Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia

Biography

Alexandra Feodorovna was born Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine in Darmstadt in 1872, a daughter of Grand Duke Louis IV and Princess Alice, and so a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her mother and a younger sister died of diphtheria in 1878. She met the future Nicholas II in 1884 and, after long hesitation over leaving the Lutheran church, accepted him in 1894.

She was received into the Orthodox Church the day after Alexander III's death and married Nicholas in November 1894; they were crowned in Moscow in May 1896, days before the Khodynka disaster. The couple had four daughters and a son, Alexei, whose haemophilia made her rely on religious healers, above all Grigori Rasputin, whose influence became a political scandal.

A firm believer in autocracy, she was distrusted as German-born once war broke out in 1914. When Nicholas took command at the front in 1915 she was left to run affairs in the capital, and she was widely blamed for a rapid turnover of ministers. After the February Revolution and Nicholas's abdication in March 1917 the family was held at Tsarskoye Selo, then moved to Tobolsk and, in 1918, to Yekaterinburg.

On 17 July 1918 Bolshevik guards shot Alexandra, Nicholas and their five children in the Ipatiev House. Her remains were reburied in St Petersburg in 1998, and in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised her as a passion bearer.