The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(21)

Although Alexandra had plenty of staff at her disposal, she continued to spend so much time in the nursery that ‘they began to say at court that the empress was not a tsaritsa but only a mother’.

Even when dealing with day-to-day official business in the mauve boudoir, she would often be dandling one child on her knee or rocking another in her cradle, ‘while with the other hand she signed official papers’.43 She and Nicholas were hardly seen by members of their own entourage. When her ladies did have a moment’s conversation with the empress alone, she only ever had two topics of conversation – Nicky and her children. As Princess Baryatinskaya recalled, it was only when talking of how ‘deeply interesting’ she found it to ‘watch the gradual development of a child step by step’

that Alexandra’s mournful shyness was ‘for once subsumed in a moment’s true pleasure’.

Maria Feodorovna strongly disapproved of so much mothering by her daughter-in-law. An empress should be visible, performing her ceremonial duties, but Alexandra stubbornly refused to put herself or her children on show, although she genuinely wished to play an active role in philanthropic work, as her mother Alice had done. Her social projects included establishing workhouses for the poor, crèches for working mothers, a school for training nurses at Tsarskoe Selo and another for housemaids. Having a particular concern about the high infant mortality rate and the welfare of women during pregnancy, she also set about organizing midwives





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for rural areas.44 The illustrated magazines, however, were left to create their own fantasy figure of the ‘womanly woman, who lives in a secluded mansion and nurses her own children’. The tsaritsa was to be commended, readers of the Young Woman were told, for she was ‘something more than a figurehead. Even if she had done nothing else, she has nursed her own baby, and an Empress nursing a baby is a sight worth living to see.’45

*

The first intimations of a possible crisis in the Russian succession came in August 1899 when Nicholas’s brother the tsarevich, Grand Duke Georgiy, died suddenly at Abbas Tuman in the Caucasus. A manifesto was issued soon after, declaring that the next in line to the throne was now Nicholas’s youngest brother Grand Duke Mikhail, but he was only named as heir and not given the formal title of tsarevich, in anticipation that Nicholas would soon have a son. Gossip in Russia had it that this was a superstitious act on the part of the couple, out of a fear that to make Michael tsarevich would in some way jinx them and ‘prevent the appearance in the world of [their own] boy’.46

It is certainly clear that after Grand Duke Georgiy’s death, the level of concern escalated, for the first time arousing real fears that the tsaritsa might never have a boy. After Maria was born letters of advice began arriving – from England, France, Belgium, and as far afield as the USA, Latin America and Japan – offering the secret of begetting a son. Many correspondents solicited thousands of dollars from the imperial couple in return for divulging their miracle pana-ceas. Most of the theories on offer were in fact variants of those much talked about since publication in 1896 of The Determination of Sex by the Austrian embryologist, Dr Leopold Schenk. Himself the father of eight sons, of whom six had survived, Schenk considered this proof that his method worked. In October 1898 when Alexandra had been trying to fall pregnant for a third time she had apparently instructed one of her doctors in Yalta ‘to study Dr Schenk’s theory thoroughly and to communicate with him’; she had subsequently ‘lived exactly according to Dr Schenk’s precepts’, supervised at St Petersburg and Perhof by that Yalta doctor. The story first





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broke in an article on Dr Schenk in the American press in December 1898, which reported that he was ‘at present, with an assistant, working in the court of Russia, where the Czar of all the Russias longs for an heir’. The article claimed that it was ‘an open secret in Russia that the Czarina . . . has placed herself under Dr Schenk’s treatment and is willing to await the result’.47

At a time when the genetics of conception were still not under-stood, Schenk’s theories had been pooh-poohed by many of his medical contemporaries but he stuck to his guns, arguing that the sex of the child depended upon which ovary had ovulated: an unripe ovum, released soon after menstruation, would produce female children and a ripe one males. Schenk also believed that nutrition played a key role in the development of sexual characteristics, and his advice focused on the nutrition of the mother up to and during pregnancy.

A woman wanting a son, he argued, should eat more meat in order to raise the level of blood corpuscles (perhaps Maria Feodorovna had also read Dr Schenk’s book?), there being more in the male than the female. Other unsolicited advice was offered from within Russia, based on more superstitious practice. * ‘Ask your wife, the empress, to lie on the left hand side of the bed’ wrote one correspondent, instructing that he, Nicholas, lie on the right -– a euphe-mistic allusion to the popular belief that ‘if the husband mounts his wife from the left a girl will be born, if from the right a boy’ (the ‘missionary position’ in Russian being na kone ‘on a horse’).48?

Whatever the efficacy of the remedies offered them, in October 1900, while they were staying in Livadia, Nicholas was pleased to inform his mother that Alexandra was once again pregnant. As with her previous pregnancies, she was receiving no one, he said, ‘and is in the open air all day’.49 The happy couple’s quiet retreat was, however, suddenly disrupted at the end of that month when Nicholas * Over 260 such letters survive in RGIA, the State Historic Archive in St Petersburg.