The Romanov Sisters Read online

  For now, Gibbes’s lessons with the girls took the form of English grammar, spelling and usage in the mornings and dictation in the afternoons. With all four sisters now in the classroom and Gibbes settled in, Pierre Gilliard – in addition to his duties as French teacher – was officially appointed to take overall charge of the girls’ curriculum. Like Gilliard, Gibbes chose to maintain his independence by living in St Petersburg and travelling out to Tsarskoe Selo for lessons five days a week. Both, like Tyutcheva (aka Savanna), were accorded pet names by the girls: Zhilik and Sig, the latter based on Gibbes’s initials. Other tutors also came and went from town: PVP continued to teach Russian; Konstantin Ivanov taught history and geography; M. Sobolev mathematics; a Herr Kleikenberg gave German lessons to Olga and Tatiana – a language they never took to, or him either; Dmitry Kardovsky, a professor from the Russian Academy of Arts, was their drawing master; and Father Alexander Vasiliev drilled them in their catechism.31

  In March 1907 a major assassination plot against Nicholas, his uncle Grand Duke Nikolay and Prime Minister Stolypin had been uncovered in St Petersburg, leading to the pre-emptive arrest of twenty-six ‘very prominent anarchists’ and the confiscation of an arsenal of bombs and arms.32 The story inevitably prompted sensationalist reports in the western press that the tsar was ‘cowering in terror, and dreading to visit his own capital’ and that the Alexander Palace was ‘a huge bastioned fortress, with barred windows suggesting the gloom of a prison-house’.33 Yet, in fact the only sop to security within the palace at this time of heightened alert was the habit – actually adopted after an attempt on Alexander II many years before – for Nicholas and Alexandra to have their meals served in different rooms in alternation. A Russian general recently invited to lunch with the tsar had been surprised to find the table set in the tsaritsa’s mauve boudoir. Noticing his surprise, young Tatiana had pertly remarked, ‘Next time … I suppose we shall lunch in the bathroom!’34

  Security nevertheless remained extremely tight when the family took their annual Finnish holiday in the Shtandart in 1907. All was following its normal uneventful pattern until 29 August when, with the yacht travelling at 15 knots towards Riilakhti with an experienced Finnish pilot on board, there was a terrible accident not far from the port of Hanko. As Anna Vyrubova recalled:

  We were seated on deck at tea, the band playing, a perfectly calm sea running, when we felt a terrific shock which shook the yacht from stem to stern and sent the tea service crashing to the deck. In great alarm we sprang to our feet only to feel the yacht listing sharply to starboard. In an instant the decks were alive with sailors obeying the harsh commands of the captain, and helping the suite to look to the safety of the women and children.35

  Although the Shtandart was not in immediate danger, the captain ordered a speedy evacuation. This prompted a sudden panic for Alexey could not be found on deck, where he had last been seen playing with the ship’s cat and her kittens. Alexandra went into paroxysms of terror as a frantic search began, only for the boy to appear with his dyadka Derevenko who, when the impact had hap-pened and fearful that the boilers might blow, had gathered Alexey up in his arms and carried him to the prow of the yacht where it was safer.36 Nicholas remained his usual uncannily impassive self, calmly calculating the yacht’s degree of list and how long they might have before she sank, as the outlying escort of some 15–20 vessels hurried to the crippled Shtandart’s assistance.37 With Nikolay Sablin escorting the children to safety, Alexandra regained her composure enough to dash down to her cabin with Anna Vyrubova and gather up all her valuables into sheets, as did Nicholas with his important state papers; the yacht was leaning at a 19-degree angle by the time they disembarked.

  When Sablin and other officers later went down into the ship to examine the damage, they found a huge dent in the bottom of the hull, which if it had been breached would have caused the yacht to sink very fast. As it was, only one compartment had let in any water and this was sealed.38 The official inquiry into the accident revealed that the rock that had caused it was uncharted; on subsequent maps it was named after Blomkvist, the unfortunate Finnish pilot who had failed to spot it. Members of the crew involved in the swift and speedy evacuation of the family and in the yacht’s preservation were rewarded with money, gold and silver watches, and medals. Meanwhile, the accident had attracted widespread coverage in the world’s press, with newspaper correspondents flocking to Hanko. Considerable shock was registered in the Russian papers, with the finger of blame being pointed first at the Finns, then the revolutionaries and then the whole tsarist system. Many were convinced it had been a terrorist attack and that the yacht had hit a mine or that a bomb had been planted in her prow.

  The children, though, had found the adventure of a real-life shipwreck hugely exciting, even down to being crammed together overnight in one small and rather grubby cabin in an escort cruiser, before being transferred to the Aleksandriya. The family eventually continued their holiday in the dowager Empress’s yacht, the Polyarnaya zvezda. Once more the children contented themselves with happy days of picnicking, mushroom-gathering and roasting potatoes on bonfires on the island of Kavo and walking with Nicholas in the woods on Paationmaa, gathering flowers.39

  Chapter Seven

  OUR FRIEND

  By the autumn of 1907 Alexey was out of his baby skirts and into long trousers; his girlish curls were turning smooth and brown, but he still was an engagingly beautiful child, similar in looks to his sister Tatiana. His outward robustness, however, belied the fact that he was already a ‘Child of many Prayers’, as Lili Dehn described him.1 With little to go on about the heir to the Russian throne, the foreign press was full of fanciful stories about plots to kidnap or murder him, or to poison his bread and butter or his porridge. It was also, already, discussing rumours about his ‘ill health’, which for now was ‘ascribed to the misfortune that so many residences of the Czars leave much to be desired from the point of view of sanitary science’.2

  The first stories about the tsarevich to emerge tended to focus on his rather spoilt behaviour. Little Alexey had a mind of his own and a strength of personality to equal Anastasia’s. He loved attending army inspections and manoeuvres with his father, strutting around in his miniature uniform, complete with toy wooden rifle, and playing the despot – even at the tender age of three. He was already a stickler for the due respect that should be accorded him as heir and at times showed a marked air of impertinence – a trait he also shared with his nearest sibling.3 He rather liked the outmoded ritual of being kissed on the hand by the officers on board ship and ‘didn’t miss his chance to boast about it and give himself airs in front of his sisters’, as Spiridovich recalled. On the recent Shtandart cruise off Finland Alexey had taken it into his head to have the ship’s band got out of their beds to play for him in the middle of the night. ‘That’s the way to bring up an Autocrat!’ Nicholas had remarked, with paternal pride.4 There were times, however, when Nicholas took his son’s peremptory behaviour in hand, such as when he discovered that Alexey took particular delight in suddenly creeping up on the guards posted at the front of the Alexander Palace, ‘watching them out of the corner of his eye as they sprang to attention and stood like statues while he strolled nonchalantly past’. Nicholas forbade the guards to salute unless another member of the family accompanied Alexey; the boy’s humiliation ‘when the salute failed him’ had, it was said, ‘marked his first taste of discipline’.5

  For a while everyone had had to contend with the reign of ‘Alexey the Terrible’, as Nicholas called his son, but mercifully he soon began to grow out of the worst of his bad behaviour.6 Some of it no doubt was a response to the limitations placed upon him by his condition. For here was a little boy who had everything:

  the most costly and expensive playthings, great railways, with dolls in the carriages as passengers, with barriers, stations, buildings, and signal boxes, flashing engines and marvelous signalling apparatus, whole battalions of tin soldiers, models of towns with chur
ch towers and domes, floating models of ships, perfectly equipped factories with doll-workers, and mines in exact imitation of the real thing, with miners ascending and descending,7

  – all of which were mechanical and could be made to work at the press of a button. But Alexey did not have his health. As time went on and the restrictions on what he could and could not do increased he rebelled at constantly hearing the word ‘no’. ‘Why can other boys have everything and I nothing?’ he kept on asking angrily.8 Alexey proved difficult at times for his dyadka Derevenko to control, for he was naturally adventurous and constantly challenged all his carers. He liked nothing better than hurtling down his indoor slide at the Alexander Palace or riding round in his pedal car, but every knock and bang was potentially dangerous.

  In the early 1900s there was nothing any doctor could do to control the bleeding into the joints that followed the tsarevich’s numerous accidents other than to apply ice and confine the little boy to bed. At the time, acetylsalicylic acid – an early form of aspirin available from the 1890s – was considered a useful painkiller (Alexandra had taken salicylic acid for her sciatica). But in Alexey’s case it was counterproductive – thinning the blood and thus intensifying the bleeding. Nicholas and Alexandra were fiercely resistant to the use of morphine because of its powerful addictive effect and so the best and only way to protect Alexey was to have him constantly watched, but this did not prevent him having his worst accident yet, in the autumn of 1907, when, out playing in the Alexander Park, he fell and hurt his leg. There was hardly any visible bruising but the internal haemorrhage triggered by the fall caused him excruciating pain. As Olga Alexandrovna – who had rushed over on hearing the news – recalled: ‘The poor child lay in such pain, dark patches under his eyes and his little body all distorted, and the leg terribly swollen.’9 The doctors could do nothing, nor could Professor Albert Hoffa, an eminent orthopaedic surgeon who was called in haste from Berlin. ‘They looked more frightened than any of us and they kept whispering among themselves’, Olga Alexandrovna recalled. ‘There seemed just nothing they could do, and hours went by until they had given up all hope.’10

  In desperation, and remembering how Grigory Rasputin had helped Stolypin’s daughter, Alexandra telephoned Stana, whom she knew was in regular contact with him. Stana sent her servants out to find Rasputin, who hastened to Tsarskoe Selo. Arriving late, he entered by a side entrance and up the back stairs where he could not be seen. Nicholas, Alexandra and the four girls were anxiously awaiting him in the tsarevich’s bedroom, along with Anna Vyrubova, the imperial physician Dr Evgeny Botkin and Archimandrite Feofan (the tsar’s and tsaritsa’s personal confessor). Rasputin’s daughter Maria later described the scene as her father had told it to her:

  Papa raised his hand, and making the sign of the cross, blessed the room and its occupants … Then he turned to the sickly boy, and observing the pallid features wracked with pain, he knelt beside the bed and began to pray. As he did this … each knelt as if overcome by a spiritual presence, and joined in the silent prayer. For a space of ten minutes, nothing was to be heard but the sound of breathing.11

  Finally, Rasputin stood up and told Alexey to open his eyes. Bewildered, the boy looked around him and finally focused on Rasputin’s face. ‘Your pain is going away; you will soon be well. You must thank God for healing you. And now, go to sleep’, he told him gently. As he left, Rasputin assured Nicholas and Alexandra: ‘The tsarevich will live.’ Soon after he had left, the swelling in Alexey’s leg began to subside. When his aunt Olga saw him the next morning he ‘was not just alive – but well. He was sitting up in bed, the fever gone, the eyes clear and bright, not a sign of any swelling on his leg.’12

  Alexey had cheated death, but no one could explain his miraculous recovery. Rasputin clearly had great powers of intuition and auto-suggestion that had had some kind of calming effect, causing his haemorrhaging blood vessels to contract, (much as adrenalin has the reverse effect and dilates them).13 Many of his followers saw Rasputin’s gift of healing as being in the Vedic tradition of the Siberian shamans who believed in the connectivity between the natural and spiritual worlds. Like all the imperial doctors, Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Sergey Feodorov – who had been called in on several occasions when there had been a crisis – had an instinctive dislike of the man, but he could not explain why what Rasputin did worked, while conventional medicine failed him.14 In treating the tsarevich, Rasputin insisted that the use of aspirin and all drugs should be abandoned in favour of a reliance solely on prayer and spiritual healing – and this, ironically, may also have been of some benefit. But the ability to stop the flow of blood was not exclusive to him; it was a gift he shared with other folk healers. As Iza Buxhoeveden observed, it was not uncommon for Russian peasants to control bleeding in their injured livestock by ‘exercising pressure on the smaller blood-vessels and thus stopping bleeding’, but it was a secret gift that they ‘jealously guarded’.15 Princess Barbara Dolgorouky also recalled:

  Among the peasants in Russia there were most remarkable healers. Some healed burns, some stopped blood and some cured toothaches – I know of some exceptional cases of toothaches which were stopped not only for these particular minutes of pain, but for ever. And from a distance … I knew and later was a great friend of a Russian lady, Madame de Daehn, who cured burns by touching the burned places and murmuring something.16

  One thing is certain: the unquestioning trust Nicholas and Alexandra invested in Grigory, as they called him, was based on a profound and genuine belief that he was – pure and simple – not just a healer but a man of God, sent to help them when no one else could. If Alexey were to survive with Grigory’s help, then it was God’s will.17

  During those first occasional visits Rasputin made to Tsarskoe Selo (and sources vary on how often he came), Olga and Tatiana were sometimes allowed to sit in on his discussions about religion with their parents, but the younger girls, especially Anastasia, were for a while excluded. Mariya Geringer remembered hurrying over to see the empress on an urgent matter one evening, when Anastasia ‘rushed to meet her in a corridor, threw out her arms and blocked her way, saying “You and I can’t go there, the New One (the name given to Rasputin by Alexey) is there.”’ Anastasia ‘was not allowed to enter’ when Rasputin was visiting, as she ‘always laughed when he spoke or read about religious matters’, unable to take such discussions seriously.18

  It was not long, however, before even she had begun to relate to him. On one occasion Aunt Olga arrived on a visit and was taken upstairs by Nicholas and Alexandra, where she found Rasputin with the children ‘all in white pyjamas … being put to bed by their nurses’:

  When I saw him I felt that gentleness and warmth radiated from him. All the children seemed to like him. They were completely at their ease with him. I still remember their laughter as little Alexis, deciding he was a rabbit, jumped up and down the room. And then, quite suddenly, Rasputin caught the child’s hand and led him to his bedroom, and we three followed. There was something like a hush as though we had found ourselves in church. In Alexis’s bedroom no lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. The child stood very still by the side of that giant, whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. It was all most impressive. I also knew that my little nephew had joined him in prayer.19

  Olga Alexandrovna always freely admitted that she had never liked Rasputin – he was ‘primitive’ and ‘uncouth’ and paid no lip-service to court etiquette, addressing the imperial family by the informal ty rather than the formal vy and often calling Nicholas and Alexandra ‘papa and mama’. She was discomfited by Rasputin’s unbridled familiarity, which she saw as intrusive and impertinent – as well as, probably, sexually intimidating. It was a common response, for wherever he went Grigory Rasputin sparked controversy. He remains one of the most written-about personalities in late imperial Russian history, and one who has attracted some of the most sensationalist and contradictory claims. As the E
nglish novelist and travel writer Carl Eric Bechhofer, who met him, recalled: ‘Before I went to Russia and all the time I was there, I never could make any two accounts of Rasputin tally’; in Bechhofer’s view, the levels of his perceived wickedness were always ‘in large proportion to the political liberalism of the reporter’.20 Part of this stems no doubt from Rasputin’s inherently contradictory personality. Depending on whether one was with him or against him Rasputin was either pious, mild and benevolent or the polar opposite – promiscuous, bestial and repellent. But who was he in reality – ‘sensual hypocrite’ or ‘wonder-working mystic’?21 History has struggled for the last 100 years to make up its mind.

  It is certainly clear that despite being a man of religion, Rasputin was also a shrewd opportunist, nor did he ever make any attempt to hide his physical appetites. On arriving in the capital, he did the rounds of the salons of a fin-de-siècle St Petersburg noted for its decadence, pandering to rich society ladies who dabbled in the then-fashionable cults of faith healing, table turning and eastern mysticism, and built a following among them. He was, for his detractors, an easy personality to caricature in his loose peasant blouse and long boots, with his heavy frame, his long oily black hair and beard, and his coarse bulging lips. But there is no denying the astonishing force of his personality: his sonorous voice was hypnotic and those legendary blue eyes, which he apparently could dilate at will, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. Rasputin consciously and cleverly exploited the innate theatricality of these two gifts, the unfamiliar, archaic church Russian that he spoke adding to his strange other-worldliness. The salacious gossip circulating about him seemed to have no adverse effect on his devoted followers, who remained drawn to Rasputin’s inexplicable powers of healing, for there was absolutely no doubt about the deep and affecting influence he had over the sick. By 1907 the impressionable Anna Vyrubova had become an ardent follower and was regularly inviting him to visit her at her little house close by the Alexander Palace.