On November 3 (November 15 New Style),
1895, the citizens of St. Petersburg waited in anticipation for the rounds of a cannon.
The cannon would announce the gender of the tsar and tsaritsa's first child: 101 rounds if
the baby was a girl; 300 if it were a boy.
One...two...ninety-nine...one hundred...one hundred one. The one hundred second round
never fired. The firstborn of the new Imperial family was born to prestige, fame, fortune,
and - fate: Her Imperial Highness Olga Nicholaievna Romanova, Grand Duchess and Tsarevna
of Russia. Her name was Slavic for "holy," a favorite of the Russian Imperial
family for ages. Nicholas delightedly reported in his diary,
"She is a big baby
weighing 10 pounds and measuring 55 centimeters. I can hardly believe it's really our
child! God what happiness! She does not look at all new-born, because she is such a big
baby with a full head of hair."
Olga was born with what her
great-grandmother Queen Victoria termed an "immense head" and a mass of
gold-chestnut hair, which a nursemaid claimed would bring her luck. But Great-Grandmama
Victoria did relent on one point: she admitted the chubby little baby girl was
"splendid."
The new grand duchess visited France with
her parents and nurse only months after her birth. French crowds called, "vive la
grande duchesse" and "vive la bebe." Olga was a celebrity.
But celebrities are often naughty, and the
small duchess was no exception. However, she showed a good mind, even when bad. Her nurse,
M. Eager, wrote in Six Years at the Russian Court:
"One day during
Eastertide, we were out driving on the Nevsky Prospekt, and the little Grand Duchess Olga
was not good. I was speaking to her, trying to induce her to sit down quietly, when
suddenly she did so, folding her hands in front of her. In a few seconds she said to me,
"Did you see the Policeman?" I told her that was nothing extraordinary, and that
the police would not touch her. She replied, "but this one was witting something; I
was afraid he might have been writing 'I saw Olga, and she was very naughty." I
explained that this was very unlikely, and she reminded me, rather reproachfully, that one
day, some time before, she had seen a drunken woman arrested in the street, and had wished
me to tell the police not to hurt her. I had refused to interfere, saying that the woman
was naughty, and the police quite right in taking her. I now explained that one had to be
quite big and very naughty indeed before the police would take one to prison. On returning
home she made particular inquiries as to whether a policeman had come while she was out.
When she went to see her parents that afternoon she recounted the whole story to her
father, telling him that I said it was quite possible to live without going to prison. She
then asked her father if he had ever been a prisoner, the Emperor answered that he had
never been quite naughty enough to go to prison. Her remark then was: "Oh! how very
good you must have been, too."
As she grew older, Olga became slender and
pretty, with thick blond-chestnut hair that she was proud of, and blue eyes. She was very
serious, and "she bore everything with [Alexandra]". Even then, her fiery,
ardent nature quickly spouted over when something crossed her; she often yelled at her
mother, complained at having to do chores, and was in general the opposite of cheery,
patient Tatiana. Olga preferred to be left alone with a book from her mother's library to
playing in the snow. She liked poetry the most.
As most first children, Olga was
exceptionally intelligent, and had she not died early, would have become a woman of
consequence. Her tutor, Pierre Gilliard, said of her in his memoirs:
"The eldest, Olga,
possessed a remarkably quick brain. She had good reasoning powers as well as initiative, a
very independent manner, and a gift for swift and entertaining repartee. She gave me a
certain amount of trouble at first, but our early skirmishes were soon succeeded by
relations of frank cordiality. She picked up everything extremely quickly, and
always managed to give an original turn to what she learnt. I well remember how, in one of
our first grammar lessons, when I was explaining the formation of verbs and the use of the
auxiliaries, she suddenly interrupted me with: "I see, monsieur. the auxiliaries are
the servants of the verbs. It's only poor 'avoir' which has to shift for itself."
A sensitive, compassionate girl, Olga gave to charities and used much of her
personal fortune for the "commoners." Once, she saw a little peasant boy on
crutches, and found out that his parents could not afford any medical treatment. She paid
the hospital bills.
Partly, Olga's pensive, somber nature was
due to her mature thinking and realization of Russia's circumstances. In 1914, she became
a nurse with her mother, sister Tatiana, and Alexandra's friend Anna Viroubova. What she
saw was too much for her sensitive spirit; she retired from the more gruesome parts of
nursing and settled for changing bandages instead of surgeries.
Olga Nicholaievna turned sixteen in 1911.
Sixteen was the coming-out age in Russia, and even the overprotective empress gave Olga
her right to a coming-out ball at Livadia. On her birthday, the eldest grand duchess
received the traditional gift for each daughter of the tsar: diamond and pearl jewelry. In
1913, when Tatiana turned sixteen, the two sisters attended their last ball in St.
Petersburg society, held at the Anitchkov Palace by their grandmother. That same year,
during the tricentennial celebrations, the daughter of the English ambassador recorded the
presence of the emeror, empress, and their oldest daughter at a ball in the Winter Palace:
"...She [Alexandra] retired before the
end of the evening, leaving the emperor behind with Grand Duchess Olga, who on this
occasion made her first public appearance in society. Dressed in a simple pale pink
chiffon frock, her fair hair shining like burnished gold, her blue eyes very bright, her
cheeks softly flushed, she danced every dance enjoying herself as simply and
wholeheartedly as any girl at her first ball."
In June of 1914, when Olga was eighteen, the
Imperial family took a trip on the Standart to Constanza, Rumania, to visit the Rumanian
royal family. The main purpose of the visit was to get Olga interested in Crown Prince
Carol. Olga, however, was intelligent and sought out her tutor, Pierre Gilliard, on deck,
asking him why everyone wanted her to marry Carol. "I am a Russian and wish to remain
Russian," she asserted, and refused the marriage and, thus, any chance of leaving
Russia. Another suitor, Boris, the fast son of Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, was also
scorned by the eldest grand duchess and her parents.
Whom Olga really wished to marry, however,
was the tsar's cousin, the young and handsome Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich. Dimitri was
one of the rare imperial relatives that Alexandra liked. All of the grand duchesses had a
crush on him at one time or another, but it appears that Olga actually loved him. At one
time, in fact, she was going to be engaged to him, but for some reason Alexandra cut it
off. The crushing blow came in 1916, when Dimitri, Prince Yusupov, and three others killed
Rasputin, the man who kept Alexandra on her myopic course. After that, of course, Dimitri
was out of the question. A downcast Olga recorded in her diary, "All hope is
lost."
The Revolution made Olga even more
withdrawn. Before 1917, she had had at least a semblance of happiness and gaiety. Now,
however, she grew steadily more somber. In April 1918, her parents left for Ekaterinburg
with Marie, leaving her in charge of the household at Tobolsk. Baroness Sophie Buxhoevden,
a friend of the family, later recalled that the stress and responsibility of that position
had turned the once smiling young girl into a woman.
Olga died soon after her twenty-third
birthday.