The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (61 page)

teen years incarcerated in the notorious Shlisselburg Fortress and

from there was sent into exile in Yakutiya before being freed in the

political amnesty of 1905. His revolutionary career might have been

a textbook one but to Nicholas, Pankratov would be ‘the little man’.31

But adjust to him he did, for Pankratov, who did his best by the

family within the constraints placed upon him, would be their only

link with the outside world. During the weeks that followed, the

family, and Pankratov, would learn much about each other and

develop a polite, respectful relationship.

The first thing that had struck the new commissar was seeing

the family at prayer. He noted how devotedly Alexandra came and

arranged the temporary altar, covered it with her embroidery, the

candles and icons before the arrival of the priest and nuns for the

service. There was a punctiliousness to every aspect of the family’s

religious observance: after the entire suite and servants had all

assembled, in their designated places according to rank, the family

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entered through the side doors and everyone bowed to them. During

the service Pankratov noticed how frequently – and fervently – the

Romanovs crossed themselves. He could not but be impressed that

‘the whole family of the former tsar had given themselves up to a

truly religious state of mind and feeling’ – even if it was one that

was beyond his comprehension.32

With their lives so grounded in religious acceptance it took no

time at all for the family to slip back into the same kind of quiet,

uneventful routine that they had followed under house arrest at the

Alexander Palace. Having always been so physically active, Nicholas

was intensely frustrated by the lack of exercise and took to walking

up and down the yard forty or fifty times in an hour, though soon

he was able to busy himself sawing wood for the winter. Alexey’s

only outside interest, until the arrival of a playmate in the shape of Dr Derevenko’s son Kolya later that month, was in the dogs. Much

of the girls’ time was spent, when not helping their father saw logs, in chasing Joy and Ortipo away from the refuse tip at the back of

the yard, where they persisted in rootling around for food.33 The

heat was too much for Alexandra who would sometimes sit on the

balcony under a parasol sewing, before retiring indoors. She was

rarely up and out of her room before lunchtime and often remained

alone in the house when the others were outside – painting and

sewing, or playing the piano. Much of her time was spent in religious contemplation and reading the gospels, her thoughts on which she

continued to pour into long exhortatory letters to her friends, particularly Anna Vyrubova.

The food at the Governor’s House was surprisingly good and

plentiful in comparison with the desperate shortages now being

endured in Petrograd. Many of the locals looked favourably on the

former tsar and his family, and gifts of food began to arrive. Some

doffed their caps when passing by on the street; others occasionally

even kneeled down and crossed themselves. Old habits died hard,

even here, and Alexandra still wrote out menu cards for each day’s

modest meals. The atmosphere was less stressful too. Evenings were

spent playing the usual games of bezique and dominoes, or bumble

puppy and nain jaune, and Nicholas as always read aloud – his first

choice on arrival in Tobolsk being
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. He then
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set about revisiting the classics of Russian literature. ‘I have decided to re-read all our best writers from beginning to end (I’m reading

English and French books too)’, he told his mother.34 Having just

worked his way through Gogol, he moved on to Turgenev. But, as

Pankratov noted with amusement, the members of the entourage

often seemed to get bored with having to sit in silence as he read

and would begin to whisper among themselves or even nodded off

to the monotonous sound of his voice.35 Nevertheless, reading was

undoubtedly a boon for all the family. Sydney Gibbes soon arrived

with more favourite books for the children: English adventure stories such as Alexey’s great favourite
Cast Up by the Sea
by Sir Samuel Baker, the novels of Walter Scott (Tatiana and Anastasia loved

Ivanhoe
), Thackeray, Dickens and H. Rider Haggard. Such indeed was the hunger for reading material that Trina Schneider wrote to

PVP in Petrograd asking him to send more books – the stories of

Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Karamzin, which the children didn’t have, as

well as books on Russian grammar and literature.36 Tatiana wrote

too, asking him to send out her set of Alexey Tolstoy’s novels that

she had unfortunately not brought with her.

But even the best of books could not for long fend off the crip-

pling boredom that was infecting the entire entourage, which was

so clearly reflected in everyone’s diaries and letters. Alexey’s perfunc-tory diary contained nothing but repetitious complaints: ‘Today

passed just as yesterday . . . It is boring.’37 Even Alexandra could

write nothing but ‘I spent the day, as usual’ . . . ‘Everything was the same as yesterday’. And Nicholas echoed her: ‘The day passed as

always’ . . .‘The day passed as usual’.38 By 25 August he was already noting that ‘Walks in the garden are becoming incredibly tedious;

here the sense of sitting locked up is much stronger than it ever

was at Tsarskoe Selo.’39 To keep himself occupied he dug out a pond

in the garden, helped by Alexey, for the ducks and geese that had

been brought in, and he also built a wooden platform on the roof

of the greenhouse where he and the children could sit soaking up

the sunshine and watch the world go by below. The locals were

fascinated when they saw them there, or on the balcony, especially,

when they saw the girls: ‘Their hair was shorn like little boys’ . . .

We thought that was the fashion in Petrograd,’ recalled one local,

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‘later, people said they had been sick . . . still they were very pretty, very clean.’40

At midday on Friday 8 September – the Nativity of the Virgin

– the family was allowed out for the first time to attend service at

the nearby Blagoveshchensky Church. They went on foot, pushing

Alexandra in her wheelchair through the public garden where there

was no one around, but were greatly disconcerted to see a crowd

waiting for them outside the church. ‘The emperor was still the

emperor in Tobolsk’, it appeared.41 ‘It was very unpleasant’, Alexandra wrote, but she was ‘grateful that I had been in a real church for the first time in six months’.42

Pankratov noticed how much pleasure this small concession had

evoked:

As Nicholas II and the children walked through the public garden,

they looked this way and that, talking in French
*
about the

weather, the garden, as though they had never seen it before,

although the gardens were located directly opposite their balcony,

from where they could clearly see them every day. But it is one

thing to see something from a distance, from behind bars as it

were, and quite another to see it when almost at liberty. Every

tree, every twig and bush and bench acquired its own unique

charm . . . From the expression on their faces and the way they

moved one could tell they all undergone some particular personal

trial.43

On their way through the gardens Anastasia fell over while

craning her neck to look at things and her sisters and father laughed at her clumsiness. Alexandra did not react. ‘She sat there majestically in her wheelchair and said nothing.’ She hadn’t been sleeping at

night – tormented by another bout of neuralgia and toothache. Once

again, what most evoked public curiosity as the family passed was

the girls’ heads: ‘Why was their hair cut short like boys?’ people

asked.44 By the end of September, however, their hair was getting

quite long again, though Anastasia told Katya that it had been ‘such

a pleasure to have short hair’.45

* No doubt to prevent the guards understanding what they were talking about.

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On 14 September when they attended church a second time the

family went at 8 a.m. to avoid the crowds: ‘You can just imagine

how great our joy was,’ Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia, ‘as you

will remember how inconvenient our field chapel at Tsarskoe Selo

was.’46 But a chill autumnal rain the previous day had brought a

transformation in the surrounding streets, and they were now a sea

of mud: ‘If they hadn’t laid wooden boards on the road it would be

impossible to get through’, said Anna Demidova.47 Nicholas was

now spending as much time as he could outside sawing wood.

Pankratov was astonished at his prodigious energy. From time to

time Alexey, Tatishchev, Dolgorukov, and even an uncomfortable-

looking Pierre Gilliard (inappropriately dressed in trilby and wing

collar) were enlisted to help, but Nicholas wore them all out.

Pankratov sent word to the local authorities that the ex-tsar enjoyed sawing wood so much that in response they sent in great piles of

birch trunks for him to cut up.48 The whole family was counting its

luck at the continuing fine weather. ‘It’s so good that we sit in the garden a lot or in the courtyard in front of the house’, Tatiana told her aunt Xenia:

It’s terribly nice that we have a balcony, which the sun warms

from morning to evening. It’s good to sit there and watch people

coming and going on the street. It is our only entertainment . . .

We’ve managed to play skittles in front of the house and we play

a kind of tennis, though of course without a net, for the sake of

practice. Then we walk up and down, so we don’t forget how to

walk – 120 paces in all, which is considerably shorter than the

deck [of the
Shtandart
].49

Tatiana calculated that you could walk round the entire kitchen

garden in three minutes flat, but at least there was the livestock to look after, which now included five pigs housed in the former stables

– all no doubt destined to provide food during the winter to come.50

The beginning of October brought the long-awaited arrival from

Tsarskoe Selo of carpets, curtains and window blinds in time for the

approaching winter, but the wine brought from the imperial cellars

was confiscated by the guards and poured into the Irtysh.51 Far more

welcome, however, was Sydney Gibbes, who on 5 October arrived

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on the boat from Tyumen – one of the last before the ice made the

river impassable – along with a new tutor for the children, Klavdiya

Bitner. Gibbes brought cards and gifts from Anna Vyrubova, now

out of prison, including her favourite perfume which Maria said

reminded them all of her. How they missed her, she wrote to Anna:

‘It’s terribly sad that we don’t see each other, but God grant that

we shall meet again and what joy that will be.’52

It was not long before Sydney Gibbes found himself once more

having to contend with Anastasia’s quirky and inattentive behaviour

in class. On one occasion, having lost his temper, he told her to

‘shut up’; the next time she handed in her homework she had added

a new nameplate to her exercise book – ‘A. Romanova (Shut up!)’.53

Klavdiya Bitner found Anastasia a trial too – lazy in lessons and

often ill-mannered.54 She had been a teacher at the Mariinsky girls’

school at Tsarskoe Selo and during the war had volunteered as a

nurse at one of the hospitals where she had looked after Kobylinsky

who had been wounded at the front. A romance had developed

between them and when he was sent with the family to Tobolsk,

Kobylinsky had wangled a job for Klavdiya teaching Maria, Anastasia

and Alexey Russian language, literature and maths. Both she and

Pankratov remained distinctly unimpressed with the standard of the

children’s education, particularly Alexey’s, unaware perhaps that it

had been constantly interrupted through illness. Pankratov was

shocked at how little they, and their father for that matter, knew of Siberia, its geography and peoples.55 As winter set in, one of the

grand duchesses had been amazed at the sight of people on the

streets wearing ‘strange white and grey costumes trimmed with fur’.

Pankratov realized she was referring to the reindeer-skin traditional dress worn by Yakuts, Khanty and Samoyedic peoples living in the

region. Had the sisters never seen pictures of these inhabitants of

their father’s vast Russian Empire in their geography books, he

wondered? Such strangers from the ‘outside life’ were, for the girls, precisely the kind of people they had so longed to learn about, but

had never had a chance to discover. Pankratov found them at times

extremely naïve: you only had to talk to them about the most