The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (19 page)

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 sheep-

ishly 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

94

693GG_TXT.indd 94

29/10/2013 16:17

THE BIG PAIR AND THE LITTLE PAIR

Having such a compliant personality it was perhaps inevitable

that Maria would be completely in thrall to the dominating person-

ality of her younger sister Anastasia, for the youngest Romanov

sister was a force of nature to whose presence it was impossible to

remain indifferent. Even at four years old she was ‘a very study 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 impos-

sible 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

95

693GG_TXT.indd 95

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

The anodyne public image of four little girls in white embroidered

cambric with blue bows in their hair gave little or no indication of

the four very different personalities developing behind the closed

doors of the Alexander Palace. Public perception of the Romanov

sisters was quickly being set in stone by the many official photo-

graphs of them that were circulated for mass consumption. It was

one that conveyed a superficial, saccharine image of them right up

to the war years.52

96

693GG_TXT.indd 96

29/10/2013 16:17

THE
SHTANDART

N

Throughout the disturbances of 1905 the Romanov family had had

no choice but to remain at Peterhof, shut away as virtual prisoners.

The head of the tsar’s secret personal bodyguard, General Spiridovich (having recovered from the recent terrorist attack on him), was one

of the few people in the imperial entourage with close access to the

family.1 He took particular charge of security arrangements in the

summer of 1906 when, with even Peterhof considered by him to be

unsafe, the family boarded their yacht the
Shtandart
and headed off on holiday. For three weeks, they cruised the granite skerries in the Virolahti region off the coast of southern Finland between Kronstadt

and Helsinki, stopping off at favourite spots such as Björkö,

Langinkoski, Pitkäpaasi and the Pukkio islands. The security police

made a thorough search for undesirables in the area ahead of the

Shtandart
’s arrival and the yacht’s moorings were constantly changed as an additional security measure. But such was official neurosis

about the threat of attack that she was escorted by a squadron of

eight ships of the imperial fleet – including torpedo boats and courier vessels – which stopped any boats from coming too close.2 On board

the yacht there were no security guards, the imperial family trusting to the intense loyalty of the officers and crew; ‘we form a united

family’, Alexandra remarked.3

The children loved the
Shtandart
and came to know many of the 275 sailors and cabin staff who crewed it, remembering all their

names; they felt safe on board and she soon became a home from

home. At 420 feet (128 m) long she was the biggest and fastest of

97

693GG_TXT.indd 97

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

all the imperial yachts and enjoyed the best modern amenities of

electric lighting, steam heating and hot and cold running water. Her

luxurious formal staterooms featured chandeliers and mahogany wall

panelling; the private chapel was complete with its own iconostasis

and the dining room could seat seventy-two at dinner. The family

rooms were comfortable but quite modest, echoing the ubiquitous

homely English style of the Lower Dacha and the Alexander Palace,

although boxes of fresh-cut flowers from Tsarskoe Selo were sent

out regularly by tender, along with Nicholas’s dispatch boxes, to

feed Alexandra’s one abiding indulgence.

At first the girls shared small cramped cabins on the lower deck

with their maids. Their parents considered this arrangement more

than adequate while the girls were young, but after 1912, they were

given their own bigger cabins up on the imperial deck, though even

these did not compare with the spacious suite set aside for Alexey.4

Small or not the girls loved their little cabins but it was up on the sundeck that they felt liberated and where, kitted out in their navy

blue sailor suits (white when the weather was warm), straw boaters

and button boots they could talk to the officers, play deck games,

and rollerskate on the smooth wooden surface. Alexandra would be

near, sitting sewing in a comfortable wicker chair or resting on a

couch under a canvas awning, always watching over them. Whenever

the family sailed, each of the Romanov children was appointed its

own personal bodyguard or
dyadka
(‘uncle’) from among the crew to take care of the child’s safety at sea. That summer of 1906 the

children had been rather shy of the
Shtandart
crew at first sight, but they soon warmed to their
dyadki
who would sit for hours regaling them with seafaring stories and telling them about their

homes and their families. Andrey Derevenko was assigned to the

special care of Alexey, who now he was walking had to be extremely

closely watched at all times, for fear that he would fall or knock

himself and cause haemorrhaging. The girls meanwhile attached

themselves to certain of the officers; they held their hands when

they went ashore and would sit alongside them in the rowing boats

helping with the oars. Most mornings they would be up and on the

deck at 8 a.m. to see the crew gather for the formal raising of the

flag to the sound of the ship’s band playing the Nikolaevsky March.

98

693GG_TXT.indd 98

29/10/2013 16:17

THE
SHTANDART

For their part the crew, who relished the prestige of serving in

the
Shtandart
, loved the four sisters, and found them enchanting, as Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin recalled later in his memoirs. Such

was the informality on board that the sailors addressed the sisters

by name and patronymic rather than by title, and could not do

enough for them. From out of these first innocent, tentative acquaintances developed deep friendships; on that first trip in 1906 Olga

attached herself to Nikolay Sablin and Tatiana to his namesake (no

relation) Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin. Nikolay Vadbolsky was Maria’s

favourite, while little Anastasia took a shine, surprisingly, to a rather taciturn navigator called Alexey Saltanov. She gave him and everyone

else the run-around, including her sailor
dyadka
Babushkin, rushing around the yacht from dawn to dusk, climbing up to the bridge

when no one was looking, always dishevelled and difficult to control, only be finally carried off kicking and screaming to bed at the end

of the day.5 Her phlegmatic sister Maria had a rather more relaxed

approach to life on board. As Sablin remembered: she ‘liked to sit

a little, have a read and eat sweet biscuits’, getting ever plumper in the process, no doubt explaining her sisters’ choice of nickname –

‘fat little bow-wow’.6

Alexandra was a quite different woman in the
Shtandart
–
happier and more relaxed than anywhere else. She now had the companion-ship of a new-found friend Anna Vyrubova, who had arrived at court

in February 1905. Although she was never formally made a lady-

in-waiting, Anna quickly filled the gap left by Alexandra’s favourite, Princess Sonya Orbeliani, who had been with her since 1898 but

who was now suffering from a chronic wasting disease and was no

longer able to serve. Soon Anna was the tsaritsa’s indispensable

confidante and an almost permanent fixture in her daily life. God

had sent her a friend, Alexandra said, and friends as trustworthy as

Anna were hard to find in the closed-off world that she inhabited.

Small, dumpy and unprepossessing, with a short neck and an

ample bosom, Anna Vyrubova had a credulous manner and was ‘so

childish-looking in fact that she seemed only fit for boarding school’.7

It was precisely this unworldliness and her malleability that appealed to Alexandra: Anna was too simple-minded for intrigues and was

thus no threat, indeed Alexandra took pity on her. Her

99

693GG_TXT.indd 99

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

uncharacteristic intimacy with the twenty-year-old ingénue provoked

considerable resentment and jealousy among the other long-serving

ladies of the imperial household – notably the displaced Orbeliani

and Madeleine Zanotti. But on board the
Shtandart
Alexandra and Anna were inseparable. They would often sing duets and sit playing

four-handed pieces at the piano together. The docile and adoring

Anna hung on Alexandra’s every word and within a year the tsaritsa

had, in motherly fashion, helpfully orchestrated her marriage.

The simple but idyllic Finnish sailing holidays that became a

regular feature of Romanov family life until the outbreak of war in

1914 were for the four sisters the best and happiest of times; for

unlike any on dry land, these voyages provided a degree of special

intimacy with their parents, and in particular more time in the

company of the father they all worshipped. ‘To be at sea with their

father – that was what constituted their happiness’, recalled the tsar’s aide-de-camp Count Grabbe.8 There was nothing of the usual stultifying Victorian condescension in Nicholas’s attitude to his children, and they in turn were content just to be in his company, enjoying

the simplest of pleasures. On board the
Shtandart
the Romanovs could act out the kind of idealized, untrammelled family life that

they craved but which they could never enjoy on shore.

Sailing leisurely in the still golden autumn sunshine along the

Finnish coast, out past the chain of small, wooded islands thick with fir, spruce and birch trees, and uninhabited bar a few fishermen’s

huts, the family could stop off at will. The children delighted in

going onshore in the launch with their nurses and
dyadki
to play ball games or tag, have picnics or go mushroom- and berry-picking.

They often went out rowing with their father and many of their

expeditions were captured in numerous photographs taken by

General Spiridovich, who was always at hand, casting an eagle eye

over their safety. Nicholas was never much of a huntsman and didn’t

like fishing. But he did love long, vigorous walks and few in the

entourage could keep up with him. Even on holiday he still had to

give a great deal of time to his dispatch boxes, but when he did

have time to himself he sometimes went ashore to play tennis on

some local landowner’s court, or went off alone in his
baidarka
– a type of kayak – in the still waters as dusk fell, with an escort of