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Anna Anderson- The Fake Anastasia
News of the execution of the Romanov family in 1918 rocked the world. (For more on this please see this post: http://www.historynaked.com/assassination-tsar-nicholas-ii-romanovs/ ) However, in the face of this devastation people tried to keep the faith that someone may have made it out. European newspaper ran stories that one or more of the Romanov children had escaped. The one name that kept coming up was Anastasia Romanov. However, there was no proof. Only hope. Then in 1920, a young woman was fished out of a the water after jumping off a bridge in Berlin. Her suicide attempt failed and the young woman had no identification and refused to tell her…
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The Romanovs
Romanov. That’s the name nearly all of us come up with when faced with the question of naming royalty in Russia. But why? The Romanovs only ruled Russia for a very brief period, and it is the female branch of the family that ruled the longest. This means that in countries, such as France or England, the name would have changed completely once the male line died out. Of course there is the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, but that’s a whole different story. In Russia though, the name went from Romanov to Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Why the difference? It’s starts with Michael I, the first Romanov tsar of all Russia. He ruled from 1613…
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Peter the Great: Reforms of a Future Empire
Peter Romanov was not born Great but earned the moniker by setting precedents previously unheard of for the kingdom of Russia. Born royal in 1672 to Tsar (or Czar) Alexis I and his second wife, Natalya, as he was the youngest son, no one gave much thought to him ever reigning the kingdom. When Peter was only 3 years old, his father passed away leaving his eldest son as the King Of Russia. Feodor III or more aptly named, Feodor the Most Quiet, had suffered from health issues as a result of falling off his horse when he was 12 years old. The injuries left him nearly an invalid as…
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Assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanovs
Born on May 18th 1868, at the Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg, the former home of Empress Catherine I, wife of Peter the great at the beginning of the 18th Century, Nicholai Alexandrovich Romanov was the oldest child of the heir to the Russian monarchy, Alexander III and his wife Marie Feodorovna (Princess Dagmar of Denmark). At the age of twelve in 1881, whilst staying at the Winter Palace, Nicholas’ grandfather Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb. Having already survived several assassination attempts, that day Alexander had been out in his carriage followed by two sleighs full of Cossacks and when a member of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s…
