The Romanov Sisters Read online

  While eagerly awaiting the birth of her child, Alexandra set about creating something no Russian empress before her had ever attempted: an intimate family home for herself, Nicky and the children to come. They both loved the Alexander Palace out at Tsarksoe Selo, preferring its location well away from inquisitive St Petersburg society. ‘The quiet here is so delightful,’ she told Ernie, ‘one feels quite another creature, than when in town.’10 She and Nicholas chose not to take over Alexander III’s family apartments in the east wing, but instead the somewhat neglected and sparsely furnished west wing closer to the palace gates. The interior was to be neither imperial in style nor in any way grandiose but renovated to Alexandra’s own simple provincial tastes, the perfect environment in which she anticipated living the life of a devoted hausfrau and mother. Simple modern furniture like that familiar from her childhood in Darmstadt was ordered from Maples, the London-based furniture manufacturer and retailer, which sent out orders from its Tottenham Court Road store. The ambience of this intentionally family-oriented home, in which Nicholas and Alexandra would spend the majority of their time – aside from the obligatory winter season in St Petersburg from Christmas to Lent – was to be cosily Victorian, as Grandmama would have liked it. St Petersburg society was of course duly horrified at the new tsaritsa’s bourgeoise tastes, for she had commissioned the Russian interior designer, Roman Meltzer, to refurbish the rooms in the Jugendstil or art nouveau style then popular in Germany, rather than in ways that would match the palace’s Russian location and its classical exterior.

  The heat was intolerable that summer of 1895 and as her pregnancy progressed and with it her discomfort, Alexandra was glad to escape to the sea breezes of the Lower Dacha at Peterhof, located in the Alexandria Park, one of six English-style landscaped parks on the Peterhof estate. The Lower Dacha inhabited a world entirely its own, located well out of sight of the golden cupolas of Peter the Great’s grand palace and its cascading fountains and ornamental gardens, a charming, unobtrusive building of red and cream brickwork laid in alternating, horizontal stripes. Between 1883 and 1885 Alexander III had had it enlarged from a two-storey turreted structure into a four-storey Italianate pavilion with balconies and glazed verandas. But it was still rather high and narrow with smallish rooms and low ceilings, giving it more the feel of a seaside villa than an imperial residence. The location, however, was idyllic – tucked away at the far north-east corner of the park behind a grove of shady pine and deciduous trees and in sight of the boulder-strewn shoreline of the Gulf of Finland. The park itself, where the wild flowers grew in profusion and which was full of rabbits and hares, was surrounded by railings 7 feet (2 m) high, with a soldier with fixed bayonet posted every 100 yards (90 m) and Cossacks of the Tsar’s Escort – Nicholas’s personal bodyguard, who went with him everywhere – patrolling on horseback inside the grounds.11 The Lower Dacha itself was encircled by a lawn and a flower garden of lilies, hollyhocks, poppies and sweet peas. It reminded Alexandra of the lovely gardens at Wolfsgarten, Ernie’s hunting lodge in the heart of the Hessian forest, and she felt safe and at home here. Anticipating the need for more rooms, Nicholas ordered an additional wing to be constructed. The interior would remain much as the couple’s new apartments at Tsarskoe Selo, only more modest in scale, with plain and mainly white furniture and the familiar chintz draperies, and everywhere, as always, Alexandra’s trademark: ‘tables, brackets, and furniture … laden with jars, vases, and bowls filled with fresh-cut, sweet-smelling flowers’.12

  She spent the months of June to September in absolute seclusion at Peterhof. Her pregnancy was exhausting and the baby was very active. As she told Ernie in July, ‘My tiny one hops like mad sometimes, and makes me feel quite giddy, and gives me stiches [sic] (downstairs) when I walk.’*13 She spent much of her time resting on a couch in sight of the sea, or taking gentle daily walks and drives with Nicky, in between drawing, painting and making quilts and baby clothes. ‘What a joy it must be to have a sweet little wee child of one’s own’, she wrote in July to Ernie, who now had a baby daughter, Elisabeth. ‘I am longing for the moment when God will give us ours – it will be such a happiness for my darling Nicky too … he has so many sorrows and worries that the appearance of a tiny Baby of his very own will cheer him up.… So young, and in such a responsible position and so many things to fight against.’14

  At the end of August the apartments at Tsarskoe Selo were ready for use. Despite its modest size, the palace and its 14 miles (22.5 km) of parkland would need a 1,000-strong staff of servants and court officials to run it and a much larger military garrison to guard it.15 Alexandra loved her new rooms and was busy organizing her layette, although suffering a lot of discomfort. ‘I do hope I shall not have to wait much longer – the weight and movements get so strong’, she told Ernie.16 At the end of September she experienced a bout of acute pain in her abdomen. Madame Günst was sent for and immediately called in Dr Dmitri Ott – director of the St Petersburg Institute of Midwifery and the most influential gynaecologist in Russia at the time – and with whom Günst had recently attended the birth of Nicholas’s sister Xenia’s first child.17 Meanwhile Alexandra was thinking about a nurse for the baby. Like Xenia, she wanted her to be English: ‘If I can only find a good one – they mostly dread going so far away, and have extraordinary ideas about the wild Russians and I don’t know what other nonsense – the nursery maid will of course be a Russian.’18

  Nicholas and Alexandra were both convinced their baby would arrive around the middle of October but it still had not been born when Ella arrived from Moscow at the end of the month. She found Alix looking ‘remarkably well thank God so much plumper in the face such a healthy complexion better than I had seen for years’, she reported to Queen Victoria. She was concerned that the baby was ‘probably immense’, but Alix was transformed – ‘full of fun quite like as a child & that dreadfully sad look which Papa’s death had printed on her disappears in her constant smiles’.19

  Nicholas was keeping careful watch over his wife: ‘the “babe” has sunk lower and makes her very uncomfortable, the poor dear!’ he told his mother.20 So preoccupied was he with its imminent arrival, that he hoped his ministers would not ‘swamp’ him with work when the time came. Anticipating a son, he and Alexandra had already decided on the name Paul. Maria Feodorovna, however, was not at all keen on it, because of its associations with Paul I, who had been murdered, but she was anxious to be there when labour began. ‘It is understood, isn’t it, that you will let me know as soon as the first symptoms appear? I shall fly to you, my dear children, and shall not be a nuisance, except perhaps by acting as policeman, to keep everybody else well away.’21

  The baby’s size and position were causing Alexandra such terrible pain in her back and legs that she was now forced to lie in bed or on the sofa for much of the time. ‘Baby won’t come – it is at the door but has not yet wished to appear & I do so terribly long for it’, she told Ernie.22 Dr Ott was now staying overnight and Madame Günst had been there for the past two weeks. With no news emanating from official sources about the progress of the Empress of Russia’s pregnancy, rumour abroad was rife, just as it had been in the run-up to her marriage. The gossip prompted a firm rebuttal in the British press, based on ‘well-informed quarters in Darmstadt and Berlin’:

  With reference to certain disquieting rumours which have been circulated respecting the health of the Empress of Russia, and the statement that some other physicians will be called in, a St Petersburg correspondent says that Her Imperial Majesty, according to the declaration of her medical adviser, is going on as well as possible, and that she neither needs nor desires any extraneous assistance.23

  At around 1 o’clock in the morning of 3 November, Alexandra finally went into labour. Ella was joined by Maria Feodorovna, and together, as Ella reported to Queen Victoria, they ‘gently rubbed her back & legs which relieved her’.24 Alexandra was grateful for their presence and that of her husband too, for her labour lasted twenty hours, during
which Nicholas was frequently in tears and his mother often on her knees in prayer.25 Finally, at 9 p.m. ‘we heard a child’s squeal, and all heaved a sigh of relief’, as Nicholas recalled.26

  It was not, however, the longed-for boy, but a girl, and Ella’s apprehensions had been correct: ‘The Baby was colossal but she was so brave & patient & Minny [Maria Feodorovna] a great comfort encouraging her.’27 The baby girl weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg); it had required the combined skill of Ott and Günst to deliver her, an episiotomy and forceps having been necessary, with the help of chloroform.28 It was, Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘A day I will remember for ever’, but he had ‘suffered a very great deal’ at the sight of his wife in the agonies of labour. His baby daughter, whom he and Alexandra named Olga, seemed so robust that he remarked that she didn’t look like a newborn at all.29

  Queen Victoria was enormously relieved to hear the news: ‘At Carlisle got a telegram from Nicky saying: “Darling Alix has just given birth to a lovely enormous little daughter, Olga. My joy is beyond words. Mother & child doing well.” Am so thankful.’30 She was even more relieved to hear from Ella that ‘The joy of having their baby has never one moment let them regret little Olga being a girl’.31 Indeed Nicholas was quick to emphasize his and Alexandra’s joy, in a story later widely circulated in the press. Upon being congratulated by the court chamberlain he is said to have remarked, ‘I am glad that our child is a girl. Had it been a boy he would have belonged to the people, being a girl she belongs to us.’32 They were, quite simply, besotted. ‘They are so proud of themselves & each other & the baby that they think nothing could be more perfect’, wrote the wife of a British diplomat.33 ‘For us there is no question of sex,’ Alexandra asserted, ‘our child is simply a gift from God.’34 She and Nicholas were quick to reward the skills of Dr Ott and Madame Günst in the safe delivery of their daughter: Ott was appointed leib-akusher* to the imperial court and presented with a jewelled snuffbox of gold and diamonds and an honorarium of 10,000 roubles (as he would be for delivering all the Romanov children); Evgeniya Günst received around 3,000 roubles each time.35

  There was, inevitably, a sense of disappointment in the wider Romanov family, expressed by Grand Duchess Xenia, who thought Olga’s birth ‘a great joy, although it’s a pity it’s not a son!’36 Such disquiet was not of course expressed in any of the heavily censored Russian press. The whole of St Petersburg had been eagerly anticipating the event, to be announced by the boom of cannons across the Neva. When the moment came, ‘people opened their windows, others rushed out into the street to hear and count the volleys’. But alas the number of rounds fired was only 101; for a first son and heir it would have been 301.37 The news reached many of the theatres in St Petersburg just as people were leaving at the end of the evening performance. It ‘duly called forth patriotic demonstrations from the audiences, in response to whose wish the Russian national anthem had to be played several times’.38 In Paris’s Little Russia, a Te Deum was sung at the St Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church on rue Daru in celebration of the tsaritsa’s safe delivery. But the British press was quick to note an element of dismay in Russian political and diplomatic circles: ‘A son would have been more welcome than a daughter, but a daughter is better than nothing’, observed the Pall Mall Gazette.39 At a time when Russia and England were still to some extent political rivals, the Daily Chronicle wondered whether baby Olga ‘might be made a peg to hang an Anglo-Russian understanding on’ at some future date. The seed was sown for a rapprochement between the Russian and British royal families, and what better way than through a future dynastic marriage?

  On 5 November 1895 an Imperial Manifesto was issued in St Petersburg greeting Grand Duchess Olga’s birth: ‘Inasmuch as we regard this accession to the Imperial House as a token of the blessings vouchsafed to our House and Empire, we notify the joyful event to all our faithful subjects, and join with them in offering fervent prayers to the Almighty that the newly born Princess may grow up in happiness and strength.’40 In a magnanimous gesture to celebrate his daughter’s birth, Nicholas announced an amnesty for political and religious prisoners, who were given a free pardon, as well as ordering remittances in sentence for common criminals.

  But not everyone shared the optimistic view of little Olga’s future; early in the new year of 1896 a curious story appeared in the French press. Prince Charles of Denmark (soon to be married to Princess Maud of Wales, daughter of Alexandra’s cousin Bertie) had, it appeared, been ‘exercising his ingenuity in drawing the horoscope of the Czar’s infant daughter’. In it the prince predicted critical periods in Olga’s health at ‘her third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth years’. In so doing, he felt unable to ‘guarantee that she will even reach the last-named age, but if she does she will assuredly reach twenty’. This, the prince concluded, would grant ‘twelve years of peace to be thankful for’. For ‘it is certain … that she will never live to be thirty’.41

  * * *

  The moment her new great-granddaughter was born, Queen Victoria, as godmother, took it upon herself to ensure that the baby had a good English nanny and promptly set about recruiting one. But she was horrified when Alexandra announced her intention to breastfeed, just as her mother Alice had done. The British press quickly got wind of what, for the times, was sensational news. It was unheard-of for sovereigns – particularly imperial Russian ones – to breastfeed their children. The news had ‘astonished all the Russians’ although a wet-nurse was also to be appointed as essential back-up. ‘A large number of peasant women … were gathered from various parts’ for the selection process. ‘None of them was to be the mother of fewer than two or more than four children, and those of dark complexion were to be preferred.’42 Alexandra’s first attempts at breastfeeding did not, however, go to plan, for baby Olga rejected her, and, as Nicholas recalled, it ‘ended up with Alix very successfully feeding the son of the wet-nurse, while the latter gave milk to Olga! Very funny!’ ‘For my part I consider it the most natural thing a mother can do and I think the example an excellent one!’ he told Queen Victoria soon after.43

  Alexandra, as one might expect, bloomed as a nursing mother; her whole world, and Nicholas’s, revolved around their adored newborn daughter. The tsar delighted in recording every detail of her life in his diary: the first time she slept through the night, how he helped feed and bathe her, the emergence of her baby teeth, the clothes she wore, the first photographs he took of her. Neither he nor Alexandra of course noted that little Olga was in fact not the prettiest of babies – her large moon-shaped head with its awkward quiff of blonde hair that replaced the long dark hair she was born with, was too large for her body, and made her seem almost ugly to some members of the imperial family. But she was, from the outset a good, chubby and happy baby and her doting parents rarely let her out of their sight.

  On the morning of 14 November 1895 – her parents’ wedding anniversary and the Dowager Empress’s forty-eighth birthday – Olga Nikolaevna Romanova was christened (with just the one given name, according to Russian Orthodox practice). It was a particularly joyful occasion for the imperial court as it marked the end of official mourning for Tsar Alexander III. The baby was dressed in Nicholas’s own christening robes and conveyed in a gold state coach drawn by six white horses, accompanied by Cossacks of the Tsar’s Escort, to the Church of the Resurrection, the imperial chapel at Tsarskoe Selo. From here, Princess Mariya Golitsyna, the mistress of the robes, carried Olga to the font on a golden cushion. In line with Russian Orthodox practice, Nicholas and Alexandra did not attend the actual ceremony, at which members of the Orthodox synod, illustrious royal relatives, diplomats and foreign VIPs, all in full court dress, were gathered. The baby had seven sponsors including Queen Victoria and the dowager empress. But most of these could not attend in person, so Maria Feodorovna presided, resplendent in Russian national dress and jewelled kokoshnik, surrounded by most of the Russian grand dukes and duchesses. During the service, the baby ‘was dipped three times into the water in the
orthodox way and then was straight laid into a pink satin quilted bag, dried and undressed, & returned to the gamp [nurse], who was very important in corded silk’.44 Olga was then anointed with holy oil on her face, eyes, ears, hands and feet and carried round the church three times by Maria Feodorovna, with one of the godfathers on either side of her. When the ceremony was over, Nicholas invested his daughter with the Order of St Catherine.

  Olga’s difficult birth had, inevitably, left Alexandra considerably weakened and she was not allowed out of bed until 18 November. Thereafter, she went for quiet drives in the park with Nicky but despite the presence of her brother and his wife Ducky (Victoria Melita’s pet name in the family), she took little advantage of their company, even though they were only there for a week. Ducky complained in letters to relatives of her boredom, of how Alix was rather distant and that she talked endlessly of Nicky and ‘praise[d] him so much all the time’, that she came to the conclusion that her sister-in-law preferred being on her own with him.45 She certainly jealously guarded her time with Nicky; the rest of it was spent mothering Olga. Orchie was still in evidence, as a superannuated family retainer, given the token role of supervising the running of the nursery, but she was not entrusted with the baby’s care, even when Madame Günst – who stayed on as maternity nurse for three months – was laid up for a couple of days.46 The presence of Günst caused considerable disgruntlement. ‘Orchie slept in the blue room and scarcely spoke to me, so offended we did not have Baby with her’, Alexandra told Ernie.47