In August 1914, Russia entered the First World War, and with it,
the Imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II was thrust into a conflict
from which they would not emerge. His eldest child, Olga
Nikolaevna, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had begun a
diary in 1905 when she was 10 years old and kept writing her
thoughts and impressions of day-to-day life as a Grand Duchess
until abruptly ending her entries when her father abdicated his
throne in March 1917. Held at the State Archives of the Russian
Federation in Moscow, Olga's diaries during the wartime period have
never been translated into English until this volume. At the outset
of the war, Olga and her sister, Tatiana, worked as nurses in a
military hospital along with their mother, Tsarina Alexandra.
Olga's younger sisters, Maria and Anastasia, visited their own
infirmaries to help raise the morale of the wounded and sick
soldiers. The strain was indeed great as Olga records her
impressions of tending to the officers who had been injured and
maimed in the fighting on the Russian front. Concerns about her
sickly brother, Aleksei abound, as well those for her father who is
seen attempting to manage the ongoing war.Gregori Rasputin appears
in entries, too, in an affectionate manner as one would expect of a
family friend. While the diaries reflect the interests of a young
woman, her tone increases in seriousness as the Russian army
suffers setbacks, Rasputin is ultimately murdered, and a popular
movement against her family begins to grow. At the point Olga ends
her writing in 1917, the author continues the story by translating
letters and impressions from family intimates, such as Anna
Vyrubova, as well as the diary kept by Nicholas II himself.
Finally, once the Imperial family has been put under house arrest
by the revolutionaries, observations by Alexander Kerensky, head of
the initial Provisional Government, are provided, these too in
English translation for the first time. Olga would offer no further
personal writings as she and the rest of her family were crowded
into the basement of a house in the Urals and shot to death in July
1918.The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian
Revolution, translated and introduced by scientist and librarian
Helen Azar, and supplemented with additional primary source
material, is a remarkable document of a young woman who did not
choose to be part of a royal family and never exploited her own
position, but lost her life simply because of what her family
represented.
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