CONFESSIONS OF A ROMANOV-PHILE

I remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with the Romanovs. I was lying in a hammock suspended between trees at my country place in upstate New York. It was a late summer afternoon that can best be described as “languid” and I was feeling very languid indeed.  A frosted glass of lemonade rested nearby and I was turning the pages of a book on “the Lost Empire” and there “They” were—the four exquisite daughters of Tsar Nicholas II, the “OTMA” as they were known—Olga, Marie, Tatiana, and Anastasia.  They seemed to look back at me from the past with a collective luminous gaze.  They all wore white batiste Victorian dresses…They were a Midsummer’s Night Dream come alive… And then, as the pages relayed in graphic images—the girls and their entire family and retinue were kept in exile and ultimately murdered. When I read the description of their final detention—the 78 days and nights in the Ipatiev mansion, re-named by the Bolsheviks as “The House of Special Purpose,” I felt a shiver and I was hooked. I believe it was that name—“The House of Special Purpose” — that sent the nitrous chill through me and injected my soul with something more than curiosity… I stared at the image of the rococo mansion, the high fence built around it, and imagined what it must have been like for those lovely daughters to be imprisoned there. The pictures fed my imagination: there was their last bedroom, with the delicate lily stained glass chandelier, their icons and embroidered shawls, and then three images taken after they had been killed— the parlor where they ate their last meal shown with their mother Tsarina Alexandra’s empty wicker wheelchair positioned near the Victorian palms. The plants are shown dying too, their fronds already dark and flattened…And then the downstairs death chamber itself— the elegant yellow striped wallpaper, bullet-riddled and the plaster hacked out…The family had been asked to pose against that wall for a group photograph, an excuse to gather them all the Romanovs and their retinue with their chests exposed to the firing squad. The girls had been hard to kill; bullets ricocheted off their chests. The boy guards hired to shoot them panicked. The religious guards thought the girls were in fact, immortal, as the Tsar was said to be divine and of God. The true reason was discovered when the sisters’ bodies were stripped—their bodices were filled with diamonds, hidden in the lining. The diamond-stuffed corsets had acted as bullet-proof vests. The girls had to be killed by bayonet wounds and shots to the head. Detail after detail and I imbibed it all like pure heroin. I was transported to the edge of Siberia, to enter, in my mind, that House of Special Purpose and to be there with the girls, their parents, the plump dumb maid, Nyuta, the good doctor Botkin, and the boys who were forced to guard them and then kill them… I knew I was obsessed but I didn’t dare dream that the Romanovs and  their final exile and execution would take over my own life as they have,  A few years later, they led me straight to their palace, and then on to the edge of Siberia, where, I arrived at 2:00 a.m. under moonlight at the Ekaterinburg train station. From there, I was driven deep into the dark Koptyaki forest where “They” were buried. There was no escape—for them, or for me.