The Romanov Sisters Read online

  For the remainder of that first month the couple were in a state of denial, hoping against hope, once the bleeding had stopped, that all would be well. And then almost six weeks later it had started again, confirming their very worst fears.64 Dr Feodorov, whom Nicholas and Alexandra liked and trusted, had been on hand at all times and had drawn on the best possible medical advice in St Petersburg. But it was already clear that the medical men could do little. Nicholas and Alexandra’s son’s fate rested on a miracle: only God could protect him. But nobody in Russia must know the truth. The life-threatening condition of the little tsarevich – ‘the hope of Russia’ – would remain a closely guarded secret, even from their nearest relatives.65 Nothing must undermine the security of the throne that Nicholas and Alexandra were absolutely determined to pass on, intact, to their son.

  Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, was only thirty-two but was already a physical wreck after ten physically and mentally draining years of pregnancy and childbirth. Her always precarious mental state was severely undermined by the discovery of Alexey’s condition and she tormented herself that she of all people had unwittingly transmitted haemophilia to her much-loved and longed-for son.* Her already melancholic air henceforth became an inexplicably tragic one to those not privy to the truth. The whole focus of the family now dramatically shifted, to protecting Alexey against accident and injury – to literally keeping him alive within their own closely controlled domestic world. Nicholas and Alexandra therefore abandoned their newly refurbished apartments in the Winter Palace and ceased staying in town for the court season. Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof would from now on be their refuge.

  Alexey’s four still very young but highly sensitive sisters – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – would bond ever more closely in response to the family’s retreat and in support of their physically vulnerable mother. In the late summer of 1904, the world of the four Romanov grand duchesses began to shrink, at the very point when they were eager to rush out and explore it. What no one then, of course, knew was that as female children of the tsaritsa, one or all of the sisters might be carriers of that terrible defective gene – a hidden time bomb that had already begun to reverberate across the royal families of Europe. Alexandra’s elder sister Irene – who like her was a carrier and who had married her first cousin, Prince Henry of Prussia – had already given birth to two haemophiliac sons. The youngest, four-year-old Heinrich, had died – ‘of the terrible illness of the English family’, as Xenia described it – just five months before Alexey was born. In Russia they called it the bolezn gessenskikh – ‘the Hesse disease’; others called it ‘the Curse of the Coburgs’.66 But one thing was certain; in the early 1900s, the life expectancy of a haemophiliac child was only about thirteen years.67

  Chapter Five

  THE BIG PAIR AND THE LITTLE PAIR

  By the beginning of 1905, and despite the arrival of the long-awaited tsarevich, Russia was in crisis, as war continued to rage with Japan. The Russian Imperial Army had not proved invincible in the East, as Maître Philippe had predicted, and was demoralized, weary and undersupplied. Press censorship had become even more rigorous as a result. All comments in foreign newspapers and magazines arriving in Russia that were in any way critical of the war – and, by association, the tsarist system – were heavily blacked out. A notable casualty was an article on the Russian succession in the Illustrated London News by journalist Charles Lowe. Published shortly after Alexey’s birth it had been accompanied by a portrait of Alexandra, captioned ‘The Mother of a Czar to Be’, congratulating the Russians on ‘this ray of sunshine amidst the heavy clouds of national misfortune’, but adding provocatively that ‘the advent of the Czarevitch has probably averted a revolution’. The Russian censor had been much exercised in how to deal with this inflammatory statement. It would have been considered sacrilegious to obliterate the tsaritsa’s portrait on the page, so in the end the entire article surrounding it was blacked out when the magazine reached Russian readers.1 Such draconian censorship was a futile gesture: on the discontented streets of St Petersburg industrial and political unrest continued to build. It seemed to Grand Duke Konstantin ‘as if the dam has been broken’. Russia, he said, ‘has been seized with a thirst for change … Revo-lution is banging on the door’.2

  In a rare performance of public ceremonial Nicholas attended the ritual of the Blessing of the Waters, traditionally marking the end of the Christmas festival, held on 6 January in the Orthodox calendar. The key moment came when he descended the Jordan Staircase of the Winter Palace to the edge of the frozen River Neva, to witness the Metropolitan of St Petersburg dip the gold cross into the water three times through a hole in the ice in commemoration of the baptism of Christ. After this a flagon of the sacred water was presented to the tsar to cross himself with. However, during the traditional gun salute that followed, three of the charges fired from the battery on the opposite bank of the Neva – whether by accident or design – proved to be lives not blanks. One of them smashed into the windows of the Winter Palace’s Nicholas Hall which was crowded with guests and showered grapeshot and glass over the temporary wooden chapel on the ice in which Nicholas and Maria Feodorovna and other members of the imperial family were gathered. Nicholas was unhurt, and ‘never moved a muscle except to make the Sign of the Cross’, as one eyewitness recalled, although his ‘quiet, resigned smile’ seemed ‘almost unearthly’.3 A later investigation suggested it had been a genuine error – shotted cartridges having been left in the breech of the cannon after target practice. The fatalistic Nicholas was, however, convinced that the live shells had been intended for him.4 For a nation reading catastrophe into every unfortunate incident in this ill-fated reign it was further proof that the autocracy was doomed.

  Three days later, tragedy on a grand scale unfolded across St Petersburg, which had been gripped for weeks by bitter industrial unrest, exacerbated by mounting discontent with the war with Japan. Hundreds were left dead and wounded when Cossack troops fired on a rally of unarmed workers and their families who had marched to the Winter Palace to present a petition to Nicholas begging for political and industrial reform. The advent of Bloody Sunday, as it became known, brought about a radical shift in the traditional popular perception of the tsar as the protective ‘little father’ and a volatile nation descended into extreme violence as the year went on. In February the Russian army was routed at Mukden in Manchuria, and in mid-May the Baltic Fleet was decimated at Tsushima Strait. By the time peace was negotiated with Japan in August, Nicholas’s Minister of the Interior, Petr Stolypin, had instigated a round of courts martial and summary executions to counter the escalating violence.

  Widespread unrest went hand in hand with a dramatic escalation in the assassination of prominent government figures. Two of Stolypin’s predecessors in succession had been assassinated: Dmitri Sipyagin in 1902, and Vyacheslav von Plehve – the victim of a bomb attack on the streets of St Petersburg – two weeks before Alexey was born. The Romanov family had long been living in the shadow of political terrorism and in February 1905 the revolutionaries scored their most chilling success yet, when Ella’s husband, the much-hated Grand Duke Sergey, was blown to pieces in a bomb attack in Moscow. Such was the perceived danger to the imperial family that Nicholas and Alexandra were not allowed to attend his funeral. Other attacks followed thick and fast: in May the head of the Kiev section of the Okhrana, Alexander Spiridovich, was shot and seriously wounded. In August 1906 General Vonlyarlyarsky, the Russian military governor of Warsaw, was assassinated, as too was General Min, commander of the Life Guards regiment, who was gunned down by a female revolutionary at Peterhof Railway Station in front of his wife.5

  Such were the dangers now threatening Nicholas that it ‘led to the organization of a curiously complicated system of spying and tattling; spies were set to watch spies; the air was filled with whisperings, cross-currents of fear and mistrust’, as the overstretched tsarist police struggled to cope.6 Although the imperial family never walk
ed out informally in crowded places in St Petersburg, every eventuality had to be covered – such as those occasions when they went out for drives in a landau or troika, or attended church services or public ceremonies where they might be surrounded by crowds. This elaborate security network was bolstered by a ban on any press announcements about their day-to-day appointments or any journeys they might be making.7 Nothing escaped the rigorous inspection of the Press Censor’s Department. As a result, the Russian people, as one London paper observed, had absolutely no sense of the ‘sweet family life’ of their tsar and tsaritsa; ‘the papers dare not print it – it is spoken about rarely, if at all, and always with bated breath.’ A few anodyne bulletins were released for public consumption, along with official photographs and postcards available for sale, but that was the sum of it. The Russian imperial family was becoming famous for its ‘dazzling inaccessibility’.8

  Four different security networks now guarded the Romanovs’ every move: the Tsar’s Escort was backed up by a special police force at Tsarskoe Selo that watched the surrounding streets and vetted all visitors to the palace. A specially designated railway battalion monitored the line from St Petersburg out to Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof. All other railway lines were closely guarded by cordons of troops positioned along both embankments of any route taken by the imperial train and guards on board gave added protection to the family.9 Even here, though, Alexandra would insist that the blinds be drawn and she refused to allow the children – or even Nicky – to go to the windows to wave at passers-by. On one such journey, Alexander Mosolov, head of the Court Chancellery, recalled how ‘the children pressed their faces against the slits on either side between curtain and window frame’, hungry for sight of the world beyond.10

  The assassination of General Min so close to home – for the imperial family had been in residence at the Lower Dacha at Peterhof at the time – was unnerving for Nicholas, but far more so for Alexandra, who lived in constant fear for his life and the safety of her children.11 The growing isolation of the imperial family was even felt abroad; a major article in the Washington Post at the end of May, headed ‘Children Without a Smile’, featured the latest set of official photographs, the paper remarking on the sweetness of the Romanov sisters’ expressions, but concluding that ‘melancholy has marked them for her own’, living as the family now did as ‘almost prisoners in their palaces, surrounded by servants and guards whose fidelity, in the light of past events, must always be distrusted’.12

  Under threat of further political upheaval, in the autumn of 1905 Nicholas reluctantly agreed to the creation of a legislative assembly – the State Duma – that was inaugurated in April 1906. Alexandra abhorred his decision, for she resented any political concessions that might endanger the safe transition of the throne to their heir Alexey, and predictably, the Duma was short-lived. Deeply conservative and fearful of change, Nicholas lost his nerve and prorogued it two months later, having come to the conclusion that it was a hotbed of political conflict. Violence inevitably escalated in response. On the afternoon of 12 August 1906 Prime Minister Stolypin narrowly escaped death when a massive bomb attack on his wooden summer dacha in St Petersburg, which was full of visitors at the time, practically demolished the building and killed thirty people, leaving another thirty-two wounded. Stolypin himself was miraculously unharmed, but as they dug him out of the wreckage he was heard to repeat over and over again, ‘My poor children, my poor children.’13 Two of them, his son Arkady and one of his daughters, Natalya, who had both been on the balcony at the time, had been hurled onto the road below by the explosion. Arkady, who was three years old, broke his hip, and fifteen-year-old Natalya was very seriously injured. She lay in hospital in a critical state for weeks. The doctors had expected her to die or face the amputation of both of her badly broken legs, when, on 16 October, a note came from Nicholas telling Stolypin and his wife that a man of God – ‘a peasant from the government of Tobolsk’ – wished to come and bless Natalya with an icon and pray for her. Nicholas and Alexandra had met the man recently and he had made ‘such a distinctly powerful impression’ on them that Nicholas urged Stolypin to let him visit the children in hospital.14 ‘When he came, the man did not touch the child, just stood at the foot of the bed holding up an icon of the miracle worker, St Simeon of Verkhotur’e, and prayed. On leaving, he said “Don’t worry, everything will be all right”.’ Natalya’s condition improved soon after and she eventually recovered, though she was left with a permanent limp as the result of having one heel blown off.15

  The mysterious healer was a strannik – a semi-literate, thirty-seven-year-old lay pilgrim – named Grigory Rasputin, who had been gaining a reputation in St Petersburg as a mystic and healer since his arrival there during Lent 1903.16 Nicholas and Alexandra had already met him, briefly, in November 1905, at Stana’s home, Sergievka, near Peterhof and saw him there again in July 1906. With Philippe now dead, the Montenegrin sisters had recently adopted this new mystic and healer and, being privy to the truth of Alexey’s incurable condition, they were concertedly steering Rasputin in the highly vulnerable couple’s direction. On the evening of 13 October 1906 Rasputin had come to see the imperial family at the Lower Dacha, at his own request, to give them a wooden painted icon of St Simeon, one of the most celebrated Russian saints from Siberia, whom he particularly revered. While he was there he was allowed the privilege of meeting the children and ‘gave them blessed bread and holy images, and spoke a few words to them’.17 But this is as far as it went and Rasputin was not invited back. For now, Nicholas and Alexandra remained impressed, and curious – but cautious.

  The shock of the injuries to Stolypin’s children was, however, profound for both of them; particularly as Stolypin and his wife had finally had a son after five daughters in succession. Alexandra was, at all times, inordinately protective of Alexey; she seemed to ‘press the little boy to her with the convulsive movement of a mother who always seems in fear of her child’s life’.18 The harrowing events of 1905–6 coupled with the strain of Alexey’s haemophilia had already taken a heavy toll on her. When her sisters Irene and Victoria visited that summer they thought she had aged and were alarmed by how frequently incapacitated she was by her sciatica. She was complaining too of shortness of breath and pain in her heart, convinced that it was ‘enlarged’. Victoria went back home greatly saddened by what she had seen; it was ‘only in the faces of the four winsome little girls’ that she had seen any real happiness at Tsarskoe Selo.19

  The total clampdown on news about the Russian imperial family was in stark contrast to the daily court circulars issued in Britain on every royal carriage ride, ribbon-cutting and unveiling, however trivial. In an attempt to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the imperial family, St Petersburg was awash with foreign correspondents chasing stories about the ‘home life’ of the tsar. The ‘Four Little Russian Princesses’ were the object of endless curiosity across the women’s and girls’ magazines of Europe and America.20 Occasionally – before Nicholas and Alexandra quit the Winter Palace in 1905 – the girls had sometimes been seen out in the streets of St Petersburg in a landau with their nannies, often behaving in an unruly fashion, climbing on the seats, standing up and bowing to passers-by and eagerly taking in everything around them. An odd glimpse could still also be caught of them, from beyond the perimeter fence of the Alexander Palace, riding their ponies or bicycles in the park, or running around picking flowers. They seemed full of energy and vivacity and the newspapers hungered for more.21

  One of the first to provide an inside view was Margaretta Eagar, who had, quite suddenly, been ‘let go’ from her post on 29 September 1904 not long after the birth of Alexey. No explanation was given, either by Eagar in her later memoir and articles, or in Nicholas’s brief diary entry alluding to her departure. But it is possible that the forthright Margaretta had become too combative for Nicholas and Alexandra’s tastes – much like Mrs Inman before her – when she had insisted on her right, as nanny, to discipline the child
ren. Having spoken to Alexandra out of turn once on this matter, insisting that she was ‘charged by Your Majesty with the education of the little princesses’, the tsaritsa had been obliged to remind Margaretta that she was talking to the Empress of Russia.22 Margaretta had always been highly opinionated and talkative; perhaps the imperial couple had come to see her as a loose cannon at a time when they were anxious to keep Alexey’s condition secret.

  Nevertheless, it had clearly been difficult for Alexandra to let Margaretta Eagar go, for the nanny had performed her role with considerable skill and dedication and the girls all adored her, but she decided from now on to take charge of the girls’ upbringing herself and not hire any more English nannies. This ran entirely counter to Russian tradition, or for that matter the normal way of things among most aristocratic parents at that time, who handed over the everyday care of their children to a retinue of servants. Alexandra did of course have the service of Russian nursemaids to help with the girls’ day-to-day care, two of the most loyal and long-serving being Mariya Vishnyakova, who would increasingly take care of Alexey, and Alexandra – ‘Shura’ – Tegleva.

  As for the girls’ education, Alexandra had already started tutoring them herself in English and French and basic spelling, having taught them needlework the moment they were able to hold a needle. She enlisted her own lectrice Trina Schneider to teach the older two in other general subjects. Trina also acted as a chaperone, much as Margaretta Eagar had done, when the girls went out for walks or drives. Meanwhile male tutors for other subjects were sought out.23 One of the first to be recruited was Petr Vasilevich Petrov – a teacher and former army officer who had been a senior government administrator responsible for military schools and who began teaching Olga and Tatiana Russian language and literature in 1903. Although approaching retirement Petrov was devoted to his charges, and they responded to his genial manner with great affection, referring to him by his initials, PVP.24 But he found them a handful; the girls at times could be wild and out of control. ‘They used to play with him, shouting, laughing, pushing him, and generally hauling him about without mercy’, recalled Baroness Buxhoeveden. Olga and Tatiana could be ‘meek as mice’ when studying but once their teacher had departed the schoolroom, ‘a wild scramble’ often followed during which Olga would jump on the sofa and race along the row of neatly positioned chairs against the wall, only for the younger two to come rushing in from the nursery to join in until the next teacher saw them once more demurely seated in their places.