Rare Last Photos Of The Romanovs

Tsarina Alexandra

The Tsarina was widely unliked by her subjects and apparently came across as quite cold. However, Alexandra was apparently not trying to be rude but was rather shy. She was also known to be highly standoffish and only associated herself with a few close friends, which made other aristocrats view her with suspicion. It is possible that in order to deal with her shyness and difficulty in dealing with people she turned to drugs. She at one point confided in one of her few friends that she might have had an addiction to barbiturates. Specifically, one called Veronal and she wrote in a letter a few years before her execution, “I’m literally saturated with it.”