Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia - Romances With Soldiers

Romances With Soldiers

Tatiana fell in love on at least one occasion. In an article in the December 2004 edition of the magazine Royalty Digest: A Journal of Record Peter de Malama wrote that his cousin, Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama, an officer in the Imperial Russian Cavalry, met Tatiana when he was wounded in 1914 and a romance later developed between Tatiana and the young man when he was appointed an equerry to the court of the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo. Dmitri Malama gave Tatiana a French bulldog she named "Ortino" in September 1914. "Forgive me about the little dog," Tatiana wrote to her mother on 30 September 1914. "To say the truth, when he asked should I like to have it if he gave it to me, I at once said yes. You remember, I always wanted to have one, and only afterwards when we came home I thought that suddenly you might not like me having one. But I really was so pleased at the idea that I forgot about everything." The dog died, but Malama gave her a replacement puppy. Tatiana took it with her to Yekaterinburg, where it died with the rest of the family. Malama paid the imperial family a visit some eighteen months after he gave Tatiana the first dog. "My little Malama came for an hour yesterday evening," wrote Alexandra to Nicholas on 17 March 1916. "...Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still. I must say a perfect son in law he w(ou)ld have been – why are foreign P(rin)ces not as nice!" Malama was killed in August 1919 while commanding a unit of the White Russians fighting the civil war against the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, according to Peter de Malama.

Tatiana was also fond of an officer named Vladimir Kiknadze, whom she cared for when he was wounded in 1915 and again in 1916, according to the diary of Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, a nurse who worked with Tatiana during the war. Chebotareva described how Tatiana sometimes sat beside "Volodia" at the piano as he played a tune with one finger and talked to her in a low voice, wearing a mysterious expression on his face. Chebotareva also described how Tatiana and her sister Olga made excuses to come to the hospital to see Volodia. Chebotareva felt the flirtations between the grand duchesses and the wounded officers could cause gossip and damage the girls' reputations.