The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (12 page)

He usually came after dinner, joining Nicholas and Alexandra in her lilac drawing room. After kissing three times in the Russian fashion, they would talk—about God, miracles, and Alexei’s health. Then the three would head upstairs to the nursery.

There Rasputin led everyone, parents and children alike, into Alexei’s bedroom. “
There was something like a hush,” recalled Nicholas’s sister Olga, “as though we had found ourselves in Church.… No lamps were lit; the only light came from the candles burning in front of some beautiful icons. [The children] stood very still by the side of the [starets], whose head was bowed. I knew he was praying. I also knew that my little nephew [and nieces] had joined him in prayer.” Added Olga, “[All the children] were completely at ease with him.”

But it wasn’t just conversation and prayers that kept getting Rasputin invited to the palace. It was his apparent ability to ease Alexei’s pain.

His aunt Olga remembered one such incident. Arriving at the palace, she learned her little nephew was sick. She immediately went up to the nursery to look in on him. “
The poor child lay in
pain, dark patches under his eyes, and his little body all distorted,” she said. “The doctors were just useless … more frightened than any of us … whispering among themselves.”

Alexandra sent an urgent message to Rasputin in St. Petersburg. He arrived at the palace around midnight, and closing himself up in Alexei’s room, stood at the end of the bed, praying. Then he laid his hand on the boy’s leg. “
There’s a good boy,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “You’ll be all right.”

The next morning when Olga peeked in on her nephew, she could not believe her eyes. “
[He] was not just alive—but well! He was sitting up in bed … [his] eyes clear and bright, not a sign of any swelling.”

How had Rasputin done it? To this day, no one knows. Some historians have speculated that he used his strange, piercing eyes to cast a sort of hypnotic spell over the sick and frightened boy, calming him so the bleeding slowed. Others have suggested that the
starets
simply had good timing, that he waited until the symptoms had run their course before appearing at Alexei’s bedside to take credit for his improvement.

But Alexandra believed Rasputin’s healing powers were a gift from God, the answer to all her long hours of prayer. Here at last, she told herself, was the man whose coming “Dr.” Philippe had foretold two years earlier: the man
“who will speak to you of God.”

On a fall morning in 1908, Sydney Gibbes, a nervous man with painstakingly combed brown hair, arrived at the Alexander Palace. Strangely, he wore a long-tailed frock coat, black bow tie, and silk top hat. The unsuitableness of his outfit made him even more nervous. Still, “[court]
etiquette was that gentlemen who had not a uniform wore evening dress,” Gibbes later explained, “and so I set off to the Palace in evening dress at 6:00 in the morning. A ghastly experience!”

Gibbes’s nerves could be chalked up to more than his clothing. Here he was, the new English teacher for the three oldest grand duchesses, and he had yet to meet a single member of the imperial family. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra had even bothered to interview him. Seemingly summoned out of the blue, he found himself being led to a small schoolroom on the second floor. For several minutes, he was left there alone. Then the door opened. And Gibbes braced himself. The imperial children, he had heard, “
generally behaved like young savages.”

But Gibbes saw none of this—at least not right away. “
I took my first lesson with the two elder girls … [thirteen-year-old] Olga and [eleven-year-old] Tatiana.… Then I had the third daughter [nine-year-old Marie] by herself.”

Seven-year-old Anastasia and four-year-old Alexei were still too young for school. But while Gibbes was teaching, the tsarevich sneaked down the hall to visit the schoolroom. “
A tiny little chap in wee white knickerbockers and a Russian shirt trimmed with … 
embroidery of blue and silver,” recalled Gibbes, Alexei “toddle[d] into my classroom … look[ed] around and then gravely shook hands.”

Gibbes was not the only tutor. The grand duchesses’ lessons were taught by a string of teachers who arrived at the palace once or twice a week to focus on a particular subject. Among them was Peter Petrov, a friendly old man who taught Russian; Catherine Schneider, the German instructor; and Master Sobolev, the arithmetic teacher.

Sadly, these teachers were mostly a “
mediocre bunch,” recalled a family friend. “
Not one of [them] enjoyed any prominence or had any outstanding achievement to his credit,” agreed a member of court. Thus the grand duchesses’ education was “to some extent neglected.”

This was their parents’ fault. Nicholas and Alexandra put little stock in education. “
I was amazed that such a family, which possessed all the means, did not surround the children with the best possible teachers,” remarked one observer. “Just how little attention was paid to the children’s development could be judged by the interest with which they listened to the most ordinary things, as though they had never seen, read, or heard about anything. At first I thought this was simple bashfulness. But soon I came to realize that the situation concerning their education and intellectual development was very bad.”

And for too long, remembered court official A. A. Mosolov, “
the grand duchesses had
no
teacher. There were nurses to be seen in their apartments, but that was all. When the nurses had gone [because the children had grown too old for them] they had virtually no supervision, except, of course, that of their mother.” But Alexandra did nothing to challenge their intellect. Instead, claimed Mosolov, she “remained always in an arm chair, motionless, and never spoke to her daughters in the presence of a third party.”

Even with teachers, the grand duchesses’ curriculum was an easy one. They studied some literature (although, curiously, none of Russia’s great classics), religion, a little science, and only the most basic math. What they needed most, Alexandra felt, was languages—Russian, French, English, and German.
“Four languages
is
a lot,” she admitted, “but they need them absolutely.” They were, after all, necessary for everyday living. English was the language spoken within the family circle because Alexandra’s Russian was shaky. Russian, of course, was the children’s native tongue, and they occasionally spoke it with their father and others but never when their mother was present. German was their mother’s native tongue, and even though Nicholas spoke it fluently, he and Alexandra never used it to communicate with each other. And French was spoken at court.

The girls (including, later, Anastasia) detested languages. Calling them “piddle,” they did just enough work to get by and nothing more. While they spoke English fluently, their great-uncle King Edward VII of England once declared their accents atrocious. And even with Gibbes’s tutoring, they never mastered its spelling or grammar. As for Russian, some claimed they were hard to understand.
“[The grand duchesses] had an accent that seemed English when they spoke in Russian, and Russian when they spoke English,” said one acquaintance. “Never before or since have I heard anybody talk with that strange … accent.” And French? “
They never learned to speak it fluently,” confessed their French teacher, Pierre Gilliard.

A courteous and observant man with a fastidiously trimmed mustache, Gilliard had arrived at the palace two years before Gibbes. In that time, he had grown to care for his young students. They, in turn, had come to trust him as a friend.

Olga, he wrote, “
possessed a remarkably quick brain. She had good reasoning powers as well as initiative.… She picked up everything quickly, and always managed to give an original turn to what
she learned.” An avid reader, she was forever swiping novels and books of poetry from her mother’s table before the empress read them. One day, when Alexandra complained, Olga replied, “
You must wait, Mama, until I find out whether this book is a proper one for you to read.” Still, for all her natural gifts, Olga did not fulfill Gilliard’s hopes.

Less frank and spontaneous than her older sister, Tatiana liked painting, needlework, and playing the piano. Too bad, remarked Gibbes, “
she showed no feeling when she played.” Gilliard agreed. “
She was not so gifted,” he wrote, but she made up for it in “perseverance.”

And then there was Marie. Unlike her two older sisters, who were at least diligent students, Marie paid little attention to her lessons. She preferred walking outside or painting pictures. In fact, according to Gibbes, she could paint with her left hand even though she was right-handed. More extraordinary, she could paint with her left hand
while
writing with her right. If that wasn’t unusual enough, Marie was incredibly strong. She showed off her strength by occasionally grabbing her flustered tutors around the waist and lifting them off the ground.

Gilliard briefly pinned his academic hopes on little Anastasia. As a small child, she showed an interest in the classroom. But this fascination was short-lived. Just after her eighth birthday, she officially started school—and so did her teachers’ troubles.

Anastasia was a mischievous little girl, “
wild and rough, a hair-puller and tripper-up of servants,” wrote one historian. She possessed, recalled one family friend, “
a true genius in naughtiness” that extended into the classroom. Said Gibbes, “The little grand
duchess was not always an easy child to instruct.… We had, as a rule, charming lessons, but sometimes there were storms.”

Once, she snatched up a bottle of black ink and threatened to throw it all over Gibbes’s impeccable white shirt if he did not raise her English grade. The teacher refused, and the furious girl stormed out. Minutes later, she returned. This time, she was all smiles and sweetness, and she clutched a bouquet of flowers she’d grabbed from one of the palace’s many blossom-filled vases.

Was this an apology for her earlier bad behavior?

No, it was a bribe—a fistful of flowers for a raised mark. Again, Gibbes refused.

Anastasia drew herself up. Chin high and with a loud huff, she marched into the classroom next door, where their Russian instructor sat. At the top of her voice, she said, “
Peter Vasilievich, allow me to present
you
with these flowers.”

Had Gibbes heard?

She shouted again just to be sure.

Anastasia was obviously a handful during Gilliard’s lessons, too. While the French teacher did not share details, clues to her behavior can be found in a letter to her father. “
What we [children] did to Monsieur Gilliard—just terrible!” she confessed. “We were pushing him with our fists and in any other way, he had it from us.”

Another time, Alexei gleefully reported to his father, “
Anastasia was trying to strangle Monsieur Gilliard!”

Anastasia’s distaste for school was clear. “
Now I have to do an arithmetical problem,” she once grumbled in a letter to a friend, “and of course it doesn’t want to solve, such pig and filth!” School, she added in a burdened tone, was nothing but “horrid lessons.”

Still too young for school, the youngest Romanov was the center of his parents’ world. They called him their
“dear one,” their “wee one,” their “Sunbeam.” And they fussed over him endlessly.
“[He] was … the focus of all [their] hopes and affections,” recalled Pierre Gilliard. “When he was well, the palace … seemed bathed in sunshine.”

A handsome child with chestnut-colored hair and big blue-gray eyes, Alexei was, despite his fragile health, romping and full of mischief. Once, when he was five, he crawled under the dinner table and snatched off one of the female guest’s slippers. Carrying it above his head, he ceremoniously presented it to Nicholas.

The tsar was not amused. He commanded his son to return it.

Grudgingly, Alexei again crawled under the table.

Seconds later, the lady shrieked. That’s because Alexei had stuffed a big, juicy strawberry into the shoe before putting it back on her foot.

He laughed uproariously at the joke—until he was banished to the nursery. He was not allowed in the dining room for several weeks.

Some guests wished Alexei’s exile from the dinner table had been made permanent. “
He wouldn’t sit up, ate badly, licked his plate, and teased the others,” Cousin Konstantin wrote in his diary after lunching with the imperial family one day. “The Emperor often turned away, perhaps to avoid having to say anything, while the Empress rebuked her elder daughter [fifteen-year-old] Olga, who sat next to her brother, for not restraining him. But Olga cannot deal with him.”

His parents could deny him nothing. They loved him passionately and found it impossible to be firm with him. Because of this, most of his wishes were granted. If the tsarevich wanted a toy rifle, they bought it. If he wanted pancakes for dinner, they served them.