The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (25 page)

would retrospectively become an indelible emblem of the dying days

of the old world order. ‘The four Russian Grand Duchesses had

enchanted everybody, and the poignant little Tsarevich melted all

hearts.’18 But many shared the sobering thoughts of Sir Henry

William Lucy:

Thus it came to pass that the great autocrat, master of the lives

of millions, was deprived of the privilege enjoyed by the humblest

tourist from the Continent. He visited England, and left its shores

without setting foot upon them, save in the way of a hasty, furtive

visit to Osborne House.19

The British and Russian royal families would never meet again.

*

By the time the Romanovs arrived home, Alexandra was once again

prostrated. ‘How I am paying for the fatigues of my visits,’ she wrote to Ernie on 26 August, ‘a week already in bed.’20 Her health was

causing serious concern for it had been in rapid decline since the

winter of 1907 when Alexandra had called in her physician Dr

Fischer forty-two times in the space of two months.21 Spiridovich

had privately sought the opinion of an eminent Russian medical

professor at around this same time. He had concluded that the

tsaritsa had inherited something of the ‘vulnerability’ to nervous

illness and ‘great impressionability’ of the house of Hesse and that

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there was a distinct ‘hysterical nature’ to her ‘nervous manifesta-

tions’. These took the physical form of general weakness, pain around the heart, oedema of the legs caused by poor circulation, and problems with her neuro-vascular system which manifested itself in red

blotches on her skin – all of which were getting worse as she

approached middle age. ‘As for the psychic troubles,’ the professor

concluded, ‘these are principally expressed by a state of great depression, by great indifference to that which surrounds her, and by a

tendency to religious revery.’22

Dr Fischer had been called in again in 1908 to treat Alexandra

for a bout of painful neuralgia that had been affecting her sleep.23

As a specialist in nervous disorders he had prescribed absolute rest.

He had also felt very strongly that the presence of Anna Vyrubova

– who now spent almost every day with the tsaritsa – was detrimental, if not harmful.24 He advised Nicholas in writing that he could not

treat the tsaritsa properly all the time Anna was in such close prox-

imity. But Alexandra would not countenance Anna’s removal and

Fischer soon after requested leave to resign from his post. He was

replaced in April 1908 by Dr Evgeny Botkin who immediately

suggested that an upcoming trip to the Crimea – where Nicholas

was to review the Black Sea Fleet – would be beneficial to the

empress’s health.

From now on Alexandra would be loath to consult anyone but

Botkin. His appointment as court physician was, however, something

of a poisoned chalice: Alexandra was the kind of patient who only

tolerated doctors who agreed with her own self-diagnosis. He played

up to her view of herself as a chronic invalid who must bear her

affliction, as Father Grigory had taught her, ‘in the nature of an

offering’.25 Her confirmed invalidism became a useful tool when

dealing with the misbehaviour of her daughters, who were clearly

affected by her constant absences from family life. ‘When God thinks

the time comes to make me better, He will, and not before’, she

told them, and they had better behave themselves to ensure this

happened.26

In September 1909 the family headed for the Crimea by rail –

the longest train ride any of the children had ever made and their

first visit to the region, for Nicholas and Alexandra had not spent

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any real time there since Alexander III’s death in 1894. At the port

of Sevastopol they joined the
Shtandart
and sailed round the Crimean coast to welcoming fireworks and illuminations at Yalta and a warm,

holiday atmosphere, before travelling on to the old summer palace

at Livadia, 53 miles (85 km) further south. During the holiday the

children rode, played tennis and swam from their private beach,

often with their favourite cousin, eighteen-year-old Grand Duke

Dmitri Pavlovich, who was now spending a great deal of time with

the family. Nicholas was glad of Dmitri’s company as he had always

had a soft spot for him, and they spent much time going off on

walks and rides together.27 Alexandra kept to her bed for most of

the time or sat on the veranda, receiving no one and often not even

joining the family for lunch. Her recovery was very slow and affected everyone’s spirits. But she refused to see any specialists, trusting to Botkin and her own self-medication with carrot juice, ‘saying that

this substance liquefied the blood, which was too thick’.28 Perhaps

her rigorous vegetarian diet was beneficial; by the end of October

she had recovered sufficiently to take gentle walks and drives with

her daughters and go shopping with them in Yalta.

That autumn at Livadia Alexey suffered another attack of bleeding

when he once again hurt his leg. A French medical professor was

called in and visited three times in secret. But he was a specialist in tuberculosis and ‘declared himself incompetent to diagnose what it

was’, clearly not being told the child was suffering from haemophilia.

Nor could another medical expert summoned from St Petersburg

offer any palliatives.29 By this time, as Spiridovich noted, it was

becoming increasingly difficult to disguise the fact that there was

something profoundly wrong with the tsarevich, ‘which, like the

Sword of Damocles, hung menacingly over the Imperial Family’. It

was clear that in Alexey’s case, as well as her own, Alexandra had

given up on conventional medicine and, under the influence of her

spiritual adviser Grigory, ‘only counted upon the help of the Most

High’.30 Alexey’s condition coupled with his mother’s poor state of

health meant that the family remained in Livadia almost until

Christmas. But as the brilliant, sunny Crimean autumn turned to a

cold and wet winter, there were only endless games of dominoes,

halma and lotto and occasional film shows to divert the members

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of the household from the stultifying boredom that consumed them.

Their mother’s chronic ill health was an emotional burden that

her daughters struggled to cope with. ‘God help that dearest mama

will not be sick any more this winter,’ Olga wrote to Grigory in

November, ‘or it will be so awful, sad and difficult.’ Tatiana was

anxious too, telling him that ‘we feel bad seeing her so sick. Oh, if only you knew how hard it was for us to endure Mama’s sickness.

But yes, you
do
know, because you know everything.’31 For the best part of six months that year of 1909 the imperial family had been

almost totally absent from view in Russia. The four sisters were

beginning to show the signs of their isolation from the real world

and the natural interchange they needed with young people of their

own age. Yet even now, Nicholas and Alexandra were planning the

family’s continued retreat – for the sake of Alexandra’s and Alexey’s poor health. Before leaving Livadia that Christmas they commissioned the building of a new palace to replace the dark and damp

existing main palace (although the nearby brick-built Maly Palace

where Alexander III had died was left standing). In this new home

they intended to spend the whole of every spring and summer. For

ordinary Russians it would continue to be, as the peasant saying

went, ‘a great height to God and a long way to the tsar’.32

*

New Year 1910 was a gloomy one in imperial Russia. For the first

two months the court was in mourning for Grand Duke Mikhail

Nikolaevich, the tsar’s great- uncle, who had died in Cannes on 18

December (NS) the previous year. In April Alexandra lost her

mistress of the robes, Princess Mariya Golitsyna, a woman whom

she had counted as one of her closest ladies at court and a personal

friend; barely a month later she was plunged into black again on

the death of her uncle King Edward VII.33

In normal circumstances Nicholas and Alexandra would have led

the public mourning in St Petersburg for Grand Duke Mikhail, but

Alexandra was ill yet again. Everywhere that year ‘the conversation

wore the topic of the Imperial Family’s seclusion threadbare’, with

mounting concern being voiced about ‘the effect on public opinion

and the nation of the long-continued absence from the capital of

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the Tsar and the imperial family’.34 As the US diplomat in St

Petersburg, Post Wheeler, recalled:

They spent the spring and fall at Livadia in the Crimea. In the

summer, when they were not at Peterhof, they were yachting on

the imperial yacht, the
Standart
. The coast of Finland saw more of them than their own capital. In between they were at Tsarskoe

Selo, the ‘Tsar’s City’ only a handful of miles away, but so far as

St. Petersburg was concerned it might have been a hundred . . .

Society was at a loose end. It was not a wholesome situation

either for them or for the nation. So the talk ran.35

St Petersburg had become ‘a city with a frown’, a sombre place

oppressed by its history, concluded British journalist John Foster

Fraser.36 The social life of the capital was moribund and increasingly corrupt, its aristocracy deeply resistant to political change or social reform and fixated on rank. An outmoded, Gogolian bureaucracy

still divided the population into two main camps – officials and

non-officials – with the mass of the population looking upon the

members of the inflated tsarist bureaucracy as ‘vampires’. ‘The hatred is covered, smothered, but it is there all the time’, Foster Fraser

argued.37 At the heart of this polarized system stood an elusive tsar

– ‘timorous and brave, hesitant and resourceful, secretive and open-

minded, suspicious and trusting’ – a man who, far from the blood-

thirsty image projected, was kindly, sincere and modest, a devoted

husband and loving father but who, as tsar, was utterly ill equipped

emotionally or morally for the task with which an accident of birth

had charged him. The burden of responsibility was ageing Nicholas

fast; and so was the emotional strain of having an invalid wife and

son. ‘Nature had framed him for a placid country gentleman, walking

amid his flower beds in a linen blouse, with a stick instead of a

sword. Never for a Tsar’, concluded Post Wheeler.38

Stagnating in the absence of the tsar and tsaritsa, and with it

their moral example, St Petersburg society was increasingly domi-

nated by the reactionary grand dukes and their wives who saw

themselves – in the face of Nicholas’s incorrigible weakness as

monarch – as the ‘true champions of Imperial power’, intent as they

were on protecting their own wealth and power by propping up a

tottering autocracy implacably opposed to democratic reform.39 St

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Petersburg society, as the French ambassador’s wife put it, consisted of ‘two or three hundred cliques, all of them social cut-throats’,

backed up by a Camorra of court officials, many of them also highly

antipathetic to the imperial couple.40 Holding centre stage was

Nicholas’s aunt, Maria Pavlovna, whose husband Vladimir (a man

of expensive vices who had dissipated thousands of roubles on

gambling and women) had died the previous February. Grand

Duchess Vladimir, as she was often referred to, was German by

birth. Like the tsaritsa she had converted to Russian Orthodoxy,

albeit shortly before her husband’s death and with a very determined

eye on the dynastic future of her sons. But she had married almost

as well as her monarch, coming, like Alexandra, from a fairly minor

German dukedom – of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

At her luxurious Florentine-style mansion on the Palace

Embankment by the River Neva, a residence which more than

rivalled the Alexander Palace, Grand Duchess Vladimir held court

in the absence of Russia’s real monarchs, her fabulous wealth enabling her to throw the most lavish receptions, charity bazaars and costume

balls. Her four-day bazaar traditionally opened the Christmas-to-

Lent season in St Petersburg and in the weeks that followed, hers

were the most sought-after invitations in the capital. The grand

duchess’s lofty and forceful manner might be intimidating but her

brilliant social connections and her natural energy ensured that she

had a finger on the pulse of Russian high society. It also meant that she was at the centre of much intrigue in the capital focused against the increasingly unpopular tsaritsa.

As a result of her wide-reaching literary interests, Grand Duchess

Vladimir had, at the end of 1909, invited a distinguished foreign

visitor to come and stay. The best-selling British novelist Elinor