Unearthed Photos Reveal The Final Days Of The Romanov Family

The Romanov family tragedy remains one of the most horrific brutalities in recent world history. For Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children, life shifted from the trappings of royalty to the confinement of prisoners.

Nicholas II was the final emperor of Russia. His mishandling of World War I, and the dire consequences his nation faced as a result, led to his forced abdication of the crown. This portrait was taken moments later, before he understood the horrors that awaited his family.

Before the bleakness, life was good for the Romanovs. Nicholas and Alexandra welcomed four daughters. The two eldest, Olga and Tatiana, were dubbed "The Big Pair." The two youngest, Maria and Anastasia, were logically called "The Little Pair."

At the time, the most discussed was Tatiana. She inherited her mother's good looks, with steely blue-grey eyes and auburn hair. Apart from the attention she attracted from her beauty, Tatiana was respected for her wartime efforts, serving as a nurse with the Red Cross.

Rumors flamed by misinformation made the youngest, Anastasia, the most famous. You might remember her from the Disney movie bearing her name. She was the funny girl in the family, proudly wearing false teeth for laughs, despite the grim detail that they were pulled from corpses back then.

The arrival of Alexei, their only son, gave the Romanovs a collective sigh of relief. He was the male heir that they'd so desperately needed. Though, they soon discovered the boy was plagued with health problems — suffering from the rare blood clotting disorder hemophilia.

Politics and illness aside, the Romanovs lived like most other kids: playing with their cousins, running round outside, older sisters simultaneously bossing around and doting on their brother. Their parents whisked them around the country to various royal estates as contemporary royals do.

Nicholas II was the picture-happy dad behind the camera. As an amateur photographer, his favorite subject was his family. Six full albums packed with candids were recovered years later, containing gems like this beach day outing.

Everyone was hyper protective of Alexei given his illness and succession to the throne. A hovering mother and sisters couldn't keep Alexei from goofing off like a normal little boy. Flopping around in the sand, or riding a sled down a staircase, he could've give a hoot about safety.

"Took the elephant to our pond with Alexei today and had fun watching him bathe," wrote the Tsar in a 1914 journal entry. The Romanovs owned an entire zoo full of exotic creatures, until the war and subsequent Russian revolution in 1917 resulted in its closure.

Their favorite retreat was aboard their yacht, The Standart. The ship was a picture of lavishness, chandeliers glittering from the rocking waves, top notch interiors flanked in mahogany. It made a fitting location to soften the blow when Nicholas II learned of the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand.

While Nicholas II attempted to entangle the strategies of war, his children balanced time at home with their mother versus their own wartime responsibilities. Olga, in her nurses veil, volunteered to assist wounded soldiers. Anastasia was too young for nursing, so she and Maria played checkers with the injured.

As monarchs, wartime relief was encompassing family affair. Everyone pulled their weight, visiting soldiers to boost moral together presented a united front. However, Tsarina Alexandra's ties to Germany, she was a German born princess, didn't bode well with the rest of the country.

In spite of the tension, the Romanovs stuck to their duties. Tsar Nicholas was joined by Maria and Anastasia at the beside of wounded soldiers. Less than a year later, the family would be held captive at the hands of their own soldiers.

In the days before the shoe dropped for the royals, the girls dealt with a case of the measles. Alexandra lined her daughters up and shaved each of their heads. Yet they smiled through it, not knowing their entire family was about to be placed under house arrest.

Revolution erupted, and Nicholas II was forced to relinquish his and Alexei's claim to the monarchy. The guards who once protected the Romanovs turned cruel and vindictive. This picture was taken during their captivity, with Anastasia holding Tatiana's pet bulldog Ortipo, a gift from a smitten soldier.

Tatiana wrote to a fellow nurse friend in 1917 expressing her frustrations with sitting idle in captivity: "It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not go to change the bandages!"

Royal functions and etiquette fell by the wayside. Tatiana rose to the action in the midst of the crisis, keeping a level head. For a period the family was separated, the parents and son at one location, the daughters at another.

They avoided prison cells, though their house arrest conditions were far from cushy. Alexei, weakened from his inherited hemophilia, was still expected to execute hard labor. All their food was restricted to solider rations.

One saving grace was the Romanovs were allowed to keep their dogs for company. Of the three family pets, Joy, Alexei's dog, was the only one of that appealed to the sympathies of the guards on the day of their final tragedy.

The last year of their lives was an isolated waiting game. Moved roughly from location to location, exile weighed on their spirits. Nicholas acted as the glue for his family, maintaining an "internal calm" during crisis, taking pictures like this in their final months together.

End of the road for the Romanov's was the Yekaterinburg's Ipatiev House. Soldiers woke the family, and ushered them to the basement, supposedly to shield them from a nearby riot. Instead, the family was executed by gunfire, and when that didn't work, by bayonets.

Murmurs that one or two of the daughters survived the executions swirled for decades. Anastasia was primarily the focus. DNA testing debunked that theory years later, and the entire Romanov family was buried in a mass grave located in 1991.

It took until 1998 for the family to be properly laid to rest. A funeral, attended by the Russian prime minister at the time, Boris Yeltsin, acted as a symbolic acknowledgment of wrongdoings by the government. Unfortunately, misinformation about the Romanov case leaked for decades. Leading to some bizarre developments in the wake of the tragedy.

People gathered false facts about the incident from fictional accounts in movies. The delay in determining DNA identification inspired hundreds of people to claim they were the elusive long-lost Romanov. Though they're best known through Anastasia, the older sister Tatiana was the one truly beloved in her own right — just not at first.

At the time of Tatiana's birth, her mother, Empress Alexandra, looked around after waking up and saw anxious faces all around her. She knew what troubled them because it also troubled her. “My God," she cried, "It is again a daughter. What will the nation say, what will the nation say?"

Despite her mother's fears, Tatiana showed a strong acumen and impressive presence from a young age. Her parents raised her under somewhat harsh conditions in order to build character. While sleeping on barren cots to taking cold showers, Tatiana excelled at keeping her chin up and making the most of a bad situation.

In life, Tatiana was the most famous of Tsar Nicholas' daughters, but she wasn't alone in her upbringing. First came her older sister, Grand Duchess Olga. She also had three younger siblings: Grand Duchess Maria, Grand Duchess Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei, who was the youngest Romanov. Tatiana shared a special bond with one of her siblings.

Growing up, Tatiana could always be seen with her sister Olga. The two were inseparable. Known in the family as "The Big Pair," they shared a bedroom and developed much of the same likings and habits from a young age. Their idyllic relationship was tested in the early 1900s.

In the spring of 1901, Olga developed a bad case of typhoid fever that ravaged her body and forced her to stay in the nursery until she recuperated. Some weeks later, she recovered enough to see Tatiana, who wept at the sight of her skinny and pale sister. Thankfully, the sisters entered their teen years together relatively unscathed.

Tatiana grew into a breathtaking young woman. One of her mother's aides recalled that Tatiana "was, to my mind, prettier than her sisters...she was so slight and well-proportioned that her great height was not remarkable. She had fine, regular features, recalling pictures of ancestresses who had been famous beauties."

In addition, the even-keeled Tatiana grew up to be someone who didn't need to be called by her royal name. In fact, she demanded that even staff members dropped her royal title. Among family, friends, and servants, she was known simply as Tatiana, or a diminutive name "Tanya", "Tatya", "Tatianochka", or "Tanushka."

The Birth of Tsarevich Alexei finally rid Tatiana of the pressures of having been born a girl, but it didn't stop her from being dedicated to her duty as a royal. Nothing could stop Tatiana from engaging in her own royal doings, some of which may surprise anyone unfamiliar with her nurturing ways.

Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden remembers that Tatiana was a big help to the royal household, saying that she "took care of the little ones, and...was a constant help to the Household, always willing to help them in arranging that their official duties should not clash with their private engagements."

Tatiana's goodness was partially due to her own inclinations, but it's also because she was a devoutly religious person who read the Bible daily. One of her thoughts on the matter was that "one has to struggle much because the return for good is evil, and evil reigns." And Tatiana definitely endured her share of evil times.

After the whole family suffered from respective bouts of hemophilia, which was genetically predisposed, they sought the help of a mystic healer named Grigori Rasputin. He did his job well, but it wasn't long before accusations of him touching and even raping the royal daughters came about.

Nicholas asked him not to come back, but Rasputin didn't listen. In the early morning of December 30, 1916, Rasputin was murdered by aides of the Empire. It was rumored that Tatiana was present at the murder in hopes of avenging herself, but this has yet to be confirmed as anything more than hearsay.

Even though she was just shy of being a teenager when World War I broke out, Tatiana moved on to being a colonel in the Russian Empire's military. She and Olga were a duo in this matter, but something unexpected happened while they looked after their stock of soldiers.

Tatiana fell in love with a soldier, and it would be the beginning of many romances. At 13, she wrote to her mother: "I would like so much to go the review of the second division...Yes, Mama, and at the second division I will see whom I must see ... you know whom ..."

Although Tatiana wasn't one to shy away from romance, her real passion was nursing. During World War I, she was a dedicated Red Cross nurse alongside her mother and sister Olga. She was known as much for her hardworking nature and kindness as a nurse as for her more charming side when among society.

In time, Tatiana had to let go of her romances and nursing, and not because of impending matrimony. As tensions increased between the poor and royalty, the duchesses became targets. An impending revolution had its eye on the Russian Empire, and life as Tatiana knew it was about to change forever.

By the year 1917, the Russian Revolution was in full swing, and Tatiana and her family were in captivity. When she and her siblings were separated from their parents, she because the head of the household. On top of caring for her siblings, Tatiana smartly sewed her family's jewels into their clothes for hidden protection.

After leaving her native home, the Romanovs were placed on house arrest in Yekaterinburg, Siberia. She'd sometimes talk to the guards, and revealed to them her dreams of one day living in England. But unfortunately for Tatiana and her family, that dream never came true.

On July 17, 1918, Tatiana and her family were told to leave their rooms because of civil unrest in the city. The Romanovs were supposedly being moved to safety, but they were instead greeted by a firing squad. Tatiana and Olga were the last family members to be killed, but the sisters' story didn't end there.

Even after the news of the Romanov's deaths spread, people held out home that at least one member of the family may have survived. For a while, people speculated that it was the beloved Tatiana who had escaped with her life. But ten years later, a mysterious stranger arrived in New York City with a much different claim.

In 1928, a woman with sunken eyes and a crooked smile arrived in New York. “I am the lost heir of the Romanov family,” she announced. Her claims were met with skepticism and it was eventually revealed that she was an imposter. In actuality, all the members of the Romanov family were long since murdered.