My empress; twenty-three years of intimate life with the empress of all the Russias from her marriage to the day of her exile

A few dreadful days followed upon the one which had brought us the news of the abdication of the Czar. The Empress tried to get into communication with him, but though she contr...

It was only on the first day which followed upon the return of Nicholas II. at Czarskoi Selo that he was allowed to see his wife without witnesses. The very next morning Kornilo...

The christening of the Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna was solemnised with great pomp at Czarskoi Selo, after which the Court moved to St. Petersburg, and the young Empress took...

The beginning of the visits of the young Emperor and Empress to foreign courts was marked by one of those misfortunes which seemed to dog their footsteps wherever they went. The...

The uncomfortable winter which followed upon the marriage of the Czar came at last to an end without his young bride having been much seen in public. The ladies prominent in St....

Owing to the haste with which the royal wedding was celebrated there was no time to prepare in advance suitable apartments for the Czar and his bride in any of the Imperial pala...

The Empress, like all German Princesses, had been brought up in a family atmosphere which had a great deal of the bourgeois about it. Her father had been comparatively a poor ma...

I have heard that many different tales have been circulated concerning the relations of my mistress with the Dowager Empress. It is useless to pretend that they were pleasant, b...

It would be difficult to find a better mother than the Empress Alexandra. She entered into the smallest details of the training of her daughters and her son, and she tried befor...

The first really great sorrow and anxiety which fell on my beloved mistress was the Japanese war. I am not writing here a political book, and indeed understand nothing about pol...

Alexandra Feodorovna did not make any real friends during the first years that followed upon her marriage. Indeed it was only after the Japanese war that she started the intimac...

I often wondered whether the Empress had quite appreciated the magnitude of the first revolutionary movement which took place in Russia during and after the Japanese war. She ha...

I have often been asked what the Czarina used to do with her days and whether it was true that she spent them in absolute idleness. And just as often I have wondered what could...

I have often been asked details about the kind of existence by the Imperial family in the interior of their home. So long as I was in their service I never spoke of what I saw,...

At the time of her marriage St. Petersburg society was well disposed toward my unfortunate mistress, and it would have been easy for her to have made herself popular. Unfortunat...

When the Empress married, her household was formed in a hurry, which was a great pity, because it was not composed entirely of the best people from an intellectual point of view...

It is useless to repeat that when the great war broke out no one in Russia expected it, the Czar least of all. I shall not touch upon the serious part of this awful drama; I onl...

The last days of the year 1916 were sad ones for my poor Empress. First came the assassination of Rasputin, which was a terrible source of grief for her, because she firmly beli...

At the risk of rousing a storm of indignation against me, I must say that one of the misfortunes of the Czarina was to have in Russia an elder sister already married to a Russia...

It is the custom, or rather it was the custom, at the Russian Court, not to allow any Princess marrying into the Imperial family to bring with her maids from her own country. I...

Towards the middle of the summer vague rumours reached us that in consequence of the agitation which was already shaking the country to a considerable degree, the Government had...