The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (16 page)

Mott remembered dining with Grand Duke Vladimir – Nicholas’s

eldest uncle – who would be next in line to the throne after the

childless Mikhail, and after him, his sons Kryil, Boris and Andrey.

On 30 July Mott had joined the grand duke for lunch after attending

army manoeuvres. Upon arriving, Vladimir was handed a telegram

and immediately disappeared. His guest was left waiting for an hour

before the grand duke returned:

We sat down in silence; and as our host did not speak, the rest

of us could not do so. The changing of the plates and the constant

presenting of a fresh cigarette to the Grand Duke by the tall

Cossack who stood at other times immovable behind his chair,

alone relieved the stillness.58

After lunch the grand duke once more absented himself. It was

only later that Mott learned that the telegram that had cast such a

gloom over their lunch had contained the news of the birth of

Alexey.

Had he known then what Nicholas and Alexandra already knew,

the grand duke might well have been less gloomy. It has generally

been accepted that it was not until 8 September, nearly six weeks

after Alexey was born, that the baby first experienced ominous

bleeding from the navel. But bleeding had in fact occurred almost

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as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, and it had taken two days for

the doctors to bring it under control. On 1 August, Nicholas wrote

at length to Militza, on behalf of Alexandra, telling her that:

Thank God the day has passed calmly. After the dressing was

applied from 12 o’clock until 9.30 that evening there wasn’t a

drop of blood. The doctors hope it will stay that way. Korovin

is staying overnight. Fedorov is going into town and coming

back tomorrow . . . The little treasure is amazingly placid, and

when they change the dressing he either sleeps or lies there and

smiles. His parents are now feeling a little easier in their minds.

Fedorov says that the approximate amount of blood loss in 48

hours was from 1/8th to 1/9th of the total quantity of blood.59

The bleeding was frightening. Little Alexey had seemed so robust

– he had ‘the air of a warrior knight’ as Grand Duchess Xenia

remarked when she had first seen him.60 Militza had no doubt from

the start. With their exclusive access to Nicholas and Alexandra at

the time, she and Grand Duke Petr had driven over to the Lower

Dacha the day Alexey was born to congratulate his parents, as their

son Roman later recalled:

When they returned in the evening to Znamenka, my father

remembered that when he had bidden farewell, the Tsar had told

him that even though Alexei was a big and healthy child, the

doctors were somewhat troubled about the frequent splatters of

blood in his swaddling clothes. When my mother heard this, she

was shocked and insisted on the doctors being told about the

cases of haemophilia that were occasionally passed down in

the female line from the English Queen Victoria, who was the

Tsaritsa’s maternal grandmother. My father tried to calm her and

assured her that the Tsar had been in the best of spirits when

he had left. All the same, my father did indeed phone the palace

to ask the Tsar what the doctors had to say about the blood

splatters. When the Tsar answered that they hoped that the

bleeding would soon stop, my mother took the receiver and

asked if the doctors could explain the cause of the bleeding.

When the Tsar could not give her a clear answer, she asked him

with the calmest of voices she could manage: ‘I beg you, ask

them if there is any sign of haemophilia’, and she added that

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should that be the case, then the doctors of today would be able

to take certain measures. The Tsar fell silent on the phone for

a long time and then started to question my mother and ended

by quietly repeating the word that had staggered him: haemo-

philia.61

Mariya Geringer later recalled how Alexandra had sent for her

soon after Alexey was born. The bleeding, she told Mariya, had

been triggered by the midwife Günst swaddling the baby too tightly.

This was traditional Russian practice but the pressure of the tight

binding over Alexey’s navel had triggered a haemorrhage and had

caused him to scream out in a ‘frenzy’ of pain. Weeping bitter tears, Alexandra had taken Mariya’s hand: ‘If only you knew how fervently

I have prayed for God to protect my son from our inherited curse’,

she had told her, already only too aware that the blight of haemo-

philia had indeed descended on them.62 Nicholas’s first cousin, Maria Pavlovna, had no doubt that he and Alexandra had known almost

immediately that Alexey ‘carried in him the seeds of an incurable

illness’. They hid their feelings from even their closest relatives, but from that moment, she recalled, ‘the Empress’s character underwent

a change, and her health, physical as well as moral, altered’.63

For the remainder of that first month the couple were in a state

of denial, hoping against hope, once the bleeding had stopped, that

all would be well. And then almost six weeks later it had started

again, confirming the very worst fears.64 Dr Fedorov, whom Nicholas

and Alexandra liked and trusted, had been on hand at all times and

had drawn on the best possible medical advice in St Petersburg. But

it was already clear that the medical men could do little. Nicholas

and Alexandra’s son’s fate rested on a miracle: only God could protect him. But nobody in Russia must know the truth. The life-threatening

condition of the little tsarevich – ‘the hope of Russia’ – would remain a closely guarded secret, even from their nearest relatives.65 Nothing must undermine the security of the throne that Nicholas and

Alexandra were absolutely determined to pass on, intact, to their

son.Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, was only thirty-two

but was already a physical wreck after ten physically and mentally

draining years of pregnancy and childbirth. Her always precarious

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mental state was severely undermined by the discovery of Alexey’s

condition and she tormented herself that she of all people had

unwittingly transmitted haemophilia to her much-loved and longed-

for son.
*
Her already melancholic air became an inexplicably tragic one to those not privy to the truth. The whole focus of the family

now dramatically shifted, to protecting Alexey against accident and

injury – to literally keeping him alive within their own closely

controlled domestic world. Nicholas and Alexandra abandoned their

newly refurbished apartments in the Winter Palace and ceased

staying in town for the court season. Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof

would from now on be their refuge.

Alexey’s four still very young but highly sensitive sisters – Olga,

Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – would bond ever more closely in

response to the family’s retreat and in support of their physically

vulnerable mother. In the late summer of 1904, the world of the

four Romanov grand duchesses began to shrink, at the very point

when they were eager to rush out and explore it. What no one then,

of course, knew was that as female children of the tsaritsa, one or

all of the sisters might be carriers of that terrible defective gene – a hidden time bomb that had already begun to reverberate across the

royal families of Europe. Alexandra’s elder sister Irene – who like

her was a carrier and who had married her first cousin, Prince Henry

of Prussia – had already given birth to two haemophiliac sons. The

youngest, four-year-old Heinrich, had died – ‘of the terrible illness of the English family’, as Xenia described it – just five months before Alexey was born. In Russia they called it the
bolezn gessenskikh
– ‘the Hesse disease’; others called it ‘the Curse of the Coburgs’.66 But

one thing was certain; in the early 1900s, the life expectancy of a

haemophiliac child was only about thirteen years.67

* Even in the early twentieth century haemophilia was little understood and was thought to be caused by a weakness in the blood vessels. It was not until the 1930s that scientists concluded that the fatal defect lay in the lack of proteins in the blood platelets which prevented the blood clotting in those with the condition.

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N

By the beginning of 1905, and despite the arrival of the long-awaited tsarevich, Russia was in crisis, as war continued to rage with Japan.

The Russian Imperial Army had not proved invincible in the East

and was demoralized, weary and undersupplied; press censorship

had become even more rigorous as a result. All comments in foreign

newspapers and magazines arriving in Russia that were in any way

critical of the war – and, by association, the tsarist system – were

heavily blacked out. A notable casualty was an article on the Russian succession in the
Illustrated London News
by journalist Charles Lowe.

Published shortly after Alexey’s birth it had been accompanied by

a portrait of Alexandra, captioned ‘The Mother of a Czar to Be’,

congratulating the Russians on ‘this ray of sunshine amidst the heavy clouds of national misfortune’, but adding provocatively that ‘the

advent of the Czarevitch has probably averted a revolution’. The

Russian censor had been much exercised in how to deal with this

inflammatory statement. It would have been considered sacrilegious

to obliterate the tsaritsa’s portrait on the page, so in the end the

entire article surrounding it was blacked out when the magazine

reached Russian readers.1 Such draconian censorship was a futile

gesture: on the discontented streets of St Petersburg industrial and

political unrest continued to build. It seemed to Grand Duke

Konstantin ‘as if the dam has been broken’. Russia, he said, ‘has

been seized with a thirst for change . . . Revolution is banging on

the door’.2

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In a rare performance of public ceremonial Nicholas attended

the ritual of the Blessing of the Waters, traditionally marking the

end of the Christmas festival, held on 6 January in the Orthodox

calendar. The key moment came when he descended the Jordan

Staircase of the Winter Palace to the edge of the frozen River Neva,

to witness the Metropolitan of St Petersburg dip the gold cross into

the water three times through a hole in the ice in commemoration

of the baptism of Christ. After this a flagon of the sacred water was presented to the tsar to cross himself with. However, during the

traditional gun salute that followed, three of the charges fired from the battery on the opposite bank of the Neva – whether by accident

or design – proved to be lives not blanks. One of them smashed

into the windows of the Winter Palace’s Nicholas Hall which was

crowded with guests and showered grapeshot and glass over the

temporary wooden chapel on the ice in which Nicholas and Maria

Feodorovna and other members of the imperial family were gathered.

Nicholas was unhurt, and ‘never moved a muscle except to make

the Sign of the Cross’, as one eyewitness recalled, although his

‘quiet, resigned smile’ seemed ‘almost unearthly’.3 A later investigation suggested it had been a genuine error – shotted cartridges

having been left in the breech of the cannon after target practice.

The fatalistic Nicholas was, however, convinced that the live shells

had been intended for him.4 For a nation reading catastrophe into

every unfortunate incident in this ill-fated reign it was further proof that the autocracy was doomed.

Three days later, tragedy on a grand scale unfolded across St

Petersburg, which had been gripped for weeks by bitter industrial

unrest, exacerbated by mounting discontent with the war with Japan.

Hundreds were left dead and wounded when Cossack troops fired

on a rally of unarmed workers and their families who had marched

to the Winter Palace to present a petition to Nicholas begging for

political and industrial reform. The advent of Bloody Sunday, as it

became known, brought about a radical shift in the traditional

popular perception of the tsar as the protective ‘little father’ of the nation and a volatile nation descended into extreme violence as the

year went on. In February the Russian army was routed at Mukden

in Manchuria, and in mid-May the Baltic Fleet was decimated at

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Tsushima Strait. By the time peace was negotiated with Japan in

August, Nicholas’s Minister of the Interior, Petr Stolypin, had instigated a round of courts martial and summary executions to counter

the escalating violence.

Widespread unrest went hand in hand with a dramatic escalation

in the assassination of prominent government figures. Two of