BOOKS

How very sad their fates

Alastair Forbes

THE LAST TSAR: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NICHOLAS II by Edvard Radzinsky Hodder & Stoughton,f20, pp. 422 ANASTASIA: THE LOST PRINCESS by James Blair Lovell Robson, £22.50, pp. 512 PRINCESS VICTORIA MELITA: GRAND DUCHESS CYRIL OF RUSSIA 1879-1936 by John van der Kiste Alan Sutton, £14.95, pp. 207 ANASTASIA by Peter Kurth Fontana, £5.99, pp. 576 Icould hardly fail to be moved by the photographs in the press of the recent funeral in St Petersburg of a contemporary of whom I have the fondest memories, Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov. We had known each other man and boy for some 64 years and, save during the second world war, had made a point every summer of chewing the cud of our shared recollections and adventures. Most of these had taken place under the sad but benevolent eyes of his adoring and artistic mother, the ill- starred 'Ducky', born Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh and Great Britain, unhappy victim of a disastrous first mar- riage to a first cousin, 'Ernie' of Hesse, arranged, to her everlasting regret, by her grandmama, Queen Victoria. Many of them were the products of our shared passion, first for bikes, later for motorbikes and cars, licences to drive the former being available in those days at 15, the latter at 16. The whole school-holiday long I would be in and out of this expatriate Russian house, being especially fond of and spoilt rotten by the Grand Duchess. It says as much for her unselfishness as a mother as for our callowness and youthful egotism that neither of us became aware until long after her death that she was dying of a broken and unforgiving heart since learn- ing from her beautiful daughter Kira (so the latter's Greek first cousin Princess Olga later told me) of her ageing playboy hus- band's repeated Parisian infidelities, though affectionate appearances were kept Up en famille. In August 1990, after glasnost had been Spreading its warming rays around a bit in all directions, our Brittany village council, despite containing a couple of communists, carried nem con a motion to rename the narrow lane to Vladimir's home 'Chemin dil Grand Duc', this despite his strictly somewhat slim right ever to have been pro- moted from Prince to that rank. In that month, too, after we had leafed through an album of old snaps, some of them of his aunt, Queen Marie of Rumania, an occa- sional visitor and benefactress, he wrote to Me to say that he felt that 'St Briac is like a little bit of home to you and me, Ali, and I hope we may continue meeting here for many years'. In that same summer he talked to me a lot about his pleasure at the visit of a team from Ogonyok, the pioneer- ringly progressive magazine that had given min the full Sunday supplement-Hello! treatment. It was Ogonyok too that in 1989 had published the astonishing 70-year-old note of the Bolshevik Yakov Yurovsky, Participating witness and commandant of the regicide at the Ipatiev house at Ekater-

inburg. This had been discovered by Edvard Radzinsky after painstaking researches in the now at last unsealed Sovi- et archives and is the conclusion of his fascinating and for the most part well- translated volume.

To the life of the last Tsar his long book brings little that is new; indeed only 150 pages of it make much attempt to describe it. There are a few touching glimpses of his boyhood and youth: his passion for square- bashing, mad about being marched up and down by Alexander Volkov, an NCO of the Palace Guard; his officially frustrated hopes of a beautiful Jewish mistress; his passionate and at last consummated affair with Mathilde Kchessinska, the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Mariynsky (why do we have to go on calling it the Kirov, I

'It's my own fault, doctor, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel.'

should like to know?), for whom he bought a palace and who later in Paris, where she had run a valuable ballet class where I once saw her, lived to be 100, having married one Grand Duke after bearing another's son; and then his weak rabbity hypnosis by that extraordinary, neurotic, even psycho- pathic Hessian wife, his worshipped Alix, whose influence was the principal factor in making revolution inevitable and in causing the great Russian ship, in Winston Churchill's apt phrase, 'to go down in sight of port'.

But there are other revelations at the end of Radzinsky's book, one of which, at least, certainly puts in place the last, tiny, missing piece in the already long-solved Anastasia jigsaw puzzle. He establishes from archival and other sources that two bodies were missing when the convoy of corpses had bumped 11 miles along from the place of execution in their droshky carts; that moans had been heard from under the tarpaulin, in the forest, beneath a star-studded sky. These were the stars above her that had been the strongest rec- ollection of poor confused Anastasia when she first tried half to remember and half not to remember how it had not been as everyone seemed to accept — just bang, bang; they're all dead.

Radzinsky also has a rather more mysterious cat to let out of his bag. In the late Forties, there twice appeared, in a briefly psychotically disturbed state, 'curs- ing someone called Beloborodov' (a senior official at the scene of the regicide), one F. G. Semyonov, who soon calmed down and was able quietly to convince the staffs of two psychiatric hospitals that he must indeed be the Tsar's only son. He appeared to have been wearing a bodice as a diamond-stuffed flak jacket, like his sisters, but had been wounded, he said, only in the buttocks, since his father was hugging him tightly as the shots were fired. Physical examination confirmed his story, as did his cryptorchidism, the Tsarevich having also had only one testicle descended. Of this extraordinary survival Anastasia was never to learn, her putative brother, after quite a full life as a soldier and husband, despite constant haematuria, disappearing for ever into the ghastly Soviet Psychiatric Gulag.

But the story of Anastasia herself is a much more incontrovertible one, by now amply documented. Her latest long biogra- phy comes from the ill-tuned, unmistakably American word-processor of one James Blair Lovell. Its principal value lies in Lovell's long conversations with Anastasia in old age in America, where she seems to have taken quite a shine to him. He also goes, rather interestingly, sleuthing, on a tip from Anastasia, into Holland after traces of a long-dead putative fifth daugh- ter, born between Anastasia and Alexei, and as it were farmed out in a warming-pan with the five-million-rouble dowry later denied by the Brits to poor Anastasia.

But none of these books remotely approaches the standards of scholarship and literary style set ten years ago by another American, Mr Peter Kurth, who had already spent the greater part of the previous decade researching his book. The received ideas dinned into me by my known elders and supposed betters, British, Russian and French (one of the most odi- ous of my family's governesses had been a friend of Pierre Gilliard, the tutor of 'le petit Tsarevich', whom Kurth unmasked as having been heavily bribed by the Grand Duke Ernie of Hesse to disavow Anastasia, despite the fact that he had married Shura, her beloved nursemaid, who had recog- nised her at once) had been that the noto- rious 'Anna Anderson' was just a potty faker. It was not until the late Fifties that I began to discover the truth through the reports from Germany. But besides what I read I made a study of every photograph ever taken of the Grand Duchess from babyhood to her middle-age, some of them being of her shaved skull when she and her sisters had had to submit to a popular old wives' remedy in a measles epidemic. I saw, as I still see in all the later pictures right up to her death, the selfsame person. The cel- ebrated portrait painter Derek Hill, a phys- iognomist with decades of experience behind him, concurred with my judgment for the same reasons.

After the appearance of Kurth's book, I tackled Vladimir Kirillovich about it. 'Look here', I said, 'have you not read what your own uncle the Grand Duke Andrei wrote after he had been delegated by your father and the Romanov family to visit the poor woman?'

For two days [he had written] I had to observe the invalid and I can tell you that no doubt remains in my mind. She is Grand Duchess Anastasia. I have seen Nicky's daughter! I have seen Nicky's daughter! It is impossible not to recognise her. Naturally, years and suffering have marked her but not as much as 1 would have imagined. Her face is striking in its profound sadness, but when she smiles it is she, it is Anastasia, without a doubt.

And I went on to quote his uncle's strong rebuke to the Grand Duchess Olga, who, having at first recognised her niece, was ordered by the Dowager Empress her mother (Queen Alexandra's clever sister Ninny') to pipe down, and did so, though on her deathbed in poverty in Toronto she was to seek God's forgiveness for what she had done to her 'poor girl' of a niece. (I tactfully didn't bother to remind him of Anastasia's horrified spontaneous reaction, in Berlin in 1925, to the mere mention of his father's name; `He in Papa's place! He was the first to desert Papa with his

regiment. If he and his wife come in to my parents' place, then there is no God!', an item which, when I first became aware of it, struck me as perhaps the most convincing proof of all of the genuineness of her claimed identity). 'Oh, yes, Ali,' he replied, 'I dare say all you say is true, but I shan't let you see the papers I have on the subject, so let's talk of something else', and did so. Vladimir was never a scholar or historian.

But the delightful Queen 'Daisy', Margarethe II of Denmark, whose bread and salt I have also eaten, is both. She is a most exemplary monarch who could teach Buckingham Palace and its inmates a thing or two about how to conduct their affairs with a little bit more seemliness and intelli- gence without losing either dignity or pop- ularity. There is more to her than just the Honorary Doctorate Roy Jenkins con- ferred on her at his last encaenia. I myself owe her an immense debt of gratitude, for it was the sight of her full to overflowing ashtrays and those of her fellow- chain-smoking husband in their apartments in the Amalienborg Palais which one evening 20 something years ago decided me there and then to give up smoking for ever.

Where does this great lady, who writes her own books and her own speeches (she made the most perceptive and touching one at her recent silver wedding celebra- tion), come into the Anastasia story? Well, we have seen that Nicholas II's mother Minny was the sister of King Christian X whom she persuaded to authorise his Min- ister in Berlin to investigate Anastasia in her German retreat. This the said gentle- man (and a true gentleman is exactly what the late Herluf Zahle was) most conscien- tiously did. He and his wife, both convinced of Anastasia's true identity, showed her great kindness and were evidently shocked by the cruelty of the Grand Duchess Olga's blind obedience to her imperial mother. Zahle prepared a ten-page questionnaire which he said he would answer if he had his government's permission, which, alas, he never obtained. There may be as many as 15 volumes in Zahle's dossier. 'Since everybody in this story, whether they be innocent or guilty, is now dead, why, Ma'am, should his report not now be opened to historians?', I asked the Queen one fine summer day in the lovely château in the Lot she has restored for her French- born husband. 'You see, the Zahle papers are in the family archives and these remain private', she answered. I nervously pointed out that the regime at Windsor was not quite so rigid, but as rigid over this as ever her great-great-grandmother Queen Victo- ria, Queen Margarethe remained. Unhappy Zahle that he did not live in photocopy days! No wonder James Blair Lovell writes, 'No purpose can be served by Queen Mar- garethe's refusal to release these crucial documents.' The well-read Queen (be it noted at Balmoral and Clarence House, by the way, that at the Ipatiev house Nicky's daughters' were reading Chekhov, Saltykov-Schedrin, Tolstoy and even Ros- tand's L'Aiglon in French) is perhaps even better read in French than in English, despite her school and Cambridge educa- tion in England. So perhaps she has missed out on Cromwell's 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'. I hope it is not too late to put it to her with great respect.

For long I believed that one reason Anastasia had been so cold-shouldered and reviled was the fact, shocking still in those days, that she had been rarzd by a Bolshe- vik (and, while Windsor eyes remained complacently closed to the thought of such horrors, was forced to watch the repeated rapes of all her sisters and both her par- ents) and had abandoned to others the child born of this traumatic assault. When a sinister mishap befell a Mecklenburg- Strelitz princess a decade earlier, she was thrown out by her parents and treated kindly only by Queen Victoria and Queen Mary. But the threat posed by Anastasia was financial. From the moment Anastasia told her aunt Olga that there was money deposited for her in London by her late father she was done for. Her other aunt, the Grand Duchess Xenia, like her Dowa- ger Empress mother already in receipt from the British crown of a pension of ten thousand 1920s' pounds, as well as a large grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court, had been declared her father's British heiress and wanted all she could get her hands on. Kenneth Rose has exposed King George V's cowardice over saving his Romanov cousins' lives. As for the Romanov jewels, Queen Mary cannily wait- ed for the bottom to fall out of the market and bought them in at their lowest valua- tion. They certainly much improve the appearance of many a tiara'd descendant of that acquisitive couple.

But oh, Anastasia, her father's `Malenkaya', who had inherited his unfor- gettable misty blue eyes, to which she added her irresistible smile and espieglerie, together with a promise of beauty still to come in her sparkling kokochnik, what a lousy deal she got from Russia and from life and from so many of her beastly rela- tions who survived to live their comfortable capitalist lives in peace! And who can imagine a worse nightmare than being humiliatingly told ad nauseam, both in public and in private, that you simply cannot be the person you know yourself to be?