Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (16 page)

One might say that her high domed forehead was an indicator of her cleverness and natural wit. Of all the sisters she was the most shrewd and intellectually mature. She was quick to learn – an accomplished pianist, good at languages, an avid reader. And she was utterly devoted to her father. There was nothing Olga loved better than to go for long walks with him whenever the opportunity arose, often clutching him tightly by the arm; she also frequently accompanied him to church, sitting close to him. There is no doubt that she, of all the Romanov children, was the one most aware of the cruelty and injustice in the world outside. After she reached the age of 20, when she was allowed access to her considerable fortune (bequeathed to his grandchildren by Alexander III), she regularly made donations to the poor and sick. She seemed deeply troubled by the plight of Russia after the outbreak of war and then revolution in 1917. She was highly sensitive to her father’s position; she read the papers regularly and could not understand why the feeling in the country had so turned against him. In 1915, with her mother and sister Tatiana, she took up nursing training and worked with the wounded. But Olga could not handle the stress and anguish of it all, nor the sight of her mother wearing herself to exhaustion, and was forced to take lighter duties. Her health declined during the war years; she became thin and pale, suffering from anaemia and bouts of depression. She was clearly worried about the family’s tenuous future after they were sent to Tobolsk; on leaving the Governor’s House she told Baroness von Buxhoeveden that they were lucky to be still alive and reunited with their parents once more. Now, at Ekaterinburg, even the guards noticed how sad and tired she looked for most of the time and how, during exercise periods in the garden, she kept herself apart, her melancholy gaze fixed on the distance.

By any normal royal standards of the day, Olga should have long since been married off. But in matters emotional and sexual she was still an innocent at 22. Her mother had tortured herself pondering the future: ‘Oh if only our children could be as happy in their married life’, she wrote to Nicholas. The couple were acutely aware of how fortunate they were to have had a love match, and it is hard to believe that Alexandra
would have been prepared to sacrifice her daughters to dynastic or political expediency, as her grandmother Queen Victoria had done. Writing in 1915, Alexandra intimated her anxieties for her eldest child: ‘I look at our big Olga, my heart fills with emotion and wondering as to what is in store for her – what her lot will be.’ Rumours of suitable dynastic alliances with the Greek, Serbian and Romanian royal houses had begun circulating once Olga had reached the age of 16 in 1911, on which occasion she had enjoyed her coming-out ball – the only real ball ever organised specially for the two eldest girls. In 1912 there had been talk of her marrying her father’s cousin Dimitry, but Alexandra had vetoed the idea after she heard tales of his unacceptable private life. For a few months at the end of 1913 Olga had had a crush on Pavel Voronov, a junior officer on the
Shtandart
. But of course there was never any future in a relationship with a commoner, and that December Pavel became engaged to a lady-in-waiting. Finally, in the autumn of 1913, she was introduced to Crown Prince Karol of Romania, when the Imperial yacht made a royal visit to Constanta. Olga did not warm to him and refused point blank any suggestion of marriage. She would never leave Russia or convert from Orthodoxy: ‘I am a Russian and I wish to remain Russian’, she said most emphatically, and nothing would change her mind. Karol, as it turned out, preferred the prettier Tatiana, but failed to impress her with his coarse and tactless behaviour. Finding a suitable husband of sufficiently high status for Olga within Russia, let alone for three more daughters (who may well have shared their sister’s feelings), would have been even more problematic once the Russian Grand Dukes had all been discounted. Meanwhile Olga continued to fall for the most obvious candidates with whom she came into contact during the war years – the wounded soldiers in her care.

There is no doubt that a high-calibre union would eventually have been the lot of the second Romanov daughter, Tatiana, born on 11 June 1897. She was a picture-book beauty and perfect bride material for the dynastic matchmakers of Europe. Taller even than her mother, willowy and with a tiny waist, she was the most elegant and ‘aristocratic’ looking of the four sisters and exuded a sense of her status from head to toe. People often remarked that she behaved ‘like the daughter of an emperor’. Confident in her beauty, with a fixed, almost challenging expression in her eyes, Tatiana could look effortlessly imperious. Her profile was exquisite; with her pale, almost marble skin, lovely dark chestnut hair and a slightly mystical, Asiatic look about her wide, tipped-up dark grey eyes, she was naturally photogenic. She loved clothes and carried them with grace and elegance, as well as a slightly coquettish air. But she was very much her mother’s daughter: reserved, inscrutable, less
open and spontaneous than her sisters and less inclined to smile. The guards at the Ipatiev House had sometimes found her ‘stuck up’; she would often throw disapproving looks at them when confronted with their uncouth behaviour, though when she smiled her disarming smile in order to ask a favour of some kind, it was a quite different matter.

By nature Tatiana was a romantic idealist and a dreamer, but she never let this get in the way of her very practical talents and her sense of balance, which meant she was very focused and at times opinionated about what she wanted. Although younger than Olga she was the more forceful of the two, and her elder sister frequently deferred to her judgement. For Tatiana’s fragile features and figure belied a physical strength and energy that she constantly applied around the home and in organisational skills. She had natural gifts as a housekeeper and decisionmaker, as well as being good at handicrafts. Her mother came to rely on her heavily as friend, nurse and adviser, ready to take responsibility for her younger siblings when she was sick or indisposed. Yurovsky found her by far ‘the most mature’ of the four girls and their natural leader, who often came to his office requesting one thing or another on behalf of the family. She was always ready to do what was asked of her and would persevere to get it right, so much so that her sisters nicknamed her ‘the governor’ for her purposefulness.

It was crystal clear to everyone that Tatiana was her mother’s favourite daughter, and slavishly devoted to her, even though she had a knack too for winning her father’s favour when needed. Despite this, there is, in her childhood letters to her mother, written begging forgiveness of ‘deary’ (such an oddly grown-up term for a child to use to a parent) for some minor misdemeanour or other, an air of heightened anxiety. She lived in fear of her mother’s disapproval and was desperate for her love and time, and so learned to pander to Alexandra’s moods and demands. She willingly became the ‘conduit of all her mother’s decisions’ and therefore more readily than all the others inculcated Alexandra’s superstition and religiosity and was quick to mouth her platitudes.

Poor little Maria. Everyone inwardly groaned when she was born on 27 June 1899, including her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, regretting ‘the 3rd girl for the country’. The Dowager knew, as did the royal couple themselves only too well, that ‘an heir would be more welcome than a daughter’. But Mashka, as she was affectionately called in the family, soon won everybody’s hearts. She was enchantingly pretty in a very rounded Russian way, with a glowing peaches-and-cream complexion, a full mouth, and lustrous thick light-brown hair. Beneath the finely shaped sable eyebrows shone out the biggest, most luminous grey-blue eyes. Everyone remarked on them and it earned them the
nickname of ‘Maria’s saucers’. She was not particularly bright at her studies but had a wonderful gift for painting in watercolours. She had a tendency to be clumsy and earned herself another playful family nickname – ‘fat little bow wow’ (
le bon gros tutu
). Modest, placid and biddable, Maria allowed her younger sister Anastasia, to whom she was devoted, to rule her. Of all the sisters she was the most natural earth mother, having the voluptuous broad-boned figure to match and possessed of a truly loving heart. No doubt she would have been one of the first of the sisters to marry and would have made a fine mother, for she loved little children and had an instinctive way with them. She exuded good health and energy and seemed easily contented with very little, having had no complaints about the family’s quiet life at Tobolsk. Indeed she had told the commandant there, Vasily Pankratov, that the family now was healthier and more physically active and useful than during all its years at court.

Because of her natural nurturing skills, Maria was the one who most often remained indoors with her ailing mother when the others went outside – ‘my legs’, as the Tsaritsa so often called her. She had been the obvious choice to accompany Alexandra as carer when she and Nicholas travelled on ahead to Ekaterinburg, and she was equally patient and attentive with her brother. Maria was a stoic; she had tremendous reserves of energy and was strong enough to carry Alexey when needed. But there were times, when younger, when she had suffered bouts of insecurity and anxiety as the third daughter and had felt unloved. Perhaps it had been her mother’s increasing preoccupation with her own ills and Alexey’s that had prompted her more and more to seek conversation and company among the guards who surrounded the family – first at Tsarskoe Selo, and later at Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg. Gauche and naïve, she was an innocent abroad in the company of men. Sometimes her flirtatious, skittish behaviour provoked unwarranted innuendo from the guards in their responses; sexual curiosity was a dangerous thing in girls such as the Romanovs who had been so little prepared for the real world outside. And it bubbled under the surface the more they grew and experienced the normal hormonal changes of adolescence and the longer they had no other male company than the guards surrounding them. The men of the Special Detachment at the Ipatiev House clearly liked Maria best of all the family: she had a natural openness and a lovely smile. Even Yurovsky later remarked that her ‘sincere, modest character’ had impressed them all. And she truly enjoyed being with ordinary people, talking to them about their lives, their homes and children; she even showed the guards her photograph albums. Her open flirtation with the guards brought consequences of which the details are very sketchy, but it is clear that in the final weeks at Ekaterinburg her mother and eldest sister froze her out
for her behaviour. From the outset Alexandra had strongly disapproved of Maria’s fraternisation with the Ipatiev House guards and constantly whispered sharp admonitions to her, but at the age of 19 Maria, by now aware of her own sexuality and attractiveness, was only behaving as most girls of her age would have done, lacking as she did her youngest sister’s boyish disinterest in men.

The day that the long-suffering Alexandra struggled to give birth, on 18 June 1901, to yet another large baby – and yet another girl – Nicholas lit a cigarette and took off on a long walk around the park at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘My Lord! What a disappointment!’ his sister Xenia wrote in her diary. Master of self-concealment that he was, Nicholas managed not to show his true feelings and grew to love his impish, wayward fourth daughter as much as all the others.

It was clear from very early on that Anastasia would be the wild child of the family. Although the youngest daughter, she compensated for this by being by far the most forceful and outward-going. She was far less subservient to parental control or sisterly anonymity, inhabiting her own self-created world of imaginary friends, monsters and comical characters. Such was Anastasia’s irrepressible curiosity and vivacity that her Aunt Olga, the Tsar’s sister, called her
schwipsig
(a German affectionate expression meaning ‘merry little one’). And it stuck, the name being as quirky as the girl herself: awkward, obstreperous, noisy, unconventional. Her love of life was so infectious that it forever redeemed her endless acts of naughtiness, though there were times when she could be rough and spiteful during games with other children – a fact complained about by some of her Romanov cousins.

Perhaps of all the sisters Anastasia would have been destined for a less conventional life: she always took risks and looked on everything as an adventure. An out-and-out tomboy, she was vigorously active, ignoring the warnings to take care of her weak back and climbing trees with the best of the boys. She had inherited the cornflower-blue eyes of the Romanovs, just like her father. Shorter than her sisters, she lacked their natural grace and became lumpy and awkward after the onset of puberty. The family found another nickname for her:
kubyshka
(‘dumpling’); even at the Ipatiev House, despite the rationing, she was often described as being chubby. Indeed everything about Anastasia was ungracious and unconventional, down to her deportment, which lacked the elegance of a Russian Grand Duchess and is evident in group photographs with her far more dignified sisters. But some could see the beautiful girl she would one day become once the puppy fat was gone.

Anastasia’s mercurial nature meant she was constantly restless; she wanted to grasp life by the throat and hated sitting at her studies. Her
thoughts were so chaotic and undisciplined that she found it impossible to concentrate, even when writing a letter – those to her father are full of quirky humorous expressions and private jokes shared between them, reflecting an unconventional personality. ‘I just grasp at whatever enters my noddle’, as she wrote in May 1918.

Anastasia might have been a poor student, but she did not lack natural intelligence, and Sidney Gibbes, who found her too unpredictable and a nightmare to teach, was nevertheless impressed by her self-possession and her bright and happy disposition. A tease and a brilliant mimic, Anastasia employed her natural intelligence in the observation of others: she watched and absorbed the physical idiosyncrasies and speech mannerisms of those around her, keeping everyone amused with her comical voices and grimaces through the long freezing winter in the draughty Governor’s House at Tobolsk, performing in amateur theatricals and doing circus tricks with Tatiana’s dog Jimmy. She was absolutely fearless and refused to be cowed by misfortune and the restrictions of imprisonment. Even at Ekaterinburg she remained irrepressible: she would poke her tongue out at Yurovsky behind his back and entertain the guards with her pratfalls and practical jokes. Perhaps her subversive humour was a defence mechanism, a cover for her own inner unease and apprehension. Perhaps it was a mark of something deeper, more altruistic. Her Aunt Olga always said that Anastasia had a heart of gold, and in her own free-spirited way she worked hard to dissipate the fears and anxieties of those around her. Whilst her eldest sister Olga had long since capitulated and retreated within herself, bold, brave Anastasia remained always on the offensive. Of all the sisters, Yurovsky noticed that she seemed the one best adjusted to their confinement.