Anastasia and Her Sisters Read online

  Livadia, 4 November 1911

  What happiness! I am sixteen, and last night at my birthday ball I danced three times with Pavel Alexeyevich. For a few moments we stood on the balcony, and he took my hand. We were surrounded by people, we dared not kiss, but I was happy. For one perfect night I could allow myself to be in love and to know that Pavel returns that love. For one perfect night we danced and let our eyes speak the words that we could not say aloud.

  Pavel Alexeyevich was Lieutenant Voronov, and Olga was in love with him!

  I knew I should not read the diary. The contents were private. I worried that I would be caught and she would be very angry. It was wrong to read it!

  I closed the book and returned it carefully to its place among the prayer books, promising myself that I would not look at it again.

  Within days I had broken my vow. I found Olga’s secret notebook, and from then on I could not stay away.

  Livadia, 10 November

  We will be here for another month, and it is pure bliss! I see Pavel nearly every day, and we have even had a few moments alone to talk when everyone was busy at the bazaar. P. gave me a lovely lace handkerchief as a gift—of course I know that he bought it from that girl everyone was making such a fuss over.

  Livadia, 12 November

  Tanya has noticed. We were in our bedroom dressing for dinner, when she asked suddenly, “Do you think I don’t see how you look at him?” I pretended not to know whom she was talking about.

  She calls him “your lieutenant” and says I gaze at him like a sick puppy! She also reminded me that there’s no future for me with him. “You won’t ever marry Pavel Alexeyevich or anyone else of his class.” Her words exactly.

  I asked who had said anything about marrying him, and assured her I am not contemplating marriage at the age of sixteen, any more than she is at fourteen.

  She said that if my crush on Pavel is obvious to her—she insists on calling it a “crush”—then it is surely obvious to Mother as well.

  I asked if Mother had said anything. Tanya said no, but then she said, “I’m warning you—if she does take notice, you can be sure it’s the last you’ll see of him. Lieutenant Voronov will be transferred to Vladivostok before you can snap your fingers.”

  I know that Tanya is right, and I have resolved to be more careful.

  Livadia, 14 November

  The afternoon tennis matches continue, and I follow darling P. with my eyes and ache for a few minutes alone with him. But that does not happen. I hate the thought of leaving here, for it will be spring until I see him again.

  I put the notebook back where I had found it. I could hear Olga practicing on the piano, but there was a chance that Tatiana might come in and find me. I wondered if she knew about the notebook-disguised-as-prayer-book. When did Olga even have time to write in it?

  A little further investigation revealed that she slept with the lace-trimmed handkerchief under her pillow. Poor Olga! I worried about her and how her heart might be broken.

  CHAPTER 2

  Family Secret

  TSARSKOE SELO, 1912

  The snow lay deep at Alexander Palace, and the Neva River, winding toward the Baltic, was thick with ice. Days in Tsarskoe Selo were short and bitterly cold. We settled in for the long winter, dreaming of spring, of returning to Livadia and cruising again on the Standart.

  In the meantime we looked forward to Christmas. My sisters and I knitted scarves and embroidered handkerchiefs to give as gifts to servants and friends. The palace was decorated with huge fir trees trimmed with ornaments and lit with tiny candles, a German tradition. There was one tree in our playroom, another in Mama’s sitting room, a third in the dining room.

  Everyone else might be having a cozy Christmas at home, but not the Tsar of All the Russias, whose obligations never end. Papa had to attend several Christmas celebrations—at the military hospital, the nursing school, the home for disabled soldiers. The biggest celebration was for the men of our family’s personal guard—those Cossacks who were always following us around! Mama wasn’t feeling well, but Papa’s younger sister, Olga Alexandrovna, came from St. Petersburg and took her place. Aunt Olga, who was cheerful and fun-loving, never seemed to mind filling in for Mama when she was feeling out of sorts. Alexei looked adorable in his white uniform and white fur hat. A gigantic tree had been set up in the horse ring and decorated with hundreds of little electric lights.

  Next to the tree, tables were piled with Christmas gifts. Each Cossack saluted Papa, took a numbered slip and presented it to Aunt Olga, kissed her hand, and accepted the gift from the pile, a silver spoon or cup with the imperial seal. A balalaika orchestra played, followed by a chorus of Cossacks in their brilliant red coats, singing “Absolute Master of our great land, our tsar,” followed by Cossack dancers leaping and whirling and throwing their daggers. This went on for three long hours! The Cossacks were splendid, but still! And then, after we’d had tea, there was yet another Christmas tree party for the officers, this one at our palace.

  “I can’t bear it,” my sister Olga muttered.

  “It’s our duty,” Tatiana, “the Governess,” reminded her.

  Daughters of the tsar couldn’t argue with duty. Duty was duty, and we had no choice.

  When the official obligations were over and the first star gleamed in the sky, we gathered by the light of a single candle for our own quiet Christmas Eve supper. The table was spread with the twelve traditional Russian dishes—bowls of kutya made with wheat grains mixed with honey and nuts, mushrooms served in several ways, almond soup, pickled herring, and roast carp stuffed with buckwheat—but it was the last of the forty days of fasting, and there was no meat or eggs or cheese, and no sweets. Papa loved the meal, and we ate it because Papa did. Mama hardly touched it.

  A crowd had gathered, as they always did, in front of Alexander Palace to wish our family a joyous Christmas. We stepped out onto Mama’s balcony to acknowledge their joyful shouts and cheers, as we always did. At midnight we attended Mass in the chapel, and the next day, the Great Feast of the Nativity, we exchanged gifts and presented our handmade presents to our servants and friends.

  Papa believed in a strict routine—rising at a certain hour, eating at set times, working and studying and exercising during certain periods. In Tsarskoe Selo we rose at seven and joined Papa for breakfast at eight. He always had the same thing, tea and two rolls, buttered. After breakfast he disappeared into his study to receive visitors and read reports and do whatever else a tsar does, and we dragged ourselves to our schoolroom to spend the morning at the mercy of our tutors. Our tutors arrived at nine o’clock. Alexei was taught separately. Hour after tedious hour we were at our lessons.

  An Englishman, Charles Sydney Gibbes—we called him Sydney Ivanovich; I’m not sure why—instructed us in English. When I was seven, our family made a summer visit to England as the guests of King Edward VII. He was an uncle of both Mama and Papa—it’s a very complicated family tree; you really need a chart to keep it all straight—and we called him Uncle Bertie. He informed our parents that their daughters spoke English with “atrocious accents.” Papa speaks English beautifully, almost as though he was born and raised there, and Mama does also but with a German accent. They must have agreed with Uncle Bertie, because when we arrived home in Russia, Mama hired Sydney Ivanovich to correct the problem.

  Monsieur Pierre Gilliard, a Swiss with an upturned mustache and a well-trimmed beard, taught French. We called him Zhilik, our Russian version of his name. My sisters read French rather well, but I’m the only one who actually spoke it well. I may not have gotten the grammar right, but my accent was impressively good. Gilliard’s explanation: “Anastasia is a born mimic. She imitates perfectly what she hears.”

  Dear Trina—Catherine Schneider—tried valiantly to teach us to speak German. When Mama had come from Germany as a girl engaged to marry Papa, Trina was hired to teach her Russian. Poor Mama struggled; she had a terrible time with it. “It’s very hard to learn a for
eign language when one is an adult,” Mama told us. “And that’s why you girlies—and Baby, too—must learn while you’re still young.” She always called Alexei “Baby” or “Sunbeam.”

  We spoke English with Mama, Russian with Papa, French with Grandmère Marie, a mixture with each other, and German with nobody.

  Dear old baggy-eyed Pyotr Vasilyevich Petrov, our Russian tutor, also attempted to instill in us some knowledge of geography. He had mounted a large map of the world on the wall of our schoolroom. “First, Your Imperial Highnesses, let us look at the Russian Empire,” he announced at the beginning of each day’s lesson, taking up his pointer. It made me laugh when he called us by our formal titles, since he saw us every day and we had known him for most of our lives, but Pyotr Vasilyevich was a traditionalist, and traditionalists don’t change. He swept his pointer from west to east, from central Europe to the Pacific Ocean—“Fifty-four hundred miles! More than eight thousand versts!”—and then from north to south. “The tsar’s mighty empire covers one sixth of the land surface of the world!”

  It was, I thought, truly impressive: Russia was much bigger than all the countries of Europe put together, bigger than China, bigger than the United States. Our papa was the tsar, the emperor, the autocrat—whatever you wished to call him—and ruler of more than one hundred seventy million people: the most powerful man in the world.

  After that stirring introduction, Petrov droned on interminably about mountain ranges and river systems and natural resources, and the many different nationalities living within Russia’s distant borders. Olga took a particular interest in geography, although I could not understand why. I yawned and sketched flowers in the margins of my copybook. Only when the lessons were in art, dancing, and music did I truly apply myself.

  In early January Alexei, racing around the palace in his usual rambunctious manner, took a tumble and was hurt. For days he did not leave his bedroom. These were the times we dreaded. A gloom settled over the entire palace, surely noticeable to everyone. Papa constantly wore a worried look. For days at a time Mama hardly left Alexei’s bedside, and we scarcely saw her. Meanwhile, we were expected to carry on as though nothing was wrong. My brother had an illness that was a closely guarded secret. We had been instructed by our parents never to speak of it outside the circle of our family and a few close friends. “It is our burden to bear,” Mama said.

  The secret was that Alexei has hemophilia. His blood doesn’t clot. He could die from a minor cut or a nosebleed. When he bruises himself, he bleeds inside his body. The blood has nowhere to go and collects in his joints, and that causes him great pain. It’s an inherited disease. Only males suffer from it, and only females carry it. Mama’s grandmother, Queen Victoria of England, was a carrier, and many of her descendants are bleeders. Alexei is one of them.

  Our parents learned of this terrible illness when Alexei was still a baby, but they never spoke of it because they didn’t want the Russian people to know that the tsarevich might not live to become their next tsar. The doctors could do nothing. There is no treatment for it. Two sailors from the imperial navy, Andrei Derevenko and Klementy Nagorny, were assigned to stay with him constantly to keep him from injuring himself and to carry him when he couldn’t walk.

  Mama and Papa were in despair, until they met Father Grigory.

  To us, he was always Father Grigory or Our Friend, but to others he was known as Grigory Efimovich Rasputin. He was a starets, a holy man. He prayed with Mama, and when he did, Alexei got better. The swelling went down, and the pain went away. Mama came to believe in Father Grigory completely and loved him devotedly, because of the effect he had on Alexei. He had only to bow his head and take my brother’s hand, and Alexei immediately became calmer. When Father Grigory visited my parents, he usually came to our rooms and spent time with my sisters and me, talking quietly and praying with us in front of our holy icons.

  Father Grigory was a big man, taller than Papa and much broader and heavier. He dressed in the rough clothes of a moujik, a peasant—baggy trousers and loose blouses and muddy leather boots, as though he had just come in from working in the fields. He looked as though he never changed those filthy clothes, or bathed, or even washed his grimy hands, and he smelled worse than Alexei’s pet donkey. His thick, scraggly black beard was stuck with bits of food, and his long, stringy hair hung down to his shoulders.

  Bad as he looked and smelled, there was something deeply mysterious about Father Grigory. His brilliant blue eyes were so magnetic that I could not look away when he gazed at me, and I felt sure that he could see into my very soul. His voice was so compelling that when he spoke my name, I shivered, but it wasn’t a shiver of fear—it was something I couldn’t name. My sisters, too, felt his powerful spell. Strangely, his animal smell didn’t bother us when he bent close to us and placed a gentle, fatherly kiss on our foreheads.

  Mama believed that God had sent this holy man to her and to all of us. She was convinced that he possessed miraculous powers that would save Alexei from his terrible illness—not cure him, but heal him and let him live without suffering. “If God does not hear my prayers, I know that He hears Father Grigory’s,” she said.

  But not everyone loved him. Our governess at that time, Sophia Ivanovna, mistrusted him. “Holy man or not, Grigory Rasputin should not be going into your bedroom while you girls are in your nightgowns. He should not be sitting down beside you on your beds, and touching you in a most familiar way. It’s simply not proper for him to be there with you unchaperoned.”

  Sophia expressed her disapproval to Papa, and Papa spoke to Father Grigory. His visits to our bedrooms stopped, but he was still a regular visitor to Alexander Palace. Then one day our dear nurse, Maria, upset and weeping, told Sophia that Father Grigory had done something very wicked to her. Sophia reported Maria’s story to Mama. A few days later Maria was sent away. When I asked Sophia what had happened and where our nurse had gone, our governess just shook her head and grimaced. “It’s too shocking. I shall say no more about it,” she said, and changed the subject.

  I didn’t know what to think. Papa and Mama believed Father Grigory was a saint, and Sophia Ivanovna thought he was a devil. She said no more to us, but she must have spoken to others, because Mama heard about it, and suddenly Sophia Ivanovna, too, was dismissed.

  Mama instructed us not to speak of Father Grigory to anyone outside our little family. “They don’t understand,” she said.

  Lyosha is much better, and we are grateful for the help we’ve received from Fr. G. But Mother allows no criticism of him. Everyone is afraid to say a word.

  Today Zhilik came to the music room while I was practicing and listened with his eyes closed until I finished. Usually so calm, he paced nervously and asked if he could speak frankly. I said he could. In the three years he has served our family, he said, he has observed that Lyosha suffers from physical problems, but the cause has never been explained to him. At times Lyosha seems quite well; then, without explanation, the lessons are suddenly suspended. A fortnight later the boy is racing through the palace again—or one of the sailors carries him about as if he were an invalid. Could I explain it? Zhilik asked.

  What to tell him? We’ve been told never to speak of it. I decided on the truth, and described the nature of the disease and the reason for secrecy. Then I revealed another secret: Only Fr. G is able to help him.

  A look of distaste crossed our tutor’s face, though he tried to hide it. He said he’d met Fr. G only once but has heard much talk about him. “And how does this man Rasputin help?”

  I explained the effect the starets has on Lyosha and told him that Fr. G is a holy man who prays with Mother, and then Lyosha gets better. No one can deny it, and no one is allowed to question it. Then I begged Zhilik not to let anyone know what I told him.

  The truth is that I find Fr. G completely revolting, but for Mother’s sake and Lyosha’s, I must be careful never to let anyone know how I feel. I feel guilty for saying as much as I did, because Mother instr
ucted us not to—especially not to Zhilik, who is Swiss and not of our religion and wouldn’t understand.

  I was shaking when I put away Olga’s notebook. I wished that I did not know what she thought of Father Grigory. Mama would be furious if she found out.

  • • •

  Tsarskoe Selo was only a half hour’s journey from the gaiety and excitement of St. Petersburg, but ours was a different world. Our family occupied the west wing of Alexander Palace, which was very small—only a hundred rooms—compared to the enormous Catherine Palace nearby that my parents used only for formal occasions, and there weren’t many of those. The east wing had quarters for our tutors, for our physician, Dr. Botkin, and his children, Gleb and Tatiana, and for Mama’s ladies-in-waiting and Papa’s gentlemen. Between the two wings was a huge semicircular hall with a giant dome, filled with busts and portraits of important people.

  OTMA shared two large bedrooms (Big Pair in one, Little Pair in the other), slept on camp beds with thin mattresses, endured cold morning baths, and kept diaries in which we recorded the events of our day. I thought the diaries were a waste of time, because every day was almost the same as the previous one, even when we’d moved to a different palace. Sometimes we bargained for a change: Olga finally persuaded Mama to persuade Papa that warm evening baths were more beneficial for young girls than cold baths in the morning. We thought the biggest treat in the world was having Papa’s permission to use his huge marble swimming bath.