The Romanov Sisters Read online

  The most important new arrival in the schoolroom was undoubtedly the twenty-six-year-old Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard, so dapper with his stiff wing collars, twirled moustache and goatee beard. He began teaching Olga and Tatiana French at Peterhof in September 1905 while still in the employ of Stana, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, and her husband. Gilliard travelled over from their nearby dacha at Sergievka several days a week, running the gauntlet of endless security checks in the process. He was unnerved to have the tsaritsa sit in on his lessons until she was satisfied with their quality; thereafter a lady-in-waiting would attend as an informal chaperone. Gilliard’s first impression of his charges was that Olga was ‘spirited like a runaway horse and very intelligent’ and Tatiana, in comparison, ‘calm and fairly lazy’.25 He liked their frankness and the fact that they ‘didn’t try to hide their faults’, and better still he found the simplicity of the tsar’s family a refreshing contrast to his stultifying, ‘desiccated’ life with the Leuchtenbergs, with all its tensions and intrigues (the couple was in the throes of a scandalous separation and divorce).26

  * * *

  After the summer sojourn at Peterhof, life at Tsarskoe Selo in the autumn returned to its set routine. Nicholas was up long before his wife in the mornings, her ill health often preventing her from getting up till after 9. The children meanwhile ate breakfast in the upstairs nursery and had the plain food so beloved of English families – porridge, bread and butter, milk and honey. Nicholas occasionally joined them before heading off to his study for meetings with ministers. Once they reached 8–10 years old the girls were considered well behaved enough to join their parents at the adult table downstairs. Lunch, when guests or members of the entourage often joined them, was always simple. With the children back at their lessons Alexandra would spend the afternoons at her needlework, or painting and writing letters till afternoon tea at around five in the mauve boudoir, where she liked to have Nicky to herself if she could and the children only came by invitation, in their best frocks – though they could always come to her at any time if there was a particular reason. Family supper, when the children were older, was usually very modest, after which the evenings were spent with more sewing, board and card games till bedtime, with Nicholas often reading aloud to them all.27 No one ever saw the girls idle or bored for Alexandra ensured that they were never at a loss for something to do. When she had to be apart from them on official duties with Nicholas, she sent them little admonitory notes: ‘Be sure to be very good and remember, elbows off the table, sit straight and eat your meat nicely.’28 She expected notes back from them – however brief. A typical response to ‘Maman’ from Tatiana in 1905 in her best and neatest handwriting went as follows:

  J’aime maman, qui promet et qui donne

  Tant de baisers à son enfant,

  E si doucement lui pardonne

  Toutes les fois qu’il est méchant.*29

  The most notable aspect of the tsar’s home life when details of it made their way into the western press was how simple and uneventful it was. People seemed surprised that the four sisters enjoyed ‘only the healthy pleasures of ordinary children’.30 Reporters were impressed by the Englishness of their upbringing, with lessons interspersed with lots of fresh air and exercise, all planned in advance to a fixed schedule. During the morning break between lessons at around eleven, Alexandra would often walk or drive out in the park with the children and one of her ladies – usually her now honorary lady-in-waiting Baroness Buxhoeveden, whom they all called Iza, or Trina Schneider. In winter she and the children would often go out in a large four-seater sledge. At such times little Anastasia, already an irrepressible clown, would ‘slip down under the thick bear-rug … and sit, clucking like a hen or barking like a dog’, imitating Aera, Alexandra’s nasty little dog that was noted for biting people’s ankles. Sometimes the girls would sing as the sledge rolled along, ‘the Empress giving the key-note’ to which from under the bear rug Anastasia would offer up an accompanying ‘boom, boom, boom’, asserting ‘I’m a piano.’31

  The Romanov girls were seldom ostentatiously dressed and even on the coldest days they were never ‘muffled up in the prevailing fashion’, so the Daily Mirror told its readers, ‘as the Tsarina has quite British ideas on the subject of hygiene’.32 With Anastasia now four, Alexandra began dressing the girls in their own informal ‘uniform’ of matching colours, as two identifiable couples – the ‘Big Pair’ and the ‘Little Pair’ as she called them – a shorthand which, however affectionate the intention, marked the beginning of a family habit of referring to the girls collectively rather than as individuals. The big pair and the little pair each shared a room, where they slept on simple, narrow nickel campbeds (of the portable kind used by the army; a vestige of Nicholas’s own Spartan childhood). They took cold baths in the morning and were allowed warm ones in the evening. The older girls dressed themselves and Alexandra expected them to make their own beds and tidy their rooms. The streak of Lutheran puritanism in her ensured that their clothes and shoes were handed down from one to the next. ‘The toy cupboards of the imperial nurseries do not contain the host of expensive playthings deemed indispensable in so many middle-class households’, observed the Daily Mail, indeed ‘the splendid dolls sent by Queen Victoria to her great-great-grandchildren are only brought out on high days and holidays.’33

  Most notable to foreign observers was the degree of access that the children had to their mother and father. Despite his heavy workload Nicholas, from the first, had tried to be back from his study in the evening to see the latest baby having its bath and he always found time to play with or read to them in the evenings. Both parents set their children high moral standards; Alexandra was inspired by the popular American Presbyterian minister, James Russell Miller, whose homiletic pamphlets such as Secrets of Happy Home Life (1894) and The Wedded Life (1886) sold in their millions. She noted down many quotations from Miller on the joys of married life, on children as ‘God’s ideal of completeness’, and on parental responsibility for the formation of their characters within a Christian and loving home. ‘May God help us to give them a good and sound education and make them above all brave little Christian soldiers fighting for our saviour’, she told her old friend Bishop Boyd Carpenter in 1902.34

  In 1905, approaching her tenth birthday, Olga already had an inherent awareness of her position as the eldest and loved giving a military salute to soldiers standing on guard as she passed by. Until Alexey was born people had often greeted her as their ‘little empress’ and Alexandra underlined this by demanding that her ladies kiss Olga’s hand rather than offer more impulsive expressions of affection. Although she could be boisterous with her sisters, Olga already had a serious side. There was an earnestness and integrity about her that would have served her well, had it come to it, as a future tsaritsa. From the start Alexandra invested a level of responsibility in Olga, constantly reminding her of this in little notes: ‘Mama kisses her girly tenderly and prays that God may help her to be always a good loving Christian child. Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving, then all will love you’, she wrote in 1905.35

  It was clear to Margaretta Eagar that from a very young age Olga had inherited her mother’s and her grandmother Alice’s altruistic spirit. She was highly sensitive to the plight of others less fortunate than herself; driving in St Petersburg one day she had seen a policeman arrest a woman for being drunk and disorderly and had begged Margaretta that she be let off; the sight of poor peasants falling on their knees by the roadside in Poland as they passed in their carriage also unsettled her and she wanted Margaretta to ‘tell them not to do it’.36 Not long after Christmas one year when they were out driving, she had seen a little girl crying in the road. ‘“Look,” she exclaimed, in great excitement; “Santa Claus could not have known where she lived”; and she had immediately thrown the doll she had with her out of the carriage, shouting “Don’t cry, little girl; here’s a doll for you.”’37

  Olga was curious and full of questions. O
nce when a nursemaid reprimanded her for her grumpiness, saying that she had ‘got out of bed on the wrong foot’, the following morning Olga had pertly asked which was ‘the right foot to get out with’ so that the ‘bad foot won’t be able to make me naughty to-day’.38 Cranky, scornful and difficult she certainly could be, especially during puberty, and her flashes of anger revealed a dark side that she sometimes found difficult to control, but Olga also was a dreamer. During a game of I-spy with the children Alexandra had noticed that ‘Olga always thinks of the sun, clouds, sky, rain or something belonging to the heavens, explaining to me that it makes her so happy to think of that’.39 In 1903 at the age of eight she made her first confession, and soon after her cousin’s tragic death that same year developed a fascination with heaven and the afterlife. ‘Cousin Ella knows, she is in heaven sitting down and talking to God, and He is telling her how He did it and why’, she insisted to Margaretta Eagar when once discussing the plight of a blind woman.40

  Tatiana at eight years old was pale-skinned, slender and with darker, auburn hair, and eyes rather greyer than the sea-blue of her sisters. She was already arrestingly beautiful, ‘the living replica of her beautiful mother’, with a naturally imperious look enhanced by her fine bones and tilted-up eyes.41 On the surface she seemed an extraordinarily self-possessed young girl, but she was in fact emotionally cautious and reserved, like her mother. She was never hostage to her temperament as Olga sometimes could be and unlike Olga – who had a volatile relationship with their mother as she grew older – Tatiana was unquestioningly devoted; it was she in whom Alexandra always confided. She was the most polite and deferential at table with adults and proved to be a natural-born organizer with a methodical mind and a down-to-earth manner that her sisters could not match. No wonder her sisters called her ‘the governess’. Whereas Olga was musical and played the piano beautifully, Tatiana was a gifted needlewoman like her mother. She too was deeply altruistic and sensitive to what others did for her. On once discovering that her nursemaid and Miss Eagar were paid for their services because they had no money of their own and needed to earn a living, she came to Eagar’s bed the next morning and got in and cuddled her, saying ‘Anyway, you are not paid for this.’42

  The third sister, Maria, was a shy child who suffered later from being piggy in the middle between her two older sisters and her younger siblings. Her mother may have coupled her with Anastasia as the ‘little pair’ but as time went on Maria occasionally found herself adrift from Anastasia and Alexey – the more natural little pair – and she sometimes felt that she did not get the love and attention she craved. Her strong physique made her seem rather ungainly and she had a reputation for clumsiness and boisterousness. Yet for many who knew the family, Maria was by far the prettiest, with her peaches-and-cream complexion, her rich brown hair and an earthy Russian quality not possessed by any of the other children; everyone remarked on her eyes that shone ‘like lanterns’ and her warm smile.43 She was not especially bright but had a real gift for painting and drawing. Mashka, as her sisters often called her, was the least affected by any sense of her station. She ‘would shake hands with any palace attendant or servant, or exchange kisses with chambermaids or peasant women whom she happened to meet. If a servant dropped something, she would hurry to help her pick it up.’44 Once when watching a regiment march past below her window at the Winter Palace she exclaimed, ‘Oh! I love these dear soldiers; I should like to kiss them all!’ Of all the sisters she was the most open-hearted and sincere and she was always extremely deferential towards her parents. Margaretta Eagar felt that she was Nicholas’s favourite and that he was touched by her natural affection. When she once sheepishly admitted to stealing a forbidden biscuit from a plate at teatime he was relieved for he had been ‘always afraid of the wings growing’. It had made him ‘glad to see she is only a human child’.45

  Having such a compliant personality, it was perhaps inevitable that Maria would be completely in thrall to the dominating personality of her younger sister Anastasia, for the youngest Romanov daughter was a force of nature to whose presence it was impossible to remain indifferent. Even at four years old she was ‘a very sturdy little monkey, and afraid of nothing’.46 Of all the children, Nastasya or Nastya as they called her, was the least Russian in looks. She had dark blonde hair like Olga and her father’s blue eyes but her features were very much like those of her mother’s Hesse family. She was not shy like her sisters either, in fact was extremely forthright, even with adults. She may have been the youngest of the four but was always the one who commanded the most attention. She had the great gift of humour and ‘knew how to straighten out wrinkles on anybody’s brow’.47 One day, shortly after Alexey was born, Margaretta caught Anastasia eating peas with her fingers: ‘I reproved her, saying seriously, “Even the new baby does not eat peas with his fingers.” She looked up and said, “’es him does – him eats them with him’s foots too!”’48 Anastasia balked at doing anything she was told; if ordered not to climb on things she did precisely that. When told not to eat apples gathered in the orchard to be baked for nursery supper she deliberately gorged herself and when reprimanded was unrepentant: ‘You don’t know how good that apple was that I had in the garden’, she told Margaretta teasingly. It took a total ban from the orchard for a week before Anastasia finally promised she would not eat any more.49

  Everything with Anastasia was a battle of wills. She was an impossible pupil; distracted, inattentive, always eager to be doing anything other than sit still, yet despite not being academically bright she had an instinctive gift for dealing with people. When punished for bad behaviour she always took it on the chin: ‘she could sit down and count the cost of any action she wished to perform, and take the punishment “like a soldier”’, as Margaretta recalled.50 But this never stopped her from being the major instigator of naughtiness, and she got away with far more than her sisters. At times, as she got bigger, she could be rough and even spiteful when playing with other children, scratching and pulling hair, leading to complaints from cousins when they visited that she was ‘nasty to the point of being evil’ when things didn’t go her own way.51

  The anodyne public image of four sweet little girls in white embroidered cambric with blue bows in their hair thus gave little or no indication of the four very different personalities developing behind the closed doors of the Alexander Palace. By 1906 public perception of the Romanov sisters was being set in stone by the many official photographs of them that were circulated for mass consumption. But it remained one that conveyed a superficial, saccharine image of them right up to the war years.52

  Chapter Six

  THE SHTANDART

  Throughout the disturbances of 1905 the Romanov family had had no choice but to remain at Peterhof, shut away as virtual prisoners. The head of the tsar’s secret personal bodyguard, General Spiridovich (having recovered from the recent terrorist attack on him), was one of the few people in the imperial entourage with close access to the family.1 He took particular charge of security arrangements in the summer of 1906 when, with even Peterhof considered by him to be unsafe, the family boarded their yacht the Shtandart and headed off on holiday. For three weeks, they cruised the granite skerries in the Virolahti region off the coast of southern Finland between Kronstadt and Helsinki, stopping off at favourite spots such as Björkö, Langinkoski, Pitkäpaasi and the Pukkio islands. The security police made a thorough search for undesirables in the area ahead of the Shtandart’s arrival and the yacht’s moorings were constantly changed as an additional security measure. But such was official neurosis about the threat of attack that the yacht was escorted by a squadron of eight ships of the imperial fleet – including torpedo boats and courier vessels – which stopped any other boats from coming too close.2 On board the yacht there were no security guards, the imperial family trusting to the intense loyalty of the officers and crew; ‘we form a united family’, Alexandra remarked.3

  The children loved the Shtandart and came to know many of
the 275 sailors and cabin staff who crewed it, remembering all their names; they felt safe on board and she soon became a home from home. At 420 feet (128 m) long she was the biggest and fastest of all the imperial yachts and enjoyed the best modern amenities of electric lighting, steam heating and hot and cold running water. Her luxurious formal staterooms featured chandeliers and mahogany wall panelling; the private chapel was complete with its own iconostasis and the dining room could seat seventy-two at dinner. The family rooms were comfortable but quite modest, echoing the ubiquitous homely English style of the Lower Dacha and the Alexander Palace, although boxes of fresh-cut flowers from Tsarskoe Selo were sent out regularly by tender, along with Nicholas’s dispatch boxes, to feed Alexandra’s one abiding indulgence.

  At first the girls shared small cramped cabins on the lower deck with their maids. Their parents considered this arrangement more than adequate while the girls were young, but after 1912, they were given their own bigger cabins up on the imperial deck, though even these did not compare with the spacious suite set aside for Alexey.4 Small or not the girls loved their little cabins but it was up on the sundeck that they felt liberated and where, kitted out in their navy blue sailor suits (white when the weather was warm), straw boaters and button boots, they could talk to the officers, play deck games and rollerskate on the smooth wooden surface. Alexandra would be near, sitting sewing in a comfortable wicker chair or resting on a couch under a canvas awning, always watching over them. Whenever the family sailed, each of the Romanov children was appointed its own personal bodyguard or dyadka (‘uncle’) from among the crew to take care of the child’s safety at sea. That summer of 1906 the children had been rather shy of the Shtandart crew at first sight, but they soon warmed to their dyadki, who would sit for hours regaling them with seafaring stories and telling them about their homes and their families. Andrey Derevenko was assigned to the special care of Alexey, who now he was walking had to be extremely closely watched at all times, for fear that he would fall or knock himself and cause haemorrhaging. The girls meanwhile attached themselves to certain of the officers; they held their hands when they went ashore and would sit alongside them in the rowing boats helping with the oars. Most mornings they would be up and on the deck at 8 a.m. to see the crew gather for the formal raising of the flag to the sound of the ship’s band playing the Nikolaevsky March.