anastasia's mother

Today is International Women's Day, and I wanted to introduce the woman who had the biggest influence on Anastasia and her siblings: her mother, Alexandra Feodorovna, who started out life as Alix of Hesse.

Alix of Hesse: a tiny title for a girl who would grow to be one of the most influential women in the world. With the advantage of time, perhaps this is unsurprisng: Alix was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She married the man who ruled one-sixth of the globe. But her life started out as anything but promising, as early tragedies marred what could have been a happy childhood.

Alix was born Viktoria Alix Helena Luise Beatrice on June 6, 1872. She was the sixth of seven children to Grand Duke Louis of Hesse and his wife Alice, a princess of England. She shared a first name with her oldest sister, though she was always known as Alix after her mother - though the name was Germanized, as the Hessians apparently had trouble pronouncing Alice's name.

The first sorrow her life happened only a year after she was born, when her older brother Freidrich, known as Frittie, toppled from his mother's bedroom window and fell onto the ground below. The fall might have been survivable, had Frittie not been a hemophiliac.

But the real tragedy that shaped Alix happened when she was six. Diptheria broke out among the family, striking everyone but Alix's sister Elizabeth, who was away from home at the time. Marie, the seventh child, known as May, eventually succumbed to the disease, though her death was kept from the other children. When Alice finally told her only surviving son, Ernie, he burst into tears. Alice kissed her son to comfort him, despite the risk of infection, and eventually came down with diptheria herself. She died on December 14, 1878, on the anniversary of her father Prince Albert's death.

Queen Victoria stepped in after the death of her daughter to personally see to her Hessian grandchildren's upbringing, but Alix was already becoming known for her pensive and serious nature. Victoria nurtured a hope that Alix would marry in England; one of her possible husbands was Albert Victor, heir to the English throne. But it was a meeting in 1884 with the heir to the Russian throne that changed Alix's life forever. While they both fell in love, it would be another five years before they would meet - and another five after that before they were allowed to marry. The wedding almost didn't happen, as Alix wrestled with the requirement to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith. Nicholas's father Alexander III had long opposed the match, but the wedding finally happened just as the tsar's health began to fail. It would be a love match that rivaled that of Alix's grandparents, Victoria and Albert. Alix of Hesse became Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna, and Russia would never be the same.

Photo: A rare smile from Alexandra with Tatiana, the daughter she was closest to.

Alexandra was not popular with the Russian people. Unlike her mother-in-law, Marie Feodorovna, Alexandra hated public events. She was shy and preferred to close herself up with her family. While the Romanov family tree was overwhelmingly male for generations, Alexandra produced four girls before the long-sought-after son, Alexei. And to make it worse, Alexei turned out to be a hemophiliac like Alexandra's brother Frittie, a condition that was kept secret from everyone except a select number of friends and servants. The final death noll to Alexandra's image as tsaritsa was her friendship with a peasant turned self-proclaimed holy man, Grigory Rasputin.

Rasputin has been so villanized, it's hard to look at him as anything other than a creepy man who was at least partially responsible for bringing down the Romanov throne (and his pictures don't help his case much). But if you put yourself in Alexandra's shoes, what would you have done differently? Here was a woman under tremendous pressure to produce a son - and when she has a son, he is not the perfect healthy child, but a little boy who falls deathly ill with the smallest bump or cut. Doctors were powerless to heal Alexei, but here was a strange man who helped him. If I were Alexandra, I would have trusted him, too.

When World War I started, life only became more difficult for Alexandra. Her birth country was now the enemy, and her unpopularity did not help her case. The stress of her life, coupled with her son's ill health, meant she often was sick as well, and many pictures exist showing her in a wheelchair. After looking at those photos, it's surprising to me that Alexandra didn't live to see 50 - her face looks much older and wearier. As tragic as her life's end was, it was perhaps how she would have wanted it - together with her family, surrounded by the people she loved most in the world.

nicholas's other love

Nicholas and his father, Alexander III, were unique men for their times - they were both faithful to their wives. Perhaps Alexander was motivated by the scandalous relationships his father, Alexander II, had, including of course the kicker, Princess Yurievskaya. And while Nicholas was faithful after he married Alexandra, there was one other woman who could claim his heart, however naively it was given: the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska.

Nicholas's affair with Mathilde started in 1890 and lasted three years. If it was widely accepted for men to have mistresses, it was almost expected that these mistresses would be dancers. Nicholas had already met Alexandra, then Alix, by this point and did not disguise his love for her from Mathilde. She was grateful for his attention and happy to remain in her position. "I adored the tsarevich and wanted only one thing...my happiness, however brief it might be," she later wrote.

They later parted ways amicably when Nicholas married Alexandra. Mathilde went on to continue her life both as a dancer and royal mistress. She eventually had affairs with two of Nicholas's cousins, Sergei Mikhailovich and Andrei Vladmirovich. When she later gave birth to a son, Vladmir, no one knew who the father of the child was, though he took the patronym of Sergeievich.

She survived the revolution, though the house that had been a gift from Nicholas was seized. It later became Lenin's headquarters. Mathilde eventually moved to Paris, where she died about eight months short of her 100th birthday.

Image courtesy of ballerinagallery.com

the curse of the name alexandra

The name Alexandra pops up infrequently throughout the Romanov family tree, but with it comes misfortune to almost every bearer of that name.

The youngest unfortunate Alexandra was the eldest child of Alexander II and his wife Maria, Alexandra Alexandrovna. Born in 1842, she was a favorite of her father and mother. But Alexandra died at age six of meningitis, leaving her parents devastated.







An even earlier unlucky Alexandra was Alexandra Pavlovna, aunt to Alexander II and daughter of Paul I (Catherine the Great's son). She was first heartbroken over an almost-engagement to the King of Sweden that fell through when he discovered a clause in the marriage contract stating Alexandra would retain her Orthodox faith. She finally married Archduke Joseph of Austria, a union that would prove both short-lived and unhappy. Alexandra Pavlovna died when she was only 17 years old of childbed fever; her baby, a girl named Alexandrine also died.


Alexandra Nicholaevna was a niece to Alexandra Pavlovna and the sister to Alexander II. When she met Prince Frederick "Fritz" of Hesse, a prospective bridegroom for her older sister, Olga, the couple immediately fell in love. They were allowed to marry in 1844, but Alexandra soon became ill with tuberculosis. To make matters worse, she also found out she was pregnant. She eventually went into labor three months premature and gave birth to a son, Wilhelm. Both mother and baby soon died.



Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna was actually born a princess of Greece and Denmark, and is a maternal aunt of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's husband. When Alexandra was 19, she married Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, a son of Alexander II. At the end of her second pregnancy, Alexandra was walking with a friend along the Moskva River and jumped from the bank into a boat anchored along the shore. She fell as she landed, and collapsed the next day in tremendous pain. She eventually gave birth to a son, Dmitri Pavlovich, but died soon after. Miraculously, her son, born during the seventh month of pregnancy, survived, thanks to his uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the brother of Alexander III. Paul was so grief-stricken, he tried to leap into Alexandra's coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Dmitri and his older sister Maria were raised mostly by their uncle Sergei and his wife Elizabeth Feodorovna (also a sister to the tsaritsa Alexandra), which was a comfort to the couple, who had never been able to have children themselves. Paul eventually remarried morganatically.


Perhaps the only fortunate Alexandra was Alexandra Iosifovna, wife of Konstantin Nicholayevich, brother to Alexander II. She was born Alexandra Friederike Henriette of Saxe-Altenberg. It is said she looked so much like Alexandra Nicholaevna, her husband's late sister, that her mother-in-law burst into tears upon meeting her. She and Konstantin would eventually have six children, but the happiness they had initially started with did not last. While her husband was unfaithful to her (as was so common in those days), she lived to be 80, dying in 1911, truly one of the last of the Old Order.



But it would be the tsaritsa who was the last Alexandra. As each of her daughter's names were announced, many in England wondered why none were named for their mother. Margaret Eagar explained the name was considered unlucky by the family.

And of course we know of the fate of the last Alexandra, sadly another unfortunate story.

Thanks to Wikipedia and "Romanov Autumn" by Charotte Zeepvat for information and photographs of these Alexandras!

tsarina, tsaritsa or czarina?

Alexandra Feodorovna may have been born a Hessian (modern-day German) princess, but she is remembered as a Russian empress. The Russian word for empress (there were no queens in Russia) is царица, translated as tsaritsa. It is also written as tsarina, czarina, or czaritsa. Russian is a very complicated language, one that I speak in a very limited way, but the most accurate way to spell and say Alexandra's title is tsaritsa. That is because the letter "ц" is phoenitcally equivolent to the sound "ts". Nicholas was the tsar (цар), and their son Alexei was the tsarevich (царевич). The "cz" spelling still occurs in some sources, but I've noticed a movement toward the "ts" spelling is more accepted as accurate.

The word "tsar" is close to the German equivolent "k" - both taking their names from the Roman "Caesar."

Incidentally, the last German kaiser, Wilhelm II, was Alexandra's cousin - though they would later become enemies with the dawn of World War One.

anastasia's quirks

Marie, top, and Anastasia making faces during their captivity at Tsarskoe Selo

Anastasia Nicholaevna was a jokester. One of her family's nicknames for her was shvibzik, "imp" in Russian.

She was not the best student. Her French tutor Pierre Gilliard described her as "... almost a wag. She had a very strong sense of humour, and the darts of her wit often found sensitive spots. She was rather an enfant terrible, though this fault tended to correct itself with age. She was also extremely idle, though with the idleness of a gifted child."

Like all her family, Anastasia loved taking pictures - and she often used to color her hats or clothes after the photographs were printed.

She also enjoyed painting, though she admitted she was not as talented as older sister Olga.

Despite stories, rumors, accounts and movies all pointing to the contrary, Anastasia did not survive the shooting in the cellar in 1918. That story, which has persisted nearly 100 years after the family's deaths, was finally put to rest in 2008. More about this soon - though I doubt one blog entry will be enough!

Thanks to Pierre Gilliard's wonderful memoirs, "Thirteen Years at the Russian Court." You can read Pierre's memoirs here.

about the romanov names

Unlike some of the western countries, where royal children often had four or five (or more!) names, the Russians simply had two: one was the first name, while the other was the patronym. The patronym combines a child's father's name with the ending vich for a son or evna/ovna for a daughter. Thus Anastasia's middle name was Nicholaevna - daughter of Nicholas. In keeping with the simplicity and informality in which they were raised, Nicholas and Alexandra insisted on their children being called by their first name and patronym, rather than "Grand Duchess Anastasia" or "Her Imperial Highness." In fact, the children would rebuke servants for calling them anything but their informal names - which were still a mouthful! It's little wonder they ended up shortening these even further: Olishka, Tatianochka, Masha, Nastyusha and Baby for Alexei Nicholaevich the tsarevich.

Shorter still was the acronym the sisters would often use when referring to themselves as a group: OTMA.

picture courtesy of livadia*org