The Romanov Empress

by C. W. Gortner

  “Majesty, I am ordered to carry you on board by force, if need be,” he replied, but he visibly blanched as he confronted me with my Tip in my arms, Tania and Sophie flanking me, amid our pile of luggage. A short distance away, Xenia and her sons, Nikolasha, Felix, Irina, and Zenaida, and their assortment of trunks, watched as I harangued this man whose sole purpose was to rescue us.

  I lifted my chin toward my family. “Will you carry all of us on board by force?” Then I shifted my gaze to the horde on the docks. “You need only tell them that you’re rescuing them because of me and they’ll swim to your ships.”

  It was supposed to be a secret evacuation, but word had spread fast, and I’d not been remiss to hasten it. As soon as the refugees learned of our departure, panic erupted. They’d crammed Yalta with their own luggage, pets, and servants, some of our wealthiest nobles and landowners, reduced to whatever they could carry. Xenia shivered at my side, distraught that at the penultimate hour, after everyone had scrambled to pack in collective relief, I now set up another obstacle. Olga, who’d departed the previous day with her family for the Caucasus, would have expected nothing less, although I’d been furious at Kulikovsky for agreeing with her to embark on an arduous journey into the mountains, with her pregnancy so advanced. Olga herself had refused to heed me, as well. She might prefer to live without our imperial trappings, but she insisted that her child had Romanov blood and therefore must be born in Russia.

  “Is Your Majesty quite decided?” the lieutenant asked with clipped British reserve. Even when faced with disobeying his sovereign’s instructions, he did not reveal a hint of disquiet.

  “I am. All of them and me. Or none of us.”

  He sighed. “I’ll cable the fleet. I promise, everyone will get on board a ship. Now”—he held out his arm to accompany me onto the jetty—“will Your Majesty trust in my word?”

  I accepted his gesture. “You’ll never hear the end of it if you go back on it.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE BATTLESHIP, I entrusted Tip to Tania. She and Sophie went belowdecks to prepare the cabin allotted to us. Xenia would share an adjacent cabin with Irina, Zenaida, and Bébé. My grandsons, Felix, and Nikolasha would bunk with the sailors. It wasn’t a pleasure craft; we were under British naval authority until we reached Malta and transferred to another vessel for England. For a time, I’d seek comfort with Alix, but I already knew that eventually I must return to Denmark and Hvidøre, the only house I had left. If I must dwell in exile from the land I’d called my home for over fifty years, at least I would go to my grave in my native country.

  The balm of the early-April morning rustled the Black Sea. I paced to the railings at the edge of the quarterdeck. Gazing toward the rocky escarpments of the Crimea, I envisioned those places I could no longer see: Livadia, where I’d bid goodbye too soon to my Sasha. Ai-Todor, where I’d fled from chaos. Djulbar, where I’d thought I might die. And Harax, where I’d learned of blood spilled that I could never concede aloud.

  I saw every place, and beyond, to St. Petersburg and the splendor of the Winter Palace, to my beloved Anichkov, our fortress of Gatchina, and, finally, into the echoing emptiness of the Alexander Palace, where our forsaken future had hoped and despaired.

  Expecting to weep as the ship heaved under me, preparing to depart, instead I caught sight of another ship passing nearby—a Russian steamer, crowded with volunteer recruits for the White Army. I stared, mesmerized, as it neared, so close I could discern the pinched anonymous faces of young men still willing to fight for us. The world they sought to preserve had already changed. Many, I knew, would perish defending our cause.

  I rummaged in my pocket for a handkerchief. I only had this moment, one brief time as our ships crossed paths, when they could see me as I saw them. Lifting my handkerchief, I waved it. Let them see me. Let them know that though I was forced to leave, I would always remember. I was a mother; they too had mothers, who might never see them again.

  Look at me. See your beloved Matushka. Let me know you will remember me.

  And as my tears finally came, misting my eyes, they stared toward me. They jammed the railings of the steamer, raising their arms in the traditional salute. From across the lapping wash of our passing vessels, I heard their ragged voices swell as they sang out:

  God save the Tsar!

  Strong sovereign, reign for our glory

  Reign to our foes’ fear, Orthodox Tsar.

  God save the Tsar!

  At last, after everything denied, God answered my prayer. I was given this one miracle.

  We would never be forgotten.

  AFTERWORD

  Following her arrival in Malta, where many of the refugees she helped to escape were left stranded but not forsaken by her, Minnie reached England in May 1919, together with Xenia and her sons. Minnie’s reunion with her sister Alix must have been heartrending, yet she adopted her characteristically brave face for a world still reeling from the aftermath of the Great War and cataclysmic fall of Imperial Russia. In private, however, she faced a near-penniless existence, dependent on a charitable pension from the British royal family after having been one of the wealthiest women in the world.

  Many came to see her, including Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who’d helped murder Rasputin and whose military service in Persia saved him from the Bolsheviks. All those who saw Minnie reported she was gracious as ever, if diminished by her circumstances.

  For the rest of her life, she proved a relentless champion for Russian émigrés. She also interviewed visitors over the years about her missing family. In public, she never wavered in her faith that they may have survived, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. In addition to the slaughter of thousands of landowners and members of the aristocracy, of the fifty-three Romanovs alive in Russia when Nicholas II abdicated, eighteen were murdered and thirty-five escaped. In July 1918, fourteen Romanovs were killed; among these were Misha, shot in a forest near Perm with his secretary, and the tsar and his family, executed in Yekaterinburg at Ipatiev House.

  Misha was the first Romanov to die at Bolshevik hands; his remains and those of his loyal British secretary, Brian Johnson, have never been found. Following Misha’s exile to Perm, his wife, Natalia, smuggled their son, George, to Copenhagen. She remained in Russia, petitioning Bolshevik commissars, including Lenin himself, about Misha until they ordered her imprisonment, from which she escaped. The retreating Germans, believing Misha was alive and leading a counterrevolution, assisted Natalia and her daughter by her first marriage to flee to England in 1919, where George reunited with them. To support her family, Natalia accessed Misha’s international bank accounts; like most exiles, she also sold her jewels. Conflicting rumors about Misha went unabated until 1924, when Natalia had him legally declared dead to inherit his estate in Britain, valued at a mere £95. She then moved to France to reduce her cost of living. In 1931, George died after a car accident, devastating her. By the outbreak of World War II, Natalia was destitute. She died in 1952 and is buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris beside her son, Count Brasov, last male-line descendant of Tsar Alexander III.

  Although photographs of the ravaged cellar in Ipatiev House had been in circulation since 1923, there’s no evidence that any were presented to Minnie. It bears noting that Alexei’s devoted spaniel, Joy, escaped the massacre, when two of the family dogs did not. A starving stray, Joy was found months later, wandering by the abandoned house. One of the former house guards recognized and took pity on the dog, caring for him until a colonel in the British Expeditionary Force rescued Joy as the White Army retreated from the Urals. The colonel returned to England with the spaniel, who was loved and died in Sefton Lawn in Windsor. In his memoirs, the colonel wrote that Joy never fully recovered his spirits.

  Minnie must have learned of Joy’s survival. She often said, “Nobody saw Nicky killed.” Yet the evidence was irrefutable. What
she thought in private can only be assumed. It seems doubtful that, knowing as much as she did, she believed her own assertion. Given Cyril’s strident claim to the throne, perhaps she resolved that to preserve the dynastic succession in case of a miraculous survival, she must never admit her sons were dead.

  Nevertheless, she lent financial support to Nikolai Sokolov, a White Army judicial investigator who traveled to Yekaterinburg eight months after the tsar and his family had vanished. The first to gather testimony on the regicide and explore the abandoned mine where the bodies had initially been taken, Sokolov concluded that no one in the imperial family had survived the House of Special Purpose. When he went into exile in France, he took his meticulous documentation with him; his archives later informed the 1993 investigation by Russian authorities into the events of July 16–17, 1918. Before his death, Sokolov prepared a report for the dowager empress. Minnie never met him in person and it is not known if she read his report. His book, Ubiistvo Tsarskoi Semi (“The Murder of the Royal Family”), was published posthumously in 1925.

  Designated as a branch of the Ural Revolution Museum in 1927, Ipatiev House was demolished in 1977 under Boris Yeltsin’s regime. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Church on the Blood was built on the site.

  The disappearance of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children, along with four of their attendants, including Dr. Eugene Botkin and Alexandra’s maidservant, Anna Demidova, gave rise to rampant tales of harrowing survival and numerous imposters. The most famous was the 1922 claim by Anna Anderson that she was Anastasia—a ruse engineered to inherit the legendary Romanov fortune. Anderson persisted in her claim until her death in 1984; she was proven a fraud by DNA analysis after the exhumation of the imperial family.

  In 1979, amateur archaeologists made the clandestine discovery of the tangled skeletons of Nicholas, Alexandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia, as well as Botkin, Demidova, the family valet, and the cook, buried beneath railway planks under a dirt road near Yekaterinburg. The bones, bearing evidence of bullet holes and bayonet gouges, were discolored by the sulfuric acid used in vain by the executioners to dissolve the bodies. They were left in their makeshift grave until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

  DNA identification matched Alexandra to a sample provided by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, related to the tsarina through his maternal grandmother. Mitochondrial DNA from the body of Nicholas’s brother, George, as well as from his father and grandfather, confirmed the tsar. Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that Nicholas II and his family had been victims of political persecution; canonized as martyrs, the last tsar, tsarina, and the three grand duchesses were entombed in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral. In 2007, a shallow pit not far from the original site revealed fragments of the missing Tsarevich Alexei and his sister, Grand Duchess Maria, separated from the others during the chaos to dispose of the bodies following the executions. New DNA testing in 2015 confirmed a 99 percent probability that the discovered bones belonged to the tsar and his family. To date, the Russian Orthodox Church has refused to recognize the results, confiscating the remains of Alexei and Maria and those of Nicholas and Alexandra from their crypt for further analysis. It is unknown when the family who lost their lives under such terrible circumstances will be reunited.

  Minnie moved to Denmark in 1920, eventually settling in Hvidøre. She became the heart of the refugee community and an occasional thorn in the side of her nephew, King Christian X, for despite her penury she was extravagant and defiant. In 1925, her sister Alix died—the final loss. On October 13, 1928, Minnie died in Hvidøre at the age of eighty, having outlived four of her six children. She was interred in Roskilde Cathedral. Not until 2006, following negotiations between Denmark and Russia, was her wish to be interred beside Sasha honored. She returned to Russia one hundred forty years after her first arrival to be laid to rest in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, next to those she loved most.

  Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, known as Miechen, was the last of the Romanovs to escape Russia. She remained in the Caucasus with her two younger sons throughout 1918 until the Bolshevik approach prompted their escape to Anapa on the north coast of the Black Sea. Miechen only agreed to leave Anapa in 1920 when she was told the White Army was losing the civil war. With her son Andrei, his mistress, the ballerina Little K, and their young son, she boarded a ship for Venice. Grand Duchess Olga happened upon her at the port of Novorossiysk and described Miechen’s inimitable flair: “When even generals were lucky to find a cart, Aunt Miechen made the journey in her own train. It was battered—but it was hers. For the first time in my life, I found it a pleasure to kiss her.” Miechen died in September 1920. She was sixty-six.

  A family friend in the British Secret Service retrieved Miechen’s jewels from her palace vault. Before her death, Miechen distributed her jewels among her children, who sold the most valuable pieces. Queen Mary, wife of George V, purchased her Bolin diamond-and-pearl tiara; it remains in the British royal collection and has been worn by Queen Elizabeth II. The heiress Barbara Hutton purchased the grand duchess’s prized emeralds from Van Cleef & Arpels, converting the necklace into a tiara. Actress Elizabeth Taylor later acquired the tiara and had the emeralds recut and set as a necklace and earrings. The luxury jeweler Bulgari, who had sold the emeralds to Ms. Taylor, reacquired them at the auction of the late actress’s jewelry collection.

  Despite the abolition of the Russian monarchy, Miechen’s senior son, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich, declared himself emperor from his exile in France. Minnie and her surviving family refuted his claim. Cyril died in 1938. His granddaughter, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, has likewise declared herself the rightful successor to the Romanov throne.

  Minnie’s eldest daughter, Xenia, settled in England, while her husband, Sandro, resided in Paris until his death in 1933. Xenia’s finances were precarious and she was obliged to contend with the fraudulent claims of Anna Anderson until 1928, the ten-year anniversary of Nicholas’s disappearance. With him and his family legally presumed dead, the much-contested Romanov fortune, which has never materialized, devolved to Xenia as her brother’s heir. Upon her mother’s death, she sold Hvidøre and the dowager empress’s jewels for income. By 1937, Xenia was residing in the Wilderness House in Hampton Court Palace, where she died in 1960 at the age of eighty-five. Her youngest son, Prince Vasili, the last of her seven children, died in 1989.

  Xenia’s daughter, Irina, and her husband, Felix Yusupov, led a colorful existence after their exile, selling his Rembrandts to sustain the family and traveling throughout Italy before bribing an immigration officer with diamonds to enter France. In 1920, they established the couture house Irfé in Paris, but the venture was short-lived, their philanthropy and excessive lifestyle decimating their wealth. Felix won a 1932 lawsuit against MGM for a scurrilous movie titled Rasputin and the Empress. He also wrote his memoirs, capitalizing on his infamy as Rasputin’s assassin. He had affairs with men, even while he and Irina enjoyed their marriage for more than fifty years. Felix died in 1967, and a grief-stricken Irina followed him to the grave three years later. They are buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in Paris.

  Princess Zenaida was entrusted with raising her granddaughter, Bébé, in Rome. After her husband’s death, the princess moved to Paris to be with Irina and Felix, where she died in 1939. She never recovered the rest of her magnificent jewel collection from her Moika palace; the jewels were discovered and sold by the Bolsheviks in 1925. To support her family, Zenaida sold her major jewels, removed earlier by Felix from the vault. Bébé, whose title was Princess Irina Yusupova, married a Russian count and bore a daughter. She died in 1983 and is buried alongside her family.

  Minnie’s younger daughter, Olga, gave birth to her second son, Guri, in the Caucasus. In November 1919, she and her family fled to Novorossiysk. Sent to a refugee camp near Istanbul and evacuated to Belgrade, she arrived in Denmark with her fa
mily in 1920, where she became Minnie’s reluctant secretary. Never the best of friends, mother and daughter clashed, and the dowager empress excluded Olga’s husband from formal functions.

  In 1925, Olga met Anna Anderson in Berlin. She was unconvinced by Anderson’s claim. Anderson didn’t speak Russian or English, languages that Anastasia had mastered, and the tsar’s youngest daughter would have been twenty-four, while Olga found Anderson much older, with dissimilar features. Olga expressed sympathy for Anderson, sensing she was mentally unstable, primed by nefarious sources to “act the role in order to lay their hands on our nonexistent fortune,” but she publicly denied that Anderson was her niece.

  With her share of her mother’s estate, Olga purchased a farm outside Copenhagen, where her family took to the rural life with vigor. Olga continued to paint. Her renditions of Russian and Danish scenes had exhibition auctions in European cities. She donated some of the proceeds to Russian charities.

  During World War II, Olga’s two sons served in the Danish Army and were briefly interned as POWs. At the end of the war, Soviet troops occupying eastern Denmark accused Olga of conspiracy against them. Fearing assassination or abduction by Stalin’s regime, she and her family emigrated to Canada in 1948, purchasing a farm in Halton County, Ontario.

  By 1952, Olga and her husband were elderly and had sold the farm, taking a small house in a Toronto suburb. An enduring symbol of Romanov appeal, the grand duchess was visited by dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Her husband’s declining health prompted Olga to sell her remaining jewelry to pay for his care. His death in 1958 exacerbated her own infirmity. Toward the end of her life, she lived with émigré friends in an apartment above a beauty salon. Grand Duchess Olga died in 1960 at the age of seventy-eight and is buried next to her husband in York Cemetery, Toronto. Her son Tikhon founded the Russian Relief Program in her honor to exhibit selections of her work. Her paintings can be found in the collections of Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family of Norway. The Ballerup Museum in Denmark houses approximately one hundred of her works. Her son Guri died in 1984. Tikhon died in 1993.