Czarina of Russia Alexandra

German princess, and last Russian Tzarina of the twentieth century. The daughter of Princess Alice of Hesse who was the second daughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra carried the hemophilia gene. She grew up in a royal family that needed the financial handouts from the purse of Queen Victoria to survive.

Her life dramatically changed when she married her friend Prince Nicholas Romanov of Russia on 26 November 1894. Suddenly she was in control of a vast fortune as her husband became the Tzar of all Russia upon the death of his father in 1894. Tzar Nicholas was a man who was spectacularly unqualified to rule. In 1915, during WW I, Nicholas was at the front leaving Alexandra as a defacto ruler in Petrograd. Only listening to her favorite confidante, the monk Rasputin, she removed key governmental officials and replaced them by appointing incompetent friends of Rasputin into their posts.

Alexandra was the fifth of seven children of her parents, Prince Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt and Princess Alice. Her childhood was spent with her brother Ernst and sister May. When she was six years old, her mother died, on 14 December 1878. Her fun and mischievous nature turned somber. Brought up in the English fashion, she learned history, literature and the geography of England and Germany. She had a retentive memory and excellent handwriting. A shy, sensitive girl with self-restraint, she played the piano brilliantly but grew extremely self-conscious. She enjoyed listening to music, especially the works of Wagner. She liked to spend her hours working on her needlepoint. Alexandra enjoyed visiting her grandmother, Queen Victoria at Osborne House.

She met her future husband, Tzarvich Nicholas when she was nine-years-old. They developed a friendship before their engagement. After their marriage, Alexandra quickly gave birth to four daughters beginning with Olga in 1895, Tatiana in 1897, Marie in 1899, and Anastasia in 1901.