The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (58 page)

felt the same: ‘We often hear the bells of the good cathedral and

feel so sad,’ she told Katya on 4 July, ‘but it is always nice to

remember the good times, right?’ She wondered all the time about

Viktor and the other officers and how they were all doing.77 ‘This

time last year we were in Mogilev’, she recalled wistfully on the

12th. ‘It was so nice there, as well as the last time we were there in November! We constantly think and talk about you all.’ There were,

she said, one or two amusing or interesting things she would have

liked to tell Katya, but she could not write about it in her letters:

‘you surely understand this, don’t you?’ By now, as Count Benkendorf

recalled, even the accommodating Korovichenko had begun to

complain about the ‘enormous correspondence of the young Grand

Duchesses, which took up a great deal of his time and prevented

him from delivering us our correspondence as quickly as he might’.78

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One of the highlights of family life, aside from receiving letters,

was occasional showings of Alexey’s collection of cinematographs,

thanks to the gift of a projector and a large number of films made

to him by Pathé during the war. Otherwise, evening entertainment

was confined to Nicholas reading aloud. During the five months of

their incarceration at the Alexander Palace, he got through a consid-

erable number of popular French and English novels: Alexander

Dumas’s
Comte de Monte-Cristo
and
Alphonse Daudet’s adventure stories
Tartarin de Tarascon
and
Tartarin sur les Alpes
; Gaston Leroux’s popular
Le mystère de la chambre jaune
was a great favourite, but undoubtedly the most popular were Conan Doyle’s stories –
The

Poison Belt
,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,
A Study in Scarlet
and
The
Valley of Fear.

Such diversions into adventure and fantasy served only to distract

the family for a short while from the realities of their imprisonment.

As the stifling heat of summer gathered – a time when they would

have been enjoying the sea breezes at Peterhof or the Crimea –

‘Tsarskoe was a
dead
place. Its windows were almost hidden by the straggling branches of the unclipped trees,’ recalled Lili Dehn, ‘grass grew between the stones of its silent courtyard.’ Shortly before

leaving Petrograd, she had managed to get out there to try and

catch sight of the family: ‘I walked to and fro gazing up at the

windows, but those within the Palace gave no sign of life. I wanted

to call aloud that I was there, but I dared not imperil their safety

or my own’.79 Valentina Chebotareva too was complaining of the

inertia of the town; it had entirely changed in character and lost all its pride and vigour. Now all you could see were soldiers wandering

around aimlessly, chewing sunflower seeds, lounging on the grass.

They had taken the fish from the ponds and trampled all the flower-

beds in the public gardens. ‘We hear little of the children now’, she wrote sadly. ‘Over there they live a monotonous life. The children

amuse each other, Olga and Maria with history . . . They dig in the

garden, have planted carrots themselves.’ ‘Yesterday,’ as they told

her, ‘we went a little way on our bicycles. In the evenings we gather together and Papa reads aloud. Alexey walks with Papa a lot more’

– that was the sum total of their lives. As for their mother – she

was ‘think[ing] only of the past’.80 The increasingly religiose tone

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of Alexandra’s letters was evidence of her determined withdrawal

from the real world into a mystical contemplation of death and

redemption. The Bible and the scriptures, she said, provided her

with the answers to all of life’s questions and she was proud of her

children’s responsiveness: ‘they understand many deep things – their

souls are growing through suffering.’81 Suffering had become the

family’s
métier
; God, she knew, would crown them for it.

On her sixteenth birthday on 5 June Anastasia received ‘a pair

of earrings, and my ears were pierced’, she told Katya, though ‘this

is, so to say, small news’.82 But this was soon spoiled by the loss of all her hair. Ever since their attack of measles, all the girls had found their hair was falling out in great hanks – Maria’s especially – and

early in July they had to have their heads shaved. A day later Alexey did likewise, in sympathy. Pierre Gilliard captured their stoical

response in his diary and on camera:

When they go out in the park they wear scarves arranged so as

to conceal the fact. Just as I was going to take their photographs,

at a sign from Olga Nicolaievna [
sic
] they all suddenly removed their headdress. I protested, but they insisted, much amused at

the idea of seeing themselves photographed like this, and looking

forward to seeing the indignant surprise of their parents.

Gilliard was comforted to see that ‘their good spirits reappear

from time to time in spite of everything’.83 He put it down to the

girls’ ‘exuberant youth’. But although they took the loss of their

beautiful long hair in good heart their morbidly introspective mother saw it quite differently; Pierre’s photograph, she said, made them

look like the condemned.

‘Poor Mama is terribly bored; can’t at all get used to the new

life and the circumstances here,’ Olga told her aunt Olga on 21

June, ‘although on the whole we can all be grateful that we will be

together and in the Crimea.’84 With a flare-up of conflict in

Petrograd, discussion of the family’s evacuation had once again

resumed. On 4 July Elizaveta Naryshkina had heard rumours that

a ‘group of young monarchists have got up an insane project: to

take them away by car at night to one of the ports where an English

steamer would be waiting’. But she was fearful ‘of a repetition of

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Varennes’ – the attempted flight in 1791 of the deposed Louis XVI,

his wife and his family that had resulted in the king and queen’s

arrest and execution.85

Faced with a possible Bolshevik coup against the provisional

government that summer, and worried about plots to spirit the

Romanovs away, Kerensky, (who had now taken over as prime

minister), came to the Alexander Palace to see Nicholas. Radical

elements in the Petrograd soviet might try to storm the palace and

he told him that the family ‘would likely go south, given the prox-

imity of Tsarskoe Selo to the uneasy capital’.86 As Count Benkendorf

understood it, Kerensky thought ‘it would be more prudent for His

Majesty and his family to . . . settle in the interior of the country, far from factories and garrisons, in the country house of some landed proprietor’.87 The possibility of Grand Duke Mikhail’s estate at

Brasovo, near Orel 660 miles (1060 km) to the south, was discussed;

but it was soon discovered that local peasants would be hostile.88

There had even been talk of sending the family to the Ipatiev

Monastery at Kostroma. Nicholas and Alexandra still clung to hopes

of the Crimea, for his mother and sisters and their families were

now living there, but this was out of the question as far as Kerensky was concerned; travelling all that way by train, through the heavily

politicized industrial cities of central Russia, would be impossible.89

‘We all thought and talked about our forthcoming journey’,

Nicholas wrote on 12 July. ‘Strange to think of leaving here after

4 months in seclusion.’90 The following day he began ‘surreptitiously, to gather together my things and books’, still nursing hopes of the

Crimea where he ‘could live like a civilized man’.91 It appeared that Kerensky intended moving them some time after Alexey’s birthday,

but by now, although the Romanovs did not yet know it, he was

considering other, very different options.92

Out in the palace garden and oblivious to this, the children were

able to savour their first home-grown vegetables and were learning

to cut hay. It was extremely hot and Alexey had been amusing himself

squirting water over the girls from the water pump. They didn’t

mind: ‘It’s so good out in the garden’, Tatiana told her friend Zinaida Tolstaya:

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but even better when you go deep into the wood, where it is

quite wild and you can go along the little paths and so on . . .

Oh how envious I was to read that you saw the dreadnoughts

Alexander III
and the
Prut
. This is what we miss so much – no sea, no boats! We had grown so used to spending practically the

whole summer on the water, at the skerries; in my opinion there

is nothing better; it was the best and happiest of times – after

all, we went sailing for nine years in a row and even before,

when we were quite small; and now it’s so strange to have been

here for three years without the water, there’s no other such

feeling in the summer for me as we only used to live at Tsarskoe

Selo in the winter and sometimes in the spring, till we went to

the Crimea. Right now the lime trees are in full bloom and it

smells so divine.93

By the middle of the month the family was packing in earnest

for the hoped-for journey south. And then, on Friday 28 July,

Nicholas noted with dismay:

After breakfast we found out from Count Benkendorf that they

are sending us, not to the Crimea, but to one of the distant

provincial towns three or four days’ journey to the east! But

where exactly they don’t say – even the commandant doesn’t

know. And there we were still counting on a long stay in Livadia!94

For the next two days as everyone hurried to sort out the items

they most wished to take with them, there was still no clear indica-

tion of where exactly they were going. Hopes were finally dashed

when, on the 29th, they were told ‘that we must provide ourselves

with warm clothing.’ Pierre Gilliard was dismayed: ‘So we are not

to be taken south. A great disappointment.’ They had been told to

expect a five-day journey; Nicholas soon worked it out. Five days

on a train meant they were going to Siberia.95

*

With the family’s departure fixed for 31 July, the members of the

entourage had to decide whether they would be prepared to travel

with them into a decidedly uncertain future. Pierre Gilliard had no

doubts about where his duty lay, as he explained in a letter to his

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family in Switzerland on the 30th: ‘I have thought about all the

possible eventualities and am not
frightened by what awaits me. I feel I must go to the very end . . . with God’s grace. Having benefited from happy days, should I not share with them the bad days?’96

Ladies-in-waiting Trina Schneider and Nastenka Hendrikova also

prepared to go with the family, but Iza Buxhoeveden was about to

undergo an operation and would have to join them later; Sydney

Gibbes, still stuck in Petrograd, hoped to do likewise.97

On 30 July everyone did their best to celebrate Alexey’s thirteenth

birthday. Alexandra asked that the icon of Our Lady of the Sign

should be brought from the Znamenie Church for a special
Te Deum

led by Father Belyaev. It was a very emotional experience and

everyone was in tears: ‘Somehow it was especially comforting to

pray to her holy image together with all our people’, wrote Nicholas, in the knowledge that it would probably be for the last time.98 Later, the household went outside in the garden to take farewell photographs of each other and out of habit Nicholas sawed some wood,

telling Benkendorf (who, too old and with an ailing wife, was

remaining at Tsarskoe) to distribute the vegetables and wood among

those servants who had remained loyal during their captivity.

Valentina Chebotareva had sent Tatiana a note that day congratu-

lating them on Alexey’s birthday: ‘As for you, my dear child, allow

this old V[alentina] I[vanovna] who loves you so much to mentally

make the sign of the cross over you and kiss you warmly.’99

Instructed to be ready to leave at midnight on Monday 31 July,

the family assembled in the semicircular hall, downstairs by the rear entrance. The elegant marble reception room looked like ‘a customs

hall’, as chambermaid Anna Demidova noted. She was horrified at

the mountains of luggage that two hours later had yet to be carried

out to the waiting trucks; by 3 o’clock the men loading it all had

hardly made a dent in the pile and everyone was getting anxious

about the delay to their departure, which had been scheduled for 1

a.m.100 Finally everything was loaded, but now rumours were flying

that their train had not even left Petrograd.101 They all sat there,

dog tired, and waited with sinking hearts as the night wore on. The

girls wept a great deal and Alexandra was extremely agitated. Dr

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