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| The third of November (or the fifteenth in
the new calendar) 1895 was, for my papa Tsar Nicholas II, "a day I will
remember for ever. At exactly nine o'clock a baby's cry was heard and we
all breathed a sigh of relief! With a prayer we named the daughter sent to
us by God Olga!" And that there is the start of my story of my life.
Not very interesting, I'm sorry to say. I was quite the large baby, weighing
ten pounds, and I had to be birthed with forceps. Poor, dear Mama! My
great-grandmother Queen Victoria commented I was "splendid, in spite of
the immense head". I think that's not something one would want to hear
from their grandmother. As a baby, I was watched over with a hawk's eye by my doting parents. Mama nursed me and clothed me, and Papa enjoyed bathing and playing with me. I was even taken to a state visit to France in 1896, where the people rejoiced at seeing the fat little highnesse impériale. In December of that same year I was sent to the nursery, and neither Mama or Papa really liked the idea much; about it, Papa wrote that "our daughter will have to be moved upstairs, which is a pity and rather a bore". The nanny even told Mama she popped in too often. In 1897 I was joined in the nursery with best friend, Tatiana. We were named after Olga and Tatiana from the play Evgeny Onegin. We were so close, we shared rooms in the Alexander Palace, Peterhof Palace, Livadia Palace, our yacht, and, well, everywhere! In 1899 we were joined by sweet Maria, and in 1901 naughty Anastasia arrived. Although she loved us all very much, Mama was dismayed she didn't have a son to hold up the dynasty. Finally, we were joined by our brother Alexei in 1904. Although we had our squabbles as children we're all quite close. We call ourselves an acronym--OTMA--which we sign cards and whatnot for our many relatives, and it just goes to show how united we all are! Being the oldest, one would expect me to take the seat of authority with the little ones, but I most certainly don't hold that title, for Tatiana does. In fact, they call her The Governess. |
"Olga was perhaps the cleverest of them all, her mind being
so quick to grasp ideas, so absorbent of knowledge that she learned almost
without application or close study. Her chief characteristics, I should say,
were a strong will and a singularly straightforward habit of thought and
action. Admirable qualities in a woman, these same characteristics are often
trying in childhood, and Olga as a little girl sometimes showed herself willful
and even disobedient. She had a hot temper which, however, she early learned
to keep under control, and had she been allowed to live her natural life
she would, I believe, have become a woman of influence and distinction."
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| In the schoolroom, our tutors generally think of me as their
best pupil, for learning is something I enjoy and not just slog through or
completely ignore like my sisters and brother. In his memoirs, our French
tutor Pierre Gilliard wrote I "possessed a remarkably quick brain" and
I "had good reasoning powers as well as initiative". I am especially
fond of reading--novels, plays, and poetry are among my favorites--and, when
the mood strikes, I write poetry. Our poor Mama could sometimes find books
missing and trace them right back to me, where I would tell her that she
would have to wait, because I had to find out if it was proper for her to
read. I also enjoyed critiquing others' work, including the son of Mama's
physician, Dr. Botkin; jokingly, I called the doctor a "deep well of profound
ideas" and thus addressed him in letters as "Dear Well". There are many who say I am much like my father, as well as my mother, although I'm inclined to believe the former. I certainly see we look enough alike, although I have blonde hair; one wonders how in the world I got it, seeing as everyone has brown or dark hair in our family. I have cornflower blue eyes and the funny little Romanov nose that I call "my humble snub". I don't care much for appearances, although I think I could say I'm sort of pretty. Many say I am quite graceful and a good dancer and rider; both of those I enjoy very much. I am the colonel-in-chief of the 8th Elizavetgradsky Hussars, and often accompany Papa on military reviews in my uniform. Among the sisters, I am the "disagreeable one," so to speak. I am terribly moody and sometimes bossy to my sisters. I often fight with Mama for we don't see eye-to-eye, and have to be calmed by dear, patient Tatiana. I am a sensitive person, sometimes too sensitive I think, and even the smallest thing--the wrong word, the wrong look--can make me cross and upset. However, don't think I'm all dull and serious and depressed; quite on the contrary! "She had great charm, and could be the merriest of the merry," wrote our friend Sophia (Isa) Buxhoeveden, and although I'm not so sure about how charming I am (I'm quite the good talker, though; people seem amused at my anecdotes!), I enjoy having fun. As a little girl I was very silly, much like Anastasia, and went around playing every imaginable prank on our poor tutors. As I got older I found myself ready to have any sort of amusement, as noted in a letter I sent to Papa in 1915 where Anastasia and I had locked one of the daughters of a lady-in-waiting in the water closet since she was quite the nasty little brat and had got me quite fed up! My sisters and I donate our modest allowance (about ten American dollars) to charities: to help orphanages, churches, hospitals, things that really matter. We are all very interested in helping as much as we can. Being a grand duchess, I was expected to attend functions and parties, although I did not due to the fact that Papa and Mama hated them, and that there weren't many to go around in the first place; we weren't welcome in the sociable circle much. Besides that, I was also expected to make myself a grand marriage: Edward (we all called him David), the Prince of Wales, was supposedly interested and our parents approved the match, but he was too busy getting shot at during the War, and it has been said that my cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, was as well, along with Prince Carol of Romania and Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich (how revolting!). I greatly wished for marriage and children, but it just wasn't to be. I was supposed to make my grand debut in 1914, but fate got in the way. |
"Olga was by nature a thinker and, as it later seemed to me, understood the general situation better than any member of her family, including even her parents. At least I had the impression that she had little illusions in regard to what the future held in store for them, and in consequence was often sad and worried. But there was a sweetness about her which prevented her from affecting anybody in a depressing manner, even when she herself felt depressed; she alone appeared to see clearly the tragic future." |
| So Papa went off to war, and Mama, Tatiana and I donned
Red Cross nursing uniforms. We studied for two months for an exhausting exam,
and the first day there we saw death and suffering first hand. It was a
horrifying experience and terribly sad when one of these brave young men
died, but it was rewarding when we could help someone overcome their wounds
and rise up on their hospital beds from pain and terror. To cheer the soldiers
up, we often held concerts in the Catherine Palace Hospital where we went
every day, and I played the piano for them. The Little Pair and Alexei sometimes
came to visit and laugh with the men, but I soon found myself stressed, nervous
and anemic as the war dragged on. I had no stomach for blood, surgery and
death, unlike Mama and Tanya who seemed born nurses. I took to the wards
and just washed, cleaned and encouraged, taking no more part in surgeries
where death on the operating table was a common occurance. All we saw forced
the frivolous, moody Olga away and left in it's stead a shadow of the former
Olga--an adult, a woman forced to grow up--who understood too much of the
world Mama and Papa did not want us to see. They were not infallible in my
eyes--eyes that were no longer a child's. When the revolution came to Russia, we were all abed with the measles. The disease struck Maria and me the hardest; she had to be in bed with oxygen as she had double pneumonia on top of it, and I was almost blind for a period of time, as well as having peritonitis--the inflammation of the membrane around my abdomen. Alexei, thank the Lord, came through his measles fine. Papa came home, and was no longer tsar. I had to write it down for Tatiana, who couldn't hear due to the disease. We were given medication which eventually made out hair fall out. So Mama decided to have our heads shaved. As if we didn't have to suffer enough humiliation with Soviet guards constantly around! Finally we were all allowed outside, and we began building a kitchen garden, believing we would be staying at our dear Alexander Palace through winter. We hoped we would get to England or, better yet, to our beloved Crimean estate called Livadia, where I had my coming out ball six years earlier. We were instead shipped like cattle to Siberia--Tobolsk, to be precise. Life there wasn't utterly horrible, although we all wished we could at least walk outside the gates that went 'round the house we all lived in. Everything got worse when, in November, Vladimir Lenin and his communist party ran over the Duma and took over Russia. |
"Her beautiful, gentle hands handle any job with ease and cleverness. She is so fragile and gentle as she bends with particular love and care over every soldier's shirt that she sews. Her musical voice, her graceful movements, her lovely, thin little figure--it is the essense of femininity and friendliness. She is so bright and joyful." |
| Red Guards were ordered to take over our house; we had
befriended the previous soldiers at Tobolsk with no one else to talk to.
But these men were ruthless. Most of them were rapists and murderers, horrible
people who deserved to stay in jail. They told Papa and Mama that we all
had to go to Moscow, but mainly our parents. Mama stressed over which one
of us she should take, until Tatiana told her she must decide. She picked
Maria, telling us I needed to take care of Alexei who had hurt himself yet
again, and Tatiana needed to watch the household and be in charge. Anastasia
was too young to be taken into account at sixteen. We bid tearful goodbyes,
and were stunned when we heard they were taken to a house in Ekaterinburg,
captured by the wild Ural Soviets. We all joined them weeks later. Maria wasn't wrong when she wrote in her letter that things were terrible. Although we were together, our suffering increased tenfold, only comforted by the fact we were again one united family although the pressures of imprisonment weighed heavily on our minds. Some of the soldiers were my age and younger, caught up in the fervor of the Revolution and not so bad, but others were older and much more concerned with making us suffer. While my sisters socialized with the young men, I remained aloof and ignored them, too preoccupied with my thoughts and honestly too upset to even contemplate talking to those who helped bring down the Russia we knew. According to one of these young soldiers in Ekaterinburg, I would often stand "gazing sadly into the distance making it easy to read [her] emotions"; the same man said I "was thin, pale and looked very ill". Another wrote that I preferred to be alone, away from my younger sisters; their attempts at being jovial made my heart break. I will be honest and say their attempts at flirting with these men who were our enemy infuriated me, and I didn't spend much time with Maria or Anastasia, who were the friendliest of us all. The nastier soldiers removed our doors and prowled about at night, watched us as we went to the lavatory, and wrote cruel things on the walls and forced us to play and sing revolutionary songs. In this sometimes oppressive and frightening environment, we trusted our lives in the hands of God, and Mama told me to wait for what He had in store for us in silence. He gives us suffering and then He delivers us from it and by suffering, we will be in Heaven; all this our mother told us. No, it wasn't the pleasantest thing to hear, but I had somewhat resigned myself to some awful fate. Here is a prayer I wrote in my diary during these months.
Give patience, Lord to us, Thy Children, I drew my strength from hymns, the Bible, from my prayers and in the end, we were all rewarded for our suffering and made Holy Imperial Martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church.
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