The Wild True Story of the Romanovs: How Empire, Marriage and Murder Shaped Russia's Royal Family

The first royal wedding to take place in Russia in more than a century represented a most epic return for the Romanov family, whose 304-year reign ended in a massacre in 1918.

By Natalie Finn Oct 12, 2021 7:00 PMTags
George Mikhailovich Romanov, Victoria Romanovna Bettarin, Royal WeddingPeter Kovalev\TASS via Getty Images

When Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov married Victoria Bettarini in St. Petersburg on Oct. 1, their lavish nuptials marked a rather epic return to the world stage for the Romanov family, whose 304-year rule in Russia ended more than a century ago in a hail of state-sanctioned bullets.

Which begs the reminder, no matter how scandalous the behavior of the modern royal families of Britain, Spain, Sweden, Monaco, et al., nothing really compares to the millennia of bloody intrigue that once defined the reigns of so many monarchs across Europe and beyond. King Henry VIII alone had two wives executed because divorce wasn't an option. His daughter Queen Elizabeth I ordered the beheading of her perceived rival Mary, Queen of Scots because maybe Mary was plotting against her. Catherine the Great came to power and ruled Russia for a record (for a female leader, anyway) 34 years after her husband (and second cousin) Peter III was violently overthrown in a coup and promptly died-or-was-assassinated in captivity. 

"No member of the Romanov family ever thought we would come back here," the 40-year-old groom told The New York Times in an email before the grand religious wedding (the bride, born Rebecca Virginia Bettarini, converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Victoria Romanovna), which followed their official civil ceremony on Sept. 24.

And the power struggle continues, George the disputed heir apparent to the headship of the Imperial Family of Russia, House Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. (Not that, even when/if he becomes head of the family, he'd have any power in the country, where Vladimir Putin has been president for the better part of two decades. "This marriage does not belong on our agenda in any way," a Putin spokesman told reporters before the wedding.)

The headship, meanwhile, is disputed due to the not-uncommon confusion over which man in the Romanov family tree had the right to jumpstart the line of succession after the last tsar of Russia was deposed in 1917. But we'll get to that.

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It all started with the reign of Michael I, the first Russian Tsar of the House of Romanov, upon his election to the post (by parliament, not the people) in 1613. He lived till the ripe old age of 49 and was succeeded by his son Alexis, one of only four of his 10 children to reach adulthood.

Alexis died in 1676 and his sickly son Feodor III became emperor until 1682, when he died and his younger half-brother Peter the Great (as he was eventually known) ascended, at first sharing power with his older half-brother Ivan V until Ivan's death at 29 in 1696. (They only co-reigned in the first place because, while Ivan V was a son from Alexis' first marriage, he was mentally and physically unwell and ruled in name only.)

Peter, the eldest of Alexis' three children with his second wife, expanded Russia's military might and turned the nation into an industrial and cultural powerhouse—and when he tired of his first marriage, he got a divorce and installed his ex in a convent. He had his second wife, Catherine I, crowned empress in 1724, though he ruled over her shoulder till his death the following year. And when she died, their son Peter II, 12, ruled for only two years until his untimely death from smallpox.

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Peter II was the last male Romanov leader who could be traced directly back through the family's paternal lineage. When he died, his cousin Anna, daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother and former co-ruler Ivan V, became empress. There were other candidates, including her older sister, but Anna was chosen because she was a childless widow, therefore less prone to distraction and influence. (However, her 10-year reign was known derisively as the Age of Biron, after her alleged affair with the German Duke Ernst Johann von Biron, who supposedly wielded tremendous decision-making power behind the scenes.)

Empress Anna picked grand-nephew Ivan VI (grandson of her older sister Catherine Ivanovna) as her successor; but he was only 2-months-old when she died, so his mother, Anna Leopoldovna, reigned as regent empress for one year—after which she and her emperor baby were overthrown and locked up. (Ivan VI was killed in 1764 at the age of 23 by prison guards, having spent his whole life incarcerated. A delusional army officer showed up with a plan to bust him out and make him emperor, not knowing there were orders to kill "Prisoner Number One" should anyone try to get to him. The officer was later beheaded.)

Peter the Great's second-eldest daughter Elizabeth Petrovna took the throne in 1741 and presided over an Age of Enlightenment in Russia—the last Romanov leader who could be tracked directly through the paternal line back to Michael I. She was very popular with the people, ironically—considering she became empress thanks to a coup—because she ordered no executions during her reign. She didn't marry or have children, so she designated nephew Peter IIIthe only child of her elder sister Anna Petrovna—as her successor.

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Peter III was the super-unpopular fellow who was ousted and succeeded by his Prussian-born wife and last-ever Empress of Russia, Catherine II (whose humanity and ruthless cunning has been brought to vibrant life by Elle Fanning on the Hulu series The Great) in July 1762, barely six months into his reign. He was buried on Aug. 3 of that year.

And just in case you thought conspiracy theories were a 20th-century concoction, the prevailing belief at the time was that Peter III was still alive and his wife was keeping him locked away somewhere. A series of revolts by peasants and various other disgruntled Russians were fought in his name, but Catherine's army crushed them all.

Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul I—for all intents and purposes her only child with Peter III, though her lover Sergei Saltykov was rumored to be the boy's actual father. Paul I hung on for five years before he was assassinated at the age of 49 (an inside job, as his aides considered him too pro-German), after which his son Alexander I (who may have known a plot was afoot) became emperor.

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Researchers later determined that Alexander started showing signs of schizophrenia before dying of typhus when he was 47, leaving no legitimate children behind. His younger brother Nicholas I became tsar—and his domestic life was notable for its happiness, including the survival of all seven of his children into adulthood.

When Nicholas died of a cold that turned into pneumonia, he was succeeded by his eldest, son Alexander II. With rancor rising against Russia's autocratic ruling class, Alexander II—who presided over the freeing of the nation's serfs in 1861 and was hailed as "the Liberator"—survived multiple assassination attempts. Until he didn't, in 1881, when his carriage was bombed by members of Narodnaya Volya, a militant populist movement that hoped to incite a revolution to overthrow the government, and he died of his injuries. 

Under the reign of his more conservative son, Alexander III, Russia avoided any major wars—as well as enacting any reforms that would test the tsar's power in any way. Still, he earned the nickname "the Peacemaker" for his relatively less eventful reign.

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But into that tinderbox of discontent stepped his eldest son, Nicholas II, who became the last-ever tsar of Russia in 1894.

On a happier note, that same year he married German-born Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, one of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom's 42 grandchildren. The future Empress Consort Alexandra Feodorovna was 12 when she met 16-year-old Nicholas II, a nephew of the groom, at her big sister Ella's wedding to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. When "sweet little Alix," as the future tsar referred to her in his diary, visited her sister in Russia six years later, the the courtship began, enthusiastically championed by Ella and Sergei.

"It is my dream to one day marry Alix H," Nicholas II wrote in his diary. "I have loved her for a long time, but more deeply and strongly since 1889 when she spent six weeks in Petersburg. For a long time, I have resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true."

Queen Victoria liked her granddaughter's future husband as a person but didn't approve of the match, writing in a letter after they got engaged, "The more I think of sweet Alicky's marriage the more unhappy I am. Not as to the personality for I like him very much but on account of the country and the awful insecurity to which that poor child will be exposed."

Books upon books have been written about the political turmoil of that time in Russia alone, let alone the rest of Europe, and through it all Nicholas II committed the fatal move of wanting to hang onto the old ways—a.k.a. autocratic rule—and not reading the temperature of the room. Which was soon blazing as World War I began in 1914.

Wildly unpopular, Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, drawing up a plan of succession to have brother Grand Duke Michael become the next emperor. But the provisional government, formed as a compromise by the Duma, who wanted to keep the status quo, and the Marxists of the Petrograd Soviets, who wanted to install a republic, refused to implement it. After spending a few days as Emperor Michael II, Misha (as he was familiarly known) signed his own abdication papers, stating that he'd only assume the position if the people decided at the ballot box that the monarchy should continue.

And that was that for the 304-year reign of the Romanovs and the Russian crown.

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The United Kingdom offered asylum to Nicholas II and his family, but before they could make a move, the provisional government put him, wife Alexandra and their five children under house arrest. Life at Alexander Palace wasn't so bad (household staff were allowed to stay, and there was no shortage of food), though they were under the watch of armed guards 24/7 whenever they strolled the grounds. But that summer they were transported to an empty governor's mansion in western Siberia, supposedly for their safety due to the threat of uprisings, but bit by bit, their luxuries and freedoms were chipped away. 

In April 1918, the family was further packed up and transported to Ekaterinburg, Siberia, where they were lodged in Ipatiev House, a private home that belonged to a local military engineer. "The House of Special Purpose," it would later be called. Throughout, Nicholas II was confident that a plot to break them out and ferry his family abroad had to be underway.

Meanwhile, his brother Michael, had been put under house arrest at a luxurious hotel in Perm at the behest of the Council of the People's Commissars (whose members included Lenin and Stalin). That June, he was killed by former prisoners of the Tsarist regime posing as officials with a transfer order. They drove Michael out into the woods along with his longtime secretary Nicholas Johnson and shot them both.

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On the night of July 17, 1918, with an anti-Bolshevik White Army regiment headed toward Ekaterinburg, a Bolshevik commissar named Yakov Yurovsky arrived at Ipatiev House, tasked by the Ural Executive Committee—which got its "you deal with it" non-orders from Bolshevik leaders in Moscow—to get rid of the former emperor and his family.

Forty minutes later, Nicholas II, 50; Alexandra, 46; their daughters Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Marie, 19, and Anastasia, 17, and son Alexei, 13 (who had inherited the family's infamous genetic disposition for hemophilia and weighed only 80 pounds), were all gathered in the home's inner courtyard, along with Nicholas' longtime valet, Alexandra's maid, the household cook and the family doctor. Yurovsky led them into an 11x13-foot cellar in the corner of the house.

All 11 of them were shot, bayonetted and beaten to death. Yurovsky and his fellow assassins toted the bodies to an unnamed mine about 12 miles outside the city, where they were stripped, examined for valuables (the girls had 18 pounds of diamonds stitched into their corsets, the reason why bullets alone didn't kill them), and disposed of in such a way that all that was found—when the site was finally discovered in 1919—could fit into one suitcase.

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Eight days after the murders, the White Army took over the city and rushed to Iptiev House, which was abandoned. The family's clothes were gone, but personal items such as toothbrushes, hair combs, a copy of War and Peace and Alexandra's wheelchair (severe sciatica sometimes rendered her unable to walk), had been left behind. The cellar walls were still pockmarked with bullet holes and there were traces of blood on the baseboards.

The government's first version of events was that Nicholas II was going to be executed for miscellaneous crimes against the state but his family was being transported out of the country—and most people believed that until British intelligence got word at the end of August that the lot of them had been killed.

Amateur historians who figured out where the unceremonious grave site was by analyzing pictures Yurovsky took (as proof the job was done; he also took group photos of the doomed family) dug up the Romanovs' storied bones in 1979—and reburied them, the Soviet government uninterested in digging up the past. (The KGB naturally knew the location all along.) Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 did an official expedition recover the bones, which were sorted into nine skeletons, Alexei and Maria's still untraceable.

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A funeral attended by then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin—he called it "a historic day for Russia"—and 30 Romanov descendants was held on July 17, 1998, the 80th anniversary of the assassination, and the remains were permanently interred at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg.

"We have long been silent about this monstrous crime," Yeltsin said. "The Ekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful episodes in our history. We want to atone for the sins of our ancestors. We are all guilty."

He continued, "Many glorious pages of Russian history are connected with the Romanovs. But this name is connected to one of the most bitter lessons."

In 2000, Nicholas II and his family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as "passion-bearers," saints who were not killed because of their faith, like martyrs, but who were practitioners of faith when they were murdered.

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The plot and politics of it all thickened when two more fire- and acid-damaged partial skeletons were found in 2007 at the site of a bonfire that Yurovsky mentioned in his journals. The expert consensus was that they belonged to young Tsesarevich (tsar-in-waiting) Alexei and his sister Maria but the find went unannounced and the bones were stored in boxes in the State Archives for eight years.

Finally, in 2015, the Interior Ministry authorized testing using DNA from the exhumed remains of the children's parents; a blood-stained tunic that belonged to their great-grandfather Alexander II that's housed in the Hermitage Museum; their grandfather Alexander III, also interred at Peter and Paul Cathedral; and their maternal aunt Ella, who was buried in Jerusalem, to positively identify the whole family once and for all.

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On July 17, 2018, heir George Romanov, who was raised in Spain and France and didn't visit Russia until he was 11, was among those in attendance at a service marking the 100th anniversary of the assassinations in Ekaterinburg.

Almost a century ago, with both Nicholas II and Michael dead, their first cousin Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich—the eldest son of Alexander III's next-youngest brother, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich—controversially assumed the role of head of the Imperial Family in 1924 and appointed himself emperor-in-exile in 1926 (though they wielded zero political influence in Russia).

He passed that not-quite-literal crown to his son Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, who passed it to his daughter, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna—who plans on her son George, her only child, taking the title one day. 

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But while George's great-grandfather was Nicholas II's cousin, the fertile lineage of the assassinated emperor's sister Xenia begs to differ as far as line of succession. Her oldest surviving grandson Prince Andrew Romanoff may be 98, but he laid claim to the title as well, and he has three sons—Princes Alexis, Peter and Andrew—of George's generation. The elder Andrew's younger sister Princess Olga Andreevna Romanoff, 71, is currently president of the Romanov Family Association.

Nicholas II's other sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, fled to Denmark in 1920 and, still fearing Stalin's reach, emigrated with her whole family to Canada in 1948.

But birthright squabbles aside, for the first time since Nicholas II stood at the altar with Alexandra on Nov. 26, 1894, at the Grand Church of the Winter Palace, wedding bells rang for members of the Romanov family in Russia, for Grand Duke George and his bride Victoria, the daughter of an Italian diplomat. The couple met in Belgium and moved to Russia just a few years ago.

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The bride and groom exchanged Fabergé rings and Victoria wore a tiara by the French jeweler Chaumet, while a nod to her storied in-laws came in the form of an Imperial eagle embroidered onto her veil.

Roughly 1,500 people attended the ceremony at historic Saint Isaac's Cathedral. It's unclear how many cousins were present, but royalty including Princess Léa of Belgium, Queen Sofia of Spain, Prince Rudolph and Princess Tilsim of Liechtenstein, and former Bulgarian Tsar Simeon II made the trip.

"It is very, very close to our family," George told Russian news site Fontanka of Saint Petersburg—which was founded by Peter the Great. The city is "the history of Russia," he added, "the history of the House of Romanov."

Or as a passerby told Agence France-Presse in the days before the wedding, "For us the monarchy is something from a past life, of course, but it's interesting."