The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (62 page)

mundane things in the world outside and it was ‘as if they had never

seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything’, a highly

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biased view and one that was clearly ignorant of the breadth of the

education the girls had in fact been receiving until the revolution

had disrupted it.56

Lessons, for all their limitations in such highly constrained

circumstances, were, in Sydney Gibbes’s estimation, an important

distraction that helped the younger children get through the

monotony of the day. Indeed, he felt that the only one of the grand

duchesses who seemed ‘dull’ was Olga, who didn’t have any formal

lessons, although she did continue with her own independent study,

wrote poetry and practised her French by reading stories to

Alexandra. It seemed painfully clear to Gibbes, though, that the

family’s ‘greatest hardship’, especially Nicholas’s, was the lack of free exercise, ‘the yard being a poor substitute for their Alexander Park’.57

On one occasion Maria had said to him that they were all, otherwise,

quite contented and that she ‘could live at Tobolsk for ever if only

they would be able to walk out a little’.58 But Nicholas’s repeated

requests to Pankratov to be allowed into town were refused. ‘Are

they really afraid that I might run off?’ he asked. ‘I will never leave my family.’59 He seemed to have no comprehension of the security

problems that this would pose. The local government of Tobolsk

was still holding on but not far away, in Tomsk, the workers’ soviet

there was already demanding that the Romanovs be taken to prison.

‘We keep doing the same things every day’, became the regular

complaint of all the family, as Anastasia told Katya on 8 October.

One thing that lightened the girls’ day was the visits of a cleaning

woman who brought her little boy Tolya with her. The sisters loved

playing with him for he reminded them of a little boy at Stavka

called Lenka whom they had taken under their wing. ‘Ask your

brother; he met him’, Anastasia told Katya. Mention of Lenka once

again prompted the remembrance of happier times with the Tsar’s

Escort at Mogilev: ‘What are you doing? I want to see you all
awfully
badly
! . . . When I look at the street through the window, I see everything covered with snow and feel so sad, because it is winter

already, and I love summer and warmth.’60 ‘Till now we’ve had no

reason to complain about the weather, as it’s been warm,’ Olga told

Xenia that same day, ‘but now we are freezing.’ She envied her living in the Crimea with her mother and sister. ‘No doubt it’s wonderful

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where you are. The sea so bluish-green . . . We are all well and our

life is the same, so there is nothing interesting that I can write

about.’61

For ten days in the second half of October came a less than

pleasant change to the daily routine when the former imperial dentist, Sergey Kostritsky, travelled all the way from the Crimea to check

the family’s teeth and perform some urgent dental work on Nicholas

and Alexandra, who both suffered endless problems. Kostritsky

arrived with letters and gifts from Maria Feodorovna, Xenia and

Olga and was accommodated in Pankratov’s lodgings. Inevitably, the

two men discussed the family and agreed that even here in Tobolsk,

they were still ‘suffocating in the same stilted formal atmosphere’

that had prevailed at court. It had created a real ‘spiritual hunger’

in them and a ‘thirst to meet with people from a different milieu’.

Hidebound tradition ‘dragged them down like a dead weight and

made them the slaves of etiquette’.62 Pankratov might have wished

more time had been given to the girls’ broader education, instead

of to the niceties of ‘how to stand, how to sit and what to say, and

so on’, but despite that he was impressed with how willingly they

chopped wood and cleared the snow – ‘their simple life gave them

much pleasure’.63 With most of the winter wood now cut the girls

were helping their father to pile it up in the wood store and clear

the snow in the yard, as well as from the steps and roofs of the

outbuildings. Pankratov caught Maria one day struggling to do this

with a broken spade. Why hadn’t she asked for a replacement, he

enquired, adding that he had not thought she would wish to do

such things. ‘But I love this kind of work’, she had replied.64 So

long as the weather was fine and they could work outside in the

fresh air the girls were happy. ‘Bright sun . . . makes my mood

immediately better’, Olga wrote to PVP, with the weather continuing

‘divine’ well into November. ‘So don’t think that it is always bad.

Not at all. As you know, we don’t get dejected easily.’65

But dejection must have descended at the end of the month when

the family heard of the October Revolution in Petrograd. ‘A second

revolution’, Alexandra wrote in her diary on the 28th, when the

news finally reached Tobolsk. ‘Provisional government replaced.

The Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky have occupied the Smolny.

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FOUR SISTERS

Winter Palace badly damaged.’66 Only the day before Nicholas had

written a cheerful letter to his mother: ‘I’m chopping a lot of wood, usually with Tatishchev . . . The food here is excellent and plenty

of it, a big difference with Tsarskoe Selo, so that we have all settled down well in Tobolsk and have put on 8–10 pounds [3.5–4.5 kg] in

weight.’67 Petrograd and their former lives were now so much past

history for Nicholas that the Bolshevik coup did not particularly

register with him and he didn’t even mention it in his diary; the

weather was excellent, he had walked a lot and chopped wood, that

was the sum total of his world now.68 For a long time he made no

comment about the October Revolution: ‘Nicholas II suffered

silently and never talked to me about it’, Pankratov recalled.

Eventually he merely expressed outrage at the sacking of the Winter

Palace. It was mid-November before Nicholas finally received the

newspaper accounts and deemed this second revolution ‘Far worse

and more shameful than the events of the Time of Troubles’. The

turbulent years of the interregnum in the sixteenth century seemed

to have far more resonance for him now than the recent past.69

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THANK GOD WE ARE STILL IN

RUSSIA AND ALL TOGETHER

N

A heavy fall of snow greeted Olga’s birthday on 3 November, for

which she received modest presents of three pots of cyclamen and

some strong-smelling geraniums. ‘Dear Olga has turned 22,’

Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘it’s a pity that the poor thing has to

spend her birthday in this present environment.’1 For a mournful

and introspective Alexandra, Olga’s birthday was, this sad difficult

year of 1917, a talismanic day – a day of remembrance rather than

celebration. Thirty-nine years previously to the day, her little sister May had died of diphtheria; and on this same day fourteen years

ago Ernie’s daughter Elisabeth had died suddenly when staying with

them at Skierniewice. Against this comment in her diary Alexandra

added the left-facing
sauwastika
symbol of which she was so fond, her use of it denoting the cycle of life and death.

For Olga herself – twenty-two, unmarried, and a prisoner in

snowbound Siberia – it must have been a particularly bleak birthday.

She had remained very thin since her illness and had become increas-

ingly withdrawn and anxious, so much so that Sydney Gibbes had

found her rather brusque at times. But her innate love and kindness

still illuminated her letters to friends and family. On 9 November

she wrote with affection to her aunt Xenia saying they were all well

and cheerful. She had rescued a half-dead potted lemon tree from

the conservatory and brought it back to life with careful watering.

She was sorry that she had nothing interesting to tell her and that

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FOUR SISTERS

Xenia could not come and visit them, ‘as we’ve arranged things very

nicely and feel completely at home here’.2

‘We live here as though on a ship at sea, and the days all resemble

one another’, Nicholas wrote to Xenia with the same sense of quiet

resignation.3 But the lack of news depressed him: ‘No papers at all,

or even telegrams, have come from Petrograd for a long while. This

is awful in such trying times.’4 When newspapers finally did arrive

they said little. Denied access to
The Times
, ‘we were reduced to a nasty local rag printed on packing paper,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard,

‘which only gave telegrams several days old and generally distorted

and cut down’.5 Nevertheless Nicholas was grateful for any news;

Sydney Gibbes noticed how he ‘would read through a newspaper

from beginning to end, and when he had finished, would start again’.6

He was rereading his old diaries too, which he found ‘a pleasant

occupation’ and a distraction from his interminable routine.7

‘We have not had any significant changes in our life so far’,

Anastasia told Katya on 14 November. Apart from outside propel-

ling themselves back and forth on the swing and from there drop-

ping down into a heap of snow, or pulling Alexey around on his

sledge, there was only the endless piling up of logs. ‘This work kept us busy. That is the way we live here, not very exciting, is it?’

Anastasia found herself endlessly apologizing to Katya: ‘I am terribly sorry that my letter turned out to be so stupid and boring, but

nothing interesting happens here.’8 Her sense of frustration and

irritation grew in her next letter: ‘I am starting to write this letter to you for the third time, because it either turns out messy, or very stupid! . . . Of course we have not played tennis for a long time.

We swing, walk, and saw logs. Inside the house we read and study.’9

‘The children are getting very bored without their walks’, Anna

Demidova wrote to a friend at the end of the month. Indeed,

there is a terrible boredom among the entourage. Frost, thaw,

sunshine – darkness. The days fly by. Reading out loud in the

evenings, needlework or bezique. We’re making Christmas

presents. On the 21st they suddenly once more would not allow

us out to church and wouldn’t even let us have a service at home

– everything hangs on the whim of others. And it is at such

difficult times that we particularly long for church . . . It’s hard

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THANK GOD WE ARE STILL IN RUSSIA

to write letters when others read them, but I’m grateful all the

same to have them.10

The unreliability of the postal system was a major frustration for

everyone. All of the girls’ and Alexandra’s correspondence testifies

to many letters and parcels never reaching them or the people they

sent them to. ‘Every time I went over to the house,’ recalled

Pankratov, ‘one or other of the Grand Duchesses would meet me

with the question – are there any letters?’11 Their own were full of

endless questions about old friends, former patients, where they

were and what they were doing – though hopes of their ever knowing

the answer were rapidly receding. ‘Forgive me for so many ques-

tions,’ Maria apologized to her friend Vera Kapralova, ‘but I so want to know what you are doing and how everyone is.’12 ‘Do you have

news of any of ours?’ echoed her sister Olga. ‘As always, my post-

cards are uninteresting and full of questions.’13 And again, the same day, to Valentina Chebotareva: ‘Did you receive my letter of 12/10?

I’m very sad not to have had news of you for such a long time.’14

Tatiana, more restrained, seemed for her part almost to enjoy the

isolation: ‘everything is quiet in our distant little town. It’s good to be so far from the railway and large towns, where there are no cars

and only horses.’15 But she admitted to Valentina Chebotareva ‘we

feel as though we are living on some kind of faraway island where

we receive news from another world . . . I play the piano a lot. The

time goes quickly and the days pass completely unnoticed.’16

By early December the temperature was dropping well below

zero; on the 7th and 8th it hit –23C (–9.4 F) below. ‘We shiver in

the rooms,’ Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova, ‘and there is always a

strong draught from the windows.’17 It was so cold indoors that even

the hardy Nicholas sat in his Cossack
cherkeska.
The girls huddled together to try and keep warm; ‘the dogs are running around and

begging to get in our laps’, Tatiana told Zinadia Tolstaya, all of

them glad of the warmth of a friendly animal. ‘We do not have

enough space for everybody,’ Anastasia wrote to Katya, ‘so one of

us is writing while sitting on the sofa and holding the paper on her

lap. It is pretty chilly in the room, so our hands do not write prop-