The World Turned Upside Down Russia's Lost Princesses


The World Turned Upside Down

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On the 17th of July, 1918,

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these four girls in white dresses were brutally murdered

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in the bloody climax to the Russian Revolution.

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The girls' names may not be remembered, but their alluring

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mix of beauty and innocence holds an enduring fascination -

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they are emblems of a world that vanished forever in the Revolution.

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In Russia today, the Tsar's four daughters -

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Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia -

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have literally become icons and are worshipped as holy martyrs.

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The second programme in this two-part series will

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tell their story in their own words.

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'Darling, I am writing to you in semi-darkness. We have not dared to

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'draw the curtains, the whitewashed windows are too horrible.'

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And it will reveal the real girls behind the saintly images.

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By 1914, the two eldest Romanov sisters had grown from

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little girls into young women.

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Olga was now 18 and Tatiana 16, and the time had come for them

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to fulfil the ultimate duty of all royal princesses

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and be married off to eligible princes.

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With their winning combination of blue blood and beauty,

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it seemed that the world would be their oyster.

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I think there's an inherent similarity with Diana,

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being the most photographed princesses of their time, the most

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marriageable, attractive, desirable young royal princesses in Europe.

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These fairy-tale princesses seemed to lead a charmed life.

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But behind the happy family photographs,

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their childhood was far from idyllic.

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Although Nicholas was a devoted and indulgent father,

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he was an ineffectual Tsar and as opposition to his rule had mounted,

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his family had been forced to retreat to the safety and security

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of their imperial palaces.

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The girls' freedom was further constrained by their mother

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Alexandra, who maintained an iron-grip over their young

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lives and raised her daughters in the shadow of their little brother

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Alexei, who had the life-threatening condition haemophilia.

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At home in the Alexander Palace, the girls were as much

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prisoners as princesses - they rarely went out,

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had few friends, seldom saw their extended family

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and knew nothing of the real world beyond the palace gates.

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It's extraordinary that you have these four sisters growing up,

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now entering adolescence and their mother's still

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looking upon them as "girlies", as she called them.

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There's this constant infantilisation of her daughters,

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as though she couldn't accept that they were growing up,

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they needed to be out in the wide world.

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It's as though she wanted to keep them locked away from that.

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It was almost a convent-like existence.

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So, these girls, even as they were growing up,

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with Olga at 18, and Tatiana at 16,

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they were still much younger than their years.

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Because there was no outside contact.

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There was no real outside experience.

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When it came to the opposite sex, the girls had always been most

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interested in the officers of the imperial entourage and

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the sailors on their royal yacht - the Standart -

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who they had known since childhood.

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These could never be more than teenage crushes - to marry

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so far beneath themselves would have been quite unthinkable.

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But when the search for suitable husbands began in earnest,

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it soon became clear that Olga and Tatiana were ill-prepared to

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mix with the grand dukes or princes who were their social equals.

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You get this extraordinary sight of the Tsar escorting his two

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eldest daughters to these swish balls during the centenary year

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and in 1914, and they don't know anybody.

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And they gravitate towards the officers from the Standart or the

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imperial entourage and this caused an awful lot of disapproval

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in St Petersburg society. They seemed such ingenues,

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so lacking in social accomplishments, so innocent, so childish, really.

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In the summer of 1914, whilst most of Europe was preoccupied with

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thoughts of the impending war,

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the four sisters were more concerned with matters of the heart.

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The Tsar and Tsarina thought they might have found a royal match

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for Olga in Prince Carol, the heir to the Romanian throne,

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but their eldest daughter would take some convincing.

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Olga was really rather horrified that Carol of Romania had

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been suggested as a prospective bridegroom

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because he had quite a reputation as a ladies' man, he wasn't

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really ideal material so far as Olga was concerned and she was actually

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quite definite that she wasn't having anything to do with it.

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In June 1914, the Romanov family paid a visit to their Romanian

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counterparts - this was intended to be an opportunity

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for the dubious Carol to win over the reluctant Olga.

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As the families posed for an official photograph,

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Olga sat at the far right-hand side of frame,

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kept her distance from Carol at the back

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and paid far more attention to the baby on her knee than to him.

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And just in case he hadn't got the message, she and her sisters

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had concocted a cunning plan to ward off any Romanian advances.

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They had all spent time lying in the sun before going across to

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Romania and were quite sunburnt.

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And it was something that the Romanians immediately noticed

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with horror, royal princesses do not have a sunburn

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and look like sunburnt gypsies.

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And they were very disapproving of the fact, and in a way,

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the Romanov girls were triumphant because this was a deliberate

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conspiracy on their part that none of them should be attractive to

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Prince Carol and none of them should have to marry him and leave home.

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The sisters might not have felt there was much urgency to the

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hunt for a husband, but within a few weeks of their return home, any

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thought of marriage or of leaving Russia had become a distant dream.

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On the 19th of July, the German Kaiser declared war on Russia.

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The next day, Nicholas and Alexandra appeared on the balcony

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of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to be met by a vast crowd

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singing God Save The Tsar.

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But such patriotic fervour was sorely

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tested by the scale of the bloodshed.

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In the first five days of fighting alone,

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70,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded.

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To deal with the unprecedented scale of casualties,

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thousands of European women, from all walks of life,

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volunteered as Red Cross nurses and the Tsarina

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and her two eldest daughters eagerly joined their ranks.

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This wasn't a matter of just donning an apron

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and mopping a fevered brow and holding hands by the bedside,

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this was real hands-on nursing, and everything it involved.

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Seeing people with horrible mutilations and wounds.

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Within a couple of weeks, the girls were observing amputations,

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and it was throwing them in absolutely at the deep end.

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These were very protected girls,

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who'd never seen anything of human suffering, really.

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The Sisters Romanova - as they were known -

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worked on a special ward of the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo,

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caring for wounded officers.

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Although it was only a short drive from the Alexander Palace,

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for the girls the hospital was another world.

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It did give them a taste of what normal people were like, really.

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In fact, one day they sent the car for them,

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without the lady-in-waiting present.

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And the girls got in the car and they decided,

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instead of going straight back to the palace, they would go shopping.

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They went into a shop

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and then realised they didn't actually know how to buy anything.

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And the next day they came back

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and asked one of the nursing sisters, "How do we go shopping?"

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And she had to explain to them.

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The irony of the war years is that it finally brought the girls

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the kind of social contact that they had been craving,

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albeit often with wounded officers as people who were suffering

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and recovering from injury.

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But they were so curious to take advantage of these

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opportunities of talking to men from the outside, you know,

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ordinary officers and soldiers, ask them about the world outside,

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the "outside life", as they called it, was something that fascinated

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all five children.

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Even Alexei constantly interrogated people

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when he visited at the hospital about the outside life.

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There was this world that they just didn't know about.

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If the war expanded the Romanovs' extremely narrow horizons,

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then it also tested the bonds of an incredibly close-knit family.

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Nicholas was often away at the front

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and Alexandra found the agony of separation hard to bear.

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The couple wrote to each other incessantly, sometimes several

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times a day and their letters reveal that 20 years of marriage

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had not dimmed their devotion to - and desire for - each other.

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'I press you passionately to my heart and lower.

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'Forgive me.'

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'Lady thanks you for the caress which she returns with great love!'

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She's very anxious that when he comes back for a... for a week

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or two that her period shouldn't be there to get in the way

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of their sexual activity.

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But she is very coy about it so she uses words like Madame Becker,

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which appears to have been a euphemism for the period,

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or the engineer mechanic, so she'll say,

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"Well, I do hope the engineer mechanic isn't going to be here

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"when you're back."

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And, "Madame Becker was here but she's just gone."

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Of course she'll also tell him about the girls.

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She tells more than you might expect a mother to tell a father actually,

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that the girls have got Madame Becker and that's why Olga's in a bad mood.

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Alexandra's letters were driven not just by a physical longing,

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but by a deep-rooted fear that at this critical moment

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in their country's history, the man to whom she was

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so passionately devoted was simply not up to the job of being Tsar.

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It's been said about Nicholas that he was essentially a pillow, that he

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sort of bore the impression of the last person that sat upon him.

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That is a source of constant concern and frustration for Alexandra.

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She loves Nicholas dearly but she sees him as a weak man.

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And if you read their correspondence,

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this comes through very clear.

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She's constantly telling him "Be strong, be strong,

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"don't be talked out of something, you need to stand up,

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"the Russians need a strong man."

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And she's forever repeating these lines over and over

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in their correspondence.

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"Be more autocratic than Peter the Great, bang your fists,

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"they just need you to bang your fist,

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"the Russians like people who bang their fists and give them a smack."

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I mean, she does talk again in a rather infantilising way,

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"Give them a smack and they'll behave themselves."

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He must have dreaded these letters arriving,

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even though he claims to be really pleased to hear from her because

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yes, she got bossier and bossier.

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And if words alone weren't enough,

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Alexandra had a secret weapon in her arsenal -

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the family's beloved spiritual advisor Grigori Rasputin.

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Rasputin's remarkable abilities to ease their son Alexei's suffering

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ensured that he was the one outsider in whom

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the imperial couple had complete faith.

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She's always sending things, trinkets and little talismans

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and things from Rasputin to Nicholas.

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There's a time when she says, you know,

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"Remember you have his comb, you have the comb from our friend.

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"Before your meeting with the ministers, with the top brass,

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"make sure you use it, this will give you the strength you need to

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"hold firm and stand your ground."

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And she's always doing this, she's sending him

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bits of fruit from Rasputin to eat. It's utterly bizarre.

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A year into the war, Rasputin wasn't just dispensing lucky charms

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but highly controversial political advice.

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By the summer of 1915, the Russian army was in retreat,

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almost a million-and-a-half Russians had been killed or wounded

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in the fighting, and troop morale was dwindling fast.

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Rasputin convinced Alexandra that the Tsar must sack his uncle -

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the highly experienced Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich -

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as Commander in Chief and take charge of the army himself.

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In fact, when the Tsar told his mother, the Dowager,

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that he was thinking of getting rid of Nikolasha, she said,

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"Everyone will think this is Rasputin's bidding."

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And she writes in her diary, "And he blushed."

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With the Tsar commanding the army, he left the Tsarina at the

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Alexander Palace, with instructions to oversee

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the running of the government - she was only too happy to oblige.

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Many now believed that this was the true seat of imperial power

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and they had their suspicions about how much influence

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the Tsarina's favourite was wielding.

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Once Nicholas leaves and heads to the front permanently,

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everyone is then focused on what Alexandra is doing in the palace.

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And the fact that Rasputin remains in Petrograd leads to all sorts

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of rumour and gossip and salacious talk that the two of them are,

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in a sense, pulling all the strings,

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and these are the true powers behind the throne.

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And they are the ones that will bring ruin to the country.

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As the atmosphere at home grew increasingly claustrophobic,

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the Romanov sisters found a welcome escape in their war work.

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Hundreds of their private photographs reveal how close

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Olga and Tatiana became to their favourite patients.

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The hospital increasingly became like a second home for all of them.

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And as the years went on and more and more wounded were arriving,

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they spent longer and longer days,

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often till nearly midnight at the hospital,

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changing the dressings, making beds,

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helping boil the silk for sewing stitches, and preparing swabs.

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They had free time in the afternoons, after they went home for lunch,

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to go back to the hospital and sit with their favourites

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and look at photographs, take endless photographs of each other.

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And such became this narrow but, in a way, strangely happy life

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they had that even when they went home at the end of the day,

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they often still telephoned back

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to have one last chat with their favourites.

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Beneath their bandages, many of the wounded were dashing young men.

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And for teenage girls so starved of male company,

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they proved irresistible.

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It's rather amusing when you look at all the many photographs

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taken of Olga and Tatiana at the hospital during the war years,

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with their favourite officers, their favourite wounded.

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But most of these young men were rather dark, swarthy, Caucasian types

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with big twirly moustaches, men from Armenia or Georgia, with

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a certain kind of exoticness, some of them even, I think, were Muslims.

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They seemed to fall for those kind of dark, enigmatic,

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swashbuckling looks much more than your rather austere

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northern European Russian types.

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In May 1915, a wounded Georgian officer, Dmitri Shakh-Bagov,

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was admitted to the hospital.

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He was a sweet and bashful character and Olga

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and he were soon smitten with each other.

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But love had scarcely had the chance to blossom when disaster struck

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and Mitya recovered and was sent back to the front.

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It's kind of an irony really that he had to get seriously wounded

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again for Olga to see him later in the year.

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When Mitya Shakh-Bagov was brought back, quite badly wounded a

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second time, her world lit up again, and she was happy and she was

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smiling and she found every possible excuse to be at the hospital.

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And this was the sum of her life, her world.

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Olga filled her diary with references to her beloved Mitya.

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'13th August - Cleaned the instruments with Mitya,

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'the darling, sitting next to me.

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'29th August - Went to vespers, Mitya the darling also came.

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'Such absolute joy. Thank you, God.

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'7th October - Sat for a long time with Mitya.'

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But her position meant that there was no hope this passionate affair

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could ever be consummated.

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I think that if Olga had had her wish,

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to marry and live quietly in the country,

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she would have wanted to marry a man just like Mitya. An ordinary man.

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Rather than a prince, an ordinary Russian soldier.

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It's rather sad that the one thing Olga really wanted to do

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was hardly likely to happen.

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She was an Imperial Grand Duchess,

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she was going to have to make a grand marriage.

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Olga's thwarted romances only exacerbated

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the bouts of depression she suffered during the war, which were so severe

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that she was treated with the period cure-all of arsenic injections.

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I think part of the cause of this might have been her

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relationship with Mitya.

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The fact that she was besotted by this chap.

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And that she knew that really and truly, it wasn't

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going to go anywhere.

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Dmitri finally left the hospital at the beginning of 1916

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and Olga never saw him again,

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but to the very end of her life she carried a flame for him.

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She's clutching at straws for every shred of news about Mitya.

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How he is. And towards the end of the year,

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is thrilled to meet his mother and says, "Oh, it's wonderful,

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"I have a little piece of him. I've met his mother."

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And as late as the beginning of 1917,

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almost one of her last diary entries, she's recording his birthday,

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and when he first was admitted to the hospital.

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He did find a very special place in her heart, I think.

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Behind the scenes, private passions might get the better of

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the Sisters Romanova, but in public the Tsarina and her daughters'

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war work was meant to serve an important propaganda purpose,

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although it didn't always create quite the right impression.

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There was a need for the imperial family to put out a good message,

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good online message, you know.

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And there was a photo opportunity done

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for the Empress and her daughters.

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The basement of the Winter Palace had been turned, part of it, into a

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military hospital and the Empress had worked there as a volunteer.

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And she and her daughters were photographed in nurses' outfits.

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All sounds fine except that they hadn't taken into account

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that by this time, a British consignment of nurses outfits

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delivered to St Petersburg - Petrograd as it was then -

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had fallen into the hands of the city's prostitutes

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and the whole image of the nurse had been transformed.

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So this attempt to put out a good PR message backfired very badly.

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But it was the family's close association with

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a man of Rasputin's notorious proclivities that caused

0:21:170:21:21

by far the greatest damage to their reputation.

0:21:210:21:24

Amid the isolation of the Alexander Palace,

0:21:240:21:28

the Tsarina seemed oblivious to rumours,

0:21:280:21:31

which made a mockery of her much-vaunted morality.

0:21:310:21:34

The Empress really becomes the key political figure in the capital

0:21:340:21:38

and she loves this role.

0:21:380:21:40

She likes the fact that...she boasts in her diary that she's the first

0:21:400:21:44

woman in Russia to receive ministers since Katherine the Great.

0:21:440:21:47

And maybe she sees herself playing that sort of role.

0:21:470:21:51

But in reality, she's much more playing out the role

0:21:510:21:55

of Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution.

0:21:550:21:59

Completely unpopular, with all sorts of rumours

0:21:590:22:03

circulating around society of her sexual shenanigans with Rasputin.

0:22:030:22:09

All of this was very damaging because these ideas of sexual corruption

0:22:090:22:14

in the court became a sort of metaphor

0:22:140:22:17

for the political corruption of the monarchy as a whole.

0:22:170:22:19

But Alexandra had such faith in Rasputin that she was willing

0:22:190:22:24

to turn a blind eye to reports of his increasingly embarrassing

0:22:240:22:27

sexual misdemeanours.

0:22:270:22:30

Rasputin had a bad incident when he was in Moscow,

0:22:300:22:33

where he sort of exposed himself in a nightclub.

0:22:330:22:37

And he boasted that he was sleeping with the Tsarina.

0:22:370:22:39

When the Tsarina heard about this particular incident,

0:22:390:22:43

and other ones, she thought that there was a sort of double

0:22:430:22:46

dressing up as Rasputin, pretending to be him.

0:22:460:22:50

Just to discredit him.

0:22:500:22:52

Because he was so close to the imperial family.

0:22:520:22:55

And it wasn't just the Empress herself who was implicated in

0:22:550:23:00

the gossip - her innocent children were tarred with the same brush.

0:23:000:23:03

It was said that Rasputin had had his wicked way

0:23:030:23:07

with the Romanov sisters,

0:23:070:23:09

or as he would euphemistically put it, "rejoiced with them."

0:23:090:23:13

Rumours go round St Petersburg that he's raped all the Grand Duchesses

0:23:140:23:20

and that they are now mad with lust,

0:23:200:23:23

having discovered sex and the joy of "rejoicing" with Rasputin.

0:23:230:23:27

Cartoons appear around St Petersburg.

0:23:270:23:31

Lewd cartoons of the Tsarina with Rasputin.

0:23:310:23:34

Schoolchildren are singing songs.

0:23:340:23:37

It's as though they're suddenly no holds barred

0:23:370:23:41

in what you can say about Rasputin and the Tsarina.

0:23:410:23:44

Alexandra and Rasputin were not only rumoured to be guilty

0:23:500:23:53

of a sexual scandal but of the most horrifying political betrayal.

0:23:530:23:59

The true allegiance of the German Tsarina was called into question

0:23:590:24:04

and even ordinary Russians, whose loyalty Nicholas

0:24:040:24:07

and Alexandra had taken for granted,

0:24:070:24:10

now seemed to have lost all faith in their Tsar and Tsarina.

0:24:100:24:13

There's a great conviction that Rasputin and Alexandra -

0:24:150:24:19

remember, she is a German after all -

0:24:190:24:21

are actually spying and working with the Germans to conclude a

0:24:210:24:25

separate peace and sell out the Allies.

0:24:250:24:27

And this is a very, very widely held belief,

0:24:270:24:31

this is not some lunatic fringe.

0:24:310:24:33

I think historians have tended to sort of belittle all of these

0:24:380:24:41

rumours about Rasputin as a bit of tittle-tattle

0:24:410:24:44

and it's interesting but not really part of the revolutionary story.

0:24:440:24:48

But I don't agree with them

0:24:480:24:49

because by 1915 when these rumours take off,

0:24:490:24:52

of his sexual orgies with the Empress,

0:24:520:24:55

of his direct connection to the Germans and so on,

0:24:550:24:58

there's a revolutionary crisis. And in a revolutionary crisis, what

0:24:580:25:02

matters is not what's true or not, there's no reliable information.

0:25:020:25:06

Newspapers are censored, people don't know what to believe.

0:25:060:25:09

What matters in a revolutionary situation is what people believe.

0:25:090:25:12

And these rumours were believed, not just by ordinary

0:25:120:25:15

people in the streets, not just by peasants, but they were

0:25:150:25:18

believed by statesmen, they were believed by foreign ambassadors.

0:25:180:25:21

Buchanan, the British Ambassador, Paleologue, the French Ambassador,

0:25:210:25:24

are repeating these rumours, as if they were true, to their governments.

0:25:240:25:28

So these rumours take on a real political power

0:25:280:25:31

and become very damaging to the monarchy.

0:25:310:25:33

Shut away in her palace, Alexandra's commitment to the man widely

0:25:350:25:40

believed to be at the root of Russia's problems never faltered.

0:25:400:25:44

But with the Tsarina insisting that her weak-willed husband

0:25:450:25:49

follow every one of Rasputin's political pronouncements,

0:25:490:25:52

the government ground to a halt.

0:25:520:25:54

Minsters were no sooner appointed than they were sacked.

0:25:570:26:01

In little more than a year, five different prime ministers,

0:26:010:26:04

four different ministers of the interior

0:26:040:26:07

and three different war ministers all came and went.

0:26:070:26:11

And nobody was more conscious of the looming political crisis

0:26:110:26:15

than the extended Romanov family -

0:26:150:26:18

if the Tsar would not stand up to his own wife, they would.

0:26:180:26:21

I think you could call the Romanov's at this point probably

0:26:230:26:26

one of the great dysfunctional families of all time.

0:26:260:26:29

The degree to which no-one trust anyone.

0:26:290:26:31

They're talking behind each other's backs, it's a recipe for

0:26:310:26:34

disaster and it's remarkable the degree to which they have allowed

0:26:340:26:39

this to happen, that they don't realise that they need each other.

0:26:390:26:43

On the 16th of December, 1916,

0:26:450:26:48

members of the wider Romanov family finally made their move.

0:26:480:26:52

That evening, Rasputin disappeared in Petrograd.

0:26:540:26:58

Anastasia recorded in her diary...

0:26:580:27:01

'Father Grigori went missing last night.

0:27:010:27:03

'They are looking for him everywhere. It's absolutely dreadful.'

0:27:030:27:08

That night, the sisters were so upset that the four of them

0:27:090:27:13

shared a bed.

0:27:130:27:15

Two days later, they heard the news they had dreaded -

0:27:150:27:19

Rasputin had been murdered.

0:27:190:27:22

It was Olga alone

0:27:220:27:23

who recognised that his death might be a blessing in disguise.

0:27:230:27:27

It's interesting, of the four sisters, Olga seemed always

0:27:290:27:32

the most sensitive to the wider political situation.

0:27:320:27:36

And she had sensed, I think, for quite a while, that there was a

0:27:360:27:40

certain malevolent influence about Rasputin that was not a good thing.

0:27:400:27:44

And perhaps there was a need to kill Rasputin because he'd overreached

0:27:440:27:49

himself with their mother and his influence over her.

0:27:490:27:52

But what upset her was the brutal way in which he was murdered.

0:27:520:27:57

Rasputin was poisoned with cyanide-laced cream cakes,

0:27:580:28:03

shot and then bludgeoned to death in the cellar of the Moika Palace -

0:28:030:28:08

home to Felix Yusupov, the heir to Russia's greatest fortune.

0:28:080:28:12

For the imperial family, it wasn't just the gruesome

0:28:150:28:19

details of the murder that were so shocking,

0:28:190:28:21

but the fact that his killers were intimately known to them.

0:28:210:28:25

Yusupov was married to the Tsar's only niece and his co-conspirator

0:28:260:28:31

Dmitri Pavlovich was even closer to Nicholas and Alexandra

0:28:310:28:35

and had once been considered the ideal husband for Olga.

0:28:350:28:39

Rasputin's murder is sort of a family murder, if you will.

0:28:410:28:46

I mean, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, one of the main conspirators,

0:28:460:28:50

was a cousin of Nicholas II and was practically raised

0:28:500:28:54

almost as a surrogate son by Nicholas.

0:28:540:28:56

This was sort of treachery at the most intimate, personal level.

0:28:560:29:02

And clearly struck at the very heart of Nicholas and Alexandra when

0:29:020:29:05

they learned the degree to which the people that they had allowed in,

0:29:050:29:10

and very few people were allowed in to them, and to be close to them.

0:29:100:29:13

These were the ones who then sort of thrust the dagger

0:29:130:29:16

and struck at a person in whom they had placed all their faith and hope.

0:29:160:29:20

Alexandra is completely desperate over Rasputin's murder.

0:29:220:29:29

She is also very bitter.

0:29:290:29:31

There was already a great divide between her

0:29:310:29:34

and the rest of the family, but it must have made it

0:29:340:29:36

enormously impossible to cross the divide

0:29:360:29:39

when it was realised that actually members of their own family had

0:29:390:29:42

been involved in the assassination. It's like assassinating her.

0:29:420:29:46

The Romanov clan hoped that the murder would be just

0:29:490:29:52

the first step in a palace coup - it wasn't Rasputin alone

0:29:520:29:57

they wanted to see the back of, but the Tsarina herself.

0:29:570:30:01

Rasputin's murder was part of a larger plan.

0:30:030:30:06

It wasn't simply one murder that they were planning,

0:30:060:30:09

but it was sort of a larger way of trying to neutralise

0:30:090:30:12

not just obviously Rasputin but Alexandra as well.

0:30:120:30:15

That there was talk that she would be sent to a convent and

0:30:150:30:18

forced to take orders as a way of getting her out of the government,

0:30:180:30:21

of again fighting these dark forces and thus allowing Nicholas,

0:30:210:30:26

they hoped, to stand up and take complete rule of the country.

0:30:260:30:29

Nicholas' own mother allied herself with her son's opponents

0:30:290:30:34

and agreed that her wayward daughter-in-law should be banished.

0:30:340:30:38

'If only the Lord would open poor Nicky's eyes.

0:30:380:30:42

'And that he would stop following her dreadful advice.

0:30:420:30:45

'What despair! All of this will end in disaster!'

0:30:450:30:48

I think the conspirators believe that the monarchy will come

0:30:480:30:51

to its senses, Nicholas will correct his policies

0:30:510:30:55

and allow for a sort of compromise with the opposition forces

0:30:550:30:59

to see the country through till the end of the war.

0:30:590:31:02

But, you know, in assassinating Rasputin, they bring about

0:31:020:31:07

quite the opposite because Nicholas and Alexandra withdraw even

0:31:070:31:11

further into seclusion and will have no truck with any talk of reform.

0:31:110:31:16

So by January 1917, we have a really hopeless situation

0:31:160:31:21

in which there's no possibility for any compromise at this late stage

0:31:210:31:27

and really, the monarchy is doomed.

0:31:270:31:30

By February 1917, Nicholas and Alexandra's isolation was absolute -

0:31:320:31:37

they were estranged from their wider family

0:31:370:31:40

and totally cut off from Russia's looming political crisis.

0:31:400:31:44

Nicholas is oblivious to the situation.

0:31:440:31:48

He's out at headquarters and his diary, you know,

0:31:480:31:52

it's still filled with the usual stuff about who was at dinner,

0:31:520:31:57

games and dominos still, he's more concerned that a couple of

0:31:570:32:01

his daughters have measles than with the reports that are now coming in

0:32:010:32:04

in February from General Khabalov about disturbances in the capital.

0:32:040:32:08

And he's not prepared to make any concessions at this late stage.

0:32:080:32:13

On Sunday the 26th of February,

0:32:130:32:15

the Tsar ordered the use of military force

0:32:150:32:18

to put down protests in Petrograd,

0:32:180:32:21

but the capital's soldiers chose instead to side with the people.

0:32:210:32:25

The following day, the Petrograd garrison mutinied

0:32:260:32:29

and a disturbance became a revolution.

0:32:290:32:32

Out at the Alexandra Palace,

0:32:400:32:43

all the children except Maria had the measles.

0:32:430:32:46

From their sick beds, they heard gun fire

0:32:470:32:50

and the playing of the Marseillaise coming from the town barracks,

0:32:500:32:54

but the Tsarina insisted they should not be told anything was wrong

0:32:540:32:58

until it was impossible to keep the truth from them.

0:32:580:33:00

Alexandra refused to take the threat of revolution seriously

0:33:020:33:07

even when reports were coming in thick and fast of marches

0:33:070:33:11

and protests and bread riots,

0:33:110:33:12

she thought it was all a storm in a teacup and it would soon blow over.

0:33:120:33:17

And she refused to accept that the enemy was at the gates.

0:33:170:33:21

But as the unrest in Petrograd intensified,

0:33:230:33:27

events overtook the Romanov family.

0:33:270:33:30

The leaders of the Duma and Nicholas' own military chiefs

0:33:300:33:34

insisted that only his abdication could resolve the crisis.

0:33:340:33:38

And the Tsar did not take much convincing.

0:33:380:33:41

On the 2nd March, more than three centuries of Romanov rule

0:33:410:33:45

came to an end when Nicholas renounced the throne

0:33:450:33:49

for himself and Alexei.

0:33:490:33:51

Initially only Maria was told the news,

0:33:510:33:54

as the other children were still so ill.

0:33:540:33:57

She seemed to be taking it well, until one of the court ladies

0:33:570:34:01

discovered her crouched in a corner weeping - she was

0:34:010:34:04

terrified that the revolutionaries would come and take her mother away.

0:34:040:34:09

Almost a week later,

0:34:090:34:11

Alexandra finally broke the news to the rest of the children.

0:34:110:34:15

It was Alexei who was the most perplexed by it all.

0:34:150:34:19

He was totally bewildered. He couldn't understand. He said,

0:34:190:34:23

"Well, does that mean I won't be able to go and see my soldiers any more?

0:34:230:34:27

"Won't we be able to go on the Standart Yacht

0:34:270:34:30

"and sail round as a family?"

0:34:300:34:31

No, none of that was going to happen any more.

0:34:310:34:35

And then he asked the perfectly logical question, he said,

0:34:350:34:38

"Well, who's going to be Tsar?"

0:34:380:34:41

"Well, there isn't going to be a Tsar," he was told.

0:34:410:34:44

"But if there isn't a Tsar," he asked,

0:34:440:34:47

"Who's going to govern Russia?"

0:34:470:34:49

On the 9th March, the former Tsar -

0:34:550:34:57

or Colonel Romanov, as he was now known -

0:34:570:35:01

came home to a palace that was now a prison.

0:35:010:35:04

The provisional government had placed the Romanovs

0:35:050:35:08

under house arrest.

0:35:080:35:10

For a family who had always sought to distance

0:35:100:35:13

themselves from the outside world,

0:35:130:35:15

their isolation was now strictly enforced.

0:35:150:35:18

They were not allowed to leave the palace,

0:35:180:35:21

to receive visitors, to use the telephone or telegraph

0:35:210:35:25

and their letters were even checked for invisible ink.

0:35:250:35:28

For the children, life in this world turned upside down

0:35:300:35:33

was a rude awakening.

0:35:330:35:34

Derevenko - who was one of Alexis' sailor carers -

0:35:370:35:41

lifted him, protected him from hurting himself.

0:35:410:35:44

And there was a sort of role reversal, which was horrible,

0:35:440:35:48

because he started shouting at Alexis, giving him orders.

0:35:480:35:51

He was quite overweight, Derevenko.

0:35:510:35:53

And Alexis used to shout, "Look at Fatty run."

0:35:530:35:56

And then all of a sudden, Fatty turning round and saying,

0:35:560:36:00

"Pick up your own things."

0:36:000:36:02

The family could only go outside under armed guard and were

0:36:040:36:08

not allowed to stray beyond a small area of the Alexander Park.

0:36:080:36:13

This bridge marked a frontier which they could not cross.

0:36:130:36:17

To compound their humiliation,

0:36:170:36:20

the captives became a visitor attraction -

0:36:200:36:23

hundreds of curious onlookers flocked to the park gates,

0:36:230:36:27

eager for a glimpse of their fallen royals.

0:36:270:36:30

But for a dethroned autocrat,

0:36:300:36:32

Nicholas seemed remarkably accepting of his new life.

0:36:320:36:36

In a way, abdication was an enormous relief for Nicholas.

0:36:360:36:40

He accepted with an extraordinary sort of equanimity, there was

0:36:400:36:44

almost a sense of indifference, one of the commandants

0:36:440:36:48

at the palace said that he was like the lowest form of plant life,

0:36:480:36:52

you know, unreacting, he was like a human oyster, so clamped up,

0:36:520:36:57

so introverted that nothing...

0:36:570:37:00

He showed nothing on the surface about how he felt about

0:37:000:37:04

this momentous event in his life.

0:37:040:37:07

Nicholas had always prized his private life above all else -

0:37:090:37:13

now his great hope was that his family should all remain together

0:37:130:37:17

and be allowed to go into exile within Russia or abroad.

0:37:170:37:21

I think he felt that it would all come right in the end.

0:37:240:37:28

I think you had to have a lot of faith to think that,

0:37:280:37:31

but he did think that.

0:37:310:37:33

Now, don't forget his family, or his connections, his cousins,

0:37:330:37:37

were so widespread.

0:37:370:37:38

He knew them all very well because they had spent time with him.

0:37:380:37:43

He had travelled a lot.

0:37:430:37:45

There were many occasions, family occasions,

0:37:450:37:48

when he saw a lot of them.

0:37:480:37:50

So I think they always felt that whatever happened,

0:37:500:37:53

somebody would bail them out in the end, somebody would rescue them.

0:37:530:37:56

I don't think they knew quite to what extent they were in danger.

0:37:560:38:00

Immediately after the Revolution,

0:38:010:38:04

King George V had offered his cousin Nicky asylum in Britain.

0:38:040:38:09

He had this aspiration that perhaps he could come to England

0:38:090:38:12

and be a gentleman farmer. As his cousin Willy - the Kaiser -

0:38:120:38:16

had said, "Well, Nicholas is only good for one thing,

0:38:160:38:18

"which is growing turnips and being country gent."

0:38:180:38:21

That would've suited Nicholas,

0:38:210:38:23

to live in obscurity and just be a modest family man.

0:38:230:38:29

But such modest ambitions

0:38:290:38:31

were ultimately thwarted by his children's measles.

0:38:310:38:35

If they had acted quickly,

0:38:350:38:37

if both the British and the provisional government in Petrograd

0:38:370:38:40

had acted quickly,

0:38:400:38:42

they might have got the children and Alexandra out north,

0:38:420:38:45

to an ice-free port like Murmansk, and under a white flag to Britain.

0:38:450:38:50

But the tragedy was, the children were far too sick to be moved.

0:38:500:38:54

And that's really the ultimate 'what if'.

0:38:540:38:58

If the children hadn't been ill,

0:38:580:38:59

might they have been able to get them out to safety?

0:38:590:39:03

By the time the children recovered, cousin George had had

0:39:030:39:07

second thoughts and withdrawn his offer of asylum.

0:39:070:39:11

The family's future was now more uncertain than ever.

0:39:110:39:16

If Nicholas and the children were coping with the dramatic

0:39:160:39:19

reversal in their fortunes, then Alexandra was not.

0:39:190:39:23

Under house arrest, she grew increasingly melancholic.

0:39:230:39:27

After their attack of the measles, her daughters' hair

0:39:270:39:30

had begun to fall out and they had all had to shave their heads.

0:39:300:39:34

Alexei joining in to show solidarity.

0:39:340:39:37

But when their mother was confronted with a photograph of her

0:39:370:39:41

daughters proudly displaying their bald heads, she was horrified.

0:39:410:39:46

She thought they looked like those condemned to death.

0:39:460:39:49

After almost five months under house arrest, the family left

0:39:510:39:55

the Alexander Palace for the last time on the 1st of August.

0:39:550:39:59

Nicholas wrote in his diary...

0:39:590:40:02

'The sunrise that saw us off was beautiful.

0:40:020:40:05

'We left Tsarskoye Selo at 6.10 in the morning.

0:40:050:40:08

'Thank God we are all saved and together.'

0:40:080:40:10

At the Alexandrovsky Station, they boarded a special train,

0:40:120:40:16

its final destination was unknown.

0:40:160:40:18

All the family had been told was to prepare for a long trip east

0:40:180:40:22

and to pack plenty of warm clothes.

0:40:220:40:26

For the children, this would be their first sight of a homeland

0:40:260:40:30

they hardly knew.

0:40:300:40:32

The empire that their father was Tsar of

0:40:320:40:37

was so vast that anything beyond the limitations of White Russia,

0:40:370:40:42

ie - Petersburg down to Moscow and a bit beyond,

0:40:420:40:45

were unknown to the children. It was such a vast place.

0:40:450:40:49

So this great hinterland of endless forests and the great flat horizons

0:40:490:40:54

that they entered on that long four-day train ride

0:40:540:40:58

through to Siberia

0:40:580:40:59

was a whole different world that the children had never seen.

0:40:590:41:03

Anastasia described the journey for her tutor, Sydney Gibbes,

0:41:040:41:08

in her somewhat broken English.

0:41:080:41:10

'The first day was hot and very dusty.

0:41:120:41:15

'At the stations, we had to shut our window curtains

0:41:150:41:17

'that nobody should see us.

0:41:170:41:20

'On the way, many funny things happened,

0:41:200:41:22

'and if I shall have time, I shall write to you our travel farther on.

0:41:220:41:26

'Goodbye. Don't forget me.'

0:41:280:41:31

She was right to worry.

0:41:380:41:40

Their ultimate destination had been chosen precisely to keep the family

0:41:400:41:45

so far out of sight and mind that there was little chance

0:41:450:41:49

that royalists would rescue them,

0:41:490:41:51

or violent revolutionaries would kill them.

0:41:510:41:55

Tobolsk was a provincial backwater 1,700 miles east of St Petersburg.

0:41:550:42:02

It had been by-passed by the trans-Siberian railway

0:42:020:42:06

and was accessible only by boat.

0:42:060:42:09

During the seven-month-long Siberian winter,

0:42:100:42:14

the river froze and the town was completely cut off

0:42:140:42:17

from the outside world.

0:42:170:42:19

The family's new home was meant to be one of the best houses in town,

0:42:210:42:26

but when an advance party went to inspect the accommodation,

0:42:260:42:29

they found it dirty, smelly and stripped of almost all furniture.

0:42:290:42:34

When the family are living in the former Governors' mansion in Tobolsk,

0:42:360:42:41

it's clearly...

0:42:410:42:43

if not a terrible prison condition, it's not pleasant.

0:42:430:42:48

And Nicholas complains about the plumbing

0:42:480:42:50

and the toilets keep overflowing, and it does all sound really unpleasant

0:42:500:42:54

when you're used to a palace.

0:42:540:42:56

Conditions in the house were cramped

0:42:570:43:00

and the four sisters shared a bedroom.

0:43:000:43:03

They filled it with reminders of their previous life -

0:43:030:43:06

religious icons, family snaps

0:43:060:43:09

and pictures of their favourite wounded officers.

0:43:090:43:12

As they adjusted to their new life, what little they got to see

0:43:140:43:18

of Siberia was a revelation

0:43:180:43:20

and their captors were struck by the girls' naivety.

0:43:200:43:23

The commissar in charge of them

0:43:230:43:26

thought they were terribly badly educated.

0:43:260:43:29

Of course, he was rather shocked when he noticed their

0:43:290:43:32

bewilderment at seeing local Yakuts and Siberian indigenous peoples

0:43:320:43:37

going around in reindeer skins.

0:43:370:43:39

And the girls would be standing there at the window,

0:43:390:43:42

looking in bafflement at these strange people on the streets below

0:43:420:43:46

as though they were from another planet.

0:43:460:43:48

And he wondered just exactly how broad their education had been.

0:43:480:43:52

The family's outside space was far more limited than at the

0:43:540:43:57

Alexander Palace - they had just a small kitchen garden and a yard.

0:43:570:44:03

Desperate for something to do, Nicholas would pace the yard 40

0:44:030:44:07

or 50 times an hour and perform daily chin-ups on a horizontal bar.

0:44:070:44:12

He and his children grabbed any opportunity for fresh air

0:44:120:44:16

and a view of the outside world.

0:44:160:44:18

When you see photographs of them,

0:44:190:44:22

and it must look a bit odd to our eyes, sitting on top of a...

0:44:220:44:25

on top of a sort of what looks like a greenhouse.

0:44:250:44:28

You think, what are they doing?

0:44:280:44:29

Well, the answer was they're trying to get some sun.

0:44:290:44:32

Because they've been sitting, stewed up in this...indoors all the time,

0:44:320:44:36

so it was nice to get out, get a bit of fresh air.

0:44:360:44:39

And that's the only place they could do it,

0:44:390:44:41

because they wouldn't let them go anywhere else.

0:44:410:44:43

As the Siberian winter set in, there was little sun left to catch.

0:44:450:44:50

And by mid-December, the temperature had dropped below minus 20.

0:44:500:44:55

The family tried to keep busy chopping wood

0:44:560:44:59

and pulling Alexei around on his sledge.

0:44:590:45:02

Inside the house it was so cold that Anastasia complained,

0:45:020:45:06

"Our hands do not write properly."

0:45:060:45:09

But that didn't stop her and her sisters sending endless letters,

0:45:090:45:13

although they had very little to say.

0:45:130:45:15

As she wrote to her friend Katya...

0:45:150:45:18

'I am terribly sorry my letter turned out to be so stupid

0:45:180:45:21

'and boring but nothing interesting ever happens here.'

0:45:210:45:26

Her older sister Tatiana wrote to Valentina, one of the

0:45:260:45:31

nurses she had worked with at the hospital in Tsarskoye Selo...

0:45:310:45:34

'We feel we are living on some kind of far away island

0:45:340:45:38

'where we receive news of another world.

0:45:380:45:40

'The time goes quickly and the days pass completely unnoticed.'

0:45:400:45:46

When they weren't writing letters, the girls were gazing out of

0:45:460:45:49

the window - ironically, it was under house arrest in Tobolsk

0:45:490:45:53

that they saw more of ordinary life than they ever had before,

0:45:530:45:57

or would again.

0:45:570:45:58

Their life became very narrow, very repetitious, very boring.

0:45:580:46:02

But they did have one thing that they loved above all others.

0:46:020:46:06

And that was to sit at the window and watch the world go by outside.

0:46:060:46:11

This became almost a primary hobby.

0:46:110:46:14

And the girls would mention it in their letters to friends and family

0:46:140:46:17

how they took such pleasure in sitting and watching people

0:46:170:46:21

in the street below and waving to them.

0:46:210:46:23

At least they had a kind of point of contact,

0:46:230:46:27

even if it was through the glass of the windows.

0:46:270:46:30

In their Siberian prison, the Romanovs were

0:46:340:46:37

starved of news from the outside world, but what little

0:46:370:46:41

they did hear made their position seem bleaker than ever.

0:46:410:46:45

At the end of October, the provisional government was

0:46:450:46:49

overthrown by a Bolshevik coup led by Lenin and Trotsky -

0:46:490:46:53

the family's fate now lay in the hands of their most avowed enemies.

0:46:530:46:57

There's no doubt that Olga, of all the girls, the most sensitive,

0:46:590:47:03

the most naturally melancholic, felt their captivity very profoundly

0:47:030:47:08

in terms of the broader picture of what was going on in Russia.

0:47:080:47:12

She was extremely upset by the fact that the nation had

0:47:120:47:15

turned against, for her, a very loving father.

0:47:150:47:18

It's clear to me that Olga, of all of them,

0:47:200:47:23

sensed that there was something terrible out there.

0:47:230:47:27

Something terrible that may perhaps, in the end, destroy them all.

0:47:270:47:31

On the 3rd March, 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty

0:47:330:47:37

with Germany, but no sooner had one conflict ended

0:47:370:47:41

than another began and the country was plunged into a bloody civil war

0:47:410:47:45

between the Bolshevik Red Army and the anti-Communist White Army.

0:47:450:47:50

The Bolsheviks were terrified that the Whites would attempt to rescue

0:47:520:47:55

their former Tsar and they decided that the family must be moved.

0:47:550:48:00

But Alexei was too ill to travel

0:48:000:48:03

so he was left behind in Tobolsk with Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia,

0:48:030:48:08

whilst Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria went on ahead.

0:48:080:48:13

The family's greatest fear, separation, had finally been

0:48:130:48:18

realised and as they said their goodbyes, the sisters wept.

0:48:180:48:23

I think, in the end, their religious faith enabled them

0:48:230:48:27

to deal with this terrible agony of separation.

0:48:270:48:31

And it was a separation that had no end in sight,

0:48:310:48:34

they didn't know when they were going to see their parents again.

0:48:340:48:37

They didn't know IF they would see their parents again.

0:48:370:48:41

But somehow they had to hang onto each other.

0:48:410:48:44

Nicholas and Alexandra expected to be taken to Moscow,

0:48:490:48:53

the new Bolshevik capital,

0:48:530:48:55

but instead they found themselves in Russia's third city -

0:48:550:48:59

Yekaterinburg, more than 1,000 miles east of the capital.

0:48:590:49:03

They were put up in the Ipatiev House -

0:49:050:49:08

or as the Bolsheviks had ominously renamed it -

0:49:080:49:11

the House of Special Purpose.

0:49:110:49:13

The house no longer exists, but where it once stood

0:49:140:49:18

the Church on the Blood

0:49:180:49:20

has been built in honour of the Romanov sainthood.

0:49:200:49:24

It was consecrated in 2003 and has become a major pilgrimage site.

0:49:240:49:29

Once they're moved to Yekaterinburg

0:49:300:49:32

and incarcerated in the Ipatiev House,

0:49:320:49:36

it's no longer house arrest.

0:49:360:49:37

It must have felt much more like prison.

0:49:370:49:40

The house is surrounded by a high wooden fence, there are guards,

0:49:400:49:44

they have to be accompanied by them to go to the toilet, they are,

0:49:440:49:50

you know, they are insulted, there is obscenity, graffiti on the walls.

0:49:500:49:54

It must have been threatening. They knew that something had changed.

0:49:540:49:58

They knew that their political drama was moving towards some

0:49:580:50:03

sort of resolution which was not likely to be good for them.

0:50:030:50:06

In Tobolsk, the sisters had at least been able to watch the world

0:50:080:50:11

go by from their windows,

0:50:110:50:14

but in Yekaterinburg even that small freedom was denied them.

0:50:140:50:18

Maria wrote to her siblings...

0:50:180:50:20

'Darling, I am writing to you in semi-darkness for we have not dared

0:50:200:50:24

'to draw the curtains,

0:50:240:50:26

'the whitewashed windows are too horrible.'

0:50:260:50:29

On the 20th May, her three sisters

0:50:300:50:32

and Alexei began the journey to Yekaterinburg by boat.

0:50:320:50:36

During that trip, their English tutor Sydney Gibbes took the last

0:50:360:50:41

known photographs of the children.

0:50:410:50:43

A lady-in-waiting who joined them on that voyage

0:50:430:50:47

was struck by the change in Olga during her time in Tobolsk.

0:50:470:50:51

She had turned from, "A lovely bright girl of 22

0:50:510:50:55

"into a faded and sad middle-aged woman."

0:50:550:50:59

On the 23rd of May, the sisters were reunited.

0:51:010:51:04

After a lifetime spent in virtual captivity,

0:51:040:51:08

their imprisonment was now total.

0:51:080:51:10

There is no semblance of real life at all.

0:51:130:51:19

You know, the girls to try and do something about this

0:51:190:51:25

unending boredom are taught by the cook to make bread rolls,

0:51:250:51:31

they take great delight in washing handkerchiefs.

0:51:310:51:36

The end is kind of coming closer and closer, and I can't believe

0:51:360:51:43

for one moment that they didn't have some idea

0:51:430:51:47

of what was going to happen.

0:51:470:51:48

As they struggled to adapt to their new situation,

0:51:480:51:52

the sisters found comfort from a most unlikely source.

0:51:520:51:56

The girls had always been drawn to soldiers -

0:51:560:51:59

whether the sailors on the royal yacht, or the wounded officers

0:51:590:52:03

they had nursed - and their jailors were no exception.

0:52:030:52:06

One thing becomes very apparent in the Ipatiev House

0:52:080:52:11

that brief, hot summer - is that they're all going stir crazy.

0:52:110:52:15

You have four hormonal young women plus a probably menopausal mother,

0:52:150:52:22

and a sick brother all hemmed in, crammed in with each other.

0:52:220:52:27

It's clear that those girls,

0:52:270:52:29

in their frustration and their boredom,

0:52:290:52:31

saw the officers surrounding them as the only kind of point of contact.

0:52:310:52:36

The only form of entertainment or human association.

0:52:360:52:41

Of all the four girls, Maria had always been the most open,

0:52:410:52:45

the most friendly, the most engaging, she loved the company of soldiers.

0:52:450:52:50

She of all the sisters seemed the most susceptible within the

0:52:500:52:54

Ipatiev House to making friendships that perhaps would worry her parents.

0:52:540:52:59

Maria was treading a fine line -

0:53:000:53:03

one that was crossed on the 26th of June -

0:53:030:53:06

her 19th birthday, when one of the guards, Ivan Skorokhodov,

0:53:060:53:11

brought in a cake for her.

0:53:110:53:13

Relations between captor and captive had become dangerously close.

0:53:130:53:19

It was clear the fraternisation was going too far.

0:53:190:53:23

That the guards were being too kind, getting to like the girls,

0:53:230:53:26

developing a relationship with them and the girls with them,

0:53:260:53:30

and it was at this point that there was the extreme

0:53:300:53:33

clamp-down on this fraternisation between them and their captors.

0:53:330:53:37

The guard was instantly dismissed and jailed,

0:53:390:53:42

but Maria suffered a more subtle punishment -

0:53:420:53:45

during the Romanovs' final weeks,

0:53:450:53:47

the incident created a rift within this most tightly knit of families.

0:53:470:53:52

It would appear that Alexandra was deeply disapproving of

0:53:520:53:56

Maria's increasing friendliness with the guards

0:53:560:53:59

and that at some point she was, to an extent, cold-shouldered.

0:53:590:54:02

Certainly by Alexandra.

0:54:020:54:05

There was a change, a shift in the family dynamic for a while

0:54:050:54:09

and Maria suffered as a result.

0:54:090:54:12

No news came in to the Ipatiev House and no news came out.

0:54:140:54:19

With no end in sight to their imprisonment,

0:54:190:54:22

Russia's former royals had nothing to do but sit and wait.

0:54:220:54:27

But in the world beyond their whitewashed windows,

0:54:290:54:32

the Bolshevik leadership were arguing over the family's fate.

0:54:320:54:35

Trotsky wanted to put Nicholas on trial in Moscow,

0:54:370:54:40

but others favoured a more straightforward solution.

0:54:400:54:44

The trial, I think, was not really an option because to allow Nicholas

0:54:440:54:49

to stand a political trial even though, you know,

0:54:490:54:52

everybody knew what its resolution was going to be,

0:54:520:54:55

would nonetheless be to admit the possibility of the Tsar's innocence.

0:54:550:55:00

And if you admit the possibility of his innocence,

0:55:000:55:03

that's to raise the question of the Revolution's legitimacy.

0:55:030:55:08

So in a sense, to put the Tsar on trial was at the same time to

0:55:080:55:12

put the Revolution on trial, and that was not revolutionary justice.

0:55:120:55:17

Revolutionary justice was to carry out the will of the people

0:55:170:55:20

and murder them.

0:55:200:55:21

On Monday the 15th of July, four local women came to wash

0:55:210:55:26

the floors of the Ipatiev House.

0:55:260:55:29

They were the last civilians to see the four sisters alive.

0:55:290:55:34

The washer women couldn't quite believe their eyes when

0:55:340:55:36

they saw these girls in their plain white blouses and their black frocks

0:55:360:55:41

and their hair, of course, hadn't yet grown back much beyond their chins.

0:55:410:55:45

These were not royal princesses as they had perceived them

0:55:450:55:48

from the picture books and all the stories they'd been told.

0:55:480:55:51

These weren't people sort of wafting around in stately robes

0:55:510:55:55

with lots of beautiful glittering jewellery.

0:55:550:55:58

They were ordinary people. Just like us.

0:55:580:56:01

This chapel in the Church on the Blood stands on the site

0:56:050:56:09

of the basement of the Ipatiev House,

0:56:090:56:12

where early on the morning of the 17th of July,

0:56:120:56:15

the four sisters, along with the rest of their family,

0:56:150:56:19

were shot at point-blank range and then bayoneted to death.

0:56:190:56:23

After the murder, their bodies were dumped into

0:56:270:56:31

a mine shaft in nearby woods.

0:56:310:56:33

The order for the family's execution came from the very top -

0:56:340:56:38

from Lenin himself.

0:56:380:56:40

But he did not want the Bolsheviks blamed for the

0:56:400:56:43

slaying of innocents so initially only Nicholas' death was announced.

0:56:430:56:47

Almost immediately, rumours started to circulate that

0:56:490:56:52

one of the girls had escaped - the story of the sister who

0:56:520:56:56

survived became one of the 20th century's most enduring myths.

0:56:560:57:01

When someone as important as the imperial family disappears like that

0:57:030:57:08

and the exact fate of the children is unknown,

0:57:080:57:12

there will always be speculation.

0:57:120:57:16

But I don't think there was any serious doubt.

0:57:160:57:19

They were shot by a ruthless execution squad,

0:57:190:57:23

one shooter for every person to be shot,

0:57:230:57:27

the bodies were then eradicated with sulphuric acid,

0:57:270:57:31

remains dumped into mines.

0:57:310:57:33

They were not going to let some teenage girl run off into the forest.

0:57:330:57:39

Why would that happen?

0:57:390:57:40

When they died, Olga was 22,

0:57:480:57:51

Tatiana 21,

0:57:510:57:54

Maria 19

0:57:540:57:56

and Anastasia 17.

0:57:560:57:58

The sisters are remembered as martyrs of a bloody revolution,

0:58:000:58:04

but they were also the innocent victims of a mother

0:58:040:58:07

and a father so divorced from reality that they unwittingly

0:58:070:58:12

condemned their beloved family to a terrible fate.

0:58:120:58:16

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