The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (63 page)

erly.’18 Spirits were beginning to sag until Sydney Gibbes came up

with a new way of passing the cold, dark winter days. He suggested

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that the children perform some one-act plays; he had brought a

selection with him. They started rehearsing after their afternoon

walks, and created an improvised theatre in the ballroom upstairs.

On the evening of 6 December Maria, Alexey and Gilliard performed

a twenty-minute playlet,
Le fluide de John
by Maurice Hennequin.19

At last, on 10 December, the family was allowed out to mass

again. ‘We are always so happy when they let us go to church’,

Tatiana wrote to her aunt Xenia:

although you can’t compare this church with our cathedral,
*
but all the same it’s better than indoors . . . I often remember Tsarskoe Selo and the lovely concerts we had at the hospital; do you

remember how amusing it was when our wounded did the
lezginka

dance; I also remember our walks at Pavlovsk and your little

carriage, and the morning jaunts past your house. How long ago

that all seems, doesn’t it? Well, I must stop now.20

Although they were all getting chilblains from the intense cold,

the girls had at last had things to do in the run-up to Christmas,

helping their mother make presents for the entourage and even the

guards as well. Alexandra knitted woollen waistcoats and painted

cards and bookmarks. She and the girls were using up every last

precious scrap of material and knitting wool to ensure that everyone

had something to open on Christmas Day. ‘They were all expert

needlewomen’, remembered Iza Buxhoeveden, ‘and managed to

make the prettiest things out of the coarse, hand woven, country

linen, on which they drew their own designs.’21 ‘I am knitting stock-

ings for the small one’, Alexandra told Anna on the 15th.

He asked for a pair as all his are in holes. Mine are warm and

thick like the ones I gave the wounded, do you remember? I

make everything now. Father’s trousers are torn and darned, the

girls’ under-linen in rags. Dreadful, is it not? I have grown quite

gray. Anastasia is now very fat, as Marie was, round and fat to

the waist, with short legs. I do hope she will grow. Olga and

Tatiana are both thin, but their hair grows beautifully so that

they can go without scarves.22

* The Feodorovsky Sobor at Tsarskoe Selo.

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With food supplies considerably better in Tobolsk than Petrograd,

she had sent Anna precious gifts of flour, sugar, macaroni and sausage, as well as a hand-knitted scarf and stockings. In return Anna had

sent a parcel with perfume, a blue silk jacket for Alexandra and

pastilles for the children.23 Alexandra regretted that unlike her

husband she had no old diaries and letters to read through. ‘I have

not a line of yours’, she told Anna. She had ‘burnt everything’:

All the past is a dream. One keeps only tears and grateful memo-

ries. One by one all earthly things slip away, houses and posses-

sions ruined, friends vanished. One lives from day to day. But

God is in all and nature never changes. I can see all around me

churches (long to go to them) and hills, the lovely world.24

Her heart lifted when, on 19 December, Iza Buxhoeveden finally

arrived in Tobolsk, with her Scottish travelling companion Miss

Mather. Disappointingly, however, militants in the 2nd Regiment

of the guard refused to allow her into the Governor’s House and

she had to put up at the Kornilov House and content herself with

catching only glimpses of the family.25 When the girls first saw her

‘they began to gesticulate wildly . . . in a moment all four Grand

Duchesses were at the window waving their hands, while the

youngest jumped up and down in her excitement’.26 They were all

terribly disappointed that Iza was not allowed to join them, even

for Christmas; three weeks later she was told to move into lodgings

in town.

‘Christmas is coming,’ Trina Schneider wrote to her colleague

PVP in Petrograd, ‘but this year it will be an especially sad one –

far from our friends and families.’ Olga too, in response to a comment from her aunt Xenia about recent misfortunes, was trying hard not

to feel melancholy:

They always say that nothing good or happy endures for long,

or rather doesn’t last; but I also think that even awful things

must come to an end some time. Isn’t that so? Things are as

quiet with us as they can be, thank God. We are all well and

cheerful and are not losing heart.

I dreamed about grandmother today. I’ve just put on an orange

scarf and for some reason it reminded me of your sitting room

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in Petrograd. My thoughts are jumping from one thing to

another, which is why this letter seems so incoherent, for which

I ask your forgiveness. Well, what else is there to write?27

Having made their many Christmas gifts the girls did their best

to decorate the tree. ‘We have a Christmas tree standing in the

corner and it gives off such a wonderful smell, not at all like the

ones at Tsarskoe’, Olga told Rita Khitrovo.

It’s a special kind and is called a ‘balsamic fir’. It smells strongly of orange and mandarin, and resin trickles down its trunk all the

time. We don’t have any decorations; only some silver rain and

wax candles, church ones of course, as there aren’t any other

kind here.28

The tree ‘smelled divine,’ Tatiana wrote to PVP, ‘I don’t remember

such a strong scent anywhere else.’29 Its presence inevitably inspired thoughts of absent friends: ‘At Christmas we will be especially

thinking of the past’, Anastasia wrote to Katya. ‘How much fun we

had . . . I would like to write and tell you a lot, but it is so sad that everything is being read!’30

At midday on Christmas Eve everyone gathered for liturgy in

the upstairs hall and after lunch they arranged the tree and presents.

The family also decorated a tree for the twenty men of the guard,

and at half past four took them their gifts, as well as special things to eat. Alexandra presented each soldier with a gospel and a hand-painted bookmark. Nor did she forget Iza, sending gifts to the

Kornilov House of ‘a tiny Christmas tree and some tablecloths and

pillows embroidered by herself and her daughters, to which the

Emperor added a little vase with his cipher on it.’31

‘After supper on Christmas Eve,’ Olga wrote to Rita,

we handed out the presents to everyone, the majority being

various items of our own needlework. As we were sorting them

out and deciding who to give what to, it reminded us so much

of our charity bazaars at Yalta. You remember how much there

always was to get ready? We had vespers at around 10 last night

and the tree was lit. It was lovely and cosy. The choir was large

and sang well, only too much like a concert, which I don’t like.32

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Surrounded by those who had remained faithful to them through

these last difficult nine months, the Romanov family sang with great

heart – and hope. Pierre Gilliard felt a special sense of ‘peaceful

intimacy’ that Christmas, as though they all, truly, were like ‘one

big family’.33

Early on Christmas Day the family walked to church in the snow

for the early morning service, conducted in front of the icon of the

Mother of God brought specially from the Abalaksy Monastery 17

miles (27 km) from Tobolsk. During the service, when Father Alexey

Vasiliev intoned the
mnogoletie
– the
prayer for the long life of the family – he failed to omit their imperial titles. Militants in the guard who heard this loudly complained to Pankratov. The result was a

total ban on the family’s attending any more services in church.34 It was a disheartening end to Christmas, and to the year. After a glass

of tea in the early evening of 31 December, ‘we went our separate

ways – without waiting for the New Year’, Nicholas noted in his

diary. His final thoughts that year’s end were elsewhere: ‘Lord God,

save Russia.’35

Alexandra’s were more explicit: ‘Thanks be to God that all seven

of us are alive and well and together,’ she wrote in her diary that

same night, ‘and that he has kept us safe all this year as well as all those who are dear to us.’ But a similar message she sent to Iza was

far more emphatic: ‘Thank God we are still in Russia and all

together.’36

*

The Siberian winter, in all its merciless fury, finally arrived in Tobolsk in January 1918. Until then the single-digit sub-zero temperature

had been generally tolerable and the Romanov family had begun to

wonder whether the savage winter foretold them was a myth. But

as January passed Alexandra recorded the plummeting temperature.

It was –15C (5 F) on the 17th; five days later it was down to –29C

(–20 F) and with a searing cold wind to boot. In the depths of winter Tobolsk became a ‘city of the dead’, ‘a living tomb’, a ‘listless, life-less place, whose mournful appearance sinks into the soul’.37 All the children had been ill again – this time with German measles, brought

into the house by Alexey’s playmate Kolya Derevenko, but luckily

their symptoms lasted only a few days.38

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The severe cold lingered throughout February; it was mid-March

before the thermometer struggled above freezing. Even indoors with

the tiled stoves stoked with logs it was ‘mortally cold’.39 ‘The logs were damp, so they could not warm up the house at all; they just

smoked’, Anastasia told Katya.40 The windows were thick with ice

and the wind rattled at the frames and penetrated every aperture.

‘The Grand Duchesses’ bedroom is a real ice-house’, Pierre Gilliard

noted in his diary; their fingers were so stiff with cold that they

could barely write or sew.41 Being on the corner their room caught

the worst of the winter wind and recently the temperature in there

had been as low as –44C. They wrapped themselves in their thickest,

long knitted cardigans and even wore their felt boots indoors, but

they could still feel the wind whistling down the chimney.42 In

desperation, they took to sitting in the corridors, or went and huddled in the kitchen, though that, alas, was full of cockroaches.43

‘Lost in the immensity of distant Siberia’, the long dark days of

winter passed, for everyone, in a continuing atmosphere of quiet

acceptance and ‘family peace’, as both Pierre Gilliard and Sydney

Gibbes recalled.44 The children remained patient and uncomplaining,

always kind-hearted and willing to help and support the others,

although it was clear to Gibbes that the elder two sisters ‘realized

how serious things were becoming’. Even before leaving Tsarskoe

Selo, Olga had told Iza Buxhoeveden that she and her sisters ‘put

on brave faces for their parents’ sake’.45 Everyone who spent those

last months with the family noticed their quiet fortitude in the face of so much desperate uncertainty. ‘My respect for the Grand

Duchesses only grew the longer our exile lasted’, recalled Gleb

Botkin.

The courage and unselfishness they displayed were indeed

remarkable. My father marveled at the exhibition of cheerfulness

– so often an assumed one – by which they strove to help and

cheer their parents.

‘Every time the Emperor enters the dining room with a sad

expression on his face,’ my father told me, ‘the Grand Duchesses

push each other with their elbows and whisper: “Papa is sad

today. We must cheer him up.” And so they proceed to do. They

begin to laugh, to tell funny stories, and, in a few minutes, His

Majesty begins to smile.’46

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The girls’ engaging warmth extended to their friendly relations

with the soldiers of the guard, particularly those of the 1st and 4th regiments. ‘The Grand-Duchesses, with that simplicity which was

their charm, loved to talk to these men’, observed Gilliard. It was

easy to understand why; the soldiers seemed, to the sisters, ‘to be

linked with the past in the same way as themselves. They questioned

them about their families, their villages, or the battles in which they had taken part in the Great War.’47 Nicholas and Alexey meanwhile

had grown so close to the men of the 4th that they often went to

the guardhouse in the evening to sit and talk with them and play

draughts.

Klavdiya Bitner, the most recent addition to the entourage, soon

came to her own very clear perception of the five children during

the last months of their lives. She had no doubt that it was the brisk and efficient Tatiana who was the absolute linchpin at the Governor’s House: ‘if the family had lost Alexandra Feodorovna, then its

protector would have been Tatiana Nikolaevna’.

She had inherited her mother’s nature. She had many of her