The Resurrection of the Romanovs (10 page)

Eventually, after weeks of watching the prisoners, the revolutionary hatred displayed by most of the guards softened. When spring came, the imperial family started a kitchen garden, and these soldiers helped the four grand duchesses in moving earth and planting rows of vegetables.
37
Having been brought up since birth around members of the imperial guard, Anastasia and her sisters were soon at ease with the new soldiers, befriending them and chatting about their families; as a result of measles, the grand duchesses’ hair had been shaved, and they even felt comfortable enough to remove their hats and be photographed—bald imperial heads shining in the sun—with their guards.
38
Even if attitudes softened, though, there were occasional unwelcome incidents. One hot summer night, Anastasia was sitting on an open windowsill, doing needlework as her father read aloud. Suddenly, soldiers burst into the room: a sentry patrolling the grounds had seen the prisoners signaling from the window with flashing red and green lights. The Romanovs professed ignorance, and investigation soon revealed what had happened: as Anastasia repeatedly leaned forward while doing her needlework, she had blocked and then uncovered two lamps burning behind her with green and red shades.
39

This was how the summer passed for Anastasia, in occasionally amusing but petty annoyances, in lessons, in the new vegetable garden, and in uncertainty. No one expected the imprisonment at Tsarskoye Selo to last. There was talk of the Romanovs being allowed to live quietly at Livadia in the Crimea, but nothing came of the idea; plans to exile the prisoners to England also failed when King George V intervened and pressed his government to deny his Romanov cousins asylum. By late summer, Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, was increasingly worried that the continued presence of the Romanovs so near to the capital would lead to disaster, and decided to transfer them away from potential danger. Warning that they would soon be leaving Tsarskoye Selo, Kerensky advised the prisoners to quietly pack what they wished to take with them. He refused to reveal their destination, but did say that they should bring warm clothing.

On the evening of August 12—Tsesarevich Alexei’s thirteenth birthday—the imperial family gathered in a luggage-filled semicircular hall at the palace, anxiously awaiting word that the train ordered by Kerensky was at the station. In past, happier years, they had gathered here to watch films, the children giggling at the sight of some meaningful glance or the batting of a suggestive eyelash that had escaped the censor; now it had become a place of torment, as hour after agonizing hour passed without any news. The grand duchesses stood alone in one corner and “wept copiously” as morning approached.
40
Finally, as dawn broke over Tsarskoye Selo, the prisoners were ushered into a series of motorcars and, accompanied by an armed escort, driven to a nearby station, where a train, disguised with Japanese flags to confuse any revolutionaries bent on vengeance, took them east, toward Siberia.

A modern view of the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, where the Romanovs were imprisoned during their Siberian exile from August 1917 to May 1918.

The journey took a week. “I will describe to you who [how] we traveled,” Anastasia wrote in her imprecise English,

We started in the morning and when we got into the train I went to sleap, so did all of us. We were very tierd because we did not sleap the whole night. The first day was hot and very dusty. At the stations we had to shut our window curtanse that nobody should see us. Once in the evening I was loking out of the window we stoped near a little house, but there was no staition so we could look out. A little boy came to my window and asked: “Uncle, please give me, if you have got, a newspaper.” I said: “I am not an uncle but an anty and I have no newspaper.” At the first moment I could not understand why did he call me “Uncle” but then I remembered that my hear [hair] is cut and I and the soldiers (which were standing next to me) laught very much. On the way many funy things hapend, and if I shall have time I shall write to you our travell father on. Good by. Don’t forget me.
41

The destination was Tobolsk, a small, remote town in Siberia; it was so remote that there was no railway link, and the prisoners had to make the last leg of the journey by river, aboard a steamer named
Rus
. During the voyage they sailed past the little hamlet of Pokrovskoye and saw Rasputin’s native village in the distance, as the peasant had once predicted they would.
42
With the prisoners came their three pet dogs; forty-two courtiers and servants to attend to their needs; dozens of steamer trunks packed with clothing, photograph albums, paintings, and souvenirs; and a contingent of some three hundred armed soldiers under the command of Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky to guard them.
43
They also carried something else: more than $14 million worth of diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and gold, carefully concealed in their belongings from inquisitive eyes, a fortune that would help ensure their well-being in the event that they were forced to leave the country.
44

The Governor’s House, where the Romanovs were imprisoned, was a large, two-story structure that the prisoners decorated and adorned with their favorite paintings, carpets, and possessions sent from the Alexander Palace.
45
The four grand duchesses shared a corner room on the second floor, “arranged all quite cozily,” as Olga Nikolaievna wrote to Anna Vyrubova, sleeping in their camp beds beneath walls hung with icons, family photographs, and memories of happier days aboard the
Standart
.
46
Large as the house was, it could not accommodate more than a handful of the retinue that had followed the imperial family into exile; other courtiers and servants were given rooms in a large, ornate villa, the Kornilov Mansion, just across the street. When the imperial family casually visited them, though, some members of the special detachment guarding the prisoners objected, and Kobylinsky was forced to ring the Governor’s House with a high stockade fence to placate his soldiers.
47
The Romanovs were now truly prisoners.

The arrival of the Romanovs in Tobolsk marked not only the end of their indulgent captivity but also, in many ways, an end to their tangible existence for many of their former subjects. It was not merely the fact that their faces and names, so well known, disappeared from newspapers and magazines. At Tsarskoye Selo, they had still lived largely as they had done before the Revolution, in a palace and surrounded by the trappings that had defined them as a ruling family. Their identity was still royal, their experiences not entirely unpleasant and certainly comfortable. Now, deprived not only of power, titles, and money but also of the privileged mise-en-scène that had set them apart from mere mortals, they disappeared into the vast Siberian landscape, into myth. The fairy tale had ended, replaced by a terrible, creeping nightmare that depicted Tobolsk as the first stage of the Romanovs’ earthly Calvary.

At first life in Tobolsk was not unpleasant, although the house became incredibly cold as the Siberian winter took hold. Everyone agreed that “the inhabitants of Tobolsk were well disposed toward the Imperial Family,” as Gilliard wrote. Citizens regularly gathered in the street outside the Governor’s House, staring in curiosity, crossing themselves, and bowing if they saw any movement at the windows.
48
People collected donations and dispatched cakes, eggs, milk, fresh fish, candy, and other gifts for the prisoners.
49
An agreeable routine settled over the house. After breakfast, Anastasia had several hours of lessons: English with Gibbes when he finally arrived in Tobolsk, French with Gilliard, Russian and arithmetic with a young woman named Klaudia Bitner, religion with her mother, and history with her father.
50
At eleven, the prisoners usually went outside. There was no garden; for exercise, they could only walk back and forth along a section of roadway enclosed by the fence. Here, Nicholas and his children, assisted by retainers, took turns cutting logs with a twin-bladed saw; when the snow came and blanketed the compound, the grand duchesses pulled each other and their brother on sleds, and built an ice mountain for their toboggans.
51
Lunch, at one, generally consisted of four courses (soup, fish, an entrée, and dessert), while dinner, at eight, sometimes added a fifth course, of fruit.
52
In the afternoon, the imperial family took tea, and in the evenings the Romanovs and their retainers gathered in the drawing room to play cards or listen as Nicholas read aloud, just as they had done in the Alexander Palace; occasionally the grand duchesses—except for Tatiana, who remained with her mother—visited the rooms occupied by nurse Alexandra Tegleva and the empress’s maids, exchanging jokes and playing games to pass the time.
53
There were, as Anastasia wrote to Anna Vyrubova, few diversions: “We often sit in the windows, looking at the people passing, and this gives us distraction.”
54
The grand duchesses had merely exchanged the suffocating boredom of their lives at Tsarskoye Selo for a new kind of isolation.

That autumn Dr. Botkin’s two children, nineteen-year-old Tatiana and seventeen-year-old Gleb, arrived in Tobolsk, sharing his lodgings in the Kornilov House. When they asked for permission to visit the grand duchesses and the tsesarevich, though, authorities refused, apparently on the pretext that they were not intimates and had never been invited to the palace.
55
From the windows of the Kornilov House, Tatiana and Gleb could catch only occasional glimpses of the prisoners, but Botkin’s son found a novel way to amuse the youngest Romanovs. A talented artist, Gleb created an allegorical story about a group of aristocratic animals living through a revolution, illustrated with charming drawings. These he gave to his father, who smuggled them to Anastasia and Alexei for review; they would make suggestions about the stories, which Dr. Botkin conveyed back to his son.
56

The winter passed. Anastasia, as her mother wrote, had now grown “very fat,” and even at sixteen she stood just a little over five feet tall.
57
Kobylinsky called her “over-developed for her age . . . stout and short, too stout for her height,” while Gibbes deemed her “ungraceful” and said, rather unkindly, that “if she had grown and lost weight she might have been the prettiest of the family.”
58

Monotony set in. To relieve the boredom, Gilliard and Gibbes organized small plays, acted and staged by Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei for the amusement of their parents and members of the household sharing their exile. One night, it was an English farce called
Packing Up
, in which Anastasia took the principal male role. As always, she relished the attention, and was doing a splendid job of it until the end, when she turned so quickly that her dressing gown flew up, exposing “her sturdy legs and bottom encased in the Emperor’s Jaeger underwear,” as Gibbes recalled. The audience collapsed in laughter as Anastasia, with no idea of what had happened, stood on the makeshift stage with a confused look on her face.
59

Laughter was much needed in Tobolsk as life became more uncertain. The Bolshevik coup in November that replaced the Provisional Government marked the end of the rather indulgent treatment the Romanovs had thus far received. Over the months that followed, restrictions and personal freedoms tightened: new, coarse guards replaced the old, friendly soldiers who had been charged with security, and attendance at church services was denied. Money became tight: when Kerensky’s regime ceased, so did government stipends for the prisoners’ upkeep and pay for the men guarding them.
60
In the spring of 1918 the Romanovs were placed on ordinary soldiers’ rations, and eggs, butter, and coffee disappeared from their diet, although occasionally sympathetic citizens in the town dispatched baskets of provisions.
61
Dinner now, Gilliard reported, without a hint of irony, “consisted of two courses, and this situation was difficult to bear for those who had been accustomed since birth to an entirely different manner of life.”
62
Although the Romanovs possessed a fortune in jewelry that they had smuggled into exile with them—enough to bribe entire regiments of soldiers and escape—lack of imagination; a critical failure to recognize the mounting forces aligned against them; and, above all, a fatalistic approach to life all coalesced into a stunning sense of resignation. As winter turned to spring, the prisoners whispered of possible rescue plots, dreaming of a world of freedom that lay beyond the still-frozen Siberian plains.

The late April arrival of Vassili Yakovlev, a new commandant from Moscow, brought with it new worries. Relieving Kobylinsky of duty, he explained that he had come to immediately transfer the Romanovs from Tobolsk, although he refused to reveal their intended destination. Tsesarevich Alexei’s precarious health, though, threatened the urgency of Yakovlev’s mission: he found the thirteen-year-old in bed, suffering from a severe internal hemorrhage and unable to travel. When the commissar insisted on taking Nicholas II as planned, Alexandra was forced to choose between her husband and her sick son; after a terrible night that found the whole family in tears, the emperor and empress, together with Marie and a handful of servants, agreed to travel with Yakovlev; the others would follow when Alexei had recovered. Just before dawn on the morning of April 26, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia stood on the steps of the Governor’s House, “three figures in gray suits,” as Tatiana Botkin saw them from her window, who “gazed for a long time into the distance” as the carts holding their parents and sister disappeared into the darkness.
63