Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse)

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexandra Feodorovna, the last empress of Russia, was judged by her own court as a woman who "holds herself as if she'd swallowed a yardstick." She was born a German princess and became the consort of Tsar Nicholas II. On the 17th of July 1918, Bolshevik forces murdered her in Yekaterinburg. She was widely disliked while she reigned. Yet in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized her as Saint Alexandra the Passion Bearer.

  How does a granddaughter of Queen Victoria become so unpopular in an empire she was meant to adorn? Why did a Siberian peasant gain such a hold over her household? And why did a ruler who saw no need to win affection end up honored as a saint? The answers begin in a small German grand duchy, with a girl whose name nobody could pronounce.

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• 2. Victoria's Favorite

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  Princess Alice of Hesse wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria, that people in Germany "murder my name here," dragging it out as "Ali-ice." So her newborn daughter became Alix. The baby, Princess Alix Viktoria Helene Luise Beatrix of Hesse and by Rhine, was born on the 6th of June 1872 in a grand duchy then part of the German Empire. She was the sixth of seven children of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Alice, Victoria's second daughter. Her names echoed those of her mother and her mother's four sisters.

  Alice nicknamed the child "Sunny" for her cheerful disposition, and her future husband later adopted the name. British relatives called her "Alicky," to distinguish her from her aunt Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who was known in the family as Alix.

  In May 1873, her older brother Friedrich, called Frittie, died after a fall. He had hemophilia, and Alix was about one year old. Her closest companion was Princess Marie, called May, who was two years younger. Observers called the two sisters inseparable.

  In November 1878, diphtheria swept through the House of Hesse. Alix, her three sisters, her brother Ernst and their father all fell ill. Her older sister Elisabeth, called Ella, escaped because she was visiting their paternal grandmother. Alice chose to nurse the children herself rather than hand them to nurses and doctors. She caught the disease and died on the 14th of December 1878. Alix was six. Marie died as well. Alix later described her earlier years as an "unclouded, happy babyhood, of perpetual sunshine, then of a great cloud."

  Queen Victoria stepped into the gap. "While I live Alicky, til she is married, will be more than ever my own child," she declared. She handpicked the girl's tutors and demanded detailed monthly reports at Windsor. Gifts of dresses, jewelry, lace and dolls arrived every birthday and Christmas. Alix signed her letters "your loving and grateful child," not grandchild. When Victoria died in 1901, Alix wept openly at the memorial service in Saint Petersburg. Russian courtiers, who thought her cold and unfeeling, were shocked.

  In March 1892, when Alix was nineteen, her father died of a heart attack. Her biographer, Baroness Buxhoeveden, wrote in 1928 that Alix regarded it as the greatest sorrow of her life. For years, Buxhoeveden recalled, she could not speak of him.

  Victoria had large plans for her. She wanted Alix to be queen consort of the United Kingdom, which she called "the greatest position there is." On the 2nd of March 1888, she wrote that her heart and mind were set on securing Alicky for either Eddy or Georgie. They were Alix's first cousins, the second in line to the British throne and his brother, the future George V.

  In 1889, Victoria invited Alix and Eddy to Balmoral, hoping love would follow. Eddy became infatuated and proposed. Alix refused. Victoria kept pressing, warning that Alix should reflect on the "folly of throwing away the chance of a very good husband." Ella also opposed the match, because Eddy "does not look over strong and is too stupid." In May 1890, Alix wrote to Eddy that it pained her to pain him, but she saw only a cousin. She told Victoria she would marry him if forced, but both would be miserable. Victoria relented, saying Alix had shown "great strength of character."

  In 1891, Victoria tried again, asking Louis to invite Prince Maximilian of Baden to Darmstadt. He told Alix he meant to propose. She was surprised and unhappy, later saying, "I did not know him at all." She asked her sister Victoria to help her turn him down politely. Her other sister Ella, the one who had dismissed Eddy, was by then married to a Russian grand duke named Sergei Alexandrovich and living far to the east.

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• 3. Winning Nicholas

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  At the 1884 wedding of Ella and Grand Duke Sergei in Saint Petersburg, twelve-year-old Alix met the sixteen-year-old Tsesarevich Nicholas, heir to the Russian throne. Nicholas wrote in his diary of "sweet little Alix" and declared, "we love each other." He gave her a brooch, and the two scratched their names into a windowpane.

  In January 1890, Alix visited Ella in Russia. She and Nicholas skated, met at tea parties and played badminton. Nicholas confided to his diary that it was his dream to marry Alix one day, and that his love had deepened since she spent six weeks in Petersburg in 1889. Ella and Sergei were thrilled. Alix's uncle, the future King Edward VII, warned his mother that Ella "will move heaven and earth" to get Alix to marry a grand duke.

  Queen Victoria disliked the idea. She liked Nicholas personally, but she distrusted Russia and feared for Alix's safety there. After the betrothal she wrote of "the awful insecurity to which that poor child will be exposed." On the Russian side, Tsar Alexander III and his wife Maria Feodorovna were fiercely anti-German. Maria thought the youngest daughter of an undistinguished grand duke unworthy of the heir, and judged Alix tactless and unlikeable.

  Alexander preferred Princess Hélène of Orléans, daughter of the Comte de Paris. Nicholas noted in his diary that his mother hinted at Hélène while he wanted to go in the opposite direction. Hélène was Roman Catholic, and her father refused to let her convert. Next came Princess Margaret of Prussia, sister of Wilhelm II. Nicholas said he would rather become a monk, and she did not want to leave Protestantism either.

  In 1894, Alexander III's health failed. He decided to let Nicholas marry Alix so the succession would be secure, and Maria reluctantly agreed. But Alix hesitated. She did not want to give up her Lutheran faith for the Orthodox Church. "I cannot convert to Orthodoxy against my conscience," she wrote, asking what happiness could come from a marriage that began without God's real blessing. Nicholas was devastated, and he begged her "not to say 'no' directly."

  In April 1894, her brother Ernest Louis married Princess Victoria Melita in Coburg, and several Russians attended, Nicholas among them. He came prepared. He brought Father Ioann Yanyshev, the imperial family's confessor, to teach her Orthodoxy, and Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider to teach her Russian. The day after arriving he proposed and spent two hours trying to persuade her. She wept throughout but refused.

  Ella then spoke to her. Ella had converted to Orthodoxy without abjuring Lutheranism, and she assured Alix that she could do the same. The next day Alix talked with Wilhelm II, who hoped a German empress would improve relations with Russia. She also consulted Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a German princess who had converted to marry a Russian grand duke. Then she accepted Nicholas's second proposal.

  Alix wrote to her old governess, "I am more happy than words can express. At last, after these five sad years!" In June, Nicholas visited England for the christening of Prince George's eldest son, who would briefly reign as Edward VIII in 1936. Both Alix and Nicholas were named godparents.

  In September, Nicholas won his dying father's permission to summon Alix to the Livadia Palace in Crimea. Ella escorted her from Warsaw on an ordinary passenger train. Alexander III insisted on receiving her in full dress uniform, and he gave her his blessing.

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• 4. Behind a Coffin

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  On the 1st of November 1894, Alexander III died at the age of 49. Nicholas became Tsar Nicholas II. The next day, Alix was received into the Russian Orthodox Church as "the truly believing Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna," though she did not have to repudiate Lutheranism. She had hoped to take the name Yekaterina. Nicholas wanted Alexandra, so they could be a second Nicholas and Alexandra, as his great-grandfather Nicholas I and great-grandmother Alexandra Feodorovna had been.

  The funeral took place on the 19th of November. One week later, on the 26th of November 1894, the couple married in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace. Court mourning was relaxed because it was the birthday of the new Dowager Empress, Maria Feodorovna. Many Russians muttered, "She has come to us behind a coffin. She brings misfortune with her." Alexandra felt much the same. She wrote to her sister that the wedding seemed a continuation of the funeral liturgy, with one difference: she wore white instead of black.

  On the 26th of May 1896, the pair were crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. About five hundred thousand Russians gathered in Moscow for entertainment, food and gifts. Rumors spread that supplies would run out, and the crowd surged toward the gift tables. Police lost control. A thousand people were trampled to death at Khodynka Field.

  The young rulers were horrified. They considered skipping the ball hosted by the French ambassador, the Marquis de Montebello. Nicholas's uncles urged them to go, so as not to offend the French or feed rumors that the German-born empress disliked them. Sergei Witte recalled that they had expected the party to be cancelled, but instead the ball was opened by Their Majesties dancing a quadrille. The British ambassador told Queen Victoria that the empress appeared in great distress, her eyes reddened by tears. The next day the couple visited the wounded and paid for the coffins of the dead. Still, many Russians took Khodynka as an omen, and critics seized on it to mock the heartless autocracy and its "German woman."

  Alexandra's shyness read as arrogance. Her courtiers sneered that she was wooden, with cold eyes. She spoke English and German fluently and learned Italian as a teenager. Her letters show she read and wrote French very well, and she used it with her children's tutor Pierre Gilliard. The claim that she barely spoke Russian before becoming empress is untrue. Her teenage diaries record Russian lessons, and during her engagement she wrote Nicholas long passages in the language. Her later letters with her son Alexei were almost all in Russian.

  Her difficulty was the empress's public role. Traditionally she led society and hosted balls, but she was shocked by the love affairs and gossip. She struck names from invitation lists until nobody was left. At one early ball, she sent a lady-in-waiting to scold a young woman in a low-cut gown. The reply came back: "Pray tell Her Majesty that in Russia we do wear our dresses this way." In 1896 she launched "Help Through Handwork," workshops where noblewomen would teach poor peasants to sew and raise money for needy families.

  Protocol also worked against her. In Russia the dowager empress outranked the reigning one. Maria entered royal balls on her son's arm, while Alexandra followed on a grand duke's arm. Maria even had her maids of honor's monograms read M. A. rather than A. M. She held onto the crown jewels, which belonged to the current empress, until Alexandra threatened to wear no jewels at all.

  Alexandra also alienated the wider family. She was an advocate of the divine right of kings. Her aunt, the German Empress Victoria, warned Queen Victoria that Alix would never yield one iota of power. She disliked the sons of Grand Duke Vladimir, Kirill, Boris and Andrei, calling them irredeemably immoral. In 1913 she refused Boris's proposal for the hand of Grand Duchess Olga. Insecure about her modest origins, she demanded full imperial honors. During a 1896 European tour, Wilhelm II lent her an antique silver toilette service once owned by Queen Louise of Prussia. She was insulted and said only gold suited an empress.

  She also refused to court the public. On a train to Crimea, hundreds of peasants waited overnight in their best clothes. Nicholas waved from the window, but Alexandra kept the curtains shut. Maria fumed that her daughter-in-law thought the family should be above winning people's affection, and yet complained of public indifference.

  Queen Victoria urged her granddaughter to earn her subjects' love. Alexandra reportedly answered that Russia was not England, because the Russian people revered their tsars as divine beings. This letter reached English readers through Orlando Figes. His source was a Russian book by Vladimir Gurko, who admitted he could not vouch for it. It cannot be checked. After the abdication in 1917, Alexandra burned her entire correspondence with Queen Victoria, and none survives in the Russian State Archives.

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• 5. Waiting for a Son

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  On the 15th of November 1895, Alexandra gave birth to her first child, Olga, at the Alexander Palace. Many Russians and relatives were disappointed by the child's sex. Under the Pauline Laws of Tsar Paul I, no woman could take the throne while any male Romanov lived. Nicholas's brother Grand Duke George remained heir presumptive. Few worried, since Alexandra was only 23. After the coronation stress, she miscarried. No announcement was made, but malicious rumors in Saint Petersburg claimed she had hidden an affair.

  On the 10th of June 1897 came a second daughter, Tatiana. Waking from chloroform, Alexandra saw anxious faces and cried, "My God, it is again a daughter. What will the nation say, what will the nation say?" Maria was born on the 26th of June 1899. Queen Victoria telegraphed that she regretted "the third girl for the country," and Grand Duke Konstantin fretted, "And so there's no Heir." Two weeks later, George died. Nicholas's younger brother Michael became heir presumptive, and courtiers flocked to him, which distressed Alexandra.

  In October 1900, Nicholas fell ill with abdominal typhus and lay in bed for five weeks. The cabinet had to consider his death. Alexandra, pregnant again, insisted she be named regent in hope of bearing a son. The ministers refused, because Michael would become tsar and renounce the throne only if a boy was born. She grew to distrust them for trying to "steal" her unborn son's inheritance.

  Anastasia was born on the 18th of June 1901. Grand Duchess Xenia exclaimed, "a fourth girl!" The French diplomat Maurice Paléologue reported that the German empress had the evil eye. Peasants concluded she was not beloved in heaven, or she would have borne a son.

  The couple turned to faith. Shortly after Anastasia's birth, Grand Duchess Militza Nikolaevna introduced them to a mystic named Philippe Nizier-Vachot. He was an unlicensed quack who claimed his magnetic powers could change the sex of an unborn child. Nicholas arranged a medical diploma for him from the Imperial Military Medical Academy and made him a State Councilor. Maria, Xenia and Ella warned the couple away. They ignored it.

  In late 1901 Alexandra seemed to be pregnant again, and Philippe swore it was a boy. By summer 1902 it was clear she was not. Doctors had mistaken anaemia for pregnancy, as Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich noted. In truth, she had suffered a molar pregnancy. On the 19th of August 1902, she passed a fleshy mass the size of a walnut, which Dr Dmitry Ott confirmed was a dead fertilized egg. To save face, court physicians announced on the 21st that she had a simple miscarriage. Humiliated, Alexandra sent Philippe to France.

  In 1903, the couple backed the canonisation of Seraphim of Sarov, a Tambov monk who had been dead for seventy years. Before leaving, Philippe had promised that Seraphim would grant them a son. The Metropolitan of Moscow reluctantly agreed. On the 19th of August, Alexandra and Nicholas bathed in the Sarov Spring where Seraphim once bathed, and prayed for a boy.

  In 1904 she became pregnant. A newspaper wrote that days would decide whether the czarina became the most popular woman in Russia or a "castaway." On the 12th of August 1904, in Peterhof, she gave birth to Alexei Nikolaevich. The family's faith in Philippe was affirmed. Nicholas's sister Olga wrote, "I am sure it was Seraphim who brought it about."

  By then the nursery held five children, and Alexandra related to each differently. Olga stayed distant and was leaned on to keep her siblings in order. She complained that her mother had no time for her and preferred her father. Tatiana was closest, a near copy of her mother in looks and temperament, as her aunt Xenia noted. Maria felt insecure, and Alexandra wrote, "Sweet child you must promise me never again to think that nobody loves you." Anastasia, dubbed the shvibzik, Russian for "imp," was mischievous. Alexandra called the girls her "little four-leaved clover."

  To Alexei, the family's attention flowed. Gilliard wrote that his sisters worshipped him, and that when he was well the palace was transformed, as if bathed in sunshine. Everything in that household hinged on those three words: when he was well.

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• 6. Hemophilia and Rasputin

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  After Alexei's umbilical cord was cut, his stomach bled for days and his blood would not clot. Nicholas wrote that the baby lost "1/8 to 1/9 of the total quantity" of his blood in 48 hours. The court doctors quickly recognized hemophilia. The disease had spread through Europe's royal houses via the daughters of Queen Victoria, including Alexandra's mother, Alice. In the early twentieth century it was often fatal, and a hemophiliac's average life expectancy was 13. Alexandra's brother Friedrich and her uncle Prince Leopold had died young of it. Her sister Irene and cousin Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg were carriers who had hemophiliac sons.

  Alexandra was consumed by guilt. Soon after the diagnosis, she told the nurse she had prayed fervently for God to protect her son from "our inherited curse." Xenia called it "the terrible disease of the English family," and relatives blamed Alexandra for contaminating the Romanovs. The family kept the illness secret from the Russian people to limit instability.

  Russian doctors failed. Alexandra turned to prayer, studied the saints, and spent hours daily in her private chapel. Then came Grigori Rasputin, a peasant from Siberia, who appeared to help the boy by praying over him. Over time, Alexandra came to believe he alone could save Alexei. Rasputin told her bluntly that without him, she would lose her son within six months.

  She refused to see his faults. When the director of the national police told her that a drunken Rasputin had exposed himself in a Moscow restaurant and boasted about her, she blamed malicious gossip. "Saints are always calumniated," she wrote. "He is hated because we love him." Nicholas recognized Rasputin's flaws, but felt powerless. Gilliard explained that if Alexei died, in the mother's eyes the Tsar would be his son's murderer.

  Gossip about Rasputin circulated from the start. Some of Saint Petersburg's clergy accepted him as a living prophet, while others denounced him as a fraud and heretic. Tales from his Siberian life spread, including one that he conducted village weddings in exchange for the bride's first night. In the capital he lived with his two daughters and two housekeepers, and women who sought his blessing visited his apartment, nicknamed the "Holy of Holies." He preached that one must become familiar with sin to overcome it. Court officials, who did not believe he could heal Alexei, were baffled by her dependence.

  In 1912, at Spała in Poland, Alexei suffered a life-threatening hemorrhage in his thigh. Alexandra sat at his bedside for days, barely eating or sleeping. He begged for death and asked to be buried in a forest, not the family mausoleum. Doctors expected him to die. A priest read last rites, and officials drafted the telegram announcing his death. In desperation, Alexandra wired Rasputin. His reply: "God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die." To the doctors' astonishment, Alexei recovered. From then on, Alexandra relied on Rasputin even more.

  The strain wore on her. Her health had never been robust, and four daughters in six years, then a son three years later, drained her. Biographers including Robert K. Massie, Carolly Erickson, Greg King and Peter Kurth blame nervous exhaustion from worry over the fragile boy for her later semi-invalidism. She spent most of her time in bed or on a chaise in her boudoir, which let her avoid the social events she disliked. She took adonis vernalis, a herbal medicine, to regulate her pulse. She was always tired, slept badly and complained of swollen feet. She may have had Graves disease, which causes high thyroid hormone levels, a poor heartbeat and low energy.

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• 7. Regent at War

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  "War! And I knew nothing of it! This is the end of everything." Alexandra burst into her husband's study with those words when she learned that Russia was mobilizing for the First World War. Over the course of the war, she and Nicholas exchanged around 1,700 letters.

  Her German ties made her unpopular. Her brother Ernest Louis ruled Hesse, so he fought with the Germans. Wilhelm II was her first cousin, and her sister Irene was married to Wilhelm's brother Henry. Yet Alexandra was an ardent Russian patriot, and privately called Wilhelm "really nothing but a clown." Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was now known, accused her of collaborating with Germany. In 1916, one of her ladies-in-waiting was asked in all seriousness whether the Grand Duke of Hesse was hidden in the palace cellars. She worked as a nurse to wounded soldiers, but nobody appreciated it. Rumors even said she and Rasputin held nightly conversations with Wilhelm in Berlin about a dishonorable peace.

  In 1915, Nicholas went to the front to take personal command of the army, leaving Alexandra in charge in the capital. Her brother-in-law Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich noted that when the Emperor went to war, his wife governed instead. In just sixteen months she appointed three prime ministers, five ministers of the interior and three ministers of war. It looked as if she chose officials on Rasputin's advice, though people close to the family denied it. The historian Florinsky wrote that a fairly honorable bureaucratic leadership degenerated into a rapid succession of Rasputin's appointees.

  Alexei Polivanov, an excellent official credited with revitalizing the Imperial Russian Army, was a casualty. Alexandra asked her husband, "Is he not our Friend's enemy?" She also resented Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, who disliked Rasputin. "Russia will not be blessed if her sovereign lets a Man of God sent to help him be persecuted," she wrote on the 16th of June. She told Nicholas that Rasputin had his and Russia's interests at heart.

  She was equally firm on autocracy. "You are master and sovereign of Russia," she wrote to Nicholas, urging him to "Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Emperor Paul-- crush them all." Of the Duma she said, "We are not ready for constitutional government."

  The imperial family was alarmed. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna twice asked Alexandra to banish Rasputin, and several grand dukes tried with Nicholas. Neither effort worked. Over 1916-17, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna reportedly planned a coup with four Imperial Guard regiments to force Nicholas's abdication and install his underage son under the regency of her own son, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich.

  Documents also suggest Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna took part in a plan. She would give her son an ultimatum, banish Rasputin or she would leave the capital, and the signal would unleash the coup. Accounts differ on how she meant to replace him. One version has Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich taking power in her name. The other has them as regents for Alexei. Alexandra reportedly learned of it and persuaded Nicholas to order his mother out of the capital. Maria settled in the Mariinskyi Palace in Kiev and never returned.

  On the 30th of December 1916, Rasputin was assassinated to end his perceived meddling in politics. The conspirators included Prince Felix Yusupov, married to Nicholas's niece Princess Irina, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who had once been close to the family. Less than three months later, the monarchy was gone.

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• 8. Fall and Captivity

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  The severe winter of 1916-17 pushed Russia over the edge. Fifteen million men had been pulled from farm work to fight, railroads were turned to military use, and food could not reach the cities. Inflation raged. Nicholas's decision to command the army himself made him personally blamed for every defeat, while leaving Alexandra in charge of the government fed rumors that the German-born empress was conspiring for Germany. He had also replaced capable ministers with weaker men, notably putting Alexei Khvostov in place of N. B. Shcherbatov as interior minister, at the urging of Alexandra and Rasputin.

  Steelworkers struck on the 7th of March 1917. The next day crowds hungry for bread rioted in Petrograd. On the 11th, troops fired on the crowd, and the Duma asked the Tsar to act. He dissolved it. On the 12th, soldiers sent to suppress the rioters mutinied, igniting the February Revolution. The Duma declared a Provisional Government on the 13th. Nicholas tried to reach Petrograd by train from Mogilev, but his train was stopped at Pskov. After consulting his generals, he abdicated for himself and, later, for his son Alexei too.

  Alexandra was now the wife of a deposed Tsar and hated by the people. Mutinous troops from the Tsarskoye Selo garrison tried to storm the Alexander Palace, but the guards held. Soon they drifted to the capital. On the 18th of March, General Lavr Kornilov and Alexander Guchkov came to inspect security. Afterward, Alexandra noticed guards wearing handkerchiefs on their wrists, a sign they backed the Duma. She understood that she and her children were under de facto house arrest. Kornilov made it formal on the 21st of March, and told the household they could leave but must obey the same rules if they stayed. On the 22nd, Nicholas was allowed to return. She told him that the husband and father mattered more to her than the Emperor whose throne she had shared.

  Alexander Kerensky of the Provisional Government interviewed her about her political role and Rasputin. She answered that she and Nicholas kept no secrets and discussed politics, and that Rasputin had been a true holy man. Kerensky told the Tsar he believed her.

  The government hoped Britain would take the family. Despite being first cousin to both Nicholas and Alexandra, George V refused, alarmed by their unpopularity and the danger to his throne. British diplomats reported that France would not welcome them either, because Alexandra was believed to sympathize with Germany. In August 1917, the family was sent to Tobolsk in Siberia. Kerensky considered the Crimea, which they had suggested, too dangerous. From Tobolsk, Alexandra wrote Xenia that they lived quietly, far away, but that God was merciful.

  After the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, their position worsened. On the 30th of April 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria arrived at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. Guards ordered them to open their luggage. When Alexandra objected, they threatened to separate Nicholas from his family. Fearing for him, she gave in. On the window frame of her last bedroom she scrawled a swastika, her favorite good-luck symbol, and pencilled the date 17/the 30th of April 1918. The other children arrived in May, delayed by Alexei's illness.

  Seventy-five men guarded the house, many from local factories. Their commandant, Alexander Avadeyev, was remembered as coarse and brutish. He answered every request with, "Let them go to hell!" and privately called Nicholas "the Blood-Drinker" and Alexandra "The German Bitch." The family had an hour of exercise each afternoon in the rear garden, but Alexandra mostly sat in a wheelchair reading the Bible or the works of Saint Seraphim.

  Historians still ask who ordered the end. Dmitri Volkogonov and other Soviet historians believe Lenin personally ordered the execution, though official Soviet accounts blame the Ural Regional Soviet. Trotsky's diary records Sverdlov saying that Lenin did not want to leave the Whites "a live banner to rally around."

  On the 4th of July 1918, Yakov Yurovsky, the chief of the Yekaterinburg Cheka, took over as commandant. He tightened security and collected the family's jewelry and valuables into a sealed box. Alexandra kept only two bracelets, given to her as a child by her uncle Prince Leopold, which she could not take off. Yurovsky did not know the women wore diamonds, emeralds, rubies and ropes of pearls hidden on their bodies. Those were found only afterward. He received the order on the 13th of July.

  On Sunday the 14th of July, two priests came to hold the Divine Liturgy. Father Storozhev later recalled that Yurovsky asked Nicholas whether they were all there. Nicholas answered firmly, "Yes, all of us."

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