(Redirected from Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse)
'Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia' (), born 'Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine' ()
6 June 1872 –
17 July 1918, was
Empress consort of
Nicholas II, the last
Tsar of the
Russian Empire. Born a granddaughter of
Queen Victoria of the
United Kingdom, she assumed the name Alexandra Feodorovna upon blessing into the
Russian Orthodox Church, which canonised her as 'Saint Alexandra the Passion Bearer' in 2000.
Alexandra is best remembered as the last
Tsaritsa of Russia, as one of the most famous
royal carriers of the haemophilia disease, as well as for her support of authoritarian control over the country. Her notorious friendship with the Russian mystic
Grigori Rasputin was also an important factor in her life.
Early life
She was born Princess Viktoria Alix Helena Luise Beatrice in
Darmstadt,
Hesse and by Rhine, a
grand duchy that was then part of the
German Empire. Her father was
Grand Duke Louis IV, and her mother was the former
Princess Alice, the second daughter of
Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert. Alix was baptized on
1 July 1872 according to the rites of the
Lutheran Church and given the names of her mother and each of her mother's four sisters, some of which were transliterated into German. Her godparents were
the Prince of Wales,
the Princess of Wales,
the Tsarevich of Russia,
the Tsarevna of Russia,
Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom,
the Duchess of Cambridge, and
the Landgravine of Hesse.
In November of 1878, diptheria swept through the tiny duchy of Hesse. While Alix's older sister, Ella, had been sent to live with their paternal grandmother,
Princess Elizabeth of Prussia, Alix herself, her sisters, Irene and May and brother Ernie fell ill. While her sisters and brother recovered, little May did not. She died aged 4 shortly before the end of the month. In the meantime, Alix's mother, now the Grand Duchess of Hesse, fell sick after caring for Ernie when he came down with the disease. When little Alix was just six, Princess Alice died on December 14, 1878, the anniversary of her own father's death seventeen years before. Princess Alix became very close to her maternal grandmother and was often thought to be Victoria's favourite granddaughter. As a result, Alix spent many of her early years in the United Kingdom and frequently stayed with her British relatives at
Balmoral Castle in
Scotland and at
Osborne House on the
Isle of Wight. As a little girl, she was called Sunny. But after the loss of her mother and younger sister,
May, she became more sullen and withdrawn. In 1892 when she was twenty, her father died, and her brother,
Ernst Ludwig, succeeded his father as Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine.
Marriage
Alix was married relatively late for her rank in her era, having refused a proposal from
Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (the eldest son of the
Prince of Wales) despite strong familial pressure. It is said that Queen Victoria had wanted her two grandchildren to marry, but because she was very fond of Alix and many thought she was her favorite granddaughter she accepted that she did not want to marry him; The Queen even went on to say that she was proud of Alix for standing up to her, something many people, including her own son the Prince of Wales did not do. Alix had, however, already met a relative by both blood and marriage,
the Tsarevich of Russia, whose mother was the sister-in-law of Alix's uncle, the
Prince of Wales, and whose uncle
Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was married to Alix's sister
Elizabeth. At first, Nicholas' father,
Tsar Alexander III, refused the prospect of marriage, but later relented as his health began to fail. Alix was troubled by the requirement that she renounce her Lutheran faith, as a Russian tsaritsa had to be Orthodox; but she was persuaded and eventually became a fervent, even fanatical convert.
She and Nicholas became engaged in April 1894. Alexander III died in November 1st of that year, and Nicholas became Tsar of
all the Russias at the age of twenty-six. The marriage was not delayed, and Alexandra and Nicholas were married at the Chapel of the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg on November 14/26, 1894.
Her older sister Ella, was not only her sister, but her aunt by marriage. In fact, she, like Nicky was a first cousin to England's
King George V; Nicky was a first cousin to three other monarchs as well:
Christian X of Denmark,
George II of Greece, and
King Haakon VII of Norway.
Alix of Hesse accompanied the Imperial family as they returned to St. Petersburg with the body of the Tsar, and it is said that the people greeted their new Empress-to-be with ominous whispers of "She comes to us behind a coffin."
[1]
Relationship With Her Children
Alexandra, to the Russian people, was a cold-hearted German woman, with no ability to see the needs of those around her, unless they were family. This was only true to a certain extent, as Alexandra was, like her husband, was very focused on family. The empress, from her childhood, was painfully shy; a trait shared by her grandmother,
Queen Victoria. She hated public appearances, and when she was required to be present, the empress did her best to retreat to the sidelines, allowing her mother-in-law to be the center of attention; something upon which Maria Feodorovna thrived. This shyness and desire to be alone had a deep impact on her five children.
Almost one year after her marriage to the tsar, Alexandra gave birth to the couple's first child: a girl, named Olga, was born on November 3/15, 1895. Although she was not the coveted heir, Olga was well-loved by her young parents. However, three more girls were to follow Olga: Tatiana on May 29/June 11, 1897, Maria on June 14/26, 1899 and Anastasia on June 18/5, 1901. Three more years passed before the empress gave birth to the long-awaited heir. Alexei Nikolaevich was born at Gatchina on July 30/August 12, 1904. But to his parents' dismay, Alexei was born with hemophilia---the bleeding disease.
With her eldest daughter, Olga, Alexandra had a difficult time.
She did not understand her well, and was often critical of Olga, Maria and Anastasia during their adolescence. Tatiana, her second daughter, was often considered to be Alexandra's favorite child, aside from Alexei, the hemophiliac heir.
Tatiana was very obedient, especially towards her mother. She kept an eye on Alexei in place of their mother. During the family's final months alive, Tatiana helped the empress move from place to place, pushing her about the house in a wheelchair. Maria, who was considered the angel of the family, was unintentionally ignored by her mother. Being the 'good child', she, unlike her sister Anastasia, did not need to be looked after and kept out of trouble. Anastasia, the youngest and most famous daughter, was the 'infant terrible', or 'shvibzik'---the Russian word for 'imp'. Although she greatly resembled the empress in looks, Anastasia was closer to her father, the tsar, as was Olga.
However, Alexandra doted on Alexei. Having to live with the knowledge that she had given him the bleeding disease, Alexandra was obsessed with protecting her son; she kept a close eye on him at all times and consulted several mystical people to heal him during his nearly fatal attacks. Alexandra spoiled her only son and let him have his way. She seemed to pay more attention to him that any of her four 'unwanted' daughters. When Alexei's illness was finally announced to the public in 1912, Alexandra became an unpopular figure with her people. The Great War only made this hatred grow.
Empress Alexandra
On May 14th 1896, Nicholas and Alexandra were crowned in Moscow.
[2] [2] The coronation celebrations were marred by the deaths of several thousand peasants who were trampled to death at the
Khodynka Tragedy when they thought there were not enough gifts for everyone to receive.
Alexandra was unpopular at court and with the Russian people. She was hurt by their unenthusiastic reception, and declared herself to be tired of the loose morals and etiquette of the Russian court. She did not attempt to forge bonds with the other members of the large Romanov family and she generally attended as few court occasions as possible. She was unfavourably compared to her popular (and still youthful) predecessor,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, daughter of King
Christian IX of Denmark and a sister of the
Princess of Wales, who had a higher court precedence. In Russia, Dowager Empresses outranked Empress Consorts, unlike at most royal courts of Europe. Alexandra's stubborn attitude did not allow her to make any attempt to learn from her more experienced mother-in-law who could have helped her so much. She was not good at establishing happy family relationships with her husband's family. Her failure to produce an heir to the Russian throne in her first four attempts was also judged harshly.
Alexandra was fiercely protective of her husband's role as Tsar, and actively supported his rights as an autocratic ruler. She was a fervent advocate of the divine right, and believed that it was unnecessary to attempt to secure the approval of the people.
Rasputin
Alexei was born during the height of the
Russo-Japanese War on
August 12,
1904. The Tsarevitch was the
Heir Apparent to the throne of Russia, and Alexandra had fulfilled her most important role as Tsaritsa by bearing a male child. The excitement was short-lived, when it was discovered Alexei suffered from
hemophilia, which could only have been transmitted from Alexandra's side of the family. Hemophilia was generally fatal in the early 20th century, and had entered the royal houses of Europe via the daughters of Queen Victoria, who was a carrier. Alexandra had lost a brother,
Friedrich, to the disease, as well as an uncle,
Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany; her sister
Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine was also a carrier of the gene and, through her marriage to her cousin
Prince Heinrich of Prussia, spread it to the Prussian royal family.
Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, another of Queen Victoria's granddaughters and a first cousin of Alexandra's, was also a carrier of the haemophilia gene. She married
King Alfonso XIII of Spain and two of her sons were haemophiliacs. As an incurable and life threatening illness, suffered by the sole male heir, the heir's disease was kept secret from the Russian people. As a carrier of the haemophilia gene, Alexandra was not a haemophiliac but she likely produced lower-than-normal clotting factor, having only one normal copy of the gene instead of two. Her status as a carrier, in addition to her worry over her son's health, might have been one reason for her reportedly poor health.
At first Alexandra turned to Russian doctors and medics to treat Alexei; however, their treatments generally failed, and Alexandra increasingly turned to mystics and holy men. One of these,
Grigori Rasputin, appeared to have a success still inexplicable today. Rasputin's unpopularity, however, and the rumours about him led Nicholas to distance him from the family.
In 1912, Alexei suffered a life-threatening
haemorrhage in the thigh and groin while the family were at Spala,
Poland. At this point Alexandra took the advice of her intimate friend
Anna Vyrubova and sent a telegram to Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin's response, that Alexei was over the worst and the doctors should leave him to recover, coincided with his revival. From 1912 onwards, Alexandra came to rely increasingly on Rasputin, and to believe in his ability to ease Alexei's suffering. This reliance enhanced Rasputin's political power, which was seriously to undermine Romanov rule during the First World War
[4],
[5]
Rasputin was eventually murdered in December 1916. Amongst the conspirators was a noblemen
Prince Felix Yusupov, married to
Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna's daughter,
Princess Irina of Russia, and a member of the Romanov family
Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.
World War One
The outbreak of
World War I was a pivotal moment for Russia and Alexandra. The war pitted the Russian Empire of the Romanov dynasty against the much stronger militarily German Empire of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
[6] The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine, ruled by her brother, formed part of the German Empire. This was, of course the place of Alexandra's birth. This made Alexandra very unpopular with the Russian people, who accused her of collaboration with the Germans.
[7] The German Kaiser,
William II, was also Alexandra's first cousin. Ironically, one of the few things that Empress Alexandra and her mother-in-law Empress Maria had in common was their utter distaste for Kaiser Wilhelm II.
When the Tsar travelled to the front line in 1915 to take personal command of the Army, he left Alexandra in charge of St. Petersburg. Alexandra was not gifted at government, and constantly appointed and reappointed incompetent new ministers, which meant the government was never stable or efficient. This was particularly dangerous in a war of attrition, as neither the troops nor the civilian population were ever adequately supplied. She paid great attention to the self-serving advice of Rasputin, and their relationship was widely, though falsely, believed to be sexual in nature. She was the focus of ever increasing and extremely negative rumours, and widely believed to be a German spy in the Russian court.
[8]
Revolution, Imprisonment and Murder
World War I put what proved to be unbearable burden on Imperial Russia's government and economy, both of which were dangerously weak. Mass shortages and hunger became the daily standard of living of tens of millions of Russians due to the disruptions of the war economy. Fifteen million men were diverted from agricultural production to fight in the war, and the transportation infrastructure (primarily railroads) were diverted towards war use, exacerbating food shortages in the cities as available agricultural products could not be brought to urban areas. Inflation was rampant which, combined with the food shortages and the poor performance by the Russian military in the war, generated a great deal of anger and unrest among the people in
St. Petersburg and other cities.
The decision of the Tsar to take personal command of the military did not improve its performance. His relocation to the front, leaving the
Tsaritsa in charge of the government, helped undermine the Romanov dynasty. The poor performance of the military led to rumors believed by the people that the German-born Tsaritsa was part of a conspiracy to help Germany win the war. The severe winter of 1916–17 essentially doomed Imperial Russia. Food shortages worsened and
famine gripped the cities. The mismanagement and failures of the war turned the soldiers against the Tsar, whose personal command of the military made him personally responsible for the defeats. The mood of the army is captured by one scene in
Jean Renoir's movie, '
La Grande Illusion'. Alexandra sends boxes to Russian prisoners of war. Thrilled to think they are receiving
vodka, they open them to discover bibles, and promptly riot.
By March 1917, conditions had worsened. Steelworkers went out on strike on March 7th, and the following day,
International Women’s Day, crowds hungry for bread began rioting on the streets of St. Petersburg to protest food shortages and the war. After two days of rioting, the Tsar brought in the Army to restore order, and the next day, on the 11th, they fired on the crowd. That very same day, the
Duma, the elected legislature, urged the Tsar to take action to ameliorate the concerns of the people. The Tsar responded by dissolving the Duma.
On the March 12th soldiers sent to suppress the rioting crowds mutinied and joined the rebellion, thus touching off the February Revolution (like the later October Revolution of November 1917, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 get their names due to the Old Style calendar). Soldiers and workers set up the "
Petrograd Soviet" of 2,500 elected deputies.
Anarchy was rampant.
During the snowballing crisis, the badly stressed Tsar suffered a nervous breakdown and failed to take further action. As, under the
divine right of kings doctrine in which he and his Tsaritsa feverently believed, ''HE'' was the government, there was no government. On the 13th, the Duma threw its lot in with the rebels, establishing a Provisional Government, led by the liberal
Alexander Kerensky. The Duma informed the Tsar that day that he must abdicate.
Nicholas tried to get to St. Petersburg by train from army headquarters at Mogiliev. The route was blocked so he tried another way. His train was stopped at Pskov where, after receiving advice from a number of different sources, he first formally abdicated the throne for himself and later on seeking medical advice for himself and his son the
Tsarevich Alexei. Alexandra was now in a perilous position as the wife of the deposed Tsar, hated by the Russian people. Nicholas finally was allowed to return to the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo where he was under arrest with his family. Despite the fact he was a cousin of both Alexandra and Nicholas,
King George V refused to allow them to evacuate to the United Kingdom, as he was alarmed by their unpopularity in his country and the potential repercussions to his own throne.
Portrait by Alexander Sokolov of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. St. Petersburg, 1901.
The
Provisional Government formed after the revolution kept Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children confined in their primary residence, the
Alexander Palace at
Tsarskoye Selo, until they were moved to
Tobolsk in
Siberia in August 1917, a step by the
Kerensky government designed to remove them from the capital and possible harm. They remained in Tobolsk until after the
Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, but were subsequently moved to Red-controlled
Yekaterinburg.
The Tsar and Tsaritsa and all of their family, including the gravely ill Alexei, along with several family servants, were executed by firing squad and bayonets in the basement of the Ipatiev House, where they had been imprisoned, early in the morning of July 17, 1918, by a detachment of
Bolsheviks led by
Yakov Yurovsky. Alexandra watched the murder of her husband and two servants before military commissar
Peter Ermakov killed her with a gun shot to the left side of her head before she could finish making the sign of the cross. Ermakov, in a drunken haze, stabbed her dead body and that of her husband's, shattering both their rib cages.
Identification and burial
After the execution of the Romanov family in the Ipatiev House, Alexandra's body, along with Nicholas, their children and some faithful retainers who died with them, was stripped and the clothing burnt according to the Yurovsky Note. Initially the bodies were thrown down a disused mine-shaft at
Ganina Yama,
12 miles (19 km) north of Yekaterinburg. A short time later they were retrieved, their faces were smashed and the bodies dismembered and disfigured with sulphuric acid were hurriedly buried under railway sleepers with the exception of two of the children whose bodies have still not been located. The bodies missing are assumed to be those of a daughter- Maria or Anastasia- and Alexis. In the early 1990s, following the fall of the
Soviet Union, the presumed bodies of the majority of the Romanovs were located along with their loyal servants, exhumed and formally identified. A secret report by Yurovsky, which came to light in the late 1970s, but did not become public knowledge until the 1990s, helped the authorities to locate the bodies.
DNA analysis represented a key means of identifying the bodies. A blood sample from
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (a grandson of Alexandra's oldest sister,
Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine) was employed to identify Alexandra and her daughters through their
mitochondrial DNA. They belonged to
Haplogroup H (mtDNA). Nicholas was identified from DNA obtained from among others his late brother
Grand Duke George Alexandrovich of Russia. Grand Duke George had died of
tuberculosis in the late 1890s and was buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St.Petersburg. Alexandra, Nicholas and their children (except
Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia and one daughter, whose remains were missing) were reinterred in the Romanov family crypt in the
Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998, with much ceremony, on the eightieth anniversary of the execution.
In 2000 Alexandra was
canonised by the
Russian Orthodox Church together with her husband Nicholas II, their children, the servants who died with them and other her sister Grand Duchess Elisabeth and her fellow nun Varvara.
A rather romanticised version of Alexandra's life was dramatised in the 1971 movie ''
Nicholas and Alexandra'', based on the book by the same title written by
Robert Massie, in which the tsaritsa was played by
Janet Suzman. An episode devoted to the fall of the Romanov dynasty is featured in the Danish television ''
A Royal Family'', a series about the descendants of King Christian IX of Denmark.
Ancestors
Titles
★ ''Her Grand Ducal Highness'' Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine
★ ''Her Imperial Highness'' Grand Duchess Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia (created prior to marriage)
★ ''Her Imperial Majesty'' Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna, Empress of Russia.
See also
★
Romanov sainthood
Notes
1. The Last Empress by Greg King p.76
2.
3.
4. Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie
5. The Last Empress by Greg King
6. The Last Tsar by Virginia Cowles, p.4
7. The Last Empress by Greg King p.223
8. ibid
External links
★
The Murder of Russia's Imperial Family, Nicolay Sokolov. Investigation of murder of the Romanov Imperial Family in 1918.
★
FrozenTears.org, A media library on the Last Imperial Family.
★
Alexander Palace Time Machine, Alexandra's home in Tsarskoe Selo.
★
Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna, Sophie Buxhœveden.
★
The Real Tsaritsa, Lily Dehn.
★
The Religious Character of Alexandra Feodorovna, Vladimir Gurko.
★
God in All Things, the Religious Beliefs of Russia's Last Empress by Janet Ashton.
★
Letters of Alexandra in Exile, in English and Russian.
★
Letters of Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–17.
★
Marriage Ceremony of Nicholas and Alexandra.
★
Jewels of the Romanovs.
★
Nicholas and Alexandra Exhibition.
★
Hemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency)
★
The Romanovs in Film, a complete filmography.
★
A short biography of the Alexandra
★
Margaretta Eagar
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