The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (35 page)

I thank you so
very
much for your dear letter. I am so sorry that your heart is still No. 2.
*
I hope your cold is better. My temperature now is 37.1 [99 degrees F] and my throat acks less than

* Alexandra created her own private code for the levels of intensity of her heart pain, ranging from 1 to 3, used in notes to her daughters.

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THE LITTLE ONE WILL NOT DIE

yesterday. Am so sorry not to see you today, but sertenly its

better for you to rest. 1000 kisses from your own loving Maria.39

For the four sisters, especially Olga and Tatiana, there was also

a major public role to perform in the coming year – 1913 – of the

Romanov Tercentary in promoting the popular image of the im perial

family in their mother’s frequent absences and in acting, too, as ‘the faithful companions of their beloved father’. ‘It was as if the young, beautiful princesses should protect the ever-threatened czar,’ observed Baroness Souiny, ‘and they did protect him.’40

*

Brilliant sunshine in a cloudless sky greeted a St Petersburg in the

grip of the winter thaw, when on Thursday 21 February 1913 the

streets were set ablaze with the most splendid decorations in red,

white and blue in celebration of the Tercentary of the ascent of the

Romanov dynasty to the throne of Russia.41 At 8 a.m. that morning

a twenty-one-gun salute from the Peter and Paul Fortress had

announced the start of the celebrations. Every shopfront and lamp-

post along the Nevsky Prospekt was festooned with the tsarist

double-headed eagle and portraits of all the Romanov tsars, since

Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich had accepted the nomination back in

February 1613. Shops were full of commemorative items, special

stamps bearing the tsar’s head for the first time (it had previously

been considered an insult to depict it), medals and coins were issued and a manifesto by Nicholas published in which he proclaimed his

‘steadfast desire, in unalterable agreement with our beloved people,

to continue to lead the Empire along the path of peaceful develop-

ment of the national life’.42

Over the last few years Russia, which occupied one-sixth of the

world’s surface, had been enjoying a remarkable period of growth

that had seen St Petersburg become one of the six largest cities in

Europe. The economy was still an agricultural-based one, the corner-

stone of its enormous wealth being cereal production, but this now

outstripped that of the USA and Canada combined. The territories

of the Russian Empire contained a burgeoning iron and steel

industry; and yet to be exploited natural reserves in Central Asia

and Siberia that were being opened up by a vast new Trans-Siberian

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Railway network that was also linked to the valuable oilfields at

Baku in Azerbaijan and Batumi in Georgia. In the City of London

and on Wall Street, Russia, for so long viewed as Asiatic and back-

ward, was now at last seen as a ‘profitable field for investment’. As the
Illustrated London News
told its readers, ‘the general public are beginning to awaken to the great riches and the greater potential

riches – agricultural, mineral, and industrial – of the Empire of the Great White Tsar’.43 There was much talk abroad too about the

growing military and political might of imperial Russia – having as

it did a potential war strength of 4 million men – a fact that had

recently been confirmed by the establishment of the
entente cordiale
with Britain and France.

But it was not just in industrial and military strength that Russia

was carving out a higher international profile for itself: the country was enjoying an extraordinary and unprecedented burst of artistic

creativity – with the music of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov; the

avant-garde paintings of Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall;

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes featuring outlandish set and costume

designs by Léon Bakst; a musical stage graced by the legendary

dancers Pavlova and Nijinsky and the opera singer Chaliapin; the

innovative direction of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold in the theatre;

and a vibrant ‘Silver Age’ of poetry dominated by Alexander Blok,

Andrey Bely and Anna Akhmatova.

In tones of the highest optimism
The Times
in early 1913 was therefore predicting a rosy future for Russia: ‘The House of

Romanoff has done more than create a mighty Empire. It has flung

wide the gates of knowledge to a great people, and has launched

them upon all her boundless ways.’44 But in order to ensure further

economic development it still lacked one crucial element: a stable

political system and a proper, constitutional government. Since 1906

the Duma had juddered from one crisis to the next in an increas-

ingly emasculated form, three times being dissolved and then re-

instated by Nicholas. The Fourth Duma of 1912, created in the

wake of Stolypin’s assassination, had been the most dysfunctional

yet and the political mood that year of 1913 was ‘antagonistic’ in

continuing response to the repressive measures instituted after the

1905 revolution.45 Many Russians felt there was little to celebrate.

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The Tercentary had brought a raft of concessions including amnes-

ties and reductions in sentences for many prisoners – but not for

those imprisoned for their opposition to tsarism.

In February Nicholas and Alexandra installed themselves and the

children in the Winter Palace for the three days of official celebra-

tions – their first real time in St Petersburg since 1905 – the focus of which was entirely religious. Thursday the 21st was a day of pious observance, with twenty-five different religious processions winding

their way across the capital, singing hymns and bursts of the national anthem. From the Winter Palace, the imperial family led the procession of carriages, Nicholas and Alexey in uniform at its head in an

open victoria, followed by closed state coaches containing Alexandra, Maria Feodorovna and the girls. It processed down the Nevsky

Prospekt the short distance to the Kazan Cathedral for a very long

Te Deum
conducted by the Patriarch of Antioch, who had travelled from Greece specially, and attended by over 4,000 of the Russian

nobility, and by foreign diplomats and dignitaries, as well as by

representatives of the peasantry and from the duchy of Finland. ‘It

was all brilliance,’
Novoe Vremya
reported, ‘the brilliance of the ladies’ diamonds, the brilliance of the medals and the stars, the

brilliance of the gold and silver of the uniforms.’46 But it was not

the spectacular beauty of the assembled costumes, the icons, lighted

tapers and incense, that had moved everyone; it was the ‘inexpress-

ibly sad’ sight of the tsarevich, who was still too lame to walk, being carried into the service by a Cossack, his ‘white, pinched small face

. . . gazing anxiously round him at all the sea of human beings before him’.47

Although the Okhrana had been prepared for trouble, on the

streets of St Petersburg ordinary citizens, huddled in their quilted

coats and felt boots, demonstrated a marked indifference towards

much of the ceremonial. Prince Gavriil Konstantinovich later wrote

that he had the ‘distinct impression that there was no special enthu-

siasm in the capital for the Romanov Dynasty Jubilee’. Meriel

Buchanan noticed it too: the crowds were ‘strangely silent’, she

recalled, ‘breaking into cheers only when they caught sight of the

young Grand Duchesses smiling under their big flower-trimmed

hats’.48

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The ceremony at the Kazan Cathedral would be the first of many

collective public professions of faith led by the imperial family that year, accompanied by much genuflection, crossing, and kissing of

miracle-working icons, all intended to ‘arouse a general upsurge of

patriotic sentiment in the people’ at a time of continuing political

discontent.49 Meriel Buchanan had, like many, hoped that the festiv-

ities ‘would force the Imperial Family to come out of their seclusion, and that the Emperor, when he attended the Duma, would make

some public announcement that would relieve the internal situa-

tion’.50 But she was disappointed; it soon became apparent that the

primary objective of the Tercentary was to reinforce the image of

a national life driven by religious faith, harking back to the ancient mystical union of tsar and people, rather than one where democracy

and the work of the Duma held any true significance. Indeed, many

members of the Fourth Duma were squeezed out at the celebrations,

the limited number of places being given to members of the aris-

tocracy and monarchist organizations.51

Later that day Nicholas and Alexandra received a great proces-

sion of 1,500 dignitaries in the Nicholas Hall at the Winter Palace

in order to accept their congratulations. It was a milestone for Olga and Tatiana to be present, wearing matching formal Russian court

dresses. These were made in the workshop of Olga Bulbenkova who

specialized in ceremonial clothes for the court, and were full-length, off-the-shoulder style in white satin with long, pointed, open sleeves, a front panel of pink velvet and a detachable train decorated with

garlands of artificial roses.52 Across their chests both girls wore their orders of St Catherine on scarlet sashes, and on their heads
kokoshniki
of pink velvet encrusted with pearls and decorated with bows. It

must have been a moment of great pride for them, for they had not

worn full-length formal dresses before and it signalled their final

arrival in the adult world of the court. The two sisters were never

more beautiful, as official photographs taken of them by the family’s favourite studio, Boissonnas & Eggler, testified. The reception itself was something new for both of them, ‘a rare chance of seeing

Petersburg society, and from their attentive, animated faces it was

clear that they were trying to take everything in and remember all

the faces’.53

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That evening the still crowded streets of St Petersburg were lit

up with celebratory illuminations; it reminded Nicholas of his coro-

nation, but the happiness of the occasion was marred by the news

the following morning that Tatiana – who had not been feeling well

for a day or so – was in bed with a fever. Alexandra had been too

exhausted to take part in any of the public receptions during the

day, where Maria Feodorovna had enjoyed the limelight in her stead.

But the tsaritsa did steel herself to attend a gala performance of

Glinka’s opera,
A Life for the Tsar
, starring Chaliapin that evening at the Mariinsky Theatre. She and Nicholas received a standing

ovation from the audience as they entered the imperial box with

Olga. But Anna Vyrubova detected a false note: ‘there was in the

brilliant audience little real enthusiasm, little real loyalty’.54 Alexandra looked extremely pale and sombre, thought Meriel Buchanan, ‘her

eyes, enigmatical in their dark gravity, seeming fixed on some secret inward thought that was certainly far removed from the crowded

theatre and the people who acclaimed her’.55 Flushed and uncom-

fortable at all eyes being directed on her, the tsaritsa sank gratefully into her chair but she ‘looked listless, as though she were in pain’, thought Agnes de Stoeckl and indeed such was her extreme discomfort and her anxious laboured breathing, that she left after the first act. ‘A little wave of resentment rippled over the theatre’, noted

Meriel Buchanan. ‘Was it not always the same story?’ with the

empress yet again making no effort to disguise her distaste for St

Petersburg society.56 For that is how her retreat that evening was

perceived. Only her daughter Olga and her husband knew the terrible

toll Alexey’s recent near-fatal illness had taken on her. It was the

‘sad knowledge’ of her son’s life- threatening condition that made

the tsaritsa ‘so extraordinary in her ways’, thought Princess Radziwill.

It explained why ‘she hates so much to see anyone, or to take part

in any festivity, even for the sake of her daughters’. For their part, as always, the Romanov sisters had made the best of things. ‘The

whole city was celebrating, a lot of people’, Olga recalled of the day in her diary, but, sensing as she did an atmosphere of change in

Russia, it had not passed without some apprehension on her part:

‘Thank you God that everything is OK.’57

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LORD, SEND HAPPINESS TO HIM,

MY BELOVED ONE

N

The 23rd of February 1913 was a very special day for eighteen-

year-old Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, when, accompanied by

her father, her mother and her aunt Olga, she attended her first

major public ball in St Petersburg, at the Assembly of Nobles. The

tsar and tsaritsa had not attended a ball in the city since the grand costume ball of 1903, and Alexandra was determined to be there