The Romanov Sisters Read online

  This is a book about the real Romanov sisters.

  So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love

  1 Corinthians 13: 13

  Prologue

  THE ROOM OF THE FIRST AND LAST DOOR

  The day they sent the Romanovs away the Alexander Palace became forlorn and forgotten – a palace of ghosts. The family had spent the previous three days frantically packing for their departure, having been informed at short notice by Kerensky’s provisional government of their imminent removal. But when it came to the final moments, although the children took their three dogs with them, the cats – Zubrovka, the stray rescued by Alexey at Army HQ, and her two kittens – had to be left behind, with a plaintive request from the tsarevich asking that someone take care of them.1

  Later, when Mariya Geringer – the tsaritsa’s senior lady-in-waiting, charged with caretaking the palace after their departure – arrived, the hungry creatures emerged like wraiths from the shadows and hurled themselves at her, wailing for attention. But all forty doors of the rooms inside had been sealed; the palace kitchens were closed; everything was locked. Only the cats remained in a deserted Alexander Park, the last remnants of a family now heading hundreds of miles east into Siberia.

  * * *

  In the years that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 anyone curious about where Russia’s last imperial family had lived could travel the 15 miles (24 km) from the former capital to take a look. You could get there either on a grubby suburban train, or – avoiding the many potholes – by car, along the old royal road that led, straight as a ribbon, across the plain of low flat fields and woodland to Tsarskoe Selo – The Tsar’s Village. Once considered the Russian equivalent of Versailles, in the dying days of the tsarist empire Tsarskoe Selo had acquired an increasingly melancholic air – a kind of ‘tristesse impériale’, as one former resident expressed it.2 By 1917, almost 300 years since Catherine the Great had first commissioned its construction, this village of the tsars was already anticipating its own imminent demise.

  The Soviets were, indeed, quick to strip Tsarskoe Selo of its imperial links, renaming it Detskoe Selo – the Children’s Village. Located on higher ground away from the marshy Gulf of Finland, its unpolluted air and orderly grid of wide boulevards surrounded by parkland was considered the perfect place for vigorous exercise. The Alexander Park was transformed into a centre for sport and recreation that would breed healthy young citizens for the new communist order. Communism took a while, however, to make its mark on the town itself, which was still small, neat and mainly wooden. Beyond its modest market square, avenues of grand summer villas, built there by aristocrats who served the court, surrounded the two imperial palaces. Their once legendary occupants – the now vanished great Russian families of the Baryatinskys, Shuvalovs, Yusupovs, Kochubeys – were long gone, their homes requisitioned by the Soviets and already crumbling with neglect and decay.3

  The focal point of this pleasant and peaceful little town had until the revolution been the elegant, golden-yellow Alexander Palace with its white Corinthian columns, but in previous centuries the even grander Catherine Palace next door, in all its gilded baroque splendour, had held centre stage. But in 1918 both were nationalized, transformed into object lessons in ‘the aesthetic decay of the last of the Romanovs’.4 In June the state rooms located on the ground floor of the Alexander Palace were opened to the public after a careful inventory had been made of all their contents. People paid their 15 kopeks to enter and gawp – not at what they had anticipated would be the lavish style in which their former tsar had lived, but rather in disbelief that such a homespun environment could have been the residence of the last Tsar of All the Russias.5 The interiors were unexpectedly modest by former imperial standards – no grander perhaps than those of a public library or museum in the capital, or the country house of a moderately well-off gentleman. But for the Romanov family the Alexander Palace had been a much loved home.

  Dutiful members of the newly liberated proletariat, ‘munching apples and caviar sandwiches’, sometimes joined by a few intrepid foreign tourists, were encouraged to visit on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, making sure first to don the ugly but obligatory felt overshoes to protect the beautiful waxed parquet floors from damage.6 After doing so, they would be ushered through the imperial apartments to an accompanying – and frequently contemptuous – account of their former occupants. The well-drilled official guides did their best to decry the decidedly bourgeois tastes of Russia’s last tsar and his wife. The old-fashioned, art-nouveau-style furniture, the cheap, outmoded oleographs and sentimental pictures, the English wallpaper, the profusion of knick-knacks scattered around on every available surface (predominantly factory-made goods of the most ordinary kind), reminded visitors of the ‘typical parlour of an English or American boarding house’ or a ‘second-class Berlin restaurant’.7 The family themselves were dismissed in the glib phrases of Soviet-speak as an historical irrelevance.

  As visitors were conducted from room to room, their doorways guarded by waxwork models of the scarlet and gold liveried real-life footmen who had once stood there, they could not avoid an increasing sense of Nicholas II, not as the despotic ruler painted to them but rather as a dull family man, who had crammed his study and library – where he received his ministers on matters of important state business – with photographs of his children at every stage of their development from babyhood to adulthood: children with dogs, on ponies, in the snow, by the seaside, a happy family smiling to the camera for home-made photographs taken on the Box Brownies that they took with them everywhere. Even in his private study the tsar had a table and chair where his invalid son could sit with him when he was working. This, the hub of now defunct tsarist power, could not have appeared more unremarkable, more domestic and child-friendly. Was it really the last home of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’?

  The tsar and tsaritsa’s suite of interconnecting private rooms further testified to their three consuming passions: each other, their children and their devout religious faith. Their overcrowded bedroom with its English chintz wallpaper and curtains was more Russian Orthodox shrine than boudoir. Two modest single iron bedsteads – of the kind found in ‘second-rate hotels’, as one American visitor observed in 1934 – stood pushed together in a heavily curtained alcove, every inch of wall space behind which was crammed from floor to ceiling with religious images, crucifixes and ‘pathetic, cheap little tin ikons’.8 On every shelf and table top in her private sitting room the tsaritsa had set out yet more knick-knacks and photographs of her children and her darling Nicky. Personal possessions were few and surprisingly trivial – useful domestic items such as a gold thimble, sewing materials and embroidery scissors, as well as cheap toys and trinkets – ‘a china bird and a pincushion made like a shoe. The kind of things that one of the children might have given her.’9

  At the far end of the corridor toward the gardens, the cupboards in Nicholas’s dressing room still held his neatly pressed uniforms and, nearby, the Great Library of glass-fronted bookcases was full of carefully ordered French, English and German books bound in fine Moroccan leather of the kind that he often sat and read aloud to his family in the evenings. Visitors were often taken aback by what greeted them in the Mountain Hall beyond. This, one of the palace’s formal parade rooms, had instead served as a downstairs playroom for the tsarevich Alexey. In the centre of this elegant hall of coloured marbles, caryatids and mirrors, a large wooden slide or ‘American glide’10 – on which the children of previous tsars had happily played – still took pride of place, along with Alexey’s three favourite toy motor cars. Near a door leading out to the garden stood a poignant reminder of the tragedy that had dominated the lives of the last imperial family of Russia – Alexey’s ‘small wheelchair, upholstered in red velvet’, an evocative reminder of the merciless attacks of haemophilia that frequently disabled him, the contours of his body still visible on it.11

  Two flights of stone steps led up
to the now deserted children’s apartments – where once again the adored Alexey’s large playroom dominated – full of wooden and mechanical toys: a music box that played the Marseillaise, picture books, boxes of bricks, board games, and his favourite ranks of toy lead soldiers. Languishing among them a large teddy bear – one of the last gifts from the Kaiser before war changed everything – stood sentinel by the door.12 The tsarevich’s adjacent personal bathroom often made visitors gasp in sympathy; it was ‘full of beastly surgical instruments’ – the calipers and other ‘encasements for the legs, arms and body made of canvas and leather’ that had been used to support him when his attacks of bleeding had left him temporarily disabled.13

  Beyond, and modestly subsidiary to the tsarevich’s larger apartments – just as its occupants had been secondary to him in the eyes of the nation – were the bedrooms, classroom, dining and reception rooms of his four older sisters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Their light and spacious bedrooms were furnished with simple ivory-painted and polished lemonwood furniture and English chintz fabric curtains.14 A stencilled frieze of pink roses and bronze butterflies above pink coloured wallpaper had been chosen by the younger sisters Maria and Anastasia. For Olga and Tatiana, the frieze was of convolvulus flowers and brown dragonflies. On the girls’ matching dressing tables there was still a scattering of boxes, jewellery cases, manicure sets, combs and brushes – just as they had left them.15 Elsewhere, on their writing tables, were piles of their exercise books with multicoloured covers, and in profusion on every surface, framed photographs of family and friends. Yet in the midst of so much typical, girlish ephemera, one could not fail to notice the presence everywhere in the sisters’ rooms of icons and popular religious prints and pictures. By their bedsides there were gospels and prayer books, crosses and candles – rather than the usual clutter one might expect to find.16

  In their wardrobes, the girls had left behind many of their clothes, hats, parasols and shoes; the uniforms worn by the elder sisters with such pride when they rode side saddle at the big military parades for the Tercentary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913; even their baby clothes and christening robes. They would have no need in Siberia of their finely made formal court dresses – four of everything: matching sets in pink satin with silver embroidery, with pink brocade kokoshniki headdresses; or for that matter of the four sets of large summer hats, all meticulously stored in boxes. Outside in the hallway trunks and hampers still stood, half-packed with many more of the girls’ possessions – ready for that last journey, but never taken.

  In the children’s dining room the table was still laid with monogrammed Romanov china ready for the next meal. ‘You feel the children are out playing somewhere in the garden’, wrote a visitor in 1929. ‘They will be back at any moment.’17 But outside, in the acres of parkland beyond the high iron railings surrounding the palace, a wilderness had grown up among the neat and orderly avenues of lindens, where in the soft undergrowth on either side the Siberian buttercups, ‘large, double, and fragrant as roses’, the wood anemone and forget-me-nots had bloomed in such profusion in the spring.18 The palace itself might have been preserved as a historical monument but its once admired park was now overgrown with weeds, the grass waist-high in places. The long leafy avenue where the Romanov children had once played and ridden their ponies and their bicycles; the neatly ordered canals where they went boating with their father; the little blue-and-white painted playhouse on the Children’s Island with its profusion of lily of the valley and nearby the little cemetery where they buried their pets … everywhere and everything connected with those vanished lives now had about it a sense of absolute desolation.

  * * *

  The Alexander Palace might have once been the residence of now denigrated ‘former people’ liquidated by the revolution, of whom ordinary Russians were increasingly fearful to speak, but, as the palace’s devoted curator recalled, that last lingering indefinable ‘aroma of the epoch’ was never quite eradicated. The honeyed scent of the beeswax used to polish the floors and the odour of Moroccan leather from the many volumes in the tsar’s library lingered – along with the faint smell of rose oil in the icon lamps in the tsaritsa’s bedroom – until the onset of the Second World War and the palace’s occupation by the German military command consigned it to near destruction.19

  In the days before the war, the tour of the state apartments culminated in the central, semicircular hall at the rear of the palace, where the tsar had held official receptions and dinners for visiting dignitaries, and where, during the First World War, the family had sat down together on Saturday evenings to enjoy film shows. That last night, 31 July–1 August 1917, the Romanov family had patiently waited out the long tedious hours here, dreading the final order to leave their home for ever.

  During the preceding days the four Romanov sisters had had to make painful choices about which of their precious possessions – their many albums of photographs, letters from friends, their clothes, their favourite books – they should take with them. They had to leave their childhood dolls behind, carefully arranged on miniature chairs and sofas, along with other treasured toys and mementoes, in hopes that they might be cherished by those who came after.20

  Legend has it that it was through the central door in the semicircular hall that Catherine the Great had first entered the palace in 1790, carrying her young grandson, the future Alexander I, when the palace that she had ordered to be built, and later presented as a gift to him, was completed. Just after sunrise on 1 August 1917, 127 years later, with the cars pulled up and waiting for them outside, the last imperial family of Russia passed out of the echoing space of the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi’s eighteenth-century hall with its great arc of windows, through that same glass door and into an uncertain future – 1,341 miles (2,158 km) away in Tobolsk in western Siberia.

  The four Romanov sisters, still thin from the after-effects of the severe attack of measles they had suffered early in the year, wept inconsolably as they left the home where they had spent so many of the happy days of their childhood.21 After they had gone, a dejected Mariya Geringer spoke of her still lingering hopes for them. Perhaps the girls would be lucky somewhere in exile and find decent, ordinary husbands and be happy, she said. For her, and for other loyal retainers and friends left behind, the memory of those four lovely sisters in happier times, of their many kindnesses, of their shared joys and sorrows – the ‘laughing faces under the brims of their big flower-trimmed hats’ – would continue to linger during the long, deadening years of communism.22 As, too, would the memory of their vivacious brother who daily challenged his life-threatening disability and refused to be cowed by it. And always, hovering in the background, a woman whose abiding virtue – and one that, perversely, destroyed them all in the end – was a fatal excess of mother love.

  Chapter One

  MOTHER LOVE

  There once were four sisters – Victoria, Ella, Irene and Alix – who lived in an obscure grand duchy in south-western Germany, a place of winding cobbled streets and dark forests made legendary in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In their day, these four princesses of the house of Hesse and by Rhine were considered by many to be ‘the flowers of Queen Victoria’s flock of granddaughters’, celebrated for their beauty, intelligence and charm.1 As they grew up they became the object of intense scrutiny on that most fraught of international stages – the royal marriage market of Europe. Despite their lack of large dowries or vast territories, each sister in turn married well. But it was to the youngest and most beautiful of the four that fate dealt the biggest hand.

  The four Hesse sisters were daughters of Princess Alice – second daughter of Queen Victoria – and her husband Prince Louis, heir to the Grand Duke of Hesse. In July 1862, aged only eighteen, Alice had left England heavily veiled and in mourning for her recently deceased father Prince Albert, after marrying Louis at Osborne House. By the dynastic standards of the day it was a modest match for a daughter of Queen Victoria, but one tha
t added another strand to the complex web of royal intermarriage between European first and second cousins. During her long reign Victoria had orchestrated the marriages of all her nine children, and remained meddlesome enough into old age to ensure that, after them, their children and even their grandchildren secured partners befitting their royal status. Princess Alice might well have achieved something better had she not fallen in love with the rather dull Prince Louis. As royal domains went, Hesse was relatively small, perpetually financially overstretched and politically powerless. ‘There are English noblemen who could endow their daughter with a richer dower than falls to the lot of the Princess Alice’, observed one newspaper at the time. Hesse Darmstadt was a ‘simple country, of pastoral and agricultural character’, with an unostentatious court. It was pretty but its history till now had remained unremarkable.2

  The capital, Darmstadt, set in the oak-forested hills of the Odenwald, was deemed ‘a place of no importance’ in the eyes of the pre-eminent Baedeker tourist guide.3 Indeed, another contemporary traveller found it ‘the dullest town in Germany’, a place ‘on the way to everywhere’ – nothing more.4 It was built on a uniform plan of long, straight streets and formal houses populated by ‘well-fed burghers and contented hausfraus’, not far from the River Darmbach, and ‘the general absence of life’ in the capital gave it ‘an air of somber inactivity’.5 The older, medieval quarter had a degree of bustle and character, but aside from the grand-ducal palace, the opera house and a public museum full of fossils there was little to redeem the city from the insipid stiffness that permeated the Darmstadt court.