Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia: Difference between revisions

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia
Parent(s)	Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse

For the daughter of Nicholas I of Russia, see Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna.

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (Maria Nikolaevna Romanova) (In Russian Великая Княжна Мария Николаевна),(June 14 (O.S.)/June 26 (N.S.), 1899 - July 17, 1918???) was the third daughter of Nicholas II of Russia and Alexandra of Hesse. Her murder following the Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in her canonization as a passion bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church. She was an elder sister of the famous Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, whose escape from the assassination of the imperial family has been rumored for nearly 90 years. In recent years, Maria's own survival has been rumored. Scientists dispute whether Maria or Anastasia is the grand duchess missing from the Romanov grave that was discovered near Yekaterinburg, Russia, in the latter years of the twentieth century.

Maria's title is most precisely translated as "Grand Princess," meaning that Maria, as an "imperial highness" was higher in rank than other princesses in Europe who were "royal highnesses." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title into English from Russian. Her friends and family generally called her by her first name and patronym, Maria Nikolaevna, by the French version of her name, "Marie," or by the Russian nicknames "Masha" or "Mashka."

Character and childhood

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna wearing court dress for a formal portrait taken in 1904.

In addition to Anastasia, Maria's siblings were Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, Grand Duchess Tatiana of Russia, and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei of Russia.

A formal photograph of Grand Duchesses Tatiana, Maria, and Olga Nikolaevna in 1900.

Contemporaries described her as a pretty, flirtatious girl, broadly built, with light brown hair and large blue eyes that were known in the family as "Marie's saucers." As an infant and toddler, her looks were compared to one of Botticelli's angels. Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia nicknamed her "The Amiable Baby" because of her good nature.

As a toddler, little Maria once escaped from her bath and ran naked up and down the palace corridor while her distracted Irish nurse, Margaret Eagar, who loved politics, discussed the Dreyfus Affair with a friend. "Fortunately, I arrived just at that moment, picked her up and carried her back to Miss Eagar, who was still talking about Dreyfus," recalled her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia. Her older sisters objected to including Maria in their games and once referred to Maria as their "stepsister" because she was so good and never got into trouble, recalled Margaret Eagar in her own memoirs. However, on occasion the sweet-natured Maria could be mischievous. Once, as a little girl, she stole some biscuits from her mother's tea table. As a punishment for her surprising behavior, the governess and Alexandra suggested she be sent to bed; however Nicholas objected, stating, "I was always afraid of the wings growing. I am glad to see she is only a human child." Eagar noted that Maria's love for her father was "marked" and she often tried to escape from the nursery to "go to Papa." When the Tsar was ill with typhoid, the little girl covered a miniature portrait of him with kisses every night.

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, left, and Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna, right, play with kittens, ca. 1908, on board the Imperial yacht Standard. Courtesy: Beinecke Library.

Maria and her younger sister, Anastasia, were known in the household as the "Little Pair" because they were the younger sisters. Like their older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, the two girls shared a bedroom and spent most of their time together. Maria tended to be dominated by Anastasia because of the energy and enthusiasm of her younger sister. The pair were also dressed similarly for special occasions, wearing variations of the same dress. Her French tutor Pierre Gilliard described Maria as a "fine girl, tall for her age, and a picture of glowing health and color ... Her tastes were very simple, and with her warm heart she was kindness itself. Her sisters took advantage somewhat of her good nature, and called her 'fat little bow-wow.' She certainly had the benevolent and somewhat gauche devotion of a dog." Her mother's friend, Lili Dehn, said Maria was not as lively as her three sisters, but knew her own mind. "The Grand Duchess Marie knew at once what she wanted and why she wanted it," she wrote. She was surprisingly strong and sometimes amused herself by demonstrating how she could lift her tutors off the ground. Young Maria also enjoyed innocent flirtations with the young soldiers she encountered at the palace and on family holidays. She particularly loved children and, had she not been a Grand Duchess, would have loved nothing more than to marry a Russian soldier and raise a large family.

Portrait of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, 1905

Maria was fond of soldiers from a very early age, according to Margaret Eagar:

One day the little Grand Duchess Marie was looking out of the window at a regiment of soldiers marching past and exclaimed, "O! I love these dear soldiers; I should like to kiss them all!" I said, "Marie, nice little girls don't kiss soldiers." A few days afterwards we had a children's party, and the Grand Duke Constantine's children were amongst the guests. One of them, having reached twelve years of age, had been put into the Corps de Cadets, and came in his uniform. He wanted to kiss his little cousin Marie, but she put her hand over her mouth and drew back from the proffered embrace. "Go away, soldier," said she, with great dignity. "I don't kiss soldiers." The boy was greatly delighted at being taken for a real soldier, and not a little amused at the same time.

Alexandra's letters reveal that Maria, the middle child of the family, sometimes felt insecure and left out by her older sisters and feared she wasn't loved as much as her sisters. Alexandra reassured her that she was as dearly loved as her siblings. At age eleven, Maria apparently developed a painful crush on one of the young men she had met. "Try not to let your thoughts dwell too much on him, that's what our Friend said," Alexandra wrote to her on December 6, 1910. Alexandra advised her third daughter to keep her feelings hidden because others might say unkind things to her about her crush. "One must not let others see what one feels inside, when one knows it's considered not proper. I know he likes you as a little sister and would like to help you not to care too much, because he knows you, a little Grand Duchess, must not care for him so."

Association with Grigori Rasputin

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Grigori Rasputin with admirers in about 1914.

Maria, like all her family, doted on the long-awaited heir Tsarevich Alexei, or "Baby," who suffered frequent attacks of haemophilia and nearly died several times. Her mother relied on the counsel of Grigori Rasputin, a Russian peasant and wandering starets or "holy man" and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. Maria and her siblings were also taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to share confidences with him. In the autumn of 1907, Maria's aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was escorted to the nursery by the Tsar to meet Rasputin. Maria, her sisters and brother Alexei were all wearing their long white nightgowns. "All the children seemed to like him," Olga Alexandrovna recalled. "They were completely at ease with him."

Rasputin's friendship with the imperial children was evident in the messages he sent to them. "My Dear Pearl M!" Rasputin wrote the nine-year-old Maria in one telegram in 1908. "Tell me how you talked with the sea, with nature! I miss your simple soul. We will see each other soon! A big kiss." In a second telegram, Rasputin told the child, "My Dear M! My Little Friend! May the Lord help you to carry your cross with wisdom and joy in Christ. This world is like the day, look it's already evening. So it is with the cares of the world." In February 1909, Rasputin sent all of the imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework."

However, one of the girls' governesses, Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, was horrified in 1910 that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when the four girls were in their nightgowns and wanted him barred. Nicholas asked Rasputin to avoid going to the nurseries in the future. "I am so afr(aid) that S.I. can speak ... about our friend something bad," Maria's twelve-year-old sister Tatiana wrote to her mother on March 8, 1910, after begging Alexandra to forgive her for doing something she didn't like. "I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now." Alexandra eventually had Tyutcheva fired.

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna in the schoolroom in about 1910.

Tyutcheva took her story to other members of the family, who were scandalized by the reports, though Rasputin's contacts with the children were by all accounts completely innocent. Nicholas's sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia was horrified by Tyutcheva's story. She wrote on March 15, 1910 that she couldn't understand "...the attitude of Alix and the children to that sinister Grigory (whom they consider to be almost a saint, when in fact he's only a khlyst!) He's always there, goes into the nursery, visits Olga and Tatiana while they are getting ready for bed, sits there talking to them and caressing them. They are careful to hide him from Sofia Ivanovna, and the children don't dare talk to her about him. It's all quite unbelievable and beyond understanding."

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna in 1910.

Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, another nurse for the royal children, was at first a devotee of Rasputin, but later was disillusioned by him. She claimed that she was raped by Rasputin in the spring of 1910. The empress refused to believe her "and said that everything Rasputin does is holy." Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was told that Vishnyakova's claim had been immediately investigated, but "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard." Vishnyakova was dismissed from her post in 1913.

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Grand Duchess Maria in 1914.

It was whispered in society that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses. Rasputin had released ardent letters written by the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses to him. They circulated throughout society, fueling rumors. Pornographic cartoons circulated depicting Rasputin having relations with the empress, with her four daughters and Anna Vyrubova nude in the background. Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to Israel. Despite the rumors, the imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until Rasputin was murdered on December 17, 1916. "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed," Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on December 6, 1916. In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that the four grand duchesses appeared "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death and sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms on the night they received the news. Mordvinov reported that the young women were in a gloomy mood and seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. Rasputin was buried with an icon signed on its reverse side by Maria, her sisters, and mother. Maria attended Rasputin's funeral on December 21, 1916 and her family planned to build a church over his grave site.

Life during World War One

Grand Duchess Maria, left, and her sister Grand Duchess Anastasia visiting soldiers in a hospital during World War I, ca. 1915. Courtesy: Beinecke Library

Maria and her three sisters, like their mother, were potentially carriers of the haemophilia gene. Maria herself reportedly hemorrhaged in December 1914 during an operation to remove her tonsils, according to her paternal aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by Maria's mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the haemophilia gene like their mother.

Grand Duchesses Maria, left, and Anastasia Nikolaevna roughhouse with their cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the man who later murdered Grigori Rasputin, during World War I.

Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not haemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of haemophilia including a lower than normal blood clotting factor that can lead to heavy bleeding.

Like her younger sister Anastasia, Maria visited wounded soldiers at a private hospital on the grounds of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo during World War I. The two teenagers, who were too young to become nurses like their mother and elder sisters, played games of checkers and billiards with the soldiers and attempted to uplift their spirits. A wounded soldier named Dmitri signed Maria's commonplace book and addressed her by one of her nicknames: "the famous Mandrifolie."

Life in captivity and murder

An official portrait of, from left to right, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna in August 1916.

The family was arrested following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and imprisoned first in their home at Tsarskoye Selo and later at residences in Tobolsk and Yekaterinburg in Siberia. Tsarina Alexandra chose Maria to accompany Tsar Nicholas II and herself to Yekaterinburg when the family was briefly separated in April 1918. Maria had grown from a child to a woman during the years of captivity, according to the Baroness Sophie Buxhoevden, a lady in waiting, and the Tsarina felt she could rely upon her third daughter to help her as she could not rely upon the deeply depressed Olga or Anastasia, who was still a child. Level-headed Tatiana was needed to watch over her ill brother. They were forced to leave their other children behind in Tobolsk because Maria's brother Alexei was ill. The four other children joined their family in Yekaterinburg several weeks later. In her letters to her siblings in Tobolsk, Maria described her unease at the new restrictions on the family at Yekaterinburg. She and her parents were searched and warned they would be subject to further searches. A wooden fence was installed around the house, limiting their view of the street. "Oh, how complicated everything is now," she wrote on May 2, 1918. "We lived so peacefully for eight months and now it's all started again." Maria passed the time by attempting to befriend members of the Ipatiev House Guard, showed them pictures from her photo albums and talked with them about their families and her own hopes for a new life in England when she was released. Alexander Strekotin, one of the guards, recalled in his memoirs that she "was a girl who loved to have fun." Another of the guards recalled Maria's buxom beauty with appreciation and said she didn't assume an air of grandeur. One former sentry recalled that Maria was often scolded by her mother in "severe and angry whispers," apparently for being too friendly with the guards at Yekaterinburg.. Strekotin wrote that their conversations always began with one of the girls saying, "We're so bored! In Tobolsk there was always something to do. I know! Try to guess the name of this dog!" The teenage girls walked by the sentries, whispering and giggling in a manner that the guards considered flirtatious.

Grand Duchess Maria, Grand Duchess Tatiana and Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, ca. 1916. Courtesy: Beinecke Library.

In his memoirs, one guard recalled that on one occasion another guard forgot himself and told an off-color joke to the grand duchesses during one of these meetings. The offended Tatiana ran from the room, "pale as death." Maria eyed the man and said, "Why are you not disgusted with yourselves when you use such shameful words? Do you imagine that you can woo a well-born woman with such witticisms and have her be well disposed towards you? Be refined and respectable men and then we can get along." Ivan Kleschev, a 21-year-old guard, declared that he intended to marry one of the grand duchesses and if her parents said no he would rescue her from the Ipatiev House himself. Ivan Skorokhodov, yet another of the guards, smuggled in a birthday cake to celebrate Maria's nineteenth birthday on June 27, 1918. Maria slipped away from the group with Ivan Skorokhodov for a private moment and they were discovered when two of his superiors conducted a surprise inspection of the house. Skorokhodov was removed from his position after his actions and friendliness towards the grand duchess were discovered by his commanding officers. In their memoirs, several guards reported that both the Tsarina and her older sister Olga appeared angry with Maria in the days following the incident and that Olga avoided her company.

On July 14, 1918, local priests at Yekaterinburg conducted a private church service for the family and reported that Maria and her family, contrary to custom, fell on their knees during the prayer for the dead. Maria was murdered on July 17, 1918 in the cellar room of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. The murder was carried out by forces of the Bolshevik secret police under the command of Yakov Yurovsky. According to one account of the murders, Maria ran from the assassins and began banging on the double doors and crying for help. She was then shot in the thigh by drunken military commissar Peter Ermakov, who also tried to stab her with a bayonet and shoot her in the head, but may have failed to aim properly. Maria somehow fainted and remained alive until the bodies were inspected to check for pulses. She screamed, causing Ermakov to try and stab her again. When his attempt failed to kill her, he struck her in the face until she was silent. Her ultimate cause of death is not known.Today her cause of death remains a mystery.

Rediscovery and sainthood

From left to right, Grand Duchesses Maria, Olga, Anastasia, and Tatiana Nikolaevna in captivity at Tsarskoe Selo in the spring of 1917.

In 1991, bodies believed to be those of the Imperial Family and their servants were finally exhumed from a mass grave in the woods outside Yekaterinburg. The grave had been found nearly a decade earlier, but was kept hidden by its discoverers from the Communists who still ruled Russia when the grave was originally found. Once opened, the excavators realized that instead of eleven sets of remains (Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Tsarevitch Alexei, the four Grand Duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia; the family's doctor, Yevgeny Botkin; their valet, Alexei Trupp; their cook, Ivan Kharinotov; and Alexandra's maid, Anna Demidova) the grave held only nine. Alexei and, according to the late forensic expert Dr. William Maples, Anastasia were missing from the family's grave. Russian scientists contested this, however, claiming that it was Maria's body that was missing. The Russians identified Anastasia by using a computer program to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where pieces of bone were missing. American scientists found this method inexact.

American scientists thought the missing body to be Anastasia because none of the female skeletons showed the evidence of immaturity, such as an immature collarbone, undescended wisdom teeth, or immature vertebrae in the back, that they would have expected to find in a seventeen year old. In 1998, when the bodies of the Imperial Family were finally interred, a body measuring approximately 5'7" was buried under the name of Anastasia. Photographs taken of her standing beside her three sisters up until six months before the murders demonstrate that Anastasia was several inches shorter than all of them. Scientists considered it unlikely that she could have grown so much in the last months of her life. Her actual height was approximately 5'2".

DNA testing confirmed these were the remains of the Imperial Family and their servants, although the fate of the two missing children remains a mystery. Some historians believe the account of the "Yurovsky Note," a report filed by commander Yakov Yurovsky with his superiors following the murders, that two of the bodies were removed from the main grave and cremated at an undisclosed area. The rationale was that this action would create doubt that these were the remains of the Tsar and his retinue should the grave be discovered by the Whites because the body count would not be correct. However, some forensic experts believe the complete burning of two bodies in that short amount of time would have been impossible given the environment and materials possessed by Yurovsky and his men. Numerous searches of the area in subsequent years have also failed to turn up a cremation site or the remains of the two missing Romanov children.

According to the accounts of some of the guards, there may have been an opportunity for one or more of the guards to rescue a survivor. Yurovsky demanded that the guardAna 20 13:49, 15 January 2007 (UTC)s come to his office and turn over items they had stolen following the murder. There was reportedly a span of time when the bodies of the victims were left largely unattended in the truck, in the basement and in the corridor of the house. Some guards who had not participated in the murders and had been sympathetic to the grand duchesses were reportedly left in the basement with the bodies.

At least two of the grand duchesses were said to have survived the initial attack on the royal family. Two of the grand duchesses, Maria and Anastasia, "sat up screaming" when they were being carried out to a waiting truck. They were then attacked again.

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This icon depicts the Imperial Family as passion bearers of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the days following the murders, there were reports of trains and houses being searched for "Anastasia Romanov" by Bolshevik soldiers and secret police. When she was briefly imprisoned at Perm in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, reported that a guard brought a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the daughter of the Tsar. Helena Petrovna said she didn't recognize the girl and the guard took her away. Although other witnesses in Perm later reported that they saw Anastasia, her mother Alexandra Fyodorovna and sisters in Perm after the murder, that story is now widely discredited as nothing more than a rumor.

During a 1964-1967 German trial regarding the identity of Anna Anderson, a woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Viennese tailor Heinrich Kleinbetzl testified that he saw a wounded Anastasia immediately following the murders at Yekaterinburg. The girl was being treated by his landlady, Anna Baoudin, in a building directly opposite from the Ipatiev House.

"The lower part of her body was covered with blood, her eyes were shut and she was pale as a sheet," he testified. "We washed her chin, Frau Annouchka and me, then she groaned. The bones must have been broken ... Then she opened her eyes for a minute." Kleinbetzl testified that the wounded girl remained in his landlady's home for three days. During those days, Red Guards came to the house, but knew his landlady too well to actually search the house. "They went like this: 'Anastasia's disappeared, but she's not here, that's for sure,'" he testified. Finally a Red Guard, the same man who had brought her, came to take her away. Kleinbetzl knew no more about her fate.

Kleinbetzl had delivered clothing to the Ipatiev House and seen the grand duchesses walking in the home's enclosed courtyard, but had never spoken to any of them. He testified that the wounded girl was "one of the women" he had seen walking in the courtyard, not that he personally recognized her as Anastasia.

Gabriel Louis Duval wrote a book, A Princess in the Family, claiming that his foster grandmother "Granny Alena" might have been the Grand Duchess Maria. According to Duval, Granny Alena married a man named Frank and emigrated to South Africa. She later lived with his family before dying in 1969. Her body was exhumed, but DNA was too degraded to be useful in determining whether she shared DNA with the imperial family.

Her first cousin, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, kept a photograph of Maria beside his bed in memory of the crush he had upon her until his own assassination in 1979. In 2000, Maria and her family were canonized as passion bearers, or people who accepted their impending deaths with Christian humility, by the Russian Orthodox Church. She and her family were previously canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1981 as holy martyrs. In recent years, believers have attributed healing from illnesses or conversion to the Orthodox Church to their prayers to Maria and her family.

References

• Peter Christopher, Peter Kurth, and Edvard Radzinsky, Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, 1995, ISBN 0316507873
• Lili Dehn, The Real Tsaritsa, 1922
• Gabriel-Louis Duval, A Princess in the Family, 2004.
• Margaret Eagar, Six Years at the Russian Court, 1906
• Pierre Gilliard, Thirteen Years at the Russian Court
• Greg King and Penny Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003, ISBN 0-471-20768-3
• John Klier and Helen Mingay, The Quest for Anastasia: Solving the Mystery of the Last Romanovs, Birch Lane Press Book, 1995. ISBN 1-55972-442-0
• Peter Kurth, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, 1983, ISBN 0-316-50717-2
• Hugo Mager, Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia, Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-7867-0678-3
• Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, ISBN 0440163587
• Robert K. Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995 ISBN 0-394-58048-6
• Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, eds., A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story, Doubleday, 1997, ISBN 0-385-48673-1
• George Negus Tonight, "A Princess in the Family," an October 25, 2004 broadcast on ABC (Australian television)
• Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File, Doubleday, 2000, pp. 129-130, ISBN 0-385-48909-9
• Demetrios Serfes, The Miracle of the Child Martyr Grand Duchess Maria, an April 11, 2000 account of a healing reported by a Serbian woman
• Maxim Shevchenko, "The Glorification of the Royal Family," a May 31, 2000 article in the Nezavisemaya Gazeta,
• Ian Vorres, The Last Grand Duchess, 1965, ASIN B0007E0JK0
• Charlotte Zeepvat, The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album, Sutton Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3049-7

External links

• Photographs of Grand Duchess Maria and the Imperial Family at Livadia.org
• FrozenTears.org, a media presentation of the last Imperial Family.
• Hemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency
• A discussion of the canonization of the Imperial Family in 2000
• Gilliard, Pierre, Thirteen Years at the Russian Court [1]
• A Princess in the Family?, transcript of an October 25, 2004 broadcast on Australian television.
• Granny Alina is Maria R.!, a thread discussing Granny Alena and Gabriel Duval's book claiming she was Grand Duchess Maria at www.alexanderpalace.org