The Gilded Cage Russia's Lost Princesses

On the 17th of July 1918,

these four girls in white dresses were brutally murdered

in the bloody climax to the Russian Revolution.

The girls' names may not be remembered,

but their alluring mix of beauty and innocence

holds an enduring fascination.

They are emblems of a world that vanished for ever in the revolution.

In Russia today, the Tsar's four daughters -

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia -

have literally become icons and are worshipped as holy martyrs.

The first programme in this two-part series

will tell their story in their own words...

My whole body shakes. I love him.

I want to fling myself at him.

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

In 1913, Tsar Nicholas II and his family

celebrated 300 years of Romanov rule.

The lavish state occasions of the tercentenary

were designed to show off the enduring power and imperial might

of this ancient dynasty.

But at the heart of this virtually medieval monarchy

was a surprisingly modern family.

The tercentenary offered the public a rare glimpse of their royals

and the crowds were captivated by the sight

of the Tsar's four daughters.

In their identical white dresses and matching hats,

the girls were picture-perfect princesses.

They have this enduring fascination

because they are stuck in this time warp, having died young,

of innocence, beauty, untainted, unmarried, virginal.

Little was known about them, really. They were viewed with fascination,

because they appeared so beautiful, almost like fairy-tale princesses.

I think there's an inherent similarity with Diana,

being the most photographed princesses of their time,

the most marriageable, attractive, desirable young royal princesses

in Europe.

The girls' lives were dominated, and all too often overshadowed,

by their mother, the Empress Alexandra.

In the Romanov family drama, it was her formidable character,

more than any other,

which ultimately sealed her daughters' fates.

Alexandra's story began a world away

from the pomp and ceremony of imperial Russia -

in the tiny German duchy of Hesse And By Rhine.

On her maternal side, she boasted impeccable royal credentials -

her mother was Princess Alice, Queen Victoria's second daughter.

By contrast, her good-looking father, the Grand Duke Louis,

came some way down the royal pecking order.

The Hesses were a happy and close-knit family,

but in 1878 they suffered a double tragedy

when diphtheria killed both Alexandra's little sister, May,

and her beloved mother, Alice.

Alexandra was just six at the time

and profoundly traumatised by their deaths.

She was always very shy, which didn't help things.

But the death of her mother and her sister

really did have a change in her personality.

And it was the start, really, of this deep introspection.

And in the nursery, she was alone.

She didn't even have her familiar toys around,

because they'd been burnt or were away to be disinfected.

So all of that, I mean there was a huge cloud of mourning

over the palace and over her childhood.

In the wake of Alice's untimely death,

Alexandra's grandmother, Queen Victoria,

stepped into the breach

and took a very hands-on role in her grandchildren's upbringing.

With Alix, in particular, because she was so young when her mother died,

Queen Victoria took her on as her own.

And she really did take on the role of surrogate mother

in a very serious and determined manner.

She had the nurse prepare monthly reports

on what Alix and the girls were doing.

Queen Victoria would go through all of the points,

she would initial them.

It was a very close, very loving relationship.

Alexandra was raised in her grandmother's image,

with the same solidly English tastes and strict Victorian morality.

Alexandra was very English.

I mean, it's often said she was the German woman,

but actually her Englishness

was her most pronounced sort of characteristic,

as she had been brought up in a very English manner.

Queen Victoria, her grandmother, had had a big influence on that -

Alexandra was one of her favourites.

It was very much, sort of, austere Victorian upbringing -

she had an English nursemaid, she had an English governess,

she was taught to fold hospital corners, make her own bed.

In 1884, when she was 12 years old,

Alexandra had visited St Petersburg for her elder sister's wedding.

There she met Nicholas,

the 16-year-old son and heir of Tsar Alexander III.

Nicholas would one day be absolute ruler

of one sixth of the earth's surface

and the richest monarch in the world.

Other dynasties paled into insignificance next to the Romanovs.

As royal matches went,

the Tsar-to-be was the greatest prize going.

Within a few years, the pair were head over heels in love,

though neither Alexandra's grandmother, nor Nicholas' parents

considered it a match made in heaven.

The Queen was very concerned, of course,

when Alexandra announced

she wanted to marry Nicky, the Tsarevitch Of Russia.

She was terribly worried about Russia,

which seemed a very long away place,

very alien, very unsettled and almost dangerous throne to occupy.

Neither Marie Feodorovna or her husband, Alexander III,

wanted this marriage to take place.

They seriously did not like anything German.

They didn't like Germany.

They didn't want this modest, shy, awkward German princess marrying

the heir to this vast empire.

They wanted a much bigger catch.

And it wasn't just Nicholas' choice of bride

that was a cause for concern,

but his ability to fill his father's shoes.

Alexander III himself, the father,

was a bear-like figure with a huge beard down to here. Immensely strong.

He could tear a pack of cards like that.

Alexander III was the true autocrat.

He was a giant of a man at six foot three, he knew his will,

he was decisive, he knew how to command his ministers,

and he looked upon Nicholas, his son, whom he called "girlie",

as a bit of a lost cause, really,

in so far as the succession was concerned.

Count Witte, who was then the minister of finance,

suggested that Nicholas might be instructed in the means of statehood

and Alexander replied, "Hadn't you noticed? Nicky's a bit of a dunce."

And the future Tsar did little to confound his father's fears.

The horseplay of his youth

was probably quite commonplace amongst the aristocracy.

But I'm slightly shocked to read in his diary in 1894 when he was,

what, 25, 26 and about to ascend the throne

that he just spent the day in a giant chestnut fight

in the park with Prince George of Greece,

and, in fact, later on in the diary, maybe he's already on the throne,

he writes about a similar fight with pine cones.

So this is a man who wasn't taking

the responsibilities of learning kingship particularly seriously.

And the challenges Nicholas would face upon becoming Tsar

were immense.

At the end of the 19th century, Russia was a vast empire

caught between the medieval and the modern.

Serfdom had been abolished 30 years earlier,

but most Russians continued to work the land

and live in grinding poverty.

At the same time,

rapid industrialisation was transforming the country,

though the imperial regime seemed unable to keep up

with the dizzying pace of change.

Whilst the might of Europe's other monarchies had waned,

Nicholas would inherit the same absolute power

as every Tsar had wielded for the past 300 years.

And in the autumn of 1894,

the Tsar-in-waiting found himself put to the test

far sooner than expected.

Whilst visiting his new fiancee in Germany,

Nicholas was suddenly summoned home to his father's sick bed.

Alexander had been taken ill with a disease of the kidneys

and died on the 20th of October, leaving his son utterly distraught.

He is on record as saying, long before he became Tsar,

"I dread the day when this will have to happen."

But nobody thought it would happen as soon as it did.

I mean, the father was 49, so if he'd lived to be 69,

that was 20 years later. So he was caught on the hop

and horrified with the responsibility that was on his shoulders.

When Alexander died, Nicholas burst into tears and said,

"I don't want to be king, a tsar, I can't.

"I don't even know how to talk to the ministers."

Just a week after he buried his father,

Nicholas married Alexandra in a lavish ceremony

at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

Faced with the horror of becoming Tsar,

Nicholas' one consolation was his new wife.

The pair wrote to each other in English, their best common language.

"My own precious little sunny. My love for you is unspeakable.

"It fills me utterly and makes the darkness of these days bright."

And his bride was also smitten.

"Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world,

"such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings.

"I love you. Those three words have my life in them."

It was lucky she was so in love,

because far from home, at a foreign court,

she found little comfort other than in Nicholas' arms.

Alexandra had a pretty tough time when she first arrived

at the Russian Imperial Court.

One thing one has to remember -

that it happened far more quickly that she'd anticipated or desired.

Her hope was, and indeed Nicholas' expectation was,

that she would learn Russian, she'd learn about Russian Orthodoxy,

she would learn how the court worked.

In fact, what happened was Nicholas is catapulted onto the throne,

Alix is called to Russia, they marry, and there's no preparation.

She only knows a little bit of Russian when she arrives.

Alexandra was no stranger to the world of royalty,

but even being a granddaughter of Queen Victoria was no preparation

for the Imperial Court.

They were much grander than any other court in Europe

and whenever there was a state occasion, for example,

there'd be more food, more people invited, more servants, more style.

Everything was very exaggerated.

Queen Victoria formed the impression in the 1880s, 1890s,

that the Russians were really, you know, a bit much.

In the Great Procession, the most impressive of all court ceremonies,

the entire imperial family and their leading courtiers

processed in strict order of precedence

through the vast halls of the Winter Palace,

each one packed with hundreds of civil servants,

military officials and other guests.

One lucky invitee remarked,

"There was hardly elbow room

"and to enjoy oneself was quite out of the question."

The Russian Court was incredibly opulent.

The protocol, the ceremonial was rigid, rigid, rigid.

There were rules and rules were not bent.

These rules were not broken.

If they were, you paid the price.

In this world of unimaginable excess and unbearable rigmarole,

Alexandra completely lost her bearings.

She'd come from a very modest, little German backwater.

And here she is in the centre of St Petersburg society,

and she couldn't cope with it.

She was the kind of person who if she got something wrong

would be mortified.

And her remedy was to run away, to have a headache

and retire to her bedroom.

To make matters worse,

Nicholas' mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna,

had set her daughter-in-law a daunting example to live up to.

For Alexandra, her glamorous, vivacious,

highly sociable mother-in-law

was a constant reminder of everything she was not.

The Dowager's view was that an empress

had to be visible, that was her job.

She should be out there in society, shaking hands, smiling,

at receptions and balls and doing all the things empresses of Russia did,

which she of course had done with supreme confidence.

But Alexandra was not like Maria Feodorovna

and the Empress was very annoyed and disgruntled

that her daughter-in-law was not,

as she saw it, fulfilling her proper function.

What she fails to see is that, in marrying Nicholas,

she hasn't just married the man, she's married the institution.

And this is one enormous institution.

From what she wore to the way she spoke,

Alexandra could do nothing right -

her Russian was almost non-existent

and her French, the official language of the court,

did not pass muster either.

The Russian Court is totally unimpressed with Alexandra.

They talk, they laugh, they send her up behind her back.

She is regarded as gauche, as awkward, as badly dressed.

Apparently, she speaks French with a bad accent.

This is somebody who isn't well liked at all.

And Alexandra doesn't go out of her way to try and change that.

She retreats even more.

She is shy, she is awkward, and she doesn't fulfil her role as Empress.

Nicholas and Alexandra found sanctuary

from the demands of court life at Tsarskoye Selo -

a series of royal residences secluded in beautiful parkland,

which lay 15 miles south of the capital.

This imperial haven had been a favourite of Catherine The Great,

who had added the Chinese pagodas and bridges,

which gave the place the air of an enchanted fairyland.

Tsarskoye Selo was a complex of palaces.

It had begun in the 18th century as a sort of copy of Versailles,

and was similar in many ways.

It was a retreat, where they could live away from the capital,

untroubled by their ministers and by the problems of state.

I think they envision life as sort of country squires.

They wanted to live away from society,

they didn't want to move in elite society,

they wanted to live in a sort of cocoon - a bubble, if you will.

For the newlyweds,

the Alexander Palace represented a break with the past

and the beginning of a new chapter in imperial life.

Alexandra rejected the gilt and grandeur of other imperial palaces

in favour of a far more homely look.

At Tsarskoye Selo, they didn't have imperial furniture -

they bought directly import from Maples,

the sort of middle-class store of London,

and that was very much the sort of cosy domestic environment

they wanted.

They called each other "hubby" and "wifey"

in that sort of domestic language of Victorian sensibility.

Every room was stuffed with favourite trinkets,

every surface covered with family photographs,

and examples of her personal emblem - the owl -

were to be spotted everywhere.

People thought the Alexander Palace interiors were very, er...

rather down-market for an empress,

they were terribly modest and bourgeois -

there was no grandeur about them,

and this was a beautiful, classical building,

and yet its interiors were like, in some people's eyes,

a sort of second-rate hotel.

The cosiness of Nicholas and Alexandra's domestic arrangements

reflected their deep emotional and physical bond -

the pair had eyes only for each other.

Theirs was a very tight, close, passionate,

co-dependent relationship.

Alexandra could not bear it

when Nicholas went away on official business.

She didn't like him being out of her sight.

She had this intense need for his love and his support.

And, equally, he had for hers.

In Nicholas and Alix's letters,

there's always a sense of longing for one another.

They have a sexual element.

Nicholas would refer to "boysey", which is his penis, actually.

And "lady" would be her equivalent, so...

And they have, sort of, a bit of sexual innuendo.

"Oh, boysey's really missing lady,"

or "Boysey isn't having any attention paid to him."

However overwhelming their private passions,

the Tsar and Tsarina could not

completely evade their public duties.

In May 1896, Nicholas' coronation took place in Moscow.

The eyes of the world were on the new Tsar and Tsarina.

Not only had vast crowds gathered for the celebrations,

but this was one of the very first public occasions to be filmed.

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians

who lined the streets reinforced Nicholas' faith

in an ancient and enduring bond between the Tsar and his people.

Nicholas believes in that divine mystical link

between Tsar and people.

That he ruled only in accordance with his conscience before God

and that he need not take account of public opinion.

He took it for granted that the people revered him,

worshipped him as a god,

and this was part of tsarism's ideology

going back to medieval times.

But a few days after the coronation,

a tragedy unfolded that called into question this relationship

and suggested that Nicholas, in fact, took not just the loyalty,

but the lives of his people for granted.

On the 18th of May, half a million people turned out

at a coronation fair held at Khodynka Field

in the suburbs of Moscow.

Souvenir tankards and biscuits were to be handed out to the crowds,

but when a rumour went round

that there would not be enough for everyone,

there was a stampede.

By the end of the day, 1,400 were dead, 600 were wounded.

That evening, Nicholas goes to a ball at the French Embassy.

During the coronation, the usual festivities,

banquets, balls, continue -

and the whole thing's sort of hushed up.

It caused damage.

It was a very good example of Nicholas' inability

to give out a good impression,

and in later years Nicholas would look back on that incident

as a bad omen.

With his coronation out of the way,

Nicholas was delighted that life could return to normal,

as he wrote in his diary...

"Awoke with the wonderful realisation

"that everything is over and that it is now possible to live for oneself,

"quietly and peacefully."

Alexandra was as relieved as her husband

to withdraw from public view,

and saw no need to indulge her subjects

with the usual royal charm offensives.

She took the view that as Empress of Russia,

she didn't need to win people's respect -

and, in fact, Queen Victoria, her grandmother,

learning of her problems did write to her,

suggesting, in her wisdom,

that she might help her earn the love and respect of her citizens.

And Alexandra wrote back, "You're mistaken, Grandma -

"this is Russia, not England,

"in Russia the people worship their tsars as divine beings

"and we don't need to earn their love and respect."

And she took the same view of St Petersburg society.

She thought, as did Nicholas, that public opinion counted for nothing.

Instead, the couple's attention was focused much closer to home.

On the 15th of November 1895,

Alexandra had given birth to their first child, Olga.

Two years later, another daughter, Tatiana, was born,

and two years after that a third daughter, Maria, arrived.

Far from subscribing to Victorian stereotype

and leaving their offspring to be brought up by maids and governesses,

the Emperor and Empress were determined

to raise their children themselves.

Alexandra had a very clear plan in her mind

of what family life was going to be.

Family life was going to be private mothering

with her controlling everything

right from the moment her children were born -

which meant she breast-fed them,

which was unheard of in Russian aristocratic circles.

People were appalled

when they discovered that the Empress of Russia

was breast-feeding her children

But any criticism fell on deaf ears.

The Empress knew best how to raise her girls.

Alexandra always liked to say and remind Nicholas

that it was she who wore the trousers,

and I think she was definitely the, sort of...

the boss of that relationship, and the boss of that family.

In the royal nursery,

Alexandra disregarded the eye-watering wealth of the Romanovs

and displayed a very un-imperial zeal for economising.

She saw to it that her girls had the same modest,

relatively Spartan upbringing as she had had.

They tidied their rooms, they made their beds.

It was early to bed, plain nursery food,

cold baths in the morning.

She never for a moment spoilt her four daughters.

They had hand-me-downs,

each passed on her clothes to the next one

and there are accounts of having frocks let out and skirts let down.

They had very modest amounts of pocket money,

they lived very simple and unostentatious lives.

Nowhere is the Romanovs' surprisingly ordinary

and down-to-earth lifestyle more apparent

than in their remarkable private family photographs,

which capture royalty at its most relaxed.

These were probably the most photographed royal princesses

in history - even more so than the British royals,

who took an awful lot of pictures of themselves -

because they all had Box Brownie cameras,

and they were constantly snapping each other.

I think the wonderful fascination about those girls

is you see them not just as royal princesses -

you see them as an informal family group,

loving, laughing, sharing things,

making pratfalls in the sand.

You see them as normal human beings.

Although Nicholas and Alexandra were delighted

with their little princesses,

there was no escaping the fact that the Tsarina had so far failed

in her most crucial duty as Empress -

providing her husband with a son and successor.

The Romanov rules of succession are the strictest in Europe

in terms of insisting on the elder son taking over

and not allowing any choice in the matter.

So there was huge pressure on Alexandra to bear a son.

Even within the imperial family, great rejoicing when Olga,

the eldest daughter, was born.

Not quite so delighted when second child, Tatiana, is a daughter.

The Tsar's sisters are saying, "Oh, God forbid us

"for not being thrilled to bits with this baby -

"but it's another daughter."

On the 5th of June 1901,

Alexandra gave birth to her fourth child,

but instead of the longed-for son and heir

it was another daughter - Anastasia.

In the Tsarina's mind,

one little girl seemed to be as good as another

and she treated her daughters more as a homogenous mass

than as four distinct characters.

Their mother split them into two groups,

the big pair and the little pair,

and often didn't refer to the girls by their names individually.

And she tended to dress them in these pairs -

sometimes all four girls wore the same clothes.

You see endless photographs of them all in a line

in the same white frocks and big hats.

And it kind of emphasised this sense of them being just anonymous,

not having any individual personalities of their own.

This group mentality was even reinforced by the girls -

they referred to themselves as OTMA,

from the initial letters of their four names -

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

But behind the convenient acronym and the identical outfits,

four very different personalities were taking shape.

Olga was the most sensitive of the four daughters.

She was very independent, she was very strong minded.

Shy. Compassionate. Had a temper.

Olga was temperamental, she had moods,

and really was, I think, of all the girls

the one who answered back and could be quite hard to handle.

I always see Tatiana as a beautiful enigma.

She was sphinx-like in her beauty,

with those gorgeous aristocratic features,

but there was something very closed off about her,

she was very reserved, like her mother,

very dutiful, very good at organising and getting things done.

So much so that her sisters found her bossy

and called her The Governess.

And then there was Maria,

and her sisters used to be slightly cruel to her,

and call her Fat Little Bow-wow.

But she had a wonderful generosity of spirit that was quite her own.

In fact, at one point Nicholas said of her

that he was worried she was almost too perfect,

so he liked to be told when she was actually naughty.

And Anastasia, she was the mischievous one.

She was the one that would play the pranks.

She was the one that would stick her tongue out behind people's backs.

She was the tomboy, really.

But by 1904, the Romanovs' treasured family life looked,

to the outside world, like an abject failure.

As the American magazine, Bystander, commented...

"There are four of these little girls.

"They are bright, intelligent children,

"but nobody in Russia wants them, unless it be their parents."

On July the 30th 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra's

luck finally seemed to change.

CANNON BOOMS

That afternoon, the cannon of the Peter and Paul Fortress

fired a 301-gun salute to announce

the birth of a son and heir - Alexei.

The capital's streets erupted in celebrations

and the sound of church bells was almost deafening.

CHURCH BELLS RING

But the imperial couple's joy was very short lived.

Almost immediately after his birth,

there was bleeding from Alexei's navel

and his mother's worst nightmare

began to unfold before her very eyes.

Shortly after Alexei's birth, she took one of her ladies aside,

absolutely distraught and weeping and she said to her,

"You don't know how much I have been praying that our child would not

"have our inherited curse."

That's what she called it.

She had clearly, throughout that pregnancy,

been longing for a son, yet dreading the thought that this boy she'd

been waiting for for nearly ten years might have haemophilia.

The Tsarina had inherited haemophilia from

her mother, Princess Alice,

who in turn had inherited it from her mother, Queen Victoria.

They didn't know why it happened. They couldn't test blood for it.

They had no way of confirming the diagnosis,

and, most critically of all, they didn't have any way to treat it.

It was regarded as an early death sentence.

Up until about 1950,

the mean age of death of a young man with severe haemophilia was 16.

What makes it even more difficult for Alexandra to cope with

is that nobody can know that the boy suffers from haemophilia.

It would have meant that this is a boy with bad blood.

This was not going to redound to Alexandra's credit

in any way, shape or form.

And they could not have an imperfect heir on the throne.

It reflected on the dynasty and it was an ill omen.

Alexandra would for ever live in the shadow of her son's illness,

but Alexei's birth also transformed the lives of his four sisters.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia lost their places

in the family hierarchy. From now on, they would always take

second place to their little brother.

The whole dynamic of the Romanov family changed the minute

Alexei was born because suddenly those four girls very much

became secondary to a whole focus on that

precious, frail, haemophiliac child -

of the emphasis of everyone's time and attention.

And the girls, immediately, from a very young age,

are sucked into this sense of caring and protecting and cocooning Alexei.

Whilst Alexandra had insisted that her daughters

be treated as ordinary girls rather than imperial princesses,

it was a very different matter when it came to her precious son.

Alexei becomes incredibly precocious.

He's spoiled, incredibly, by both his parents -

well, in fact, by his sisters, too.

And I suppose it is...

Alexandra, of course, is going to do everything she possibly can.

She's going to give in every way to this boy.

You know - he's Baby. He's known as Baby.

Even when he's 12 years old, he's Babykins.

You know, this is a little treasure that has to be kept in cotton wool.

Alexei's haemophilia meant that any knock or bump

could trigger a potentially fatal bleed.

Here, as his playmates launch themselves into the water,

he is forced to watch from the safety of the pier.

To make up for all the restrictions placed on him,

the little Tsarevich was frequently allowed to get away with murder.

He got away with some absolutely appalling bad behaviour,

which a normal child, a normal, healthy child,

would never have been allowed to get away with.

He would be very peremptory, he would like people

kissing his hand and bowing and scraping

to him when he was a little boy.

And especially on board the imperial yacht, the Standart,

he had a penchant for commanding that

the band play for him at unsociable hours.

And there were people in the entourage who actually really

didn't like Alexei - they thought he was a dreadful spoilt brat.

Here, a lady makes the mistake of turning her back on the heir

to the throne and is rewarded with a vigorous shove to the bottom.

And here, Alexei, standing third from the right,

slaps his companion in the face.

He's very aware from an early age, he's the important one.

He can be very dismissive of his sisters, who adore him,

but he knows he's going to be the Tsar.

After Alexei's birth,

his parents guarded their family's privacy more fiercely than ever,

determined that his haemophilia should remain an absolute secret.

And, in 1905, the year after his birth,

a new crisis drove the family even closer together

and isolated them still further from the outside world.

On Sunday the 9th of January,

a crowd in St Petersburg marched on the Winter Palace.

They were protesting against Russia's disastrous war

with Japan, against their terrible working conditions

and against the autocratic regime's failure to offer any kind of reform.

The protesters hoped to present their petition to the Tsar,

but instead troops outside the palace fired on them,

killing 200 and wounding a further 800.

I think we can say that Bloody Sunday,

the massacre of protesting workers and women and children,

was the end of the popular myth of the benevolent Tsar.

People no longer believe that the Tsar was

governing in their interests.

Nicholas was not in St Petersburg that Sunday.

Instead, as he so often did,

he was spending the weekend with his family at the Alexander Palace.

Amidst the peace and tranquillity of his private retreat,

he was virtually oblivious to the seriousness of events

unfolding in his capital just 15 miles away.

When Bulygin, the Minister Of Interior,

suggested to him that some political concessions might be required,

Nicholas said to him, "My God, man, anyone would think

"you're afraid a revolution will break out."

To which Bulygin replied,

"Your Majesty, the Revolution has already begun."

He didn't ever really grasp the true nature of the situation.

So if you look at his diary entries for 1905, for example,

I mean, it's full of the usual stuff about, you know, how many deer

he shot at hunting, who was at afternoon tea, games of dominoes,

the reading on the barometer, et cetera, et cetera.

He seems completely removed from political power,

and that's very much part of the problem.

Bloody Sunday, as it became known, was only the beginning of a

year of revolutionary upheaval,

and as the safety of the imperial family was called into question,

their security was dramatically increased.

The Tsarina was terrified that Nicholas might be killed

or Alexei kidnapped and she became obsessed

with keeping her family out of harm's way.

Their mother's siege mentality had a profound impact on her daughters.

When they travelled on the imperial train, for example,

she was once described as insisting all the blinds be pulled down.

And there are the little children, trying to peep out at this

extraordinary world outside that they didn't know,

that they had so little experience of.

And she even forbade Nicholas from going too close to the train windows.

She didn't want people to see into their privacy,

into their little, enclosed world.

After 1905, the imperial children rarely appeared in public.

They were most likely to be spotted through

the fence of the Alexander Park playing in the palace grounds,

where they had their own

little house on what was known as Children's Island.

It was in the park that Alexei - then aged three -

had his worst accident yet, when he fell and hurt his leg.

He was in excruciating pain and the doctors seemed unable to help.

In desperation, the Tsarina turned to a mystical healer,

Grigori Rasputin, who she had met a couple of years earlier.

Rasputin had already sort of made a name for himself as a mystic,

and in the high society circles of St Petersburg at that time,

there was a search for sort of mystical men,

for some sort of spirituality - there were seances.

Rasputin, with his supernatural powers, his eyes,

his charisma, undoubtedly, had a hold over aristocratic ladies,

and, indeed, over some high churchmen,

who recommended Rasputin to the Tsarina.

And she genuinely believes that he has some sort of mystical ability

to cure, or at least relieve the suffering of her son.

Rasputin was a wandering pilgrim from Siberia, who came to

St Petersburg in 1903 and gained a reputation for his mystical powers.

When he was first summoned to Alexei's sick-bed

he simply prayed for the boy and reassured him

that his pain would go and the next morning his fever had gone

and the swelling in his leg had also disappeared.

The encounter seemed to confirm Rasputin's remarkable abilities,

to ease both Alexei's suffering and the Tsarina's frayed nerves.

It is well known that particularly with pain and distress,

and the interplay of pain and distress in the child,

with distress and emotional pain in the mother, that for someone

to enter the situation and express in terms of great confidence,

that everything will be all right, is sometimes extremely effective.

It works.

I think Alexandra saw in Rasputin elements of what her grandmother

saw in John Brown - the kind of noble savage.

There was a brutal, rough, crude simplicity about Rasputin

that there was in John Brown.

He had this peasant understanding about life and belief in a way

that was untrammelled by the sophistication

of the world of St Petersburg.

She saw in him someone sent by God to help them,

to save Alexei, to keep her boy alive.

But Alexandra prided herself on her strict Victorian morals,

and she knew that the family's relationship with Rasputin

was fraught with danger.

If his personal habits were unappealing,

he was often drunk, and ate everything, even soup,

with his hands,

then his debauchery was far worse - he visited prostitutes

and indulged in orgies with his aristocratic patrons.

It was not a reputation that sat easily with the imperial family's

wholesome image, so the Tsarina drilled her daughters

never to mention his name in public.

Alexandra was very aware of the gossip and scandal

and innuendos surrounding Rasputin,

and his bad reputation.

And she did not want that to attach to the family or to the girls.

They kept his visits private, they didn't discuss them

with other people, and Alexandra instructed her

daughters never to discuss Rasputin with others.

He was their friend, their family confidante,

and it stayed within the family.

In 1909, the four daughters enjoyed a brief respite from the family's

self-imposed retreat at the Alexander Palace.

That summer, Nicholas took his family to

Britain to visit King Edward VII and

their other royal relations during the Cowes Sailing Regatta.

Nicholas' and the future George V's mothers were sisters,

making the pair first cousins,

and a striking family resemblance was clear.

But this was not the average family holiday

and, even well beyond the borders of his empire,

the Tsar had to remain vigilant to the threat of assassination.

The British royals, and in fact the British aristocracy,

were absolutely horrified at the amount of security

required to protect the Tsar of Russia.

But there were so many threats against him,

even extremist groups in Britain,

that they didn't actually stay on land -

they stayed on their yacht, moored off Cowes.

The future Edward VIII,

who was quite a young man at the time

and was appointed to escort his royal cousins around,

was absolutely horrified at the levels of security.

He said it wasn't worth being a prince for.

But for the girls, the Isle of Wight provided

a brief taste of a kind of freedom

they would never be allowed within Russia.

And it was, for the girls, like being let out of jail.

This was a whole new world,

this "outside life", as they later referred to it,

that they had had no experience of.

It was extraordinary.

All of the children came ashore to go shopping in West Cowes

and look around the shops, but particularly Olga and Tatiana

with their little bit of pocket money going around the shops and

buying postcards, even of their own parents, that were on sale in Cowes.

It was such a revelation for those children to be allowed out.

There is a delightful story of the two elder girls,

Olga and Tatiana, escaping.

Not literally, cos their guards were behind them.

But they had some time off and they did things like

they bought tickets for the ferry for themselves, which was great.

They'd never done that before, other people would deal with money

or there would be no money anywhere.

They couldn't keep it up for very long

because people began to realise -

"Who are these young ladies walking around

"who look very pretty and like one another?"

"Oh, they're the Tsar's daughters!"

They must have rather missed it when they came back

but I think it was a highlight for them

and does demonstrate how constrained their lives were normally.

The trip to Cowes was the last time the two royal families would meet.

From the glitz and glamour of Edwardian England,

the girls returned to a life in Russia

that was becoming ever more suffocating

and a childhood that was now blighted by both Alexei's

and their mother's failing health.

Alexandra had suffered from agonising sciatica -

pain in the lower back - since she was a teenager,

and five pregnancies in quick succession

had left her a physical wreck.

When she returned home from Cowes,

she was suffering from extreme exhaustion.

From photographs of Alexandra,

she so often seems to be either lying down on her sofa,

in her bedroom, in a wheelchair, rarely moving around.

She's basically an invalid.

She suffered from palpitations,

she was convinced she had an enlarged heart,

she had ear problems, otitis, she had migraines, she had headaches,

she suffered from swollen legs, from bouts of extreme exhaustion.

It wasn't just a matter of her physical ailments

that incapacitated her -

it was the huge and constant mental strain,

first of all worrying that her husband might be murdered

or assassinated, secondly that her son could die.

This longed-for child could die.

But the Tsarina's numerous detractors put her ill health

down more to hypochondria and hysteria than any genuine ailment.

There was a kind of total selfishness there.

She was very self absorbed when it came to these illnesses.

You know, the sciatica? OK, fine.

The enlarged heart? Well, all right,

she'd have had some problems there, perhaps.

But there was an awful lot that was psychosomatic.

There was an awful lot there that somebody,

if they'd been brave enough, might have said,

"Think about your husband. Think about your children.

"Stop thinking about yourself."

Although Alexandra and her daughters shared a house,

when their mother's health was at its worst

the girls scarcely got to see her.

The Tsarina shut herself away in her room

and refused either to come out or to allow her daughters in.

She's not there as the mother that she should be.

The girls constantly made reference in their letters -

it's almost a monotonous, painful litany -

about, "What a shame, Mama is at her bed."

"Mama came down very briefly, she took to her bed."

"Mama was too tired to attend this..."

You know, it's a constant refrain through the lives of these girls.

The girls' one form of communication with their absent mother

were plaintive notes written in their imperfect English.

13-year-old Olga was clearly missing Alexandra.

"So sorry never to see you alone, Mama dear.

"Cannot talk so shall try to write to you

"what could course better say."

And so was her 11-year-old sister, Tatiana.

"I hope you won't be today very tied and that you can get up for dinner.

"I am always so awfully sorry

"when you are tied and when you can't get up."

But if her children were seeking comfort or reassurance,

they were in short supply.

Instead, their mother used the excuse of her ill health

to keep her daughters firmly under the thumb.

"Try to be as good as you can and not cause me worries,

"then I will be content.

"Be an example of what a good little obedient girlie ought to be.

"Learn to make others happy, think of yourself last of all."

She kind of, in a way, manipulated the girls with her ill health,

because they couldn't distress Mama.

Mama wasn't feeling well, you know, they couldn't upset her,

so therefore they had to be good and do what Mama wanted.

And it was a way of kind of keeping them down.

Alexandra made sure her daughters always knew just how ill she was.

She devised a code for her heart pain,

rating it on a scale of one - the mildest -

to three - the most severe.

And the girls were all well aware of how the code worked.

"I'm so sorry that your heart is number two.

"I'm so sorry not to see you today,

"but certainly it's better for you to rest.

"1,000 kisses from your own loving Maria."

She would write a letter to the girls saying,

"Oh, my heart's number two today."

They would creep around and be quiet and be very solicitous.

And they were very aware, all the time,

that Mama's heart troubled her,

and that if it was number three they really had to keep the lid

on any demands they made on her.

Alexandra was so absorbed with her own ill health

and that of Alexei that she was unable - or unwilling -

to provide the emotional support and motherly advice

her daughters so craved.

So the girls turned instead to one of the very few people

who had managed to breach the family's strict defences

and grow genuinely close to them -

Rasputin.

I think it's incredible the degree to which Rasputin was taken

into the heart of the royal family, and it happened relatively quickly.

They were first introduced in 1905 and it doesn't take that long

before Alexandra is literally bringing Rasputin

into the girls' bedrooms, into the nursery,

allowing him to pray with them.

The relationship of the four Romanov sisters with Rasputin

is interesting because they clearly followed the parent's line.

They saw Grigori, as they called him - Father Grigori -

as a wise owl, a guru, a teacher.

Someone, even as young teenage girls, that they could confide in.

They wrote letters to him, even asking his advice,

almost like an agony aunt.

They asked his advice about their teenage pashes.

They trusted him implicitly with a, kind of, total unworldly innocence.

Alexandra had always fought to preserve her daughters' innocence

but, beneath their unruffled exteriors, private passions seethed.

In December 1909, the 14-year-old Olga

was in the grip of one of her first teenage crushes

on a man who was probably an officer in the imperial entourage.

She poured out her heart to Rasputin.

"It's hard without you.

"I have no-one to turn to with my worries

"and there are so very many of them.

"Here is my torment. Nikolay is driving me crazy.

"I have only to go to St Sophia Cathedral and see him

"and could climb the wall. My whole body shakes.

"I love him. I want to fling myself at him.

"You advised me to be cautious.

"But how can I be when I cannot control myself?"

Among their Romanov relations, there was mounting concern

about the exact nature of the relationship

between four young and very innocent girls

and a man notorious for his sexual appetites.

In March 1910, Nicholas' mother and his two sisters

heard that Rasputin had taken advantage of the two elder sisters,

Olga and Tatiana.

Within the wider Romanov family there is some horror over Rasputin

and how close he appears to be to the family,

particularly to the two elder daughters.

There was an incident when their governess came to Nicholas

and complained that Rasputin was actually in the bedroom

of the girls saying good night to them.

And there was, certainly within the wider family and those who knew

about this, there were fears of what we would term sexual abuse.

Nicholas' mother was so concerned about her granddaughters

and about the future of the Romanov line

that she confided in the Prime Minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov.

"My poor daughter-in-law is ruining the dynasty and herself.

"She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer,

"and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune that is sure to come."

When people start to approach Nicholas and Alexandra

with the rumours that they're hearing about Rasputin,

the reaction that both Nicholas and Alexandra give

are "This is our private life."

"These are our private, personal family matters

"and do not concern the state and do not concern the public,

"and we will have no further conversation about it."

Rasputin dismissed all accusations of impropriety

with the pithy riposte, "Nobody fouls where they eat".

And there is no evidence that he was guilty of any abuse.

But, with the family's private life so shrouded in mystery,

even the most outlandish rumours seemed all too plausible.

But, in 1913, the Russian public did enjoy a rare sighting

of their reclusive royals.

That year's Romanov tercentenary demanded that the family

show their faces at a series of grand state occasions.

For Nicholas and Alexandra, the tercentenary seemed to confirm

that their long absence from public view

had left their popularity undimmed, and the couple remained oblivious

to the political storm threatening to engulf their family.

The Romanov tercentenary of 1913 was a huge propaganda operation

and, to a large extent, Nicholas and Alexandra

fell prey to their own propaganda.

They are extremely cut off

from the political reality that is engulfing them.

There's a retreat from any idea of political reform.

Nothing is done about Rasputin,

nothing is done to halt the drift towards revolution,

which everybody feels.

Aleksandr Blok, the great poet, described living in Russia in 1913

as like living on a volcano.

At the time, none of the Romanov sisters would have realised it,

but this was a volcano that was about to erupt so violently

that it would destroy all trace of the world they knew.

The second part of Russia's Lost Princesses

will trace the girls' lives through war and revolution.

It will reveal how Olga and Tatiana's war work

finally gave them a taste of real life

and real love beyond the palace gates.

And it will uncover the story of the sisters' final days in exile

in Siberia, watching and waiting as the world closed in upon them.