by Gill Paul
Maria was alarmed. “So you think I should accept him for that reason? Even though I don’t love him?”
Her mother frowned. “Not accept, necessarily, but it would be kind to give him hope, surely? Then after we are rescued from here, you can spend all the time you like getting to know each other. I think it’s a charming letter, Mashka. What do you have to lose?”
Maria considered this. “Can we keep it secret from the others? They will tease me and I’m not sure . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Besides, Olga and Tatiana might be jealous if I get engaged before them.”
“I’ll tell your father, of course, but the others don’t need to know. Now, let’s get to work on your letter. I imagine it will be collected by someone who works for Thomas Preston, the British consul in Ekaterinburg. Victoria met him when she was here just before the war. Perhaps he will be able to put it in a diplomatic pouch going back to Britain.” She opened her Moroccan-leather writing set and pulled out a sheet of notepaper with the Romanov mauve-and-cream crest, a quill pen, and a silver inkwell with a gold filigree lid.
There was no table in the bedroom, so Maria balanced the leather case on her lap as she wrote My dear Dickie. She stopped and looked at Alexandra for guidance.
You can’t imagine how surprised I was to receive your letter, her mother dictated, and how delighted.
Maria wrote as she was told. She had always been the most obedient of the five children.
* * *
Next morning, an hour before breakfast, she took her letter to the kitchen, where Ivan Kharitonov was baking bread.
“Will you slip this in the exact same place as you found the last one?” she asked.
“Of course I will, Miss Maria.” He nodded, taking it from her with a discreet smile.
She wandered back to the bedroom, feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. When would the letter reach Dickie? What would he think?
Her reply felt dishonest. She had given him hope when really there should be none. She had deliberately misled him. But what choice did she have when the safety of her family was at stake? She hoped fervently that before they met again, he would have fallen in love with some other girl and would not hold her to any implied commitment. Of all possible outcomes, she decided that would be the best.
Historical Note
During the war, anti-German sentiment in the UK persuaded the Battenbergs to change their name to Mountbatten. Lord Louis Mountbatten went on to have a long and distinguished career in the Royal Navy, oversaw the transition to Indian independence in 1947–48, became First Sea Lord in 1955, and served as Chief of the Defence Staff in the early 1960s. He married an English heiress, Edwina Ashley, in 1922 and they had three children. He was particularly close to Prince Charles, to whom he was a great-uncle. In 1979 he was assassinated when the Irish Republican Army blew up his fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo. Until the day he died, he kept a photograph of Maria Romanova on a mantelpiece in his bedroom.
Historical Afterword
WHEN THE ROMANOV royal family were placed under house arrest following the February 1917 revolution, few could have believed the Tsar and Tsarina would be executed less than seventeen months later, along with their five children. After all, they were the wealthiest family in the world and closely interconnected with several European royal dynasties.
The initial plan was for them to be exiled to Britain, but arrangements were complicated by the war in Europe, and King George V dragged his heels. As Russia lurched toward civil war during the summer of 1917, the Romanovs were transported to Tobolsk, Siberia, in a move that was said to be for their own safety. Attitudes toward them hardened after Lenin seized power in the October Revolution, and in April 1918, Maria and her parents were escorted to the smaller, more heavily guarded Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, which is where The Lost Daughter begins.
Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C., Bain Collection
My depiction of the character of Maria is based on facts we know about her. She did not feel secure in her parents’ affections, and once wrote to her mother saying she considered herself unloved. She was plump as a child, earning her the nickname “fat little bow-wow,” but many considered her the most beautiful of the four girls, with her huge eyes “like saucers.” She was physically the strongest of the four, able to lift and carry thirteen-year-old Alexei on her own. And although she was not academically gifted, she was artistic, enjoying drawing, painting, and photography.
Around men, Maria appears to have been naturally but innocently flirtatious. One guard, Alexander Stretokin, wrote that she was “a girl who loved to have fun.” Commandant Yurovsky wrote that she had a “sincere, modest character” that made her very popular with his men. He said that she “spent most time with the sentries” and he remembered her showing them her photograph albums.
It is well documented that a guard called Ivan Skorokhodov smuggled a cake into the house on Maria’s birthday in June 1918, then the pair of them disappeared together and were caught in what were described as “compromising circumstances.” No one knows exactly what happened, but Ivan was jailed for three months and thereafter disappears from the history books.
Maria was clearly a friendly, outgoing kind of girl with a healthy interest in the opposite sex. If the guards were going to save any one of the girls in the house, surely it would have been her? And if she did escape, her physical strength would have helped her to survive. That was my thinking when I began to shape the story of The Lost Daughter.
* * *
I have stuck closely to the known facts about the Romanovs’ stay in Ekaterinburg. Konstantin Ukraintsev, Avdeyev, and Yurovsky are all real people, but the characters of Peter Vasnetsov and Anatoly Bolotov are my inventions. The men who executed the Romanovs were recruited from the militant Verkh-Isetsk metallurgy works and the meeting I describe in the prologue of this novel did take place. My depiction of the events of July 16–17, 1918, is derived from accounts left by Yurovsky and others who were present. In the days following the mass execution, members of the public were able to wander into the Ipatiev House and help themselves to souvenirs, and the place later became an unofficial pilgrimage site. It was destroyed under Leonid Brezhnev’s premiership in 1977, just a year after my fictional Australian character Val visited it.
Two days after the execution in 1918, it was announced in Russian newspapers that Tsar Nicholas had been killed but that the rest of the family were being held in a safe location. This location was never divulged and the uncertainty led to dozens of Romanov impostors emerging over the subsequent decade, most famously Anna Tschaikovsky (later Anderson), who claimed to be Anastasia and was only proved posthumously to have been a Polish factory worker. Some Maria impostors came forward but none of the stories were credible.
A report by a White Army inspector, Nikolai Sokolov, first published in 1924, gave a strong hint as to the fate of the Romanovs. It detailed some grisly objects he had found near an abandoned mine shaft in the Ekaterinburg area, including belt buckles, shoes, dentures, and bone fragments, though he did not discover the family’s graves. Under Stalin’s authoritarian rule, speculation on the fate of the erstwhile royals was discouraged and the subject was seldom raised in the Soviet Union. During the mid-1970s, when my character Val began investigating the Romanov possessions she found in her late father’s house and safe deposit box, the fate of Russia’s royal family was still not entirely certain.
Some amateur archeologists found the main grave site in 1979, but the news was not publicly announced until 1991, after the collapse of Communism. The bodies were then exhumed and sent to labs in Russia, the UK, and the US for DNA analysis. It was discovered that the remains of Alexei and one of the younger girls—either Maria or Anastasia—were missing. Their grave was not found until 2007.
The mainstream view is that the Tsar and Tsarina, their five children, and the four retainers—Dr. Botkin, Anna Demidova, Alexei Trup
p, and Ivan Kharitonov—were shot and bayoneted to death in the Ipatiev House during the night of July 16–17. A few historians, however, still claim that there could have been mistakes in the identification of the remains due to contamination of the bone samples, and that one or more of the Romanovs could have escaped the slaughter in Ekaterinburg.
* * *
The Lost Daughter follows Maria through the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik economic experiments that led to the famine of 1921–22, in which a staggering five million Russians died. There was a mass movement of peasants to the cities thereafter and the population of St. Petersburg grew rapidly. Citizens lived in communal apartments, often sharing a single room with other families and sleeping in curtained-off areas. Several families used the same bathroom and cooking facilities, leading inevitably to conflicts between neighbors, but I decided to make Peter a shock worker and give his family an apartment of their own.
The Cheka was formed by Lenin in December 1917 as a secret police force to root out enemies of Bolshevism. It had the power to conduct its own nonjudicial trials and executions, and to torture suspects. In 1922 the Cheka was reorganized and eventually the NKVD, the dreaded police force of Stalin’s regime, took over. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were convicted by NKVD troikas and either executed or sent to gulags. There were waves of purges through various professions—the army, doctors, kulaks—and against any perceived enemies of the state. Between 1936 and 1938, in what became known as the Great Terror, over a million people may have died in front of firing squads or in the notorious gas vans. Those whose family members had been jailed or executed came under suspicion themselves, and becoming an informer was one way to avoid arrest.
The siege of Leningrad was one of the most avoidable tragedies in twentieth-century history. Stalin completely misread Hitler’s intentions when he signed a nonaggression pact with him in 1939, and the Soviet army was totally unprepared for invasion, not least because many of its top commanders had been purged in the preceding years. Once the siege began, Stalin seemed to write off the beleaguered city as indefensible and failed to prioritize getting supplies through. Between September 1941 and January 1944, around a quarter to a third of the prewar population of Leningrad died—700,000 to 800,000 people. In the brutally cold January and February of 1942, around 100,000 were dying per month. For years afterward, the siege was rarely spoken about, either inside or outside the Soviet Union. There were references to “hardships” suffered in wartime, but it was only after the collapse of Communism that the true scale of the horror came to light in the form of survivors’ memories and diaries. I’ve used many details from these in my descriptions of conditions.
* * *
In the years during and after the Russian civil war, between 100,000 and 200,000 White Russians fled across the country’s eastern border into Harbin, Manchuria. There was already an established Russian community there, with their own Orthodox churches and Russian businesses. Some were waiting in the hope that the Bolsheviks would be overthrown and they could return to their homeland without fear of retribution for being kulaks, or intellectuals, or Whites. But during the 1920s, Soviet influence grew stronger in the town and life must have felt more precarious. Some people emigrated back into the Soviet Union, others to Japan and South America, but a sizeable number sailed south to Australia, as I have Val’s father doing in my novel.
Some Russian political exiles had already arrived in Sydney after the February 1917 revolution, and another wave followed in the 1920s. A club known as the Russian House was founded as an organization to help new arrivals find work and a meeting place in which to celebrate Russian festivals. In 1933, Father Methodius Shlemin began to hold Orthodox services there, and in 1942 the church I describe in the novel was founded on Robertson Road, Centennial Park. Sydney retains a strong Russian community to this day.
* * *
This is my second novel about the Romanovs. The first, The Secret Wife, concerns the romance between the second-eldest daughter, Tatiana, and a cavalry officer called Dmitri Malama. I have alluded to their story in The Lost Daughter. But the family’s fate is so shocking and haunting that I couldn’t resist returning to it in 2018, the centenary of their murders. I feel as moved by it now as I did when I first read the story as a teenager.
For a regime to execute a monarch and his wife was not unheard of, but to execute their five children as well, the youngest just thirteen years old, was barbarous in the extreme. If only Nicholas’s first cousin, George V, had let them flee to safety in England. If only one of the many rescue attempts had succeeded. There is no paper trail connecting Lenin to the murders, but he could certainly have saved them had he tried.
The slaughter happened in the twentieth century, to a family who often filmed themselves with movie cameras, so you can find them on YouTube prancing through the gardens of their palaces, paddling in the sea, and playing with the sailors on their royal yacht. The girls are beautiful and utterly innocent of anything except being born into the wrong family at the wrong time. They could have been mothers and grandmothers, wives and lovers, farmers or artists or authors. In my novels, they are.
The Romanov Family. From the left: Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Maria, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Tsarevitch Alexei, and Grand Duchess Tatiana. Portrait by the Levitsky Studio, Livadiya
Sources
HELEN RAPPAPORT’S THREE BOOKS on the Romanovs are compelling and beautifully written. I highly recommend Four Sisters for an in-depth look at the characters of the girls, Ekaterinburg for a chilling countdown of the final days of their lives, and The Race to Save the Romanovs for a gripping account of the attempts to rescue them. Greg King and Penny Wilson’s The Fate of the Romanovs contains a wealth of detail that I found invaluable. It was fascinating to read the diaries and letters of the family, which have been translated into English by Helen Azar. And I also valued Robert K. Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter and Andrew Cook’s The Murder of the Romanovs.
Treasure of the Tsars, a 2017 exhibition at the Hermitage in Amsterdam, had many poignant exhibits, including drawings by the children, clothes, and letters. I was also able to use my own memories of a visit to St. Petersburg in 2016, when I fell in love with the glitzy palaces and the exquisite Fabergé Museum.
While researching the period after the Revolution, I began with Orlando Figes’s brilliant and comprehensive book A People’s Tragedy. The exhibitions Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 at London’s Royal Academy in 2017 and Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths at the British Library in the same year were both invaluable. Actually seeing ration cards and photographs of factory life and communal living, then reading stories of individuals executed by the NKVD, made the era seem all the more real.
If you want to know about life in Stalinist Russia, the starting point has got to be Orlando Figes’s extraordinary book The Whisperers, which collects personal testimonies from survivors throughout the Soviet Union. I also found some compelling stories online, and there was useful information in the memoir My Life in Stalinist Russia by an American woman called Mary M. Leder.
Anna Reid’s masterful Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege is the best account I found of that period. She quotes liberally from diaries and personal accounts and provides the kind of detail that is a gift for a novelist. Alexis Peri’s The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad was also very useful, and I found several other accounts online.
Finally, while researching Sydney in the 1970s, I used a 1973 guide to the city entitled Ruth Park’s Sydney. I also had a wonderful reader in Sydney resident Gerrie Fletcher, and was helped by my own happy memories of a six-week stay in the city in the 1990s.
The Love Lives of the Romanov Daughters
GRAND DUCHESSES OLGA, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were born in an era when royals still needed to marry other royals, or else the marriage would be declared morganatic and their offspring would not inherit their titles. But Nicholas and Alexa
ndra had married for love and wanted the same for their beloved daughters. They trawled through the pool of eligible European royals and considered candidates from the Balkan countries, as well as the sons of their first cousins in Germany and Great Britain, but no great romances ensued and the outbreak of war in 1914 put the search on hold.
The Romanov girls had led cloistered lives, rarely socializing except with direct family members, and as a result they were young for their ages. Most evenings were spent at home sewing, reading, and playing card games such as bezique and board games such as halma. Before 1914 their main contact with the opposite sex had been with sailors on the royal yacht Shtandart or members of the imperial guard, whom they would rope in to games of tennis or croquet. Olga had crushes on a couple of them, writing breathlessly in her diary in February 1913, “Sat with AKSH [Alexander Konstantinovich Shvedov] . . . and strongly fell in love with him.” But she was fickle; by June 10 that year she was writing of Pavel Voronov, an officer on the Shtandart: “He is so affectionate . . . I love him so much!”
The outbreak of war in 1914 brought many potential new beaus into their sphere when the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was turned into a makeshift military hospital, and Olga, then aged eighteen, and Tatiana, seventeen, trained as nurses. It was by far the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.
Soon Olga met the man who would be the great love of her life: Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, known to all as Mitya, a soldier she nursed in 1914. They corresponded after he went back to the front, and a sister at the hospital wrote in her 1916 diary, “A letter came from Shakh-Bagov. Olga . . . threw all her things around from delight—she felt feverish and she jumped around, saying: ‘Can one have a stroke at 20 years old? I think I am having a stroke!’”
The whole family knew of Olga’s romance, conducted by letter and in fevered meetings when Mitya was back in Tsarskoe Selo. They could easily have married after the war; he came from an aristocratic family and Nicholas’s sister had married an aristocrat, so it was not unprecedented. But the last time they saw each other was on December 27, 1916, two months before the Russian Revolution, when Mitya spent an evening with the family before heading back to his Yerevan Regiment.