The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (2 page)

Thora: Helena Victoria, daughter of Princess Helena and Prince

Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, OTMA’s second cousin

Trina Schneider: Ekaterina Schneider, Alexandra’s
lectrice
, who often acted as chaperone to OTMA.

Valentina Chebotareva: senior nurse at OT’s annexe hospital

Viktor (Vitya) Zborovsky: Anastasia’s favourite officer in the

Tsar’s Escort

Vladimir (Volodya) Kiknadze, a favourite officer of Tatiana’s at

the annexe hospital

Volkov: Alexey Volkov, Alexandra’s valet

Xenia: Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, the girls’ aunt,

Nicholas’s sister

Zinaida Tolstaya: family friend of OTMA; a correspondent in

captivity

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Author’s Note

Readers familiar with Russian history will know that any author taking on the pre- revolutionary period has to deal with the frustrations of two dating systems – the Julian calendar in use in Russia until February 1918 and the Gregorian calendar, then in use in most of the rest of

the world, which was adopted in Russia on 14 February 1918. For the

sake of clarity, all dates relating to events taking place in Russia prior to this date are given in the Julian (Old Style) form (which was 13 days behind the Gregorian system); all events taking place in Europe during that period, and reported in the foreign press or letters written outside Russia are given in the Gregorian (New Style). In cases where confusion might occur both dates are given, or qualified as OS or NS.

The transliteration of Russian words and proper names is a minefield

of confusion, disagreement, and perceived error – depending on which

transliteration system one favours. No single sytem has been set in

stone as the correct one although authors are regularly belaboured for getting their transliteration supposedly wrong. Some systems are decidedly unattractive to the non Russian-speaking lay reader; many are

unnecessarily pedantic. For this reason I have made the decision to

drop the use of the Russian soft and hard signs, represented by the

apostrophe, which in the main serve only to confuse and are a distraction on the eye. I have in the end gone with my own slightly modified version of the Oxford Slavonic Papers transliteration system, opting

for example to represent the name Aleksandr as Alexander, in hopes

of sparing the reader. I have also avoided using patronymics unless

needed to differentiate one person of the same name from another.

When I first began writing
Four Sisters
I had to make a very clear decision about where my story was going to end, having already written about the Romanovs in my 2009 book
Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of
the Romanovs
. In that book I undertook a close-up examination of the
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AUTHOR’S NOTE

last fourteen days in the lives of the family at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, and charted in forensic detail the horrific circumstances of their murder and the disposal of their bodies and I shall not repeat that part of the story here. Judging when and where exactly to end my narrative has therefore been difficult and I take full responsibility for the decision I have made about when to stop. I hope that readers will find that the Epilogue ties up the most important loose ends.

Finally, and most importantly, it is not my intention in the narrative that follows to give space to any of the numerous false claimants, a

trail of whom, since Berlin in 1920, have variously attempted to persuade the world that they are one or other of the four sisters – somehow

miraculously escaped from the bloodbath at the Ipatiev House. This

book is not for anyone wanting to read more about the much mytholo-

gized Anna Anderson aka Franziska Szankowska, nor does it give the

oxygen of publicity to the conspiracy theorists who continue to claim her survival – or that of any of her sisters – in the face of extensive and rigorous scientific analysis and DNA testing undertaken since the most recent discoveries in the Koptyaki Forest in 2007.

This is a book about the
real
Romanov sisters.

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So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

but the greatest of these is love

1 Corinthians 13: 13

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AND LAST DOOR

N

The day they sent the Romanovs away the Alexander Palace became

a forlorn and forgotten place – a palace of ghosts. The family had

spent the previous three days frantically packing for their departure, having been informed at short notice by Kerensky’s provisional

government of their imminent removal. But when it came to the

final moments, although the children took their three dogs with

them, the cats – Zubrovka, the stray rescued by Alexey at Army

HQ, and her two kittens – had to be left behind, with a plaintive

request from the tsarevich asking that someone take care of them.1

Later, when Mariya Geringer – the tsaritsa’s senior lady-in-

waiting, charged with caretaking the palace after their departure –

arrived, the hungry creatures emerged like wraiths from the shadows

and hurled themselves at her, wailing for attention. But all forty

doors of the rooms inside had been sealed; the palace kitchens were

closed; everything was locked. Only the cats remained in a deserted

Alexander Park, the last remnants of a family now heading hundreds

of miles east into Siberia.

*

In the years that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 anyone

curious about where Russia’s last imperial family had lived could

travel the 15 miles (24 km) from the former capital to take a look.

You could get there either on a grubby suburban train, or – avoiding

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FOUR SISTERS

the many potholes – by car, along the old royal road that led, straight as a ribbon, across the plain of low flat fields and woodland to

Tsarskoe Selo – The Tsar’s Village. Once considered the Russian

equivalent of Versailles, in the dying days of the tsarist empire

Tsarskoe Selo had acquired an increasingly melancholic air – a kind

of ‘
tristesse impériale
’
as one former resident expressed it.2 By 1917, almost 300 years since Catherine the Great had first commissioned

its construction, this village of the tsars was already anticipating its own imminent demise.

The Soviets were, indeed, quick to strip Tsarskoe Selo of its

imperial links, renaming it Detskoe Selo – the Children’s Village.

Located on higher ground away from the marshy Gulf of Finland,

its unpolluted air and orderly grid of wide boulevards surrounded

by parkland was considered the perfect place for vigorous exercise.

The Alexander Park was transformed into a centre for sport and

recreation that would breed healthy young citizens for the new

communist order. Communism took a while, however, to make its

mark on the town itself, which was still small, neat and mainly

wooden. Beyond its modest market square, avenues of grand summer

villas, built there by aristocrats who served the court, surrounded

the two imperial palaces. Their once legendary occupants – the now

vanished great Russian families of the Baryatinskys, Shuvalovs,

Yusupovs, Kochubeys – were long gone, their homes requisitioned

by the Soviets and already crumbling with neglect and decay.3

The focal point of this pleasant and peaceful little town had until

the revolution been the elegant, golden-yellow Alexander Palace

with its white Corinthian columns; in previous centuries the even

grander Catherine Palace next door, in all its gilded baroque splen-

dour, had held centre stage. But in 1918 both were nationalized,

transformed into object lessons in ‘the aesthetic decay of the last of the Romanovs’.4 In June the state rooms located on the ground floor

were opened to the public after a careful inventory had been made

of all their contents. People paid their 15 kopeks to enter and gawp

– not at what they anticipated would be the lavish style in which

their former tsar had lived, but rather in disbelief that such a homespun environment could have been the residence of the last Tsar of

All the Russias.5 The interiors were unexpectedly modest by former

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THE ROOM OF THE FIRST AND LAST DOOR

imperial standards – no grander perhaps than those of a public

library or museum in the capital, or the country house of a moder-

ately well-off gentleman. But for the Romanov family the Alexander

Palace had been a much loved home.

Dutiful members of the newly liberated proletariat, ‘munching

apples and caviar sandwiches’, sometimes joined by a few intrepid

foreign tourists, were encouraged to visit on Sundays, Wednesdays

and Fridays, making sure first to don the ugly but obligatory felt

overshoes to protect the beautiful waxed parquet floors from

damage.6 After doing so, they would be ushered through the im-

perial apartments to an accompanying – and frequently contemp-

tuous – account of their former occupants. The well-drilled official

guides did their best to decry the decidedly bourgeois tastes of

Russia’s last tsar and his wife. The old-fashioned, art-nouveau- style furniture, the cheap, outmoded oleographs and sentimental pictures,

the English wallpaper, the profusion of knick-knacks scattered

around on every available surface (predominantly factory-made

goods of the most ordinary kind), reminded visitors of the ‘typical

parlour of an English or American boarding house’7 or a ‘second-

class Berlin restaurant’. The family themselves were dismissed in

the glib phrases of Soviet-speak as an historical irrelevance.

As visitors were conducted from room to room, their doorways

guarded by waxwork models of the scarlet and gold liveried real-life

footmen who had once stood there, they could not avoid an

increasing sense of Nicholas II, not as the despotic ruler painted to them but rather as a dull family man, who had crammed his study

and library – where he received his ministers on matters of impor-

tant state business – with photographs of his children at every stage of their development from babyhood to adulthood: children with

dogs, on ponies, in the snow, by the seaside, a happy family smiling

to the camera for home-made photographs taken on the Box

Brownies that they took with them everywhere. Even in his private

study the tsar had a table and chair where his invalid son could sit

with him when he was working. This, the seat of now defunct tsarist

power, could not have appeared more unremarkable, more domestic

and child-friendly. Was it really the last home of ‘Nicholas the

Bloody’?

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FOUR SISTERS

The tsar and tsaritsa’s suite of interconnecting private rooms

further testified to their three consuming passions: each other, their children and their devout religious faith. Their overcrowded

bedroom with its English chintz wallpaper and curtains was more

Russian Orthodox shrine than boudoir. Two modest single iron

bedsteads – of the kind found in ‘second-rate hotels’ as one American visitor observed in 1934 – stood pushed together in a heavily

curtained alcove, every inch of wall space behind which was crammed

from floor to ceiling with religious images, crucifixes and ‘pathetic, cheap little tin ikons’.8 On every shelf and table top in her private sitting room the tsaritsa had set out yet more knick-knacks and

photographs of her children and her darling Nicky. Personal posses-

sions were few and surprisingly trivial – useful domestic items such

as a gold thimble, sewing materials and embroidery scissors, as well

as cheap toys and trinkets – ‘a china bird and a pincushion made

like a shoe. The kind of things that one of the children might have

given her.’9

At the far end of the corridor toward the gardens, the cupboards

in Nicholas’s dressing room still held his neatly pressed uniforms

and, nearby, the Great Library of glass-fronted bookcases was full

of carefully ordered French, English and German books bound in

fine Moroccan leather of the kind that he often sat and read aloud

to his family in the evenings. Visitors were often taken aback by

what greeted them in the Mountain Hall beyond. This, one of the

palace’s formal parade rooms, had instead served as a downstairs

playroom for the tsarevich Alexey. In the centre of this elegant hall of coloured marbles, caryatids and mirrors, a large wooden slide or

‘American glide’10 – on which the children of previous tsars had

happily played – still took pride of place, along with Alexey’s three favourite toy motor cars. Near a door leading out to the garden

stood a poignant reminder of the tragedy that had dominated the

lives of the last imperial family of Russia – Alexey’s ‘small wheelchair, upholstered in red velvet’, an evocative reminder of the merciless

attacks of haemophilia that frequently disabled him, the contours