فصل 05

کتاب: خواهران رومونو / فصل 6

فصل 05

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Chapter Five

THE BIG PAIR AND THE LITTLE PAIR

By the beginning of 1905, and despite the arrival of the long-awaited tsarevich, Russia was in crisis, as war continued to rage with Japan. The Russian Imperial Army had not proved invincible in the East, as Maître Philippe had predicted, and was demoralized, weary and undersupplied. Press censorship had become even more rigorous as a result. All comments in foreign newspapers and magazines arriving in Russia that were in any way critical of the war – and, by association, the tsarist system – were heavily blacked out. A notable casualty was an article on the Russian succession in the Illustrated London News by journalist Charles Lowe. Published shortly after Alexey’s birth it had been accompanied by a portrait of Alexandra, captioned ‘The Mother of a Czar to Be’, congratulating the Russians on ‘this ray of sunshine amidst the heavy clouds of national misfortune’, but adding provocatively that ‘the advent of the Czarevitch has probably averted a revolution’. The Russian censor had been much exercised in how to deal with this inflammatory statement. It would have been considered sacrilegious to obliterate the tsaritsa’s portrait on the page, so in the end the entire article surrounding it was blacked out when the magazine reached Russian readers.1 Such draconian censorship was a futile gesture: on the discontented streets of St Petersburg industrial and political unrest continued to build. It seemed to Grand Duke Konstantin ‘as if the dam has been broken’. Russia, he said, ‘has been seized with a thirst for change … Revo-lution is banging on the door’.2

In a rare performance of public ceremonial Nicholas attended the ritual of the Blessing of the Waters, traditionally marking the end of the Christmas festival, held on 6 January in the Orthodox calendar. The key moment came when he descended the Jordan Staircase of the Winter Palace to the edge of the frozen River Neva, to witness the Metropolitan of St Petersburg dip the gold cross into the water three times through a hole in the ice in commemoration of the baptism of Christ. After this a flagon of the sacred water was presented to the tsar to cross himself with. However, during the traditional gun salute that followed, three of the charges fired from the battery on the opposite bank of the Neva – whether by accident or design – proved to be lives not blanks. One of them smashed into the windows of the Winter Palace’s Nicholas Hall which was crowded with guests and showered grapeshot and glass over the temporary wooden chapel on the ice in which Nicholas and Maria Feodorovna and other members of the imperial family were gathered. Nicholas was unhurt, and ‘never moved a muscle except to make the Sign of the Cross’, as one eyewitness recalled, although his ‘quiet, resigned smile’ seemed ‘almost unearthly’.3 A later investigation suggested it had been a genuine error – shotted cartridges having been left in the breech of the cannon after target practice. The fatalistic Nicholas was, however, convinced that the live shells had been intended for him.4 For a nation reading catastrophe into every unfortunate incident in this ill-fated reign it was further proof that the autocracy was doomed.

Three days later, tragedy on a grand scale unfolded across St Petersburg, which had been gripped for weeks by bitter industrial unrest, exacerbated by mounting discontent with the war with Japan. Hundreds were left dead and wounded when Cossack troops fired on a rally of unarmed workers and their families who had marched to the Winter Palace to present a petition to Nicholas begging for political and industrial reform. The advent of Bloody Sunday, as it became known, brought about a radical shift in the traditional popular perception of the tsar as the protective ‘little father’ and a volatile nation descended into extreme violence as the year went on. In February the Russian army was routed at Mukden in Manchuria, and in mid-May the Baltic Fleet was decimated at Tsushima Strait. By the time peace was negotiated with Japan in August, Nicholas’s Minister of the Interior, Petr Stolypin, had instigated a round of courts martial and summary executions to counter the escalating violence.

Widespread unrest went hand in hand with a dramatic escalation in the assassination of prominent government figures. Two of Stolypin’s predecessors in succession had been assassinated: Dmitri Sipyagin in 1902, and Vyacheslav von Plehve – the victim of a bomb attack on the streets of St Petersburg – two weeks before Alexey was born. The Romanov family had long been living in the shadow of political terrorism and in February 1905 the revolutionaries scored their most chilling success yet, when Ella’s husband, the much-hated Grand Duke Sergey, was blown to pieces in a bomb attack in Moscow. Such was the perceived danger to the imperial family that Nicholas and Alexandra were not allowed to attend his funeral. Other attacks followed thick and fast: in May the head of the Kiev section of the Okhrana, Alexander Spiridovich, was shot and seriously wounded. In August 1906 General Vonlyarlyarsky, the Russian military governor of Warsaw, was assassinated, as too was General Min, commander of the Life Guards regiment, who was gunned down by a female revolutionary at Peterhof Railway Station in front of his wife.5

Such were the dangers now threatening Nicholas that it ‘led to the organization of a curiously complicated system of spying and tattling; spies were set to watch spies; the air was filled with whisperings, cross-currents of fear and mistrust’, as the overstretched tsarist police struggled to cope.6 Although the imperial family never walked out informally in crowded places in St Petersburg, every eventuality had to be covered – such as those occasions when they went out for drives in a landau or troika, or attended church services or public ceremonies where they might be surrounded by crowds. This elaborate security network was bolstered by a ban on any press announcements about their day-to-day appointments or any journeys they might be making.7 Nothing escaped the rigorous inspection of the Press Censor’s Department. As a result, the Russian people, as one London paper observed, had absolutely no sense of the ‘sweet family life’ of their tsar and tsaritsa; ‘the papers dare not print it – it is spoken about rarely, if at all, and always with bated breath.’ A few anodyne bulletins were released for public consumption, along with official photographs and postcards available for sale, but that was the sum of it. The Russian imperial family was becoming famous for its ‘dazzling inaccessibility’.8

Four different security networks now guarded the Romanovs’ every move: the Tsar’s Escort was backed up by a special police force at Tsarskoe Selo that watched the surrounding streets and vetted all visitors to the palace. A specially designated railway battalion monitored the line from St Petersburg out to Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof. All other railway lines were closely guarded by cordons of troops positioned along both embankments of any route taken by the imperial train and guards on board gave added protection to the family.9 Even here, though, Alexandra would insist that the blinds be drawn and she refused to allow the children – or even Nicky – to go to the windows to wave at passers-by. On one such journey, Alexander Mosolov, head of the Court Chancellery, recalled how ‘the children pressed their faces against the slits on either side between curtain and window frame’, hungry for sight of the world beyond.10

The assassination of General Min so close to home – for the imperial family had been in residence at the Lower Dacha at Peterhof at the time – was unnerving for Nicholas, but far more so for Alexandra, who lived in constant fear for his life and the safety of her children.11 The growing isolation of the imperial family was even felt abroad; a major article in the Washington Post at the end of May, headed ‘Children Without a Smile’, featured the latest set of official photographs, the paper remarking on the sweetness of the Romanov sisters’ expressions, but concluding that ‘melancholy has marked them for her own’, living as the family now did as ‘almost prisoners in their palaces, surrounded by servants and guards whose fidelity, in the light of past events, must always be distrusted’.12

Under threat of further political upheaval, in the autumn of 1905 Nicholas reluctantly agreed to the creation of a legislative assembly – the State Duma – that was inaugurated in April 1906. Alexandra abhorred his decision, for she resented any political concessions that might endanger the safe transition of the throne to their heir Alexey, and predictably, the Duma was short-lived. Deeply conservative and fearful of change, Nicholas lost his nerve and prorogued it two months later, having come to the conclusion that it was a hotbed of political conflict. Violence inevitably escalated in response. On the afternoon of 12 August 1906 Prime Minister Stolypin narrowly escaped death when a massive bomb attack on his wooden summer dacha in St Petersburg, which was full of visitors at the time, practically demolished the building and killed thirty people, leaving another thirty-two wounded. Stolypin himself was miraculously unharmed, but as they dug him out of the wreckage he was heard to repeat over and over again, ‘My poor children, my poor children.’13 Two of them, his son Arkady and one of his daughters, Natalya, who had both been on the balcony at the time, had been hurled onto the road below by the explosion. Arkady, who was three years old, broke his hip, and fifteen-year-old Natalya was very seriously injured. She lay in hospital in a critical state for weeks. The doctors had expected her to die or face the amputation of both of her badly broken legs, when, on 16 October, a note came from Nicholas telling Stolypin and his wife that a man of God – ‘a peasant from the government of Tobolsk’ – wished to come and bless Natalya with an icon and pray for her. Nicholas and Alexandra had met the man recently and he had made ‘such a distinctly powerful impression’ on them that Nicholas urged Stolypin to let him visit the children in hospital.14 ‘When he came, the man did not touch the child, just stood at the foot of the bed holding up an icon of the miracle worker, St Simeon of Verkhotur’e, and prayed. On leaving, he said “Don’t worry, everything will be all right”.’ Natalya’s condition improved soon after and she eventually recovered, though she was left with a permanent limp as the result of having one heel blown off.15

The mysterious healer was a strannik – a semi-literate, thirty-seven-year-old lay pilgrim – named Grigory Rasputin, who had been gaining a reputation in St Petersburg as a mystic and healer since his arrival there during Lent 1903.16 Nicholas and Alexandra had already met him, briefly, in November 1905, at Stana’s home, Sergievka, near Peterhof and saw him there again in July 1906. With Philippe now dead, the Montenegrin sisters had recently adopted this new mystic and healer and, being privy to the truth of Alexey’s incurable condition, they were concertedly steering Rasputin in the highly vulnerable couple’s direction. On the evening of 13 October 1906 Rasputin had come to see the imperial family at the Lower Dacha, at his own request, to give them a wooden painted icon of St Simeon, one of the most celebrated Russian saints from Siberia, whom he particularly revered. While he was there he was allowed the privilege of meeting the children and ‘gave them blessed bread and holy images, and spoke a few words to them’.17 But this is as far as it went and Rasputin was not invited back. For now, Nicholas and Alexandra remained impressed, and curious – but cautious.

The shock of the injuries to Stolypin’s children was, however, profound for both of them; particularly as Stolypin and his wife had finally had a son after five daughters in succession. Alexandra was, at all times, inordinately protective of Alexey; she seemed to ‘press the little boy to her with the convulsive movement of a mother who always seems in fear of her child’s life’.18 The harrowing events of 1905–6 coupled with the strain of Alexey’s haemophilia had already taken a heavy toll on her. When her sisters Irene and Victoria visited that summer they thought she had aged and were alarmed by how frequently incapacitated she was by her sciatica. She was complaining too of shortness of breath and pain in her heart, convinced that it was ‘enlarged’. Victoria went back home greatly saddened by what she had seen; it was ‘only in the faces of the four winsome little girls’ that she had seen any real happiness at Tsarskoe Selo.19

The total clampdown on news about the Russian imperial family was in stark contrast to the daily court circulars issued in Britain on every royal carriage ride, ribbon-cutting and unveiling, however trivial. In an attempt to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the imperial family, St Petersburg was awash with foreign correspondents chasing stories about the ‘home life’ of the tsar. The ‘Four Little Russian Princesses’ were the object of endless curiosity across the women’s and girls’ magazines of Europe and America.20 Occasionally – before Nicholas and Alexandra quit the Winter Palace in 1905 – the girls had sometimes been seen out in the streets of St Petersburg in a landau with their nannies, often behaving in an unruly fashion, climbing on the seats, standing up and bowing to passers-by and eagerly taking in everything around them. An odd glimpse could still also be caught of them, from beyond the perimeter fence of the Alexander Palace, riding their ponies or bicycles in the park, or running around picking flowers. They seemed full of energy and vivacity and the newspapers hungered for more.21

One of the first to provide an inside view was Margaretta Eagar, who had, quite suddenly, been ‘let go’ from her post on 29 September 1904 not long after the birth of Alexey. No explanation was given, either by Eagar in her later memoir and articles, or in Nicholas’s brief diary entry alluding to her departure. But it is possible that the forthright Margaretta had become too combative for Nicholas and Alexandra’s tastes – much like Mrs Inman before her – when she had insisted on her right, as nanny, to discipline the children. Having spoken to Alexandra out of turn once on this matter, insisting that she was ‘charged by Your Majesty with the education of the little princesses’, the tsaritsa had been obliged to remind Margaretta that she was talking to the Empress of Russia.22 Margaretta had always been highly opinionated and talkative; perhaps the imperial couple had come to see her as a loose cannon at a time when they were anxious to keep Alexey’s condition secret.

Nevertheless, it had clearly been difficult for Alexandra to let Margaretta Eagar go, for the nanny had performed her role with considerable skill and dedication and the girls all adored her, but she decided from now on to take charge of the girls’ upbringing herself and not hire any more English nannies. This ran entirely counter to Russian tradition, or for that matter the normal way of things among most aristocratic parents at that time, who handed over the everyday care of their children to a retinue of servants. Alexandra did of course have the service of Russian nursemaids to help with the girls’ day-to-day care, two of the most loyal and long-serving being Mariya Vishnyakova, who would increasingly take care of Alexey, and Alexandra – ‘Shura’ – Tegleva.

As for the girls’ education, Alexandra had already started tutoring them herself in English and French and basic spelling, having taught them needlework the moment they were able to hold a needle. She enlisted her own lectrice Trina Schneider to teach the older two in other general subjects. Trina also acted as a chaperone, much as Margaretta Eagar had done, when the girls went out for walks or drives. Meanwhile male tutors for other subjects were sought out.23 One of the first to be recruited was Petr Vasilevich Petrov – a teacher and former army officer who had been a senior government administrator responsible for military schools and who began teaching Olga and Tatiana Russian language and literature in 1903. Although approaching retirement Petrov was devoted to his charges, and they responded to his genial manner with great affection, referring to him by his initials, PVP.24 But he found them a handful; the girls at times could be wild and out of control. ‘They used to play with him, shouting, laughing, pushing him, and generally hauling him about without mercy’, recalled Baroness Buxhoeveden. Olga and Tatiana could be ‘meek as mice’ when studying but once their teacher had departed the schoolroom, ‘a wild scramble’ often followed during which Olga would jump on the sofa and race along the row of neatly positioned chairs against the wall, only for the younger two to come rushing in from the nursery to join in until the next teacher saw them once more demurely seated in their places.

The most important new arrival in the schoolroom was undoubtedly the twenty-six-year-old Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard, so dapper with his stiff wing collars, twirled moustache and goatee beard. He began teaching Olga and Tatiana French at Peterhof in September 1905 while still in the employ of Stana, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, and her husband. Gilliard travelled over from their nearby dacha at Sergievka several days a week, running the gauntlet of endless security checks in the process. He was unnerved to have the tsaritsa sit in on his lessons until she was satisfied with their quality; thereafter a lady-in-waiting would attend as an informal chaperone. Gilliard’s first impression of his charges was that Olga was ‘spirited like a runaway horse and very intelligent’ and Tatiana, in comparison, ‘calm and fairly lazy’.25 He liked their frankness and the fact that they ‘didn’t try to hide their faults’, and better still he found the simplicity of the tsar’s family a refreshing contrast to his stultifying, ‘desiccated’ life with the Leuchtenbergs, with all its tensions and intrigues (the couple was in the throes of a scandalous separation and divorce).26


After the summer sojourn at Peterhof, life at Tsarskoe Selo in the autumn returned to its set routine. Nicholas was up long before his wife in the mornings, her ill health often preventing her from getting up till after 9. The children meanwhile ate breakfast in the upstairs nursery and had the plain food so beloved of English families – porridge, bread and butter, milk and honey. Nicholas occasionally joined them before heading off to his study for meetings with ministers. Once they reached 8–10 years old the girls were considered well behaved enough to join their parents at the adult table downstairs. Lunch, when guests or members of the entourage often joined them, was always simple. With the children back at their lessons Alexandra would spend the afternoons at her needlework, or painting and writing letters till afternoon tea at around five in the mauve boudoir, where she liked to have Nicky to herself if she could and the children only came by invitation, in their best frocks – though they could always come to her at any time if there was a particular reason. Family supper, when the children were older, was usually very modest, after which the evenings were spent with more sewing, board and card games till bedtime, with Nicholas often reading aloud to them all.27 No one ever saw the girls idle or bored for Alexandra ensured that they were never at a loss for something to do. When she had to be apart from them on official duties with Nicholas, she sent them little admonitory notes: ‘Be sure to be very good and remember, elbows off the table, sit straight and eat your meat nicely.’28 She expected notes back from them – however brief. A typical response to ‘Maman’ from Tatiana in 1905 in her best and neatest handwriting went as follows:

J’aime maman, qui promet et qui donneTant de baisers à son enfant,E si doucement lui pardonneToutes les fois qu’il est méchant.*29

The most notable aspect of the tsar’s home life when details of it made their way into the western press was how simple and uneventful it was. People seemed surprised that the four sisters enjoyed ‘only the healthy pleasures of ordinary children’.30 Reporters were impressed by the Englishness of their upbringing, with lessons interspersed with lots of fresh air and exercise, all planned in advance to a fixed schedule. During the morning break between lessons at around eleven, Alexandra would often walk or drive out in the park with the children and one of her ladies – usually her now honorary lady-in-waiting Baroness Buxhoeveden, whom they all called Iza, or Trina Schneider. In winter she and the children would often go out in a large four-seater sledge. At such times little Anastasia, already an irrepressible clown, would ‘slip down under the thick bear-rug … and sit, clucking like a hen or barking like a dog’, imitating Aera, Alexandra’s nasty little dog that was noted for biting people’s ankles. Sometimes the girls would sing as the sledge rolled along, ‘the Empress giving the key-note’ to which from under the bear rug Anastasia would offer up an accompanying ‘boom, boom, boom’, asserting ‘I’m a piano.’31

The Romanov girls were seldom ostentatiously dressed and even on the coldest days they were never ‘muffled up in the prevailing fashion’, so the Daily Mirror told its readers, ‘as the Tsarina has quite British ideas on the subject of hygiene’.32 With Anastasia now four, Alexandra began dressing the girls in their own informal ‘uniform’ of matching colours, as two identifiable couples – the ‘Big Pair’ and the ‘Little Pair’ as she called them – a shorthand which, however affectionate the intention, marked the beginning of a family habit of referring to the girls collectively rather than as individuals. The big pair and the little pair each shared a room, where they slept on simple, narrow nickel campbeds (of the portable kind used by the army; a vestige of Nicholas’s own Spartan childhood). They took cold baths in the morning and were allowed warm ones in the evening. The older girls dressed themselves and Alexandra expected them to make their own beds and tidy their rooms. The streak of Lutheran puritanism in her ensured that their clothes and shoes were handed down from one to the next. ‘The toy cupboards of the imperial nurseries do not contain the host of expensive playthings deemed indispensable in so many middle-class households’, observed the Daily Mail, indeed ‘the splendid dolls sent by Queen Victoria to her great-great-grandchildren are only brought out on high days and holidays.’33

Most notable to foreign observers was the degree of access that the children had to their mother and father. Despite his heavy workload Nicholas, from the first, had tried to be back from his study in the evening to see the latest baby having its bath and he always found time to play with or read to them in the evenings. Both parents set their children high moral standards; Alexandra was inspired by the popular American Presbyterian minister, James Russell Miller, whose homiletic pamphlets such as Secrets of Happy Home Life (1894) and The Wedded Life (1886) sold in their millions. She noted down many quotations from Miller on the joys of married life, on children as ‘God’s ideal of completeness’, and on parental responsibility for the formation of their characters within a Christian and loving home. ‘May God help us to give them a good and sound education and make them above all brave little Christian soldiers fighting for our saviour’, she told her old friend Bishop Boyd Carpenter in 1902.34

In 1905, approaching her tenth birthday, Olga already had an inherent awareness of her position as the eldest and loved giving a military salute to soldiers standing on guard as she passed by. Until Alexey was born people had often greeted her as their ‘little empress’ and Alexandra underlined this by demanding that her ladies kiss Olga’s hand rather than offer more impulsive expressions of affection. Although she could be boisterous with her sisters, Olga already had a serious side. There was an earnestness and integrity about her that would have served her well, had it come to it, as a future tsaritsa. From the start Alexandra invested a level of responsibility in Olga, constantly reminding her of this in little notes: ‘Mama kisses her girly tenderly and prays that God may help her to be always a good loving Christian child. Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving, then all will love you’, she wrote in 1905.35

It was clear to Margaretta Eagar that from a very young age Olga had inherited her mother’s and her grandmother Alice’s altruistic spirit. She was highly sensitive to the plight of others less fortunate than herself; driving in St Petersburg one day she had seen a policeman arrest a woman for being drunk and disorderly and had begged Margaretta that she be let off; the sight of poor peasants falling on their knees by the roadside in Poland as they passed in their carriage also unsettled her and she wanted Margaretta to ‘tell them not to do it’.36 Not long after Christmas one year when they were out driving, she had seen a little girl crying in the road. ‘“Look,” she exclaimed, in great excitement; “Santa Claus could not have known where she lived”; and she had immediately thrown the doll she had with her out of the carriage, shouting “Don’t cry, little girl; here’s a doll for you.”’37

Olga was curious and full of questions. Once when a nursemaid reprimanded her for her grumpiness, saying that she had ‘got out of bed on the wrong foot’, the following morning Olga had pertly asked which was ‘the right foot to get out with’ so that the ‘bad foot won’t be able to make me naughty to-day’.38 Cranky, scornful and difficult she certainly could be, especially during puberty, and her flashes of anger revealed a dark side that she sometimes found difficult to control, but Olga also was a dreamer. During a game of I-spy with the children Alexandra had noticed that ‘Olga always thinks of the sun, clouds, sky, rain or something belonging to the heavens, explaining to me that it makes her so happy to think of that’.39 In 1903 at the age of eight she made her first confession, and soon after her cousin’s tragic death that same year developed a fascination with heaven and the afterlife. ‘Cousin Ella knows, she is in heaven sitting down and talking to God, and He is telling her how He did it and why’, she insisted to Margaretta Eagar when once discussing the plight of a blind woman.40

Tatiana at eight years old was pale-skinned, slender and with darker, auburn hair, and eyes rather greyer than the sea-blue of her sisters. She was already arrestingly beautiful, ‘the living replica of her beautiful mother’, with a naturally imperious look enhanced by her fine bones and tilted-up eyes.41 On the surface she seemed an extraordinarily self-possessed young girl, but she was in fact emotionally cautious and reserved, like her mother. She was never hostage to her temperament as Olga sometimes could be and unlike Olga – who had a volatile relationship with their mother as she grew older – Tatiana was unquestioningly devoted; it was she in whom Alexandra always confided. She was the most polite and deferential at table with adults and proved to be a natural-born organizer with a methodical mind and a down-to-earth manner that her sisters could not match. No wonder her sisters called her ‘the governess’. Whereas Olga was musical and played the piano beautifully, Tatiana was a gifted needlewoman like her mother. She too was deeply altruistic and sensitive to what others did for her. On once discovering that her nursemaid and Miss Eagar were paid for their services because they had no money of their own and needed to earn a living, she came to Eagar’s bed the next morning and got in and cuddled her, saying ‘Anyway, you are not paid for this.’42

The third sister, Maria, was a shy child who suffered later from being piggy in the middle between her two older sisters and her younger siblings. Her mother may have coupled her with Anastasia as the ‘little pair’ but as time went on Maria occasionally found herself adrift from Anastasia and Alexey – the more natural little pair – and she sometimes felt that she did not get the love and attention she craved. Her strong physique made her seem rather ungainly and she had a reputation for clumsiness and boisterousness. Yet for many who knew the family, Maria was by far the prettiest, with her peaches-and-cream complexion, her rich brown hair and an earthy Russian quality not possessed by any of the other children; everyone remarked on her eyes that shone ‘like lanterns’ and her warm smile.43 She was not especially bright but had a real gift for painting and drawing. Mashka, as her sisters often called her, was the least affected by any sense of her station. She ‘would shake hands with any palace attendant or servant, or exchange kisses with chambermaids or peasant women whom she happened to meet. If a servant dropped something, she would hurry to help her pick it up.’44 Once when watching a regiment march past below her window at the Winter Palace she exclaimed, ‘Oh! I love these dear soldiers; I should like to kiss them all!’ Of all the sisters she was the most open-hearted and sincere and she was always extremely deferential towards her parents. Margaretta Eagar felt that she was Nicholas’s favourite and that he was touched by her natural affection. When she once sheepishly admitted to stealing a forbidden biscuit from a plate at teatime he was relieved for he had been ‘always afraid of the wings growing’. It had made him ‘glad to see she is only a human child’.45

Having such a compliant personality, it was perhaps inevitable that Maria would be completely in thrall to the dominating personality of her younger sister Anastasia, for the youngest Romanov daughter was a force of nature to whose presence it was impossible to remain indifferent. Even at four years old she was ‘a very sturdy little monkey, and afraid of nothing’.46 Of all the children, Nastasya or Nastya as they called her, was the least Russian in looks. She had dark blonde hair like Olga and her father’s blue eyes but her features were very much like those of her mother’s Hesse family. She was not shy like her sisters either, in fact was extremely forthright, even with adults. She may have been the youngest of the four but was always the one who commanded the most attention. She had the great gift of humour and ‘knew how to straighten out wrinkles on anybody’s brow’.47 One day, shortly after Alexey was born, Margaretta caught Anastasia eating peas with her fingers: ‘I reproved her, saying seriously, “Even the new baby does not eat peas with his fingers.” She looked up and said, “’es him does – him eats them with him’s foots too!”’48 Anastasia balked at doing anything she was told; if ordered not to climb on things she did precisely that. When told not to eat apples gathered in the orchard to be baked for nursery supper she deliberately gorged herself and when reprimanded was unrepentant: ‘You don’t know how good that apple was that I had in the garden’, she told Margaretta teasingly. It took a total ban from the orchard for a week before Anastasia finally promised she would not eat any more.49

Everything with Anastasia was a battle of wills. She was an impossible pupil; distracted, inattentive, always eager to be doing anything other than sit still, yet despite not being academically bright she had an instinctive gift for dealing with people. When punished for bad behaviour she always took it on the chin: ‘she could sit down and count the cost of any action she wished to perform, and take the punishment “like a soldier”’, as Margaretta recalled.50 But this never stopped her from being the major instigator of naughtiness, and she got away with far more than her sisters. At times, as she got bigger, she could be rough and even spiteful when playing with other children, scratching and pulling hair, leading to complaints from cousins when they visited that she was ‘nasty to the point of being evil’ when things didn’t go her own way.51

The anodyne public image of four sweet little girls in white embroidered cambric with blue bows in their hair thus gave little or no indication of the four very different personalities developing behind the closed doors of the Alexander Palace. By 1906 public perception of the Romanov sisters was being set in stone by the many official photographs of them that were circulated for mass consumption. But it remained one that conveyed a superficial, saccharine image of them right up to the war years.52

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