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Peter III · 02/21/1728–07/17/1762 · Kiel, Germany → Ropsha, Russia — Emperor of Russia for six months in 1762, a German-born grandson of Peter the Great whose open admiration for Prussia and contempt for Russian ways alienated the court. Within months his wife Catherine led a coup that deposed him, and he was killed days later at Ropsha — clearing her path to the throne.

Catherine II the Great · 05/02/1729–11/17/1796 · Szczecin, Poland → Pushkin, Russia — A minor German princess who, after overthrowing her husband Peter III in 1762, reigned thirty-four years as Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest-ruling female monarch. An enlightened patron of arts and letters who corresponded with Voltaire, she vastly expanded the empire into Poland and toward the Black Sea while entrenching serfdom, and died in 1796.

Paul I · 10/01/1754–03/23/1801 · Saint Petersburg, Russia → Saint Petersburg, Russia — Emperor from 1796, the son of Catherine the Great, who reversed much of his mother’s policy and ruled erratically, antagonising the nobility with his autocratic whims and obsession with military drill. He fixed the law of succession on male primogeniture, but was assassinated by disaffected officers in his new St Michael’s Castle in 1801.

Maria Feodorovna of Wurttemberg · 10/25/1759–11/05/1828 · Szczecin, Poland → Saint Petersburg, Russia — Empress consort of Paul I, born Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg, mother of two emperors — Alexander I and Nicholas I — and a tireless patron of charity and education whose institutions long outlived her. Widowed by her husband’s murder in 1801, she remained a revered matriarch of the dynasty until her death in 1828.

Alexander I · 12/23/1777–12/01/1825 · Saint Petersburg, Russia → Taganrog, Russia — Emperor from 1801, the grandson Catherine groomed for the throne, who came to power in the shadow of his father’s assassination. He led Russia through Napoleon’s catastrophic 1812 invasion — surviving the burning of Moscow to enter Paris in 1814 — and shaped the post-war order at the Congress of Vienna. His mysterious death in 1825 bred a legend that he had become a wandering hermit.

Elizabeth Alexeievna of Baden · 01/24/1779–05/16/1826 · Karlsruhe, Germany → Belyov, Russia — Empress consort of Alexander I, born Louise of Baden, a cultivated and admired but melancholy figure whose marriage was long estranged. She outlived both of her infant daughters, was reconciled with her husband in his final years, and died only months after him in 1826.

Nicholas I · 07/06/1796–03/02/1855 · Pushkin, Russia → Saint Petersburg, Russia — Emperor from 1825, whose reign opened with the suppression of the Decembrist revolt and became a byword for rigid autocracy — “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” — secret police and censorship. The self-styled gendarme of Europe, he died in 1855 amid the military humiliations of the Crimean War he had helped provoke.

Alexandra Feodorovna of Prussia · 07/13/1798–11/01/1860 · Berlin, Germany → Pushkin, Russia — Empress consort of Nicholas I, born Princess Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of the Prussian king and a link in the close Russo-German royal ties of the age. Gentle and much loved at court, she was mother of the reforming emperor Alexander II and died in 1860.

Alexander II · 04/29/1818–03/13/1881 · Moscow, Russia → Saint Petersburg, Russia — Emperor from 1855, remembered as the “Tsar Liberator” for the great reform that emancipated Russia’s serfs in 1861, along with the modernising of the courts, army and local government. Yet reform bred revolutionary ferment, and after surviving several attempts on his life he was killed by a bomb in St Petersburg in 1881.

Maria Alexandrovna of Hesse · 08/08/1824–06/03/1880 · Darmstadt, Germany → Saint Petersburg, Russia — Empress consort of Alexander II, born Marie of Hesse, a pious and retiring woman who bore the emperor eight children, among them the future Alexander III. Long in failing health and saddened by her husband’s open second household, she died in 1880, the year before his assassination.

Alexander III · 03/10/1845–11/01/1894 · Saint Petersburg, Russia → Livadia, Russia — Emperor from 1881, a giant of a man who, shaken by his father’s assassination, reversed the era of reform with a hard programme of autocracy, Russification and repression. Abroad, however, he kept Russia at peace — earning the name “the Peacemaker” — and forged the alliance with France, before dying of kidney disease at forty-nine in 1894.

Maria Feodorovna of Denmark · 11/26/1847–10/13/1928 · Copenhagen, Denmark → Copenhagen, Denmark — Empress consort of Alexander III, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark and sister of Britain’s Queen Alexandra. A popular and elegant empress and mother of the last tsar Nicholas II, she survived the revolution that destroyed her family, escaping Crimea on a British warship in 1919 to die in her Danish homeland in 1928.

Nicholas II · 05/18/1868–07/17/1918 · Pushkin, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — The last Emperor of Russia, who came to the throne in 1894 ill-prepared for it and clung to autocracy as the country slid toward catastrophe. War with Japan, the upheaval of 1905 and the disasters of the First World War broke his rule; he abdicated in the February Revolution of 1917 and, with his whole family, was shot by the Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg in July 1918.

Alexandra Feodorovna of Hesse · 06/06/1872–07/17/1918 · Darmstadt, Germany → Yekaterinburg, Russia — The last Empress of Russia, born Alix of Hesse and a favourite granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. Devoted and reclusive, she carried the haemophilia that afflicted her only son Alexei, and her desperate reliance on the faith-healer Rasputin helped discredit the throne; she was murdered with her husband and children at Yekaterinburg in 1918.

Olga Romanova · 11/15/1895–07/17/1918 · Pushkin, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — Eldest daughter of Nicholas II and Alexandra, a thoughtful and well-read young woman who served as a wartime nurse alongside her mother and sister. Held captive after the revolution, she was murdered with her entire family in the cellar at Yekaterinburg in 1918, at the age of twenty-two.

Tatiana Romanova · 06/10/1897–07/17/1918 · Peterhof, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — Second daughter of Nicholas II, often thought the most capable and commanding of the four sisters, who trained as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War. She was killed with her family at Yekaterinburg in 1918, aged twenty-one.

Maria Romanova · 06/26/1899–07/17/1918 · Peterhof, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — Third daughter of Nicholas II, warm-hearted and admired for her beauty, who shared her family’s captivity with quiet courage after the revolution. She was murdered with them in the cellar at Yekaterinburg in 1918, at the age of nineteen.

Anastasia Romanova · 06/18/1901–07/17/1918 · Peterhof, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — Youngest daughter of Nicholas II, lively and mischievous, whose death at seventeen at Yekaterinburg in 1918 gave rise to enduring legends that she had escaped. A string of impostors claimed her identity for decades, until the discovery and DNA testing of the family’s remains proved that she too had perished.

Alexei Romanov · 08/12/1904–07/17/1918 · Peterhof, Russia → Yekaterinburg, Russia — The long-awaited son and heir of Nicholas II, a haemophiliac whose precarious health drew his parents into their fatal dependence on Rasputin. A bright and lively boy despite his suffering, he was murdered with his family at Yekaterinburg in 1918, at the age of thirteen — the last heir of the Romanov dynasty.

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House of Romanov

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