Czarina Of Russia Alexandra

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German princess, and last Russian Tzarina of the twentieth century. The daughter of Princess Alice of Hesse who was the second daughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra carried the hemophilia gene. She grew up in a royal family that needed the financial handouts from the purse of Queen Victoria to survive. Her life dramatically changed when she married her friend Prince Nicholas Romanov of Russia on 26 November 1894. Suddenly she was in control of a vast fortune as her husband became the Tzar of all Russia upon the death of his father in 1894. Tzar Nicholas was a man who was spectacularly unqualified to rule. In 1915, during WW I, Nicholas was at the front leaving Alexandra as a defacto ruler in Petrograd. Only listening to her favorite confidante, the monk Rasputin, she removed key governmental officials and replaced them by appointing incompetent friends of Rasputin into their posts. Alexandra was the fifth of seven children of her parents, Prince Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt and Princess Alice. Her childhood was spent with her brother Ernst and sister May. When she was six years old, her mother died, on 14 December 1878. Her fun and mischievous nature turned somber. Brought up in the English fashion, she learned history, literature and the geography of England and Germany. She had a retentive memory and excellent handwriting. A shy, sensitive girl with self-restraint, she played the piano brilliantly but grew extremely self-conscious. She enjoyed listening to music, especially the works of Wagner. She liked to spend her hours working on her needlepoint. Alexandra enjoyed visiting her grandmother, Queen Victoria at Osborne House. She met her future husband, Tzarvich Nicholas when she was nine-years-old. They developed a friendship before their engagement. After their marriage, Alexandra quickly gave birth to four daughters beginning with Olga in 1895, Tatiana in 1897, Marie in 1899, and Anastasia in 1901. Alexandra became a fanatically devout Russian Orthodox praying to conceive an heir to her husband's throne. Her prayers were answered with the birth of her youngest child, Tzarvich Alexis, born 12 August 1904 in Peterfhof, Russia. Alexis was diagnosed with hemophilia, a genetic legacy of Queen Victoria, five months after his birth. A Siberian monk named Grigory Rasputin was introduced to the royal family in 1905 and by 1908 he was administering a kind of hypnotic spell to help control the young tzarvich's bleeding. Alexandra was despised by the Russian people because of her German background and her refusal to help her husband change his government into a constitutional monarchy. She believed in her husband's supreme autocratic right from God to rule the Russian people as he saw fit. As her husband blundered in his rulership abilities, Alexandra leaned heavily on the advice of her favorite, the corrupt Rasputin. With tension mounting in the country, Rasputin was murdered by Russian aristocratic princes, Tzar Nicholas II abdicated and the overthrow of the Dumas, the provisional government transpired into Imperial Russia's collapse in 1915. Once she became Tzarina in 1894, Alexandra took over the responsibilities of running the Tsar's home. She was extremely careful with money and treated each ruble as if it might be her last. Palace ministers were amazed as she worked on her budget making sure to stretch her money as far as it could go. Her frugality became a point of obsession. Alexandra believed strongly in saving and preparing for a "rainy day." She believed her wealth of jewels would help the family escape from exile. She and her daughters sewed the jewels into their corsets before they were killed. On 15 March 1917, after military defeats, heavy war casualties and famine, Imperial Russia collapsed as Nicholas signed his abdication in a private train on his way home from the front. Along with her husband, four daughters and son, Alexandra was sent into exile to Siberia in July 1917. After attempts by the German Kaiser and the White Army to rescue the Romanov family, Lenin gave the decree to murder the family in the cellar basement of Ipatyev House in Yekaterinburg. Awakened after midnight and sent downstairs to the cellar, Alexandra was killed by a gun squad along with her family in the early hours of 17 July 1918. In 1979, the Romanov's skeletons were found in a wooded swampy spot 12 miles northwest of Yekaterinburg by geologist Aleksandr Avdonin and Gely Ryabov. They were officially exhumed in 1991. On 17 July 1998, 80 years to the day of their brutal murder, the family was laid to rest in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg next to Peter and Catherine the Great. Link to Wikipedia biography