فصل 10

Chapter Ten

CUPID BY THE THRONES

In January 1912, on a week’s visit to Russia as one of a delegation of British officials, Sir Valentine Chirol of The Times remembered with particular pleasure a lunch with the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘I happened to sit next to the little Grand Duchess Tatiana, a very attractive girl of fifteen’, he recalled. She talked with ease in English and told him how she was ‘longing to have another holiday in England’.

When I asked her what she liked best there she whispered quickly, almost in my ear, ‘Oh, it feels so free there,’ and when I remarked that she surely enjoyed a great deal of freedom at home she pursed up her lips into a little pout and with a toss of the head pointed towards an elderly lady sitting at another small table close to ours who was her gouvernante.1

Rasputin’s two daughters Maria and Varvara, who had been brought to St Petersburg by their father to be educated, also noticed how extremely curious the Romanov sisters were when they met them at Anna Vyrubova’s. They plied the Rasputin sisters with questions: ‘the life of a girl of fourteen living in the town, who went to school with other children, and once a week went to the cinema, sometimes to the circus, seemed to them the rarest and most enviable of wonders’, recalled Maria.2 In the years just before the war, she and her sister represented a rare female link of their own age with the outside world. The Romanov girls were especially anxious to know all about the dances Maria Rasputin attended, ‘they would question her at length about her clothes and who was there and what dances she danced’, recalled Sydney Gibbes.3 Two other young visitors to Trina Schneider at her apartments in the Alexander Palace found themselves bombarded with similar questions. Maria and Anastasia often joined them at Trina’s apartments after lunch and engaged the girls, Natalya and Fofa, in exuberant, mischievous games that were almost too much for Trina to cope with. In quieter moments Anastasia and Maria were endlessly inquisitive about their everyday lives. ‘They asked us about school, our friends, our teachers and wanted to know how we spent our time off, which theatres we went to, what books we read, and so on.’4

For now, however, the world of the Romanov sisters was strictly controlled by their governess Sofya Tyutcheva, who was still holding fast to her continuing campaign against the corrupting influence of Rasputin and the world outside. According to Anna Vyrubova, Tyutcheva had been encouraged in her ongoing vilification of Rasputin by ‘certain bigoted priests’, one of whom was Tyutcheva’s own cousin, Bishop Vladimir Putiyata.5 By the end of 1911 things had reached crisis point, at a time when Alexandra was also coming into conflict with the dowager and her sister-in-law over her con-tinuing patronage of Grigory. ‘My poor daughter-in-law does not perceive that she is ruining the dynasty and herself’, Maria Feodorovna had prophetically remarked to the murdered Stolypin’s successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov. ‘She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune, which is sure to come.’6 The situation had been greatly exacerbated by circulation in St Petersburg in December 1911 of the letters written in all innocence to Father Grigory two years previously by the four sisters and the tsaritsa, and which he had given to an associate and defrocked monk named Iliodor.* Iliodor had since fallen out with Rasputin and, out of spite, had entrusted the letters to a Duma deputy who had had them copied and circulated among his political colleagues. When they were brought to Kokovtsov’s attention, he went straight to Nicholas. The tsar turned pale at the sight of the letters, but confirmed their authenticity before shutting them in a drawer.7 When she heard what had happened, Alexandra sent a furious telegram to Grigory, who was effectively banished back to Pokrovskoe and away from the family.

During the frantic damage limitation that followed, Sofya Tyutcheva was the first of Grigory’s detractors to be targeted, accused of spreading malicious gossip about him and also of taking too stubbornly independent a line in her management of the girls.8 Early in 1912 she was summoned to Nicholas’s study, where he asked her, ‘What is going on in the nursery?’ – or, as Anna Vyrubova would have it, ‘rebuked her severely’.9 When Tyutcheva explained her position, voicing her objections to Rasputin’s familiarity with the children and her own strongly held opinions on how the girls should be brought up, the tsar responded:

‘So you do not believe in the sanctity of Grigory?’… I answered negatively and the Emperor said ‘And what if I told you that all these difficult years I have survived only because of his prayers?’ ‘You have survived them because of the prayers of the whole of Russia, Your Majesty,’ I replied. The Emperor started to say that he was convinced it was all a lie, that he did not believe these stories about R., that the pure always attracts everything dirty.10

Tyutcheva remained in her post for a while after this dressing-down, Nicholas and Alexandra always reluctant to dismiss anyone because of the attendant gossip, but finally, in March 1912 and still unrepentant, she was sent back to her home in Moscow, ‘for talking too much and lying’, as Alexandra told Xenia.11 Iza Buxhoeveden was sorry to see how ‘deeply distressed’ Tyutcheva was to have to leave the girls, for she loved them dearly. But it was, sadly, her own fault: ‘What she said carelessly was twisted and turned into marvellous stories, which did the Empress a great deal of harm.’12 But she continued to write regularly and before too long was allowed to make occasional visits to see her former charges. Anastasia in particular remained strongly attached to her friend Savanna, and exchanged letters with her until 1916.13

Tyutcheva was not the only member of the imperial household to be caught up in the controversy. Mariya (Mary) Vishnyakova, who after seeing the girls through their early years had become nursemaid to Alexey in 1909, had at first been an ardent admirer of Grigory. But she had of late been suffering from the strain of her difficult job. When, in the spring of 1910, Alexandra recommended she go for a visit to Grigory at Pokrovskoe in the company of three other women, Vishnyakova had returned, accusing him of having sexually assaulted her and begging the empress to protect her children from his ‘diabolical’ influence.14 There appears to be no foundation in the disturbed Vishnyakova’s accusation. Anna Vyrubova and others described her as ‘over-emotional’; indeed, according to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, during a subsequent investigation of Vishnyakova’s allegations, the hapless nursemaid was caught in bed with a Cossack from the imperial guard.15 Nicholas and Alexandra were as reluctant to dismiss her as they had been Tyutcheva; she had served the family loyally for fifteen years and was greatly loved by the children. She was therefore sent to the Caucasus for a rest cure, and the following June, 1913, was quietly retired rather than dismissed from service, with a comfortable pension and her own three-bedroom flat in the commandant’s quarters at the Winter Palace. Right up to the revolution, Nicholas and Alexandra continued to pay for Mary to have annual rest cures in the Crimea.16 There would be no replacement for her though; her role would increasingly be taken by Alexey’s dyadka Derevenko, nor would there be any new governess for his sisters. The imperial family closed ranks, trusting to just a few loyal retainers. Trina Schneider* would act as chaperone for Maria and Anastasia, while the older sisters would be accompanied on outings by one or other of Alexandra’s ladies-in-waiting. Iza Buxhoeveden was finally taken on formally as a lady-in-waiting in 1914, after which she and Nastenka Hendrikova took over escorting Olga and Tatiana into town. But over and above them all and keeping an eagle eye on the girls’ moral welfare was ‘the old hen’, mistress of the robes Elizaveta Naryshkina.17

The loss of Sofya Tyutcheva left a still sick Alexandra with a lot to prepare for the spring and summer seasons; for she had to ‘select and organize the dresses, hats, coats for 4 girls’ to see them through first a trip south to Livadia, then on to a series of formal engagements in Moscow in May for which the girls needed ‘to be dressed very elegantly’, and back to Moscow later in the year for the celebrations for the anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. A selection of tea dresses and semi-formal dresses would be required, at considerable expense.18

Surviving accounts for Maria’s wardrobe allowance during 1909–10 provide a fascinating insight into the kind of money being spent on each daughter on a wide range of items. All of Maria’s accounts for that year are meticulously itemized, expenditure on wardrobe alone amounting to 6,307 roubles (something like £14,500 today). Everything is accounted for: from ribbons, pins, lace, combs, handkerchiefs; to perfume and soap sent from Harrods to the St Petersburg parfumier Brocard & Co; to her manicurist Madame Kühne; to Alice Guisser for repairs and cleaning of her lace; to her mother’s coiffeur Henri-Joseph Delacroix; as well as payments for visits to the American dentist Dr Henry Wallison, who had premises on the upmarket Moika Embankment.19 A considerable variety of footwear was purchased for Maria at Henry Weiss on 66 Nevsky Prospekt, whose shoes all bore the legend ‘Fournisseur de S. M. L’Impératrice de Russie’: thirty-two different pairs ranging from soft glacé leather pumps of various colours, to demi and high button boots, sandals, felt boots and fur-lined overshoes. The smart firm of Maison Anglaise on the Nevsky supplied silk and Lisle thread stockings; swimming costumes and bathing caps came from Dahlberg, and Robert Heath, ‘Hatter to HM the Queen and all the Courts of Europe’, sent out hats from his fashionable London store at Hyde Park Corner. The French couturier Auguste Brisac (next door to Weiss in a prime spot at 68 Nevsky Prospekt), worked exclusively for ladies of the imperial family and members of the court, his sixty staff creating the very latest Parisian gowns for special occasions. But for more simple, day-to-day clothing, Alexandra had garments made for her daughters by the Russian dressmaker Kitaev, and, true to her frugal nature, got him to alter hand-me-downs from the older girls to fit Maria, or enlarge clothes that she was growing out of. In one year alone Kitaev supplied:

a grey suit with a silk lining of a foreign fabric – 115 roubles, a blue sheet-wadded silk-lined suit – 125 roubles, a blue cheviot suit with a downy silk-lined collar and cuffs of dark mink – 245 roubles, a suit in the English style with a silk lining and a pleated skirt –135 roubles. He also altered a suit – made a new fur, a new lining and made the slip longer – 40 roubles. He also altered Olga Nikolaevna’s old suit for her – 35 roubles; made a long overcoat of hand-made linen – 35 roubles; made two skirts longer and bought some more fabric for that; made 3 skirts longer and broader and made new linings for them – 40 roubles; made 4 jackets broader and their sleeves longer – 40 roubles; made new belts for two skirts and made them broader – 15 roubles; altered the eldest sister’s riding suit – the jacket, the skirt and the riding breeches – 50 roubles; mended a jacket – 7 roubles.20

In the last week of Lent 1912, the family headed south to Livadia for their first Easter at the White Palace. They arrived in a still cold and snowy Crimea, at a time of religious contemplation and sobriety, with long hours spent standing in church and endless prayers before candle-lit icons. The children’s time was occupied in the days before Easter in painting and decorating dozens of hard-boiled eggs that were traditionally exchanged to celebrate Christ’s resurrection. On Great Saturday – a day when the bells rang out across Russia and the faithful filled the churches to bursting – the girls wore mourning, as was the tradition, during the final great service leading up to midnight, the sadness finally broken by the joyful announcement Khristos voskres! – ‘Christ is Risen!’ Although it was now the early hours of the morning, the entire household broke the long Lenten fast together, enjoying a great feast in the White Hall. Its centrepiece was the two sweet cakes so looked forward to after the long period of abstention: the kulich, a rich iced Easter cake made with almonds, candied orange peel and raisins; and pashka, a gloriously sweet blending of everything that the pious had not eaten for weeks: sugar, butter, eggs and cream cheese.

In private, as he had done every Easter since they were married (except during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5), Nicholas presented his wife with an exquisite Fabergé jewelled Easter egg to add to her collection, a tradition begun by his father in 1885, when Maria Feodorovna had received her own first Fabergé egg. This particular Easter, Fabergé’s son Eugene delivered Alexandra’s gift in person at the Livadia Palace.21 It would become known as the Tsarevich Egg, for inside the outer shell of dark blue lapis lazuli mounted with a gold cagework of flowers, cupids and imperial eagles was a miniature portrait of Alexey encrusted with diamonds. On Easter Monday the family gathered in the Italian Courtyard for the ceremony of greeting the troops – in Livadia this being the crew of the Shtandart and officers of the Tsar’s Escort. As Nicholas exchanged the traditional three kisses and greetings Tatiana and Olga helped hand out the painted porcelain Easter eggs that the imperial couple distributed every Easter.22

Whenever she was in the Crimea Alexandra always tried to visit the TB sanatoria in the region of which she was patron, two of which – the military and naval hospitals on the imperial estate at Massandra – she had had built and paid for out of her own fortune. There was also the Alexander III Sanatorium in Yalta, catering to 460 patients, which she had opened in 1901. The care of the sick had always been one of the few socially acceptable pursuits that royal princesses could engage in, and Alexandra was determined that her daughters should continue this family tradition. Elizaveta Naryshkina was somewhat concerned about the children being brought into contact with highly infectious TB patients: ‘Is it safe, Madame,’ she had asked the empress, ‘for the young Grand Duchesses to have people in the last stage of consumption kiss their hands?’ Alexandra’s response was unequivocal: ‘I don’t think it will hurt the children, but I am sure it would hurt the sick if they thought that my daughters were afraid of infection.’ The children might love Livadia but she wanted to ensure that they also learnt to ‘realize the sadness underneath all this beauty’.23

In hospital visiting as in everything, the girls performed their duty without complaint and with a smile. All five children took part in White Flower Day, a major charitable event for the Anti-Tuberculosis League and the Yalta sanatoria, celebrated on St George’s Day, 23 April. The idea had originated with Margareta, Crown Princess of Sweden, and Alexandra had adopted it in Russia. The day got its name from the white daisies, or marguerites, that were carried wreathed round long wooden staffs. Holding their staffs of flowers and dressed in white, the Romanov children walked round the streets of Yalta taking donations in return for the gift of a flower, each of them proudly raising between 100 and 140 roubles that year.24

One of the big social events of the Crimean season was another charitable venture of the empress’s: the Grand Charity Bazaar in aid of the sanatoria. Every year Alexandra enlisted the girls in busily knitting, embroidering and sewing, as well as painting water-colours and making other hand-made items for sale, straining her own eyes in the process. The bazaar had been held for the first time the previous year, on the pier at Yalta, where the stall under its white awning that she staffed with the girls had been besieged by the fashionable ladies of Yalta eager to buy something made by their own fair hands. There was barely room to move, with ‘people pressing forward almost frenziedly to touch the empress’s hand or her sleeve’.25 This in itself created great anxiety for the officers of the Okhrana and Shtandart, on the lookout always for any attack on the family. Their guard had been raised that year when a mild-looking old man in an old-fashioned frockcoat had approached the empress and stretched out his hand offering her an orange, which she had politely accepted. ‘It was the most ordinary looking fruit,’ recalled Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin, ‘but as we later said amongst ourselves, a terrible thought had flashed by, “That so-called Macedonian orange might have been a bomb!”’26 The bazaar was a great success and raised thousands of roubles for Alexandra’s good causes. It also provided an opportunity for people to see the elusive tsarevich. Anna Vyrubova remembered how on these occasions, ‘smiling with pleasure, the Empress would lift him to the table, where the child would bow shyly but sweetly, stretching out his hands in friendly greeting to the worshipping crowds’.27

During the imperial family’s time in Livadia many of their favourite officers from the Shtandart were in evidence and as usual the four sisters were ‘allowed to have a little preference for this or that handsome young officer with whom they danced, played tennis, walked, or rode’ – though always in the presence of a chaperone.28 That year Tatiana seemed to be taking a particular shine to Count Alexander Vorontsov-Dashkov – a hussar in the Life Guards from a distinguished Russian family, who was one of Nicholas’s ADCs and a favourite tennis partner. Although Tatiana was not yet sixteen, the matchmakers would soon be busy pairing of her off. Indeed, they were already busily predicting future possible dynastic unions for all four girls. So anxious was the tsar to keep the Balkan states faithful to Russia, it was asserted, that he intended ‘to utilize his four daughters, who are not to marry four Russian Grand Dukes, nor even four unorthodox Princes of Europe’. No, the four grand duchesses of Russia, so the rumour went, were to become ‘Queens of the Balkans’, with Olga a bride for Prince George of Serbia; Tatiana for Prince George of Greece; Maria for Prince Carol of Romania and Anastasia set for Prince Boris of Bulgaria – although other press reports had gone so far as to claim that Boris was in fact about to be betrothed to Olga.29

When Olga had celebrated her name day the previous July on board the Shtandart, among the gifts and bouquets of flowers presented to her by the officers had been a home-made card, the suggestiveness of which was obvious. ‘What do you think it was?’ Tatiana wrote to Aunt Olga. ‘There was a cardboard frame with a portrait of David cut out from a newspaper.’ Olga had ‘laughed at it long and hard’, but her less worldly sister Tatiana had been offended: ‘Not one of the officers wishes to confess that he had done it. Such swine, aren’t they?’30 It can be no coincidence that eleven days prior to Tatiana’s writing this letter, the formal investiture ceremony for their cousin David, as Prince of Wales, had taken place.

There is no doubt that ever since the coronation of the new king, George V, in June 1911, talk had been brewing in Britain that ‘the next greatest event to which the people may look forward will be the marriage of Prince Edward of Wales [David], heir apparent to the throne’.31 He was only seventeen but already the royal marriage brokers had drawn up a list of the seven most eligible princesses, with the names of both Olga and Tatiana at the top. The Washington Post was sceptical: ‘A marriage with any Russian princess would certainly not be popular in England’, it averred, citing the example of Maria Alexandrovna, Alexander II’s daughter, who had married the Duke of Edinburgh and was now the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, and who ‘never in the least identified herself with English affairs or ways, but remained always a stranger’. The paper was certain that ‘the same fate would probably attend a Russian queen’.32

All this foreign press speculation was of course entirely without foundation; for in Russia in 1912 it was assumed that Olga Nikolaevna’s affections were for someone much closer to home. Of all the highborn dukes and princes whose names were being bandied about as possible husbands for the tsar’s eldest daughter, his first cousin, twenty-year-old Grand Duke Dmitri, seemed to be the perfect candidate. Tall and slim – ‘as elegant as a Fabergé statuette’, in the words of his uncle Grand Duke Sergey – Dmitri was naturally sociable and witty; and, most important of all, he was a Russian.33 His debonair manner was extremely disarming and he already had a well-known way with women. ‘Nobody had an easier, a more brilliant debut in life than he’, as his sister Maria recalled:

He had a large fortune with very few responsibilities attached to it, unusually good looks coupled with charm, and he also had been the recognized favourite of the Tsar. Even before he had finished his studies and joined the Horse Guards, there was no young prince in Europe more socially conspicuous than he was both in his own country and abroad. He walked a golden path, petted and fêted by everyone.34

Dmitri and Maria were the children of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, who was in turn the youngest of the six sons of Tsar Alexander II. Their mother had died as the result of a boating accident that had triggered Dmitri’s premature birth, and when in 1902 the widowed Pavel provoked scandal by marrying again, to a commoner, Nicholas, who was anxious to stem the incidence of morganatic marriages in the Romanov family, sent him into exile. With Pavel living in the south of France, his brother Grand Duke Sergey and his wife Ella, who had no children of their own, became Dmitri and Maria’s guardians. After Sergey was assassinated in 1905 (his large estate eventually passed on to Dmitri by Ella), Nicholas and Alexandra effectively took over responsibility for his and Maria’s upbringing. In May 1908 the widowed Ella had encouraged eighteen-year-old Maria into a dynastic marriage with Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. With the loss of his only and adored sibling Dmitri gravitated ever more towards the imperial family as surrogates and was now on such intimate terms with Nicholas and Alexandra that he often addressed them as Papa and Mama (even though Nicholas had eventually allowed Dmitri’s own father to return to Russia). In 1909 Dmitri had entered the Officers’ Cavalry School in St Petersburg, the traditional finishing establishment for young men of the Romanov aristocracy, at the end of which he was commissioned as a cornet in the Horse Guards. During those three years he often spent his free time out at Tsarskoe Selo and regularly joined the tsar in military manoeuvres at nearby Krasnoe Selo, often acting as Nicholas’s aide-de-camp; in the spring of 1912 he had joined the family in Livadia for three weeks.

At some point during 1912, and in the light of the tsarevich’s precarious health, Nicholas and Alexandra must have considered the possibility that, should Alexey die, Dmitri would be the ideal match for Olga as potential heir. Nicholas was intent anyway in creating her co-regent with her mother, should he die before Alexey reached the age of twenty-one.35 Indeed, there was a great deal of logic in such a marriage; it would have been immensely popular in Russia, for Dmitri was one of their own; even better, from Nicholas and Alexandra’s point of view, it would have spared Olga the agony, which she dreaded, of a marriage that might force to her leave Russia. A marriage to Dmitri Pavlovich would give him the title of joint heir presumptive, should Nicholas go even further and change the succession laws in Olga’s favour after Alexey. Becoming tsar was a role that Dmitri coveted; at present he was sixth in line to the throne, but if he married Olga, that might all change.

Despite the twenty-three-year age difference, Dmitri and Nicholas greatly enjoyed each other’s company; they loved playing billiards together in Nicholas’s study and developed a father–son relationship so close that Dmitri always spoke extremely frankly – if not with a degree of bawdy, even homosexual innuendo – to him, in the manner of fellow officers in the barracks, such as signing off this letter from St Petersburg of October 1911:

This capital of yours, or, to speak with perfect clarity, MY capital, does not favour us with good weather. It’s so shitty that it’s just frightful – dirty and cold … Well, and now I wrap my illegitimate mother in a firm embrace (the fault is mine – I am an illegitimate son, not she an illegitimate mother). I give the children a big, wet kiss, [and] you I clasp in my arms (but not without the proper respect). I am devoted to you with my whole heart, soul, and body (except, of course my arse hole).36

Dmitri’s lewd and ambiguous manner often blurred the divide between familial jesting and the dangerously erotic. While this might be par for the course with his cousin the tsar, even a diluted form of it might have been rather too near the knuckle for his unworldly female cousins. As late as 1911 Dmitri still referred to the girls collectively as children, at a time when rumours were gathering in the foreign press of an imminent engagement between himself and Olga. But there is no solid evidence to support any interest in Dmitri on Olga’s part; in fact rather the opposite, she appears to have found his blokeish behaviour with her father – the badinage and endless billiard playing – rather immature. And for someone as sexually experienced as Dmitri, who already was demonstrating an interest in strong-minded, older and often married women, Olga Nikolaevna would have seemed a total innocent, if not, as has been suggested, ‘a wet blanket’.37

In 1908 Nicholas had banned Dmitri, so Dmitri told his sister Maria, from going out riding alone with Olga ‘because of what had happened the first time’, probably an allusion to his mischievous behaviour and penchant for telling dirty jokes.38 Yet to all intents and purposes it seemed by 1911 that he was being groomed as a prospective husband for her. Certainly the signs were sufficient for the foreign press to pick up on the gossip in St Petersburg and run away with it. But in fact the possibility of an engagement was already being anticipated much closer to home – within the imperial household itself – as General Spiridovich confirmed in his memoirs. Everyone enjoyed Dmitri’s presence, for he livened up the rather dull atmosphere at court. ‘The grand duke came often without ceremony, after merely announcing his arrival over the phone to the emperor. Such was the emperor’s affection for him that all the entourage already saw in him the future fiancé of one of the grand duchesses.’39

Although he had not excelled as officer material, at cavalry school Dmitri had proved himself to be an excellent horseman and in early June 1912 he returned to St Petersburg to take up serious training for the Russian equestrian team at the Stockholm Olympics to be held in July. At this point serious rumours began circulating of an engagement, for in her diary for 7 June, General Bogdanov’s wife Alexandra – who held a monarchist political salon in St Petersburg – noted that ‘Yesterday Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna was betrothed to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’.40 The foreign press pounced on the rumours: the Dmitri–Olga ‘romance’ was repeated in the Washington Post in July, under the fanciful headline ‘Cupid by the Thrones’, where it was asserted that Olga had turned down an approach from Prince Adalbert, third son of the Kaiser, because ‘she had given her heart to her cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Paulovitch [sic]’. What is more, the paper said, she and Dmitri had ‘spoken of their affection’ and Olga ‘wore hidden a diamond pendant as a remembrance of these words’.41

The absence of any official announcement and the lack of clarity even among those in the imperial entourage were compounded by a sphinx-like remark from British ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan, a great friend of Dmitri Pavlovich, in her diary in August, which appears to be a response to the betrothal rumour:

I heard a rumour yesterday that a certain person is going to marry the Emperor’s eldest daughter. I can’t quite believe it considering all the high and mighty people who are panting to marry her. Of course she may have a coup de foudre for him and insist on having her own way.42

Whether or not the rumours were true, a possible marriage between Grand Duke Dmitri and Olga soon became problematic. By the autumn of 1912 he had fallen increasingly under the influence of a boyhood friend, Prince Felix Yusupov, and had rapidly been sucked into the racy lifestyle of the St Petersburg fast set that Yusupov patronized. The two men were now spending a riotous time in town, wining and dining, consorting with ballerinas and gypsy girls and driving fast cars. Like any bright young thing in the dying days before the First World War with too much money and not enough to occupy his time, Dmitri was also developing a dangerous gambling habit. He had his own palace by the Anichkov Bridge on St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt – gifted to him by Ella when she retreated to her convent – and conveniently located in sight of all the fashionable clubs. Dmitri began to haunt the Imperial Yacht Club next door to his favourite restaurant at the Astoria Hotel; when he was not running through his fortune playing poker and baccarat there, he would be doing so in Paris, at the Travellers Club on the Champs-Elysées.43

Sooner or later word of Dmitri’s playboy lifestyle must have got back to Nicholas and Alexandra and also to Olga. It was already rapidly eroding his good looks, the boyish charm mutating into a dark-eyed, saturnine appearance, made worse by the onset of health problems. Olga might have been young but she was strong-willed, deeply religious and principled. By January 1913 she was noting a degree of disdain for Dmitri’s habit of ‘messing about with papa’ that does not square with any romantic interest, although it could perhaps have been a case of teenage sour grapes. That same month Meriel Buchanan was more overt in her own opinion of the situation: ‘He absolutely refuses to look at Olga I believe.’44

On 6 August, with the roses of Livadia still filling the gardens with their lovely perfume, the family sadly left the Crimea and returned to Peterhof for army manoeuvres at Krasnoe Selo, followed, on 20 August, by the consecration at Tsarskoe Selo of the family’s newly built church, the Feodorovsky Sobor. This had been built a short walk from the palace and was also for the specific use of Cossacks serving with the Tsar’s Escort. It would become the fam-ily’s favourite place of worship and a significant feature in their spiritual lives, Alexandra in particular creating her own private retreat in a side chapel. Soon afterwards the family left Tsarskoe Selo by special train to Moscow to celebrate the centenary of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in 1812.

The focal point of the ceremonies was the battlefield of Borodino, 115 miles (185 km) west of Moscow, where, on 7 September 1812, 58,000 Russians had been killed or wounded in what had been a pyrrhic victory for the French. Within two months the exhausted and depleted Grande Armée withdrew from Moscow and into the catastrophe of the long winter retreat from Russia. On 25 August at Borodino Nicholas and Alexey reviewed units whose predecessors had fought in the original battle and were joined by the whole family at a religious ceremony held at Alexander I’s campaign chapel nearby.45 On the following day came more parades on Borodino Field, everyone walking solemnly behind the sacred Smolensk Mother of God icon with which Russian troops had been blessed before the battle, followed by prayers at the Spaso-Borodinsky Monastery and the Borodino monument. The whole family found it an intensely moving experience: ‘A common feeling of deep reverence for our forebears seized us all there,’ Nicholas told his mother, ‘these were moments of such emotional grandeur as can rarely be surpassed in our days!’46 On both occasions, with the emphasis on the tsar and his heir in their military uniforms, the girls looked the epitome of imperial grace in the now iconic ensemble of long white lace dresses and hats draped with large white ostrich feathers – ‘four young girls, whose beauty and charm will gradually be revealed to a respectfully-admiring world, like the blooming of rare and lovely flowers in our hothouses’.47 They were charming, enchanting even; but to ordinary Russians the four Romanov sisters remained as beautiful and inaccessible as storybook princesses.

After Borodino, the imperial party travelled on to Moscow and further celebrations of the 1812 anniversary at the Kremlin and elsewhere, culminating in a mass at the exquisite fifteenth-century Uspensky Sobor. On the last day of an exhausting programme of religious and public celebration, where the citizens of Moscow took full advantage of a rare glimpse of the entire imperial family together, a huge prayer service was held on Red Square in memory of Alexander I, the conquering tsar who had driven the French from

Russia. It was a highly emotive conclusion to the anniversary, the square echoing to the voices of a 3,000-strong choir, the booming of cannon firing the salute and the unforgettable sound of church bells ringing out across the heart of old Moscow.48