Alix and Nicky

Nearly a century after their lives were violently ended, perspectives on Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna remain strikingly divergent. Their partisans venerate them as martyrs—innocent victims of Bolshevik butchers. Their monarchist detractors impugn them as the harbingers of revolution and imperial collapse, while the Communists blame "Bloody Nicholas" for all the ills that befell the Russian people in the 20th century.

But while opinions about the last tsar of Russia and his tsarina may be divided, as a couple they were indivisible—for whatever else can be said of them, there is no doubt that “Alix” and “Nicky” adored one another. Analyzing the letters and diaries written by the couple and by those around them, Virginia Rounding provides a nuanced portrayal of these two complex figures.

Described even by his detractors as modest, charming and self-effacing, Nicholas Romanov wed the shy, self-conscious, yet fervently loyal Alexandra Fyodorovna, in 1894. Their bond proved strikingly durable, in light of the marital difficulties that plagued the rest of the Romanov family. Soon after their engagement, Alix wrote in her fiancé’s diary: “Ever true and ever loving, faithful, pure and strong as death”—words which proved tragically prophetic 24 years later, when the family was massacred by the Bolsheviks in a Yekaterinburg cellar.

Rounding explores the possible causes of the tsarina’s often debilitating ill health. Alix’s perplexing combination of illnesses sufficiently worried her grandmother, England’s Queen Victoria, that she wrote to the tsar with advice for her care. The author examines in depth the enigmatic triangular relationship between Nicky, Alix and her “favorite,” Ania Vyrubova, protégée of the infamous Rasputin. Where the official words and private thoughts recorded in diaries prove inadequate, Rounding expertly extracts meaning from hints and innuendo.

The endlessly fascinating story of Alix and Nicky inevitably incorporates that of their four daughters and their sunny-tempered, hemophiliac little boy, Alexei. The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia—known collectively as “OTMA”—inherited both their father’s desire to please and their mother’s sense of duty. The author makes these characters come alive, skillfully filtering through decades’ worth of gossip and polemics to reveal the famously private family in all their human dimensions.

The dramatic love story is set against a portrait of a Russia that was already in transition before the First World War. Alix and Nicky provides an intimate, penetrating and fresh study of the Romanov dynasty’s tragic last years, bringing profound psychological insight into the imperial marriage and how it responded to—and shaped—the events that engulfed them.