The Romanov Sisters Read online

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  The first intimations of a possible crisis in the Russian succession came in August 1899 when Nicholas’s brother the tsarevich, Grand Duke Georgiy, died suddenly at Abbas Tuman in the Caucasus. A manifesto was issued soon after, declaring that the next in line to the throne was now Nicholas’s youngest brother Grand Duke Mikhail, but he was only named as heir and not given the formal title of tsarevich, in anticipation that Nicholas would soon have a son. Gossip in Russia had it that this was a superstitious act on the part of the couple, out of a fear that to make Michael tsarevich would in some way jinx them and ‘prevent the appearance in the world of [their own] boy’.46

  It is certainly clear that after Grand Duke Georgiy’s death, the level of concern escalated, for the first time arousing real fears that the tsaritsa might never have a boy. After Maria was born letters of advice began arriving – from England, France, Belgium, and as far afield as the USA, Latin America and Japan – offering the secret of begetting a son. Many correspondents solicited thousands of dollars from the imperial couple in return for divulging their miracle panaceas. Most of the theories on offer were in fact variants of those much talked about since publication in 1896 of The Determination of Sex by the Austrian embryologist, Dr Leopold Schenk. Himself the father of eight sons, of whom six had survived, Schenk considered this proof that his method worked. In October 1898 when Alexandra had been trying to fall pregnant for a third time she had apparently instructed one of her doctors in Yalta ‘to study Dr Schenk’s theory thoroughly and to communicate with him’; she had subsequently ‘lived exactly according to Dr Schenk’s precepts’, supervised at St Petersburg and Perhof by that Yalta doctor. The story first broke in an article on Dr Schenk in the American press in December 1898, which reported that he was ‘at present, with an assistant, working in the court of Russia, where the Czar of all the Russias longs for an heir’. The article claimed that it was ‘an open secret in Russia that the Czarina … has placed herself under Dr Schenk’s treatment and is willing to await the result’.47

  At a time when the genetics of conception were still not understood, Schenk’s theories had been pooh-poohed by many of his medical contemporaries but he stuck to his guns, arguing that the sex of the child depended upon which ovary had ovulated: an unripe ovum, released soon after menstruation, would produce female children and a ripe one males. Schenk also believed that nutrition played a key role in the development of sexual characteristics, and his advice focused on the nutrition of the mother up to and during pregnancy. A woman wanting a son, he argued, should eat more meat in order to raise the level of blood corpuscles (perhaps Maria Feodorovna had also read Dr Schenk’s book?), there being more in the male than the female. Other unsolicited advice was offered from within Russia, based on more superstitious practice.* ‘Ask your wife, the empress, to lie on the left hand side of the bed’ wrote one correspondent, instructing that he, Nicholas, lie on the right – a euphemistic allusion to the popular belief that ‘if the husband mounts his wife from the left a girl will be born, if from the right a boy’ (the ‘missionary position’ in Russian being na kone ‘on a horse’).†48

  Whatever the efficacy of the remedies offered them, in October 1900, while they were staying in Livadia, Nicholas was pleased to inform his mother that Alexandra was once again pregnant. As with her previous pregnancies, she was receiving no one, he said, ‘and is in the open air all day’.49 The happy couple’s quiet retreat was, however, suddenly disrupted at the end of that month when Nicholas fell seriously ill with what was at first put down to a severe case of influenza and then diagnosed as ‘an abdominal typhus peculiar to the Crimea’, although the foreign press widely referred to it as typhoid fever.50 Its onset provoked widespread concern for Nicholas, at a time when Russia was viewed as an important international power during the hostilities of the Boer War in Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China.

  Many papers referred to the tsar’s supposed delicate health and that he appeared to have suffered from attacks of vertigo and severe headaches in the previous three years.51 The reality was that despite being a heavy smoker, Nicholas in general enjoyed very good health and was extremely physically active. The attack of typhoid while serious was not ultimately life-threatening, but in all he was confined to bed for five weeks, suffering at times from agonizing pain in his back and legs and becoming very thin and weak. Despite her pregnancy, Alexandra had from the first taken exclusive control of his nursing and proved an exceptionally capable sickbed nurse. Aside from the loyal help of Mariya Baryatinskaya, she allowed virtually nobody near her precious husband and demonstrated ‘a very strong will’. She also ‘made the most of the fact that she found herself alone with the Czar in such an emergency’, vetting any urgent documents regarding affairs of state and ‘with exquisite tact … know[ing] how to keep from the Czar all that might have caused him excitement or worry’.52

  Nicholas was flattered by his wife’s excessive care: ‘My darling Alix nursed and looked after me like the best of sisters of mercy. I can’t describe what she was for me during my illness. May God bless her.’53 The girls meanwhile were sent away from the palace, for fear of infection, and lodged at the house of one of the imperial entourage who had daughters of his own. Alexandra insisted on having them brought to the palace every day, ‘to a place where she could see them through a window, and looked at them for some time to convince herself that they were in perfect health’. Beyond the sickroom, however, the spectre of a Russian throne without a male heir once more rose, provoking considerable concern about what would happen should Nicholas die.

  Back in 1797, Emperor Paul I had regularized the transfer of power in Russia by abandoning the old law of primogeniture and setting down clear rules on a male-only line of succession. This had been done in an attempt to avoid palace coups of the kind that had brought the mother he hated, Catherine the Great, to power.54 Until now, with previous tsars having plenty of sons, there had been no reason to seek changes to the Fundamental Laws on the succession. Even though Olga was not yet five years old, neither Nicholas nor Alexandra wished his brother, twenty-one-year-old Grand Duke Mikhail, to accede to the throne in preference to their own daughter or the child Alexandra was carrying. She certainly was distraught at the prospect; her baby might well be a boy, and she insisted that she be nominated regent in anticipation of that and until her son came of age. Although desperately ill, Nicholas was consulted and sided with his wife. His minister of finance, Count Witte, held a meeting with other ministers in Yalta; they all agreed that there was no precedent in Russian law that allowed a pregnant tsaritsa to rule in hopes of eventually producing a son, and it was decided that if the tsar died, they would swear an oath of allegiance to Mikhail as tsar.55 Should Alexandra’s baby turn out to be a boy, Witte was confident that Mikhail would renounce the throne in his nephew’s favour.

  In the aftermath of his illness, Nicholas remained mindful of protecting his eldest daughter’s dynastic interests, and instructed government ministers to draft a decree to the effect that Olga would succeed to the throne if he should die without a son and heir.56 The impact on Alexandra of this debate over the succession was profound; psychologically, it marked the onset of a creeping paranoia that the throne might be wrested from her yet-to-be-born son by plotters in court circles and it further alienated her from the rest of the Romanov family, whom she mistrusted. In one thing she was fiercely resolute: she would defend the Russian throne for her future son, at absolutely any cost.

  While their parents had both been hidden from view for weeks, the three Romanov sisters had been seen a great deal in and around Yalta that autumn. ‘Nothing can be prettier’, wrote a local correspondent, ‘than the three little girls in the carriage, chattering and asking questions, and bowing when passers-by take their hats off to them’, adding somewhat mischievously that ‘the smallest Princess is living proof of the inefficiency of Professor Schenk’s theories’.57 For some time the girls continued to be the only public face of the Rus
sian imperial family and according to press reports were extraordinarily unspoilt, thanks to the tsaritsa’s principle that her children should be ‘brought up without any extreme or special consideration on account of their high position and imperial birth’. They were always modestly dressed in ‘cheap, white dresses, short English stockings and plain, light shoes’; the temperature in their rooms was ‘always kept moderate’ and they went out into the fresh air even in the coldest of weather. ‘All useless, heavy etiquette and luxury are forbidden.’ The tsar and tsaritsa often went to see their children in the nursery; but even stranger and contrary to normal royal protocol, the correspondent reported with incredulity that ‘the august parents play with their daughters as mortal parents usually do’.58

  The two older girls were already developing very clear and different personalities. Olga was ‘very kind hearted and of noble character’. She spoke Russian and English fluently, was talented at music and already a good pianist. Although she and Tatiana had a little English donkey, the tsar had recently indulged Olga’s request to ride side saddle ‘as grown up people do’, after she had admired the Cossack members of the Tsar’s Escort. ‘Charming Tatiana’, meanwhile, was ‘of a gay and lively temperament, and always quick and playful in her movements’. Both were very attached to their baby sister.59 No doubt they were, but Nicholas had already noted that Maria, who was now toddling, ‘falls often, because her elder sisters push her about and when one does not watch them they are altogether inclined to treat her very roughly’. He was pleased to report to his mother that Miss Eagar was doing an excellent job: ‘In the nursery all runs smoothly between nurse and the other girls, – it is real paradise in comparison with the dismal past.’60

  With Nicholas’s doctors insisting he take a long convalescence in the Crimea, it was 9 January 1901 before the family left a beauti-ful, balmy Yalta in the Shtandart. At Sevastopol where they disembarked for the imperial train to St Petersburg, Nicholas and Alexandra received the news that Queen Victoria, whose health had been failing for some time, had died at Osborne on 22 January (NS). When they arrived back to a grey and gloomy St Petersburg, the Russian court season was immediately cancelled and the entire imperial household went into mourning. As Alexandra was now four months pregnant, the doctors would not allow her to travel to England for the funeral. Instead she attended a memorial service for her grandmother at the English Church in the capital, supported by Nicholas, where, much to everyone’s surprise, she openly wept. It was the first and only time many saw the tsaritsa give public display to her feelings.61

  The loss of her beloved grandmama was profound but fortunately Alexandra remained well during this fourth pregnancy. Grand Duke Konstantin thought she was looking ‘very beautiful’ when he saw her in February and what is more she was feeling ‘wonderful, unlike the other occasions’. For this reason, the grand duke noted in his diary, ‘everyone is anxiously hoping that this time it will be a son’. But such preoccupations were forgotten in May when five-year-old Olga contracted typhoid at Peterhof.62 ‘She is separated from her sibling upstairs in the only empty room … but under the roof it is pretty hot’, Alexandra told a friend. ‘I spend most of the day with her; the stairs are tiring in my present condition.’ Olga was ill for five weeks and became very pale and thin; her long blonde hair had to be cut short because the illness had started to make it fall out. ‘She loves to have me with her, and for as long as I am on my feet, it is a delight to sit with her’, Alexandra added, for ‘to see a sick child really hurts and my heart weeps – God watch over her’.63 So changed was Olga by the illness that when Tatiana was taken in to see her sister she did not recognize her and wept.

  When Madame Günst arrived at Peterhof in preparation for the fourth baby, she became concerned that the tsaritsa’s exertions looking after Olga might trigger a premature birth and she called in the doctors.64 But all was well. At 3 a.m. on 5 June, Alexandra went into labour at the Lower Dacha. It was very quick this time; three hours later, and without complications, she gave birth to a large, 11½ lb (5.2 kg) baby girl. Nicholas had little time to register any disappointment. It all happened so quickly, before the household were up and about, giving himself and Alexandra ‘a feeling of peace and seclusion’.65 They gave their new daughter the name Anastasia, from the Greek anastasis, meaning ‘resurrection’; in Russian Orthodox usage the name was linked to the fourth-century martyr St Anastasia, who had succoured Christians imprisoned for their faith and was known as the ‘breaker of chains’. In honour of this Nicholas ordered an amnesty for students imprisoned in St Petersburg and Moscow for rioting the previous winter.66 Anastasia was not a traditional Russian imperial name but in naming her thus the tsar and tsaritsa were perhaps expressing a profoundly held belief that God would answer their prayers and that the Russian monarchy might yet be resurrected – by the birth of a son.

  The Russian people and the imperial family were, however, extremely despondent; as US diplomat’s wife Rebecca Insley Casper observed, the arrival of Anastasia had ‘created such indescribable agitation in a nation clamouring for a boy’.67 ‘My God! What a disappointment!… a fourth girl!’ exclaimed Grand Duchess Xenia. ‘Forgive us Lord, if we all felt disappointment instead of joy; we were so hoping for a boy, and it’s a fourth daughter’, echoed Grand Duke Konstantin.68 ‘Illuminations, but Disappointment’ ran the headlines of the Daily Mail in London on 19 June (NS). ‘There is much rejoicing, although there is a popular undercurrent of disappointment, for a son had been most keenly hoped for.’ The newspaper could not but offer commiserations: ‘the legitimate hopes of the Czar and Czarina have so far been cruelly frustrated, whatever may be their private parental feelings towards their four little daughters … [who] had been born into an expectant world with distressing regularity’.69 In Russia the response was once again heavy with superstitious resentment, as the French diplomat Maurice Paléologue reported: ‘We said so, didn’t we! The German, the nemka, has the evil eye. Thanks to her nefarious influence our Emperor is doomed to catastrophe.’70

  In the face of so much negativity, and determined to show how proud he was of his fourth daughter, Nicholas ordered the fullest possible pageantry at her christening in August, which followed the same format as those for her sisters, and after which ‘the cannon boomed all the way from Peterhof back to the capital’. Later Nicholas entertained his illustrious guests to lunch, during which they ‘went up to the supposedly happy father to present their felicitations’. Rebecca Insley Casper reported that for once the tsar seemed unable to conceal his dismay, for, when he turned to one of the ambassadors, he was heard to say with a sad smile – ‘We must try again!’71

  Three months later, Nicholas and Alexandra visited the new French president, Emile Loubet, at Compiègne, leaving the girls at Kiel in the care of Alexandra’s sister Irene. The security surrounding them was intense: the town swarmed with French police who were even sent to ‘beat the forest and search every copse and thicket’ for undesirables. The chateau where Nicholas and Alexandra stayed was searched ‘from garret to basement’ and plain clothes detectives mingled with the staff.72

  The imperial couple seemed clearly devoted, but there was an air of unmistakable melancholy about Alexandra. At a public reception Margaret Cassini, daughter of the Russian ambassador to Washington, thought her withdrawn air very marked. She looked luminous, as usual, dressed in white and wearing exquisite jewels ‘mostly pearls and diamonds, from ears to waist’. But, as Cassini could not help noticing, ‘she wears them without joy’. The French found the sombre Russian empress hard to fathom: ‘Oh, la la! Elle a une figure d’enterrement,’* they complained. Her sadness, thought Cassini, was a reflection of her being ‘a mother only of girls’. ‘Have you children?’ Alexandra would ask of ladies presented to her at court, only for sadness to descend whenever the lady in question replied as she curtsied, ‘A son, Your Majesty.’73

  ‘Nicholas would part with half his Empire in exchange for one Imperial boy’, remarked the travel writer B
urton Holmes that year, wondering ‘Will one of the dear little duchesses some day ascend the throne of Catherine the Great?’74

  But privately the imperial couple had not given up hope. Barely a month after Anastasia’s birth a new person was in evidence within their inner circle at Peterhof and was being referred to by them as ‘our friend’. A certain ‘Maître Philippe’ – a fashionable French faith-healer-cum-mystic – had arrived in Russia at the invitation of Grand Duke Petr and his wife Militza, and was staying with them at their home, Znamenka, not far from the Lower Dacha.75 It was there that Nicholas and Alexandra – who had met Philippe briefly in March – soon became locked into long evenings of earnest conversation with this mysterious French visitor. In their desperation for a son they were now turning to faith healing and the occult.

  Chapter Four

  THE HOPE OF RUSSIA

  In the Russian imperial family there was a custom, whereby all brides on the night before their wedding would go to St Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral to pray before the wonder-working icon of the Mother of God. According to Russian superstition, failure to perform this ritual would lead to infertility or the birth of only girls. When the tsaritsa had been told this before her wedding in 1894 – so the gossip in St Petersburg went – she had refused to go, saying that she had no intention of kowtowing to obsolete practices.1 For the highly superstitious Russian peasantry it seemed clear, by 1901, that ‘the Empress was not beloved in heaven or she would have borne a son’.2 God was angry.

  Under such intense pressure, Alexandra was naturally susceptible to the insidious influence of men such as Nizier Anthelme Philippe.3 His background was shadowy and medically dubious. The son of peasant farmers from Savoy, he had been working in his uncle’s butcher’s shop in Lyons, when at the age of thirteen he began claiming extra-sensory powers. Aged twenty-three, and without completing any formal medical training, he set himself up in practice without a licence, offering treatment with mysterious ‘psychic fluids and astral forces’.4 In 1884 Philippe had presented a paper, ‘Principles of Hygiene Applicable in Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infancy’, in which he had claimed he could predict the sex of a child and, even more outlandishly, that he could use his magnetic powers to change its sex inside the womb.5 Philippe’s occult medicine was geared to hypnosis sessions with patients and business prospered, despite his being fined several times for practising illegally; by the late 1890s his consulting rooms in Paris were besieged by fashionable French society. The Russian aristocracy too was becoming interested in mysticism and the occult at this time; in the south of France the Montenegrin princess, Militza, had solicited Philippe’s help in treating her sick son Roman.6 So convinced were she and her husband Grand Duke Petr of Philippe’s supposed miraculous powers of healing, that they invited him to St Petersburg. On 26 March 1901 they introduced him to Nicholas and Alexandra. ‘This evening we met the amazing Frenchman Mr Philippe’, Nicholas recorded in his diary. ‘We talked with him for a long time.’7