Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia - Young Adulthood and World War I

Young Adulthood and World War I

As a young teenager, Tatiana was assigned a regiment of soldiers, the Vosnesensky (Ascenscion) Hussars and given the rank of honorary colonel. She and Olga, who was also given her own regiment, would go out and inspect the soldiers regularly, an occasion they greatly enjoyed. When she was nearly fourteen, an ill Tatiana begged her mother to permit her to get out of bed in time to go to a review so she could watch a soldier she was infatuated with. "I would like so much to go the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn," she wrote to Alexandra on 20 April 1911. "...Yes, Mama, and at the second division I will see whom I must see ... you know whom ..."

While she enjoyed the company of the soldiers she met, the young Tatiana also sometimes found their behavior shocking. A group of officers aboard the imperial yacht gave her older sister Olga a portrait of Michelangelo's nude David, cut out from a newspaper, as a present for her name day on 11 July 1911. "Olga laughed at it long and hard," the indignant fourteen-year-old Tatiana wrote to her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia. "And not one of the officers wishes to confess that he has done it. Such swine, aren't they?" The fourteen year old found her distant cousin Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia's engagement to Helen of Serbia "touching" but found the thought of Helen kissing him hilarious. "How funny if they might have children, can (she) be kissing him?" Tatiana wrote Olga Alexandrovna on 14 July 1911. "What foul, fie!"

That fall, the fourteen-year-old Tatiana experienced her first brush with violence when she witnessed the assassination of the government minister Pyotr Stolypin during a performance at the Kiev Opera House. Tatiana and her older sister Olga had followed their father back to his opera box and witnessed the shooting. Her father later wrote to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria, on 10 September 1911, that the event had upset both girls. Tatiana sobbed and both of them had trouble sleeping that night.

A few years later, when World War I broke out, Tatiana became a Red Cross nurse with her mother and Olga. They cared for wounded soldiers in a private hospital on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. According to Vyrubova, "Tatiana was almost as skillful and devoted as her mother, and complained only that on account of her youth she was spared some of the more trying cases." Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, who worked with her at the hospital, described in her journal how she planned to boil silk while Tatiana was otherwise occupied, fearing that Tatiana would be too tired to help her. But Tatiana guessed what Chebotareva was doing. "Why can you breathe carbolic acid and I can't?" she asked Chebotareva and insisted on helping her with the work. Tatiana was strongly patriotic and apologized in an 29 October 1914 letter for saying something negative about the Germans in her mother's presence. She explained that she forgot her mother had been born in Germany because she thought of Alexandra as only Russian. The Tsarina responded that she did feel completely Russian and Tatiana had not hurt her feelings with her sharp words, but Alexandra was hurt by the actions of her former countrymen and by the gossip she heard about her own German connections.U

On 15 August 1915, Tatiana wrote her mother another letter expressing her desire to help her bear the burdens brought on by the war: "I simply can't tell you how awfully sorry I am for you, my beloved ones. I am so sorry I can in no way help you or be useful. In such moments I am sorry I'm not a man." As Tatiana grew into adulthood, she undertook more public appearances than her sisters and headed committees. Vyrubova recalled that she became better known to the public than her three sisters because of her attention to duty and her ability to engage those she met. In their memoirs, both her mother's friend, Vyrubova, and lady in waiting Lili Dehn recalled that Tatiana, the most social of the sisters, longed for friends her own age but her social life was restricted by her rank and her mother's distaste for society. She also had a more introspective side, known only to her closest friends and family. "With her, as with her mother, shyness and reserve were accounted as pride, but, once you knew her and had gained her affection, this reserve disappeared and the real Tatiana became apparent," Dehn recalled. "She was a poetical creature, always yearning for the ideal, and dreaming of great friendships which might be hers."

Chebotareva, who grew to love "sweet" Tatiana almost like a daughter, described how the shy grand duchess once reached out to hold her hand when Tatiana was nervous about walking in front of a large group of nurses. "I am so terribly embarrassed and frightened – I do not know whom I greeted and whom not," Tatiana told Chebotareva. Tatiana's informality also impressed Chebotareva's son, Gregory. Tatiana once called Chebotareva at her home on the telephone and spoke first to her sixteen-year-old son. Gregory was annoyed when the grand duchess referred to him by his diminutive name, "Grisha." Not realizing who she was, the affronted Gregory asked the grand duchess to identify herself and she replied, "Tatiana Nikolaevna." When he asked her again, still not believing he was talking to a Romanov, Tatiana again failed to claim the imperial title of Grand Duchess and replied that she was "Sister Romanova the Second."

On another occasion during the war, when the lady in waiting who usually picked them up from the hospital was detained and sent a carriage without an attendant, Tatiana and her sister Olga decided to go shopping for the first time. They ordered the carriage to stop near a group of shops and went into one of the stores, where they were unrecognized because of their nurses' uniforms. They came back out without buying anything when they realized they did not have money with them and wouldn't have known how to use it even if they did. The next day they asked Chebotareva how to use money.