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Girls in White Dresses
SUNDAY 7 JULY 1918
The Romanov family awoke to a bright, sunny day on Sunday 7 July. Indeed, such was the fineness of the weather, the air so ‘nice’ and ‘not too hot’, that for the first time in a fortnight Alexandra ventured out into the garden with everyone else. It was the one highlight of an uneventful day, but a significant one for the four Romanov sisters. The sight of their sick mother outside enjoying the sunshine for once, instead of being closeted indoors with a headache or some other ailment, must have brought joy to their hearts. For so long now Alexandra’s sufferings – real and imaginary – had coloured their every waking moment. Indeed, they had never really known their mother well. ‘O, if you knew, how hard Mama’s illness is for us to bear’, Tatiana had said plaintively in a letter to Rasputin 10 years earlier. It had been so ever since they were very young, but increasingly since the birth of their brother and the many crises in his fragile health. The painful uncertainty of being around so much unrelenting maternal suffering had taken a huge emotional toll on the young, affectionate Romanov daughters. But they were highly resourceful and had fallen back on their own strengths and profound sisterly affection. They had created their own coping mechanisms by uniting in a fierce loyalty to each other and a determination always to share the burden of attendance on their mother and sickly brother.
One after another, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia hovered attentively over Alexandra, constantly at her beck and call, forever fearful of offending her or upsetting her fragile equilibrium. But, as growing girls, they also longed for her energy, her time, for real emotional engagement with them. Mama loved them very much; they knew that, of course. But if only she could be well and whole like other mothers – that was all they ever wanted. Yet there were many days when she did not join them at breakfast . . . or at lunch . . . or dinner. Afternoon tea was sacrosanct: the Tsaritsa liked to share it in private with her husband, and the girls only attended if she specifically invited them. During Alexandra’s frequent bouts of illness and the Tsar’s inevitable preoccupations with matters of state, they were left a great deal to their own devices, Alexandra sharing the view of many Victorian parents that her children should find their own amusements.
Such were Alexandra’s absences from their view, even within the family, that the girls had often been reduced to writing plaintive little notes expressing their love, apologising for being naughty, enquiring after Mama’s welfare – notes that were full of unspoken longing. There was always the hope that perhaps tomorrow they would see her not in bed but in her sitting room and that her head would not be aching. Suffering was Mama’s cross, and it had to be borne without question or complaint. This was a fact that Alexandra constantly impressed upon the girls; but it meant that they too had to bear Mama’s cross, their young minds filled with her morbid fatalism about endurance, duty and Christian submission.
For a brief while the Romanov sisters had had a governess, but such were Alexandra’s very strict views on parenting that she had abandoned the idea, preferring instead to oversee their care and education herself with the assistance of Russian and English nursemaids and a team of tutors led by Pierre Gilliard, their French teacher. Like both their parents before them, the girls adhered to a strict schedule of study combined with physical exercise, all closely monitored and approved by Alexandra, who was insistent on imposing her own moral and religious values at all times. The girls learned to be good needlewomen, had a drawing master, a religious instructor and a teacher of mathematics. Russian language and literature were also included in their curriculum, as well as English lessons with tutor Sidney Gibbes. As a patrician Victorian parent, Alexandra did not believe in pampering her daughters: they slept on simple camp beds as their father had before them, and were taught to keep their things tidy and never sit idly but always have something to knit, sew or embroider. They were allowed limited amounts of pocket money monthly and wore each other’s hand-me-downs. Their rooms contained only the most simple of furnishings, the one indulgence being the family photographs they pinned up on the walls and the many icons hung above their beds. They were trained to be indifferent to the cold; their rooms were well ventilated and they took cold baths in the morning. Warm ones followed in the evening, perfumed with the only luxury allowed them – fragrances made by Coty of Paris. Rose for Olga, jasmine for Tatiana, lilac – one of several favourites – for Maria and violet for Anastasia. As for jewellery, Alexandra presented to each daughter, on her birthday, a single pearl and a single diamond, so that by the time they reached 16 they had sufficient for one simple, plain necklace of each.
Apart from occasional trips into St Petersburg with their adored Aunt Olga on Sundays during the years 1906–14, when they had tea and enjoyed games and dancing at her house and met other young people, the girls were given very few opportunities to make friends. Their mother was of the view that most of those at court were a pernicious influence on their innocent young minds and were to be shunned; the girls therefore were only occasionally allowed to play with the children of members of the Imperial entourage. Even among their own close relatives, however, they had no real friends. But they longed for them, for the secret confidences and shared giggles that adolescent girls grow up with, as much as they did for the loving embrace and warmth of a mother who all too often was physically incapacitated or engrossed with their sickly brother. With very little protest, the Romanov sisters grew used to their isolation and the relative austerity of their lives, becoming extremely self-sufficient, turning to each other, their china dolls, their pet dogs and their treasured Box Brownie cameras. They photographed each other incessantly and shared everything. They seemed totally bonded, despite the inevitable occasional tiffs and petty rivalries for the attention of their parents, so contented in their narrow world. They were lively girls, full of energy, curious about life, always wanting to run in different directions. Yet somehow they ended up living in a bubble, which they accepted without complaint, as Count Mosolov, head of the Imperial Chancellery, observed: ‘I don’t honestly think that it ever entered the Grand Duchesses’ heads that life could be other than it was.’
Such isolation inevitably left them all to a degree innocent for their years and thus more emotionally vulnerable. It meant that when they did have to go out into society they sometimes seemed gawky and ingenuous and tended to talk to each other like girls far younger than their years. Such was the sublimation of self within this collective of four that when the sisters sent letters to favourite tutors or relatives they often did so jointly, signing themselves ‘OTMA’ – the first letter of each of their names – a sign of their unity and also, perhaps, of a passive acceptance of their collective anonymity. Even in the elegant and uncontroversial way in which they posed together in publicity photographs, their identity as a group rather than individuals was reinforced once their brother was born and became the centre of attention. Their diaries too largely recorded collective activities. With the onset of puberty, there inevitably were times when the girls resisted their mother’s control over their every waking thought and deed. ‘They rarely understand my point of view on things, even the most trifling ones’, noted Alexandra with exasperation. ‘They always consider themselves right and when I tell them how I was educated and how one should be educated they cannot understand’ – in other words, they were growing up and finding their own way as young women. If the Revolution had not intervened, perhaps they might at last have begun to assert their individual personalities more. But now, as prisoners in the house at Ekaterinburg, the sisters were forced in on themselves even more, in close and constant proximity to their mother’s terrible physical decline and her increasingly obsessive religiosity.
But there had of course been happier days when they had seen her smile – halcyon, cloudless summer days during that final idyllic period before the Great War of 1914–18 changed the world for ever. As a family they had enjoyed many happy summers between 1904 and 1913, livi
ng out the fairy-tale life of the rich and privileged: long, hot summer holidays often in the company of their various royal cousins, as part of an extended European royal dynasty soon to be torn apart by war and revolution. Summers on the Imperial yacht sailing the fjords off the coast of Finland, or at their lovely white marble Italianate palace in Livadia were always the best of times for the Romanov sisters. In the Crimea, they lived in a virtual paradise, enjoying the subtropical climate of the Imperial estate, surrounded by pine forests, mountains and densely covered valleys, and with craggy cliffs descending to a perfect blue sea, the air thick with the scent of bougainvillea, roses and honeysuckle. Olga, the eldest, had no doubts on the matter: ‘In St Petersburg we work, but at Livadia we live.’ Livadia breathed life into all the family; no wonder it had been their chosen place of exile after the Revolution, a wish never to be fulfilled. For the girls, life at Livadia or on the royal yacht was such a joy: to savour the pleasures of picnics, mushroom-gathering, walks, seabathing, tennis parties, roller-skating, games of boules and dancing on the deck of the Shtandart with the yacht’s lively and entertaining junior officers – it was all so magical compared to their stultifying existence at the Alexander Palace.
When they were in the Crimea, visits to their Romanov cousins at their Aunt Xenia’s estate nearby at Ai-Todor also brought great pleasure. On such holidays the four young sisters were much photographed, dressed alike, as so often they were, in soft white cambrics, Brussels lace and muslins, their hair tied back in blue bows, or wearing distinctive large-brimmed summer hats decorated with lace frills or flowers. The photo opportunities were not missed for promoting these seemingly perfect, innocent young girls as archetypes of Russian feminine beauty, the modest and charming offspring of parents who lived by the pious values of Christian family life. In their simplicity, always smiling and vibrant, the Romanov sisters and their handsome young brother projected an Imperial fantasy world where the sun always shone and at the heart of which the four girls were forever young and incorruptible – the fairy companions in white to the Tsarevich’s eternal Peter Pan.
At the time of the Romanov tercentenary in 1913, when the Romanov children were first publicly paraded to an adoring Russian public, the virtues of the Tsar’s daughters had been much extolled – again collectively, in commemorative books such as Georgy Elchaninov’s popular hagiography of the Tsar – as having been ‘trained to be good and careful housewives’, who took a pleasure in doing kindnesses to others and were equipped with the social graces of painting, piano playing and photography. But who were they as real people, as individuals?
The closeness in years between Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia belied a marked difference in character which the public image glossed over. There were only six years between them but it was a sufficient time span to mean that the girls naturally gravitated into two pairs, becoming known in the family as ‘the big pair’ and ‘the little pair’ and sharing bedrooms accordingly. The separation into two age groups became further accentuated once, having reached the age of 16, the older two (between whom there was only 18 months) started putting their hair up in neat ripples of marcel waves, whilst the younger girls, their hair still loosely beribboned, remained gawky and plump.
The Tsar and Tsaritsa had been delighted with Olga when she was born on 15 November 1895 – even though in the Romanov family for generations the first-born had usually been a boy. There was plenty of time yet for a son and heir. A huge, fat, bonny baby, Olga turned into rather a plain, serious little girl. But then, at 15, she suddenly became pretty. She was not a beauty like her younger sisters Tatiana and Maria, but was somehow very feminine and vulnerable. With her round face, turned-up nose (‘my humble snub’, as she called it), high cheekbones, light chestnut hair and blue eyes, Olga Nikolaevna Romanova was the epitome of Slavic beauty. She was never conscious of her charming looks and did not pay much attention to her appearance. From the start she was someone for whom the inner life was paramount, and it showed in her face. True, on the outside she had a gentle, timid charm and softness all her own – like that of her father, whom she most resembled. But of all the sisters she was the most serious and thoughtful – a melancholic dreamer who loved poetry and music. Unlike her father, however, she never learned to control her outbursts of sometimes violent temper and could be impetuous and capricious. Her fierce intelligence meant that sometimes she would be too outspoken in what she said, and her remarks could be wounding. Being the eldest, she was expected to set an example to the others, and as time went on she occasionally clashed with her mother and would go off into moody sulks when reprimanded. Alexandra had problems controlling her behaviour, exhorting her to ‘try to be an example of what a good little obedient girlie ought to be’ for her younger sisters. But Olga found it hard to toe the line and as she grew older sought to assert her independence, tending to separate off into her own inner world. There was always, from a young age, a deep, sometimes lost expression on her face, and as the years went on it became ever more marked in the photographs taken of her.
One might say that her high domed forehead was an indicator of her cleverness and natural wit. Of all the sisters she was the most shrewd and intellectually mature. She was quick to learn – an accomplished pianist, good at languages, an avid reader. And she was utterly devoted to her father. There was nothing Olga loved better than to go for long walks with him whenever the opportunity arose, often clutching him tightly by the arm; she also frequently accompanied him to church, sitting close to him. There is no doubt that she, of all the Romanov children, was the one most aware of the cruelty and injustice in the world outside. After she reached the age of 20, when she was allowed access to her considerable fortune (bequeathed to his grandchildren by Alexander III), she regularly made donations to the poor and sick. She seemed deeply troubled by the plight of Russia after the outbreak of war and then revolution in 1917. She was highly sensitive to her father’s position; she read the papers regularly and could not understand why the feeling in the country had so turned against him. In 1915, with her mother and sister Tatiana, she took up nursing training and worked with the wounded. But Olga could not handle the stress and anguish of it all, nor the sight of her mother wearing herself to exhaustion, and was forced to take lighter duties. Her health declined during the war years; she became thin and pale, suffering from anaemia and bouts of depression. She was clearly worried about the family’s tenuous future after they were sent to Tobolsk; on leaving the Governor’s House she told Baroness von Buxhoeveden that they were lucky to be still alive and reunited with their parents once more. Now, at Ekaterinburg, even the guards noticed how sad and tired she looked for most of the time and how, during exercise periods in the garden, she kept herself apart, her melancholy gaze fixed on the distance.
By any normal royal standards of the day, Olga should have long since been married off. But in matters emotional and sexual she was still an innocent at 22. Her mother had tortured herself pondering the future: ‘Oh if only our children could be as happy in their married life’, she wrote to Nicholas. The couple were acutely aware of how fortunate they were to have had a love match, and it is hard to believe that Alexandra would have been prepared to sacrifice her daughters to dynastic or political expediency, as her grandmother Queen Victoria had done. Writing in 1915, Alexandra intimated her anxieties for her eldest child: ‘I look at our big Olga, my heart fills with emotion and wondering as to what is in store for her – what her lot will be.’ Rumours of suitable dynastic alliances with the Greek, Serbian and Romanian royal houses had begun circulating once Olga had reached the age of 16 in 1911, on which occasion she had enjoyed her coming-out ball – the only real ball ever organised specially for the two eldest girls. In 1912 there had been talk of her marrying her father’s cousin Dimitry, but Alexandra had vetoed the idea after she heard tales of his unacceptable private life. For a few months at the end of 1913 Olga had had a crush on Pavel Voronov, a junior officer on the Shtandart. But of course there was never any fut
ure in a relationship with a commoner, and that December Pavel became engaged to a lady-in-waiting. Finally, in the autumn of 1913, she was introduced to Crown Prince Karol of Romania, when the Imperial yacht made a royal visit to Constanta. Olga did not warm to him and refused point blank any suggestion of marriage. She would never leave Russia or convert from Orthodoxy: ‘I am a Russian and I wish to remain Russian’, she said most emphatically, and nothing would change her mind. Karol, as it turned out, preferred the prettier Tatiana, but failed to impress her with his coarse and tactless behaviour. Finding a suitable husband of sufficiently high status for Olga within Russia, let alone for three more daughters (who may well have shared their sister’s feelings), would have been even more problematic once the Russian Grand Dukes had all been discounted. Meanwhile Olga continued to fall for the most obvious candidates with whom she came into contact during the war years – the wounded soldiers in her care.
There is no doubt that a high-calibre union would eventually have been the lot of the second Romanov daughter, Tatiana, born on 11 June 1897. She was a picture-book beauty and perfect bride material for the dynastic matchmakers of Europe. Taller even than her mother, willowy and with a tiny waist, she was the most elegant and ‘aristocratic’ looking of the four sisters and exuded a sense of her status from head to toe. People often remarked that she behaved ‘like the daughter of an emperor’. Confident in her beauty, with a fixed, almost challenging expression in her eyes, Tatiana could look effortlessly imperious. Her profile was exquisite; with her pale, almost marble skin, lovely dark chestnut hair and a slightly mystical, Asiatic look about her wide, tipped-up dark grey eyes, she was naturally photogenic. She loved clothes and carried them with grace and elegance, as well as a slightly coquettish air. But she was very much her mother’s daughter: reserved, inscrutable, less open and spontaneous than her sisters and less inclined to smile. The guards at the Ipatiev House had sometimes found her ‘stuck up’; she would often throw disapproving looks at them when confronted with their uncouth behaviour, though when she smiled her disarming smile in order to ask a favour of some kind, it was a quite different matter.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 12