The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport [Rappaport, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Biography & Autobiography, Women's Studies, Family & Relationships, Royalty, 1910s, Civil War, WWI
ISBN: 9781250020215
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

SISTERS OF MERCY

N

When Russia went to war in the summer of 1914, it was faced with

a desperate shortage of nurses. With massive losses of almost 70,000

killed or wounded in the first five days of fighting, the Russian

government predicted that at least 10,000 nurses would be needed.

Stirred by patriotic duty, legions of the fashionable and aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg – or rather Petrograd, as the city was quickly renamed – as well as the wives and daughters of government officials, and professional women such as teachers and academics, rushed to

do medical training and embrace the war effort. By September, with

the need for nurses increasingly acute, the Russian Red Cross had

reduced the usual year-long training to two months. Many women

did not make the grade and with it the right to be called sestry

miloserdiya – sisters of mercy – as nurses were termed in Russia.

From the day war broke out the tsaritsa was determined that she

and her two eldest daughters should play their part; in early

September they began their Red Cross training, taking on the

self-effacing titles of Sister Romanova, numbers 1, 2 and 3.1

Although Maria and Anastasia were too young to train they also

were to play an active role, as hospital visitors. No one repre-

sented the female war effort in Russia more emotively than did

the tsaritsa and her daughters through the three long and dispir-

iting years of war that preceded the revolution of 1917.

Everywhere – in newspapers, magazines and shop fronts – one

prevailing, iconic image dominated – of the three imperial sisters

of mercy soberly dressed in their Red Cross uniforms. Stolitsa i

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FOUR SISTERS

Usadba featured them in uniform regularly on its pages, a fact that inspired many other Russian women to follow their example.2

Edith Almedingen remembered a city full of young women

burning with ‘war-work fever’ and wearing the ‘short white veil

and the scarlet pectoral cross on their white aprons’.3

War galvanized the ailing tsaritsa; ‘Looking after the wounded

is my consolation’, she asserted.’4 Within three days of hostilities

beginning Alexandra had taken command of the vast national war

relief effort, re-establishing the huge supply depots that she had set up in the Winter Palace and elsewhere during the war with Japan.

Aside from producing surgical bandages and other essential medical

dressings, the depots also gathered and distributed pharmaceutical

supplies, ‘non-perishable foodstuffs, sweets, cigarettes, clothing,

blankets, boots, miscellaneous gifts and religious items such as tracts, postcards, and icons’ and sent them out to the wounded.5 Soon they

were filled with the well-heeled society ladies in their plain overalls learning to work sewing machines under the supervision of seam-stresses to produce bed linen for the wounded, or sitting for hours

on end packing gauze and rolling surgical bandages.6 All the major

rooms of the Winter Palace – the concert hall and various other

large reception rooms, as well as the imperial theatre and even the

throne room – were converted into hospital wards for the wounded,

their beautiful parquet floors covered with linoleum to protect them

and filled with row upon row of iron beds. Soon, without fuss or

fanfare, the tsaritsa and her two eldest daughters were

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