House of Romanov

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the night of the 16th of July 1918, Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, was ordered down to a cellar with his wife, his five children, and four servants. They were told a photograph would be taken to quell rumors of their escape. Then a dozen armed men burst into the room. The family that had ruled Russia for over three centuries died in a hail of gunfire and bayonet stabs. The bullets and blades were partly deflected by diamonds that had been sewn into the children's clothing.

  The House of Romanov had reigned since 1613, when a sixteen-year-old boy wept with fear upon being offered the Russian crown. How did a family of boyars climb from the service of medieval Moscow princes to the heights of imperial autocracy? What fractured the dynasty from within, generation by generation? And how did a name that was arguably no longer even legally theirs come to stand for one of history's most dramatic collapses of royal power?

• 2. Boyars to Tsars

  ›

  Around 1347, a man named Andrei Kobyla appears in records as a boyar in the service of Simeon, the prince of Moscow. He is the earliest known common ancestor of the Romanovs and roughly two dozen other Russian noble families. Later generations tried to burnish his origins. An eighteenth-century genealogy claimed he descended from an Old Prussian prince named Glanda Kambila, who had fled invading Germans in the second half of the thirteenth century. A rival tradition traced the family instead to a boyar line from Novgorod. Neither version can be verified.

  One of Kobyla's sons, Feodor, sat on the boyar duma of Dmitry Donskoy and carried the nickname Koshka, meaning "cat." His descendants took the surname Koshkin, then shifted to Zakharin, then split into branches named Zakharin-Yakovlev and Zakharin-Yuriev. During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the grandchildren of Roman Yurievich Zakharyin-Yuriev took the name Romanov, after him.

  The family's fortunes pivoted sharply on the 3rd of February 1547, when Roman's daughter Anastasia Zakharyina married Ivan IV, who had assumed the title of Tsar of all Russia just weeks earlier. She became the first tsaritsa of Russia. Her death in 1560 is often cited as the turning point in Ivan's character; suspecting the boyars of having poisoned her, he launched a reign of terror against them. Among the children she bore Ivan, the eldest, also named Ivan, was killed by the tsar himself in a quarrel. The younger, Feodor, a pious and somewhat lethargic prince, inherited the throne in 1584.

• 3. The Time of Troubles

  ›

  Feodor's reign lasted from 1584 to 1598, during which real power rested not with the tsar but with his brother-in-law Boris Godunov and the Romanov cousins who contested Godunov's grip on Russia. When Feodor died childless, the seven-hundred-year Rurik dynasty ended with him, and the resulting succession crisis opened what became known as the Time of Troubles.

  The Zemsky Sobor, Russia's assembly of the land, elected Godunov as tsar in 1598. His revenge on the Romanovs was swift and harsh. The family and all its relations were deported to remote corners of the Russian North and the Urals, where most died of hunger or in captivity. The family's leader, Feodor Nikitich Romanov, was exiled to the Antoniev Siysky Monastery and forced to take monastic vows under the name Filaret.

  The fall of the Godunov dynasty in June 1605 reversed the family's fortunes again. Filaret's standing as a former opponent of Godunov and cousin of the last legitimate Rurikid tsar made him useful to a series of impostors who claimed the throne during the chaos. False Dmitriy I appointed him a metropolitan. False Dmitriy II raised him to patriarch. After Polish forces were expelled from Moscow in 1612, the Zemsky Sobor offered the crown to various Rurikid and Gediminian princes, but all of them declined.

  Filaret's son Mikhail, then sixteen years old and living at the Ipatiev Monastery of Kostroma, burst into tears of fear and despair when the crown was offered to him. His mother, Kseniya Ivanovna Shestova, finally persuaded him to accept, blessing him with the holy image of Our Lady of St. Theodore. On the 21st of February 1613, the Zemsky Sobor made it formal: Michael Romanov became tsar, and Russia had its second reigning dynasty.

• 4. Transformation and Crisis

  ›

  Michael's grandson Peter I did more than any other Romanov to reshape what Russia was. He proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721 and took the title of emperor, expanding the state through a series of wars and reforms and pushing a cultural revolution that replaced medieval political forms with a modern, Europe-oriented system. He ruled until his death in 1725.

  Yet Peter's own family life was a tangle of conflict. His only son to reach adulthood, Tsarevich Alexei, opposed his father's modernization and was arrested. Alexei died in prison. Near the end of his life, Peter altered the succession tradition to allow him to choose his heir, and power passed to his second wife, Empress Catherine. Peter II, Alexei's son, then took the throne but died in 1730, ending the Romanov male line.

  Anna I, daughter of Peter's half-brother Ivan V, succeeded him. Before she died in 1740, she declared that her grandnephew, the one-year-old Ivan VI, should succeed her. The attempt failed. Elizabeth Petrovna, a legitimized daughter of Peter I, seized the throne in a coup supported by the Preobrazhensky Regiment and the ambassadors of France and Sweden. Ivan VI was later murdered in 1764 while imprisoned.

  When Elizabeth died childless in 1762, she left her throne to her nephew Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, who had been brought from Germany to St. Petersburg in 1742. He was an agnatic member of the House of Holstein-Gottorp, a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg. He adopted his Romanov mother's house name, and his descendants are sometimes called Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. The 1944 edition of the Almanach de Gotha records the dynasty's name from the time of Peter III onward as precisely that. Russia itself, however, continued to use the name Romanov in official references, and in 1913 officially celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of Romanov rule.

• 5. Autocracy and Its Costs

  ›

  Paul I, the first ruler under whom succession was formally regulated by the so-called Pauline Laws, was murdered in his palace in Saint Petersburg in 1801. The Pauline Laws he had decreed established semi-Salic primogeniture and required Orthodox faith for monarchs and their near dynasts; his successor Alexander I later added the requirement that consorts of all male-line dynasts had to be of equal birth.

  Nicholas I, who came to the throne in 1825, faced an immediate test: hundreds of troops pledged loyalty to his elder brother Constantine Pavlovich, who had in fact renounced his claim years earlier following a morganatic marriage. The confusion fed the Decembrist revolt. Nicholas fathered four sons and educated them for both rule and military careers. From those sons descended the last branches of the dynasty.

  Alexander II, son of Nicholas I, became emperor in 1855 during the Crimean War. He freed the serfs in 1861, gave increased autonomy to Finland, and built the Imperial Russian Army, earning wide popular support. But his private life cracked open in the 1860s. His eldest son and heir, Tsarevich Nicholas, died suddenly in 1864. His wife, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, suffered from tuberculosis and spent much of her time abroad. Alexander turned to a mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgorukova, and immediately after his wife's death in 1880, he contracted a morganatic marriage with her, legitimizing their children and provoking fury within the dynasty.

• 6. The Last Emperor

  ›

  Nicholas reportedly said upon inheriting the throne: "I am not ready to be tsar." Just one week after his father's funeral, he married Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, a favorite grandchild of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Alix took the name Alexandra Feodorovna upon her conversion to Orthodoxy.

  Alexandra was a carrier of the gene for haemophilia, inherited from her maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria. Her son Alexei, the long-awaited heir to the throne, inherited the disease and suffered agonizing bouts of protracted bleeding. Rasputin, a Siberian mystic, became a presence in the household because his ministrations sometimes appeared to alleviate the boy's pain. Alexandra's reliance on Rasputin, combined with her German origin, damaged the dynasty's reputation as Russia entered World War I.

  In September 1915, Nicholas took command of the army at the front, leaving Alexandra in a position to influence government affairs in Petrograd. Nicholas was known as a kind-hearted man, but he maintained his father's harsh policies. Alexandra avoided many of the social duties traditional for Russia's tsarinas and was unfavorably compared to her popular mother-in-law, Maria Fyodorovna.

  The February Revolution of 1917 ended it. Nicholas abdicated in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. Michael declined to accept imperial authority, pending a democratic referendum, effectively ending Romanov rule. The abdication closed 304 years of Romanov dynasties over Russia. Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, the senior surviving male-line descendant of Alexander II, waited until 1924 before claiming the headship of the defunct Imperial House, by which time the evidence appeared conclusive that all Romanovs higher in the line of succession had been killed.

• 7. The Cellar and After

  ›

  After the February Revolution, Nicholas and his family were placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace. Alexander Kerensky sent them into exile in the Siberian town of Tobolsk in August 1917. After the Bolsheviks ousted the Provisional Government in October 1917, the family was moved in April 1918 to the Russian town of Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where they were held in the Ipatiev House.

  On the night of 16-the 18th of July 1918, the family and their servants were arranged in two rows in the cellar on the pretext of a photograph. Twelve armed men entered and opened fire. The dark room filled with smoke and dust. Many of the gunmen hit the ceiling and walls, injuring some of their own number. Alexandra was shot in the head by military commissar Peter Ermakov. Some family members survived the initial volley; Maria tried to escape through rear doors that had been nailed shut. Two of the daughters were still alive ten minutes after the shooting began and were then struck with rifle butts. The bullets and bayonets had been partially deflected by diamonds sewn into the children's clothing.

  The Bolsheviks made several attempts to dispose of the bodies. They initially planned to drop them down a mineshaft, then decided to burn two corpses and disfigure them with acid. Nine additional bodies were buried in a pit also covered with acid. The remains were moved and hidden multiple times.

  In the mid-1970s, Dr. Alexander Avdonin discovered the mass grave near Old Koptyaki road in Yekaterinburg. Avdonin released his findings after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, prompting a government investigation. The grave contained 44 heavily degraded bone and tooth fragments. DNA analysis using a sample from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, confirmed the identities of Alexandra and her children. The remains of Nicholas II were confirmed using mtDNA matching from his brother George Alexandrovich's exhumed remains. In 1998, after years in laboratories, the remains were interred at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, where Nicholas II's ancestors were already buried. The day after the Yekaterinburg killing, on the 18th of July 1918, members of the extended imperial family including Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna were thrown alive down a mine shaft near Alapayevsk. Elisabeth had been a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the elder sister of Tsarina Alexandra; she had been living as a serving nun since the 1905 assassination of her husband, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. She was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1992, and her remains were eventually re-interred in Jerusalem.