The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (64 page)

mother’s features: strength of character, a tendency to keeping

life in order, and an awareness of her duty. She took charge of

organizing things in the house. She watched over Alexey

Nikolaevich. She always walked with the emperor in the yard.

She was the closest person to the empress. They were two friends

. . . She loved running the household. Loved doing embroidery

and ironing the linen.48

But there was also a trait in Tatiana’s personality that she shared

with her father – and that was her absolute, crippling reticence. Her ability to keep her feelings bottled up and privy to no one became

even more marked during the final months of captivity. Nobody

ever penetrated that intense reserve; ‘It was impossible to guess her thoughts,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘even if she was more decided

in her opinions than her sisters.’49

Klavdiya Bitner found the gentle and soft-hearted Olga, who in

so many ways was Tatiana’s opposite, so much easier to love, for

she had inherited her father’s warm, disarming charm. Unlike

Tatiana, Olga hated being organized and loathed housework. With

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her love of books and her preference for solitude, it seemed to

Klavdiya that ‘she understood the situation considerably more than

the rest of the family and was aware of how dangerous it was’. There

was an air of sadness about Olga that suggested to Klavdiya – much

as it had done for Valentina Chebotareva – some kind of hidden

unhappiness or disappointment. ‘There were times when she smiled

when you would sense that the smile was all on the surface, and

that deep down inside her soul, she was not smiling, but sad.’50

Olga’s finely tuned nature clearly predisposed her to a sense of

impending tragedy, accentuated by her love of poetry and her

increasing concentration, in her reading, on religious texts. She

withdrew ever more into herself, listening to the many church bells

ring across Tobolsk and writing to friends about the beauty of the

extraordinarily clear night skies and the astonishing brilliance of the moon and stars.51

Some time that winter Olga wrote to a family friend, Sergey

Bekhteev (the brother of Zinaida Tolstaya), who was himself a

budding poet and had published his first collection in 1916. Bekhteev had sent some of his verse to the family in captivity and in response Nicholas had asked Olga to write and thank him. This surviving

fragment, more than anything else that has come down to us, sums

up both Olga’s mood and that of her father in those final months:

Father asks me to tell all who have remained loyal to him and

those over whom they might have an influence, that they should

not avenge him, for he has forgiven everyone and prays for them

all; that they should not themselves seek revenge; that they should

remember that the evil there now is in the world will become

yet more powerful, and that it is not evil that will conquer evil

– only love.52
*

Bekhteev later took this letter as the inspiration for a composi-

tion of his own that echoes these sentiments and which begins

* There is an echo in Olga’s words of Romans xii: 19 and 21: ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.’ . . . ‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’

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‘Father asks us to tell everyone, there is no need to weep and murmur

/ The days of sufferings are sent us all / For our great general sin’.53

Of all the Romanov sisters, sweet, accommodating Maria

remained the most self-effacing, her consistently loving and stoical

personality inviting the least amount of comment or criticism.

Everyone, including the guards and even Commissar Pankratov,

adored her. For Klavidya Bitner, Maria was the archetypal, whole-

some Russian girl: ‘kind hearted, cheerful, with an even temper, and

friendly’.54 In contrast, Anastasia, whom she found ‘uncouth’, never

seduced Klavdiya. The constant playfulness and challenge to

authority in the classroom soon began to grate: ‘She wasn’t serious

about anything.’ But worse, in Klavdiya’s opinion, was the way that

Anastasia ‘always took advantage of Maria’.55 ‘They were both behind

in their lessons’, she recalled, an opinion that reinforced Pankratov’s view. ‘Neither of them could write essays and had not been trained

how to express their thoughts.’ Anastasia was ‘still an absolute child and you had to treat her as you would a child’. Sydney Gibbes

tended to agree; the youngest Romanov sister’s social development,

in his opinion, had been arrested and he thought her the ‘only

ungraceful member of the family’.56

Others of course saw Anastasia’s irrepressible personality quite

differently; she was the family’s ‘cheer-leader’ who kept everyone’s

spirits up with her high energy and mimicry.57 She certainly could

be very juvenile at times and Dr Botkin had been shocked at her

sexually precocious ‘shady anecdotes’ and wondered where she had

collected them.58 She had a penchant too for drawing ‘dirty’ pictures and making the occasional outrageous comment. But all in all, at

Tobolsk, her ‘gay and boisterous temperament proved of immeasur-

able value to the rest of the family’, for when she chose to, ‘Anastasia could dispel anybody’s gloom’.59 And even she was often overcome

with an intense sadness, thinking about their hospital and those who

had died: ‘I suppose there’s no one now to visit the graves of our

wounded,’ she wrote to Katya, ‘they’ve all left Tsarskoe Selo’; but

she kept a postcard of Feodorovsky Gorodok on the writing table

because ‘the time we spent at the hospital was so terribly good’.60

She was pining for news of Katya and her brother Viktor. ‘I have

not received letters nos. 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29 – all these letters that
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you wrote to this address’, she complained plaintively, suggesting

Katya address them to Anna Demidova instead as ‘letters to her are

of less interest to these people’. ‘It’s awful to think of how long we have not seen you . . . If God allows, we will see each other some

time, and it will be possible to tell you a lot of things, both sad and funny, and in general, how we live.’ But, she added, ‘I will not write about it of course.’61

Perhaps Anastasia’s madcap behaviour was in fact indicative of a

‘heroic effort’, as Gleb Botkin saw it, a way of helping the family

‘stay cheerful and keep their spirits up’, her relentless offensive

being, in its own way, a form of self-protection. She was without

doubt the star of the show in a series of playlets, in French and

English, staged by Gibbes and Gilliard during the final three weeks

of January and last two of February. The biggest hit was
Packing

Up
– ‘a very vulgar but also very funny farce by Harry Grattan’ in which Anastasia played the male lead, Mr Chugwater, and Maria

his wife.62 During her energetic performance on 4 February the

dressing gown Anastasia was wearing flew up, exposing her sturdy

legs encased in her father’s Jaeger long johns. Everyone ‘collapsed

in uncontrolled laughter’ – even Alexandra, who rarely laughed out

loud. It was, remembered Gibbes, ‘the last heartily unrestrained

laughter the Empress ever enjoyed’. The play had been so ‘awfully

amusing & really well and funnily given’ in Alexandra’s estimation, that a repeat performance was demanded.63

Despite Anastasia’s attention-grabbing performances, it was

Alexey who won Klavidya’s heart at Tobolsk. ‘I loved him more than

the others’, she later admitted, though he seemed to her subdued

and terribly bored. Although he was very behind in his education

and read badly, she found him ‘a good, kind boy . . . intelligent,

observant, receptive, very gentle, cheerful, ebullient’. Like Anastasia, he was by nature ‘very capable but a little lazy’. But he was an

extremely quick learner, hated lies and had inherited his father’s

simplicity. Klavdiya admired the patience with which Alexey endured

his condition. ‘He wanted to be well and hoped this would be so’,

and he often asked her, ‘Do you think this will go?’64 At Tobolsk

he continued to defy the limitations placed on him and threw himself

enthusiastically into vigorous games with Kolya Derevenko using

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home-made wooden daggers and guns. In early January the boys

helped Nicholas and the other men build a snow mountain out in

the courtyard. Once the snow was piled up Gilliard and Dolgorukov

began carting out bucket after bucket of water to pour over it and

make it icily smooth. ‘The children are sledging their hearts out on

a snow mountain and taking the most amazing falls’, Alexandra

wrote to a friend. ‘It’s a wonder they haven’t broken their necks.

They’re all covered with bruises, but even so, this is the only distraction they have, either that or sit at the window.’65 Alexey inevitably banged himself but it was, ironically, Pierre Gilliard who was the

snow mountain’s first real casualty; he twisted his ankle badly and

was laid up for several days.66 Shortly afterwards Maria, too, took a tumble and ended up with a black eye.

While most of the entourage tried hard to enjoy the distractions

of the snow mountain, and sneak a look over the fence from its

summit, anxieties about the deteriorating situation in the country

at large frequently bubbled to the surface. ‘Everything they are

doing to our poor country is so painful and sad,’ Tatiana wrote to

Rita Khitrovo, ‘but there is one hope – that God will not abandon

it and will teach these madmen a lesson.’67 Trina Schneider was

profoundly depressed. Whenever she received news from outside,

she admitted that it reduced her to a state of despair. ‘I don’t read the papers any more, even if they manage to get here,’ she told

PVP, ‘it’s become so awful. What kind of times are these – everyone

does what they want . . . If you only knew my frame of mind. No

hopes at all – none . . . I don’t believe in a better future, because I won’t live to see it – it’s too far off.68 Meanwhile, the only aspiration that Alexandra clung to, as she told a friend, was ‘to achieve the

possibility of living tranquilly, like an ordinary family, outside politics, struggle and intrigue’.69

On 14 February – the first official day of the changeover to the

New Style, Gregorian calendar
*
– Alexandra noted despondently

* On 31 January the Bolshevik government switched to the Gregorian calendar, immediately jumping forward fourteen days to 14 February. Nicholas however persisted in writing his diary with old style dates, while Alexandra noted both.

The girls dated their letters variously OS and NS, often making it difficult to
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how ‘many of the nicest soldiers left’.70 Their favourite guards in

the Special Detachment, the 4th Rifles – good troop soldiers, many

of whom had been conscripted at the outbreak of war – were sent

away and replaced by the new breed of revolutionary Red Guards;

Pankratov too was removed from his post as commissar responsible

for the imperial family. On the 24th, the family clambered on to

the top of the snow mountain to get the best view, as three more

large groups of the Rifles marched away. Of the 350 men who had

accompanied them from Tsarskoe Selo, only around 150 remained.71

The new revolutionary guards were far more threatening: ‘One can

never predict how they are going to behave’, remarked Tatiana.

These guards had been incensed when the family climbed up and

made themselves visible above the level of the fence, in so doing

exposing themselves to possible pot shots, for which the guards

might be held responsible.72 They promptly voted to remove the

snow mountain (by hacking a trench through the middle), though

some who took part in its destruction did so, as Gilliard noticed,

‘with a hang-dog look (for they felt it was a mean task)’. The chil-

dren were, inevitably, utterly ‘disconsolate’.73

Soon the new guards held another meeting and another vote –

that none of them should wear epaulettes, thereby putting everyone

on the new, socialist-level playing field. For Nicholas the soldier

this was the ultimate dishonour; he refused to comply, opting instead to wear a coat to conceal his own when among the guards outside.

But the change in regime brought further unwelcome news.

Kobylinsky, who remained in nominal charge of the Governor’s

House, received a telegram informing him that Lenin’s new govern-

ment was no longer prepared to pay the family’s living expenses

beyond 600 roubles a month per person, in other words a total for

the seven members of the family of 4,200 roubles a month.74

Alexandra spent several days going through all the household

accounts with Gilliard. They had for some time been running up