“The Last Grand Duchess” - Bryn Turnbull

🪆If you have any interest at all in reading about the doomed Romanov family, I highly recommend this book. It is a riveting narrative not least because of the meticulous research that Turnbull has clearly poured into crafting it.

🪆 The tale is told from the POV of Olga Romanov, the eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria). Turnbull fills her pages with details of daily life in the palaces of imperial Russia. The cast of characters includes the Romanov family, the royal household (including the mystic Rasputin), and revolutionaries like Vladmir Lenin. The time period of the novel is primarily 1903-1917 and it captures the dramatic reversal of fortunes of the last Russian Emperor and his family. We see the ravages of WWI on Russia, and the direct contribution to the Russian civil war that followed.

🪆As readers, we bear witness to Alexandra’s mania for Rasputin, and we come to sympathize with her mother’s desperation, though ultimately she was misled and ill-advised by the mystic. Rasputin had the ability to sufficiently calm young Alexander so his body could recover from his hemophilic attacks. No other medical or holy person was able to do so. Thus, Alexandra would come to rely on Rasputin exclusively for his care of Alexander. Rasputin made himself indispensable to her, such that before long, she relied on him for matters of governance - well beyond his initial scope of assistance to the Romanovs.

🪆In Turnbull’s telling of their young adulthood, we see that Olga and her sisters made choices based on the belief that was bred into them, that their position was inviolable: sacred and permanent. As this belief was slowly dismantled before their eyes, we witness the very human attempt to eke out an existence, to survive somehow. The theme of the Romanov girls being too naive and sheltered from real politik runs throughout TLGD.

🪆The eldest Romanov daughters - Olga and Tatiana - watch their parents’ refusal to acknowledge changing times, and miscalculation after miscalculation all stemming from their lack of awareness of the struggles of ordinary Russians. The girls saw their parents consumed with maintaining autocratic power even as it was being chipped away, while also desperately concealing their only heir’s hemophelia from their subjects. Though Olga did not perceive it at the time, the October Manifesto of 1905 whereby Czar Nicholas II was transformed from an absolute monarch to a constitutional monarch, was a prelude for the Bolshevik Revolution.

🪆As Turnbull notes, most of the atrocities committed during Nicholas’ reign were likely totally unknown to his daughters - hence they are not mentioned in this narrative. Olga simply saw her father as an out of touch Tsar and woefully unprepared military leader, seemingly caught off guard by the pervasive revolutionary sentiment. Turnbull is certainly not excusing the horrors ordered by Nicholas, however in this story, we are seeing the Romanovs more as a family unit than as deposed rulers. In Olga’s eyes, her father’s greatest miscalculation was also a desperate attempt to keep their family together. Unfortunately, it may have cost them all their lives. In her author’s note, Turnbull addresses the atrocities that fomented anti-emperor sentiments in Russia. As the Romanov children were sheltered totally from these events, it lends credibility to the view of the children as innocents being led to the slaughter, never truly knowing the depths of the hatred toward their father.

Turnbull also looks at the historical record behind the fate of the youngest Romanov sister, Anastasia, and persistent rumors that she somehow lived on, as well as what became of Tsar Nicholas’ sister who in Turnbull’s estimation was the only Romanov to survive the revolution.

🪆Some interesting historical details included by Turnbull in TLGD:

• The Arapy was a small group of Black courtiers since the time of Catherine the Great. They were an ornamental guard due to their “exotic” looks and were meant to represent the the breadth of the Russian empire. Jim Hercules, a secondary character in TLGD, was an American, who served in the Arapy during the time period of this novel.
• Abram Gannibal is also mentioned. He was kidnapped from central Africa and enslaved. The twists of fate brought him to the court of Peter the Great, who made Gannibal his godson. Gannibal is the great-grandfather of Pushkin.
• Dr. Vera Gedroits was the first female resident physician at the military hospital where Olga and Tatiana served as nurses during WWI. As portrayed by Turnbull in TLGD, the historical record shows that she did prefer to dress in men’s fashions, and the Countess Nirod was her partner. What a fascinating and pioneering person Gedroits must have been!