The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (36 page)

for her daughter even though she had spent most of the day lying

down; but once again she had been obliged to leave early.1 Tatiana

should have shared the occasion with her sister but she was ill in

bed at the Winter Palace; a couple of days later the doctors confirmed that she had typhoid fever.2
*

Olga had been determined not to let these disappointments spoil

her evening. She looked lovely, ‘dressed in a simple pale-pink chiffon frock’. Much as at her sixteenth birthday ball in Livadia, ‘she danced every dance, enjoying herself as simply and wholeheartedly as any

girl at her first ball’.2 Her own record of the evening was rather

* In her letters Alexandra described it as ‘typhus’, much as she had Nicholas’s attack in 1900 and Olga’s in 1901, the names for the two quite different diseases often being used interchangeably at the time. Typhus is, however, lice-borne and caught in dirty, overcrowded conditions, which is clearly unlikely in either daughter’s case. Tatiana is thought to have contracted typhoid fever from an infected drink of lemonade taken at the Winter Palace.

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more prosaic: ‘I danced a lot – it was so much fun. A ton of people

. . . it was so beautiful.’3 She enjoyed the quadrille and the mazurka with many of her favourite officers and was happy to have her dear

friend Nikolay Sablin from the
Shtandart
in attendance. Meriel Buchanan was captivated by the sight of the eldest grand duchess

that evening, dressed with ‘classical simplicity’, her only necklace a simple string of pearls, but yet so irresistible with her ‘tip-tilted nose’. She ‘had a charm, a freshness, an enchanting exuberance that

made her irresistible’.4 Meriel Buchanan remembered seeing her

‘standing on the steps leading down from the gallery to the floor

of the ball-room, trying gaily to settle a dispute between three young Grand Dukes who all protested that they had been promised the

next dance’. It prompted a pause for thought: ‘watching her I

wondered what the future was going to hold for her, and which of

the many possible suitors who had been mentioned from time to

time she would eventually marry.’5

The issue of Olga’s future marriage had, inevitably, gained in

importance during the Tercentary year. Until now the imperial sisters had been a taboo subject in the Russian press, but here they were

for the first time being officially presented to the nation. Discussion of Olga’s role as eldest child had once more been raised behind the

scenes, when a crisis in the Russian succession broke during the

winter of 1912–13. When Alexey had been lying at death’s door at

Spala, Nicholas’s younger brother Mikhail had secretly gone off to

Vienna to marry his mistress, Natalya Wulfert – a divorcee and a

commoner – knowing that if Alexey died and he became heir

presumptive again Nicholas would forbid this morganatic marriage.

Mikhail hoped that if he married behind his brother’s back it would

be accepted as a fait accompli, but Nicholas was furious. And his

response was draconian: he demanded Mikhail renounce his right

to the throne or immediately divorce Natalya in order to prevent

a scandal. When Mikhail refused to do so, Nicholas froze Mikhail’s

assets and banished him from Russia. At the end of 1912 a manifesto

was published in the Russian papers removing Mikhail from the

regency, his military command and imperial honours. According to

the laws of succession, Grand Duchess Vladimir’s eldest son Kirill

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would become regent if Nicholas should die before Alexey was

twenty-one, but he and his two brothers who followed in the pecking

order were deeply unpopular in Russia. Instead Nicholas overruled

existing law and ordered Count Freedericksz to draft a manifesto

nominating Olga as regent with Alexandra as guardian during

Alexey’s minority. It was published early in 1913 without Nicholas

seeking, as he should have done, the Duma’s approval. It inevitably

provoked a furious objection from Grand Duchess Vladimir.

From her well-connected position at the British Embassy, Meriel

Buchanan could see that the imperial family was in a very bad way

that year:

The marriage of the Grand Duke Michael has caused a tremen-

dous upheaval and they say dear Emp.[eror] is heartbroken.

Nobody quite knows what is the matter with the little boy and

if the worst should happen the question of succession becomes

a serious one. Kyrill is of course the nearest but there is some

doubt as to whether any of the Vladimir lot will be allowed to

succeed as their mother was not an Orthodox when they were

born. It would then come to Dimitri and he would have to marry

one of the Emperor’s daughters.6

Rumours were clearly still circulating about a match between

Olga and Dmitri. The waspish Meriel found the thought rather

amusing; she had seen much of Dmitri Pavlovich of late on the

Petersburg social scene, where everyone had been learning the latest

dance crazes. ‘I had a very ardous [
sic
] lesson from Dimitri the other day’, she wrote to her cousin. ‘It would be rather “chic” if Dimitri

were one day Emperor of all the Russias to be able to say that he

taught me the Bunnyhug wouldn’t it?’7 All talk of the match soon,

however, evaporated when Dmitri Pavlovich proposed to his cousin,

Irina, Grand Duchess Xenia’s only daughter, only to be spurned in

favour of his friend Felix Yusupov. A distancing between Nicholas

and Dmitri followed as the year wore on, even though Dmitri

continued to serve as an ADC.

As for Olga, her romantic teenage thoughts were now firmly

directed much lower down the ranks, towards a favourite officer,

Alexander Konstantinovich Shvedov, a captain in the Tsar’s Escort.

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In her diary she referred to him by the acronym of AKSH and his

presence at afternoon tea parties at Aunt Olga’s was the focal point

of her very limited social life for much of the first half of that year.

These occasions were little more than get-togethers for high jinks

with a group of favourite hand-picked officers; of dancing to the

phonograph and playing childish games of cat-and-mouse, slap-on-

hands, hide-and-seek and tag. They were nominally supervised by

Olga Alexandrovna but regularly degenerated into a lot of giggling

and boisterous play that brought the four sisters into close physical proximity with men with whom they otherwise could never have

had such intimacy. It was the strangest and most perverse kind of

interplay – but one in which both their mother and their aunt saw

no harm. Here were Russian imperial grand duchesses on the brink

of womanhood indulging in infantile behaviour, the end result of

which was to leave the impressionable Olga swooning about a young

man who in every other way was totally off limits. ‘Sat with AKSH

the whole time and strongly fell in love with him’, she confided to

her diary on 10 February, ‘Lord, save us. Saw him all day long – at

liturgy and in the evening. It was very nice and fun. He is so sweet.’8

For weeks afterwards the pattern of her life beyond lessons, walks

with Papa, sitting with Mama and listening to Alexey say his prayers

at bedtime was the occasional day release to Auntie Olga’s in St

Petersburg to play silly games and gaze longingly at the handsome

mustachioed AKSH in his dashing Cossack
cherkeska
.
*

Tatiana was distraught at having to miss out on many of the

celebrations for the Tercentary in St Petersburg, not to mention the

trips to Aunt Olga’s, where she too had looked forward to seeing

her favourite officers. Because of her illness (which Dr Botkin and

Trina Schneider also soon contracted), the family was obliged to

leave the Winter Palace on 26 February and return to Tsarskoe

Selo; but before doing so Tatiana asked her nurse Shura Tegleva to

telephone Nikolay Rodionov and tell him that she would love it if

some of her officers would come and walk past her window at the

Winter Palace so she could at least see them. Rodionov and Nikolay

Vasilevich Sablin were only too happy to oblige and remembered

* A long Circassian collarless coat.

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seeing the poor sick girl, wrapped in a blanket, bowing to them at

the window.9

Upon her return to the Alexander Palace Tatiana was immediately

quarantined from her sisters and was very ill for more than a month;

on 5 March her beautiful long, chestnut hair had to be cropped short, though a wig was made of it for her to wear until her hair grew back

sufficiently (which it had done by the end of December).10 Confined

at home with her invalid mother, each looking after the other, it

wasn’t until early April that Tatiana finally ventured outside onto

Alexandra’s balcony, but it was still too cold and snowy to stay for

long. When she did at last go outside she was deeply self-conscious

about the wig. One day, when she was playing a skipping game in

the park with Maria Rasputin and some young officers from the Corps

de Pages, Alexey’s dog had run up to her barking; Tatiana got her

foot caught in the rope, tripped and as she fell ‘her hair suddenly

tumbled down and, to our amazement, we saw a wig drop off’, Maria

recalled. Poor Tatiana ‘revealed to our eyes and those of the two

embarrassed officers, the top of her head where a few short, sparse

hairs were just beginning to grow’. She was absolutely mortified, and

‘with one bound she was on her feet, had picked up her wig and

dashed towards the nearest clump of trees. We saw only her blushes

and vexation and she did not appear again that day.’11

During the winter months of 1913 at the Alexander Palace,

Nicholas’s diary is a testament to his hands-on parenting of his four daughters in lieu of his perpetually sick wife. No matter the amount

of paperwork on his desk, the number of meetings with ministers,

public audiences and military reviews that filled his day, at this time of year when they were home at Tsarskoe Selo he always found time

for his children. History may have condemned him many times over

for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt,

the most exemplary of royal fathers. The months of January and

February were a special time for him and his daughters, during

which he treated them all to trips to see the ballets
The Little

Humpbacked Horse
,
Don Quixote
and
The Pharoah’s Daughter
– in which last they were thrilled to see Pavlova dance. As the eldest,

Olga (and Tatiana, until illness prevented her) enjoyed the added

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bonus of seeing the operas
Madame Butterfly
,
The Legend of the
Invisible City of Kitezh
and Wagner’s
Lohengrin
, which latter Olga found particularly beautiful and moving.12 But in the main, time

with Papa was spent out in the park, whatever the weather, sharing

invigorating walks, riding bicycles, helping him break the ice on the canals, skiing, sliding down the ice hill, and joined – when he was

well enough – by Alexey wearing his specially made boot with a

caliper. The girls so enjoyed having their father to themselves; he

was a fast, unrelenting walker and they had all learned to keep up

or be left behind, Olga in particular always walking closest to him

on one side, Tatiana on the other, with Maria and Anastasia running

back and forth in front of them, sliding on the ice and throwing

snowballs. It was clear to anyone who encountered the tsar and his

daughters in the Alexander Park how much pride he had in his girls.

‘He was happy that people admired them. It was as though his kind

blue eyes were saying to them: “Look what wonderful daughters I

have.”’13

*

On the evening of 15 May the family boarded the imperial train

for Moscow and the beginning of a two-week trip in the steamship

Mezhen
up the Volga from Moscow in celebration of the Tercentary.

It was an arduous tour during which they stopped off at the major

religious sites of the Golden Ring, a route taken by the first Romanov tsar from his birthplace to Moscow in 1613.14 It had been a major

pilgrimage route for centuries and was one that Alexandra had long

expressed a wish to see; Nicholas himself had not visited the area

since 1881. From a succession of holy sites at Vladimir, Bogolyubovo

and Suzdal the family travelled to Nizhniy Novgorod for a service

at its beautiful Cathedral of the Transfiguration; then back along

the Volga by steamer, arriving at Kostroma on 19 May. At each stop

there was a traditional welcome of bread and salt from local digni-

taries and clergy. Church bells rang out and military bands played,

as huge crowds of peasants gathered along the river banks – some

wading deep into the water – to catch a glimpse of the imperial