Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses

On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down twenty-three steps into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg. The eldest was twenty-two, the youngest only seventeen. Together with their parents and their thirteen-year-old brother, they were brutally murdered. Their crime: to be the daughters of the last Tsar and Tsaritsa of All the Russias. Four Sisters is the most authoritative account yet of the lives of Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Drawing on their own letters and diaries, Rappaport paints a vivid picture of the sisters' lives in the dying days of the Romanov dynasty. We see, almost for the first time, their journey from a childhood of enormous privilege, throughout which they led a very sheltered and largely simple life, to young womanhood - their first romantic crushes, their hopes and dreams, the difficulty of coping with a mother who was a chronic invalid and a haemophiliac brother, and, latterly, the trauma of the revolution and its terrible consequences. Compellingly readable, meticulously researched and deeply moving, Four Sisters gives these young women a voice with a story that still resonates almost a century after their death.