The Resurrection of the Romanovs (9 page)

Anastasia on the balcony at the Alexander Palace.

These visits, “all too short” for the grand duchesses, said Gilliard, relieved some of the boredom of “their monotonous and austere lives.”
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Inevitably, though, military matters demanded Nicholas’s attention, and forced the family back to Tsarskoye Selo, back—for Anastasia—to lessons, to the wards of her hospital, to the trivial events that filled the ebb and flow of her days. And those days, so relentless in their unceasing regularity, were about to veer into violent uncertainty.

Influenced by their mother, the grand duchesses had completely accepted the infamous Rasputin as a genuine religious figure whose prayers kept their brother alive. “All the children seemed to like him,” Olga Alexandrovna remembered. “They were completely at ease with him.”
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Very early on, they learned from Alexandra to avoid mentions of the peasant and even to conceal his visits from curious servants, as their aunt Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna noted. “He’s always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them,” she complained of Rasputin in 1910, deeming the situation “quite unbelievable and beyond understanding.”
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This bit of dissembling, like the secrecy imposed over Alexei’s illness, led people to believe the worst. One nurse employed at the palace accused Rasputin of raping her and spread her story across St. Petersburg; it was taken up and carried into the ether of escalating rumor when governess Sophie Tiutcheva lost her position at court over the peasant’s presence and complained of his malignant influence at Tsarskoye Selo.
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The four Grand Duchesses, seated in the Corner Salon of the Alexander Palace, about 1915. From left: Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia.

“Our Friend,” Alexandra wrote of Rasputin to Nicholas, “is so contented with our Girlies, says they have gone through heavy ‘courses’ for their age and their souls have much developed.”
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Just ten days after this letter, on the night of December 29, 1916, Rasputin accepted an invitation to visit Prince Felix Yusupov at his Petrograd palace. Yusupov, the immensely wealthy, decadent, and debauched husband of Anastasia’s first cousin Princess Irina Alexandrovna, gathered a group of conspirators, including Nicholas II’s first cousin Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, and poisoned, shot, and stabbed Rasputin in a highly melodramatic and mythologized murder before dumping his body into a frozen tributary of the Neva. Discovery of the crime, and of Rasputin’s body, shocked the imperial family. Anatole Mordvinov, one of Nicholas II’s adjutants, recalled how he had found the grand duchesses on a sofa on hearing the news, “huddled up closely together. They were cold and visibly, terribly upset, but for the whole of that long evening the name of Rasputin was never uttered in front of me. They were in pain, because the man was no longer among the living, but also because they had evidently sensed that, with his murder, something terrible and undeserved had started for their mother, their father, and themselves, and that it was moving relentlessly toward them.”
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In killing Rasputin, Yusupov and the other conspirators had hoped to prevail upon Nicholas II to radically change his reactionary policies; with Rasputin gone, it was thought, an aggrieved empress would withdraw from political affairs altogether. But the murder of the peasant merely strengthened the imperial couple in their resolve to stand firm against any hint of concessions, any admission that public opinion mattered, any acknowledgment that the autocracy had ceased to exist when Nicholas II had granted the Duma in 1905. By March 1917, when Nicholas had returned to Mogilev, the country stood poised on the edge of an abyss, and strikes and bread riots in the capital quickly swelled into revolution.

As chaos erupted on the streets of Petrograd, Empress Alexandra remained isolated at Tsarskoye Selo. Not only was her husband away at headquarters, but also Olga, Tatiana, and Alexei had suddenly come down with serious cases of the measles, confined to their beds and nursed around the clock by Dr. Botkin and by their increasingly anxious mother.
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Rumors about the disorders in the capital replaced fact, and no one knew quite what to believe as the empress anxiously awaited the return of her husband. Alexandra’s friend Lili Dehn, who had come to Tsarskoye Selo, spent the evening of Tuesday, March 13, putting jigsaw puzzles together with Anastasia, an ordinary slice of life that played out in a palace isolated from the churning storm gathering beyond its walls. After sending her youngest daughter to bed, Alexandra turned to her friend, saying, “I don’t want the girls to know anything until it is impossible to keep the truth from them, but people are drinking to excess, and there is indiscriminate shooting in the streets. Oh, Lili, what a blessing that we have here the most devoted troops. There is the Garde Equipage, they are all our personal friends.”
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These guards became crucial the next day when a mutinous mob of soldiers decided to storm the Alexander Palace and take the empress and her son back to the capital under arrest. The emperor was expected back early the following morning, but that night his family prepared for an attack. Some fifteen hundred loyal men surrounded the building and huddled in the snowy palace courtyard around open fires awaiting the expected mob; the guards were armed with rifles and a massive field gun pointing out into the black night.
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Warning her sick children that maneuvers were under way and that soldiers might be firing their guns close to the palace, Alexandra went out to the courtyard, accompanied by Marie, to speak to the remaining guards and thank them for their loyalty.
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Looking down on this scene with Lili, Anastasia naively remarked, “How astonished Papa will be!”
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Marie remained with her mother through the nervous hours, and Lili Dehn took the grand duchess’s camp bed in the room she usually shared with Anastasia. Throughout the winter night, a restless Anastasia tossed and turned, unable to sleep; occasionally, alarmed at the sound of gunfire, she jumped from her bed and raced to the windows, peering out into the darkness. By six the next morning, she waited with her mother in the Mauve Boudoir, expecting her father to return as promised; after several hours passed with no word, though, even the usually ebullient Anastasia sensed that something was terribly wrong. “Lili,” she nervously confided to Dehn, “the train is never late. Oh, if only Papa would come quickly.”
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Wednesday passed in growing anxiety, without word of the emperor and with increasingly ominous rumors from Petrograd. Entire regiments deserted, and increasingly angry mobs tore through the streets, looting shops and burning police buildings. By Thursday, the men guarding the Alexander Palace had abandoned their posts, and revolutionaries had cut its water and electricity, leaving its nervous inhabitants to await the unknown by candlelight.
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That same day, at a railway siding in the town of Pskov, where his train had been diverted, Nicholas II bowed to the calls of his generals and abdicated the throne for both himself and his son. The 304-year-old Romanov Dynasty had come to an end.

On March 21, after her father’s abdication, Anastasia began 483 days of captivity, first under the new Provisional Government and later under Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet regime. Telephone lines were disconnected, all communications read, packages searched, and the Alexander Palace locked and ringed with soldiers guarding the imprisoned Romanovs.
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Although most courtiers and servants abandoned their posts in the wake of the Revolution, nearly a hundred ladies-in-waiting, adjutants, valets, grooms, footmen, tutors, maids, nurses, and cooks remained—resembling “the survivors of a shipwreck,” said Anna Vyrubova—to loyally share their captivity at Tsarskoye Selo.
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This created a slightly surreal environment, where armed sentries patrolled the exterior of the palace, while inside, footmen in elaborate liveries still bowed and offered the prisoners vintage wines from the imperial cellars.
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Although there were petty annoyances—fruit was banned from the imperial table as a “luxury that prisoners could not be allowed”—life in the palace was not uncomfortable.
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A modicum of normalcy descended as the imperial family settled into their new routine, and Anastasia resumed her lessons. Gibbes had not been at Tsarskoye Selo during the Revolution and was denied access by the Provisional Government, but Gilliard remained and continued French instruction; to occupy his time, Nicholas taught Russian history; Mademoiselle Catherine Schneider, the empress’s lectrice, took on Russian language; and Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden stepped in for the absent Gibbes and gave lessons in English.
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The Romanov children, imprisoned at Tsarskoye Selo, taking a break from working on the kitchen garden in the grounds of the Alexander Palace, spring 1917. From left: Olga, Alexei, Anastasia, and Tatiana.

The five Romanov children, imprisoned in the Alexander Palace following their father’s abdication. Their heads have been shaved following measles. From left: Anastasia, Olga, Alexei, Marie, and Tatiana.

It was when the prisoners left the palace that they faced the most insistent and unpleasant reminders of their changed status. For several hours each day, they were allowed to exercise in a corner of the park, always shadowed by armed soldiers and watched by a crowd gathered along the length of a nearby iron fence. These spectators included a handful of still-loyal former subjects along with the merely curious, anxious to see for themselves the family that had once ruled over them, but the most vocal were those who loathed the Romanovs; since the Revolution they had read the myths of a heartless tsar and his deranged wife who wanted her native Germany to crush her adopted homeland. Heads filled with gossip and exaggerations, these spectators jeered and shouted revolutionary slogans and obscenities, all in an effort to attract the prisoners’ attention.
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Men had previously bowed to the ground just to touch Nicholas II’s shadow; now, soldiers guarding him turned their backs when he offered his hand in greeting, knocked him from his bicycle as he rode through the park, and insolently addressed him as “Mr. Colonel” as his family looked on helplessly.
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