Remnants of the Romanovs

“That is the window,” our Russian guide, Natalya, explained. She gestured toward a yellow and white rotunda studded with bow windows that reflected a stormy sky. “Through there at dawn on Aug. 1, 1917, the Czarina Alexandra’s wheelchair was lifted and the entire imperial family was taken away.”

On either side of the ominous rotunda stretched two stately wings of an 18th century palace, and beyond them the green depths of an overgrown park. Except for the wind blowing through stands of white lilac planted by the doomed czarina, there was no sound. It was an eerie place. I kept looking over my shoulder for the imperial ghosts that must surely haunt it. Natalya looked somberly at the crumbling, yet-to-be-restored exterior of the palace. “Of course, you know that the Romanovs never returned.”

So here I was, finally, visiting a place I had read about for years: the Alexander Palace at Czarskoe Selo, the Czar’s Village, about 15 miles south of St. Petersburg. I had come in June for a convention and was thrilled to be in a city that always has fascinated me. The Alexander Palace was a big part of the attraction.

Built between 1792 and 1796 by Catherine the Great as a wedding present for her favorite grandson, Czar Alexander I, the palace passed in 1894 to Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II. He and his wife, Alexandra, and their five children lived for 22 years in the modestly decorated west wing. Of their four young daughters, the youngest, Anastasia, was the clown, mimicking guests, cracking jokes and climbing trees in the adjacent Alexander Park.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution and the czar’s abdication, the Romanovs spent five months under house arrest in the palace. That August they were spirited away to Siberia, and 11 months later they were dead--slain by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg.

For years speculation grew that Anastasia had escaped the massacre, and a woman even claimed to be the grand duchess. Evidence suggests she was actually a Polish factory worker, but her attempts to assume the identity of the grand duchess made Anastasia probably the best-known Russian royal in the world.

My fascination with Anastasia and her family began in my childhood. At a party in 1968, I met Maria Rasputin, daughter of Grigori Rasputin, the religious mystic-turned-confidant of Nicholas II and Alexandra. On some Sundays, Maria said, the czar would send a car to take her to the palace so she could have tea with the grand duchesses. The girls would enter the room so quietly, she couldn’t hear their feet touch the floor.

Fifteen years later, in 1983, I visited St. Petersburg for the first time. It was called Leningrad then. The sky was gray, and so were the faces of the people.

When I returned this past June with my mother, I found a world of change. The sky was blue, and people were fashionably dressed. There were no long lines at the food stores, and the shelves were crammed with goods in the Gostiny Dvor, St. Petersburg’s fashionable bazaar on Nevsky Prospect, the main shopping boulevard.

We stayed at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, a concrete warren of 1,200 rooms on the western end of Vasilevsky, one of the city’s 42 islands. What the hotel lacked in style and elegance it made up with a stunning view of the Gulf of Finland out my window. It was the time of the so-called white nights of June and July, when the sun barely dips below the horizon. I could stand at my window at midnight and watch the sunlight on whitecaps that flecked the gulf.

It also helped that among the hotel’s amenities was a travel agency that arranged our trip to the Alexander Palace. We rented a car and hired a driver and English-speaking guide (Natalya) to take us to Czarskoe Selo, site of not only the relatively modest Alexander Palace but also the stunning Catherine Palace. The latter was built largely under the direction of Czarina Elizabeth, starting in 1752, and was named after her mother, Catherine I; the palace later was reshaped dramatically by Catherine II, a.k.a. Catherine the Great.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Czarskoe Selo was the Beverly Hills of St. Petersburg. The rich and famous constructed mansions on the outskirts of the palace parks. Only the nobility were allowed to build in what was essentially a large gated community patrolled by soldiers.

As we pulled onto the gravel of the Alexander Palace drive, it was as if we had entered that lost world. The crumbling yellow and white walls are the same ones that Anastasia would have seen had she looked back one last time on that fateful August dawn. The trees Anastasia climbed still stand in the park, as does the full-size, four-room playhouse on the Children’s Island, where the family’s pet cemetery was.

The palace was just opened to visitors in 1998, and much restoration work remains. After the royal family was taken away in 1917, the palace sat undisturbed for 13 years, the children’s schoolbooks still on the shelves, their toys in the nursery, their clothes in the closets and family photographs still stuck in the mirror of Alexandra’s vanity in the mauve boudoir.

In 1931 the communists decided that the furnishings of the late czar’s home served no purpose, so they gutted the rooms. In typical Russian fashion, however, they carefully documented what they were about to destroy. Photographs and watercolor pictures have been used to re-create the rooms for public display.

For anyone familiar with the reign of the last Romanov, these rooms echo with ghosts. Original pieces of Alexandra’s white enameled furniture for the mauve boudoir stand beside replicas of the rest of the suite. Rose-flowered chintz, re-created from photographs, lines the walls and encloses the surprisingly narrow brass twin beds where she and the czar slept.

Nicholas II’s study, with its Russian-style interior balcony, squat pillars and dark corners filled with family photographs and bric-a-brac, looks like a setting for a Russian fairy tale. Here on the carpet by the czar’s desk, his daughter Marie played with her dolls. In the bedroom overhead, Anastasia experimented with her beloved Kodak camera, photographing surreal images of herself in a mirror.

Nicholas II’s built-in wardrobe still holds some of his uniforms, and the rooms that had housed his indoor swimming pool contain cases of the children’s belongings: a doll owned by one of the girls, the son’s christening gown and pony trappings from Italy covered with red ribbon and mirrors.

Staring at a doll dressed in blue silk that might have been one of Anastasia’s, or hearing the wooden floors creak beneath footsteps in the next room, I found it hard to believe that nearly a century had passed since the Romanovs lived here. Alexandra, afflicted with sciatica and chronic leg pain, rolled her wheelchair across this very floor. The ghost of the czarina--her full-length portrait dressed in formal white hanging on the wall of her husband’s study--especially seemed to haunt the palace.

Back in St. Petersburg, after an elegant late lunch of timbale of salmon, minestrone soup and artichoke heart tapas in Brasserie, a restaurant in the Grand Hotel Europe, I set out to explore more Romanov sites. Along Nevsky Prospect, many of the splendid Art Nouveau buildings still house the same types of businesses that were here in the days of the czar.

Yeliseev’s at 56 Nevsky Prospect is a gastronome’s delight where food is sold beneath brilliantly colored windows. Dom Knigi, the House of Books, at 28 Nevsky Prospect, operates behind an elegant facade designed in 1910 by Pavel Syuzor, one of the city’s best-known Art Nouveau architects.

Of course, my visit to St. Petersburg wouldn’t have been complete without stops at the Hermitage art museum and the Kazan Cathedral, completed in 1811.

But as my trip neared its end, I focused on the last stop on my Romanov pilgrimage. I entered the precincts of the Peter and Paul Fortress, site of Peter the Great’s defeat of the Swedish in 1703. Peter put to death his son and heir, Alexis, on these grounds, and Russian writer Feodor Dostoevski was imprisoned and nearly shot by a firing squad in 1849, pardoned by the czar at the last minute.

But in late spring, with the lilacs in bloom and the trees providing welcome shade for visitors, the fortress had the feel of a Sunday picnic in the park. Ice cream sellers, souvenir stands and children taking art classes defused the fortress of its grim associations.

Inside the fortress walls, a cathedral with a golden-needle spire is the final resting place of Anastasia and her family. In the side chapel, behind white marble plaques, the remains of the last Romanovs are buried. The ceiling is painted sky blue with a dove of peace in the center, and rosy heads of cherubs emerge from puffs of clouds.

The argument still goes on as to whether Anastasia has actually been laid to rest among her ancestors, but standing beneath the dove and the cherubs with the sun streaming through the windows, I hoped so.

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GUIDEBOOK

Fit for Royalty in St. Petersburg

Getting there: From LAX to St. Petersburg, Russia, Lufthansa and Aeroflot offer connecting service (one change of plane). Restricted round-trip fares start at $1,060.

Where to stay: I stayed at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, which had a beautiful view of the Gulf of Finland. Doubles are $160 per night; 14 Korablestroiteley St., St. Petersburg 199226; telephone 011-7-812-356-3001, fax 011-7-812-356-4496, Internet https://pribaltiyskaya.com.

St. Petersburg Hotel overlooks the Neva River near St. Peter and Paul Fortress. Doubles are $100 to $200 per night; 5/2 Pirogovskaya Naberezhnaya, St. Petersburg 194175; tel. 011-7-812-542-9411, fax 011-7-812-248-8002.

Sheraton Nevskij Palace Hotel is near the Hermitage. Doubles run from $195 to $340; 57 Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg 191025; tel. 011-7-812-275-2001, fax 011-7-812-301-7323, Internet https://www.sheraton.com.

Where to eat: The Grand Hotel Europe’s elegant Brasserie serves Russian and European fare; dishes are $10 to $60. 1/7 Mikhaylovskaya Ulitsa; local tel. 329-6000.

Literary Cafe is a casual, historic spot; writer Alexander Pushkin dined at this site. Lunch or dinner runs about $15 per person. 18 Nevsky Prospect; tel. 312-6057.

Dvorianskoye Gnezdo is an elegant restaurant, considered one of the city’s best; three-course meals start around $60. 21 Dekabristov Ulitsa; tel. 312-3205.

For more information: Russian National Tourist Office, 130 W. 42nd St., Suite 412, New York, NY 10036; tel. (212) 575-3431, fax (212) 575-3434, Internet https://www.russia-travel.com.