The World Turned Upside Down 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 forever 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 second programme in this two-part series will

tell their story in their own words.

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

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

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

By 1914, the two eldest Romanov sisters had grown from

little girls into young women.

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

to fulfil the ultimate duty of all royal princesses

and be married off to eligible princes.

With their winning combination of blue blood and beauty,

it seemed that the world would be their oyster.

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.

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

But behind the happy family photographs,

their childhood was far from idyllic.

Although Nicholas was a devoted and indulgent father,

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

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

of their imperial palaces.

The girls' freedom was further constrained by their mother

Alexandra, who maintained an iron-grip over their young

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

Alexei, who had the life-threatening condition haemophilia.

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

prisoners as princesses - they rarely went out,

had few friends, seldom saw their extended family

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

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

now entering adolescence and their mother's still

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

There's this constant infantilisation of her daughters,

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

they needed to be out in the wide world.

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

It was almost a convent-like existence.

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

with Olga at 18, and Tatiana at 16,

they were still much younger than their years.

Because there was no outside contact.

There was no real outside experience.

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

interested in the officers of the imperial entourage and

the sailors on their royal yacht - the Standart -

who they had known since childhood.

These could never be more than teenage crushes - to marry

so far beneath themselves would have been quite unthinkable.

But when the search for suitable husbands began in earnest,

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

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

You get this extraordinary sight of the Tsar escorting his two

eldest daughters to these swish balls during the centenary year

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

And they gravitate towards the officers from the Standart or the

imperial entourage and this caused an awful lot of disapproval

in St Petersburg society. They seemed such ingenues,

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

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

thoughts of the impending war,

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

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

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

but their eldest daughter would take some convincing.

Olga was really rather horrified that Carol of Romania had

been suggested as a prospective bridegroom

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

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

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

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

counterparts - this was intended to be an opportunity

for the dubious Carol to win over the reluctant Olga.

As the families posed for an official photograph,

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

kept her distance from Carol at the back

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

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

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

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

Romania and were quite sunburnt.

And it was something that the Romanians immediately noticed

with horror, royal princesses do not have a sunburn

and look like sunburnt gypsies.

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

the Romanov girls were triumphant because this was a deliberate

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next day, Nicholas and Alexandra appeared on the balcony

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

singing God Save The Tsar.

But such patriotic fervour was sorely

tested by the scale of the bloodshed.

In the first five days of fighting alone,

70,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded.

To deal with the unprecedented scale of casualties,

thousands of European women, from all walks of life,

volunteered as Red Cross nurses and the Tsarina

and her two eldest daughters eagerly joined their ranks.

This wasn't a matter of just donning an apron

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

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

Seeing people with horrible mutilations and wounds.

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

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

These were very protected girls,

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

The Sisters Romanova - as they were known -

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

caring for wounded officers.

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

for the girls the hospital was another world.

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

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

without the lady-in-waiting present.

And the girls got in the car and they decided,

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

They went into a shop

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

And the next day they came back

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

And she had to explain to them.

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

the kind of social contact that they had been craving,

albeit often with wounded officers as people who were suffering

and recovering from injury.

But they were so curious to take advantage of these

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

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

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

all five children.

Even Alexei constantly interrogated people

when he visited at the hospital about the outside life.

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

If the war expanded the Romanovs' extremely narrow horizons,

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

Nicholas was often away at the front

and Alexandra found the agony of separation hard to bear.

The couple wrote to each other incessantly, sometimes several

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

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

'I press you passionately to my heart and lower.

'Forgive me.'

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

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

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

of their sexual activity.

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

which appears to have been a euphemism for the period,

or the engineer mechanic, so she'll say,

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

"when you're back."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if you read their correspondence,

this comes through very clear.

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

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

"the Russians need a strong man."

And she's forever repeating these lines over and over

in their correspondence.

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

"they just need you to bang your fist,

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

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

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

He must have dreaded these letters arriving,

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

yes, she got bossier and bossier.

And if words alone weren't enough,

Alexandra had a secret weapon in her arsenal -

the family's beloved spiritual advisor Grigori Rasputin.

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

ensured that he was the one outsider in whom

the imperial couple had complete faith.

She's always sending things, trinkets and little talismans

and things from Rasputin to Nicholas.

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

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

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

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

"hold firm and stand your ground."

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

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

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

but highly controversial political advice.

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

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

in the fighting, and troop morale was dwindling fast.

Rasputin convinced Alexandra that the Tsar must sack his uncle -

the highly experienced Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich -

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Palace, with instructions to oversee

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

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

and they had their suspicions about how much influence

the Tsarina's favourite was wielding.

Once Nicholas leaves and heads to the front permanently,

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

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

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

in a sense, pulling all the strings,

and these are the true powers behind the throne.

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

As the atmosphere at home grew increasingly claustrophobic,

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

Hundreds of their private photographs reveal how close

Olga and Tatiana became to their favourite patients.

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

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

they spent longer and longer days,

often till nearly midnight at the hospital,

changing the dressings, making beds,

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

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

to go back to the hospital and sit with their favourites

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

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

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

they often still telephoned back

to have one last chat with their favourites.

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

And for teenage girls so starved of male company,

they proved irresistible.

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

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

with their favourite officers, their favourite wounded.

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

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

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

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

swashbuckling looks much more than your rather austere

northern European Russian types.

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

was admitted to the hospital.

He was a sweet and bashful character and Olga

and he were soon smitten with each other.

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

and Mitya recovered and was sent back to the front.

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

again for Olga to see him later in the year.

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

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

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

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

Olga filled her diary with references to her beloved Mitya.

'13th August - Cleaned the instruments with Mitya,

'the darling, sitting next to me.

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

'Such absolute joy. Thank you, God.

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

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

could ever be consummated.

I think that if Olga had had her wish,

to marry and live quietly in the country,

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

Rather than a prince, an ordinary Russian soldier.

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

was hardly likely to happen.

She was an Imperial Grand Duchess,

she was going to have to make a grand marriage.

Olga's thwarted romances only exacerbated

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

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

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

relationship with Mitya.

The fact that she was besotted by this chap.

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

going to go anywhere.

Dmitri finally left the hospital at the beginning of 1916

and Olga never saw him again,

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

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

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

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

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

And as late as the beginning of 1917,

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

and when he first was admitted to the hospital.

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

Behind the scenes, private passions might get the better of

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

war work was meant to serve an important propaganda purpose,

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

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

good online message, you know.

And there was a photo opportunity done

for the Empress and her daughters.

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

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

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

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

that by this time, a British consignment of nurses outfits

delivered to St Petersburg - Petrograd as it was then -

had fallen into the hands of the city's prostitutes

and the whole image of the nurse had been transformed.

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

But it was the family's close association with

a man of Rasputin's notorious proclivities that caused

by far the greatest damage to their reputation.

Amid the isolation of the Alexander Palace,

the Tsarina seemed oblivious to rumours,

which made a mockery of her much-vaunted morality.

The Empress really becomes the key political figure in the capital

and she loves this role.

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

woman in Russia to receive ministers since Katherine the Great.

And maybe she sees herself playing that sort of role.

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

of Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution.

Completely unpopular, with all sorts of rumours

circulating around society of her sexual shenanigans with Rasputin.

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

in the court became a sort of metaphor

for the political corruption of the monarchy as a whole.

But Alexandra had such faith in Rasputin that she was willing

to turn a blind eye to reports of his increasingly embarrassing

sexual misdemeanours.

Rasputin had a bad incident when he was in Moscow,

where he sort of exposed himself in a nightclub.

And he boasted that he was sleeping with the Tsarina.

When the Tsarina heard about this particular incident,

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

dressing up as Rasputin, pretending to be him.

Just to discredit him.

Because he was so close to the imperial family.

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

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

It was said that Rasputin had had his wicked way

with the Romanov sisters,

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

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

and that they are now mad with lust,

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

Cartoons appear around St Petersburg.

Lewd cartoons of the Tsarina with Rasputin.

Schoolchildren are singing songs.

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

in what you can say about Rasputin and the Tsarina.

Alexandra and Rasputin were not only rumoured to be guilty

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

The true allegiance of the German Tsarina was called into question

and even ordinary Russians, whose loyalty Nicholas

and Alexandra had taken for granted,

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

There's a great conviction that Rasputin and Alexandra -

remember, she is a German after all -

are actually spying and working with the Germans to conclude a

separate peace and sell out the Allies.

And this is a very, very widely held belief,

this is not some lunatic fringe.

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

rumours about Rasputin as a bit of tittle-tattle

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

But I don't agree with them

because by 1915 when these rumours take off,

of his sexual orgies with the Empress,

of his direct connection to the Germans and so on,

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

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

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

What matters in a revolutionary situation is what people believe.

And these rumours were believed, not just by ordinary

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

believed by statesmen, they were believed by foreign ambassadors.

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

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

So these rumours take on a real political power

and become very damaging to the monarchy.

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

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

But with the Tsarina insisting that her weak-willed husband

follow every one of Rasputin's political pronouncements,

the government ground to a halt.

Minsters were no sooner appointed than they were sacked.

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

four different ministers of the interior

and three different war ministers all came and went.

And nobody was more conscious of the looming political crisis

than the extended Romanov family -

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

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

one of the great dysfunctional families of all time.

The degree to which no-one trust anyone.

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

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

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

On the 16th of December, 1916,

members of the wider Romanov family finally made their move.

That evening, Rasputin disappeared in Petrograd.

Anastasia recorded in her diary...

'Father Grigori went missing last night.

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

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

shared a bed.

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

Rasputin had been murdered.

It was Olga alone

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

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

the most sensitive to the wider political situation.

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

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

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

himself with their mother and his influence over her.

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

Rasputin was poisoned with cyanide-laced cream cakes,

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

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

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

details of the murder that were so shocking,

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

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

Dmitri Pavlovich was even closer to Nicholas and Alexandra

and had once been considered the ideal husband for Olga.

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

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

was a cousin of Nicholas II and was practically raised

almost as a surrogate son by Nicholas.

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

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

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

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

These were the ones who then sort of thrust the dagger

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

Alexandra is completely desperate over Rasputin's murder.

She is also very bitter.

There was already a great divide between her

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

enormously impossible to cross the divide

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

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

The Romanov clan hoped that the murder would be just

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

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

Rasputin's murder was part of a larger plan.

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

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

not just obviously Rasputin but Alexandra as well.

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

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

of again fighting these dark forces and thus allowing Nicholas,

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

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

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

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

'And that he would stop following her dreadful advice.

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

I think the conspirators believe that the monarchy will come

to its senses, Nicholas will correct his policies

and allow for a sort of compromise with the opposition forces

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

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

quite the opposite because Nicholas and Alexandra withdraw even

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

So by January 1917, we have a really hopeless situation

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

and really, the monarchy is doomed.

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

they were estranged from their wider family

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

Nicholas is oblivious to the situation.

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

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

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

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

in February from General Khabalov about disturbances in the capital.

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

On Sunday the 26th of February,

the Tsar ordered the use of military force

to put down protests in Petrograd,

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

The following day, the Petrograd garrison mutinied

and a disturbance became a revolution.

Out at the Alexandra Palace,

all the children except Maria had the measles.

From their sick beds, they heard gun fire

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

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

until it was impossible to keep the truth from them.

Alexandra refused to take the threat of revolution seriously

even when reports were coming in thick and fast of marches

and protests and bread riots,

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

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

But as the unrest in Petrograd intensified,

events overtook the Romanov family.

The leaders of the Duma and Nicholas' own military chiefs

insisted that only his abdication could resolve the crisis.

And the Tsar did not take much convincing.

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

came to an end when Nicholas renounced the throne

for himself and Alexei.

Initially only Maria was told the news,

as the other children were still so ill.

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

discovered her crouched in a corner weeping - she was

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

Almost a week later,

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

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

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

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

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

"and sail round as a family?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Who's going to govern Russia?"

On the 9th March, the former Tsar -

or Colonel Romanov, as he was now known -

came home to a palace that was now a prison.

The provisional government had placed the Romanovs

under house arrest.

For a family who had always sought to distance

themselves from the outside world,

their isolation was now strictly enforced.

They were not allowed to leave the palace,

to receive visitors, to use the telephone or telegraph

and their letters were even checked for invisible ink.

For the children, life in this world turned upside down

was a rude awakening.

Derevenko - who was one of Alexis' sailor carers -

lifted him, protected him from hurting himself.

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

because he started shouting at Alexis, giving him orders.

He was quite overweight, Derevenko.

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

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

"Pick up your own things."

The family could only go outside under armed guard and were

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

This bridge marked a frontier which they could not cross.

To compound their humiliation,

the captives became a visitor attraction -

hundreds of curious onlookers flocked to the park gates,

eager for a glimpse of their fallen royals.

But for a dethroned autocrat,

Nicholas seemed remarkably accepting of his new life.

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

He accepted with an extraordinary sort of equanimity, there was

almost a sense of indifference, one of the commandants

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

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

so introverted that nothing...

He showed nothing on the surface about how he felt about

this momentous event in his life.

Nicholas had always prized his private life above all else -

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

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

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

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

but he did think that.

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

were so widespread.

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

He had travelled a lot.

There were many occasions, family occasions,

when he saw a lot of them.

So I think they always felt that whatever happened,

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

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

Immediately after the Revolution,

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

He had this aspiration that perhaps he could come to England

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

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

"which is growing turnips and being country gent."

That would've suited Nicholas,

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

But such modest ambitions

were ultimately thwarted by his children's measles.

If they had acted quickly,

if both the British and the provisional government in Petrograd

had acted quickly,

they might have got the children and Alexandra out north,

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

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

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

If the children hadn't been ill,

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

By the time the children recovered, cousin George had had

second thoughts and withdrawn his offer of asylum.

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

If Nicholas and the children were coping with the dramatic

reversal in their fortunes, then Alexandra was not.

Under house arrest, she grew increasingly melancholic.

After their attack of the measles, her daughters' hair

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

Alexei joining in to show solidarity.

But when their mother was confronted with a photograph of her

daughters proudly displaying their bald heads, she was horrified.

She thought they looked like those condemned to death.

After almost five months under house arrest, the family left

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

Nicholas wrote in his diary...

'The sunrise that saw us off was beautiful.

'We left Tsarskoye Selo at 6.10 in the morning.

'Thank God we are all saved and together.'

At the Alexandrovsky Station, they boarded a special train,

its final destination was unknown.

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

and to pack plenty of warm clothes.

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

they hardly knew.

The empire that their father was Tsar of

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

ie - Petersburg down to Moscow and a bit beyond,

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

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

that they entered on that long four-day train ride

through to Siberia

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

Anastasia described the journey for her tutor, Sydney Gibbes,

in her somewhat broken English.

'The first day was hot and very dusty.

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

'that nobody should see us.

'On the way, many funny things happened,

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

'Goodbye. Don't forget me.'

She was right to worry.

Their ultimate destination had been chosen precisely to keep the family

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

that royalists would rescue them,

or violent revolutionaries would kill them.

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

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

and was accessible only by boat.

During the seven-month-long Siberian winter,

the river froze and the town was completely cut off

from the outside world.

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

but when an advance party went to inspect the accommodation,

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

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

it's clearly...

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

And Nicholas complains about the plumbing

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

when you're used to a palace.

Conditions in the house were cramped

and the four sisters shared a bedroom.

They filled it with reminders of their previous life -

religious icons, family snaps

and pictures of their favourite wounded officers.

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

of Siberia was a revelation

and their captors were struck by the girls' naivety.

The commissar in charge of them

thought they were terribly badly educated.

Of course, he was rather shocked when he noticed their

bewilderment at seeing local Yakuts and Siberian indigenous peoples

going around in reindeer skins.

And the girls would be standing there at the window,

looking in bafflement at these strange people on the streets below

as though they were from another planet.

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

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

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

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

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

He and his children grabbed any opportunity for fresh air

and a view of the outside world.

When you see photographs of them,

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

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

You think, what are they doing?

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

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

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

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

because they wouldn't let them go anywhere else.

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

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

The family tried to keep busy chopping wood

and pulling Alexei around on his sledge.

Inside the house it was so cold that Anastasia complained,

"Our hands do not write properly."

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

although they had very little to say.

As she wrote to her friend Katya...

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

'and boring but nothing interesting ever happens here.'

Her older sister Tatiana wrote to Valentina, one of the

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

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

'where we receive news of another world.

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

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

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

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

or would again.

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

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

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

This became almost a primary hobby.

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

how they took such pleasure in sitting and watching people

in the street below and waving to them.

At least they had a kind of point of contact,

even if it was through the glass of the windows.

In their Siberian prison, the Romanovs were

starved of news from the outside world, but what little

they did hear made their position seem bleaker than ever.

At the end of October, the provisional government was

overthrown by a Bolshevik coup led by Lenin and Trotsky -

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

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

the most naturally melancholic, felt their captivity very profoundly

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

She was extremely upset by the fact that the nation had

turned against, for her, a very loving father.

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

sensed that there was something terrible out there.

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

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

with Germany, but no sooner had one conflict ended

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

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

The Bolsheviks were terrified that the Whites would attempt to rescue

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

But Alexei was too ill to travel

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

whilst Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria went on ahead.

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

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

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

to deal with this terrible agony of separation.

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

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

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

But somehow they had to hang onto each other.

Nicholas and Alexandra expected to be taken to Moscow,

the new Bolshevik capital,

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

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

They were put up in the Ipatiev House -

or as the Bolsheviks had ominously renamed it -

the House of Special Purpose.

The house no longer exists, but where it once stood

the Church on the Blood

has been built in honour of the Romanov sainthood.

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

Once they're moved to Yekaterinburg

and incarcerated in the Ipatiev House,

it's no longer house arrest.

It must have felt much more like prison.

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

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

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

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

They knew that their political drama was moving towards some

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

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

go by from their windows,

but in Yekaterinburg even that small freedom was denied them.

Maria wrote to her siblings...

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

'to draw the curtains,

'the whitewashed windows are too horrible.'

On the 20th May, her three sisters

and Alexei began the journey to Yekaterinburg by boat.

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

known photographs of the children.

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

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

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

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

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

After a lifetime spent in virtual captivity,

their imprisonment was now total.

There is no semblance of real life at all.

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

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

they take great delight in washing handkerchiefs.

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

for one moment that they didn't have some idea

of what was going to happen.

As they struggled to adapt to their new situation,

the sisters found comfort from a most unlikely source.

The girls had always been drawn to soldiers -

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

they had nursed - and their jailors were no exception.

One thing becomes very apparent in the Ipatiev House

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

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

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

It's clear that those girls,

in their frustration and their boredom,

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

The only form of entertainment or human association.

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

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

She of all the sisters seemed the most susceptible within the

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

Maria was treading a fine line -

one that was crossed on the 26th of June -

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

brought in a cake for her.

Relations between captor and captive had become dangerously close.

It was clear the fraternisation was going too far.

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

developing a relationship with them and the girls with them,

and it was at this point that there was the extreme

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

The guard was instantly dismissed and jailed,

but Maria suffered a more subtle punishment -

during the Romanovs' final weeks,

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

It would appear that Alexandra was deeply disapproving of

Maria's increasing friendliness with the guards

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

Certainly by Alexandra.

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

and Maria suffered as a result.

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

With no end in sight to their imprisonment,

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

But in the world beyond their whitewashed windows,

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

Trotsky wanted to put Nicholas on trial in Moscow,

but others favoured a more straightforward solution.

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

to stand a political trial even though, you know,

everybody knew what its resolution was going to be,

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

And if you admit the possibility of his innocence,

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

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

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

Revolutionary justice was to carry out the will of the people

and murder them.

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

the floors of the Ipatiev House.

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

The washer women couldn't quite believe their eyes when

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

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

These were not royal princesses as they had perceived them

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

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

with lots of beautiful glittering jewellery.

They were ordinary people. Just like us.

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

of the basement of the Ipatiev House,

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

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

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

After the murder, their bodies were dumped into

a mine shaft in nearby woods.

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

from Lenin himself.

But he did not want the Bolsheviks blamed for the

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

Almost immediately, rumours started to circulate that

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

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

When someone as important as the imperial family disappears like that

and the exact fate of the children is unknown,

there will always be speculation.

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

They were shot by a ruthless execution squad,

one shooter for every person to be shot,

the bodies were then eradicated with sulphuric acid,

remains dumped into mines.

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

Why would that happen?

When they died, Olga was 22,

Tatiana 21,

Maria 19

and Anastasia 17.

The sisters are remembered as martyrs of a bloody revolution,

but they were also the innocent victims of a mother

and a father so divorced from reality that they unwittingly

condemned their beloved family to a terrible fate.