Baby in the Palace - PART I

would remain bright at heart for many months, perhaps years to come. The trouble seemed to have disappeared, and the boy, healthily chubby from birth, began to grow. There was still a faint, vague fear in the depth of everyone’s heart, a silent worry when Aleksei, a lively, fidgety child, was learning to crawl -- watched at every turn by a host of nurses, he would still manage to tumble, and at the end of the day his mother would find large purple swellings on his little arms and legs. There was a tense guessing game that sometimes began in their minds -- was this the terrible disease that, it was rumored, was carried in the blood of Queen Victoria? And then the guessing game would end abruptly as Aleksei, a little boy of two, would toddle in, laughing, mischievous, rambunctious and cheerful.

The tension of worry would end as soon as the last tear dried from his little cheek after an unfortunate fall, and the sun would shine again into the baby’s world. The nursery where he spent most of his time was a fairytale of a playroom indeed -- being the son of the Tsar, and a fifth child, Aleksei had an enormous store of fantastic toys to receive and to inherit from his sisters. In Tsarskoye Selo, one of the Romanov residences near St. Petersburg, the children’s playroom was in fact a portion of the spacious Concert Hall, and was thus an incredibly vast area, with high ceilings, many doors and windows, a balcony, and a thick carpet. Because Olga, Tatiana and Marie were beginning to “graduate” from the playroom by the time Aleksei was old enough to occupy it full-force, it became almost entirely the kingdom of Aleksei and wild Anastasia, and was thus converted into a genuinely boyish fantasy. Models of planes hung under the ceiling, pictures of battleships and historic battles occupied the walls, and a clockwork train, complete with a long railroad and stations, encircled the room. The train was a special favorite, received by Aleksei as a Christmas gift from his parents, and he and the Tsar would spend hours playing with it, making it stop suddenly between stations for repairs, creating train crashes, and so on.

The Imperial children had many other elaborate and marvelous toys, and their numbers grew rapidly with the years. Family members, military divisions and government officials all

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