The Romanovs

By 1894, the Romanovs had ruled Russia for almost three hundred years. The dynasty had begun in 1613, and across the centuries it had produced figures as towering as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. The new emperor, Nicholas II, inherited the largest land empire on earth — and almost none of his ancestors' iron will. Gentle, devoted to his family, happiest away from politics, he was, by most accounts, a kind man and a poor ruler, who clung to the idea that God alone had made him an absolute autocrat.

He married Alexandra, a German princess and a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. Theirs was a genuine love match, but Alexandra was shy, intense and deeply religious, and the Russian court never warmed to her. The couple had four daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia — and at last, in 1904, the son they had longed for: Alexei, the heir.

But the boy had inherited something else from Victoria's bloodline — haemophilia. His blood would not clot, and a bruise or a fall could threaten his life. The parents kept his condition a state secret, and a desperate Alexandra turned to anyone who seemed able to help. Into that fear stepped Grigori Rasputin, a wandering peasant mystic who appeared, again and again, to calm the boy's bleeding when doctors could not. To the empress he became indispensable — and through her, this strange, unwashed holy man gained an extraordinary influence over the affairs of an empire.

When Russia entered the First World War in 1914, the strain was more than the empire could bear. Millions of poorly equipped soldiers were killed; the cities went hungry; the railways and the economy buckled. Disastrously, Nicholas left the capital to take personal command of the army — which meant that when things went wrong at the front, the blame now fell on him directly. He left Alexandra, and behind her Rasputin, effectively running the government. By the end of 1916 a group of nobles, hoping to save the monarchy, murdered Rasputin. It changed nothing.

In March 1917, bread queues in the capital turned into strikes, and strikes turned into a revolution. The soldiers sent to crush the crowds joined them instead. Within days the unthinkable had happened: Nicholas, isolated and abandoned even by his generals, abdicated the throne — not only for himself but for his sick son. After three centuries, the Romanov dynasty had simply ceased to rule. The family were placed under house arrest while the new Provisional Government decided what to do with them.

That government did not last either. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized power in a second revolution and pulled Russia out of the war. For the former emperor and his family, this was catastrophic. They were moved east — first to Tobolsk in Siberia, then, in 1918, to a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg in the Urals. They were now in the hands of men who saw them not as people to be protected, but as a dangerous symbol that must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands.

In the early hours of 17 July 1918, with anti-Bolshevik forces closing in on the city, the family and the few servants who had stayed with them were woken, taken to a cellar room, and killed. Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters and their thirteen-year-old son all died that night. The bodies were taken away in secret and buried in the forest, and for decades the new Soviet state said almost nothing about exactly what had happened.

That silence left room for one of the twentieth century's strangest legends. Because the burial was hidden, rumours spread that someone — most often the youngest daughter, Anastasia — had somehow survived. In 1920 a young woman in Germany began to claim that she was Anastasia. Known as Anna Anderson, she impersonated the lost princess for the rest of her life, won the belief of some who had known the family, and inspired films, books and decades of legal argument. She was almost certainly a Polish factory worker, but while she lived, the mystery could not quite be closed.

In the end, science closed it. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a forest grave near Yekaterinburg was opened in 1991, and DNA testing — using samples from living relatives, including Britain's Prince Philip — confirmed that these were the Romanovs. Two children were still missing, fuelling the legends a little longer, until their remains were found nearby in 2007 and identified too. The same testing showed that Anna Anderson had no Romanov blood at all. The family that had ruled for three centuries was, at last, accounted for — and the ghost of Anastasia was finally laid to rest.