The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (29 page)

Despite his wounds, Stolypin heroically managed, with assistance,

to walk out of the theatre and into an ambulance, which rushed him

to ‘a first class private clinic’ where he ‘took Holy Communion’ and

‘spoke very lucidly’.39 Meanwhile, his attacker, Dmitri Bogrov, a

young lawyer from a prosperous Jewish family in the city (who had

been both a revolutionary activist and an informer for the Okhrana),

was set upon by members of the audience who would have lynched

him if they could. After Bogrov was bundled off by the police the

cast of the opera came on to the stage and joined the audience in

singing the National Anthem, Nicholas at the front of his box ‘obvi-

ously distressed but showing no fear’.40 ‘I left with the girls at eleven’, he later wrote to Maria Feodorovna. ‘You can imagine with what

emotions.’ ‘Tatiana came home very tearful and is still a little shaken,’

Alexandra told Onor the following day, ‘whereas Olga put on a brave

face throughout.’41 The following morning Sofya Tyutcheva, who

had not slept all night from the shock of what she had seen, was

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surprised to find the girls calmer than she expected after their

experi ence. Noticing how disconcerted she was by this, their nurse

Mariya Vishnyakova came up to her and whispered: ‘He’s already

there’, meaning Rasputin, who had happened to be in Kiev at the

time. ‘Then it all became clear to me’, Tyutcheva later wrote.42

Hopes remained high that Stolypin would recover from his

wounds and the bulletins seemed favourable. ‘They think he is out

of danger’, Alexandra told Onor. ‘His liver seems to be only slightly affected. The bullet hit his Vladimir Cross and then bounced off in

another direction.’43 Nicholas meanwhile was obliged to continue

with his engagements in Kiev and on the 4th attended a major

review of troops with the children, followed by visits to museums

and to the first school to be founded in Kiev, now celebrating its

hundredth anniversary.

The Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelshtam was an eleven-year-

old pupil at that time. She remembered the day vividly and how

moved she had been by the sight of ‘the very handsome boy and

four sad girls’, one of whom, Maria, was the same age as herself. It

prompted her to ponder the difficult lives they led:

I suddenly understood that I was much happier than these unfor-

tunate girls; after all, I could run around with the dogs on the

street, make friends with the boys, not learn my lessons, make

mischief, go to bed late, read all kinds of junk and fight with my

brothers and anybody else. I and my governesses had a very

simple arrangement: we’d leave that house together, purposefully,

and then go our separate ways – they to their rendezvous and I

to my boys – I didn’t make friends with girls – you can only

really fight with boys. But these poor princesses were bound in

everything: they were polite, affectionate, friendly, attentive . . .

they weren’t even allowed to fight . . . poor girls.44

The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions

Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow

Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and

Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With

martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the

Jewish residents to flee the city. The imperial family meanwhile

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boarded their train and headed for the Black Sea coast and the

Shtandart
, Nicholas ‘giving very strict instructions to the governor General Fedor Trepov’, as he left, ‘that he would not allow a pogrom

against the Jews on any pretext whatsoever’.46

Bogrov was tried by military court and hanged ten days later in

Kiev, despite a plea for clemency from Stolypin’s widow. Having

long anticipated his own violent death Stolypin had asked to be

buried near the place of his murder and was interred at the Pechersky Monastery in Kiev. Alexandra might have mourned the manner of

Stolypin’s death but she did not mourn his loss, for he had always

been implacably opposed to Rasputin. When the imperial party later

arrived at Sevastopol en route to Livadia, bands and illuminations

greeted them on the seafront. One of the ladies-in-waiting thought

this inappropriate, as they all did, so soon after Stolypin’s assassination and said as much to Alexandra, who snapped: ‘He was only a

minister, but this is the Russian emperor.’ Sofya Tyutcheva couldn’t

fathom her response: she had seen how distraught Alexandra had

been and how she had comforted Stolypin’s widow. What had

provoked this sudden change of mood? ‘There was only one thing

I could put it down to,’ she later concluded, convinced that the

entire family was all in absolute thrall to Rasputin. ‘It was that same baleful influence which in the end destroyed the unfortunate

Alexandra Feodorovna and all her family.’47

*

After the horror of Stolypin’s murder the family was very glad to

escape to the Crimea, where the newly constructed palace was ready

for occupation. The Crimea had always been ‘the loveliest gem in

the crown of the czar’, a territorial trophy annexed by Catherine

the Great in 1783 at the end of numerous wars with the Ottoman

Empire.48 Gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine atop the rugged

southern coast, the palace was surrounded by gardens of vibrant-

coloured and sweet-smelling bougainvillea and oleander, trailing

vines of glycinia, and all around ‘a veritable riot of roses of every colour and shape’.49
*
There was plenty of shade too from exotic

* During the Crimean War of 1854–6 British soldiers had written home describing
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palms, olive trees, and pines and cypresses, and below the palace,

the family had its own private rocky beach and a sea to bathe in as

blue as the Aegean. No wonder Livadia was named after the Greek

word for a beautiful meadow or lawn. It literally was a heaven on

earth for the Romanov children and they spoke of it always as ‘their

real home’. As one of the Romanov sisters later put it: ‘In St

Petersburg we work; but at Livadia we live.’50 Livadia was also an

important refuge for an increasingly world-weary Nicholas and his

invalid wife. For those with money and social status the Crimea was

the Russian equivalent of the French Riviera, with Yalta, 2 miles (3

km) from the palace, its most fashionable resort and the Russian

social set all arrived here for the balmy autumn months before the

onset of the winter season in St Petersburg. Here, more than

anywhere else in Russia, they were most likely to catch a glimpse

of their elusive imperial family, for in Livadia the Romanovs were

far more relaxed and informal than at Tsarskoe Selo.

The Livadia Palace was two-storeyed and Italian Renaissance in

style, with large windows that let in the light, and faced in local

white Inkerman limestone – prompting its popular name as the

‘White Palace’. It had been completed inside sixteen months,

including a second house for the imperial entourage, and had all

the modern conveniences of central heating, lifts and telephones.

Having taken possession on 20 September Nicholas wrote to his

mother: ‘We cannot find the words to express our joy and the

pleasure of having such a house, built exactly as we wished . . .

The views in all directions are so beautiful, especially of Yalta and the sea. There is so much light in the rooms and you remember

how dark it was in the old house.’51 Inside all was simplicity, much

in the
style moderne
that Alexandra favoured. The private apartments on the second floor had the preferred white furniture and chintz

fabrics, and as usual there were flowers everywhere.52 The windows

and balconies at the back of the palace gave out over the sea: Olga

and Tatiana delighted in taking their morning French lessons with

Pierre Gilliard out on the balcony. On the northern side of the

the exquisite flowers growing wild all over the peninsula. Many of them dug up Crimean crocus and snowdrop bulbs to take back to England with them.

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palace facing inland, the palace looked out onto the rugged Crimean

mountains in the distance. A cool and shady inner courtyard featured

Italianate marble colonnades and a fountain surrounded by a pretty

knot garden. It was a favourite place for the entourage to escape

the heat of the day and sit and chat after luncheon.

An idyllic late summer and autumn at Livadia followed for the

Romanov children. There were wonderful days of hiking in the hills

with their father, taking drives along the coast to a favourite picnic spot – such as St George’s Monastery perched high on the cliffs at

Cape Fiolent; or journeys into the Crimean heartland, past trees

heavy with succulent fruit, to the tsar’s own vineyard at Massandra

which produced the finest wines in the Crimea. Day after sunny

day was spent riding and playing tennis with Grand Duchess Xenia’s

children and other relatives who visited. Swimming was also a great

favourite, though after Anastasia nearly drowned one day when an

unexpectedly large wave hit them and Nicholas had to rescue her,

he had had a swimming pool made of canvas sails attached to wooden

posts erected down at the beach for the children’s safety, where they could swim under the watchful eye of Andrey Derevenko.53

With her pathological dislike of studying and of any kind of

constraints on her physical freedom, Anastasia was in clover, as she

told their tutor PVP, who was staying in Yalta with Pierre Gilliard:

Our rooms here are very large and clean and white and we have

real fruit and grapes growing here . . . I am so happy that we

don’t have these horrid lessons. In the evening we all sit together,

four of us, the gramophone plays, we listen to it and play together

. . . I don’t miss Tsarskoe Selo at all, because I can’t even tell

you how bored I am there.54

Everything about the palace filled the girls with energy and delight.

They enjoyed nothing better than going up and running out along

the galvanized roof and delighting in the noise their footsteps made.

And the nights there were so full of stars. Anastasia was entranced

by the sky and loved going out on the roof to ‘study the formations

of the stars’, for in the Crimea they seemed to shine extra-bright.55

During their stays at Livadia, as at home in Tsarskoe Selo, the

family enjoyed regular film shows on Saturdays in the covered riding

school. This was such an important event in their lives that the

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children would spend the following week talking about it.56 Elizaveta Naryshkina was charged with vetting the films, requiring court

photographer Aleksandr Yagelsky (who also been designated to shoot

official footage of the imperial family at all their public appearances) to edit out any parts she objected to.57
*
What the children saw for the most part were newsreels or travelogues from Yagelsky’s own

Tsarist Chronicles
of the family, or films of educational merit. But they also saw dramas such as
The Defence of Sevastopol
– about the siege of the naval base during the Crimean War – which, at 100

minutes long, was the first major historical feature film to be made

in Russia and which was premiered especially for the imperial family

at the Livadia Palace on 26 October 1911.58

Nicholas also relished the informality of life at Livadia and the

family gatherings they had there, for several of their Romanov rela-

tives had summer homes in the vicinity. Grand Duchess George

(Nicholas’s cousin, a daughter of the King of Greece) was nearby

at Harax; his sister Xenia and her husband Sandro and their seven

children were at Ai-Todor; the Montenegrin sisters Militza and

Stana had estates at Dulber and Chair, although they now had little

contact with Nicholas and Alexandra. Other influential families spent the spring and autumn in the Crimea: the Vorontsovs at Alupka,

the Golitsyns at Novyi Svet and the Yusupovs, who had two beau-

tiful homes: one the Moorish palace of Kokoz inland on the road

to Sevastopol, and the other at Koreiz on the coast of the Black

Sea.During balmy summer evenings when the Romanovs visited

Harax, Grand Duchess George’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de Stoeckl

would often find herself looking at the four lovely sisters and

wondering ‘what their future might be’. Twenty-three-year-old

Prince Christopher of Greece, who had been visiting his sister Grand

Duchess George that summer, confessed to Agnes that he ‘greatly

admired the Grand Duchess Olga . . . and he asked me if I thought

he had any chance’. They talked it over with his sister and, after