By nature Tatiana was a romantic idealist and a dreamer, but she never let this get in the way of her very practical talents and her sense of balance, which meant she was very focused and at times opinionated about what she wanted. Although younger than Olga she was the more forceful of the two, and her elder sister frequently deferred to her judgement. For Tatiana’s fragile features and figure belied a physical strength and energy that she constantly applied around the home and in organisational skills. She had natural gifts as a housekeeper and decisionmaker, as well as being good at handicrafts. Her mother came to rely on her heavily as friend, nurse and adviser, ready to take responsibility for her younger siblings when she was sick or indisposed. Yurovsky found her by far ‘the most mature’ of the four girls and their natural leader, who often came to his office requesting one thing or another on behalf of the family. She was always ready to do what was asked of her and would persevere to get it right, so much so that her sisters nicknamed her ‘the governor’ for her purposefulness.
It was crystal clear to everyone that Tatiana was her mother’s favourite daughter, and slavishly devoted to her, even though she had a knack too for winning her father’s favour when needed. Despite this, there is, in her childhood letters to her mother, written begging forgiveness of ‘deary’ (such an oddly grown-up term for a child to use to a parent) for some minor misdemeanour or other, an air of heightened anxiety. She lived in fear of her mother’s disapproval and was desperate for her love and time, and so learned to pander to Alexandra’s moods and demands. She willingly became the ‘conduit of all her mother’s decisions’ and therefore more readily than all the others inculcated Alexandra’s superstition and religiosity and was quick to mouth her platitudes.
Poor little Maria. Everyone inwardly groaned when she was born on 27 June 1899, including her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, regretting ‘the 3rd girl for the country’. The Dowager knew, as did the royal couple themselves only too well, that ‘an heir would be more welcome than a daughter’. But Mashka, as she was affectionately called in the family, soon won everybody’s hearts. She was enchantingly pretty in a very rounded Russian way, with a glowing peaches-and-cream complexion, a full mouth, and lustrous thick light-brown hair. Beneath the finely shaped sable eyebrows shone out the biggest, most luminous grey-blue eyes. Everyone remarked on them and it earned them the nickname of ‘Maria’s saucers’. She was not particularly bright at her studies but had a wonderful gift for painting in watercolours. She had a tendency to be clumsy and earned herself another playful family nickname – ‘fat little bow wow’ (le bon gros tutu). Modest, placid and biddable, Maria allowed her younger sister Anastasia, to whom she was devoted, to rule her. Of all the sisters she was the most natural earth mother, having the voluptuous broad-boned figure to match and possessed of a truly loving heart. No doubt she would have been one of the first of the sisters to marry and would have made a fine mother, for she loved little children and had an instinctive way with them. She exuded good health and energy and seemed easily contented with very little, having had no complaints about the family’s quiet life at Tobolsk. Indeed she had told the commandant there, Vasily Pankratov, that the family now was healthier and more physically active and useful than during all its years at court.
Because of her natural nurturing skills, Maria was the one who most often remained indoors with her ailing mother when the others went outside – ‘my legs’, as the Tsaritsa so often called her. She had been the obvious choice to accompany Alexandra as carer when she and Nicholas travelled on ahead to Ekaterinburg, and she was equally patient and attentive with her brother. Maria was a stoic; she had tremendous reserves of energy and was strong enough to carry Alexey when needed. But there were times, when younger, when she had suffered bouts of insecurity and anxiety as the third daughter and had felt unloved. Perhaps it had been her mother’s increasing preoccupation with her own ills and Alexey’s that had prompted her more and more to seek conversation and company among the guards who surrounded the family – first at Tsarskoe Selo, and later at Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. Gauche and naïve, she was an innocent abroad in the company of men. Sometimes her flirtatious, skittish behaviour provoked unwarranted innuendo from the guards in their responses; sexual curiosity was a dangerous thing in girls such as the Romanovs who had been so little prepared for the real world outside. And it bubbled under the surface the more they grew and experienced the normal hormonal changes of adolescence and the longer they had no other male company than the guards surrounding them. The men of the Special Detachment at the Ipatiev House clearly liked Maria best of all the family: she had a natural openness and a lovely smile. Even Yurovsky later remarked that her ‘sincere, modest character’ had impressed them all. And she truly enjoyed being with ordinary people, talking to them about their lives, their homes and children; she even showed the guards her photograph albums. Her open flirtation with the guards brought consequences of which the details are very sketchy, but it is clear that in the final weeks at Ekaterinburg her mother and eldest sister froze her out for her behaviour. From the outset Alexandra had strongly disapproved of Maria’s fraternisation with the Ipatiev House guards and constantly whispered sharp admonitions to her, but at the age of 19 Maria, by now aware of her own sexuality and attractiveness, was only behaving as most girls of her age would have done, lacking as she did her youngest sister’s boyish disinterest in men.
The day that the long-suffering Alexandra struggled to give birth, on 18 June 1901, to yet another large baby – and yet another girl – Nicholas lit a cigarette and took off on a long walk around the park at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘My Lord! What a disappointment!’ his sister Xenia wrote in her diary. Master of self-concealment that he was, Nicholas managed not to show his true feelings and grew to love his impish, wayward fourth daughter as much as all the others.
It was clear from very early on that Anastasia would be the wild child of the family. Although the youngest daughter, she compensated for this by being by far the most forceful and outward-going. She was far less subservient to parental control or sisterly anonymity, inhabiting her own self-created world of imaginary friends, monsters and comical characters. Such was Anastasia’s irrepressible curiosity and vivacity that her Aunt Olga, the Tsar’s sister, called her schwipsig (a German affectionate expression meaning ‘merry little one’). And it stuck, the name being as quirky as the girl herself: awkward, obstreperous, noisy, unconventional. Her love of life was so infectious that it forever redeemed her endless acts of naughtiness, though there were times when she could be rough and spiteful during games with other children – a fact complained about by some of her Romanov cousins.
Perhaps of all the sisters Anastasia would have been destined for a less conventional life: she always took risks and looked on everything as an adventure. An out-and-out tomboy, she was vigorously active, ignoring the warnings to take care of her weak back and climbing trees with the best of the boys. She had inherited the cornflower-blue eyes of the Romanovs, just like her father. Shorter than her sisters, she lacked their natural grace and became lumpy and awkward after the onset of puberty. The family found another nickname for her: kubyshka (‘dumpling’); even at the Ipatiev House, despite the rationing, she was often described as being chubby. Indeed everything about Anastasia was ungracious and unconventional, down to her deportment, which lacked the elegance of a Russian Grand Duchess and is evident in group photographs with her far more dignified sisters. But some could see the beautiful girl she would one day become once the puppy fat was gone.
Anastasia’s mercurial nature meant she was constantly restless; she wanted to grasp life by the throat and hated sitting at her studies. Her thoughts were so chaotic and undisciplined that she found it impossible to concentrate, even when writing a letter – those to her father are full of quirky humorous expressions and private jokes shared between them, reflecting an unconventional personality. ‘I just grasp at whatever enters my noddle’, as she wrote in May 1918.
Anastasia m
ight have been a poor student, but she did not lack natural intelligence, and Sidney Gibbes, who found her too unpredictable and a nightmare to teach, was nevertheless impressed by her self-possession and her bright and happy disposition. A tease and a brilliant mimic, Anastasia employed her natural intelligence in the observation of others: she watched and absorbed the physical idiosyncrasies and speech mannerisms of those around her, keeping everyone amused with her comical voices and grimaces through the long freezing winter in the draughty Governor’s House at Tobolsk, performing in amateur theatricals and doing circus tricks with Tatiana’s dog Jimmy. She was absolutely fearless and refused to be cowed by misfortune and the restrictions of imprisonment. Even at Ekaterinburg she remained irrepressible: she would poke her tongue out at Yurovsky behind his back and entertain the guards with her pratfalls and practical jokes. Perhaps her subversive humour was a defence mechanism, a cover for her own inner unease and apprehension. Perhaps it was a mark of something deeper, more altruistic. Her Aunt Olga always said that Anastasia had a heart of gold, and in her own free-spirited way she worked hard to dissipate the fears and anxieties of those around her. Whilst her eldest sister Olga had long since capitulated and retreated within herself, bold, brave Anastasia remained always on the offensive. Of all the sisters, Yurovsky noticed that she seemed the one best adjusted to their confinement.
During all their years largely closeted from the world at the Alexander Palace, the Romanov sisters had been trapped in a kind of time warp, but the war years and an increasing responsibility for their mother, as well as their sick brother, after Nicholas had left for the Front in August 1915, had brought with them a sudden and cruel awakening into the real world. Now, one of the girls always slept with their mother in her room – Mama was not strong, they could not leave her alone. And then at Mama’s instigation ‘the big pair’, Olga and Tatiana, had undertaken nurses’ training, whilst ‘the little pair’ had been recruited into charitable work and visiting hospitals for the wounded. The war and then the Revolution had finally, to differing degrees, made women of them – courageous, dignified and mutually supportive in the face of adversity. Their uncle, Grand Duke Alexander, had seen Olga and Tatiana that last winter of 1916–17 in their Red Cross uniforms and their nurses’ wimples, looking so plain and serious, their faces drawn.
And now, at the Ipatiev House, the four girls were being forced increasingly to contemplate their own suffering and the family’s uncertain future. They worked hard at concealing their apprehensions from each other and at lifting everyone’s flagging spirits. Their clothes were worn, their famously long glossy hair grown back barely to chin length – their heads had all been shaved in the spring of 1917 when they had been recovering from measles – and they were now far from being the idealised girls in white dresses of the Imperial publicity machine. Olga in particular seemed so much older and troubled, ‘like the sad young heroine of a Turgenev novel with the eyes of a gazelle’. Baroness von Buxhoeveden, who had travelled with her as far as Ekaterinburg in mid-May, had noted even then how the ‘lovely, bright girl of 22’ had become ‘a faded and sad middle-aged woman’. Yet even so, some of the guards were moved by the sisters. Aleksandr Strekotin thought ‘there was something very special about them’, even in their old and tattered clothes, something ‘especially sweet’. He thought that they would not have looked better ‘even if they had been covered in gold and diamonds’.
That last Christmas at Tobolsk in 1917 the girls had put on a brave face for their parents’ sake, but seven months later, in Ekaterinburg, they were still incarcerated, with no sight at all of the outside world and hopes fading of ever seeing their beloved Livadia again. Olga seems to have welcomed with quiet calm what she, in her profound religious faith, believed – that passive acceptance was the only answer. It was what their parents had taught all of them – to turn the other cheek – which perhaps explains why the sisters remained quiet and uncomplaining, watching out for their mother and brother and constantly buoying each other up through the monotony and sometimes despair of their lives with false bonhomie and mutual protectiveness. In the absence of any physical ability to escape their situation, love was the last and only defence the family had. And it did not take much: only a moment of sympathy or commiseration from the guards, one of them later said, for the girls to recover their equilibrium and smile.
But how many times must those four sisters – aged 22, 21, 19 and 17 – have sat and stared at the whited-out windows, wishing they could see the world beyond once more. They had sat for hours on the window ledges at Tobolsk watching people pass by, smiling and waving. But now the Russia they all loved so passionately was out of sight, a distant blank, and their future with it. That evening, 7 July 1918, as a violent storm broke outside and washed the dust of summer from the city’s streets and shook the already yellowing leaves from the trees in the Ipatiev House garden, all the Romanov daughters could do was sit and listen to the rain and wonder, perhaps, as Chekhov’s three sisters did when faced with an uncertain future in a provincial backwater, ‘Why do we live? Why do we suffer? If only we knew . . . if only.’
In his untidy, smoke-filled office across the hallway, the new commandant of the Ipatiev House, Yakov Yurovsky, knew only too well what the future held for the four Romanov sisters. He had now completed arrangements to replace the friendly but increasingly untrustworthy internal guard of workers from the local factories with men of his own choosing – hand-picked from the Ekaterinburg Cheka. From now on, the younger three girls, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia would even be denied the casual conversations and flirtations that had alleviated the agonising boredom of their lives. A wall of silence was about to descend and the screw to be turned ever tighter on their isolation.
6
The Boy in the Sailor Suit
MONDAY 8 JULY 1918
When the Romanovs emerged to use the bathroom and lavatory on the morning of 8 July, they found themselves confronted by a group of strangers. ‘Inside the house new Latvians are standing guard’, Nicholas noted in his diary. The cool of the showery early morning was matched by a new and chilly atmosphere inside. These shadowy new figures would from now on be overseeing the family’s life at the Ipatiev House, along with the three remaining senior internal guards from Avdeev’s original detachment from the Sysert works – Anatoly Yakimov, Konstantin Dobrynin and Ivan Starkov. These three, however, were now designated to guard the hallway area and no longer had the run of the Romanov’s rooms. That was now the province only of Yurovsky’s men.
Yurovsky had requested the new guards be chosen by the local Cheka from the volunteer battalions at the Verkh-Isetsk factory; he had to have men who were dedicated Bolsheviks and who could be relied on to do whatever was asked of them. The new guards therefore had been hired on the understanding that they would be prepared, if necessary, to execute the Tsar, about which they were sworn to secrecy. Nothing at this stage was said about killing the rest of the family. In order to prevent a repetition of the fraternisation that had occurred under Avdeev, Yurovsky had ensured a further emotional distance between the guards and their charges by choosing mainly foreigners, hence Nicholas describing them as ‘Letts’ – a term commonly used in Russia to define someone of European, non-Russian origin. The only Russians among them were Viktor Netrebin, an 18-year-old from the Verkh-Isetsk factory who had already fought against the Whites under Dutov, and the brothers Mikhail and Alexey Kabanov, the latter a former soldier in the Imperial Guards.
Adolf Lepa, the leader of the new guards, was Lithuanian; a man called Jan Tsel’ms (or Tsal’ms; in English sources often transliterated misleadingly as Soames), who was, according to Yurovsky, probably Latvian, had been recruited from a Latvian communist rifle detachment that had arrived in Ekaterinburg at the end of June. The remaining foreigner, Andras Verhas, was, like Yurovsky’s household servant Rudolf Lacher, an Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war. Verhas and Lacher, like many of their kind, had been forcibly conscripted into the Bolshevik war effort and sent
to work in the munitions factories of the Urals; Lacher had been sent from the Verkh-Isetsk factory to the Ipatiev House during Avdeev’s tenure, to assist in various household duties, such as keeping the samovars filled, and had stayed on.
Yurovsky was intent on keeping his new special guards close at hand and under his thumb. He treated them as equals and often spoke to them in German. He moved Avdeev’s old internal guard members, except for Lacher, out of their quarters in the basement of the Ipatiev House and into the Popov House across the street, and the new men took over their billet, eating their meals upstairs in the commandant’s room. Yet, extraordinarily, one afternoon soon afterwards, when out exercising in the garden, Olga recognised one of the new guards – Alexey Kabanov. Had he not been in one of her father’s Guards regiments? Kabanov grudgingly conceded it was so but he did not tell her he was now assigned to man the new Maxim machine gun in the attic.
The arrival of the new guards would have fascinated the ever-curious Alexey, a boy whose inability to run from room to room like other children was compensated for by a capacity to watch and take in everything going on around him in great detail.
The whole focus and dynamic of the Romanov family had shifted dramatically when, at 1.15 p.m. on Friday 30 July 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra’s fifth child had been born. At last the family had been ‘visited by the grace of God’, Nicholas wrote in his diary. He had answered his and his wife’s years of fervent prayers and had sent a son as comfort ‘in time of sore trials’, Russia then being in the midst of a disastrous war with Japan.
Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg Page 13