The Secret Wife(117)

I’d long been fascinated by the tragic story of the Romanovs. Back in my teens I read Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold’s book The File on the Tsar and desperately wanted to believe their theory that some of the family had survived. I read other books about the Romanovs as they were published and I knew that both Olga and Tatiana had flirtations with officers they treated in the Tsarskoe Selo hospital but I’d only come across Dmitri Malama as a footnote. Once I started reading about him, and realised how handsome and courageous he was, and how close he and Tatiana seem to have been, the plot of The Secret Wife fell into place.

During my research I discovered that Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama was born on the 19th of July 1891 in Lozovatka, the son of a cavalry general, and he had two sisters, Vera and Valerina. He trained at the prestigious Imperial Corps de Page in St Petersburg, which brought him into contact with the royal court. In August 1912 he graduated and became a cornet in the Uhlan Lancer Guard Regiment, of which Grand Duchess Tatiana was honorary colonel. Two years later, during the opening week of the First World War, he was wounded in the leg while their regiment was under attack but he refused to leave the field, earning him the Golden Arms sword with an inscription that read ‘for bravery’.



Dmitri was brought to hospital in Tsarskoe Selo in September 1914 and there he got to know Tatiana, who had volunteered as a nurse. There’s a chance he might have encountered her before but now they became so close that he gave her a gift of a French Bulldog she called Ortipo. I slightly tinkered with historical fact at this point: in fact, he asked her permission to buy her a puppy and she excitedly said ‘yes’ straight away, then had to write a note apologising to her mother and asking if it would be all right. He had the puppy delivered to the palace, but as a novelist I couldn’t resist altering the facts to have him surprise her with the gift.

Tatiana’s 1914 diaries list what she has been doing and who she has seen without much commentary, but it is easy to read between the lines with entries such as these:

27th September 1914. Malama took photographs. He is awfully sweet. He is already walking by himself, but of course still limping.

23rd October 1914. Talked to Malama sweetheart in the hallway for a little then went to his ward and took photographs. Today my darling Malama is being discharged from the infirmary. I feel such horrible regret.

28th October 1914. After dinner at 9.15 Malama came over and sat till 10.15. I was terribly glad to see him, he was very sweet.





A 1914 shot of the family showing Olga and Tatiana standing behind, Maria seated left and Anastasia on the right, with Alexandra and Nicholas in the centre and little Alexei in front.

21st November 1914. Had tea at home with Mama [we] four, and Malama sweetheart was [here]. [Was] awfully glad to see him. And we said goodbye as he is going to the front soon.

If Dmitri and Tatiana corresponded while he was at the front, the letters have not survived. A year and a half later, once he had returned to Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra wrote of him to Tsar Nicholas: ‘He had matured, though still a lovely boy. I have to admit, he would make an excellent son-in-law. Why are foreign princes not like him?’

Had it not been for the Revolution, there is a good chance Malama and Tatiana could have married: Malama’s family were part of Russia’s old nobility and there were precedents because Nicholas’s sister Olga had married an army officer in 1916. Tatiana also had an admirer called Volodya, but there is no doubt Malama was her favourite from the many times she mentions him in her diaries and from the numerous photographs she took of him. In my story I departed from known historical fact when I had them engage in a secret marriage, although there is a precedent for this in the Russian royal family: it is rumoured that Catherine the Great secretly married her lover Grigory Potemkin in 1774, and I have borrowed some details of the moonlit chapel downriver in which this might have taken place.



After the Romanovs were placed under house arrest in February 1917, it seems to me only natural that Tatiana’s brave young lover would have been part of at least one of the many plots to rescue them. At first it was assumed that George V would bring the family to live in the United Kingdom but he hesitated. Who would support them? How would the order of precedence be affected at court? They were related to virtually every other European royal family – the Danish, Greek, German and British – but in wartime, the world’s attention was focused elsewhere and, shockingly, no one stepped out of line to save the Romanovs.

There were several rescue attempts while they were in captivity, including the one in which Red Guard commander Vasily Yakovlev tried to redirect their train to Omsk, and another led by British merchant Henry Armistead. In the novel, I imagine Dmitri leading an attempt that goes horribly wrong just before the fateful events of the night of the 16th–17th of July 1918. In fact, according to record, he joined the White Army after the October 1917 Revolution and achieved the rank of captain, fighting as bravely against the Bolsheviks as he had previously fought the Germans. After rumours of the murder of the Romanov family leaked out, it is said that he lost heart and was killed at Tsaritsyn in June 1919.

But what if he wasn’t? What if both he and Tatiana survived? Would she have been able to convince anyone of her identity in those days before DNA testing? There were dozens of people claiming to be Romanovs, of whom Anna Tschaikovsky/Anderson