Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (50 page)

Growing up, the girls naturally divided themselves into two groups: Olga and Tatiana (“the big pair”), and Marie and Anastasia (“the little pair”), though all four of them were tenderly close. Olga and Tatiana, by virtue of being the eldest, took more after their father. Like Nicholas II, they possessed dark features and deep eyes that revealed passionate souls. Olga could be stubborn and experienced intense emotional highs and lows: “In temperament and appearance she most resembled her father, whom she adored.”
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Olga was also the daughter with whom Alexandra was most often in conflict. “Olga is most unamiable about every proposition,” the empress wrote, “though she may end by doing what I wish.”
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In contrast, Tatiana was the closest of the four girls with their mother. Like Alexandra, Tatiana was stately, elegant, refined, and inherited much of the empress’s regal nature. More than any of her sisters, Tatiana also possessed a total acceptance of their family’s royal position and the privileges that came with it. Her self-assurance and commanding nature made her the natural leader among the four sisters—even though Olga was the eldest. The other three girls nicknamed Tatiana the Governess. Nonetheless, she was still a modest, down-to-earth girl who embarrassed easily. She once kicked a lady-in-waiting for addressing her publicly as “Your Imperial Highness.”
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The younger grand duchesses, Marie and Anastasia, were similar but different. Without a doubt, Marie was the biggest flirt in the family and attracted the attention of many suitors. The youngest grand duchess, Anastasia, was the exact opposite of her sisters, especially Olga and Tatiana. If the elder two were passionate and pensive, and Marie was flirtatious, Anastasia was a tomboy. She made her unique mark by being the joker of the family. “Forever in the shadow of her more glamorous sisters,” wrote one historian, “Anastasia came into her own through her gift of mimicry. Never shy, always game for a good joke, Tsarina Alexandra’s youngest daughter was the very antithesis of her reserved mother.”
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Anastasia’s antics endeared her to many of her relatives. Her Aunt Olga nicknamed her
schwipsig
, a German expression meaning “merry little one.”
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Perhaps more than her other daughters, Alexandra kept Anastasia under a close eye. As a young girl, she nearly drowned in the Gulf of Finland in a freak accident when she was swept underwater by a massive rogue wave, driving the air out of her lungs. As a consequence, the empress took special care of Anastasia, much in the same way she did for Alexei. For Alexandra, her two youngest children were her babies.

The Russian aristocrats saw Alexandra’s Victorian, bourgeois values as abnormal. She did not believe that her daughters should grow up used to royal extravagance. The grand duchesses were unaccustomed to formality in their homes. Servants and courtiers were instructed to refer to them by their names rather than their titles, a practice that would have been unthinkable in Potsdam or Vienna. To combat indulgence, the girls slept on folding military beds—a tradition dating back almost a century—in rooms decorated with simple stuffed furniture, chintz, icons, and favorite watercolors and photographs. Alexandra wanted her daughters to learn how to endure the elements. Their rooms were heavily ventilated, even in the winter, causing them to grow largely insensitive to the cold. In the mornings, they took cold baths. Each evening concluded with a warm bath, in a solid silver tub, at which point they were allowed one of their few luxuries: scented bath mixes imported from Paris. Between the four sisters, rose, jasmine, lilac, and violet could be smelled in the hallways of the palaces on any given day.

With Olga and Tatiana now in their late teens, they began to replace the tsarina at court functions. The empress had become so insular that, when she appeared in Saint Petersburg in 1913 for the Romanov tercentennial celebrations, it was her first official public appearance since 1905. “They must get accustomed to replace me,” Alexandra wrote to her old governess, “as I rarely can appear anywhere, and when I do, am afterwards long laid up—over-tired muscles of the heart.”
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Her health continued to get worse, making it far more difficult for her to appear in public. Alexandra’s children were consumed with worry over their mother’s worsening health. “O, if you knew, how hard Mama’s illness is for us to bear,” Tatiana told Rasputin in 1908.
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Alexandra reiterated this in a letter written in 1913: “My children are growing up so fast & are such real little comforters to us—the older ones often replace me at functions & go about a great deal with their father—they are all 5 touching in their care for me—my family life is one blessed ray of sunshine excepting the anxiety of our Boy.”
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Russia’s imperial family lived in unimaginable wealth. Exact numbers differ depending on the source, but it is generally agreed that the tsar and his family were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nicholas was, more or less, the wealthiest monarch in the world. That wealth was not purely in money alone; it also came from copious assets. The imperial family owned “huge timber and mineral reserves in Siberia and the Caucasus; five yachts and two private trains; hundreds of horses, carriages, and new motorcars; accounts stocked with gold bullion in Moscow, London, and Berlin; thousands of works of art, including important paintings by Van Dyke, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, and da Vinci; crowns, tiaras, necklaces, and a fortune in jewelry; and a priceless collection of objets d’art and Easter eggs by famed jeweler Peter Karl Fabergé.”
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Along with these assets, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their family divided their time among more than thirty breathtaking palaces. In Saint Petersburg, they stayed at the Winter Palace. Designed in the classical Baroque style, its interiors contained more than fifteen hundred rooms. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I between 1825 and 1855, the palace could accommodate four thousand occupants. Its interiors were dazzling, with “polished marquetry floors, crystal chandeliers, marble and granite pillars and staircases, gold-inlaid ebony door, huge vases of spectacular green malachite, and lapis lazuli decorated furnishings.”
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In the summer, the Romanovs moved their court to Livadia, their Crimean palace on a remote peninsula on the north coast of the Black Sea. Livadia was much more exotic in design than many of the other imperial estates. Built from white Crimean granite, its unique neo-Renaissance design looked more Arabian than European, though its overall idea was inspired by the buildings Nicholas and Alexandra had seen on a state visit to Italy. The palace grounds included patios in both Middle Eastern and Italian designs, a Florentine tower, and a chapel modeled after the Byzantine style. It was here at Livadia that the imperial family was truly in their element. Alexandra’s daughter Olga once remarked, “In St Petersburg we work, but at Livadia we live.”
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One of the family’s lesser-used homes was Spala, an old hunting lodge in Poland. Anna Viroubova described it as one “of the dampest, gloomiest palaces I have ever seen.”
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It was here that a simple accident threatened Alexei’s life, cementing the tsarina’s relationship with the insalubrious Gregory Rasputin. Alexei was playing when he slipped and fell. At first, the swelling seemed to go down, and life returned to normal. Two weeks later, when the family was out for an automobile ride, Alexei shrieked in pain with every bump in the road. “Every movement,” Anna Viroubova recalled, “every rough place in the road, caused the child the most exquisite torture, and by the time we reached home, the boy was almost unconscious with pain.”
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An examination revealed a hemorrhage in his leg, causing blood to seep into his body. Alexei’s sufferings multiplied when the swelling began pressing on nerves in his upper left thigh and abdomen, causing excruciating pain. Upon examination, doctors discovered a tumor that showed signs of becoming septic as well. Ordinarily, surgery would have been the only answer, but Alexei’s hemophilia made that impossible.

The situation quickly became perilous. A heartrending drama unfolded on October 21 when Alexei developed a dangerous fever as the blood filled his tiny body. Bloodcurdling screams pierced the long halls of Spala as Alexei lay curled up on his bed, writhing in agony. The torturous screams became so horrific that the lodge’s staff begged for something with which to cover their ears. The heavy doses of morphine Alexei was given a few days later barely dulled the pain. His suffering was made especially poignant by the feigned jovial atmosphere at Spala during the daytime. It was the middle of the hunting season, and aristocrats came from miles around expecting to be entertained by the tsar. Nicholas played the role of the dutiful host admirably, never allowing any of his guests to fathom the internal grief he was experiencing. Alexandra made only fleeting appearances at the dinner table. She relied heavily on her sister Irene, who was visiting with her son Sigismund, to act as hostess and offer apologies to the guests for her absence. With the exception of Nicholas, Princess Irene was the only person who truly understood Alexandra’s pain. She too was a hemophilia carrier and had passed the disease to two of her sons, Waldemar and Henry. “Like Alexandra,” wrote one Romanov historian, Irene “had endured the agonies of uncertain days and nights, watching helplessly as her sons suffered without relief.… This shared pain, this maternal guilt, created a bond between Alexandra and Irene that came to the fore at Spala that autumn, providing the desperate empress with an ally who shared her agony.”
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When Alexandra was required to appear before the guests, she could not even fake a smile. It was as if her very soul was being wrenched from her body. She was forced to watch helplessly as her exhausted little boy wailed and thrashed in his bed, his forehead covered in sweat, slipping in and out of delirium. Workers at Spala were so moved that they begged the local priest to hold daily masses to pray for him. For eleven days, Alexandra sat at her son’s bedside, going with almost no sleep for five of those days. Her dark hair became tinged with noticeable streaks of white. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she looked at his face, “absolutely bloodless, drawn and seamed with suffering, while his almost expressionless eyes rolled back in his head.” For Nicholas, it was all too much to bear. When he came into the room, “seeing his boy in this agony and hearing his faint screams of pain, the poor father’s courage completely gave way and he rushed, weeping bitterly, to his study.”
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In Alexei’s few rare moments of lucidity, Alexandra could hear him begging, “Mamma, help me!” It devastated the empress that there was nothing she could do but wait and pray. It broke her heart when he asked her, “When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it, Mama?”
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Eventually, Dr. S. P. Fedorov, the attending physician, pulled Nicholas and Alexandra aside to give them the grave news that Alexei’s stomach was hemorrhaging, increasing the already high risk of blood poisoning and peritonitis. Fedorov had little recourse but to prepare them for the possibility that Alexei would soon die. Two bulletins were issued, each one day apart, preparing the public for the awful news that Alexei had passed away. Both notifications were carefully worded to give no indication of how he died. An Orthodox priest came to perform the last rites. Witnesses recalled the heartrending sight of what they believed to be Alexei’s final hours: “It was as if he had already passed from life into another realm at the threshold of death, his body already corpselike in its whiteness, his breath already beginning to cease as, lacking the energy to scream or cry, he murmured his prayer for divine mercy and whispered his mother’s name.”
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In her desperation, Alexandra could think of only one thing to do. She asked her friend Anna to send a telegram to Father Gregory. Why she waited so long before contacting him remains uncertain, but faced with the imminent death of her son, the tsarina was willing to try anything. After all, had not Alexei been a divine answer to prayer? And was not Father Gregory the answer to the question of Alexei’s hemophilia? Alexandra’s faint hope in Rasputin can be traced not to her faith in him as a man but to her faith in God. The Russian Orthodox Church believes in the existence of
staretz
(“a holy man”). The modern interpretation is that a
staretz
is a venerated elder of the Russian Orthodox faith sent by God to advise and teach. Some were known to do miracles, most were ascetics, and all knew the Holy Scriptures inside and out. A
staretz
was never officially appointed but is recognized by the people as being imbued with the power of the Holy Spirit. In general, there is little doubt that Gregory Rasputin was a charlatan. He drank, caroused with women, and was more lecherous than even the most pernicious aristocrats. Yet he also had a believable quality and managed to convince many, including Alexandra Feodorovna and Anna Viroubova, of his God-given ability to heal, prophesy, and guide. That this supposed
staretz
was a man of the world was no secret to anyone, including the tsar and tsarina, but they faithfully believed he was a repentant sinner. According to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, “to Nicky and Alix he remained what he was—a peasant with a profound faith in God and gift of healing.”
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