Anastasia and Her Sisters Read Free

shared bedrooms and a bathroom in another car; the bathtub was specially constructed so that water didn’t slosh out when the train rounded a curve. A third car was for Mama’s ladies-in-waiting and Papa’s aides and our governesses. The dining car seated twenty at a long, narrow table; at one end were a kitchen and a little room where Papa and his friends gathered before dinner for zakuski —hors d’oeuvres, Mama called them, preferring the French term—while thetrain chuffed through the darkness. A car for the servants and a baggage car completed the train.
    A second train that looked exactly like the first—dark blue cars with the double-eagled Romanov crest embossed in gold on the sides—traveled either ahead of us or behind us. It was actually a dummy train. A revolutionary or an anarchist planning to throw a bomb would not know on which train the tsar was traveling. I had no idea then what a revolutionary or an anarchist was, but I did understand there were men who hated my father because he was the tsar, and who might cause something terrible to happen to him, just as they had blown up Papa’s poor uncle Sergei a few years earlier. What I did not understand then was why they hated Uncle Sergei enough to kill him. I simply could not fathom why all of us had to be guarded wherever we went—four girls and a little boy who had nothing to do with the government. And how could anyone possibly hate Papa, the kindest man in the world?
    No one could answer any of those questions to my satisfaction.
    •  •  •
    Keeping a diary, making an entry every single day, was something all of us were expected to do. Mama kept a diary, and so did Papa. I therefore assumed that everyone did. At some time during the summer of 1911, I had become curious about what my sisters were writing in their diaries. Marie’s lay on a shelf near her bed, and in less than a minute I had leafed through it and discovered there wasn’t a thing in it that wasn’t almost exactly like mine. Tatiana’s was hidden but easy to find—under her pillow—and it was full of lists of things to do, birthdaysand name days of family and servants who might require gifts, various projects she had dreamed up and intended to organize. Olga’s, lying in plain sight on her desk, included notes about books she was reading—she was particularly interested in English writers, like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters—and the latest piano piece she’d been working on. Hardly worth the trouble of reading.
    Boring. Every single one of the diaries was boring. I didn’t bother to look at them again for months.
    But then, just after we’d returned from Livadia to Tsarskoe Selo, I needed an address book that I thought one of my older sisters had left somewhere. Olga was practicing in the music room and Tatiana was with Mama in her boudoir, and not wanting to disturb them I went alone into their bedroom to look for it. On a shelf among Olga’s prayer books I noticed a book with a black leather cover stamped with a gilt cross. I thought it was a book of devotions. I have no idea what led me to open it, but what I found was a notebook disguised to look like a book of devotions. It was not. It was another kind of diary. The rest of us kept diaries so dull that anyone could read them without finding anything the least bit shocking. But the first few lines were enough to tell me that Olga’s notebook was not for the eyes of anyone but Olga. I began to read.
Livadia, 4 November 1911
What happiness! I am sixteen, and last night at my birthday ball I danced three times with Pavel Alexeyevich. For a few moments we stood on the balcony, and he took my hand. We were surrounded by people, we dared not kiss, but I was happy. For one perfect night I could allow myself to be in love and to know that Pavel returns that love. For one perfect night we danced and let our eyes speak the words that we could not say aloud.
    Pavel Alexeyevich was Lieutenant Voronov, and Olga was in