The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (38 page)

several days beforehand for the auspicious day when they would

review their regiments in uniform on horseback for the first time

– Olga in the blue and red with gold trim of the 3rd Elizavetgrad

Hussars on her horse Regent and Tatiana in the navy and blue of

the 8th Voznesensk Uhlans on Robino. They were now the youngest

female colonels in the world – and on the day proved how accom-

plished they were. ‘Both Grand Duchesses led a pass in front of the

Emperor at a gallop’, escorted by Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich,

Commander-in-Chief of the army.34 ‘It was a hot day and they were

very nervous, but they were delightful and did their utmost. I believe the Emperor was very proud as he watched his daughters for the

first – and alas! – for the last time in a military line-up’, recalled Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich. But it was yet another milestone in

their lives that their mother had been too ill to witness, shut away

in her boudoir suffering from another bout of neuralgia.

Two days later, the family headed south to Livadia in the

40-degree C (104-degree F) heat of high summer. Alexey was still

unwell, and grumbled about the mud-bath treatments he had to

endure twice a week, which he hated. But he now had his own,

official governor. Nicholas and Alexandra had originally considered

appointing someone from their military or naval entourage, but

eventually decided to offer the post to Pierre Gilliard. Not everyone approved; Gilliard was an impeccable pedagogue, very proper and

punctilious but very un-Russian, as Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin

noted.35 Some said appointing a republican Swiss to look after the

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tsarevich was inappropriate. Gilliard accepted the appointment with

considerable apprehension at what it entailed, having only just been

privately informed by Dr Derevenko that Alexey had haemophilia.

‘Will I ever get used to the terrible responsibility that I am taking on?’ he asked his brother Frederick in a letter home.36 He found

Alexey very undisciplined; in his view the boy’s nervousness and

restless behaviour was exacerbated by the constant supervision of

Derevenko. At the end of November his charge had yet another

accident, falling off a chair he had climbed up on in the schoolroom

and banging his leg. The subsequent swelling quickly spread from

below the knee to his ankle. Another sailor from the
Shtandart
, Klimenty Nagorny, had recently been charged with sharing the task

of looking after Alexey with Derevenko and proved to be ‘touchingly

kind’, sitting up at night with him during this latest attack, while

his sisters opened the door every now and then and tiptoed in to

kiss him.37 Yet again, the prayers of Grigory, who was in Yalta at

the time, seemed to be the only thing that saved him; but, with the

same alarming regularity, as after every injury, the frail tsarevich

needed months of convalescence.

*

On 9 August when she had boarded the
Shtandart
in Sevastopol for the journey to Livadia, and saw Pavel Voronov once more, Olga

began referring to him in her diary as ‘S’. This was an abbreviation

for the Russian words
sokrovishche –
treasure,
solntse
– sunshine and
schaste
– happiness that were her frequently used epithets for those she cared about most. Her whole world for the rest of that year was

bound up in Pavel Voronov. Day after day she refers to him: ‘it’s so

boring without my S, ghastly’; ‘it’s empty without him’; ‘didn’t see

S and was miserable’.38 Pavel was perfection: sweet, kind, gentle,

precious. At all times, no matter how brief, she was always ‘so happy, so terribly happy’ to see him. Indeed, Olga was desolate when even

a day passed without her spending time with the object of her affec-

tion and she snatched at the slightest sight or word of him like the

lovesick teenager that she was. This experience went beyond the

usual light flirting and coquetry that she and Tatiana had been

indulging in for the last couple of years with the officers in the

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LORD, SEND HAPPINESS TO HIM

entourage. It was first love and it was painful. But it also had no

future whatsoever. None of the well-drilled officers in the
Shtandart
ever breached the strict, unwritten code of honour that they adhered

to in their relations with the daughters of the tsar. Voronov was

clearly attracted to Olga, touched by her attention and certainly

flattered; when the family left the ship for the White Palace, his

fellow officers noticed how he often pointed his binoculars in its

direction in hopes of catching a glimpse of her white dress on the

balcony. Olga did likewise from her own vantage point – perhaps

they had a private agreement to do so?39

Whatever Pavel Voronov might have felt in his heart, his tenta-

tive relationship with the tsar’s eldest daughter was love held firmly at bay: furtive, affectionate and confidential glances, occasional chats over tea on deck, games of tennis, sticking photographs in albums

together. There was even the occasional chance to partner her at

small informal dances on the deck of the
Shtandart
, such as that held to celebrate Olga’s eighteenth birthday, during which, as

everyone noticed, she danced a great deal with Voronov. By

December 1913, having spent the best part of five months in his

company Olga’s feelings had inevitably intensified and she began

confiding them in a special code – something her mother had done

during her own youth – using symbols similar to Georgian cursive.

Pavel was now ‘her tender darling’, suggesting a degree of reciprocal feeling on his part, and she was happier than she had ever been.40

And then, in September, a worrying note entered her diary entries.

Pavel was less in evidence. Olga would go several days without

seeing him: ‘It’s so abominable without my S.,
awful
’; even seeing her dear friend AKSH, who was on duty in the Escort at Livadia,

didn’t cheer her up.41 Life returned to the same predictable routine

of lessons in the morning, sitting with either her sick mama or

brother, playing tennis and going on occasional walks or horse rides.

From disappointment, to boredom, to petulance and finally

pretending she really didn’t care, Olga Nikolaevna ran the gamut

of feelings of any teenager in love. Her attention wandered in the

days without S and with typical, hormonal fickleness, she turned

her thoughts back to AKSH, using a new nickname for him – Shurik

– and reminding herself ‘what a sweetheart’ he was and how nice

he looked in uniform wearing ‘my favourite dark jacket’.42

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FOUR SISTERS

It turned out that during his time off, Pavel had been making

visits to the Kleinmikhels, close friends of the Romanov family who

had an estate at Koreiz. One day Countess Kleinmikhel was invited

to the White Palace to lunch. She arrived, bringing her young niece

Olga with her. Suddenly it all became clear; Pavel Voronov and

Olga Kleinmikhel were being steered in each other’s direction. When

Olga Nikolaevna saw him at a charity ball shortly after in October

she already sensed a distancing between them: ‘I saw my S once,

during the quadrille, our encounter was strange somehow, a bit sad,

I don’t know.’43 Soon after, with characteristic teenage sangfroid she announced: ‘I am used to S. not being here by now’, but oh how it

hurt when on 6 November, at a small dance at the White Palace,

she noticed that he ‘danced the entire time with Kleinmikhels [
sic
]’.44

She was miffed and several days later tried to shrug it off: ‘It’s good to see him and not good at the same time. Did not say a word to

him and don’t want to.’45 There were always games of hide-and-seek

in the palace with Shurik and Rodionov, during which she ‘horsed

around a lot’, and a trip to see a film in Yalta. But when she returned home it was the same depressing scenario: Alexey was crying because

his leg hurt; Mama was tired, and lying down and her heart was no.

2.46By December Olga had become scared of her feelings for S and

how they still dominated her thoughts and so it was as well that on

the 17th the family left Livadia, although this year, in particular, it was a wrench to go. ‘We all were left with such a longing for the

Crimea’, wrote Nicholas in his diary.47 For Olga it was ‘boring

without all the friends, the yacht, and S., of course’. And then, on

21 December, she heard the news: ‘I learned that S is to marry Olga

Kleinmichael [
sic
].’ Olga’s response was brief but dignified: ‘May the Lord grant happiness to him, my beloved.’48

Is it possible that Nicholas and Alexandra had deliberately

contrived the engagement of Pavel Voronov to Olga Kleinmikhel,

with a view to sparing Olga any further heartache in pursuing a

hopeless love match? It was patently clear to everyone – and must

have been to them – that she had fallen in love with him, though

Pavel’s true feelings for her are unknown. Perhaps he had sensed

that his close friendship with the grand duchess was beginning to

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LORD, SEND HAPPINESS TO HIM

overstep the permitted mark and that he should therefore fall on

his sword and remove himself from the frame. Nicholas and

Alexandra were certainly more than happy to give their warm

approval of his engagement to Olga Kleinmikhel, but for Olga

Nikolaevna it was hard and her response was to suppress the pain

she was feeling, even in her diary. Dealing with a broken heart was

one thing, but having to continue seeing Pavel with his fiancée was

quite another, as too was having to listen to her sisters excitedly

discussing their wedding to come at Tsarskoe Selo.

In January Aunt Ella arrived at Tsarskoe Selo with Countess

Kleinmikhel and Olga and ‘S’; only now S – Olga’s treasure, her

happiness – was the other Olga’s, ‘not mine!’ as she exclaimed in

her diary. ‘My heart aches, it’s painful, I don’t feel well and only

slept for an hour and a half.’49 That year Christmas was a sad one

for her. After visiting her grandmother at the Anichkov Palace and

presenting gifts to the officers of the Escort it was back to the same quiet routine, as the winter weather closed in on a bitter cold New

Year’s Eve at Tsarskoe Selo: ‘At 11 p.m. had tea with Papa and

Mama, and welcomed the New Year in the regimental church. I

thank God for everything. Snow blizzard. –9 degrees.’50

All of the Romanov family found Pavel Voronov’s wedding service

on 7 February 1914, at the regimental church at Tsarskoe Selo,

deeply moving. Olga kept her feelings to herself and did not even

unburden them in her diary:

At about 2:30, the three of us set out with Papa and Mama. We

drove to the regimental church for the wedding of P. A. Woronoff

and O. K. Kleinmichael at the regimental church. May the Lord

grant them happiness. They were both nervous. We made the

acquaintance of S’s parents and 2 sisters, sweet girls. We drove

to the Kleinmichael’s. There were many people at the reception

at the house.51

Immediately afterwards Pavel Voronov went on leave for two

months with his bride, after which he was transferred to the post

of commander of the watch on the imperial yacht
Aleksandriya
. Olga would still see Pavel from time to time at Tsarskoe Selo, and

continued to refer to him as ‘S’ in her diary, but her brief

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experience of real love was over. His wife later recalled that ‘of his four years’ service in the proximity of the imperial family Paul kept a sacred memory’. But Pavel Voronov remained the soul of discretion about his relationship with Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna;

it was a memory that he kept to himself until the day he died.52

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GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

N

The last great winter season of 1913–14 in St Petersburg was a

glittering one in the opinion of many who witnessed it – ‘even the

dowagers’ could not remember another like it.1 Coming at the end

of a successful Tercentary year, the succession of parties laid on by the greatest of Russia’s noble houses would mark the ‘sunset of the

dynasty’, as Edith Almedingen recalled – ‘a sunset splendid enough

to win a lodgment in the memory’.2 Such unbridled splendour was

of course confined to the playgrounds of the super-rich, who spent

the season dissipating their crippling ennui in a ‘vortex of worldly

gaiety’ during which they ‘scarcely saw the daylight for weeks at a

time during the six hours of the winter’s sunshine’.3 Behind the

façades of their overheated, luxurious palaces and browsing in the

high-class shops along the Nevsky Prospekt filled with Western

luxury goods, the Russian aristocracy remained stubbornly oblivious

to the visible unrest gathering across the city, fuelled by poverty,