In Russia today, the Tsar’s
four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia have literally become
icons and are worshiped as holy martyrs. The first program in this two-part series
will tell their story in their own words. In 1913, Tsar Nicholas the Second 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 modest 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. These four princesses have an enduring fascination
because they died young, unmarried, virginal, and they remain a symbol of innocence and untainted
beauty. Little was known about them at the time. They were viewed with fascination because they
appeared so beautiful, almost like fairy tale princesses. There's an inherent similarity with
Princess Diana, being the most photographed princesses of their time. The most marriageable,
attractive, desirable, young royal princesses in Europe. Undoubtedly, the main figure in the lives
of the four sisters was their mother Alexandra. Alexandra's story began a world away from the
pomp and ceremony of Imperial Russia, in the tiny German Duchy of Hessen 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 Louie,
came some way down the Royal pecking order. They were a happy and close-knit family,
but in 1878, they suffered a double tragedy, when diphtheria killed both Alexandra's little
sister Mae and her beloved mother Alice. Alexandra was just six at the time, and
profoundly traumatized 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.
That was the start of her deep introspection. In the nursery she was alone. She didn't even
have her familiar toys around because they'd been burned or taken away to be disinfected. So, there
was a huge cloud of mourning 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 Alex 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. She would go through all of the points and 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. She was very
English. 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 had had a big influence on that. She had an
English nursemaid and an English governess. In 1884, when she was 12 years old, Alexandra
visited St. Petersburg for her eldest sister's wedding. There, she met Nicholas, the 16-year-old
son, and heir of Tsar Alexander the third. Nicholas would one day be the 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 Romanov dynasty. 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. However, neither Alexandra's grandmother, nor Nicholas’s parents considered it a match
made in heaven. The Queen was very concerned when Alexandra announced she wanted to marry Nikki, the
future Tsar of Russia. She was terribly worried about Russia, which seemed a very long away
place, very alien, and very unsettled. That throne seemed almost dangerous to occupy. Nicholas’s
parents 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's choice of bride that was a cause for concern,
but his ability to fill his father's shoes. 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
industrialization 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, Nicolas would inherit the same absolute power as every Tsar had wielded for
the past 300 years. And in the autumn of 1894, the future Tsar found himself put to
the test far sooner than expected. Whilst visiting his new fiancé 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 28th of October,
leaving his son utterly distraught. Just a week after he buried his father, Nicholas married Alexandra in a lavish ceremony
at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The couple shared a uniquely strong love, which
helped them through all their trials in life. That was especially important for
Alexandra because far from home, at this foreign court, she found little
comfort other than in Nicholas's arms. Alexandra had a pretty tough time when she
first arrived at the Russian imperial court. One has to remember that it happened far
more quickly than she anticipated or desired. Her hope was that she would learn Russian,
she would learn about Russian Orthodoxy, and how the court worked. However, what happened
was that Nicholas was catapulted onto the throne and Alix was suddenly called to Russia. They got
immediately married and there was no preparation. Alix only knew a little bit of Russian when she
arrived. The Russian call was incredibly opulent. The protocol was rigid. There were rules, and
rules were not bent. These rules could not be broken. In this world of unimaginable access and
unbearable rigmarole, Alexandra completely lost her bearings. She came from a very modest,
little German backwater, and here she was in the center of St. Petersburg society, and
she couldn't cope with it. She was the kind of person who if he 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's mother the Dowager Empress Marie, had set her daughter-in-law, a
daunting example to live up to. For Alexandra, her glamorous, highly sociable mother-in-law was
a constant reminder of everything she was not. The Dowager Empress’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 an empress of Russia should do, which
she, of course, had done with supreme confidence. But Alexandra was not like Marie. And the Dowager
Empress was very annoyed and disgruntled that her daughter-in-law was not, as she saw it, fulfilling
her proper function. The Russian Court was totally unimpressed with Alexandra. They talked and they
laughed, and they sent her up behind her back. She was regarded as gauche, as awkward,
as badly dressed. On the other hand, Alexandra didn’t go out of her way to try
and change that; she retreated even more. Nicholas and Alexandra found sanctuary from
the demands of court life, at Tsarskoe Selo, a series of royal residences secluded in a beautiful
parkland, which lay 15 miles south of the capital. This Imperial haven had been a favorite
of Catherine the Great, who had added the Chinese pagodas and bridges, which gave
the place the air of an enchanted fairyland. Here, 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, and that included private mothering,
which meant she breastfed them, something that was unheard of
in Russian aristocratic circles. People were appalled when they discovered that the
Empress of Russia was breastfeeding her children! But any criticism fell on deaf ears. The
empress knew best how to raise her girls. In the Royal nursery, Alexandra disregarded
the eye-watering wealth of the Romanovs, and displayed a very unimpaired zeal for
economizing. She saw to it that her girls had the same modest relatively Spartan upbringing
as she had had. They tidy their rooms, they made their beds, cold baths in the morning. She'd never
for a moment spoiled them. They had hand-me-downs: each passed on her clothes to the next one.
They had very modest amounts of pocket money, they lead very simple and unostentatious lives. Nowhere is the amount of 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. 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
were of the strictest in Europe, in terms of insisting on the eldest son taking over and not
allowing any choice in the matter. Therefore, there was huge pressure on Alexandra to
bear a son, even within the imperial family. There was surely great rejoicing when
Olga the oldest daughter was born. Not quite so delighted when the second
and third children were also daughters. 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. The four girls referred to themselves as OTMA,
from the initial letters of their four names. 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, very
strong-minded, shy, and compassionate. Tatiana was a beautiful enigma.
She was Sphinxlike 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 organizing and getting things done, so much so, that her sisters
found her bossy and called her “the governess.” Then there was Maria. Her sisters used to
be slightly cruel to her and call her names. 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 actually was naughty. Anastasia was the mischievous one. She
was the one that would play the prank. She was the one that would stick her tongue
out behind people's backs. She was the tomboy! On July the 30th 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra’s
luck, finally seemed to change. 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 streets erupted in celebrations, and the sound of church
bells was almost deafening. 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. She said to her, “you don't know how much I have been praying for
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 that this boy she'd been waiting
for, for nearly 10 years, might have hemophilia. The Tsarina had inherited hemophilia 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. Up until about
1950, it was regarded as an early death sentence. The mean age of death of a young
man with severe hemophilia was 16. What made it even more difficult for Alexandra
to cope with, was that nobody could know that the boy suffered from hemophilia. That would have
meant that this was a boy with bad blood, and it was something that would not be getting down to
Alexandra's credit in any way. They could not have an imperfect heir on the throne, because it
reflected on the dynasty, and it was an ill omen. Alexandra would forever live in the shadow of her
son's illness. But Alexei’s birth also transformed the lives of his four sisters. The girls 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 moment Alexei was born, because
suddenly, those four girls very much became secondary to a whole focus on that precious, frail
hemophiliac child. And the girls, immediately from a very young age, are sucked into this sense
of caring and protecting, and cocooning Alexei. Alexei became incredibly precocious. His hemophilia 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. After Alexei’s birth, his parents guarded
their family's privacy more fiercely than ever, determined that his hemophilia
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. 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. 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 age three, had his worst
accident yet, when he fell and hurt his leg. He was in excruciating pain, and the doctor 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 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 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 believed that he had 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 sickbed, he simply prayed for the boy, and
reassured him that his pain would go away. 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 in the child
with distress, and emotional pain in the mother, for someone to enter the situation, and express in
terms of great confidence that everything will be alright, it’s sometimes extremely effective, if it
works. According to some historians, 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, as there was in John Brown. He had this peasant understanding about life
and belief, in a way that was untrammeled 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. For a start, his manners were notoriously bad. He was
often drunk, and ate everything, even soup, with his hands. Worse than that, he was known
to visit prostitutes, and to have had affairs with many of his female followers. It was not
a reputation that sat easily with the Imperial family’s wholesome image. Alexandra was very
aware of the gossip and scandal and innuendo, surrounding Rasputin, 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. Therefore, the tsarina instructed her daughter's
never to mention his name in public, or discuss him with others. He was their friend, their
family confidant, and it stayed within the family. In 1909, the four daughters enjoyed a brief
respite from the family self-imposed retreat at the Alexander Palace. That summer,
Nicholas took his family to Britain, to visit King Edward the seventh, and their other
Royal relations during the Cowes sailing regatta. Nicholas and the future George
the fifth’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. The future Edward the eighth, 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. But for the girls, the Isle of
Wight provided a brief taste of the kind of freedom they would never be allowed within
Russia. It was 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 a
little bit of pocket money, they were going around the shops, buying postcards, even of
their own parents that were on sale on 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, because their guards were behind them, but they had some time off. And they did things
like buying tickets for the ferry for themselves, which was a new experience for them. They'd
never done that before. Other people would deal with money, or there would be no money
anywhere. However, they couldn't keep it up for very long, because people began to
realize who were those young ladies, walking around looking really pretty. They must
have rather missed it when they came back. But it was a highlight for them, and it demonstrates
how constrained normally their lives were. 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 both
by Alexei's and their mothers failing health. Alexandra had suffered from intense
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. In many photographs, Alexandra is often seen to
be either lying down on her sofa in her bedroom, or sitting in a wheelchair, rarely moving around.
She was basically an invalid. She suffered from palpitations, and it was believed that she had an
enlarged heart. She had ear problems, migraines, she suffered from swollen legs, and from bouts
of extreme exhaustion. And it wasn't just 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 longed-for son could die at any time. 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 an officer in the Imperial entourage. She poured out her heart to Rasputin: “It's hard without you. I have no one to talk to.
There is my torment. Nikolai is driving me crazy. I have only to go to the Cathedral and see him,
and my whole body shakes. I love him. I want to win myself with him. You advise me to be cautious.
But how can I be when I cannot control myself?” The relationship of the four Romanov sisters
with Rasputin clearly followed the parents’ line. They saw him as a wise owl, a spiritual father, a
teacher, someone even as young teenage girls could confide in. They wrote letters to him, asking
his advice. They asked his advice about their teenage passions, they trusted him implicitly
with a kind of total unworldly innocence. Among their Romanov relations, there was
mounting concern about the exact nature, of the relationship between four young
and very innocent girls and Rasputin. In March 1910, Nicholas’s mother and his two
sisters, heard that Rasputin had taken advantage of the two eldest sisters, Olga and Tatiana.
There was an incident, when their governess came to Nicholas and complained that Rasputin
was actually in the bedroom of the girls, saying goodnight to them. Nicholas’s mother was so
concerned about her granddaughters and about the future of the Romanov line, that she confided
in the Prime Minister, Vladimir Kokovstov. “My poor daughter-in-law is ruining the dynasty
and herself. She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we're powerless
to ward off the misfortune that is sure to come.” In 1913, the Russian public enjoyed
a rare sighting of their 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 could not foresee the political
storm threatening to engulf their family. At the time, none of the Romanov sisters would
have realized 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 and last part of this series,
will trace the girls’ lives through war and revolution. It will reveal how the war work of
the girls, finally gave them a taste of real life and real love beyond the palace gates.
It will uncover the story of the sisters’ final days in exile in Siberia, watching and
waiting, as the world closed in, upon them.
