فصل 12

Chapter Twelve

LORD SEND HAPPINESS TO HIM, MY BELOVED ONE

The 23rd of February 1913 was a very special day for eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, when, accompanied by her father, her mother and her aunt Olga, she attended her first major public ball in St Petersburg, at the Assembly of Nobles. The tsar and tsaritsa had not attended a ball in the city since the grand costume ball of 1903, and Alexandra was determined to be there for her daughter even though she had spent most of the day lying down; but once again she had been obliged to leave early.1 Tatiana should have shared the occasion with her sister but she was ill in bed at the Winter Palace; a couple of days later the doctors confirmed that she had typhoid fever.*2

Olga had been determined not to let these disappointments spoil her evening. She looked lovely, ‘dressed in a simple pale-pink chiffon frock’. Much as at her sixteenth birthday ball in Livadia, ‘she danced every dance, enjoying herself as simply and wholeheartedly as any girl at her first ball’.3 Her own record of the evening was rather more prosaic: ‘I danced a lot – it was so much fun. A ton of people … it was so beautiful.’4 She enjoyed the quadrille and the mazurka with many of her favourite officers and was happy to have her dear friend Nikolay Sablin from the Shtandart in attendance. Meriel Buchanan was captivated by the sight of the eldest grand duchess that evening, dressed with ‘classical simplicity’, her only necklace a simple string of pearls, but yet so irresistible with her ‘tip-tilted nose’. She ‘had a charm, a freshness, an enchanting exuberance that made her irresistible’.5 Meriel Buchanan remembered seeing her ‘standing on the steps leading down from the gallery to the floor of the ball-room, trying gaily to settle a dispute between three young Grand Dukes who all protested that they had been promised the next dance’. It prompted a pause for thought: ‘watching her I wondered what the future was going to hold for her, and which of the many possible suitors who had been mentioned from time to time she would eventually marry.’6

The issue of Olga’s future marriage had, inevitably, gained in importance during the Tercentary year. Until now the imperial sisters had been a taboo subject in the Russian press, but here they were for the first time being officially presented to the nation. Discussion of Olga’s role as eldest child had once more been raised behind the scenes, when a crisis in the Russian succession broke during the winter of 1912–13. When Alexey had been lying at death’s door at Spala, Nicholas’s younger brother Mikhail had secretly gone off to Vienna to marry his mistress, Natalya Wulfert – a divorcee and a commoner – knowing that if Alexey died and he became heir presumptive again Nicholas would forbid this morganatic marriage. Mikhail hoped that if he married behind his brother’s back it would be accepted as a fait accompli, but Nicholas was furious. And his response was draconian: he demanded Mikhail renounce his right to the throne or immediately divorce Natalya in order to prevent a scandal. When Mikhail refused to do so, Nicholas froze Mikhail’s assets and banished him from Russia. At the end of 1912 a manifesto was published in the Russian papers removing Mikhail from the regency, his military command and imperial honours. According to the laws of succession, Grand Duchess Vladimir’s eldest son Kirill would become regent if Nicholas should die before Alexey was twenty-one, but he and his two brothers who followed in the pecking order were deeply unpopular in Russia. Instead Nicholas overruled existing law and ordered Count Freedericksz to draft a manifesto nominating Olga as regent with Alexandra as guardian during Alexey’s minority. It was published early in 1913 without Nicholas seeking, as he should have done, the Duma’s approval. It inevitably provoked a furious objection from Grand Duchess Vladimir.

From her well-connected position at the British Embassy, Meriel Buchanan could see that the imperial family was in a very bad way that year:

The marriage of the Grand Duke Michael has caused a tremendous upheaval and they say dear Emp.[eror] is heartbroken. Nobody quite knows what is the matter with the little boy and if the worst should happen the question of succession becomes a serious one. Kyrill is of course the nearest but there is some doubt as to whether any of the Vladimir lot will be allowed to succeed as their mother was not an Orthodox when they were born. It would then come to Dimitri and he would have to marry one of the Emperor’s daughters.7

Rumours were clearly still circulating about a match between Olga and Dmitri. The waspish Meriel found the thought rather amusing; she had seen much of Dmitri of late on the Petersburg social scene, where everyone had been learning the latest dance crazes. ‘I had a very ardous [sic] lesson from Dimitri the other day’, she wrote to her cousin. ‘It would be rather “chic” if Dimitri were one day Emperor of all the Russias to be able to say that he taught me the Bunnyhug wouldn’t it?’8 All talk of the match soon, however, evaporated when Dmitri proposed to his cousin, Irina, Grand Duchess Xenia’s only daughter, only to be spurned in favour of his friend Felix Yusupov. A distancing between Nicholas and Dmitri followed as the year wore on, even though Dmitri continued to serve as an ADC.

As for Olga, her romantic teenage thoughts were now firmly directed much lower down the ranks, towards a favourite officer, Alexander Konstantinovich Shvedov, a captain in the Tsar’s Escort. In her diary she referred to him by the acronym of AKSH and his presence at afternoon tea parties at Aunt Olga’s was the focal point of her very limited social life for much of the first half of that year. These occasions were little more than get-togethers for high jinks with a group of favourite hand-picked officers; of dancing to the phonograph and playing childish games of cat-and-mouse, slap-on-hands, hide-and-seek and tag. They were nominally supervised by Olga Alexandrovna but regularly degenerated into a lot of giggling and boisterous play that brought the four sisters into close physical proximity with men with whom they otherwise could never have had such intimacy. It was the strangest and most perverse kind of interplay – but one in which both their mother and their aunt saw no harm. Here were Russian imperial grand duchesses on the brink of womanhood indulging in infantile behaviour, the end result of which was to leave the impressionable Olga swooning about a young man who in every other way was totally off limits. ‘Sat with AKSH the whole time and strongly fell in love with him’, she confided to her diary on 10 February, ‘Lord, save us. Saw him all day long – at liturgy and in the evening. It was very nice and fun. He is so sweet.’9 For weeks afterwards the pattern of her life beyond lessons, walks with Papa, sitting with Mama and listening to Alexey say his prayers at bedtime was the occasional day release to Auntie Olga’s in St Petersburg to play silly games and gaze longingly at the handsome mustachioed AKSH in his dashing Cossack cherkeska.*

Tatiana was distraught at having to miss out on many of the celebrations for the Tercentary in St Petersburg, not to mention the trips to Aunt Olga’s, where she too had looked forward to seeing her favourite officers. Because of her illness (which Dr Botkin and Trina Schneider also soon contracted), the family was obliged to leave the Winter Palace on 26 February and return to Tsarskoe Selo; but before doing so Tatiana asked her nurse Shura Tegleva to telephone Nikolay Rodionov and tell him that she would love it if some of her officers would come and walk past her window at the Winter Palace so she could at least see them. Rodionov and Nikolay Vasilevich Sablin were only too happy to oblige and remembered seeing the poor sick girl, wrapped in a blanket, bowing to them at the window.10

Upon her return to the Alexander Palace Tatiana was immediately quarantined from her sisters and was very ill for more than a month; on 5 March her beautiful long, chestnut hair had to be cropped short, though a wig was made of it for her to wear until her hair grew back sufficiently (which it had done by the end of December).11 Confined at home with her invalid mother, each looking after the other, it wasn’t until early April that Tatiana finally ventured outside onto Alexandra’s balcony, but it was still too cold and snowy to stay for long. When she did at last go outside she was deeply self-conscious about the wig. One day, when she was playing a skipping game in the park with Maria Rasputin and some young officers from the Corps de Pages, Alexey’s dog had run up to her barking; Tatiana got her foot caught in the rope, tripped and as she fell ‘her hair suddenly tumbled down and, to our amazement, we saw a wig drop off’, Maria recalled. Poor Tatiana ‘revealed to our eyes and those of the two embarrassed officers, the top of her head where a few short, sparse hairs were just beginning to grow’. She was absolutely mortified, and ‘with one bound she was on her feet, had picked up her wig and dashed towards the nearest clump of trees. We saw only her blushes and vexation and she did not appear again that day.’12

During the winter months of 1913 at the Alexander Palace, Nicholas’s diary is a testament to his hands-on parenting of his four daughters in lieu of his perpetually sick wife. No matter the amount of paperwork on his desk, the number of meetings with ministers, public audiences and military reviews that filled his day, at this time of year when they were home at Tsarskoe Selo he always found time for his children. History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers. The months of January and February were a special time for him and his daughters, during which he treated them all to trips to see the ballets The Little Humpbacked Horse, Don Quixote and The Pharoah’s Daughter – in which last they were thrilled to see Pavlova dance. As the eldest, Olga (and Tatiana, until illness prevented her) enjoyed the added bonus of seeing the operas Madame Butterfly, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Wagner’s Lohengrin, which latter Olga found particularly beautiful and moving.13 But in the main, time with Papa was spent out in the park, whatever the weather, sharing invigorating walks, riding bicycles, helping him break the ice on the canals, skiing, sliding down the ice hill, and joined – when he was well enough – by Alexey wearing his specially made boot with a caliper. The girls so enjoyed having their father to themselves; he was a fast, unrelenting walker and they had all learned to keep up or be left behind, Olga in particular always walking closest to him on one side, Tatiana on the other, with Maria and Anastasia running back and forth in front of them, sliding on the ice and throwing snowballs. It was clear to anyone who encountered the tsar and his daughters in the Alexander Park how much pride he had in his girls. ‘He was happy that people admired them. It was as though his kind blue eyes were saying to them: “Look what wonderful daughters I have.”’14

On the evening of 15 May the family boarded the imperial train for Moscow and began a two-week trip in the steamship Mezhen up the Volga from Moscow in celebration of the Tercentary. It was an arduous tour during which they stopped off at the major religious sites of the Golden Ring, a route taken by the first Romanov tsar from his birthplace to Moscow in 1613.15 It had been a major pilgrimage route for centuries and was one that Alexandra had long expressed a wish to see; Nicholas himself had not visited the area since 1881. From a succession of holy sites at Vladimir, Bogolyubovo and Suzdal the family travelled to Nizhniy Novgorod for a service at its beautiful Cathedral of the Transfiguration; then back along the Volga by steamer, arriving at Kostroma on 19 May. At each stop there was a traditional welcome of bread and salt from local dignitaries and clergy. Church bells rang out and military bands played, as huge crowds of peasants gathered along the river banks – some wading deep into the water – to catch a glimpse of the imperial family as they arrived (a fact which alarmed Alexandra who feared a catastrophe like the stampede at Khodynka Fields). But she enjoyed meeting the devoted old peasant babushki and would stop and talk to them on the river bank, giving them money and religious images.16 Kostroma was the most important stop on their itinerary for it was here, at the Ipatiev Monastery,* that the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov had taken refuge during a time of political upheaval in Russia, and where he was invited by a delegation of boyars from Moscow to take the throne. The monastery had its own Romanov Museum that the family visited after attending services in the cathedral, before going on to unveil a monument marking the Tercentary. This was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip with huge crowds voicing their enthusiasm for the imperial family as they processed through streets decorated with flags and Romanov insignia, the peasantry demonstrating their traditional loyalty to the ‘little father’ by falling on their knees when the national anthem was played.17 Such devotion served to stiffen Alexandra’s conviction that the ordinary people loved them: ‘What cowards those State Ministers are’, she told Elizaveta Naryshkina. ‘They are constantly frightening the Emperor with threats and forebodings of a revolution, and here you see it yourself – we only need to show ourselves, and at once their hearts are ours.’18

Olga was thrilled when they arrived at Yaroslavl to see her dear AKSH in the honour guard that greeted them. After yet another crowded reception and a visit to an orphanage built to commemorate the Tercentary, the girls and Nicholas left Alexandra behind and headed for an exhibition of local manufacturing, a prayer service followed by dinner and musical entertainment, before they all finally boarded the train at midnight for Rostov. ‘A ton of presents, got very tired, very long and boring, also very hot’, Olga noted in her diary of that day. But ‘nice, sweet AKSH was there. I was terribly happy to see him.’ ‘Poor Mama’ was, however, very tired. ‘Heart no. 3, hurts. Lord save her.’19 The whole of the following day Alexandra remained in bed. During their time on the Volga Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin saw the strain Nicholas was under coping with the demands of the schedule and a tetchy wife constantly prostrated by fatigue and eating virtually nothing; he noticed that she often went all day on just a couple of boiled eggs.20

The family arrived back in Moscow on 24 May for the climax of their tour; ‘dear AKSH was once more smiling from across the crowd’ among officers of the Tsar’s Escort standing guard when they stepped from the carriages.21 If the celebrations in St Petersburg had been muted, officialdom had ensured that those in the heart of ancient Muscovy were triumphal, mimicking the entry into Moscow of Tsar Alexander I in the early days of the 1812 war with France. However, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, who was there for the celebrations, thought the crowds seemed subdued:

The Emperor made restrained greetings to the right and the left without changing expression; it was impossible to detect any enthusiasm from either side. The muzhiks mostly stood there staring, a few made the sign of the cross or fell to their knees for the head of the church. It was more awe and curiosity than spontaneous warmth, more dutiful obedience than trust. Subjects kept down rather than free citizens. It was unpleasant, remote and as unlike how things are at home [in Sweden] as possible. The unbridgeable gap between the ruler and the people was more notable than ever.22

The ceremonials once more revealed Alexey’s frailty, particularly on 25 May during the procession made by the family down the famous Red Staircase in the Kremlin, when people were shocked to see the tsarevich carried by one of the Cossacks from the Tsar’s Escort. ‘How sad to see the heir to the Romanov throne so weak, sickly, and helpless’, wrote Prime Minister Kokovtsov, who noted also the gasps of sympathy that this sight evoked in the crowd.23 The empress’s discomfort was also clearly visible, an ugly red flush appearing on her face during the ceremony. In contrast, the four Romanov daughters seemed relaxed if somewhat inattentive at the end of what had been a gruelling two weeks. At the Kremlin, one of the guards noticed how they ‘looked around, they were bored, they ate grapes and sweets’, though they always ‘behaved in a very natural and unpretentious manner’.24

Just before their return to Tsarskoe Selo, Olga and Tatiana attended a ball at Moscow’s Assembly of Nobles. Alexandra was unable to endure more than an hour, but the two sisters happily opened the ball and took centre stage, dancing with many of the officers from the Erevan Regiment. And Olga’s head was once more turned during the quadrille by the sight of ‘AKSH’s sweet smiling face from afar’.25 En route to the railway station the following morning she thought she caught sight of him ‘in a red cap on one of the balconies far away’ and she saw him again soon at Aunt Olga’s on 2 and 6 June. As usual, after tea, dinner and a cosy chat on the sofa, the Romanov sisters indulged in a succession of noisy and childish catch-me-if-you-can games in the garden with their regular group of officers including AKSH and another great favourite, Viktor Zborovsky from the Tsar’s Escort. On the 6th, however, it all got wildly out of hand during a game of hide-and-seek upstairs when they ‘horsed around terribly, turned everything upside down, especially one big wardrobe. 10 people got inside it, and also on top of it, broke the doors, laughed and had a lot of fun.’26 A necessary dissipation of pent-up energies perhaps, but – for the older two sisters at least – there must have been an underlying sexual tension. But then, inevitably, the motor car came for them at 7 p.m. and took them all back to Tsarskoe Selo. Olga went back with a heavy heart, sad to have learned that day that AKSH was ‘leaving for [the] Caucasus on Saturday. God save him.’

Throughout the 1913 Tercentary the tsarist publicity machine had promoted a paternalistic Romanov monarchy headed by a loving, devoted and virtuous family, an image perpetuated in the thousands of official photographs sold as postcards across Russia that year. But many of the Russian peasantry were bewildered by the official images, for they did not project an authoritarian all-powerful tsar, remote on his throne, as many of them certainly perceived him, but instead an ordinary, bourgeois man at the heart of a domestic unit dominated by women that called into question his manliness and with it his ability to rule.27 The role of the four Romanov sisters as an adjunct to their brother meanwhile underlined their widespread depiction as uncontroversial, dutiful daughters, nowhere more so than in an official hagiography, made available in English translation as The Tsar and His People. Written for the Tercentary by a member of the imperial entourage, Major-General Andrey Elchaninov, it found time briefly to summarize the sisters as

brought up in the rules of the Holy Orthodox Church and trained to be good and careful housewives … [They] are remarkable for their power of observation, kindness, and sympathy, and their manners are simple and gracious. They are very active in helping the poor, especially poor children, their presents taking the form not of money, but of useful objects which they have made or knitted themselves.28

Such a description set in stone the representation of the four girls as interchangeable and unremarkable, and it was one that they themselves compounded by often referring to themselves collectively as OTMA. The official view continued to be entirely bland with an emphasis on domestic pleasures over and above worldly ones: ‘They seldom visit the theatre except during their holidays. Only at Christmas or on other feast-days are they taken to the opera by their parents.’ Ironically, this was true enough; with hindsight one might say that in being denied contact with young men and women of their own social standing and the life experiences that went with it, the sisters were trapped in a stultifying, artificial world in which they were perpetually infantilized. ‘Why were they never seen,’ asked Meriel Buchanan, ‘except at Te Deums, or Reviews, or on some State occasion?’29 The one breath of fresh air in their lives remained their beloved Aunt Olga, but tea parties with her in St Petersburg were curtailed when, after returning from Moscow, the family headed straight off to Finland for four weeks’ holiday in the Shtandart.30

They were all very tired after their Volga tour and the holiday was a rather subdued one for most of the family. But for Olga it was full of new interest for, in the absence of AKSH, she turned her attention to another handsome moustachioed officer on the Shtandart, who in her diary she referred to as ‘Pav. Al.’. The newly promoted Lieutenant Pavel Alexeevich Voronov was twenty-seven and had joined the Shtandart in April. From the moment she stepped on board on 10 June, Olga rapidly developed an attachment to him. Sometimes she sat with him in the front control room when he was on duty, or came there to dictate the day’s log to him. Soon they had a favourite trysting place, between the telegraph room and one of the ship’s funnels, where they often sat chatting with Tatiana and her favourite, Nikolay Rodionov. During the day Pavel sometimes joined the girls and their father on land, playing hot and vigorous games of tennis (he was Nicholas’s favourite partner at the game) or going for walks or swimming. Back on board they watched film shows and played card games together. It all seemed so innocent and above-board, but under the surface Olga’s emotions were in turmoil.

Everyone liked the easy-going Pavel Voronov, especially Alexey, whom Voronov often carried when he was unwell. By the end of June Olga was writing that ‘he is so affectionate’, and was snatching what small moments of intimacy she could, often simply sitting gazing at him as he kept watch on the bridge.31 Any activity from which Pavel was absent or excluded was ‘boring’; when he was there ‘it was cosy and insanely nice to be with him’. By 6 July her feelings had deepened: ‘I dictated the log journal to him. After that we sat on the couch until after 5.00. I love him, dear, so much.’32 On 12 July on their last day in the Shtandart en route back to Peterhof she sat with Pavel in the control room all the way. ‘It was awfully sad. The whole time while the gangway was extended, I stood with him. Left the yacht around 4.00. So terribly hard to part with the beloved Shtandart, officers and sweetie pie … Lord save him.’33

In the intervening weeks at Peterhof she received occasional telephone calls from Pavel and also the dependable Nikolay Sablin whom she so looked up to. It helped temper the sad litany of her mother’s almost daily indispositions. Mama’s heart hurt, her face hurt, her legs hurt; she was tired; she had a bad headache. Alexey was unwell too, his arm sore ‘from waving his arms about too much when playing’, so much so that in mid-July Grigory was called in to see him. He came at seven one evening, sat with Alexandra and Alexey and then talked for a short while with Nicholas and the girls, before leaving. ‘Soon after his departure,’ Nicholas noted in his diary, ‘the pain in Alexey’s arm began to go, he calmed down and began to fall asleep.34 Olga sat with her brother and her mother often when they were unwell, offering comfort – as too did Tatiana – in between the occasional horse ride or game of tennis. Her former crush, AKSH, reappeared from time to time in the Escort and she was happy to see him but her thoughts remained primarily with the Shtandart which was now sailing to the Mediterranean.

At the beginning of August the two older sisters began preparing in earnest for their first official appearance at army manoeuvres, to be held on the 5th at Krasnoe Selo. They practised their riding for several days beforehand for the auspicious day when they would review their regiments in uniform on horseback for the first time – Olga in the blue and red with gold trim of the 3rd Elizavetgrad Hussars on her horse Regent and Tatiana in the navy and blue of the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans on Robino. They were now the youngest female colonels in the world – and on the day proved how accomplished they were. ‘Both Grand Duchesses led a pass in front of the Emperor at a gallop’, escorted by Grand Duke Nikolay, Commander-in-Chief of the army.35 ‘It was a hot day and they were very nervous, but they were delightful and did their utmost. I believe the Emperor was very proud as he watched his daughters for the first – and alas! – for the last time in a military line-up’, recalled Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich. But it was yet another milestone in their lives that their mother had been too ill to witness, shut away in her boudoir suffering from another bout of neuralgia.

Two days later, the family headed south to Livadia in the 40-degree C (104-degree F) heat of high summer. Alexey was still unwell, and grumbled about the mud-bath treatments he had to endure twice a week, which he hated. But he now had his own, official governor. Nicholas and Alexandra had originally considered appointing someone from their military or naval entourage, but eventually decided to offer the post to Pierre Gilliard. Not every-one approved; Gilliard was an impeccable pedagogue, very proper and punctilious but very un-Russian, as Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted.36 Some said appointing a republican Swiss to look after the tsarevich was inappropriate. Gilliard accepted the appointment with considerable apprehension at what it entailed, having only just been privately informed by Dr Derevenko that Alexey had haemophilia. ‘Will I ever get used to the terrible responsibility that I am taking on?’ he asked his brother Frederick in a letter home.37 He found Alexey very undisciplined; in his view the boy’s nervousness and restless behaviour was exacerbated by the constant supervision of Derevenko. At the end of November his charge had yet another accident, falling off a chair he had climbed up on in the schoolroom and banging his leg. The subsequent swelling quickly spread from below the knee to his ankle. Another sailor from the Shtandart, Klimenty Nagorny, had recently been charged with sharing the task of looking after Alexey with Derevenko and proved to be ‘touchingly kind’, sitting up at night with him during this latest attack, while his sisters opened the door every now and then and tiptoed in to kiss him.38 Yet again, the prayers of Grigory, who was in Yalta at the time, seemed to be the only thing that saved him; but, with the same alarming regularity, as after every injury, the frail tsarevich needed months of convalescence.

On 9 August when she had boarded the Shtandart in Sevastopol for the journey to Livadia, and saw Pavel Voronov once more, Olga began referring to him in her diary as ‘S’. This was an abbreviation for the Russian words sokrovishche – treasure, solntse – sunshine and schaste – happiness, which were her frequently used epithets for those she cared about most. Her whole world for the rest of that year was bound up in Pavel Voronov. Day after day she refers to him: ‘it’s so boring without my S, ghastly’; ‘it’s empty without him’; ‘didn’t see S and was miserable’.39 Pavel was perfection: sweet, kind, gentle, precious. At all times, no matter how briefly, she was always ‘so happy, so terribly happy’ to see him. Indeed, Olga was desolate when even a day passed without her spending time with the object of her affection and she snatched at the slightest sight or word of him like the lovesick teenager that she was. This experience went beyond the usual light flirting and coquetry that she and Tatiana had been indulging in for the last couple of years with the officers in the entourage. It was first love and it was painful. But it also had no future whatsoever. None of the well-drilled officers in the Shtandart ever breached the strict, unwritten code of honour that they adhered to in their relations with the daughters of the tsar. Voronov was clearly attracted to Olga, touched by her attention and certainly flattered; when the family left the ship for the White Palace, his fellow officers noticed how he often pointed his binoculars in its direction in hopes of catching a glimpse of her white dress on the balcony. Olga did likewise from her own vantage point – perhaps they had a private agreement to do so?40

Whatever Pavel Voronov might have felt in his heart, his tentative relationship with the tsar’s eldest daughter was love held firmly at bay: furtive, affectionate and confidential glances, occasional chats over tea on deck, games of tennis, sticking photographs in albums together. There was even the occasional chance to partner her at small informal dances on the deck of the Shtandart, such as that held to celebrate Olga’s eighteenth birthday, during which, as everyone noticed, she danced a great deal with Voronov. By December 1913, having spent the best part of five months in his company, Olga’s feelings had inevitably intensified and she began confiding them in a special code – something her mother had done during her own youth – using symbols similar to Georgian cursive. Pavel was now ‘her tender darling’, suggesting a degree of reciprocal feeling on his part, and she was happier than she had ever been.41 And then, in September, a worrying note entered her diary entries. Pavel was less in evidence. Olga would go several days without seeing him: ‘It’s so abominable without my S., awful’; even seeing her dear friend AKSH, who was on duty in the Escort at Livadia, didn’t cheer her up.42 Life returned to the same predictable routine of lessons in the morning, sitting with either her sick mama or brother, playing tennis and going on occasional walks or horse rides. From disappointment, to boredom, to petulance and finally pretending she really didn’t care, Olga Nikolaevna ran the gamut of feelings of any teenager in love. Her attention wandered in the days without S and with typical, hormonal fickleness, she turned her thoughts back to AKSH, using a new nickname for him – Shurik – and reminding herself ‘what a sweetheart’ he was and how nice he looked in uniform wearing ‘my favourite dark jacket’.43

It turned out that during his time off, Pavel had been making visits to the Kleinmikhels, close friends of the Romanov family who had an estate at Koreiz. One day Countess Kleinmikhel was invited to the White Palace to lunch. She arrived, bringing her young niece Olga with her. Suddenly it all became clear; Pavel Voronov and Olga Kleinmikhel were being steered in each other’s direction. When Olga Nikolaevna saw him at a charity ball shortly after in October she already sensed a distancing between them: ‘I saw my S once, during the quadrille, our encounter was strange somehow, a bit sad, I don’t know.’44 Soon after, with characteristic teenage sangfroid she announced: ‘I am used to S. not being here by now’, but oh how it hurt when on 6 November, at a small dance at the White Palace, she noticed that he ‘danced the entire time with Kleinmikhels [sic]’.45 She was miffed and several days later tried to shrug it off: ‘It’s good to see him and not good at the same time. Did not say a word to him and don’t want to.’46 There were always games of hide-and-seek in the palace with Shurik and Rodionov, during which she ‘horsed around a lot’, and a trip to see a film in Yalta. But when she returned home it was the same depressing scenario: Alexey was crying because his leg hurt; Mama was tired, and lying down and her heart was no. 2.47

By December Olga had become scared of her feelings for S and how they still dominated her thoughts and so it was as well that on the 17th the family left Livadia, although this year, in particular, it was a wrench to go. ‘We all were left with such a longing for the Crimea’, wrote Nicholas in his diary.48 For Olga it was ‘boring without all the friends, the yacht, and S., of course’. And then, on 21 December, she heard the news: ‘I learned that S is to marry Olga Kleinmichael [sic].’ Olga’s response was brief but dignified: ‘May the Lord grant happiness to him, my beloved.’49

Is it possible that Nicholas and Alexandra had deliberately contrived the engagement of Pavel Voronov to Olga Kleinmikhel, with a view to sparing Olga any further heartache in pursuing a hopeless love match? It was patently clear to everyone – and must have been to them – that she had fallen in love with him, though Pavel’s true feelings for her are unknown. Perhaps he had sensed that his close friendship with the grand duchess was beginning to overstep the permitted mark and that he should therefore fall on his sword and remove himself from the frame. Nicholas and Alex-andra were certainly more than happy to give their warm approval of his engagement to Olga Kleinmikhel, but for Olga Nikolaevna it was hard and her response was to suppress the pain she was feeling, even in her diary. Dealing with a broken heart was one thing, but having to continue seeing Pavel with his fiancée was quite another, as too was having to listen to her sisters excitedly discussing their wedding to come at Tsarskoe Selo.

In January Aunt Ella arrived at Tsarskoe Selo with Countess Kleinmikhel and Olga and ‘S’; only now S – Olga’s treasure, her happiness – was the other Olga’s, ‘not mine!’ as she exclaimed in her diary. ‘My heart aches, it’s painful, I don’t feel well and only slept for an hour and a half.’50 That year Christmas was a sad one for her. After visiting her grandmother at the Anichkov Palace and presenting gifts to the officers of the Escort it was back to the same quiet routine, as the winter weather closed in on a bitter cold New Year’s Eve at Tsarskoe Selo: ‘At 11 p.m. had tea with Papa and Mama, and welcomed the New Year in the regimental church. I thank God for everything. Snow blizzard. –9 degrees.’51

All of the Romanov family found Pavel Voronov’s wedding service on 7 February 1914, at the regimental church at Tsarskoe Selo, deeply moving. Olga kept her feelings to herself and did not even unburden them in her diary:

At about 2:30, the three of us set out with Papa and Mama. We drove to the regimental church for the wedding of P. A. Woronoff and O. K. Kleinmichael at the regimental church. May the Lord grant them happiness. They were both nervous. We made the acquaintance of S’s parents and 2 sisters, sweet girls. We drove to the Kleinmichael’s. There were many people at the reception at the house.52

Immediately afterwards Pavel Voronov went on leave for two months with his bride, after which he was transferred to the post of commander of the watch on the imperial yacht Aleksandriya. Olga would still see Pavel from time to time at Tsarskoe Selo, and con-tinued to refer to him as ‘S’ in her diary, but her brief experience of real love was over. His wife later recalled that ‘of his four years’ service in the proximity of the imperial family Paul kept a sacred memory’. But Pavel Voronov remained the soul of discretion about his relationship with Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna; it was a memory that he kept to himself until the day he died.53