The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (30 page)

giving Christopher ‘a stiff whisky and soda’, Grand Duchess George

dispatched him to the Livadia Palace to try his luck. He came back

* Yagelsky worked for the firm of K. E. von Gann, based at Tsarskoe Selo.

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with his tail between his legs; Nicholas had been kind but firm:

‘Olga is too young to think of such a thing as marriage yet’, he had

told him.59

That might be so, but Olga and Tatiana were growing up fast,

and Sofya Tyutcheva had already noticed with some alarm their

coquettish behaviour with some of the officers in the
Shtandart
.60

Several of these men joined the family at Livadia for games of tennis, which were Nicholas’s principal distraction from his heavy workload.

Tennis matches were a golden opportunity for the eldest girls to

see much more of their favourites:
Nikolay Sablin, Pavel Voronov and Nikolay Rodionov.61 Like Sofya Tyutcheva, General Mosolov

noticed the older girls’ growing interest in the opposite sex and how the sometimes childish games they played with officers ‘changed

into a series of flirtations all very innocent’. ‘I do not, of course, use the word “flirtation” quite in the ordinary sense of the term’,

he pointed out, for ‘the young officers could better be compared

with the pages or squires of dames of the Middle Ages’. They were

all intensely loyal to the tsar and his daughters and thus were

‘polished to perfection by one of their superiors, who was regarded

as the Empress’s squire of dames’. What disturbed Mosolov, however,

was the sisters’ astonishing unworldliness: ‘even when the two eldest had grown up into real young women one might hear them talking

like little girls of ten or twelve’.62

Nevertheless, the physical transformation in Olga between her

fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays had been considerable. Many

remarked how the rather plain and serious grand duchess had now

blossomed into an elegant beauty. Her tutor Pierre Gilliard had

been taken aback, on returning to Russia from a visit to his family

in Switzerland, by how Olga had become so slender and graceful.

She was now ‘a tall girl (as tall as me) who blushes violently as she looks at me, seeming as uncomfortable with her new self as she is

in her longer skirts’.63

On her sixteenth birthday on 3 November 1911 Olga awoke to

gifts from her parents of two necklaces, one of diamonds, one of

pearls, and a ring. Alexandra, with typical frugality, had wanted one large pearl to be bought for each of her daughters every time she

had a birthday so that by the time they all reached sixteen they

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would have enough for a necklace; a fact which the head of her

private office Prince Obolensky considered a false economy.

Alexandra was eventually persuaded, with the tsar’s backing, to buy

a five-string necklace that could be broken up into individual pearls, so that the pearls in the necklaces when complete would at least

match.64

That evening, Olga appeared wearing a full-length, high-necked,

tulle dress with a lace bodice and a deep sash round her waist pinned with roses, her cheeks flushed with excitement and her shining fair

hair dressed on top of her head – an important signifier of her

transition from girl to young woman. ‘She was as excited over her

debut as any other young girl’, recalled Anna Vyrubova. But the

girls were still thought of as two pairs: Tatiana was dressed similarly to Olga with her hair up, while Maria and Anastasia wore shorter

matching dresses with their hair loose.65

The ball was the social event of the Crimean season, and Olga

was thrilled to have her favourite officer Nikolay Sablin as her escort for the evening; while Tatiana was partnered by Nikolay Rodionov.66

At a quarter to seven, 140 carefully selected guests assembled in the large upstairs state dining room for dinner. Agnes de Stoeckl recalled how

Innumerable servants in their gold and scarlet liveries were

standing behind each chair – those special ones called ‘l’homme

à la plume’ with plumes in their hats. The ladies were in rich

coloured gowns, the young girls mostly in white tulle, and the

gorgeous uniforms seemed to belong to a feast from the eastern

hemisphere.67

After a candlelit dinner, the dancing began to music from the

regimental orchestra, as officers of the
Shtandart
(which was at anchor nearby at Sevastopol) and the Alexandrovsky cavalry division

invited the ladies to dance. Nicholas proudly conducted his daughter

on to the dance floor for her first waltz, as a gaggle of admiring

young officers gathered round to watch. It was a magical evening,

with a full moon in a cloudless sky. The exotic Crimean location

made it even more special, wrote Anna Vyrubova:

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the glass doors to the courtyard thrown open, the music of the

unseen orchestra floating in from the rose garden like a breath

of its own wondrous fragrance. It was a perfect night, clear and

warm, and the gowns and jewels of the women and the brilliant

uniforms of the men made a striking spectacle under the blaze

of the electric lights.68

Flushed with the thrill of dancing the mazurka, waltz, contre-

danse, danse hongroise and cotillion, and heady with the Crimean

champagne they had been allowed to drink for the first time, Olga

and Tatiana spent the whole evening in high spirits, ‘fluttering round like butterflies’ as General Spiridovich recalled, and savouring every moment.69 Never one to say much in her diaries, which she had

first attempted keeping in 1906 at the age of eleven, Olga made

little of the occasion:

Today for the first time I put on a long white dress. At 9 p.m.

was my first ball. Knyazhevich (Major-General of the Suite) and

I opened it. I danced the whole time, right up till 1 a.m. and

was very happy. There were many officers and ladies. Everyone

was having a terribly good time. I am 16 years old.70

Rather as anticipated, the empress had made her excuses about

attending the dinner but had come down afterwards to greet her

guests, looking quite beautiful in a gold brocade gown and wearing

vivid jewels in her hair and her corsage. By her side was Alexey, ‘his lovely little face flushed with the excitement of the evening’.

Alexandra sat down in a large armchair to watch the dancing (looking, as one lady recalled ‘like an Eastern potentate’). During the cotillion she went down onto the dance floor to place garlands of artificial

flowers on the ladies’ heads that she had made herself.71 She tried

several times to send Alexey off to bed, where he stubbornly refused

to go. Eventually she left the room, upon which Alexey jumped up

into her chair. ‘Slowly his little head dropped and he slept’, recalled Agnes de Stoeckl, upon which Nicholas, who had been sitting at a

table playing bridge for most of the evening, went over and ‘gently

woke him up saying: “You must not sit in mama’s chair” and led

him quietly away to bed’.72

Other smaller family dances were enjoyed by the sisters that

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autumn at Harax and Ai-Todor but General Mosolov later recalled

that ‘the children long regarded [Olga’s] ball as one of the greatest events in their lives’.73 For on this one, special night in the Crimea the Romanov sisters had shown that despite the limitations of their

till now sheltered lives, ‘they were simple, happy, normal young

girls, loving dancing and all the frivolities which make youth bright and memorable’.74 Elizaveta Naryshkina could not help wishing that

the girls would now be able to take their proper place in Russian

aristocratic society. ‘In this, however, I was to be disappointed.’75

For although, when the family returned to Tsarskoe Selo, Olga and

Tatiana were allowed to attend three more balls given by the

Romanov grand dukes in the run-up to Christmas, their mother

maintained a stern attitude about how ‘harmful’ she thought aris-

tocratic society to be.76

But Olga, of all the girls the most deep-feeling and sensitive, was

now struggling with her emotions, full of longing for something

more from life. At sixteen she was already well aware of widespread

discussion about her future marriage, only too painfully conscious

that the men she most admired and felt comfortable with – the

officers of the
Shtandart
and her father’s Cossack Escort – would never, ever, be acceptable candidates.

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N

In January 1912, on a week’s visit to Russia as one of a delegation

of British officials, Sir Valentine Chirol of
The Times
remembered with particular pleasure a lunch with the imperial family at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘I happened to sit next to the little Grand Duchess Tatiana, a

very attractive girl of fifteen’, he recalled. She talked with ease in English and told him how she was ‘longing to have another holiday

in England’.

When I asked her what she liked best there she whispered quickly,

almost in my ear, ‘Oh, it feels so free there,’ and when I remarked

that she surely enjoyed a great deal of freedom at home she

pursed up her lips into a little pout and with a toss of the head

pointed towards an elderly lady sitting at another small table

close to ours who was her gouvernante.1

Rasputin’s two daughters Maria and Varvara, who had been

brought to St Petersburg by their father to be educated, also noticed how extremely curious the Romanov sisters were when they met

them at Anna Vyrubova’s. They plied the Rasputin sisters with ques-

tions: ‘the life of a girl of fourteen living in the town, who went to school with other children, and once a week went to the cinema,

sometimes to the circus, seemed to them the rarest and most envi-

able of wonders’, recalled Maria.2 In the years just before the war,

she and her sister represented a rare female link of their own age

with the outside world. The Romanov girls were especially anxious

to know all about the dances Maria Rasputin attended, ‘they would

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question her at length about her clothes and who was there and

what dances she danced’, recalled Sidney Gibbes.3 Two other young

visitors to Trina Schneider at her apartments in the Alexander Palace, found themselves bombarded with similar questions. Maria and

Anastasia often joined them at Trina’s apartments after lunch and

engaged the girls, Natalya and Fofa, in exuberant, mischievous games

that were almost too much for Trina to cope with. In quieter

moments Anastasia and Maria were endlessly inquisitive about their

everyday lives. ‘They asked us about school, our friends, our teachers and wanted to know how we spent our time off, which theatres we

went to, what books we read, and so on.’4

For now, however, the world of the Romanov sisters was strictly

controlled by their governess Sofya Tyutcheva, who was still holding

fast to her continuing campaign against the corrupting influence of

Rasputin and the world outside. According to Anna Vyrubova,

Tyutcheva had been encouraged in her ongoing vilification of

Rasputin by ‘certain bigoted priests’, one of whom was Tyutcheva’s

own cousin, Bishop Vladimir Putiyata.5 By the end of 1911 things

had reached crisis point, at a time when Alexandra was also coming

into conflict with the dowager and her sister-in-law over her contin-

uing patronage of Grigory. ‘My poor daughter-in-law does not

perceive that she is ruining the dynasty and herself’, Maria

Feodorovna had prophetically remarked to the murdered Stolypin’s

successor, Vladimir Kokovtsov. ‘She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune,

which is sure to come.’6 The situation had been greatly exacerbated

by circulation in St Petersburg in December 1911 of the letters

written in all innocence to Father Grigory two years previously by

the four sisters and the tsaritsa, and which he had given to an asso-

ciate and defrocked monk named Iliodor.
*
Iliodor had since fallen out with Rasputin and, out of spite, had entrusted the letters to a

Duma deputy who had had them copied and circulated among his

political colleagues. When they were brought to Kokovtsov’s atten-

tion, he went straight to Nicholas. The tsar turned pale at the sight of the letters, but confirmed their authenticity before shutting them

* Rasputin later claimed that Iliodor had stolen the letters from him.

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in a drawer.7 When she heard what had happened, Alexandra sent

a furious telegram to Grigory who was effectively banished back to

Pokrovskoe and away from the family.

During the frantic damage limitation that followed, Sofya

Tyutcheva was the first of Grigory’s detractors to be targeted, accused of spreading malicious gossip about him and also of taking too stubbornly independent a line in her management of the girls.8 Early