فصل 18

Chapter Eighteen

GOODBYE. DON’T FORGET ME

Nicholas II’s return to Tsarskoe Selo on 9 March 1917 was the most painful of rude awakenings: ‘sentries on the street and surrounding the palace and inside the park, and inside the front entrance some kind of officers’.1 Upstairs he found his wife sitting in a darkened room with all their children; they were all in good spirits, though Maria was very ill. Hugely relieved to be back home he soon discovered that even his most innocuous daily habits were to be severely restricted. That afternoon he was refused permission to go for his usual long walk in the Alexander Park; his domain now comprised a small recreation-area-cum-garden at the immediate rear entrance of the palace. Here he took up a spade and cleared the footpath with his aide Prince Vasili Dolgorukov – the only officer allowed to return with him from Stavka – their guards looking on with amusement.2

Lili Dehn was shocked when she saw Nicholas. He was ‘deathly pale, his face covered with innumerable wrinkles, his hair was quite grey at the temples, and blue shadows encircled his eyes. He looked like an old man.’3 To Elizaveta Naryshkina he seemed calm on the surface; she admired his astonishing self-control and his apparent indifference to being addressed not as tsar but as an army officer, which effectively was all he now was.4 Although the palace commandant, Pavel Kotzebue, referred to him politely as ‘the ex-Emperor’ most of Nicholas’s captors called him Nikolay Romanov or even ‘little Nikolay’.5 He tried hard not to react to the petty humiliations from some of the more truculent guards: ‘They blew tobacco smoke in his face … A soldier grabbed him by the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed at his anger and pain’, Anna Vyrubova later recalled.6 But Nicholas did not react: ‘Despite the circumstances in which we now find ourselves,’ he wrote in his diary on the 10th, ‘the thought that we are all together cheers and comforts us.’7 Maria’s condition, however, was becoming a serious cause for concern; her temperature was running at over 40 degrees C (104 degrees F). Alexandra and Lili moved her from her small nickel campbed to a proper double bed, the better to nurse her. With the exhausted girl drifting in and out of delirium they spent their time constantly sponging her down, brushing her now horribly tangled hair and changing her sweat-drenched nightdress and bedding. To make matters worse, she had developed pneumonia as well.8

Shortly after Nicholas’s return, during the days of uncertainty about where the family might eventually be allowed to live, Elizaveta Naryshkina had suggested that Nicholas and Alexandra accept any offer to leave the country; she and Count Benkendorf would look after the children until they were well enough and then bring them to them later.9 Thoughts of evacuating the children ahead of Nicholas’s return had indeed been in Alexandra’s mind, even after they fell sick, and she had discussed various options with her entourage.10 Perhaps she could get them north into Finland; she asked Dr Botkin if he thought ‘in their present physical condition’ they could cope with the journey. Botkin’s response was unequivocal: ‘at the moment I would be less afraid of measles than of the revolutionaries.’11 However, any thoughts Alexandra might have had were abandoned when Nicholas countermanded her suggestion and insisted they wait for his projected return on 1 March. Had he arrived home then, the family might all have been speedily evacuated, but once he was trapped at Stavka and Alexandra placed under house arrest the whole situation dramatically changed. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, had been in an agony of frustration since the beginning of the year: ‘I shall not be happy till they are safely out of Russia’, he had said, but tentative negotiations with the British government for a possible refuge in England had quickly stalled.12 The offer from George V, made on 9 March (22nd NS) in response to a request from Russia’s Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov, had spoken only of asylum for the duration of the war. Other options were quickly discussed and dropped: Denmark was too close to Germany; France would not entertain the idea. Alexandra had at one point said that she would prefer to go to Norway where she felt the climate would suit Alexey, although she would certainly be glad to see England again, should it come to it.13 But wherever the family went, she and Nicholas both thought in terms only of a temporary refuge until the situation eased and they could hopefully be allowed to return and live quietly in Russia – preferably the Crimea.14

The British government continued to discuss the issue throughout March, while Alexander Kerensky pondered the family’s evacuation, perhaps to Port Romanov (Murmansk), from where a British cruiser could take them through German-patrolled waters to England under a white flag. But then George V had had a change of heart. The king was uneasy that the former tsar’s arrival in England would create problems for his government – which had already acknowledged the revolution – and in so doing threaten the safety of his own throne. The most important thing was to keep the new revolutionary Russia on side and in the war, and this transcended any familial loyalty to Nicholas. By the time George’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was instructed on 24 March (6 April NS) to suggest that the Russian government ‘make some other plan for the future residence of their imperial majesties’, far too much precious time had been lost.15 A powerful, grassroots opposition to any evacuation had escalated, particularly among the pro-Bolshevik executive committees of the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.16 Any attempt to get the family out by train would have been blocked by the heavily politicized railwaymen of Petrograd, who, according to Izvestiya (the new organ of the Petrograd soviet), had already ‘wired along all railway lines that every railway organization, each station-master, every group of railway-workmen, is bound to detain Nicholas II’s train whenever and wherever it may appear’.17

Izvestiya reflected the ugly mood building in the capital. An evacuation of the family could not be permitted, the paper railed, for the ex-tsar was privy to all state secrets relating to the war and was ‘possessed of colossal wealth’ that he would be able to access in the comfort of exile.18 Nicholas must be held under the strictest isolation pending the meting out of a new, Soviet form of justice. Yet amid so many accusations levelled against them Nicholas and Alexandra had in fact remained intensely loyal to Russia and all talk of any political betrayal on their part was entirely unfounded; indeed, Nicholas had already been worrying that his abdication might damage the allied offensive. As far as exile was concerned, neither he nor Alexandra had any desire for the sybaritic expatriate lifestyle of ‘wandering about the Continent, and living at Swiss hotels as ex-Royalties, snapshotted and paragraphed by representatives of the picture papers’. They shrank from such ‘cheap publicity’, asserted Lili Dehn, and considered it their duty to stand by Russia whatever the cost.19

Arriving in Russia just after Nicholas’s return, the Anglo-Irish journalist Robert Crozier Long was immediately struck by the ‘unexampled reversal of ranks and conditions which … the Revolution had brought about in the most despotic and class-crystallized country of Europe’. He travelled out to Tsarskoe Selo to report on the tsar’s incarceration and encountered an unnerving atmosphere. The town was ‘a microcosm of the Revolution’; at the Alexandrovsky Station he was greeted by ‘crowds of untidy revolutionary soldiers, all with red badges’, the stationmaster was an army corporal and ‘portraits of Nicholas II and his father Alexander III lay in tatters in a rubbish heap’. The authorities were finding it hard to keep the lid on renegade elements in the town that resented any form of indulgence shown to the prisoners and were keen to exert their own form of rough justice on the tsar and tsaritsa. The railings of the Alexander Park had now become a public sideshow where people gathered in order to catch a glimpse of the former tsar and his family whenever they emerged in the garden.20

The family’s daily routine, having always been mundane, now became even more predictable. They all got up early except Alexandra and by 8 a.m. Nicholas was often seen walking outside with Dolgorukov, or undertaking some kind of physical work – breaking the ice on the waterways and clearing the snow. It was all too painful for Elizaveta Naryshkina to watch: ‘How far has he sunk who once owned the riches of the earth and a devoted people! How splendid his reign could have been, if he had only understood the needs of the era!’21 After a plain lunch at 1 p.m., and as the weather improved and the girls recovered, the family worked outside digging up the turf and preparing the ground for a vegetable garden to be planted in the spring. When it was warm enough Alexandra would join them in her wheelchair, where she sat embroidering or tatting. In the afternoon the younger children had their lessons, and later, if the weather continued fine, they returned to the garden until the light began to fade. Much to their surprise, the guards found themselves watching over a family that was ‘quiet, unprovocative, unfailingly polite to one another and to them, and whose occasional sadness bore the stamp of a dignity their jailers could never emulate and were reluctantly compelled to admire’.22 Some of the sentries exploited public curiosity by taking money from people wanting a closer look at the tsar and his children. The family moved out of sight as best they could when this happened, but even so they were not immune to insult not just from onlookers but also from their own guards. ‘When the young Grand Duchesses or the Empress appeared at a window, the sentries made obscene gestures which were greeted with shouts of laughter from their comrades.’23A few of the soldiers guarding them persisted in referring to Nicholas as the tsar or ex-tsar, and one officer, it was said, was dismissed ‘after being caught kissing the hand of the Grand Duchess Tatiana’, but these were exceptions. Other cruel gestures served only to hurt: the children’s rowing boat was soiled with excrement and graffiti, and out in the park Alexey’s pet goat was shot and the pet deer and swans too – probably for food.24

Many found Nicholas’s extraordinary passivity in the face of insult disturbing: ‘The Tsar felt nothing; he was neither kind nor cruel; merry nor morose; he had no more sensibility than some of the lowest forms of life. “A human oyster” is how the later commandant, Evgeny Kobylinsky, would describe him.’25 As for Alexandra, Elizaveta Naryshkina found her conversation increasingly disjointed and incomprehensible. No doubt the constant headaches and dizzy spells as ever impinged on it, but Elizaveta had by now come to the conclusion that Alexandra’s unbalanced mental state had become ‘pathological’. ‘It should serve to acquit her’ should it come to the worst, she hoped, ‘and perhaps will be her only salvation.’ Dr Botkin agreed with her: ‘He now feels as I do when seeing the state the empress is in and berates himself for not having realized it sooner.’26

Inside the palace much had changed. ‘Along the wide corridors covered with thick soft carpets, where formerly efficient, silent servants glided noiselessly, throngs of soldiers now reeled, with coats unbuttoned, in muddy shoes, caps on the side of their heads, unshaved, often drunk, and always noisy.’27 Visitors to the family were strictly forbidden (although members of the entourage were occasionally allowed to see their relatives). Use of the telephone or telegraph was forbidden and the family was ordered to speak Russian at all times. Correspondence was vetted by Kotzebue, who having served with Alexandra’s Uhlans was sympathetic and often allowed letters through without the formal checks being made. But he was soon replaced, and letters were later even tested for invisible ink.28 The family was still allowed to celebrate religious services on Sundays and high holidays, led by Father Belyaev from the Feodorovsky Sobor, who held them in a field chapel erected behind a screen in the corner of an upstairs room.29

Although it was mid-March Maria was still very sick and Anastasia had developed such acute earache that her eardrums had had to be pierced to relieve the pressure in them.30 And then on the 15th Anastasia developed a secondary infection – pleurisy – on a day when Maria’s temperature hit 40.6 degrees C (over 105 degrees F). Both children were prostrated by fits of terrible coughing.31 In a letter to Rita Khitrovo, Tatiana wrote that Anastasia wasn’t able to eat either, ‘because it all comes back again’. Both her sisters, she said, were ‘very patient and lie quietly. Anastasia is still deaf and you have to shout so that she can hear what you’re saying to her.’ Her own hearing was much better, although she was still having problems with her right ear. She couldn’t say much more: ‘Remember that they are reading your and my letters.’32

By the 18th Maria was so ill that Alexandra sent Anna Vyrubova an anxious note, fearful that she was dying. Anastasia too was ‘in a critical condition, lungs and ears being in a sad state of inflammation’. ‘Oxygen alone was keeping the children alive’, administered by a doctor who had come out voluntarily from Petrograd to attend them.33 It was not until 20 March that Anastasia and Maria’s temperatures finally began to drop. They were at last over the worst, much to their parents’ relief, though were still very weak and sleeping a lot.34 Alexey was recovering too and Tatiana, the most robust of all the children, was much better. But Olga still seemed very under par.

There was now a new palace commandant – Pavel Korovichenko – who was introduced to the family on 21 March by Kerensky when he arrived on an inspection. Before leaving that day, Kerensky announced that Anna Vyrubova was to be removed. The stigma of her previous close association with Rasputin was still bringing with it accusations of her being involved in ‘political plots’ against the new regime.35 Her presence at the palace, it was felt, served only to inflame revolutionary hatred of the imperial family. To lose Anna was a disaster for an emotionally drained Alexandra, but even worse was Kerensky’s decision to take her other close friend Lili Dehn away too. Before Lili left Alexandra hung a small icon round her neck as a blessing and Tatiana rushed in with a small leather photograph case containing photos of her parents – taken from her own bedside table. ‘If Kerensky is going to take you away from us, you shall at least have Papa and Mama to console you’, she said, and then she turned to Anna and begged for ‘a last memory’ of her as a keepsake. Anna gave her the only thing she had – her wedding ring.36

Lili was still wearing her nurse’s uniform when she and Anna were taken out to the waiting cars. Alexandra and Olga seemed calm and impassive as they left, but Tatiana was openly sobbing – ‘this the girl whom history had since described as “proud and reserved”’, but on this occasion, as Lili remembered, ‘ma[king] no secret of her grief’. Both women were heartbroken to be so unjustly and forcibly removed after so many years of loyal service to the family; Anna, still weak both from the measles and the injuries sustained in her accident, could barely walk, even with the help of crutches. As their car drove away in the rain, Anna could just make out ‘a group of white-clad figures crowded close to the nursery windows’ watching them go. From Tsarskoe Selo the two women were taken to the Palace of Justice in Petrograd; after being held for two days in a freezing cold room with little food Lili was allowed to go home to her sick son Titi.37 But Anna was transferred to the notorious Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress where she was held for interrogation and not released until July.

With all the children recovered, the family still nursed the hope that it would be allowed to go into temporary exile and on 23 March Nicholas noted that he had been going through his books and papers, packing up everything he might wish to take with him ‘if we should leave for England’.38 But Lent came and there was still no news. Father Belyaev was allowed to come and stay at the Alexander Palace to conduct services, albeit closely observed at all times by the highly suspicious members of the guard. On Saturday 25 March Anastasia got up for the first time and joined the family for lunch. The following morning, Palm Sunday, she sat down and wrote what was probably her first letter since her illness; and she wrote it to the person closest to her favourite officer – Viktor Zborovsky’s sister, Katya.

Like her sisters Rimma and Xenia, Katya had been serving as a nurse during the war, at Feodorovsky Gorodok.39 Three years older than Anastasia, she had sometimes been brought out from St Petersburg to play with her when they were younger and had become a close friend, thanks to their common bond with her brother Viktor. During the war, all four Romanov sisters often sent gifts to their Escort favourites – especially hand-knitted items of warm clothing to take to the front. They also treasured their photographs of Vitya (Viktor), Shurik (Alexander Shvedov) and Skvorchik (Mikhail Skvortsov) taken at tea parties at Anna Vyrubova’s. After they were shut up in the Alexander Palace the girls were desperate to stay in touch with the Escort and Katya became the conduit, allowed a pass into the palace to come and deliver and fetch letters.40

Until now Anastasia had been something of a sluggish letter writer compared to her sisters, but with little to do she began writing regularly to Katya in order to have news of Viktor. ‘Tatiana asks me to send this blanket for Makyukho [one of the officers] for his young son’, she wrote on the 26 March:

He apparently is her godson. What is his name? Give the remaining socks and shirts to your brother and he can hand them out to his colleagues. We are sorry there aren’t enough for everyone, but we are sending all we have left. At the bottom of these two boxes is written which item is to be given to our former wounded. Maria is still ill, but I got up yesterday, and am very glad about that, as I had been confined to bed for about four weeks, though I am still weak in the legs.Please ask your brother again to return the group [photographs] that we sent you last time. We think of you all often and send huge greetings. Write and tell us sometimes, dear Katya how everyone is and so on, we are always so happy to have news. Jim [her dog] is well and happy.* Send my best to Sidorov. Warmest greetings to your mother and brother. All the best! I kiss you warmly, Your Anastasia. These little icons are from mother for all the officers.41

At a time when such simple acts of friendship and remembrance preoccupied the four sisters, a positive ‘outpouring of venom’ against the imperial family was filling the Petrograd press. Some of it took the form of lurid cartoons of the former tsar and tsaritsa – of Alexandra reclining in a bath full of blood, or Nicholas watching mass hangings – or featured descriptions of elaborate, bloated meals of caviar, lobster and sturgeon gorged on by the imperial family while Petrograd starved.

There was a cartoon of the Emperor lighting a cigarette with a hundred-rouble note. There was a nauseating story about ‘the proof’ that Grand-Duke Alexis was the son of [Monsieur] Philippe. There were sketches of the young grand-duchesses’ ‘private’ lives written by their ‘lovers’.42

‘The joint excesses of Nero, Caligula, the Sforzas and the Borgias would have suggested a mild nursery-story’ in comparison with the lurid press accounts that Edith Almedingen remembered reading that spring. Yet still the accusations against Nicholas and Alexandra escalated, so much so that on 27 March, during the judicial investigation into Anna Vyrubova, Kerensky ordered that the couple should be separated in order to prevent collusion between them, should any trial ensue. For the next three weeks they were allowed to meet only twice daily at meals, Nicholas appearing almost glad to escape his wife’s draining presence for a while.43 They adhered strictly to the new rules imposed on them, fearing that if they did not one or both of them might be taken away, like Anna, to the Peter and Paul Fortress.* Kerensky had actually wanted to separate Alexandra from the children, confining them with their father, but Elizaveta Naryshkina had appealed saying this was too cruel: ‘It would mean death to her. Her children are her life.’44 It was as well that Kerensky relented, for on 27 March Olga was back in bed again with swollen glands and a sore throat; once more her temperature climbed to nearly 40 degrees C (104 degrees F).45 On 4 April Alexandra noted that her daughter was now suffering from ‘inflammation around the heart’.46

Over Easter weekend the entire household, including the remaining servants, were grateful to be allowed to pray together, though at one stage Belyaev had had to contend with a noisy funeral service being held in the park outside for supposed ‘victims of the Revolution’– in fact, those killed during wine-shop rioting and pillaging in the town a few days previously.47 All five children had made confession to him on Good Friday, Olga in bed and Maria in a wheelchair, and he was impressed by their ‘mildness, restraint [and] obedience to their parents’ wishes’. They seemed to him so innocent, so ‘ignorant of worldly filth’.48 The late-night communion service for Velikaya Subbota (Great Saturday) on 1 April was especially poignant for everyone (though Olga and Maria were too sick to attend). Afterwards eighteen sat down at table to break the fast. There was a huge Easter kulich, decorated eggs, ham and veal, sausage and vegetables, but for Iza Buxhoeveden it was ‘a dismal repast, like a meal in a house of mourning’, during which Nicholas and Alexandra were obliged to sit apart, the tsaritsa hardly speaking. She ate nothing and drank only a cup of coffee, saying she was ‘always on a diet’.49

Beautiful spring weather greeted Easter Sunday, ‘a day of great joy despite the human suffering’, recalled Elizaveta Naryshkina. Nicholas presented her with a porcelain egg with his insignia. ‘I shall treasure it as a good memory’, she wrote in her diary. ‘How few loyal people they have left … One cannot be certain of the future: everything depends on whether the Provisional Government can hold on or whether the anarchists will win – the danger is unavoidable. How I wish that they could leave as soon as possible, seeing that they are now all well.’50 It being a Sunday and a public holiday, crowds gathered outside the railings to gawp at the tsar when he came out to work in the garden, surrounded by guards with fixed bayonets. ‘We look like convicts with their warders’, Pierre Gilliard remarked ruefully.51 People were now taking day trips out from the capital to stand and stare and there were as many again on Easter Monday, gathered to watch Nicholas shovelling the snow away from the canal. They stood there in silence, ‘like watching a wild animal in a cage’, recalled Valentina Chebotareva. ‘Why do they have to do this?’52 The family had at least been consoled by another wonderful service that day but afterwards, when Elizaveta Naryshkina went to see the grand duchesses in their sickroom, she had been alarmed to see how much thinner Maria was, though ‘very much prettier; the expression on her face sad and gentle. You can see that she has suffered a lot and that what she has been through has left a deep mark on her.’53

At the annexe hospital, Valentina Chebotareva was continually saddened and frustrated by the lack of contact, particularly with her beloved Tatianochka. ‘We know little about the prisoners, although letters regularly arrive’, but these were extremely circumspect. She was worried about writing too often, which might be seen as a provocation by those who did not understand her close friendship with the grand duchesses. Any letters sent in signed with pet names and not in full immediately fell under suspicion as being some kind of coded message – there had already been problems with the authorities taking exception to letters sent by ‘Lili’ and ‘Titi’ or sometimes even ‘Tili’ – a combination of the two.54 Knowing that they could now never return to the annexe, Tatiana had asked Bibi and Valentina to send back the things they had left there. Valentina worried that this too might be looked upon suspiciously, but nevertheless she packed up their nurses’ smocks, photo albums and other mementoes, together with a last photograph of them taken with their wounded in the dining room.55 Tatiana in return sent gifts of shirts, pillows and books for the patients from herself and Olga. ‘Tell darling Bibi that we love her and kiss her fondly’, she wrote, adding plaintively, ‘What are Mitya and Volodya doing?’56 The girls sent Easter greetings on the Sunday but Valentina was worried to read how ill Olga was and that ‘Alexey Nikolaevich is in bed having hurt his arm – another haemorrhage’. She had heard that when Kerensky had recently visited, he had asked Alexey, ‘Do you have everything you need?’ to which the child had responded:

‘Yes, only I’m bored and I love the soldiers so much.’‘But there are so many all around and in the garden.’‘No, not that kind, they aren’t going to the front – it’s those that I love.’57

There were indeed plenty of soldiers all around, so much so that Tsarskoe Selo was now being called Soldatskoe Selo [Soldiers’ Village] for, as a British businessman in Petrograd remarked, ‘The Tsarskoe Selo municipal authorities are as ultra-Red as Versailles in 1789.’58

It was now April and the days were beginning to drag – ‘one and the same, in a state of spiritual anguish’, as Elizaveta Naryshkina noted.59 While Tatiana was often out in the garden with Nicholas helping to break the ice around the bridges, Alexandra remained preoccupied with Olga and Maria, who were still confined to their rooms. ‘Olga is still very weak poor thing,’ wrote a despondent Elizaveta Naryshkina on 9 April, ‘her heart has been strained by unremitting illness over the last two months … She is very sweet; and Maria is enchanting even though still in bed with the last vestiges of pleurisy.’60 Tatiana meanwhile was pining for the annexe: ‘It’s sad that now we are better we can’t come and work in the hospital again. It’s so strange to be at home in the morning and not to be doing the dressings.’ Who was doing them, she asked Valentina.61 ‘What will happen to our old hospital now?’ ‘Forgive me for so many questions dear Valentina Ivanovna, but it’s so interesting to know what is happening with you. We constantly remember how good it was to work at the hospital and how we all got along together.’62

Korovichenko had been doing his best to defend the right of the girls to send and receive so many letters. ‘They had been hard workers, worked like real sisters of mercy’, he told Valentina. ‘Why should they be deprived in Easter Week of the joy of exchanging greetings with their former wounded and their work colleagues?’ He vetted all their letters and their content was ‘absolutely innocent’. ‘Often Sister Khitrovo and other nurses [send letters] which I have handed on.’ He had, however, ‘a whole box full of letters to the Romanov family’ that he had chosen not to allow through.63 Among the letters being allowed out by Korovichenko were those from Anastasia to Katya Zborovskaya. ‘Truly He is Risen!’ Anastasia exclaimed at the opening of an Eastertide letter, in which she enclosed one of the first snowdrops of spring from the garden and told Katya that she and Tatiana were now going out for walks and helping to break the ice. But, worryingly, Anastasia also confided that ‘After Olga had a sore throat, something happened to her heart, and she has rheumatism now’ – suggesting that Olga’s ‘inflammation of the heart’ was in fact the far more serious post-measles complication of rheumatic fever.64

By mid-April, with the younger children back at their desks, a new modified timetable of lessons was set up for them and shared among the remaining members of the entourage. Nicholas began teaching Alexey geography and history; Alexandra took on religious doctrine and catechism, as well as giving Tatiana tuition in German; Olga, when recovered, helped teach her siblings English and history. Iza Buxhoeveden gave Alexey and his younger sisters piano lessons, and also taught them all English. Trina Schneider tutored them in maths and Russian grammar; Nastenka Hendrikova taught Anastasia history and gave her art lessons with Tatiana; Dr Botkin took on Russian literature with Alexey and Dr Derevenko volunteered to give him science lessons. Pierre Gilliard continued his French lessons with all five children. Everyone pulled together to try and create as normal an environment as possible in such abnormal circumstances.65 The family appeared to be quietly adjusting to its new, highly circumscribed life; one of the young subaltern guards told Elizaveta Naryshkina how impressed he was: ‘having come down from his pedestal’ even the emperor seemed contented, so long as his routine was not disturbed and he could have ‘his walks and tea at five o’clock’.66

Increasingly absorbed in thoughts of God, Alexandra seemed to draw especial comfort from her Bible lessons with the children. The girls made a point, as they always did, of remembering her name day on 23 April when all the arestovanniye – ‘those under arrest’ as Nicholas called them – gave her little home-made gifts.67 Olga composed a poem specially:

You are filled with anguishFor the suffering of others.And no one’s griefHas ever passed you by.You are relentlessOnly toward yourself,Forever cold and pitiless.But if only you could look uponYour own sadness from a distance,Just once with a loving soul –Oh, how you would pity yourself.How sadly you would weep.68

On 30 April, Anastasia was delighted to tell Katya, in a letter enclosing several postcards for Viktor and the other officers, that now that the ground had at last begun to thaw ‘we all together started to dig our own kitchen garden … The weather is wonderful today, and it is very warm, so we have worked for a long time.’ The sisters had rearranged their rooms upstairs as they adapted to their changed circumstances: ‘We are all now sitting together and writing in the same Red Room, where we still live, as we do not want to move to our bedroom.’ They had attached a swing to the gymnastic rings in the doorway, where ‘we swing so nicely that the screws probably won’t last long’.69

May came but the cold weather still lingered. There was snow and a cold wind the day Nicholas turned forty-nine; Alexey was suffering from pains in his arms yet again and was back in bed, and the ever loyal Elizaveta Naryshkina had bronchitis, brought on by the perishing cold in the unheated rooms. Thoughtful as always, Nicholas came and sat with her and Alexandra sent a posy of anemones picked from the garden, but on the 12th Elizaveta had to be sent away to the Catherine Palace Hospital to be nursed. As she said goodbye to Nicholas ‘both of us had a premonition that we would never be together again. We embraced repeatedly, and he kissed my hands incessantly.’70

Work in the garden remained the only outlet for pent-up energies and May was spent by everyone busily weeding carrots, radishes, onions and lettuce, watering them and watching with pride as the 500 cabbages they had planted began to swell in their neatly ordered rows. When Nicholas, still wearing his khaki soldier’s tunic, had exhausted all possible work in the vegetable garden he began a vigorous and systematic felling of dead trees, sawing them up ready for winter. It was now warm enough to take Alexey out in the rowing boat on the pond near the Children’s Island, or ride bicycles with his daughters. And they had the dogs – Alexey’s Joy, Tatiana’s Ortipo and Anastasia’s Jimmy, as well as two kittens produced by the cat from Stavka that Alexey had given Olga.71

Nicholas seemed perfectly contented to work up a sweat doing physical labour: ‘Congenial work in the vegetable garden,’ he noted on 6 May, ‘we began to dig beds. After tea vespers, supper, and evening reading – [I am] much more with my sweet family than in normal years.’72 It was hard to ‘be without news of dear Mama,’ he admitted, ‘but I am indifferent toward everything else’.73

As the Maytime lilac blossom came into full bloom, ‘the aroma of the garden was wonderful when you sat by the window’, observed Nicholas; the girls revelled in it too.74 Anastasia was bright and chirpy in her letters to Katya, telling her on the 20th how much they enjoyed their work in the garden:

We have already planted a lot; the total number of beds is sixty so far, but we are going to plant more. As now we do not have to work that much, we often just lie and warm ourselves in the sun. We have taken a lot of pictures, and we even processed the film ourselves.

But it was hard to have to tell Katya, who had now left Tsarskoe Selo with her family and gone south, that their hospitals were to be closed soon ‘and everybody will go away, to my great sorrow’.

We are thinking of everybody a lot; now while I am writing this letter, my sisters are sitting next to me in the room and are drinking tea, and Maria is sitting on the window sill and writing letters; they all talk a lot, and make writing letters difficult. They kiss you many times. Are you still roller-skating? Do you feel cosy living with your mother in a new place? I’m sending you a sprig of lilac from our garden; let it remind you of northern spring … Well Katya, sweetheart, I have to finish … Huge regards to everybody from us! May the Lord be with you. I kiss you as deeply as I love you. Your A.75

For all the sisters, thoughts were increasingly turning to the things they missed so much. ‘Today, quite softly, I could hear the sound of the Catherine Palace bells’, Olga told her friend Zinaida Tolstaya. ‘I wish so much that I could sometimes go to Znamenie.’76 Anastasia felt the same: ‘We often hear the bells of the good cathedral and feel so sad,’ she told Katya on 4 July, ‘but it is always nice to remember the good times, right?’ She wondered all the time about Viktor and the other officers and how they were all doing.77 ‘This time last year we were in Mogilev’, she recalled wistfully on the 12th. ‘It was so nice there, as well as the last time we were there in November! We constantly think and talk about you all.’ There were, she said, one or two amusing or interesting things she would have liked to tell Katya, but she could not write about it in her letters: ‘you surely understand this, don’t you?’ By now, as Count Benkendorf recalled, even the accommodating Korovichenko had begun to complain about the ‘enormous correspondence of the young Grand Duchesses, which took up a great deal of his time and prevented him from delivering us our correspondence as quickly as he might’.78

One of the highlights of family life, aside from receiving letters, was occasional showings of Alexey’s collection of cinematographs, thanks to the gift of a projector and a large number of films made to him by Pathé during the war. Otherwise, evening entertainment was confined to Nicholas reading aloud. During the five months of their incarceration at the Alexander Palace, he got through a considerable number of popular French and English novels: Alexander Dumas’s Comte de Monte-Cristo and Alphonse Daudet’s adventure stories Tartarin de Tarascon and Tartarin sur les Alpes; Gaston Leroux’s popular Le mystère de la chambre jaune was a great favourite, but un-doubtedly the most popular were Conan Doyle’s stories – The Poison Belt, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear.

Such diversions into adventure and fantasy served only to distract the family for a short while from the realities of their imprisonment. As the stifling heat of summer gathered – a time when they would have been enjoying the sea breezes at Peterhof or the Crimea – ‘Tsarskoe was a dead place. Its windows were almost hidden by the straggling branches of the unclipped trees,’ recalled Lili Dehn, ‘grass grew between the stones of its silent courtyard.’ Shortly before leaving Petrograd, she had managed to get out there to try and catch sight of the family: ‘I walked to and fro gazing up at the windows, but those within the Palace gave no sign of life. I wanted to call aloud that I was there, but I dared not imperil their safety or my own’.79 Valentina Chebotareva too was complaining of the inertia of the town; it had entirely changed in character and lost all its pride and vigour. Now all you could see were soldiers wandering around aimlessly, chewing sunflower seeds, lounging on the grass. They had taken the fish from the ponds and trampled all the flowerbeds in the public gardens. ‘We hear little of the children now’, she wrote sadly. ‘Over there they live a monotonous life. The children amuse each other, Olga and Maria with history … They dig in the garden, have planted carrots themselves.’ ‘Yesterday,’ as they told her, ‘we went a little way on our bicycles. In the evenings we gather together and Papa reads aloud. Alexey walks with Papa a lot more’ – that was the sum total of their lives. As for their mother – she was ‘think[ing] only of the past’.80 The increasingly religiose tone of Alexandra’s letters was evidence of her determined withdrawal from the real world into a mystical contemplation of death and redemption. The Bible and the scriptures, she said, provided her with the answers to all of life’s questions and she was proud of her children’s responsiveness: ‘they understand many deep things – their souls are growing through suffering.’81 Suffering had become the family’s métier; God, she knew, would crown them for it.

On her sixteenth birthday on 5 June Anastasia received ‘a pair of earrings, and my ears were pierced’, she told Katya, though ‘this is, so to say, small news’.82 But this was soon spoiled by the loss of all her hair. Ever since their attack of measles, all the girls had found their hair was falling out in great hanks – Maria’s especially – and early in July they had to have their heads shaved. A day later Alexey did likewise, in sympathy. Pierre Gilliard captured their stoical response in his diary and on camera:

When they go out in the park they wear scarves arranged so as to conceal the fact. Just as I was going to take their photographs, at a sign from Olga Nicolaievna [sic] they all suddenly removed their headdress. I protested, but they insisted, much amused at the idea of seeing themselves photographed like this, and looking forward to seeing the indignant surprise of their parents.

Gilliard was comforted to see that ‘their good spirits reappear from time to time in spite of everything’. He put it down to the girls’ ‘exuberant youth’. But although they took the loss of their beautiful long hair in good heart their morbidly introspective mother saw it quite differently; Pierre’s photograph, she said, made them look like the condemned.83

‘Poor Mama is terribly bored; can’t at all get used to the new life and the circumstances here,’ Olga told her aunt Olga on 21 June, ‘although on the whole we can all be grateful that we will be together and in the Crimea.’84 With a flare-up of conflict in Petrograd, discussion of the family’s evacuation had once again resumed. On 4 July Elizaveta Naryshkina had heard rumours that a ‘group of young monarchists have got up an insane project: to take them away by car at night to one of the ports where an English steamer would be waiting’. But she was fearful ‘of a repetition of Varennes’ – the attempted flight in 1791 of the deposed Louis XVI, his wife and his family that had resulted in the king and queen’s arrest and execution.85

Faced with a possible Bolshevik coup against the provisional government that summer, and worried about plots to spirit the Romanovs away, Kerensky, (who had now taken over as prime minister), came to the Alexander Palace to see Nicholas. Radical elements in the Petrograd soviet might try to storm the palace and he told him that the family ‘would likely go south, given the proximity of Tsarskoe Selo to the uneasy capital’.86 As Count Benkendorf understood it, Kerensky thought ‘it would be more prudent for His Majesty and his family to … settle in the interior of the country, far from factories and garrisons, in the country house of some landed proprietor’.87 The possibility of Grand Duke Mikhail’s estate at Brasovo, near Orel 660 miles (1060 km) to the south, was discussed; but it was soon discovered that local peasants would be hostile.88 There had even been talk of sending the family to the Ipatiev Monastery at Kostroma. Nicholas and Alexandra still clung to hopes of the Crimea, for his mother and sisters and their families were now living there, but this was out of the question as far as Kerensky was concerned; travelling all that way by train, through the heavily politicized industrial cities of central Russia, would be impossible.89

‘We all thought and talked about our forthcoming journey’, Nicholas wrote on 12 July. ‘Strange to think of leaving here after 4 months in seclusion.’90 The following day he began ‘surreptitiously, to gather together my things and books’, still nursing hopes of the Crimea where he ‘could live like a civilized man’.91 It appeared that Kerensky intended moving them some time after Alexey’s birthday, but by now, although the Romanovs did not yet know it, he was considering other, very different options.92

Out in the palace garden and oblivious to this, the children were able to savour their first home-grown vegetables and were learning to cut hay. It was extremely hot and Alexey had been amusing himself squirting water over the girls from the water pump. They didn’t mind: ‘It’s so good out in the garden’, Tatiana told her friend Zinaida Tolstaya:

but even better when you go deep into the wood, where it is quite wild and you can go along the little paths and so on … Oh how envious I was to read that you saw the dreadnoughts Alexander III and the Prut. This is what we miss so much – no sea, no boats! We had grown so used to spending practically the whole summer on the water, at the skerries; in my opinion there is nothing better; it was the best and happiest of times – after all, we went sailing for nine years in a row and even before, when we were quite small; and now it’s so strange to have been here for three years without the water, there’s no other such feeling in the summer for me as we only used to live at Tsarskoe Selo in the winter and sometimes in the spring, till we went to the Crimea. Right now the lime trees are in full bloom and it smells so divine.93

By the middle of the month the family was packing in earnest for the hoped-for journey south. And then, on Friday 28 July, Nicholas noted with dismay:

After breakfast we found out from Count Benkendorf that they are sending us, not to the Crimea, but to one of the distant provincial towns three or four days’ journey to the east! But where exactly they don’t say – even the commandant doesn’t know. And there we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!94

For the next two days as everyone hurried to sort out the items they most wished to take with them, there was still no clear indication of where exactly they were going. Hopes were finally dashed when, on the 29th, they were told ‘that we must provide ourselves with warm clothing.’ Pierre Gilliard was dismayed: ‘So we are not to be taken south. A great disappointment.’ They had been told to expect a five-day journey; Nicholas soon worked it out. Five days on a train meant they were going to Siberia.95

With the family’s departure fixed for 31 July, the members of the entourage had to decide whether they would be prepared to travel with them into a decidedly uncertain future. Pierre Gilliard had no doubts about where his duty lay, as he explained in a letter to his family in Switzerland on the 30th: ‘I have thought about all the possible eventualities and am not frightened by what awaits me. I feel I must go to the very end … with God’s grace. Having benefited from happy days, should I not share with them the bad days?’96 Ladies-in-waiting Trina Schneider and Nastenka Hendrikova also prepared to go with the family, but Iza Buxhoeveden was about to undergo an operation and would have to join them later; Sydney Gibbes, still stuck in Petrograd, hoped to do likewise.97

On 30 July everyone did their best to celebrate Alexey’s thirteenth birthday. Alexandra asked that the icon of Our Lady of the Sign should be brought from the Znamenie Church for a special Te Deum led by Father Belyaev. It was a very emotional experience and everyone was in tears: ‘Somehow it was especially comforting to pray to her holy image together with all our people’, wrote Nicholas, in the knowledge that it would probably be for the last time.98 Later, the household went outside in the garden to take farewell photographs of each other and out of habit Nicholas sawed some wood, telling Benkendorf (who, too old and with an ailing wife, was remaining at Tsarskoe) to distribute the vegetables and wood among those servants who had remained loyal during their captivity. Valentina Chebotareva had sent Tatiana a note that day congratulating them on Alexey’s birthday: ‘As for you, my dear child, allow this old V[alentina] I[vanovna] who loves you so much to mentally make the sign of the cross over you and kiss you warmly.’99

Instructed to be ready to leave at midnight on Monday 31 July, the family assembled in the semicircular hall, downstairs by the rear entrance. The elegant marble reception room looked like ‘a customs hall’, as chambermaid Anna Demidova noted. She was horrified at the mountains of luggage that two hours later had yet to be carried out to the waiting trucks; by 3 o’clock the men loading it all had hardly made a dent in the pile and everyone was getting anxious about the delay to their departure, which had been scheduled for 1 a.m.100 Finally everything was loaded, but now rumours were flying that their train had not even left Petrograd.101 They all sat there, dog tired, and waited with sinking hearts as the night wore on. The girls wept a great deal and Alexandra was extremely agitated. Dr Botkin spent the night going from one to the next with valerian drops to calm them down. Alexey kept trying to lie down and sleep but in the end gave up. Wan with fatigue, he sat ‘perched on a box, and holding his favourite spaniel “Joy” by a leash’ as his father paced up and down, endlessly lighting cigarettes.102 They were all grateful for the offer of tea when it finally came at 5 a.m.

Behind the scenes, Kerensky’s evacuation plans had been on the brink of failure. During the night, workers at Petrograd’s Nikolaevsky Station, who had been preparing the train had begun to hesitate about whether they would allow it to leave. ‘All night long there had been difficulties, doubts and vacillations. The railwaymen delayed the shunting and coupling, put through mysterious phone calls, made inquiries somewhere.’103 Dawn was already breaking when the train – comprised of wagons-lits and a restaurant car of the Chinese Eastern Railway – finally arrived at Tsarskoe Selo’s Alexandrovsky Station more than five hours late and was parked down the tracks, away from the main entrance.104 The station itself ‘was surrounded by soldiers, and troops with loaded rifles’ who had ‘marched out and lined both sides of the road from the palace to the station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds of ammunition’.105

Word by now had got out in Tsarskoe Selo that something was afoot and as the sun rose on 1 August a triple cordon of guards in front of the palace was having to hold back an ‘immense crowd of people hooting and shouting menacingly’, keen to get one last look at Nikolashka-durachok* as he was taken away.106 At about 5.15, four motor cars finally arrived. It was clearly going to be impossible to take the family out past the crowds at the main gate; they would have to cross the Alexander Park to reach the station at its western end. The entourage tried to steel themselves and remain cheerful during this final farewell, refusing to say the usual Do svidaniya but repeating the more emphatic Do skorogo svidaniya, ‘till we see each other soon’.107 Much to her despair the tsaritsa had not been allowed to say farewell to all of her most faithful retainers, particularly her elderly mistress of the robes, Elizaveta Naryshkina, who had served three tsaritsas. But she sent her a note: ‘Farewell, darling motherly friend, my heart is too full to write any more.’108 It was only now, as Alexandra left the palace, that Kerensky, who on their previous encounters had found her ‘proud and unbending, fully conscious of her right to rule’ saw for the first time ‘the former Empress simply as a mother, anxious and weeping’.109

When the family arrived at the station – their cars surrounded by a mounted escort of Dragoons – they had to walk down the heavy moist sand of the railway embankment to get to their train, which had been mocked up with flags and placards proclaiming it was part of a ‘Red Cross Mission’.*110 Alexandra could barely manage the walk, nor could she climb up onto the footboard and had to be ‘pulled up with great difficulty and at once fell forward on her hands and knees’. A military escort, headed by Evgeny Kobylinsky, was to travel with them and their immediate entourage on this train; a second train was waiting nearby for the remainder of the servants and the guards.111

When everyone in the Romanov entourage had taken their places, Kerensky ran up and shouted, ‘They can go!’ and ‘The whole train immediately shuddered off in the direction of the imperial branch line’. As it did so the quiet and watchful crowd that had gathered as one ‘suddenly stirred themselves, and waved their hands, their scarves and caps’, in an eerily silent farewell.112 The sunrise was beautiful, noted Nicholas, as the train headed north in the direction of Petrograd before swinging south-east in the direction of the Urals; his attitude to departure as an ordinary civilian from his home of twenty-two years was as phlegmatic as it had been to his abdication.

‘I will describe to you how we travelled’, Anastasia later wrote of their journey, in an essay for Sydney Gibbes, in which as usual she struggled with her English spelling:

We started in the morning and when we got into the train I went to sleap, so did all of us. We were very tierd because we did not sleap the whole night. The first day was hot and very dusty. At the stations we had to shut our window curtanse that nobody should see us. Once in the evening I was looking out we stoped near a little house, but there was no station so we could look out. A little boy came to my window and asked: ‘Uncle, please give me, if you have got, a newspaper.’ I said: ‘I am not an uncle but an aunty and have no newspaper.’ At the first moment I could not understand why did he call me ‘Uncle’ but then I remembered that my hear is cut and I and the soldiers (which were standing next to me) laugh very much. On the way many funy things had hapend, and if I shall have time I shall write to you our travel farther on. Goodbye. Don’t forget me. Many kisses from us all to you my darling. Your A.113

It was only now, on the train, that the family was finally informed of their destination.114 ‘And so ended this act of the tragedy, the final episode of the Tsarskoe Selo period’, wrote Valentina Chebotareva in her diary after they had gone. ‘What’, she wondered, ‘awaits them in Tobolsk?’115