If Rasputin could be attacked and killed, they certainly could be.īy then, World War I had been raging for years.
In any case, they did mourn his death, if only because by then it was obvious to the two oldest girls, at least, that something was badly, badly wrong in Russia, and the family was in danger. Rappaport, who combed through diaries, memoirs and letters, does not, but also ignores the small issue that if something had happened there, the girls probably would not have said much.
Rappaport doesn't dwell on him, probably because so many other books do, possibly because at the time, quite a few people were questioning his intimate access to the Grand Duchesses, especially since they had very limited access, intimate or not, to other people, and because Rasputin was known to sleep around a lot. On the other hand, it went nowhere.Īnd, well, they also had Rasputin, the Russian mystic who, their mother believed, had miraculous healing powers. On the one hand, I was glad that she at least had the chance to fall in love – something no other biography I've read of the Romanovs detailed. The details of Olga's first real love are especially heartbreaking. They read books, certainly they talked to those they could, but it was not enough. There's several heartbreaking cases of the girls begging to hear about "normal" lives, or indeed anything outside their palaces. From the pictures, I'm pretty sure that this was mostly because the sailors in question were pretty hot, and Olga and Tatiana were, in that sense, perfectly normal teenagers, but Rappaport makes a convincing case that this was also because they simply didn't have the chance to meet that many men, eligible or not. The two older girls even ended up falling for a couple of the highly ineligible sailors, who, of course, couldn't possibly return the feelings. They also interacted with the sailors on the family yacht – one decided exception to the more middle class lifestyle. Which is not to say that the girls were completely isolated: they had tutors and governesses, and their mother's attendants, and a few selected relatives and occasional playmates.
They therefore kept their children, for the most part, behind walls of guards, in palaces furnished largely in simple, middle class style. Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, were not fond of Russian aristocratic society (the dislike was mutual, and was a minor cause of the Russian Revolution), and were terrified, with reason, of assassination attempts.
The Romanov Sisters is a detailed look of the lives of Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who had the initial luck and later massive misfortune, to be the daughters of Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia.Īs the daughters of the tsar, they lived surprisingly simple, extremely sheltered lives until the outbreak of World War I – and even later. MarinessI'm still on a major biography kick.
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