فصل 16

Chapter Sixteen

THE OUTSIDE LIFE

By the spring of 1916 the refugee crisis in the Russian Empire had become enormous, with something like 3.3 million people, many of them Jews displaced from the Pale of Settlement, by fighting on the Eastern Front.1 With the urgent need for more refuges, orphanages and soup kitchens, Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna published a heartfelt appeal in aid of her committee in the Russian press. ‘The war has ruined and scattered millions of our peaceful citizens’, she wrote:

Homeless and breadless, the unfortunate refugees are seeking shelter throughout the land … I appeal to you, all you kind-hearted people, to help the refugee physically and morally. At the very least give him the comfort of knowing that you understand and feel for him in his boundless misery. Remember the words of our Lord: ‘I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ [Matthew, xxv: 35]2

The Tatiana Committee not only sought to provide for refugees but also to register them and reunite families separated by the fighting. In particular it worked to ensure the welfare of children – many arriving from the war zone in a pitiful state, weak from hunger and lice-ridden – by setting up orphanages and schools for them. Early in 1916 a seventh home for refugee children and their mothers was opened in Petrograd under the auspices of the committee. It was funded by Americans in the city, led by the ambassador’s wife, Mrs George Marye; later that year the Americans donated fifteen field ambulances.3 The British also collaborated, sending out a team of female nurses and doctors to staff the British Women’s Maternity Hospital in Petrograd which the Tatiana Committee was supporting to the tune of 1,000 roubles a month.4

After more than a year of war, word had spread into the foreign press of the exemplary work of the empress and her two eldest daughters. Olga and Tatiana were projected as virtuous heroines, ‘The Beautiful “White Sisters” of the War’, heading an army of ‘ministering women carrying the snow-white sign of peace and the red cross of redemption’.5 British journalist John Foster Fraser recalled how a ‘3-day Flag Day for collection for the refugees was begun with a big service in front of Kazan Cathedral’:

The idea of helping the distant war-sufferers came from the Grand Duchess Tatiana, aged seventeen … She is tall and dark and beautiful and mischievous, and the Russians adore her … When she started her fund to find bread and clothing for the people of Poland it was like the waving of a fairy wand … The appeal by their pretty princess was irresistible … It would have been difficult to find a shop window in Petrograd where there was not a large photograph of the young lady, with a softly twinkling side-glance as much as to inquire: ‘well, how much have you given?’6

Alexandra was delighted to tell Nicholas on 13 January that Tatiana’s name day ‘was celebrated in town with great fanfare. There was a concert and presentations in the theatre … Tatiana’s portrait with autograph was sold along with the programme.’7 Money raised from the sale of postcards and portraits of Tatiana was going into the fund for her committee. ‘I’ve seen elderly gentlemen sauntering along the Nevski with as long a row of little photographs of the princess across their rotund chests as the stretch of medals worn by a Petrograd policeman,’ reported John Foster Fraser, ‘and that is wonderful.’8 For others, however, the imperial family was ‘surrounded by wall after wall of isolation from the people’, wrote American Richard Washburn Child, ‘the Czarina and the four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, take some interest in charities, but otherwise are real to the Russian people only through their photographs’.9

Tatiana’s public profile nevertheless had been considerably raised by the crucial work of her committee, in comparison to Olga’s less visible role on the Supreme Council, although this undoubtedly had much to do with Olga’s continuing ill health. Their mother too had been absent from meetings in Petrograd as well as the annexe hospital since before Christmas. She spent most of January and February suffering from a recurrence of excruciating neuralgia and toothache, as well as problems with her ‘enlarged’ heart, which left her ‘constantly in tears’ from the pain.10 Dr Botkin gave her electrotherapy treatment for the neuralgia and her dentist visited numerous times, while Alexandra continued to dose herself on a wide range of proprietary medicines, including opium and ‘Adonis and other drops to quieten the heartbeating’.11 Anastasia had bronchitis and Alexey was also unwell, with pain in his arms from going out sledging. ‘Both arms are bandaged & the right ached rather yesterday’, Alexandra told Nicholas. Grigory had, since Anna’s accident the previous year, been constantly on hand to pray and offer sage advice and told her Alexey’s pain would ‘pass in two days’.12 Rasputin’s increased influence over the empress in her husband’s absence, and his now constant whisperings on matters military and political in Alexandra’s ear, had been fanning the flames of gossip even more of late. ‘The hatred grows not by the day but by the hour,’ recorded an anxious Valentina Chebotareva, ‘and transmits itself to our poor unfortunate girls. People think them of the same mind as their mother.’13

For Tatiana and Olga, life continued on its narrow, repetitive course. The foreign press might be reminding their readers that behind the wartime nurse’s wimple, they were still considered ‘the most beautiful children of royalty in Europe’ as it speculated yet again on marital alliances with the Balkan states, but for Olga thoughts of love were still very firmly rooted in her own backyard.14 Mitya Shakh-Bagov had recovered and was to leave the hospital in early January and she was taking the prospect of his second departure very hard. ‘Olga has a tragic look once more’, Valentina was sad to record. Part of it, she felt, was in response to the gossip about her mother and Rasputin. There was about her such ‘terrible suppressed suffering’:

Perhaps the imminent departure of Shakh-Bagov is adding to it – her trusty knight is leaving. He really is a fine fellow. He venerates her, like a sacred object. ‘Olga Nikolaevna only need tell me that she finds Grigory disgusting, and he’d be dead the next day – I’d kill him’.15

Valentina felt that Mitya’s instincts were ‘primitive’, but he was an ‘honest man’. Tatiana meanwhile remained hard-working, self-effacing and ‘touchingly gentle’. ‘Everything is the same as ever here,’ she told her father in February, ‘nothing new.’16 When she came to the hospital one evening to help sterilize the instruments and boil the silk thread she ‘sat on her own in fumes of carbolic’, recalled Valentina. When, on another occasion, Valentina had tried to relieve her of this task in advance, ‘She caught me out. “Tell me please, what’s the hurry!… If you can breathe in the carbolic, why can’t I?”17 Such were her proven capabilities as a nurse that by the autumn Tatiana was being allowed to administer the chloroform in operations. But while she remained steadfast, her still frail and increasingly melancholic sister was sinking into a depression. ‘Olga assures [me] that she thinks she will remain a spinster’, Valentina noted, even though she and Shakh-Bagov ‘had been reading each other’s palms and he had prophesied she would have twelve children’. Tatiana’s hand was ‘interesting’: ‘the line of fate is suddenly interrupted and makes a sharp turn sideways. They assure her that she will do something unusual.’18 For the time being, however, Tatiana’s day was filled with responsibility – at home and at the hospital – allowing her little or no time to herself. On 16 January she recorded a typical day:

German lesson in the morning. At 10 o’clock went to the hospital. Dressed the wounds of Rogal of 149th Chernomorsk regiment, wound in skull, Gaiduk of 7th Samogitsk Grenadiers regiment, wound in left thigh, Martynov of the 74th Stavropol regiment, wound in left thigh, Shchetinin of the 31st Tomsk regiment, wound in left thigh, Melnik of the 17th Arkhangelsk regiment, wound in the right forearm, wound in right lower ribcage, Arkhipov of the 149th Chernomorsk regiment, wound in right hand with the loss of the fourth and fifth fingers, wound in right thigh. Then Bleish, Sergeyev, Chaikovsky, Ksifilinov, Martynov, Emelyanov – only superficial wounds. Then at 12 went upstairs with Valentina Ivanovna to the soldiers’ ward to change Popov’s dressings. Under anaesthetic. His kidney was removed. Then went back and went to see Tuznikov. Had lunch and drank tea with mama. Then had a history lesson. The four of us went for a troika ride with Iza. Then we were at the Big Palace for a concert. Then to vespers. Had supper with mama and Anna. Then Nikolay Pavlovich [Sablin] arrived. We said farewell to him as tomorrow he is going to join his battalion, in the army.19

With their mother out of action it devolved to Olga and Tatiana on 19 January to attend an important function on her behalf in town, along with their grandmother as surrogate – the official opening ceremony of the Anglo-Russian Hospital. This had been set up in Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace on the corner of the Fontanka by the Anichkov Bridge – he having given it over to use as a wartime hospital – and provided 188 beds and had its own operating theatre, bandaging room, lab and X-ray facilities. Supplies were sent out from England by Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild and the War Hospital Supply Depot, and its eight doctors and thirty nurses were British and Canadian volunteers. One of them, Enid Stoker (a niece of the novelist Bram Stoker), recalled their preparations for the opening:

the hospital was cleaned and polished to the last degree and looked lovely with big pots of flowers and palms and all its own beautiful carving and marble … by 2.30 we were all standing in there dressed up to the nines in starched everythings … Then we heard a crowd moving slowly up the stairs, and a small dowdy woman in black, like a plain edition of Alexandra – (the Empress sister of our own queen) but with a very sweet expression – came in. The two little princesses, Olga and Tatiana, looked charming and so pretty in little ermine hats with white ospreys in them and little low-necked rose-coloured frocks and ermine furs and muffs.20

Everyone at the hospital remarked on how attractive the Romanov girls were. Olga put on a good show of being cheerful and friendly. Enid thought her ‘the prettiest and really lovely’, adding that the sisters had been ‘so jolly-looking and natural’. Other members of the family would visit the hospital later, Enid Stoker remembering the arrival of Anastasia ‘with her hair down her back and an Alice in Wonderland comb’, and one ‘unforgettable’ day when the ‘little Czarevitch’ came – ‘one of the most beautiful children I ever saw’.21 Meriel Buchanan noted a similar response when Olga and Tatiana visited the English Colony Hospital run by her mother, where they toured the wards and talked to the patients, ‘Olga often making them laugh with her whimsical merriment, her sister talking to them gently, but with a greater reserve. How kind they were, the soldiers told me afterwards, how lovely they looked.’22 An appearance in civilian clothes was a rarity these days for the older Romanov sisters and for their mother too, so much so that people were taken aback when they saw them out of nurses’ uniform. One Sunday morning on the way to church they ‘went for half an hour to bid all good morning in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas and ‘Like Babies they all stared at us in “dresses and hats” and looked at our rings and bracelets (the ladies too) and we felt shy and [like] “guests”’.23

A French journalist who had been granted the rare privilege of meeting Alexandra and the girls at their hospital remarked in 1916 that there was ‘something of the serenity of the mystic about Olga Nikolaevna’.24 It was a trait that perhaps more than anything defined her Russianness and one that became more pronounced as the war went on. Olga seemed more and more lost in her own private thoughts about the kind of life, and love, that she longed for. One day at the hospital, she had confided to Valentina her personal ‘dreams of happiness’: ‘To get married, live always in the countryside winter and summer, always mix with good people, and no officialdom whatsoever.’25 She would no doubt therefore have been horrified to know that Grand Duchess Vladimir had recently approached her mother suggesting that Olga should marry her thirty-eight-year-old son Boris. It hadn’t surprised Alexandra, for the grand duchess’s ‘ambition to get [Boris] nearest to the throne is well known’.26 ‘The idea of Boris is too unsympathetic & the child would, I feel convinced, never agree to marry him and I should perfectly well understand her’, she wrote to Nicholas at Stavka, intimating that ‘other thoughts have filled the child’s head and heart’ – a possible allusion to her daughter’s feelings for Mitya Shakh-Bagov of which she must, surely, have been aware. ‘Those are a young girl’s holy secrets wh[ich] others must not know of’, she insisted. ‘It would terribly hurt Olga, who is so susceptible.’27

As for Boris: to ‘give over a well used half worn out, blasé young man to a pure, fresh girl, 18 years his junior, & to live in a house in which many a woman has “shared” his life … An inexperienced girl would suffer terribly, to have her husband 4th, 5th hand or more.’28 The suggestion of Boris as a husband had been an all too painful reminder of the bad company Dmitri Pavlovich – the husband they had once hoped for for Olga – had slipped into of late. As far as Alexandra was concerned, Dmitri was now well and truly out of the frame: ‘he is a boy without any caracter [sic] and can be lead by anybody.’29 He was currently back in Petrograd pleading poor health, but ‘doing no work and drinking constantly’. Alexandra wanted Nicholas to order him back to his regiment. ‘Town and women are poison for him.’

One who might well have fitted the bill for Tatiana, had he been higher-born, was ‘my little Malama’, as Alexandra described him, for he was back in town. Many of the Russian cavalry regiments such as Dmitri’s had been decimated in eastern Prussia; left with no regiment to transfer to, he had been appointed an equerry at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra, who seemed to have a special affection for him, invited him to tea. ‘We had not seen him for 1½ years’, she told Nicky. ‘Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still. I must say, a perfect son in law he w[ou]ld have been.’ Ah, there was the rub. ‘Why are foreign P[rin]ces not as nice!’ she added. As circumspect as ever, Tatiana did not confide her thoughts on Dmitri Malama’s return to either her diary or any letters.*30 Her sister by contrast made her own feelings all too clear, when, out of the blue, a letter arrived from Mitya: ‘Olga Nikolaevna in ecstasy, threw all her things around’, recalled Valentina: ‘She was on fire and jumping up and down: “Is it possible to have a heart attack at 20? I think I might just have one.”’31 The massages Olga was having in the mornings to help her mood swings did not seem to be having much effect. They were as pronounced as ever: Olga was ‘grumpy, sleepy, angry’ all the time, Alexandra complained to Nicholas in April, and ‘makes everything more difficult by her [ill] humour’.32

While their older sisters were preoccupied at the annexe, Maria and Anastasia continued to watch over their own wounded at Fedorovsky Gorodok. Anastasia was now the proud honorary Commander-in-Chief of her own regiment, the 148th Caspian Infantry, gifted to her by her father just before her 14th birthday. Soon she was proudly writing to Nicholas at Stavka, signing herself ‘Nastaska the Caspian’.33 Sadly, she and Maria found themselves increasingly visiting the graves of those who had died; ‘we are constantly having offices for the dead nowadays’, Maria told Nicholas in August. Back in March, in a long and delightfully animated letter, she had described her own attempts, in deep snow and treacherous conditions, to find a couple of graves in the military cemetery of men from the lower ranks:

It took an incredibly long time to get there because the roads were extremely bad … The snow was piled up very high on the side of the road, so that it was a job getting through it on my knees and from there jumping down. The snow there turned out to be above my knees, and although I had big boots on, I was already wet, but I decided all the same to go further. And not much further on I found a grave with the name Mishchenko, one of our wounded. I laid some flowers on it and went further and suddenly I saw the same name again. I looked at the marker to see what regiment he was and it turned out that this one was our wounded man and not the other. Well I laid flowers there too and had just managed to move forward when I fell on my back, and lay there spread-eagled and almost for a minute couldn’t get up as there was so much snow that I couldn’t put my hand down on the ground in order to brace myself.34

Anastasia and Tatiana meanwhile had gone off to another part of the cemetery to visit the grave of Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting Sonia Orbeliani, who had died the previous December, leaving Maria with the cemetery caretaker to find the other grave she was searching for, which turned out to be near to the cemetery fence. To get there

we’d have to climb across a ditch. He stood in the ditch and said to me: ‘I will lift you over’. I said: ‘No’. He said: ‘Let’s try’. He did not of course manage to lift me to the other side, but dropped me right in the middle of the ditch. So there we both stood in the ditch, up to our tummies in snow and dying from laughter. It was very difficult for him to crawl out because the ditch was deep, and the same for me. But somehow or other he got out and then gave me his hand. I of course slipped down on my tummy back into the ditch about three more times, but at last I got myself out. And we did all this holding flowers in our hands. After that there was no way we could manage to crawl between the crosses as we both had overcoats on. But all the same, I did find the grave and at last we made it out of the cemetery.35

By March 1916 Alexandra was becoming increasingly distressed that she remained too unwell to do her war work. The strain of managing the five children on her own was also beginning to tell on her. ‘Our train is just being emptied out & Marie’s comes later in the day with very heavy wounded’, she told Nicholas on 13 March, and there she was, ‘despairing not to be able to go and meet them and work in the hospital – every hand is needed at such a time’.36 She missed her husband so terribly: ‘such utter loneliness … the children with all their love still have quite other ideas & rarely understand my way of looking at things, the smallest even – they are always right and when I say how I was brought up and how one must be, they can’t understand, find it dull.’ Dependable Tatiana, in her view, seemed to be the only one of the five with a level head on her shoulders – ‘she grasps it’. Even the compliant Maria had become moody of late – particularly when she had her period – ‘grumbles all the time and bellows at one’. Olga continued to be a problem, being ‘always most unamiable about every proposition’.37

The war clearly was getting to all of them, and so in early May the five Romanov siblings were delighted to be taken on a trip on the imperial train, back at long last to their beloved Crimea. After visiting Alexandra’s huge, forty-ward hospital for 1,000 wounded at Vinnitsa and its supply depots they travelled on to Odessa. After the obligatory church service, troop inspections and tree-planting they sailed to Sevastopol where Nicholas reviewed the Black Sea Fleet. ‘I was so terribly glad to see the sea’, Tatiana wrote in her diary.38 It was their first visit to the Crimea since 1913 but sadly they did not go back to the Livadia Palace, even though the doctors said it would be good for Alexandra’s health. ‘It was, she said, “too great a treat to indulge in during the war”.’39 The sisters made the most of being able to lie in the warm sunshine, but when the time came, ‘It was dreadfully sad to set off from the Crimea and leave the sea, the sailors and the ships’, sighed Tatiana.40 At the end of their trip, with Alexey well once more, Nicholas announced that he was taking him back to Stavka again. In August Sydney Gibbes was asked by Alexandra to join them there in order to continue with Alexey’s English lessons. Nicholas had now promoted Alexey to corporal; he was finally settling down and at last seemed to be losing his shyness with strangers.

In mid-May both David Iedigarov and Nikolay Karangozov were back at the annexe hospital, wounded again; and then, almost a year to the day since his first admittance, Mitya Shakh-Bagov returned to Tsarskoe on a visit with a fellow officer, Boris Ravtopulo.41 Olga’s spirits immediately lifted: she started coming back to the annexe in the evenings to help sterilize the instruments and sew compresses and once more played the piano for the wounded and sat talking to them in the garden on warm summer days. The sad, dejected girl of a few weeks earlier was now doing her utmost to stay as late as possible at the hospital, chatting to Mitya who often came to visit the wounded.42 Her health improved, as too did Alexandra’s. The tsaritsa resumed her work at the annexe, though she was rarely able to stand to do the bandaging or assist in operations. Instead she spent her time sitting by patients’ bedsides doing the fine embroidery at which she was so talented, and chatting to them.43 The annexe had effectively become home for all five women in the absence of Nicholas and Alexey. They missed their menfolk; it was hard to ‘be upstairs without Alexey’, Tatiana told her father. ‘Every time I pass through the dining-room at 6 p.m., I am surprised not to see the table laid for his dinner. And in general there’s very little noise now.’44 The annexe was such a huge comfort to them. ‘Yesterday we spent the evening cosily in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas on 22 May. ‘The big girls cleaned instruments with the help of Shah B. and Raftopolo [sic], the little ones chattered till 10 – I sat working and later made puzzles – altogether forgot the time and sat till 12, the Pss G [Dr Gedroits] also busy with puzzle!’45

The wounded – many very serious – were now coming thick and fast to both of the sisters’ hospitals. But sadly for Olga, Mitya Shakh-Bagov left Tsarskoe Selo on 6 June. He departed for the Caucasus with an icon she had given him.46 Valentina sympathized with the pain Olga was going through. Her attachment to Mitya was ‘so pure, naïve and without hope’, which made it so much harder to take. She found her a ‘strange, distinctive girl’ and saw how hard she was trying to bottle up her feelings: ‘When [Mitya] left the poor thing sat on her own for more than an hour, her nose buried in her sewing machine, furiously sewing away with great concentration.’ Then she suddenly became fixated on finding ‘the little penknife that Bagov had sharpened on the evening before his departure’. She searched all morning and, as Valentina recalled, ‘was beyond joy when she found it’. Everything connected with Mitya Shakh-Bagov was precious: after he left, Olga recorded every anniversary attached to his time at the hospital in her diary: when he had been wounded, when discharged, when returned, and, as Valentina noted, ‘She also treasures a page from the calendar for the 6th June – the day he left’.47

Reverting to her former morose state of mind, Olga went through the motions of fulfilling her duties at the annexe – measuring and handing out the medicines, sorting the bed linen, arranging flowers and phlegmatically noting in her brief diary entries: ‘Did the same as always. It’s boring without Mitya.’48 Day after day was much like any other, and she ‘didn’t do anything special’: maybe a walk or drive in the afternoon, sewing pillowcases at the hospital in the evening, or board games with the wounded, playing the piano and then home to bed. But as Olga wilted like a fading flower Tatiana had lost none of her vigour nor her application to duty. Nicholas, who often referred to her as his secretary, was now entrusting her, rather than Olga, with regular requests to send items such as writing paper or cigarettes out to him at Stavka. On Tatiana’s nineteenth birthday he had telegraphed Alexandra congratulating her: ‘God bless dear Tatiana and may she always remain the good, loving and patient girl she is now and a consolation in our old days.’49 Alexandra agreed; by September and once again full of aches and pains, she openly admitted to her husband ‘I do so want to get quicker well again, have more work to do and all lies upon Tatiana’s shoulders.’50

Whenever any of their favourite officers were wounded the family made special efforts to take care of their welfare. A case in point was Lieutenant Viktor Zborovsky, their old friend from the Tsar’s Escort, who was seriously wounded at the end of May 1916. Nicholas himself sent special instructions from Stavka for Zborovsky to be brought back from Novoselitsky in the Caucasus to Tsarskoe Selo. Much to Anastasia’s great joy, Vitya, as she affectionately called him, was brought to the officers’ ward of the Feodorovsky Gorodok. His arrival raised everyone’s spirits – despite the severity of his wounds. He looked ‘brown and all right,’ Alexandra told Nicky, ‘pretends he has no pains, but one sees his face twitch. He is wounded through the chest, but feels the arm.’51

His Majesty’s Own Cossack Escort, to give it its full title, was comprised of four squadrons, two of Kuban Cossacks and two of Tereks, who were distinguished wherever they went by their red Cossack parade uniforms and black Persian lamb hats. Under the command of Count Grabbe since January 1914, the Escort largely performed a ceremonial role, but for the Romanov family it was the heart and soul of the Russian army.* In July, when the four sisters visited Nicholas and Alexey at Stavka with their mother, they made a surprise visit to the Escort’s summer camp. The soldiers sang old Cossack songs for them and performed their traditional dance – the lezginka. Tatiana recalled one particular thrilling exploit of theirs in a letter to Rita Khitrovo, a friend and fellow nurse at the annexe:

Yesterday we went up on the banks of the Dnieper again. The squadron of our Escort came along singing, hurrying to catch up with us. They sang songs, and played games and we just lay on the grass and enjoyed it. When they left, Papa said to them that they should go along the same bank of the river, and that we’d stay here for a bit longer, then drive in a fast moving car lower down along the river. We caught up with the squadron which had been going at a march playing the zurna* and singing. When we came alongside they put their horses into a full gallop behind us and flew along. Further on there was a steep ravine and a bend in the river. They had to cross it in a single stride as the earth was soft. They had already fallen behind us, but as soon as they came out of this ravine, then they began to catch us at a full gallop. It was terribly exciting. They were like real Caucasian horsemen at that pace. You can’t imagine just how marvellous it was. They rode with a whoop and a shout. If they go into an attack like that, especially whole regiments of them, I think the Germans will run away out of fear and wonder at what’s coming at them.52

Having such affection for the Escort, it is not surprising that Maria and Anastasia delighted in having Viktor Zborovsky as a patient at Feodorovsky Gorodok when the new officers’ ward was opened there in June; they reported on his progress regularly in their letters to Nicholas. They were now visiting daily, although evenings were still mainly spent at the annexe hospital with Olga and Tatiana. At their own hospital the warm presence of the two younger sisters greatly enhanced the sense of homeliness that the place already exuded. In the autumn of 1916, Felix Dassel, an officer from Maria’s regiment, the 5th Kazan Dragoons, was brought in, severely wounded in the leg. He found the hospital cosy and welcoming with a wood fire crackling in the grate – ‘nothing like how you would imagine a military hospital to be’. His small ward was calm and intimate, the bed made up with snow-white linen. Shortly after he arrived the grand duchesses came for their regular visit and he remembered them vividly: ‘Maria, my patron, stocky, with a round open face, good clear eyes, somewhat timid’, stopped to ask whether he was in very much pain. ‘Anastasia, the smaller of the two, with elfish, lusty eyes’, greeted him in the same concerned, though rather inattentive, way, ‘leaning on the end of the bed, observing me sharply, examining me, swinging a foot, rolling her handkerchief’.53

Not long afterwards Dassel fell into a delirium and was operated on; he woke up to find roses on the table by his bed from the grand duchesses, who had telephoned regularly to enquire on his progress. During his time at the hospital the girls visited Dassel once or twice a week; Maria always remaining ‘a little self-conscious’, while the forthright Anastasia was ‘freer, impish, with a very dry humour’, and, as he noticed, adept too at cheating at board games with her sister. She also liked to ‘tease in a childish way’ which brought reproachful, warning glances from Maria.54 (The two sisters certainly still squabbled, as Tatiana told Valentina Chebotareva: they often had cat fights when ‘Nastasya gets mad and pulls [Maria’s] hair and tears out clumps of it’.)55 Once Dassel started feeling better the girls celebrated his recovery by posing for photographs with him. He noticed how ‘terribly proud of her hospital’ Anastasia was: ‘she feels like she’s half grown up, on an equal footing with her older sisters’. Maria too talked with concern about the war, about the hunger in the towns and of people not knowing if their fathers or brothers at the front were still alive.56

Captain Mikhail Geraschinevsky of the Keksholm Imperial Guard had similar warm memories of Feodorovsky Gorodok where he was a patient for thirteen months. He noticed that ‘the girls came every day except when they did not behave’; this, it would seem, was their mother’s most effective punishment.57 He remembered their care over one wounded soldier in particular who had a bullet lodged in his skull and had lost his memory, and how they had patiently sat with him, asking him questions in an attempt to help bring back his memory.58 When he was home from Stavka on visits, Alexey sometimes visited too – he chatted and played dice with the soldiers, demanding they tell him all about the war. Like the patients at the annexe, the wounded here all loved the imperial children for their open and friendly manner: ‘we could not tell them apart from ordinary children’, recalled Geraschinevsky. He noticed how Alexey and his sisters always talked very fast with them in Russian, thinking that perhaps this was because ‘they were so rarely in contact with strangers that they were always in a hurry to tell them all they knew before they would be called away’.59 Whenever Anastasia and Maria sat at soldiers’ bedsides, playing board and card games with them, there was always one thing in particular they wanted to know. ‘They would ask us to tell them stories of the people from outside life. They would call “outside life” anything that was not in the castle [sic] and would listen intently not to miss one word.’60

While the Romanov sisters might still have little experience of ‘outside life’ – the world outside definitely wanted to see more of them. On 11 August Alexandra informed Nicholas that their daughters had spent all day posing for a new set of official photographs ‘for giving away to their committees’.61 As it turned out these would be the last official pictures ever taken of the four sisters – by photographer Alexander Funk.62 Released from their usual all-purpose plain skirts and blouses the girls dressed in their best satin tea dresses with embroidered panels of roses, wearing their pearl necklaces and gold bracelets. Anastasia not having passed the socially liberating age of sixteen still had her long hair loose, but her three older sisters all had theirs specially marcel-waved and dressed in chignons, most probably by Alexandra’s hairdresser Delacroix. The girls and their brother were now also being regularly captured on newsreel foot-age, most of it during official appearances, which was released for public consumption. Watching such films was one of the few forms of entertainment they enjoyed during the war years, although they were occasionally allowed the comic antics of Max Linder and André Deed, and morale-raisers such as Vasilii Ryabov, a documentary film about a war hero shot by the Japanese in 1904. John Foster Fraser recalled how when he was in Petrograd in the summer of 1916, Nicholas had had a cinematograph operator put together some film of the imperial family ‘in unimperial circumstances’.63 Fraser had applied for a copy of the film to use in lectures when he went back to the UK and had had it run for him by Pathé Frères in their dark room in Moscow:

There was the Emperor on a see-saw with his son, the Czare-vitch. There was a tug-of-war between the daughters, the grand duchesses, and their imperial father; the emperor lost, and was hilariously dragged along the ground. There was a snow-fight in which the Emperor was routed by his girls. There were picnic scenes. There was dancing on the royal yacht Standart.64

In all, 3,000 feet (914 m) of film showed the Romanovs at their most happy and informal. Nicholas had no objection to Fraser using the film but Alexandra, conscious of public image-making and in particular the future dynastic role of the heir, most certainly did and insisted that those parts ‘which were not imperial’ should be cut before the film could be shown in London.

With Olga continuing to pine for the absent Mitya, Tatiana resisted the temptation of being sucked into the same kind of visible emotional turmoil when Volodya Kiknadze was wounded again – this time in the spine – and returned to the annexe in September 1916. In fact Tatiana only recorded his departure for recuperation in the Crimea a month later; she was sad but said nothing more. Olga, however, seemed happy to grasp at any small reminders of her precious Mitya, whose mother she met in September, a fact that made her feel ‘terribly happy to have a little piece of him’.65 She saw Mitya again briefly in October when he was passing through and appeared unexpectedly at the hospital. He looked well and suntanned and she was pleased to note that he had changed his hair parting, but she was reticent about saying more, even in her diary. ‘We stood in the corridor and then sat. Darned socks.’66 The strain of having to internalize so many of her feelings left her frustrated, which she dissipated back at home by indulging in childish play with her younger sisters, chasing them round indoors on bicycles, while her more composed sister sat reading a book quietly in a corner. Olga was approaching her twenty-first birthday, but life and love had, it seemed, passed her by. It was ‘Quite a venerable age!’ as Alexandra observed in a letter to Nicholas, but if only their girls might one day find ‘the intense love and happiness you, my Angel, have given me these 22 years. It’s such a rare thing nowadays, alas!’67

Perhaps Olga was able to take some consolation in a gift from Alexey at Stavka – a cat that he had taken pity on, notorious as he was for rescuing stray cats and dogs there.68 He seemed to be doing famously over at Mogilev with Nicholas, proud to inform his mother that he had recently been given an award by the Serbs of ‘a gold medal with the inscription “For Bravery”’. ‘I deserved it in my battles with the tutors’, he told her.69 He found himself obliged to write to Alexandra in November to remind her that his pocket money was overdue:

My darling dear, sweet beloved mummy. It’s warm. Tomorrow I shall be up. The salary! I beg you!!!!! Nothing to stuff myself with!!! In ‘Nain Jaune’* also bad luck! Let it be! Soon I shall be selling my dress, books, and, at last, shall die of starvation.70

After the final words Alexey added a drawing of a coffin. His cry of anguish must have crossed with a letter from his mother in which she enclosed ten roubles and wrote apologetically, ‘To my dear Alexei. To my dear corporal. I am sending you your salary. I am sorry I forgot to enclose it.… Kiss you fondly your own Mama. Alexey was ecstatic – ‘Rich!! Drink barley coffee.’71

During these last two years of war and her husband’s frequent absences at Stavka, Alexandra had seen her daughters grow up considerably. It pleased her to tell Nicholas that Grigory approved:

Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy ‘courses’ for their age and their souls have much developed – they are really great dears … They have shared all our emotions and it has taught them to see people with open eyes, so that it will be a great help to them later in life.72

The experience of war had, in Alexandra’s view, ‘ripened’ their girls, though ‘They are happily at times great babies – but have the insight and feelings of the soul of much wiser beings’.73 With this in mind, on 11 December 1916, she took all four daughters south on the imperial train to visit the ancient Russian city of Novgorod, for centuries a focal point of Orthodoxy and Russian spirituality. Upon arriving they attended a two-hour mass at the Cathedral of St Sophia, then visited a nearby hospital, a museum of church treasures, and in the afternoon a provincial hospital and a shelter for refugee children. The final stop on their brief visit was the Desyatinny Convent – where Alexandra particularly wished to meet a renowned and much venerated seer, the staritsa Mariya Mikhailovna. Olga later described to Nicholas how they entered the old nun’s cell:

it was very narrow and dark and only one small candle was burning, which immediately went out, so they lit some kind of kerosene lamp without a shade and a nun, her eyes watering, held it. The old woman was lying behind a kind of piece of patchwork that was full of holes on a wooden bed. She had huge iron fetters on her and her hands were so thin and dark, just like religious relics. It seems she is 107 years old. Hair very very thin, dishevelled and her face covered in wrinkles. Eyes bright and clear. She gave each of us a little icon and some communion bread and blessed us. She said something to mama, that it would all soon be over and everything would be all right.74

Alexandra too was very taken by the sweetness of the old woman: ‘always works, goes about, sews for the convicts and soldiers with-out spectacles – never washes. And of course no smell, or feeling of dirt.’ More importantly, the staritsa had addressed her personally, telling her – exactly as Olga recalled – that the war would be over soon: ‘And you beautiful one, she had said several times, “don’t fear the heavy cross”’ – as though in prophecy of a personal test of faith to come.75 Others later told a different tale: Anna Vyrubova was sure that ‘as the tsarina approached, the old woman cried out: “Behold, the martyred Empress Alexandra Feodorovna!”’ Iza Buxhoeveden remembered much the same, adding that ‘Her Majesty seemed not to hear’.76 After receiving the staritsa’s blessing and the gift of an apple for Nicholas and Alexey (which they later dutifully ate, on Alexandra’s instructions, at Stavka) the tsaritsa left Novgorod feeling ‘cheered and comforted’, telling Nicholas that the visit to Novgorod had reinforced her faith in the simple people of Russia. ‘Such love and warmth everywhere, feeling of God and your people, unity and purity of feelings – did me no end of good.’77 Those in the entourage who had accompanied her returned with very different feelings. Having heard what the staritsa had said they ‘came back depressed and apprehensive for they felt the reception was an omen’.78

Alexandra’s devoutly Orthodox belief and the continuing wise counsel and prayers of Grigory undoubtedly sustained her at a time when her perilous state of health would have felled a far stronger woman. ‘She believes in Rasputin; she regards him as a just man, a saint, persecuted by the calumnies of the Pharisees, like the victim of Calvary’, observed the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue: ‘she has made him her spiritual guide and refuge; her mediator with Christ, her witness and intercessor before God.’79 But when the tsaritsa returned to Tsarskoe Selo in December 1916 it was in a state of total denial about the rapidly changing atmosphere in the capital 19 miles (30.5 km) away. Edith Almedingen recalled ‘the feverish texture of the last weeks of 1916’, of a city ‘brooding over a darkly uncertain future’. With prophecies of disaster for Nicholas’s command as the army continued to suffer catastrophic casualties, another harsh winter approached, ‘under the most sinister auspices’.80 Cold, war weariness, hunger, the grim reality of food shortages leading to profiteering and rumour of famine, were all fermenting discontent, soon made manifest in strikes and food riots. ‘The streets were just queues full of ceaseless whimpering chatter’, wrote Almedingen.81

But the loudest chatter of all around the city came in public discussion of the empress’s continuing close relationship with Rasputin. At the annexe Valentina Chebotareva worried about how the unrelenting vilification of the tsaritsa was impacting on her daughters and possibly imperilling them. ‘Olga is holding out with difficulty,’ she wrote, ‘[she] is either more light hearted or has better control over herself. How difficult it is to see them after all I’ve heard. Is it really true that they are threatened by imminent danger?’ Valentina had heard that ‘the young people, the social revolutionaries are resolved to remove them all – and her!’82 ‘If the Emperor appeared on Red Square today,’ predicted Ambassador Paléologue in his diary on 16 December 1916, ‘he would be booed. The Empress would be torn to pieces.’83 Elizaveta Naryshkina agreed with him: ‘What a multitude of things are coming to an end, Ambassador! And such a bad end.’84 To the superstitious Russian people the imperial family seemed increasingly shackled to the mystical chains of fate. It was a uniquely Russian view and one that had long dictated that everything about to be unleashed in Russia was a manifestation of God’s inexorable will.