The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (54 page)

That afternoon Alexandra received Viktor Zborovsky, one of the

most trusted officers of the Escort protecting the palace. She thanked him for his continuing loyalty and reiterated that no blood should

be shed in protecting the family. As Zborovsky was leaving Maria

stopped him and they ended up chatting for an hour. He was deeply

moved by the great change in her during recent days. ‘Nothing

remained of the former young girl’, he told his colleagues later; in

front of him stood ‘a serious sensible woman, who was responding

in a deep and thoughtful way to what was going on.’86 But the strain

of it all was telling on her. That evening Lili heard the sound of

weeping and went to look: ‘In one corner of the room crouched

the Grand Duchess Marie. She was as pale as her mother. She
knew

all! . . . She was so young, so helpless, so hurt.’87 ‘Mama cried

terribly’, Maria told Anna Vyrubova, when she visited her sickbed

to talk about her father’s abdication. ‘I cried too, but not more than I could help, for poor Mama’s sake’; but Maria was terrified that

they would come and take her mother away.88 Such ‘proud fortitude’

was but one instance of what Anna later recalled was ‘shown all

through those days of wreck and disaster by the Empress and her

children’.89

Cornet S. V. Markov was another loyal officer allowed in to see

Alexandra that day. He entered via the basement, which he remem-

bered was full of soldiers of the Combined Regiments taking a break

from the cold, and was taken upstairs through many rooms still full

of the lingering fragrance of flowers. In the children’s apartments

he came to a door on which was fixed a piece of paper on which

was written ‘No entry without the permission of Olga and Tatiana’.90

A big table in the middle of the room was covered with French and

English magazines, scissors and water-colours, where Alexey had

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been cutting out and pasting pictures before his illness. Alexandra

came in and surprised him by saying, ‘Hello dear little Markov.’ She

was dressed in her nurse’s white, ‘her sunken eyes very tired from

sleepless nights and fear, expressive of unbearable suffering’. During their conversation she asked Markov to remove his imperial insignia

– rather than have some drunken soldier on the street tear them

from his jacket – and to tell his fellow officers to do likewise. She thanked them all for their loyalty and made the sign of the cross

over him as he left.91

Alexandra was right to be fearful for the loyal troops still guarding her since they did so at increasing risk to themselves. They all took the news of the emperor’s abdication very hard. None more so than

Viktor Zborovsky: ‘Something incomprehensible, savage, unreal had

happened that was impossible to take in’, he wrote in his diary on

4 March. ‘The ground fell away from under one’s feet . . . It had

happened . . . and there was nothing! Empty, dark . . . It was as

though the soul had taken flight from a still living body.’92 For the last couple of days, in an attempt to demoralize those out at Tsarskoe Selo, a false rumour had been put about in Petrograd that the men

of the Escort had defected. But this was far from the truth. When

Alexandra at last made contact with Nicholas on the 4th one of the

first to hear the news from her was Viktor Zborovsky. She wanted

to reassure him that despite the pernicious rumours, she was in no

doubt of the Escort’s loyalty and that she and Nicholas ‘were right

to look upon the Cossacks as our true friends’. She also asked him,

as she had Markov, to tell the officers of the Escort to remove their imperial insignia. ‘Do this for me,’ she urged, ‘or I will once more

be blamed for everything, and the children might suffer as a result.’93

The men of the Escort took this instruction hard when Zborovsky

brought it: for them it was a deeply dishonourable act and some of

them wept and refused to comply: ‘What kind of Russia is it without

the tsar?’ they asked.94 Honour, for the Escort, died hard and they

were prepared to defend theirs to the death.

On 5 March Princess Helena tried to telephone Alexandra at the

palace, only to find that the lines had been cut. With no telephones, no trains to Tsarskoe Selo, palace supplies of food and wood dwin-dling, no electricity or running water, domestic staff defecting and

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a crowd of curious and increasingly belligerent onlookers gathering

outside the palace gates the situation was becoming very dangerous

for Alexandra and the children: ‘A curtain of bayonets separated the

Imperial Family from the living world.’95 Lili Dehn noticed that

Alexandra was now sometimes smoking cigarettes to ease her stress.

It wasn’t until 5 March that Valentina Chebotareva at the annexe

finally saw news of the abdication in the papers. ‘At the hospital it is as silent as the grave’, she noted. ‘Everyone is shaken, downcast.

Vera Ignatievna [Gedroits] was sobbing like a helpless child. We

really were waiting for a constitutional monarchy and suddenly the

throne has been handed to the people. In the future – a republic.’96

Alexandra was now urging all of her entourage that they had the

right to leave if they so wished. But even Lili Dehn refused to desert her, insisting she would stay ‘no matter what’.97 She feared she would never see Titi again, nor her husband, who was away on a military

mission to England, but she was determined not to desert her

empress. Iza Buxhoeveden, Nastenka Hendrikova and Trina

Schneider – as well as the ever-present Dr Botkin and Count and

Countess Benkendorf – all rallied round as well. Anna Vyrubova

was still lying ill in the other wing of the palace, but her moral

support at this time was crucial, as too was that of Elizaveta

Naryshkina who had at last managed to get back to Tsarskoe Selo

from Petrograd. ‘Oh such emotional turmoil!’ she wrote of their

reunion:

I was with the empress: calm, very sweet, much largesse of spirit.

It strikes me that she has not quite grasped that what has happened

cannot be put right. She told me: ‘God is stronger than people.’

They have all endured extreme danger and now it is as though

order has been reestablished. She does not understand that there

are consequences to all mistakes, and especially her own . . . the

condition of the sick children is still serious.98

It was around 7 March that Alexandra regretfully decided, on

the urging of Lili Dehn, to begin the systematic destruction of all

her letters and diaries.99 Lili was worried that if they fell into the wrong hands they might easily be misinterpreted, or worse be

deemed treasonous and used against her and Nicholas. And so, over

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the course of the following week, the two women sat together day

after day in the girls’ sitting room, taking great piles of letters from a huge oak chest in which Alexandra had stored them and burning

them in the fireplace. All of Alexandra’s most treasured letters from her grandmother Queen Victoria, her brother Ernie and many other

relatives were ruthlessly consigned to the flames, but the hardest of all to part with were undoubtedly the hundreds of letters she had

received from Nicky since the day of their engagement in 1894.

Occasionally she stopped to read parts of them and weep before

tossing them into the flames. And then too there were her many

diaries, satin-covered ones dating from her childhood and the later

leather-bound ones, which even now she was still keeping.
*
Everything remorselessly was turned to ash – with one exception: Nicky’s letters to her from Stavka during the war years, which Alexandra was

determined to preserve as proof, should it be needed, of their undying loyalty to Russia.100 But on Thursday the 9th one of Alexandra’s

maids came in and ‘begged us to discontinue’ as Lili recalled. The

half-charred papers were being carried up the chimney and settling

on the ground outside where some of the men were picking them

up and reading them.101

In the sickroom, signs of recovery among the children were slow

to come. Although Alexey was improving and his temperature drop-

ping, Olga now was suffering from one of the complications of

measles, encephalitis – inflammation of the brain – and Anastasia’s

temperature was worryingly high. And then on the evening of the

7th the inevitable happened: Maria began to feel unwell and soon

was running a temperature of 39 degrees C (over 102 degrees F).

‘“Oh I did so want to be up when Papa comes,” she kept on repeating,

until high fever set in and she lost consciousness.’102

On Wednesday 8 March Alexandra finally received news of

Nicholas from Count Benkendorf – that he was safe and back at

Mogilev, and would be returning to the Alexander Palace the

following morning. At midday, General Lavr Kornilov, Commander-

in-Chief of the Petrograd military district, arrived in the company

* Alexandra took her current diary with her to Tobolsk and continued writing it until the night before her death in July 1918. These diaries were recovered after the family were murdered and are now in the Russian State Archives, GARF.

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of Colonel Evgeny Kobylinsky, newly appointed head of the military

garrison at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Kornilov announced that we are shut up

. . . From now [we] are considered pris[oners] . . . may see nobody

fr[om] outside’, Alexandra noted dispassionately.103 As Benkendorf

understood it at the time, the imperial couple would only be under

arrest until the children had recovered, after which ‘the Emperor’s

family would be sent to Murmansk [an ice-free port on Russia’s

extreme north-west border] where a British cruiser would await

them and take them to England’.104 This was the hoped-for swift

resolution to the problem of what to do with the former tsar,

announced by the new Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky, in

Moscow the previous day, and in response to an initial offer of help

from King George V. ‘I will never be the Marat of the Russian

Revolution’, Kerensky had grandly declared, but the hopes of a

speedy and safe evacuation of the imperial family would soon prove

to be a pipe dream.105

That morning Elizaveta Naryshkina had gone to church, during

which the congregation had hissed when prayers were said for the

tsar. When she got back to the palace Benkendorf told her:

We are arrested. We do not have the right either to go out of

the palace, or telephone; we are only allowed to write via the

Central Committee. We are waiting for the Emperor. The

Empress asked to have prayers said for the Emperor’s return trip.

Refused!106

Those in the entourage who wanted to leave, Kornilov told

Alexandra that morning, had only forty-eight hours to do so; after

that they too would be under house arrest. Many left hurriedly soon

after in a ‘veritable orgy of cowardice and stupidity, and a sickening display of shabby, contemptible disloyalty’, recalled Dr Botkin’s son Gleb.107 Dr Ostrogorsky, the children’s paediatrician, sent word that he ‘found the roads too dirty’ to get out to Tsarskoe Selo any more.108

Much to his dismay Sydney Gibbes, who had been in Petrograd for

the day on the 10th – his day off – was not allowed back into the

palace. Even worse, however, was the news that the men of the

Escort and Combined Regiments were to be sent away and replaced

by 300 troops of the 1st Rifles, sent by the provisional government.

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Although Maria already knew the truth, it was no longer possible

for Alexandra to keep the news of their father’s abdication from the

other children. They took it calmly, although Anastasia resented the

fact that her mother and Lili had not told them, but ‘as Papa is

coming, nothing else matters’.109 Tatiana was still so deaf from the

otitis brought on by her measles that Iza Buxhoeveden noticed that

‘she could not follow her mother’s rapid words, her voice rendered

husky with emotion. Her sisters had to write down the details before

she could understand.’110 It was a bewildered and downcast Alexey,

now on the mend, who was full of questions. ‘Shall I never go to

G.H.Q. again with Papa?’ he asked his mother. ‘Shan’t I see my

regiments and my soldiers? . . . And the yacht, and all my friends

on board – shall we never go yachting any more?’ ‘No’ she replied.

‘We shall never see the “Standart” . . . It doesn’t belong to us now.’111

The boy was concerned too about the future of the autocracy. ‘But

who’s going to be tsar, then?’ he quizzed Pierre Gilliard. When his

tutor responded that probably no one would be, it was only logical

that he should then ask: ‘But if there isn’t a Tsar, who’s going to

govern Russia?’112

Wednesday 8 March was an intensely melancholy day for