The Last Imperial Family

The persons behind the icon: Emperor Nicholas II (1868–1918), Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (1872–1918), the four grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich Alexei (1904–1918), the hemophiliac heir whose illness shaped the family’s inner life. This file introduces them as the documentary record shows them, before either the tragedy of 1918 or the veneration that followed reshaped their memory.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

Nicholas Alexandrovich

Nicholas II was born on 6/18 May 1868 at Tsarskoe Selo, the eldest son of the future Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark). He succeeded his father on 20 October / 1 November 1894, at the age of twenty-six, by his own account unprepared: “What is going to happen to me and all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling,” he is reported to have said to his cousin and brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich (Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, on the accession; the remark is preserved in Alexander Mikhailovich’s memoirs, Once a Grand Duke, 1932). His reign, coronation, and fall are treated in Nicholas II as Ruler; here it is enough to note the man the sources show: reserved, fatalistic, deeply attached to family and to a personal, almost domestic piety, and formed by an unshaken conviction that autocracy was a sacred trust he was bound before God to hand on intact (Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias, 1993, on his character and convictions).

Nicholas’s diary, which he kept with near-daily regularity from youth to within days of his death, is the single most intimate source for the family, and one of the most disorienting: it records the weather, walks, tea, and shooting with the same even tone whether the day held a family dinner or a national catastrophe (the diary is edited and excerpted in Maylunas and Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, 1996; the full late diary is well studied in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs, 1995). This flatness has been read both as evidence of a shallow man and, by others, as the reticence of a private personality who reserved feeling for his family. The diary’s character is itself a source-critical problem, addressed in Sources and How We Know.

Alexandra Feodorovna

The Empress was born Princess Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse and by Rhine on 25 May / 6 June 1872 at Darmstadt, a daughter of Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse and Princess Alice, herself a daughter of Queen Victoria. She was thus a granddaughter of Queen Victoria — as was, on his mother’s side, her own future husband’s German kin — and her first language and formation were German and English; her Russian remained imperfect. Her elder sister was Elizabeth Feodorovna (Ella), who married Nicholas’s uncle Grand Duke Sergei and later, widowed, founded the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent in Moscow and died a martyr at Alapaevsk the day after the Ekaterinburg killings — a life told in its own collection (St. Elizabeth the New Martyr; Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, on the Hessian family).

Alix converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy on her marriage to Nicholas in November 1894 — a conversion she had at first resisted on conscientious grounds and then embraced with the intensity characteristic of her nature, taking the name Alexandra Feodorovna (Massie, 1967, on the conversion; Maylunas and Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, 1996, for the courtship correspondence). Shy to the point of appearing cold at the Russian court, she was mistrusted as “the German woman,” a prejudice that hardened catastrophically during the First World War. Her surviving letters — above all the wartime correspondence with Nicholas — reveal an ardent, anxious, intensely devout woman, wholly absorbed in her husband, her children, and her son’s illness, and increasingly drawn to the peasant healer Grigori Rasputin, whose place in the family is treated with the necessary both-sides care in Alexandra, Alexei, and Rasputin (the correspondence is published as The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916, ed. Bernard Pares, 1923; and in Maylunas and Mironenko, 1996).

The Four Grand Duchesses

Four daughters were born in the first seven years of the marriage: Olga (3/15 November 1895), Tatiana (29 May / 10 June 1897), Maria (14/26 June 1899), and Anastasia (5/18 June 1901). In the family’s private shorthand the four were “OTMA,” an acronym formed from their initials by which they sometimes signed jointly (Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters, 2014, on the sisters’ shared identity and the “OTMA” signature). They were raised with deliberate simplicity for royal children — camp beds, cold baths, limited pocket money — under Alexandra’s strict and pious regime, and were largely kept apart from Petersburg society, so that the four grew unusually close to one another and to their parents (Rappaport, 2014).

The historical record resists the flattening the daughters have suffered from both revolutionary caricature and pious idealization. The elder two, Olga and Tatiana, served as Red Cross nurses during the war, Tatiana with notable competence; the younger two, Maria and Anastasia, were still children when the war began (Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters, 2014). Anastasia’s supposed survival became, after 1918, the most famous of modern impostures — the Anna Anderson affair — finally closed by DNA in the 1990s (see The Discovery and Identification). None of the four survived the night of 16–17 July 1918.

The Tsarevich Alexei

The heir, Alexei Nikolaevich, was born on 30 July / 12 August 1904, the fifth child and long-awaited son. Within weeks it was clear that he had inherited hemophilia — the bleeding disorder transmitted through the female line from Queen Victoria, which had already afflicted the royal houses of Europe (Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 1967, which devotes sustained attention to the disease; the genetic character of the “royal disease,” later identified as hemophilia B, is discussed in Rogaev et al., “Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the ‘Royal Disease,’” Science 326, 2009). The child’s life was a succession of crises in which a minor injury could become a days-long agony and a mortal danger; the near-fatal Spała crisis of 1912 is the best documented (Massie, 1967).

Alexei’s illness is not incidental to this history; it is, in a real sense, its hidden engine. It bound Alexandra to Rasputin, whose apparent ability to calm the child’s bleeding gave him his hold over her (a connection Douglas Smith’s Rasputin, 2016, treats critically and at length). It was cited in the abdication: Nicholas, having first meant to abdicate in Alexei’s favor, changed the act to remove his son from the succession precisely because he would not be parted from a boy he did not expect to live long (see Abdication 1917). The photographs and accounts of captivity show a bright, mischievous, and often bedridden boy of thirteen. He was carried down to the Ipatiev basement because he could not walk, and was killed there with his family.

A Family, Not a Symbol

What the documentary record most consistently shows — the diaries, the OTMA letters, the family photographs the Romanovs took obsessively of one another — is an unusually inward-turned, mutually devoted domestic unit, one whose very closeness insulated it from the country it ruled. This is the fact most easily lost between the two later distortions: the Bolshevik caricature of “Nicholas the Bloody” and his brood, and the pious portrait of a flawless holy family. The Church, in glorifying them, canonized neither caricature; what it weighed was the manner of their death and their conduct in captivity, not an idealized life (see What the Church Canonized). The persons who went down to that basement were a middle-aged couple, three young women, a girl not yet seventeen, and a sick boy of thirteen — and it is as those persons, not as a symbol, that this collection tries to hold them.

References

Maylunas, Andrei, and Sergei Mironenko, eds. A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra, Their Own Story. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996. (The diaries and correspondence, edited with commentary.)
Massie, Robert K. Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: Atheneum, 1967. (The standard narrative biography; extended treatment of hemophilia and of Alexandra.)
Lieven, Dominic. Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias. London: John Murray, 1993. (Scholarly study of Nicholas’s character and convictions.)
Rappaport, Helen. The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014. (The four grand duchesses; the “OTMA” identity; wartime nursing.)
Steinberg, Mark D., and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv. The Fall of the Romanovs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. (Documents of the last years, with study of Nicholas’s diary.)
Pares, Bernard, ed. The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916. London: Duckworth, 1923. (Alexandra’s wartime letters.)
Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke. Once a Grand Duke. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. (Memoir; source of Nicholas’s accession remark.)
Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. (Rasputin and the hemophilia connection, critically assessed.)
Rogaev, Evgeny I., et al. “Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the ‘Royal Disease.’” Science 326, no. 5954 (2009): 817. (Hemophilia B identified in the Romanov remains.)