The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (45 page)

of whom sported splendid moustaches – to arrive at the annexe

during the war.

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Tatiana meanwhile had fallen for the boyish charm of the clean-

shaven Staff Captain Dmitri Malama, a Kuban Cossack from her

own regiment of Uhlans who already was something of a legend

for his gallantry in rescuing a fellow officer under fire. All of the sisters liked Malama and found him incredibly sweet and good-natured. Fellow patient Ivan Stepanov vividly remembered the ‘fair

haired and ruddy cheeked’ young officer, so modest and with such

dedication to his regiment, who was tormented by the fact that he

was lying in hospital ‘enjoying his life’ while others were out there fighting.42 Tatiana first dressed his wounds on 26 September; she

was incredibly proud of her Uhlans and within days was sitting on

Malama’s bed at every opportunity, chatting and looking at photo-

graph albums, much as her sister was doing with Karangozov, for

the two men shared the same ward. Often in the evenings they

would sing, with Olga playing the piano for them, making their

ward, according to Stepanov, the noisiest and liveliest at the annexe.43

Such evenings became the highlight of Olga and Tatiana’s day, but

like Maria and Anastasia they were always delighted to catch up

with other old army friends who arrived on tours of duty. Men such

as Olga’s old favourite AKSH, now posted with the 1st squadron of

the Tsar’s Escort, who seemed as ‘sweet’ as ever, and his fellow

officer, Staff Captain Viktor Zborovsky, the tsar’s favourite tennis

partner, for whom Anastasia was showing clear signs of devoted

puppy love.

With their daily routine becoming increasingly mundane and

largely restricted to Tsarskoe Selo, bad news from the front made

all the girls, particularly Olga, fearful for their father, but they always felt themselves to be in safe hands with the officers of the Escort.

In Aunt Olga’s absence nursing in Rovno, Anna Vyrubova had taken

to inviting the four sisters to tea with these officers at her house

near the Alexander Palace. ‘At 4 we had tea at Anna’s with Zborovsky

and Sh[vedov] – the darling’, noted Olga on 12 October. ‘So glad

at last to see each other and chatted happily.’ Tatiana was particularly pleased that same day to be able to talk on the phone to Dmitri

Malama, who had enlisted Anna to buy Tatiana a special gift from

him – ‘a little French bulldog . . . it’s unbelievably sweet. I’m so

happy.’44 She named the dog Ortipo – after Malama’s cavalry horse.45

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In advance of Ortipo’s arrival, she wrote one of her typical apologetic notes to her mother:

Mama darling mine,

Forgive me about the little dog. To say the truth, when he

asked should I like to have it if he gave it me, I at once said yes.

You remember, I always wanted to have one, and only afterwards

when we came home I thought that suddenly you might not like

me having one . . . Please, darling angel, forgive me . . . 1000

kisses from your devoted daughter . . . Say, darling, you are not

angry.

Ortipo was soon running riot at the palace; she was mischievous

and disruptive (and before long pregnant), but she arrived at a

fortuitous time, for Alexey’s own dog Shot died not long after and

she was a companion for Anastasia’s dog Shvybzik. Ortipo’s puppies,

however, proved to be ‘small and ugly’ and the family did not keep

them.46 Sadly for Tatiana, Dmitri Malama recovered all too quickly

from his wounds. He was discharged from the annexe on 23 October;

‘Poor me, it’s so awful’, was as much as she could bring herself to

write in her diary.47

On 4 November the Sisters Romanova took their final exams in

surgery and two days later, along with forty-two other sisters, were

issued with their nursing certificates at Red Cross headquarters in

Tsarskoe Selo. By this time Alexandra had already set up around

seventy hospitals across the town and its environs.48 Work in the

military hospitals had, by the beginning of 1915, recalled Sydney

Gibbes, ‘become the centre of their life and their engrossing occu-

pation’, for all four Romanov sisters. To some extent, as was inevi-

table, the education of the younger two suffered ‘but the experience

was so vitalizing that the sacrifice was certainly worth the making’.49

As Anastasia wrote with enthusiasm to her teacher PVP at the time:

‘This afternoon we all went for a ride, went to church and to the

hospital, and that’s it! And now we have to go eat dinner and then

to the hospital again, and this is our life, yes!’50

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WE CANNOT DROP OUR WORK IN

THE HOSPITALS

N

In January 1915 an additional burden of concern was placed on the

shoulders of the Romanov sisters when Anna Vyrubova was very

seriously injured in a railway accident on the line between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo. She was brought to the annexe in a desperate

state with a dislocated shoulder, double fracture of her left leg,

lacerations to the right one and head and spine injuries. She was

not expected to live. Her elderly parents arrived; Tatiana met them

in tears, and gently escorted them down the corridor. Valentina

Chebotareva remembered that night vividly:

They sent for Grigory. I thought this was terrible, but I could

not sit in judgment on another. The woman is dying, she believes

in Grigory, in his saintliness, in [his] prayers. He arrived in a

state of fright, his dishevelled beard shaking, his mouselike eyes

flitting back and forth. He grasped Vera Ignateva [Dr Gedroits]

by the hand: ‘She’ll live, she’ll live’. But as she herself later told me: ‘I decided to play the priest at his own game, thought for a

moment and then said solemnly: ‘Thank you, but I will save her.’

Gedroits’s response did not go unnoticed by Nicholas who was

home from Stavka at the time: ‘Each to his own’, he said, giving

Gedroits a wry smile.1 He spoke with the doctor for some time that

evening, as Valentina recalled. It seemed clear to both women that

the tsar ‘without doubt did not believe in either Grigory’s saintliness
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or his powers, but put up with him, like a sick person when exhausted by suffering clutches at straws’. But Grigory himself had been visibly drained by the experience of willing Anna’s recovery. He always later claimed that he had ‘raised Annushka from the dead’, for against

the odds she did indeed recover.2

After six weeks’ dedicated care Anna was able to return home

but her recuperation was a long one and she was disabled by her

injuries for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, early that year, having driven herself relentlessly since day one of the war in the face of

her already unstable health, Alexandra broke down completely. Dr

Botkin ordered her to bed for six weeks. ‘The nursing in the hospital and assisting at operations, tending and binding up the most hideous

wounds,’ Alexandra explained to a friend, ‘is all less tiring than for hours visiting hospitals and talking with the poor wounded.’ She

struggled to carry on with some of her work at the annexe, ‘Coming

as privately and unexpectedly as possible, but it does not often

succeed . . . One’s greatest comfort is being with the dear wounded

and I miss my hospitals awfully.’3 When her energies failed her,

Alexandra read and composed reports from her sickbed, meanwhile

taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heartdrops.’4*

For the next few weeks, in addition to their nursing duties at the

hospital, Olga and Tatiana would spend their days visiting Anna and

often sitting with their mother or Alexey, who was suffering recur-

ring pain in his arms from overdoing it when playing. Moments of

private pleasure were increasingly rare, but when she could Tatiana

would escape in the afternoons on her own to go riding. In the

evenings, while her other sisters often sat playing board games or

the gramophone, or Anastasia fussed round the two dogs – clearing

up after their numerous accidents – Tatiana would sit quietly and

read poetry. She found her mother’s latest indisposition hard to take and constantly tormented herself that she was not doing enough to

support her: ‘Mama, sweet, I am so awfully sad. I see so little of

you . . . It doesn’t matter if sisters go earlier to bed – I’ll remain.

For me it is better to sleep less and see more of you, my beloved

one.’ ‘In such moments,’ she told Alexandra, ‘I am sorry I’m not a

man.’5 She was now having to draw on all her strength of character

to deal with the many duties required of her, as she told Nicholas

in May:

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Today I was in the hospital dressing the wounds of this poor

unfortunate soldier with amputations of his tongue and ears. He’s

young and has a lovely face, from the Orenburg district and

cannot speak at all, so wrote down how it all had happened to

him, which Mama asked me to send on to you . . . and he was

very happy. Princess Gedroits hopes that he will in time be able

to speak, as only half his tongue had to be amputated. He is in

a lot of pain. He has lost the top of his right ear, and the bottom

of his left one. I am so sorry for the poor man. After lunch Mama

and I went into Petrograd to the Supreme Council. We sat for

an hour and a half – it was dreadfully boring . . . then Mama

and I went all round the supply depot. And we’ve only just got

back now at 5.30.6

Alexandra was convinced that their committee work was ‘so good

for the girls’; it would teach them to become independent and would

‘develop them much more having to think and speak for themselves

without my constant aid’.7 It seems strange that, believing this, she had not allowed her daughters a greater role in society sooner; had

she done so they would not still be grappling with the intense self-

consciousness they suffered chairing committee meetings. Tatiana

said these meetings made her want ‘to dive under the table from

fright’. As for Olga, in addition to her mother’s interminable meet-

ings at the Supreme Council, she had to sit and take donations every

week, which Alexandra thought equally good for her: ‘she will get

accustomed to see people and hear what is going [on]’, she told

Nicholas, though she sometimes despaired of her: ‘She is a clever

child but does not use her brains enough.’8

With the arrival of spring in 1915, the family could not but

ruefully cast their minds back on how life had been before the war.

It was still snowing at Tsarskoe Selo in mid-April but one of their

friends in Livadia had sent them gifts of Crimean flowers – glycinia, golden rain, purple irises, anemones and peonies. ‘To see them in

one’s vases makes me quite melancholy’, Alix told Nicky, ‘Does it

not seem strange, hatred and bloodshed and all the horrors of war

– and there simply Paradise, sunshine and flowers and peace . . .

Dear me, how much has happened since the peaceful, homely life

in the fjords!’9 They all longed for their usual visit to the Crimea.

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But duty was paramount, as Tatiana told Pavel Voronov’s wife Olga

in June: ‘It’s the first summer that we are not going to live in

Peterhof. We cannot drop our work in the hospitals. It would be

distressing to live there and to think that there will be no yacht and no skerries. It’s a pity there is no sea here.’10

The girls had from time to time still seen Pavel and Olga when

they had visited Tsarskoe Selo, but the sad summer of 1913 and all

the heartache attached to it had now faded for Olga, whose thoughts

since the end of May had been increasingly revolving around a new

arrival at the annexe: Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, a Georgian adjutant in

the Life Grenadiers of the Erevan Regiment. This was one of the

oldest and most prestigious regiments in the Russian army and the

dearest to the imperial family after the Escort. But Dmitri’s stay was short: ‘After supper spoke on the phone to Shakh-Bagov and said

goodbye as he is going back to his regiment tomorrow’, Olga wrote

in her diary on 22 June. ‘I’m so sorry for him the darling, it’s terrible, he is so sweet.’11 Tatiana also had a favourite patient from the same regiment – an ensign from Azerbaijan called Sergey Melik-Adamov.

He had the archetypal swarthy looks and large moustache of his

predecessors, but his fellow patients found his pockmarked face

unattractive and his loud jokes something of an embarrassment.12

Dmitri Shakh-Bagov’s departure had a marked and immediate

effect: ‘Dear Olga Nikolavna became sad,’ recalled another patient,

Ivan Belyaev, ‘her cheeks lost their usual ruddiness, and her eyes

darkened with tears.’13 Soon afterwards, Dmitri’s commanding officer

Konstantin Popov was brought in wounded and joined Melik-