Everything changes in the first world war when Alexandra, Olga and Tatiana train as nurses (typically modest, they take the titles of Sister Romanova numbers 1, 2 and 3). Even as teenagers, they play boisterous games of hide and seek with the handsome young officers at one stage 10 people crammed into a wardrobe. Infantilised by Alexandra, they are allowed to run wild with the soldiers who escort them on their annual holiday to Crimea. They are delighted when they can wander around an English village with money of their own to spend.įor all four sisters, the ideal life would be one of quiet middle-class domesticity with a soldier husband. The 'girlies' (as Alexandra persists in calling them) long for news of 'outside life' but have little interest in court intrigues. Anxious to protect her son and fearing the moral iniquity of St Petersburg society, Alexandra keeps her children secluded in their countryside palace. The tsarevitch appeared just when Nicholas was despairing of ever providing the country with a male heir, and the girls grow up conspiring to keep his constantly life-endangering haemophilia a secret from the nation.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia are bright, wilful girls who are devoted to their parents and to their precious little brother Alexey. When Nicholas abdicates, his first thought is that now he can 'fulfil my life's desire – to have a farm, somewhere in England'. Nicholas comes home for the children's bathtime every night and records episodes of teething and weaning in his diary. Alexandra finds the business of state 'a horrid bore' that keeps her husband away from her.

What is most surprising in this story is quite how unsuited the family is to power. Now she moves from nightmare to fairytale, placing the four beautiful grand duchesses centre stage for the first time.

Helen Rappaport has already written about the Romanovs' terrifying final weeks in prison. The entire family was moved to Ekaterinburg and shot. He tried to find the family refuge outside Russia (Britain's George V couldn't help, although Nicholas's wife, Alexandra, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria) and then sent them to Siberia hoping that the Russian populace would forget about them. 'I will never be the Marat of the Russian revolution,' pledged the prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, after the February revolution in 1917. T he four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II were murdered almost by accident.

The romanov 4 sisters