Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia

Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia, was born in 1904 at Peterhof Palace in the Russian Empire, the only son and fifth child of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, formerly Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine. His elder sisters were the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. As tsesarevich he was heir apparent to the imperial throne. Through his mother he inherited haemophilia B, a hereditary clotting disorder transmitted in the female line from Queen Victoria. Recurrent internal bleeding, especially into joints, caused severe pain and long periods of invalidism; a blow or fall that would have been trivial for another child could threaten his life. The imperial couple treated the diagnosis as a closely held secret. Empress Alexandra’s search for relief brought the Siberian starets Grigori Rasputin into the family’s inner circle; his apparent ability to ease the boy’s haemorrhages gave him extraordinary access to the empress and, indirectly, to political affairs in the capital.

Observers who knew Alexei in health described a bright, affectionate, and high-spirited boy who liked practical jokes, soldiers’ company, and outdoor play, and who resented the hovering of physicians and of sailors assigned to catch him if he stumbled. He was educated privately. The Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard and others left accounts of his intelligence and of the strain the disease placed on the whole family. During the First World War he accompanied his father at intervals to the Stavka at Mogilev, wearing a uniform and sharing in the ceremonial life of headquarters, which he preferred to the isolation of Tsarskoye Selo. The February Revolution of 1917 ended the autocracy. Nicholas II, after briefly contemplating abdication in favour of Alexei under a regency, abdicated for himself and his son, citing the boy’s fragile health. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich declined the crown the next day. The former emperor and his family were held first at the Alexander Palace, then transported to Tobolsk in Siberia, and in the spring of 1918 moved to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, designated by the Bolsheviks the House of Special Purpose.

In July 1918, as anti-Bolshevik forces approached the city, the Ural Soviet and Bolshevik central authorities decided to kill the prisoners. In the early hours of 17 July, Yakov Yurovsky and a squad of executioners assembled the family and four retainers in a cellar room and opened fire. Alexei, then thirteen and recently immobilized by another haemorrhage, was seated in a chair; after the first volley he was still alive and was killed with further shots and bayonet thrusts. The bodies were stripped, mutilated to hinder identification, burned with gasoline and acid, and buried in a boggy clearing in the Koptyaki forest. A separate, smaller grave for two of the children was dug nearby. The larger grave was located by local researchers in 1979, kept secret until the end of the Soviet Union, and excavated in 1991; the smaller grave was found in 2007. Forensic and DNA studies identified the 2007 remains as those of Alexei and one sister. Most of the family was interred with state honours in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg in 1998. The Russian Orthodox Church long withheld full liturgical recognition of the 2007 remains pending its own inquiry.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified Nicholas II, Alexandra, and their children as martyrs in 1981. In 2000 the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them as passion-bearers—saints who endured suffering in a Christ-like manner—and appointed 17 July as their principal feast. They are commemorated as the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers. Alexei held no clerical office, belonged to no religious order, never married, and had no children. His short life remains inseparable from the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, the medical and political consequences of his haemophilia, and the violence of the Russian Civil War.