The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (52 page)

exchanged New Year greetings but Pierre Gilliard had no doubt

that they had all entered a period of ‘dreadful waiting for the disaster which there was no escaping’.30 A last gasp of imperial ceremonial

came during an official visit by Prince Carol of Romania and his

parents, their country having finally entered the war on the side of

Russia and its allies.31 Alexandra decided to take advantage of a rare state dinner – held in Carol’s honour on the 9th – to present Maria

officially to the court. She and Nicholas still viewed their third

daughter, albeit affectionately, as chubby and gawky; the previous

evening the girls had all been trying on dresses and according to

Tatiana ‘Maria had got so fat that she couldn’t get into any of them’.32

She had long taken her family’s teasing with good heart and this

occasion was no exception. ‘She looked extremely pretty in her pale

blue dress, wearing the diamonds that her parents gave to each of

their daughters on her sixteenth birthday’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden, but unfortunately ‘Poor Maria slipped in her new high heels and

fell when entering the dining hall on the arm of a tall Grand Duke’.

‘On hearing the noise, the Emperor remarked jokingly, “Of course,

*

A source of protection.

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fat Marie.”’ After her sister had ‘fallen over with a thud with all her might’, as Tatiana recalled, she had sat there on the floor laughing

‘to the point of embarrassment’. Indeed the whole occasion turned

out to be quite amusing: ‘After dinner papa slipped on the parquet

floor, [and] one of the Romanians knocked over a cup of coffee.’33

But it had all washed over Olga, who, still thinking of Mitya, had

noted her former patient’s twenty-fourth birthday in her diary.

Valentina Chebotareva thought she had seemed particularly sad of

late. ‘Is that the fault of your guests?’ Chebotareva had asked her.

‘Oh, there’s no threat of that now, while there’s a war’, Olga had

added, alluding to the unspoken suggestion of a marriage.34 Elizaveta Naryshkina had rather hoped that an engagement between Olga

and Carol still might take place, for she found him ‘charming’. But

Anna Vyrubova had noticed that Prince Carol’s ‘young man’s fancy

[had] rested on Marie’ at that dinner, despite her clumsy behaviour.

Before he left for Moscow on 26th January, Carol made a formal

proposal for her hand. Nicholas had ‘good-naturedly laughed the

Prince’s proposal aside’, saying that his seventeen-year-old daughter

‘was nothing more than a schoolgirl’.35 At Carol’s final lunch with

the family Elizaveta Naryshkina noticed how markedly the four

sisters kept their distance from him and only Nicholas made any

effort at conversation.36 Behind the scenes, however Carol’s mother,

Marie – now Queen of Romania – had had her hopes renewed the

day of their departure from Russia, when she and her husband King

Ferdinand had received ‘ciphered telegrams from Russia’. ‘It seems

they still think about a marriage for Carol with one of Nicky’s

daughters,’ she confided to her diary. She was surprised and grati-

fied; ‘one would have thought about it now when our poor little

Country hardly exists, now when we have not even a house of our

own left. But on the whole it is flattering and might be taken as a

good sign!’ the only problem was Carol himself: “I do not at all

know if he wants to marry.’37

Two of the last private visitors to the Alexander Palace were the

head of the Anglo-Russian Hospital, Lady Sybil Grey, and Dorothy

Seymour. Having been in Petrograd since September 1916, Dorothy

had been excited to be sent an official invitation to meet the tsaritsa,
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telling her mother that ‘It will be too annoying if they start a revolution before I have time to get down to see her’.38 When she and

Lady Sybil took the train out to Tsarskoe Selo, Dorothy found the

whole experience, despite the difficult times, an ‘amazing fairytale’.39

They were met at the station ‘by gorgeous officials, footmen, horses

all white and prancing – Great State – At the palace door two

glorious footmen with huge orange and red ostrich plumes on their

heads.’40After being entertained to lunch by Iza Buxhoeveden and

Nastenka Hendrikova the two women were taken ‘through miles of

palace and a huge banqueting room’ to a door that was opened ‘by

a huge negro’ and ushered in to meet Alexandra and Olga. The

empress, wearing purple velvet and ‘huge amethysts’, seemed to

Dorothy ‘quite lovely’ and ‘wonderfully graceful’. But there was

something haunted about her ‘desperately sad eyes’. Olga, in her

nurse’s uniform, seemed very plain in comparison. ‘Pretty eyes. Nice

little thing, very pleasant and informal’, recalled Dorothy. They sat and talked for almost two hours, at the end of which she came away

impressed by Olga’s spirituality and sensitivity. She was ‘evidently a pacifist, and the war and its horrors [were] on her nerves’. Dorothy

left with a sense of sadness and the overwhelming feeling that the

room they had sat in – and the palace itself – were already ‘heavy

with tragedy’.41

*

The spectre of illness continued to dog the imperial family that

winter; Alexandra was still suffering with her heart and legs and

Alexey had recurring pain in his arm, and then swollen glands.

Shortly after Dorothy Seymour’s visit the still sickly Olga had gone

down with a painful ear infection. The two invalids had been sharing

the same room when, on 11 February, a couple of young cadets

whom Alexey had befriended at Stavka had been brought in to play

with him. Olga had remained in the room with them, and Alexandra

had noticed that one of the boys was coughing; the following day

he went down with measles.42 By 21 February, Olga and Alexey both

seemed unwell, but the doctors assured Nicholas that it was not

measles, and he began packing for a return to Stavka. He had not

wanted to leave Tsarskoe at this time, mindful of the gathering

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danger since Rasputin’s murder of a possible coup against him. The

warnings had been coming thick and fast from his own relatives,

including his brother-in-law Sandro, who visited and begged

Nicholas to concede to a proper, democratically elected Duma free

of imperial interference; ‘with a few words and a stroke of the pen,

you could calm everything and give the country what it yearns for’,

he urged. To Sandro it was clear that Alexandra’s constant meddling

in affairs of state was ‘dragging her husband into an abyss’. Even

now she bridled at any talk of capitulation: ‘Nicky is an autocrat.

How could he share his divine right with a parliament?’43 And now

Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Mikhail was warning of imminent

mutiny in the army if the tsar did not immediately return to Stavka.

Nicholas listened to Sandro passively, as he always did, lighting one cigarette after another. He had no stomach for a fight, either with

his relatives, his wife, or his government. His life was in the hands of God and he had long since abandoned all responsibility for it.

Reluctant to leave the family, he nevertheless prepared to go. A

highly strained atmosphere prevailed over lunch the day he left.

Everyone seemed anxious and ‘wanted to think more than talk’.44

No sooner had a drawn and hollow-cheeked Nicholas said fare-

well than it became clear not only that Olga and Alexey were coming

down with measles, but that Anna Vyrubova too had been infected

– and seriously so. On 24 February Tatiana joined them in the

darkened sickroom, where their devoted mother wearing her Red

Cross nurse’s uniform nursed her three children.45 All had terrible

coughs and were suffering from headaches and earache as their

temperatures rocketed.46 Despite the seriousness of their condition

Nicholas was already discussing the children’s recuperation with Dr

Federov at Stavka. He wrote and told Alexandra that the doctor

considered it ‘absolutely necessary for the children and Aleksei

especially [to have] a change of climate after their complete recovery’.

Perhaps, soon after Easter, he told Alexandra, they could take them

to the Crimea? ‘We will think it over quietly when I come back.

. . . I won’t be long away – only to put all things as much as possible to rights here and then my duty will be done.’47

*

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FOUR SISTERS

In the grip of deep snow and remorseless sub-zero temperatures,

Petrograd that winter of 1916–17 was a desperate place. The trans-

port system was in disarray due to fuel shortages; a lack of labour,

horses and implements was affecting the production and transporta-

tion of food. There was no flour, and long queues could be seen

everywhere for what little bread was baked; virtually no meat was

to be had and sugar and butter could only be got on the black

market. There was no wood for fuel and the streets were piled high

with garbage. Talk of revolution was on everyone’s lips. Petrograd

was doomed, a
Chertograd –
‘Devil’s town’, as poet Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary:

The most frightening and crude rumours are disturbing the

masses. It is a charged, neurotic atmosphere. You can almost

hear the laments of the refugees in the air. Each day is drenched

in catastrophes. What is going to happen? It is intolerable.

‘Things cannot go on like this’ an old cab-driver says.48

The ‘first claps of thunder’ were heard with riots and protests

in the workers’ districts of the Vyborg Side and Vasilievsky Island.49

Soon hungry crowds were marching along the Nevsky Prospekt as

bakeries and food shops came under attack. By 25 February, and

with a lift in the temperature, street disturbances were becoming

widespread and violent, with acts of arson, looting and the lynching

of policemen. The capital was seething with strikers. At the Alexandra Palace the tsaritsa remained convinced that none of this posed a

serious threat. Bread rationing was all that was needed to bring the

situation under control. ‘It’s a hooligan movement,’ she wrote to

Nicholas, ‘young boys and girls running about and screaming that

they have no bread; only to excite . . . if it were very cold they

would probably stay indoors. But this will all pass and quieten down, if the Duma would only behave itself.’50 Meanwhile she was proud

to tell him that his two youngest daughters ‘call themselves the

sick-nurses –
sidelki
– chatter without end and telephone right and left. They are most useful.’ The lift at the palace had stopped working and Alexandra was increasingly relying on Maria to do the running

around that she could not manage, affectionately calling her ‘my

legs’.51 But she was expecting both her younger daughters inevitably

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to succumb to the measles. Alexey was now covered in one great

ugly rash, ‘like a leopard – Olga has flat spots, Ania too all over, all their eyes and [their] throats ache’.52

By the 27th, a day of ‘street brawls, bombs, shootings and

numerous wounded and dead’, shouts of ‘Bread, victory!’ and ‘Down

with the War!’ could be heard everywhere on the streets of

Petrograd.53 Nicholas could not leave Stavka and meanwhile his

children’s temperatures had reached 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees

F) or more.54 With measles spreading at the Alexander Palace and

unrest raging in the city, Alexandra struggled to maintain her equi-

librium, still convinced that the disturbances, like the sickness, would pass; but the strain of it was ageing her and her hair was turning

grey. ‘Terrible things are going on in St Petersburg’, she confided

in her diary, shocked to hear that regiments she had always thought

loyal to the throne – the Preobrazhensk and the Pavlovsk Guards

– were even now mutinying.55 She was therefore greatly cheered by

the arrival of Lili Dehn who had bravely come out to Tsarskoe Selo

to offer moral support, leaving her son behind in the city with her

maid. But by 10 p.m. that evening a message came from Duma

chairman Mikhail Rodzianko advising that Alexandra and the chil-

dren be evacuated from the Alexander Palace immediately. ‘When

the house is burning,’ he had told Count Benkendorf, Minister of

the Court, ‘you take the children to safety, even if they are ill.’56

Benkendorf immediately telephoned Mogilev and informed Nicholas.

But the tsar was adamant: his family should stay put and wait until

he could get back, which he hoped would be on the morning of 1

March.57

*

Many years later, Meriel Buchanan recalled the ‘deathlike stillness of Petrograd’ on the eve of revolution. ‘There were the same wide streets we knew so well, the same palaces, the same golden spires and domes

rising out of the pearl-coloured mists, and yet they all seemed unreal and strange as if I had never seen them before. And everywhere empti-ness: no long lines of carts, no crowded trams, no
isvostchiks
,
*
no private