The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (26 page)

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

133

693GG_TXT.indd 133

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

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

134

693GG_TXT.indd 134

29/10/2013 16:17

ROYAL COUSINS

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 demon-

strated 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

135

693GG_TXT.indd 135

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

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 audi-

ence 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 and 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

136

693GG_TXT.indd 136

29/10/2013 16:17

ROYAL COUSINS

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

137

693GG_TXT.indd 137

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

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

138

693GG_TXT.indd 138

29/10/2013 16:17

ROYAL COUSINS

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