Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [61]
“My aunt used to tell us that one of her responsibilities was cleaning the children’s rooms and putting together their wardrobe, and when the little girls were growing up she taught them handwork. My aunt was inseparable from the girls even on the family’s trips to the Crimea.… When the war began, Elizaveta taught the girls to care for the sick. The girls worked in a hospital as nurses and aides, and all the maids and parlormaids worked with them. This collective of amateur medics was headed up by the tsaritsa….
“According to Aunt Elizaveta’s stories, the children were modest and diligent. Olga, the eldest, was a little spoiled and capricious and could be lazy, but Tatiana and Anastasia were always busy—all of them sewed and embroidered, they even cleaned their own room. Their father paid the children more attention than their mother did. Alexandra Feodorovna often lay in bed with a migraine, or quarreled with the parlormaids, or was busy with antique buyers from the Alexander Market (the tsaritsa ordered old and unfashionable items sold to the antiquarians, although she changed mother of pearl buttons for ivory or glass before selling).… In about 1905 Elizaveta acquired a helper, another parlormaid, Anna Stepanovna [Stefanovna] Demidova. She became very friendly with Elizaveta and her family. She even became my father’s fiancée. At that time he was an official for the State Railway Inspection Control. He served under State Councilor Vladimir Skryabin, the brother of Vyacheslav Skryabin-Molotov, future prime minister under Stalin.
“The parlormaids were permitted to invite guests to visit. The tsaritsa was very frugal with the housekeeping. If the girls had to offer their guests something, they did so at their own expense. Moreover, all were warned to save their money while they were working, since they would receive no pension. Parlormaids, maids, and lackeys had to be unmarried. In the event of marriage they were dismissed or moved to other jobs.
“At our house we kept a cherished box with photographs of the Family with dedicatory inscriptions to my aunt. Simple inscriptions like ‘To Liza as a memento from a grateful father,’ ‘To Liza in gratitude for her loyalty’ (Alexandra). And children’s like ‘To dear Liza from Tania’ and the uneven letters of childish scribbles. ‘Liza, sew on my button,’ and so on. In 1932 my father brought this box out, it was opened, and my whole family looked through them all—and burned them, to my aunt’s sobs as well as mine. They were destroyed because of the general searches being made then of ‘formers.’ They were looking for gold, digging up cellars and attics. My father was extremely cautious and decided to be rid of the dangerous burden.”
Yet another view from the “people.”
“People”—that’s what Nicholas called his servants in his diaries.
The girls were growing up, and Alix was giving increasing thought to their marriages.
“Oh, if only our children could be as happy in their married life,” she wrote him.
In 1912 everyone began to talk about a marriage between Olga and Nicholas’s cousin Dmitry, who had been taken in by the tsar many years earlier. She was in love. Dmitry was a charming rake, her father’s favorite. Even the evil-tongued Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich said that he was “as elegant as a Fabergé statuette.”
In the happy year 1912, on August 26, on the centennial of the victory over Napoleon at Borodino, a cavalcade of grand dukes, with the tsar in the lead, rides a circuit around the famous field of Borodino. There is a fence