The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (28 page)

agony aunt, and had told Maria not to ‘dwell too much on him’,

and not to give anything away in the presence of others. ‘Now that

you are a big girl, you must always be more careful and not show

those feelings’, Alexandra reiterated. ‘One must not let others see

what one feels inside.’15 Such studied reticence had encouraged the

view people on the outside now held of Alexandra as aloof and

unfeeling. ‘It was the usual policy of hush-hush’, recalled Iza

Buxhoeveden; Alexandra told her that it was ‘not
comme il faut
for our family to be known to be ill’ – and that included Alexey. The

only time the public were to be told something was wrong was

‘when someone is dying’.16

It was therefore left to the foreign press to speculate. ‘The Czarina Slowly Dying of Terror’ ran one headline, relaying a story from the

Rome
Tribuna
claiming that Alexandra had ‘long been the unhappiest royal personage in Europe’ as a result of the high security

isolating her and the family from the outside world, for it had made

her ‘a victim of melancholia and morbid fears’.17 It was almost

impossible, the papers claimed, to recognize in ‘this sad-faced

sombre-eyed woman the merry girl who once delighted the hearts

of the cottagers at Balmoral’. ‘Her fear of attack by revolutionaries was now all-consuming.’ There was, said the
Express
in London, ‘no more pitiful tragedy in the history of any royal house’.18

*

By November 1910 back at Tsarskoe, Nicholas was determined that

his daughters should enjoy something of the winter season in the

capital. In January he and Olga attended a performance of
Boris

Godunov
starring the famous bass Fedor Chaliapin, a great favourite with the family. In February Olga and Tatiana were his companions

at Tchaikovsky’s opera
Eugene Onegin
and later Nicholas took all four girls to see the ballet
The Sleeping Beauty
. Such trips were small consolation for the absence of their mother, but all five children

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thoroughly enjoyed a concert that winter featuring their favourite

army balalaika orchestra.

Post Wheeler and his wife Hallie were there, surrounded by

members of the diplomatic community and the ubiquitous Okhrana

men. The imperial party arrived: Maria Feodorovna, Maria Pavlovna,

and ‘trooping after her, not only the two older daughters, Olga and

Tatiana, but the younger pair, Marie and Anastasia’ – an event

remarkable because it was the first time that the Wheelers had seen

all four sisters together. ‘The two older ones were in simple white,

each with a string of small pearls, and with their heavy dark hair

hanging over their shoulders looked very girlish and sweet.’ Olga

carried ‘a little bunch of violets’ and Maria and Anastasia had boxes of ‘silver-wrapped chocolates’. Anastasia sat down in the box immediately next to Hallie ‘and gave me a demure little smile as she set

her box of chocolates on the railing between us’.19 Then, as Hallie

recalled, ‘there was a stir, the whole audience was rising and facing the back’, as the tsar in marshal’s uniform entered with the tsarevich

‘dressed all in white cloth braided with gold’.20

‘The house was very still, for it was witnessing what Russia had

never seen before. People were completely taken aback’, recalled

Hallie. The tsarevich was so little seen in public, that for most

Russians ‘he had been only a fable’.21 During the balalaika concert

that followed Alexey thrilled to the performance, for he loved the

instrument and was learning to play it himself. At the end the entire audience rose to its feet roaring its approval, Alexey by his father’s side, sweet and childishly solemn, ‘stealing cautious glances now

and then to right and left’. ‘
Mon dieu! Comme il est adorable
’, Hallie heard a woman near her remark:

There was on every face the adoration that through the centuries

had been lavished on the person of the ‘Great White Tsar’, and

it was more than that, for this little lad, with his boyish beauty,

typified the future to which Russia looked . . . The Tsar stood

for the reign that Russia knew and was now coming to distrust,

but in the hands of the little future autocrat were the lambent

possibilities of which it dreamed.22

Such adoration of the little heir to the throne served to underline

the feelings expressed by Maria Feodorovna back in 1906 that the

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‘unfortunate little girls are moved into secondary importance’ with

Alexey’s arrival.23 They certainly were in the public’s estimation, for everyone’s eyes were on the tsarevich. Returning to her box after

the interval, Hallie noticed that Anastasia and Maria had already

taken up their places near her side of the railing. ‘She was not a

beautiful child, but there was something frank and winning about

her’, she recalled of Anastasia. ‘On the flat railing sat the now

depleted box of chocolates and her white gloves were sadly smudged.

She shyly held out the box to me, and I took one.’ As the music

struck up Anastasia began softly humming the folk tune they were

playing. Hallie asked her what it was. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it is an old song about a little girl who had lost her doll.’ The lingering notes

of that lovely song hummed by the young grand duchess, and the

sight of her chocolate-soiled gloves that evening, would stay with

Hallie for many years.24

*

In the spring of 1911 Alexandra admitted to her sister-in-law Onor

that the ‘cure’ at Nauheim had done her no good: ‘Personally I have

felt no benefit . . . and have been so bad again.’25 Olga was despairing of ever seeing her mother well again. ‘Don’t get downhearted, my

darling, if she is not getting as strong as you would like her to be,’

her aunt Ella consoled her, ‘it won’t happen quickly, the real effect of the treatment won’t be felt for a month or two, if not after a

second course of it.’ Meanwhile Ella advised that Olga invest her

best efforts in patient prayer on her mother’s behalf.26 In the spring at least Olga had the excitement of reviewing the new recruits to

her Guards corps, but Tatiana was becoming jealous. ‘I would like

so much to go to the review of the second division as I am also the

second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn’, she

complained to Alexandra, adding that ‘at the second division I will

see whom I
must
see . . . you know whom . . . !!!!??!?!’27 Tatiana too was confiding in her mother about her first teenage crushes. More

military reviews followed in August, at the big parade ground at

Krasnoe Selo, during which Olga and Tatiana, who were both accom-

plished horsewomen (having learnt to ride in 1903),28 took great

pride in riding out side saddle and in uniform to inspect the

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regiments of which their father had gifted them the honorary

command on their 14th name days: the 3rd Elizavetgrad Hussars

for Olga and the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans for Tatiana. Maria would

have her own regiment too – the 9th Kazan Dragoons in 1913 – but

a glum-faced Anastasia was still not old enough. The
Shtandart

officers had teased her that in view of her lively personality she

should be made commander of the St Petersburg fire brigade.29

During the military reviews that spring the girls had enjoyed a

visit from an English cousin, Prince Arthur of Connaught (son of

Alexandra’s uncle the Duke of Connaught), a captain in the Royal

Scots Greys who had come as an observer. The unmarried

twenty-seven-year-old prince had, as British ambassador’s daughter

Meriel Buchanan noted, other preoccupations: ‘Prince Arthur is

coming out next week for the manoeuvres and also (secretly) to look

at the Emperor’s daughter.’30 This covert inspection of Olga is no

surprise, although we know nothing of her impression of Arthur or

his of her.* As the eldest Romanov daughter, she was approaching

her sixteenth birthday, a marriageable age, and interest in her in the royal dynastic stakes had long been gathering.
*
Aware of the need for her two eldest daughters to take their position in society,

Alexandra was already planning their official appearance at two

family weddings of the children of Grand Duke Konstantin, the

first, of his oldest son, Ioannchik, to Princess Helena of Serbia at

Peterhof on 21 August.

‘They have all grown a lot,’ Alexandra told Onor as she prepared

for this, ‘Tatiana is already taller than Olga, whose dresses almost

reach the floor now. – Skirt hemlines drop and hair goes up when

they reach the age of 16 – how time flies.’ As for herself, she was

likely to be absent: ‘I will barely put in an appearance; will have to see how strong I am, and that won’t be much.’31 In the event,

Alexandra was not well enough to attend Ioannchik’s wedding but

her five good-looking children made an impression, Alexey ‘charming

in the uniform of the Imperial family Riflemen’ and the grand duch-

esses wearing Russian court dresses ‘white with pink flowers but no

* Prince Arthur finally found himself a bride in 1913 when he married Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife.

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trains and pink
kokoshniki
’. The groom’s brother thought they ‘looked lovely’.32 No doubt Ioannchik did too, for he had been carrying a

torch for Olga since seeing her in 1904 at Alexey’s christening. In

November of 1909 he had still been holding out hope, for despite

his having had a succession of short-lived romantic attachments in

his search for a bride, Olga had left ‘an indelible mark on him’.

Ioannchik had travelled to the Crimea the previous autumn ‘only

out of hunger to see Olga’, but having openly admitted his feelings

to the tsar and tsaritsa there, had finally given up hope. ‘They won’t let me marry Olga Nikolaevna’, he had told his father disconsolately.33 But now, at last, the awkward, gangly Ioannchik, who was

extremely unprepossessing as suitors go, had found a suitable royal

bride, a fact which alarmed the intensely naïve Tatiana, ‘How funny

if they might have children, can they be kissing . . . ? What foul,

fie! [sic]’34

Just three days later Grand Duke Konstantin’s eldest daughter

Tatiana was married to Prince Bagration-Mukhransky in a small

family ceremony at Pavlovsk, attended by the imperial family. The

weddings were closely followed at the end of the month by an

important official visit to Kiev. The girls were increasingly deputizing for their mother during her bouts of illness and this trip marked

their first major public role in this regard. They were in the Ukrainian city for the inauguration of a new statue to Alexander II, to mark

the fiftieth anniversary of his liberation of the serfs in 1861, as well as to visit the famous Pechersky Monastery and attend two large

military reviews on 1 and 2 September. Although Alexandra attended

the unveiling of the statue and managed a long day of official duties on the 1st, she then retreated, exhausted. That evening Olga and

Tatiana accompanied Nicholas to the Kiev Municipal Theatre for

a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera
The Tale of Tsar Saltan
.

Here numerous local dignitaries and politicians, including Prime

Minister Stolypin, joined them.

During the second interval, Stolypin had been standing in the

aisle, at the balustrade very near to the imperial box, when a young

man rushed towards him with a gun and shot at him twice.

‘Fortunately,’ as Alexandra was relieved to tell Onor in a letter soon afterwards, ‘N., O. and T. were in the foyer when it happened.’35

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Sofya Tyutcheva who was there as chaperone remembered Olga

suggesting they went outside to get some tea, Nicholas having

complained of feeling so hot in their box.36 Out in the foyer they

‘heard two noises, like the sound of an object falling’, Nicholas later wrote to his mother. He thought ‘a pair of binoculars must have

fallen on somebody’s head from above’, and ran back into the box

to look:

To the right I saw a group of officers and others dragging

someone, a few ladies were screaming, and there right opposite

me stood Stolypin. He turned slowly to face me, and made the

sign of the cross in the air with his left hand.37

Olga and Tatiana had tried to restrain their father but as Nicholas

instinctively reached towards Stolypin, he noticed that the prime

minister had been hit. Stolypin slowly sank into his seat and everyone rushed to his aid, including Dr Botkin. Stolypin muttered a message

for the tsar, which the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count

Freedericksz, brought to him: ‘Your Majesty, Petr Arkadevich has

asked me to tell you that he is happy to die for you.’ ‘I hope there

is no reason to talk of death’, the tsar replied. ‘I fear there is’, replied Freedericksz – for one of the bullets had entered Stolypin’s liver.38