فصل 13

Chapter Thirteen

GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

The last great winter season of 1913–14 in St Petersburg was a glittering one in the opinion of many who witnessed it – ‘even the dowagers’ could not remember another like it.1 Coming at the end of a successful Tercentary year, the succession of parties laid on by the greatest of Russia’s noble houses would mark the ‘sunset of the dynasty’, as Edith Almedingen recalled – ‘a sunset splendid enough to win a lodgment in the memory’.2 Such unbridled splendour was of course confined to the playgrounds of the super-rich, who spent the season dissipating their crippling ennui in a ‘vortex of worldly gaiety’ during which they ‘scarcely saw the daylight for weeks at a time during the six hours of the winter’s sunshine’.3 Behind the facades of their overheated, luxurious palaces and browsing in the high-class shops along the Nevsky Prospekt filled with Western luxury goods, the Russian aristocracy remained stubbornly oblivious to the visible unrest gathering across the city, fuelled by poverty, deprivation and continuing political oppression.4

There was a mass of high-society parties, amateur theatricals and masked balls to choose from that year, for those with an ‘in’ to the clique-ridden social scene, all described in detail and lavishly photographed on the pages of the high-society magazine Stolitsa i usadba [Capital and Country Estate], its title reflecting the charmed lives of those privileged to have homes in both locations. After Grand Duchess Vladimir’s four-day Grand Christmas Bazaar had opened the season at the Assembly of Nobles, the hot tickets were for Princess Obolenskaya’s Greek Mythology Ball at her big white palace on the Moika; Countess Kleinmikhel’s fancy-dress ball with costumes designed by Bakst; and two more opulent balls – one in black-and-white and the other featuring wigs and multicoloured turbans – held by the fabulously wealthy Princess Betsy Shuvalova at her palace on the Fontanka. In addition there were endless, rather more sedate bals blancs for debutantes in white watched over by their chaperones, bals roses for young married women and dances at the various embassies, the two at the British Embassy on the English Embankment being the most sought after. At the Imperial Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre society ladies flocked to see its star performers Mathilde Kschessinska and Anna Pavlova, while gentlemen could indulge in extravagant private dinners and gaming at Grand Duke Dmitri’s favourite haunt, the Imperial Yacht Club.5

The tsaritsa of course would not dream of allowing her daughters to attend any of these functions; it was their grandmother who gave a special ball – at the Anichkov Palace on 13 February 1914 – to mark Olga’s and Tatiana’s official debut in society and which was the highlight of the social season. Guests were greeted by ‘masters of ceremony in gold-embroidered court dress, black silk breeches and stockings, and buckled, patent leather shoes’, holding ‘thin ivory canes which made them look like rococo shepherds’.6 From here they were herded past ‘two tall black Ethiopian footmen in Oriental costume and high turbans’ into the ballroom, where they awaited the entrance of the emperor and empress, followed by Tatiana and Olga, ‘tall, slim lovely creatures’ who looked at those assembled ‘with a sort of amused curiosity’.7 After the tsar had opened the ball with a ceremonial polonaise, there was a moment of confused embarrassment. ‘Not a single young man made a move to ask the two grand duchesses to dance’, noticed debutante Helene Iswolsky. ‘Were they all too shy to make the plunge? Or was it the sudden realization that the two girls were strangers?’8 After an embarrassing pause a few officers from the Tsar’s Escort who had danced with them before were ‘jockeyed into position’, but it was clear that these young men ‘did not belong to the smart set’; they were ‘completely unknown, rather uncouth, common looking’.9

Alexandra managed to tolerate the ball for an hour and a half, leaving Nicholas with the girls until a wearying 4.30 in the morning, his daughters having ‘refused to be torn away any earlier’.10 But he had spent the whole evening looking timid and feeling uncomfortable: ‘Je ne connais personne ici’, he confided to one dancing partner.11 Such was the isolation in which he and his family had been living for the last eight years that they were completely out of touch with who was who in fashionable society. This fact did not go unnoticed by Nicholas’s aunt, the forthright Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, who was in St Petersburg for the wedding of Grand Duchess Xenia’s daughter Irina to Prince Felix Yusupov. She did not mince her words when describing the evening in a letter to her daughter Marie, the Crown Princess of Romania. The duchess had very decided views on the high-born company young women such as her great-nieces should keep. But instead,

they were surrounded by a Chinese wall of Cossack and other third class officers who would not let any of the real good society ones come near them. As the girls know nobody in society, they simply hopped about like provincial demoiselles without anybody being presented to them and they were never made to talk with any of the ladies young or old.12

The duchess was appalled: ‘Now fancy Grand Duchesses who perhaps will soon marry and perhaps leave the country not being properly introduced into the Petersburg society!’

If I only think of my young days when before going out I knew all the ladies and the young gentlemen who were presented during a ball. As Alix has allowed her daughters to be engaged by their dancers instead of sending for them like we did (and liked it much better as we got all those we really wanted and not the bores, so that the young ladies even envied us) the whole of the old and good etiquette has been abandoned. The result is that only certain officers danced with them.13

This mattered not a jot to Olga and Tatiana, who continued to make the most of what precious few social engagements came their way that winter before the austerity of Lent was upon them. A few days later Alexandra allowed Anastasia and Maria to join them for a small thé-dansant at Grand Duchess Vladimir’s palace, given ‘almost in defiance of the cloistered tsarina’ and in which the grand duchess ‘made a great display of luxury and decoration’, as though emphasizing to the sisters the lifestyle they were being deprived of by their anti-social mother. Here Olga and Tatiana ‘danced every dance with wholehearted and intense enjoyment’ and Meriel Buchanan took pleasure in watching them ‘whispering in a corner, fair head and dark head close together, blue eyes and amber eyes alight with merriment’.14 But again, Nicholas, who accompanied them, looked lost, not knowing any of the ladies and gentlemen present.15

The Duchess of Saxe-Coburg was totally exasperated with Alexandra’s endless retreats and non-appearances that season and her daughters’ total lack of social experience, but she had to admit that she could not help admiring ‘their great devotion to her’. ‘How trying it must be for young gay creatures to have an eternally ailing mother’, she told Marie.16 Nevertheless, by 1914 the eldest two Romanov daughters were finally coming into their own. St Petersburg was full of rumours

which coupled their names with those of one or two Foreign Princes, with that of a young Grand Duke very popular in Society [i.e. Dmitri Pavlovich]; the story of a too forward suitor who got his cheek severely slapped by the Grand Duchess Olga, the whisper of a romance with one of the officers attached to the Staff which was promptly squashed by those in authority.17

Was the latter, one wonders, an allusion to Voronov? Certainly, all the royal princes of Europe were once more being thrown into a mix that was being vigorously stirred by the ‘matchmaking busybodies’ of the Continental press.18 A ‘sentimental crisis’ was now approaching in the careers of the tsar’s two eldest daughters according to Current Opinion, which depicted Olga as grave and somewhat melancholy, a reminder of ‘her august origin’. Yet even so, who could miss the exquisiteness of her throat, her slender neck and ‘soft white arms dimpling at the elbow and the long tapering fingers’? But it was Tatiana who intrigued. With her fascinating eyes that ‘alternated from deep grey to violet’ she had ‘all the seductiveness of a sprite’.19 Both sisters were nevertheless noted for their piety, their mother having admitted to a departing French ambassador: ‘My ambition for my girls is that they may become Christian ladies.’20 Their modesty was also reflected in the continuing simplicity of their dress, a fact mourned by the French modistes: ‘The Czarina will not allow her girls to don gold gauze or flaunt in the colours of the Avenue d’Alma.’21 It was clear that the clothes of the young grand duchesses ‘must still be made under the supervizion [sic] of their mother, as they were ten years ago’. Unsophisticated they might be but one thing impressed: the girls’ military ranks were by no means a ‘formality, a mere honour’, for, gasped Current Opinion, ‘the royal ladies can actually put their men through the drill’, a fact which seemed to confirm that not only was Nicholas ensuring his daughters were privy to the mysteries of statecraft but that one or either might if necessary ‘take their father’s place on the throne with the same ease’.22

In all respects there were, by 1914, no two more wealthy, desirable and marriageable royal princesses than Olga and Tatiana Romanova. According to the Berlin Tageblatt, it was Tatiana who was now being paired off with the Prince of Wales, in anticipation of a projected visit he was to make to St Petersburg in the spring. The rumour soon received short shrift from George V’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham: ‘There is not a vestige of truth in the statement … It is pure invention.’23 Tatiana was also the object of an informal approach by Nikola Pa?i?, the Serbian prime minister, on behalf of the king, for his son Prince Alexander. The names of Boris of Bulgaria, Peter of Montenegro and Adalbert of Germany were all also once more raised and discussed. Meanwhile rumours persisted that ‘Grand Duchess Olga is willing to become the consort of her second cousin, Grand Duke Demetrius Pavlovich, and that it is on his account that she has rejected the suggestion of other matrimonial alliances’.24 The gossips would not let go of what they still perceived as the ideal match; but in fact Dmitri, whose disreputable reputation was growing, was suffering from tuberculosis of the throat and spending much of his time abroad for his health. Olga’s diary for December 1913 had made quite clear the rather dim view that she took of him and his louche badinage during a visit to the family: ‘Dmitri was talking nonsense.’25

Press speculation aside, by early 1914 Nicholas and Alexandra were clearly giving serious consideration to a new royal candidate for their eldest daughter: twenty-year-old Prince Carol of Romania, grandson of the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg. The initiative for the match seems to have been theirs, urged on by Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov, who wished to ensure that the Romanian royal family, who were Hohenzollerns, were in the right political camp – Russia’s and not Germany’s – before the now inevitable war broke out. Such a dynastic union would certainly bring long-term political and economic benefits and Nicholas and Alexandra could see the logic in it.26 Their sole reservation was ‘that the grand duchess’s marriage … should take place only as the result of a much closer acquaintance between the young people and on the absolute condition of their daughter’s voluntary agreement to it’.27 It was the Washington Post that on 1 February broke the story in the West of a possible engagement. ‘Prince Charles [Carol] is a handsome, clever young man’, it reported, and ‘his bride-to-be has great musical talent and is a remarkably accomplished linguist. She is a general favourite in court circles.’28 But in fact the couple had yet even to meet; Carol and his parents were due to visit St Petersburg in March, although everyone was already anticipating that an engagement would take place.

In the run-up to the Romanian visit and still in St Petersburg, the busybodying Duchess of Saxe-Coburg was doing her best to lay the ground for a favourable outcome, writing to Marie quashing the persisting rumours about Olga and her cousin: ‘the imperial girls don’t care at all for Dmitri’, she insisted.29 But how she pitied them:

shut up at Zarskoe, never even allowed to come to the theatre, not one single amusement the whole winter. Of course Alix would not allow them to come to Aunt Miechen’s [Grand Duchess Vladimir’s] ball, they are only granted a Sunday afternoon at Olga’s where they play des petits jeux [little games] with officers: now why this is considered convenable [appropriate] is a real puzzle to us all as Olga is a tomboy without any manners and her surroundings always second rate. She never sees the real society because it bores her to put on better manners.30

Indeed the duchess talked of how offended Maria Feodorovna was that her granddaughters spent so little time with her when in St Petersburg, preferring to pass their Sundays ‘under the sole chaperonage of that madcap [aunt] Olga … for dinner and romps with the officers’. How ironic that a mother so scrupulous about her daughters’ sense of propriety should allow them the ‘greatest intimacy’ with these young men, unsupervised, and ‘in perfect independence without a lady to look after them’.31 The duchess was anxious to prepare her daughter for what she considered a degree of difficulty when the Romanians arrived: ‘People who think they know all have decided that Carol intends marrying Tatiana, not Olga, as the eldest could not be missed by her parents, being a great help to them and would remain in Russia.’32

The Crimea would have seemed the far more logical location for a first meeting, being only a short journey across the Black Sea from Romania, but the duchess assured Marie that the Romanovs would not invite them there. In Livadia ‘the acquaintance would have been hopeless as the naval favourites would laugh into ridicule every prince that would come with matrimonial intentions’. The duchess was deeply disapproving of the girls’ familiarity with the officers of the Shtandart, which she considered totally infra dig: ‘Each girl, the big ones like the small ones, have their favourites, qui leur font la cour [who pay court to them] and Alix not only allows it but finds it natural and amusing.’33 This particularly troubled the duchess’s rigid sense of comme il faut. Despite the fact that ‘Olga and Tatiana are very well educated’, as well as being ‘gay, natural and amiable’, she felt they were entirely lacking in the sophisticated social skills of the kind needed by any young woman marrying into a royal court. ‘You must put away all our ideas of imperial young ladies’, she told her daughter. ‘As they have now no governess, no lady, they cannot be taught any manners, they have never paid me a visit and I really don’t know them at all.’ Even their aunts Xenia and Olga had at least been ‘allowed to go out and never had any intimacy with officers’.34

There was one other important topic that did not pass without comment – haemophilia. The duchess had clearly been checking the lie of the land in this regard ahead of her daughter’s visit: ‘What can I find out about inheriting that sad illness? We all know that it can be propagated, but the children can also escape. I can only quote Uncle Leopold’s two children who never had it but Alice’s boys inherited it.’* It was, as the duchess concluded, ‘a mere chance, but one is never sure. The risk is there always.’35 Such comments beg the question of whether other royal houses had by now considered and rejected the Romanov daughters as prospective brides, for fear of haemophilia being brought into their families. And then there was the prospect of union with a country as politically unstable as Russia. The duchess’s letters to her daughter that January and February are full of foreboding about the future of the country, with a tsar too timid to spend time with anyone beyond his family circle and a tsaritsa stubbornly isolated from society through a combination of perverted choice and physical incapacity, hiding herself away with her only two friends – her ‘false prophet’ and Anna Vyrubova. The duchess sensed a ‘despair and hopelessness’ in St Petersburg so great that ‘people are panting with fear and anxiety of it all’. She was longing to get away – ‘the heavy moral atmosphere simply kills me’.36 Nevertheless she had tried to have a private word with Nicholas and Alexandra about the possible engagement. ‘What shall I say? Do I think it very hopeful? They seem to wish it but Alix is so strange and I have not the slightest idea what she wishes about her daughters.’ The duchess had long since given up on her, and now thought the tsaritsa ‘absolutely mad’.37

On 15 March 1914 Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, his wife Marie and their son Carol arrived in St Petersburg and were installed in the west wing of the Alexander Palace. That same day, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna officially completed her ten-year period of studies. Her final exams had covered the history of the Orthodox Church; Russian language (dictation, composition and answers on the history of Russian words); general and Russian history; geography and three foreign languages – English, French and German, with dictation and composition in each. (All these subjects had been taught at home; for physics lessons she and her sisters had gone to the Nicholas II Practical Institute in Tsarskoe Selo.)38 In all of them Olga had received top marks, although she had struggled with English composition and German dictation. ‘An average of 5 [out of marks 1 to 5],’ she noted in her diary. ‘Mama was pleased.’39

During the week of the Romanian visit she acted as escort to her second cousin Karlusha – as she referred to him (a somewhat belittling, Russian diminutive form of Carol’s name). She seemed unimpressed with his shock of blond hair, sticky-out ears and bulbous blue eyes – the latter an unmistakable Hanoverian trait inherited from his English grandfather Alfred. Nevertheless Olga dutifully went everywhere with him: to church, for walks round the park, dinner with Grandmama at the Anichkov and a ball at the exclusive Smolny Girls Institute. She smiled and chatted and went through the motions (in so doing giving the lie to the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg’s insistence that she had no social graces) but revealed nothing. A young secretary at the Romanian legation noted during the first day of the visit: ‘The Imperial Family retired rather early to their chambers, with the daughters casting short and anxious glances at Carol. I found out later that they had not liked him.’40 The gossips still insisted that Olga was not the object of Carol’s interests. An American diplomat heard tell that he was actually ‘trying to get Tatiana, but Olga must go first’.41 In the event the two sets of parents were disappointed at the negative outcome but were not quite ready to give up. They agreed that the Russians would reciprocate with a visit to Constanza in June to enable the young couple to take a second look at each other. The Russian press made no comment on a possible marriage, but in London The Times put it eloquently into perspective: ‘The view propounded in official quarters is that Russia would like to see Rumania as free to choose her friendships as Prince Carol and the Grand Duchess Olga are to follow the inclinations of their hearts.’42

Three days later, with a sigh of relief, the Romanovs boarded the imperial train for the south and Easter in Livadia. On board the Shtandart that year (and contrary to what the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg had heard) there had been a distinct shift in the attitude of the crew to the now teenage Romanov sisters. Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted in particular how Olga had ‘turned into a real lady’. On the Shtandart, like everywhere else, the officers had begun discussing the future marriages of the sisters and had come to ‘a kind of unspoken agreement … to conduct themselves with these charming Grand Duchesses no longer as juveniles or little girls’.43 Sablin was fully aware that the older two sisters ‘preferred the company of certain officers to that of others’ – no doubt an allusion to the favouritism for Rodionov and the now departed Voronov. But the former relationship the men had had with the sisters was now ‘inadmissable’: ‘We had to remember they were the daughters of the tsar.’ These were not the same little girls they had first encountered seven years previously, and they must all ensure that they behaved punctiliously, as officers and gentlemen. They did, however, gently tease the sisters, telling them ‘that they would soon be brides and leave us’. In response the girls had laughed and promised that they would ‘never marry foreigners and leave their beloved homeland’.44 Sablin thought this was wishful thinking; for since when, he asked, had royal brides ever had freedom of choice? In this respect, however, he was most certainly wrong.

The men in the Shtandart were not the only ones to notice how the Romanov sisters were all becoming beautiful young women that last hot summer before the war. Visiting Count Nostitz’s estate near Yalta one day, they were taken by the countess to feed the black swans on the lake: ‘I thought how lovely they looked as they flitted in and out among the flower-beds in their light summer dresses, like so many flowers themselves’, she recalled.45 At a ball at the White Palace shortly afterwards the sisters enjoyed another magical Crimean evening, when ‘a great golden moon hung low over the dark ruffled waters of the Black Sea, gilding the silhouettes of the tall cypress trees’.

From the ball-room behind us came the dreamy lilt of a Viennese waltz, the light laughter of the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, their merry eyes sparkling with pleasure, as they drifted past the open windows, dancing with Jean Woroniecki and Jack de Lalaing.*46

It was a perfect picture-book image; but it would be the girls’ last ball in their beloved Crimea.

With the visit to Constanza imminent, Nicholas walked over to visit Grand Duchess George at Harax one last time before leaving, ‘escaping from the horde of detectives and his bodyguard by taking the mountain paths’. As the duchess’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de Stoeckl stood with him looking out over the sea in the still of the Crimean evening, he turned to her: ‘We are in June now,’ he said, ‘we have had two very happy months, we must repeat them … Let us make a pact we all meet here again on 1 October.’47 And then after a pause he added, ‘more slowly, rather seriously’ – ‘After all, in this life we do not know what lies before us.’48

Alexandra too was privately expressing her apprehensions about what might be to come. During a discussion she had with Sergey Sazonov on the balcony of the White Palace before they left for Constanza, she spoke of the possible political repercussions of high-profile dynastic matches and the responsibilities her girls would have to take on. ‘I think with terror … that the time draws near when I shall have to part with my daughters’, she told him.

I could desire nothing better than they should remain in Russia after their marriage. But I have four daughters, and it is, of course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never in the position my daughters occupy … The Emperor will have to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond that.49

Privately, although Sazonov had been bullish about the desirability of the Romanian match, saying that ‘It’s not every day that an Orthodox Hohenzollern comes along’, Olga was already very clear in her mind, even before they had set sail. ‘I will never leave Russia’, she told her friends in the Shtandart, and she said as much to Pierre Gilliard too.50 She was adamant that she did not want to be a queen or princess in some foreign court. ‘I’m a Russian, and mean to remain a Russian!’

On 1 June the Romanovs sailed from Yalta across the Black Sea to Romania. It was a glorious sunny day, ‘smiling, windless and yet not too hot, a day of rare beauty’, when the Shtandart steamed into view at Constanza escorted by the Polyarnaya Zvezda, like ‘two marvelous Chinese toys of laquer, black and gold’.51 Waiting on the quayside, the Romanian royal family caught sight of Nicholas on deck, ‘a little white figure’ and his wife ‘very tall and dominat[ing] her family as a solitary poplar dominates the garden’. As for the girls, it was the same bland, collective view: ‘four light dresses, four gay summer hats’.52

As they disembarked, the Romanovs were greeted by a fanfare of guns, flags, hurrahs, military bands and a warm welcome from King Carol and Queen Elizabeth, their son Crown Prince Ferdinand, his wife Marie and their children. Crown Princess Marie later wrote to her mother about their ‘great Russian day’, which had been an intensive fourteen hours of church service at the cathedral, family luncheon in a pavilion, high tea in the Shtandart, a military review, a gala banquet and speeches in the evening. ‘From the first we all had a pleasant surprise, and that was Alix’, Marie told her mother. ‘She took part in everything except the parade and tried to smile and was anyhow very amiable.’53

Marthe Bibesco, a close friend of the Romanian royal family, saw it rather differently: the empress’s eyes, she recalled, ‘looked as if they had seen all the sorrow of the world and when she smiled … her smile had been one of ineffable sadness, like those smiles which play on the faces of the sick and the dying’.54 As for the four sisters, they were ‘sweet’, and sat patiently through it all, Olga answering all Carol’s questions as politely as she could. But her sisters, as Pierre Gilliard noticed, had ‘found it none too easy to conceal their boredom’ and ‘lost no chances of leaning towards me and indicating their sister with a sly wink’.55

There was one thing, however, about the tsar’s otherwise charming daughters that alarmed the Romanian party. Having come straight from endless sunny days in Livadia ‘they were baked brown as nuts by the sun and were not looking their best’.56 Sad to say, as Crown Princess Marie told her mother, they ‘were not found very pretty’.57 Marthe Bibesco went so far as to say that their unfashionably sunburnt faces made them as ‘ugly as those of peasant women’.58 The consensus was that the Romanov sisters were ‘much less pretty than their photographs had led us to suppose’.59 Olga’s face ‘was too broad, her cheek-bones too high’, thought Marie, though she liked her ‘open, somewhat brusque way’. Tatiana she found handsome but reserved; Maria was pleasant but plump though with ‘very fine eyes’; and Anastasia’s looks did not register with her at all, though she noticed how ‘watchful’ she was.60 The girls seemed doomed to be unremarkable in the eyes of the Romanian court, although they could not be faulted for their solicitous care of their bored and rather petulant brother, with his face marked by ‘a precocious gravity’. In taking the strain off their mother by entertaining and amusing Alexey throughout the day, the four sisters had remained ‘a clan apart’ from their Romanian cousins, and the presence of Alexey’s shadow Derevenko reminded everyone ‘of the horrible truth about this child’.61

Although Olga had, for obvious reasons, been ‘the centre of all eyes’, Carol had seemed to his mother to be ‘not particularly attentive’ to any of the girls; later it was said that he was ‘not enamoured of Olga’s broad, plain face and brusque manner’.62 Certainly, neither he nor Olga showed any desire whatsoever in ‘becoming more closely acquainted’.63 Indeed, all four girls had shown far more interest in Carol’s six-month-old baby brother Mircea, whom Olga had dandled on her knee in official photographs taken that day. In the end, the lasting impression left by the imperial family’s visit to Constanza had been not of the girls, but the extraordinary proficiency with which the mischievous tsarevich had, at lunch, sat teaching two of the Romanian children, Prince Nicolas and Princess Ileana, how to spit grape pips into a lemonade bowl in the middle of the dining table.64

During the Romanians’ earlier visit to St Petersburg Marie and Alexandra had already had a private word and had agreed then that ‘neither of us could make any promises in the name of our children, that they must decide for themselves’.65 Faced with an inconclusive outcome to this second meeting, they parted with a smile; they had done their duty, but the rest ‘was in the hands of Fate’. The two families took a final drive through the streets of Constanza to displays of fireworks and a torchlight procession, but as they waved goodbye at midnight it seemed highly unlikely that the ‘spark of love [would] be lighted between these two’.*66

It was only after the imperial family had left Constanza that Marthe Bibesco heard that the girls had, all along, had a secret plan to subvert the entire exercise. They had ‘decided … to make themselves as ugly as they could’ by soaking up the sun, hatless, on the journey from Livadia, ‘so that Carol should not fall in love with any of them’.67

The Romanov family arrived back at Tsarskoe Selo on 5 June, in time for Anastasia’s thirteenth birthday; it was followed by a visit from the First British Battle-Cruiser Squadron commanded by Sir David Beatty, an important mission intended to further bolster the entente cordiale. The squadron arrived at Kronstadt Island on Monday 9 June to a gun salute from Russian destroyers, thousands of pleasure boats with flags flying, and crowds of cheering Russians thronging the quayside opposite. For the British diplomatic community in St Petersburg ‘a week of feverish gaiety’ followed, during which Meriel Buchanan admitted to never getting to bed before 3 a.m.68 The tsar entertained Admiral Beatty and his officers to lunch at Peterhof, and at a garden party at the summer villa of Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich at Tsarskoe Selo the girls all plied the British officers with questions. The inquisitive Anastasia was the most demanding; ‘her childish voice rang out above the hum of conversation’, recalled Meriel. ‘You will take me up into your conning tower,’ she implored, and added mischievously, ‘Couldn’t you let off one of the guns and just pretend it was a mistake?’69

Among the young officers on board one of the British ships, the New Zealand, was young Prince George of Battenberg, Alexandra’s nephew, whose brother Dickie had taken a shine to Maria during the family’s visit to Nauheim in 1910. Georgie came to stay with his cousins at Tsarskoe Selo during which time the officers of the Shtandart thought he paid a lot of attention to Tatiana, with whom he agreed to exchange letters.70 On the last day of the squadron’s official visit, 14 June, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies, the imperial family returned the admiral’s visit, dining on board HMS Lion, after which the girls were shown round ‘every corner’ of the ship by four eager young midshipmen who had been specially chosen by him. One of them, Harold Tennyson, remembered the thrill and honour: ‘I showed round Princess Olga, who is extraordinarily pretty and most amusing.’ She and her sisters were ‘the most cheery and pretty quartette I have met for some time, and roared with laughter and made jokes the whole time’. ‘If only they were not Princesses,’ he confided rather ruefully in a letter home, ‘I should not mind getting off with one!’*71

By the end of the afternoon the crew of the Lion were totally captivated by the Romanov sisters: they ‘could talk of nothing but the Emperor’s daughters, their beauty, their charm, their gaiety, the unaffected simplicity and ease of their manners’.72 A farewell ball for 700 guests was to be held later that evening on board the Lion and New Zealand specially roped together for the purpose, but much to the visitors’ dismay Alexandra refused to allow her daughters to attend. Meriel Buchanan noticed a look of ‘wistful regret’ on the faces of the British officers as they said goodbye to the four Romanov sisters. The girls, as always, accepted their mother’s decision ‘without demur or argument’, though they had looked a little ‘crestfallen’ and when Olga boarded the imperial launch taking them back to Peterhof ‘she looked back at the big grey ship, and waved her hand to the officers standing to attention on deck’. She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.73 It was a moment that, decades later, Meriel Buchanan would recall with an intense regret tinged by hindsight: ‘Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer afternoon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something far away.’74

On 15 June (28 NS), news came of the assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian nationalist. Nicholas made no mention of it in his diary: political assassination of this kind was a fact of everyday life in Russia and the potential significance of the act was made little of at first. Far more important was the family’s imminent holiday among the Finnish skerries in the Shtandart. But it was rather subdued, Alexey having hurt his leg jumping on board and being once more laid up. At the end of the trip Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova that she sensed that the family’s wonderful days in Finland were over and that they ‘would never again be together on the Shtandart’, though they hoped to be back on board in the autumn when they planned to visit Livadia, the doctors having recommended that Alexey and his mother both needed ‘sunshine and a dry climate’.75

The family was back at the Lower Dacha at Peterhof on 7 July in time to greet the French president Raymond Poincaré on a four-day visit. The highlight was a review of the Guards at Krasnoe Selo, led by Nicholas on his favourite white horse, accompanied by all the Russian grand dukes, and with Alexandra and the children in open carriages also drawn by white horses. It would prove to be the last great parade of Russian imperial military glory: two days after the French president left, Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia and on 15 July (28 NS) it declared war. Historically Russia had a duty to defend the Serbs as fellow Slavs and war now seemed inevitable. In between urgent meetings with ministers Nicholas, who remembered the debacle of the war with Japan and dreaded the prospect of hostilities, exchanged urgent messages with his German cousin Willy. ‘With the aid of God it must be possible for our long-tried friendship to prevent the shedding of blood’, he telegraphed.76 Meanwhile he reluctantly capitulated to his General Staff and sanctioned general mobilization, bringing a 600,000-strong Russian army onto a war footing. This provoked an aggressive response from Germany, now rallying to the support of Austria-Hungary. Final, frantic attempts at diplomatic mediation were made in this ‘time of great anguish’, during which Alexandra sent a desolate telegram to Ernie in Hesse: ‘God help us all and prevent bloodshed.’ She had, of course, also sought Grigory’s wise counsel. He had been horrified at the prospect of war and had repeatedly begged her and Nicholas: ‘the war must be stopped – war must not be declared; it will be the finish of all things.’77

On the evening of 19 July (1 August NS in Europe) Nicholas, Alexandra, Aunt Olga and the children went to church to pray. They had not long returned and were sitting down to dinner when Count Freedericksz arrived with formal notice, handed to him by the German ambassador in St Petersburg: Germany was at war with Russia. ‘On learning the news the Tsarina began to weep,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, ‘and the Grand Duchesses likewise dissolved into tears on seeing their mother’s distress.’78 ‘Skoty! [Swine!]’ wrote Tatiana of the Germans in her diary that evening.79 The following day, 20 July (2 August NS), was scorching hot. In anticipation of the imminent Russian declaration of war, people crowded the streets of St Petersburg as they had in 1904, parading with icons and singing the national anthem. The news spread like wildfire: ‘women threw jewels into a collection made for Reservists’ families’, reported the correspondent of The Times.80 At 11.30 a.m. about 50,000 people surrounded the British Embassy singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.81 Church bells rang out constantly, all day long. The whole city was one huge traffic jam of motor cars and droshkies and full of people shouting and singing and waving ‘cheaply printed portraits of the beloved “Little Father”’.82 The shop windows too were full of Nicholas’s portrait ‘and the veneration was so deep that men lifted their hats and women – even well-dressed elegant ladies – made the sign of the cross as they passed it’.83 In the afternoon, Nicholas wearing field marshal’s uniform, and Alexandra and the girls all in white, arrived in the capital in the Aleksandriya. Alexey, who was still recovering from his latest accident, had had to be left behind. From the royal landing stage at the Palace Bridge, the imperial family walked the short distance to the Winter Palace through crowds of people who fell onto their knees shouting hurrahs, singing hymns and calling out blessings to Nicholas.84 ‘Kostroma last year is nothing to this,’ said one eyewitness, ‘they’ll lay down their lives for him.’85

At 3 p.m., after a gun salute had thundered out across the city, some 5,000 court officials, military and members of the aristocracy gathered in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace for a solemn and intensely moving Te Deum, sung in front of the talismanic icon of the Virgin of Kazan. This was the same icon Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov had prayed to in August 1812 before leaving for Smolensk to take on Napoleon, who had just invaded Russia. During the service Nicholas ‘prayed with a holy fervor which gave his pale face a movingly mystical expression’, noted the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, while Alexandra stood, characteristically tight-lipped, by his side.86 The assembled crowd ‘all looked tremendously tense and alive, as if gathering up their strength to offer it collectively to their ruler’.87 ‘Faces were strained and grave’, recalled Maria Pavlovna. ‘Hands in long white gloves nervously crumpled handkerchiefs and under the large hats fashionable at the time many eyes were red with crying’. After the service, the court chaplain read out the manifesto declaring that Russia was at war with Germany, after which Nicholas raised his right hand in front of the gospel and announced: ‘We will not make peace until the last man and the last horse of the enemy shall have left our soil.’88 Immediately afterwards, ‘quite spontaneously, from some 5,000 throats broke forth the national anthem, which was not less beautiful because the voices choked with emotion. Then cheer upon cheer came, until the walls rang with their echo!’89

The tsar and tsaritsa then processed out. Nicholas’s face was a blank; Alexandra more than ever looked like ‘a Madonna of Sorrows, with tears on her cheeks’ and stooped to console people as she passed; others fell on their knees or tried to grasp at Nicholas and kiss his hand. When he emerged on the balcony overlooking Palace Square, a vast crowd of around 250,000 people who had been patiently waiting ‘quiet, with faces grave and rapt’ knelt down ‘as one’ ‘in mute adoration’.90 Nicholas made the sign of the cross and brought Alexandra forward to greet them, after which he and she retreated inside. But the crowd did not want to let them go: ‘Each time that the sovereigns left the balcony the people clamoured for their reappearance with loud hurrahs and sang God Save the Tsar.’91

The day had been ‘absolutely wonderful’, Tatiana later wrote in her diary, but that evening for once there were no games of dominoes for Nicholas, and no reading aloud to his family.92 Returning to Peterhof at 7.15, they all spent it ‘quietly’.93 The next morning, central St Petersburg seemed like a ghost town. The magnet of everyone’s attention was now the railway stations as column after column of troops marched in great lines towards them singing popular Russian folk songs, waving their khaki caps and leaving behind a trail of sobbing women and children.94 On 22 July (4 August NS) Russia’s ally Great Britain declared war on Germany, upon which Nicky received a telegram from the king, his cousin Georgie. They both were fighting ‘for justice and right’, he said, and he hoped ‘this horrible war will soon be over’. In the meantime, ‘God bless and protect you my dear Nicky … Ever your very devoted cousin and friend.’95

In those first heady days of July–August 1914 Russia was gripped by a consuming, almost feudal sense of nationhood that harked back to the old Mother Russia of legend. ‘It seemed as if the Tsar and his people embraced each other strongly, and in this embrace stood before the great Russian land’, declared Novoe vremya in suitably jingoistic terms.96 The declaration of war was a fitting coda to all the ceremonial of the previous year’s Tercentary. ‘We believe unshakeably that all our faithful subjects will rise with unanimity and devotion for the defence of Russian soil’, Nicholas had declared in his manifesto, adding the hope that ‘internal discord will be forgotten in this threatening hour, that the unity of the Tsar with his people will become still more close’.97

The capital might have been gripped by intensely felt patriotism of a kind that every Russian knew from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but in the countryside most of the peasants were resigned rather than enthusiastic, knowing full well that the burden of the war effort would fall on them, as it had always done. Rasputin was in despair that his warning had gone unheeded and that he had not had the opportunity to persuade Nicholas, in person, against going to war.* The words of a telegram he had sent in the final days before war was declared have, ever since, been seen as prophetic:

There is a terrible storm cloud over Russia: calamity, much grief, no ray of light, an incalculable ocean of tears, and as for blood – what can I say? There are no words, just an indescribable horror. I know they all want war from you, even those who are loyal, but without knowing that the price is destruction … Everything will be drowned in much blood.98

There remained one final grandiose public act of ceremonial for the Romanov family to perform – in Russia’s historic capital, Moscow, on 5 August. The imperial court and the diplomatic community took the 444-mile (714.5-km) train journey south for what seemed to British ambassador Sir George Buchanan an occasion where ‘the heart of Russia voiced the feelings of the whole nation’.99 At the Kremlin on their way to the Te Deum at the Uspensky Cathedral, the tsar and tsaritsa walked in procession, followed by their daughters. Meriel Buchanan thought they seemed ‘a little subdued and grave, their faces pale’; Olga in particular had had ‘a rapt expression on her face’; Maria had been in tears and Meriel noticed how ‘Anastasia turned to her now and then with a little admonishing word’.100 Much to his parents’ despair, Alexey had once more had to be carried. Now, more than ever, the heir to the Russian throne needed to be perceived as fit and well.

In a speech he made that day, Nicholas emphasized that the conflict embraced all Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire: this war would be nothing less than a defence of Slavdom against the Teutons. Sir George Buchanan was impressed by the power of the religious ceremony inside the Uspensky, which was ‘beautiful and impressive beyond description’:

The long line of archbishops and bishops, in their vestments of gold brocade, their mitres sparkling with precious stones; the frescoes on the walls, with their golden background; the jewelled icons – all lent colour and brilliancy to the picture presented by the glorious old cathedral.As soon as we had taken our places behind the imperial family the deep bass voice of a priest was heard chanting the opening passages of the liturgy, and then the choir, joining in, flooded the church with harmony as it intoned the psalms and hymns of the Orthodox ritual. As the service was nearing its close the Emperor and Empress, followed by the Grand Duchesses, went the round of the church, kneeling in deep devotion before each of its shrines or kissing some specially sacred icon presented them by the Metropolitan.

As he drove away with Maurice Paléologue, Buchanan ‘could not help wondering how long this national enthusiasm would last, and what would be the feeling of the people for their “Little Father” were the war to be unduly prolonged’.101 A long and costly war of attrition against Germany and Austria-Hungary, as Nicholas well knew, would fan the flames of social unrest in Russia yet more, as it had done during the war with Japan. For Alexandra, distraught and desperately worried for her brother Ernie and his family trapped in a Germany she no longer loved or recognized, the outbreak of war ‘was the end of everything’.102 All that was left now was to beg Grigory to pray with them for peace.

War of course put paid, at a stroke, to all talk of marriage for the two eldest Romanov sisters. Nor would there be any more cruises round the Finnish skerries or holidays in the Crimean sunshine; no more idling away the long sunny days of summer chatting and laughing with their favourite officers from the Shtandart; and no more Sunday afternoon teas with Aunt Olga, for she had volunteered as a nurse and had already headed off on a hospital train to the Russian front at Kiev.

On 1 August Tatiana recorded her aunt’s departure and the usual mundane routine:

The five of us had lunch with Papa and Mama. In the afternoon we went for a walk like yesterday. Went on the swing and got caught in the rain. Had tea with Papa and Mama. We spoke on the phone to N. P. [Nikolay Sablin] and N. N. [Nikolay Rodionov] – to whom I sent my little icon to wear round his neck via N. P. The two of us had supper with Papa and Mama and Grandmother. Xenia and Sandro were there too. Then Kostya [Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich] came to say goodbye as he’s leaving for the war tomorrow with the Izmailovsk Regiment. We came back at 10.30. Papa read.103

The safe, unchallenging, insular world that the Romanov sisters had known until now was about to change dramatically.