The four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II were murdered almost by accident. "I will never be the Marat of the Russian revolution," pledged the prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, after the February revolution in 1917. He tried to find the family refuge outside Russia (Britain's George V couldn't help, although Nicholas's wife, Alexandra, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria) and then sent them to Siberia hoping that the Russian populace would forget about them. But revolutions demand their victims. The entire family was moved to Ekaterinburg and shot. Helen Rappaport has already written about the Romanovs' terrifying final weeks in prison. Now she moves from nightmare to fairytale, placing the four beautiful grand duchesses centre stage for the first time.
What is most surprising in this story is quite how unsuited the family is to power. They all live chiefly for each other. Alexandra finds the business of state "a horrid bore" that keeps her husband away from her. Nicholas comes home for the children's bathtime every night and records episodes of teething and weaning in his diary. When Nicholas abdicates, his first thought is that now he can "fulfil my life's desire – to have a farm, somewhere in England".
Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia are bright, wilful girls who are devoted to their parents and to their precious little brother Alexey. The tsarevitch appeared just when Nicholas was despairing of ever providing the country with a male heir, and the girls grow up conspiring to keep his constantly life-endangering haemophilia a secret from the nation. Anxious to protect her son and fearing the moral iniquity of St Petersburg society, Alexandra keeps her children secluded in their countryside palace. The "girlies" (as Alexandra persists in calling them) long for news of "outside life" but have little interest in court intrigues. They are delighted when they can wander around an English village with money of their own to spend.
For all four sisters, the ideal life would be one of quiet middle-class domesticity with a soldier husband. Infantilised by Alexandra, they are allowed to run wild with the soldiers who escort them on their annual holiday to Crimea. Even as teenagers, they play boisterous games of hide and seek with the handsome young officers; at one stage 10 people crammed into a wardrobe. Everything changes in the first world war when Alexandra, Olga and Tatiana train as nurses (typically modest, they take the titles of Sister Romanova numbers 1, 2 and 3). Now at last the girls have the contact with the outside world they have longed for as they change dressings and help with operations. But again it's the ordinariness they most love. "It's only at our hospital that we feel comfortable and at ease," Olga tells one of her patients.
Because the grand duchesses are so ordinary their story can feel tedious. The book seems quite long and slow at times as they go on one holiday after another while Alexandra's health steadily deteriorates. The sisters are too young to be complex (they are aged between 17 and 22 when they die). Rappaport is keen to transcend the saccharine image of four fairytale princesses by emphasising their flaws, but all she can say is that they throw things at their siblings and rag their tutors. The chief drama comes not from their individual stories but from their untimely deaths. We know that, like all good fairytales, this one will have a nightmare ending and Rappaport sets it up powerfully so that we remain uneasily frightened throughout.
Psychologically, Nicholas and Alexandra are more interesting than their children. Rappaport is insightful in her analysis of Alexandra's vulnerability and mistrust of strangers. And in the process she illuminates the precise influence of Grigory Rasputin, the drunken hypnotic pilgrim whose close association with the family contributes to their unpopularity. Alexandra disapproves of Rasputin's intemperance as much as her subjects do, but she is helpless because she believes that no one else can save her son. His effects on Alexey's health are visible to all around them; he can cure the tsarevitch's bleeding attacks simply by speaking to him on the telephone. Also, the isolation in which they live makes her more susceptible to his power. At times, he seems like their only friend.
There is a danger of making too much of all this. Four Sisters is a work of history as well as biography and arguably Rappaport is too eager to tackle historical causation. She says early on that the tsar and his family were destroyed by "a fatal excess of mother love". Lenin and the Bolsheviks are barely mentioned. But if this is unashamedly history from above, then it is also history from within; an astoundingly intimate tale of domestic life lived in the crucible of power.
Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury).
