Rare Last Photos Of The Romanovs

The Daughters with Shaved Heads

The Romanov daughters are pictured here looking very different from the formal piano portrait they took together just a year earlier. The grand duchesses shaved their heads in the spring of 1917 after a bout with measles. Captivity certainly took its toll on the Romanovs. Grand Duchess Tatiana was reportedly most upset that she couldn’t continue her work tending to wounded soldiers as she had as a World War I Red Cross nurse. She wrote to fellow nurse Velentina Chebotarev in April 1917, “It is strange to sit in the morning at home, to be in good health and not go to change the bandages!”

The Children Playing at Wolfsgarten

When thinking about the gruesome end that befell the Romanov children, it’s strange to look at earlier photographs of them playing. Grand Duchess Maria, Tsarevich Alexei, Georg Donatus, the Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, and Grand Duchess Anastasia are pictured here playing with a toy car at Schloss Wolfsgarten, a royal hunting lodge. The photograph was taken in the Autumn of 1910 when Anastasia was just nine years old, Alexei was six years old, and Tatiana was thirteen years old. Tatiana was the only one of the Romanov children pictured above who would live to see the first year of her twenties. Her older sister Olga had a slightly longer life, as she was executed at age twenty-two.