The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(2)

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FOUR SISTERS

The tsar and tsaritsa’s suite of interconnecting private rooms further testified to their three consuming passions: each other, their children and their devout religious faith. Their overcrowded bedroom with its English chintz wallpaper and curtains was more Russian Orthodox shrine than boudoir. Two modest single iron bedsteads – of the kind found in ‘second-rate hotels’ as one American visitor observed in 1934 – stood pushed together in a heavily curtained alcove, every inch of wall space behind which was crammed from floor to ceiling with religious images, crucifixes and ‘pathetic, cheap little tin ikons’.8 On every shelf and table top in her private sitting room the tsaritsa had set out yet more knick-knacks and photographs of her children and her darling Nicky. Personal possessions were few and surprisingly trivial – useful domestic items such as a gold thimble, sewing materials and embroidery scissors, as well as cheap toys and trinkets – ‘a china bird and a pincushion made like a shoe. The kind of things that one of the children might have given her.’9

At the far end of the corridor toward the gardens, the cupboards in Nicholas’s dressing room still held his neatly pressed uniforms and, nearby, the Great Library of glass-fronted bookcases was full of carefully ordered French, English and German books bound in fine Moroccan leather of the kind that he often sat and read aloud to his family in the evenings. Visitors were often taken aback by what greeted them in the Mountain Hall beyond. This, one of the palace’s formal parade rooms, had instead served as a downstairs playroom for the tsarevich Alexey. In the centre of this elegant hall of coloured marbles, caryatids and mirrors, a large wooden slide or ‘American glide’10 – on which the children of previous tsars had happily played – still took pride of place, along with Alexey’s three favourite toy motor cars. Near a door leading out to the garden stood a poignant reminder of the tragedy that had dominated the lives of the last imperial family of Russia – Alexey’s ‘small wheelchair, upholstered in red velvet’, an evocative reminder of the merciless attacks of haemophilia that frequently disabled him, the contours of his body still visible on it.11

Two flights of stone steps led up to the now deserted children’s apartments – where once again the adored Alexey’s large playroom 4

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THE ROOM OF THE FIRST AND LAST DOOR

dominated – full of wooden and mechanical toys: a music box that played the Marseillaise, picture books, boxes of bricks, board games, and his favourite ranks of toy lead soldiers. Languishing among them a large teddy bear – one of the last gifts from the Kaiser before war changed everything – stood sentinel by the door.12 The tsarevich’s adjacent personal bathroom often made visitors gasp in sympathy; it was ‘full of beastly surgical instruments’ – the calipers and other ‘encasements for the legs, arms and body made of canvas and leather’ that had been used to support him when his attacks of bleeding had left him temporarily disabled.13

Beyond, and modestly subsidiary to the tsarevich’s larger apartments – just as its occupants had been secondary to him in the eyes of the nation – were the bedrooms, classroom, dining and reception rooms of his four older sisters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

Their light and spacious bedrooms were furnished with simple ivory-painted and polished lemonwood furniture and English chintz fabric curtains.14 A stencilled frieze of pink roses and bronze butterflies above pink coloured wallpaper had been chosen by the younger sisters Maria and Anastasia. For Olga and Tatiana, the frieze was of convolvulus flowers and brown dragonflies. On the girls’ matching dressing tables there was still a scattering of boxes, jewellery cases, manicure sets, combs and brushes – just as they had left them.15

Elsewhere, on their writing tables, were piles of their exercise books with multicoloured covers, and in profusion on every surface, framed photographs of family and friends. Yet in the midst of so much typical, girlish ephemera, one could not fail to notice the presence everywhere in the sisters’ rooms of icons and popular religious prints and pictures. By their bedsides there were gospels and prayer books, crosses and candles – rather than the usual clutter one might expect to find.16

In their wardrobes, the girls had left behind many of their clothes, hats, parasols and shoes; the uniforms worn by the elder sisters with such pride when they rode side saddle at the big military parades for the Tercentary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913; even their baby clothes and christening robes. They would have no need in Siberia of their finely made formal court dresses – four of everything: matching sets in pink satin with silver embroidery, with pink brocade 5

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FOUR SISTERS

kokoshniki headdresses; or for that matter of the four sets of large summer hats, all meticulously stored in boxes. Outside in the hallway trunks and hampers still stood, half-packed with many more of the girls’ possessions – ready for that last journey, but never taken.

In the children’s dining room the table was still laid with mono-grammed Romanov china ready for the next meal. ‘You feel the children are out playing somewhere in the garden’, wrote a visitor in 1929. ‘They will be back at any moment.’17 But outside in the acres of parkland beyond the high iron railings surrounding the palace, a wilderness had grown up among the neat and orderly avenues of lindens, where in the soft undergrowth on either side the Siberian buttercups ‘large, double, and fragrant as roses’, the wood anemone and forget-me-nots had bloomed in such profusion in the spring.18 The palace itself might have been preserved as a historical monument but its once admired park was now overgrown with weeds, the grass waist-high in places. The long leafy avenue where the Romanov children had once played and ridden their ponies and their bicycles; the neatly ordered canals where they went boating with their father; the little blue-and-white painted playhouse on the Children’s Island with its profusion of lily of the valley and nearby the little cemetery where they buried their pets . . . everywhere and everything connected with those vanished lives now had about it a sense of absolute desolation.