THE LAST OF THE ROMANOVS, Stalin and the overthrow of the Old Bolsheviks

State Council of Imperial Russia

Under Russia's revised Fundamental Law of February 20, 1906, the Council of the Empire was associated with the Duma as a legislative Upper House; from this time the legislative power was exercised normally by the emperor only in concert with the two chambers.^[8] The Council of the Empire, or Imperial Council, as reconstituted for this purpose, consisted of 196 members, of whom 98 were nominated by the emperor, while 98 were elective. The ministers, also nominated, were ex officio members. Of the elected members, 3 were returned by the "black" clergy (the monks), 3 by the "white" clergy (seculars), 18 by the corporations of nobles, 6 by the academy of sciences and the universities, 6 by the chambers of commerce, 6 by the industrial councils, 34 by the governments having zemstvos, 16 by those having no zemstvos, and 6 by Poland. As a legislative body the powers of the Council were coordinate with those of the Duma; in practice, however, it has seldom if ever initiated legislation.

State Duma of the Russian Empire

The Duma of the Empire or Imperial Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma), which formed the Lower House of the Russian parliament, consisted (since the ukaz of June 2, 1907) of 442 members, elected by an exceedingly complicated process. The membership was manipulated as to secure an overwhelming majority of the wealthy (especially the landed classes) and also for the representatives of the Russian peoples at the expense of the subject nations. Each province of the empire, except Central Asia, returned a certain number of members; added to these were those returned by several large cities. The members of the Duma were chosen by electoral colleges and these, in their turn, were elected in assemblies of the three classes: landed proprietors, citizens and peasants. In these assemblies the wealthiest proprietors sat in person while the lesser proprietors were represented by delegates. The urban population was divided into two categories according to taxable wealth, and elected delegates directly to the college of the Governorates.

The peasants were represented by delegates selected by the regional subdivisions called volosts. Workmen were treated in special manner with every industrial concern employing fifty hands or over electing one or more delegates to the electoral college.

In the college itself the voting for the Duma was by secret ballot and a simple majority carried the day. Since the majority consisted of conservative elements (the landowners and urban delegates), the progressives had little chance of representation at all save for the curious provision that one member at least in each government was to be chosen from each of the five classes represented in the college. That the Duma had any radical elements was mainly due to the peculiar franchise enjoyed by the seven largest towns — Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Riga and the Polish cities of Warsaw and Łódź. These elected their delegates to the Duma directly, and though their votes were divided (on the basis of taxable property) in such a way as to give the advantage to wealth, each returned the same number of delegates.

The Romanov dynasty lasted 300 years: the lives of its tsars and emperors and empresses is a bejewelled but bloodsplattered chronicle of assassinations, adulteries, tortures, secret marriages, coups, reckless rises and brutal falls.  

It is peopled by heroic, brilliant statesmen, soldiers and reformers  -  as well as nymphomaniacs, martinets, murderers, blunderers, monsters, megalomaniacs and lunatics.

But throughout, Russia's tsars projected their country's greatness in the majestic flamboyance of their clothes, a never-ending parade of ermine, gold and diamonds.

In the photograph from the Beinecke Library’s collection of recovered Romanov family albums, Tsar Nicholas II is pictured with his daughters, Maria, Anastasia, Olga, and Tatiana. All four daughters were born before the heir apparent, Alexei. Olga was closest to Tatiana. They were known as “The Big Pair.” They were always seen together. Maria and her younger sister Anastasia were known as “The Little Pair.” Like Olga and Tatiana, they shared a room and dressed alike. The four girls were raised as simply as possible, sleeping on hard cots when they weren’t ill, and taking cold baths in the morning.

The last Tsar: Nicholas II and the empress of Russia, Alexandra Fedorovna in 1903

A new exhibition of their sumptuous ceremonial uniforms at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows for the first time the true extent with which they embraced magnificence  -  and how they employed the finest dressmakers, tailors, embroiderers and jewellers in Russia so they could demonstrate their glory through the theatre of dress and jewels.

The Romanov daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, are pictured in a formal portrait taken in 1916, just two years before their execution. With pearls on their necks, they pose in evening gowns in one of the salons, which is decorated with French furniture. Behind them is an organ with sheet music, which all of Tsar Nicholas II’s daughters learned how to play. Tatiana was the best player of the four girls. The relaxed portrait shows no sign of the tragedy that would soon befall the Romanov girls. In just a year, they would be placed under house arrest and confined to their quarters.

The Romanov daughters are pictured here looking very different from the formal piano portrait they took together just a year earlier. The grand duchesses shaved their heads in the spring of 1917 after a bout with measles. Captivity certainly took its toll on the Romanovs. Grand Duchess Tatiana was reportedly most upset that she couldn’t continue her work tending to wounded soldiers as she had as a World War I Red Cross nurse. She wrote to fellow nurse Velentina Chebotarev in April 1917, “It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not go to change the bandages!”

When thinking about the gruesome end that befell the Romanov children, it’s strange to look at earlier photographs of them playing. Grand Duchess Maria, Tsarevich Alexei, Georg Donatus, the Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, and Grand Duchess Anastasia are pictured here playing with a toy car at Schloss Wolfsgarten, a royal hunting lodge. The photograph was taken in the Autumn of 1910 when Anastasia was just nine years old, Alexei was six years old, and Tatiana was 13 years old. Tatiana was the only one of the Romanov children pictured above who would live to see the first year of her 20s. Her older sister Olga had a slightly longer life, as she was executed at age 22.

The photograph below offers a glimpse into the Romanov’s captivity at Tobolsk. The former tsar, Nicholas II, sits with Tatiana, Olga, a little boy of a servant, Alexei, and Anastasia on a fence in front of a greenhouse. In August of 1917, the Romanovs were sent to Tobolsk by Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government, supposedly to protect them from the revolution. They lived in the former governor’s mansion in relative comfort until October 1917 when the Bolsheviks came to power. Then, the conditions of their imprisonment became stricter. The photograph above was taken in September 1917, just a month before life would become even more difficult for the Romanovs.

The photograph here is believed the be the last photograph ever taken of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. She sits under an umbrella on the balcony of the Governor’s Mansion at Tobolsk in Siberia. Her daughters Olga and Tatiana are by her side. The photo was taken in the spring of 1918. The Romanovs would be executed just a few months later by Bolshevik troops led by Yakov Yurovsky. Tsarina Alexandra was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Her faith in the mystic Grigori Rasputin, her influence on her husband, specifically to resist surrendering Siberiaratic authority over the country, and her German heritage severely damaged the reputation of the Romanovs.

Prior to their fall from grace, the Emperor and his family enjoyed incredible wealth and luxury, including luxury forms of transportation. This photo show the Tsar sitting with his four daughters while vacationing on their imperial yacht, the Standart. The Standart was commissioned by Tsar Nicholas’s father, Emperor Alexander III. It was reportedly one of the most luxurious vessels of its time, fitted with crystal chandeliers and mahogany paneling, with the idea of making it a floating palace for the royal family. The yacht was also where the royal family were told in 1914 of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that would ultimately be the catalyst for the first World War.

This haunting photograph of Grand Duchess Anastasia was taken shortly before her execution while she was being held in captivity at Tobolsk in the spring of 1918. She is sitting at a desk in her bedroom during captivity. There were many false reports of Anastasia’s survival through the 20th century, inspiring books and films. At least ten women claimed to be the Grand Duchess. The best-known imposter was Anna Anderson. Anderson was cremated upon her death in 1984, but DNA testing showed no relation to the Romanov family. However, DNA testing at two grave sites has now identified the four Romanov daughters, their parents, and Alexei, which proved conclusively that the entire family died in 1918.

The Romanov’s house arrest started at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Nicholas II, no longer a monarch and addressed by sentries as Nicholas Romanov, was reunited with his family there while they were held by the Provisional Government and confined to their quarters. The photograph above shows Olga, Alexei, Anastasia, and Tatiana sitting on the ground while being held captive. Anastasia is holding Tatiana’s beloved French bulldog, Ortipo, on her lap. The photograph was taken on May 1917, a couple of months after the Romanov children were reunited with their father and Alexandra was reunited with her husband on March 22, 1917.

This photograph of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and Tsar Nicholas II is from the Beinecke Library’s collection of Romanov family photographs and was likely taken by Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevena. The photograph was taken sometime in the winter of 1917-1918, while the Romanov family was being held captive at Tobolsk. At this time, the family’s conditions were far less comfortable than their initial house arrest, as the Bolsheviks had come to power in October 1917. Alexei and his father are seen sawing wood since they were no longer permitted to have their ten devoted servants by their side. The family was also placed on soldier’s rations during this time.

This photograph, taken in the spring of 1917 during the Romanov’s captivity, shows Alexei, Tatiana, and her French bulldog Ortipo sitting on the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo. Ortipo was given to Tatiana while she worked as a nurse during the war by her favorite infirmary patient, Dmitri Malama. The dog was a favorite of the family and was mentioned frequently in diaries and letters. Ultimately, Ortipo would travel with Grand Duchess Tatiana and the Romanov family as far as Tobolsk, where it was recorded that Tatiana tried to balance the dog and her suitcase in her arms while the family walked in the mud from the train station to their quarters at Tobolsk.

This photograph from the Beinecke Library is also part of the Romanov family’s personal collection. The photo captures a very young Prince Alexei sitting at the table with his father, Tsar Nicholas II. This candid moment reveals none of the political turmoil that was brewing beneath the surface. Prince Alexei was the only male child of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Tsarina Alexandra, who also had four daughters. As the heir apparent, Alexei was doted on by his parents and sisters and was affectionately referred to as Alyosha. Alexei’s health was always a concern; he inherited hemophilia from his mother, which made trivial injuries like a bruise potentially life threatening.

This photograph from the United States Library of Congress was taken in the spring of 1917. The photo shows Grand Duchess Tatiana during her captivity at Tsarskoe Selo. She transports lumps of sod on a stretcher with the aid of a soldier. It often fell upon Tatiana to hold her family together during captivity. She urged her mother to follow her father to Tobolsk when Alexei was too ill to be transported and helped her sisters and brother sew jewels into their clothing so they could go undetected by guards and would have funding to start a new life if they were able to escape.

Tsar Nicholas II is shown here in a field surrounded by soldiers after his forced abdication on March 15, 1917. He was the last Emperor of Russia, and his reign saw the fall of the Russian Empire from a great power of the world to economic and military collapse. Nicholas II earned the name Nicholas the Bloody for the events of the Khodynka Tragedy, Bloody Sunday, the violent suppression of the 1905 Revolution, his perceived responsibility for and defeat in the Japanese War, and the anti-Semitic pogroms common under his empire. The estimated 3.3 million Russians killed in World War I and the lack of food and supplies on the home front were ultimately the downfalls of the Romanov dynasty.

This photograph was taken at Tsarskoe Selo in 1916, about a year before the family would be held in captivity on the same grounds. Alexei sits between his mother Empress Alexandra, and father Tsar Nicholas II. Before Tsarskoe Selo was a prison for the Romanovs, the beautiful Alexander Palace and adjacent Alexander Park were a summer residence for the family. Visiting nobility would also stay in Tsarskoe Selo, which is located about 15 miles south of the center of Saint Petersburg. After Bloody Sunday, Alexandra decided to make Alexander Palace the family’s permanent residence, since the Winter Palace was too dangerous.

Before their execution, the Romanovs were moved to Yekaterinburg’s Ipatiev House. Around midnight on July 17, 1918, Yakov Yurovsky ordered the family to move to the basement under the pretense that it would be a safe location due to the impending chaos in Yekaterinburg. The family was taken to the cellar room and asked to wait there. They were only given a few seconds to process their orders for execution before they were shot chaotically. At one point, the guards opened the doors to let out the smoke. The Romanov children had jewels sewn into their clothing, which protected them from the initial shots.

In this photograph, some of the Romanov sisters are seen posing for the camera. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. Although, it is commonly known that Anastasia was the subject of myth for many years, so was her eldest sister Olga. Although over the years many began to claim they were members of the Russian royal family, one woman named Marga Boodts also staked her claim to royalty and said she was actually the Grand Duchess Olga. Some relatives of the royal family actually believed her to be Olga and Nikolaus the Hereditary Grand Duke of Oldenburg who was a godson of Tsar Nicholas II allegedly financially supported Marga until his death in 1970.

Tatiana, the second eldest Romanov sister is seen here during one of her family’s summer cruises. Tatiana was widely regarded to be “the most beautiful” of all the Romanov sisters. Her hair was said to be dark auburn and she had blue-grey eyes. It was also said that of all the sisters she most closely resembled their mother. As the rest of the family, Tatiana had a relationship with the “healer” Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin met Tatiana when she was a young girl of around 12 years old but apparently, there was some controversy because he met her and her sisters while they were wearing their nightgowns.

The Romanov family revered Rasputin and viewed him and everything he did as “holy”. However, the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna was horrified after she was told by one of the girls’ caretakers who said that Rasputin had visited the two eldest sisters while they were getting ready for bed and was “caressing” them. Xenia apparently viewed Romanov as khlyst which was an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church and she regarded him with much suspicion. Ultimately, the caretaker he who viewed Rasputin with suspicion was fired. There were rumors that Rasputin had seduced the four sisters. Ultimately, Rasputin was murdered not long before the royal family themselves were executed.

The Tsarina was widely unliked by her subjects and apparently came across as quite cold. However, Alexandra was apparently not trying to be rude but was rather shy. She was also known to be highly standoffish and only associated herself with a few close friends, which made other aristocrats view her with suspicion. It is possible that in order to deal with her shyness and difficulty in dealing with people she turned to drugs. She at one point confided in one of her few friends that she might have had an addiction to barbiturates. Specifically, one called Veronal and she wrote in a letter a few years before her execution, “I’m literally saturated with it.”

The third sister Romanov sister, Grand Duchess Maria, was said to have survived the initial attack on the royal family. Along with her sister Anastasia, after the initial shooting, they were being carried outside to a truck and they “sat up screaming”. Some rumors surrounded the possible survival of Maria from the execution. Like her other sisters, people have claimed to be various family members and descendants of Maria’s. However, historians mostly discount the possibility that any of the family survived the attack. In one such story, two young women claimed to be Maria and Anastasia and were taken in by a priest in the Ural Mountains. They were subsequently buried with the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna; however, no proof surrounding the claims has been found.

This photograph shows Olga Romanov lying in bed. Eldest sister Olga’s marriage was often the source of rumor in Russian society. Allegedly, at one point Olga became engaged to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, her first cousin once removed. One author named Edvard Radzinsky asserts that the engagement was later broken off because Dmitri strongly disliked Grigori Rasputin. In The Rasputin File, Edvard also says that Dmitri was also rumored to be bi-sexual. Whether the rumors are true or not the betrothal never came to be. Olga was also rumored to be discussing marriage to Prince Carol of Romania, England’s George V, and Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia. At some point, Olga fell in love with Pavel Voronov, an officer; however, their relationship could not be because of their differing social status.

This photograph shows Olga and Anastasia sitting alongside their mother sometime in 1916. All of the children enjoyed a close relationship with both of their parents. Olga often read books and then recommended them to her mother if they were suitable for her to read. Anastasia was known for being silly and goofy, often teasing and making other family members laugh. When they were little, Alexandra always dressed her daughters in pairs and would have them wear identical clothing. When Alexei was born, he became the apple of the entire family’s eye. Alexandra was particularly obsessed with her son especially since she gave him the gene of hemophilia and felt it her duty to protect him.

The peaceful photograph of the family enjoying Alexander Park is in stark contrast to this photo taken just a year later. The photograph shows Grand Duchess Tatiana and Alexei sitting in Alexander Park in Tsarskoe Selo, holding shovels. They are surrounded by Russian soldiers and are under house arrest. Alexei’s hemophilia likely made any manual labor difficult and may have led to his severe illness in his last year of captivity, which initially prevented him from being transported. Tatiana, on the other hand, was used to physical work from her time as a Red Cross nurse during World War I.

This photograph of Alexandra was taken a few years before the end of her life. It was Alexandra who brought Rasputin into the family circle, mainly because of her obsession with healing her son. She felt like Rasputin might hold the key to healing hemophilia. Towards the end of her life, Alexandra and the rest of her family were confined, she spent her time in a wheelchair. Either she was suffering from poor health or simply or emotional health was being worn down by the confinement. She, along with her husband the Tsar, were said to have been among the first to have been killed during the execution.

This photograph shows the youngest son Alexei playing war with the children of his tutor. World War I had broken out in 1914. Alexei was the youngest son of the Tsar and Tsarina, yet he was also the heir to the royal throne. In the Russian monarchy, only sons are able to be heirs to the crown. He is, of course, most famous for having hemophilia. His condition led to him being particularly spoiled and sometimes his behavior was looked down upon. He was also said to tempt fate as he got older which led to him getting severely injured a number of times.

This photograph shows Olga, Alexei, and Tatiana. It was taken four years before they were executed in 1914. Alexei was known to be taken care of by his sisters especially the eldest Olga. Although at times she said it was difficult for her to control him. He allegedly loved playing pranks, especially as a young boy. One such story said that at a formal dinner he crawled underneath the table and removed the shoe of a female guest. When he showed it to his father, his father told the boy to return the shoe immediately. Alexei did but not before placing a strawberry on top.

This photograph was taken sometime during the first World War. Often, the Romanov sisters would visit the soldiers, probably as an attempt to boost morale. During the war, the sisters even worked as nurses. One of the nurses that worked alongside Olga was named Valentina Chebotareva. In Valentina’s diary, she claimed that the love of Olga’s life was a wounded soldier she cared for named Dmitri Shakh-Bagov. Olga would allegedly be extremely excited when she would speak to him on the telephone or receive a letter from the hospital. Dmitri also allegedly adored Olga. He even apparently claimed to be willing to kill Rasputin for her if she wished.

This photograph shows the Romanov sisters when they were working as nurses during the World War. More specifically, it shows the two eldest, Tatiana and Olga. Olga cared for and pitied the soldiers she helped to treat. The First World War, as most wars are, was quite brutal and horrific in nature. There is no doubt that the sisters would have been witness to some horrific sights. Apparently, the stress did eventually get to Olga and she acted out in a number of ways. It is quite interesting that a royal family would not choose to protect their daughters from the atrocities of war but rather have them serve in the midst of it all.

Ultimately caring for the dying and catastrophically injured ultimately wore on Olga. She apparently had several moments of acting out her stress which included breaking a window and having various rages. She was ultimately moved to an office position instead of directly caring for patients due to her nerves. She was even given arsenic injections in 1915, which were at the time not thought of as a poison but rather as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Olga was also apparently very aware of the goings on politically and the way her family was received by the Russian people. This caused her to be in a constant state of worry about what might happen to her family.

The royal family was ultimately sent by the Kerensky government (those who had taken power) to Tobolsk, Siberia. Some members of the royal family were instead sent to Crimea. However, the entire immediate royal family was sent to Siberia. Kerensky claimed it to be for the safety of the family, however, others suspected other motivations. All of the other members who reached Crimea survived the revolution. It was rumored that Siberia was chosen because that was the common place of exile. It was said that because the Tsar and his ancestors had banished many to Siberia that they deserved such a fate as well.

This photograph was taken in 1918, which is the same year the Romanov family was executed. It shows Alexei and his mother Alexandra. The Kerensky government ultimately fell to the Bolsheviks who treated the Royals with even more disdain. In April of that year, the family was moved to Ekaterinburg, which would be their last place before they were executed. The family, forced into exile, lived completed isolated before their deaths which apparently wore quite heavily on most of the family, with the exception of the Tsar who was said to possess an “internal calm”. The family was also cut off from the outside world and had little news of what was happening so it is unlikely they saw what was coming.

Here, Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alexandra are photographed with their children including daughters Olga, Maria, Anastasia, and Tatiana, and son, Alexei. This portrait was shot by the Levitsky Studio and was one of the final portraits of the family altogether. Taken in 1913, this photograph was taken when the House of Romanov was still in reign. Less than two years later, on March 15, 1917, Tsar Nichols II would be abdicated as a result of the Revolution in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. However, he declined to accept imperial authority and ultimately terminated the Romanov dynasty’s rule over Russia.

Tsar Nicholas II is known for his poor handling of Bloody Sunday and Russia’s role in World War I. When demonstrators appealed to Nicholas II to improve working conditions in St. Petersburg, troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing more than 1,000. His actions regarding these events ultimately led to his abdication and the execution of him and his entire family. Prior to his abdication, many of the Romanov family members would visit wounded soldiers in the hospital. This picture shows Tsar Nichols II daughters Maria and Anatasia during one of their visits.

This was of Tsar Nicholas II was taken in 1915 by none other than Tsar Nicholas II himself. Nicholas II was an amateur photographer who loved to take photographs of his family and day-to-day activities. He was meticulous when it came to his hobby and would take the utmost care of his pictures, filing them in various albums. Nichols II passed down his love for shooting film to his third-born daughter Maria. Maria was constantly photographing life through her eyes and took an interest in coloring many of the family photos.

After the Romanovs were arrested and sent into exile, they brought a cook with them. This wasn’t intended to be a snobbish gesture—the family simply wanted to uphold the tradition and importance of eating family meals together. Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of being exiled, the family found comfort in the routine of making up daily menus as it reminded them of their happy life prior to the Russian revolution. Despite the harsh conditions under which they were living in while exiled, no one in the Romanov family ever complained about the limited food they were allowed in captivity.

The Romanov family spent the remaining year of their lives in exile. Since they could no longer partake in many of their favorite activities, a large part of their lives centered around cooking. The Romanov sisters in particular eagerly spent their time learning how to cook and bake. The four sisters enjoyed baking bread the most.

After the family’s execution, the girls’ diaries were discovered. They each would frequently write about their family meals, including what they ate, where they ate it, and who they ate with. An entry from Olga’s diary read, “Had tea as usual. I sat between my friends. Had dinner in the salon of the yacht. Awfully cozy.”

This photo shows the stark contrast of life after Tsar Nicholas II was abdicated. Here, the family is photographed on the house roof in Tobolsk. Tobolsk is the location the family was kept until the transfer of Yekaterinburg in 1918.

Although Nicholas II was not exactly admired by the public, it is hard to believe the Russian public wasn’t completely outraged by the horrendous acts of violence towards the Romanov family. In fact, according to Russian historians, the authorities still received many letters from the public asking to kill Nicholas II even after he had already been executed.

After the execution of the Romanov family, their bodies lay in two unmarked graves in locations which were kept secret by Soviet Leaders. It wasn’t until 1979 that amateur historians found the remains of family members, which were later reopened and confirmed via DNA testing. The Romanovs remains were removed and relocated to a room in the Bureau of Forensic Examination in Ekaterinburg. Although the amateur historians uncovered the bodies of Nicholas, Alexandra and daughters Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia—Alexei and Maria’s remains were not located until 2007. Since then, there have been numerous investigations opened and reopened regarding the murders.

This photo shows the ceremony of deaths of the Romanovs, which took place in 1998 and was meant to showcase the country’s reconciliation with its brutal and corrupt past. The ceremony was attended by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, as well as 50 Romanov relatives. Millions tuned in to watch the ceremony, which was televised, as soldiers carried the caskets of Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia down a red carpet past various Romanov descendants and dignitaries. Following the ceremony, the remains were reburied in the family crypt.

2017 marked the 100 year anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, which marked the beginning of the end for the Romanov family. To commemorate the anniversary, members of the Communist party held protests throughout Moscow. Many carried photos of Vladimir Lenin. The Kremlin, not wishing to support a revolution of any kind by the people, remained silent. Current president Vladimir Putin said that the revolution is best left to history books. In 2013, Putin said that “[t]oo often in our national history, instead of an opposition to the government, we faced opposition to Russia itself. And we know how that ends. It ends with the destruction of the state itself.”

The Russians always took such displays to new realms of excess.

British envoys visiting the Russian court in the 18th century were staggered by the number of diamonds even male courtiers were wearing all over their clothes and hats.

The costumes of staff were as opulent as those of members of the royal families in other countries. Even their stockings were embroidered with gold.

Why were the tsars so taken with high court fashion?

The easy answer is that they could afford to be, owning millions of tax-paying slaves called serfs. But also because, as leaders of a brash new power, they resented and envied the superiority of older established powers like Britain and France.

So they dressed up in order to parade their glory and legitimacy before their own restless empire and an often disdainful world.

Tsar Nicholas II with his wife Tsarina Alexandra (standing on the right), the Tsaravitch (2nd from right) and his four daughters

Under the Romanovs between 1613 and 1917, Russia was an empire of oppressed nations dominated by one family and a tiny Russian nobility.

Its system was a paranoid, hereditary autocracy which was 'tempered by assassination' as one commentator puts it.

The single Imperial family holding it all together used fashion and pomp to show their might, as well as the army and police to oppress opposition.

It did not matter that the vast wealth on display had been created on the backs of serfs who were sold, starved, beaten and raped.

It did not matter either that, on many occasions, the flamboyance of the court scarcely concealed the brutality beneath its glittering surface.

The important thing was to convey the image of power, empire and stability... as well as defiance towards foreign courts.

Glory and magnificence is certainly one way to display stability and grandeur  -  but it can also be a sign of ludicrous weakness.

By the time of the last Tsar Nicholas II, who succeeded in 1894, the punctilious, rigid hierarchy of uniforms, titles and ranks was the clearest indication of a sclerotic, isolated and inept regime on its last legs, incapable of reforming or saving itself.

The more outrageous, the more gilded and bemedalled the costumes, the more fragile the empire beneath them.

Perhaps that is why the most lavish garments in the exhibition belonged to Nicholas.

The fur-trimmed mantles worn by members of the family for his coronation are wildly extravagant. His mother's was more than 20ft long and took seven chamberlains to carry.

Nicholas and his wife's identical mantles were no less grand, using 2,691 ermine skins in total.

Alexei Nikitin, chief of the group of scientists in Yekaterinburg, examined exhumed bones of last Russian Tzar Nicolas II, his wife and other members of his family

As for his fancy dress cloak made from layers of fur-lined silks woven with gold and decorated with pearls the size of marbles, diamonds, rubies, silver brocade and gold buttons, it was so heavily encrusted with jewels that it was given to the armory for safekeeping after Nicholas wore it for a ball in 1903.

Little more than ten years later, the last Tsar was dead, executed by the Bolsheviks.

It was Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century who was the first of the Grand Dukes of Muscovy to be titled 'Tsar'  -  or Caesar  -  but the beginning of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 came after Russia had been beset by civil war, a period known as the Time of Troubles.

Russian national dress in those dark days consisted of kaftans and long, furlined robes with relics and portraits of saints hanging off them.

To Western eyes, it was backward and bizarrely exotic even 100 years later.

In her book, Dress In 18th Century Europe, Aileen Ribeiro talks of heavily rouged Russian women who dyed their teeth black and polished them until they gleamed like lacquer.

The first hint of change came in 1682  -  with the secession of Peter the Great, one of the greatest political leaders of all history, a man who was as much a monster as he was a hero.

The achievements of this astonishing titan were colossal: he modernised Russia with German and Dutch engineering and fashion, created a Baltic Fleet, founded St Petersburg and defeated the invading Swedish king.

Yet Peter's modernising did not make him a liberal: he was also a brutal tyrant.

When the Muscovite Streltsy Regiment of musketeers mutinied, Peter returned from his European tour and personally took part in the torture, dismemberment and beheading of hundreds of these musketeers in a scene that resembled a grisly charnel house.

When he thought a former mistress of his, Anna Mons, was being unfaithful, she was arrested and died in terrible conditions.

Worse, when her brother was suspected of flirting with Peter's wife, he was beheaded.

Peter the Great: 'This half-genius, half-brute died in 1725'

His head was then sent to the Empress before being preserved in a bottle of alcohol: it remains today in Peter's fascinating but gruesome Museum of Oddities in St Petersburg.

Peter the Great was so all-powerful that he emphasised his absoluteness by pretending to be an ordinary sailor in his new navy.

A giant well over 6ft tall, he reserved the right to dress in the uniform of a lowly soldier or sailor, but this in itself was a display of power almost as grand as his glorious coronation robes.

(Incidentally, Stalin, who worshipped Peter the Great, also prided himself on dressing in a plain tunic while commanding the greatest empire on earth.)

In 1721, Peter had himself crowned Emperor and henceforth the Romanovs used that as their main title. This half-genius, half-brute died in 1725 as Russia's greatest ever ruler, but his reckless cruelty had also left his empire in the unstable hands of a succession of women and children.

When his eldest son fled Russia, Peter hunted him down, tricked him home and then tortured him to death, leaving his new empire without an adult heir.

The Romanovs boasted Empresses whose magnificence, extravagance and love lives were legendary.

The love of Peter's life was a courtesan whom he stole from his favourite henchman.

Peter crowned her Empress and she succeeded him as Catherine I, even though she was a peasant-moll without a trace of royalty who had been bought and sold by men for their own pleasures.

Her short reign was just the start of the so-called of Age of Petticoats  -  when a series of women became absolute autocrats of all the Russias.

The last two who ruled as empresses in their own rights were among the greatest  -  and most scandalous  -  of all the Romanovs.

Bejewelled beauty Alexandra Feodorovna

Peter and Catherine's daughter, Elizaveta  -  who was famously blonde, buxom and longlegged  -  ruled for 20 stable years when Russia emerged as a European power.

Yet she was wildly extravagant and vain: she believed that her legs were better displayed in male clothing so she famously held transvestite balls in which everyone had to dress as the opposite sex so the Empress would look good.

Her female courtiers hated this, of course, and so did the men.

She was also utterly ruthless  -  when one of her courtiers' ladies was involved in a conspiracy against her, Elizaveta had her tongue ripped out and she was deported to Siberia.

Empress Elizaveta was also the most promiscuous female ruler of modern times.

She had countless lovers: they varied from Russian princes and Swiss doctors to guardsmen, choirboys and peasant lads who took her fancy.

On her death, she was succeeded by a pimply youth named Peter III, whose wife was a minor German princess known to history as Catherine the Great.

She had no claim whatsoever to the throne, but Empress Elizaveta married her to Peter.

In the brutal Russian court, stranded in a miserable cruel and loveless marriage, the clever, blue-eyed Catherine did not manage to become pregnant for years.

The Empress Elizaveta, who had arranged the match, became worried.

So Catherine was encouraged by her to start an adulterous affair with a courtier. She got pregnant and gave birth to a son, Paul.

Since the entire Romanov dynasty down to Nicholas II was descended from him, it is entirely possible that the Romanovs were not Romanovs at all.

With the help of her Guards officers, Catherine overthrew her feeble husband and seized power in 1762.

When she rode into St Petersburg to launch her coup, she was met en route by her French hairdresser, Michel, who did her hair on the way to the revolution.

As she emerged out of the Winter Palace, she dressed up in a male Guards officer's uniform, again showing she was just an ordinary Russian soldier-patriot in one sense.

One Guards officer noticed she was missing a swordknot on her sword so he galloped up and gave her his own: this young man was Gregory Potemkin, who became the love of her life, secret husband and partner in government.

Their love letters remain the most romantic and sexually explicit correspondence of any head of state in history.

Catherine and the brilliant Prince Potemkin were the most humane and decent rulers of Russia  -  yet they had one big fault: extravagance.

On the big occasions, there was no one more splendid than these two: once when he was trying to seduce a girl, Potemkin served diamonds instead of pudding at a dinner party.

There was a dark side to Catherine, too. When she overthrew her unfortunate husband, he was duly murdered, but secretly.

Catherine, with Potemkin, expanded the Russian empire, annexed the Crimea and much of Poland, created a Black Sea navy and brought Peter the Great's project of making Russia a true Great Power to fruition.

She reigned for 30 years and on her death in 1796, she was succeeded by her embittered, insane and tyrannical son, Emperor Paul I.

Paul was one of the worst of the Romanovs. He was so obsessed with his father's murder that he dug up the body to have him reburied with full honours, making his mother  -  the murderer  -  walk behind the coffin as chief mourner.

He regularly ordered people to be beaten, tortured or imprisoned and reintroduced the medieval rule that all subjects should abase themselves as his carriage passed by.

WWI Riga Eastern Front

New bridge, ice drift and small steam boats on the River Daugava in Riga

Before long he was loathed and, in the end, his courtiers who crept into the palace, chased him up a chimney in his nightshirt, then smashed him in the head with a solid gold inkstand and took turns strangling him.

His son and heir, Alexander I, personified the glamour and triumph of the Romanov dynasty: he was first defeated then charmed by Napoleon. But when the French Emperor invaded Russia in 1812, Alexander rallied and fought Napoleon all the way to Paris.

Alexander bestrode Europe: when President Roosevelt's envoy congratulated Stalin in 1945 on taking Berlin, Stalin retorted: 'Yes, but Alexander made it to Paris!'

But afterwards came Alexander's cold and very Germanic brother Nicholas I. By now the Romanov family was as much German as Russian and court life was as frosty, stratified, organised and monitored as any Germanic court with its graded uniforms and formal dances.

He created the first modern secret police, run out of his own office and he monitored every part of Russian life.

The Emperor boasted he was a soldier who slept on an iron cot (and Stalin cited this as his own inspiration for his sleeping arrangements.) 

All the fizzy exuberance, hedonistic flamboyance and creative energy of the 18th century was now crushed in a Prussian-style police state known as the Prison of Peoples. Meanwhile, the Tsar's arrogant demands towards the Ottoman Empire led to the Crimean War.

There was one last great Romanov Emperor. Nicholas's son, Alexander II, was everything his father wasn't: he ended the Crimean War and then bravely in 1861 liberated the millions of Russian serfs who were no more than slaves, the property of their noble masters who could beat, rape and sell them and often did.

He was for a while adored by the peasants as the 'Tsar-Liberator' but his early years of almost ending autocracy unleashed such expectations that in the end everyone was disappointed.

Alexander was pursued by terrorists who launched repeated attempts to kill him, until he was a fugitive in his own empire  -  he responded by expanding the secret police and repression.

Eventually, on a carriage ride through St Petersburg, terrorists tossed bombs under his carriage in 1881, killing the last great Emperor.  

His oafish son, Alexander III, was interested in neither reform, culture or women and died young, leaving the throne in 1894 to Nicholas, who married Princess Alexandra of Hesse, Queen Victoria's granddaughter.

It has been fashionable to paint Nicholas and Alexandra as a saintly and loving couple of martyrs who lived a blameless, bourgeois life.

They certainly loved each other and suffered greatly because their son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexei, was so often in agony and danger due to his haemophilia, indeed threatening the future of the dynasty.

The murder of the couple and their children by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1918 was certainly a dreadful crime.

Nonetheless, as rulers, they were foolish, stubborn, anti-Semitic and self-indulgent: when thousands of peasants died, trampled underfoot as crowds panicked before their coronation, they insisted on continuing with the ball. After the 1905 revolution, Nicholas organised anti- Jewish pogroms in which thousands of women and children perished.

Russian soldiers hit by shell splinters

Doomed: Nicholas, Alexandra and their children

Those of us watching The Hollow Crown - the BBC’s magnificent production of Shakespeare’s history plays - may find we can easily apply the many haunting insights on the nature of monarchy to Russia’s tragic last Tsar: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

The story of the Romanovs is familiar history - and yet contains all the drama of great fictional tragedy, too. Thinking of the pitiful, doomed imperial family, imprisoned by revolutionaries at Ekaterinburg, I wonder if Tsar Nicholas II ever considered the social conditions which led to the downfall of his dynasty, thinking, like King Lear, ‘O, I have taken too little care of this.’

Might history have veered in a different direction if Nicholas had acknowledged that urgent change was needed in Russia, instead of doing everything just as his father had done? If the autocrat had nodded in the direction of the people and their urgent needs and not dismissed their aspirations as ‘senseless’? But central to this new biography of Nicholas and Alexandra is another imponderable. Might Nicholas II have evolved into a better ruler had he not been so strangely - and weakly - besotted with his neurotic, withdrawn and increasingly unstable wife?

Evil influence: Grigory Rasputin, the 'mad monk'

The subtitle to Virginia Rounding’s new double biography is The Passion Of The Last Tsar And Tsarina, and she explains that the word ‘passion’ implies suffering (‘the passion of Christ’) as well as love. It’s a telling point. Her focus is the love story of a couple whose physical passion for each other lasted throughout their marriage, who found it hard to communicate when face to face, yet who adored each other to the exclusion of all others, including their own children. She advised him unwisely, he listened; the couple gazed at each other rather than at the turmoil within the land they loved so much. The passion play unfolds with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, their great love leading to the suffering in the blood-spattered cellar. Nicholas ascended to the throne of Russia in 1894, when he was 26. He was totally unprepared, and wept pathetically to his cousin: ‘What am I going to do . . . I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I have never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to ministers.’

As a young teenager, Nicky witnessed the last moments of his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, who died after his leg was blown off by an assassin’s bomb.

His family knew the fear of assassination all too well and Nicholas himself was to experience attempts on his life - the first just before his 23rd birthday. No wonder the young man would have preferred to go on singing songs and drinking vodka with his fellow officers, rather than accept the burden of the imperial throne. He was already in love with the shy German princess who was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. They’d first met when Alix was 12. No arranged marriage for them, but mutual infatuation which triumphed over her reluctance to embrace Russian Orthodoxy, as well as her natural unsuitability for the public pomp of the Tsarina’s role. Alex inherited aloofness and stubbornness from her grandmother, who encouraged her in her indifference to public opinion. The Queen also fed Alex’s natural inclination towards what the modern reader can’t help but see as pathological hypochondria.

Revolution: Soldiers join the uprising in 1917

From the engagement on, she tended to be incapacitated by mysterious ailments (some real) and it was normal for her to be confined to her room, only communicating with her children (one floor below) by telephone and notes. She would also use her health as a form of blackmail, writing to her daughter Maria: ‘Then loving your old Mama who is ill does not make life bright for you poor children.’ She was 38 at the time.

When, after four daughters, the longed-for son and heir Alexei was born, they discovered he had inherited haemophilia (uncontrolled bleeding) which had a tendency to afflict the male descendants of Queen Victoria.

Biographers of the Tsarina have suggested that her obsessive concern for her vulnerable son exacerbated Alix’s natural tendency to reclusiveness. No doubt it did, but from the beginning, the Russian people had rejected her and she - a passionate believer in absolute rule - had little interest in their good opinion.

So the terrible story unfolds - with a cast of characters who, though well-known, are still fascinating. The evil monk Rasputin gains control of the Tsarina as the Tsar goes along with whatever she suggests, many of the most damaging notions coming from the highly suspect ‘holy man’.

During World War I, Alix is viewed as a German spy, but the hapless Nicky still insists of taking command of the military, leaving his reviled wife to act as regent in his absence. It is disastrous. Starvation stalks Russia, while she appoints and dismisses ministers, and writes hectoring letters telling him to remember he is the absolute ruler.

Not all the Grand Dukes in the empire can do anything to change the fact that ‘Wifey’ is hastening the dynasty towards its bloody end. Which came in the small hours of the morning of July 17, 1918. The Tsar and his wife, with their children Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Maria, 19, Anastasia, 17, and Alexei, nearly 14, were herded into a cellar with their devoted servants and their doctor. The Tsar was shot first, followed by his wife. The girls were finally stabbed many times and Alexei finished off with two shots to the head. The servants, the doctor and Alexei’s pet spaniel also lay dead. The dog’s name was Joy.

The merciless savagery which ended their lives would continue for years, with millions slaughtered across Russia. As for the Royal family, their bodies were hurled into a pit, then retrieved and burnt. Their remains were only discovered and identified in the late Seventies, and buried (80 years to the day after the murders) in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St Petersburg.

As the light faded, a train halted in the siding near the remote railway station of Lyubinskaya on the Trans-Siberian railway line.

Gunned down: The Tsar and Tsaritsa with their five children who were executed by the Bolsheviks. It was the evening of April 29, 1918, and there was nothing outwardly remarkable about these first-class railway carriages, except the presence of a heavily armed guard outside their doors. Inside sat a family whose faces have been immortalized through history book pictures. Four pale girls, in white lace, their hair tied back with satin ribbons. A sickly little boy in a sailor suit. This was the moment of truth for the Romanovs, the Russian Imperial Family deposed by the Soviet revolution. Now, they were making their final journey. The young and beautiful Grand Duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, sat beside their mother, the haughty Tsaritsa Alexandra, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

The young Tsarevich Alexey lent on his father, the former Tsar Of All The Russias, Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov. The engine started, and the train took a decisive turn.

The lingering hope inside Special Train No. 8 evaporated. The train was lumbering not towards a trial in Moscow or foreign exile, as they had believed, but to the bleak Urals.

The Romanovs were being taken to Ekaterinburg, the historic hub of Russia's old penal system.

There they would face a firing squad just 78 days later  -  and exactly 90 years ago this week.  

To coincide with that anniversary, their last wretched days have been chronicled in an explosive new book.

Using previously overlooked documents and witness accounts, it tells the story of the family's final moments in unprecedented detail.  

So just how did these most aristocratic of aristocrats fall so decisively from glory?

A man of limited political vision and ability, Nicholas was an unlikely king. Even in stature, at 5ft 7in, he was lacking.

Fatally, he turned a blind eye to social unrest. He left his deeply unpopular wife, Alexandra, in effective political control.

She was increasingly spellbound by Grigory Rasputin, the charismatic 'holy man' she believed could save her haemophiliac son Alexey from bleeding to death.

Faced with escalating political turmoil, Nicholas believed he had no option but to abdicate 'for the good of Russia' in 1917.

He did so also because he believed it would guarantee the safety of his beloved family.

Again, in this he proved calamitously naive. The family were initially placed under house arrest and then transferred to a small rural town, Tobolsk, where they retained a substantial entourage of 39 courtiers and servants.

They brought many of their Imperial Palace treasures with them, including leather-bound volumes of photographs and vintage wines from the court cellars.

Eventually, the new revolutionary high command decreed that such privilege could not be allowed in the emerging communist state.

Instead, a house in Ekaterinburg was secretly prepared. It would be a far cry from the sumptuous winter and summer palaces, banqueting halls and glorious gardens the Imperial Family had previously enjoyed. Ominously,

it would be referred to by a Bolshevik euphemism, dom osobogo znachenie -  The House Of Special Purpose.

Stepping off the train in Ekaterinburg after a bone-rattling five-day journey, an exhausted Nicholas and his wife were received into the hands of local soviets, along with their doctor, maid, valet and footman. As their car drew up to The House Of Special Purpose, they looked their last on the outside world. It was Passion Week, and the Easter bells of the Orthodox Church rang out across the city.  As the gates to his new prison slammed shut, the Tsar was curtly told: 'Citizen Nicholas Romanov, you may enter.'  From now on, there would be no more acknowledgement of Romanov status and titles, much to the Tsaritsa's disgust.  Gradually, the Imperial Family settled in to their new lodgings, a private house which, though hardly a palace, was nonetheless regarded as one of the most modern in the city, as it possessed a flushing toilet.  Hidden behind a high wooden fence, its windows blacked out, it was now a gloomy prison. The Romanovs were confined to a suite of five rooms.

Spirited and bored, the Romanov girls, aged between 17 and 22, ignored warnings not to peek out of an unsecured top-floor window, until a sentry fired a warning shot at Anastasia's head.

The young princesses' clothes were becoming increasingly threadbare  -  there were no more white dresses and pretty hats like they used to wear every summer at their palace in the Crimea, a seaside paradise where the air was thick with the scent of roses and honeysuckle.  Lively and vivacious, they still beguiled their guards, however, with one saying they could not have looked prettier 'even if they had been covered in gold and diamonds'. The family were allowed to keep their bed linen, bearing personalised monograms and the Imperial crest, as well as fine porcelain dinner plates bearing the name Nicholas II.

Alexandra had also brought supplies of her favourite English eau de cologne by Brocard, as well as cold cream and lavender salts.

These were not the only potions on which the Tsaritsa was reliant. Plagued by migraines, heart palpitations, insomnia and sciatica, she was hopelessly addicted to a whole range of drugs.

She had long ago admitted to being 'saturated' with Veronal, a barbiturate. She also took morphine and cocaine for menstrual pain.  It has been speculated that the Tsar, too, was cushioned from reality by narcotics. It was said that his childlike indifference to losing the throne was the result of smoking a mixture of hashish and the psychoactive herb henbane, administered by a Tibetan doctor, recommended by Rasputin, to counter stress and insomnia.

Life in The House Of Special Purpose was severely restrictive. They were not allowed visitors, nor to go outside except during a proscribed hour.  And they were to talk no language other than Russian 54 -  the Tsaritsa liked to speak to her children in English.  However, she refused point blank to obey an edict to ring a bell every time she went to use the bathroom. Daily life had become a matter of endurance. The family had one consuming obsession, however: Alexey's fragile health.  Since April, the 13-year-old had been suffering from a recurring haemorrhage in his knee, causing him agonising pain.  Doctors had already cautioned that Alexey would not reach 16 because of his debilitating illness, but he seemed now at death's door.

The family was exhausted by a relentless round of all-night sessions at his beside. Eventually, the splint was taken off his leg, and he could be carried out to the garden, but he would never walk again.

By early July, the daily ritual of life at the House had taken on a numbing predictability. The family rose at eight in the morning, and breakfasted on tea and black bread. The days were filled with endless games of cards, patience and the French game bezique, which was a family favourite, while Alexey played with his model ship and tin soldiers.  The family dogs, Ortino, Joy and Jemmy, provided a much-needed diversion.

During their hour in the small garden, the girls and their father would walk the 40 paces back and forth, eager to make the most of their exercise time.  It was a sorry picture: the man who had once ruled 8.5 million square miles of empire, now master of a single room of his own and a small, scrappy garden.  The evenings were filled with a meagre supper, prayers and Bible readings, more games, and embroidery and sewing 55 -  the women spent long, furtive hours concealing gemstones and pearls into the linings of their dresses, to fund the life in exile of which they dreamed. On July 4, there was an abrupt change in the House. The authorities were concerned that a rescue attempt was being plotted by royalists, and the guards were changed.

There was another reason for this, and for the Tsar and Tsaritsa, it was a shocking one.

On June 27, Maria, the most flirtatious and attractive of the Grand Duchesses, had been discovered, during an inspection by commanders, in a compromising situation with guard Ivan Skorokhodov.

He had smuggled in a cake for her 19th birthday, and their friendship had developed quickly in the boredom of the house.

Skorokhodov was sent to the city's prison, while Maria, an elegant young woman with light brown hair and mischievous blue eyes  -  was reprimanded by her family.

Tragically, in their final weeks together, her eldest sister, Olga, and her mother froze her out, refusing to speak to her as punishment for disgracing them.

Outside, civil war raged. The ranks of the White Army, which opposed the Bolsheviks, had been swelled by Czech deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army.

They were rapidly gaining ground on Ekaterinburg. Food in the city was rationed, and typhus and cholera had taken grip.

The mood grew increasingly ugly  -  45 members of the local Orthodox diocese were murdered, their eyes gouged out, tongues and ears hacked off and their mangled bodies thrown in the river.

But inside the House Of Special Purpose, an air of unreality reigned. It was getting hotter and hotter, and the inhabitants of the building had now settled into a state of restless boredom.

The atmosphere was increasingly claustrophobic.  The Tsar and Tsaritsa continued to write their diaries every evening, although there were no grand banquets, affairs of state, or court gossip to relate.

Only their joy when the frail Alexey had been well enough to take a bath. 'Very hot, went early to bed as awfully tired and heart ached more,' wrote Alexandra on Thursday, July 4, 1918.

A guard described the Tsar's 'melancholy' aspect, of outward calm and dignity, that crumpled when he though he was unobserved.

He would watch his children play, his soft blue eyes full of tears. For her part, the Tsaritsa was a broken woman. Gone were her delicate features and lovely golden hair.

The family had learnt to be stoical, but their awful fate loomed. In America, the Washington Post published rumours that they had already been executed.

In Britain, George V had withdrawn his earlier offer of asylum for the family, and three days' before the execution was blithely attending a cricket match at Lord's

In fact, the Romanovs' fate at this point hung in the balance. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was aware that their demise would anger the Kaiser, because of the Romanov's links with the German royal family.

But his advisers were telling him that Ekaterinburg could soon fall to the Czechs, and the Imperial Family could prove a rallying point against communism.

The deeply religious Tsaritsa wrote to a friend that she and her family were: 'Readying ourselves in our thoughts for admission to the Kingdom of Heaven.'

At the House Of Special Purpose, the guard book recorded as it had for many days: 'Vse obychno' -  ' Everything is the same'. But ominous preparations were in hand to ' liquidate' the Romanovs and to keep the matter a state secret.

A nearby mineshaft had been identified as a suitable burial place, and a doctor had been ordered to procure 400lb of sulphuric acid to destroy the bodies.

Tuesday, July 16 began uneventfully for the Romanovs, but their guards were putting into place the last plans for their execution, assembling an armoury of guns in order to carry out their task, and ordering 50 eggs from local nuns to help give them strength for the task ahead.

On one occasion, a laundrywoman witnessed 17-year-old Ansastasia sticking out her tongue at the head of the hit squad, Yakov Yurovsky.

And while there is no indication that the children were aware of their impending fate, two of the guards got cold feet and said they would not shoot the girls. They were sent away.

At 3pm, the family walked around the strip of unkempt garden for the last time. After evening prayers, they went to bed. In the early hours of the following day, they were wakened and told that the White Army was approaching and might launch an artillery attack on the house.

They were to go downstairs for their own safety. The Tsar got up immediately, the women put on their camisoles sewn full of jewels and pearls, as they had rehearsed for a rescue attempt or sudden flight. Soon they emerged, 'all neat and tidy' as one guard observed. At 2.15am on July 17, they were led down to the basement. The Tsar was heard to turn and say to his daughters reassuringly: 'Well, we're going to get out of this place'  -  proof, some say, that he was a true martyr who was fully aware of the horror ahead.

Anastasia carried her sister Tatiana's little Pekinese, Jemmy, down the stairs. They were ushered into a storeroom, lit by a single naked bulb. The windows had been nailed shut. True to form, Alexandra complained that there were no chairs. Next, the family and their servants were lined up as for a last, sinister official photograph. Then they were left alone for half an hour, as their assassins downed shots of vodka. Re-entering the room, a guard read out a statement sentencing the family to death. The faces before him registered blank incomprehension. The family crossed themselves, and a man walked towards the Tsar and shot him at point-blank range in the chest. Other guards fired, as his body crumpled to the floor. Half drunk, the guards shot clumsily, hitting the Tsaritsa in the left side of her skull. Next to her, poor lame Alexey, too crippled to move, sat transfixed with terror, his ashen face splattered with his father's blood.

The moans and whimpers from the floor testified to a botched job. But it was the children who suffered most.

None of the Romanov girls died a quick or painless death. Maria was felled by a bullet in the thigh, and lay bleeding until repeated stabbing in the torso snuffed out her life.

Her sisters were eventually finished off with an 8in bayonet, Olga having been shot in the jaw, and Tatiana in the back of the head as she tried to escape.

What should have been a quick, clean execution had turned into an orgy of killing, with only the thick clouds of gunpowder smoke obscuring the full horror of it. Last of the women to die was Anastasia. A drunken guard lunged at her like an animal, attempting to pierce her chest with his bayonet. Eventually, the head of the hit squad, Yakov Yurovsky, took his gun to her head.

Alexey alone was still alive, the young heir to the throne. He was wearing an undergarment sewn with jewels, which acted as a flak jacket. Yurovsky fired his Colt into the boy's head, and he slumped against his father. It had taken a frenzied 20 minutes to kill the Romanovs and their servants. In the panicked moments that followed, Yurovsky's men staggered from the room, choking and coughing. Shaking and disoriented, one of them vomited as he emerged into the cool night air. Meanwhile, upstairs, in the House Of Special Purpose, Alexey's King Charles spaniel, Joy, barked, his ears pricked, waiting for his young master to return.  

Finally, in 2000, they were canonized as ‘new martyrs’ - and today people pray before glittering icons showing the mournful faces of the Romanovs, whose own fervent prayers went unanswered.

The revolution will be colorised: Remarkable images of the 1917 Russian uprising taken by a young Yale graduate are discovered 95 years later

Hundreds of historic photographs documenting a young Yale graduate's travel to Russia during the start of the Russian Revolution have been discovered a near century later by his granddaughter after tucked away in his California home.

Opening an old metal chest after her grandfather's passing, more than 500 hand-painted glass slides have been found capturing a remarkable 1917 excursion that put him face-to-face with heavy-coated soldiers, machine guns, bunkers and gas masks.

Seen today fully restored after a near century of darkness, the slides were purchased in 2012 by Southern California camera and photo collector Anton Orlov after experiencing the extraordinary find first hand.

Scroll down for video

Everyday life: A train is seen sometime in either late 1917 or early 1918 in Russia as photographed by John Wells Rahill, a then-recent Yale graduate and pastor

Soldiers of Russia: In one of more than 500 glass slides discovered from the early 1900s, a Russian machine gunner poses alongside another soldier while holding his weapon before a snow-covered bunker

Band: A group of Cossack soldiers pose for Mr Rahill's Kodak camera's lens

'...I was asked to come by a Northern California home to help translate and identify some mystery images,’ he writes on his photography blog of his first discovery of the photos in 2005.

‘I love old photos, so I was eager to help. All I knew when I was on my way up there was that they were from Russia and really old,' he recalled.

Opening up a number of wooden storage boxes presented before him, he was amazed by the hundreds of delicate glass slides, each containing tiny people, homes, villages and obvious signs of war. He purchased them all several years later, setting out to fully restore all that he could. Inquiring of the photographer to the granddaughter, Mr Orlov was taken back in time to the fall of 1917 when John Wells Rahill, a recent Yale graduate and pastor, set out from the U.S. for Russia.

Inspired by news of the first Russian revolution, a historic monument he wanted to experience and capture for himself, he grabbed his Kodak camera and joined the YMCA’s War Works Division, helping armies on both sides where he could.

Moscow: The Pskov Kremlin is seen photographed, while its colour later hand painted like the rest of the hundreds of glass Magic Lantern slides

Shooting: A group of Russian soldiers are seen shooting at what is only described with the photograph's notes as a suspicious house

Modern life: Men are seen warmly dressed outside a train station, a few perhaps curiously watching the camera

In the process he captured the people's everyday life, from the market place, to the bustling streets, to his own people working alongside him at the YMCA.

He even found time to travel to China and Japan after purchasing a number of photographs of the area taken before he viewed them himself - vowing to similarly capture them on his camera.

After his return to the U.S. in the spring of 1918, he converted many of his best pictures to Magic Lantern Slides as a means to share his experience with others.

He gave lectures on his experience with the YMCA while also working as a pastor, but by the 1920s, those who had worked in Russia during the First World War found themselves harmfully labelled as 'socialist sympathizers' in the U.S.

Front lines: Soldiers on the front lines are seen in a bunker while wearing gas masks over their face

Market: Russian women are photographed posing with strings of onions they hope to sell in a marketplace

Mission: One of the so-called Soldiers House Mr Rahill helped create in Valk is pictured with all of its men standing proudly outside

The photographer himself: Mr Rahill is seen here in this photo taken in Russia where he stands among three village children

It’s believed result led to his pictures placed in his home's storage, locked away until his granddaughter's startling discovery.

'Those photos also have been unseen by the world because in mid 1920s they were put into a basement for storage and were only discovered 85 years later,’ Mr Orlov, who’s originally from Russia himself said.

After a gruelling and expensive process of preserving all 500-plus photos, Mr Orlov is now hoping to recreate Mr Rahill’s journey himself come 2017.

As an avid collector, photographer and developer who has transformed an old school bus into a traveling photo studio and darkroom, Mr Orlov’s so-called Photo Palace Bus - aiming ‘propagation of knowledge related to historic photographic techniques through cross-country art exhibits, lectures and demonstrations’ - is helping to showcase the hundreds of images.

Helpers: These are just some of the YMCA members who joined Mr Rahill's efforts in Russia during the revolution

Workplace: Photographed in Russia is the inside of one of the YMCA Soldiers Club interiors by Mr Rahill

Damage: A badly damaged building in Russia is seen on a street corner where people are captured otherwise going about their daily lives  

It comes in addition to a second collection of WWI photos he recently discovered only just this year in a camera hidden in a Los Angeles antique store that documents parts of war-torn France.

If he is able to complete his financial goal, accepting donations and selling copies of his work, his Russian journey will take place exactly 100 years after Mr Rahill’s.

'I hope beyond hope that I can find a private or corporate sponsor to fund the re-photographing journey in the near future,' he tells the MailOnline.

'I'm really hopeful that the Russian set will finally get the attention it so rightly deserves. Also, me being from Russia and not having been back there since I moved to U.S. in ‘94, I am very much looking forward to the re-photographing trip,’ he says.

Moving East: An Asian man is photographed carrying two water barrels on street

Great Wall: Four YMCA members stand before the mighty Great Wall of China

Children: Two boys are photographed partially hiding inside a large urn

Migrant farmstead in the settlement of Nadezhdinsk with a group of peasants, Golodnaia Steppe; between 1905 and 1915 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress).

All at sea with the Russian royal family

Revolution and Counter-Revolution as tools to achieve hegemony

The Protocols

What most people in the world, even Russians, consider the Russian Revolution was, in reality, a counter-revolution at the hands of Bolshevik Zionists and the Rothschild bankers – that same ‘imaginary conspiracy’ outlined in the Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion.

Why do you think anyone who mentions the Protocols is slammed silent, almost as though they were Holocaust deniers, oh yes, we may well have just touched another one.

Now we go into an aside, you know, the American Articles of Confederation and that Revolutionary government, set up by the real founding fathers was knocked off in similar fashion when Rothschild agent Alexander Hamilton and fledgling American organised crime cobbled together the monstrous Constitution that finally crashed and burned the American public only a few short weeks ago.

Historian Charles A. Beard outlines this process in his Economic Interpretation of The Constitution published by Colombia University Press in 1935.

We might mention myriad other occasions when this Zionist ploy has been successfully carried out – the Glorious Restoration of 1688 that destroyed the British Royal line, placed a Dutch army officer on the throne and enslaved Britain under a “financial cabal” hegemony that continues to the current day.

We had the Congress of Vienna in 1822 that reordered Europe or in more recent times, the very many CIA-sponsored coups from Chile to Iran, the NATO destruction of Serbia in the 90s and most recently, the Maidan coup in Ukraine that installed a Neo-Nazi anti-Russian regime in Kiev.

Great humanitarian or virulent anti-Semite?

How many are aware that Poland was overthrown and replaced with a military dictatorship not unlike the one that attacked Germany in September 1939? Oh, that version of history, the Ford/Rockefeller rewrite. Did Egypt invade Israel in 1967? Former ITV correspondent and VT staffer, Alan Hart was there.

We should also remember the occasions when they have failed such as in Germany in 1919 when the Communist revolution lead by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and their Bolshevik gang was defeated by the Freikorps or the similar events in Hungary the same year where the Royalist forces of Admiral Horthy, with Romanian assistance were able to defeat the Communist takeover of Bela Kun and his murderous ‘Lenin’s Boys’.

Now that we have outlined the methodology, let us go on and see how they did it to the Russian people in 1917.

A group of Lenin Boys in their trademark leathers, they subjected Hungary to a murderous 133 days of ‘Red Terror’

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is an event that is grossly misunderstood by most people, not just outside Russia, but inside Russia too. The Revolution took place in February 1917, when the Russian army finally broke after suffering millions of casualties and joined forces with the workers who were starving due to the privations of three years of war.

The Tsar resigned, a provisional government under Kerensky was formed that was largely both socialist and liberal, at this time the Bolsheviks were a tiny, powerless group, one of many. Kerensky’s government was never popular and crippled by infighting, but worst of all, for the Russian people, it refused to end the war with Germany and Austro-Hungary.

The Russian Army could finally take no more, and after one last offensive ordered by Kerensky, ended the same way almost all the others had – with no gains and immense numbers of dead Russians, the army broke, shot many of its officers and started to head back home, leaving the trenches abandoned.

Which brings us to October 1917 and the situation on the streets of the Russian cities is akin to a powder keg as mutinous soldiery, striking workers and political agitators of all colours mingled and grumbled. On one key point however, they were all in agreement – the war must come to an end.

The unprecedented scale of the slaughter of WW1 brought the Russian Empire to revolution

Now the conspiracy is set in motion, not in Russia, but thousands of miles away in New York and Berlin. The part that everyone knows is that Max Warburg (father of Paul Warburg, creator of the Rothschild owned Federal Reserve Banking system in the US), the head of the Kaiser’s intelligence services and also the head of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the largest German bank, hatched the devious scheme to pluck Lenin from his Swiss exile and transport him via sealed train to St Petersburg, tasked with becoming the frontman for the Bolshevik coup d’état.

However, the crucial part that most are largely unaware of is that another Zionist agent, a far more dangerous one, had already been dispatched from the US to Russia to be the real leader and organiser of the new order to be imposed on post-revolution Russia.

I am referring of course, to the Marxist revolutionary Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. The history books all record that Trotsky returned to St Petersburg and during the summer of 1917 organised and planned the Bolshevik coup that seized power in November of that year. Stalin summarised Trotsky’s role in a November 1918 article for Pravda:

“All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.”

What is not included in the mainstream histories is that Trotsky did not arrive in Russia alone, he brought with him a large amount of gold, financing for the revolution provided by Wall St under the guidance of Paul Warburg, son of Max.

Along with Trotsky and the Wall St. finance were 100 Jewish emigrees who, like Trotsky, had emigrated from the Russian Empire after the failed 1905 revolution and were now returning to carry out a new coup aimed at seizing control of the Russian Empire.

The Bolshevik Revolution is one of the most mythologised moments in recent history, most of the ‘facts’ about it are mere fabrications; rather than being a popular uprising of the people, as seen in the films of Eisenstein, it was a simple coup d’état launched by a group of Talmudic Bolsheviks who were as cunning and murderous as they were scant in number.

When one thinks of the ‘October Revolution’ the images that spring to mind are most often those of the workers, peasants and soldiers of the Red Guard storming the gates of the Winter Palace, seizing the seat of government at the point of the bayonet after a hard fought battle.

It may be stunning filmmaking but pure propaganda with no basis in reality. This is little more than the precursor of the historical narrative that Hollywood has long since hijacked.

In reality, the Winter Palace had been securely defended by 2000 loyal troops – loyal guardsmen, young officers, cadets and a women’s battalion. However, by the time of the Bolshevik coup, most of those defenders had left, driven out by the desperation of starvation having received no food or supplies for days. The Reds took the Palace with barely a shot fired, all that was left defending the place were the remnants of the women’s battalion.

The same story applies throughout St Petersburg – it fell to the Bolshevik coup almost without a fight. Trotsky then had to defend the city from loyal cossacks that tried to overturn the coup, in this he succeeded. Now, while Lenin made the stirring speeches, the evil mind of Trotsky carried out the Zionist scheme to totally destroy the Russian Empire and replace it with a police state enslaved under a Marxist totalitarian regime.

First a peace treaty was signed with Germany, taking Russian out of the Great War and fulfilling Lenin’s prime task given to him by Max Warburg. Then a terrible 5 year civil war was fought where Trotsky led the Bolshevik Red Army in a murderous campaign against loyalist Whites, ‘Black’ anarchists and nascent nationalist movements in Poland and Ukraine.

By 1922, hundreds of thousands of combatants had become casualties and the Russian nation was exhausted. Drought, famine and disease added millions of deaths to the untold millions of Cossacks, tsarists and others declared ‘enemies of the people’ who were slaughtered at the hands of Trotsky’s murderers. The Bolshevik takeover of Russia was one of the most bloody and massive genocides in history, perhaps only rivalled by the campaigns of Genghis Khan.

_________

Stalin and the overthrow of the Old Bolsheviks

THE RUSSIAN COURT AT SEA: THE VOYAGE OF HMS MARLBOROUGH, APRIL 1919 BY FRANCES WELCH

The last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, with his family: In 1919 HMS Marlborough was dispatched to the Crimea to rescue the surviving Romanov family

All books about the fall of the Romanovs leave one with an uneasy doubt that we have ever heard the full story.

It was complicated for decades by doubts about the murder of the Tsar and his family, the supposedly missing remains, the unanswered questions about whether George V did or did not attempt or even want to rescue them.

This addendum to the story concentrates entirely on the rescue mission that was sent on the King’s initiative to evacuate the Tsar’s mother, the dowager Empress Marie and her entourage, from the Crimea.

It was carried out in the nick of time before the Bolsheviks reached Yalta, where the surviving Romanovs were confined to their summer estates. It was entirely successful. In April, 1919, HMS Marlborough carried off the Empress and 17 members of her family at the head of a small fleet of vessels rescuing White Russian refugees who had swarmed to the port.  

An intimate diary of the voyage to Malta has been constructed by Frances Welch from the diaries and memoirs both of the passengers and the crew, especially the Marlborough’s first lieutenant, Francis Pridham, who found himself in the anxious position of purser to the crews. His was the worry of finding suitable cabins for a quarrelsome set of relatives acutely conscious of status and protocol - by no means a united family.

Besides soothing their temperaments, sorting out their luggage and overseeing their menus, he found time to keep a diary of events, the prime source for this close-up of this weird, quirky family party, thrown together by events they still did not comprehend. Dark but tantalising photographs give us glimpses of them.

By the end of the short voyage one does feel a certain sympathy for them, tempered by an impatience that such an inadequate family happened to exercise supreme power over an empire.

The leading characters on the voyage were first and foremost the dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of the Tsar. She was an awkward customer for two reasons: she refused to believe that her son and his family were dead, and strongly objected to leaving Russia under the impression that the revolution could soon be over and she would be going back to St Petersburg.

At that time, 1918, it was still possible for her to believe this. The execution of the Tsar, but not of his family, had been tersely announced. But rumours abounded of their secret removal to a hiding place - possibly a Siberian monastery. Meanwhile the uncertain grip of the Bolsheviks on the country was hotly disputed by White Russian armies in civil war.

George V, as we now know, changed his mind about the original invitation to the abdicated Tsar to come to Britain.

He feared it would cause unrest - the Russian revolution had many sympathisers. Unfairly he later laid the blame on the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. But this time he had no choice.

His Danish mother, Queen Alexandra, was the Empress Marie’s sister. She wanted her rescued without delay. Eventually the King sent instructions through the admiralty that the Empress and her family ‘should be embarked whatever their personal desires’.

The Empress still refused to go except on a promise that the ships would also evacuate loyal subjects in the Crimea, of whom there were hundreds seeking to escape.

They included the Grand Duke Nicholas on the neighbouring estate, with whom the Empress was in a long-standing feud. She was very small but stately in an English toque.

The Grand Duke was immensely tall - 6ft 4in - and wore an astrakhan hat that made him even taller. He had been commander-in-chief of the huge Russian Army until Rasputin’s influence persuaded the Tsar that he should take over command himself.

The Tsar was only 5ft 4in and spent long periods standing on his toes. The Empress knew how unsuitable he was for the task. She hated Rasputin, like everyone else except the hysterical Tsarina.

As it happened one of their fellow passengers now was Rasputin’s murderer, Prince Felix Youssoupov. He dressed as an Edwardian gentleman in an English cap. His family had been Russia’s largest landowners - they used to visit their 17 estates in their private train. Now he carried a long tube with him which he said contained two rolled-up Rembrandt portraits that he had saved from his walls.

In the evenings he entertained the company by singing gypsy songs to his guitar, which he did rather well.

The other leading member of the cast was the Grand Duchess Xenia, daughter of the Empress, with five of her sons about her. Although a grandmother at 44, she looked very young. Estranged from her husband, who was in Paris, she led a complicated love life. One of her lovers, the Empress’s equerry, was among the company.

Lieutenant Pridham admired her greatly, ‘an extremely charming and capable woman, worth half a dozen of their men’. She also spoke the best English and helped him settle the cabin problems successfully.

The 72-year-old Empress much impressed him too: ‘Although small, her bearing was so majestic that when she entered all eyes were riveted - a superb picture of stately grace.’

Despite her stateliness, in private she was a chain smoker. If a servant came in she would hide the cigarette behind her like a guilty schoolgirl, oblivious that the smoke continued to rise behind her.

Her rescue voyage, until now a footnote to history, was well worth exploring and Frances Welch has thoroughly unearthed its fascinating details. If coming new to the Romanovs and their complicated family relationships, the reader will need frequent recourse to the list of characters given at the outset (20-strong, all of them Princes or Grand Dukes). Out of these she brings into focus the Empress as a brave patriotic woman, however stubborn and difficult, who engages our sympathy.

After so much virtual imprisonment at home, she enjoyed the Marlborough and the hospitality of the Navy so much that when they reached Malta she didn’t want to disembark. She sent a telegram to the King asking for it to take her onto England. Unfortunately, said the King, it was wanted elsewhere.

Marie reached Portsmouth on another ship where her sister Alix was waiting. The King greeted her at Victoria Station and she went to stay with Alix at Marlborough House - but not for long. They got on each other’s nerves and Marie went home to Denmark for the rest of her life. She died in 1928, possibly still firm in her belief that her son was living, for it was long before his bones were discovered.

The Romanovs. From left to right: Olga, Maria, Nicholas II, Alexandra, Anastasia, Alexei, and Tatiana. Pictured at Livadia Palace in 1913

The Romanovs were being held by the Red Army in Yekaterinburg. As the civil war continued and the White Army (a loose alliance of anti-communist forces) was threatening to capture the city, the fear was that the Romanovs would fall into White hands. This was unacceptable to the Bolsheviks for two reasons: first, the tsar or any of his family members could provide a beacon to rally support to the White cause; second, the tsar, or any of his family members if the tsar were dead, would be considered the legitimate ruler of Russia by the other European nations. This would have meant the ability to negotiate for greater foreign intervention on behalf of the Whites. (Soon after the family was executed, the city did in fact fall to the White Army.)

On 16 July 1918 forces of the Czech legion were closing on Yekaterinburg, not realizing that Russia's royal family was being held under house arrest there. The Bolsheviks, believing that the Czechs were on a mission to rescue the Russian royals, panicked and executed their wards. The real reason for the Czechs being in Yekaterinburg was to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway, of which they had total control. Circumstance played a large part in the execution of the Russian royal family.^[7]

Execution

Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia in captivity at Tsarskoe Selo in the spring of 1917. One of the last known photographs of Tsar Nicholas II's daughters.

Other sources indicated that the great wealth of the Russian Czars was entrusted to the Rothschilds, $35 million with the Rothschild's Bank of England, and $80 million in the Rothschild's Paris bank. Czar Nicolas and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks on order of the Rothschilds, who managed the Czar's money.  The Rothschilds financed the Russian Revolution which confiscated vast portions of the Orthodox Church's wealth. They have been able to prevent (due to their power) the legitimate heirs of the Czars fortune to withdraw a penny of the millions deposited in a vcesariety of their banks. The Mountbattens, who are related to the Rothschilds, led the court battles to prevent the claimants from withdrawing any of the fortune. In other words, the money they invested in the Russian Revolution, was not only paid back directly by the Bolshevists in millions of dollar of gold, but by grabbing the huge deposits of the Czars' wealth, the Rothschilds gained what is now worth over $50 Billions.

The telegram giving the order to execute the prisoners on behalf of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow was signed by Yakov Sverdlov. Around midnight, Yakov Yurovsky, the commandant of The House of Special Purpose, ordered the Romanovs' physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, to awaken the sleeping family and ask them to put on their clothes, under the pretext that the family would be moved to a safe location due to impending chaos in Yekaterinburg.^[1] The Romanovs were then ordered into a 6×5 meter semi-basement room. Nicholas asked if Yurovsky could bring three chairs, on which Alexei, his father and his mother sat.

The prisoners were told to wait in the cellar room while the truck that would transport them was being brought to the House. A few minutes later, an execution squad of secret police was brought in and Yurovsky read aloud the order given him by the Ural Executive Committee:

“
Nikolai Aleksandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you...^[1]
”

Nicholas, facing his family, turned and said "What?"^[1] Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and the weapons were raised. The Empress and Grand Duchess Olga, according to a guard's reminiscence, had tried to cross themselves, but failed amid the shooting. Yurovsky reportedly raised his gun at Nicholas and fired; Nicholas fell dead instantly. The other executioners then began shooting until all the intended victims had fallen. Several more shots were fired and the doors opened to scatter the smoke.^[1] There were some survivors, so P.Z. Yermakov stabbed them with bayonets because the shouts could be heard outside.^[1] The last to die were Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, and Maria, who were carrying several pounds (over 1.3 kilograms) of diamonds within their clothing, thus protecting them to an extent.^[8] However, they were speared with bayonets as well. Olga sustained a gunshot wound to the head. Anastasia and Maria were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads in terror until Maria was shot down, and Anastasia was finished off with the bayonets. Yurovsky himself killed Tatiana and Alexei. Tatiana died from a single bullet through the back of her head.^[9] Alexei received two bullets to the head, right behind the ear.^[10] Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, survived the initial onslaught but was quickly stabbed to death against the back wall while trying to defend herself with a small pillow she had carried that was filled with precious gems and jewels.

They ate cats, sawdust, wallpaper paste...even their own babies. Leningrad's agony as the Nazis tried to starve it into submission, LENINGRAD: TRAGEDY OF A CITY UNDER SIEGE 1941-44 BY ANNA

The fallen: Only one passer-by seems to notice these victims of the siege lying dead in the street  

During the days I was reading this book I ate comparitively little. It quelled the appetite. Starvation on such a scale makes one feel almost guilty for having enough and to spare.

The German siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days from September, 1941 to January, 1944. During that time 800,000 people, nearly a third of the population at the siege’s beginning, starved to death. Roughly one in three. Many of them in the streets.

Terrible times: Citizens of Leningrad after the German bombing in the winter of 1941

Twenty years later I visited Leningrad. They took me to see the front line - a canyon gashed out of the landscape lined with shattered ruins of houses - as if a giant excavator had taken a mouthful of the city. Because we were still in the city, that was the shock. The Germans got that close.

The Leningraders still bore the signs. Here were so many old and shrivelled faces. Often you saw the flash of steel teeth. Dentists’ amalgam had run out early. The city’s stunning architecture (after all, it was, and now again is, St Petersburg) looked sadly worn except for certain restored cathedrals and palaces.

Few people outside realised what the siege was like. For years afterwards Stalin kept it dark. Deaths were underestimated. Its party leaders were purged. There were to be no other heroes of the war besides himself.

After the Khrushchev thaw, a new legend was propagated of a Leningrad whose heroic citizens unflinchingly disregarded the bombs and shells and starved quietly as willing sacrifices to defend the cradle of the Revolution.

Then, with the collapse of communism, archives began to open with their police records and siege diaries. This book seeks to tell objectively what really happened. It is a stark shocking tale. Two arresting quotations will give you an idea:

Writer Dmitri Likhachev looks back: ‘In time of famine people revealed themselves stripped of all trumpery. Some turned out marvellous, incomparable heroes. Others - scoundrels, villains, murderers, cannibals. There were no half measures.’

Note this timetable, kept in a pocket book by Tanya Savicheva: ‘28 December 1941 - Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 - Granny died. 17 March - Lyoka died. 13 April - Uncle Vasya died. 10 May - Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30am - Mama died. The Savichevs are dead, everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.’ Tanya was 12.

We don’t know what happened to her but we do know about Irina Bogdanova, who was eight and was left alone in the family flat when her mother, aunt and grandmother died one by one from dysentery in February, 1942.

Counter-attack: Soviet troops fight back during the siege of Leningrad

She was found ten days later and handed in to an orphanage where she woke up to realise that the girl sharing her bed was dead. The days Irina spent along with her dead family were a total blank.

The toll of that first winter is staggering. Leningrad was totally unprepared for siege - as Russia was for the German attack. It took only 12 weeks for the German and Finnish armies to cut off the city. In that time the evacuation of civilians and obtaining of food supplies were hugely bungled.

Andrei Zhdanov, the city’s Communist Party chief, actually telephoned Stalin to tell him that their warehouses were full - in order that he should look prepared. So several relief food trains were diverted elsewhere.

Over a million children and dependants were still in the city when the ring closed. In all there were 3.3 million mouths to feed.

Quite soon the bread ration had to be halved. By mid-November manual workers received 250 grams a day, the rest only half of that. But the bread had been adulterated with pine shavings. So people were existing (or failing to) on 400, even 300 calories.

Pet owners swapped cats in order to avoid eating their own. There wasn’t a dog to be seen. Only the zoo preserved its star attractions, like ‘Beauty’ the hippopotamus, with special rations of hay.

People searched desperately for substitute food. Cottonseed cake (usually burned in ships’ boilers), ‘macaroni’ made from flax seed for cattle, ‘meat jelly’ produced from boiling bones and calf skins, ‘yeast soup’ from fermented sawdust, joiners’ glue boiled and jellified, toothpaste, cough mixture and cold cream - anything that contained calories. They even licked the dried paste off the wallpaper.

The Black Market flourished openly on street stalls with ever rising prices. A fur coat fetched fewer and fewer kilograms of flour. Meanwhile the Party chiefs and their friends and connections, continued to look well fed to general resentment.

The first news that people had died from starvation met with incredulity: ‘Not the one I know? In broad daylight? With a Masters Degree?’

But before long people were concealing deaths in the family, hiding the bodies so that the deceased’s ration card could be used until it expired. Husbands and fathers helped to feed their families posthumously.

It was a very severe winter - temperatures of minus 35 degrees. Trams froze in their tracks. Buildings burned for days - fire services ceased to function. Factories closed, hospitals were overwhelmed, cemeteries could not keep pace. Bodies, shrouded but uncoffined, were dragged through the streets on sleds. At one cemetery gate a corpse propped upright with a cigarette in its mouth extended a frozen arm and finger as a sign post to the newest mass graves.

Commemoration: A Russian guard of honour marches at a ceremony for the 61st anniversary of the end of the siege

Of course there was a crime wave, mainly of adolescent muggers thieving food and ration cards. One 18-year-old killed his two younger brothers for their cards. Another murdered his granny with an axe and boiled her liver. A 17-year-old stole a corpse from a cemetery and put it through a mincer.

Rumours of cannibalism abounded. Amputated limbs disappeared from hospital theatres. Police records released years later showed that 2,000 people were arrested for cannibalism; 586 of them were executed for murdering their victims. Most people arrested however were women. Mothers smothered very young children to feed their older ones.

The spring of 1942 brought a thaw and with it edible dandelions and nettles. The population, now much reduced, set about raising vegetables.

The burst pipes in the Hermitage Museum flooded the priceless porcelain collections in the cellars. The rescuers were rewarded with tours of the empty frames of the masterpieces which had been evacuated in time. Those left behind were guarded by a corps of volunteer elderly ladies.

Although there were to be two more siege winters, it was never as bad again. In January 1943 the siege ring was broken and a narrow corridor allowed a railway to be laid from unoccupied Russia. By the time it was liberated, Leningrad’s population was down to 600,000. Three quarters of them were women.

What can one make of it all? First, that Hitler’s order to raze the city to the ground by bombardment proved futile - as did his vision of a conquered Russia as a home for Germans, while the Russians were banished to live like animals in Siberia.

Second, that far fewer lives need have been lost if the Communist regime had done its job of evacuating and provisioning the city with a glimmer of foresight and efficiency.

Third, that as in the concentration camps, those who gave up died, while those who kept up the struggle survived. They include the writers, almost all of them women, whose diaries and finely written reflections make up the most moving pages of this appalling but necessary book. Anna Reid calls it, convincingly, ‘the deadliest blockade of a city in history’.

Cathedral of Our Lady of Smolensk Новоде́вичий монасты́рь, Богоро́дице-Смоле́нский монасты́рь

Among Dmitriev's subjects was General Voitsekhovsky (left), who fought for the White army against the Bolshevik reds during the Russian Civil War of 1917-23;  right, military commissioner Orlov in 1928

Moscow's Red Guards View On Black Members of the Red Guards in Moscow, following the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution Cruiser Aurora The cruiser Aurora fired a blank round from one of its guns as the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg during the Russian Revolution.   At the convent After the Revolution, the convent was shut and converted into a museum for the emancipation of women. It has now returned to its original use.

The Russian Revolution 1905 الثورة الروسية View On Black Workers marching through the streets of St. Petersburg, during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The central banner reads 'Proletarians of All Countries Unite' May Day Petrograd Rallies 1917 Bolsheviks بلاشفة View On Black Distribution of newspapers on the first day of the session of the soviets in Moscow, following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution 1917    Victory Park Hand to hand combat at Kursk

Born into immense wealth, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II grew up largely hidden from public view and little was known about them – until now. Author Helen Rappaport reveals how, just when they were able to start engaging with the wider world, events in Russia overtook them From left: Grand Duchesses Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia and Olga in 1914 It is now almost 50 years since Robert K Massie’s acclaimed biography Nicholas and Alexandra first brought the story of Russia’s last Imperial Family to a wider audience in the West. In the wake of its huge success, a wealth of glossy coffee-table books have perpetuated the haunting image of the five innocent children who died with their parents in a savage bloodbath on the night of 16-17 July 1918. It is impossible to resist the allure of those touching and now iconic images of the tsar’s four lovely daughters – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – in their pretty white lace dresses, and their young brother Alexey. They seem to represent not just the lost world of old tsarist Russia but also the ruthless and arbitrary brutality of the revolution that destroyed them. The faces are familiar, but until now very little was known about the four Romanov sisters beyond the chocolate-box image of them produced for public consumption by the tsarist publicity machine. The many charming and informal pictures that the sisters took of each other during their childhood show something of the happy and unpretentious personalities behind the public image, but in truth, the Romanov princesses have never been considered anything more than the pretty set-dressing to the much bigger and more dramatic story of their parents and their tragic haemophiliac brother Alexey. For they were born into a Russia where sons were essential for the survival of the dynasty and daughters were deemed of little consequence. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia with the Imperial Family, 1913 In November 1894, when Princess Alix of Hesse (Alexandra Feodorovna) married the new tsar, Nicholas II, gossips around the world were agog. She may have landed the biggest dynastic catch and the richest man in the world, but as far as the Russian public was concerned, Alexandra’s primary duty as Empress was to produce a son and heir. Instead, the birth of four daughters in quick succession, although a private joy to their doting parents, was a bitter public disappointment that increased with every girl born: Olga in 1895, Tatiana in 1897, Maria in 1899 and Anastasia in 1901. The continuing lack of a son brought the Russian throne to the brink of a succession crisis and provoked much superstitious talk among the peasantry of a curse on the Romanovs. The Tsar and Tsarina with their five children dressed in sailing outfits The Tsar shares a cigarette with Anastasia Little attention was paid to the four charming and vivacious young princesses who were growing up at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo outside St Petersburg. Indeed, during the 1900s the political climate in Russia became so volatile, and the assassination threats against Nicholas II so worrying, that the Imperial Family was increasingly secluded from public view and the press was gagged from saying anything about their domestic life. 'The birth of four daughters in quick succession was a public disappointment' At home the sisters grew up like any other happy, normal girls, prone to the same fights and squabbles and hair pulling (Anastasia in particular being fond of the latter). They might have been cosseted with extravagant gifts from royal relatives and eminent statesmen, but their mother – in the tradition of her own mother Alice and her much-loved grandmother Queen Victoria – imposed a rigorous English regime of frugality, hand-me-down clothes, iron bedsteads, plain nursery food and cold baths. The girls were educated in the necessary social graces and spoke French, Russian (among themselves) and English (with their parents), but they were never spoilt. All four enchanted visitors: they were pert, friendly, inquisitive and clearly devoted to each other. The Tsarina in her boudoir with Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia The Tsar with three of the Grand Duchesses on a tennis court Ordinary Russians, however, were lucky to catch glimpses of the Romanov princesses during carriage rides around St Petersburg or at increasingly rare official engagements; abroad, the Romanovs were not seen as a family until a brief visit to Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1909. A steady stream of carefully selected official photographs did nothing to convey the individuality of the Imperial daughters, serving instead to perpetuate an endearing but bland image of them as dutiful, docile and uncontroversial. Such a homogeneous view was further compounded by Alexandra herself, who referred to her daughters, even into adulthood, as ‘the big pair’ – Olga and Tatiana – and ‘the little pair’ – Maria and Anastasia. The girls followed suit, often referring to themselves collectively in letters as OTMA, their first-name initials. Olga, the eldest, was a dreamer and a romantic who loved music and poetry and was prone to melancholy. She struggled with her temper as she grew older, partly because, as the eldest, she had the responsibility of setting an example to her younger siblings. She wore her heart on her sleeve and was the most emotionally vulnerable of all the sisters. Tatiana was her polar opposite: brisk and highly self-controlled, she was a natural-born organiser, prompting her sisters to nickname her ‘The Governess’. Having inherited her mother’s intense reserve, she was often seen as haughty and detached by those who did not know her. But without doubt she was the most beautiful, stylish – and enigmatic – Romanov daughter. The Grand Duchesses, Alexey and their father in exile in Tobolsk, 1917 The Grand Duchesses with their father and brother on the royal yacht Standard in 1911 In contrast, the third sister, Maria, had a wonderful warmth and openness; everyone remarked on her great, plaintive blue eyes. She had an earthy, Russian quality that was demonstrated in her great love for children and she would have made a devoted mother. But with such a naturally docile and submissive nature, she suffered at times at the hands of her manipulative and domineering younger sister Anastasia. The now much-mythologised fourth Romanov daughter was the wild child of the family, a force of nature who constantly entertained and demanded attention. Quirky, inattentive and a hopeless scholar, she was also instinctive and intuitive and it was impossible to ignore her seductive personality. The arrival in 1904 of their brother Alexey – ‘The Hope of Russia’ – and with it the discovery soon after his birth that he had inherited haemophilia – passed down the female line from Queen Victoria to his mother – had immediately cast a long shadow over the sisters’ lives and only served to further accentuate their subsidiary role. The Tsar and his family shortly before his forced abdication in March 1917 Though still young, the four sisters became their brother’s devoted carers, watching over him and trying their best to protect him from harm. They learned to content themselves with each other’s company and they never complained. But unremitting anxiety about Alexey’s health and the numerous crises he suffered when he fell or injured himself came just at the point when the girls were developing a curiosity about the world around them and were longing to rush out and explore it. Life instead closed in on them and those four beguiling personalities were increasingly shut away from view. From 1907, when Alexey suffered his first serious haemophilia attack, instead of enjoying the company of young people of their own age, the girls’ lives were dominated by the presence of Grigory Rasputin, the man whom Nicholas and Alexandra looked upon as a spiritual adviser and healer and trusted as the only person who could protect their precious son from harm. 'Throughout the bitter winter they helped to keep their fading brother alive' Yet despite all the constraints placed on them by public and press curiosity, by the time they had entered their teens, the four Romanov sisters were undoubtedly the most talked-about princesses in Europe. When the Romanov tercentenary was celebrated in 1913, Olga and Tatiana were clearly blossoming, and were at last seen on the public stage at a series of official engagements. The foreign press was awash with gossip about the men they might marry. From the moment she turned 16 in 1911, every possible princely candidate was discussed for Olga, with Carol of Romania, Boris of Bulgaria, Alexander of Serbia and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich of Russia all posited as suitable bridegrooms. And until her death in 1901, Queen Victoria nursed the hope of a marriage between her granddaughter Olga and her grandson, the future Edward VIII. How different British history might have been with a Queen Olga and no Wallis Simpson. But nothing came of a string of suggested matches – particularly that of Olga with Prince Carol of Romania. Both sets of royal parents tried hard to bring the two young people together in the summer of 1914, but Olga did not like Carol and his roving eye would not have guaranteed a happy match for her. Anastasia with shaven head after contracting measles In any event, Olga adamantly refused to marry a foreign prince and leave Russia. When it came down to it, Nicholas and Alexandra, who had married for love and wished the same for their daughters, would not force her into a marriage of dynastic expediency any more than they would her sisters, who were united in their desire to stay in Russia. Wistfully, Olga admitted that all she wanted to do was get married, have children and live in obscurity in the countryside, far away from the official world of the Russian court. But the outbreak of war in August 1914 put paid to all talk of marriage. Instead, war threw Olga and her sister Tatiana into the path of a succession of handsome, wounded army officers when they began training as Red Cross nurses to work in the military hospital set up by their mother at Tsarskoe Selo. War, of all things, finally opened up something of the world outside for all four princesses. Maria and Anastasia worked as hospital visitors, regularly interrogating the wounded about the ‘outside life’ that they longed to be part of. All the girls supported wartime charities and soon their hospital work became the focus of their daily lives. Olga and Tatiana both demonstrated great dedication in their nursing; but while the strain of her responsibilities and the disappointments of falling for men she knew could never marry eventually led to physical and nervous collapse for Olga, Tatiana proved to be an exceptionally gifted and courageous nurse who – had history been different – might have been a pioneer of women’s nursing. Olga nursing a soldier in 1915 In early 1917, with Nicholas away at the front hundreds of miles away, events in Russia moved inexorably towards chaos. When the revolution broke out in Petrograd in March, the metaphorical cage that until then had protected the four sisters at Tsarskoe Selo became a very frightening one. Nicholas was stopped en route to rejoin the family and forced to abdicate. Alexandra and her children were placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace; the four pretty girls of the storybook Romanov fantasy were now confined to the gardens in plain skirts and blouses and woolly hats. In June, they were deprived of their most beautiful asset – their hair – when all four, having contracted measles in February, had to have their heads shaved. But they remained extraordinarily forbearing. They dug the gardens and helped chop wood and grow vegetables; they darned their clothes and adapted to a different kind of life, under constant and intimidating surveillance. They had always found solace in each other’s company and wished only for one thing: that they could all stay together as a family, somewhere in exile. When, on 1 August 1917, Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government put the Romanovs on a train to Tobolsk in Western Siberia, the sisters, as always, made the most of their terrible situation. Olga and Alexey in captivity at Tobolsk Throughout the bitter Siberian winter of 1917-18, they bolstered their mother’s rapidly failing health and helped to keep their fading brother alive. Their hopes remained buoyant until the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917 and six months later sent them from Tobolsk to an even more constrained life as prisoners of the hardline Ural Regional Soviet at Ekaterinburg. On the night of 16-17 July 1918, the Romanov family were awakened and told they were being evacuated. Instead, they were led into the cellar of the house where they were being held, and executed. The circumstances of the savage murder almost immediately sparked a plethora of rumours about miraculous escape, bringing with it a trail of false claimants. But thanks to rigorous DNA testing of their remains, there is now no doubt that the entire family died that terrible night in Ekaterinburg, leaving us with an indelible memory of those tragic sisters – of four gentle, laughing girls – and the haunting pathos of their unfulfilled lives. This intimate collection of photos capture Russia's imperial Romanov family like you've never seen them before. Huddled together on a day out at the beach or around the beds of soldiers wounded in the Great War, the pictures were taken shortly before their 300-year dynasty came to a tragic and abrupt end. Within a year of the album's latest photos, the Russian revolution swept across the country, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and he and his family were exiled, before being murdered on Lenin's orders. Scroll down for video +13 Family outing: Tsar Nicholas poses with his four daughters  (L-R) Maria, Anastasia, Olga and Tatiana In one image, Tsar Nicholas II and his daughters Anastasia, Maria, Olga and Tatiana look solemnly into the camera, the Emperor stood proudly in full military uniform. Another shows Maria, Olga and Tatiana paddling in shallow water at the beach - their younger brother Alexei, who would have been around 14 at the time, stood in front of his sisters. Many of these rare pictures, taken between 1915 and 1916, were shot by head of the family and Russia's last tsar himself, Nicholas II. An insatiable photographer, the tsar took great care of his pictures, filing them carefully in numerous albums. +13 Day at the beach: (L-R) Maria and Olga and Tatiana Romanov pose at the beach with their brother Alexei Father and daughter: Tsar Nicholas II and his daughter Anastasia (R), wearing false teeth. He passed down his love for photography to Maria, his third daughter, who was responsible for colouring most of the pictures. Several of the images show the family dutifully attending wounded soldiers near the front line - but as the war raged on, civil unrest mounted around the country. As the government failed to produce supplies, mounting hardship created massive riots and rebellions and by early 1917, Russia was on the verge of total collapse. On 23 February 1917 in Petrograd, a combination of very severe cold weather and acute food shortages caused people to start to break shop windows to get bread and other necessaries. Visiting soldiers: The Emperor and Anastasia and Maria visit wounded troops during the Great War +13 Happy times: Within a year of the album's latest photos, the Russian revolution swept across the country, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and he and his family were exiled, before being murdered on Lenin's orders In the streets, red banners appeared and the crowds chanted: 'Down with the German woman! !Down with the war! Down with the Tsar!' Order broke down and members of the Soviet Party demanded that Nicholas abdicate. Faced with this demand, which was echoed by his generals, deprived of loyal troops, with his family firmly in the hands of the Provisional Government and fearful of unleashing civil war and opening the way for German conquest, Nicholas had little choice but to submit. After his abdication on March 2, 1917, Nicholas II and his family were exiled to Tobolsk, where they initially lived in considerable comfort. +13 Nicholas passed down his love for photography to Maria, his third daughter, who was responsible for colouring most of the pictures +13 Many of the unique photos were taken by Tsar Nicholas himself, who was an insatiable photographer Archive: Tsar Nicholas II and his daughters filmed in 1914 But following the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, their living conditions worsened. In 1918 the Imperial family was imprisoned. As the White Russian troops approached the Urals, threatening to reach and free the Romanovs, the Imperial family met their fate. On the eve of July 16, 1918, the Tsar, his German-born wife Alexandra and their five children, were roused from their beds and escorted to the basement of Ipatiev House, where they had been imprisoned. Toll of the war: Tsar Nicholas II and daughters Anastasia and Maria Romanov visit wounded soldiers in the Great War. There they were callously murdered along with three servants and their doctor. The horrific story of the Romanovs' execution spawned the long-running myth that one of the children had survived and was living in secret somewhere in Russia. Hundreds of claims were made that either Anastasia or Alexei had somehow escaped the Bolshevisks' death squad. +13 The horrific story of the Romanovs' execution spawned the long-running myth that one of the children had survived and was living in secret somewhere in Russia +13 (L-R) Maria, Olga and Tatiana Romanov, the daughters of Tsar's Nicholas II pictured just one or two years before they were exiled and later shot on orders of Lenin Since her death, women posing as the Russian princess Anastasia have repeatedly come forward, among them Anna Anderson who first appeared in Berlin in 1920, two years after the Russian royals were executed. Anderson, who also went by the names Tschaikovsky and Manahan, later moved to the USA and was portrayed for decades as the escaped daughter of the last Romanov emperor. But in 1991, when the remains of the Russian royals were unearthed, DNA testing proved that the bodies were indeed those of the Tsar, Tsarina and their children. +13 Olga Romanov is pictured lying in bed in this photo taken not long before she was murdered along with the rest of her family +13 Olga Romanov, (R) seen on the beach during the Great War, died with her sisters when Bolshevik fighters carried out orders to execute the royal family THE END OF A DYNASTY: THE LAST MOMENTS OF THE ROMANOVS REVEALED After Tsar Nicholas abdicated on 15th March 1917, he and his family were moved from house to house as the revolution and ensuing civil war raged around them. By May 1918, they had been installed at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg which was under Bolshevik control. The house was owned by Yakov Yurovsky, a dedicated Marxist and Bolshevik with close links to the Cheka - the secret police force run by the revolutionaries. At around 2.15am on the morning of the 17th July 1918, Yurovsky and a squad of Bolsheviks burst into the bedrooms of the Russian royals and ordered them into the cellar. Minutes later, the soldiers, each armed with a revolver and led by Yurovsky, followed them into the room. According to Yurovsky, he ordered them to stand. Characteristically, the Tsarina did so 'with a flash of anger'. 'Your relations have tried to save you,' he is believed to have said next. 'They have failed and we must now shoot you.' The Tsar rose from his chair and only had time to utter 'What...?' before he was shot several times in the chest. The Tsarina died next, killed by a single bullet fired by commissar Peter Ermakov that entered her head just above the left ear, followed by her haemophilliac son Alexei, who was just 13-years-old when he died. The last to perish were Anastasia and her sisters, saved, initially by the valuable diamonds hidden in their bodices. The girls were then bayoneted by the Bolshevik fighters before being finished off with a shot to the head.