Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia
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Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia (Tatiana Nikolaevna Romanova) (In Russian
Великая Княжна Татьяна Николаевна), (May 29 (O.S.)/June 10 (N.S.), 1897 – July 17, 1918), (after 1900, Tatiana's birthday was celebrated on June 11) was the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II
, the last monarch of Russia, and of Tsarina Alexandra
. She was born at the Peterhof
, Saint Petersburg
.
She was better known than her three sisters during her lifetime and headed Red Cross committees during World War I. Like her older sister Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
, she nursed wounded soldiers in a military hospital from 1914 to 1917, until the family was arrested following the first Russian Revolution of 1917
.
Her murder by revolutionaries on 17 July 1918 resulted in her being named as a passion bearer
by the Russian Orthodox Church
. She was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
and an elder sister of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia
, all of whom were falsely rumored to have survived the assassination of the Imperial Family. Dozens of imposters claimed to be surviving Romanovs. Author Michael Occleshaw speculated that a woman named Larissa Tudor
might have been Tatiana; however, all of the Romanovs, including Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, were murdered by the Bolshevik
assassination squad.
, Maria, Anastasia
, and the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei of Russia. All of the children were close to one another and to their parents up until the end of their lives.
Tatiana was described as tall and slender, with dark auburn hair and dark blue-gray eyes, fine, chiseled features, and a refined, elegant bearing befitting the daughter of an Emperor. She was considered the most beautiful of the four grand duchesses by many courtiers. Of all her sisters, Tatiana most closely resembled their mother.
Tatiana's title is most precisely translated as "Grand Princess," meaning that Tatiana, as an "imperial highness", was higher in rank than other princesses in Europe, who were "royal highnesses." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title into English from Russian. However, her friends, family and the household servants generally called her by her first name and patronym, Tatiana Nikolaevna or by the Russian nicknames "Tanya," "Tatya," "Tatianochka," or "Tanushka."
Like the other Romanov children, Tatiana was raised with some austerity
. She and her sisters slept on camp beds without pillows, took cold baths in the morning, and were expected to keep themselves occupied with embroidery or knitting projects if they had a spare moment. Their work was given as gifts or sold at charity bazaars. According to one story, Tatiana, accustomed to being addressed only by her name and patronymic
, was so disconcerted when she was addressed as "Your Imperial Highness" by lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden
when she was heading a committee meeting that she kicked the woman under the table and hissed "Are you crazy to speak to me like that?"
Tatiana and her older sister, Olga, were known in the household as "The Big Pair." According to a 29 May 1897 diary entry written by her father's distant cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia
, she was given the name "Tatiana" as an homage
to the heroine in Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin
. Her father liked the idea of having daughters named Olga and Tatiana, like the sisters in the famous poem. Like their two younger sisters, the two older girls shared a bedroom and were very close to one another from early childhood. In the spring of 1901, Olga had typhoid fever
and was confined to the nursery for several weeks away from her younger sisters. When she began to recover, Tatiana was permitted to see her older sister for five minutes but didn't recognize her. When her governess, Margaretta Eagar
, told her after the visit that the sickly child she had been conversing so gently with was Olga, four-year-old Tatiana began to cry bitterly and protested that the pale, thin child couldn't be her adored older sister. Eagar had difficulty persuading Tatiana that Olga would recover. French tutor Pierre Gilliard
wrote that the two sisters were "passionately devoted to one another."
Tatiana was practical and had a natural talent for leadership. Her sisters gave her the nickname "The Governess" and sent her as their group representative when they wanted their parents to grant a favor. Though she was eighteen months Tatiana's senior, Olga had no objection when Tatiana decided to take charge of a situation. She was also closer to her mother than any of her sisters and was considered by many who knew her to be the Tsarina's favorite daughter. Tatiana was the conduit of all her mother's decisions. "It was not that her sisters loved their mother any less," recalled her French tutor Pierre Gilliard
, "but Tatiana knew how to surround her with unwearying attentions and never gave way to her own capricious impulses." Alexandra wrote Nicholas on 13 March 1916 that Tatiana was the only one of their four daughters who "grasped it" when she explained her way of looking at things.
Gilliard wrote that Tatiana was reserved and "well balanced" but less open and spontaneous than Olga. She was also less talented than Olga, but worked harder and was more dedicated to seeing projects through to completion than her elder sister. Colonel Kobylinsky, the family's guard at Tsarskoye Selo and Tobolsk, felt Tatiana "had no liking for art. Maybe it would have been better for her had she been a man." Others felt Tatiana's artistic talents were better expressed in handiwork and in her talent for choosing attractive fashions and creating elegant hair styles. Her mother's friend Anna Vyrubova
later wrote that Tatiana had a great talent for making clothing, embroidery and crochet and that she dressed her mother's long hair as well as any professional hair stylist.
Tatiana, like all her family, doted on the long-awaited heir Tsarevich Alexei, or "Baby," who suffered frequent attacks of haemophilia and nearly died several times. Tatiana and her three sisters, like their mother, were all potential carriers of the hemophilia gene; the Tsarina was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, from whom the trait was inherited. Tatiana's younger sister Maria reportedly hemorrhaged in December 1914 during an operation to remove her tonsils, according to her paternal aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by their mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the haemophilia
gene like their mother. Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not hemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of hemophilia including a lower than normal blood clotting factor that can lead to heavy bleeding.
The Tsarina relied on the counsel of Grigori Rasputin
, a Russian peasant and wandering starets
or "holy man," and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. Tatiana and her siblings were also taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to share confidences with him. In the autumn of 1907, Tatiana's aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
was escorted to the nursery by the Tsar to meet Rasputin. Tatiana and her sisters and brother were all wearing their long white nightgowns. The children appeared to be friendly with Rasputin and comfortable in his company. Rasputin's friendship with the children was also evident in some of the messages he sent to them. In February 1909, Rasputin sent the imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework." Eleven-year-old Tatiana wrote a letter asking Rasputin to visit her and telling him how hard it was to see her mother ill. "But you know because you know everything," she wrote.
However, one of the girls' governesses, Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, was horrified that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when the four girls were in their nightgowns; she wanted him barred. Rasputin's contacts with the children were, by all accounts, innocent in nature, but Nicholas did ask Rasputin to avoid going to the nurseries in the future. Young Tatiana was aware of the tension in the nursery and afraid of her mother's reaction to Tyutcheva's actions. "I am so afr(aid) that S.I. can speak ... about our friend something bad," the twelve-year-old Tatiana wrote to her mother on 8 March 1910. "I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now." Alexandra eventually had Tyutcheva fired.
Tyutcheva took her book to other members of the family. Nicholas's sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia
was horrified by Tyutcheva's story. She wrote in her diary on 15 March 1910 that she couldn't understand the family's regard for Rasputin as "almost a saint" when she viewed him as only a "khlyst"
Tyutcheva told Grand Duchess Xenia that the starets
visited when Olga and Tatiana were getting ready for bed and sat there talking with them and "caressing" them. The girls hid his presence from their governess and were afraid to talk to her about Rasputin. Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, another nurse for the royal children, was at first a devotee of Rasputin, but later was disillusioned by him. She claimed that she was raped by Rasputin in the spring of 1910. The empress refused to believe her, Vishnyakova told investigators, and said everything Rasputin did was holy. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was told that Vishnyakova's claim had been immediately investigated, but "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard." Vishnyakova was dismissed from her post in 1913.
It was whispered in society that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses. Rasputin had released ardent, though completely innocent in nature, letters written by the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses to him. They circulated throughout society, fueling more rumors. Pornographic cartoons circulated that depicted Rasputin having relations with the empress, with her four daughters and Anna Vyrubova nude in the background. Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Despite the rumors, the imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until Rasputin was murdered in 1916. "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed," Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on 6 December 1916. Tatiana was rumored to have been present at Rasputin's murder on 17 December 1916, "disguised as a lieutenant of the Chevaliers-Gardes, so that she could revenge herself on Rasputin who had tried to violate her." It was also rumored that Rasputin was castrated in front of Tatiana, wrote Maurice Paléologue
, the French ambassador to Russia, in his memoirs. Paléologue was skeptical at the time about the truth of the wild rumors and attributed them to the hatred of Rasputin held by people in St. Petersburg. In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that all four grand duchesses appeared "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death and sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms on the night they received the news. Mordvinov reported that the young women were in a gloomy mood and seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. Tatiana attended Rasputin's funeral on 21 December 1916, and Rasputin was buried with an icon
signed on its reverse side by Tatiana, her mother and sisters.
Tatiana later kept a notebook in which she recorded Rasputin's sayings: "Love is Light and it has no end. Love is great suffering. It cannot eat, it cannot sleep. It is mixed with sin in equal parts. And yet it is better to love. In love one can be mistaken, and through suffering he expiates for his mistakes. If love is strong—the lovers happy. Nature herself and the Lord give them happiness. One must ask the Lord that he teach to love the luminous, bright, so that love be not torment, but joy. Love pure, Love luminous is the Sun. The Sun makes us warm, and Love caresses. All is in Love, and even a bullet cannot strike Love down."
Tatiana, like her mother, was deeply religious and read her Bible frequently. She also studied theology and struggled with the meaning of "good and evil, sorrow and forgiveness, and man's destiny on earth." She decided that "One has to struggle much because the return for good is evil, and evil reigns." A.A. Mosolov, a court official, felt that Tatiana's reserved nature gave her a "difficult" character, but one with more spiritual depth than her sister Olga. Her English tutor, Sydney Gibbes
, who later became a Russian Orthodox priest, disagreed and felt that religion for Tatiana was a duty rather than something she felt in her heart.
As a young teenager, Tatiana was assigned a regiment of soldiers, the Vosnesensky (Ascenscion) Hussar
s and given the rank of honorary colonel
. She and Olga, who was also given her own regiment, would go out and inspect the soldier
s regularly, an occasion they greatly enjoyed. When she was nearly fourteen, an ill Tatiana begged her mother to permit her to get out of bed in time to go to a review so she could watch a soldier she was infatuated with. "I would like so much to go the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn," she wrote to Alexandra on 20 April 1911. "...Yes, Mama, and at the second division I will see whom I must see ... you know whom ..."
While she enjoyed the company of the soldiers she met, the young Tatiana also sometimes found their behavior shocking. A group of officers aboard the imperial yacht gave her older sister Olga a portrait of Michelangelo's
nude David
, cut out from a newspaper, as a present for her name day
on 11 July 1911. "Olga laughed at it long and hard," the indignant fourteen-year-old Tatiana wrote to her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
. "And not one of the officers wishes to confess that he has done it. Such swine, aren't they?" The fourteen year old found her distant cousin Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia's
engagement to Helen of Serbia
"touching" but found the thought of Helen kissing him hilarious. "How funny if they might have children, can (she) be kissing him?" Tatiana wrote Olga Alexandrovna on 14 July 1911. "What foul, fie!"
That fall, the fourteen-year-old Tatiana experienced her first brush with violence when she witnessed the assassination of the government minister Pyotr Stolypin
during a performance at the Kiev Opera House. Tatiana and her older sister Olga had followed their father back to his opera box and witnessed the shooting. Her father later wrote to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria, on 10 September 1911, that the event had upset both girls. Tatiana sobbed and both of them had trouble sleeping that night.
A few years later, when World War I
broke out, Tatiana became a Red Cross
nurse with her mother and Olga. They cared for wounded soldiers in a private hospital on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo
. According to Vyrubova, "Tatiana was almost as skillful and devoted as her mother, and complained only that on account of her youth she was spared some of the more trying cases." Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva
, who worked with her at the hospital, described in her journal how she planned to boil silk while Tatiana was otherwise occupied, fearing that Tatiana would be too tired to help her. But Tatiana guessed what Chebotareva was doing. "Why can you breathe carbolic acid and I can't?" she asked Chebotareva and insisted on helping her with the work. Tatiana was strongly patriotic and apologized in an 29 October 1914 letter for saying something negative about the Germans in her mother's presence. She explained that she forgot her mother had been born in Germany because she thought of Alexandra as only Russian. The Tsarina responded that she did feel completely Russian and Tatiana had not hurt her feelings with her sharp words, but Alexandra was hurt by the actions of her former countrymen and by the gossip she heard about her own German connections.
On 15 August 1915, Tatiana wrote her mother another letter expressing her desire to help her bear the burdens brought on by the war: "I simply can't tell you how awfully sorry I am for you, my beloved ones. I am so sorry I can in no way help you or be useful. In such moments I am sorry I'm not a man." As Tatiana grew into adulthood, she undertook more public appearances than her sisters and headed committees. Vyrubova recalled that she became better known to the public than her three sisters because of her attention to duty and her ability to engage those she met. In their memoirs, both her mother's friend, Vyrubova, and lady in waiting Lili Dehn
recalled that Tatiana, the most social of the sisters, longed for friends her own age but her social life was restricted by her rank and her mother's distaste for society. She also had a more introspective side, known only to her closest friends and family. "With her, as with her mother, shyness and reserve were accounted as pride, but, once you knew her and had gained her affection, this reserve disappeared and the real Tatiana became apparent," Dehn recalled. "She was a poetical creature, always yearning for the ideal, and dreaming of great friendships which might be hers."
Chebotareva, who grew to love "sweet" Tatiana almost like a daughter, described how the shy grand duchess once reached out to hold her hand when Tatiana was nervous about walking in front of a large group of nurses. "I am so terribly embarrassed and frightened – I do not know whom I greeted and whom not," Tatiana told Chebotareva. Tatiana's informality also impressed Chebotareva's son, Gregory. Tatiana once called Chebotareva at her home on the telephone and spoke first to her sixteen-year-old son. Gregory was annoyed when the grand duchess referred to him by his diminutive name, "Grisha." Not realizing who she was, the affronted Gregory asked the grand duchess to identify herself and she replied, "Tatiana Nikolaevna." When he asked her again, still not believing he was talking to a Romanov, Tatiana again failed to claim the imperial title of Grand Duchess and replied that she was "Sister Romanova the Second."
On another occasion during the war, when the lady in waiting who usually picked them up from the hospital was detained and sent a carriage without an attendant, Tatiana and her sister Olga decided to go shopping for the first time. They ordered the carriage to stop near a group of shops and went into one of the stores, where they were unrecognized because of their nurses' uniforms. They came back out without buying anything when they realized they did not have money with them and wouldn't have known how to use it even if they did. The next day they asked Chebotareva how to use money.
Tatiana fell in love on at least one occasion. In an article in the December 2004 edition of the magazine Royalty Digest: A Journal of Record Peter de Malama wrote that his cousin, Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama, an officer in the Imperial Russian Cavalry, met Tatiana when he was wounded in 1914 and a romance later developed between Tatiana and the young man when he was appointed an equerry to the court of the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo. Dmitri Malama gave Tatiana a French bulldog she named "Ortino" in September 1914. "Forgive me about the little dog," Tatiana wrote to her mother on 30 September 1914. "To say the truth, when he asked should I like to have it if he gave it to me, I at once said yes. You remember, I always wanted to have one, and only afterwards when we came home I thought that suddenly you might not like me having one. But I really was so pleased at the idea that I forgot about everything." The dog died, but Malama gave her a replacement puppy. Tatiana took it with her to Yekaterinburg, where it died with the rest of the family. Malama paid the imperial family a visit some eighteen months after he gave Tatiana the first dog. "My little Malama came for an hour yesterday evening," wrote Alexandra to Nicholas on March 17, 1916. "...Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still. I must say a perfect son in law he w(ou)ld have been – why are foreign P(rin)ces not as nice!" Malama was killed in August 1919 while commanding a unit of the White Russians fighting the civil war against the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine
, according to Peter de Malama.
Tatiana was also fond of a officer of a Georgian named Vladimir Kiknadze, whom she cared for when he was wounded in 1915 and again in 1916, according to the diary of Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, a nurse who worked with Tatiana during the war. Chebotareva described how Tatiana sometimes sat beside "Volodia" at the piano as he played a tune with one finger and talked to her in a low voice, wearing a mysterious expression on his face. Chebotareva also described how Tatiana and her sister Olga made excuses to come to the hospital to see Volodia. Chebotareva felt the flirtations between the grand duchesses and the wounded officers could cause gossip and damage the girls' reputations.
. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pasic
delivered a letter to Tsar Nicholas in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the Grand Duchesses. Nicholas replied that he would allow his daughters to decide whom to marry, but he noticed that the Serbian prince Alexander often gazed upon Tatiana during a family dinner. Marriage negotiations ended due to the outbreak of World War I. Tatiana exchanged letters with Alexander during World War I and Alexander was distraught when he learned of her death.
The family was arrested during the Russian Revolution of 1917
and imprisoned first at Tsarskoye Selo and later at private residences in Tobolsk
and Yekaterinburg
, Siberia
. The drastic change in circumstances and the uncertainty of captivity took its toll on Tatiana as well as on the rest of her family. "She pines
without work," wrote her fellow nurse Valentina Chebotareva after receiving a letter from Tatiana on 16 April 1917. "It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not to go to the change of bandages!" Tatiana wrote Chebotareva. Tatiana, apparently trying to advocate for her mother, asked her friend Margarita Khitrovo in a letter on 8 May 1917 why their fellow nurses did not write to Tsarina Alexandra directly. Chebotareva wrote in her journal that, while she pitied the family, she could not write directly to the Tsarina because she blamed her for the Revolution. "If anyone wishes to write us, let them write directly," Tatiana wrote to "my dear dove" Chebotareva on 9 December 1917, after expressing concern for fellow nurses and a patient they had once treated together. Chebotareva's son, Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, noted the grand duchess's "firm, energetic handwriting" and how the letter "reflected the nature which endeared her so much to my mother."
Tatiana's English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, recalled that Tatiana had grown razor thin in captivity and seemed "haughtier" and more inscrutable to him than ever. In April 1918 the Bolsheviks moved Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria to Yekaterinburg. The remaining children remained behind in Tobolsk because Alexei, who had suffered another attack of haemophilia, could not be moved. It was Tatiana who persuaded her mother to "stop tormenting herself" and make a decision to go with her father and leave Alexei behind. Alexandra decided that level-headed Tatiana must be left behind to manage the household and look after Alexei.
During the month of separation from their parents and sister, Tatiana, Olga, Anastasia, and ladies in waiting busied themselves sewing precious stones and jewelry into their clothing, hoping to hide them from their captors, since Alexandra had written she, Nicholas and Maria had been heavily searched upon arrival in Ekaterinburg, and items confiscated. A letter from Demidova
to Tegleva gave the instructions on how to deal with the 'medicines', a predetermined code name for the jewels. The concealments were successful, as the Bolsheviks were never aware of the jewels in the clothes until after the executions.
Pierre Gilliard later recalled his last sight of the imperial children at Yekaterinburg. "The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out, but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..."
, the family was forbidden from fraternizing with the guards and the rules of their confinement became more strict. Tatiana, still the family leader, was often sent by her parents to question the guards about rules or what would happen next to the family. She also spent a great deal of time sitting with her mother and ill brother, reading to her mother or playing games to occupy the time. At the Ipatiev House, Tatiana and her sisters were required to do their own laundry and make bread. Her nursing skills were called upon at the end of June 1918 when she gave an injection of morphine
to Dr. Eugene Botkin
to ease his kidney pain.
On 14 July 1918, local priests at Yekaterinburg conducted a private church service for the family and reported that Tatiana and her family, contrary to custom, fell on their knees during the prayer
for the dead. The final entry in Tatiana's final notebook at Yekaterinburg was a saying she had copied from the words of a well-known Russian Orthodox holy man, Father Ioann of Kronstadt
: "Your grief is indescribable, the Savior's grief in the Gardens of Gethsemane
for the world's sins is immeasurable, join your grief to his, in it you will find consolation." The following day, on July 15, Tatiana and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked with one another and moved the beds in their room so visiting cleaning women could scrub the floor. They got down on their hands and knees to help the women and whispered to them when the guards weren't looking. All four young women wore long black skirts and white silk blouses, the same clothing they had worn the previous day. Their short hair was "tumbled and disorderly." They told the women how much they enjoyed physical exertion and wished there was more of it for them to do in the Ipatiev House. On the afternoon of 16 July 1918, the last full day of her life, Tatiana sat with her mother and read from the Biblical Books of Amos
and Obadiah
, Alexandra noted in her diary. Later, mother and daughter sat and just talked. As the family was eating dinner that night, Yakov Yurovsky
, the head of the detachment, came in and announced that the family's kitchen boy and Alexei's playmate, 14-year-old Leonid Sednev, must gather his things and go to a family member. The boy had actually been sent to a hotel across the street because the guards did not want to kill him along with the rest of the Romanov party. The family, unaware of the plan to kill them, was upset and unsettled by Sednev's absence. Tatiana went that evening to Yurovsky's office, for what was to be the last time, to ask for the return of the kitchen boy who kept Alexei amused during the long hours of captivity. Yurovsky placated her by telling her the boy would return soon, but the family was unconvinced.
Late that night, on the night of July 16, the family was awakened and told to come down to the lower level of the house because there was unrest in the town at large and they would have to be moved for their own safety. The family emerged from their rooms carrying pillows, bags, and other items to make Alexandra and Alexei comfortable. The family paused and crossed themselves when they saw the stuffed
mother bear
and cubs that stood on the landing, perhaps as a sign of respect for the dead. Nicholas told the servants and family "Well, we're going to get out of this place." They asked questions of the guards but did not appear to suspect they were going to be killed. Yurovsky, who had been a professional photographer, directed the family to take different positions as a photographer might. Alexandra, who had requested chairs for herself and Alexei, sat to her son's left. The Tsar stood behind Alexei, Dr. Botkin stood to the Tsar's right, Tatiana and her sisters stood behind Alexandra along with the servants. They were left for approximately half an hour while further preparations were made. The group said little during this time, but Alexandra whispered to the girls in English, violating the guard's rules that they must speak in Russian. Yurovsky came in, ordered them to stand, and read the sentence of execution. Tatiana and her family had time only to utter a few incoherent sounds of shock or protest before the death squad under Yurovsky's command began shooting. It was the early hours of 17 July 1918.
The initial round of gunfire killed only the Tsar, the Empress and two male servants, and wounded Grand Duchess Maria, Dr Botkin and the Empress' maidservant, Demidova. At that point the gunmen had to leave the room because of smoke and toxic fumes from their guns and plaster dust their bullets had released from the walls. After allowing the haze to clear for several minutes, the gunmen returned. Dr Botkin was killed, and a gunman named Ermakov repeatedly tried to shoot Tsarevich Alexei, but failed because jewels sewn into the boy's clothes shielded him. Ermakov tried to stab Alexei with a bayonet but failed again, and finally Yurovsky fired two shots into the boy's head. Yurovsky and Ermakov approached Olga and Tatiana, who were crouched against the room's rear wall, clinging to each other and screaming for their mother. Ermakov stabbed both young women with his 8-inch bayonet, but had difficulty penetrating their torsos because of the jewels that had been sewn into their chemises. The sisters tried to stand, but Tatiana was killed instantly when Yurovsky shot her in the back of her head. A moment later, Olga too died when Ermakov shot her in the head.
Author Michael Occleshaw made the claim in his 1995 book The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor that Tatiana might have been rescued and transported to England, where she married a British officer and lived under the name Larissa Tudor. Occleshaw based this claim on studying the diaries of the British agent Richard Meinertzhagen
, who hinted at the successful liberation of a Grand Duchess, allegedly Tatiana. However, historians discount this claim. Survival stories persist because two bodies were missing from the mass grave found in the forest outside Yekaterinburg and exhumed in 1991. Those bodies were identified as Tsarevich Alexei and one of the four grand duchesses, generally thought by Russians to be Grand Duchess Maria and by Americans to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Most historians believe that all of the Romanovs, including Tatiana, were assassinated at Ekaterinburg.
On 23 August 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years, one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and their brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old at the time of the assassinations. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes.
Preliminary testing indicates a "high degree of probability" that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, Russian forensic scientists announced on 22 January 2008. The Yekaterinburg region's chief forensic expert Nikolai Nevolin indicated the results would be compared against those obtained by foreign experts. On 30 April 2008, Russian forensic scientists announced that DNA testing proves that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters. With this result, all of the Tsar's family are accounted for.
In 2000, Tatiana and her family were canonized
as passion bearer
s by the Russian Orthodox Church
. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs
.
The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral
in St. Petersburg on 17 July 1998, eighty years to the day after they were murdered.
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
Великая Княжна Татьяна Николаевна), (May 29 (O.S.)/June 10 (N.S.), 1897 – July 17, 1918), (after 1900, Tatiana's birthday was celebrated on June 11) was the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II
Nicholas II of Russia
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Prince of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church.Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until...
, the last monarch of Russia, and of Tsarina Alexandra
Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse
Alix of Hesse and by Rhine later Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova , was Empress consort of Russia as spouse of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of the Russian Empire...
. She was born at the Peterhof
Peterhof Palace
The Peterhof Palace in Russian, so German is transliterated as "Петергoф" Petergof into Russian) for "Peter's Court") is actually a series of palaces and gardens located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, laid out on the orders of Peter the Great. These Palaces and gardens are sometimes referred as the...
, Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
.
She was better known than her three sisters during her lifetime and headed Red Cross committees during World War I. Like her older sister Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia ; , November 16 after 1900 – July 17, 1918) was the eldest daughter of the last autocratic ruler of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II, and of Empress Alexandra of Russia....
, she nursed wounded soldiers in a military hospital from 1914 to 1917, until the family was arrested following the first Russian Revolution of 1917
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
.
Her murder by revolutionaries on 17 July 1918 resulted in her being named as a passion bearer
Passion bearer
In Orthodox Christianity, a passion bearer is a person who faces his or her death in a Christ-like manner. Unlike martyrs, passion-bearers are not explicitly killed for their faith, though they hold to that faith with piety and true love of God...
by the Russian Orthodox Church
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
. She was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia ; , November 16 after 1900 – July 17, 1918) was the eldest daughter of the last autocratic ruler of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II, and of Empress Alexandra of Russia....
and an elder sister of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna....
and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia was the third daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna...
, all of whom were falsely rumored to have survived the assassination of the Imperial Family. Dozens of imposters claimed to be surviving Romanovs. Author Michael Occleshaw speculated that a woman named Larissa Tudor
Larissa Tudor
Larissa Feodorovna Tudor was the wife of Owen Frederick Morton Tudor, an officer of 3rd Battalion of The King's Own Hussars. Following her death, it was rumoured that she was in truth Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, the second daughter of Nicholas II of Russia, and of Tsarina...
might have been Tatiana; however, all of the Romanovs, including Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, were murdered by the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
assassination squad.
Early life and characteristics
Grand Duchess Tatiana's siblings were Grand Duchesses OlgaGrand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia ; , November 16 after 1900 – July 17, 1918) was the eldest daughter of the last autocratic ruler of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II, and of Empress Alexandra of Russia....
, Maria, Anastasia
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna....
, and the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei of Russia. All of the children were close to one another and to their parents up until the end of their lives.
Tatiana was described as tall and slender, with dark auburn hair and dark blue-gray eyes, fine, chiseled features, and a refined, elegant bearing befitting the daughter of an Emperor. She was considered the most beautiful of the four grand duchesses by many courtiers. Of all her sisters, Tatiana most closely resembled their mother.
Tatiana's title is most precisely translated as "Grand Princess," meaning that Tatiana, as an "imperial highness", was higher in rank than other princesses in Europe, who were "royal highnesses." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title into English from Russian. However, her friends, family and the household servants generally called her by her first name and patronym, Tatiana Nikolaevna or by the Russian nicknames "Tanya," "Tatya," "Tatianochka," or "Tanushka."
Like the other Romanov children, Tatiana was raised with some austerity
Austerity
In economics, austerity is a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided. Austerity policies are often used by governments to reduce their deficit spending while sometimes coupled with increases in taxes to pay back creditors to...
. She and her sisters slept on camp beds without pillows, took cold baths in the morning, and were expected to keep themselves occupied with embroidery or knitting projects if they had a spare moment. Their work was given as gifts or sold at charity bazaars. According to one story, Tatiana, accustomed to being addressed only by her name and patronymic
Patronymic
A patronym, or patronymic, is a component of a personal name based on the name of one's father, grandfather or an even earlier male ancestor. A component of a name based on the name of one's mother or a female ancestor is a matronymic. Each is a means of conveying lineage.In many areas patronyms...
, was so disconcerted when she was addressed as "Your Imperial Highness" by lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden
Sophie Buxhoeveden
Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, also known as Sophia Karlovna Buxhoeveden , was a lady in waiting to Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. She was the author of three memoirs about the imperial family and about her own escape from Russia...
when she was heading a committee meeting that she kicked the woman under the table and hissed "Are you crazy to speak to me like that?"
Tatiana and her older sister, Olga, were known in the household as "The Big Pair." According to a 29 May 1897 diary entry written by her father's distant cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia
Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia
Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia was a grandson of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, and a poet and playwright of some renown...
, she was given the name "Tatiana" as an homage
Homage
Homage is a show or demonstration of respect or dedication to someone or something, sometimes by simple declaration but often by some more oblique reference, artistic or poetic....
to the heroine in Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...
. Her father liked the idea of having daughters named Olga and Tatiana, like the sisters in the famous poem. Like their two younger sisters, the two older girls shared a bedroom and were very close to one another from early childhood. In the spring of 1901, Olga had typhoid fever
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...
and was confined to the nursery for several weeks away from her younger sisters. When she began to recover, Tatiana was permitted to see her older sister for five minutes but didn't recognize her. When her governess, Margaretta Eagar
Margaretta Eagar
Margaretta Alexandra Eagar, also known as Margaret Eagar, , was a nanny for the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, known collectively as OTMA: The Grand Duchesses Olga ; Tatiana ; Maria ; and Anastasia Margaretta Alexandra Eagar, also known as Margaret Eagar, (August 12, 1863...
, told her after the visit that the sickly child she had been conversing so gently with was Olga, four-year-old Tatiana began to cry bitterly and protested that the pale, thin child couldn't be her adored older sister. Eagar had difficulty persuading Tatiana that Olga would recover. French tutor Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard was a Swiss academic, who was French language tutor to the five children of Tsar Nicholas II from 1905 to 1918. Years after the Imperial Family was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, Gilliard wrote a book Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, about his time with the family...
wrote that the two sisters were "passionately devoted to one another."
Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard was a Swiss academic, who was French language tutor to the five children of Tsar Nicholas II from 1905 to 1918. Years after the Imperial Family was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, Gilliard wrote a book Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, about his time with the family...
, "but Tatiana knew how to surround her with unwearying attentions and never gave way to her own capricious impulses." Alexandra wrote Nicholas on 13 March 1916 that Tatiana was the only one of their four daughters who "grasped it" when she explained her way of looking at things.
Gilliard wrote that Tatiana was reserved and "well balanced" but less open and spontaneous than Olga. She was also less talented than Olga, but worked harder and was more dedicated to seeing projects through to completion than her elder sister. Colonel Kobylinsky, the family's guard at Tsarskoye Selo and Tobolsk, felt Tatiana "had no liking for art. Maybe it would have been better for her had she been a man." Others felt Tatiana's artistic talents were better expressed in handiwork and in her talent for choosing attractive fashions and creating elegant hair styles. Her mother's friend Anna Vyrubova
Anna Vyrubova
Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova, née Taneyeva , was a lady-in-waiting, best friend and confidante to Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna.-Early life:...
later wrote that Tatiana had a great talent for making clothing, embroidery and crochet and that she dressed her mother's long hair as well as any professional hair stylist.
Relationship with Grigori Rasputin
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II....
, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by their mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the haemophilia
Haemophilia
Haemophilia is a group of hereditary genetic disorders that impair the body's ability to control blood clotting or coagulation, which is used to stop bleeding when a blood vessel is broken. Haemophilia A is the most common form of the disorder, present in about 1 in 5,000–10,000 male births...
gene like their mother. Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not hemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of hemophilia including a lower than normal blood clotting factor that can lead to heavy bleeding.
The Tsarina relied on the counsel of Grigori Rasputin
Grigori Rasputin
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a Russian Orthodox Christian and mystic who is perceived as having influenced the latter days of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their only son Alexei...
, a Russian peasant and wandering starets
Starets
A starets is an elder of a Russian Orthodox monastery who functions as venerated adviser and teacher. Elders or spiritual fathers are charismatic spiritual leaders whose wisdom stems from God as obtained from ascetic experience...
or "holy man," and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. Tatiana and her siblings were also taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to share confidences with him. In the autumn of 1907, Tatiana's aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II....
was escorted to the nursery by the Tsar to meet Rasputin. Tatiana and her sisters and brother were all wearing their long white nightgowns. The children appeared to be friendly with Rasputin and comfortable in his company. Rasputin's friendship with the children was also evident in some of the messages he sent to them. In February 1909, Rasputin sent the imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework." Eleven-year-old Tatiana wrote a letter asking Rasputin to visit her and telling him how hard it was to see her mother ill. "But you know because you know everything," she wrote.
Tyutcheva took her book to other members of the family. Nicholas's sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia was a daughter of Tsar Alexander III of Russia and the elder of Tsar Nicholas II two sisters. She married her cousin Grand Duke Alexander Mikailovich of Russia, with whom she had seven children....
was horrified by Tyutcheva's story. She wrote in her diary on 15 March 1910 that she couldn't understand the family's regard for Rasputin as "almost a saint" when she viewed him as only a "khlyst"
Khlysts
Khlysts or Khlysty was an underground sect from late 17th to early 20th century that split off the Russian Orthodox Church and belonged to the Spiritual Christians tendency.-Definition:...
Tyutcheva told Grand Duchess Xenia that the starets
Starets
A starets is an elder of a Russian Orthodox monastery who functions as venerated adviser and teacher. Elders or spiritual fathers are charismatic spiritual leaders whose wisdom stems from God as obtained from ascetic experience...
visited when Olga and Tatiana were getting ready for bed and sat there talking with them and "caressing" them. The girls hid his presence from their governess and were afraid to talk to her about Rasputin. Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, another nurse for the royal children, was at first a devotee of Rasputin, but later was disillusioned by him. She claimed that she was raped by Rasputin in the spring of 1910. The empress refused to believe her, Vishnyakova told investigators, and said everything Rasputin did was holy. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was told that Vishnyakova's claim had been immediately investigated, but "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard." Vishnyakova was dismissed from her post in 1913.
It was whispered in society that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses. Rasputin had released ardent, though completely innocent in nature, letters written by the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses to him. They circulated throughout society, fueling more rumors. Pornographic cartoons circulated that depicted Rasputin having relations with the empress, with her four daughters and Anna Vyrubova nude in the background. Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Despite the rumors, the imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until Rasputin was murdered in 1916. "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed," Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on 6 December 1916. Tatiana was rumored to have been present at Rasputin's murder on 17 December 1916, "disguised as a lieutenant of the Chevaliers-Gardes, so that she could revenge herself on Rasputin who had tried to violate her." It was also rumored that Rasputin was castrated in front of Tatiana, wrote Maurice Paléologue
Maurice Paléologue
Maurice Paléologue was a French diplomat, historian, and essayist.-Biography:Paléologue was born in Paris as the son of Alexandru Paleologu, a Wallachian Romanian revolutionary who had fled to France after attempting to assassinate Prince Gheorghe Bibescu during the 1848 Wallachian revolution;...
, the French ambassador to Russia, in his memoirs. Paléologue was skeptical at the time about the truth of the wild rumors and attributed them to the hatred of Rasputin held by people in St. Petersburg. In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that all four grand duchesses appeared "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death and sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms on the night they received the news. Mordvinov reported that the young women were in a gloomy mood and seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. Tatiana attended Rasputin's funeral on 21 December 1916, and Rasputin was buried with an icon
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
signed on its reverse side by Tatiana, her mother and sisters.
Tatiana later kept a notebook in which she recorded Rasputin's sayings: "Love is Light and it has no end. Love is great suffering. It cannot eat, it cannot sleep. It is mixed with sin in equal parts. And yet it is better to love. In love one can be mistaken, and through suffering he expiates for his mistakes. If love is strong—the lovers happy. Nature herself and the Lord give them happiness. One must ask the Lord that he teach to love the luminous, bright, so that love be not torment, but joy. Love pure, Love luminous is the Sun. The Sun makes us warm, and Love caresses. All is in Love, and even a bullet cannot strike Love down."
Tatiana, like her mother, was deeply religious and read her Bible frequently. She also studied theology and struggled with the meaning of "good and evil, sorrow and forgiveness, and man's destiny on earth." She decided that "One has to struggle much because the return for good is evil, and evil reigns." A.A. Mosolov, a court official, felt that Tatiana's reserved nature gave her a "difficult" character, but one with more spiritual depth than her sister Olga. Her English tutor, Sydney Gibbes
Charles Sydney Gibbes
Charles Sydney Gibbes was the English tutor of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia. Later in his life he became an Orthodox monk, adopting the name of Nicholas after Saint Nicholas The Passion Bearer. After his return to Britain he became a prominent figure in Orthodoxy in Britain...
, who later became a Russian Orthodox priest, disagreed and felt that religion for Tatiana was a duty rather than something she felt in her heart.
Young adulthood and World War I
Hussar
Hussar refers to a number of types of light cavalry which originated in Hungary in the 14th century, tracing its roots from Serbian medieval cavalry tradition, brought to Hungary in the course of the Serb migrations, which began in the late 14th century....
s and given the rank of honorary colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
. She and Olga, who was also given her own regiment, would go out and inspect the soldier
Soldier
A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary...
s regularly, an occasion they greatly enjoyed. When she was nearly fourteen, an ill Tatiana begged her mother to permit her to get out of bed in time to go to a review so she could watch a soldier she was infatuated with. "I would like so much to go the review of the second division as I am also the second daughter and Olga was at the first so now it is my turn," she wrote to Alexandra on 20 April 1911. "...Yes, Mama, and at the second division I will see whom I must see ... you know whom ..."
While she enjoyed the company of the soldiers she met, the young Tatiana also sometimes found their behavior shocking. A group of officers aboard the imperial yacht gave her older sister Olga a portrait of Michelangelo's
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
nude David
David (Michelangelo)
David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504, by the Italian artist Michelangelo. It is a marble statue of a standing male nude. The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favoured subject in the art of Florence...
, cut out from a newspaper, as a present for her name day
Name day
A name day is a tradition in many countries in Europe and Latin America that consists of celebrating the day of the year associated with one's given name....
on 11 July 1911. "Olga laughed at it long and hard," the indignant fourteen-year-old Tatiana wrote to her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II....
. "And not one of the officers wishes to confess that he has done it. Such swine, aren't they?" The fourteen year old found her distant cousin Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia's
Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia
Prince John Constantinovich of Russia , sometimes also known as Prince Ioann, Prince Ivan or Prince Johan, was the eldest son of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia by his wife Elisaveta Mavrikievna, née Princess Elisabeth of Saxe-Altenburg...
engagement to Helen of Serbia
Princess Helen of Serbia
Jelena Karađorđević or Princess Helen of Serbia was the daughter of King Peter I of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Zorka of Montenegro. She was the elder sister of George, Crown Prince of Serbia and Alexander I of Yugoslavia...
"touching" but found the thought of Helen kissing him hilarious. "How funny if they might have children, can (she) be kissing him?" Tatiana wrote Olga Alexandrovna on 14 July 1911. "What foul, fie!"
That fall, the fourteen-year-old Tatiana experienced her first brush with violence when she witnessed the assassination of the government minister Pyotr Stolypin
Pyotr Stolypin
Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin served as the leader of the 3rd DUMA—from 1906 to 1911. His tenure was marked by efforts to repress revolutionary groups, as well as for the institution of noteworthy agrarian reforms. Stolypin hoped, through his reforms, to stem peasant unrest by creating a class of...
during a performance at the Kiev Opera House. Tatiana and her older sister Olga had followed their father back to his opera box and witnessed the shooting. Her father later wrote to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria, on 10 September 1911, that the event had upset both girls. Tatiana sobbed and both of them had trouble sleeping that night.
A few years later, when World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
broke out, Tatiana became a Red Cross
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide which was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human...
nurse with her mother and Olga. They cared for wounded soldiers in a private hospital on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo is the town containing a former Russian residence of the imperial family and visiting nobility, located south from the center of St. Petersburg. It is now part of the town of Pushkin and of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.-History:In...
. According to Vyrubova, "Tatiana was almost as skillful and devoted as her mother, and complained only that on account of her youth she was spared some of the more trying cases." Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva
Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva
Valentina Ivanovna Chebotaryova recorded her impressions of work in a military hospital in Tsarskoye Selo, Russia during World War I in her journal...
, who worked with her at the hospital, described in her journal how she planned to boil silk while Tatiana was otherwise occupied, fearing that Tatiana would be too tired to help her. But Tatiana guessed what Chebotareva was doing. "Why can you breathe carbolic acid and I can't?" she asked Chebotareva and insisted on helping her with the work. Tatiana was strongly patriotic and apologized in an 29 October 1914 letter for saying something negative about the Germans in her mother's presence. She explained that she forgot her mother had been born in Germany because she thought of Alexandra as only Russian. The Tsarina responded that she did feel completely Russian and Tatiana had not hurt her feelings with her sharp words, but Alexandra was hurt by the actions of her former countrymen and by the gossip she heard about her own German connections.
On 15 August 1915, Tatiana wrote her mother another letter expressing her desire to help her bear the burdens brought on by the war: "I simply can't tell you how awfully sorry I am for you, my beloved ones. I am so sorry I can in no way help you or be useful. In such moments I am sorry I'm not a man." As Tatiana grew into adulthood, she undertook more public appearances than her sisters and headed committees. Vyrubova recalled that she became better known to the public than her three sisters because of her attention to duty and her ability to engage those she met. In their memoirs, both her mother's friend, Vyrubova, and lady in waiting Lili Dehn
Lili Dehn
Lili Dehn, or Lili von Dehn, born Yulia Alexandrovna Smolskaia, , was the wife of a Russian naval officer and a friend to Tsarina Alexandra....
recalled that Tatiana, the most social of the sisters, longed for friends her own age but her social life was restricted by her rank and her mother's distaste for society. She also had a more introspective side, known only to her closest friends and family. "With her, as with her mother, shyness and reserve were accounted as pride, but, once you knew her and had gained her affection, this reserve disappeared and the real Tatiana became apparent," Dehn recalled. "She was a poetical creature, always yearning for the ideal, and dreaming of great friendships which might be hers."
Chebotareva, who grew to love "sweet" Tatiana almost like a daughter, described how the shy grand duchess once reached out to hold her hand when Tatiana was nervous about walking in front of a large group of nurses. "I am so terribly embarrassed and frightened – I do not know whom I greeted and whom not," Tatiana told Chebotareva. Tatiana's informality also impressed Chebotareva's son, Gregory. Tatiana once called Chebotareva at her home on the telephone and spoke first to her sixteen-year-old son. Gregory was annoyed when the grand duchess referred to him by his diminutive name, "Grisha." Not realizing who she was, the affronted Gregory asked the grand duchess to identify herself and she replied, "Tatiana Nikolaevna." When he asked her again, still not believing he was talking to a Romanov, Tatiana again failed to claim the imperial title of Grand Duchess and replied that she was "Sister Romanova the Second."
On another occasion during the war, when the lady in waiting who usually picked them up from the hospital was detained and sent a carriage without an attendant, Tatiana and her sister Olga decided to go shopping for the first time. They ordered the carriage to stop near a group of shops and went into one of the stores, where they were unrecognized because of their nurses' uniforms. They came back out without buying anything when they realized they did not have money with them and wouldn't have known how to use it even if they did. The next day they asked Chebotareva how to use money.
Romances with soldiers
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, according to Peter de Malama.
Tatiana was also fond of a officer of a Georgian named Vladimir Kiknadze, whom she cared for when he was wounded in 1915 and again in 1916, according to the diary of Valentina Ivanovna Chebotareva, a nurse who worked with Tatiana during the war. Chebotareva described how Tatiana sometimes sat beside "Volodia" at the piano as he played a tune with one finger and talked to her in a low voice, wearing a mysterious expression on his face. Chebotareva also described how Tatiana and her sister Olga made excuses to come to the hospital to see Volodia. Chebotareva felt the flirtations between the grand duchesses and the wounded officers could cause gossip and damage the girls' reputations.
Negotiations for marriage
According to some sources, Serbian king Peter I wanted Tatiana as a bride for his younger son, Prince AlexanderAlexander I of Yugoslavia
Alexander I , also known as Alexander the Unifier was the first king of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as well as the last king of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes .-Childhood:...
. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pasic
Nikola Pašic
Nikola P. Pašić was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician and diplomat, the most important Serbian political figure for almost 40 years, leader of the People's Radical Party who, among other posts, was twice a mayor of Belgrade...
delivered a letter to Tsar Nicholas in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the Grand Duchesses. Nicholas replied that he would allow his daughters to decide whom to marry, but he noticed that the Serbian prince Alexander often gazed upon Tatiana during a family dinner. Marriage negotiations ended due to the outbreak of World War I. Tatiana exchanged letters with Alexander during World War I and Alexander was distraught when he learned of her death.
Captivity
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
and imprisoned first at Tsarskoye Selo and later at private residences in Tobolsk
Tobolsk
Tobolsk is a town in Tyumen Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers. It is a historic capital of Siberia. Population: -History:...
and Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg is a major city in the central part of Russia, the administrative center of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Situated on the eastern side of the Ural mountain range, it is the main industrial and cultural center of the Urals Federal District with a population of 1,350,136 , making it Russia's...
, Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
. The drastic change in circumstances and the uncertainty of captivity took its toll on Tatiana as well as on the rest of her family. "She pines
Boredom
Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is without any activity or is not interested in their surroundings. The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a...
without work," wrote her fellow nurse Valentina Chebotareva after receiving a letter from Tatiana on 16 April 1917. "It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not to go to the change of bandages!" Tatiana wrote Chebotareva. Tatiana, apparently trying to advocate for her mother, asked her friend Margarita Khitrovo in a letter on 8 May 1917 why their fellow nurses did not write to Tsarina Alexandra directly. Chebotareva wrote in her journal that, while she pitied the family, she could not write directly to the Tsarina because she blamed her for the Revolution. "If anyone wishes to write us, let them write directly," Tatiana wrote to "my dear dove" Chebotareva on 9 December 1917, after expressing concern for fellow nurses and a patient they had once treated together. Chebotareva's son, Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, noted the grand duchess's "firm, energetic handwriting" and how the letter "reflected the nature which endeared her so much to my mother."
Tatiana's English tutor, Sydney Gibbes, recalled that Tatiana had grown razor thin in captivity and seemed "haughtier" and more inscrutable to him than ever. In April 1918 the Bolsheviks moved Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria to Yekaterinburg. The remaining children remained behind in Tobolsk because Alexei, who had suffered another attack of haemophilia, could not be moved. It was Tatiana who persuaded her mother to "stop tormenting herself" and make a decision to go with her father and leave Alexei behind. Alexandra decided that level-headed Tatiana must be left behind to manage the household and look after Alexei.
During the month of separation from their parents and sister, Tatiana, Olga, Anastasia, and ladies in waiting busied themselves sewing precious stones and jewelry into their clothing, hoping to hide them from their captors, since Alexandra had written she, Nicholas and Maria had been heavily searched upon arrival in Ekaterinburg, and items confiscated. A letter from Demidova
Anna Demidova
Anna Stepanovna Demidova was a maid in the service of Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. She acquired posthumous fame because she was murdered alongside her employer in 1918....
to Tegleva gave the instructions on how to deal with the 'medicines', a predetermined code name for the jewels. The concealments were successful, as the Bolsheviks were never aware of the jewels in the clothes until after the executions.
Pierre Gilliard later recalled his last sight of the imperial children at Yekaterinburg. "The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out, but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..."
Death
At Yekaterinburg, Tatiana occasionally joined her younger sisters in chatting with some of the guards over tea, asking them questions about their families and talking about her hopes for a new life in England when they were released. On one occasion one of the guards forgot himself and told the grand duchesses an off-color joke. The shocked Tatiana ran from the room, "pale as death," and her younger sister Maria scolded the guards for their bad language. She "would be pleasant to the guards if she thought they were behaving in an acceptable and decorous manner," recalled another of the guards in his memoirs. Later, when a new commander was placed in charge of the Ipatiev HouseIpatiev House
Ipatiev House was a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg where the former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his family and members of his household were executed following the Bolshevik Revolution...
, the family was forbidden from fraternizing with the guards and the rules of their confinement became more strict. Tatiana, still the family leader, was often sent by her parents to question the guards about rules or what would happen next to the family. She also spent a great deal of time sitting with her mother and ill brother, reading to her mother or playing games to occupy the time. At the Ipatiev House, Tatiana and her sisters were required to do their own laundry and make bread. Her nursing skills were called upon at the end of June 1918 when she gave an injection of morphine
Morphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
to Dr. Eugene Botkin
Eugene Botkin
Yevgeny Sergeyevich Botkin was the court physician for Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and, while in exile with the family, sometimes treated the hemophilia-related complications of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia.Botkin went into exile with the Romanovs following the Russian...
to ease his kidney pain.
Prayer
Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
for the dead. The final entry in Tatiana's final notebook at Yekaterinburg was a saying she had copied from the words of a well-known Russian Orthodox holy man, Father Ioann of Kronstadt
John of Kronstadt
Saint John of Kronstadt was a Russian Orthodox archpriest and member of the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was a striking and somewhat unconventional figure in his personality but was deeply pious and immensely energetic...
: "Your grief is indescribable, the Savior's grief in the Gardens of Gethsemane
Gethsemane
Gethsemane is a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem most famous as the place where, according to Biblical texts, Jesus and his disciples are said to have prayed the night before Jesus' crucifixion.- Etymology :...
for the world's sins is immeasurable, join your grief to his, in it you will find consolation." The following day, on July 15, Tatiana and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked with one another and moved the beds in their room so visiting cleaning women could scrub the floor. They got down on their hands and knees to help the women and whispered to them when the guards weren't looking. All four young women wore long black skirts and white silk blouses, the same clothing they had worn the previous day. Their short hair was "tumbled and disorderly." They told the women how much they enjoyed physical exertion and wished there was more of it for them to do in the Ipatiev House. On the afternoon of 16 July 1918, the last full day of her life, Tatiana sat with her mother and read from the Biblical Books of Amos
Book of Amos
The Book of Amos is a prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Amos, an older contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah, was active c. 750 BCE during the reign of Jeroboam II, making the Book of Amos the first biblical prophetic book written. Amos lived in the kingdom of Judah...
and Obadiah
Book of Obadiah
The canonical Book of Obadiah is an oracle concerning the divine judgment of Edom and the restoration of Israel. The text consists of a single chapter, divided into 21 verses, making it the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible....
, Alexandra noted in her diary. Later, mother and daughter sat and just talked. As the family was eating dinner that night, Yakov Yurovsky
Yakov Yurovsky
Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky was an Old Bolshevik best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family in 1918, during the Russian Civil War.- Early life :...
, the head of the detachment, came in and announced that the family's kitchen boy and Alexei's playmate, 14-year-old Leonid Sednev, must gather his things and go to a family member. The boy had actually been sent to a hotel across the street because the guards did not want to kill him along with the rest of the Romanov party. The family, unaware of the plan to kill them, was upset and unsettled by Sednev's absence. Tatiana went that evening to Yurovsky's office, for what was to be the last time, to ask for the return of the kitchen boy who kept Alexei amused during the long hours of captivity. Yurovsky placated her by telling her the boy would return soon, but the family was unconvinced.
Late that night, on the night of July 16, the family was awakened and told to come down to the lower level of the house because there was unrest in the town at large and they would have to be moved for their own safety. The family emerged from their rooms carrying pillows, bags, and other items to make Alexandra and Alexei comfortable. The family paused and crossed themselves when they saw the stuffed
Taxidermy
Taxidermy is the act of mounting or reproducing dead animals for display or for other sources of study. Taxidermy can be done on all vertebrate species of animals, including mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians...
mother bear
Bear
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...
and cubs that stood on the landing, perhaps as a sign of respect for the dead. Nicholas told the servants and family "Well, we're going to get out of this place." They asked questions of the guards but did not appear to suspect they were going to be killed. Yurovsky, who had been a professional photographer, directed the family to take different positions as a photographer might. Alexandra, who had requested chairs for herself and Alexei, sat to her son's left. The Tsar stood behind Alexei, Dr. Botkin stood to the Tsar's right, Tatiana and her sisters stood behind Alexandra along with the servants. They were left for approximately half an hour while further preparations were made. The group said little during this time, but Alexandra whispered to the girls in English, violating the guard's rules that they must speak in Russian. Yurovsky came in, ordered them to stand, and read the sentence of execution. Tatiana and her family had time only to utter a few incoherent sounds of shock or protest before the death squad under Yurovsky's command began shooting. It was the early hours of 17 July 1918.
The initial round of gunfire killed only the Tsar, the Empress and two male servants, and wounded Grand Duchess Maria, Dr Botkin and the Empress' maidservant, Demidova. At that point the gunmen had to leave the room because of smoke and toxic fumes from their guns and plaster dust their bullets had released from the walls. After allowing the haze to clear for several minutes, the gunmen returned. Dr Botkin was killed, and a gunman named Ermakov repeatedly tried to shoot Tsarevich Alexei, but failed because jewels sewn into the boy's clothes shielded him. Ermakov tried to stab Alexei with a bayonet but failed again, and finally Yurovsky fired two shots into the boy's head. Yurovsky and Ermakov approached Olga and Tatiana, who were crouched against the room's rear wall, clinging to each other and screaming for their mother. Ermakov stabbed both young women with his 8-inch bayonet, but had difficulty penetrating their torsos because of the jewels that had been sewn into their chemises. The sisters tried to stand, but Tatiana was killed instantly when Yurovsky shot her in the back of her head. A moment later, Olga too died when Ermakov shot her in the head.
Author Michael Occleshaw made the claim in his 1995 book The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor that Tatiana might have been rescued and transported to England, where she married a British officer and lived under the name Larissa Tudor. Occleshaw based this claim on studying the diaries of the British agent Richard Meinertzhagen
Richard Meinertzhagen
Colonel Richard Henry Meinertzhagen CBE DSO was a British soldier, intelligence officer and ornithologist.- Background and youth :Meinertzhagen was born into a socially connected, wealthy British family...
, who hinted at the successful liberation of a Grand Duchess, allegedly Tatiana. However, historians discount this claim. Survival stories persist because two bodies were missing from the mass grave found in the forest outside Yekaterinburg and exhumed in 1991. Those bodies were identified as Tsarevich Alexei and one of the four grand duchesses, generally thought by Russians to be Grand Duchess Maria and by Americans to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Most historians believe that all of the Romanovs, including Tatiana, were assassinated at Ekaterinburg.
On 23 August 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years, one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and their brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old at the time of the assassinations. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes.
Preliminary testing indicates a "high degree of probability" that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, Russian forensic scientists announced on 22 January 2008. The Yekaterinburg region's chief forensic expert Nikolai Nevolin indicated the results would be compared against those obtained by foreign experts. On 30 April 2008, Russian forensic scientists announced that DNA testing proves that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters. With this result, all of the Tsar's family are accounted for.
Sainthood
-
- For more information, see Romanov sainthoodRomanov sainthoodTsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei are saints of the Orthodox Church...
- For more information, see Romanov sainthood
In 2000, Tatiana and her family were canonized
Canonization
Canonization is the act by which a Christian church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints. Originally, individuals were recognized as saints without any formal process...
as passion bearer
Passion bearer
In Orthodox Christianity, a passion bearer is a person who faces his or her death in a Christ-like manner. Unlike martyrs, passion-bearers are not explicitly killed for their faith, though they hold to that faith with piety and true love of God...
s by the Russian Orthodox Church
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...
.
The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral
Peter and Paul Cathedral
The Peter and Paul Cathedral is a Russian Orthodox cathedral located inside the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia. It is the first and oldest landmark in St. Petersburg, built between 1712 and 1733 on Zayachy Island along the Neva River. Both the cathedral and the fortress were...
in St. Petersburg on 17 July 1998, eighty years to the day after they were murdered.
Ancestry
Books
- Bokhanov, Alexander and Dr. Knodt, Manfred and Oustimenko, Vladimir and Peregudova, Zinaida and Tyutyunnik, Lyubov; Xenofontova, Lyudmila (translator); The Romanovs: Love, Power, and Tragedy. Leppi Publications, 1993. ISBN 0-9521644-0-X
- Christopher, Peter, Kurth, Peter, and Radzinsky, Edvard. Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra ISBN 0316507873
- Dehn, Lili. The Real Tsaritsa. 1922.
- De Malama, Peter. The Romanovs: The Forgotten Romance in Royalty Digest. December 2004, p. 184.
- Eagar, Margaret. Six Years at the Russian Court, 1906.
- Fuhrmann, Joseph T. The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Nicholas and Alexandra: April 1914 – March 1917. Greenwood Press, 1999.
- Gilliard, Pierre. Thirteen Years at the Russian Court. ISBN 0-4050-3029-0
- King, Greg and Wilson, Penny. The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003. ISBN 0-4712-0768-3
- Kurth, Peter, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, Back Bay Books, 1983, ISBN 0-316-50717-2
- Livadia.org
- Mager, Hugo. Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-7867-0678-3
- Massie, Robert K. Nicholas and Alexandra. 1967. ISBN 0-5754-0006-4
- Massie, Robert K. The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. 1995. ISBN 0-6794-3572-7
- Maylunas, Andrei and Mironenko, Sergei, Galy (editors); Darya (translator). A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story. 1997, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-48673-1.
- Occleshaw, Michael, The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor, Orion, 1993, ISBN 1855925184
- Rappaport, HelenHelen RappaportHelen Rappaport is a British historian, author, and former actress. As a historian, she specialises in the Victorian era and revolutionary Russia.-Biography:...
. The Last Days of the Romanovs. 2008. St. Martin's Griffin. 2008. ISBN 978-0-312-60347-2. - Radzinsky, Edvard. The Rasputin File. Doubleday. 2000, ISBN 0-385-48909-9
- Shevchenko, Maxim. "The Glorification of the Royal Family," a 31 May 2000 article in the Nezavisemaya Gazeta.
- Tschebotarioff, Gregory P., Russia: My Native Land: A U.S. engineer reminisces and looks at the present, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, ASIN B00005XTZJ
- Vorres, Ian. The Last Grand Duchess. 1965. ISBN 1-5526-3302-0
- Vyrubova, Anna. Memories of the Russian Court.
- Zeepvat, Charlotte. The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album. 2004. ISBN 0-7509-3049-7
External links
- livadia.org
- alexanderpalace.org
- FrozenTears.org A media library of the last Imperial Family.
- Find-A-Grave
- The Glorification of the Royal Family
- Hemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency)