فصل 08

Chapter Eight

ROYAL COUSINS

In the late summer of 1909 the Romanov sisters at last found themselves with something exciting to look forward to – a visit to their royal cousins in England. It would be their first proper official trip abroad, apart from private family visits to Uncle Ernie at Darmstadt and Wolfsgarten. Crossing the North Sea, the Shtandart encountered strong winds from the south and the water was very choppy. All the children were seasick, and many of the entourage too.1 The crew made up an area of plaids and pillows for the children to sleep on where the rocking of the ship was less intense. But Tatiana still suffered terribly; she had never been a good sailor and had sometimes been seasick even when the yacht was at anchor. ‘A whole trunkful of special remedies from America’ had been sent for but nothing worked.2 En route to England, the family had stopped briefly at Kiel to visit Alexandra’s sister Irene and her family, and then they had made a three-day visit to President Fallières of France at Cherbourg, where they were greeted with the usual pageantry of gun salutes, crowds, bunting and massed bands playing the Marseillaise. After three days of diplomatic meetings, formal dinners and a review of the French fleet – at which the girls had been thrilled to be allowed to take photos of French submarines with their Box Brownies – the Shtandart finally set sail for England.3

Having met at Reval for three days the previous year, both Nicholas and his cousin Edward VII had been keen to rehabilitate Russia in the eyes of the world after the terrible events of 1905, at a time when talk of war with Germany was increasing. But it was also an opportunity for a much-wanted family reunion. There was, however, a problem: the impending visit of the tsar caused considerable disquiet in Parliament and the British press, far more so than the 1896 visit. After the events of 1905 British radical groups had damned Nicholas as a brutal despot, the architect of Russian imperial oppression. In the run-up to the visit he was further vilified in socialist rallies at Trafalgar Square and elsewhere, with the evidence of Stolypin’s repressive measures against political activists stacked up against him. In short, Nicholas II was seen as the repository of all evil: ‘The Czar of the “Bloody Sunday”, the Czar of Stolypins and the Czar of Pogroms and Black Hundreds’.4 The impending visit divided public opinion in Britain, although Lord Hardinge, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, put much of the protest down to scaremongering and dismissed the Trafalgar Square ‘demonstrators’ as a motley collection of ‘five hundred Frenchmen, six hundred German waiters, a few Russian Jews and Italian ice-vendors’.5 One of the most strident opponents of Nicholas’s visit was the Labour leader Keir Hardie, who inspired 130 resolutions from socialist groups, schools, evangelical societies, trade unions, pacifist groups and branches of the Labour Party and the Women’s Labour League that were sent to the Home Secretary condemning the visit.6 At some radical meetings there were open calls for Nicholas’s assassination, should he step onto English soil.

Mindful of the huge security problem for the police on the Isle of Wight, it was soon made clear that the tsar and his family would not stay on land but on board the Shtandart off Cowes, where it was much easier to protect them, surrounded as the yacht would be by two Russian cruisers and three destroyers as well as ships of the British fleet. Nevertheless, the most elaborate security arrangements were put into effect, with ‘every possible means of entrance, not only to Cowes, but to the Isle of Wight’ – landing stages, roads and railways, and ‘even the peaceful rural villages of the interior’ – being watched by hundreds of plain clothes detectives, backed up by a special ‘bicycle corps’ of thirty men. Many of the detectives adopted the token disguise of double-breasted yachtsmen’s jackets and white sailing caps, but as one newspaper observed, ‘this was really more of an advertisement of constabulary duty than a disguise. Instead of avoiding attention they invited it … As yachtsmen who wandered about in couples without visible means of support afloat they were marked men.’7 Cowes itself, as the Liberal peer Lord Suffield recalled, ‘was crowded with detectives on the watch for possible assassins, and everyone seemed to be in fear for the poor hunted Czar’. The detectives were not just British either; Spiridovich had brought his own Okhrana men. Suffield had found it all rather unnerving: ‘I do not know how any man can submit to such thralldom; it is too big a price to pay for being a potentate.’8

On the evening of 2 August (NS) the Shtandart and its escort sailed towards Spithead in the Solent for a rendezvous with the British royal family on board their yacht the Victoria and Albert. The event was filmed and photographed too, as an impressive naval review and regatta of 152 ships was watched by both families, following which the royal yachts sailed into Cowes harbour to be greeted by an armada of gaily pennanted steam and sail boats and yachts of every description.9 Four days of intensive receptions and meetings followed, during which the only meal not shared with the British royals was breakfast. The strain of it all on the empress’s face was evident to Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s long-standing mistress. Up on deck in the Shtandart surrounded by a dense crowd of people the tsaritsa had ‘presented a frigid calm’, yet, strangely, Alexandra’s moral probity did not prevent her from inviting Mrs Keppel to join her below in her suite. As soon as the cabin door was closed behind them ‘there was a sudden lightening of the atmosphere’, recalled Alice. ‘Dropping her regal mask, the Empress had at once become a friendly housewife, “Tell me, my dear, where do you get your knitting wool?” she had urgently demanded.’10

For the Romanov children, spared the strains of officialdom, the visit was an all too brief glimpse of an entirely new landscape, though for those protecting them it was yet another security nightmare. They had till now seen little or nothing beyond their homes at St Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof. On the morning of 3 August all five of them made their first trip ashore, to East Cowes and a visit by open landau to Osborne Bay, just down from Osborne House (the large part of which had now become a naval officers’ training college). Here they played with their cousins on the private beach, paddling in the sea, collecting shells and digging sandcastles, much as their mother and their grandmother Alice had done before them. Olga and Tatiana made a second impromptu trip ashore that afternoon with their chaperones and a posse of detectives, and were delighted to be allowed to walk rather than take the carriage into West Cowes to do some shopping in the main street. It was such a rare thing for them to be able to move freely in this way; the cobbled high street of West Cowes might not be the glamorous Nevsky Prospekt, but Shtandart officer Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted that many of the shops were subsidiaries of the big London stores, open specially for the yachting season and the Cowes Regatta, and had plenty of luxury goods and souvenirs with which to tempt the girls’ pocket money. Olga and Tatiana were extremely animated throughout their visit. They talked in English to the shopkeepers and took great pleasure in spending their money in a newsagent’s shop on pennants of the various nations, commemorative picture postcards of their royal relatives and even of their own parents. After that they moved on to a jeweller’s where they snapped up gifts for members of the crew. They also treated themselves to some perfume from Beken & Son’s pharmacy.11

West Cowes meanwhile had come to a complete standstill, for word had quickly spread about these charming young Russian visitors in their smart matching grey suits and straw hats. Soon the sisters were being followed round the town by a large crowd of curious holiday-makers and across the floating bridge into East Cowes, where they visited Whippingham Church and saw the chair Great-grandmama had sat in when attending services. Throughout their visit, as The Times reported on 7 August, Olga and Tatiana ‘behaved with complete self-possession, smiling when one or two enthusiasts raised a cheer for them’. They were still laughing and talking excitedly at the end of their three-hour visit.12

The whole family came ashore the following day, the girls and Alexey bowing and waving at the crowd, on their way to see the private wing of Osborne House and the Swiss Cottage – a playhouse for learning practical skills, created in the garden for his children by Prince Albert – in which Alexey took particular delight. After enjoying five o’clock tea at Barton Manor with their cousin George, Prince of Wales, and his family, everyone sat for their photographs. The Princess of Wales thought the Romanov children ‘delicious’ and everyone commented on how unaffected and delightful they were.13 The two cousins, George and Nicholas, who had not seen each other for twelve years, seemed remarkably alike with their blue eyes, neatly trimmed beards and similar stature, particularly when they posed for photos with their two sons – David in his naval uniform (the future King Edward VIII was then at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth) and Alexey in his own trademark white sailor suit.14 David had been delegated to escort his cousins at Osborne, that task having originally been earmarked for his younger brother Bertie (the future King George VI). But Bertie had gone down with whooping cough shortly before the visit and such had been the imperial doctors’ paranoia of exposing the tsarevich to any possible infection that he was bundled off to Balmoral and his role given to his brother. During the visit David took rather a shine to Tatiana (despite his grandmother having seen Olga as a possible future bride for him). He could see how protective she was of her timid little brother and could not help noticing a ‘frightened’ look in Alexey’s large, watchful eyes.15 But as for the ‘elaborate police guard’ thrown around the tsar’s every movement, he later recalled that it ‘made me glad I was not a Russian prince’.16

During those four idyllic, sunny days in August 1909, when ‘all the world was on the water’ and the Solent was ‘like a sea of glass, the sun going down like a red ball leaving the evenings still and warm’, one stately ceremony had followed another. As General Spiridovich later recalled, ‘the colossal fleet’ that had gathered at Cowes ‘motionless and as if asleep, seemed a vision from a fairytale’ – the effect enhanced by the night sky illuminated by the lights from all the ships anchored off shore. The night before the Romanovs’ departure the bands played and there were fireworks and dancing, with the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher, partnering each of the girls in turn. Then everyone sat down to a final grand dinner – the ladies with Alexandra in the Shtandart – the men with King Edward in the Victoria and Albert. After a final lunch party on the 5th – the hottest, and most windless, day of the year so far – the Shtandart weighed anchor at 3.30 p.m. and, with Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children up on deck waving goodbye to their relatives in the Victoria and Albert, the imperial yacht headed off into the English Channel. As it disappeared from view, Superintendent Quinn of the Cowes police force was seen ‘offering a cigarette out of a gorgeous gold cigarette case, shining with newness, and bearing the intimation that it was “a present from the Czar”’. One of his colleagues was wearing ‘a scarf pin with the Imperial crown in diamonds, and still another sported a gold watch’ – all of them ‘gifts for their care’ from a grateful Russian emperor and empress. But the British police were, nevertheless, intensely relieved that ‘the strain was over’.17

All in all the Russian imperial visit to England was a triumph – an unforgettable coming together of two great royal families that would retrospectively become an indelible emblem of the dying days of the old world order. ‘The four Russian Grand Duchesses had enchanted everybody, and the poignant little Tsarevich melted all hearts.’18 But many shared the sobering thoughts of Sir Henry William Lucy:

Thus it came to pass that the great autocrat, master of the lives of millions, was deprived of the privilege enjoyed by the humblest tourist from the Continent. He visited England, and left its shores without setting foot upon them, save in the way of a hasty, furtive visit to Osborne House.19

The British and Russian royal families would never meet again.

By the time the Romanovs arrived home, Alexandra was once again prostrated. ‘How I am paying for the fatigues of my visits,’ she wrote to Ernie on 26 August, ‘a week already in bed.’20 Her health was causing serious concern for it had been in rapid decline since the winter of 1907 when Alexandra had called in her physician Dr Fischer forty-two times in the space of two months.21 Spiridovich had privately sought the opinion of an eminent Russian medical professor at around this same time. He had concluded that the tsaritsa had inherited something of the ‘vulnerability’ to nervous illness and ‘great impressionability’ of the house of Hesse and that there was a distinct ‘hysterical nature’ to her ‘nervous manifestations’. These took the physical form of general weakness, pain around the heart, oedema of the legs caused by poor circulation, and problems with her neuro-vascular system which manifested itself in red blotches on her skin – all of which were getting worse as she approached middle age. ‘As for the psychic troubles,’ the professor concluded, ‘these are principally expressed by a state of great depression, by great indifference to that which surrounds her, and by a tendency to religious revery.’22

Dr Fischer had been called in again in 1908 to treat Alexandra for a bout of painful neuralgia that had been affecting her sleep.23 As a specialist in nervous disorders he had prescribed absolute rest. He had also felt very strongly that the presence of Anna Vyrubova – who now spent almost every day with the tsaritsa – was detrimental, if not harmful.24 He advised Nicholas in writing that he could not treat the tsaritsa properly all the time Anna was in such close proximity. But Alexandra would not countenance Anna’s removal and Fischer soon after requested leave to resign from his post. He was replaced in April 1908 by Dr Evgeny Botkin, who immediately suggested that an upcoming trip to the Crimea – where Nicholas was to review the Black Sea Fleet – would be beneficial to the empress’s health.

From now on Alexandra would be loath to consult anyone but Botkin. His appointment as court physician was, however, something of a poisoned chalice: Alexandra was the kind of patient who only tolerated doctors who agreed with her own self-diagnosis. He played up to her view of herself as a chronic invalid who must bear her affliction, as Father Grigory had taught her, ‘in the nature of an offering’.25 Her confirmed invalidism became a useful tool when dealing with the misbehaviour of her daughters, who were clearly affected by her constant absences from family life. ‘When God thinks the time comes to make me better, He will, and not before’, she told them, and they had better behave themselves to ensure this happened.26

In September 1909 the family headed for the Crimea by rail – the longest train ride any of the children had ever made and their first visit to the region, for Nicholas and Alexandra had not spent any real time there since Alexander III’s death in 1894. At the port of Sevastopol they joined the Shtandart and sailed round the Crimean coast to welcoming fireworks and illuminations at Yalta and a warm, holiday atmosphere, before travelling on to the old summer palace at Livadia, 53 miles (85 km) further south. During the holiday the children rode, played tennis and swam from their private beach, often with their favourite cousin, eighteen-year-old Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who was now spending a great deal of time with the family. Nicholas was glad of Dmitri’s company as he had always had a soft spot for him, and they spent much time going off on walks and rides together.27 Alexandra kept to her bed for most of the time or sat on the veranda, receiving no one and often not even joining the family for lunch. Her recovery was very slow and affected everyone’s spirits. But she refused to see any specialists, trusting to Botkin and her own self-medication with carrot juice, ‘saying that this substance liquefied the blood, which was too thick’.28 Perhaps her rigorous vegetarian diet was beneficial; by the end of October she had recovered sufficiently to take gentle walks and drives with her daughters and go shopping with them in Yalta.

That autumn at Livadia Alexey suffered another attack of bleeding when he once again hurt his leg. A French medical professor was called in and visited three times in secret. But he was a specialist in tuberculosis and ‘declared himself incompetent to diagnose what it was’, clearly not being told the child was suffering from haemophilia. Nor could another medical expert summoned from St Petersburg offer any palliatives.29 By this time, as Spiridovich noted, it was becoming increasingly difficult to disguise the fact that there was something profoundly wrong with the tsarevich, ‘which, like the Sword of Damocles, hung menacingly over the Imperial Family’. It was clear that in Alexey’s case, as well as her own, Alexandra had given up on conventional medicine and, under the influence of her spiritual adviser Grigory, ‘only counted upon the help of the Most High’.30 Alexey’s condition coupled with his mother’s poor state of health meant that the family remained in Livadia almost until Christmas. But as the brilliant, sunny Crimean autumn turned to a cold and wet winter, there were only endless games of dominoes, halma and lotto and occasional film shows to divert the members of the household from the stultifying boredom that consumed them.

Their mother’s chronic ill health was an emotional burden that her daughters struggled to cope with. ‘God help that dearest mama will not be sick any more this winter,’ Olga wrote to Grigory in November, ‘or it will be so awful, sad and difficult.’ Tatiana was anxious too, telling him that ‘we feel bad seeing her so sick. Oh, if only you knew how hard it was for us to endure Mama’s sickness. But yes, you do know, because you know everything.’31 For the best part of six months that year of 1909 the imperial family had been almost totally absent from view in Russia. The four sisters were beginning to show the signs of their isolation from the real world and the natural interchange they needed with young people of their own age. Yet even now, Nicholas and Alexandra were planning the family’s continued retreat – for the sake of Alexandra’s and Alexey’s poor health. Before leaving Livadia that Christmas they commissioned the building of a new palace to replace the dark and damp existing main palace (although the nearby brick-built Maly Palace where Alexander III had died was left standing). In this new home they intended to spend the whole of every spring and summer. For ordinary Russians it would continue to be, as the peasant saying went, ‘a great height to God and a long way to the tsar’.32

New Year 1910 was a gloomy one in imperial Russia. For the first two months the court was in mourning for Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, the tsar’s great-uncle, who had died in Cannes on 18 December (NS) the previous year. In April Alexandra lost her mistress of the robes, Princess Mariya Golitsyna, a woman whom she had counted as one of her closest ladies at court and a personal friend; barely a month later she was plunged into black again on the death of her uncle King Edward VII.33

In normal circumstances Nicholas and Alexandra would have led the public mourning in St Petersburg for Grand Duke Mikhail, but Alexandra was ill yet again. Everywhere that year ‘the conversation wore the topic of the Imperial Family’s seclusion threadbare’, with mounting concern being voiced about ‘the effect on public opinion and the nation of the long-continued absence from the capital of the Tsar and the imperial family’.34 As the US diplomat in St Peters-burg, Post Wheeler, recalled:

They spent the spring and fall at Livadia in the Crimea. In the summer, when they were not at Peterhof, they were yachting on the imperial yacht, the Standart. The coast of Finland saw more of them than their own capital. In between they were at Tsarskoe Selo, the ‘Tsar’s City’ only a handful of miles away, but so far as St. Petersburg was concerned it might have been a hundred … Society was at a loose end. It was not a wholesome situation either for them or for the nation. So the talk ran.35

St Petersburg had become ‘a city with a frown’, a sombre place oppressed by its history, concluded British journalist John Foster Fraser.36 The social life of the capital was moribund and increasingly corrupt, its aristocracy deeply resistant to political change or social reform and fixated on rank. An outmoded, Gogolian bureaucracy still divided the population into two main camps – officials and non-officials – with the mass of the population looking upon the members of the inflated tsarist bureaucracy as ‘vampires’. ‘The hatred is covered, smothered, but it is there all the time’, Foster Fraser argued.37 At the heart of this polarized system stood an elusive tsar – ‘timorous and brave, hesitant and resourceful, secretive and open-minded, suspicious and trusting’ – a man who, far from the bloodthirsty image projected, was kindly, sincere and modest, a devoted husband and loving father but who, as tsar, was utterly ill equipped emotionally or morally for the task with which an accident of birth had charged him. The burden of responsibility was ageing Nicholas fast; and so was the emotional strain of having an invalid wife and son. ‘Nature had framed him for a placid country gentleman, walking amid his flower beds in a linen blouse, with a stick instead of a sword. Never for a Tsar’, concluded Post Wheeler.38

Stagnating in the absence of the tsar and tsaritsa, and with it their moral example, St Petersburg society was increasingly dominated by the reactionary grand dukes and their wives who saw themselves – in the face of Nicholas’s incorrigible weakness as monarch – as the ‘true champions of Imperial power’, intent as they were on protecting their own wealth and power by propping up a tottering autocracy implacably opposed to democratic reform.39 St Petersburg society, as the French ambassador’s wife put it, consisted of ‘two or three hundred cliques, all of them social cut-throats’, backed up by a Camorra of court officials, many of them also highly antipathetic to the imperial couple.40 Holding centre stage was Nicholas’s aunt, Maria Pavlovna, whose husband Vladimir (a man of expensive vices who had dissipated thousands of roubles on gambling and women) had died the previous February. Grand Duchess Vladimir, as she was often referred to, was German by birth. Like the tsaritsa she had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, albeit shortly before her husband’s death and with a very determined eye on the dynastic future of her sons. But she had married almost as well as her monarch, coming, like Alexandra, from a fairly minor German dukedom – of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

At her luxurious Florentine-style mansion on the Palace Embankment by the River Neva, a residence which more than rivalled the Alexander Palace, Grand Duchess Vladimir held court in the absence of Russia’s real monarchs, her fabulous wealth enabling her to throw the most lavish receptions, charity bazaars and costume balls. Her four-day bazaar traditionally opened the Christmas-to-Lent season in St Petersburg and in the weeks that followed, hers were the most sought-after invitations in the capital. The grand duchess’s lofty and forceful manner might be intimidating but her brilliant social connections and her natural energy ensured that she had a finger on the pulse of Russian high society. It also meant that she was at the centre of much intrigue in the capital focused against the increasingly unpopular tsaritsa.

As a result of her wide-reaching literary interests, Grand Duchess Vladimir had, at the end of 1909, invited a distinguished foreign visitor to come and stay. The best-selling British novelist Elinor Glyn had recently scored a big success in Russia with her romantic novel Three Weeks, and the grand duchess suggested Glyn might like to come to Russia to gather material for a Russian-based story.41 ‘Everyone always writes books about our peasants,’ she had told her, ‘come and write one about how the real people live.’ Few remarks could be more symptomatic of the staggering indifference of her class to the plight of the ordinary Russian population.42 Unfortunately for Glyn, having set off for Russia on the promise that the tsar and tsaritsa were about to emerge from Tsarskoe Selo and take a greater part in St Petersburg social life, she arrived to find the city in mourning for Grand Duke Mikhail. Far worse from a social point of view, she had come with an entirely new wardrobe of clothes from the couturier Lucile, as well as hats from Reboux of Paris, but she had no mourning clothes. The British ambassador’s wife had had to go to her rescue and buy her ‘the regulation headgear … a mourning bonnet of black crepe with a long and flowing veil’.43

From a window of the British Embassy on the Palace Embankment, on a cold grey day of receding snow and slush, Glyn watched the funeral cortège heading for the Peter and Paul Cathedral across the Neva on Zayachy Island, with the empress ‘crouching back in her carriage’ and Nicholas and the grand dukes walking behind, he pale-faced and like his cousins patently aware of their vulnerability to assassins. Advance warnings of bomb outrages had prompted the authorities to ban all spectators from watching at windows (bar the British Embassy) and soldiers and policemen had been set ‘shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, in a double row facing both ways’ along the entire 3-mile (4.8-km) route.44 As the procession passed, Glyn noticed that the huge crowds stood there ‘mute but unmoved’; there was none of the genuine mourning she had witnessed at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901. ‘The atmosphere was filled, not with grief but with apprehension, not with sorrow but with doom.’45 For Glyn ‘the blind, silent houses, the massed guards, and the hostile people proclaimed to all the world the inevitable passing of this tragic regime’. As she wrote in her journal that evening: ‘Oh! How we should thank God for dear, free, safe, happy England.’46

The following day Glyn was deeply impressed by the ritual of the magnificent funeral service, the candles and incense and the beautiful but strangely alien singing of the priests. Only Nicholas was present, ‘unnaturally composed, as though he wore a mask’; Alexandra, she was told, had ‘refused’ to come.47 That, no doubt, is how her absence was perceived by the gossips; the reality was that the empress would have been incapable of standing through the four-hour-long ceremony. But inexorably, the drip-drip of negative gossip about her was doing its work, as Glyn noted: ‘I was shocked to find that her unpopularity amounted to hatred, even as early as 1910.’48 She had the distinct impression that St Petersburg society looked upon Grand Duchess Vladimir as the real Empress of Russia, for Alexandra now hardly ever emerged from her retirement at Tsarskoe Selo.49 Indeed, Glyn professed herself to be ‘shocked to witness the atmosphere of unhappiness and dread’ that Alexandra’s morbid personality shed over the Russian court – even in her absence.50 It was the strained but dignified figure of Nicholas leading the mourning that had impressed her. But his presence at the grand duke’s funeral had been considered reckless by those charged with his security, particularly his insistence on walking in the street procession behind the bier, and it had been ‘an anxious day for everybody concerned’.

‘Would the tsar and tsaritsa come to the Winter Palace when the court mourning was lifted?’ everyone was asking two months later. ‘That would mean one court ball, at least, which was better than nothing.’51 In diplomatic circles a posting to St Petersburg was considered ‘poisonous’ and one that few enjoyed. Post Wheeler, who was there for six years, encountered a considerable amount of criticism of the restrictions placed on the Romanov daughters, as one society hostess complained to him:

Poor things!… What a way to bring up imperial children! They might as well be in Peter-Paul [the fortress prison]. It is all right for the little Anastasia and for Marie … But for Tatiana and especially for Olga, who is fifteen, it is ridiculous.52

The isolation imposed on the girls by their mother was seen by many as cruel and narrow-minded: ‘She wants them to grow up in ignorance of what she calls “the tragedy of the Russian court”’, asserted one lady, alluding to Alexandra’s horror of its immorality.53 All of which makes it all the more extraordinary that the four Romanov sisters seemed so natural and well-rounded. Everyone who met them concurred that they were fine young women, who demonstrated affection, loyalty and a dignified sense of their role: ‘They never let you forget that they are grand duchesses; but they are not forgetful of the feelings of others’, as one lady-in-waiting commented.54 But sightings of the imperial children in the city, especially Alexey, were incredibly rare. One had far more chance of seeing them out at Tsarskoe Selo. Post Wheeler recalled having the good fortune of encountering the tsarevich out with a Cossack minder, when he visited Tsarskoe with Countess Tolstoy one day. The boy was ‘bundled in a long overcoat with a white astrakhan collar and a fur cap at a jaunty tilt’, and ‘talking eagerly, with many gestures, pausing now and then to kick up a cloud of snow’. ‘I was all eyes’, Wheeler admitted. ‘The child was almost a legend, I knew no one who had ever seen him.’ The countess, who knew the imperial family well, felt intensely sorry for Alexey: ‘Poor child! With only his sisters, no boys of his own age to play with! The Empress is doing a great wrong to him, and to the girls too, but no one can make her see it!’55 This widely held view of the imperial children could not of course be countered, although one English visitor granted an audience at Tsarskoe Selo was given the rare privilege of meeting Alexey and the girls.

He seemed somewhat shy, and stood at one end of the room surrounded by his sisters, handsome young ladies, simply but neatly dressed. They seemed quite at their ease, and their manners were the frank unaffected manners of ordinary well brought up children. The moment they entered, a smile of motherly pride spread over the features of the Empress, and she advanced towards them placing her arm lovingly round her son’s neck.56

Alexey was clearly the centre of their mother’s universe, as a result of which the Romanov girls seemed doomed to a bland interchangeability, forever in the shadows of their charismatic brother. Yet behind the scenes shifts in the relationship between the five siblings were beginning to appear. Olga had increasingly been tasked by Alexandra with trying to make the wilful Alexey behave in public during her own frequent periods of indisposition. Once, attending a Boy Scout parade, he had tried to get out of the carriage to join in and when Olga had restrained him had ‘slapped her face as hard as he could’. In response Olga hadn’t so much as winced but had taken his hand and stroked it till Alexey had recovered his equilibrium. It was only when they were safely back at home that she had run to her room and burst into tears. Alexey was duly contrite; for two days he ‘was repentance itself and made Olga accept his portion of dessert at table’. He loved Olga perhaps more than the others, for whenever he was reprimanded by his parents, he would ‘declare that he was Olga’s boy, pick up his toys, and go to her apartment’.57

By now Olga and Tatiana were becoming noticeably detached from the ‘little pair’, and Maria, the most self-effacing of the four, was beginning to suffer. Jealousy had also crept in for she sensed that perhaps her mother favoured Anastasia more. ‘I have no secrets with Anastasia, I do not like secrets’, Alexandra reassured her in one of her notes, only to send another within days: ‘Sweet child you must promise me never again to think that nobody loves you. How did such an extraordinary idea get into your little head? Get it quickly out again.’ Feeling unwanted by her older sisters, Maria had of late been seeking consolation in the friendship of her cousin Irina, Xenia’s only daughter. But Alexandra told her this would only make things worse: her sisters would ‘imagine then that you do not want to be with them; now that you are getting a big girl it is good that you should be more with them’.58

Maria clearly was anxious to win the approval and attention of her older siblings, hence perhaps the motive behind a letter on their behalf that she wrote to Alexandra in May 1910:

My dear Mama! How are you feeling? I wanted to tell you that Olga would very much like to have her own room in Peterhof, because she and Tatiana have too many things and too little room. Mama at what age did you have your own room? Please tell me if it’s possible to arrange. Mama at what age did you start wearing long dresses? Don’t you think Olga would also like to let down her dresses. Mama why don’t you move them both or just Olga. I think they would be comfortable where you slept when Anastasia had diphtheria. I kiss you. Maria. P.S. It was my idea to write to you.59

In the meantime, Maria’s egocentric younger sibling Anastasia, who inhabited her own little world, was busy thinking along entirely different, idiosyncratic lines, scribbling in her notebook a list of birthday wants that year:

For my birthday I would like to receive toy hair-combs [for her dolls], a machine on which I can write, an icon of Nikolay the Wonderworker, some kind of outfit, an album for sticking in pictures, then a big bed, like Maria has, for the Crimea, I want a real-life dog, a basket for spoiled paper when I write some book or other … then a book in which to write little plays for children that can be performed.60

The need for someone to watch over four such different and rapidly developing personalities during the crucial years of puberty was increasing in the absence of their mother, but throughout 1910 problems had been developing with the person on whom most of this had devolved – Sofya Tyutcheva. She hadn’t made many friends and several of the staff disliked her authoritarian manner; according to one diarist she was referred to as a ‘man in skirts’ for her domineering manner and the way in which she still treated the growing sisters like naughty little children.61 Fond as she was of the girls, the highly moral Tyutcheva was worried about the increasing attention – or rather distraction – in their lives of the young officers in the Shtandart and troubled by the propriety of their deepening relationships with them during their Finnish holidays.62

Although her devotion to the family was undeniable and her intentions well-meant, Sofya’s judgemental manner and her constant laying-down of the law meant she was in danger of crossing the line between her own duties as carer and those of Alexandra as the girls’ mother, with the ultimate responsibility – rather than she – for their moral welfare. Tyutcheva had never got on with the empress and she did not approve of the more relaxed ‘English’ style of the girls’ upbringing. According to Anna Vyrubova, ‘She wished to change the whole system, make it entirely Slav and free from any imported ideas’, and was now openly criticizing the tsaritsa even in front of her charges.63 She had hated Rasputin from the first and was highly critical of the relationship the girls and their mother had with him, which she considered demeaning and inappropriate. The sisters were clearly anxious about the gathering hostility towards Grigory, as Tatiana intimated in a note to her mother in March 1910: ‘I am so afread that S. I. [Sofya Ivanovna] can speak to Maria [Vishnyakova] about our friend some thing bad. I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now.’64

That January and February of 1910, Alexey had been plagued with pains in his arm and leg and Rasputin had visited the family on ten occasions at Tsarskoe Selo, often staying late and talking at length with them. Having been asked by Alexandra to say no more to the children on the matter of Rasputin’s visits Sofya Tyutcheva pulled back for a while, but then once more began gossiping with Grand Duchess Xenia about his free access to the family, and the children in particular. ‘He’s always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them’, she had told her.* Under instruction from their mother, the children were becoming increasingly secretive; even Elizaveta Naryshkina (who had taken over from the recently deceased Princess Golitsyna as mistress of the robes), felt that such was their mother’s fear of scandal, that the children were being drilled to ‘hide their thoughts and feelings about Rasputin from others’.65 ‘It can hardly be beneficial to accustom the children to such dissimulation’, thought Grand Duke Konstantin.66 Certainly Tyutcheva’s renewed assault in the summer of 1910 was a criticism too far; it further undermined the view of Alexandra within the imperial family, with even her sister Ella and Xenia questioning the wisdom of her continuing patronage of Rasputin.

Those such as Lili Dehn, who loved Alexandra and respected her trust in Rasputin, put Tyutcheva’s behaviour down to ‘spite and jealousy’; Anna Vyrubova and Iza Buxhoeveden both were convinced that she was the source of much of the unfavourable gossip about the empress and Rasputin circulating in St Petersburg. But the damage had already been done; the rumours were becoming ever more lurid by the day. Dehn herself soon had good reason to be grateful for Rasputin’s help, when her two-year-old son Alexander (known to everyone as Titi) contracted diphtheria. Seeing how desperately ill Titi was, Alexandra and Anna Vyrubova had persuaded her to ask for Grigory’s help. When he arrived, he had sat for a long time on the boy’s bed, looking intently at him. Suddenly Titi woke up, ‘stretched out his little hand, laughed and mouthed the words “uncle, uncle”’. Titi told him that his head ached ‘ever so badly’ but all Rasputin did was ‘take the boy’s hand, ran his finger down the side of his nose, stroked his head and kissed him’. As he left he told Lili that the fever was going; her son would live.67 By the following morning Titi’s symptoms had indeed abated; he recovered a few days later. Lili remained convinced that this was entirely coincidental with Rasputin’s visit, but she was aware that Alexandra’s faith in him was based on her absolute conviction that he was the only person who could help her son. In this regard, any power Rasputin had over the empress was, as far as Lili was concerned, entirely mystical – and never mercenary or political.68

But on the pages of the influential daily newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti and elsewhere, the campaign of vilification against the empress and her ‘friend’ was mounting. The satirical magazine Ogonek was publishing interviews with his followers – giving lurid details of their ‘Egyptian nights of initiation’ into Rasputin’s circle.69 With Prime Minister Stolypin renewing his investigation of him, Rasputin once more felt it best to beat a retreat to the safety of Siberia.