Deliver me from the false accusations of me,
and I will keep Thy commandments.
(Ps. 118:134)
Vyrubova… The mere mention of this surname, at least until recently, evoked disgust in our contemporaries, for the woman who supposedly caused the catastrophe that brought the godless Bolsheviks to power in Russia. The militant atheist Government blackened the name of Orthodox Russia and its three pillars: Orthodoxy, monarchy, and the people, and defamed the names and memory of all those who were connected with the Royal Family. A special place among these people (perhaps more than others) belongs to the much-slandered Anna Taneyeva (Vyrubova).
Both before the 1917 Revolution and after it, Anna Alexandrovna was accused of having illicit relations with the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and with Grigori Rasputin, an extremely negative influence on the Tsarina; of espionage, betrayal, plans to poison the Heir to the Throne, etc. But relatively recently (in 2000) her authentic diaries1 were published for the first time in our country, and an image emerges of a gentle, kind, noble, morally pure, somewhat naive, sentimental, trusting like a child, and most importantly, deeply religious woman, who more than just a lady-in-waiting to the holy Empress Consort Alexandra Feodorovna—she was her faithful and devoted friend.
Anna Alexandrovna Taneyeva was born on July 16, 1884, to the aristocratic family of a high-ranking state official and head of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, Alexander Sergeyevich Taneyyev (1850–1918). A.S. Taneyev was also a well-known composer. Her mother, Nadezhda Ilarionovna Tolstaya (1860–1937), was Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov’s great–great-granddaughter, and her maternal great-grandfather and grandfather were generals.
The future lady-in-waiting spent her childhood in Moscow and at the Rozhdestveno family estate near Moscow, which was situated near the country estate of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Alexander III’s brother. Anna recalled how affectionate the Grand Duke’s wife Elizabeth Feodorovna, who was canonized as a new martyr, was with her.
Anna received her primary education at home, as her parents were afraid of possible harmful influences on their children from their peers.
“Faith in God, attending church services, a virtuous life and prayer supported us [i.e., the children.—Auth.] on our life paths.”2
At the age of sixteen, Anna contracted severe typhoid fever, and the doctors did not believe she would recover. Her parents invited St. John of Kronstadt to celebrate a prayer service at the bedside of their sick daughter. After the prayer service there was a crisis in the sick girl’s condition, and then she recovered quickly.
In 1902, Anna passed an exam at the St. Petersburg Educational District and could teach as a tutor. In 1905, when Anna Taneyeva was twenty, she was invited to the Tsarina’s retinue at the royal Court.
In 1907, Anna Alexandrovna married naval officer Alexander Vyrubov. He was one of the few who miraculously survived when the Petropavlovsk battleship sank during the Russian-Japanese war in 1904. The shock he suffered at that time was probably what caused his insanity. A year later the marriage broke up, and Anna regained her maiden name, Taneyeva.
Having become the closest friend of the holy Empress, for twelve years Anna Alexandrovna was in effect a member of the Royal Family, accompanying Tsarina Alexandra on many trips and travels and attending family celebrations. The Empress and Vyrubova were united by their common worldviews, interests and spiritual kinship—deep faith in God, the desire to help their neighbor, and compassion for the suffering.
As a lady-in-waiting, Anna served the Empress selflessly without receiving any salary, since, being the Tsarina’s confidante, she was too modest to take money.
“The Empress once said that she was happy that she had someone who served her for her own sake, and not for a good salary,” Anna wrote in her reminiscences.3
The ladies at the court envied Anna because the Empress was particularly fond of her. They also disliked Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, considering her to be arrogant, cold, and proud. Being indifferent to faith themselves, they spoke mockingly about her religiousness, regarding her as a hypocrite. They also believed Anna to be a “religious fanatic”, an “insidious schemer”, a “procuress” and a “debauchee”. But the Empress, with her high education, intellect, deep faith, and rich inner world, would not have become a close friend of someone of dubious behavior and base feelings. In addition, Anna enjoyed the friendship of all the members of the Royal Family, including the Tsar. Their long-lasting friendship stood the test of time—during the Royal Family’s imprisonment, the Tsarina wrote over twenty letters to her favorite, in which she called Anna affectionately “my dear child”, “darling”, “dearest”, “sweet”, “my little one”, “my dear friend”, and the like. The holy Royal Martyrs prayed for their faithful Annushka [an affectionate form of the name Anna.—Trans.].
Anna Alexandrovna enjoyed the full confidence of the Empress, who every time Tsarevich Alexei was seriously ill asked her to call Rasputin, who could miraculously stop attacks of the child’s illness. So, Anna became a “mediator” between the Royal Family and Rasputin. Rasputin (another victim of slander!) would usually meet with members of the Imperial Family at her dacha in Tsarskoye Selo.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Anna Alexandrovna began working as a hospital nurse together with the Empress and her daughters. At that time, the prosperous period of her life ended and was followed by a period of harsh trials. On January 15, 1915, after leaving Tsarskoye Selo for Petrograd, Anna was in a train accident and suffered injuries of such severity that doctors considered her situation hopeless. Taneyeva survived (she was bedridden for six months), but remained crippled forever. After this accident, she could only get around in a wheelchair or with crutches, and later with a stick.
A year after the accident, with the funds she had received as a compensation for her injury she organized St. Seraphim’s Infirmary for crippled soldiers in Tsarskoye Selo, where they studied various trades.
“Having experienced how hard it is to be a cripple, I wanted to make their lives a little easier in the future. After all, on their arrival home, their families would have viewed them as extra mouths to feed! Within a year we trained 200 artisans, shoemakers and bookbinders,” Anna wrote in her memoirs.4
Shortly before the 1917 Revolution, Anna Alexandrovna received death threats, and her friends tried to persuade her to leave the Empress and thereby save her own life—to which she replied:
“I am surprised that I am being told to escape; I have a clear conscience before God and people, and I will stay where the Lord has ordained me to serve.”
After the February Revolution, the Provisional Government established the so-called “Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to Investigate the Unlawful Acts of the Tsarist Regime”. Anna Vyrubova was one of the first to be arrested. (A.F. Kerensky personally took her, although she had not yet recovered from her illness, from Tsarskoye Selo and placed her in solitary confinement at the Trubetskoy Bastion Prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress). Despite her disability, she languished at the fortress in the most severe conditions—she starved, as parcels from relatives were forbidden; inmates were allowed to walk only for ten minutes a day; visits were allowed for ten minutes once a week. The guards were of the sort who were bitter towards Anna, hurled obscenities at her, spat into her plate of food (if that mess could be called “food”), attempted to rape her several times and threatened to kill her. While in solitary confinement, she suffered both morally and physically—she contracted bronchitis and pneumonia. According to Taneyeva, it was a slow execution. In moments of despair, she asked God to take her as soon as possible. The prison doctor I.I. Manukhin left his memories of those terrible events. He wrote:
“Vyrubova made an impression of a sweet, but very unhappy woman who had suddenly found herself in terrible conditions that she could never have expected for herself and had probably never imagined that there were such things in the world… A.A. Vyrubova’s state at the fortress was the worst of all. The guards that were opposed to her and the garrison staff hated her and showed their hatred in every possible way. It was clear that if there were to be victims, A.A. Vyrubova would be the first.”5
Anna Alexandrovna prayed in prison continuously, and with God’s help, endured the torments and suffering that had befallen her. The only icon that the inmate Vyrubova was allowed to keep in her cell was a small Mogilev Icon of the Mother of God: “Hundreds of times a day and during terrible nights I pressed it to my chest.” In a letter to her father dated October 18, 1917, she wrote:
“I believe that God hears every sigh; but it is absolutely impossible to endure evil when you have tried to do good all your life.”6
The guards swindled Anna Alexandrovna’s parents out of large sums of money, ostensibly to ease their daughter’s lot, and then spent it all on drink. In May 1917, by order of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, Anna Vyrubova underwent a humiliating medical examination, which found that she was a virgin (her husband was impotent). During the interrogations, which lasted for four hours or longer, they insisted that she give testimony against St. Nicholas II and his wife, but Anna was steadfast and did not slander them. After five months she was released “for lack of evidence”.
In late August 1917, the Provisional Government decided to send her abroad within twenty-four hours. At the Riihimäki railway station in Finland a crowd of revolutionary sailors threw her off the train, almost lynching her. She was taken to the Polar Star yacht, which headed for the Sveaborg sea fortress. For a whole month the sufferer’s mother through all channels requested that her daughter be released, and her efforts were crowned with success: Anna was taken from the Sveaborg fortress to Smolny and released again. She spent the winter and the summer of 1918 in freedom, but was continuously afraid of new arrests. At that time she corresponded with members of the Royal Family and sent them parcels of food via reliable people.
On October 7, 1918, Taneyeva was arrested again following a denunciation by a clerk from St. Seraphim’s Infirmary, and after five days on Gorokhovaya Street, was placed in the Vyborg Prison. She was released again a month later. Throughout the winter of 1919, Anna Alexandrovna and her mother were starving, and kind-hearted people provided at least some small help.
“The winter of 1919 was spent quietly,” Anna wrote in her memoirs. “But I was very nervous. I found solace only in churches. I often went to the Lavra, to my father’s grave… We lived trying not to lose heart and with hope in the mercy of God.”7
In September, Anna Alexandrovna saw St. John of Kronstadt in a dream, and he told her, “Have no fear—I’m with you all the time.” A new arrest and imprisonment on Gorokhovaya Street followed on September 24, 1919. In her diaries Anna described the horror of the situation of people arrested by the Bolsheviks and their endless fear for their lives. One of the investigators told her bluntly during the interrogation, “Our policy is destruction.” Anna would return to her cell nervous and exhausted after interrogations that lasted for many hours. Her legs were swollen, her heart ached, and she had frequent fainting spells. She prayed to God at night to save her from being shot. How many tears Anna shed in those days! She compared her time in prison to hell. She found consolation only in reading the Bible and the Psalms.
Having received freedom by Divine Providence and through the intercessions of St. John of Kronstadt (while she was being transferred from one prison to another, where she was sent to be shot, she miraculously escaped from her convoy soldier), Anna lived for over a year in Petrograd with her friends and acquaintances, hiding from the authorities.
“In a black headscarf, with a bag in my hands, I went from acquaintances to acquaintances. After knocking, I would ask, as I did every time, ‘I have escaped prison—will you accept me?’ Like a hunted animal, I hid now in one dark corner, then in another… I went to bed every night thinking that it would be my last night on earth.”8
In danger of being killed at any minute, Anna vowed that if she survived, she would become a nun and devote her life to God. Continuously persecuted, without money, without documents, barefoot, in a torn coat, she eventually, in December 1920, fled from Soviet Russia to Finland with her mother. But even there, in a foreign land, the malice and slander coming from her emigrant compatriots did not leave her alone.
At the age of thirty-eight, Anna Alexandrovna decided to withdraw from the world and secretly took monastic vows with the name Maria (in honor of St. Mary Magdalene Equal-to-the-Apostles). This event took place on November 14, 1923 at the Skete of the Smolensk Icon of the Theotokos of Valaam Monastery. Hieroschemamonk Ephraim (Khrobostov) became her spiritual father. She was not accepted by Lintula Convent (Finland) due to her disability, so she lived in the world with her mother, who died on March 13, 1937. Until 1939, Anna Alexandrovna lived in Vyborg, but, since the Red Army threatened to capture it, she moved to Sweden. In March 1940 Anna returned to Finland, where Field Marshal K.G. Mannerheim, her old acquaintance from St. Petersburg, began to provide her with small financial support. 1943–1947 were years of extreme poverty for Anna Taneyeva owing to the lack of any means of subsistence. In 1947, her spiritual father, Hieroschemamonk Ephraim, died, and the Valaam Elder Schema-Abbot John (Alexeyev) became Nun Maria’s new spiritual father.
Nun Maria spent almost half of her life—forty-four years—in seclusion and ended her days in the service of God in the angelic—that is, monastic rank. She fell asleep in the Lord on July 20, 1964 at the age of eighty and was interred at the Ilyinskoye Orthodox Cemetery of Helsinki.
In exile, Anna Taneyeva wrote an autobiographical book, Pages of My Life, which was published in Russian in Paris in 1922. In the 1920s, the so-called “Vyrubova Diary” was published in the USSR in the Minuvshye Gody (“Bygone Years”) magazine. In 1928 Taneyeva published a statement in the emigrant Vozrozhdenie newspaper that that “Diary” had nothing to do with her. The most likely authors of the “Diary” were the famous writer A.N. Tolstoy and the historian P.E. Shchegolev. In 1928, the Orient Publishing House in Riga published the book, The Lady-in-waiting to Her Imperial Majesty, containing a fake “Intimate Diary and Memoirs” by A.A. Vyrubova. The authentic memoirs of Anna Vyrubova-Taneyeva were published in Finnish after the author’s death. In 2008, for the first time in Russian, the book, Anna Taneyeva—the Lady-in-waiting to Her Imperial Majesty, was published in Russia.
When writing her diaries, Anna Alexandrovna was concerned not so much about her own rehabilitation as about restoring the good name of her royal friends, considering it her duty to God, the Tsar and the Fatherland. She knew that the time would come when her compatriots would become interested in the life and deeds of the last Russian Tsar. Anna remained faithful to the Empress and testified to the holiness of the Royal Family’s life. She left behind the truth about the events to which she had been an eyewitness. Her testimony destroyed the slander against the Anointed of God, telling the world how the holy Passion-Bearers, the Emperor and the Tsarina, had faithfully served their Fatherland, loving Russia selflessly.
It is known that slander is a means of political warfare. The court clique, with the help of slander, were zealously undermining the throne of St. Nicholas II, intending to put Tsarevich Alexei on the throne, hoping (due to his young age and poor health) to get unlimited power. Some of the Tsar’s relatives claimed the throne themselves. In her memoirs, Anna Alexandrovna particularly blamed the Grand Dukes who had instigated intrigues against the Imperial couple.
“When I recall all the events of that time, it seems to me that the Court and the upper class were like bedlam, everything was so confusing and strange.”9
Malice and calculated conspiracies did their job—the relatives, generals and deceived people abandoned the Anointed of God, to whom they had once sworn allegiance.
As you can see, Anna Alexandrovna’s life was full of great hardships: an unhappy marriage, disability after a train accident, intrigues and conspiracies of the Court, arrests and the horrors of incarceration and wandering from home to home after escape. But the most terrible trial was the torrent of slander and public contempt. But she endured everything courageously, because she saw an example of the life of Empress Alexandra before her. It is likely that Anna’s destiny—that of ordeal, suffering, hardships and sorrow—was a spiritual sign that her life’s path was blessed by God, and that the Kingdom of Heaven awaited her at the end of this path.
