The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra by Helen Rappaport



Prologue


THE ROOM OF THE FIRST


AND LAST DOOR

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The day they sent the Romanovs away the Alexander Palace became a forlorn and forgotten place – a palace of ghosts. The family had spent the previous three days frantically packing for their departure, having been informed at short notice by Kerensky’s provisional government of their imminent removal. But when it came to the final moments, although the children took their three dogs with them, the cats – Zubrovka, the stray rescued by Alexey at Army HQ, and her two kittens – had to be left behind, with a plaintive request from the tsarevich asking that someone take care of them.1

Later, when Mariya Geringer – the tsaritsa’s senior lady-in-waiting, charged with caretaking the palace after their departure – arrived, the hungry creatures emerged like wraiths from the shadows and hurled themselves at her, wailing for attention. But all forty doors of the rooms inside had been sealed; the palace kitchens were closed; everything was locked. Only the cats remained in a deserted Alexander Park, the last remnants of a family now heading hundreds of miles east into Siberia.

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In the years that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 anyone curious about where Russia’s last imperial family had lived could travel the 15 miles (24 km) from the former capital to take a look.

You could get there either on a grubby suburban train, or – avoiding 1

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FOUR SISTERS

the many potholes – by car, along the old royal road that led, straight as a ribbon, across the plain of low flat fields and woodland to Tsarskoe Selo – The Tsar’s Village. Once considered the Russian equivalent of Versailles, in the dying days of the tsarist empire Tsarskoe Selo had acquired an increasingly melancholic air – a kind of ‘ tristesse impériale’ as one former resident expressed it.2 By 1917, almost 300 years since Catherine the Great had first commissioned its construction, this village of the tsars was already anticipating its own imminent demise.

The Soviets were, indeed, quick to strip Tsarskoe Selo of its imperial links, renaming it Detskoe Selo – the Children’s Village.

Located on higher ground away from the marshy Gulf of Finland, its unpolluted air and orderly grid of wide boulevards surrounded by parkland was considered the perfect place for vigorous exercise.

The Alexander Park was transformed into a centre for sport and recreation that would breed healthy young citizens for the new communist order. Communism took a while, however, to make its mark on the town itself, which was still small, neat and mainly wooden. Beyond its modest market square, avenues of grand summer villas, built there by aristocrats who served the court, surrounded the two imperial palaces. Their once legendary occupants – the now vanished great Russian families of the Baryatinskys, Shuvalovs, Yusupovs, Kochubeys – were long gone, their homes requisitioned by the Soviets and already crumbling with neglect and decay.3

The focal point of this pleasant and peaceful little town had until the revolution been the elegant, golden-yellow Alexander Palace with its white Corinthian columns; in previous centuries the even grander Catherine Palace next door, in all its gilded baroque splen-dour, had held centre stage. But in 1918 both were nationalized, transformed into object lessons in ‘the aesthetic decay of the last of the Romanovs’.4 In June the state rooms located on the ground floor were opened to the public after a careful inventory had been made of all their contents. People paid their 15 kopeks to enter and gawp – not at what they anticipated would be the lavish style in which their former tsar had lived, but rather in disbelief that such a homespun environment could have been the residence of the last Tsar of All the Russias.5 The interiors were unexpectedly modest by former 2

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THE ROOM OF THE FIRST AND LAST DOOR

imperial standards – no grander perhaps than those of a public library or museum in the capital, or the country house of a moder-ately well-off gentleman. But for the Romanov family the Alexander Palace had been a much loved home.

Dutiful members of the newly liberated proletariat, ‘munching apples and caviar sandwiches’, sometimes joined by a few intrepid foreign tourists, were encouraged to visit on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, making sure first to don the ugly but obligatory felt overshoes to protect the beautiful waxed parquet floors from damage.6 After doing so, they would be ushered through the imperial apartments to an accompanying – and frequently contemp-tuous – account of their former occupants. The well-drilled official guides did their best to decry the decidedly bourgeois tastes of Russia’s last tsar and his wife. The old-fashioned, art-nouveau- style furniture, the cheap, outmoded oleographs and sentimental pictures, the English wallpaper, the profusion of knick-knacks scattered around on every available surface (predominantly factory-made goods of the most ordinary kind), reminded visitors of the ‘typical parlour of an English or American boarding house’7 or a ‘second-class Berlin restaurant’. The family themselves were dismissed in the glib phrases of Soviet-speak as an historical irrelevance.

As visitors were conducted from room to room, their doorways guarded by waxwork models of the scarlet and gold liveried real-life footmen who had once stood there, they could not avoid an increasing sense of Nicholas II, not as the despotic ruler painted to them but rather as a dull family man, who had crammed his study and library – where he received his ministers on matters of impor-tant state business – with photographs of his children at every stage of their development from babyhood to adulthood: children with dogs, on ponies, in the snow, by the seaside, a happy family smiling to the camera for home-made photographs taken on the Box Brownies that they took with them everywhere. Even in his private study the tsar had a table and chair where his invalid son could sit with him when he was working. This, the seat of now defunct tsarist power, could not have appeared more unremarkable, more domestic and child-friendly. Was it really the last home of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’?