The Resurrection of the Romanovs (6 page)

Days passed with a comforting regularity at Tsarskoye Selo. If, beyond the protected confines of the imperial estate, Russia seethed with danger and discontent, here there were only smiling and obsequious faces. Aroused from slumber, the grand duchesses crept down the narrow wooden staircase connecting their rooms to those of their mother to bid Alexandra good morning before returning to their own apartments for breakfast. Nicholas would already be at his desk, and although he might join his children for a walk in the park, sometimes accompanied by the empress, the family often came together for the first time each day at four, when they all gathered for tea in Alexandra’s famous Mauve Boudoir. This, too, was ruled by tradition: the regulations, set down in the reign of Catherine the Great, dictated the number and type of rolls, plates of bread, and pastries placed on the table. Alexandra complained that “other people had much more interesting teas,” but that even as empress she was “unable to change a single detail of the routine of the Russian Court.”
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Alexandra poured, and handed around plates of tiny sandwiches and pastries; for the children there was cocoa and little vanilla-flavored wafers called
biblichen
. Nicholas smoked and read aloud, the empress and her eldest daughters embroidered, and Anastasia played games with Alexei on the sage-green carpet.
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These quiet scenes of domestic, thoroughly middle-class harmony were often repeated in the evening, usually with the addition of the empress’s great friend Anna Vyrubova, a “sentimental and mystical,” naive young woman whose devotion to Alexandra was rivaled only by her uncritical belief in the infamous Rasputin.
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The family might listen to the gramophone—recordings of Wagnerian operas were a favorite—or to Nicholas as he read from Russian or English novels, the empress inevitably busy with needlework and the girls carefully pasting photographs they had taken with their Kodak box cameras into leather-bound albums.
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On other evenings films would be shown in the palace’s large semicircular hall: newsreels, something for the children, and perhaps an American or European silent comedy or serial. All were carefully screened to ensure that no offending scenes existed, although inevitably the censor missed a passionate kiss or meaningful glance that sent the imperial children into howls of laughter.
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For all of this apparent idyllic domesticity, one thing was missing: Anastasia had no real friends. As a young girl, she pathetically dragged around a well-worn, one-armed, one-eyed, bald-headed doll she had named Vera, and looked to her siblings and the family’s pets for comfort.
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In their isolation, the grand duchesses found comfort and companionship with each other, and with the courtiers and servants around them. Anastasia Hendrikova, a countess who served their mother, was a particular favorite, as was Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, who was appointed a lady-in-waiting to the empress in 1913 at age twenty-eight, but they could not take the place of real confidantes.
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The grand duchesses, noted imperial tutor Pierre Gilliard, “by force of circumstances,” learned “to be self-sufficient” in “a life deprived of outside amusements.”
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The blame lay with the empress. Alexandra, Anna Vyrubova remembered, “dreaded for her daughters the companionship of over-sophisticated young women of the aristocracy whose minds, even in the schoolroom, were fed with the foolish and often vicious gossip of a decadent society.”
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There were, it is true, infrequent visits with the children of Nicholas II’s eldest sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna; with Prince George and Princess Vera, the youngest children of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who lived at Pavlovsk, near Tsarskoye Selo; and with Princesses Nina and Xenia Georgievna, daughters of Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, second cousin to Nicholas II, but such occasions were sporadic and provided only momentary diversions rather than true companionship. Alexandra, said Vyrubova, “discouraged” even these innocent encounters, deeming many of her husband’s relatives “unwholesomely precocious in their outlook on life.”
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Recognizing the isolation of her nieces and their inability to enjoy any meaningful social life, Nicholas II’s youngest sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, tried to step in and provide them with a modicum of diversion. Unhappily married to a homosexual prince, the rather plain and unassuming Olga Alexandrovna shared her goddaughter Anastasia’s intense dislike of the rigidity of imperial life and the crushing etiquette of the Russian court. Her answer was to take the grand duchesses away for days at her palace in St. Petersburg, and to lunches with their grandmother Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Olga also organized small parties, teas, and dances for her nieces, and the grand duchesses looked forward to these Sunday afternoons, when they could mingle with other young men and women invited by their aunt, dance, and play games with carefree abandon.
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They all, Olga Alexandrovna later recalled, “enjoyed every minute of it,” especially Anastasia. “I can still hear her laughter rippling all over the rooms. Dancing, music, games—why, she threw herself wholeheartedly into them all.”
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It was the only apparent flaw in the fairy tale, this lack of friends and influences outside the palace, this isolation imposed by the empress upon her daughters. In a very real way, the grand duchesses were prisoners in a gilded cage. “More than her sisters,” recalled one courtier, “Anastasia chafed under the narrowness of her environment.”
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Still, little could be done. The same sentries, special details of police, sailors from the Garde Equipage, and members of the Cossack Konvoi Regiment who patrolled the palace grounds to ensure her safety also trapped her in this stifling universe. Such protections were unfortunate but necessary. The Russian throne was an unstable institution, the empire a place where discontent constantly threatened to erupt into violence. It had happened before, with unnerving frequency: Peter the Great had his son and heir Alexei tortured to death; Catherine the Great came to the throne in a conspiracy that resulted in the murder of her husband, Peter III; and Paul I was killed by a group of aristocrats. And it was not just the distant past: in 1881, when the future Nicholas II was just twelve, he had stood at the bedside of his grandfather Tsar Alexander II, watching as he bled to death from a terrorist bomb; less than a quarter century later, Nicholas’s uncle and brother-in-law Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich was literally blown to pieces by revolutionaries. There had already been half a dozen unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Nicholas II by the time Anastasia turned ten. At times, violent strikes and unruly riots left the imperial family confined to their estates; even when they left this protective cocoon and traveled across the vast Russian Empire, they did so in a heavily armored train of royal blue carriages shadowed by a second, identical string of railway cars designed to confuse any would-be revolutionaries.
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This terrible uncertainty became the leitmotif of Anastasia’s fairy tale, an unseen yet very real danger that lurked just beneath the glittering surface of her privileged world.

2

The Imp

Anastasia’s youthful vivacity and eagerness for life, so pervasive in her early years, seemed to grind to a halt when she faced the ordeal of the classroom. She was never described as an intellectual, but the quality of her natural curiosity was especially engaging. “Whenever I talked with her,” wrote General Count Alexander von Grabbe of the Cossack Konvoi Regiment that guarded the family, “I always came away impressed by the breadth of her interests. That her mind was keenly alive was immediately apparent.”
1

Early on, though, before she faced the formalized rigors of education, Anastasia seemed positively possessed by a desire to learn. Everything fascinated her, and she wanted to know who people were, how things worked, what words meant. In 1905, twenty-five-year-old, Swiss-born Pierre Gilliard, who had previously worked as a tutor for distant Romanov relation Duke Serge of Leuchtenberg, took a position at court instructing the older grand duchesses in French.
2
One day, he recalled, he had just finished a lesson with Olga Nikolaievna when a nearly five-year-old Anastasia burst into the classroom. “She carried beneath her arm a big book of pictures, which she ceremoniously placed on the table before me,” he wrote, “then she gave me her hand and said in Russian, ‘I would like to learn French, too.’ Without waiting for my reply, she climbed atop a chair, knelt down, opened the book, and pointing to a picture of a huge elephant, asked, ‘And what is this called in French?’ Soon I was confronted with an entire Ark of names—lions, tigers, and every other animal pictured.” Anastasia seemed intrigued not just by the exotic French language but also by this new addition to the imperial court, and she became a regular visitor to Gilliard’s classroom, “running in” as soon as he was alone and “telling me all about the important incidents in her life. She had a child’s picturesque turn of phrase, and the melodious Russian gave her voice a soft, almost coaxing tone. Occasionally she even got me to let her sit and listen as I taught one of the older girls. She preferred to sit on the carpet, watching everything in earnest silence for she knew that any interruption would lead to banishment from the schoolroom, which at that time she seemed to regard as a sort of forbidden paradise.”
3

This idea of the schoolroom as a paradise vanished as soon as it became a required destination. Anastasia began lessons when she was eight. Gilliard remembered that at first she possessed a “zeal for learning” and “remarkable memory,” though her mind tended to move quickly from one subject to another as her attention waned.
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She was not just a diffident pupil: she could also be a difficult one. Perhaps because her more outrageous behavior had largely been indulged, Anastasia seemed to approach lessons with a sense of amusement, as though they were simply obstacles requiring escape. Her usual approach, when confronted with difficulty, was simply to charm her way out of unpleasant situations. Once, after a particularly disastrous test, a tutor graded her accordingly; Anastasia left the classroom, returning a few minutes later and offering a large bouquet of flowers snatched from a nearby table if her marks were changed. When the tutor refused, she drew “herself up to the most of her small height” and “marched into the schoolroom next door,” loudly and pointedly presenting the flowers to another teacher.
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Perhaps part of the problem for Anastasia stemmed from the unimaginative road her education followed, for like her sisters she was tutored by a string of instructors—of varying degrees of ability and psychological insight—in history, religion, arithmetic, geography, science, and literature, as well as dancing, drawing, painting, and music. In most, she did just well enough to achieve minimal marks or comprehension; she was never outstanding in any subject, and frequently below expectations in many areas, but then, she could argue, what really was demanded of her in life except that she one day marry some suitable prince and raise a family? The things she would need for such a position—especially if she married some distant European cousin—were languages. For Anastasia, this meant Russian, English, French, and, later, German. “Four languages is a lot,” Alexandra wrote of her daughters, “but they need them absolutely.”
6

Anastasia was brought up in a multilingual household, speaking Russian with her father, siblings, courtiers, and servants, and English with her mother.
7
“Grammar, alas, was never her strong point, even in Russian,” Gilliard wrote, and her written essays and letters were always more effusively enthusiastic than formally correct.
8
Because Anastasia spoke English with her mother from birth, many assumed that she carried a very proper and precise aristocratic English accent, as befitting a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. It was part of the fairy tale’s charm for much of the English-speaking world, the idea that the ruling family of Russia spent their days talking, joking, and whispering away in a language that somehow made them seem less exotic. Yet this bit of mythology is almost certainly wrong. While Nicholas and Alexandra may have been skilled linguists and employed English, the casual proficiency and accents of their children—at least in that language—left something to be desired. In 1908, after thirteen years of daily speaking the language with her mother, Olga Nikolaievna had what was termed a bad English accent; Anastasia and Marie were even worse, and Alexei seems to have spoken almost nothing of the language before 1914.
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This led Empress Alexandra to hire Charles Sidney Gibbes, a thirty-three-year-old native of Yorkshire who taught English in St. Petersburg, to tutor her children.
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In time, and under Gibbes’s tutelage, Anastasia’s spoken English vastly improved, though her spelling and grammar left something to be desired.
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Anastasia, in an informal photo taken during a 1910 visit by the Russian imperial family to Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse in Germany.

Gilliard took on the task of teaching French to Anastasia. Her early curiosity and desire to learn the language, though, soon dissipated in the classroom; still, of all the foreign languages she learned, it was probably the one she liked best. Gilliard thought that Anastasia had an “excellent” accent, but she never succeeded in mastering grammar and had no real fluency; after seven years of instruction, he was forced to admit that she “spoke French badly.”
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In 1912, when she was eleven, Anastasia also began instruction in German with tutor Erich Kleinenberg; this continued sporadically until the Revolution.
13
By 1916, after four years of lessons, she was writing German compositions in Gothic script, though—as with her other languages—spelling and grammar were often beyond her grasp.
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Gilliard noted that Kleinenberg had “great difficulty” in his lessons, “for the Grand Duchesses had no practice in German” beyond the classroom; what little they spoke, according to Gibbes, they did so “badly” and, as the Empress’s Lady-in-Waiting Buxhoeveden recalled, with a “strong Russian accent.”
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The five imperial children in a formal photograph from 1910. From left: Tatiana, Anastasia, Alexei, Marie, and Olga.

Anastasia in Russian court dress, 1910.

The end results of all of these lessons were negligible. Anastasia strained under the confines of the classroom. Gilliard thought that her behavior was often that of “a gifted child,” but noted that she was only a very moderate pupil, with “little taste for learning.”
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In time, even this halfhearted dedication faded and she became, he thought, “distinctly lazy” in her approach. “In vain I tried to fight against the pronounced indifference she showed during lessons,” Gilliard recalled, “but this only turned them into tearful scenes that produced no results. To the end, she remained a lazy pupil.”
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The problem, thought her aunt Olga Alexandrovna, was not that Anastasia was lazy; rather, she believed that “books, as books, never said much to her.”
18

Anastasia during the imperial family’s 1910 visit to Germany.

The years passed. The grand duchesses were maturing into young women; Tsesarevich Alexei, though he periodically suffered from a painful hemorrhage, was largely well—because of Rasputin’s prayers, the empress thought—and the unrest plaguing the empire seemed to ebb. Anastasia was growing up, even if her mother continued to dress her two youngest daughters identically, as if they were matching porcelain dolls, and there was little opportunity to express personal taste or individuality. Olga was pretty if not beautiful, serious if not brilliant; Tatiana was lean and elegant; Marie was transforming into a stunning young woman; and Anastasia—well, Anastasia was fat, short, and dumpy, as if somehow the genetic gods had poured out all their bounty on her sisters and had nothing left for the youngest daughter. Her features, it is true, were good, but they seemed lost in a face that lacked refinement. She hated the way she looked: the fact that she was so short, the fact that she could never lose the pudginess that inevitably followed from her love of everything sweet.
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Once, Dr. Botkin found her alone in a room, covered in sweat and hopping up and down on one leg. To his bemused look, she explained with all seriousness: “An officer on the yacht told me that to hop around a dining room table on one leg helps one to grow!”
20
She didn’t even have the consolation of a few extra inches gained from wearing high heels, not that Alexandra would have favored the idea in any case, for Anastasia suffered from
hallux valgus
: her big toes curled inward, forming painful bunions that meant she had to wear specially designed, low-heeled shoes.
21

But if Olga could be smart, Tatiana dignified, and Marie beautiful, Anastasia found that she could be practical, a young girl ambitious for everything in life except for lessons, with a zest for enjoying herself and making the most of her admittedly peculiar environment. “I never noticed in her the least trace of mawkishness or dreamy melancholy,” recalled Gilliard, “not even at an age when girls fall prey to such tendencies. . . . She was very boisterous, and sometimes too temperamental. Every impulse, every new sensation was something she immediately had to indulge to the utmost; she glowed with animated life. Even at sixteen, she behaved like a headstrong young foal that has run away from its master. In her play, in realizing her wishes, in her schemes, in everything she did, there was the same impetuousness and youthful enthusiasm.”
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