The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (44 page)

in the hospital. Alexandra helped her with this, for the welfare of

refugees became an increasingly urgent issue as the war went on.

The committee’s budget was huge and rose to several million roubles

– so much so that private donation soon was not enough to sustain

it and the government had to step in.21

With Nicholas away for much of the time at Stavka – army HQ

located at a railway junction near Baranovichi (in today’s Belorussia)

– Alexandra sent him regular updates on their daughters’ progress.

On 20 September she told him what a comfort it was ‘to see the

girls working alone & that they will be known more and learn to

be useful’.22 They seemed to adapt quickly to the new demands

made on them, and, as Pierre Gilliard observed, ‘with their usual

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natural simplicity and good humour . . . accepted the increasing

austerity of life at Court’. Gilliard was especially impressed with

their thoughtful attitude to their work and the fact that they had

no problem with covering their beautiful hair in the nunlike nurse’s

wimple and spending most of their time in uniform. They weren’t

playing at being nurses – which from time to time Gilliard observed

in other aristocratic ladies – but were true sisters of mercy.23 Wartime volunteer Svetlana Ofrosimova who had lived at Tsarskoe Selo for

several years noticed it too. ‘I was struck by the change in them.

Most of all I was moved by the deep expression of concentration

on their faces, which were thinner and paler. There was a new kind

of expression in their eyes.’24 Maria Rasputina concurred: ‘I found

them grown taller, more serious, conscious of the responsibilities of the imperial family, bent on doing their duty with all their strength.’25

This applied equally to the younger sisters; although their days were still taken up mainly with lessons they had to adjust to the long

absences of their older siblings and all of them, with their father

now away for much of the time, had to share the burden of their

brother’s and mother’s frequent bouts of sickness.26

Until the war, with so much talk about Olga’s marriage prospects,

as well as her possible future role as heir to the throne after Alexey, much of the attention had inevitably been centred on her. She had

always been the most outgoing and talkative of the two older sisters

but during the war years it was Tatiana who would shine through.

Prior to the war she had seemed to have all the makings of a coquette for, unlike Olga, she was very self-conscious about her appearance,

had the figure of a mannequin and longed to have the fine clothes

and beautiful jewels of fashionable St Petersburg ladies. ‘Any frock, no matter how old, looked well on her’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden:

‘She knew how to put on her clothes, was admired and liked admir-

ation.’27 ‘She was a Grand Duchess from head to toe, so aristocratic

and regal was she’, recalled Svetlana Ofrosimova.28 From the first,

as a trainee nurse, Valentina Chebotareva felt there was something

special about Tatiana that was quite different from heart-on-sleeve

Olga, and that set her apart from her sisters: ‘I sensed that she had inside her her own completely private, distinctive world.’29 But it

was one that Tatiana never allowed to intrude on her practical skills as a nurse and her devotion to duty.

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Precise and even bossy at times, Tatiana could, for some, seem

too serious and – unlike Olga – lacking in spontaneity. But she was

always ready to help others and her ability to apply herself in tandem with her altruistic personality made her admirably suited for nursing work. Whenever Alexey had been ill she had helped nurse him and

followed the doctors’ instructions with regard to medicines, as well

as sitting with him. She was also unquestioningly tolerant of the

demands of her mother; she ‘knew how to surround her with

unweary ing attentions and she never gave way to her own capricious

impulses’, as Gilliard recalled, which was something that Olga was

increasingly becoming prey to.30 Indeed, in everything she did

Tatiana Nikolaevna would soon prove that she had perseverance of

the kind her more emotionally volatile older sister lacked. Many of

the nurses and doctors who observed her – as well as the patients

themselves – later spoke of her as being born to nurse.

The outbreak of war so soon after the celebrations of the

Tercentary had inevitably brought a complete turn-around in the

popular perception of the Romanov sisters as lofty princesses. With

their mother calling a wartime moratorium on the purchase of any

new clothes for the family, official photographs of the svelte young

women in court dress were replaced by images of the older sisters

in uniform and of their younger siblings in rather plain, ordinary

clothes that belied their imperial status. Alexandra felt that the sight of herself and her daughters in uniform helped to bridge the gap

between them and the population at large in time of war. Some saw

this as a terrible miscalculation: the vast majority of ordinary

Russians, especially the peasantry, still looked upon the imperial

family as almost divine beings and expected their public image to

project that. As Countess Kleinmikhel observed, ‘When a soldier

saw his Empress dressed in a nurse’s uniform, just like any other

nurse, he was disappointed. Looking at the Tsarina, whom he had

pictured as a princess in a fairy tale, he thought: “And that is a

Tsarina? But there is no difference between us.”’31

Similar expressions of distaste circulated among the society ladies

of Petrograd who noted with a sneer how ‘common’ the grand

duchesses’ clothes were, ‘which even a provincial girl would not

dare to wear’.32 They disliked this demystification of imperial women
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– and worse, their association with unclean wounds, mutilation and

men’s bodies. They were horrified to learn that the empress even

cut patients’ fingernails for them. Alexandra’s neglect of protocol

– her acting as a common nurse – was seen as a ‘
beau geste
’, ‘a cheap method of seeking popularity’.33 Even ordinary soldiers were disappointed to see the tsaritsa and her daughters performing the same

duties as other nurses or sitting on the beds of the wounded, rather

than maintaining their exalted difference. ‘The intimacy which

sprang up between the Empress, her young daughters and the

wounded officers destroyed their prestige,’ said Countess Kleinmikhel,

‘for it has been truly said: “
Il n’y a pas de grand homme pour son valet
de chambre
”.’34
*

Be that as it may, many wounded soldiers came to be grateful

for the care they received from Alexandra and her daughters during

the war. In August 1914 Ivan Stepanov, a nineteen-year-old wounded

soldier of the Semenovsk Regiment, arrived at the annexe at Tsarskoe

Selo with his dressings unchanged for over a week. Conscious of

his dirty appearance he felt discomforted at the prospect of being

helped by the nurses who surrounded him in the treatment room

– one of them, a tall gracious sister who smiled kindly as she bent

over him, and opposite her two younger nurses who watched with

interest as his filthy bandages were unwrapped. They seemed familiar, where had he seen these faces? Then suddenly he realized. ‘Really,

was it them . . . the empress and her two daughters?’35 The tsaritsa

seemed a different woman – smiling, younger-looking than her years.

During his time in the hospital Stepanov witnessed many such

instances of her spontaneous warmth and kindness, and that of her

daughters.

Maria and Anastasia inevitably envied their older sisters’ new and

challenging role. But they soon had a small hospital of their own

in which to do their bit for the war effort. On 28 August the Hospital for Wounded Soldiers No. 17 of Their Imperial Highnesses, the

Grand Duchesses Maria Nikolaevna and Anastasia Nikolaevna was

* Kleinmikhel is quoting the famous aphorism by Madame Cornuel: ‘No man is a hero to his valet’ – although the original French was ‘
Il n’y avoit point de héros
pour son valet de chambre
’.

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opened just a stone’s throw from the Alexander Palace in what was

known as the Feodorovsky Gorodok (village).36 Built between 1913

and 1917 as an adjunct to the Feodorovsky Sobor nearby and in the

same ancient Russian Novgorod style, it was comprised of five

buildings contained within a small Kremlin-like fortress wall with

towers.
*
Two of the buildings were designated as a hospital for lower ranks and another one for officers was added in 1916. The two

younger sisters would visit daily after lessons to sit and chat with

the wounded, play board games, and even help the semi-literate

patients to read and write letters. On a more serious note, they were already becoming used to sitting by the bedsides of wounded men,

and sometimes had to deal with the trauma of their subsequent

deaths. Like Olga and Tatiana they took endless photographs of

themselves with their patients, nor did their visiting activities stop here. They supported fund-raising charity concerts for their hospital and often went to the bigger Catherine Palace Hospital and even

some of those in Petrograd with their mother, as well as inspecting

the hospital trains named after various members of the family. They

might be too young to nurse but they were far from immune to the

sufferings of the wounded, as Anastasia wrote and told Nicholas on

21 September:

My precious Papa! I congratulate you on the victory. Yesterday

we visited Alexey’s hospital train. We saw many wounded. Three

died on the journey – two of them officers . . . Pretty serious

wounds, so much so that within the next two days one soldier

may die; they were groaning. Then we went to the big Court

Hospital: Mama and our sisters were dressing wounds, and Maria

and I went round all the wounded, chatted to them all, one of

them showed me a very big piece of shrapnel that they had taken

out of his leg along with a large piece [of flesh]. They all said

that they want to go back and get their revenge on the enemy.37

The girls wrote many loving letters to their father at army HQ,

filling them with kisses and drawing signs of the cross to protect

* Badly damaged in the Second World War, it is now being restored for use by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

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him. With all four of them and their mother writing with devoted

regularity Nicholas was receiving several letters a day. Much of what the girls said only reiterated in rather laconic form what Alexandra

herself told her husband in her own long, rambling missives. But

the girls clearly missed their father terribly: ‘You absolutely must

take me with you next time,’ Maria told him on 21 September, ‘or

I’ll jump onto the train myself, because I miss you.’ ‘I don’t want

to go to bed, bah! I want to be there with you, wherever you are,

as I don’t know where it is’, added Anastasia two days later.38 Olga

and Tatiana’s letters suffered as a result of their heavy workload and were often quite cursory; but the quirky individuality of Anastasia’s usually made up for it. Her breezy personality, signing off letters as

‘your devoted slave, the 13-year-old Nastasya (Shvybzig)’, constantly flitted from one point of interest to the next and must have been

welcome entertainment for Nicholas during the long weeks away

from his family. Anastasia took great delight in her letters of making fun of Maria’s developing affection for Nikolay (Kolya) Demenkov,

an officer in the Guards Equipage, and teased her about his chub-

biness calling him ‘fat Demenkov’. Maria herself happily confided

her affection for ‘my dear Demenkov’ to her father, for Kolya was

already a firm favourite with the family.39

Alexandra had once observed in conversation with Anna Vyrubova

that ‘Most Russian girls seem to have nothing in their heads but

thoughts of officers’, but she appears not to have taken seriously

what was now going on right under her very nose.40 In 1914 she

was still infantilizing her daughters as ‘my little girlies’ in letters to her husband, when they were all fast growing into young women

with an interest in the opposite sex. What she saw as harmless affec-

tion was, for her oldest daughters, developing into afternoon trysts, sitting chatting on the beds of
nashikh
(‘ours’). Olga’s first favourites were Nikolay Karangozov, an Armenian cornet in the Cuirassier

Life Guards, and the ‘terribly dishy, dark’ David Iedigarov, a Muslim from Tiflis and captain in the 17th Nizhegorod Dragoons who

arrived in mid-October and created a strong impression on her (he

was, however, married).41 Iedigarov and Karangozov were the first

of several swarthy, swashbuckling officers from the Caucasus – many