فصل 21

Chapter Twenty-one

THEY KNEW IT WAS THE END WHEN I WAS WITH THEM

After the arrival of the new guards, and with it a distinct hardening in attitude towards the imperial family, everyone in the entourage had become increasingly fearful for their safety. Rowdy and undisciplined elements were making their presence felt in town too. Russia was descending into civil war and the breakdown in law and order had finally reached Tobolsk. ‘How much longer will our unfortunate motherland be tormented and torn apart by internal and external enemies?’ Nicholas wondered in his diary. His despondency increased with news that Lenin’s government had signed the Brest–Litovsk Treaty with Germany; his abdication, for the sake of Russia, had, he felt, been in vain. ‘It sometimes seems as though there’s no strength left to endure, that you don’t even know what to hope for, what to wish for’, he confided in his diary.1

By mid-March ‘all kinds of rumours and fears’ were stirred up at the Governor’s House by the arrival in Tobolsk from Omsk of a detachment of Bolshevik Red Guards, who promptly began imposing their demands on the local government. They were closely followed by even more militant groups from Tyumen and Ekaterinburg, who roamed the town, terrorizing the inhabitants with threats of hostage-taking (a favourite occupation of Bolshevik hardliners) and agitating to take control of the Romanovs and remove them from Tobolsk.2 In response, Kobylinsky doubled the guard at the Governor’s House and increased the patrols round it. But nothing could dispel the palpable sense of danger, which fed into an already fatalistic attitude among many in the entourage. ‘I have come here knowing quite well that I shall not escape with my life’, Tatishchev told Gleb Botkin. ‘All I ask is to be permitted to die with my Emperor.’3 Nastenka Hendrikova was equally gloomy and had said openly to Iza Buxhoeveden that ‘she had a premonition that all our days were numbered’.4

For a while, earlier in the year and before the changeover in the guard, escape had seemed a very real possibility to Pierre Gilliard – given the obvious sympathies of Kobylinsky and the more relaxed attitude then of most of his men. Gilliard felt that a rescue could have been effected, with the help of a group of dedicated monarchist officers. But Nicholas and Alexandra had both been adamant that they would not contemplate any ‘rescue’ that involved the family being separated ‘or leaving Russian territory’.5 To do so, as Alexandra explained, would be for them to break their ‘last link with the past, which would then be dead for ever’. ‘The atmosphere around us is fairly electrified. We feel that a storm is approaching,’ she told Anna Vyrubova at the end of March, ‘but we know that God is merciful, and will take care of us.’ She did, however, admit that ‘things are growing very anguishing’.6

At the end of March the greater part of everyone’s anguish was once more focused on Alexey, who had been confined to bed with a bad cough. The strain of his violent coughing had provoked a haemorrhage in his groin, which soon brought excruciating pain of the kind he had not experienced since 1912. Over at the Kornilov House, Iza Buxhoeveden encountered a deeply despondent Dr Derevenko just back from visiting the boy. ‘He looked very gloomy and said that [Alexey’s] kidneys were affected by the haemorrhage, and in that God-forsaken town none of the remedies he needed could be got. “I fear he will not pull through,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes full of anxiety.’ The terrible shadow of Spala haunted the Governor’s House for many days, as Alexey’s temperature rose and bouts of agonizing pain led him to confess to his mother at one point: ‘I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death.’ Death itself had no hold over him for his fears were elsewhere. ‘I’m so afraid of what they may do to us here.’7

Alexandra hovered at her son’s bed, as she had always done, trying to soothe him, watching him become ‘thin and yellow’ and ‘with enormous eyes’ – just as at Spala.8 Their footman Alexey Volkov felt that this attack was, if anything, worse than the earlier incident, for this time both Alexey’s legs were affected. ‘He suffered terribly, wept and cried out, calling for his mother all the time.’ Alexandra’s anguish at his suffering and her own impotence was terrible. ‘She grieved … like she had never grieved before … she just could not cope and she wept as she had never wept before.’9 Hour after hour she sat ‘holding his aching legs’ because Alexey could lie only on his back, while Tatiana and Gilliard took it in turns to massage them with the Fohn apparatus they often used to keep his blood circulating.10 But Alexey’s nights were extremely restless, interrupted by bouts of severe pain. It was not until 19 April that Dr Derevenko noted hopeful signs that the ‘resorption’ (of the blood from the swelling into his body) was ‘going well’, although Alexey was still very frail and in a great deal of discomfort.11

During Alexey’s latest crisis an order had come on 12 April that, for security reasons, all those at the Kornilov House – except for the two doctors, Botkin and Derevenko and their families – must move into the Governor’s House. The house was already overcrowded, but by partitioning off some of the rooms with screens and doubling up, everyone managed, without too much grumbling, to squeeze into the ground floor, in order to ‘avoid intruding upon the privacy of the Imperial Family’ upstairs.12 The exception was Sydney Gibbes, who refused point-blank to share with Gilliard, with whom he did not get on. Together with his toothless old maid Anfisa, Gibbes was allowed to lodge in a hastily converted stone outbuilding near the kitchen – in smelling distance of the pig-swill.13 From now on, only the doctors were free to move back and forth; the rest of the entourage were no longer allowed into town and were, effectively, under house arrest.

Two weeks later news came that a high-ranking political commissar from Moscow, Vasily Yakovlev, had arrived in Tobolsk to take charge of the family. ‘Everyone is restless and distraught’, wrote Gilliard. ‘The commissar’s arrival is felt to be an evil portent, vague but real.’14 Anticipating an inspection and search of their things, Alexandra immediately set about burning her recent letters, as did the girls; Maria and Anastasia even burned their diaries.15 Yakovlev, it soon turned out, had arrived with 150 new Red Guards and instructions to remove the family to an unspecified location. But when he and his deputy Avdeev arrived at the house it was clear that ‘the yellow-complexioned, haggard boy seemed to be passing away’.16 Alexey was far too unwell to be moved, Kobylinsky argued in alarm; Yakovlev agreed to defer the family’s departure, only to be countermanded by Lenin’s Central Committee, which ordered him to remove the former tsar without delay. Nicholas refused point-blank to travel alone to an undisclosed destination. When Yakovlev conceded that he could bring a travelling companion – either that or be taken by force – Alexandra was faced with the most agonizing of decisions. Aghast at the thought of what might happen to her husband if taken to Moscow (visions of a trial by a French-Revolutionary-style tribunal), she went through hours of mental torment, trying to decide what to do for the best. Her maid Mariya Tutelberg tried to comfort her but Alexandra said:

Don’t make my pain worse, Tudels. This is a most difficult moment for me. You know what my son means to me. And I now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life – or my death – with my husband.17

It was clear to the four sisters that their mother could not travel without one of them to support her. Olga’s health was still poor and she was needed to help nurse Alexey. Tatiana must take over the running of the household; even Gibbes asserted that she was ‘now looked upon as the head of the Family in the place of the Grand Duchess Olga’.18 After discussing it among themselves, the girls agreed that Maria should accompany their mother and father, leaving court jester Anastasia to ‘cheer all up’.19 The hope was that in about three weeks’ time, when Alexey was stronger, they would be able to join their parents.

Nicholas and Alexandra spent most of that afternoon sitting by Alexey’s bed while the most essential items for their journey were packed. Tatiana asked Yakovlev where they would be taken – was her father to be put on trial in Moscow? Yakovlev dismissed the idea, insisting that from Moscow her parents ‘would be taken to Petrograd, and from there out through Finland to Sweden and then Norway’.20 That last evening everyone sat down to dinner, at a properly laid table complete with menu cards, just as they had always done. ‘We spent the evening in grief’, Nicholas confided to his diary, Alexandra and the girls frequently weeping. Alexandra’s stoicism completely gave way as she faced the prospect of leaving the son she had watched over so obsessively for the last thirteen years. Later, when everyone sat down together to take tea before bed, she appeared composed. They all ‘did their best to hide [their] grief and to maintain outward calm’, wrote Gilliard. ‘We felt that for one to give way would cause all to break down.’ ‘It was the most mournful and depressing party I ever attended,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘there was not much talking and no pretence at gaiety. It was solemn and tragic, a fit prelude to an inescapable tragedy.’21 Many years later he insisted, ‘They knew it was the end when I was with them’; that evening, though the words remained resolutely unspoken, everyone had a clear sense of what might lie ahead.22

Nicholas retained his outward steely calm to the very end, but ‘to leave the rest of the children and Alexey – sick as he was and in such circumstances – was more than difficult’, he admitted in his diary and ‘of course, no one slept that night’.23 At 4 a.m. the following morning, 26 April, Nicholas ‘had a handshake and a word for everyone and we all kissed the Empress’s hand’, recalled Gibbes, before, wrapped in long Persian lamb coats, Alexandra and Maria accompanied him out to the waiting tarantasses.*24

‘When they left it was still dark,’ recalled Gibbes, but he ran for his camera, and ‘by a lengthy exposure I succeeded in getting a picture of the Empress’ tarantas – though it was impossible to take one of the departure.’25 The sisters sobbed as they kissed goodbye; but it was the timorous maid Anna Demidova who was travelling with the tsaritsa (along with Dr Botkin, Dolgorukov and servants Terenty Chemodurov and Ivan Sednev), who had been the one finally to voice everyone’s innermost anxiety. ‘I am so frightened of the Bolsheviks, Mr Gibbes. I don’t know what they will do to us.’ Her fright as the mournful row of carriages and their escort of mounted Red Army guards drove away into the cold grey dawn was ‘pitiable to see’.26

From her window at the Kornilov House, Tatiana Botkina watched them go:

The carriages passed the house at breakneck speed, swerved round the corner, and disappeared. I cast a glance at the Governor’s residence. Three figures in grey stood on the steps for a long time yet, watching the distant ribbon of the road; then they turned and slowly walked back into the house.27

After the departure – destination unknown – of Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria ‘a sadness like death invaded the house’, as the valet Volkov remembered. ‘Before, there had always been a certain liveliness, but after the departure of the imperial couple, silence and desolation overwhelmed us.’28 ‘The feeling was noticed even in the soldiers’, Kobylinsky noted.29 Olga ‘wept terribly’ when her mother and father left but she and her sisters kept themselves busy and their minds distracted fulfilling an urgent task entrusted them by Alexandra.30 Although many of Alexandra’s large pieces of jewellery had already been smuggled out for safe-keeping at the Abalaksky or Ivanovsky monasteries, from where they were to be used by monarchist sympathizers to raise funds for a possible escape (the money never arrived), the girls had recently been helping Anna Demidova and the maids Mariya Tutelberg and Elizaveta Ersberg ‘dispose of the medicines as agreed’.31 This was Alexandra’s code for the concealment of pearls, diamonds, brooches and necklaces in the family’s clothes, undergarments and hats, with larger stones being disguised under cloth buttons. With their departure perhaps only three weeks away the women frantically worked to complete the task in time, supervised by Tatiana, who despite advice to leave the jewels in safe-keeping in Tobolsk had insisted on following her mother’s instructions to the letter.32 With Alexey still sick there was no thought of lessons. Everyone was too preoccupied with keeping him amused and raising his morale, as he ‘toss[ed] and moan[ed] on his bed of pain, always sighing for his mother, who couldn’t come’.33

Although word that the family was safe came from one of the drivers who had taken them as far as Tyumen, it was several days before any letters arrived. Because the rivers were still ice-bound the party was having to travel overland and the roads were terrible – ‘horses up to their chests in water crossing rivers. Wheels broken several times’, as Maria later reported.34 On the 29th the first letter arrived, written at their first overnight stopover at Ievlevo. ‘Mother’s heart is hurting very much as a consequence of the awful road to Tyumen – they had to travel over 200 versts [140 miles/225 km] by horses along a horrible road’, Tatiana wrote to a friend.35 The journey improved thereafter, and Alexandra sent a telegram: ‘Travelling in comfort. How is the boy? God be with you.’36 They were now on a train but still did not know where they were headed. ‘Darling, you must know how dreadful it all is’, Olga wrote to Anna Vyrubova as they waited for news.37 But it was not till 3 May – a week since their parents’ departure – that the children finally learned, by telegram, that Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria were now not in Moscow – as they had all imagined – but in Ekaterinburg, a town in the Western Urals, 354 miles (570 km) south-west of Tobolsk. The three girls and their brother now could do nothing but wait out the long anxious days till they could join them there.

The girls kept themselves busy, taking it in turns to read and play games with Alexey, who was making a very slow recovery. If the weather was fine they took him outside in the wheelchair. In the evenings Olga sat with him when he said his prayers; afterwards the girls joined Nastenka in her room rather than sit upstairs on their own, and then went to bed early. ‘Mama, dear soul, how we miss you! In every, every way. It is so empty’, Olga wrote to Alexandra in a long letter spread over several days. ‘Every now and then I go into your room and then I feel as though you are there and that is so comforting.’ Easter was approaching and they were doing their best to prepare for it, though this was the first time, as a family, that they had ever been separated during this the most important festival in the Russian Orthodox calendar. ‘Today, there was an enormous religious procession with banners, icons, numbers of clergy and a crowd of faithful. It was so beautiful with the glorious sunshine and all the church bells ringing.’38 Zinaida Tolstaya had sent painted Easter eggs, a cake and some jam, and an embroidered napkin for Alexandra. But Good Friday brought wind and rain and a temperature barely above zero. ‘It is terrible not to be together and not to know how you really are, for we are told so many different things’, wrote Olga.39 But together the girls had decorated their field chapel, arranging branches of velvety, scented pine on either side of the iconostasis – its smell reminding them of Christmas – and bringing pots of flowers and plants from the greenhouse (though they were struggling to keep the three dogs out in case of their trying to ‘water’ the pots). ‘We would so like to know how you have celebrated this Feast of Light and what you are doing,’ Olga continued on Easter Sunday, ‘the Midnight Liturgy and Vigil went very well. It was beautiful and intimate. All the side lamps were lit, but not the chandelier, it was light enough.’ That morning they had greeted the staff and handed out Easter eggs and little icons, just as their mother had always done; and they had eaten the traditional kulich and pashka.40

When a letter finally came from Maria, briefly describing their new environment at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, it was deeply disconcerting: ‘We miss our quiet and peaceful life in Tobolsk’, she wrote. ‘Here there are unpleasant surprises every day.’41 Their own Easter had been extremely modest: food was brought from the communal canteen in town and many of their belongings were in a terrible state, dusty and dirty from the bumpy journey. There was a poignant postscript for Anastasia from Nicholas: ‘I am lonesome without you, my dear. I miss you pulling funny faces at the table.’42

The three sisters were intensely relieved when the letters from Ekaterinburg finally began to arrive. Alexandra and Maria wrote daily but many of the twenty-two or so letters that they sent never reached Tobolsk. ‘It was truly dreadful to be without news all that time’, Tatiana wrote on 7 May:

We see from the window that the Irtych [sic] is calm here. Tomorrow we expect the first steamer from Tioumen [sic]. Our pigs have been sold, but there is still the sow which had six piglets … Yesterday we ate our poor turkey, so now there is only his wife … It is deadly boring in the garden. No sooner are we out there than we are looking at our watches to see when we can go back inside … We suffer a great deal in our souls for you, my darlings; our only hope is in God and our consolation in prayer.43

Even the resolute Tatiana was finding it hard to keep going: ‘I am so afraid of losing courage,’ she told her father, ‘I pray a lot for you … May the Lord God guard you, save you, protect you from all evil. Your daughter Tatiana who loves you passionately for ever and ever.’44

With the ice melting, the Irtysh was in full flood and the boats began to sail to Tyumen once more. The girls could hear their sirens in the distance and hopes lifted that they would soon be able to travel.45 At Ekaterinburg Maria was eagerly anticipating their arrival. ‘Who knows, perhaps this letter will reach you just before you leave. God bless your journey and keep you safe from all harm … Tender thoughts and prayers surround you – all that matters is to be together again soon.’46

Being reunited was the one and only preoccupation of all the letters sent between Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg in those final, intervening days – along with messages of love. ‘How are you surviving and what are you doing?’ asked Olga, in what would be her last letter from Tobolsk. ‘How I would love to be with you. We still do not know when we shall leave … May Our Lord protect you, my dear beloved Mama and all of you. I kiss Papa, you and M. many times over. I clasp you in my arms and love you. Your Olga.’47

‘It is difficult to write anything pleasant,’ Maria wrote in a letter to Alexey, ‘for there is little of that kind here.’ Her optimism, however, remained undimmed. ‘But on the other hand God does not abandon us, the sun shines and the birds sing. This morning we heard the dawn chorus.’48 The reality of their new surroundings was, however, grim. They no longer enjoyed any of the small privileges they had been granted at Tobolsk and were under constant, and close, surveillance. Letters now had to be addressed c/o The Chairman, The Regional Executive Committee, Ekaterinburg.49

Of the three sisters left behind at Tobolsk it was the sixteen-year-old Anastasia who through it all retained an undimmed sense of joy in the shrinking world around them. Writing to Maria about their mundane daily routine, she told her:

We take turns having breakfast with Alexey and make him eat, although there are days when he eats without needing to be told. You are in our thoughts all the time, dear ones. It is terribly sad and empty; I really don’t know what comes over me. We have the baptismal crosses of course and we received your news. So God helps and will help us. We arranged the iconostasis beautifully for Easter, all with spruce, which is how they do it here, and flowers too. We took pictures, I hope they come out … We swung on the swing, and how I laughed when I fell off, what a landing, honestly!… I have a whole wagonload of things to tell you … We’ve had such weather! I could shout out loud at how good it is. Strange to say, I’ve got more sunburned than the others, a real Arrrab [sic]!…We’re sitting together right now, as always, but we miss your presence in the room … I’m sorry this is such a jumbled letter, but you know how my thoughts fly around and I can’t write it all down, so throw in whatever comes into my head. I want to see you so much, it’s terribly sad. I go out and walk, and then come back. It’s boring inside or out. I swung; the sun came out but it was cold, and my hand can hardly write.50

She and her sisters had done their best to sing the liturgy during the Easter service, Anastasia told Maria, but ‘whenever we sing together it doesn’t come out right because we need that fourth voice. But you’re not here and so we make a joke about it … We constantly think and pray for everyone: Lord help us! Christ be with you, precious ones. I kiss you, my good, fat Mashka. Your Shvybz.’51

On 17 May the most intimidating band of Red Guards yet arrived at the Governor’s House, this time from Ekaterinburg, led by a man named Rodionov. They were ‘the most frightful-looking, dirty, ragged, drunken cut-throats’ Gleb Botkin had ever seen. Rodionov was in fact a Latvian named Yan Svikke and from the first nobody liked him. Kobylinsky thought him cruel, ‘a low bully’.52 Cold and suspicious by nature, Rodionov was constantly on the watch for conspiracy: he ordered a humiliating daily roll-call and the girls had to ask his permission to come downstairs from their room and go out into the yard. They were ordered not to shut the door to their room at night and when the priest and nuns came on 18 May to conduct vespers Rodionov had them searched and posted a sentry right by the altar to watch them during the ceremony.53 Kobylinsky was appalled: ‘This so oppressed everyone, had such an effect on them that Olga Nikolaevna wept and said that if she had known that this would happen she would never have asked for a service.’54

Alexey was still extremely frail and barely able to sit up for more than an hour or so at a time. Nevertheless, within three days of arriving, Rodionov decided the boy was well enough to travel. For several days now the staff had been preparing for their departure. ‘The rooms are empty, little by little everything’s being packed away. The walls look bare without the pictures’, Alexey wrote to his mother.55 Anything not to be taken was to be ‘disposed of’ in town – if it wasn’t looted by the guards first. Most of the entourage prepared to leave with the children. Dr Botkin’s daughter Tatiana begged for her and her brother to be allowed to go with the sisters but was refused. ‘Why should such a handsome girl as you are want to rot all her life in prison, or even be shot?’ Rodionov sneered. ‘In all probability they will be shot.’ He was equally callous when he told Alexandra Tegleva about what was in store: ‘Life down there is very different.’56 The day before the children left, Gleb Botkin went up to the Governor’s House to try and catch a last glimpse of them. He saw Anastasia at a window; she waved and smiled, upon which Rodionov came rushing out telling him no one was permitted to look at the windows and that the guards would shoot to kill if anyone tried.57

On their last day in Tobolsk the household gathered together for farewell meals of borshch and hazel hen with rice for lunch and veal with garnish and macaroni for dinner, washed down with the last two bottles of wine that they had managed to keep hidden from the guards.58 At 11.30 the following morning, 20 May 1918, the children were taken to the landing stage and once more boarded the Rus, where, to their great joy, they were greeted by Iza Buxhoeveden. Olga told her that they were ‘lucky to be still alive and able to see their parents once more, whatever the future might bring’.59 But Iza was shocked by the change in her, and in Alexey too – both of whom she had not seen close-to since the previous August:

He was terribly thin and could not walk, as his knee had got quite stiff from lying with it bent for so long. He was very pale and his large dark eyes seemed still larger in the small narrow face. Olga Nicolaevna had also greatly changed. The suspense and anxiety of her parents’ absence … had changed the lovely, bright girl of twenty-two into a faded and sad middle-aged woman.60

The children seemed to think that Iza’s being allowed to rejoin them ‘heralded further small concessions’ from their Bolshevik captors.61 But this was far from the case. Constant intimidation and humiliation followed on the two-day river journey to Tyumen. The guards were rude and boorish and they frightened everyone. Rodionov’s behaviour was callous; he locked Alexey and Nagorny in their cabin at night, despite Nagorny remonstrating that the sick boy needed access to the toilet. Rodionov also insisted that the three sisters and their female companions keep their cabin doors open at all times, even with the guards standing immediately out-side. None of the women undressed at night, during which they had to endure the noise of the rowdy guards drinking and making obscene comments outside their open doors.62

On arrival at Tyumen the children were transferred to a dirty, third-class carriage on a nearby waiting train, where, much to their distress, they were separated from Gilliard, Gibbes, Buxhoeveden and the others, who were put into a goods wagon with crude wooden benches. Some time after midnight on 23 May, the train finally drew to a halt at a suburban freight station on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg. It was cold and frosty and they were all left there to shiver, chilled to the marrow, till morning. Eventually Rodionov and a couple of commissars came for the children.63 But neither Gibbes, nor Gilliard, nor Iza Buxhoeveden was allowed to go any further. Tatishchev, Nastenka and Trina were also refused, as too were all the other staff except for Nagorny. ‘Tatiana Nicolaevna tried to take the matter lightly’, as Iza kissed her goodbye. ‘What is the use of all these leave-takings?’ she asked. ‘We shall all rejoice in each other’s company in half an hour’s time!’, Tatiana had said reassuringly. But, as Iza later recalled, one of the guards came up to her just then and, with an ominous voice, said, ‘Better say “Good-bye”, citizenness’, and ‘in his sinister face I read that this was a real parting’.64

Pierre Gilliard watched from the train as the four children were brought out: ‘Nagorny the sailor … passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms; behind him came the Grand Duchesses, loaded with valises and small personal belongings.’ They were surrounded by an escort of commissars in leather jackets and armed militiamen. He tried to get out of the train to say goodbye, but ‘was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry’. He watched in dismay as Tatiana trailed along last in the freezing rain, struggling to carry her heavy suitcase while holding her dog Ortipo under her other arm, as her shoes sank into the mud. Nagorny, who had meanwhile lifted Alexey into one of the waiting one-horse droshkies, turned to offer assistance but the guards pushed him away.65

A local Ekaterinburg engineer who was at the station that morning, having been tipped off that the children were due to arrive, had stood there in the downpour hoping to see them. Suddenly he caught sight of ‘three young women, dressed in pretty, dark suits with large fabric buttons’.

They walked unsteadily, or rather unevenly. I decided that this was because each one was carrying a very heavy suitcase and also because the surface of the road had become squelchy from the incessant spring rain. Having to walk, for the first time in their lives, with such heavy luggage was beyond their physical strength … They passed by very close and very slowly. I stared at their lively, young, expressive faces somewhat indiscreetly – and during those two or three minutes I learned something that I will not forget till my dying day. It felt that my eyes met those of the three unfortunate young women just for a moment and that when they did I reached into the depths of their martyred souls, as it were, and I was overwhelmed by pity for them – me, a confirmed revolutionary. Without expecting it, I sensed that we Russian intellectuals, we who claim to be the precursors and the voice of conscience, were responsible for the undignified ridicule to which the Grand Duchesses were subjected … We do not have the right to forget, nor to forgive ourselves for our passivity and failure to do something for them.66

As the three young women passed him, the engineer was struck by how

everything was painted on those young, nervous faces: the joy of seeing their parents again, the pride of oppressed young women forced to hide their mental anguish from hostile strangers, and, finally, perhaps, a premonition of imminent death … Olga, with the eyes of a gazelle, reminded me of a sad young girl from a Turgenev novel. Tatiana gave the impression of a haughty patrician with an air of pride in the way she looked at you. Anastasia seemed like a frightened, terrified child, who could, in different circumstances, be charming, light-hearted and affectionate.67

That engineer was, forever after, haunted by those faces. He felt – indeed he hoped – ‘that the three young girls, momentarily at least, sensed that what was imprinted on my face wasn’t simply a cold curiosity and indifference towards them’. His natural human instincts had made him want to reach out and acknowledge them, but ‘to my great shame, I held back out of weakness of character, thinking of my position, of my family’.68

From the window of their train Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes had craned their necks to catch a last sight of the girls as they got into the waiting droshkies. ‘As soon as they were all in, an order was given, and the horses moved off at a trot with their escort.’69

It was the last any of those who had loved, served and lived with the four Romanov sisters since their childhood ever saw of them.