The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (50 page)

hunger in the towns and of people not knowing if their fathers or

brothers at the front were still alive.56

Captain Mikhail Geraschinevsky of the Keksholm Imperial Guard

had similar warm memories of Feodorovsky Gorodok where he was

a patient for thirteen months. He noticed that ‘the girls came every

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day except when they did not behave’; this, it would seem, was their

mother’s most effective punishment.57 He remembered their care

over one wounded soldier in particular who had a bullet lodged in

his skull and had lost his memory, and how they had patiently sat

with him, asking him questions in an attempt to help bring back

his memory.58 When he was home from Stavka on visits, Alexey

sometimes visited too – he chatted and played dice with the soldiers, demanding they tell him all about the war. Like the patients at the

annexe, the wounded here all loved the imperial children for their

open and friendly manner: ‘we could not tell them apart from ordi-

nary children’, recalled Geraschinevsky. He noticed how Alexey and

his sisters always talked very fast with them in Russian, thinking

that perhaps this was because ‘they were so rarely in contact with

strangers that they were always in a hurry to tell them all they knew before they would be called away’.59 Whenever Anastasia and Maria

sat at soldiers’ bedsides, playing board and card games with them,

there was always one thing in particular they wanted to know. ‘They

would ask us to tell them stories of the people from outside life.

They would call “outside life” anything that was not in the castle

[
sic
] and would listen intently not to miss one word.’60

While the Romanov sisters might still have little experience of

‘outside life’ – the world outside definitely wanted to see more of

them. On 11 August Alexandra informed Nicholas that their daugh-

ters had spent all day posing for a new set of official photographs

‘for giving away to their committees’.61 As it turned out these would be the last official pictures ever taken of the four sisters – by photographer Alexander Funk.62 Released from their usual all-purpose plain

skirts and blouses the girls dressed in their best satin tea dresses

with embroidered panels of roses, wearing their pearl necklaces and

gold bracelets. Anastasia not having passed the socially liberating

age of sixteen still had her long hair loose, but her three older sisters all had theirs specially marcel-waved and dressed in chignons, most

probably by Alexandra’s hairdresser Delacroix. The girls and their

brother were now also being regularly captured on newsreel footage,

most of it during official appearances, which was released for public consumption. Watching such films was one of the few forms of

entertainment they enjoyed during the war years, although they

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were occasionally allowed the comic antics of Max Linder and André

Deed, and morale raisers such as
Vasilii Ryabov
, a documentary film about a war hero shot by the Japanese in 1904.
When John Foster Fraser recalled how when he was in Petrograd in the summer of

1916 Nicholas had had a cinematograph operator put together some

film of the imperial family ‘in unimperial circumstances’.63 Fraser

had applied for a copy of the film to use in lectures when he went

back to the UK and had had it run for him by Pathé Frères in their

dark room in Moscow:

There was the Emperor on a see-saw with his son, the Czarevitch.

There was a tug-of-war between the daughters, the grand duch-

esses, and their imperial father; the emperor lost, and was hilar-

iously dragged along the ground. There was a snow-fight in

which the Emperor was routed by his girls. There were picnic

scenes. There was dancing on the royal yacht Standart.64

In all, 3,000 feet (914 m) of film showed the Romanovs at their

most happy and informal. Nicholas had no objection to Fraser using

the film but Alexandra, conscious of public image-making and in

particular the future dynastic role of the heir, most certainly did

and insisted that those parts ‘which were not imperial’ should be

cut before the film could be shown in London.

*

With Olga continuing to pine for the absent Mitya, Tatiana resisted

the temptation of being sucked into the same kind of visible

emotional turmoil when Volodya Kiknadze was wounded again – this

time in the spine – and returned to the annexe in September 1916.

In fact Tatiana only recorded his departure for recuperation in the

Crimea a month later; she was sad but said nothing more. Olga,

however, seemed happy to grasp at any small reminders of her

precious Mitya, whose mother she met in September, a fact that

made her feel ‘terribly happy to have a little piece of him’.65 She

saw Mitya again briefly in October when he was passing through

and appeared unexpectedly at the hospital. He looked well and

suntanned and she was pleased to note that he had changed his hair

parting, but she was reticent about saying more, even in her diary.

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‘We stood in the corridor and then sat. Darned socks.’66 The strain

of having to internalize so many of her feelings left her frustrated, which she dissipated back at home by indulging in childish play

with her younger sisters, chasing them round indoors on bicycles,

while her more composed sister sat reading a book quietly in a

corner. Olga was approaching her twenty-first birthday, but life and

love had, it seemed, passed her by. It was ‘Quite a venerable age!’

as Alexandra observed in a letter to Nicholas, but if only their girls might one day find ‘the intense love and happiness you, my Angel,

have given me these 22 years. It’s such a rare thing nowadays, alas!’67

Perhaps Olga was able to take some consolation in a gift from

Alexey at Stavka – a cat that he had taken pity on, notorious as he

was for rescuing stray cats and dogs there.68 He seemed to be doing

famously over at Mogilev with Nicholas, proud to inform his mother

that he had recently been given an award by the Serbs of ‘a gold

medal with the inscription “For Bravery”’. ‘I deserved it in my battles with the tutors’, he told her.69 He found himself obliged to write to Alexandra in November to remind her that his pocket money was

overdue:

My darling dear, sweet beloved mummy. It’s warm. Tomorrow

I shall be up. The salary! I beg you!!!!! Nothing to stuff myself

with!!! In ‘Nain Jaune’
*
also bad luck! Let it be! Soon I shall be selling my dress, books, and, at last, shall die of starvation.70

After the final words Alexey added a drawing of a coffin. His cry

of anguish must have crossed with a letter from his mother in which

she enclosed ten roubles and wrote apologetically, ‘To my dear

Alexei. To my dear corporal. I am sending you your salary. I am

sorry I forgot to enclose it. . . . Kiss you fondly your own Mama.

Alexey was ecstatic – ‘Rich!! Drink barley coffee.’71

*

* This was a favourite board game with Alexey and his sisters. The board has five sections, each representing a playing card, and the game is played with dice, chips and slips of paper. The objective is to dispose of the cards in your hand, playing them in simple numerical sequence from 1 (Ace) to King, picking up bonuses along the way.

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During these last two years of war and her husband’s frequent

absences at Stavka, Alexandra had seen her daughters grow up

considerably. It pleased her to tell Nicholas that Grigory approved:

Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone

through heavy ‘courses’ for their age and their souls have much

developed – they are really great dears . . . They have shared all

our emotions and it has taught them to see people with open

eyes, so that it will be a great help to them later in life.72

The experience of war had, in Alexandra’s view, ‘ripened’ their

girls, though ‘They are happily at times great babies – but have the

insight and feelings of the soul of much wiser beings’.73 With this

in mind, on 11 December 1916, she took all four daughters south

on the imperial train to visit the ancient Russian city of Novgorod,

for centuries a focal point of Orthodoxy and Russian spirituality.

Upon arriving they attended a two-hour mass at the Cathedral of

St Sophia, then visited a nearby hospital, a museum of church treas-

ures, and in the afternoon a provincial hospital and a shelter for

refugee children. The final stop on their brief visit was the Desyatinny Convent – where Alexandra particularly wished to meet a renowned

and much venerated seer, the
staritsa
Mariya Mikhailovna. Olga later described to Nicholas how they entered the old nun’s cell:

it was very narrow and dark and only one small candle was

burning, which immediately went out, so they lit some kind of

kerosene lamp without a shade and a nun, her eyes watering,

held it. The old woman was lying behind a kind of piece of

patchwork that was full of holes on a wooden bed. She had huge

iron fetters on her and her hands were so thin and dark, just like

religious relics. It seems she is 107 years old. Hair very very thin, dishevelled and her face covered in wrinkles. Eyes bright and

clear. She gave each of us a little icon and some communion

bread and blessed us. She said something to mama, that it would

all soon be over and everything would be all right.74

Alexandra too was very taken by the sweetness of the old woman:

‘always works, goes about, sews for the convicts and soldiers without spectacles – never washes. And of course no smell, or feeling of

dirt.’ More importantly, the
staritsa
had addressed her personally,
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telling her – exactly as Olga recalled – that the war would be over

soon: ‘And you beautiful one, she had said several times, “don’t fear the heavy cross”’ – as though in prophecy of a personal test of faith to come.75 Others later told a different tale: Anna Vyrubova was

sure that ‘as the tsarina approached, the old woman cried out:

“Behold, the martyred Empress Alexandra Feodorovna!”’ Iza

Buxhoeveden remembered much the same, adding that ‘Her Majesty

seemed not to hear’.76 After receiving the
staritsa
’s blessing and the gift of an apple for Nicholas and Alexey (which they later dutifully

ate, on Alexandra’s instructions, at Stavka) the tsaritsa left Novgorod feeling ‘cheered and comforted’, telling Nicholas that the visit to

Novgorod had reinforced her faith in the simple people of Russia.

‘Such love and warmth everywhere, feeling of God and your people,

unity and purity of feelings – did me no end of good.’77 Those in

the entourage who had accompanied her returned with very different

feelings. Having heard what the
staritsa
had said they ‘came back depressed and apprehensive for they felt the reception was an

omen’.78

Alexandra’s devoutly Orthodox belief and the continuing wise

counsel and prayers of Grigory undoubtedly sustained her at a time

when her perilous state of health would have felled a far stronger

woman. ‘She believes in Rasputin; she regards him as a just man, a

saint, persecuted by the calumnies of the Pharisees, like the victim

of Calvary’, observed the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue:

‘she has made him her spiritual guide and refuge; her mediator with

Christ, her witness and intercessor before God.’79 But when the

tsaritsa returned to Tsarskoe Selo in December 1916 it was in a

state of total denial about the rapidly changing atmosphere in the

capital 19 miles (30.5 km) away. Edith Almedingen recalled ‘the

feverish texture of the last weeks of 1916’, of a city ‘brooding over a darkly uncertain future’. With prophecies of disaster for Nicholas’s command as the army continued to suffer catastrophic casualties,

another harsh winter approached, ‘under the most sinister auspices’.80

Cold, war weariness, hunger, the grim reality of food shortages

leading to profiteering and rumour of famine, were all fermenting

discontent, soon made manifest in strikes and food riots. ‘The streets were just queues full of ceaseless whimpering chatter’, wrote

Almedingen.81

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But the loudest chatter of all around the city came in public

discussion of the empress’s close relationship with Rasputin. At the

annexe Valentina Chebotareva worried about how the unrelenting

vilification of the tsaritsa was impacting on her daughters and possibly imperilling them. ‘Olga is holding out with difficulty,’ she wrote,

‘[she] is either more light hearted or has better control over herself.

How difficult it is to see them after all I’ve heard. Is it really true that they are threatened by imminent danger?’ Valentina had heard

that ‘the young people, the social revolutionaries are resolved to