The Suspicious Deaths of the Romanovs

Profile: Olga Romanov

Date of birth: 15 November 1895

Date of death: 17th July 1918 (aged 22)

Location of death: Yekaterinburg, Russia

Cause of death: Murder, by the Bolsheviks

Titles: Grand Duchess

Father: Tsar Nicholas II

Mother: Empress Alexandra

Siblings: Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei

Personality traits: traditional, dutiful, compassionate, short-tempered, blunt, honest, moody, impatient, scholarly, showed initiative and reasoning skills, well-spoken, independent, cheeky, bright, sheltered, wilful, idolized her father.

During the revolution: She was captured with her parents, held for a while in Tobolsk and then in Yekaterinburg. During her time in captivity, she wrote compassionately of her parents. Of her mother she wrote:

You are filled with anguish for the sufferings of others.

And no one's grief has ever passed you by.

You are relentless, only towards yourself, forever cold and pitiless.

But if only you could look upon your own sadness from a distance, just once with a loving soul

Oh, how you would pity yourself, how sadly you would weep.

Of her father, she wrote:

Father asks to ... remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love ...

An almost eerie premonition of what was to come.

And yet, she prayed for the forgiveness of the Bolsheviks, the soldiers holding her and her family hostage, the very soldiers who would one day kill them. While she had a reputation for being moody and short-tempered in her adolescence, in truth she had a soft heart. During their time in Tobolsk, Nicholas II gave her a gun to conceal on her person. When their jailer discovered this, he asked her to hand it to him before traveling to Yekaterinburg – asked, not demanded. And she did, although somewhat reluctantly, hand the revolver to him, leaving herself vulnerable.

When the family was moved to Yekaterinburg, they were briefly separated. Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria traveled together first, leaving the girls and Alexei behind in Tobolsk briefly. When Olga, her sisters, and brother were transported on the Rus, she witnessed a soldier fall and injure himself, and without hesitation, she jumped up to help him. He refused her help, and she reportedly worried for the man, referring to him as "her poor fellow".

At Yekaterinburg, Olga suffered from severe depression: she grew sick, became suddenly thin, and would often stare off into the distance, her face an open book for the world to read.

According to the reports by King and Wilson, Olga witnessed the deaths of her mother, father, baby brother and sister. She would have felt her sister, Tatiana, the second-to-last to die, collapse in her arms. Seconds later, she would have felt a bullet rip through her jaw.

And yet, some say she survived. Some are adamant that Kaiser Wilhelm and Pope Pius XII collaborated a rescue attempt, and that she escaped to live out the rest of her life as Marga Boodts in Lake Como, Italy - a much brighter end to her story than that dark, toxic basement in Yekaterinburg.