فصل 19

Chapter Nineteen

ON FREEDOM STREET

‘Why are there so many soldiers on this train?’ asked one of the grand duchesses, as it pulled out of the Alexandrovsky Station. They were all of course used to being escorted by the military, ‘but the great number on this occasion excited her surprise’.1 In all, 330 men and 6 officers of the 1st, 2nd and 4th Rifles accompanied the Romanovs on their journey to Siberia, the 1st occupying the com-partments on either side of the family. Whenever the train passed through a station the blinds were kept tightly drawn and the doors locked and it stopped only in sidings at rural halts where there were few, if any, of the curious to ask questions.

Back in Petrograd, when the news got out that the imperial family had been sent away, there was considerable confusion about where it was heading for. Talk of the Crimea abounded; others heard that the train was going west to Mogilev, and out of Russia. ‘This caused a panic in the Narva suburb of Petrograd’, recalled Robert Crozier Long:

A crowd of Bolshevik working-men proclaimed that the counter-revolutionary Government of Kerensky had treacherously sent the Tsar for safety to Germany, and that the result would be an immediate invasion with the aim of Restoration.2

Elsewhere rumour was rife that the train was heading all the way out to Harbin in Manchuria – a destination already becoming a refuge for White Russians fleeing the revolution.3 Perhaps Kerensky had this in mind as an ultimate destination, but for now the objective was to get the Romanovs beyond the tentacles of Petrograd’s militants.*

Despite the close proximity of so many guards, chambermaid Anna Demidova did not find the journey unpleasant. That first day on the train, as she noted in her diary, it was unbearably hot, but their compartments were very clean and comfortable and the food laid on in the restaurant car was surprisingly good, prepared by Chinese and Armenian cooks of the railway line.4 Alexey and his mother, who were both exhausted, did not join them, but dined together in her compartment. Finally at 7.30 in the evening, the heat still oppressive, they were all allowed off the train to stretch their legs and Anna and the girls even stopped to pick bilberries and cowberries. But they were all apprehensive about where they were headed:

It’s hard thinking about where they are taking us. While you’re on the way there you think less of what lies ahead, but your heart is heavy when you start to think about how far you are from your family and if and when you might see them again. I haven’t seen my sister once in five months.5

But she slept well that night, relieved after two weeks of terrible uncertainty and very little sleep that she now at least knew their destination, although the thought of Tobolsk made her heart sink. Later that day when the train pulled up at a rural halt, she heard questions being asked of one of the guards by a railway official:

‘Who’s on the train?‘An American Red Cross Mission.’‘Then why does no one show themselves and come out of the wagons?’‘It’s because they are all very sick, barely alive.’6

Resting in her compartment, Alexandra sat scrupulously noting down the stations as they passed: Tikhvin – Cherepovets – Shavra – Katen – Chaikovsky – Perm – Kamyshevo – Poklevskaya: aside from Perm, all obscure way stations in a vast empire that she and Nicholas had never got to know and from which they were now to be for ever separated.

Later on, near the River Slyva at Kama, they were allowed off the train once more for an hour’s walk; they stopped to admire the view of the beautiful valley of Kungur and the girls picked flowers. Now more at ease, that evening Anna Demidova played whist with Dr Botkin, Ilya Tatishchev and Vasili Dolgorukov.7 Another long hot day followed as they crossed the endless Russian steppe with its vast fields of ripening grain stretching far into the distance. The train finally crossed the Urals into western Siberia on the 4th and rattled on through the big railway junction at Ekaterinburg. Nicholas noticed a distinct chill in the air by the time they pulled up in sight of the landing stage at Tyumen at 11.15 that evening.8

There was no railway line to Tobolsk and it was accessible by boat only for the brief four months of summer, so the family now boarded the American-built steamer the Rus for the remainder of their journey. They were given no special privileges on board, just plain hard beds like everyone else; much to the disgust of Anna Demidova there were no carafes of water in any of the cabins, and the most primitive washing facilities. She came to the conclusion that the boat was designed for people who didn’t wash very much. It took all night to load all the baggage and the escort onto two additional steamers, the Kormilets and the Tyumen, and it was not till 6 a.m. on 5 August that the Rus finally set off on the 189-mile (304-km) river journey to Tobolsk.9

The low-lying river banks on either side were thinly populated and had little to distinguish them. Dr Botkin’s son Gleb later recalled ‘the same brown fields, the same groves of sickly looking birches. Not a hill, not the slightest elevation of any sort to break the monotony of the landscape.’10 Thirty-six hours later and now on the wider waters of the Tobol River, the boat entered the Irtysh – ‘a little sluggish stream that drains, or partially drains one of the great marshes of eastern Siberia’ – which brought them into Tobolsk.11 Having heard of the former tsar’s imminent arrival, many gathered to catch sight of him. ‘Literally the entire town, I am not exaggerating, spilled out on to the shore’, recalled Commissar Makarov of the guard.12 The church bells were ringing for the Feast of the Transfiguration and as the Rus drew up at the landing stage at 6.30 on the evening of 6 August, Nicholas recalled that the family’s first sight was ‘the view of the cathedral and the houses on the hill’.13 Below, on the banks of the Irtysh, Tobolsk itself was a jumble of low wooden houses and dirt roads built on treeless marshland. It was significant for two things: as a former place of exile – Feodor Dostoevsky had spent ten days in a cell here in transit to Omsk in 1850 – and as the haunt of mosquitoes ‘said to be of a size and a ferocity unequalled elsewhere’.14 Malaria haunted the miasmas of the marshy forests that stretched for miles around the town.

A small, eighteenth-century kremlin of white stone – the only one of its kind in Siberia – dominated the view from the top of a steep bluff inland, and was pretty much all that Tobolsk had to offer the adventurous tourist. Its major attraction was the former bishop’s palace – now a courthouse – the St Sophia Cathedral, and a museum containing ‘large collections of old instruments of torture: branding tools, used to stamp the foreheads and cheeks of prisoners, instruments for pulling out the center bone of the nose [a favourite of torturers during the reign of Boris Godunov], painful shackles, and other horrible devices’.15 Churches dominated the town: twenty had been built to serve a population of around 23,000 people. Kerensky knew Tobolsk, having visited it in 1910, and had chosen it for the Romanovs, not as a lesson in the iniquities of tsarism, but because it had no industrial proletariat, no railway depots or factories seething with political activists, and because for eight months of the year it was ‘shut off from the world … as remote from human association as the moon’.16 The Siberian winter was a better policeman than any prison; as Olga was soon to discover: ‘Tobolsk is a forgotten corner when the river freezes.’17

While the family waited on board the Rus, Kobylinsky, Dolgorukov, Tatishchev and Makarov went ahead to inspect the family’s accommodation. The former Governor’s House – hastily rechristened Freedom House – was located on the also appropriately revolutionary Freedom Street. It was one of the two best buildings that the town had to offer, and had the advantage of surrounding boardwalks to spare the pedestrian from the quagmire of the intractable autumn mud. But two hours later the three men came back with grim faces: the ‘dirty, boarded-up, smelly house’ had ‘terrible bathrooms and toilets’ and in its present state, was totally uninhabitable.18 Until three days previously it had been used as a barracks by deputies of the local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet, who had left it filthy and practically stripped of furniture. There were no chairs, tables, washstands, or even carpets. The double winter windows were grimy and had not been removed and there was rubbish everywhere. Forced to remain on board the Rus and in order to pass the time while waiting for the house to be got ready, the Romanov family took some excursions on the river and made the most of any opportunity to get off and walk.

Anna Demidova had meanwhile gone on ahead to help prepare the house and had been deeply depressed at the sight of its derelict interior. Soon she was trudging round town with Nastenka Hendrikova and Vasili Dolgorukov in search of household supplies: jugs and ewers for the washstands, buckets, tins of paint, flat-irons, inkpots, candles, writing paper, wool and thread for darning, as well as a much needed laundress to handle all the family’s washing. She stopped to admire the fur coats and warm valenki on sale in the market – all at horribly inflated prices, deliberately raised in the knowledge of the imperial entourage’s arrival in town. But otherwise ‘everything here is very primitive’ she noted in her diary.19 Makarov meanwhile had been hunting for a piano for Alexandra and the grand duchesses as well as additional furniture, while a team of upholsterers, carpenters, painters and electricians was gathered together – some of them German prisoners of war – to refurbish the house at speed.20 Most urgent were repairs to the inadequate plumbing, but there was also considerable concern about where exactly the authorities would put all the staff who could not be accommodated in the Governor’s House.

‘The family is bearing everything with great sangfroid and courage’, wrote Dolgorukov. ‘They apparently adapt to circumstances easily, or at least pretend to, and do not complain after all their previous luxury.’21 Finally, on Sunday 13 August the house was ready. Only one carriage was laid on to take Alexandra from the ship to the house, accompanied by Tatiana; the rest of the family, servants and entourage walked the mile (1½ km) into town. When they entered, the whole of the ground floor was a mass of luggage and packing cases; nevertheless they were allowed an impromptu Sunday service conducted by the local priest, who went round blessing the rooms with holy water.22

Although their packing had been hurried, Alexandra had ensured that they had brought with them not just their personal clothing and possessions but also many of their favourite pictures, silver tableware, monogrammed china, table linen, a phonograph and records, their cameras and photographic equipment, favourite books, a trunkful of photograph albums, and another containing all Nicholas’s letters and diaries (which he had not destroyed). The girls had left behind all their beautiful court dresses and their large picture hats, bringing only simple linen suits, white summer dresses, skirts, blouses, sunhats and, as instructed, plenty of warm cardigans, scarves and hats, fur jackets and thick felt coats.

The family was accommodated on the first floor of the two-storey house, with the girls sharing a corner bedroom facing the street. Alexey had another with his dyadka Nagorny in a small room next to it.*23 There was a bedroom for Nicholas and Alexandra, as well as a study for him and a private drawing room for her, a bathroom and toilet. A large upstairs ballroom opposite Nicholas’s study would be used for church services, furnished with the field chapel that the family had brought with them from Tsarskoe Selo and with Alexandra’s lace bedspread serving as an altar cloth. Services would be conducted by the priest and deacon from the nearby Blagoveshchensky Church, assisted by four nuns from the Ivanovsky Convent outside town, who came to sing the liturgy (and also brought welcome gifts of eggs and milk).24

With a typical lack of complaint the four sisters immediately set about making the most of their new surroundings by ensuring that the room they shared was as congenial as possible. It had a traditional, tall white-tiled stove in the corner, a small sofa scattered with cushions, a table which was soon stacked with books, pens and writing paper. Simple white bentwood chairs stood at the foot of each of the girls’ four modest campbeds, brought from the Alexander Palace and surrounded with screens covered with colourful throws and shawls, which the girls also draped on the bare and draughty white walls to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. On their tiny bedside tables the sisters crammed their favourite knick-knacks, icons and photographs. Each girl also fixed many pictures on the wall above her own bedhead: the younger two opting for fond reminders of the Tsar’s Escort in their Cossack uniforms at Mogilev and other friends, relatives, pets and much-loved wounded officers, while their older sisters’ more sober tastes focused on religious images and a large photograph of their parents on board the Shtandart.25

The dining room was located downstairs, as was a room occupied by Pierre Gilliard where he also gave the children lessons. Later on, shared rooms downstairs were allocated to the maids Alexandra Tegleva and Elizaveta Ersberg who looked after the children, Mariya Tutelberg who attended Alexandra, and other staff includ-ing Nicholas’s valet Terenty Chemodurov. For now the rest of the entourage and servants were housed in the even more ill-prepared and uncongenial Kornilov House opposite: Nastenka Hendrikova and her maid Paulina Mezhants, Dr Botkin (who in mid-September was joined by his two children, Gleb and Tatiana), Dr Derevenko and his family, Tatishchev and Dolgorukov. Here, occupying crudely partitioned cubicles in a large draughty hall, and with very little concession to privacy, the women were later joined by Trina Schneider and her two maids Katya and Masha and another tutor, Klavdiya Bitner.26 Although the family remained under house arrest with only the yard outside to move about in and occasional excursions to the nearby church, the entourage and servants were, for the time being, allowed to go about freely in town.

The weather remained hot and sunny in Tobolsk well into September, but the family had been deeply disconsolate to see that the ‘so-called garden’ was a ‘nasty little vegetable patch’ that would only grow a few cabbages and swedes at best.27 In addition, at the back of the house were a lean-to greenhouse, woodshed and barn, and a few spindly birch trees. There were no flowers or shrubs at all. The only concession for the children was a couple of swings. Nicholas was bitterly disappointed that the garden offered no scope for the physical labour and recreation that he craved, though within days he had chopped down a dry pine tree and was allowed to put up his horizontal bar on which he did his daily chin-ups. To the side of the house the authorities had hastily created a square dusty courtyard for recreation – twice a day, between 11 and 12 and after lunch until dusk – in a fenced-off part of the unpaved road.

The uncertainties of the family’s new environment were very quickly compounded by the increasingly erratic arrival of letters. ‘My dear Katya,’ Anastasia wrote within days of their arrival, ‘I am writing this letter to you being certain that you will never get it … It is so sad to be unable to hear from you. We often, often think and talk of you … Have you received my letter of 31 July and the card that I wrote long ago?’ She was now numbering her letters in hopes of keeping track of them. But her thoughts were already turning to happier times: ‘Ask Victor whether he still remembers last autumn. I am now remembering a lot … everything good, of course!’ Enclosing a red petal from a poppy in the garden she apologized for having so little to say: ‘I cannot write anything interesting … we spend our time monotonously.’28

The monotony was, however, broken soon after by unexpected news: Olga’s friend Rita Khitrovo had arrived in Tobolsk anxious to see the family and pass on to them some fifteen or so letters (which she had hidden in a travelling pillow), as well as gifts of chocolate, perfume, sweets and biscuits, and icons sent by various friends.29 The highly-strung and excitable twenty-two-year-old, whose ingenuousness and devotion to Olga – to the point of hero-worship – were equalled only by her fearlessness, had taken it upon herself to make the journey without any thought of the possible repercussions. Refused admittance to the Governor’s House, Rita went to the Kornilov House opposite to see Nastenka Hendrikova, from where she waved and blew kisses to the four sisters who had come out on the balcony to try and catch a glimpse of her.

But her arrival alarmed the authorities. During her journey she had sent postcards home that had been intercepted and interpreted as suspicious. It was thought she might be colluding with Anna Vyrubova and other monarchist friends in a conspiracy to rescue the family, rumours of a nebulous plot by ‘Cossack officers’ having already been circulating in Tobolsk. Soon afterwards, on the orders of Kerensky, men came to inspect all the things Rita had brought for the family. The letters were checked and deemed harmless, but she was put under arrest and sent back to Moscow for questioning. Hearing the story later, Valentina Chebotareva thought a ‘mountain had been made out of a molehill’, for Rita insisted that her journey had been undertaken entirely out of a personal desire to see the family. But she had, unwittingly, caused them harm: ‘an obliging fool is more dangerous than an enemy’, as Valentina observed.30 Commissar Makarov was recalled by the Provisional Government and replaced by a new man, Vasily Pankratov.

Pankratov was an archetypal, old-school revolutionary. The son of peasants, he had been active in the extremist Narodnaya Volya [People’s Will] movement of the 1880s and in 1884 had been sentenced to death for killing a gendarme in Kiev. It was only his youth that had saved him from the gallows; instead he served fourteen years incarcerated in the notorious Shlisselburg Fortress and from there was sent into exile in Yakutiya before being freed in the political amnesty of 1905. His revolutionary career might have been a textbook one but to Nicholas, Pankratov would be ‘the little man’.31 But adjust to him he did, for Pankratov, who did his best by the family within the constraints placed upon him, would be their only link with the outside world. During the weeks that followed, the family and Pankratov would learn much about each other and develop a polite, respectful relationship.

The first thing that had struck the new commissar was seeing the family at prayer. He noted how devotedly Alexandra came and arranged the temporary altar, covered it with her embroidery, the candles and icons before the arrival of the priest and nuns for the service. There was a punctiliousness to every aspect of the family’s religious observance: after the entire suite and servants had all assembled, in their designated places according to rank, the family entered through the side doors and everyone bowed to them. During the service Pankratov noticed how frequently – and fervently – the Romanovs crossed themselves. He could not but be impressed that ‘the whole family of the former tsar had given themselves up to a truly religious state of mind and feeling’ – even if it was one that was beyond his comprehension.32

With their lives so grounded in religious acceptance it took no time at all for the family to slip back into the same kind of quiet, uneventful routine that they had followed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace. Having always been so physically active, Nicholas was intensely frustrated by the lack of exercise and took to walking up and down the yard forty or fifty times in an hour, though soon he was able to busy himself sawing wood for the winter. Alexey’s only outside interest, until the arrival of a playmate in the shape of Dr Derevenko’s son Kolya later that month, was in the dogs. Much of the girls’ time was spent, when not helping their father saw logs, in chasing Joy and Ortipo away from the refuse tip at the back of the yard, where they persisted in rootling around for food.33 The heat was too much for Alexandra, who would sometimes sit on the balcony under a parasol sewing, before retiring indoors. She was rarely up and out of her room before lunchtime and often remained alone in the house when the others were outside – painting and sewing, or playing the piano. Much of her time was spent in religious contemplation and reading the gospels, her thoughts on which she continued to pour into long homiletic letters to her friends, particularly Anna Vyrubova.

The food at the Governor’s House was surprisingly good and plentiful in comparison with the desperate shortages now being endured in Petrograd. Many of the locals looked favourably on the former tsar and his family, and gifts of food began to arrive. Some doffed their caps when passing by on the street; others occasionally even kneeled down and crossed themselves. Old habits died hard, even here, and Alexandra still wrote out menu cards for each day’s modest meals. The atmosphere was less stressful too. Evenings were spent playing the usual games of bezique and dominoes, or bumble puppy and nain jaune, and Nicholas as always read aloud – his first choice on arrival in Tobolsk being The Scarlet Pimpernel. He then set about revisiting the classics of Russian literature. ‘I have decided to re-read all our best writers from beginning to end (I’m reading English and French books too)’, he told his mother.34 Having just worked his way through Gogol, he moved on to Turgenev. But, as Pankratov noted with amusement, the members of the entourage often seemed to get bored with having to sit in silence as he read and would begin to whisper among themselves or even nodded off to the monotonous sound of his voice.35 Nevertheless, reading was undoubtedly a boon for all the family. Sydney Gibbes soon arrived with more favourite books for the children: English adventure stories such as Alexey’s great favourite Cast Up by the Sea by Sir Samuel Baker, the novels of Walter Scott (Tatiana and Anastasia loved Ivanhoe), Thackeray, Dickens and H. Rider Haggard. Such indeed was the hunger for reading material that Trina Schneider wrote to PVP in Petrograd asking him to send more books – the stories of Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Karamzin, which the children didn’t have, as well as books on Russian grammar and literature.36 Tatiana wrote too, asking him to send out her set of Alexey Tolstoy’s novels that she had unfortunately not brought with her.

But even the best of books could not for long fend off the crippling boredom that was infecting the entire entourage and which was so clearly reflected in everyone’s diaries and letters. Alexey’s perfunctory diary contained nothing but repetitious complaints: ‘Today passed just as yesterday … It is boring.’37 Even Alexandra could write nothing but ‘I spent the day, as usual’… ‘Everything was the same as yesterday’. And Nicholas echoed her: ‘The day passed as always’… ‘The day passed as usual’.38 By 25 August he was already noting that ‘Walks in the garden are becoming incredibly tedious; here the sense of sitting locked up is much stronger than it ever was at Tsarskoe Selo.’39 To keep himself occupied he dug out a pond in the garden, helped by Alexey, for the ducks and geese that had been brought in, and he also built a wooden platform on the roof of the greenhouse where he and the children could sit soaking up the sunshine and watch the world go by below. The locals were fascinated when they saw them there, or on the balcony, especially when they saw the girls: ‘Their hair was shorn like little boys’… We thought that was the fashion in Petrograd,’ recalled one local, ‘later, people said they had been sick … still they were very pretty, very clean.’40

At midday on Friday 8 September – the Nativity of the Virgin – the family was allowed out for the first time to attend service at the nearby Blagoveshchensky Church. They went on foot, pushing Alexandra in her wheelchair through the public garden where there was no one around, but were greatly disconcerted to see a crowd waiting for them outside the church. ‘The emperor was still the emperor in Tobolsk’, it appeared.41 ‘It was very unpleasant’, Alexandra wrote, but she was ‘grateful that I had been in a real church for the first time in six months’.42

Pankratov noticed how much pleasure this small concession had evoked:

As Nicholas II and the children walked through the public garden, they looked this way and that, talking in French* about the weather, the garden, as though they had never seen it before, although the gardens were located directly opposite their balcony, from where they could clearly see them every day. But it is one thing to see something from a distance, from behind bars as it were, and quite another to see it when almost at liberty. Every tree, every twig and bush and bench acquired its own unique charm … From the expression on their faces and the way they moved one could tell they had all undergone some particular personal trial.43

On their way through the gardens Anastasia fell over while craning her neck to look at things and her sisters and father laughed at her clumsiness. Alexandra did not react. ‘She sat there majestically in her wheelchair and said nothing.’ She hadn’t been sleeping at night – tormented by another bout of neuralgia and toothache. Once again, what most evoked public curiosity as the family passed was the girls’ heads: ‘Why was their hair cut short like boys?’ people asked.44 By the end of September, however, their hair was getting quite long again, though Anastasia told Katya that it had been ‘such a pleasure to have short hair’.45

On 14 September when they attended church a second time the family went at 8 a.m. to avoid the crowds: ‘You can just imagine how great our joy was,’ Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia, ‘as you will remember how inconvenient our field chapel at Tsarskoe Selo was.’46 But a chill autumnal rain the previous day had brought a transformation in the surrounding streets, and they were now a sea of mud: ‘If they hadn’t laid wooden boards on the road it would be impossible to get through’, said Anna Demidova.47 Nicholas was now spending as much time as he could outside sawing wood. Pankratov was astonished at his prodigious energy. From time to time Alexey, Tatishchev, Dolgorukov, and even an uncomfortable-looking Pierre Gilliard (inappropriately dressed in trilby and wing collar) were enlisted to help, but Nicholas wore them all out. Pankratov sent word to the local authorities that the ex-tsar enjoyed sawing wood so much that in response they sent in great piles of birch trunks for him to cut up.48 The whole family was counting its luck at the continuing fine weather. ‘It’s so good that we sit in the garden a lot or in the courtyard in front of the house’, Tatiana told her aunt Xenia:

It’s terribly nice that we have a balcony, which the sun warms from morning to evening. It’s good to sit there and watch people coming and going on the street. It is our only entertainment … We’ve managed to play skittles in front of the house and we play a kind of tennis, though of course without a net, for the sake of practice. Then we walk up and down, so we don’t forget how to walk – 120 paces in all, which is considerably shorter than the deck [of the Shtandart].49

Tatiana calculated that you could walk round the entire kitchen garden in three minutes flat, but at least there was the livestock to look after, which now included five pigs housed in the former stables – all no doubt destined to provide food during the winter to come.50

The beginning of October brought the long-awaited arrival from Tsarskoe Selo of carpets, curtains and window blinds in time for the approaching winter, but the wine brought from the imperial cellars was confiscated by the guards and poured into the Irtysh.51 Far more welcome, however, was Sydney Gibbes, who on 5 October arrived on the boat from Tyumen – one of the last before the ice made the river impassable – along with a new tutor for the children, Klavdiya Bitner. Gibbes brought cards and gifts from Anna Vyrubova, now out of prison, including her favourite perfume which Maria said reminded them all of her. How they missed her, she wrote to Anna: ‘It’s terribly sad that we don’t see each other, but God grant that we shall meet again and what joy that will be.’52

It was not long before Sydney Gibbes found himself once more having to contend with Anastasia’s quirky and inattentive behaviour in class. On one occasion, having lost his temper, he told her to ‘shut up’; the next time she handed in her homework she had added a new nameplate to her exercise book – ‘A. Romanova (Shut up!)’.53 Klavdiya Bitner found Anastasia a trial too – lazy in lessons and often ill-mannered.54 She had been a teacher at the Mariinsky girls’ school at Tsarskoe Selo and during the war had volunteered as a nurse at one of the hospitals where she had looked after Kobylinsky who had been wounded at the front. A romance had developed between them and when he was sent with the family to Tobolsk, Kobylinsky had wangled a job for Klavdiya teaching Maria, Anastasia and Alexey Russian language, literature and maths. Both she and Pankratov remained distinctly unimpressed with the standard of the children’s education, particularly Alexey’s, unaware perhaps that it had been constantly interrupted through illness. Pankratov was shocked at how little they, and their father for that matter, knew of Siberia, its geography and peoples.55 As winter set in, one of the grand duchesses had been amazed at the sight of people on the streets wearing ‘strange white and grey costumes trimmed with fur’. Pankratov realized she was referring to the reindeer-skin traditional dress worn by Yakuts, Khanty and Samoyedic peoples living in the region. Had the sisters never seen pictures of these inhabitants of their father’s vast Russian Empire in their geography books, he wondered? Such strangers from the ‘outside life’ were, for the girls, precisely the kind of people they had so longed to learn about, but had never had a chance to discover. Pankratov found them at times extremely naïve: you only had to talk to them about the most mundane things in the world outside and it was ‘as if they had never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything’, a highly biased view but one that was clearly ignorant of the breadth of the education the girls had in fact been receiving until the revolution had disrupted it.56

Lessons, for all their limitations in such highly constrained circumstances, were, in Sydney Gibbes’s estimation, an important distraction that helped the younger children get through the monotony of the day. Indeed, he felt that the only one of the grand duchesses who seemed ‘dull’ was Olga, who didn’t have any formal lessons, although she did continue with her own independent study, wrote poetry and practised her French by reading stories to Alexandra. It seemed painfully clear to Gibbes, though, that the family’s ‘greatest hardship’, especially Nicholas’s, was the lack of free exercise, ‘the yard being a poor substitute for their Alexander Park’.57 On one occasion Maria had said to him that they were all, otherwise, quite contented and that she ‘could live at Tobolsk for ever if only they would be able to walk out a little’.58 But Nicholas’s repeated requests to Pankratov to be allowed into town were refused. ‘Are they really afraid that I might run off?’ he asked. ‘I will never leave my family.’59 He seemed to have no comprehension of the security problems that this would pose. The local government of Tobolsk was still holding on but not far away, in Tomsk, the workers’ soviet there was already demanding that the Romanovs be taken to prison.

‘We keep doing the same things every day’, became the regular complaint of all the family, as Anastasia told Katya on 8 October. One thing that lightened the girls’ day was the visits of a cleaning woman who brought her little boy Tolya with her. The sisters loved playing with him for he reminded them of a little boy at Stavka called Lenka whom they had taken under their wing. ‘Ask your brother; he met him’, Anastasia told Katya. Mention of Lenka once again prompted the remembrance of happier times with the Tsar’s Escort at Mogilev: ‘What are you doing? I want to see you all awfully badly!… When I look at the street through the window, I see everything covered with snow and feel so sad, because it is winter already, and I love summer and warmth.’60 ‘Till now we’ve had no reason to complain about the weather, as it’s been warm,’ Olga told Xenia that same day, ‘but now we are freezing.’ She envied her living in the Crimea with her mother and sister. ‘No doubt it’s wonderful where you are. The sea so bluish-green … We are all well and our life is the same, so there is nothing interesting that I can write about.’61

For ten days in the second half of October came a less than pleasant change to the daily routine when the former imperial dentist, Sergey Kostritsky, travelled all the way from the Crimea to check the family’s teeth and perform some urgent dental work on Nicholas and Alexandra, who both suffered endless problems. Kostritsky arrived with letters and gifts from Maria Feodorovna, Xenia and Olga and was accommodated in Pankratov’s lodgings. Inevitably, the two men discussed the family and agreed that even here in Tobolsk, they were still ‘suffocating in the same stilted formal atmosphere’ that had prevailed at court. It had created a real ‘spiritual hunger’ in them and a ‘thirst to meet with people from a different milieu’. Hidebound tradition ‘dragged them down like a dead weight and made them the slaves of etiquette’.62 Pankratov might have wished more time had been given to the girls’ broader education, instead of to the niceties of ‘how to stand, how to sit and what to say, and so on’, but despite that he was impressed with how willingly they chopped wood and cleared the snow – ‘their simple life gave them much pleasure’.63 With most of the winter wood now cut the girls were helping their father to pile it up in the wood store and clear the snow in the yard, as well as from the steps and roofs of the outbuildings. Pankratov caught Maria one day struggling to do this with a broken spade. Why hadn’t she asked for a replacement, he enquired, adding that he had not thought she would wish to do such things. ‘But I love this kind of work’, she had replied.64 So long as the weather was fine and they could work outside in the fresh air the girls were happy. ‘Bright sun … makes my mood immediately better’, Olga wrote to PVP, with the weather continuing ‘divine’ well into November. ‘So don’t think that it is always bad. Not at all. As you know, we don’t get dejected easily.’65

But dejection must have descended at the end of the month when the family heard of the October Revolution in Petrograd. ‘A second revolution’, Alexandra wrote in her diary on the 28th, when the news finally reached Tobolsk. ‘Provisional government replaced. The Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky have occupied the Smolny. Winter Palace badly damaged.’66 Only the day before Nicholas had written a cheerful letter to his mother: ‘I’m chopping a lot of wood, usually with Tatishchev … The food here is excellent and plenty of it, a big difference with Tsarskoe Selo, so that we have all settled down well in Tobolsk and have put on 8–10 pounds [3.5–4.5 kg] in weight.’67 Petrograd and their former lives were now so much past history for Nicholas that the Bolshevik coup did not particularly register with him and he didn’t even mention it in his diary; the weather was excellent, he had walked a lot and chopped wood, that was the sum total of his world now.68 For a long time he made no comment about the October Revolution: ‘Nicholas II suffered silently and never talked to me about it’, Pankratov recalled. Eventually he merely expressed outrage at the sacking of the Winter Palace. It was mid-November before Nicholas finally received the newspaper accounts and deemed this second revolution ‘Far worse and more shameful than the events of the Time of Troubles’. The turbulent years of the interregnum in the sixteenth century seemed to have far more resonance for him now than the recent past.69