia. Throughout the winter night, a restless Anastasia tossed and turned, unable to sleep; occasionally, alarmed at the sound of gunfire, she jumped from her bed and raced to the windows, peering out into the darkness. By six the next morning, she waited with her mother in the Mauve Boudoir, expecting her father to return as promised; after several hours passed with no word, though, even the usually ebullient Anastasia sensed that something was terribly wrong. “Lili,” she nervously confided to Dehn, “the train is never late. Oh, if only Papa would come quickly.”28
Wednesday passed in growing anxiety, without word of the emperor and with increasingly ominous rumors from Petrograd. Entire regiments deserted, and increasingly angry mobs tore through the streets, looting shops and burning police buildings. By Thursday, the men guarding the Alexander Palace had abandoned their posts, and revolutionaries had cut its water and electricity, leaving its nervous inhabitants to await the unknown by candlelight.29 That same day, at a railway siding in the town of Pskov, where his train had been diverted, Nicholas II bowed to the calls of his generals and abdicated the throne for both himself and his son. The 304-year-old Romanov Dynasty had come to an end.
On March 21, after her father’s abdication, Anastasia began 483 days of captivity, first under the new Provisional Government and later under Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet regime. Telephone lines were disconnected, all communications read, packages searched, and the Alexander Palace locked and ringed with soldiers guarding the imprisoned Romanovs.30 Although most courtiers and servants abandoned their posts in the wake of the Revolution, nearly a hundred ladies-in-waiting, adjutants, valets, grooms, footmen, tutors, maids, nurses, and cooks remained—resembling “the survivors of a shipwreck,” said Anna Vyrubova—to loyally share their captivity at Tsarskoye Selo.31 This created a slightly surreal environment, where armed sentries patrolled the exterior of the palace, while inside, footmen in elaborate liveries still bowed and offered the prisoners vintage wines from the imperial cellars.32
Although there were petty annoyances—fruit was banned from the imperial table as a “luxury that prisoners could not be allowed”—life in the palace was not uncomfortable.33 A modicum of normalcy descended as the imperial family settled into their new routine, and Anastasia resumed her lessons. Gibbes had not been at Tsarskoye Selo during the Revolution and was denied access by the Provisional Government, but Gillia
rd remained and continued French instruction; to occupy his time, Nicholas taught Russian history; Mademoiselle Catherine Schneider, the empress’s lectrice, took on Russian language; and Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden stepped in for the absent Gibbes and gave lessons in English.34
The Romanov children, imprisoned at Tsarskoye Selo, taking a break from working on the kitchen garden in the grounds of the Alexander Palace, spring 1917. From left: Olga, Alexei, Anastasia, and Tatiana.
The five Romanov children, imprisoned in the Alexander Palace following their father’s abdication. Their heads have been shaved following measles. From left: Anastasia, Olga, Alexei, Marie, and Tatiana.
It was when the prisoners left the palace that they faced the most insistent and unpleasant reminders of their changed status. For several hours each day, they were allowed to exercise in a corner of the park, always shadowed by armed soldiers and watched by a crowd gathered along the length of a nearby iron fence. These spectators included a handful of still-loyal former subjects along with the merely curious, anxious to see for themselves the family that had once ruled over them, but the most vocal were those who loathed the Romanovs; since the Revolution they had read the myths of a heartless tsar and his deranged wife who wanted her native Germany to crush her adopted homeland. Heads filled with gossip and exaggerations, these spectators jeered and shouted revolutionary slogans and obscenities, all in an effort to attract the prisoners’ attention.35 Men had previously bowed to the ground just to touch Nicholas II’s shadow; now, soldiers guarding him turned their backs when he offered his hand in greeting, knocked him from his bicycle as he rode through the park, and insolently addressed him as “Mr. Colonel” as his family looked on helplessly.36
Eventually, after weeks of watching the prisoners, the revolutionary hatred displayed by most of the guards softened. When spring came, the imperial family started a kitchen garden, and these soldiers helped the four grand duchesses in moving earth and planting rows of vegetables.37 Having been brought up since birth around members of the imperial guard, Anastasia and her sisters were soon at ease with the new soldiers, befriending them and chatting about their families; as a result of measles, the grand duchesses’ hair had been shaved, and they even felt comfortable enough to remove their hats and be photographed—bald imperial heads shining in the sun—with their guards.38 Even if attitudes softened, though, there were occasional unwelcome incidents. One hot summer night, Anastasia was sitting on an open windowsill, doing needlework as her father read aloud. Suddenly, soldiers burst into the room: a sentry patrolling the grounds had seen the prisoners signaling from the window with flashing red and green lights. The Romanovs professed ignorance, and investigation soon revealed what had happened: as Anastasia repeatedly leaned forward while doing her needlework, she had blocked and then uncovered two lamps burning behind her with green and red shades.39
This was how the summer passed for Anastasia, in occasionally amusing but petty annoyances, in lessons, in the new vegetable garden, and in uncertainty. No one expected the imprisonment at Tsarskoye Selo to last. There was talk of the Romanovs being allowed to live quietly at Livadia in the Crimea, but nothing came of the idea; plans to exile the prisoners to England also failed when King George V intervened and pressed his government to deny his Romanov cousins asylum. By late summer, Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, was increasingly worried that the continued presence of the Romanovs so near to the capital would lead to disaster, and decided to transfer them away from potential danger. Warning that they would soon be leaving Tsarskoye Selo, Kerensky advised the prisoners to quietly pack what they wished to take with them. He refused to reveal their destination, but did say that they should bring warm clothing.
On the evening of August 12—Tsesarevich Alexei’s thirteenth birthday—the imperial family gathered in a luggage-filled semicircular hall at the palace, anxiously awaiting word that the train ordered by Kerensky was at the station. In past, happier years, they had gathered here to watch films, the children giggling at the sight of some meaningful glance or the batting of a suggestive eyelash that had escaped the censor; now it had become a place of torment, as hour after agonizing hour passed without any news. The grand duchesses stood alone in one corner and “wept copiously” as morning approached.40 Finally, as dawn broke over Tsarskoye Selo, the prisoners were ushered into a series of motorcars and, accompanied by an armed escort, driven to a nearby station, where a train, disguised with Japanese flags to confuse any revolutionaries bent on vengeance, took them east, toward Siberia.
A modern view of the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, where the Romanovs were imprisoned during their Siberian exile from August 1917 to May 1918.
The journey took a week. “I will describe to you who [how] we traveled,” Anastasia wrote in her imprecise English,
We started in the morning and when we got into the train I went to sleap, so did all of us. We were very tierd because we did not sleap the whole night. The first day was hot and very dusty. At the stations we had to shut our window curtanse that nobody should see us. Once in the evening I was loking out of the window we stoped near a little house, but there was no staition so we could look out. A little boy came to my window and asked: “Uncle, please give me, if you have got, a newspaper.” I said: “I am not an uncle but an anty and I have no newspaper.” At the first moment I could not understand why did he call me “Uncle” but then I remembered that my hear [hair] is cut and I and the soldiers (which were standing next to me) laught very much. On the way many funy things hapend, and if I shall have time I shall write to you our travell father on. Good by. Don’t forget me.41
The destination was Tobolsk, a small, remote town in Siberia; it was so remote that there was no railway link, and the prisoners had to make the last leg of the journey by river, aboard a steamer named Rus. During the voyage they sailed past the little hamlet of Pokrovskoye and saw Rasputin’s native village in the distance, as the peasant had once predicted they would.42 With the prisoners came their three pet dogs; forty-two courtiers and servants to attend to their needs; dozens of steamer trunks packed with clothing, photograph albums, paintings, and souvenirs; and a contingent of some three hundred armed soldiers under the command of Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky to guard them.43 They also carried something else: more than $14 million worth of diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and gold, carefully concealed in their belongings from inquisitive eyes, a fortune that would help ensure their well-being in the event that they were forced to leave the country.44
The Governor’s House, where the Romanovs were imprisoned, was a large, two-story structure that the prisoners decorated and adorned with their favorite paintings, carpets, and possessions sent from the Alexander Palace.45 The four grand duchesses shared a corner room on the second floor, “arranged all quite cozily,” as Olga Nikolaievna wrote to Anna Vyrubova, sleeping in their camp beds beneath walls hung with icons, family photographs, and memories of happier days aboard the Standart.46 Large as the house was, it could not accommodate more than a handful of the retinue that had followed the imperial family into exile; other courtiers and servants were given rooms in a large, ornate villa, the Kornilov Mansion, just across the street. When the imperial family casually visited them, though, some members of the special detachment guarding the prisoners objected, and Kobylinsky was forced to ring the Governor’s House with a high stockade fence to placate his soldiers.47 The Romanovs were now truly prisoners.
The arrival of the Romanovs in Tobolsk marked not only the end of their indulgent captivity but also, in many ways, an end to their tangible existence for many of their former subjects. It was not merely the fact that their faces and names, so well known, disappeared from newspapers and magazines. At Tsarskoye Selo, they had still lived largely as they had done before the Revolution, in a palace and surrounded by the trappings that had defined them as a ruling family. Their identity was still royal, their experiences not entirely unpleasant and certainly comfortable. Now, deprived not on
ly of power, titles, and money but also of the privileged mise-en-scène that had set them apart from mere mortals, they disappeared into the vast Siberian landscape, into myth. The fairy tale had ended, replaced by a terrible, creeping nightmare that depicted Tobolsk as the first stage of the Romanovs’ earthly Calvary.
At first life in Tobolsk was not unpleasant, although the house became incredibly cold as the Siberian winter took hold. Everyone agreed that “the inhabitants of Tobolsk were well disposed toward the Imperial Family,” as Gilliard wrote. Citizens regularly gathered in the street outside the Governor’s House, staring in curiosity, crossing themselves, and bowing if they saw any movement at the windows.48 People collected donations and dispatched cakes, eggs, milk, fresh fish, candy, and other gifts for the prisoners.49 An agreeable routine settled over the house. After breakfast, Anastasia had several hours of lessons: English with Gibbes when he finally arrived in Tobolsk, French with Gilliard, Russian and arithmetic with a young woman named Klaudia Bitner, religion with her mother, and history with her father.50 At eleven, the prisoners usually went outside. There was no garden; for exercise, they could only walk back and forth along a section of roadway enclosed by the fence. Here, Nicholas and his children, assisted by retainers, took turns cutting logs with a twin-bladed saw; when the snow came and blanketed the compound, the grand duchesses pulled each other and their brother on sleds, and built an ice mountain for their toboggans.51 Lunch, at one, generally consisted of four courses (soup, fish, an entrée, and dessert), while dinner, at eight, sometimes added a fifth course, of fruit.52 In the afternoon, the imperial family took tea, and in the evenings the Romanovs and their retainers gathered in the drawing room to play cards or listen as Nicholas read aloud, just as they had done in the Alexander Palace; occasionally the grand duchesses—except for Tatiana, who remained with her mother—visited the rooms occupied by nurse Alexandra Tegleva and the empress’s maids, exchanging jokes and playing games to pass the time.53 There were, as Anastasia wrote to Anna Vyrubova, few diversions: “We often sit in the windows, looking at the people passing, and this gives us distraction.”54 The grand duchesses had merely exchanged the suffocating boredom of their lives at Tsarskoye Selo for a new kind of isolation.