The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (69 page)

had ordered that the door to their room be kept open the girls

managed to chat,
sotto voce
, with the women as they worked, and when his back was turned, Anastasia with typical irreverence cocked

a snook at him. They told the women how much they missed having

any physical work, although Olga was suffering with her health and

could not do much. But Maria in particular was as vigorous as ever.

‘We would do the most arduous work with the greatest pleasure;

washing dishes is not enough for us’, they said.31 The women were

greatly moved by the girls’ quiet acceptance of their situation and

told them that they hoped they would not have to endure such

suffering for much longer. They thanked the women. Yes, they still

had hope, they said; there was still a sparkle in their kind eyes.

After the women left at lunchtime the family settled back into

their quiet routine, reading, playing cards, walking the same small,

dusty circuit in the garden. But in the early hours of the following

morning, Wednesday 17 July, they were unexpectedly awoken by

their captors and ordered to dress. Told that they were being moved

downstairs for their safety from unrest and artillery fire in the city, they complied without question. In an orderly line Nicholas,

Alexandra and their five children, Dr Botkin and their three loyal

servants Demidova, Trupp and Kharitonov, walked quietly down the

wooden stairs from their apartments, across the courtyard and into

a dingy basement room. As they went, there were ‘no tears, no sobs

and no questions’.32

Later that morning, young Vladimir Storozhev recalled, ‘I was

on the roof flying my kite, when Father called me down and told

me they had been shot. It was July seventeenth, I remember, and

very hot.’33

Many weeks later, on 16 August, one of the last affectionate

postcards, sent during the first week of Lent by Olga to a friend in

Kiev, like so many others written by the four sisters that were never delivered, finally arrived back in Petrograd bearing an official stamp:

‘Returned due to military circumstances.’34

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On the day of their arrival in Ekaterinburg, the seventeen remaining

members of the entourage who had accompanied the children were

left to sit for several hours on their train while it was shunted back and forth before finally coming to a halt. Later, Gibbes and Gilliard saw the footman Volkov, Kharitonov the cook, Trupp the valet and

the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev taken off and put in droshkies which

took them to join the family at the Ipatiev House. Ilya Tatishchev,

Nastenka Hendrikova and Trina Schneider were taken away next;

Tatishchev to the Ipatiev House but Trina and Nastenka were trans-

ported to Perm. Here they languished in prison until, on 4

September, the Cheka came for them and they were taken out with

a group of hostages, and shot. Their bodies, at least, were soon

recovered, by the Whites, the following May.1

Ilya Tatishchev and Vasili Dolgorukov were removed from the

Ipatiev House not long after their arrival there and taken to prison

where they too were shot, on 10 July 1918; their bodies were never

found. En route to a similar death in Perm in September the footman

Volkov, by a miracle, managed to escape; he survived to tell his story and died in exile in Estonia in 1929.2 Before leaving the Alexander

Palace, Anna Demidova had sent her things home to Cherepovets

in anticipation of returning there after seeing the imperial family

safely off to exile somewhere. During the Stalinist years, her family was forced, out of fear, to destroy most of the valuable photographs

and documents she entrusted to them. But her diary, discovered in

the Ipatiev House, survives in GARF, the State Archives in Moscow.

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The rest of the servants who had loyally volunteered to go with the

family to the Ipatiev House, like Anna, shared their violent fate,

their bodies dumped in the same mass grave in the Koptyaki Forst

outside Ekaterinburg. The little kitchen boy Leonid Sednev escaped

the carnage, having been taken from the house the day before. He

was sent back to his family in Kaluga. But the tentacles of Stalinist repression finally caught up with him and he was arrested and shot

by the NKVD in 1942.

On 23 May Sydney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard had been left

sitting on the train at Ekaterinburg with Iza Buxhoeveden and Mariya

Tegleva and some of the other former servants in a state of growing

apprehension until Rodionov finally reappeared at 5 p.m. and told

them they were free. The train would, however, be their home for

the best part of the next month, for they were obliged to live on it

while waiting for permits to leave the city. During that time Gibbes

and Gilliard walked past the Ipatiev House on numerous occasions

and made repeated visits to the English consul Thomas Preston,

who lived nearby, to find out what was being done to help the

imperial family; but Preston’s requests to be granted access to them

were also consistently refused. On one occasion, when approaching

the house, Gilliard and Gibbes happened to catch sight of the valet

Ivan Sednev (Leonid’s uncle) and Alexey’s
dyadka
Nagorny being brought out of the front door. Soon afterwards, the Ekaterinburg

Cheka shot both of them.

On 26 May the group on the train was finally ordered back to

Tobolsk but en route was stranded at Tyumen – now under martial

law and besieged by a huge wave of refugees fleeing the fighting

along the Trans-Siberian Railway.3 It was here, their money running

out and short of food, that they had news of the murder of the tsar,

though at the time nothing was said about the fate of Alexandra and

the children. When Ekaterinburg fell to the Whites on 25 July,

Gibbes and Gilliard returned to the city and made their way back

to the Ipatiev House. The interior had been stripped of its furnish-

ings, though a great deal of small personal belongings of the family

had been left strewn around the rooms and Gibbes rescued a few

things, including the Italian glass chandelier from the grand duch-

esses’ bedroom. They saw the dim and grimy basement room where

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the family had been killed and found it ‘sinister beyond expression’.4

Finally, in February 1919, Gilliard, Gibbes, Tegleva and

Buxhoeveden made their way east to Omsk, where Gilliard joined

the French Military Mission. He, Tegleva and Gibbes subsequently

gave evidence to the Sokolov Commission set up by Alexander

Kolchak, leader of the White forces, at the end of July 1918 to

investigate the murder of the family, as too did Klavdiya Bitner,

Kobylinsky, Pankratov and many others. Gilliard and Tegleva even-

tually travelled on to Switzerland via Japan and the USA and were

married in Geneva in 1922. Gilliard went back to teaching French,

as a professor at Lausanne University, and died in 1962. In 1923 he

published an account of his time in Russia:
Thirteen Years at the
Russian Court
.

In Omsk in 1919 Sydney Gibbes joined the British Military

Mission, and later left Russia for Harbin, where he worked for the

Chinese Maritime Customs for many years. In April 1934, he

converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was ordained as a priest. On

his return to England in 1937 he settled in Oxford, where he founded

his own religious community of St Nicholas the Wonderworker.

After his death in 1963 the community went into decline, but it is

now thriving, and has its own church in Headington, South Oxford.

From Omsk, Iza Buxhoeveden travelled on the Trans-Siberian

Railway to Manchuria and on to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast,

from where she took a boat to the USA and eventually made her

way to Europe. She lived for a while in Denmark and then in

Germany before accepting a post in England as lady-in-waiting to

Alexandra’s sister Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven. She lived

in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court till her death

in 1956, and wrote three memoirs of her time with the Imperial

Family.5

Elizaveta Naryshkina, who was seventy-nine when the Romanovs

left Tsarskoe Selo, eventually told her story to the Austrian writer

René Fülöp-Miller, in Moscow some time in the 1920s. Published

in 1931
Under Three Tsars
is, however, a heavily edited version of her wonderful and extremely valuable diaries for the last year at

Tsarskoe Selo. These survive in GARF and are extensively quoted

in Nicholas and Alexandra’s diaries for 1917–18 that were published

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in Russia in 2008. Naryshkina eventually emigrated to Paris, dying

in the Russian Emigrants’ Home in Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois in

1928.

Klavdiya Bitner later married Evgeny Kobylinsky and they settled

in Rybinsk in central Russia, where they had a son, Innokenty. Here

in 1927 Kobylinsky was arrested for supposed ‘counter-revolutionary

activities’; he was held in the much-feared Butyrki Prison near

Moscow, where he was probably tortured before being shot that

December. Klavidya did not escape; in September 1937 she too was

arrested. Two weeks later she was taken to the Butovo Poligon, a

favourite killing ground of the NKVD during the Great Terror,

located in woodland 15 miles (24 km) outside Moscow. Here she

was shot and her body thrown into a mass grave – just one of 21,000

victims of the purges who were dumped there during 1937–8. The

Kobylinskys’ orphaned son was abandoned; his fate is unknown.

During the terrible anarchy that raged in Ekaterinburg after the

murder of the Romanovs, and under threat of being taken hostage

by the Cheka, Father Ivan Storozhev fled the city. He and others

dug a hole in the cellar of a convent and walled themselves in with

a supply of food until the Czech Legion and the Whites liberated

the city.6 From there he joined the White Army as a chaplain and

with his family fled to Harbin in China. Storozhev served as a

respected priest at St Nicholas’s Russian Orthodox Church in Harbin

and taught religion in the town’s commercial school, becoming a

leading member of the émigré community by the time of his death

in 1927.7

Of the Romanov sisters’ closest friends from the hospitals at

Tsarskoe Selo, Rita Khitrovo managed to get her precious papers,

including her letters from Olga and Tatiana, to safe-keeping in Paris.

She emigrated to Yugoslavia and then to the USA, dying in New

York in 1952; her papers have recently been donated to GARF. Dr

Vera Gedroits settled in Kiev where she continued to work and

teach, becoming chair of the faculty of surgery at the Kiev Medical

Institute. She died of cancer in 1932. After the annexe hospital was

closed in late 1917, Valentina Chebotareva continued to work as a

nurse in military hospitals. She died of typhus in Novocherkassk in

south-western Russia on 6 May 1919. Her son Gregory emigrated

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to the USA, ensuring the survival of his mother’s diary and letters,

which form a key testimony of the Romanov sisters during the war

years at Tsarskoe Selo.

After the revolution, Anastasia’s friend and confidante Katya

Zborovskaya had gone south, back to the family’s original home in

the Kuban, where she worked as a nurse in a TB hospital. Her

brother Viktor fought on with former members of the Tsar’s Escort

on the side of the Whites in southern Russia, before he was wounded

again in 1920. He was evacuated to Lemnos with his family and

settled in Yugoslavia. Katya had been sick and unable to travel with

the family at the time they left, but she had had the foresight to

entrust to them her precious letters and postcards from Anastasia

and other mementoes of the Romanovs, which the family took with

them into exile. Viktor died in 1944, but his widow and her daughter

eventually settled in California where they have since placed

Anastasia’s letters to Katya in safe-keeping with the Hoover

Institution Archives.

As for Katya’s fate, like that of her dear friend Anastasia, she

would become a representative ‘victim of repression’ during the

terrifying round-ups of perceived ‘enemies’ by the new Soviet state

– and in particular those having any links to the imperial family.

On 12 June 1927 she was arrested on a trumped-up charge of

‘counter-revolutionary activities’, under the notorious article 58 of the new Soviet Criminal Code. She was sentenced to three years’

imprisonment, without trial, by a three-man kangaroo court – or

troika
– on 18 August 1927 and sent to the Gulag in Central Asia.

A few letters found their way to her family but said very little; and then they suddenly stopped. Katya died in the Gulag, one of many