فصل 20

Chapter Twenty

THANK GOD WE ARE STILL IN RUSSIA AND ALL TOGETHER

A heavy fall of snow greeted Olga’s birthday on 3 November, for which she received modest presents of three pots of cyclamen and some strong-smelling geraniums. ‘Dear Olga has turned 22,’ Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘it’s a pity that the poor thing has to spend her birthday in this present environment.’1 For a mournful and introspective Alexandra, Olga’s birthday was, this sad difficult year of 1917, a talismanic day – a day of remembrance rather than celebration. Thirty-nine years previously to the day, her little sister May had died of diphtheria; and on this same day fourteen years ago Ernie’s daughter Elisabeth had died suddenly when staying with them at Skierniewice. Against this comment in her diary Alexandra added the left-facing sauwastika symbol of which she was so fond, her use of it denoting the cycle of life and death.

For Olga herself – twenty-two, unmarried, and a prisoner in snowbound Siberia – it must have been a particularly bleak birthday. She had remained very thin since her illness and had become increasingly withdrawn and anxious, so much so that Sydney Gibbes had found her rather short-tempered at times. But her innate love and kindness still illuminated her letters to friends and family. On 9 November she wrote with affection to her aunt Xenia saying they were all well and cheerful. She had rescued a half-dead potted lemon tree from the conservatory and brought it back to life with careful watering. She was sorry that she had nothing interesting to tell her and that Xenia could not come and visit them, ‘as we’ve arranged things very nicely and feel completely at home here’.2

‘We live here as though on a ship at sea, and the days all resemble one another’, Nicholas wrote to Xenia with the same sense of quiet resignation.3 But the lack of news depressed him: ‘No papers at all, or even telegrams, have come from Petrograd for a long while. This is awful in such trying times.’4 When newspapers finally did arrive they said little. Denied access to The Times, ‘we were reduced to a nasty local rag printed on packing paper,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, ‘which only gave telegrams several days old and generally distorted and cut down’.5 Nevertheless Nicholas was grateful for any news; Sydney Gibbes noticed how he ‘would read through a newspaper from beginning to end, and when he had finished, would start again’.6 He was rereading his old diaries too, which he found ‘a pleasant occupation’ and a distraction from his interminable routine.7

‘We have not had any significant changes in our life so far’, Anastasia told Katya on 14 November. Apart from propelling themselves back and forth on the swing outside and from there dropping down into a heap of snow, or pulling Alexey around on his sledge, there was only the endless piling up of logs. ‘This work kept us busy. That is the way we live here, not very exciting, is it?’ Anastasia found herself endlessly apologizing to Katya: ‘I am terribly sorry that my letter turned out to be so stupid and boring, but nothing interesting happens here.’8 Her sense of frustration and irritation grew in her next letter: ‘I am starting to write this letter to you for the third time, because it either turns out messy, or very stupid!… Of course we have not played tennis for a long time. We swing, walk, and saw logs. Inside the house we read and study.’9

‘The children are getting very bored without their walks’, Anna Demidova wrote to a friend at the end of the month. Indeed,

there is a terrible boredom among the entourage. Frost, thaw, sunshine – darkness. The days fly by. Reading out loud in the evenings, needlework or bezique. We’re making Christmas presents. On the 21st they suddenly once more would not allow us out to church and wouldn’t even let us have a service at home – everything hangs on the whim of others. And it is at such difficult times that we particularly long for church … It’s hard to write letters when others read them, but I’m grateful all the same to have them.10

The unreliability of the postal system was a major frustration for everyone. All of the girls’ and Alexandra’s correspondence testifies to many letters and parcels never reaching them in Tobolsk, or the people they sent them to. ‘Every time I went over to the house,’ recalled Pankratov, ‘one or other of the Grand Duchesses would meet me with the question – are there any letters?’11 Their own were full of endless questions about old friends, former patients, where they were and what they were doing – though hopes of their ever knowing the answer were rapidly receding. ‘Forgive me for so many questions,’ Maria apologized to her friend Vera Kapralova, ‘but I so want to know what you are doing and how everyone is.’12 ‘Do you have news of any of ours?’ echoed her sister Olga. ‘As always, my postcards are uninteresting and full of questions.’13 And again, the same day, to Valentina Chebotareva: ‘Did you receive my letter of 12/10? I’m very sad not to have had news of you for such a long time.’14 Tatiana, more restrained, seemed for her part almost to enjoy the isolation: ‘everything is quiet in our distant little town. It’s good to be so far from the railway and large towns, where there are no cars and only horses.’15 But she admitted to Valentina Chebotareva, ‘we feel as though we are living on some kind of faraway island where we receive news from another world … I play the piano a lot. The time goes quickly and the days pass completely unnoticed.’16

By early December the temperature was dropping well below zero; on the 7th and 8th it hit –23 degrees C (–9.4 degrees F). ‘We shiver in the rooms,’ Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova, ‘and there is always a strong draught from the windows.’17 It was so cold indoors that even the hardy Nicholas sat in his Cossack cherkeska. The girls huddled together to try and keep warm; ‘the dogs are running around and begging to get in our laps’, Tatiana told Zinaida Tolstaya, all of them glad of the warmth of a friendly animal. ‘We do not have enough space for everybody,’ Anastasia wrote to Katya, ‘so one of us is writing while sitting on the sofa and holding the paper on her lap. It is pretty chilly in the room, so our hands do not write properly.’18 Spirits were beginning to sag until Sydney Gibbes came up with a new way of passing the cold, dark winter days. He suggested that the children perform some one-act plays; he had brought a selection with him. They started rehearsing after their afternoon recreation, and created an improvised theatre in the ballroom upstairs. On the evening of 6 December Maria, Alexey and Gilliard performed a twenty-minute playlet, Le fluide de John by Maurice Hennequin.19

At last, on 10 December, the family was allowed out to mass again. ‘We are always so happy when they let us go to church’, Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia:

although you can’t compare this church with our cathedral,* but all the same it’s better than indoors … I often remember Tsarskoe Selo and the lovely concerts we had at the hospital; do you remember how amusing it was when our wounded did the lezginka dance; I also remember our walks at Pavlovsk and your little carriage, and the morning jaunts past your house. How long ago that all seems, doesn’t it? Well, I must stop now.20

Although they were all getting chilblains from the intense cold, the girls had at last had things to do in the run-up to Christmas, helping their mother make presents for the entourage and even the guards as well. Alexandra knitted woollen waistcoats and painted cards and bookmarks. She and the girls were using up every last precious scrap of material and knitting wool to ensure that everyone had something to open on Christmas Eve. ‘They were all expert needlewomen’, remembered Iza Buxhoeveden, ‘and managed to make the prettiest things out of the coarse, hand woven, country linen, on which they drew their own designs.’21 ‘I am knitting stockings for the small one’, Alexandra told Anna on the 15th.

He asked for a pair as all his are in holes. Mine are warm and thick like the ones I gave the wounded, do you remember? I make everything now. Father’s trousers are torn and darned, the girls’ under-linen in rags. Dreadful, is it not? I have grown quite gray. Anastasia is now very fat, as Marie was, round and fat to the waist, with short legs. I do hope she will grow. Olga and Tatiana are both thin, but their hair grows beautifully so that they can go without scarves.22

With food supplies considerably better in Tobolsk than Petrograd, she had sent Anna precious gifts of flour, sugar, macaroni and sausage, as well as a hand-knitted scarf and stockings. In return Anna had sent a parcel with perfume, a blue silk jacket for Alexandra and pastilles for the children.23 Alexandra regretted that unlike her husband she had no old diaries and letters to read through. ‘I have not a line of yours’, she told Anna. She had ‘burnt everything’:

All the past is a dream. One keeps only tears and grateful memories. One by one all earthly things slip away, houses and possessions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But God is in all and nature never changes. I can see all around me churches (long to go to them) and hills, the lovely world.24

Her heart lifted when, on 19 December, Iza Buxhoeveden finally arrived in Tobolsk, with her Scottish travelling companion Miss Mather. Disappointingly, however, militants in the 2nd Regiment of the guard refused to allow her into the Governor’s House and she had to put up at the Kornilov House and content herself with catching only glimpses of the family.25 When the girls first saw her ‘they began to gesticulate wildly … in a moment all four Grand Duchesses were at the window waving their hands, while the youngest jumped up and down in her excitement’.26 They were all terribly disappointed that Iza was not allowed to join them, even for Christmas; three weeks later she was told to move into lodgings in town.

‘Christmas is coming,’ Trina Schneider wrote to her colleague PVP in Petrograd, ‘but this year it will be an especially sad one – far from our friends and families.’ Olga too, in response to a comment from her aunt Xenia about recent misfortunes, was trying hard not to feel melancholy:

They always say that nothing good or happy endures for long, or rather doesn’t last; but I also think that even awful things must come to an end some time. Isn’t that so? Things are as quiet with us as they can be, thank God. We are all well and cheerful and are not losing heart.I dreamed about grandmother today. I’ve just put on an orange scarf and for some reason it reminded me of your sitting room in Petrograd. My thoughts are jumping from one thing to another, which is why this letter seems so incoherent, for which I ask your forgiveness. Well, what else is there to write?27

Having made their many Christmas gifts the girls did their best to decorate the tree. ‘We have a Christmas tree standing in the corner and it gives off such a wonderful smell, not at all like the ones at Tsarskoe’, Olga told Rita Khitrovo.

It’s a special kind and is called a ‘balsamic fir’. It smells strongly of orange and mandarin, and resin trickles down its trunk all the time. We don’t have any decorations; only some silver rain and wax candles, church ones of course, as there aren’t any other kind here.28

The tree ‘smelled divine’, Tatiana wrote to PVP, ‘I don’t remember such a strong scent anywhere else.’29 Its presence inevitably inspired thoughts of absent friends: ‘At Christmas we will be especially think-ing of the past’, Anastasia wrote to Katya. ‘How much fun we had … I would like to write and tell you a lot, but it is so sad that everything is being read!’30

At midday on Christmas Eve everyone gathered for liturgy in the upstairs hall and after lunch they arranged the tree and presents. The family also decorated a tree for the twenty men of the guard, and at half past four took them their gifts, as well as special things to eat. Alexandra presented each soldier with a gospel and a hand-painted bookmark. Nor did she forget Iza, sending gifts to the Kornilov House of ‘a tiny Christmas tree and some tablecloths and pillows embroidered by herself and her daughters, to which the Emperor added a little vase with his cipher on it’.31

‘After supper on Christmas Eve,’ Olga wrote to Rita,

we handed out the presents to everyone, the majority being various items of our own needlework. As we were sorting them out and deciding who to give what to, it reminded us so much of our charity bazaars at Yalta. You remember how much there always was to get ready? We had vespers at around 10 last night and the tree was lit. It was lovely and cosy. The choir was large and sang well, only too much like a concert, which I don’t like.32

Surrounded by those who had remained faithful to them through these last difficult nine months, the Romanov family sang with great heart – and hope. Pierre Gilliard felt a special sense of ‘peaceful intimacy’ that Christmas, as though they all, truly, were like ‘one big family’.33

Early on Christmas Day the family walked to church in the snow for the early morning service, conducted in front of the icon of the Mother of God brought specially from the Abalatsky Monastery 17 miles (27 km) from Tobolsk. During the service, when Father Alexey Vasiliev intoned the mnogoletie – the prayer for the long life of the family – he failed to omit their imperial titles. Militants in the guard who heard this loudly complained to Pankratov. The result was a total ban on the family’s attending any more services in church.34 It was a disheartening end to Christmas, and to the year. After a glass of tea in the early evening of 31 December, ‘we went our separate ways – without waiting for the New Year’, Nicholas noted in his diary. His final thoughts that year’s end were elsewhere: ‘Lord God, save Russia.’35

Alexandra’s were more explicit: ‘Thanks be to God that all seven of us are alive and well and together,’ she wrote in her diary that same night, ‘and that he has kept us safe all this year as well as all those who are dear to us.’ But a similar message she sent to Iza was far more emphatic: ‘Thank God we are still in Russia and all together.’36

The Siberian winter, in all its merciless fury, finally arrived in Tobolsk in January 1918. Until then the single-digit sub-zero temperature had been generally tolerable and the Romanov family had begun to wonder whether the savage winter foretold them was a myth. But as January passed Alexandra recorded the plummeting temperature. It was –15 degrees C (5 degrees F) on the 17th; five days later it was down to –29 degrees C (–20 degrees F) and with a searing cold wind to boot. In the depths of winter Tobolsk became a ‘city of the dead’, ‘a living tomb’, a ‘listless, lifeless place, whose mournful appearance sinks into the soul’.37 All the children had been ill again – this time with German measles, brought into the house by Alexey’s playmate Kolya Derevenko, but luckily their symptoms lasted only a few days.38

The severe cold lingered throughout February; it was mid-March before the thermometer struggled above freezing. Even indoors with the tiled stoves stoked with logs it was ‘mortally cold’.39 ‘The logs were damp, so they could not warm up the house at all; they just smoked’, Anastasia told Katya.40 The windows were thick with ice and the wind rattled at the frames and penetrated every aperture. ‘The Grand Duchesses’ bedroom is a real ice-house’, Pierre Gilliard noted in his diary; their fingers were so stiff with cold that they could barely write or sew.41 Being on the corner their room caught the worst of the winter wind and recently the temperature in there had been as low as –44 C (–47.2 F). They wrapped themselves in their thickest long knitted cardigans and even wore their felt boots indoors, but they could still feel the wind whistling down the chimney.42 In desperation, they took to sitting in the corridors, or went and huddled in the kitchen, though that, alas, was full of cockroaches.43

‘Lost in the immensity of distant Siberia’, the long dark days of winter passed, for everyone, in a continuing atmosphere of quiet acceptance and ‘family peace’, as both Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes recalled.44 The children remained patient and uncomplaining, always kind-hearted and willing to help and support the others, although it was clear to Gibbes that the elder two sisters ‘realized how serious things were becoming’. Even before leaving Tsarskoe Selo, Olga had told Iza Buxhoeveden that she and her sisters ‘put on brave faces for their parents’ sake’.45 Everyone who spent those last months with the family noticed their quiet fortitude in the face of so much desperate uncertainty. ‘My respect for the Grand Duchesses only grew the longer our exile lasted’, recalled Gleb Botkin.

The courage and unselfishness they displayed were indeed remarkable. My father marveled at the exhibition of cheerfulness – so often an assumed one – by which they strove to help and cheer their parents.‘Every time the Emperor enters the dining room with a sad expression on his face,’ my father told me, ‘the Grand Duchesses push each other with their elbows and whisper: “Papa is sad today. We must cheer him up.” And so they proceed to do. They begin to laugh, to tell funny stories, and, in a few minutes, His Majesty begins to smile.’46

The girls’ engaging warmth extended to their friendly relations with the soldiers of the guard, particularly those of the 1st and 4th regiments. ‘The Grand-Duchesses, with that simplicity which was their charm, loved to talk to these men’, observed Gilliard. It was easy to understand why; the soldiers seemed, to the sisters, ‘to be linked with the past in the same way as themselves. They questioned them about their families, their villages, or the battles in which they had taken part in the Great War.’47 Nicholas and Alexey meanwhile had grown so close to the men of the 4th that they often went to the guardhouse in the evening to sit and talk with them and play draughts.

Klavdiya Bitner, the most recent addition to the entourage, soon came to her own very clear perception of the five children during the last months of their lives. She had no doubt that it was the brisk and efficient Tatiana who was the absolute linchpin at the Governor’s House: ‘if the family had lost Alexandra Feodorovna, then its protector would have been Tatiana Nikolaevna’.

She had inherited her mother’s nature. She had many of her mother’s features: strength of character, a tendency to keeping life in order, and an awareness of her duty. She took charge of organizing things in the house. She watched over Alexey Nikolaevich. She always walked with the emperor in the yard. She was the closest person to the empress. They were two friends … She loved running the household. Loved doing embroidery and ironing the linen.48

But there was also a trait in Tatiana’s personality that she shared with her father – and that was her absolute, crippling reticence. Her ability to keep her feelings bottled up and privy to no one became even more marked during the final months of captivity. Nobody ever penetrated that intense reserve; ‘It was impossible to guess her thoughts,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘even if she was more decided in her opinions than her sisters.’49

Klavdiya Bitner found the gentle and soft-hearted Olga, who in so many ways was Tatiana’s opposite, so much easier to love, for she had inherited her father’s warm, disarming charm. Unlike Tatiana, Olga hated being organized and loathed housework. With her love of books and her preference for solitude, it seemed to Klavdiya that ‘she understood the situation considerably more than the rest of the family and was aware of how dangerous it was’. There was an air of sadness about Olga that suggested to Klavdiya – much as it had done for Valentina Chebotareva – some kind of hidden unhappiness or disappointment. ‘There were times when she smiled when you would sense that the smile was all on the surface, and that deep down inside her soul, she was not smiling, but sad.’50 Olga’s finely tuned nature clearly predisposed her to a sense of impending tragedy, accentuated by her love of poetry and her increasing concentration, in her reading, on religious texts. She withdrew ever more into herself, listening to the many church bells ring across Tobolsk and writing to friends about the beauty of the extraordinarily clear night skies and the astonishing brilliance of the moon and stars.51

Some time that winter Olga wrote to a family friend, Sergey Bekhteev (the brother of Zinaida Tolstaya), who was himself a budding poet and had published his first collection in 1916. Bekhteev had sent some of his verse to the family in captivity and in response Nicholas had asked Olga to write and thank him. This surviving fragment, more than anything else that has come down to us, sums up both Olga’s mood and that of her father in those final months:

Father asks me to tell all who have remained loyal to him and those over whom they might have an influence, that they should not avenge him, for he has forgiven everyone and prays for them all; that they should not themselves seek revenge; that they should remember that the evil there now is in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil that will conquer evil – only love.*52

Bekhteev later took this letter as the inspiration for a composition of his own that echoes these sentiments and which begins, ‘Father asks us to tell everyone, there is no need to weep and murmur / The days of sufferings are sent us all / For our great general sin’.53

Of all the Romanov sisters, sweet, accommodating Maria remained the most self-effacing, her consistently loving and stoical personality inviting the least amount of comment or criticism. Everyone, including the guards and even Commissar Pankratov, adored her. For Klavdiya Bitner, Maria was the archetypal, wholesome Russian girl: ‘kind hearted, cheerful, with an even temper, and friendly’.54 In contrast, Anastasia, whom she found ‘uncouth’, never seduced Klavdiya. The constant playfulness and challenge to authority in the classroom soon began to grate: ‘She wasn’t serious about anything.’ But worse, in Klavdiya’s opinion, was the way that Anastasia ‘always took advantage of Maria’.55 ‘They were both behind in their lessons’, she recalled, an opinion that reinforced Pankratov’s view. ‘Neither of them could write essays and [they] had not been trained how to express their thoughts.’ Anastasia was ‘still an absolute child and you had to treat her as you would a child’. Sydney Gibbes tended to agree; the youngest Romanov sister’s social development, in his opinion, had been arrested and he thought her the ‘only ungraceful member of the family’.56

Others of course saw Anastasia’s irrepressible personality quite differently; she was the family’s ‘cheer-leader’ who kept everyone’s spirits up with her high energy and mimicry.57 She certainly could be very juvenile at times and Dr Botkin had been shocked at her sexually precocious ‘shady anecdotes’ and wondered where she had collected them.58 She had a penchant too for drawing ‘dirty’ pictures and making the occasional outrageous comment. But all in all, at Tobolsk, her ‘gay and boisterous temperament proved of immeasurable value to the rest of the family’, for when she chose to, ‘Anastasia could dispel anybody’s gloom’.59 But now, even she was often overcome with an intense sadness, thinking about their hospital and those who had died: ‘I suppose there’s no one now to visit the graves of our wounded,’ she wrote to Katya, ‘they’ve all left Tsarskoe Selo’; but she kept a postcard of Feodorovsky Gorodok on the writing table because ‘the time we spent at the hospital was so terribly good’. She was pining for news of Katya and her brother Viktor. ‘I have not received letters nos. 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29 – all these letters that you wrote to this address’, she complained plaintively, suggesting Katya address them to Anna Demidova instead as ‘letters to her are of less interest to these people’. ‘It’s awful to think of how long we have not seen you … If God allows, we will see each other some time, and it will be possible to tell you a lot of things, both sad and funny, and in general, how we live.’ But, she added, ‘I will not write about it of course.’60

Perhaps Anastasia’s madcap behaviour was in fact indicative of a ‘heroic effort’, as Gleb Botkin saw it, a way of helping the family ‘stay cheerful and keep their spirits up’, her relentless offensive being, in its own way, a form of self-protection.61 She was without doubt the star of the show in a series of playlets, in French and English, staged by Gibbes and Gilliard during the final three weeks of January and last two of February. The biggest hit was Packing Up – ‘a very vulgar but also very funny farce by Harry Grattan’ in which Anastasia played the male lead, Mr Chugwater, and Maria his wife.62 During her energetic performance on 4 February the dressing gown Anastasia was wearing flew up, exposing her sturdy legs encased in her father’s Jaeger long johns. Everyone ‘collapsed in uncontrolled laughter’ – even Alexandra, who rarely laughed out loud. It was, remembered Gibbes, ‘the last heartily unrestrained laughter the Empress ever enjoyed’. The play had been so ‘awfully amusing & really well and funnily given’ in Alexandra’s estimation, that a repeat performance was demanded.63

Despite Anastasia’s attention-grabbing performances, it was Alexey who won Klavdiya Bitner’s heart at Tobolsk. ‘I loved him more than the others,’ she later admitted, though he seemed to her subdued and terribly bored. Although he was very behind in his education and read badly, she found him ‘a good, kind boy … intelligent, observant, receptive, very gentle, cheerful, ebullient’. Like Anastasia, he was by nature ‘very capable but a little lazy’. But he was an extremely quick learner, hated lies and had inherited his father’s simplicity. Klavdiya admired the patience with which Alexey endured his condition. ‘He wanted to be well and hoped this would be so’, and he often asked her, ‘Do you think this will go?’64 At Tobolsk he continued to defy the limitations placed on him and threw himself enthusiastically into vigorous games with Kolya Derevenko using home-made wooden daggers and guns. In early January the boys helped Nicholas and the other men build a snow mountain out in the courtyard. Once the snow was piled up Gilliard and Dolgorukov began carting out bucket after bucket of water to pour over it and make it icily smooth. ‘The children are sledging their hearts out on a snow mountain and taking the most amazing falls’, Alexandra wrote to a friend. ‘It’s a wonder they haven’t broken their necks. They’re all covered with bruises, but even so, this is the only distraction they have, either that or sit at the window.’65 Alexey inevitably banged himself but it was, ironically, Pierre Gilliard who was the snow mountain’s first real casualty; he twisted his ankle badly and was laid up for several days.66 Shortly afterwards Maria, too, took a tumble and ended up with a black eye.

While most of the entourage tried hard to enjoy the distractions of the snow mountain, and sneak a look over the fence from its summit, anxieties about the deteriorating situation in the country at large frequently bubbled to the surface. ‘Everything they are doing to our poor country is so painful and sad,’ Tatiana wrote to Rita Khitrovo, ‘but there is one hope – that God will not abandon it and will teach these madmen a lesson.’67 Trina Schneider was profoundly depressed. Whenever she received news from outside, she admitted that it reduced her to a state of despair. ‘I don’t read the papers any more, even if they manage to get here,’ she told PVP, ‘it’s become so awful. What kind of times are these – everyone does what they want … If you only knew my frame of mind. No hopes at all – none … I don’t believe in a better future, because I won’t live to see it – it’s too far off.’68 Meanwhile, the only aspiration that Alexandra clung to, as she told a friend, was ‘to achieve the possibility of living tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigue’.69

On 14 February – the first official day of the changeover to the New Style, Gregorian calendar* – Alexandra noted despondently how ‘many of the nicest soldiers left’.70 Their favourite guards in the Special Detachment, the 4th Rifles – good troop soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted at the outbreak of war – were sent away and replaced by the new breed of revolutionary Red Guards; Pankratov too was removed from his post as commissar responsible for the imperial family. On the 24th, the family clambered onto the top of the snow mountain to get the best view, as three more large groups of the Rifles marched away. Of the 350 men who had accompanied them from Tsarskoe Selo, only around 150 remained.71 The new revolutionary guards were far more threatening: ‘One can never predict how they are going to behave’, remarked Tatiana. These guards had been incensed when the family climbed up and made themselves visible above the level of the fence, in so doing exposing themselves to possible pot shots, for which the guards might be held responsible.72 They promptly voted to remove the snow mountain (by hacking a trench through the middle), though some who took part in its destruction did so, as Gilliard noticed, ‘with a hang-dog look (for they felt it was a mean task)’. The children were, inevitably, utterly ‘disconsolate’.73

Soon the new guards held another meeting and another vote – that none of them should wear epaulettes, thereby putting everyone on the new, socialist, level playing field. For Nicholas the soldier this was the ultimate dishonour; he refused to comply, opting instead to wear a coat to conceal his own when among the guards outside. But the change in regime brought further unwelcome news. Kobylinsky, who remained in nominal charge of the Governor’s House, received a telegram informing him that Lenin’s new government was no longer prepared to pay the family’s living expenses beyond 600 roubles a month per person, in other words a total for the seven members of the family of 4,200 roubles a month.74 Alexandra spent several days going through all the household accounts with Gilliard. They had for some time been running up considerable credit with the shopkeepers of Tobolsk and could no longer sustain such a large household. There was nothing for it – they would have to let ten servants go. This caused the family considerable distress, as many of those servants had brought their families to join them and, as Gilliard rightly noted, their devotion to the imperial family in following them to Tobolsk would ‘reduce them to beggary’.75 In the end, several insisted on staying, for no pay.

From 1 March, in addition to the tightening of the budget, everyone was put on rations, just like the rest of the country. Nicholas Romanov, ‘ex-emperor’, of Freedom Street, with six dependants, was issued with ration card no. 54 for flour, butter and sugar.76 Coffee (which Alexandra depended upon) was now virtually unobtainable. But once again, gifts of food began to arrive ‘from various kind people who have heard about our need to economize on our outgoings for food’, wrote Nicholas; he found the generosity of the donors ‘so touching!’77 In response Alexandra painted little icons on paper to send as gifts of thanks. A few days later one of Nicholas’s old staff members at Mogilev arrived in Tobolsk with a gift of 25,000 roubles from monarchist friends in Petrograd, as well as books and tea.78 But it was not just food rationing that hit everyone hard; they could not replace their increasingly threadbare clothes. By March Alexandra was grateful for any parcels of clothing from Anna Vyrubova that reached them: warm jumpers and jackets for the last of the chill weather, blouses and hats for the spring, and a military suit, vest and trousers for Alexey. From Odessa Zinaida Tolstaya sent a wonderful parcel of perfume, sweets, crayons, albums, icons and books, although several others she sent never arrived.79

Everyone drew further in on themselves as the strictures of Lent approached. Alexandra and the girls were practising their singing of the Orthodox liturgy, for they could not afford to pay the choristers any more. It was hard listening to the sound, outside on the street, of the festivities for Maslenitsa – Butter Week – one of the most joyful festivals in the Russian Orthodox calendar. ‘Everyone is merry. The sledges pass to and fro under our windows; sound of bells, mouth-organs, and singing’, wrote Gilliard. Alexey proudly noted in his diary on the 16th that he had eaten sixteen bliny at lunch before the onset of Lent, when everyone fasted for the first week. They were all looking forward to the church services to come. ‘We hope to do our devotions next week if we are allowed to do so’, Alexandra told Lili Dehn:

I am already looking forward to those beautiful services – such a longing to pray in church … Nature is beautiful, everything is shining and brilliantly lighted up … We cannot complain, we have got everything, we live well, thanks to the touching kindness of the people, who in secret send us bread, fish, pies, etc.… We too have to understand through it all that God is greater than everything and that He wants to draw us, through our sufferings, closer to Him … But my country – my God – how I love it, with all the power of my being, and her sufferings give me actual physical pain.80

On 20, 22 and 23 March the household were allowed to attend church for the first time in two months, at which they were able to hear the choir sing ‘our favourite, familiar hymns’.81 It was ‘such a joy and a consolation’, wrote Alexandra. ‘Praying at home is not the same thing at all.’82 But Lent was also, inevitably, a time of sad reflection. Nicholas’s mind went back to his abdication the previous year; his last farewell to his mother at Mogilev; the day he arrived back at Tsarksoe Selo. ‘One remembers this past difficult year unwillingly! But what yet awaits us all? It’s all in God’s hands. All our hopes are in him alone.’83 Having powered his way through most of Leskov, Tolstoy and Lermontov, he was now rereading the Bible from start to finish. Day after day he blanked out his thoughts chopping wood and loading it into the woodshed, the children helping him and revelling in being out in the glorious spring sunshine. But in truth life within the Governor’s House had become deadening beyond belief. The children found captivity ‘irksome’, noted Gilliard. ‘They walk round the courtyard, fenced in by its high paling through which they can see nothing.’84 Lack of exercise was worrying Anastasia: ‘I haven’t quite turned into an elephant yet,’ she told her aunt Xenia, ‘but may do so in the near future. I really don’t know why it’s suddenly happened; maybe it’s from too little exercise, I don’t know.’85

The children were still bitterly disappointed by the ‘stupid’ action of the guards in wrecking the snow mountain, but tried their best to find consolation in the most prosaic of outdoor tasks. ‘We have found new things to do: we saw, chop and split wood – it’s useful and very jolly work … we’re helping a lot … clearing the paths and the entrance.’ Anastasia was proud of their physical labours: ‘we have turned into real yardmen’; events of the last traumatic year had taught her and her sisters to take pleasure in the smallest of practical achievements.