Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia - Early Adulthood and World War I

Early Adulthood and World War I

Olga experienced her first brush with violence at age fifteen, when she witnessed the assassination of the government minister Pyotr Stolypin during a performance at the Kiev Opera House. "Olga and Tatiana had followed me back to the box and saw everything that happened", Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria, on September 10, 1911. "...It had made a great impression on Tatiana, who cried a lot, and they both slept badly." Three years later, she saw gunshot wounds close up when she trained to become a Red Cross nurse. Olga, her sister Tatiana, and her mother Tsarina Alexandra treated wounded soldiers at a hospital on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo.

Olga was disdainful of her cousin Princess Irina of Russia's husband Felix Yussupov, the man who eventually murdered Rasputin in December 1916. Yussupov had taken advantage of a law permitting men who were only sons to avoid military service. He was in civilian dress at a time when many of the Romanov men and the wounded soldiers Olga cared for were fighting. "Felix is a 'downright civilian', dressed all in brown, walked to and fro about the room, searching in some bookcases with magazines and virtually doing nothing; an utterly unpleasant impression he makes — a man idling in such times", Olga wrote to her father, Tsar Nicholas, on March 5, 1915 after paying a visit to the Yussupovs. She was also strongly patriotic. In July 1915, while discussing the wedding of an acquaintance with fellow nurses, Olga said she understood why the ancestry of the groom's German grandmother was being kept hidden. "Of course he has to conceal it", she burst out. "I quite understand him, she may perhaps be a real bloodthirsty German." Olga's unthinking comments hurt her mother, who had been born in Germany, reported fellow nurse Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva. Nursing during the war provided Olga and her sister Tatiana with exposure to experiences they had not previously had. The girls enjoyed talking with fellow nurses at the hospital, women they would never have met if not for the war, and knew the names of their children and their family stories. On one occasion, when a lady in waiting who usually picked up the girls from the hospital was detained and sent a carriage without an attendant, the two girls decided to go shopping in a store when they had a break. They ordered the carriage driver to stop in a shopping district and went into a store where they were not recognized because of their nursing uniforms. However, they discovered that they didn't know how to buy anything because they had never used money. The next day they asked Chebotareva how to go about purchasing an item from a store. Yet other stories tell of a regular salary of nine dollars the girls received each month, and how they used it to purchase such items as perfume and notepaper. They had also been shopping with their Aunt, Olga Alexandrovna and Olga had visited shops on a trip to Germany with her sister Tatiana

Olga cared for and pitied the soldiers she helped to treat. However, the stress of caring for wounded, dying men eventually also took its toll on the sensitive, moody Olga's nerves. Her sister Maria reported in a letter that Olga broke three panes of a window on a "caprice" with her umbrella on September 5, 1915. On another occasion, she destroyed items in a cloakroom when she was "in a rage", according to the memoirs of Valentina Chebotareva. On October 19, 1915 she was assigned office work at the hospital because she was no longer able to bear the gore of the operating theater. She was given arsenic injections in October 1915, at the time considered a treatment for depression or nervous disorders. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, one of her mother's ladies in waiting, recalled that Olga had to give up nursing and instead only supervised the hospital wards because she had "overtired herself" and became "nervous and anaemic."

According to the accounts of courtiers, Olga knew the financial and political state of the country during the war and revolution. She reportedly also knew how much the Russian people disliked her mother and father. "She was by nature a thinker", remembered Gleb Botkin, the son of the family's physician, Yevgeny Botkin, "and as it later seemed to me, understood the general situation better than any member of her family, including even her parents. At least I had the impression that she had little illusions in regard to what the future held in store for them, and in consequence was often sad and worried."