The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (21 page)

self-possession, always bright, always happy’. He also found her

endlessly inventive – always coming up with ‘some new oddity of

speech or manner; her perfect command of her features was remark-

able’ – he had never come across anything to equal it in any other

child.29 As for Alexey, at this point Gibbes, like the other tutors,

had little contact with him apart from the occasional encounter in

the classroom at break time when the little boy, who could be pain-

fully shy with strangers, would come in and ‘gravely shake hands’.30

For now, Gibbes’s lessons with the girls took the form of English

grammar, spelling and usage in the mornings and dictation in the

afternoons. With all four sisters now in the classroom and Gibbes

settled in, Pierre Gilliard – in addition to his duties as French teacher

– was officially appointed to take overall charge of the girls’ curriculum. Like Gilliard, Gibbes chose to maintain his independence by

living in St Petersburg and travelling out to Tsarskoe Selo for lessons five days a week. Both, like Tyutcheva (aka Savanna), were accorded

pet names: Zhilik and Sig, the latter based on Gibbes’s initials. Other tutors also came and went from town: PVP continued to teach

Russian; Konstantin Ivanov taught history and geography; M.

Sobolev mathematics; a Herr Kleikenberg gave German lessons to

Olga and Tatiana – a language they never took to, or him either;

Dmitry Kardovsky, a professor from the Russian Academy of Arts,

was their drawing master; and Father Alexander Vasilev drilled them

in their catechism.31

In March 1907 a major assassination plot against Nicholas, his

uncle Grand Duke Nicholas and the prime minister Stolypin had

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THE
SHTANDART

been uncovered in St Petersburg, leading to the pre-emptive arrest

of twenty-six ‘very prominent anarchists’ and the confiscation of an

arsenal of bombs and arms.32 The story inevitably prompted sensa-

tionalist reports in the western press that the tsar was ‘cowering in terror, and dreading to visit his own capital’ and that the Alexander Palace was ‘a huge bastioned fortress, with barred windows suggesting the gloom of a prison-house’.33 Yet, in fact the only sop to security within the palace at this time of heightened alert was the habit –

actually adopted after an attempt on Alexander II many years before

– for Nicholas and Alexandra to have their meals served in different

rooms in alternation. A Russian general recently invited to lunch

with the tsar had been surprised to find the table set in the tsaritsa’s mauve boudoir. Noticing his surprise, young Tatiana had pertly

remarked, ‘Next time . . . I suppose we shall lunch in the bathroom!’34

Security nevertheless remained extremely tight when the family

took their annual Finnish holiday in the
Shtandart
in 1907. All was following its normal uneventful pattern until 29 August when, with

the yacht travelling at 15 knots towards Riilakhti with an experienced Finnish pilot on board, there was a terrible accident not far from

the port of Hanko. As Anna Vyrubova recalled:

We were seated on deck at tea, the band playing, a perfectly

calm sea running, when we felt a terrific shock which shook the

yacht from stem to stern and sent the tea service crashing to the

deck. In great alarm we sprang to our feet only to feel the yacht

listing sharply to larboard. In an instant the decks were alive

with sailors obeying the harsh commands of the captain,

and helping the suite to look to the safety of the women and

children.35

Although the
Shtandart
was not in immediate danger, the captain ordered a speedy evacuation. This prompted a sudden panic for

Alexey could not be found on deck, where he had last been seen

playing with the ship’s cat and her kittens. Alexandra went into

paroxysms of terror as a frantic search began, only for the boy to

appear with his
dyadka
Derevenko who, when the impact had

happened and fearful that the boilers might blow, had gathered

Alexey up in his arms and carried him to the prow of the yacht

where it was safer.36 Nicholas remained his usual uncannily

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FOUR SISTERS

impassive self, calmly calculating the yacht’s degree of list and how long they might have before she sank, as the outlying escort of some

15–20 vessels hurried to the crippled
Shtandart
’s assistance.37With Nikolay Sablin escorting the children to safety, Alexandra regained

her composure enough to dash down to her cabin with Anna

Vyrubova and gather up all her valuables into sheets, as did Nicholas with his important state papers; the yacht was leaning at a 19-degree angle by the time they disembarked.

When Sablin and other officers went down into the ship to

examine the damage, they found a huge dent in the bottom of the

hull, which if it had been breached would have caused the yacht to

sink very fast. As it was, only one compartment had let in any water

and this was sealed.38 The official inquiry into the accident revealed that the rock that had caused it was uncharted; on subsequent maps

it was named after Blomkvist, the unfortunate Finnish pilot who

had failed to spot it. Members of the crew involved in the swift and

speedy evacuation of the family and in the yacht’s preservation were

rewarded with money, gold and silver watches, and medals.

Meanwhile, the accident had attracted widespread coverage in the

world’s press, with newspaper correspondents flocking to Hanko.

Considerable shock was registered in the Russian papers, with the

finger of blame being pointed first at the Finns, then the revolu-

tionaries and then the whole tsarist system. Many were convinced

it had been a terrorist attack and that the yacht had hit a mine or

that a bomb had been planted in her prow.

The children, though, had found the adventure of a real-life

shipwreck hugely exciting, even down to being crammed together

overnight in one small and rather grubby cabin in an escort cruiser,

before being transferred to the
Aleksandriya
. The family eventually continued their holiday in the
Polyarnaya zvezda
, the children once more contenting themselves with happy days of picnicking, mushroom-gathering and roasting potatoes on bonfires on the island of

Kavo and walking with Nicholas in the woods on Paationmaa,

gathering flowers.39

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N

By the autumn of 1907 Alexey was out of his baby skirts and into

long trousers; his girlish curls were turning smooth and brown, but

he still was an engagingly beautiful child, similar in looks to his

sister Tatiana. His outward robustness, however, belied the fact that he was already a ‘Child of many Prayers’, as Lili Dehn described

him.1 With little to go on about the heir to the Russian throne, the

foreign press was full of fanciful stories about plots to kidnap or

murder him, or to poison his bread and butter or his porridge. It

was also, already, discussing rumours about his ‘ill health’, which

for now was ‘ascribed to the misfortune that so many residences of

the Czars leave much to be desired from the point of view of sani-

tary science’.2

The first stories about the tsarevich to emerge tended to focus

on his rather spoilt behaviour. Little Alexey had a mind of his own

and a strength of personality to equal Anastasia’s. He loved attending army inspections and manoeuvres with his father, strutting around

in his miniature uniform, complete with toy wooden rifle, and playing the despot – even at the tender age of three. He was already a

stickler for the due respect that should be accorded him as heir and

at times showed a marked air of impertinence – a trait he also shared with his nearest sibling.3 He rather liked the outmoded ritual of

being kissed on the hand by the officers on board ship and ‘didn’t

miss his chance to boast about it and give himself airs in front of

his sisters’, as Spiridovich recalled. On the recent
Shtandart
cruise off Finland Alexey had taken it into his head to have the ship’s band
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FOUR SISTERS

got out of their beds to play for him in the middle of the night.

‘That’s the way to bring up an Autocrat!’ Nicholas had remarked,

with paternal pride.4 There were times, however, when Nicholas

took his son’s peremptory behaviour in hand, such as when he

discovered that Alexey took particular delight in suddenly creeping

up on the guards posted at the front of the Alexander Palace,

‘watching them out of the corner of his eye as they sprang to atten-

tion and stood like statues while he strolled nonchalantly past’.

Nicholas forbade the guards to salute unless another member of the

family accompanied Alexey; the boy’s humiliation ‘when the salute

failed him’ had, it was said, ‘marked his first taste of discipline’.5

For a while everyone had had to contend with the reign of ‘Alexey

the Terrible’, as Nicholas called his son, but mercifully he soon

began to grow out of the worst of his bad behaviour.6 Some of it

no doubt was a response to the limitations placed upon him by his

condition. For here was a little boy who had everything:

the most costly and expensive playthings, great railways, with

dolls in the carriages as passengers, with barriers, stations, build-

ings, and signal boxes, flashing engines and marvelous signalling

apparatus, whole battalions of tin soldiers, models of towns with

church towers and domes, floating models of ships, perfectly

equipped factories with doll-workers, and mines in exact imita-

tion of the real thing, with miners ascending and descending,7

– all of which were mechanical and could be made to work at the

press of a button. But Alexey did not have his health. As time went

on and the restrictions on what he could and could not do increased

he rebelled at constantly hearing the word ‘no’. ‘Why can other

boys have everything and I nothing?’ he kept on asking angrily.8

Alexey proved difficult at times for his
dyadka
Derevenko to control, for he was naturally adventurous and constantly challenged all his

carers. He liked nothing better than hurtling down his indoor slide

at the Alexander Palace or riding round in his pedal car, but every

knock and bang was potentially dangerous.

In the early 1900s there was nothing any doctor could do to

control the bleeding into the joints that followed the tsarevich’s

numerous accidents other than to apply ice and confine the little

boy to bed. At the time, acetylsalicylic acid – an early form of aspirin
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OUR FRIEND

available from the 1890s – was considered a useful painkiller

(Alexandra had taken salicylic acid for her sciatica). But in Alexey’s case it was counterproductive – thinning the blood and thus inten-sifying the bleeding. Nicholas and Alexandra were fiercely resistant

to the use of morphine because of its powerful addictive effect and

so the best and only way to protect Alexey was to have him constantly watched, but this did not prevent him having his worst accident yet,

in the autumn of 1907, when, out playing in the Alexander Park,

he fell and hurt his leg. There was hardly any visible bruising but

the internal haemorrhage triggered by the fall caused him excruci-

ating pain. As Olga Alexandrovna – who had rushed over on hearing

the news – recalled: ‘The poor child lay in such pain, dark patches

under his eyes and his little body all distorted, and the leg terribly swollen.’9 The doctors could do nothing, nor could Professor Albert

Hoffa, an eminent orthopaedic surgeon who was called in haste

from Berlin. ‘They looked more frightened than any of us and they

kept whispering among themselves’, Olga Alexandrovna recalled.

‘There seemed just nothing they could do, and hours went by until

they had given up all hope.’10

In desperation, and remembering how Grigory Rasputin had

helped Stolypin’s daughter, Alexandra telephoned Stana, whom she

knew was in regular contact with him. Stana sent her servants out

to find Rasputin, who hastened to Tsarskoe Selo. Arriving late, he

entered by a side entrance and up the back stairs where he could

not be seen. Nicholas, Alexandra and the four girls were anxiously

awaiting him in the tsarevich’s bedroom, along with Anna Vyrubova,

the imperial physician Dr Evgeny Botkin and Archimandrite Feofan

(the tsar’s and tsaritsa’s personal confessor). Rasputin’s daughter

Maria later described the scene as her father had told it to her:

Papa raised his hand, and making the sign of the cross, blessed

the room and its occupants . . . Then he turned to the sickly

boy, and observing the pallid features wracked with pain, he knelt

beside the bed and began to pray. As he did this . . . each knelt

as if overcome by a spiritual presence, and joined in the silent

prayer. For a space of ten minutes, nothing was to be heard but