The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (33 page)

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been sucked into the racy lifestyle of the St Petersburg fast set that Yusupov patronized. The two men were now spending a riotous

time in town, wining and dining, consorting with ballerinas and

gypsy girls and driving fast cars. Like any bright young thing in the dying days before the First World War with too much money and

not enough to occupy his time, Dmitri was also developing a

dangerous gambling habit. He had his own palace by the Anichkov

Bridge on St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt – gifted to him by Ella

when she retreated to her convent – and conveniently located in

sight of all the fashionable clubs. Dmitri began to haunt the Imperial Yacht Club next door to his favourite restaurant at the Astoria Hotel; when he was not running through his fortune playing poker and

baccarat there, he would be doing so in Paris, at the Travellers Club on the Champs-Elysées.43

Sooner or later word of Dmitri’s playboy lifestyle must have got

back to Nicholas and Alexandra and also to Olga. It was already

rapidly eroding his good looks, the boyish charm mutating into a

dark-eyed, saturnine appearance, made worse by the onset of health

problems. Olga might have been young but she was strong-willed,

deeply religious and principled. By January 1913 she was noting a

degree of disdain for Dmitri’s habit of ‘messing about with papa’

that does not square with any romantic interest, although it could

perhaps have been a case of teenage sour grapes.44 That same month

Meriel Buchanan was more overt in her own opinion of the situa-

tion: ‘He absolutely refuses to look at Olga I believe.’

*

On 6 August, with the roses of Livadia still filling the gardens with their lovely perfume, the family sadly left the Crimea and returned

to Peterhof for army manoeuvres at Krasnoe Selo, followed, on 20

August, by the consecration at Tsarskoe Selo of the family’s newly

built church, the Feodorovsky Sobor. This had been built a short

walk from the palace and was also for the specific use of Cossacks

serving with the Tsar’s Escort. It would become the family’s favourite place of worship and a significant feature in their spiritual lives,

Alexandra in particular creating her own private retreat in a side

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chapel. Soon afterwards the family left Tsarskoe Selo by special train to Moscow to celebrate the centenary of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon

in 1812.

The focal point of the ceremonies was the battlefield of Borodino,

115 miles (185 km) west of Moscow, where, on 7 September 1812,

58,000 Russians had been killed or wounded in what had been a

pyrrhic victory for the French. Within two months the exhausted

and depleted Grande Armée withdrew from Moscow and into the

catastrophe of the long winter retreat from Russia. On 25 August

at Borodino Nicholas and Alexey reviewed units whose predecessors

had fought in the original battle and were joined by the whole family at a religious ceremony held at Alexander I’s campaign chapel

nearby.45 On the following day came more parades on Borodino

Field, everyone walking solemnly behind the sacred Smolensk

Mother of God icon with which Russian troops had been blessed

before the battle, followed by prayers at the Spaso-Borodinsky

Monastery and the Borodino monument. The whole family found

it an intensely moving experience: ‘A common feeling of deep rever-

ence for our forebears seized
us all
there,’ Nicholas told his mother,

‘these were moments of such emotional grandeur as can rarely be

surpassed in our days!’46 On both occasions, with the emphasis on

the tsar and his heir in their military uniforms, the girls looked the epitome of imperial grace in the now iconic ensemble of long white

lace dresses and hats draped with large white ostrich feathers – ‘four young girls, whose beauty and charm will gradually be revealed to

a respectfully-admiring world, like the blooming of rare and lovely

flowers in our hothouses’.47 They were charming, enchanting even;

but to ordinary Russians the four Romanov sisters remained as

beautiful and inaccessible as storybook princesses.

After Borodino, the imperial party travelled on to Moscow and

further celebrations of the 1812 anniversary at the Kremlin and

elsewhere, culminating in a mass at the exquisite fifteenth-century

Uspensky Sobor. On the last day of an exhausting programme of

religious and public celebration, where the citizens of Moscow took

full advantage of a rare glimpse of the entire imperial family together, a huge prayer service was held on Red Square in memory of

Alexander I, the conquering tsar who had driven the French from

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Russia. It was a highly emotive conclusion to the anniversary, the

square echoing to the voices of a 3,000-strong choir, the booming

of cannon firing the salute and the unforgettable sound of church

bells ringing out across the heart of old Moscow.48

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N

The festivities for Borodino had the inevitable impact on the tsaritsa and in early September 1912, the family headed off for one of

Nicholas’s favourite hunting venues, the Belovezhskaya pushcha

(today’s Białowieża Forest), an imperial estate in eastern Poland (now Belarus). The territory was part of the Russian Empire at the time,

but before it was ceded to Russia during the partitions of the eight-

eenth century, it had long been the ancient hunting preserve of the

kings of Poland. Here, across 30,000 acres (404,686 ha) of dense,

virgin forest the tsar could take his pick, hunting for deer, wild boar, moose, wolves – and even the rare European bison, which thrived

there. The four sisters, who were all now accomplished horsewomen,

went for exhilarating morning rides with their father, leaving a

frustrated Alexey, who was not allowed such dangerous pursuits, to

be taken by car in search of the wildlife. Alexandra, meanwhile,

stayed at home, ‘lying here all on my own, writing letters and resting my weary heart’.1

It was hard for Alexey always to be excluded from vigorous family

activities, although nothing could restrain him, given half a chance, from indulging in the kind of physical games with other children

that so easily could cause him harm. Dr Botkin’s children noticed

his penchant for slapstick of the ‘pie-throwing type’ and his inability to ‘stay in any place or at any game for any length of time’.2 There

was something always so restless about him. Agnes de Stoeckl recalled with horror seeing how that summer in Livadia he had joined his

sisters in whirling round a very high maypole that Grand Duchess

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George had erected for her children at Harax, ‘insist[ing] on running holding the rope until the impetus lifted him gently into the air’.3

Everyone dreaded the repercussions if he hurt himself, but it had

long since proved impossible to contain Alexey’s natural energies

and Nicholas had ordered that Alexey be allowed ‘to do everything

that other children of his age were wont to do, and not to restrain

him unless it was absolutely necessary’. Court paediatrician Dr

Sergey Ostrogorsky had told Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich that

Alexey did not have ‘the full-blown disease’, ‘but it will develop

forcefully if it’s allowed to, which is exactly what’s happening’. This was because the empress was too indulgent with him and did not

heed his, Ostrogorsky’s, advice, such as recently when

Alexey was still suffering a great deal, Ostrogorsky ordered him

to lie quietly and avoid all movement since [it] would inevitably

bring much harm. So what do you think Alix did, the fool? When

Ostrogorsky returned a week later, he found Alexey leaping and

running with his sisters. The Empress, responding to the doctor’s

look of utter horror, said ‘I wanted to surprise you!’ But

Ostrogorsky admitted that, after such surprises, one simply gives

up.4

‘Was that not truly idiotic of Alexandra?’ Dmitri asked his sister;

but more to the point, it poses the question of whether Alexandra

had been sticking to Grigory’s advice to ignore what the doctors

said and trust only in him and God for Alexey’s well-being. The

fact was that Alexey had not benefited from the discipline of govern-

esses as his sisters had, and was extremely capricious. His mother

clearly could not control him, often rebuking Olga for not minding

her brother’s manners. But poor Olga could not manage Alexey and

his ‘peevish temper’ any more than her mother could.5 The only

authority he respected was his father’s: ‘one word was always enough

to exact implicit obedience from him’, Sydney Gibbes noted.6

There is no doubt that Alexey was often extremely difficult to

handle, yet the lovable and compassionate side of his personality

always in the end won through, for ‘it was often only by the glint

of his eyes that one could realize the tumult that was passing in his little soul’.7 When he was well he was full of life: bright, intelligent and brave, and everyone in the entourage was happy seeing it. Yet

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there was always something intensely plaintive about this handsome

little boy with the soulful eyes. He seemed so alone, aside from his

devoted
dyadka
Derevenko. The company of other children – mainly Derevenko’s own or Dr Botkin’s – or occasional visits from royal

cousins (with whom he did not always get along) were rare. In the

main Alexey had only his sisters and his tutors for company.

Until the appointment of Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes,

Alexey’s carers had all been Russians, which in itself had isolated

him, and as a result his English was much poorer than that of his

sisters. However, thanks to Gilliard, who became an important figure

in his life, Alexey did end up speaking better French than the girls.
*

But having so little contact with the outside world he was often

fearful when encountering strangers. Gerald Hamilton, a traveller

to Russia that spring, and whose German aunts had known Alexandra

in Hesse, had had the good fortune to be invited to meet the im-

perial family at Tsarskoe Selo. As he sat taking tea with the tsaritsa, who talked animatedly of her Darmstadt schooldays, the tsarevich

suddenly ‘romped into the room’ but immediately shrank back when

he saw Hamilton’s unfamiliar face. He seemed so nervous and timid,

thought Hamilton, with the ‘most extraordinarily gentle, almost

beseeching eyes’.8

For now at least Alexey was in good health and he had for a

while been accident-free, so much so that Alexandra had begun to

hope that the doctors might be wrong in thinking his condition

incurable. Earlier that year, in an attempt to make her sister-in-law Olga understand the extent to which she relied on Grigory, she had

finally admitted ‘that the poor little one has that terrible illness’.

Olga could see that Alexandra had ‘become ill because of it and

w[ould] never fully recover’.9 Her sister-in-law was adamant about

how indispensable Grigory was, insisting to Olga Alexandrovna that

‘the boy feels better the moment he is near him, or prays for him’.

He had helped him yet again during their recent stay at Livadia

when Alexey had had a ‘haemorrhage in the kidneys’, noted Olga’s

* Tatiana once declared to Anna Vyrubova ‘that she never would be able to carry on a conversation in French’; but all of the children spoke English fluently, ‘from their cradles’. Dorr,
Inside the Russian Revolution
, p. 123.

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sister Xenia, who also was now privy to the truth. Grigory, who had

followed the imperial family to the Crimea, had been sent for and

‘Everything stopped when he arrived!’10

During the long and exhausting celebrations at Borodino Alexey

had been greeted by wildly enthusiastic crowds, ecstatic at seeing

their tsarevich close to them. Alexandra had been proud of him for

coming through the physical strain of it all so well. But then disaster had once more struck; while out on the river one day not long after

their arrival at Belovezhskaya pushcha – and ignoring the warnings

of Derevenko – Alexey banged the inside of his thigh against one

of the oarlocks when hastily jumping into a rowing boat.11 A swelling developed in his left groin soon after, accompanied by pain and

raised temperature. But after a week or so it appeared to ease and

he seemed fit enough for the family to travel on to their smaller

hunting lodge deep in the forest at Spala, though Alexey still had

difficulty walking and had to be carried by Derevenko. He remained

pale and frail for days but Alexandra refused to call in any additional doctors, entrusting Alexey’s care to Dr Botkin only. He was not