The Resurrection of the Romanovs (8 page)

Day after day, life went on: Nicholas hunted, the grand duchesses walked and played tennis, groups of Polish nobles arrived for teas, and the imperial couple presided over “dinners in the company of their suite,” full of the “same meaningless conversations,” said a courtier.
44
One evening, in the midst of the crisis, Anastasia and Marie acted out two scenes from Molière’s
Bourgeois Gentilhomme
for an audience of assembled guests. The two grand duchesses seemed happy and boisterous, with Anastasia embracing the comedic role and enjoying the laughter that rang through the hall; yet Gilliard, watching from the wings of a makeshift stage, saw the empress in the front row, smiling and laughing one minute, only to excuse herself and flee in terror, face white and eyes wide, to answer the muffled screams of her son.
45

Finally, despite their reluctance, the situation became so grave that Nicholas and Alexandra finally consented to the publication of medical bulletins; for the first time, Russia learned that its future emperor was gravely ill, though there was no mention of hemophilia. Prayers were said, and a priest administered the last rites of the Orthodox Church to the dying boy.
46
In despair, the empress sent a cable to Rasputin in Siberia, pleading with him to pray for the life of her son; his answer came the following morning: “The Little One will not die.”
47
And suddenly, inexplicably, Alexei began to recover. Convinced that the peasant’s prayers had saved her son, Alexandra’s faith in Rasputin became unassailable as the peasant’s shadow lengthened over the lives of the Romanovs.

In 1913, Russia celebrated three hundred years of Romanov rule. On a frigid late February morning, sparse crowds lined St. Petersburg’s broad, snowy avenues, awaiting the string of carriages that conveyed the imperial family from the Winter Palace to a Te Deum at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. There were receptions and balls, theater galas and concerts, and carefully choreographed rituals of power designed to elicit loyal responses from an empire that had largely grown apathetic to its ruling family. In the sanctuary of their pastel palaces, aristocrats openly gossiped about Rasputin’s friendship with the empress, wondering aloud in French—for most would never condescend to speak Russian—if she was quite sane, and shaking their heads in frustrated resignation as the formerly brilliant imperial court shrank away into memory.

Nicholas and Alexandra saw none of it. That spring, they took their children and extended family on a tour along the Volga, visiting river towns, monasteries, and medieval fortresses; watching from the deck of the steamer, Olga Alexandrovna recalled “crowds of peasants wading high in the water” to catch a glimpse of her brother.
48
On June 1 they arrived in Kostroma; here, in 1613, a delegation from the Zemsky Sobor in Moscow had called upon sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, then hiding at the town’s Ipatiev Monastery, and offered him the Russian crown. Unlike the dismal reception in St. Petersburg, here the Romanovs received a resounding welcome: thousands of onlookers, held back by lines of smartly uniformed soldiers, cheered as they passed through the town in open carriages, along streets bedecked with flags and floral arches and resounding with patriotic songs from peasant choirs and ringing church bells.
49

Anastasia, 1914.

Everything, watched with wide-eyed excitement by the cloistered Romanovs, seemed to attest to their popularity, to the loyalty of the nation, to the permanence of their rule. Flickering newsreels and souvenir prints, sepia photographs and popular postcards captured it all, freezing Anastasia, almost inevitably clad throughout the festivities in white dresses and feathered hats, in the amber of time, a time that finally seemed ripe with promise and stability. This is how Russia saw her: Grand Duchess Anastasia, idealized and enshrouded in a careful mythology: for the public she was a delightful young girl, a paragon of virtue, an Orthodox princess who inhabited an ethereal plane dominated by palaces and jewels, servants and balls. The Tercentenary cloaked the imperial family in an aura of enchantment, a fairy-tale family in a fairy-tale world. Beneath this seductive surface, though, below this impassively proud universe, a volcano was stirring, its molten fires of revolt and revolution churning and simmering with an insistent, increasing urgency that no one, in 1913, could have foreseen.

3

Into the Abyss

At eight o’clock on the evening of August 1, 1914, Anastasia sat down with her mother and sisters in the dining room of the Lower Palace at Peterhof. The summer had begun happily, with a long, late holiday in the Crimea and a cruise to visit the king and queen of Romania, but then came June 28, and the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife. Diplomatic tensions ran high as alliances formed in the chancelleries of Europe strengthened, armies mobilized, and ambassadors presented ultimatums.

The world stood poised on the edge of an abyss that August night as Alexandra and her daughters waited nervously, impatiently: Nicholas II was cloistered in his study, reading the latest dispatches and poring over telegrams. As the minutes passed and the usually punctual emperor failed to appear, the empress grew increasingly agitated. No one knew what was happening, though everyone feared the worst. The fears were confirmed when Nicholas entered the room: quietly, he told his family that Germany had just declared war on Russia. Hearing this news, Anastasia—like her mother—immediately burst into tears.
1

The following day, a yacht brought the imperial family to St. Petersburg; only the tsesarevich, who had suffered a fall and could not walk, remained behind at Peterhof. The August sun shone over the imperial capital, washing its baroque palaces in the golden light of this last day of peace; cannons thundered from the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and bells pealed as the yacht slowly steamed up the shimmering Neva River, churning a ribbon of white foam in its wake. Every inch along the granite embankments brimmed with a nervous, excited, enthusiastic crowd that shouted and cheered the family on their progress. At the Winter Palace, a crimson carpet led them from sunlight to shadow, from heat into the cool and cavernous building: an impassive Nicholas, a strained Alexandra, and the four grand duchesses, clad in white and faces tense, joined within by a string of aunts, uncles, and cousins—nearly all of them, like Anastasia, born of unions between Russian men and German women, and now about to witness one country, one royal family, pitted against the other.

A crowd of aristocrats, officials, and courtiers crushed together in an immense hall; through windows opened to provide a welcome breeze came the continuous roar of thousands outside, still cheering and singing, hailing the beginning of what the Russians thought would be a sure and swift victory. “Hands in long white gloves nervously crumpled handkerchiefs,” Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna saw as she entered the hall, “and under the large hats . . . many eyes were red with crying. The men frowned thoughtfully, shifting from foot to foot, readjusting their swords, or running their fingers over the brilliant decorations pinned on their chests.”
2
Standing before this crowd of five thousand, as priests chanted and incense floated across the room, Nicholas II formally declared war on Germany.

Empress Alexandra and her daughters, 1914. From left: Olga, Tatiana, Alexandra, Anastasia, and Marie.

Optimism overwhelmed reality in these early days, and people spoke of the massive Russian Army easily annihilating the kaiser’s soldiers, of a quick victory that would restore the prestige of Nicholas II’s crown and shower his reign with laurels. Enthusiastic patriotism overtook everyone: even the empress and her two eldest daughters threw themselves into the war effort, training as Red Cross nurses and working daily in a hospital they established at Tsarskoye Selo.
3
The boisterous and energetic Anastasia, though, found herself constrained: at thirteen, she was too young to undertake such work; instead, with her sister Marie, she sponsored her own hospital for officers injured in the war. Their committee commandeered an ornate, medieval-style building in a theatrical cluster of barracks, crenellated walls, and peak-roofed towers called the Feodorovsky Gorodok, just across a lake from the Alexander Palace, and founded Convalescent Home No. 17.
4
Several wards, filled with simple white metal beds, housed two dozen wounded officers; there was a small library of books and magazines, a common room with games of chess and checkers, and even a billiard table to keep the recuperating patients occupied.
5

This hospital and its patients gave Anastasia a sense that she, too, could contribute something useful, could play some small role in fighting for her beloved “Papa”; that this also offered a temporary escape from the drudgery of her life must have had its own special appeal. With Marie, she visited these men several times a week, sitting at their bedsides, reading to them, writing letters for them, and playing games with them to help pass their long hours of convalescence.
6
She was curious about them, about their lives before the war, about their families, about their experiences fighting, about their wounds, and they, in turn, were fascinated by these privileged young women who paid them such attention, these daughters of their beloved and divinely inspired emperor. Perhaps they had seen them in newsreels or in postcards, the idealized family at the heart of its own national myth, but the reality was often startlingly, amusingly different. Anastasia kept her pockets stuffed with sweets, little, round,
crème brûlée
–flavored candies; she freely handed them out to the patients but also, recalled one, “ate them herself all the time.” She was also watchful for any other treats that might come her way: visiting one patient, she found that someone had given him a box of sugared cherries and, soon enough—and with the man’s permission—she was cramming them into her mouth “with great pleasure,” although with sidelong glances across the ward lest she be caught in the act.
7
And still she charmingly and innocently moaned and muttered about the constant battle to control her waistline.

The hospital for wounded officers operated by Marie and Anastasia at Tsarskoye Selo.

The hospital offered diversion, and it filled a void, but it also became yet another opportunity for Anastasia to understand and embrace the idea of noblesse oblige, which was so important to her position. While the empress and her two eldest daughters, according to their own wishes, were spared nothing in the operating room, from amputations to death on the table, the youngest grand duchesses had a less demanding role to fulfill. They knitted gifts for their patients, and arranged small entertainments to keep the men occupied. “Today we went to our hospital,” Anastasia wrote in a 1915 letter to her father. “There was a concert. There were singers and then dancers, and then there were those who sang and danced. . . . I sat with some of your old officers. Everyone applauded at the end.”
8
When the men were discharged, the grand duchesses provided them with watches, small souvenir medals with their initials, and other presents commemorating their encounters with the emperor’s daughters.
9
Inevitably, though, Anastasia came face-to-face with a sad reality that these men knew only too well. “Two more poor things died,” Anastasia wrote in a letter, “we sat with them only yesterday.”
10
Such painful days became increasingly common as the conflict continued and the ravages of war took hold.

These men fought for her country, for her father, for her, sacrificing their lives in the name of holy, imperial Russia, an abstract idea that, for Anastasia, took on a more personal aspect in the summer of 1915. Soldiers had protected the Romanovs, patrolled the confines of their estates, lined the avenues they traveled; in turn, members of the imperial family all enjoyed close ties with the military, serving as honorary colonels in chief of regiments—all, that is, except Anastasia, who had been deemed too young to receive such responsibility. It was, like her weight, an unending source of despair: officers aboard the
Standart
had teased her unmercifully over the situation, saying that Anastasia would be lucky to be named chief of some obscure fire brigade in St. Petersburg.
11
But her father came to the rescue. On June 18, 1915—Anastasia’s fourteenth birthday—Nicholas II named his daughter honorary colonel in chief of the 148th Caspian Infantry Rifle Regiment.
12
Custom dictated a regimental parade, the presentation of colors, and a review on horseback by the new colonel in chief, all things Anastasia would undoubtedly have enjoyed, if not for the ceremonial aspects then at least for the opportunity to make herself the center of attention, but war denied her the experience. At the time, her regiment was off in distant Galicia, fighting German and Austro-Hungarian troops along the Dniester River; she had to wait two months before finally receiving the formal congratulations of Colonel Vassili Koliubakin, the regimental commander, at a short meeting in the Alexander Palace.
13
Still, she seized on every detail, receiving, as she proudly wrote, “a report about my regiment,” and deeming it “all very interesting.”
14

Marie (left) and Anastasia visiting patients in their hospital at Tsarskoye Selo, 1916.

In August 1916 the war entered its third year. Military setbacks, shortages of ammunition, and poor planning decimated hopes for a quick and decisive victory; instead there were disasters; retreats; and, on the home front, an increasingly discontented and restive populace. The previous summer, heavily influenced by a wife under the spell of an insistent Rasputin, Nicholas II had personally assumed command of the Russian Army—over objections of his government—and taken up semipermanent residence in the town of Mogilev, where the headquarters, or Stavka, was located, and where he was joined, when he was well enough, by Tsesarevich Alexei. Left in the imperial capital, which Nicholas had re-christened with the more Russian moniker of Petrograd, Empress Alexandra propelled herself to unfortunate notoriety as, egged on by Rasputin, she demanded that her husband replace ministers at a frenetic pace that left the government hopelessly crippled. Clouds were gathering, and even members of the Romanov family openly whispered of a possible coup d’état and revolution.

It was to be the last of Anastasia’s carefree summers, these months divided between Tsarskoye Selo and visits to Mogilev with her mother and sisters. She missed her father and relished these reunions, when the imperial train pulled into a secluded siding on the outskirts of town and informality prevailed. In the mornings, the grand duchesses explored the surrounding countryside, walking through the forest and calling on surprised peasants and the children of railway workers, inevitably bringing little gifts of food and candy.
15
Each day, the empress and her daughters motored into Mogilev, to the Governor’s House, where Nicholas and Alexei shared a room, joining them for luncheons and teas, followed by cruises along the Dnieper River or excursions across the sandy hills. The latter, recalled Baroness Buxhoeveden, could be real treks, “more of a pain than a pleasure,” for Nicholas loved exercise, and he tended to ignore not just the more obvious boundaries but also the abilities of those who accompanied him. It was not uncommon for the emperor to set off at a rapid pace up and down hills, over fences, and across streams, leaving behind him a struggling, motley assortment of his children, his officers, and even his invited guests. More than once, these exhausted, breathless groups stumbled into the yard of some isolated dacha, surprising families sitting quietly drinking tea and who objected to the unwelcome intrusion; soon enough, though, most realized the illustrious identities of the intrepid wayfarers tromping across their lawns and clumsily stumbled over themselves to bow and present hastily plucked bunches of flowers to the giggling grand duchesses.
16