The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (67 page)

‘It is difficult to write anything pleasant,’ Maria wrote in a letter to Alexey, ‘for there is little of that kind here.’ Her optimism,

however, remained undimmed. ‘But on the other hand God does

not abandon us, the sun shines and the birds sing. This morning

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we heard the dawn chorus.’48 The reality of their new surroundings

was, however, grim. They no longer enjoyed any of the small priv-

ileges they had been granted at Tobolsk and were under constant,

and close, surveillance. Letters now had to be addressed c/o The

Chairman, The Regional Executive Committee, Ekaterinburg.49

Of the three sisters left behind at Tobolsk it was the sixteen-

year-old Anastasia who through it all retained an undimmed sense

of joy in the shrinking world around them. Writing to Maria about

their mundane daily routine, she told her:

We take turns having breakfast with Alexey and make him eat,

although there are days when he eats without needing to be told.

You are in our thoughts all the time, dear ones. It is terribly sad

and empty; I really don’t know what comes over me. We have

the baptismal crosses of course and we received your news. So

God helps and will help us. We arranged the iconostasis beauti-

fully for Easter, all with spruce, which is how they do it here,

and flowers too. We took pictures, I hope they come out . . .

We swung on the swing, and how I laughed when I fell off, what

a landing, honestly! . . . I have a whole wagonload of things to

tell you . . . We’ve had such weather! I could shout out loud at

how good it is. Strange to say, I’ve got more sunburned than the

others, a real Arrrab [
sic
]! . . .

We’re sitting together right now, as always, but we miss your

presence in the room . . . I’m sorry this is such a jumbled letter,

but you know how my thoughts fly around and I can’t write it

all down, so throw in whatever comes into my head. I want to

see you so much, it’s terribly sad. I go out and walk, and then

come back. It’s boring inside or out. I swung; the sun came out

but it was cold, and my hand can hardly write.50

She and her sisters had done their best to sing the liturgy during

the Easter service, Anastasia told Maria, but ‘whenever we sing

together it doesn’t come out right because we need that fourth voice.

But you’re not here and so we make a joke about it . . . We constantly think and pray for everyone: Lord help us! Christ be with you,

precious ones. I kiss you, my good, fat Mashka. Your Shvybz.’51

*

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On 17 May the most intimidating band of Red Guards yet arrived

at the Governor’s House, this time from Ekaterinburg, led by a man

named Rodionov. They were ‘the most frightful-looking, dirty,

ragged, drunken cut-throats’ Gleb Botkin had ever seen. Rodionov

was in fact a Latvian named Yan Svikke and from the first nobody

liked him. Kobylinsky thought him cruel, ‘a low bully’.52 Cold and

suspicious by nature, Rodionov was constantly on the watch for

conspiracy: he ordered a humiliating daily roll-call and the girls had to ask his permission to come downstairs from their room and go

out into the yard. They were ordered not to shut the door to their

room at night and when the priest and nuns came on 18 May to

conduct vespers Rodionov had them searched and posted a sentry

right by the altar to watch them during the ceremony.53 Kobylinsky

was appalled: ‘This so oppressed everyone, had such an effect on

them that Olga Nikolaevna wept and said that if she had known

that this would happen she would never have asked for a service.’54

Alexey was still extremely frail and barely able to sit up for more

than an hour or so at a time. Nevertheless within three days of

arriving, Rodionov decided the boy was well enough to travel. For

several days now the staff had been preparing for their departure.

‘The rooms are empty, little by little everything’s being packed away.

The walls look bare without the pictures’, Alexey wrote to his

mother.55 Anything not to be taken was to be ‘disposed of’ in town

– if it wasn’t looted by the guards first. Most of the entourage

prepared to leave with the children. Dr Botkin’s daughter Tatiana

begged for her and her brother to be allowed to go with the sisters

but was refused. ‘Why should such a handsome girl as you are want

to rot all her life in prison, or even be shot?’ Rodionov sneered. ‘In all probability they will be shot.’ He was equally callous when he

told Mariya Tegleva about what was in store: ‘Life down there is

very different.’56 The day before the children left, Gleb Botkin went up to the Governor’s House to try and catch a last glimpse of them.

He saw Anastasia at a window; she waved and smiled, upon which

Rodionov came rushing out telling him no one was permitted to

look at the windows and that the guards would shoot to kill if anyone tried.57

On their last day in Tobolsk the household gathered together

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for farewell meals of
borshch
and hazel hen with rice for lunch and veal with garnish and macaroni for dinner, washed down with the

last two bottles of wine that they had managed to keep hidden from

the guards.58 At 11.30 the following morning, 20 May 1918, the

children were taken to the landing stage and once more boarded

the
Rus
, where, to their great joy, they were greeted by Iza Buxhoeveden. Olga told her that they were ‘lucky to be still alive

and able to see their parents once more, whatever the future might

bring’.59 But Iza was shocked by the change in her, and in Alexey

too – both of whom she had not seen close-to since the previous

August:

He was terribly thin and could not walk, as his knee had got

quite stiff from lying with it bent for so long. He was very pale

and his large dark eyes seemed still larger in the small narrow

face. Olga Nicolaevna had also greatly changed. The suspense

and anxiety of her parents’ absence . . . had changed the lovely,

bright girl of twenty-two into a faded and sad middle-aged

woman.60

The children seemed to think that Iza’s being allowed to rejoin

them ‘heralded further small concessions’ from their Bolshevik

captors.61 But this was far from the case. Constant intimidation and

humiliation followed on the two-day river journey to Tyumen. The

guards were rude and boorish and they frightened everyone.

Rodionov’s behaviour was callous; he locked Alexey and Nagorny

in their cabin at night, despite Nagorny remonstrating that the sick

boy needed access to the toilet. Rodionov also insisted that the three sisters and their female companions keep their cabin doors open at

all times, even with the guards standing immediately outside. None

of the women undressed at night, during which they had to endure

the noise of the rowdy guards drinking and making obscene

comments outside their open doors.62

On arrival at Tyumen the children were transferred to a dirty,

third-class carriage on a nearby waiting train, where, much to their

distress, they were separated from Gilliard, Gibbes, Buxhoeveden

and the others, who were put into a goods wagon with crude wooden

benches. Some time after midnight on 23 May, the train finally drew

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to a halt at a suburban freight station on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg.

It was cold and frosty and they were all left there to shiver, chilled to the marrow, till morning. Eventually Rodionov and a couple of

commissars came for the children.63 But neither Gibbes, nor Gilliard, nor Iza Buxhoeveden was allowed to go any further. Tatishchev,

Nastenka and Trina were also refused, as too were all the other staff except for Nagorny. ‘Tatiana Nicolaevna tried to take the matter

lightly’, as Iza kissed her goodbye. ‘What is the use of all these

leave-takings?’ she asked. ‘We shall all rejoice in each other’s

company in half an hour’s time!’ Tatiana had said reassuringly. But,

as Iza later recalled, one of the guards came up to her just then and, with an ominous voice, said, ‘Better say “Good-bye”, citizenness’,

and ‘in his sinister face I read that this was a real parting’.64

Pierre Gilliard watched from the train as the four children were

brought out: ‘Nagorny the sailor . . . passed my window carrying

the sick boy in his arms; behind him came the Grand Duchesses,

loaded with valises and small personal belongings.’ They were

surrounded by an escort of commissars in leather jackets and armed

militiamen. He tried to get out of the train to say goodbye, but ‘was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry’. He watched

in dismay as Tatiana trailed along last in the freezing rain, struggling to carry her heavy suitcase while holding her dog Ortipo under her

other arm, as her shoes sank into the mud. Nagorny, who had

meanwhile lifted Alexey into one of the waiting one-horse droshkies,

turned to offer assistance but the guards pushed him away.65

A local Ekaterinburg engineer who was at the station that

morning, having been tipped off that the children were due to arrive, had stood there in the freezing rain hoping to see them. Suddenly

he caught sight of ‘three young women, dressed in pretty, dark suits

with large fabric buttons’.

They walked unsteadily, or rather unevenly. I decided that this

was because each one was carrying a very heavy suitcase and also

because the surface of the road had become squelchy from the

incessant spring rain. Having to walk, for the first time in their

lives, with such heavy luggage was beyond their physical strength

. . . They passed by very close and very slowly. I stared at their

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lively, young, expressive faces somewhat indiscreetly – and during

those two or three minutes I learned something that I will not

forget till my dying day. It felt that my eyes met those of the

three unfortunate young women just for a moment and that

when they did I reached into the depths of their martyred souls,

as it were, and I was overwhelmed by pity for them – me, a

confirmed revolutionary. Without expecting it, I sensed that we

Russian intellectuals, we who claim to be the precursors and the

voice of conscience, were responsible for the undignified ridicule

to which the Grand Duchesses were subjected . . . We do not

have the right to forget, nor to forgive ourselves for our passivity

and failure to do something for them.66

As the three young women passed him, the engineer was struck

by how

everything was painted on those young, nervous faces: the joy

of seeing their parents again, the pride of oppressed young women

forced to hide their mental anguish from hostile strangers, and,

finally, perhaps, a premonition of imminent death . . . Olga, with

the eyes of a gazelle, reminded me of a sad young girl from a

Turgenev novel. Tatiana gave the impression of a haughty patri-

cian with an air of pride in the way she looked at you. Anastasia

seemed like a frightened, terrified child, who could, in different

circumstances, be charming, light-hearted and affectionate.67

That engineer was, forever after, haunted by those faces. He felt

– indeed he hoped – ‘that the three young girls, momentarily at

least, sensed that what was imprinted on my face wasn’t simply a

cold curiosity and indifference towards them’. His natural human

instincts had made him want to reach out and acknowledge them,

but ‘to my great shame, I held back out of weakness of character,

thinking of my position, of my family’.68

From the window of their train Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes

had craned their necks to catch a last sight of the girls as they got into the waiting droshkies. ‘As soon as they were all in, an order

was given, and the horses moved off at a trot with their escort.’69

It was the last any of those who had loved, served and lived with

the four Romanov sisters since their childhood ever saw of them.

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N

There was still snow on the ground in Ekaterinburg that morning

in late May when the children arrived at the Ipatiev House from

Tobolsk. Nicholas and Alexandra had only had a few hours’ warning

of their arrival and despite their joy at being reunited with them,

had only to look at their faces to know that ‘the poor things had

had to endure a great deal of moral anguish during their three-day

journey’.1

After four weeks of painful and uncertain separation the four

Romanov sisters were intensely happy to be together again. Their

campbeds were yet to be sent on from Tobolsk, but they happily

slept together on the floor in their new room on an accumulation