As we can read from Olga's diary, she had a very active social life, visits from family, playing games with cousins, attending society events, etc. She was either out or had visitors every day.
That's true, but I'd love to know even more about these visitors and acquaintances. How many of them were Olga's age? Sablin, for example, was 33. I believe Voronov was at least 10 years older than Olga. There are very few young women mentioned at all outside of her own cousins. Many of the people she lists as visitors to the palace and guests at meals were her father's aides-de-camp. Did she form any real relationships with the people she had tea and played games with at Olga Alexandrovna's, or were they basically occasional playmates?
So yes, Olga definitely had a lot more social activity than we're used to believing, but I'm still cautious about saying she had a well-rounded social life. The apparent lack of friendships with people her own age is still bothersome to me.
I have to admit that for me, when I was reading Olga's 1913 diary, the whole issue of her and her sisters' so-called social isolation, which has been such a ubiquitous theme in recent historical works about the imperial family, seemed like a complete mischaracterization of their lives, in no small part because modern commentators read early 20th-century lives as if they should be late-20th century, early 21st-century lives. After all, by the standards of her day, the Grand Duchess Olga of the early 1910s had plenty of company, and an infinitely happier and more active social life than the overwhelming majority of her contemporaries. Let us recall that the idea of the "teenager" only really emerged in American culture of the 1950s. Prior to this, once you passed the age of fifteen or sixteen (depending on your social status, it was often quite younger), whether male or female, you were an adult for all intents and purposes, and expected to make your own way, or at the very least contribute to your family's economic welfare, either by work or by marriage or both. Most Russian and for that matter European "teenagers" of Olga's time did not lead such carefree lives as she did. And this general rule, that one owed to family and society what family and society dictated, was not only applied to the common masses, it affected the nobility as well.
So let's face it, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna led an extremely pampered, sheltered, and yes, carefree life, up until the outbreak of the first world war. She was not under pressure to make an advantageous marriage. She had polite, non-threatening partners galore for her dances and silly card games (whether these men were thirty years old or her own age scarcely matters in terms of the fun quotient, in fact it seems to me the older the wiser and more gentlemanly), she went to the theater, opera, and ballet on a regular basis, she went on a special tour of much of the Russian empire during the tercentary of the Romanov dynasty, she attended endless balls, parties, teas, etc., etc., etc. She was hardly deprived! The whole notion that the daughters of Nicholas II and Alexandra were "isolated" and cut off from an "active social life" should be thoroughly discredited by the publication of this diary by Raegan Baker.
You might well ask, what struck me most about Olga's diary for 1913? Her exclamation, very early on, "I'm so happy!" That summed up the entire diary for me. Furthermore, this expression of happiness should, I think, be a great comfort to those of us who still retain fond feelings for Olga as an individual eventually caught up in and destroyed by historical events beyond her control. At least we can take consolation in the fact that prior to World War I, Olga Nikolaevna was a very happy and seemingly well-adjusted young woman, someone who took great pleasure in her life and in the ordinary pleasures of those around her.
