The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (37 page)

family as they arrived (a fact which alarmed Alexandra who feared

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a catastrophe like the stampede at Khodynka Fields). But she enjoyed

meeting the devoted old peasant
babushki
and would stop and talk to them on the river bank, giving them money and religious images.15

Kostroma was the most important stop on their itinerary for it

was here, at the Ipatiev Monastery,
*
that the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov had taken refuge during a time of political upheaval in

Russia, and where he was invited by a delegation of boyars from

Moscow to take the throne. The monastery had its own Romanov

Museum that the family visited after attending services in the cathe-

dral, before going on to unveil a monument marking the Tercentary.

This was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip with huge crowds

voicing their enthusiasm for the imperial family as they processed

through streets decorated with flags and Romanov insignia, the

peasantry demonstrating their traditional loyalty to the ‘little father’

by falling on their knees when the national anthem was played.16

Such devotion served to stiffen Alexandra’s conviction that the ordi-

nary people loved them: ‘What cowards those State Ministers are’,

she told Elizaveta Naryshkina. ‘They are constantly frightening the

Emperor with threats and forebodings of a revolution, and here you

see it yourself – we only need to show ourselves, and at once their

hearts are ours.’17

Olga was thrilled when they arrived at Yaroslavl to see her dear

AKSH in the honour guard that greeted them. After yet another

crowded reception and a visit to an orphanage built to commemo-

rate the Tercentary, the girls and Nicholas left Alexandra behind

and headed for an exhibition of local manufacturing, a prayer service followed by dinner and musical entertainment, before they all finally boarded the train at midnight for Rostov. ‘A ton of presents, got

very tired, very long and boring, also very hot’, Olga noted in her

diary of that day. But ‘nice, sweet AKSH was there. I was
terribly
happy to see him.’ ‘Poor Mama’ was, however, very tired. ‘Heart

no. 3, hurts. Lord save her.’18 The whole of the following day

Alexandra remained in bed. During their time on the Volga Nikolay

* The house in which the Romanovs were held captive in 1918 in Ekaterinbug ironically had the same name, the Ipatiev House, after its owner, an engineer on the Trans-Siberian Railway named Nikolai Ipatiev.

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Vasilievich Sablin saw the strain Nicholas was under coping with

the demands of the schedule and a tetchy wife constantly prostrated

by fatigue and eating virtually nothing; he noticed that she often

went all day on just a couple of boiled eggs.19

*

The family arrived back in Moscow on 24 May for the climax of

their tour; ‘dear AKSH was once more smiling from across the

crowd’ among officers of the Tsar’s Escort standing guard when they

stepped from the carriages.20 If the celebrations in St Petersburg

had been muted, officialdom had ensured that those in the heart of

ancient Muscovy were triumphal, mimicking the entry into Moscow

of Tsar Alexander I in the early days of the 1812 war with France.

However, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, who was there for the celebra-

tions, thought the crowds seemed subdued:

The Emperor made restrained greetings to the right and the left

without changing expression; it was impossible to detect any

enthusiasm from either side. The
muzhiks
mostly stood there staring, a few made the sign of the cross or fell to their knees

for the head of the church. It was more awe and curiosity than

spontaneous warmth, more dutiful obedience than trust. Subjects

kept down rather than free citizens. It was unpleasant, remote

and as unlike how things are at home [in Sweden] as possible.

The unbridgeable gap between the ruler and the people was

more notable than ever.21

The ceremonials once more revealed Alexey’s frailty, particularly

on 25 May during the procession made by the family down the

famous Red Staircase in the Kremlin, when people were shocked

to see the tsarevich carried by one of the Cossacks from the Tsar’s

Escort. ‘How sad to see the heir to the Romanov throne so weak,

sickly, and helpless’, wrote Prime Minister Kokovtsov, who noted

also the gasps of sympathy that this sight evoked in the crowd.22

The empress’s discomfort was also clearly visible, an ugly red flush

appearing on her face during the ceremony. In contrast, the four

Romanov daughters seemed relaxed if somewhat inattentive at the

end of what had been a gruelling two weeks. At the Kremlin, one

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of the guards noticed how they ‘looked around, they were bored,

they ate grapes and sweets’, though they always ‘behaved in a very

natural and unpretentious manner’.23

Just before their return to Tsarskoe Selo, Olga and Tatiana

attended a ball at Moscow’s Assembly of Nobles. Alexandra was

unable to endure more than an hour, but the two sisters happily

opened the ball and took centre stage, dancing with many of the

officers from the Erevan Regiment. And Olga’s head was once more

turned during the quadrille by the sight of ‘AKSH’s
sweet
smiling face from afar’.24 En route to the railway station the following

morning she thought she caught sight of him ‘in a red cap on one

of the balconies far away’ and she saw him again soon at Aunt Olga’s

on 2 and 6 June. As usual, after tea, dinner and a cosy chat on the

sofa, the Romanov sisters indulged in a succession of noisy and

childish catch-me-if-you-can games in the garden with their regular

group of officers including AKSH and another great favourite, Viktor

Zborovsky from the Tsar’s Escort. On the 6th, however, it all got

wildly out of hand during a game of hide-and-seek upstairs when

they ‘horsed around terribly, turned everything upside down, espe-

cially one big wardrobe. 10 people got inside it, and also on top of

it, broke the doors, laughed and had a lot of fun.’25 A necessary

dissipation of pent-up energies perhaps, but – for the older two

sisters at least – there must have been an underlying sexual tension.

But then, inevitably, the motor car came for them at 7 p.m. and,

took them all back to Tsarskoe Selo. Olga went back with a heavy

heart, sad to have learned that day that AKSH was ‘leaving for [the]

Caucasus on Saturday. God save him.’

*

Throughout the 1913 Tercentary the tsarist publicity machine had

promoted a paternalistic Romanov monarchy headed by a loving,

devoted and virtuous family, an image perpetuated in the thousands

of official photographs sold as postcards across Russia that year. But many of the Russian peasantry were bewildered by the official images, for they did not project an authoritarian all-powerful tsar, remote

on his throne, as many of them certainly perceived him, but instead

an ordinary, bourgeois man at the heart of a domestic unit dominated

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by women that called into question his manliness and with it his

ability to rule.26 The role of the four Romanov sisters as an adjunct to their brother meanwhile underlined their widespread depiction

as uncontroversial, dutiful daughters, nowhere more so than in an

official hagiography, made available in English translation as
The
Tsar and His People
. Written for the Tercentary by a member of the imperial entourage, Major-General Andrey Elchaninov, it found

time briefly to summarize the sisters as

brought up in the rules of the Holy Orthodox Church and trained

to be good and careful housewives . . . [They] are remarkable

for their power of observation, kindness, and sympathy, and their

manners are simple and gracious. They are very active in helping

the poor, especially poor children, their presents taking the form

not of money, but of useful objects which they have made or

knitted themselves.27

Such a description set in stone the representation of the four

girls as interchangeable and unremarkable, and it was one that they

themselves compounded by often referring to themselves collectively

as OTMA. The official view continued to be entirely bland with an

emphasis on domestic pleasures over and above worldly ones: ‘They

seldom visit the theatre except during their holidays. Only at

Christmas or on other feast-days are they taken to the opera by

their parents.’ Ironically, this was true enough; with hindsight one

might say that in being denied contact with young men and women

of their own social standing and the life experiences that went with

it, the sisters were trapped in a stultifying, artificial world in which they were perpetually infantilized. ‘Why were they never seen,’ asked Meriel Buchanan, ‘except at Te Deums, or Reviews, or on some

State occasion?’28 The one breath of fresh air in their lives remained their beloved Aunt Olga, but tea parties with her in St Petersburg

were curtailed when, after returning from Moscow, the family headed

straight off to Finland for four weeks’ holiday in the
Shtandart
.29

They were all very tired after their Volga tour and the holiday

was a rather subdued one for most of the family. But for Olga it

was full of new interest for, in the absence of AKSH, she turned

her attention to another handsome moustachioed officer on the

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Shtandart
, who in her diary she referred to as ‘Pav. Al.’. The newly promoted Lieutenant Pavel Alexeevich Voronov was twenty-seven

and had joined the
Shtandart
in April. From the moment she stepped on board on 10 June, Olga rapidly developed an attachment to him.

Sometimes she sat with him in the front control room when he was

on duty, or came there to dictate the day’s log to him. Soon they

had a favourite trysting place, between the telegraph room and one

of the ship’s funnels, where they often sat chatting with Tatiana and her favourite, Nikolay Rodionov. During the day Pavel sometimes

joined the girls and their father on land, playing hot and vigorous

games of tennis (he was Nicholas’s favourite partner at the game)

or going for walks or swimming. Back on board they watched film

shows and played card games together. It all seemed so innocent

and above-board, but under the surface Olga’s emotions were in

turmoil.

Everyone liked the easy-going Pavel Voronov, especially Alexey,

whom Voronov often carried when he was unwell. By the end of

June Olga was writing that ‘he is so
affectionate
’, and was snatching what small moments of intimacy she could, often simply sitting

gazing at him as he kept watch on the bridge.30 Any activity from

which Pavel was absent or excluded was ‘boring’; when he was there

‘it was cosy and insanely nice to be with him’. By 6 July her feelings had deepened: ‘I dictated the log journal to him. After that we sat

on the couch until after 5.00. I love him, dear,
so much
.’31 On 12

July on their last day in the
Shtandart
en route back to Peterhof she sat with Pavel in the control room all the way. ‘It was awfully sad.

The whole time while the gangway was extended, I stood with him.

Left the yacht around 4.00. So
terribly
hard to part with the beloved
Shtandart
, officers and sweetie pie . . . Lord save him.’32

In the intervening weeks at Peterhof she received occasional

telephone calls from Pavel and also the dependable Nikolay Sablin

whom she so looked up to. It helped temper the sad litany of her

mother’s almost daily indispositions. Mama’s heart hurt, her face

hurt, her legs hurt; she was tired; she had a bad headache. Alexey

was unwell too, his arm sore ‘from waving his arms about too much

when playing’, so much so that in mid-July Grigory was called in

to see him. He came at seven one evening, sat with Alexandra and

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Alexey and then talked for a short while with Nicholas and the girls, before leaving. ‘Soon after his departure,’ Nicholas noted in his

diary, ‘the pain in Alexey’s arm began to go, he calmed down and

began to fall asleep.’33 Olga sat with her brother and her mother

often when they were unwell, offering comfort – as too did Tatiana

– in between the occasional horse ride or game of tennis. Her former

crush, AKSH, reappeared from time to time in the Escort and she

was happy to see him but her thoughts remained primarily with the

Shtandart
which was now sailing to the Mediterranean.

At the beginning of August the two older sisters began preparing

in earnest for their first official appearance at army manoeuvres, to be held on the 5th at Krasnoe Selo. They practised their riding for